None of this was supposed to happen: Joe Biden assuming office as the 46th president of the
United States. Instead, the military should have stepped in to keep Trump in power. At
least if you are one of the many followers of QAnon.
When that reality failed to materialize, the QAnon community reacted with disappointment,
confusion, and anger. Some refused to believe what they were seeing.
Right after Biden was inaugurated, you saw a lot of anger, a lot of feelings of betrayal,
a lot of people who sort of exclaimed, 'I, you know, I'm done with this. I'm never going
to believe in it again.' QAnon supporters are really faced with an
existential dilemma. Either their belief system was correct and this is leading to some sort
of logical conclusion, or they have to face despair.
QAnon followers tried to somehow reconcile the inauguration with the same web of conspiracy
theories that said it wouldn't happen. They simply adapted the narrative of their alternative
reality - one that more people believe in than you might think. An NPR/Ipsos poll found
that 17% of Americans - and 23% of Republicans - believe that a "group of Satan-worshipping
elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media," a key
tenet of the QAnon movement. And with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, support
for the conspiracy theory has even reached the highest levels of US politics.
In this video, we will take a closer look at where it all came from - and what comes
next for QAnon. Since there is no clear-cut definition of
QAnon, we asked the experts - people who have been studying the movement for years.
QAnon is a cultish conspiracy theory that claims that a military intelligence team is
using the board 8kun to leak classified information about an upcoming purge of the deep state.
And they do this using codes and riddles and pictures that are meant to be interpreted
by followers. And it's been going on since the end of October 2017.
So, it all started in October 2017, when a cryptic text appeared on the online discussion
board "4chan," notorious for extremist content. One of the early statements: Hillary Clinton
will soon be arrested. The obscure message by an anonymous self-proclaimed "Q clearance
patriot" would hardly have attracted attention, but 4chan moderators and Youtubers began to
knit a complete legend around this and the posts that followed. They speculated that
the author must have access to the country's nuclear secrets - the QAnon myth was born.
Q clearance is an actual US Department of Energy term. It's the classification given
to people who work with nuclear weapons. It has nothing at all to do with military intelligence,
but it sounds cool. So I think whoever makes the posts picked it up because, hey, it sounds
cool, it sounds mysterious. It's an easily brandable thing that we can run with.
It's impossible to verify who wrote the first text or whether the following posts assigned
to QAnon were even by the same person or group: all publications on 4chan are anonymous.
The main QAnon posts later migrated from 4chan to other boards like 8chan, now called 8kun.
So what are the key messages of Q? Q's texts, so-called Q drops, are often cryptic or completely
incomprehensible. They mostly consist of scraps of sentences or questions. But QAnon followers
have woven them all into an overarching myth of a dark, secret elite that is said to control
the world by means of the "deep state." This has elements of age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories, and now they're underpinning the QAnon ideology. But the movement has also
broadened to embrace many common elements of other conspiracy theories.
For QAnon believers, the central figure in fighting this secret elite and the alleged
deep state is Donald Trump. Trump and Q, they are there to fight against
something that's not just, you know, it's not just bureaucratic, it's not just this
poor version of government. It's the idea that what they're fighting against is a genuine
evil and they're responsible for making so many things in the world absolutely terrible.
It ties into things like the idea that COVID could be manufactured. You know, that people
are being kept in poverty because of the actions of this shadowy deep state.
Trump's rhetoric created an ideal breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
And as long as Trump was in office, the QAnon community could interpret every step he took
as part of his alleged plan to fight the deep state.
The lost presidential election was a major setback. But Trump's refusal to accept his
defeat gave the movement a last push – until Joe Biden peacefully assumed office as US
President. So what's next for QAnon? Will it all come
to an end now, since predictions of Trump staying in power to finish his mission turned
out to be wrong? So you have some of these supporters who are
really disappointed now and they feel betrayed. Some of them are reflecting, did I really
spoil my last three and a half years believing in this ideology? And nothing of this is true.
And on the other hand, of course, as a group, as it's always with conspiracy ideologies,
who say, no, no, it's still the plan. It's all very fine. And at the moment, this is,
as I said, interesting to watch. But of course, there's always a danger that these people
stop talking at one point and then think they have to act. And if they think they have to
act, they could also act violently, as we know. And this is the big fear for the next
months to watch. Many QAnon supporters have already proven
that they are prepared to use violence. When a mob of furious Trump supporters stormed
the Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, lots of Q flags and shirts could be seen
in the crowd. Prominent figures who took part, like Jake Angeli, the man wearing horns and
a fur hat, were part of the QAnon world. Ashli Elizabeth Babbitt, the 35-year-old woman who
was fatally shot by Capitol Police, was also a follower of QAnon, and had tweeted the previous
day "the storm is here." The storming of the Capitol did not lead to
the reversal of the election result that QAnon followers were hoping for. But experts say
that's unlikely to spell the end of the movement. I think it's probably too soon to tell exactly
what will happen. But I can tell you that the people who believe in this are going to
continue to believe it. The sort of classic conspiracy theories are always about
a sort of vast string-pulling group doing terrible things to you. Where Q is different
is that it gave you a way to fight back and that way still exists of making videos, making
memes, decoding the signs and the communications that are done in public. That's not going
to change some of the ideas that we can send out a Tweet and destroy the deep state. That
is going to change. And I don't know exactly where that will land, but the basic beliefs
are still going to be the same. Of course the movement will have to adapt.
With Joe Biden in the White House, the role of Trump in the Q universe is at stake.
Trump might no longer be the center of the spectacle. He might not be the face they see
on television. People have coped with this in several ways. The idea that Biden
is in on this, either in a way where he's turning himself in in the long run or in a
way where he is actually just a kind of implanted agent for this broader storm, this movement
that they see happening. So there's going to be a lot of mental adaptations, I think,
to the situation as it stands. And while Trump's part in the narrative will
have to be twisted, other elements of the story will continue in 2021 - such as COVID-19.
The pandemic was this huge recruiting opportunity for QAnon promoters, you know. They saw that
there's this huge mass of people dealing with this enormous event. And a lot of people were
isolated, they were bored, they were at home, they weren't working. And you go down rabbit
holes and you start looking, you start looking for reasons why this is going on. And if Q
is providing them in the form of "the deep state of China did this to prop up Joe Biden”,
it's as good an explanation as anything. As the experts point out, it is unlikely that
January 20th turns out to be a dead end for QAnon. While some followers have expressed
a lot of anger and will turn their back on QAnon now, the movement is likely to attract
others in times of uncertainty. A worst case would be further radicalization, leading to
violence. Donald Trump said in his farewell address "The best is yet to come" – a sentence
that might be further inspiration to keep the movement alive.