QANON & CO
CONSPIRACY THEORIES AREN’T GOING ANYWHERE…
What’s up with the latest kooky conspiracies, and why QAnon is more dangerous than most
In fact, they’re entering the mainstream. What’s going on? Why are seemingly intelligent people taken in by these nutty narratives?
The world is actually run by a powerful ancient sect of satanic, psychopathic paedophiles.
The US moon landing never happened and the fake video footage was directed by Oliver Stone.
These are just a few of the weird, wacky beliefs that inspire hundreds of thousands of conspiracy theorists around the world (including in South Africa) to consume thousands of hours’ worth of video, web ‘articles’ and blog posts about what can only be described as bonkers ideas about how the world works and the forces that influence us.
How does a seemingly sane, intelligent person get taken in by ludicrous conspiracy theories? Surely such people can be dismissed as unfit to participate in a civilised, democratic society? It’s tempting for those on the ‘outside’ to think so, and yet you’ve probably met people who are otherwise rational who genuinely believe Bill Gates is seeking to use vaccinations as a cover for sterilising swathes of the world’s population without their consent. Or that Covid-19 is a hoax and doesn’t really exist. I know I have.
These crackpot theories are no longer fizzing away on the fringes of society – in recent years, they’ve found growing credibility in the minds of some politicians as well as everyday folks: your neighbours, your colleagues, your relatives... According to online polling and analytics company Civiqs, 7% of Americans support a chimerical organisation
(in the loosest sense of the word) called QAnon, and according to The New York
Times 24 congressional candidates who ran for Congress in November were ‘QAnon friendly’.
Ihave met South Africans who passionately subscribe to a conspiracy theory that runs along similar lines: the gist of it is that Donald Trump is fighting a secret war against a ‘deep state’ cabal comprised partly of democratic politicians, celebrities and ‘elites’ who are working to increase their control over humanity, and who operate a global child-trafficking syndicate, participate in bizarre rituals and, in some of the more gruesome versions, harvest a substance from terrified abused children called adrenochrome.
This has been widely reported on in the mainstream media, but what hasn’t been reported on, or perhaps even noticed, is the similarity of these QAnon conspiracies to those of the king of kook, David Icke.
Icke, who rose to infamy in the UK around 1990, has enjoyed increasing support: he has ‘fans’ in 47 countries and, pre-pandemic, regularly gave lectures around the world to sold-out auditoriums of up to 6 000 people. He’s long been a proponent of some of the theories promoted by QAnon: the bit about a secret order of politicians, celebrities and elites (in his version, they’re reptilian alien-human hybrids called Archons) seeking to enslave humanity and who feed off the fear (and flesh) of captured, sexually abused children. Except, instead of positing Donald Trump as the saviour of humanity, Icke posits… himself.
How on earth – in our age of science, technology and ease of access to verifiable information – are more and more people getting, so, well, squirrelly? The answer could lie somewhere in the nexus between internet algorithms, our psychology and our universal need for purpose, stability and belonging. I began to absorb the common narrative: we create our reality with our thoughts and beliefs. Once I had swallowed that, I became so open-minded that my brains fell out, and it was only a matter of time before I believed anything that I encountered if it felt compelling.