"Q adherents come from an increasingly eclectic set of backgrounds: you’ll find NEETS, police officers, military veterans, service workers, computer programmers, successful business owners, unsuccessful business owners, stay-at-home moms, and regular working stiffs.
QAnon-ers also hail from a number of identity groups, uniting straight cis white men with women and racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and religious minorities. You’ll even find immigrants, visibly represented by the bright South Vietnamese flags seen flying at the rally. The movement boasts Zoomers, boomers, and everyone in between.
Even aesthetically, QAnon offers the dedicated paranoiac manifold subcultures and aesthetics from which to choose. Soldier of Fortune may have published its last issue in 2016, but Q provides a space for the militia-chic crowd to talk guns, ammo, and tactical gear with fellow enthusiasts. If you’re more of a yoga mom influencer, “Pastel Q” offers a decidedly feminine, New Age approach to the Ministry of MAGA, complete with crystals. There are at least a few military officers; Ashli Babbitt who died in the Capitol building, ironically, was part of the Air National Guard’s “Capital Guardians,” which is charged with protecting Washington, DC.
Aside from what appears to be a conspicuous absence of middle-class professionals, Q has space for everyone. It’s a true Rainbow Coalition.
The movement’s idiosyncratic demographics reflect its idiosyncratic ideology. Babbitt, for example, boasted on Twitter about voting for and supporting Barack Obama throughout his presidency, saying he did “great things,” before declaring that in 2016 she just couldn’t vote for Hillary and thus had to support Trump. As Babbitt’s comments suggest, not only have a fair number of QAnon-ers radicalized relatively recently, but many don’t hail from the traditional Trump or conservative base. Some, like Babbitt, were formerly liberals. Some were even Bernie Sanders supporters.
Another exceptional feature that distinguishes the contemporary iteration of QAnon from the traditional right-wing base is a palpable antipathy toward the Republican Party. Their objections and grievances toward the GOP run the gamut. Some Qanon-ers believe all institutional politicians — including almost all Republicans — are in a pedophile cabal.
Here we see how Q became one of the most successful phenomena of the Trump era, despite the fact that its adherents don’t share economic interests, culture, or even a political program. Rather, many people joined Q because of their alienation and disconnection from a system they view as illegitimate. To provide their ever-more precarious lives with meaning and an explanation for American decline, Q adherents congealed under a series of bizarre Internet conspiracy theories that unite a right-wing, anti-elitist, but nevertheless authoritarian sensibility that is organized around narratives that link pedophilic cabals, racism, antisemitism, fears of “cultural Marxism,” Satanism, and, of course, absolute faith in the singular, salvific, and millenarian figure of President Donald J. Trump.
The sources of the illegitimacy that drive QAnon are vast and well known to readers of Jacobin: the financial collapse of 2008–9, the pointless imperialist wars, the ever-more grotesque inequality between the wealthy and everyone else, bad trade deals and globalization, and a feeling of impotence in a political system that was supposed to be a democracy.
All of these anxieties, of course, have been recently compounded and exacerbated by a pandemic, lockdown, and an economic recession that predictably witnessed an explosion in QAnon proselytes.
Therefore, to combat the appeal of QAnon, you have to understand that you’re not dealing with a political movement, but with a cult. As members of an ecstatic and Evangelical movement — many of them, in fact, are literal Evangelicals — QAnon-ers embrace conspiracy theories because unlike the Republican or Democrat narratives, the stories they tell provide meaning in dislocated lives.
In essence, QAnon tells people who believe in America that a cabal has stolen their country from them, and that faith in a charismatic leader is the only way to redeem it (and, ultimately, redeem themselves).
Describing the events of January 6 as a coup winds up portraying a fundamentally religious movement as a fundamentally political one. As became clear once QAnon-ers entered the Capitol, they had no genuine strategy and no genuine program, instead relying on a millenarian faith that Trump would deliver them from the rule of elite pedophiles, heal the sick, comfort the poor, and establish a New Jerusalem.
Put simply, QAnon is not a properly political movement. Instead, the cultist collection of ideas in the Q eschatology are frenetic, adaptive, and have little connection to political strategy or even reality."
QAnon-ers also hail from a number of identity groups, uniting straight cis white men with women and racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and religious minorities. You’ll even find immigrants, visibly represented by the bright South Vietnamese flags seen flying at the rally. The movement boasts Zoomers, boomers, and everyone in between.
Even aesthetically, QAnon offers the dedicated paranoiac manifold subcultures and aesthetics from which to choose. Soldier of Fortune may have published its last issue in 2016, but Q provides a space for the militia-chic crowd to talk guns, ammo, and tactical gear with fellow enthusiasts. If you’re more of a yoga mom influencer, “Pastel Q” offers a decidedly feminine, New Age approach to the Ministry of MAGA, complete with crystals. There are at least a few military officers; Ashli Babbitt who died in the Capitol building, ironically, was part of the Air National Guard’s “Capital Guardians,” which is charged with protecting Washington, DC.
Aside from what appears to be a conspicuous absence of middle-class professionals, Q has space for everyone. It’s a true Rainbow Coalition.
The movement’s idiosyncratic demographics reflect its idiosyncratic ideology. Babbitt, for example, boasted on Twitter about voting for and supporting Barack Obama throughout his presidency, saying he did “great things,” before declaring that in 2016 she just couldn’t vote for Hillary and thus had to support Trump. As Babbitt’s comments suggest, not only have a fair number of QAnon-ers radicalized relatively recently, but many don’t hail from the traditional Trump or conservative base. Some, like Babbitt, were formerly liberals. Some were even Bernie Sanders supporters.
Another exceptional feature that distinguishes the contemporary iteration of QAnon from the traditional right-wing base is a palpable antipathy toward the Republican Party. Their objections and grievances toward the GOP run the gamut. Some Qanon-ers believe all institutional politicians — including almost all Republicans — are in a pedophile cabal.
Here we see how Q became one of the most successful phenomena of the Trump era, despite the fact that its adherents don’t share economic interests, culture, or even a political program. Rather, many people joined Q because of their alienation and disconnection from a system they view as illegitimate. To provide their ever-more precarious lives with meaning and an explanation for American decline, Q adherents congealed under a series of bizarre Internet conspiracy theories that unite a right-wing, anti-elitist, but nevertheless authoritarian sensibility that is organized around narratives that link pedophilic cabals, racism, antisemitism, fears of “cultural Marxism,” Satanism, and, of course, absolute faith in the singular, salvific, and millenarian figure of President Donald J. Trump.
The sources of the illegitimacy that drive QAnon are vast and well known to readers of Jacobin: the financial collapse of 2008–9, the pointless imperialist wars, the ever-more grotesque inequality between the wealthy and everyone else, bad trade deals and globalization, and a feeling of impotence in a political system that was supposed to be a democracy.
All of these anxieties, of course, have been recently compounded and exacerbated by a pandemic, lockdown, and an economic recession that predictably witnessed an explosion in QAnon proselytes.
Therefore, to combat the appeal of QAnon, you have to understand that you’re not dealing with a political movement, but with a cult. As members of an ecstatic and Evangelical movement — many of them, in fact, are literal Evangelicals — QAnon-ers embrace conspiracy theories because unlike the Republican or Democrat narratives, the stories they tell provide meaning in dislocated lives.
In essence, QAnon tells people who believe in America that a cabal has stolen their country from them, and that faith in a charismatic leader is the only way to redeem it (and, ultimately, redeem themselves).
Describing the events of January 6 as a coup winds up portraying a fundamentally religious movement as a fundamentally political one. As became clear once QAnon-ers entered the Capitol, they had no genuine strategy and no genuine program, instead relying on a millenarian faith that Trump would deliver them from the rule of elite pedophiles, heal the sick, comfort the poor, and establish a New Jerusalem.
Put simply, QAnon is not a properly political movement. Instead, the cultist collection of ideas in the Q eschatology are frenetic, adaptive, and have little connection to political strategy or even reality."