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My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

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America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

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Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

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You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Interesting Read: “What Happened to QAnon?”

Interesting Read: “What Happened to QAnon?”

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Philip Bump, at the Washington Post — “What Happened to QAnon?”: [gift link]

As the 2020 election approached, President Donald Trump had two problematic groups of supporters that he didn’t want to alienate. One was the Proud Boys, an extremist group that had already earned a reputation for engaging in violence against opponents. The other was more loosely knit: adherents of the QAnon movement.

QAnon was problematic for very different reasons. While there had been crimes linked to the movement (including at least one killing), the political challenge was primarily that the most fervent supporters held views that were somewhere between bizarre and deranged. There’s an international cabal of prominent people in entertainment and the Democratic Party that worships Satan and traffics children to ingest a chemical they produce? Got it.

Those views sat at the extreme, certainly. But even more anodyne manifestations of QAnonism were dubious, centered on an anonymous figure, Q, who allegedly worked in the Trump administration and was helping the president combat the evil deeds of his enemies. Q began posting cryptic messages online a few months into Trump’s presidency, with tens of thousands of people subsequently parsing them for hidden meaning.

By mid-2018, QAnon was a prominent part of Trump rallies. Supporters held up signs or large “Q’s” to get on camera, with success. By early 2019, after a spate of news stories drawing attention to the movement’s bizarre beliefs, adherents reported being asked to hide any Q insignia at the president’s rallies.

Then the election rolled around. Trump’s campaign slowly began to embrace members of the movement, recognizing its scale and loyalty to his politics. He refused to condemn even the more extreme forms the movement took and, only weeks before Election Day, even endorsed the idea that QAnon members were combating child trafficking…

Then the movement mostly evaporated. Adherents still existed; Trump began elevating their content on his social media platform with regularity. But QAnon simply wasn’t the same force that it had been when he was president.

To explore the reason QAnon lost so much energy — and to figure out where it went — I spoke with The Washington Post’s Will Sommer, author of the book “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.”

Sommer points to 2020 as the height of the QAnon movement’s size and influence. It wasn’t just Trump’s reelection bid, though that was important, given his role in the purported fight against the elites. It was also the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests — and even the death of Jeffrey Epstein, a galvanizing point of skepticism about official narratives…

The effort to block Joe Biden’s presidency failed. Trump moved to Florida. Q — generally believed to be a man named Ron Watkins — stopped posting new messages.

“You end up with a sort of reformulated QAnon that is sort of ‘QAnon in the wilderness,’ ” Sommer explained. “It’s no longer ‘this is at hand, the storm,’ but it becomes, you know, perhaps that Trump is secretly still in power or the Biden presidency is being filmed at Tyler Perry Studios or that the election was stolen.”

It was certainly harder to think that Trump was still fighting the satanic cabal from the cozy confines of Mar-a-Lago. But that wasn’t the only reason that QAnon lost steam. Its energy was also co-opted.

“QAnon and these conspiratorial beliefs and a lot of the ideas that were at the core of it … that has become more mainstreamed in the Republican Party,” Sommer explained. “It’s not that the Republican Party rejected QAnon, but that QAnon sort of assimilated into the GOP.”...

And now, of course, RFK Jr. is working hard to co-opt the QAnoners and the Q-Curious. Gonna be interesting seeing how the MAGAts — and more importantly, their handlers — respond!

Reader Interactions

39Comments

  1. 1.

    Matt McIrvin

    In 2020 Dan Olson claimed Flat Earthism had died down a bit because the followers switched to QAnon. Seems to me Flat Earth is back in a BIG WAY, at least on Facebook. Clearly Trump needs to keep RFK Jr. from peeling off the Flat Earther vote.

  2. 2.

    SpaceUnit

    Those who work in the psychiatric and mental health fields have a term for such people.  Kooks.

  3. 3.

    lowtechcyclist

    “Where we go 1, we go all.” Now if we can just lure one of them into jumping off a cliff…

  4. 4.

    bbleh

    I believe Purification is in order, beginning with those who say they believe but don’t actually believe.

    It’s the only way to be sure.

  6. 6.

    Geoduck

    Whenever QAnon gets mentioned, I think about an old Infocom text-adventure game, A Mind Forever Voyaging, in which your character visits simulations of future American society at 10 year intervals. And in these simulations, there’s this new whack-a-doodle religion started by some random nutbar working at a radio-telescope facility, that ends up taking over the government and causing the total collapse of society. (And you’re trying to prevent this from actually happening the “real world” of the game.) Stop predicting things, Steve Meretzky!

  7. 7.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Something relevant here is that a lot of the insane shit, GOP voters already believed.  This whole thing with New World Orders and Democrats being a party of Satanists running child prostitution rings… one whole Hell of a lot of GOP voters believed most or all of that shit before Q ever spoke.  It was standard Rush Limbaugh fare.  They already believed any number of crazy-ass conspiracies of how Democrats win by cheating in elections.  Crap like busloads of minorities traveling from polling station to polling station to multiple vote.

    Q was an unusually tangential flavor of nuttiness, but the stuff that became mainstream in the GOP already was.  It wasn’t even secret.  People didn’t want to believe that millions of voters were really that crazy whenever the topic was raised.

  10. 10.

    Ken

    There’s no excitement in being of the few people who know what’s really going on when 40% of the population agree with you.

  11. 11.

    Jackie

    RFK Jr and his VP nominee seem to be going after have the QAnon audience. They’re both QAnon kooks.

  12. 12.

    Noah Brand

    The interesting part of that article is toward the end: “…it offered a different world where Trump was constantly winning and fulfilling his promises.”

    I think that’s core to the appeal. Here you are, a Trump supporter, you burned your reputation and critical thinking to support this guy, and now he’s in office and he’s exactly as corrupt and incompetent as all your friends said he would be.

    But… what if he wasn’t?

    He’s not doing anything useful for anyone, but what if he was? What if there’s an alternate world where you don’t have to admit you were wrong? Don’t you want to move there?

  16. 16.

    Princess

    @Matt McIrvin: Milo Yiannopolis (remember him?) is big into flat earth. I think flat earth is a thing for fascists because it’s all about ignoring science and reason and our own eyes and believing instead what we’re told to believe. Someone who accepts flat earth will accept anything.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    @Geoduck

    Marvelous game. Can’t tell from the picture but the package acted as an optical illusion, the face appearing as either concave or convex depending on the angle of view.

    And the “Impossible” level was a funny touch.

  19. 19.

    SpaceUnit

    Nice to see that it’s the GOP getting ratfucked by a spoiler candidate for once.

     

    Biden ought to send RFK Jr. a card and a fruit basket.

     

    ETA:  Oops, fixed.  Thanks NotMax!

  21. 21.

    West of the Rockies

    I suspect QAnon will resurface with a new name much like how the Tea Party became today’s Trumpling Mob.

    I still think when Trump croaks the movement will atrophy rapidly.   There has been no one with Trump’s ludicrous ability to make Republicans turn up and make noise.  Stupid, dangerous noise.

  22. 22.

    Martin

    So, I think when you are steeped in a culture that makes it impossible to believe that the US was not divinely ordained to be the playground of white Christians, it makes literally every other explanation for why it isn’t working like that easier to believe (when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth):

    While 55% of U.S. adults say the Constitution, as a whole, was inspired by God, just 37% say the Second Amendment was, according to the Faith in America survey from the Deseret News and Marist Poll. By contrast, 62% of Americans say the First Amendment, which grants the rights of free speech and religious exercise, among others, was inspired by God.

    Q-anon provides the improbable answers. Getting them to accept the impossible answer is the real goal and Democrats aren’t really willing to even engage with that.

  24. 24.

    Scout211

    QAnon is still alive and well dangerous.  NBC 

    Sometimes they are not just kooks and conspiracy theorists, but people on the brink of violence and the conspiracy theories become the triggers.

    WASHINGTON — The ex-military member who federal authorities say drove his SUV into a barricade at the FBI office in Atlanta on Monday had online ties to QAnon-related content and appeared to be a supporter of former President Donald Trump, according to an open-source investigation by the group Advance Democracy.

    Ervin Lee Bolling currently faces a count of destruction of government property. He has not yet entered a plea. An FBI affidavitstates that after crashing his car, Bolling got out and tried to walk past the gate where he was stopped by three special agents. Bolling refused instructions to sit on the curb and resisted arrest when the agents tried to take him into custody, according to the charging documents.

    Advance Democracy, in a report seen by NBC News, found social media accounts that appeared to be linked to Bolling that had a history of promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election as well as QAnon.
    . . .

    Daniel J. Jones, the president of the non-profit group Advance Democracy, told NBC News that it was important to take “the increasing violent rhetoric and actions we’re seeing seriously, and our elected officials, especially Republican elected officials, need to speak out” against violent actions.

    “We don’t yet know the individual’s motivation for using his vehicle to crash into a gate at the FBI’s Atlanta Field Office,” Jones said. “But this individual’s suspected social media activity is part of a trend: Trump supporters espousing anti-government rhetoric and conspiracy theories — often echoing Trump’s own statements — that decide to take violent action against public officials.”

  26. 26.

    Mendo

    @Matt McIrvin: Exactly what I thought of when I saw this post. There’s clearly a bunch of conspiracy theorists who just latch on to whatever is available.

    FlatEarth, QAnon, back to FlatEarth, whatever it takes to prove to themselves that they know things that the sheeple are too blind to see.

  27. 27.

    Ken

    @Geoduck:  (Yes, kiddies, back in the day you had to schlep all the way to the mall and buy your video games in cardboard boxes!)

    Not only that, but that was the end of it. No subscriptions, no hours-long downloads of updates, no in-game purchases, no way for the company to cancel your ability to play the game. It was barely monetized at all!

  29. 29.

    Jackie

    @NotMax:

    RFK, not JFK.

    RFK Jr. I’m being driven crazy over the non-distinction of the two. RFK and RFK Jr are very different people. As are Bobby Kennedy and Bobby Jr.

    Those of us who were politically active in the ‘60s prefer defining the differences between the two.

  30. 30.

    JoyceH

    Suspended! I loved that game – so atmospheric! But I never could figure it out, eventually was just spinning my wheels.

    Speaking of atmospheric – Myst? I could just roam around there admiring the scenery.

  31. 31.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    @JoyceH:

    I liked Myst but loved Riven. My sis used to work for Cyan, the company behind the games. I’ve been to a couple of MystCons that were held at company HQ in Mead, WA (north Spokane). It’s too bad that Uru didn’t make the cut. I think it was too much for the networking tech of the day and now it’s too late. I ran an instance (shard) for several years and had a small community built up around it. I learned Python so I could mod the game so that was one good thing to come out of it!

    Good games if you like solving mysteries. I also have the autographed Myst books and a couple of the unopened games that were autographed by the team at Cyan.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @Jackie

    I was pointing out that while in this case the Jr was correct, the initials were not.

    Not the first time here mistakenly calling Junior jFK. In fact, have repeatedly come across that in comments, enough times to not attribute it to chance error.

  34. 34.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @NotMax: very quiet patron (on Monkey Island) wears a button: ask me about Grim Fandango.

    [ETA it was thanks to Collosal Cave a.k.a. Adventure that I met Bemused Senior]

  35. 35.

    H.E.Wolf

    @opiejeanne: ​Did you play Zork?

     Gawd yes. Hand-drawn maps and all.

    I preferred Adventure, though. I had a soft-hearted friend who couldn’t bear the repeated pleas of the thirsty plant, and kept going back to water it… thus solving one of the puzzles. :)

  36. 36.

    wjca

    @NotMax: Not the first time here mistakenly calling Junior jFK. In fact, have repeatedly come across that in comments, enough times to not attribute it to chance error.

    It wouldn’t be amazing if autocorrect was a contributing factor.

  37. 37.

    Chris Johnson

    @West of the Rockies: We’re gonna disagree on that. What you see as a mysterious Trump ability unique to him, I see as straight up Russian propaganda on a massive scale. Q is just a back door to manipulating Americans and has always been a Russian op.

    I was around one of the target demographics as it got going. I had a guy try to convince me of ‘pepe’ images on the Moon’s surface, one of the weirder manifestations of the Q thing. Ended up losing friends because of the influence of that guy: bad time.

    It’s not Trump. Trump is just one of the rare Pepes, nothing but a target to drive people’s beliefs toward. The mechanism is just social manipulation out of Russia for the purpose of stirring up civil and/or race war, and producing stochastic terrorism. It’ll still be there after Trump is gone. If Russia too is gone, then some fool somewhere will think they can do a better job at it.

  39. 39.

    AM in NC

    @opiejeanne: LOVED me some Zork and Beyond Zork.

    One of my proudest moments as a 19 y.o. woman was going to the video store and asking for something else like that because I’d finished the game, and the clerk staring in disbelief because “girl”.

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