Can QAnon believers be deprogrammed?
An interview with an expert on how this happened and what comes next
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere.
People joked that 2020 would never end, but the first full week of 2021 felt like all of last year condensed into one seven-day burst of pure chaos: Record COVID-19 deaths. Massive job losses. Democrats win close elections in Georgia thanks to years of hard work performed by activists of color. Donald Trump incites an insurrection by blood-thirsty right-wing extremists and tries to overturn an election, falling just short at both. Outrage ensues.
Right now, Republicans are dominating the national narrative, fanning out on Twitter and all of the Sunday shows and pretending to show concern about the terrorist attacks they actively encouraged, then demanding that Democrats not take any action so that they might create “national unity,” which of course they do not want at all. As of this morning, Donald Trump is reportedly unworried by the prospect of consequences, no doubt encouraged by what he’s seeing on TV. And Democratic leaders, having promised to begin impeachment on Monday, are now wavering on the idea. I went on a long tweet thread about the prospect of Democrats letting Trump off the hook, which you can read here (and more here).
Today, I have a truly informative and thought-provoking interview with one of the leading experts on QAnon and far-right extremists. And after that, it’s a smorgasbord of important local and state news items about voting rights, health care, criminal justice reform, cannabis legalization, and more.
Thank you to our latest crowdfunding donors: Amy, Matthew, Ronald, Kathryn, Michael, and Helen!
How QAnon Happened and Where We Go From Here
Americans watched in horror on Wednesday as delusional right-wing insurrectionists loyal to Donald Trump and the myth of white supremecy marauded through the halls of the Capitol and live-streamed their neo-Confederate Neanderthal prostrations from the floor of the House. The general public was shocked by what they watched and confused by images of stormtrooper cosplayers and that cheap Halloween costume Viking pounding their chests as the Capitol police largely allowed them to desecrate the place and walk out untouched.
But for those who monitor the dark corners of the internet, what happened on live TV and across streaming platforms was not at all a surprise — the reprobate conspiracy theorists and grinning chimp insurrectionists were largely familiar faces, carrying out a coup attempt that had been organized out in the open over social media (including on the Twitter feeds of Donald Trump and other Republicans). It wasn’t even really surprising to them that some of the people who were supposed to protect the Capitol worked to incite and assist the rioters. (There were a whole lot of off-duty cops and Republican legislators involved in the insurrection.)
Now, Americans who did their best to ignore their lunatic red-pilled family members’ conspiracy theories and rants on Facebook are being forced to figure out what to make of QAnon and other online extremist movements and how they wound up changing the course of the country’s history.
I spoke with Travis View, the widely cited expert who co-hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast, to get the lowdown on Q and these other digitally-congregating fringe fascists and to understand how they got so powerful, how this attack happened, and where it all goes from here.
(For those totally without context, QAnon began as a stupid internet conspiracy theory positing that Democrats, Hollywood elites, and other powerful figures are part of a massive, Satan-worshipping, and world-controlling cabal of pedophiles who run a global sex-trafficking ring. It emerged in 2017 and is fueled by a shadowy, unnamed, supposed high-ranking military official named “Q” who posts cryptic “drops” that serve as clues that only red-pilled true believers can understand. The gist is that Donald Trump is going to clean the world of these pedophiles and something, at some point, will deliver him re-election. Lots of racism and other garbage is sprinkled in. It sucks that we have to know about it, but it’s very clearly pernicious and powerful.)
Progressives Everywhere: It seemed like a motley crew of lunatics at the Capitol. Who was there?
Travis View: It was a broad cross-section of the pro-Trump right. There were QAnon people, mainline MAGA people, and Proud Boys, all of varying levels of militancy. One of the reasons why QAnon followers seemed to be the people leading the charge into the Capitol was their general sense of assurance of victory and inevitability. They were so thoroughly convinced that there were going to be some events that vindicated them and protected them and would help usher Trump into the presidency. And in the case of the woman who was shot on the Capitol grounds, she had this sense of invincibility; the fact that she wasn't really able to consider the consequences of these things contributed to her death.
You mention Ashli Babbitt, and she’s an interesting case because she had voted for Obama and then got radicalized into a true believer. It seems like there are people like her, Boomers who get sucked into QAnon on Facebook, and then nihilist young shitposters. How do you break them down?
When I first started researching QAnon, I assumed it was an older white Boomer thing. But as I started attending these QAnon rallies and I started to see the crowd, it actually wound up being surprisingly diverse, both in terms of age and ethnicity. The one core thing that sort of binds a lot of the QAnon followers is just total institutional distrust.
There’s this belief that all government and all academia and all media and all of Hollywood are irredeemably corrupt and unimaginably depraved. And they believe the only way that you can truly understand what's going on is not through researching the world through conventional media sources, but rather by doing your own research, and this lens becomes like a high-powered confirmation bias. They share the kind of narratives that sound more appealing and positive and exciting to them.
When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound like a far leap from the stuff that has been preached by right-wing media for decades, on Fox News and conservative radio shows back into the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Rush Limbaughs of the world led to Alex Jones. You can see the link in Clinton conspiracy theories. Do you think decades of that stuff really greased the skids or primed the pump for QAnon?
Oh of course. The Clinton Body Count conspiracy theories were very popular in the mid-’90s, and if you sincerely believe that the Clintons are responsible for dozens of murderers in their pursuit of power, then it becomes perfectly rational that you would want them to be locked up, that you would be just absolutely outraged. Then it’s seen as an injustice that these people are murderers and depraved and yet they're still walking free.
Some of the far-right commentators, when they spread those sorts of things, their motive was simply to direct messages of distrust and hatred towards the Clintons. But the base didn't know they weren't supposed to take it literally. They swallowed that whole, and in that environment, it becomes quite rational in their own tiny world that it is a profound injustice that Hillary Clinton wasn't locked up or executed.
And now they have their own “news” networks like Newsmax and OANN, which legitimize them, right? How does that work?
A QAnon conspiracy theory will be born on 8kun and then it will be spread on Twitter, then it will be picked up by OANN. And then Trump will see it on OANN and he'll repeat a version of it, which is like a confirmation to everyone else who's consuming all those other kinds of media. It’s a self-sealing network that creates an alternate reality for the people who participate.
For people who spout this stuff on those right-wing channels, who speak at events, who make a good living off this stuff — do you think they actually believe it or have just found a nice, profitable scam?
This is often the question — are they just a grifter or are they a true believer? And I feel like a lot of times, it is not as clear cut of a question as it seems. Sometimes they are genuinely a true-believer, but they simultaneously have a talent for monetizing their deranged beliefs.
Like a Jim Watkins, who owns 8kun, where Q is based, seems like both a supreme scumbag and also a grifter.
Exactly, he seems very savvy. I think there is this idea that there are grifters on one side and the true believers on a different side, and if you are crafty and savvy enough to monetize these QAnon narratives, then that means you are crafty and savvy enough to know that they're false. But that's not necessarily true.
I spoke to one major QAnon promoter named In The Matrix at a conference in Arizona. Before, I kind of assumed that he was a grifter and he was just cynically pushing these theories. But when I spoke to him, the way he very passionately rattled off these QAnon decodes, it struck me that oh man, this guy really believes this. He also happens to be monetizing it, but he really believes it.
So how many Q followers do you think have been infected on Facebook and could potentially be deprogrammed?
I often get asked, how do I talk to someone who has fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole? And it depends on how it happened. If someone has been following QAnon from the beginning and they've spent like five or six hours [a day] online researching as part of the community, and all their friends are in the QAnon community and their sense of purpose and life is now tied to the QAnon community, that kind of person is just not going to be possible [to deprogram]. You're asking them to become a different person in the core of their soul in order to let go of this theory, which no one could do very easily.
But someone that's a more casual follower and they sincerely believe it, but is not a big part of their identity — maybe they have other things going on in their life, like career or family — then that kind of person might possibly dislodge from the belief.
I think one of the issues is that the government often is filled with terrible people, doing terrible things, on behalf of even more terrible people. Corporations, too. So to some people, at least at first blush, hearing these QAnon theories, while they’re absurd and horrid, might not sound like such a big leap if you’re predisposed to certain ways of thinking.
This is a concept that Steve Bannon, when he was talking about QAnon, he called it “directionally correct.” Which is this concept that’s like, the specific claims and conspiracy theories that they're coming out of QAnon community are obviously nonsense and false, but the general gist of what it’s trying to communicate has some merit. Baseless conspiracy theories usually involve this incredibly powerful cabal of people who work behind the scenes to engineer history. A lot of times this is false, but a lot of times, it’s true.
The history of the world is really a sort of series of conspiracies amongst powerful people who decide what they're going to do with their resources and power. So it's very important to draw a distinction between the fact that just because lizard people don't really rule the world, that doesn't mean that the CIA never killed people or staged foreign interventions or MK-Ultra, or these other awful things.
Look at the Jeffrey Epstein saga: He was a horrible sex trafficker and pedophile who was protected by government prosecutors and had so many deep connections with the most powerful people in the world. That makes it tempting to believe the QAnon stuff, I’m sure.
Epstein is a really great example. Because there are two things we know: There was this outrageous abuse involving extremely powerful people and that the media really failed to uncover it — there was a Vanity Fair story that was killed.
What winds up happening is they come up with these theories about Epstein that build on top of it to the point that it doesn't closely reflect reality. One example is that QAnon followers will accuse a woman named Rachel Chandler, who is currently the owner of a casting agency in New York, of being involved in the Epstein trafficking ring. Now, there's no basis to this, there's no evidence of it. Julie K. Brown, the investigative reporter who has done more to expose Epstein than anyone, calls it a nonsense internet conspiracy theory.
So they take on something that's already really awful and really signals a high degree of corruption and a high degree of confidence that we don't have the full story of who was involved in the corruption or how bad how deep it goes. And they just like to latch to on obvious falsehoods and nonsense and extra baggage that emanates from the true core of it.
So now that so many QAnon accounts have been taken off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and Parler has been removed from Google Play and Apple’s App Store, do you think that will stop the spread? I’d imagine not having it so readily available has to help, and I’m 100% for banning them, but do you think it could radicalize people, too?
When QAnon first got going, there was an immediate push to get these kinds of theories onto mainstream social media platforms. A week after the first Q drops, the first week of November 2017, there was a deliberate campaign to get them on YouTube, Twitter, and other mainstream social networks, because they knew that these networks are so powerful and they’re more accessible than the difficult-to-use chan sites. So as consequence, this broad-scale ban really hurts the QAnon community.
The less tech-savvy ones, they're either not going to be willing to go to 8kun, for example, which is an ugly and difficult-to-use website, or maybe they'll just not be willing to go to Parler because it has so many problems with Apple and Google Play. By simply increasing the barrier to entry on these things, it is going to definitely hurt.
Now, what’s going to happen, and I think this is going to be instrumental in seeing how the QAnon community evolves in the future, is that they will get pushed to more extreme social media networks. For example, Marc-Andre Argentino has been tracking the growth of The Great Awakening group on Gab. He says it’s grown by 40,000 members since the Twitter purge of QAnon followers and that's dangerous because on Gab, QAnon followers, who are in rapture to this mystical kind of fascism will wind posting right next to classic white supremacists. And that might further radicalize them, might make them even more militant.
You posted a video (above) with a QAnon follower who was questioning whether there actually was a plan, wondering whether what he was promised was ever going to happen. And as you said, he looks so close to finally getting it, but at the same time, he might go in the other direction.
I was worried that some people will see that video and they'll think, oh, this is good news. And it is possibly good news for him but it might possibly be bad because it might wind up becoming a fucking Ted Kaczynski right-wing anarchist. They could decide that the system is irredeemably corrupt and they might wind up being an out-and-out fascist, it might push them into a more dangerous, more militant kind of extremism. Extremism is generally defined as there is an in-group and an out-group, and the extremist believes that the in-group’s success can only happen through hostile action towards the out-group.
The cost of the hostile action is part of this fictional narrative about the White Hats battling the Black Hats, and therefore the extremists themselves don't actually have to take any action. They just have to get their popcorn ready and watch the hostile action happen. And then if you stop believing that the White Hats didn't take care of it, you stopped believing that Donald Trump is gonna come to the rescue, quite possibly, the result is that you start believing that you have to do it yourself.
Important News You Need to Know
While right-wing lunatics were storming the Capitol, lawmakers across the country were beginning their state legislative sessions. Here’s a sampling of the policies and proposals discussed last week, both on the state and national level — there will be much more to come in further editions of this newsletter later this week.
Voting Rights
Georgia: Contemptible conservative hack and habitual liar James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas tried to catch Georgia election officials in an absurd lie (honestly I can’t even tell what exactly they were trying to prove), but wound up exposing a form of mass disenfranchisement instead. You need an address to vote in Georgia, which makes it impossible for the unhoused to exercise their constitutionally-guaranteed right to vote.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit last week that highlighted some of the many ways in which Trump and the GOP targeted cities and counties with significant Black communities with baseless accusations, smears, and erroneous lawsuits. These accusations didn’t change the outcome, but they have given cover to plenty of GOP state lawmakers to propose new, even-more extreme voter suppression laws.
Because Democrats didn’t make any real gains in state legislatures in November, the party will be in many places — like Georgia and Arizona, for instance — powerless to stop their passage. The only way to prevent them from taking root is by passing a new Voting Rights Act that reinstates the protections that were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, then somehow convince SCOTUS justices to not toss that new law as soon as they get the chance.
Given Amy Coney Barrett’s ascension to the high court in October, that’s not likely to happen — unless Democrats decide to expand the Supreme Court. Now that they have both chambers of Congress and the White House, they are free to pass a low to do so, and though I know both Biden and many of the party’s more centrist Senators will argue hard against going for it, it’s really the only way to preserve American democracy in the long-term. Otherwise, we’re one bad election result away from having gerrymandering and voter suppression throttle an already very weak system.
Health Care
Tennessee: As members of the Trump administration run for the exits, they’re making sure to wreck as much as they can on the way out.
Last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, run by the beloved Seema Verna, approved Tennessee’s request to try out a new financing program for its unexpanded Medicaid program.
For the next decade — unless the Biden administration can undo it — Tennessee will be getting block grants, which means that in practice, the state is requesting to reduce its Medicaid funding and, as a result, kick some poor people off their benefits.
Texas: Expanding Medicaid was a large part of most Democratic legislative candidates’ platforms in 2020, and though they largely lost those races, the idea polls incredibly well. It’s easy to see why: Texas had the country’s highest uninsured rate before COVID struck, with nearly six million without health care coverage, a number that has undoubtedly increased over the last 12 months.
As a result, Republicans in the state are still considering the expansion, especially because the national government covers 90% of the cost. With Biden in the White House, they won’t be able to pull some block grant shenanigans like Tennessee, but the pressure could force them into it anyway.
Weed News
National: Now that Democrats have unified control of the federal government, cannabis legalization is back on the table. Joe Biden has never been a fan, but he will most definitely be pushed on it. Decriminalization and medical marijuana may be more likely, at least at first.
New Jersey: The hang-up over punishing kids for possessing legal marijuana seems to have been settled:
Under the newest proposed changes, anyone between 18 and 21 years old would be subject to a $50 to $250 fine if they possess 6 ounces or less of marijuana, the legal threshold for adults over 21 years old. Possession of over 6 ounces would come with a maximum fine of $100 to $500.
Montana: Nearly 60% of voters in Montana approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in November. Uninterested in the wishes of their constituents, Republicans in the state legislature are refusing to provide the funding that is required to get the legal pot program off the ground. I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.
Nebraska: Speaking of voters getting their say on weed, a State Senator in Nebraska has introduced a constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana that would require popular approval to ratify. "If South Dakota approved it, why put off the inevitable?" said Omaha State Sen. Justin Wayne.
South Dakota: Oh, right, Gov. Kristi Noem, who is the absolute worst, is trying to challenge the voter-approved legalization. And the same thing is happening in Alabama, where medicinal marijuana was legalized in November. Republicans really hate democracy!
Real Quick, Read This
This week, Progressives Everywhere surpassed over $5.8 million dollars raised for progressive Democratic candidates and causes. Isn’t that cool?
That said, none of that money goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out there. Not a dime! In fact, it costs me money to do this. So to make this sustainable, I need your help.
I’m offering very low-cost premium subscriptions that offer a lot of goodies. If you become a member of Progressives Everywhere, you’ll get:
Premium member-only emails featuring analysis, insight, and local & national news coverage you won’t read elsewhere.
Exclusive updates from candidates and interviews with other progressive leaders.
Coverage of voting rights, healthcare, labor rights, and progressive activism.
The satisfaction of financing new projects like AbsenteeBallots.info and COVIDSuperSpreaders.com as well as a new student debt project
A new best friend (me).
You can also make a one-time donation to Progressives Everywhere’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in an upcoming edition of the big newsletter!