Sociologists and journalists have struggled to precisely categorize the shambolic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Is it a political movement? A new religion? A cult? It has elements of all these things. There is a basic set of beliefs: namely that President Trump is waging a holy war within the government against a secret cabal of pedophiles, whose members included top Democrats like Hillary Clinton and her advisers. There are accompanying behaviors and rituals: the serial viewing of YouTube videos that embed the watcher deeper into the world of QAnon; the frantic decoding of “Q drops,” or tersely worded message-board posts, which now number more than 4,000. There is a prophet, Q, and a God-like figure, Trump. Its central slogan offers the impression of a crusade, a long march: “Where we go one, we go all.”
But historians offer another thesis for the purpose QAnon serves. The “nocturnal ritual fantasy”—a term coined by the historian Norman Cohn in his landmark study of European witch trials, Europe’s Inner Demons—is a recurring trope in Western history. And it is often a politically useful one. Deployed by the Romans against early Christians, by Christians against Jews, by Christians against witches, by Catholics against “heretics,” it is a malleable set of accusations that posit that a social out-group is engaged in perverse, ritualistic behaviors that target innocents—and that the out-group and all its enablers must be crushed.
QAnon began in October 2017, in the fetid corners of the anonymous online message board 4chan. It consisted, at first, of cryptic messages by a mysterious individual who purported to have “Q-level” clearance—a designation by the Department of Energy that enables its holder to access top-secret information.
Over the past three years, Q has migrated to 8kun—an even shadier anonymous site—and the conspiracy has grown vast and jungly. Outside the core tenets of Q—Trump as godly warrior of the people, an elite cabal of Democrats abusing children—there is now a range of conspiratorial beliefs, from the existence of a lizard Illuminati to a government cover-up of alien landings.
QAnon contains significant elements of antisemitism (Q has fixated on the Rothschilds and George Soros as crucial sponsors and members of the cabal) and a furious racism (Q adherents blame wildfires on the Black Lives Matter movement and postulate that Black activists confer with demons). The fixation on Soros—an echo of mainstream Republican claims that the Hungarian Jew is the potential orchestrator of a “coup” and a perennial funder of political opposition—is particularly hysterical and violent. Q himself has referenced Soros several times as the financial font funding “domestic terrorism.”
Q adherents are perfervid Trump supporters by necessity, as Trump’s valiant battle against ultimate evil forms the spine from which the many limbs of the conspiracy grow. But a recent wave of émigrés into the Q landscape consists of New Age moms and influencers with previously vaguer politics, whose interests, during the strained days of the Covid-19 pandemic, have migrated from crystals and wellness to taking down a world-straddling cabal of demonic pedophiles. Anti-vaccination beliefs and consequent conspiracy theories about a hypothetical Covid-19 vaccine provided a gateway to QAnon in many of these cases: The twin conspiracies have merged, seamlessly, into the broad, sprawling whole.