How Qanon’s lies are hijacking the national conversation

“He knew EVERYTHING,” Trump tweeted, referring to Obama. “Just do it.”

Later that day, Graham announced a probe into the matter — although he begged off Trump’s request to subpoena Obama himself.

The example highlights a little-known facet of QAnon, experts at the NCRI said.

Rather than being a nebulous group that amplifies messages organically at the grassroots level, QAnon appears to also be an occasional architect of messages that, through coordinated behavior, make their way to the most powerful factions of the Republican Party.

“Working with the highest levels of power in our country, they’ve found ways to hijack our national conversation,” Finkelstein added.

The influence of QAnon swelled this year despite the ludicrous — some would say cult-like — contention at its core: that Trump is fighting a cabal of Satan-worshiping elites that engages in pedophilia and child sacrifice.

So substantial is QAnon’s following that many Republican elected officials have been loath to condemn it. The most vocal Republican critic of the group, Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia — who is an adviser to the NCRI — is serving the final days of his term. This week, as one of his last acts, he plans to deliver a rebuke of the movement on the floor of the House.

“A lot of people scoff at QAnon — think it’s just a bunch of, let’s face it, a bunch of idiots who believe anything on the internet,” Riggleman told CNN. “But there is something sinister. It’s something much more dangerous going on here.”

From fringe to mainstream

Three years after its birth on the fringes of the internet, QAnon appears to have gone mainstream.

“Just saying you like QAnon is not akin to basically being a believer in all QAnon conspiracy theories — or even knowing about all of them,” Schaffner told CNN. “I think some people just sort of say they like QAnon, because, ‘Oh, I think Trump likes QAnon, and I like Trump. So I probably like QAnon, even though I don’t really know much about it and I don’t pay attention to it.'”

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an education and sociology professor at American University in Washington, DC, said the QAnon movement expanded rapidly over the summer, and intersects with other conspiracy ideas.

“It’s mobilized some violence and really troubling ways on the extreme fringe,” she said. “But I think it’s also just amplifying a lot of content that undermines people’s faith in the election, in the integrity of election results, (and) that undermines people’s faith in the vaccine” for the coronavirus.

Rooted in old anti-Semitic tropes of conspiring cabals of elites, QAnon is distinct from other online extremist groups in that it tends to attract middle-aged adults, Miller-Idriss said.

“You have 15-year-olds at home feeling like, ‘What do I do? My mom thinks she’s going to go fight child trafficking rings … she’s spending all her time online doing that and has lost touch with reality,'” said Miller-Idriss, whose team partnered with the NCRI on the report. “QAnon believers can get radicalized very quickly, sometimes in a matter of weeks.”

The NCRI report stresses that QAnon takes advantage of well-meaning people by exploiting fears of existential threats.

“We must focus on the humanity of people caught up in QAnon,” it says. “The QAnon conspiracy movement thrives on dehumanization. Through compassion and patience, people may be drawn out.”

Much of the group’s mystique stems from the anonymity of its “leader,” a figure who goes by “Q” and initially began periodically dropping encrypted messages into an online message board called 4chan before switching to 8chan, which is now known as 8kun. The clues are then voraciously decoded by followers.

A separate analysis by Advance Democracy, Inc., a nonpartisan governance watchdog, shows that QAnon accounts also played a role in popularizing an incendiary and baseless hashtag about President-elect Joe Biden. The first apparent use of #PedoBiden on Twitter came in 2016 from an account now associated with QAnon, according to Advance Democracy’s analysis. About 10% of tweets with that hashtag came from QAnon-related accounts until September of this year, when Trump retweeted the hashtag, it found.

Where QAnon first made an appearance

The QAnon-associated account that first used the #PedoBiden hashtag was replying to a tweet with the caption “Pedo Joe?” which was posted by Mike Cernovich, a central figure behind the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that culminated in December of 2016 with a man firing an assault rifle inside a DC pizza parlor because he was searching for a pedophile ring he’d read about online. After finding no evidence of such a ring, he surrendered to authorities. But that conspiracy theory laid the groundwork for QAnon.

QAnon also amplified the falsehood that Dominion Voting Systems, an election-software company, switched millions of votes from President Trump to President-elect Joe Biden. The Advance Democracy report found that 14% of the nearly 110,000 tweets using the hashtag #dominion between November 2 and November 12 came from QAnon-affiliated accounts.

Some of QAnon’s activity has spilled into the real world.

The NCRI report included one other example that appears to show how a QAnon hashtag bubbled into the mainstream.

The co-mingling of #Obamagate with the Q-related hashtags “suggests the (QAnon) movement played a key role in spreading the conspiracy theory” of ObamaGate, says the NCRI report.

In the #SubpoenaObama example, after Trump called on Graham to “just do it,” the originator of the hashtag — who went by E., and whose account has been suspended — took a moment to gloat.

Hours after Trump tagged Graham on May 14, E. — whose handle, @followthe17, is a reference to how Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet — retweeted Trump’s admonition, along with a screen grab of E.’s original promise to his or her 20,500 followers from the day before: “Hey #QAnons — If you make #SubpoenaObama trend; good things will happen.” E. topped the retweet and the screen grab with a simple message: an emoji wink.

Trump followed up on the evening of May 14 with what appeared to be a winking Tweet of his own.

“Thank you to all of my great Keyboard Warriors. You are better, and far more brilliant, than anyone on Madison Avenue (Ad Agencies). There is nobody like you!”

Trump refuses to condemn QAnon

It’s unclear how aware Trump is of QAnon’s coordinated efforts, but he has refused to condemn the group, and has even praised it.

“I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” he said in August, in the White House briefing room.

During a tense town hall interview with NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie in mid-October, Trump refused to denounce QAnon before pivoting to a critique of antifa.

“I know nothing about it,” Trump said. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia — they fight it very hard. … I’ll tell you about what I do know about. I know about antifa and I know about the radical left.”

Many Republican lawmakers have also been reluctant to denounce the organization. In September, Riggleman — the outgoing GOP Congressman from Virginia — and Rep. Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat, introduced a bipartisan measure condemning QAnon. It passed handily, but 17 Republicans and one Libertarian voted no. Thirty-four Republicans and six Democrats didn’t vote on the non-binding resolution.

Riggleman lost his seat during the primary season in June, when Virginia’s 5th Congressional District Republican Committee nominated his opponent, Bob Good, nearly a year after Riggleman sparked controversy by officiating a same-sex wedding between two of his friends. (Good beat his Democratic challenger, Cameron Webb, on November 3.)

Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who has worked as a contractor for the National Security Administration in computer-network operations, told CNN that he recognizes in QAnon messaging the distinct “language of radicalization.”

“This is very dangerous,” he said. “I think we’re on a bit of a knife’s edge right now.”