The title of the
Reddit post this month seemed almost too shocking to be true: “My Qdad snapped
and killed my family this morning.”
The post — by Rebecca Lanis, a 21-year-old from
Michigan — was on a forum dedicated to people who have lost loved ones to
QAnon, the sprawling conspiracy cult that imagines that Donald Trump is waging
a secret war against blood-drinking pedophiles who run Hollywood and the
Democratic Party. As The Detroit News would soon report, Lanis’ father,
53-year-old Igor Lanis, had indeed gone on a murderous rampage.
اضافة اعلان
Lanis described how her father had fallen down the
QAnon rabbit hole after the 2020 election. He was not violent, however, until
the morning of September 11, when he shot her mother, her sister and their dog,
and was then killed in a shootout with the police. Lanis’ sister, despite being
shot in the back and legs, survived. Her mother and the dog did not.
The killings were not the first to be linked to
QAnon radicalization. Last year, a 40-year-old California man confessed to
killing his two young children; in an affidavit, an FBI agent said he “explained
that he was enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories” and had
come to believe that his children had serpent DNA. In 2019, a QAnon devotee
stabbed his brother to death after being convinced that he was a lizard.
However bizarre, the idea that the ruling elite are really lizards or reptiles
seeking to enslave the human race is an old conspiracy theory that has been
subsumed into QAnon’s paranoid omnibus mythology.
All these men appear to have been mentally ill, but
QAnon played a role in shaping and reinforcing their delusions, as it has for
many committing lesser crimes. On Friday, an Iowa man named Doug Jensen became
the latest QAnon follower to be convicted in connection to his role in the
January 6 insurrection. The existence of the Reddit forum where Lanis posted,
QAnon Casualties, is itself a testament to the way QAnon destroys lives.
But in recent weeks, as Trump’s legal troubles have mounted, his endorsement of QAnon has become more forthright. On September 12, he reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin and the words “The Storm Is Coming” on his social media platform, Truth Social. An Associated Press analysis, published September 16, found that of nearly 75 accounts Trump has reposted on Truth Social in the past month, more than one-third have promoted QAnon.
Which is why Trump’s embrace of the movement is not
just dangerous, but cruel.
Trump has long played footsie with QAnon, whose
adherents prophesy an apotheosis, or “storm”, in which Trump is returned to
power and his enemies rounded up and executed.
“I don’t know much about the movement other than I
understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said in 2020.
When he was still on Twitter, he regularly retweeted QAnon followers.
But in recent weeks, as Trump’s legal troubles have
mounted, his endorsement of QAnon has become more forthright. On September 12,
he reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin and the words “The Storm
Is Coming” on his social media platform, Truth Social. An Associated Press
analysis, published September 16, found that of nearly 75 accounts Trump has
reposted on Truth Social in the past month, more than one-third have promoted
QAnon.
“What he’s doing on Truth Social is a massive
escalation,” said Mike Rothschild, author of “The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon
Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything”.
At a rally on September 17, Trump spoke over
mournful music that was, as The New York Times reported, “all but identical” to
a QAnon theme song; many in the audience raised a pointed finger in the air, a
QAnon salute. On Friday, the former president reposted a video full of QAnon
memes on Truth Social. (Some around Trump may believe it is unhelpful for him
to openly court an apocalyptic cult; at a rally Friday, staff reportedly made
people giving the QAnon salute lower their arms.)
Many have speculated about why Trump is moving
closer to QAnon. My own guess is that he is deepening his connection with his
most fanatical fans to more easily whip up a vigilante mob if he is indicted on
any of the many charges he appears to be facing. What is clear, though, is how
little he thinks of those fans, whom he is blithely encouraging down a ruinous
path.
“We tend to see the danger that these movements
represent, but we don’t talk about the people who are in them,” Rothschild told
me.
It is easy to write off QAnon followers, he said,
many of whom have reprehensible beliefs. But “this movement, and this philosophy,
it finds an audience because it tells people things that they want to hear, and
it creates a world for them that is much safer and makes a lot more sense than
the world that we’re in now”.
It is deeply comforting for people to feel that
they’re part of an epochal battle between good and evil in which good is
destined to triumph. The world of QAnon, said Rothschild, “becomes the only
meaningful thing to them”.
Trump is making it much harder for people to leave that
world, because the man they admire most is endorsing all their wild, violently
millenarian fantasies. “It blows away the doubt,” said Rothschild. Much was
made in 2016 of Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “deplorables”. But few
have demonstrated as much contempt for the people who love Trump as Trump has
himself.
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