On our minds: Why QAnon is all about saving children, until actual children need saving. |
Unraveling the contradiction of QAnon |
 | | Facebook is taking a tougher line with any page, account or group that represents QAnon.Stephanie Keith/Getty Images |
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The big story this week remains President Trump’s illness and the growing numbers of positive coronavirus infections at the White House. But Max covered that very well in his great column from Tuesday, and I’ve got two other news stories on my mind. |
First, a story by my colleagues here at the Times revealed that Jeff Sessions overruled U.S. attorneys who did not want to separate immigrant families or detain children without their parents. “We need to take away children,” Mr. Sessions told them, according to a draft investigation report obtained by the Times. |
Second, Facebook announced a new ban on all pages, groups and Instagram accounts that are openly affiliated with QAnon, a loose confederacy of online conspiracy theorists. They claim that a cabal of pedophiles allied with prominent Democrats is kidnapping children in order to sexually exploit them and harvest a supposedly valuable chemical from their bodies, as well as conspiring against President Trump. |
Seeing the stories alongside each other in my Twitter feed highlights how weird it seems that QAnon, a movement supposedly animated by a desire to protect children from being kidnapped and abused, has not been a vocal opponent of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, which took thousands of young children and infants from their parents and imprisoned them in immigration detention facilities. |
QAnon supporters say they’re worried about children being held against their will, traumatized and sexually abused — the precise experience of many children in immigration detention. And yet, to the extent that it’s possible for a loose online congregation to align behind a politician, this one seems to be firmly aligned with Mr. Trump. |
I don’t mean to engage in whataboutism here. But I think that QAnon’s focus on mythical child abuse, rather than the actual abuse being perpetrated by politicians they support, tells us a lot about the real reasons the conspiracy theory has so many adherents — and the fears actually underlying its wild claims. |
The QAnon rumors are remarkable in their similarity to myths from all over the world claiming that scary, powerful outsiders are kidnapping innocent people to exploit their bodies. In Guatemala in the 1980s, rumors abounded of gangs who kidnapped children and fattened them up before selling their organs on the international black market. In Chechnya and Kosovo in the 1990s, the rumors were similar, but claimed adults were also at risk. |
In recent years, while reporting on social media-fueled violence, Max and I found incidents all over the world in which false rumors of kidnapping gangs went viral, leading communities to lynch outsiders in the mistaken belief that they had come to snatch local children. And now QAnon claims that a shadowy network of powerful politicians, businessmen and entertainers are trafficking American children for sexual gratification and to harvest chemicals from their brains. |
“What does it mean when a lot of people around the world begin to tell variants of the same bizarre story?” Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a Berkeley anthropologist who is a leading researcher on the way such myths spread and persist in shantytowns in Latin America and Africa, asked in a 1996 paper. She argues that the stories were a way for people to express their intuitive sense that something was gravely amiss. |
They communities she studied were wrong about the specifics of the myths they spread, but right about the danger they were in: in Guatemala and Brazil, where military governments had engaged in forced disappearances on a vast scale, people’s children and friends really were going missing, and really were in danger of torture and rape. In South Africa, doctors had a history of operating in the gray area of presumed but not informed consent when extracting organs from the dead bodies of poor, Black people. |
The QAnon rumors aren’t spreading within fearful and oppressed minority groups like the communities Dr. Scheper-Hughes studied. QAnon supporters, like Trump supporters, appear to be mostly white and middle-class — they’re members of America’s economically and politically dominant majority. |
But majorities can still have fears. Political scientists refer to “majorities with a minority complex”: ethnically dominant groups that see themselves as imperiled, at risk of being “overrun” or “replaced” by those whom they have long dominated. |
While reporting in Sri Lanka in 2018, Max and I saw firsthand how that fear could lead to violence. After rumors swirled online that members of the country’s Muslim minority were trying to sterilize the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, crowds attacked Muslim homes and mosques in days of violent pogroms. |
In the United States, white Americans are dominant now, but within a few decades they will be a demographic minority. And although white people control the vast majority of America’s wealth, much of that is concentrated among the wealthy few, and many middle-class white families are financially precarious. |
“The bottom could fall out at any moment,” Anne Helen Peterson, the author of a new book about millennial burnout, wrote in her newsletter last week. “A business could go under, a child could be diagnosed with a chronic illness, a parent could need full-time care.” |
Losing those forms of dominance raises the grim prospect of losing political dominance as well — and, especially, the protections it provides. |
The unspoken promise to white Americans has long been that they have nothing to fear from most government violence: that allowing “enhanced interrogation” in Guantánamo Bay doesn’t mean they’ll be at risk of torture in their hometown, that impunity for police shootings doesn’t mean their sons and brothers will be shot, that forcibly separating immigrant families and imprisoning children doesn’t mean their children could one day be the ones huddled behind a wire fence. |
Losing dominance could mean losing those assurances. But Mr. Trump has always promised, implicitly and explicitly, to preserve the privileges that being part of the white majority has always brought, and even to preserve the majority status itself by closing the borders to immigrants who might hasten demographic change. |
So QAnon may offer a way for its adherents to express their fears that they might one day lose power — and of what might happen after they do. |
What We’re Reading & Watching |
- In an attempt to disengage enough from world events to fall asleep, I’ve been streaming the lightest, fluffiest, lowest-stakes movies I can find. My top recommendation so far is Wimbledon, the 2004 romantic comedy starring Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst as tennis players who fall in love. Nearly all the dramatic tension comes from tennis matches rather than romantic difficulties, making the whole plot feel delightfully low stakes.
- Viewed back to back, No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits blend together into a sort of expanded cinematic universe of low-commitment sexual gratification, easily anticipatable crushes, and witty best friends. Recommend.
- This is definitely the sort of thing that makes me need to watch Wimbledon again.
- This, on the other hand, seems like relatively good news.
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