QAnon is damn dangerous
America needs to wake up and start treating the cult-like QAnon phenomenon the way we should have handled the coronavirus epidemic: with a robust public information campaign, along with contact tracing and social distancing until we can stop the spread and create a vaccine.
QAnon is more than just a small group of people spouting nutty conspiracy theories. Several violent acts, including a murder on Staten Island, are linked to QAnon beliefs. As the Daily News recently noted, the basis of the theory is “the belief that a shadow war between good and evil is playing out behind closed doors with President Trump valiantly fighting to save humanity by arresting and sometimes executing the depraved ‘deep state’ masterminds.”
The “deep state” bad guys — notably, high-ranking Democratic politicians — are allegedly kidnapping and sex-trafficking children in secret; some especially lurid versions of the theory hold that deep state leaders are Satanworshipping cannibals who eat children, and that the government invented polio and AIDS (and, of course, COVID-19).
Supposedly, an anonymous government whistleblower called “Q” keeps the whole fantastic storyline going, dropping mysterious hints about the latest developments in online forums.
“QAnon — I’m saying this as a career intelligence professional — is a uniquely dangerous, extremist organization,” author Malcolm Nance told me. “Its entire belief structure is grounded in a psychosis of a group of people who believe that the entirety of the reality that we live in is not real.”
True believers include Edgar Maddison Welch, who in 2016 drove from his North Carolina home to Washington, D.C., where he burst into a pizza parlor, fired a rifle and searched for a basement where, he believed, top Democratic officials were holding kidnapped children as part of a sex-trafficking ring.
It was all QAnon nonsense. Welch is serving a four-year prison term.
In 2018, a heavily armed man named
Matthew Wright turned his truck into a homemade armored vehicle and used it to block a bridge linking Arizona and Nevada. Wright, who later pleaded guilty to domestic terrorism charges, was trying to force the release of a nonexistent report on former FBI Director Jim Comey.
And here in Staten Island, the murder of reputed Gambino family boss Francesco Cali by a bodyguard took a strange turn when the killer confessed to bumping off his boss not because of a mob beef, but because he thought Cali was part of the deep state.
Nance compares the rise of QAnon to the way he and other Middle East intelligence officers were slow to connect the dots when scattered attacks were launched by a group of Middle East extremists led by an obscure figure named Osama Bin Laden who had audaciously declared war on the United States in 1996.
This time around, the FBI has seen enough to sound the alarm.
“Anti-Government, Identity Based, and Fringe Political Theories Very Likely Motivate Some Domestic Extremists to Commit Criminal, Sometimes Violent
Activity,” is the title of a May 2019 intelligence bulletin submitted by the FBI’s Phoenix field office.
“This is the first FBI product examining the threat from conspiracy theorydriven domestic extremists and provides a baseline for future intelligence products,” the bulletin states.
That’s a good start: we will need a lot more intelligence on QAnon, complete with surveillance, infiltration and disruption.
We’ll also need more responsible behavior from the political class. Over a dozen candidates for office have expressed QAnon sympathies. They should be shunned and opposed by every selfrespecting party organization and official at all levels of government.
ThatincludesTrump,whohasrepeatedly tweeted out QAnon trash. When asked directly about the group, he told reporters: “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”
That is not how you stop a dangerous viral epidemic. You’d think Trump would have learned his lesson about that by now.
Scarborough, N.Y.: Thanks, Councilman Robert Holden, for exposing the feckless judges who are releasing hundreds of gun criminals back onto the streets (“Are NYC’s gun laws still tough?” Op-Ed, Sept. 9). The judges who let these killers-in-training free to shoot again should be identified in the media and their records held up to public scrutiny, just like cops who discharge their weapons. Are you listening, Daily News?