On Saturday the crazies may well be out in force. A loose coalition of lockdown opponents and COVID-19 truthers are set to rally around the country to mark “freedom day,” despite a police crackdown and a number of pre-emptive arrests.
Some will claim COVID-19 is a hoax, no worse than the flu. Others will be worried about 5G towers. There’ll be plenty of garden-variety anti-vaxxers and crunchy Byron Bay New Age types. And some will believe that US President Donald Trump is a messiah fighting to liberate the world from a Satanic cabal of paedophiles and child sex traffickers.
What began with an anonymous internet poster claiming to have top level US government “Q Clearance” dropping cryptic breadcrumbs on 4Chan has mushroomed into a sprawling conspiracy theory and millenarian doomsday cult. It’s been classified as a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI. Its followers have committed murder.
In the world of QAnon, everyone from Hillary Clinton to Ellen deGeneres and Daniel Andrews are part of the satanic cabal. They’re trafficking children and drinking their blood. Accelerated by social media, QAnon has expanded across the world. It’s become a kind of mothership, the “big tent” conspiracy theory to which all others return.
Spend time around any of the anti-lockdown protests that have been sputtering across the country since March, and the QAnon talking points can’t be missed. See #SaveTheChildren? That’s QAnon. Paedophiles? QAnon. The “Great Awakening”? Also Q. Six months ago most Australians, outside the extremely online, would never have heard of QAnon. Now it’s the tie that binds together a disparate constellation of anti-lockdown conspiracies.
And thanks to the pandemic, it may have broken into our politics for good.
QAnon with an Australian accent
Even before the pandemic, QAnon had been bubbling away just outside the political fringes, slowly closing in. As Crikey reported last year, one of Scott Morrison’s closest family friends is a Q believer. At the recent Eden-Monaro byelection, an independent candidate with a QAnon-influenced social media history ran unsuccessfully.
It’s started to pull in anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists — most prominently NRL WAG turned anti-vax influencer Taylor Winterstein and celebrity chef Pete Evans. But it’s the pandemic that has truly turned it into the mothership.
“Look at any conspiracy theorist’s Facebook, and you’ll almost universally see that they’ve been ‘Q-pilled’ since March,” University of Tasmania lecturer and online disinformation researcher Kaz Ross tells Crikey.
Some of the anti-lockdown mob won’t even know what QAnon is, but will still recite its talking points — a global cabal, fear of paedophilic, satanic elites, the world on the brink of a “great awakening”.
How did QAnon come to dominate Australia’s conspiracy theory landscape so quickly? Ross says firstly, much like evangelical Christianity, QAnon tries to offer sense and cohesion during a seemingly apocalyptic time.
“We know that there’s a turn to religion and to try and make meaning of distressing events. We’ve been through the horrendous bushfires, then on the back of that, we get the pandemic. It’s all a bit Biblical.”
QAnon has considerable overlap with centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracies like the blood libel, which have been aggressively pushed out of the internet sewers by the alt-right in recent years.
And finally, there’s the anti-vaxxer wellness types, who are highly Instagram literate, and adept at spreading junk science through social media. Once they started speaking the language of QAnon, those verbal queues — references to the “Great Awakening” and a “gathering storm” seeped into the anti-lockdown lexicon.
What’s interesting is the way QAnon has flourished in Australia in the absence of a charismatic Trump-like figure, drawing in hippyish sorts who might’ve once ostensibly been on the political left.
But outside of the core beliefs, QAnon’s great strength is it’s ability to quickly subsume other strands of conspiratorial thinking, to latch onto new contexts and acquire a distinctly local flavour. QAnon effortlessly incorporated fears about 5G and vaccines through the pandemic.
Concordia University online disinformation researcher Marc-Andre Argentino has described Australia as among the “five eyes” of QAnon — it has one of the largest followings in the world here.
Looking back at Australian QAnon posts in January, Argentino pointed to a uniquely Australian focus on bushfires and the Catholic Church.
Politicians under attack
In August, three years after QAnon started popping up, reporters finally confronted Trump about it. The President nudged and winked and didn’t condemn QAnon. Who was he to disavow people who “love our country” and “like me very much”, Trump said.
In August, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a pro-QAnon businesswoman, won the GOP primary for a safe congressional seat in Florida. A future Republican star, Trump called her. Come November, there will be several QAnon-supporters in Congress.
In Australia, QAnon has started poking its head out of the political shadows in the last few months. Last week, Nationals MP Anne Webster was in court fighting a defamation battle against Karen Brewer, a conspiracy theorist who’d accused her of being part of a paedophile network.
As Victoria’s crossbench prepared to vote on extending the state’s emergency laws this week, dozens of MPs were bombarded with abusive messages, many from QAnon supporters, after their phone numbers were shared in anti-lockdown groups.
Dan Andrews is public enemy number one for QAnon Australia right now, Ross says. He’s accused, falsely, of being a paedophile. Believers have showed up at his electorate office, and he’s one of many politicians copping a stream of abuse.
The future of politics?
Australia’s politics has, by and large, always been a little more sober than that of the United States. It’s harder for Q-infused crazies to jump from the fringes into the political mainstream. But QAnon believers don’t need to be in parliament to influence our elections for the worse.
A now largely forgotten footnote to Labor’s 2019 electoral choke was the death tax scare, a Facebook misinformation campaign with no basis in the party’s platform. Labor candidates felt the ground beneath them shift, like they were fighting an impossible battle against a viral lie that wouldn’t go away.
Since 2016, sensible, normie technocrats like Bill Shorten have struggled to find an answer to the turbo-charged politics of fake. All QAnon followers need to do is clutter newsfeeds with enough white noise, and a tight election could start to shift. If Facebook carries through with its threat to block news content in Australia, that could become even easier.
In the US, and to an extent in Australia, right-wing disinformation is destroying the competition in the battle for eyeballs on Facebook. The Trump team knows that those same very fine people, radicalised by Facebook, are central to his re-election chances.
It’s not implausible that an Australian candidate could, like Trump, start really tapping into that misinformation, winking at a growing chorus of revved up Q believers.
And no matter what happens to Trump in November, those believers will grow. Because Q offers what regular life doesn’t. It’s a really good story. It has heroes and villains. It helps people make sense of a world that is surreal, nonsensical and often increasingly grim. It’s no surprise that The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance, in one of the seminal pieces of writing on QAnon, calls it a new American religion.
When adherents fall down the QAnon rabbithole, they’re often so feverishly drawn into that parallel universe they let their offline relationships wither and die. Q gives them all the purpose and hope they need. They’re patriots, citizen journalists, internet sleuths piecing together the fragments of a great, terrible secret, helping to save the world from a terrible evil.
Mainstream politics, the media, institutions that are meant to give people hope, meaning, clarity and solace, have failed to do that. Their message is far less compelling. And as long as that continues to be true, QAnon will be here to stay.
Can’t wait for Hillary and her pizza shop being outed as the global centre for pedophiles, and Michelle Obama and Jacinda Ardern being exposed as being blokes, all the “deep state” indictments etc being opened.
…. you’ve got really wonder how stupid people are – the Internet: giving the stupid and clueless a voice.
I no longer wonder.
My local pizza shop has a “BLM” pizza. On the menu it says “for the truly gullible” and the cost for a small pizza is $500.
One of my oldest friends – best man at my wedding – fell into QAnon a couple of years ago. He has a YouTube channel with more than 40,000 followers and now spends all his time interpreting the Q breadcrumbs and spreading disinformation from the loony American sites. I had to sever all contact with him a year ago when I realised he was using me as an unpaid research assistant to help refine his messaging. One thing I always found odd was that, although the cult is as wholly imported as Apple computers, and although it relates wholly to the Trump presidency, he and his fellow cult members adorn their messaging with Aussie iconography – flags, koalas, gum trees etc etc. One word of warning – one of their tricks is to construct an ‘argument’ where they make a deranged assertion – e.g. ‘the Rothschilds control the Reserve Bank of Australia’ – and require you the interlocutor to prove the negative. Complete absence of evidence to support the assertion is irrelevant, apparently. Like drug addicts, they first abuse the love and trust of those closest to them in order to feed the addiction.
I have encountered anti-vaxers who possess similar characteristics to those whom you describe. As with religion, there seems to be no correlation to intelligence on the part of the proponent. The programe (i.e. the club) becomes their entire existence as it were.
I have more to say in my post that has just been embargoed; the first with the new format. Frankly, I am amazed that I had to wait so long.
Please give me his channel details so I may follow it.
“Open Day at the Funny Farm!”
Do they have a permit? Will organisers be hunted down? Like BLM protests? “Spreading viral BS”?
Let’s face it – it suits the agenda of parts of our MSM (with partisan political aspirations) to nurture such nuts …. while most of the rest of the media looks on …. or away.
Agreed. The less airtime these people get the better.
I think a lot of them get into it because it gives them a feeling of belonging, and truly believing they are educating the masses, despite being within Social media Echo Chambers.
Yes, they have this messianic sense of superiority and irritating condescension toward those of us less familiar with the details of their deranged ranting – the grandiose air of the lunatic possessing wisdom from ‘the voices’.
Good point. The MSM can criticise the conspirators and the One Nation types and use this as a foil to show how critical they really are. In truth they do not critically approach the policies of the ruling party on the grounds that these are rational in relation to the conspirators, Such policies are usually not conspiratorial but they are equally irrational, though presented by the MSM as being well considered–supported by independent commentators–and are entirely consistent with what middle Australia wants.
We are, I suspect seeing a reaction to the extreme diversity of views that digital technology facilitates. Most people have a simple view of the world and the complexity they now confront–is neoliberalism complex?–and are told they need to confront, is too much for them. Hence the attraction of the strong man with his very clear view of the world and appeal to solid old fashion values. Quel dommage.
Nothing has made me change my mind more about the role of media than seeing the rise of fringe ideas into the mainstream thanks to the internet.
…..and Australia’s surviving print media sector has shrunk to such an extent that all journalists see themselves as being eventually dragged into the Murdoch misinformation web by default….with Sky Noise being the ultimate embarrassment.
The question for me is will QAnon join forces with Rupert’s Sky cabal or set up in cooperative competition to spread the tripe with the complementary side dish of bile.
Ones own termination isn’t so unappealing after all.
I blame the education curriculum.