QAnon followers are drawn to conspiracy theories by these personality traits -- according to psychologists

Raw Story

Travis Gettys

February 19, 2021

After the U.S. Capitol insurrection, tens of thousands of Reddit users joined a support group for people who've lost loved ones to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The group that was created in 2019 ballooned from just under 60,000 members on Jan. 6 to more than 133,000 this month, and psychologists have catalogued some of the personality traits that draw individuals into conspiracy theories like this increasingly popular variant, reported Politico.

"Times of crisis such as the current pandemic tend to increase belief in conspiracy theories as a way of coping with fear, uncertainty, and lack of control and as an expression of mistrust in authoritative sources of information," said Joseph Pierre, a UCLA psychiatry professor who's written extensively about QAnon.

The conspiracy theory's basic outline holds that Donald Trump was heading up an effort to overthrow satanic pedophiles -- mostly Democratic elected leaders, along with Hollywood and media elites -- who will be publicly executed in a military action called "the storm," but its malleability and online participatory nature allows adherents to attach their own interests or obsessions onto the overarching theme.

"It's been inclusive in a way that I've really never seen any other conspiracy," said Ethan Zuckerman, a communications professor at the University of Massachusetts who has researched the movement. "You can listen to whoever's voice is closer to your own. So if you're not here for satanism, listen to someone who is not playing up the satanic part of it."

Conspiracy-minded individuals tend to have a high level of mistrust toward authoritative sources of information, according to Pierre, and they also wish for uniqueness and certainty, closure and control.

They often fit the psychological profile of an "injustice collector," according to experts.

Those individuals tend to be overly confident, impulsive and enjoy exposing others as naïve -- like "Mark," the brother of a man interviewed by Politico.

Mark, 73, has always been insecure about his intelligence and education in comparison to his older brother Richard, 77, who was always considered the smarter one.

Richard loved books and got good grades, but Mark struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and has always gravitated toward secret information to prove he knew more than his older brother -- and QAnon has offered in abundance.

"You have treated me as a stupid little brother all your life, and I looked up to you as a mentor," Mark wrote to his brother in an email. "You have joined the sheep."

QAnon adherents bond over their shared love for secret information, but psychologists say they're also bound by anger and confusion that the conspiracy theory allows them to focus on common enemies -- often at the expense of their real-life relationships.

"[QAnon] manages to capture that authenticity, that comes from people genuinely, sincerely, trying to figure out how to make sense of a world that isn't making any sense to them," Zuckerman said.

https://www.rawstory.com/qanon-conspiracy-2650621401/

 

Conspiracy theories — unmasked! From Winston Churchill to QAnon in a few easy steps

Salon

Do we live in a golden age of wacko paranoia? No, says German scholar Michael Butter: It's always been with us 

"Many people may believe that we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories. That's not really the case, according to German academic Michael Butter, who teaches American literature and culture at the University of Tübingen in Germany. But we do live in the golden age of conspiracy-theory studies. Butter's recent book, "The Nature of Conspiracy Theories," published just after the presidential election, does an invaluable job synthesizing a wide range of research across multiple disciplines — from psychology and sociology to philosophy, literature and cultural studies — over a period of decades.   

While conspiracy theories are certainly much more prominent now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, they remain widely stigmatized. Before the 1950s, as Butter explains in his book and this interview, they were taken for a granted as a legitimate framework for describing the world. After the Nazi period and the McCarthy era they were driven to the political and social margins, and then returned under a cloud. The internet has played a central role in providing an environment where they can flourish, but the role of media is in itself hardly a new thing: Before the invention of the printing press, conspiracy theories as we know them today simply didn't exist, as far as we can tell, except in more limited scope in ancient Greece and Rome. 

With America's conspiracist in chief now gone from the White House, such paranoid beliefs are not going to suddenly disappear, any more than the populism structurally associated with the dominant forms of conspiracy theories today. But what role will conspiracy theory play in the political future of the United States and the West, and what can its history tell us to expect? Salon reached out to Butter to explain the secret forces at work behind the surface of reality — or at least to discuss those questions and his new book. This interview has been edited, as usual, for clarity and length. 

Winston Churchill probably isn't the first person who comes to mind when we talk about conspiracy theory, but you begin your introduction by discussing a short speech he gave in 1920. Why begin there, and what does the most famous British statesman of the 20th century have to tell us?  

I begin with Winston Churchill for two reasons. On the one hand, because it's a prototypical conspiracy theory that he develops in this speech. All the elements — nothing is at it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected — are there, so this allows me to define what a conspiracy theory is. Secondly and equally important, I begin with Winston Churchill because this cuts to the major point of my book, which, besides providing a general introduction to conspiracy theories, is that it used to be quite normal to believe in conspiracy theories. People that you usually do not associate with conspiracy theories, but regard very highly — people like Churchill, but also George Washington or Abraham Lincoln — spread conspiracy perfectly normal." 

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/20/conspiracy-theories--unmasked-from-winston-churchill-to-qanon-in-a-few-easy-steps/

Family Caring Research Study

Request for participants who have/had family members in controlling/abusive groups - for “Family Caring Research Study”

 

If you are interested in cooperating with the research request below, keep in mind that, unless you have made a legal commitment to the contrary, you may withdraw your participation at any time and for any reason. Occasionally, participation in research studies may stimulate adverse reactions. If you experience such reactions, feel free to assert yourself and withdraw from the study, if you wish.  Any feedback on your participation in this research project would be welcomed but is entirely voluntary and is not expected.

 

Letter from the Researcher

 

INVITATION TO PARTICIPATE IN THE FAMILY CARING RESEARCH STUDY

 

Who we are?

 

This study involves researchers from the Psychology Department of Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA).

 

What are we doing?

 

We are studying the perceptions and experiences of family members or individuals concerned about a loved one who is or was in a controlling or abusive group or relationship. The study’s purpose is to fill a research gap in this area. We hope to increase our knowledge of the specific concerns and needs of families, relatives, and friends of those affected by an abusive situation. We want to find new and better ways of understanding family relationships under these circumstances. We hope that the information collected by this study will enhance attention to the needs of those who have/had a loved one in a controlling or abusive group or relationship.

 

What we ask from you?

 

You are invited to participate in the research project if you are/were concerned about the past or current involvement of a loved one with a group or relationship you now consider was/is overly controlling or abusive to its members. You may or may not have been involved yourself with the group or relationship. We ask you to respond to a web-survey, which you may complete at your convenience.

 

What is the web-survey like?

 

The survey is divided into various separated parts. Part I and Part II include some basic demographic questions (e.g., age, education) on you and your loved one. Part III of the survey includes some instruments inquiring about your concerns, responses, and experiences about your loved one being involved in the group/relationship. Part IV includes brief instruments on problems you may have experienced. Finally, Part V includes some questions on the group/relationship your loved one is/was involved. 

 

Overall, it is anticipated that the entire survey will take approximately 45 minutes to complete. Please note that your participation in this study is voluntary, and that you may withdraw at any time, without consequence. 

 

What should you do if you accept our invitation to participate?

 

Click on the link below to access the survey. Alternatively, copy and paste it into the address bar of the web browser.  

Please, use the word “ICSA97136” as a PASSWORD to the survey. Please, be aware that only those responses with valid passwords will be considered.

 

Here is the link to the survey: https://es.surveymonkey.com/r/familycaring    

 

More information about the study

 

If you want to obtain more information about the study or make any comment, you may contact Carmen Almendros at this e-mail address: coercivecontrol.research@gmail.com, or write to: Carmen Almendros, Ph.D. Facultad de Psicología. C/ Ivan Paulov, 6. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. Cantoblanco. 28049. Madrid, Spain.

 

Thank you so much for your time. Your participation is very important for us!!!

Queensland moves to criminalise coercive control after murder of Hannah Clarke and her children

Exclusive: Hannah Clarke’s parents welcome Annastacia Palaszczuk’s appointment of a taskforce to investigate how to legislate coercive control

Amanda Gearing

The Guardian 

February 17, 2021

The parents of Hannah Clarke have welcomed moves to criminalise coercive control in Queensland as they approach the first anniversary of their daughter’s murder by her husband.

The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, announced the formation of a taskforce to consult with legal and domestic violence experts and victims to make coercively controlling behaviours crimes on Wednesday.

“Coercive control is a really severe form of oppression that can last months if not years,” she said.

Lloyd and Sue Clarke: 'Coercive control laws could have saved Hannah and her three children'

The premier said her government wanted to do everything possible to prevent intimate partner homicides, as a government, as a taskforce and as a community.

“It’s not good enough and it’s not on. And today we draw a line in the sand.”

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Lloyd and Sue Clarke said the appointment of the taskforce to report back to the Queensland government by October this year was a timely initiative.

“I’m very happy that the taskforce is a very positive step forward and I hope coercive control will be legislated,” Sue Clarke said. “We are pleased that Queensland is doing it first.”

Sue Clarke said she would like the rest of Australia to enact similar laws to enable law enforcement and domestic violence services to better protect victims of non-physical and physical domestic violence.

“I’d like the whole of Australia to follow suit,” she said. “I can’t see why coercive control can’t be made a crime Australia-wide.”

Lloyd Clarke said he would like coercive control to be legislated “next week” but he understood the need for thorough preparation of the legislation to ensure its effectiveness.

“We need to get this right,” he said. “Every one of these perpetrators is the same – like there’s a handbook that’s given out to them.”

He said he and his wife would give the taskforce all the information they could to assist with making the new laws.

Former court of appeal judge Margaret McMurdo AC will chair the taskforce. The other members are yet to be announced.

The Queensland attorney general, Shannon Fentiman, announced on Wednesday that she hoped to introduce legislation into the Queensland parliament at the beginning of next year.

The need for legislation was raised after the murder of Hannah and her three children, Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4 and Trey, 3, by her husband, who ambushed them on their way to school, poured petrol in their car and set the car on fire.

Before her death, Hannah had been subjected to years of coercive control by her husband, who isolated her from family and friends, tracked her movements, controlled who she spoke to, what she wore, where she went, when she slept and whether she saw a doctor.

Research in Britain and other countries has shown that coercive control is more highly correlated with intimate partner homicide than physical abuse.

However, several types of coercive controlling behaviour are not direct crimes in Australia.

Coercive control was made a crime in England, Ireland and Wales in 2015 and in Scotland in 2018.

Hannah’s parents did not realise the extent of the control she had suffered or the seriousness of the danger to her and their grandchildren.

However, since their deaths on 19 February 2020, the couple has campaigned for coercive and controlling behaviours to be designated as crimes in Australia.

Fentiman said the Palaszczuk government would seek community input on the proposed laws.

“It needs to be considered from all perspectives to ensure we get it right,” she said.

“We will consult with a wide range of survivors, domestic and sexual violence service providers, legal and domestic violence experts and the community.

“That includes Hannah Clarke’s parents, Lloyd and Sue, in the development of a new approach to coercive control.”

Police and other first responders will be provided with training to recognise and respond to coercive control, as well as developing a community awareness campaign, Fentiman said.

She said she was confident in the leadership of McMurdo to help the government deliver strong and carefully considered new laws.

Lloyd and Sue Clarke have invited people to light a candle in memory of Hannah and her children between 5.30pm and sunset on Friday.

Lloyd Clarke said there would not be an organised commemoration gathering due to Covid-19 regulations but people could gather informally at the memorial to Hannah at Hannah’s Place, 147 Samuel Street, Camp Hill, on the weekend.

https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/17/queensland-moves-to-criminalise-coercive-control-after-of-hannah-clarke-and-her-children

Another South Korean religious group investigated over Covid-19 outbreak

La Prensa Latina Media

Online News Editor Online News February 15, 2021

Seoul, Feb 15 (efe-epa).- South Korean police searched the headquarters of a missionary organization Monday for being behind an outbreak of Covid-19, a new case in the country of a Christian group being accused of violating health emergency laws.

Authorities stormed the International Mission headquarters in Daejeon city (about 165 kilometers south of Seoul), Yonhap news agency reported.

The agents took computers, hard drives and documentation that may contain evidence that the group violated the health emergency law and caused an outbreak that has already affected more than 400 people in different cities.

Daejeon city council denounced the group, accusing the organization of holding services despite the ban triggered by authorities or of ignoring capacity limitations in the classrooms of several of its schools.

The mission’s leader, a missionary named Michael Jo, will be taken to the police station to testify about it, according to the police.

The man has tested negative for the virus, although he had to remain in quarantine after being in contact with infected people.

The mission operates a total of 23 centers across South Korea, including several colleges.

Christian groups have been a constant focus of infections in South Korea, where the country’s first major outbreak was linked to the Shincheonji sect in February 2020.

In turn, last August the presbyterian Church of Maximum Love was behind some demonstrations and several religious services that led to the second-largest outbreak of Covid-19 that the country has faced.

Seoul City Council said Monday it had detected Covid-19 in a domestic cat, the first of its kind since the South Korean capital last week launched a pioneering testing system for pets.

The cat that has tested positive is between four and five years old and lives with a family in which all members are infected with the virus, a statement from the metropolitan government said.

After the first positives in the family, the cat began to vomit and grow tired, so it was tested, a city council spokeswoman told EFE.

The feline is in quarantine for 14 days in a municipal animal shelter since all members of the family are in medical centers (South Korea hospitalizes the majority of positive cases.)

Protocols established by Seoul, the first city in the world to implement a pet testing system, does not require that animals that test positive be sent to specific centers.

Since it has not yet been proven that animals can infect humans, Seoul allows those who have tested positive to be kept in their own home or with a designated keeper as long as they are not in direct contact with other animals or people.

Since launching its pet testing system on Feb. 10, Seoul has tested three dogs and the aforementioned cat for coronavirus.

Only those pets that show symptoms or have been in contact with infected humans can undergo the municipal testing system.

Although in a very isolated way, mammals of different species have been infected with COVID-19 by humans in different parts of the world, from dogs to minks and even lions or gorillas. EFE-EPA

https://www.laprensalatina.com/another-south-korean-religious-group-investigated-over-covid-19-outbreak/amp/

Unwelcome On Facebook And Twitter, QAnon Followers Flock To Fringe Sites

Shannon Bond

NPR

January 31, 2021

January brought a one-two punch that should have knocked out the fantastical, false QAnon conspiracy theory.

After the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social media platforms that had long allowed the falsehoods to spread like wildfire — namely Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — got more aggressive in cracking down on accounts promoting QAnon.

Just two weeks later, Joe Biden was inaugurated president. That stunned those adherents who believed, among other things, that Donald Trump would stay in office for another term and that he would arrest and execute his political enemies.

"There's no one cohesive narrative that's really emerged yet. And I pin that on [QAnon] not really having a leader right now," said Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory researcher who is writing a book about QAnon.

The QAnon universe has two stars. There's Q, the mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts on anonymous online message boards spawned the baseless claim that a satanic cabal of pedophiles runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The other star is Trump, who was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal.

But both figures have gone silent online. Whoever Q is, the account has pretty much stopped posting on those message boards since the 2020 election. Trump was kicked off Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube after urging his supporters to go to the Capitol.

And yet, even as the big social media platforms try to squash harmful misinformation and hate speech, the conspiracy has survived in the darker corners of the Internet. As QAnon believers splinter onto different fringe platforms, experts warn they could absorb even more dangerous conspiracy theories and ideologies. What's more, QAnon has gained defenders in conservative media and among Republicans in Congress.

The events of Jan. 6 underscore how QAnon has leaped from the fringes of the Internet to the real world. Some rioters in the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol openly expressed support for QAnon. That prompted Twitter, which along with Facebook and YouTube had started limiting QAnon content last year, to clamp down even more.

In the days after the Capitol insurrection, Twitter banned 70,000 QAnon-linked accounts for spreading the conspiracy theory. Some belonged to influencers with large followings, including high-profile Trump supporters Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, who had also spread false claims of election fraud and had tried to get the election results overturned.

The result? "There isn't one central place that people are finding information in terms of influential accounts, and it's kind of become more disparate," said Melanie Smith of the research firm Graphika.

Graphika found that among a dense network of 14,000 QAnon-promoting Twitter accounts it has been tracking, 60% are now inactive. That splintering makes it harder for harmful, even violent ideas to gain traction — and less likely that unsuspecting Twitter users will stumble across them.

"For me, [this] is about not exposing new communities to that type of content," Smith said. "So in my mind, that's a pretty big success."

It's hard to quantify just how many people follow QAnon. When NPR and Ipsos polled people about whether they believe QAnon's core false claim — that "a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media" — 17% said it was true, and another 37% said they didn't know.

While some people who may be susceptible to believing the falsehoods may never see them, Smith and other researchers warn there is a cost to that success: As QAnon influencers and their followers are pushed off mainstream platforms, some are migrating to apps with fewer rules, like the alternative social network Gab and the messaging app Telegram. There, they may be exposed to more extremist content, like that of white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.

"What they're essentially doing is walking straight into an incubator for radicalization," said Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, where he studies disinformation and extremism.

QAnon is already incorporating new, unfounded theories from other extremists. Some accounts are latching onto obscure legal fictions promoted by sovereign-citizen groups, which deny the legitimacy of the U.S. government, such as the bogus idea that Trump will be inaugurated on March 4.

Holt said such adoption is "just another example of something that QAnon has done repeatedly, if not constantly, which is crowdsourcing their idea of reality."

QAnon's constant evolution presents a challenge for platforms like Twitter and Facebook in enforcing their bans by stamping out new conspiracy theories and hashtags appropriated by QAnon believers.

But even if effective, the platforms' actions can go only so far.

QAnon podcasts are available through Apple and Google. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently defended QAnon adherents. QAnon has even gained a foothold in the halls of Congress, where two Republican members have openly supported some of the movement's baseless ideas.

"When you've got people like Tucker Carlson or sitting members of the House of Representatives talking about something, it's hard to ban it," said Rothschild, the researcher.

"I think this movement is now so mainstream and has pulled in so many people that it seems inconceivable that it will go away completely," he said.

Editor's note: Facebook and Google are among NPR's financial supporters.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/31/962104747/unwelcome-on-facebook-twitter-qanon-followers-flock-to-fringe-sites

The QAnon Timeline: Four Years, 5,000 Drops and Countless Failed Propheciess

Bellingcat

January 29, 2021

QAnon

Tech Team

QAnon is not a static conspiracy theory. Since it first emerged in 2017, it has continuously evolved, focusing on different key topics and adopting elements of other conspiracy theories. As Bellingcat has recently written, this elasticity has been the key to its success.

With the inauguration of US President Joe Biden, QAnon’s faithful are adrift and confused. Their distress has caused some observers to ask whether their cult may collapse entirely. That might be premature. Failed prophecies do not always collapse elaborate conspiracies — if that were true, how could QAnon have endured for four years?

If we cannot predict its end, we can at least trace QAnon from its beginning — looking at all the falsehoods and conspiracies it peddled, from the initial Mueller investigations to the era of COVID-19 and the last days of the Donald Trump presidency.

Bellingcat researchers have analysed a dataset containing 4,952 so-called “Q drops”, the cryptic messages that are at the heart of the conspiracy theory. These were posted by an anonymous person known simply as “Q” — whom followers believe to be a source of insider knowledge about US politics. Whenever a Q drop appears, believers around the world eagerly try to interpret its hidden meaning,  connecting them to real world events.

The Q drop dataset was found on the image board 8kun, which was used by Q followers as a location to comment on Q drops. It contains posts dating back to October 2017, a time when QAnon theories were a fringe online hobby, and continues until October 2020 — by which time they were taken all too seriously.

The word clouds in the timeline show the most common words found in the Q drops over one- or three-month intervals, while the accompanying text discusses important developments during these periods, both in US politics and significant Q drops.

This chronology brings quantitative and qualitative analysis to the story of QAnon’s growth, enriching our understanding of how the conspiracy adapts to contradictions and evolves its narratives.

Methodology

This investigation illustrates key developments and discussions in the QAnon conspiracy theory over time. To identify these trends, we split the data into subsets of one to three month intervals with an average of 290 Q drops.

For each subset, we ran a clustering algorithm that grouped sentences with a similar sentiment together. Using the results of the clustering, we then summarised major topics and notable developments for each time period.

“Sentiment” was evaluated using the Universal Sentence Encoder, an academically recognised text classification model that converted each Q drop into an array of numbers — a vector — based on its meaning.

Q drops with similar meanings have similar vectors. The closeness of two vectors can be calculated by taking their dot product. Thus we were able to evaluate the “closeness” in sentiment between sentences in order to categorise the text of each Q drop.

Pre-QAnon (2016)

Something of a precursor to QAnon can be found in Pizzagate — the false theory that Hillary Clinton operated a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza restaurant. Pizzagate, too, inspired serious followers who vowed to take action. One was Edgar Maddison Welch from North Carolina, who was arrested on December 4, 2016 for firing an assault rifle at the Washington D.C. pizza restaurant which was alleged to be the location of the crimes.

Welch’s arrest helped to debunk the conspiracy. But from the ashes of Pizzagate emerged QAnon. This new conspiracy theory replaced the Achilles’ heel of Pizzagate — its specificity — with ambiguity and adaptability. FBIAnon, a self-described high-level government analyst who was ostensibly the central source of information in the Pizzagate conspiracy, was replaced with Q, a supposed high-ranking intelligence officer with classified information on a supposed global cabal. As QAnon became an umbrella conspiracy theory, many others collected under its shade. Pizzagate lived on, in another form.

The first documented Q drop appeared on October 28, 2017 under the /pol/ sub board of 4chan, the “politically incorrect” and anonymous image board notorious for its grotesque content and memes.

October 2017

17 Q drops

This month’s drops all appeared over a four day period. These drops were attributed to Q through their tripcode, a unique identifier on 4chan that proves a series of anonymous posts were written by the same person or people.

From the first two words of the drop (“HRC extradition”), it is clear that QAnon was recycling an idea from Pizzagate — that Hillary Clinton was a member of child sex trafficking cabal. The next seventeen drops established Donald Trump’s role in the theory, as the central hero bent on exposing the cabal, and introduced “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged plot by mainstream media to hide the global elites’ Satanic crimes through fake news.

Notably, many of the initial Q drops are phrased as a series of questions, generating engagement and participation from followers of the conspiracy theory.

The most-mentioned topics in these drops were Hillary Clinton, POTUS (Donald Trump), the aforementioned “Operation Mockingbird”, the philanthropist George Soros, and Huma (Huma Mahmood Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton).

November 2017

223 Q drops

The following month, Q’s activity surged. The majority of these drops expanded upon previous theories about Hillary Clinton, adding to the cast of characters with conspiracy theories involving Huma (Clinton’s political aid during the 2016 campaign), Barack Obama, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

“Antifa,” a term which has since become widespread in American politics, appeared in a Q drop on October 30, 2017. This was Q’s first use of the term.

On November 4, Q first uses the millenarian term “the great awakening” — when the supposed cabal will be toppled and justice restored. It will become one of the conspiracy’s most recognisable slogans.

Furthermore, “Alice and Wonderland,” code for “Hillary Clinton and Saudi Arabia,” began to appear in Q drops. This links to a conspiracy which alleged that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were beholden to Saudi interests, in particular Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a Saudi prince and businessman to whom both owed money. Another emerging conspiracy theory alleged that the Obama administration had secretly assisted the governments of Iran and North Korea to develop their nuclear weapons programs.

Once again, Huma and Hillary Clinton were the most mentioned subjects in these drops, followed by Saudi Arabia, Barack Obama, Al-Waleed Bin Talal, nuclear weapons, Iran, North Korea, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

December 2017

219 Q drops

At the end of 2017, John McCain took his place alongside Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in QAnon’s cast of villains. Some of the month’s Q drops alleged that he had connections to terrorist groups, the Free Syrian Army, and Saudi Arabia.

The QAnon community was excited by the possibility of further external validation — a government press release entitled “United States Sanctions Human Rights Abusers and Bad Actors Across the Globe” was believed to be authored by Q.

The same month, it became known from the press that Barack Obama — whom QAnon believers referred to by his middle name Hussein — had taken the secret service code name “renegade”. For followers of the conspiracy this was appropriate, as they increasingly accused the former president of betraying the US.

But alongside its focus on supposedly corrupt individuals, the conspiracy began to evolve to target entire organisations. This month saw several attacks on the Red Cross, whose offices in Haiti are believed by QAnon followers to be a hotspot for child trafficking.

January 2018

200 Q drops

This month, the QAnon community asserted that Donald Trump had surreptitiously addressed them via Twitter. The “evidence” for this was supposedly that Trump had misspelled a Tweet, correcting the word “consentual” to “consequential”. The 8kun imageboard brimmed with discussions about the added letter “q”.  A later Q drop then affirmed the community’s connection to Trump.

Following claims that the original 4chan board had been infiltrated, the QAnon community then migrated to 8chan, another imageboard. Q attempted to re-establish their authority during this move, confirming a tripcode on the new platform. However, suspicions arose regarding Q’s identity.

The whistleblower Edward Snowden, whose initial role in the theory is controversial, is accused by Q of being a CIA plant in the NSA, with the CIA allegedly a tool of the corrupt cabal.

Meanwhile in the outside world, the US government entered a 35-day shutdown, while Special Counsel Robert Mueller led an investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election. Both issues affect the topics of Q drops.

This month, Q coins the slogan “Where we go one, we go all”. It will become a major rallying cry for followers of the QAnon conspiracy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robert Mueller and his activities were a key topic in the month’s Q drops.  Fake news, Russia, and Attorney General Rod Rosenstein also featured prominently.

February to March 2018

323 Q drops

This period saw Q’s first mention of the name “Operation Merlin”, referring to the aforementioned plot by the Obama administration to send technology to Iran and North Korea. Here, Q alleged that as part of the operation, the US authorities also sent flights carrying billions of dollars in payoffs to puppets of a shadowy global cabal.

Q also declared that cell towers, phones and Amazon Alexa and Google Home smart speakers are capable of “voice to skull” technology, emitting frequencies which implant thoughts and compel people nearby to take certain actions. Blackberry, Q continued, was destroyed by the “global cabal” for not complying with these goals.

Edward Snowden also re-emerged as a central figure of interest in Q’s lore. Q claims that the CIA uses computer games to send coded orders for illegal operations to rogue operatives such as Snowden and John Perry Barlow.

Big tech companies (namely Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Google) take the spotlight in this period’s Q drops, followed by Edward Snowden, the CIA, and the question of Russian interference on US politics.

April to May 2018

450 Q drops

Q continued to focus on “deep state” collusion with foreign powers, claiming that these shadowy powers had mined uranium in Syria to sell to Iran, covering up the deals by blaming the Russians. As the nuclear deal with Iran came to an end, Q drops considered whether Iran was continuing work on a nuclear facility in northern Syria.

Amid continuing discussions on race and racism in the USA, Q made an appeal to Black voters, increasingly stating that Black communities were ideologically enslaved by the Democratic Party.

On April 3, Q first uses WWG1WGA, the acronym for the slogan “Where we go one, we go all”. Much like the phrase itself, it will become common among QAnon followers.

Q’s tripcode password was leaked, allowing several QAnon followers to post from the account. A new tripcode for Q was then whitelisted and accepted by followers.

Alongside their focus on Syria and uranium deals during this period, Q drops started to draw attention to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

June to July 2018

352 Q drops

On June 16, Q released a “hit list” of 101 reporters who allegedly “colluded with the DNC [Democratic National Congress] during the 2016 election”. Q drops later accused the British government of having worked with Barack Obama in order to sabotage the same election.

Following Epstein’s arrest on July 6, Q drops discussed the sex trafficking crimes which Q insisted continued to be committed by the cabal. Several drops attempted to connect Bill and Hillary Clinton to Epstein, as well as other traffickers such as Allison Mack.

Q zealously followed discussions around the possible impeachment of Donald Trump and the activities of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Key topics of interest in all Q drops over this period were fake news and “MSM”, the UK and London, and sex trafficking.

August to September 2018

517 Q drops

This period appeared to be a major call to action to QAnon followers. Many of the Q drops focused on awakening from the “fake news media” with the urge to be “sheep no more” and spark a “grand awakening”.

Q drops struck a strongly political tone in August and September, repeatedly encouraging followers to vote in the US midterm elections in order to secure a “red October” (meaning a Republican landslide).

The controversy over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court was denounced by Q as an example of “liberal left lunacy”. Q also accused bot accounts and hired trolls of downvoting QAnon-related posts on discussion boards. 

The “red October”, Kavanaugh confirmation, “fake news”, and allegations of Twitter censorship were all leading topics in Q drops over this period.

October to December 2018

341 Q drops

As the US held midterm elections, online allegations of electoral fraud foreshadowed the same approach the Trump campaign would take in the 2020 presidential election. QAnon conspiracy theorists accused the Democratic Party of filling out “blank ballots” or destroying legal ones, and organising non-citizen voting.

Here Q coined the term “Scaramucci play”, referring to a theory that the White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci had been hired temporarily to remove “untrustworthy staffers” such as the White House’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

Electoral fraud was the most mentioned topic in Q drops throughout this period, alongside alleged corruption in the Democratic Party and Department of Justice. Q also paid particular attention to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh.

January – March 2019

668 Q drops

After Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that Obama had wiretapped his election campaign in 2016, Q raised the alarm about “spygate” and accused Obama once again of betraying the USA. In September 2019, the Justice Department would confirm that neither it nor the FBI had any evidence that Trump Tower had been the target of surveillance efforts by the Obama administration.

During this period, one of Q’s most lurid claims surfaced — namely that Ruth Bader Ginsburg (referred to in Q drops as “RBG”) was a member of the occult due to her association with the Clintons (Bader Ginsburg was nominated as an Assistant Justice to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton in 1993).

The White House was plunged into chaos after Trump dismissed FBI Director James Comey on May 9. Responding to these events, Q accused Rod Rosenstein of secretly recording Trump in the White House with a view to “entrap” the president. Q then questioned Rosenstein’s connections with the Democratic Party and the “extreme left”.

Key topics of Q’s interest in this period included the Mueller trials, Edward Snowden and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

April to June 2019

42 Q drops

The Mueller report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was published in April. Until its release, the report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was interpreted by some QAnon believers as part of an attempt to expose the supposed global cabal. Once again, they were disappointed — so Q muddied the waters.

With the report made public, Q suggests that it was not the endgame in the struggle against this cabal, but the beginning of yet another. This heralds the reappearance of DECLAS — a term Q had first used in November 2017 to refer to an undetermined future point where documents exposing the truth about the cabal will all be declassified.

July – August 1 2019

218 Q drops

Q finds another target: Planned Parenthood. Q’s drops claim that the organisation, which offers access to abortion in the USA, is a conspiracy “having nothing to do with a woman’s right to choose,” whose purpose is to harvest fetuses for profit.

Meanwhile Trump continued to denounce Obama, claiming that he had attempted to call Kim Jong-Un multiple times to “beg” for a meeting, but the North Korean leader did not respond. In doing so, the president compared his predecessor’s record with his own supposed success — Trump met Kim Jong-Un at a summit in Hanoi in February.

A Q drop from this period suggests a similar fixation on the supposed failings of Trump’s predecessor, with the words “Would you believe Hussein tried to call Kim prior to the Summit? He did not have his updated phone number.”

Key topics of interest in Q drops for this period include the investigation into Russian interference, child trafficking and Jeffrey Epstein.

August 2 – November 10 2019

No Q drops

After three shootings in August 2019 in which the attackers used 8chan to spread their hateful manifestos, the website was taken offline that same month. No Q drops appeared during this time period until a transition was facilitated to 8kun, a rebranded version of the site which was launched in November.

November 11 – December 2019

204 Q drops

Q’s interest in “spygate” returned. “Never has a president left office to collude with others to impede the next sitting president of the United States of America until Obama!” declared one Q drop.

Discussions about Jeffrey Epstein and child trafficking grew in prominence.

Key topics throughout this period included spygate, fake news, attempts to impeach Trump, and Antifa.

January – April 2020

265 Q drops

The first case of COVID-19 was confirmed in the USA on January 20; Trump declared a public health emergency on January 31.

In March, Trump misinformed the public that hydroxychloroquine could be effective in treating or preventing COVID-19. Q followed suit and implied that the medication, which is used to prevent malaria, can also be a cure for the new coronavirus. “What if a cure already exists?” asked Q in one drop, before suggesting that the Democrats are attempting to suppress it.

Q also perpetuated accusations that Democratic governors forced infected COVID-19 patients into nursing homes, thereby deliberately causing the majority of the country’s COVID-19 deaths at the time. Perhaps surprisingly, Q’s first mention of the term “COVID-19” only appeared on April 8.

Key topics in this period were the COVID-19 pandemic and former Attorney General William Barr. As a staunch supporter of Trump, Barr defended the president’s decision in April to fire Michael Atkinson, Inspector General of the US Intelligence Community.

The phrase WWG1WGA frequently appeared in Q drops during this period.

May – July 2020

581 Q drops

As the USA looked toward the November presidential election, Trump supporters continued to peddle conspiracies about the Democratic Party preparing for massive voter fraud. Accordingly, QAnon followers and Q drops alike relayed the same messages.

Q drops then refocused on Epstein. One of them included a photo of Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who was arrested on July 2 for her complicity in Epstein’s crimes. Multiple Q drops included photos of Bill Clinton alongside Jeffrey Epstein, followed by more familiar conspiracy theories about the Clintons operating a child trafficking ring.

Subsequent drops accused all five presidents before Trump of colluding with the “deep state”, then turned their attention to Trump’s Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Q also shared thoughts about the protests which rocked the country following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Q focused commentary on Antifa’s presumed role in the demonstrations, even quoting and reposting Fox News articles describing Antifa as an “anarchist, left-wing outlet”.

Key topics mentioned during this period included mail voting, election fraud, Ghislaine Maxwell, the Clintons, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

August – September 2020

179 Q drops

The Republican and Democratic Parties both held their national conventions in August, during which Trump and Biden were chosen as their respective presidential candidates. On August 20, Trump was asked his opinion of the QAnon movement during a press conference. The president stated that he knew little about the conspiracy theory but acknowledged that “they like me very much”.

Amid growing polarisation about the upcoming presidential election, Q continued to fulminate against Antifa, comparing it to the militant anti-fascists of the interwar German communist party. Q drops also compared Democrats’ usage of social media to the propaganda of Nazi Germany. The fractious atmosphere before the election also lead to more media attention towards QAnon — to which both Q and followers reacted very negatively.

Key topics in this period included Antifa, child trafficking and sex criminals, and the word “MSDNC”. The latter, a portmanteau of the cable TV channel MSNBC and the acronym for the Democratic National Convention, was used in Q drops denouncing fake news.

October 2020

148 Q drops

After it had generated rising media coverage and notoriety, Trump was asked if he would denounce QAnon during an interview with the NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. Trump reacted defensively and refused to explicitly disavow the conspiracy, saying “I don’t know about QAnon”.

In a single month, Q shared over 30 articles about Hunter Biden from right-wing news outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart. Since 2019, Hunter had been accused by Trump and his supporters of corruption due to his business dealings in Ukraine while his father Joe Biden was Vice President.

Otherwise, this may have been a month of déjà vu for Q’s followers. Drops earlier in the month refocused on the Clinton Foundation, accusing the Clintons of bribing politicians in Washington D.C. With another election around the corner, Q came full circle to the conspiracy’s first fixation:

Q’s penultimate drop in October read simply “are you ready to take back control of this Country”, implying that the election was not merely a referendum against the Democrats, but against a global cabal of bad actors which still reigned:

Key topics of Q drops during this period included Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the Democratic Party.

What next?

Since the US election in November 2020, the rate of Q drops has sharply declined. Only a single drop appeared in the last two months of 2020, on December 8. Recent crackdowns on QAnon accounts across social media, and the inauguration of President Joe Biden, have dealt further blows to the conspiracy.

At the time of publication, there have been no confirmed Q drops in 2021. But it’s far too early to catalogue the conspiracy as history. As demonstrated repeatedly in our timeline, QAnon is extremely adept at adapting to contradictions and challenges.

The conspiracy has weathered both homelessness on the internet (the 8chan shutdown and 4chan migration) and longer freezes in Q drops (101 days from August to November 2019) before.

It may yet survive.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to William Thompson, and Johanna Wild and Logan Williams from the Bellingcat Tech Team for their assistance on this investigation.

https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2021/01/29/the-qanon-timeline/

Ends to a Means

Why weren’t Haredi Jews troubled by Trump’s conspiracy-mongering?

SHAUL MAGID
Tablet Magazine

FEBRUARY 16, 2021

Many months after the presidential election, it is quite clear that Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, support for President Trump was strong. The Satmar enclave of Kiryas Joel in Rockland County, New York, voted 99% for Trump in 2020. In Haredi sections of Borough Park, Brooklyn, the numbers were about 90% for Trump. The story of Haredi support for Trump, or Haredi Trumpism, is very complex, and no one theory suffices to capture this phenomenon. Some have focused on Trump’s polices toward Israel, while others point to his advocacy of certain Haredi causes; for example, he granted clemency to Shlomo Rubashkin, former CEO of the Agriprocessors slaughterhouse, who had been convicted on 86 counts of fraud, money laundering, etc., and sentenced to 27 years in prison. Others say this is an example of Haredi Americanization, even a new kind of Hasidic American nationalism. It is understandable that many in that community would overlook Trump’s rather obvious moral failings if his presidency benefited them. For most of the 20th century, Haredi Jews, like many other American ethnic groups, acted transactionally in relation to politics; political leaders were never expected to be paragons of righteousness.



But what about the conspiracism that undergirded Trump’s presidency—from the Obama “birtherism” to his wink and nod to QAnon? Why wasn’t that a problem, especially in a culture that reveres the Yiddishe kup, the good Jewish head? I want to suggest that conspiracism may be less of a problem for traditional adherents of Judaism and Christianity than to those more liberal religionists who occupy a post-secular world. Conspiracy theories, even if they are not yours, may be less alarming when your own religious belief system shares certain structural principles with them.



QAnon is perhaps today the most widespread conspiracism. Recent discussions of QAnon argue that it is an emerging “hyper-real” religion, a form of religious apocalypticism, a belief that the reality we see conceals a subterranean plan where a demonic force threatens our society—and a “chosen one,” in this case Trump, will emerge to uncover the “deep state” and save us from destruction. For anyone conversant in Jewish and Christian messianism, this is not an unfamiliar story. QAnon’s stories of child sex-trafficking and other nefarious acts simply fill in the demonic nature of the powers and principalities that corrupt the world.



The details of this mad delusion needn’t concern us here—what is more interesting, for me, are the structural similarities to messianic eschatologies in both Judaism and Christianity that continue to inform its adherents, especially evangelicals and Haredim. Haredim know little about QAnon. But the structural notion of conspiracism more generally is not foreign to them. In fact, it is embedded in the system of their religious beliefs. God appears to a tribe of ex-slaves in the Sinai desert led by an ex-Egyptian aristocrat, chooses them among all peoples, and then hands them tablets of the law that they must follow. And one day in the future, maybe soon, God will bring them back from exile for a bloody global conflagration to fulfill their destiny in their homeland. Or try this: Jesus is crucified and buried, and then his disciples discover three days later that his grave is empty, and he appears to them as an apparition telling them that he will return. The Mormons would say this: Joseph Smith, while praying in the woods one night in 1823, found golden plates, a secret message from God, that became The Book of Mormon.



We could go on. These claims are believed by millions of people. Yet none of them are inherently more believable than QAnon’s claim of a demonic deep state.



This is not to say that these religions inspire the same actions as the kind of conspiracies that we find today, which helped prepare the ground for the tumult at the Capitol—although they sometimes do. The Maccabees did storm the Jerusalem Temple in a bloody insurrection to take it back from Seleucids in 164 BCE. And Jewish groups did stage an unsuccessful insurrection against Rome in 66 CE that finally ended with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. And many Christians believed in blood libel accusations that Jews used Christian blood to make matzo for Passover. Judaism and Christianity both have certain inclinations toward what scholars call an “apocalyptic epistemology,” a belief that the fulfillment of prophecy will result in the upending of society as we know it. Much of this epistemology is embedded in these religions’ messianic ideologies; part of the appeal of these religions concerns theodicy, how to explain why suffering comes upon those who believe themselves righteous—including through the promise of vindication and restoration. And many of those messianic ideologies were born during a time of great social upheaval. QAnon makes similar claims about today’s America as purportedly run secretly by an ultra-left “cabal” intent on undermining America’s (white) heritage. It is no coincidence that this all happened at a time of a global pandemic as well as a time when white America is slowly losing its majority status.



The histories of Judaism and Christianity are littered with messianic claimants and calculations of the end time that don’t pan out. But the belief in the inevitable end time is not abandoned. In most cases, religious communities self-correct to absorb the failure of prophecy while maintaining covenantal coherence. Religions survive in part by explaining such failures within their internal system of beliefs. Rabbinic Judaism is one self-correction: The Temple was destroyed, but this was God’s plan. The Second Coming another: Jesus will return. Some forms of Judaism and Christianity try to do away with apocalyptic epistemology by naturalizing it, claiming that the hoped-for end will be natural and peaceful.



But those naturalizing tendencies often do not take root for long. Apocalyptic thinking reemerges in moments of crisis. False messianism is often the form it takes, an addiction that is hard to shake.



For many of its early architects, Zionism was “messianic” in the naturalized sense. At the time, Jews were often deemed “abnormal” because were a people without a land, and Zionism sought to reestablish Jewish sovereignty in a homeland as part of a process of normalization. While that project had enormous success, apocalyptic tendencies in the tradition very quickly began to rise to the surface, especially in times of turmoil and change, yielding the expectation that the secular state would soon reveal the divine hand that will yield a messianic age. Or that God used sinners (secular Zionists) to do God’s redemptive work. This thinking was informed by the Jewish mystical tradition, which is driven by a transformative theology that often feeds apocalyptic thinking. Things are not what they seem.



And of course this apocalypticism is seen in dispensationalist Christianity as well, which is why the symmetry between Jewish Zionist messianism and Christian Zionist dispensationalism is a natural fit. It is no accident that evangelical John Hagee gave the invocation at the U.S. Embassy’s move to Jerusalem. As Trump said afterward, “I did this for the evangelicals.” On one (Zionist) Christian reading, the Jews may think they are exercising their right of self-determination, but they are really pawns, paving the way for the return of Christ (including the predicted end-time destruction of those Jews who refuse to accept Christ). But (Jewish) Zionists don’t care, because for them it is the Christians who are the pawns in the story of their own heroic redemption. Each is conspiratorial in its own way. And they can do business together.



Haredim may not all be Zionists—most are not—but they are increasingly pro-Israel, and they view Israel as an important part of their religious identity, for complex reasons. But setting aside the Israel question, Haredi support for Trump retains some of that underlying feeling of an unseen plan unfolding in unconventional ways. False messianism has plagued Judaism for its entire history. And each time, the rising messianic figure was never a conventional righteous person, but always someone who seemed the opposite. The 17th-century false messiah Sabbatai Zevi was not a righteous scholar but a largely unknown, strange, and psychologically troubled figure of questionable learning and pedigree—whose audacious claim of messianic prophecy stirred almost an entire Jewish population. In the very time between his first messianic proclamation in 1648 and his abrupt conversion to Islam in 1666, much of the Jewish world believed him to be the messiah and prepared for a collective return to Palestine. After his conversion to Islam, many were traumatized, and a smaller group of followers developed an ideology whereby his conversion was part of his messianic vocation. He seemed like he was now a Muslim, but the conversion was, well, “fake news.” Some converted with him; others remained Jewish but became clandestine Sabbatean followers (they called themselves “the believers,” maminim); and some radical circles determined the time was ripe for sinning as a final act of redemptive behavior. What looked like a sin was really a mitzvah. Many returned to their traditional lives. And yet movements like Hasidism, now a part of normative Judaism and a foundation of Haredi Judaism, emerged in part through Sabbatean influence.



Meanwhile, for QAnon Trump is a kind of messianic savior who will cleanse the country from the evil of the deep state; for some of his followers, he is better understood as a pre-messianic leader who will usher in the return of Christ. Signs at the siege upon the Capitol read “Jesus is my savior,” “Trump is my resident.” The juxtaposition was not accidental. I have been told by Haredim that Trump is like Cyrus the Great or the conqueror Alexander. In Jewish lore, Cyrus liberated the Jews from the Babylonian exile and facilitated the rebuilding of the Second Jerusalem Temple. He was viewed as a great gentile leader who helped Jews fulfill their covenantal destiny. Why Trump is viewed by some Haredi Trumpists as a modern-day Cyrus is not wholly clear. Moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is hardly Cyrus-like in scope. Nevertheless, Haredim have come to believe that Trump is a transitional gentile leader who will change the course of the country in their favor and will alter Jewish history.



Conspiratorial rhetoric may have moved many Haredim from transactional political actors to citizens who viewed Trump as a kind of Cyrus figure. Reagan was arguably better for the Haredim than Trump, but he never inspired the same kind of enthusiasm. The support for Reagan never reached that level; his support stayed largely in the realm of the transactional.



This is not false messianism. But I am suggesting that there is good reason why this conspiratorial thinking has not been as dissonant for Haredim as it is for many other Jews. Trump’s use of conspiratorial thinking has become absorbed in some way in the Haredi world even though most Haredim don’t know, or care to know, anything about Q. The more traditional Jewish belief structure comprises elements that, while not conspiratorial per se, function under similar assumptions: reality is not what it seems; things could change very quickly; a sovereign (God) is running the world; there is a plan which is often unseen; a savior will arise to lead the battle against evil. And conspiracy theories, like religions, are not falsifiable.



If QAnon is an emerging religion, as Bradley Onishi has suggested, Haredi Jews will not be a part of it. They have their own apocalyptic epistemology built into Judaism itself—one that often lies dormant but is never extinguished. Times like this rekindle its flame, and inspire action, as a response to a precarious moment. A pandemic has ravaged Haredi communities, and an odd gentile political leader, with an Orthodox Jewish child, who stokes fears of “us versus them,” and shows fidelity to Israel, has arisen. Not quite messianism. But close. One of things conspiracism does is question what it means to “know” something. It introduces epistemic confusion. It destabilizes the real by claiming the real is hiding the truth. This is not new to certain forms of Jewish belief. In Jewish apocalyptic thinking, such confusion lies at its the very core of its understanding of knowledge. To question the “real” and offer an alternative narrative is deeply embedded in Jewish thinking. The “real” might tell you that Jews are an inconsequential people, and that God has abandoned them. But the truth is that they are chosen. Denying that is heresy: “fake news.”



With thanks to all the participants in the Hasidic Research Group



Shaul Magid, a Tablet contributing editor, is the Distinguished Fellow of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. His latest books are Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism and The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament: Elijah Zvi Soloveitchik's Commentary to the Gospels.



https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/haredi-jews-trump-conspiracies

QAnon merchandise still sold by major online retailers despite social media crackdown

Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify takes down QAnon merchandise shops after CBC News inquiry

Thomas Daigle

CBC News
September 02, 2020

E-commerce giants Amazon and eBay continue to offer thousands of products for sale that promote QAnon, even as social media companies crack down on the dangerous and baseless conspiracy theory.

A search for "QAnon" on Amazon's Canadian retail site Tuesday returned more than 6,000 results, including T-shirts, hats and stickers. The same query on eBay.ca offered 15,367 items.

It's unclear how many sales actually take place and how much profit the third-party sellers are making from them, but an expert worries their availability on prominent, mainstream websites is only helping to legitimize the cult-like conspiracy theory.

QAnon "is radicalizing people," said Alison Meek, a history professor whose focus includes cults and conspiracy theories.

"For companies like Amazon and eBay to be selling this stuff is just absolutely mind-boggling," said Meek, who teaches at King's University College, affiliated with Western University in London, Ont.

QAnon supporters say a number of high-profile, and generally liberal, figures are Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are running the world and operating a child sex-trafficking ring which can only be stopped by U.S. President Donald Trump.

The FBI last year designated QAnon a "domestic terror threat" because of its potential to incite extremist violence, and people who openly support QAnon are accused of being behind some recent violent incidents both in the U.S. and Canada.

QAnon-inspired content had been posted on an Instagram account associated with the Canadian Ranger accused of ramming his truck through the gates of Rideau Hall in July. A QAnon believer charged with the murder of a New York mob boss told investigators he did it because the target was part of the "deep state."

"I don't think everybody quite realizes just how serious, how deadly and how linked to violence the QAnon conspiracy theory has become," Meek said.

Twitter recently announced it would take steps to curb QAnon's presence on the social media platform. Facebook later followed suit, removing hundreds of groups and pages in a bid to restrict QAnon adherents' ability to organize online.

An online store removed from the Shopify platform this week had offered 'QANON GIRL' T-shirts with initials signifying the motto: 'Where we go one, we go all.' (Website screen capture)
Shopify takes down QAnon stores

This week, Ottawa-based e-commerce firm Shopify took down a series of online shops from its platform after CBC News inquired about the QAnon products they were selling.

The websites — including "QAnonMerch.net" and "TheBookofQAnon.com" — featured items with symbols related to the conspiracy theory: a white rabbit, the letter Q, and the motto "Where we go one, we go all."

Another site sold "QAnon Girl" t-shirts meant for children "ages 2-6."

"We consider products and content promoting QAnon to be a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy," a Shopify spokesperson said in an email to CBC News. "When made aware of such products or stores, our team will investigate and take action when appropriate."

The Shopify representative said teams "actively review" potential violations, "and stores that violate our policies will be immediately addressed."

Amazon's public relations team and eBay Canada's communications manager did not reply to requests for comment.
QAnon allowed despite Amazon, eBay bans on offensive products

Both sites sell books that present QAnon fabrications as fact, including one for $9.99 which on Tuesday topped Amazon.ca's list of "Social Science Reference E-books." The publication warns in its first pages that a "deep state war" will soon break out.

Amazon and eBay both take fees from third-party vendors to list and sell products, but QAnon items may violate the sites' policies.

Amazon's "offensive products" policy bans items "that promote, incite or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views."

For instance, in 2015, Amazon, North America's biggest online retailer, withdrew some Nazi paraphernalia for sale on the site, including flags and knives, after a report by CBC's Go Public.

Similarly, eBay says it doesn't allow listings that "promote or glorify hatred, violence or discrimination."

QAnon supporters falsely believe widespread arrests will soon come, targeting these "deep state" global elites who control the world. Since the arrests won't actually materialize in the real world, observers like Meek worry about QAnon supporters taking up arms themselves.

What began as a fringe, online movement "could easily move into terrorism," she said.

"If Amazon and eBay are normalizing this… that's terrifying."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior Technology Reporter

While in CBC's London, U.K. bureau, Thomas reported on everything from the Royal Family and European politics to terrorism. He filed stories from Quebec for several years and reported for Radio-Canada in his native New Brunswick. Thomas is now based in Toronto and focuses on technology-related news. He can be reached by email at thomas.daigle@cbc.ca.



https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/amazon-ebay-selling-qanon-merchandise-1.5708396

On social media, vaccine misinformation mixes with extreme faith

Even with renewed efforts by tech companies, religious-themed misinformation is among the hardest to police

Elizabeth Dwoskin
Washington Post
February 16, 2021

In an insular world on the social media app TikTok, young Christians act out biblically inspired scenes in which they are forced to take a vaccine for the coronavirus, only to end up splattered in fake blood and on the brink of death.

The melodramatic videos are an attempt to represent how the introduction of coronavirus vaccines could herald the biblical End Time. Along with hundreds of thousands of other vaccine-questioning posts by social media users all over the world, they’re demonstrating the ways in which health misinformation is targeting Christians, some reaching sizable audiences.

Some churches and Christian ministries with large online followings — as well as Christian influencers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube — are making false claims that vaccines contain fetal tissue or microchips, or are construing associations between vaccine ingredients and the devil. Others talk about how coronavirus vaccines and masks contain or herald the “mark of the beast,” a reference to an apocalyptic passage from the Book of Revelation that suggests that the Antichrist will test Christians by asking them to put a mark on their bodies.

The rapid spread of this material has triggered debate and concern among U.S. Christian leaders and experts who believe the religious movement against vaccines is growing, even as many leaders such as Pope Francis and Southern Baptist Convention policy leader Russell Moore are urging people to get shots. Both approved vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, passed rigorous federal safety reviews and were shown to be more than 94 percent effective at preventing disease.

“In the summertime, I thought, these are just fringe beliefs. But the further we got into the pandemic, I realized, these are very widely held, and I was surprised by how many Christians and churches subscribe to this,” said Emily Smith, an epidemiologist at Baylor University, a private Christian university in Waco, Tex. She runs a large Facebook page dedicated to discussing covid-19.

Smith, who is Christian and married to a Baptist pastor, said her posts trying to disavow anti-vaccine sentiment have been met with hostile responses and threats.

“It’s one of the scariest and most disheartening parts of this, that so many people think that when you put on a mask, it is the mark of the beast or signals that you don’t have faith or God isn’t in control,” she added.

The prevalence of these baseless or distorted claims is yet another example of the way technology companies have failed to control the spread of harmful and problematic material on their platforms. Social media companies have all banned misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccine, citing the potential for such material to cause “imminent harm.” But enforcement has been spotty.

Groups opposed to vaccines have long used social media to get out their message. But with the development of coronavirus vaccines and the pandemic shutdowns, the companies have enabled misinformation about vaccination and the virus itself to become much more widespread. Conspiracy theories about covid-19 that proliferated on social platforms were a major force behind people protesting shutdown measures and government restrictions over the last year, while a misleading documentary called “Plandemic” became a top trending video on YouTube.

White evangelicals, along with Black Americans of different faiths, are some of the groups with the highest levels of vaccine skepticism in the United States. Just under a third of U.S. adults say they will probably or definitely not get the vaccine, compared to 44 percent of those who identify as White evangelicals, according to a January Washington Post-ABC News poll. Other polls have found higher levels of vaccine skepticism among White evangelicals.

Some creators said they were not entirely certain that the material they were sharing was accurate or certain to become reality, but that it was important to raise questions — and to warn and potentially protect fellow citizens.

“If you believe without a shadow of a doubt that a bus was coming at you, would it not be evil of me to not tackle you and try to get you out of the way?,” said Tyler Lackey, a 27-year-old Dallas-based Christian influencer and rapper who goes by the username BeyondHymn on TikTok and other platforms.

The Book of Revelation describes the End Time as a bloody battle filled with persecution, during which a beast forces “all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,” according to the New International Version. “They could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name,” 666.

A video by Lackey in July — “Could vaccines be the mark of the beast?” — speculated that mask mandates in stores and other rules might signal the mark because they were the first step in preventing people from being able to buy and sell, which Revelations suggests will be prohibited in the End Time. The video was viewed over 100,000 times.

He said that video and another he had made about Bill Gates were “shadow banned” by TikTok, meaning they were blocked from the service’s recommendations page.

Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram banned in December covid-related content associated with the mark of the beast, fetal tissue myths and misinformation connecting vaccine ingredients to the Antichrist as part of a broader ban on vaccine-related conspiracy theories. Such material has become harder to find but is still available, according to a Washington Post review using the Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle.

For example, in late December, a Facebook page with 61,000 followers called Exposing Satanic World Government posted a screenshot from the right-wing news site Gab, in which a user claimed that Amazon, banks and airlines would force people to take the vaccine. The screenshot shows Gab founder Andrew Torba commenting that such practices were the “Mark of the beast.” The post, which Facebook removed after The Post shared it with the company, had 315 likes and shares. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Post.)

TikTok banned two hashtags, #MarkOfTheBeastIsTheCovid19Vaccine and #VaccineIsTheMarkOfTheBeast, in late January in response to The Post’s inquiry. The company said the hashtags and affiliated ones, which had over 700,000 views in December, were tied to misinformation about coronavirus vaccines and violated the company’s medical misinformation policy. The company has banned such misinformation since March.

Thousands of tweets related to the mark of the beast disappeared in January after Twitter conducted a large sweep of accounts connected to the QAnon movement — a sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology that has radicalized its followers — in the wake of the Capitol riots, according to Zignal Labs, an analytics firm that identified nearly 12,000 references to it across social media in December. That suggests a significant overlap between those sharing Christian-themed conspiracy theories and those sharing other conspiracy theories about the election and covid, according to Zignal.

Experts said that religious-themed content can fall into a gray area of policy enforcement for technology giants, making it some of the hardest misinformation to police. Tech platforms have tried to draw a distinction between people expressing opinions or negative viewpoints about the coronavirus and people putting out misinformation about it. They also try to discern overall intent. But such distinctions are challenging to suss out, particularly when content is framed as a question.

“Linking misinformation to religion can be difficult to combat because a person may feel like they are being attacked for their religious beliefs,” said Kolina Koltai, a vaccine misinformation researcher with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

Conspiracy theories are often most potent when they are targeted at specific communities rather than aimed for mass appeal, she said, because they “are connected to deep-rooted parts of a person’s value system.”

The technology platforms can supercharge people’s exposure to misinformation when their algorithms direct users to content that is similar to what they have previously viewed or encourage them to join like-minded groups and communities where misinformation can fester unchecked.

Fashion influencer Taylor Rousseau, 21, said she and her family received numerous threats after posting a viral music video on TikTok last year in which she pretended to be injected with a deadly microchip for refusing the vaccine. In the video, Rousseau, wearing her own brand of thick faux eyelashes, is splattered with fake blood while a James Arthur song plays. She prays tearfully for a savior, who appeared as a light shining from the clouds at the end of the clip, which was viewed nearly 700,000 times.

“If someone doesn’t get the vaccine ’cause of me, I don’t really feel that is harming them,” Rousseau said in an interview, adding that she got the idea for making her video from another creator who had made a similar one. “Social media is already causing an overwhelming amount of fear.”

Rousseau explained that many Christians she knows believe that the social unrest and division over the last year is a sign of the world ending, and that her video was meant to be a metaphor for things that could happen if the apocalypse were to come to pass — rather than an actual microchip in the vaccine itself.

“Everybody missed the point,” she said. “The video was 100% a POV [point of view] to portray what life would be like in the End Times.”

The video was removed from TikTok for violating the company’s “integrity and authenticity policy,” which prohibits “medical misinformation that can cause harm to an individual’s physical health,” but she appealed the decision and it was reinstated two weeks later, according to records provided to The Post.

Along with misinformation, social media platforms are hosting spirited religious debates about these topics. A YouTube video titled “Is the COVID 19 vaccine the Mark of the Beast?” by a pastor of a megachurch in Riverside, Calif., who refutes that the vaccine is the mark, has over 202,000 views.

Conversations within communities are sometimes more effective at combating misinformation than labeling or other measures from social media companies, said Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.

“People who are understanding of the framework of belief and empathetic to the underlying religious concern have a huge role to play in combating this misinformation,” she said. “It has to come from someone who occupies a position of trust.”

The claim that the mark of the beast is a microchip within the vaccine is a Christian-themed spin on a distorted narrative about Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. That claim has been circulating all year among different groups, but the hoax gained new force when repurposed as a religious claim, DiResta said.

Misinformation becomes increasingly difficult to combat when religious leaders and celebrities endorse it. Ties between the vaccine and the mark of the beast have been drawn by pastor Guillermo Maldonado of Miami megachurch King Jesus International Ministry — where President Donald Trump visited in 2020 to launch his campaign outreach to Latinos — and by the Amazing Power of Prayer, a Christian ministry focused on virtual prayer that has more than 246,000 Facebook followers.

King Jesus International did not respond to requests for comment. Amazing Power of Prayer founder Trevor Winchell said in an email that he had come to his conclusions after spending “many long hours digging and researching vaccines and microchips and the possible combination of a microchip being put into a vaccine.”

When rapper Kanye West called the vaccine the mark of the beast in July, searches for the terms “mark of the beast” and “vaccine” spiked on Google and Facebook and were more popular than at any other point during the year, according to CrowdTangle and Google Trends. A spokesperson for West did not respond to a request for comment.

Foreign players, including Russia and China, have also gotten involved in sowing division over vaccination issues. In January, articles by state media service Russia Today and China Plus America about Facebook blocking posts by a Mexican cardinal who called the vaccine the mark of the beast received several thousand likes and shares, according to CrowdTangle.

Another creator, Sam Smith, a 33-year-old sales representative in St. Louis who posts popular Christian-themed content on Instagram and other services, said TikTok took down a video in which he said he didn’t actually claim that the vaccine was the mark of the beast and was merely raising questions. A similar video is still on Instagram.

“The moment you say something that goes against anyone’s agenda, you are banned or shadow banned,” he said. His next video, he said, would be about how the same number of people have died in 2019 as in 2020.

Experts say that viral claim is false and that U.S. deaths in 2020 topped 3 million, by far the most ever counted.



Michelle Boorstein contributed reporting.
Elizabeth Dwoskin

Lizza joined The Washington Post as Silicon Valley correspondent in 2016, becoming the paper's eyes and ears in the region. She focuses on social media and the power of the tech industry in a democratic society. Before that, she was the Wall Street Journal's first full-time beat reporter covering AI and the impact of algorithms on people's lives.



https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/02/16/covid-vaccine-misinformation-evangelical-mark-beast/

CHARBONNEAU: QAnon Canada: quieter, subtler

David Charbonneau
CFJC Today Kamloops
February 16, 2021

QANON IN THE U.S. has taken on the militaristic quality of a religious crusade with Q as the prophet and Trump as the Messiah. In Canada, the response has been more muted.

QAnon has been wildly successful and expanded beyond what the apocalyptic prophet Q intended. The identity of Q is speculative; s/he could be the online avatar of the American pig farmer Jim Watkins or someone connected to Watkins. Supporters are called “Anons.”

The success of QAnon has been its skill in connecting unrelated ideologies into a tangled narrative.

QAnon has brought together incoherent groups into a big-tent scheme, complete with flowcharts of the “theoretical functional relationships” of the supposed cabal of pedophiles that is operating an international child sex-trafficking ring, and a Sephirot Map of the Pharaonic Death Cult. British writer Hari Kunzru explains the appeal of QAnon:

“Yet despite its incoherence, there is, in a strictly aesthetic sense, something sublime about it, or at least about the experience it is trying to represent, the experience of scale and complexity, of a world that is beyond the capacity of the human mind to apprehend.” (Harper’s magazine, January, 2021)

At the gut level of QAnon is a primal fear that children are being murdered and trafficked for sex.

This gnawing primal fear is not new. The groundwork for QAnon was laid in a 1980s book titled Michelle Remembers. The book sparked the “Satanic Panic” —the belief that Satanists were hidden among us, abusing and murdering children. One sensation case took place In Martensville, Saskatchewan, where nine people were charged for being members of a satanic pedophile ring. One man was eventually convicted of sex-related charges, but no such satanic ring was found.

QAnon in Canada still has the sex-trafficking of children angle at heart but is subtler. The organizer of the QAnon Canada Facebook group is a mild mannered auto-glass repairman in Elliot Lake, Ontario. Blain McElrea told Walrus magazine that his passion is “an information project” that builds bridges between truth seekers. His inclusive vision of QAnons prompted him to start subgroups for religious devotees, New Agers, and UFO-believers.

“Basically, all of the bad things that the New York Times says about us — I am making sure that I’m not plugging into any one of those negative labels that they’re talking about,” said McElrea.

QAnon Canada is quieter, softer. Marc-André Argentino at Concordia University has discovered a new phenomenon he calls “Pastel QAnon.” It evolved from lifestyle influencers, mommy pages, fitness pages, diet pages and alternative healing. The pastel-coloured websites express pro-Trump, racist and anti-Semitic views.

Canada’s Anons are community leaders. In the Maritimes, a yoga teacher interrupted her Instagram feed to post a four-minute lecture to her more than 1,400 followers about a coming mass spiritual awakening — after COVID-19 is revealed as a distraction — and how the satanic cabal is about to be overcome by Trump, who belongs to the “team of light.”

McElrea had 4,000 members in his QAnon Canada group before Facebook shut it down. When I tried to find it, the following message popped up on Facebook:

“This search may be associated with a dangerous conspiracy movement called QAnon. Experts say QAnon and the violence it inspires are a significant risk to public safety.”

——

Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or the Jim Pattison Broadcast Group.



https://cfjctoday.com/2021/02/16/charbonneau-qanon-canada-quieter-subtler/