The left claims that the followers of “Q,” known as QAnon, are prone to violence due to being incited by messages from Q. Twitter claimed it banned tens or hundreds of thousands of accounts this month associated with QAnon. Facebook banned many too. The purge started after some rioters at the U.S. Capitol building were identified as QAnon, including Jacob Chansley, the man wearing a Viking fur helmet with horns. Sen. Ben Sasse said QAnon is “destroying the GOP from within.” The FBI has declared it a domestic terrorist threat.
First of all, I know only one person across all of my social media who follows Q; she is a very peaceful middle-age lady. QAnon represents a very small number of people on the right, but the left and their comrades in the MSM have cleverly elevated it as if QAnon is an extension of the GOP, particularly the MAGA movement.
Q, who claims to be a high-level government insider or multiple insiders, has posted nearly 5,000 cryptic information “drops” since 2017 on the message board 8kun (previously 4chan and 8chan). His name comes from “Q access authorization,” the level needed for a Top Secret National Security Information access clearance. But he has not posted since the beginning of December. His QAnon followers, who attempt to interpret his messages but sometimes take them to extreme levels, have been blamed for inciting violence. They can be identified by their motto, WWG1WGA: Where We Go One, We Go All.
Q said that when President Trump gave a speech in October 2018 referencing “the calm before the storm,” it meant Trump was going to arrest thousands of people from the deep state in a “Great Awakening.” QAnon predicted Trump would take drastic action such as declaring martial law on Jan. 6 or Inauguration Day to stop Biden from taking office. Some QAnon adherents became excited, traveling to Washington, D.C. But nothing of the sort happened.
It’s easy to understand why some on the right were drawn to Q. We all know the MSM censor a lot of what’s really going on. While the media are eager to expose presidential secrets like Watergate, since that made a Republican president look bad, they often ignore corruption by high-level Democrats. There is a real problem with the deep state. Consequently, Q seems to fill a void. Q often says “God bless you” and mentions prayer and the Bible, increasing his credibility with those on the right.
QAnon takes a grain of truth and adds on. Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire who hung out with powerful Democratic politicians, was proven to be a pedophile. So it becomes easy to make the jump and claim that a lot of powerful Democrats are pedophiles. R. Kelly was arrested and indicted for being a pedophile, so it became easier to believe that other powerful entertainers who act inappropriately were too. I looked into Pizzagate in 2016 and concluded that while there were some very unsavory characters involved, the rumors were mostly unprovable.
Many of Q’s drops are predictions that something big is going to happen, which are hard to immediately disprove. But they don’t happen. He predicted that Hillary Clinton would be arrested on Oct. 30, 2017. She wasn’t. People want to believe Q, because he uses the right patriotic lingo and talks about justice coming for wrongdoers who have gotten away with criminal activity. He asks a lot of questions, which sound interesting but reveal nothing but speculation. “Why did Soros donate all his money recently?” Much of his statements sound like a riddle but are really meaningless, like “Find the reflection inside the castle.” Plenty of the alleged signs that Trump was up to something were plain silly. For example, QAnon said that Melania Trump’s black-and-gray coat, worn in her final address, was representative of TV static from the media blackout that would take place once Trump executed the military takeover. Nothing Q says clearly comes from access to a top secret security clearance.
The Q believers haven’t worked in politics, haven’t worked for politicians. They don’t understand how politics works behind the scenes. While Trump has been amazing for us on the right at getting things accomplished, he was never the type to do something like put the country under martial law in order to stop the election fraud. Sure, there may be a time in our country when enough of us believe the time is ripe for a revolution – but the vast majority of Americans do not believe we are at that stage, and Trump gave no indication he was.
Q’s supporters are frustrated that justice has not been meted out when it comes to a lot of the wrongdoing in the country. They do not understand how difficult it actually is to root out corruption within the deep state. Q gave them an easy solution: Trump was going to be able to clean it out; we just hadn’t heard about it yet because it’s classified information only Q knew.
If reputable conservative news stations like Newsmax aren’t talking about information provided from Q, then it’s probably unverifiable. Newsmax has the resources to vet these claims.
We know the left loves to make the right look bad – they frequently brag about it and, it’s one of the tactics listed in Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Antifa deliberately infiltrated the protest at the U.S. Capitol in order to cause violence and enter the building; at least three people involved have been exposed from Antifa. The left has deliberately infiltrated QAnon, posing as sympathizers, while spreading outlandish tales and predicting violence.
Unfortunately, the left now ties a lot of genuine concerns on the right in with QAnon. If QAnon questions the presidential election results, then suddenly they can lump in anyone who questions the election results as QAnon. It’s a very sneaky tactic.
Until the Capitol riot, there wasn’t a single death that could be attributed to QAnon. There were merely a handful of incidents involving violence or threats of violence. But unlike BLM and Antifa, efforts were begun to silence QAnon.
Some believe that the father-son duo of Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun, and his son Ron, the administrator until November when he abruptly resigned, are the voices behind Q. Q only posts on their message board.
Now that a lot of the information spread by QAnon has been debunked – the military did not take over the country, Trump did not take any drastic action to remain president – social media is banning QAnon and Q has disappeared (probably due to fear of being investigated), the phenomenon should dissipate. Ron Watkins posted a Telegram message on Inauguration Day that said it was time for Q’s followers to “go back to our lives as best we are able.”
Shutting down speech from Q and QAnon isn’t going to solve the problem. The left will just find some other group of conservatives to infiltrate and incite violence, talk racist, etc., their usual tactics, in order to get conservatives condemned and shut down. We’re going to have to wise up on how to address these tactics in the future, which I will address in a forthcoming column.
