THE CONSPIRASPHERE

Whatever happened to QAnon? That depends who you ask, but NOEL ROONEY finds that Q’s lingering spectre is proving useful to the mainstream media in down-branding dissent

Q VADIS?

The Q thing has been moribund for a long time now; long enough to make one wonder if Q has been bumped off by the Deep State, gone over to the other side (the idea of Woke Q-drops is one to boggle the most conspiracist of minds), or gone over to the Other Side via natural causes (in which case, cue Q-related posts about deadly vaccines).

Yet the mainstream media still burn a candle for Q. It was a dependable source of filler articles for three years; the quirky scripture and its eldritch exegesis at the hands of the inner acolytes of QAnon provided both a reliable stream of wacky material and an excuse (as if an excuse were needed) to pillory the C-sphere for the entertainment – and edification – of right-minded (but not right-leaning) folks.

Every so often, a former Anon speaks just loud enough to wake the spectre of Q and allow the media an opportunity to bask in the posthumous glow of mainstream sanctity. These days, the speaker more often than not condemns the whole pony show as a Deep State operation to discredit patriots, Christians, Trump supporters and anyone who thinks that ‘pizza’ is a loaded term. Occasionally, I suspect these little bursts of rhetorical resurrection are actually media-primed, if only to allow us a little respite from the daily diet of Covidiot/Anti-vaxxer litanies.

Recently, Lin Wood (pictured above), the outspoken lawyer who for a time fronted (or possibly usurped) the Stop the Steal campaign to reclaim the presidency for the Donald, was quoted musing at length on the true nature of Q. Mr Wood has form when it comes to bandwagons; for a time he represented Nicholas Sandmann, the Kentucky teenager who got his 15 minutes by standing still in a MAGA hat in front of a Native American activist, while members of the Black Hebrew Israelites liberally (or perhaps not) insulted both him and Omaha tribal elder Nathan Philips.

Sandmann sued various media outlets for misrepresenting the encounter, and him, and some of them, including WaPo and CNN, settled out of court, inviting speculation that a trial might have been a tad embarrassing for them. Score one for Lin Wood. But Sandmann fired him a few months later, allegedly for tweeting on the viability of lining ex-VP Mike Pence up against a wall and shooting him. Mr Wood moved on and took up the cause of Kyle Rittenhouse, the young man recently cleared of murdering two men and wounding another in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during a BLM rally (the term “rally” here is not to be confused with “riot”). The Rittenhouse family fired Wood because “he was insane”, apparently.

Now he has resurfaced, brandishing a recording of someone who sounds remarkably like retired US Army General Mike Flynn, who can probably lay claim to being the briefest incumbent of a government advisory role in US history; he lasted 22 days before being forced to resign in the fallout from the Russiagate conspiracy flap. Flynn was well regarded by Anons, and was widely suspected by many in the QAnon community of being one of the secret group of military and intelligence bigwigs that recruited Donald Trump to fight the Deep State in the first place.

Messrs Flynn and Wood concur in saying that the whole QAnon brand (that seems an appropriate term in all senses of the word) is in fact a Deep State psy-op; where they differ is in how clearly they separate themselves from the movement. Flynn, despite being lionised by Anons, says the whole thing was nonsense from the off; Wood, lionised by very few in or out of the QAnon community, says that the brand was phoney but the text was valid. He still identifies as an Anon (although in the next breath he says he was never more than an outside observer) and tries to create a distinction between the Anons and QAnon; in this rendition, QAnon was a DS op to smear the true Anons, and it’s not clear where the eponymous Q fits in this more attenuated definition.

The ambiguity here is, I think, an attempt (albeit from an unreliable and unpopular source) to push back against a trend among media outlets to down-brand all forms of anti-consensus thinking under an easily recognisable label. One of the reasons for the continuing media love for QAnon is its utility; the gnomic character of the Q-drops leaves them open to a vast range of interpretations, and provides a space in which to dump dissident thought. While the term ‘conspiracy theory’ is a conceptual construct, nebulous enough to enable dubious academic activity but too loose for the new fad for identifying rather than defining, QAnon is a proper brand.

So when a couple of people wearing Q T-shirts turn up at an anti-lockdown rally (in this case a term apparently all too easily confused with “riot”), dissent, which used to be seen as a vital part of the wider democratic process, can be down-branded by association with a well-known community that self-identifies in a way that satisfies the mainstream characterisation of nonconformist, non-compliant activism as a Bad Thing. The Anons already see themselves as marginalised, so where’s the harm in confirming them as marginal, and at the same time shoving various forms of dissent into the newly, neatly branded margins?

The harm, I’d suggest, is in the wider societal conversation. Conformity by identity, and its opposite, reduce argument to something both more superficial and less deserving of a response. People like Lin Wood, while angling to make themselves central to the stream of dissent, could be seen as useful idiots for a strain of authoritarianism that regards open debate as pathological.

Lin Wood says the brand was phoney but the text was valid