The Daily - The Strange Case of QAnon

Episode Date: August 2, 2018

How did an outlandish conspiracy theory born on the fringes of the internet end up in the spotlight at a rally for President Trump? Guest: Kevin Roose, who writes about technology for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, how an outlandish conspiracy theory, born on the fringes of the internet, ended up at a real-world rally for President Trump. The story of QAnon. It's Thursday, August 2nd. Hello, Florida.

Kevin, what happened at this rally on Tuesday? I am thrilled to be in this great state where we, by the way, had a great victory. In some ways, it was a pretty typical Trump rally. With thousands of hardworking American patriots who love our country and respect our great American flag. Lots of supporters there. You had people booing the media. And then you had this new element. They wore shirts and signs emblazoned with only the letter Q. The letter Q, as in the letter on the t-shirts of Trump supporters in Tampa.

Which was that in the crowd behind and sort of around Trump, TV cameras picked up several people wearing t-shirts and holding signs that said Q. And what does that refer to, Q? Man, how much time do you have? We could go on. I'd say usually 20 to 25 minutes. Okay. I'll try to condense it down. So Q is the central figure in a vast internet-driven conspiracy theory called QAnon.

QAnon. QAnon. Q-A-N-O-N for anonymous. N-O-N for anonymous. This all started last October when an anonymous person posted on 4chan, the internet message board, calling themselves Q, which referred to Q clearance,

which is sort of a high-level government security clearance. And the post sort of had a list of rhetorical questions about issues in the U.S. Like, does POTUS know where the bodies are buried? Does POTUS have the goods on most bad actors? Was Trump asked to run for president? Why? By who? Was HRC next in line?

Was the election supposed to be rigged? Did good people prevent the rigging? So these questions and the other hints that Q began to drop in 4chan became known as crumbs. The intel comes directly to us and then we disperse it. It's the only way, Q says. People united hold the power. All of us.

And people started following these and latching on to these and sort of assembling them into a giant interconnected conspiracy theory. And what's the plot? So the plot is a little jumbled. There are many versions of it out there. But what most QAnon believers believe is that every president before Donald Trump was part of a nefarious group, a cabal of criminals.

Every president after Reagan was one of these deep state criminals, and their empire got even stronger. With each bad president came new depths. America and the world would sink. And that they were in league with bankers and heads of state. In this fringy alternate universe, senior Democrats run a secret child sex trafficking network. The deep state with child trafficking and that this goes back to the Rothschilds who were a sort of financier family, typically associated with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, to the Seth Rich conspiracy theory about the death of a DNC staffer.

In this alternate universe, the special counsel investigation is actually just a cover to really take down Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama because they were corrupted by the Kremlin. Another conspiracy theory. It's all there. It's sort of like a potpourri of internet derangement. And this is all part of the theory that all of these powerful people are in league with a big and conspiratorial criminal enterprise. QAnon claims that a shadowy cabal within the U.S. government is at war with President Trump and that the president will soon purge the country of these enemies. In QAnon's telling, there is a group of sort of white hats who are people who are working on behalf of the people who are not part of this cabal, who convinced Donald Trump to run for president

so that he would be able to break up this cabal and expose the perpetrators and bring them to justice. And how does all of this end in Q's telling? Do you guys know what this represents? Tell us, sir. Maybe it's the calm before the storm. In October of last year, the calm before the storm. President Trump made a sort of offhanded reference to the calm before

the storm. What storm is the president? You'll find out. Give us a hint. Thank you, everybody. the storm. This was seized on by Q. And the storm, they think, is the sort of denouement of all of this. This is the culminating climactic event that will result in the exposure of all of these criminals and the ultimate victory of truth and righteousness. Okay, so Kevin, this sounds almost comically outlandish. It's hard to believe that it has many supporters.

Well, it didn't at first. I mean, it was a pretty fringe community. It started to pick up steam on YouTube and Reddit and Facebook. And then... Roseanne keeps promoting QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that makes Pizzagate look tame. Some sort of fringe celebrities start tweeting about it and making references to it. So Kurt Schilling, the former baseball player Roseanne Barr, became a believer in QAnon. Barr's plugging of QAnon's theories drew renewed attention this Friday when she tweeted,

President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over the world. There's a fairly large community of people who are invested in this narrative and looking for clues that what they believe is going to happen is actually going to happen. And Kevin, what exactly is the connection between this nascent movement and President Trump, beyond the fact that it seems to put him in a heroic place in its far-fetched narrative? To be clear, President Trump has never mentioned QAnon or any of the sort of various threads of this conspiracy theory. But QAnon believers who follow President Trump very closely are convinced that he is dropping hints to them, that there are things that he is saying that align with this conspiracy theory,

and that ultimately this means that they are onto something. Like what? So one example would be the number 17. You know, I told the story the other day. I was probably in Washington in my entire life 17 times. Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. And so QAnon believers have latched onto this as sort of their number of significance. True. 17 times.

I don't think I ever stayed overnight. You know what I'm getting at, huh? And they've found several instances in which President Trump has said the number 17. Again, I've only been here about 17 times. And probably seven of those times was to check out the hotel I'm building on Pennsylvania Avenue. And they view this as proof that they are communicating with President Trump that Q is a reliable source and that this whole conspiracy theory makes sense.

Wow. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. So why does this matter, this absolutely fantastical conspiracy theory that strains every ounce of credulity? Why are we talking about it? It's a good question. I mean, I think that there is a responsibility in the media not to amplify conspiracy theories. I think for a long time this was not worth talking about in mainstream circles.

But recently, it has started to move closer and closer to the mainstream. There have been several instances where Q's followers have turned up in physical places. Sinead authorities in Nevada say a man barricaded himself in an armored vehicle near the Hoover Dam Bridge this afternoon, demanding President Trump release reports. Troopers say he was armed with a rifle and stopped traffic for about 90 minutes. So just last month, a man armed with a gun drove an armored truck to the Hoover Dam and blocked traffic while talking about this conspiracy theory.

They've turned up outside the office of Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels' lawyer. And, I mean, QAnon started off as a fringe internet conspiracy. But it has found purchase with a fairly large group of Trump supporters to the point that they're now showing up at rallies with Q merchandise. And in your mind, what is the significance of people from this group appearing at this rally in Florida? I think it does a couple things. One, I think they believe it sort of brings the movement closer to the mainstream and educates more people and brings them into the fold. But it's also kind of a signal to the people watching back at home that they're not alone.

This isn't a tiny group of people, that this is a growing network of people who understand something that no one else understands, that they share this secret knowledge with lots of other people, and that this is a source of power and legitimacy for them. and legitimacy for them. It also seems like it feeds the conspiracy by directly connecting the QAnon world to President Trump. Yeah, and in fact, after the rally, I went on Facebook, and I'm part of a QAnon Facebook group with about 40,000 other people. And what did you find? Well, here, let me just see if I can dig this up. Okay, let other people. And what did you find? Well, here, let me just see if I can dig this up.

Okay. Let's see. One member says, this entire rally was to announce QAnon to the world. Another one says, Q is mainstream.

Rejoice in Jesus' name. Oh, Sarah Sanders was asked about QAnon today. First of all, does the president encourage the support of people who showed up last night in these QAnon and Blacks for Trump fringe groups? What'd she say? She said... condemns and denounces any group that would incite violence against another individual and certainly doesn't support groups that would promote that type of behavior. We've been clear

about that a number of times since the beginning of the administration. So right away, people are sharing that clip in these groups. They're talking about how Sarah Sanders appears to be grinning, that maybe she's hiding some secret knowledge that she has, that this is all evidence that things are progressing the way that Q said they would. And for them, this is a big deal. I mean, this is their first time being this close to the center of the political discussion. It's almost like even though she's saying that the president denounces these kinds of groups, that there's legitimacy in even being asked about it at a place of such prestige, the White House press conference.

Exactly. If you're being talked about, you're winning. And for these QAnon believers who see themselves as straining for legitimacy and recognition from President Trump and people close to him, that's a very affirming sign. And one other point I want to make on this is that I think part of why it's important to talk about this now is because these movements can lead to real world harm. I mean, there was the case of Pizzagate where this conspiracy theory about a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. Led someone to actually show up with a gun there.

To the people who believe in QAnon, the extreme nature of the criminal activity that they believe is going on justifies almost anything to stop it. Traditionally, we have this idea that there are movements that happen on the internet and movements that happen in the real world, and that they're not always connected, and that somehow the stuff that happens online is less serious than the stuff that happens in the real world. But as we've seen with Charlottesville, Pizzagate, and now from QAnon, is that these internet-based movements can easily become real. They can make themselves real

by making themselves visible, by appearing at rallies, by taking these real-world actions. And I don't think we can meaningfully say that there's a difference anymore between an online movement and a real movement. An online movement is a real movement. Yeah. I mean, people on the internet are real people. They, you know, get up from their computers and go to political rallies sometimes. I think that's an underestimated force is where are these people congregating? What are they telling each other? And how might we be able to

stop or limit the spread of some of these things? Well, we spend so much time talking to you, Kevin, about the responsibilities and the capabilities of companies like Facebook, like Twitter, like YouTube to stop this kind of stuff. So in the case of QAnon, what are the responsibilities and capabilities of something like Facebook to stop it in its tracks? So there are some things that tech companies can do to combat the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories, right? They can break up a group or take down a YouTube video, but ultimately they can't change what people want to talk about. We're really talking about a political problem here. You are not allowed to be a president if you're not born in this country.

He may not have been born in this country. We are at a moment in our country's history where we have a president who is a sort of notorious conspiracy theorist who came to political prominence by promoting a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama's birth certificate. I'll tell you what, when you read the IG report with these really dishonest people, and I was never a deep state guy. Let me tell you, we got some bad people that are doing bad things. But when you read that IG report about how she got away with what she got away with, it's a disgrace. It's a total disgrace. Who has embraced conspiracy theories about the deep state and rigged elections and...

Donald, I need to come back to the topic we've been all screaming about here, which is Scalia, was he murdered? What do you think of that? It's a horrible topic, but they say they found the pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. Who seems to be willing to give affirming statements to these groups rather than disavowing them to sort of give them a subtle indication that he's not troubled by it.

So, a crumb. Exactly. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you for having me. On Wednesday, President Trump sent out a tweet that included this line. Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

In a tweet on Wednesday morning, President Trump, for the first time, called on his Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, to end the special counsel investigation, quote, right now. The president said a few weeks ago that he did what, or a few months ago, sorry, that he was not going to intervene in the Department of Justice's family of that investigation. Does that tweet this morning mark a change in posture by the president? It's not an order. It's the president's opinion. And it's ridiculous that all of the corruption and dishonesty that's gone on. The tweet immediately raised new questions about whether the president is using social media to obstruct justice in the Russia investigation, a possibility that special counsel Robert Mueller is already examining.

Look, the president is not obstructing. He's fighting back. The president is stating his opinion, he's stating it clearly, and he's certainly expressing the frustration that he has with the level of corruption that we've seen from people like Jim Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe. Under questioning at the White House, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that the tweet was not obstruction because the president was

expressing an opinion about what Sessions should do, not explicitly ordering him to do it. You said that his tweet this morning was his opinion. When he tells you something as a member of his staff, how do you know if it's a directive from the president or if it's simply his opinion? The president makes it pretty clear when I'm having those conversations with him. David, go ahead. It's been pretty clear. His tweet this morning said that he wanted to... And the Times reports that the Trump administration, which has already reduced the number of refugees

who can be resettled in the U.S. every year, is considering another major reduction. Trump, who last year cut the number from 110,000 to 50,000, and then again to 45,000, is considering reducing it to 25,000, the lowest number since 1980, when the president was first given the power to set the number of refugees allowed into the country. The administration argues that refugees represent an economic burden and a security threat

and are better off being resettled closer to their home countries. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.