It has also embraced the dangerous "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory — a fixation on a Washington, DC, pizza parlor owned by a Democratic supporter whose name appeared in the infamous WikiLeaks emails. This culminated with a man driving from his North Carolina hometown to the restaurant, determined to investigate the alleged child abuse happening in the parlor's basement — the building has no basement — and firing an AR-15 rifle inside the pizzeria. "I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way," the gunman told the New York Times. "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent."
Some people have even compared it to a religion; it has a savior figure (Trump), prophetic scripture, what they have dubbed a "Great Awakening" (an acknowledgment by the mainstream that what they believe is true), and many followers refer to Q as a saint. "It is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants," Adrienne LaFrance writes in the Atlantic. "It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. … To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion."
QAnon is not something to joke about. The mere concept — a global Satan-worshipping cabal led by prominent Democrats, under the eye of Hillary Clinton, who are kidnapping, abusing, and eating children and drinking their blood in order to live forever — is cartoonish on its face. But it's not to be underestimated, and it can't be treated simply as an online phenomenon. The real-world effects of QAnon have already been made clear: In 2018, a Q believer engaged in an armed standoff at the Hoover Dam. Recently, they've worked to hijack legitimate attempts to fight child sex trafficking.
Not everyone who subscribes to parts of the QAnon mass delusion believes in all of it. Some people could be sharing the material in ignorance of its true depth. Others could be using it to carry out identity signaling — disenfranchised people seizing on a bizarre narrative to show that they are "Patriots," regardless of the content of the messages. And with such a mess of entry points, someone could very well pass along parts of the QAnon narrative without realizing what the whole entails — just look at the recent false rumors that Wayfair was involved in sex trafficking.
The copydesk wanted to focus on QAnon for this issue of Quibbles & Bits to emphasize that there's more to the convoluted entity than the average reader might realize. The term we've decided to use — a mass or collective delusion — is not ideal; delusion could be interpreted as too sympathetic to Q believers, or as taking away their agency. (The word could also be related to a mental disorder, though that is not the context in which we're using it here.) And, fair warning, you might still see conspiracy theory in a BuzzFeed News headline about QAnon since headlines and tweets aren't conducive to nuance.
But delusion does illustrate the reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas, which inform their beliefs and actions. The impact of QAnon is an example of "the real-world consequences of our broken information ecosystem," the New York Times recently wrote. The proliferation of this delusion is in part a media literacy problem — which has become a reality problem.
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