Today, Explained - What is QAnon?

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

As the Republican National Convention gets underway, a bonkers (and dangerous) conspiracy theory is gaining a foothold inside the GOP. President Trump appears to be okay with it. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The Republican National Convention begins today. Apparently, two apprentice producers have been tapped to help run the show,

and President Trump will be speaking every night, which means it might have a bit of a Trump rally vibe, but without as many, you know, diehard Trump fans in the crowd, obviously. And if you've watched footage from those before-time Trump rallies, you may have noticed some of those diehards hoisting some strange signs. Signs with messages about Q. Q is shorthand for QAnon. It's a political conspiracy theory for people who like their conspiracy theories with a little side of bonkers. Now, if you're not familiar with QAnon, here's a quick crash course. According to the Anti-Defamation League, QAnon followers, quote, believe world governments are being controlled by a shadowy

cabal of pedophiles who will eventually be brought to justice by President Trump. The most far out of these beliefs say that celebrities and political elites actually farm children in underground caves so that they can drink blood, which supposedly staves off aging. Really, the only rule is that Donald Trump is the only good guy. He is here to go save the world from the satanic cannibals. It's been festering online for a few years now, but in 2020, where bad things come to blossom, QAnon appears to be gaining a foothold in the Republican Party. Zach Beecham, you've been following QAnon for Vox. Why is it getting less Anon all of a sudden? Well, there are two reasons.

The first one is that a woman with a very long record of supporting QAnon named Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman in Georgia, won a Republican primary in an extremely safe Republican seat in August. So basically what that means is somebody with this extensive track record of saying QAnon stuff is almost certainly going to Congress. The second reason is that on Wednesday, President Trump, at a press conference, refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked. During the pandemic, the QAnon movement appears to be gaining a lot of followers. Can you talk about what you think about that and what you have to say to people who are following this movement right now? Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I way the reporter asked the question, which was not great. But also, and more fundamentally, this is the president praising a conspiracy theory that has been linked to violence, like murder, actual murder, and other federal crimes. Last year, the FBI labeled the movement a potential domestic terror threat. I've heard these are people that love our country and they just don't like seeing it. So I don't know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me. The president not denouncing them or not saying anything that would be like,

look, these people are really, really out there, is given the specific nature of this conspiracy theory, which is basically oriented around Donald Trump secretly being the savior of the world and secretly doing all these things they think he's doing. I mean, this is so likely to add fuel to this particular fire and so likely to encourage QAnon supporters that it's breathtakingly irresponsible on the president's part. Was this the first time the president really addressed this conspiracy or that it reached a platform that high? Yeah, I mean, press secretaries have been asked about it before, but that claims that Hillary Clinton eats children, which is a thing QAnoners actually believe. Not exaggerating. A message to Hillary. It's Alex Jones. You can't run all the time. When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped.

I have zero fear standing up against her. Tell me more about this potential Congress member who's a member of the Q tribe. So Marjorie Taylor Greene is her name. She lives in Georgia, where she has owned a construction business with her husband since 2002, which is like a normal enough small business person profile for somebody running for Congress. But this is a woman who built her public profile by, in no uncertain terms, propagating the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Q is a patriot. He is someone that very much loves his country, and he's on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump. She released a whole 30-minute video about her belief in QAnon and all the things that she found persuasive in it. Now, there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cable of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it. And so I'm very excited about that. She had a now-defunct website that posted pro-QAnon content in a September 3rd, 2018 post from Marjorie Taylor Greene for Congress. She talked about how Q, the key figure in QAnon, was warning of false flags and then speculated that demon possession or military-grade

intelligence-developed weapons like voice-of-God technology were being used to manipulate these school shooters into the false flags. It's real wild stuff. She said awful things about Muslims. We have an Islamic invasion into our government offices. Proposed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I will not apologize for standing up against George Soros, even when they want to call me an anti-Semite. She made an ad, published it on her Facebook page, where she, in more or less no uncertain terms, threatened violence against any Antifa members that visited her area of Georgia.

President Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. She was holding a gun during this video. I have a message for Antifa terrorists. She cocked a gun during this video. I have a message for Antifa terrorists. She cocked the gun during the video. It's pretty clear. Stay the hell out of Northwest Georgia. You won't burn our churches, loot our businesses, or destroy our homes. I'm Marjorie Green, and I approve this message. And the video was suspended from Facebook on grounds that it violated their terms of service, which prohibit threats against specific groups. Even setting the QAnon stuff aside, Taylor Greene is a really extreme Republican candidate, even by Republican standards. But the QAnon stuff takes it to a whole new level.

We should be clear here, though, that a lot of Georgians who supported her in the primary knew exactly what she stood for and knew exactly what kind of tie she had to this conspiracy theory. Yeah, I don't think that's a stretch. There's a reason why she was able to out-raise and out-compete another conservative Republican who billed himself in the primary as conservative but not crazy and went after her for this sort of nuttery and the links to QAnon. And she won pretty decisively. And she hasn't said anything like this since she won the primary. No, I don't believe she's said anything that pro-QAnon since winning the primary. I think she's trying to mainstream herself a little bit. But she is being accepted by the Republican Party and is going to have seats on committees and stuff

like that based on what we're hearing right now from the House Republican leadership. So she needs to play by their rules a little bit. The extent to which she will succeed in doing that, like I said, I really am skeptical. Did Trump react to Greene's win? Did he have anything to say about it? Yeah, Trump is a big Marjorie Taylor Greene fan. President Trump tweeting congratulations today to QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene, the president calling Greene a, quote, future Republican star and a real winner. Is there a chance that other QAnon candidates might pop up for this 2020 election, or is she the only one?

Yeah, by some counts, there are up to 20 people who will be appearing on the ballot in November who are QAnon believers or sympathizers. Honestly, everything that I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real. Some congressional candidates, like Lauren Boebert in Colorado promoted the conspiracy theory to friendly media outlets before later calling QAnon fake news. Other candidates like Republican Joe Ray Perkins, who's running for the U.S. Senate seat in Oregon, have come out as true supporters. This is a conspiracy theory that grew out of absolute faith in Donald Trump. It is deeply linked to Republican partisanship and really specifically support for Donald Trump and can't be untethered from that.

After the break, the origins of QAnon. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Zach, who is Q? You know, if I knew, I would be putting that on Vox.com right now. Q originally was an anonymous poster on 4chan, where everyone is anonymous. 4chan, if you're not familiar with it, is like a real internet cesspool that is loosely affiliated, maybe even strongly affiliated, depending on who you talk to with the alt-right. They have actually threatened me before,

so I know what it's like. But Q is a poster on 4chan, and posters on 4chans are called Anon, so Q Anon, that's how the name of the movement began. So you would know it was Q because they would sign their messages with a dash Q at the very end of them. Now Q is generally taken to refer to a level of classification in the U.S. government, Q-level classification. It's a very high level of access to government information. So the implication by this person signing Q and claiming to have inside information about what was going on inside the government and about this sort of secret behind-the-scenes stuff is that Q is a government employee, someone very, very high up, who knows things that ordinary people don't and is now leaving little breadcrumbs,

which is what QAnon supporters call his messages, and they always say his. So we'll assume for this conversation that he's a he, though we have no idea who Q actually is. And they'll read these sort of cryptic messages written by Q and read a lot into them and use them to build out what is an almost theological view of how politics works. And what is the theology of Q? Oh, boy. We're really getting into it now, Sean. I think we should start with Pizzagate.

You know about Pizzagate? Pizzagate started on the internet shortly before Election Day when right-wing sites that make up fake news spread rumors that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex trafficking ring in D.C. Out of a restaurant in D.C. called Comet Ping Pong. A delightful restaurant other than this Pizzagate business. Yeah, yeah, I used to go there and play ping pong with my niece and nephew, and so I would not be taking them to a place that had pedophilia in that establishment.

It does not. 28-year-old Edgar Welch fired at least one round into the restaurant floor with an AR-15 rifle like this one. After police arrived, Welch surrendered peacefully, saying that he was trying to rescue the children he was sure were hidden inside. He faces charges including assault with a deadly weapon. So is this some sort of foundational moment for QAnon? Yeah, I think a lot of Q's description of the world came out of the Pizzagate conspiracy

theory, namely the idea that Democratic Party elites are involved in a secret ring of pedophilia and child trafficking, and that this is something that Donald Trump is trying to expose. 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? QAnon is a fantasy of Trump power and Trump goodness. You're trying to make sense out of the chaos of the Trump presidency if you're a hardcore Trump supporter,

if you really believe that he's somebody who is working to save America and make it great again. And so you've developed this demonized portrayal of your opponents. In some ways, it's a really natural outgrowth of one of the primary motivating forces in American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship. You know, you support your party because you hate the opposing party, not necessarily because you love everything that your party stands for. And so you think of Democrats not just as your political opponents, if you're a Republican, but as fundamentally illegitimate threats to the nation. QAnon takes it one step further and says, they're not just illegitimate political opponents,

they're actual sex criminals and murderers. And then they marry this with a very Trumpy cult of personality. But just thinking about the origins of QAnon in some 4chan message board, some guy posting under the name Q, it just sounds like this could have easily just been a bad joke that has like spiraled wildly out of control. Yeah, it's entirely possible that that's what happened. We're all pretty certain

that Q is not some high-up figure in the Trump administration or U.S. government. But Q could be anyone, right? It could be just some random person who thought it would be funny to start pretending that they were a member of the Trump administration. This actually was a fairly common

thing on 4chan, and then they, you know, it stopped being funny when QAnoners started killing people. And right, there is one QAnoner who thought there's a mafia boss who is in on this. And so he went and killed him, went to his house and killed him. 24-year-old Anthony Camillo is behind bars right now

for the shooting death of Francesco Frankie Boy Cali, the reputed boss of the Cambino crime family. This was in March 2019. And there's another person who derailed a train in California as part of what seems like a QAnon thing. There are examples, and those are ones we know about. Does it have any mainstream traction outside of President Trump's sort of quasi-endorsement last week?

It depends on how you define mainstream. You've gotten some validation from the Trump children, Eric Trump specifically posted a QAnon meme on his Instagram page. You've got some right-wing celebrities, people like Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher who has become a far-right political figure and is an

avowed QAnon supporter. And then you have Roseanne Barr, who has also promoted the same thing. But it's that kind of person. What about people in the media? Is this a Fox News-approved conspiracy? It's not really a Fox News thing. You know, it seems like this is something that is too fringy even for Fox, but flourished really on alternative right-wing media and social media. I mean, as the Republican National Convention kicks off, is there a way for the party to distance itself from these sort of fringe conspiracy theorists when the dude in charge is sort of welcoming him into the tent? I mean, individual Republicans can do what they want, but it's difficult to break with Trump on issues like this when he sets the tone, because he'll condemn you in a tweet if you do anything that seems like it is condemning something that Trump has done or even mildly criticizing it. And they're probably not going to want to do that.

What's to be done then? I mean, this isn't the tea party. These are violent conspiracy theorists who have actually killed a person who have gone to a family restaurant with weapons. I mean, what you need is to cut them off at their source where they really flourish, and that's social media, right? This is a conspiracy theory that has done its best recruiting work on Facebook, where there have been hundreds of different QAnon groups with millions of followers in total. And Facebook has just finally belatedly started cracking down on these groups. Facebook banned about 2,000 groups pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory, accusing them of promoting violence and leading to crime. So Facebook took action last week. Is it too late? Has this already gone too far? I mean, we're on the cusp of having our first elected representative in Congress with QAnon ties. Yes, she's almost certainly going to Congress. But these ideas are so closely tied to Donald Trump that it's unclear to me how they evolve in a world where he's not president.

It could be towards opposing Joe Biden and developing horrible things to do and say and think about him, my guess is even if QAnon disappears, the style of demonization of the opposition that it represents is not going away. We're here to take the country back. We're not playing around. If Joe Biden wins, I'm scared for America because I believe that QAnon will have something to say about it. And we are large, we are strong, and where we go one, we go all. Zach Beecham, he's a senior correspondent at Vox and one of the hosts of our Worldly podcast. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This one's Today Explained. The team includes Bridget McCarthy,

Efim Shapiro, Jillian Weinberger, Halima Shah, Amina Alsadi, Muj Zaydi, and Noam Hassenfeld, who makes some music too. The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes even more bop. Cecilia Lays, our fact checker, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the editorial director of Vox Podcasts. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.