QAnon supporters fail to see the real conspiracy – and it is destroying them

For decades, westerners have been fond of looking down on the Middle East as awash with conspiracy theories. These include popular contentions that secretive cabals of Americans, Brits or Jews were behind everything, from changes in national governments to changes in the weather. Scholars have devoted entire studies to what one paper described as the “prevalence of this type of thinking in the Arab-Iranian-Muslim Middle East”.  

But with the widespread emergence in the United States and elsewhere of the unhinged and persistently dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, the west is having something of a “hold-my-tin-foil-hat” moment, as it embraces a narrative so bizarre, it makes the political fables circulating within the coffee houses of the Middle East seem quaint.  

QAnon, which spread from the depths of far-right online chat rooms about four years ago, is the theory that Donald Trump and a secret band of US military officials are waging a battle to overthrow a cabal of powerful politicians, financiers and Hollywood celebrities who engage in paedophilia and drink the blood of children.

QAnon is the code name for an anonymous, supposedly senior US defence or intelligence official who has been “dropping” clues about this Manichean battle, and urging its adherents to keep the faith whenever predictions of mass arrests or cataclysmic geopolitical “storms” fail to materialise.

What began as an online fantasy has morphed into the real world. QAnon supporters – mostly white, right-wing Americans – began finding each other in real life, holding demonstrations in city streets and chanting, “Save the children”. These people have also entered politics, winning seats in heavily right-wing districts of the United States.  

Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, controversial far-right extremists, are outgrowths of QAnon. The movement came up during the presidential debates in the US, when Trump refused to refute the theory. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” he said in August.

The 6 January attack on Capitol Hill by Trump supporters included a heavy splash of QAnon imagery – slogans as well as the presence of QAnon figures such as the infamous viking-horned “shaman” Jake Angeli, who has now been charged with criminal offences.  

What’s more, the QAnon fantasy has begun to spread globally. Believers have popped up in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands and Australia, where one former adherent recently confessed to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he once believed that the dapper, silver-haired newscaster interviewing him drank babies’ blood.  

US officials last year described the movement as a potential domestic terrorist threat, with its most devout adherents believing they are foot soldiers in a righteous war against evil. And even though Trump has left the presidency and there were no “mass arrests” on Inauguration Day, as QAnon had predicted, many supporters of the theory soldier on.  

One QAnon supporter on the far-right website Gab claimed Trump will be reappointed president on 4 March, when the military will announce mass arrests. “There is currently no president,” they wrote. “The military are in charge but recognise that the office of the president is held in such high regard by most citizens that the idea of the position being vacant would cause a significant amount of civil unrest, which is why they are allowing the CIA to use the media for a psyop [psychological operations] with Biden.”

More troubling are reports that disillusioned QAnon supporters are now being recruited by violent neo-Nazi groups seeking to channel their anger for their own nefarious ends.  

Shockingly few members of the Republican Party have denounced people like Boebert and Greene, or even come out with a clear cut statement such as, “QAnon is a lie”.

Though the QAnon fantasy and its antecedents like Pizzagate (which holds that left-leaning US politicians were running a paedophile ring out of a Washington pizzeria) have been circulating for years, the movement only caught fire with the onset of the coronavirus a year ago. Stuck in their homes during lockdowns with little else to do, some became lost in internet rabbit holes on unscrupulous social media websites lusting for clicks. Those losing businesses and livelihoods became easy prey for a conspiracy theory that blamed a shadowy cabal for the world’s troubles.  

Just like in the Middle East, there’s a reason why such a conspiracy theory is growing in the west, and it has nothing to do with the “American mind”, just as such as fantastical thinking has little to do with the “Arab mind”. In both cases, it is because leaders have failed to provide leadership and because they profit off people’s ignorance.  

Iranians or Arabs who believe that everything is run by British spies or Jewish people aren’t likely to engage in genuine political activity against the actual forces that are oppressing and robbing them, just like those who believe that everything is run by the deep state and mythical bloodsuckers aren’t likely to organise against the corporations, political elite, and oligarchs who are actually exploiting them and destroying their communities.  

Constituents devouring a bizarre, disgusting conspiracy theory don’t see the actual conspiracy, in which a powerful and deeply corrupt elite pay starvation wages, cut their public services, flood their communities with opioids and convince them to blame their woes on immigrants and Black people.  

That’s the damning reason why Trump and many in the Republican Party have failed to denounce QAnon. Just as political and religious leaders in the Middle East rarely denounce and sometimes even parrot destructive conspiracy theories about Jewish bankers or British spies, the American right plays footsie with QAnon because it helps deflect attention away from their own criminal behaviour. They fail to condemn QAnon because they need QAnon.