SOCIETY
piracies
me in the movement TRISTAN ORAM toram@cjournal.ca
s one of the high points of their oon enough. Daniel fits in the
so quite a violent bully. I scared ged up on me and beat me up. I im to drop out early. ad Star and Ben, two friends he pping out. shows and anime together,” he head, a multiplayer video game. and drawing, and even once ook. reading conspiracy theories. He breddit dedicated to discussing ivilization,” according to the
“I was just desperate for some sort of hope,” he said. “I felt like the whole damn world is going to fall apart, but what if the government is hiding stuff in deep underground military bases?” This led Daniel down a rabbit hole that eventually result in him being indoctrinated into the cult known as QAnon -- a United States based conspiracy theory that has turned into a worldwide movement. Daniel left the group in April 2020, but experts say such departures are unusual and that the problems QAnon is creating may only get worse. Daniel, who is now 24, said the rabbit hole he stumbled into involved him visiting even more extreme subreddits, such as “r/ conspiracy,” which is dedicated to posting outright conspiracy theories. He claims this was when he was “manipulated and brainwashed” into the world of QAnon by an individual who he now fears - leading him to ask the Calgary Journal to change his name. QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory, based primarily on the idea that Donald Trump is fighting a secret battle against highranking elites who run the world and secretly abuse children and worship Satan. The conspiracy theory first appeared on Oct. 27, 2017 on the online message board 4Chan. An anonymous user, claiming to be a high-ranking United States government official known only as “Q” posted that Hillary Clinton would be arrested on Oct. 30, 2017. The family friend who introduced Daniel to QAnon peaked his interest by “bringing up military stuff ” which appealed to his interest in military history. From here, Daniel was introduced to more popular QAnon conspiracy theories. One such example is Pizzagate, a debunked conspiracy theory claiming that high-ranking U.S. Democrats were involved with a child sex trafficking ring that operated out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. Daniel says he supported the group because he felt that spreading its conspiracies would “help society collapse even faster,” something he strived for mostly due to the resentment he had for people after the bullying he received at a young age. “It basically destroyed my life. I hated people because of it. I didn’t have empathy for other people,” he said. Travis View, host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast with Julian Feeld and Jake Rockatansky, started studying and taking an interest in QAnon in 2018 as it began spreading worldwide. “The QAnon phenomenon isn’t something that is staying as sort of a fringe, kind of irrelevant internet thing. It’s something that kept creeping up into the mainstream,” View said. Researchers at Concordia University have found that QAnon has supporters in 71 countries around the world, including Canada. View said QAnon has been associated with the Yellow Vest movement here, whose members often espouse far-right and anti-immigrant views in Canada. QAnon’s presence in Canada became solidified on July 2, 2020, after Corey Hurren drove his truck through the gates of Rideau
Hall in an attempt to allegedly harm Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Hurren had posted QAnon conspiracy theories and hashtags on Instagram. In an interview with Vice, Concordia University PhD candidate and extremism expert Marc-Andre Argentino said, although we didn’t know the full scope of Hurren’s beliefs and how deep into QAnon he was, “he’s consumed enough of [QAnon’s] content to know the very specific hashtags to use.” Then, on July 9, 2020, a few days after the Hurren incident, Livewire Calgary reported QAnon flags, a blue flag adorned with a Q and the Punisher skull logo, were hung up outside of homes in southwest Calgary. View attributes the fast spread of QAnon to the appeal of its message. “QAnon is a hyper populist movement that is extremely distrusting of any institution,” View said.
“I think as soon as they can’t use Donald Trump as their messiah, they’ll rally around someone worse.” > Daniel
Moreover, in a report co-authored by Argentino and Amarnath Amarasingam, an assistant professor in the school of religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, QAnon’s ideology is “rooted in an apocalyptic desire to destroy the existing, corrupt world to usher in a promised golden age.” QAnon followers can be found in many movements. They have been part of antimask and anti-lockdown rallies related to the COVID-19 pandemic. They have also infiltrated the Save the Children movement, which advocates for an end to child sex trafficking but has also been used by QAnon members to spread their conspiracy theories. Daniel says he did not attend any rallies during his time with the group. Instead, he supported the movement by posting conspiracy theories on Reddit and 4Chan, and trying to recruit people in online communities he was a part of.
“I basically destroyed my own presence in the furry fandom by gaslighting people and trying to convince them of QAnon,” he said. The furry fandom consists of individuals who are interested in animal characters with human characteristics and personalities. Daniel was part of the QAnon movement until 2019 when he contemplated leaving. He says April 2020 was when he fully left the group and cut ties with the person who first introduced him to it. His decision to leave stemmed from realizing that “it was molding me into a person that I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be a New Age religious fanatic.” View says that someone leaving the QAnon movement and rejecting their ideas is rare, although it can happen. “It’s a really hard thing. If you have invested countless hours of your life in the QAnon community, it can be incredibly hard to let it go,” View said. “It can happen. It just requires a tremendous amount of strength and emotional turmoil to get to that point.” Daniel’s time with QAnon cost him quite a few personal relationships. “I still feel like everyone treats me with skepticism at best,” he says. And although he’s reconnected with his old friends Star and Ben, he feels like their relationship is strained. “They take everything I say with a grain of salt. They only listen to things they can mock me with. But I don’t know if that’s just my paranoia,” he said. Daniel is still very much haunted by the conspiracy theories he followed while he was a believer in QAnon. “I still want to know the truth I guess, but it feels like I’m trying to make myself feel smarter than I actually am.” Daniel slowly started to abandon sites like 4Chan and InfoWars as his prime source of news and information. 4Chan is the online message board where QAnon first originated, while InfoWars is a far-right media outlet owned by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He still does not look to mainstream outlets and traditional journalism for his news. But he does continue to visit the collapse subreddit to “look at the collapse of the world from a scientific perspective rather than the religious perspective of QAnon.” The future of QAnon is uncertain, as social media sites move to ban the group’s activities and Trump’s presidency appears to be at its end. However, View said predicting the future of QAnon is “as difficult as predicting what Donald Trump is going to do.” “At the moment, many QAnon supporters believe Donald Trump is going to win,” View said in an interview late last year. He’s convinced that QAnon is going to be a force to contend with well after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Daniel shares the view that QAnon will be around for a long time in the future. “I think they’re probably going to get a lot scarier,” Daniel said. “I think as soon as they can’t use Donald Trump as their messiah, they’ll rally around someone worse.”
CALGARYJOURNAL.CA
JAN/FEB 2021
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