Consider This from NPR - Believers Of Internet Hoax 'QAnon' Could Be Headed To Congress

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

The FBI has called it a potential domestic terror threat. The President says he doesn't know much. Now, congressional candidates who've signaled support for the internet hoax 'QAnon' are on the ballot this November. Email the show at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org There's something at West Point called the CTC, the Combating Terrorism Center. It's an academic institute within the Military Academy. This summer, that group published a report called the QAnon Conspiracy Theory, a Security Threat in the Making. The report cited

notable cases linked to the fringe internet hoax. Edgar Welch, 28, of Salisbury, North Carolina, has been arrested and charged with assault with a dangerous weapon. Like in 2016, when a man walked into a D.C. pizza shop with an assault rifle looking for a child's sex ring. He allegedly pointed the gun in the direction of an employee and fired the weapon inside the restaurant. Or in 2018, when a man in Nevada drove an armored truck onto a bridge over the Hoover Dam and refused to leave. Arizona DPS says Wright blocked traffic for about an hour before leading authorities on a chase down a dirt road toward the Colorado River. He was demanding the release of a Justice Department report, which had already been made public days earlier. Police found two assault rifles and 900 rounds of ammo in his vehicle.

And there's the woman who earlier this year drove from Illinois to New York City trying to find and board a Navy ship there. She was arrested on a pier with a box full of knives in the back of her car. Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate. But I don't know much about the movement. I have heard that it is gaining in popularity. Consider this. QAnon is not the first internet hoax the president has embraced, but it's the latest, and it's spreading within the Republican Party. From NPR News, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday,

August 25th. the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. At the center of the QAnon hoax is the idea that a cabal of Democrats and celebrities are satanic pedophiles running a global child sex trafficking operation, and the followers of this hoax believe President Trump is secretly leading an effort to stop it all. The Q in QAnon takes its name from a 4chan user from a few years back, someone who posted in that online forum claiming to be an anonymous government official. I'm going to tell you, I don't know who Q is, but I'm just

going to tell you about it because I think it's something worth listening to. And this is the voice of a QAnon adherent on the path to Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a construction executive from Georgia, won a congressional primary in a very red district, all but guaranteeing her a seat in the House of Representatives. Okay, so there's some really interesting things about this person Q. That was even after videos emerged of her from 2017, like this one, expressing support for QAnon. It also gives you a sense of how Q supporters arrive at some of their beliefs. Another thing is Q has put out, he put out a picture for, it was like a clue, and the photo was from an airplane. And someone figured out the angle from the photograph and it matched the coordinates exactly to the same piece of same area that Air

Force One was flying over. Okay, so people believe that Q is someone very close to President Trump. And we should point out there are a lot of other videos of Green unconnected to QAnon, some Islamophobic, others about African Americans. And while Green just last week backtracked on her support for QAnon, telling Fox News she chose a different path, she isn't the only congressional candidate who signaled support for it in the past. No, honestly, everything that I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real. In Colorado, there's Lauren Boebert, who defeated a five-term incumbent in a primary in June. Because it only means America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.

And in Oregon, Senate candidate Joe Ray Perkins used a QAnon motto in a now-deleted campaign video. Where we go one, we go all. I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots, and together we can save our republic. And when a reporter described to President Trump what the movement is actually about, Trump didn't disavow it. At the crux of the theory is this belief that you are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Does that sound like something you are behind? Well, I haven't heard that, but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?

I mean, you know, if I can help save the world from problems, I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to put myself out there. Now, the fact that Trump acknowledged the QAnon community is hugely consequential to the community because they have been waiting this for years. That's Travis View. He's been reporting on QAnon and hosts a podcast about it. The fact that he did nothing to denounce the theory or denounce the followers hugely energized them. I mean, they are they are on cloud nine as a consequence of Trump's statements. NPR's Hannah Lam has spoken to View about his podcast and the movement he covers and why he and many others believe QAnon followers need to be taken more seriously as a domestic threat. Q is a peaceful movement. Our only weapon is truth. That's an episode of the podcast QAnon Anonymous.

The show takes a deep, skeptical look into the world of QAnon. What's up QAA listeners? One of the hosts, Travis View, says QAnon is so outlandish, so ridiculous, that most people didn't take it seriously. Not federal authorities, not social media platforms. At least, not until Q believers started running for office. When things go sort of viral online, even if they're, you know, dangerous extremist movements, they might be dismissed as fringe. But once they start entering the halls of Congress, then that makes people sit up and pay attention. The watchdog group Media Matters for America counts 19 congressional candidates with links to QAnon who will be on the ballot in November.

Many are long shots, not Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her primary win in a deep red district means she's all but assured a seat in Congress. Trump has already tweeted his congratulations. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene started in the bucket where she truly believed in QAnon, but now she's probably drifting more towards the political constituency. Marc-Andre Argentino recently wrote about QAnon for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. He worries Q is fueling extremism. Last year, an FBI memo called it a potential domestic terrorism threat. Several Q supporters already have been linked to serious crimes.

Aoife Gallagher tracks QAnon for the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue. It's almost like a cult, you know, it really becomes this almost cult-like thinking. They have their mantras and their oaths and they, you know, are so dogmatic in their thinking. Gallagher says the conspiracy now goes well beyond American politics. International Q groups have formed. It's sweeping up new age and anti-vaccination types. It's reaching millions across social media platforms, outpacing new efforts by tech companies to contain it.

NPR's Hannah Lam. Now, I want to talk more about the social media part of this, because earlier this month, NBC News obtained internal Facebook documents that revealed there were thousands of active QAnon Facebook groups with millions of members. And following that report, Facebook announced this past week it had removed almost 800 of those groups from the site. It restricted another 2,000 or so, as well as 10,000 Instagram accounts. And what does restricted mean? Well, Facebook says it will no longer recommend QAnon groups to users based on their algorithmic preferences, something Facebook had been doing just last week. This is significant because, as Hannah mentioned, the conspiracy is sweeping up people who are new age adherents, anti-vaccination types, and apparently white evangelical churchgoers.

My colleague Ari Shapiro has looked more into that. Ari, is this a surprise? And how are church leaders like talking about it? Well, on one level, it's not a surprise because QAnon adherents tend to be Trump supporters and white evangelical churchgoers also tend to be Trump supporters. But I talked to a reporter who says there is a much deeper connection here. Her name is Caitlin Beatty. She writes for the Religion News Service, and she talked to a bunch of pastors who are seeing this growing phenomenon in their church and trying to talk people out of it. So they see it as a problem.

Absolutely. I mean, she said there were a few pastors in small churches who were all in on QAnon, but for the most part, these white evangelical pastors are really concerned. Like one of them she talked to is named Jeb Barr. He's a senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Elmont, Texas. As a Christian as a church, we're going to be spreading the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, because that's the most important message in the world. So if the people spreading that message are also spreading easily crazy lies, why would the message be believed, right?

Why would we listen to my friend Joe, who says he's a Christian, and is telling me about Jesus, if he also thinks the communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of some pizza restaurant. So Jeb Barr saying that it's difficult as a pastor to see people in your church believing in this stuff because it undercuts the church's ability to deliver a religious message. Absolutely. And also, it could even rival the church in its, I don't know, seductiveness, you might say. I mean, the headline on Caitlin Beatty's article was QAnon, the alternative religion that is coming to your church.

And so when I talked to her, I was like, wait a minute, do the people you interviewed really see QAnon as a belief system comparable to organized religion? They do. They are picking up on the overt spiritual language that Q is using in his messages. And they see that as connecting directly to the Bible and that they are supposed to take up a spiritual battle to reveal truth. And your reporting suggests that there's something about this moment that makes it spread that much faster. Yeah, so a lot of pastors I spoke with noted the fact that their churches are having to continue to do virtual church due to the coronavirus. And in that time, the pastors I spoke with sense that there's this isolation and loneliness that their members are experiencing. The pastors only get

one hour a week with people in their church. The people in their church are probably spending hours on Facebook, on other social media forums, taking in this information. And the pastors I spoke with just felt like they couldn't do enough to counter the false messages that some of their church members were receiving through the internet. I guess one question is, if these pastors are the voices of authority within the church community, why aren't they able to talk their parishioners out of this false belief? The pastors that I spoke with talked about a crisis of authority that they feel acutely as spiritual leaders. They perceive that we're in this time when there's a lot of mistrust of traditional sources

of authority and truth, and they feel that themselves as church leaders. And they're concerned that members of their church are not only accepting falsehood and kind of believing in these falsehoods, but also spreading falsehood to other people in the church. And that's especially problematic when QAnon is being espoused by other pastors in a denomination or by leaders in a particular church. Do you think we would find a growing belief in QAnon in any community that includes a lot of Trump supporters? Or is there something specific to the white evangelical church that makes it susceptible to these messages? That's a great question. I think about a poll conducted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical institution in the Chicago suburbs. This was a poll conducted

in 2018 that found that over half of evangelicals, as defined by belief, are strongly convinced that the mainstream media produced fake news. And that opens the door for a lot of evangelicals to turn to alternative and fringe news sources, including those that traffic in conspiracy theories. So I certainly think there's a connection there. But also, again, it's that QAnon uses this explicitly spiritual language that sounds Christian. There's a clear battle between good and evil. There's the promise of this great awakening. More people are going to wake up to these prophecies, if you will, that's coming from Q. And so it's easy for many white evangelicals to read their Bibles and connect the dots between what they read there and what they're hearing from QAnon sources.

That's reporter Caitlin Beatty speaking with my colleague Ari Shapiro. Additional reporting for this episode from our colleagues at All Things Considered. For more news, download the NPR One app or listen to your local public radio station. Supporting that station makes this podcast possible. We're back tomorrow. I'm Adi Cornish. With civil unrest, the pandemic, and the economic crisis, you want to know what's happening right when you wake up.

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