One of the books I finished reading recently is Mike Rothschild’s The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything. It’s a pretty solid overview of the phenomenon, though Rothschild focuses a tad more on the evolution Q online persona than the whole movement. But I still learned a lot from the book. My main takeaways:
1) The QAnon conspiracy theory (which, remember, roughly 15% of Americans believe in) has thrived in part because of how physically isolated people have become in the digital age, and it took off even further when the COVID lockdowns made people even more isolated. And as “a participatory game played alongside a digital community against an easy scapegoat” it was “hugely compelling,” Rothschild writes. “One of the reasons baby boomers have fallen in with Q to such a surprising degree: many are empty nesters, on their own, or retired. One day they looked around, realized they didn’t get everything they were promised out of life, and wanted someone to blame…Q gave them enemies to hate and a way to get back at them.” It’s also no coincidence how much QAnon has gained purchase with older Americans; a 2019 study found that Facebook users over 65 were seven times more likely to share fake news stories than their younger peers. The early evangelizers for Q targeted that group.
2) QAnon is just one online scam that took off more successfully than others, and many of its tropes mirror those of earlier but less successful online scams. Rothschild shows convincingly how people plugging nonsense like the Iraqi dinar investment scheme glommed onto QAnon as soon as they saw it gaining traction.
3) It doesn’t matter that it’s a scam built on some of the world’s ugliest lies; QAnon gives its followers a lot of meaning. “You are saving the world when you are in Q, [it’s] the highest way you can view yourself,” Jitarth Jadeja, a former believer, told Rothschild. A pro-choice, pro-drug legalization, Bernie Sanders supporter, Jadeja had been “baffled” by the media’s failure to see Trump’s rise and wanted to believe that a “people’s movement” was succeeding. Science writer and hoax debunker Brian Dunning tells Rothschild he sees QAnon as “the right journey, the wrong way….it’s made up of people looking for a solution.” The religious dimension of this meaning can’t be emphasized enough. “They believe they’re doing God’s work.”
4) While QAnon lacks a leader or a church, it behaves like other messianic movements, most notably in its followers’ devotion to prophecy. Rothschild writes, “Q is a movement that, at its core, believe in the ever-approaching Great Event, though in this case, it’s the mass purging of progressives….an event that would forever alter the course of the world by eliminating the bad people and rewarding the good.” Hence the repetitive appearance of the phrases “Trust the Plan,” “We are Winning” and “Arrests Will Come,” in Q postings.
Rothschild ends his book with a chapter on “How to Help People Who Want to Get Out of Q,” and his advice is quite tempered. Don’t try to do this unless you really want to, he starts. It’s hard. Getting people to let go of their “secret knowledge” without offering something equally affirming isn’t easy. Go to supportive hubs like Reddit’s r/QAnonCasualties for help. Be patient and keep non-threatening lines of communication open with your Q-addled friends or family. Don’t try to debate or debunk them directly but do try to get them off of their digital addictions. And maybe, just maybe, point out some of the more obvious contradictions of QAnon, like Q’s reliance on the 8kun website, an imageboard that is full of racist memes and pornography. Would an intelligence operation charged with saving children really choose that website as its homebase?
As I read The Storm is Upon Us and thought about where QAnon fits in American history, Rothschild’s description of Q as a religious movement reminded me of Frances FitzGerald’s great work of sociological imagination, Cities on a Hill. That latter book consists of in-depth portraits of four utopian communities that came out of the ferment of the 1960s and 1970s: Jerry Fallwell’s fundamentalist church community; the gay community of San Francisco’s Castro district; the Rajneeshpuram New Age ashram in Oregon and the Sun City retirement village south of Tampa.
At the end of Cities on a Hill, FitzGerald connects these flowerings of idealistic community-building to a much earlier moment of social change in America, the “Second Great Awakening” of religious fervor that exploded across upstate New York in the 1830s and 40s. Fueled by rapid economic change enabled by the expansion of the state’s canal system, the communities of upstate New York birthed not just an intense wave of Christian revival meetings but new formations including Mormonism, the Oneida Society (which abolished private property and practiced group marriage), and the women’s suffrage movement (the first women’s rights convention took place at Seneca Falls, a few miles from the Erie Canal). The Oneida Institute was located in the area and a hub for much abolitionist agitation as well; both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas lived in the area. So much change blew through the region in those years that historians came to refer to the area as the “Burned-over District.”
FitzGerald writes, “How such an extraordinary variety of movements could rise up in the same few counties in the same short space of time is, of course, the great puzzle of the Burned-over District. For twenty years the society was a veritable fireworks display of extraordinary ideas and extraordinary enthusiasms: projects taking off skyward, creating bursts of brilliance and the — for the most part — fading out. This is also, of course, the puzzle of the 1960s and 1970s.”
It seems as though we’re living through yet another period of intense cultural tumult and creativity, along with corresponding reactionary movements. Perhaps QAnon is just one facet of a more complicated picture, that includes positive forces for transformation like Black Lives Matter and the transgender rights movement alongside backlash formations like the Tea Party and the anti-Critical Race Theory panic now underway. What all these things have in common is they are rooted in people whose lives have been disrupted, who are searching for answers and a path out of the mess we are in. Offering folks the moderate promise of “it will get better, but slowly” doesn’t seem to be enough in these times. But promising that deep and lasting change will come quickly, as tempting as that might sound, also is a devil’s bargain.
Note to readers: This is an excerpt from my regular newsletter, The Connector, which focuses on democracy, movements, organizing and tech. For more, go here.