Figure 3.1. Psychology of QAnonization. Source: Sophia Moskalenko and Kristian Warpinski.
RED-PILLING, RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACIES, AND RADICALIZATION
Radical right-wing movements, from QAnon to Proud Boys, often talk about “red-pilling,”1 referencing the Wachowski siblings’ movie, The Matrix (1999). In the pivotal scene, Morpheus, a mysterious wise man, speaks to Neo, a disgruntled computer hacker who has sought him out:
“It’s that feeling you’ve had all your life. That feeling that something is wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”
Morpheus explains that Neo lives inside the Matrix, a computer simulation of reality:
“The Matrix is everywhere,” Morpheus says. “It’s all around us, even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church, or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
“What truth?” asks Neo.
“That you’re a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, were born into bondage, kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison of your mind.”
Morpheus offers Neo a choice:
“You take the blue pill [and] . . . wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
“Remember that all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more,” Morpheus adds.
The co-optation of the Matrix’s metaphor by the radical right offers an important insight.
Like Neo, the people who seek out Q-conspiracy theories feel that “something is wrong with the world,” that their lives are disconnected from some important truths. Like Neo, they feel that their quest might lead them into danger—yet they “take the red pill.”
Conspiracy theories are neither new nor rare. What’s different about QAnon is just how many conspiracy theories it accrues under its ideological umbrella, and how many people subscribe to the beliefs. The magnitude of the QAnon phenomenon poses unique threats. Just keeping up with the unfolding narratives is so time-consuming that followers might lose sleep, sever relationships, and lose their jobs, glued to their screens while they “connect the dots” day and night.2 At the same time as enthusiasts become entangled in conspiratorial thinking, QAnon followers are further radicalized in a community of likeminded others. Most radicalize only in opinion, but a minority will materially support violence, plot attacks, or engage in political violence in real life.
Let’s try first to understand the roots of feeling as though “something is wrong with the world” that fuels Q-conspiracy theories. What makes “red-pillers” risk alienating friends and family, or their lives and freedom, as did the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021? What specific attraction does QAnon hold for women?
Unfreezing and the Tattering of the American Dream
A “cultural worldview” is a psychological term that describes a collection of normative systems that each of us holds. These sets of unwritten rules range from personal values (such as family values or religious beliefs) to social constructions (nations, governments, institutions and social norms). Many, if not all, of our actions are governed by our cultural worldview. We don’t do bad things, like stealing, because of laws, morality, and/or religious beliefs. We seek good things, like education and career, because of cultural and social expectations. Altogether, normative systems serve as beacons that guide our life’s journey, highlighting major milestones: respecting our elders, studying and training for a career, marrying, going to church, voting, paying taxes.
Sometimes one of these beacons can dim or die out. Maybe one’s family is abusive, or maybe one fails out of school; a career may prove unfulfilling, or a political party may disappoint. These instances can be personally distressing. However, an isolated failure of a normative system to deliver on promised value is usually insufficient to send one looking for Morpheus and his red pill. Instead of falling down a rabbit hole, most pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on.
But sometimes several worldview tenets betray their value-giving purpose at once. This can happen, for example, if a war destroys families and possessions, weakens the government, and challenges survival. Or a personal crisis like mental illness or substance abuse may tear an individual away from family and friends, may cause the person to lose their job and to experience firsthand government inadequacies and the indifference of the community. In this situation, personal distress is compounded by an unraveling of social norms that tether us to reality. As a result, ideas of right and wrong, of life’s goals and meaning, are all upended. This vulnerable state is what psychologists call “unfreezing.”3
Being unfrozen is unsettling. Humans are social creatures, and communities are built around norms and values. Without them, people feel lost and isolated. Unfrozen individuals are motivated to connect, to find a new system of norms and values, to feel their life moving in a meaningful direction again.
In the state of unfreezing, individuals become easy marks for recruitment by radical groups, including religious cults or terrorist organizations. To an unfrozen individual, a group’s ideology is less important than the newfound community. Gratitude for support from a radical group mixes with resentment against those who caused the unfreezing, and, with time, the individual can embrace both the group’s radical ideology and its radical agenda. Analysis of terrorist case histories found unfreezing to be a potent mechanism of individual radicalization.
For many QAnon followers, as their cultural worldview fractured and normative systems eroded, they felt lonely and lost, fearful for their future, and angry at those they saw as responsible. This cultural unfreezing was what pushed them down the rabbit hole of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Since the 1990s, the American Dream that many QAnon followers grew up with has been upended by a cruel reality. Ideas they learned to hold dear have been violated before their eyes. Benevolent government, truthful science, moral religion, traditional gender roles—the very people who were supposed to uphold these values have betrayed public trust. Weakening social values contributed to the feeling that “there’s something wrong with the world,” leading many to seek the “truth” of the red pill––conspiracy theories––and paving the way for QAnon.
The most prevalent Q conspiracies build on genuine facts that reference failures of the current value system. They then supply an explanation for the betrayal (“the conspiracy”) and propose the cure (“the plan”).
The conspiracies’ factual foundation addresses the grievances that brought people to QAnon in the first place. But facts are limiting. Maybe your doctor is dismissive of you, but mine is actually nice. Your grievance with the government is different from mine, and as I listen to you tell the facts, they may sound like you were part of the problem. Facts anchor an individual’s experience and keep it from joining the swelling wave of similar experiences. An individual is left alone with their own anger, fear, and doubt. Fiction, on the other hand, can amplify and explain the emotions stirred by facts. “Doctors make our children sick by injecting them with vaccines to profit off the suffering.” The facts of individual experiences that kept us rooted to our private fears and anger are replaced by communal fiction. Fanning the flames of strong emotions, lies can validate painful individual experiences and build a community around a shared emotional truth.
The Lie’s Emotional Truth
Imagine being cheated by a car mechanic. You feel violated, even made a fool of. The financial injury is multiplied by moral outrage and by fear of future violations. You tell your friends, in person or on Facebook, about your experience.
One of them says, “Car mechanics are always out to cheat you. They’re all like that.”
This is probably an exaggeration, if you stop and think. But do you want to? Because another option provided by your friend’s statement is to feel better about having been cheated. Discernment takes effort and gets you nothing but conflict. By contrast, nodding along to the lie bolsters the social connection and gets you out of the unpleasant feelings. Now it’s not just you who suffered at a mechanic’s dishonest hands: It’s millions of people, and they can’t all be fools, so neither are you.
Another friend says, “Do you know how much mechanics scam off people like us? My friend’s neighbor is a mechanic, and he has a boat and a huge house, wears a Rolex watch, and he takes sailing vacations in Europe!”
You may wonder if there’s more to the story than the friend is revealing, if perhaps the friend’s neighbor is more than just a mechanic, or perhaps it’s not actually his house, or maybe the Rolex is fake. But a more inviting choice is to indulge in the outrage suggested by this statement, an outrage that so well resonates with your own. Now you’re justified in your feeling. Instead of cowering in personal embarrassment over having been cheated, you swell up in collective anger.
A third friend chimes in, “I’ve read there’s an agreement between car manufacturers and mechanics to keep secret information about catastrophic design flaws that kill thousands of drivers every year. The mechanics get bonuses for covering up, so the manufacturers don’t have to face public outrage or invest in redesign.”
You think back to something you read somewhere (or maybe you heard?) about cases where there really were design flaws that car manufacturers kept hidden to minimize cost, and people actually died as a result. Chills run down your spine. You’re scared. But this kind of distant and diffused danger is better than the personal disappointment you started with: Now you have someone other than yourself to blame. What’s better, the fear you now feel about evil mechanics and greedy car manufacturers is shared by friends, and a problem shared is a problem halved! You feel seen and supported instead of insignificant and isolated. If someone pointed out the “facts”—that there are conscientious mechanics, that most don’t get rich off customers, and that there is no secret deal between car manufacturers and mechanics—this would challenge all that you’ve gained by accepting the fiction and drag you right back into feeling bad about yourself and fearful of the future.
The fiction allows a current of shared emotion to flood the minutiae of facts. Shared emotions create a community, washing away the moral injury. While we cannot be certain about secret cabals or evil mechanics, we can be certain of how we feel. In the time of challenged certitudes, that emotional truth is within our grasp. For some, it becomes the only truth worth reaching for.
An emotional truth or tenet lies beneath every lie of QAnon. Unearthing these will help us understand QAnon followers. This chapter will consider four major truths that gave rise to QAnon lies. For each, we will suggest a psychological link to the unfreezing (worldview-tenet cracking) that likely contributed to far-right radicalization and pinpoint the unique features that make women especially vulnerable to this conspiracy theory. Finally, we will connect these truths to the QAnon lies, tracing narrative elements of the their fiction to their psychological origins.
True Lies
Disgust with Government and Hollywood Elites
Perhaps the most obvious major truth that has led to an explosion of QAnon followers has been the public’s growing revulsion at the moral failings of powerful people. The U.S. government has been marred by embarrassing sex scandals for over two decades. In 1998, President Clinton famously (and falsely) claimed, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” about an affair he had with a staffer 27 years his junior. In 2016, New York congressman and New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner denied “with certitude” explicit communications with a 15-year-old, only to later admit the truth. As the Weiner scandal unfolded, his wife Huma Abedin—an aide to the former secretary of state and then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton—had her laptop seized by the authorities. The laptop contained some of Hillary Clinton’s emails relevant to the controversy about her illegally using a personal server to send official communications, an issue that affected the presidential election that soon followed.4
While the transgressions by these two men were disgusting, it was their denials that may have done the most damage to the credibility of the government, especially to the Democratic Party to which both belonged. The violations were shameful; the denials followed by reluctant admissions of guilt were embarrassing.
Research shows that shame arises from violating moral norms, while embarrassment comes from violating social norms.5 Shame is reserved for more serious transgressions and is mostly internalized. Embarrassment may occur over a relatively lesser failing, but it requires outside observers to witness it. One can be ashamed of stealing something whether or not one is caught. On the other hand, being falsely accused of stealing is embarrassing, though not shameful. Therefore, while the shame of the extramarital affairs was incumbent upon the men responsible, the subsequent embarrassment resulting from repeated public lies and eventual confessions was something the public shared. We, the U.S. citizens, were made to witness and to feel embarrassed in real time, and so the political became personal.
The manner in which the government dispatched Clinton’s and Weiner’s failings left many observers dissatisfied. By violating social norms through sexual misconduct, and by their bad faith denials, high-ranking politicians left citizens disillusioned with them and with the party that failed to properly sanction them. For many QAnons, the political elites lost moral authority and credibility. As a result, they rejected the Democratic Party, if not the entire government. One of the worldview tenets was cracked.
Oddly, there was no parallel outrage when sex scandals erupted over Republicans—South Carolina’s Mark Sanford or Iowa’s Larry Craig, for example. One reason for less notoriety in these sex scandals may be because Republican politicians didn’t feel the need to go on a media tour to explain themselves or because the media devoted less attention to them. Another possibility is that, being more conservative, Republican voters were more outraged about sex scandals than Democrats, and Republican bias against Democratic politicians made them see Clinton and Weiner as more disgusting than Sanford and Craig.
The fact that these scandals were related to sexual misconduct means that women were disproportionally affected. Women tend to be more sexually conservative than men6 and less comfortable with violations of sexual norms. In fact, women, rather than men, are the guardians of sexual standards for behavior and attitudes: Changes in women’s, not men’s, standards of acceptable sexual practices and opinions can shift societal norms.7 Studies of mock jurors have found that women are more emotionally moved by victims of sexual misconduct; women also tend to be more punitive toward the violators and more empathetic with the victims.8 In other words, the widely publicized sexual escapades of Bill Clinton and Anthony Weiner have left women more disgusted and outraged with the government than they did men.
Both Clinton and Weiner were married at the time of their affairs. This fact likewise impacted women’s opinions disproportionately. Women react more negatively than men to adulterous political scandals and are more likely to demand the immediate resignation from the guilty party. This is especially true for Republican women who hold traditional gender stereotypes.9 It’s probably not a coincidence that the initial wave of QAnon women were Republican and tended to believe in traditional gender roles.
The sex scandals involved women either “young enough to be his daughter,” in the case of Bill Clinton, or an underage girl, in the case of Anthony Weiner. Women are more emotionally affected by the age of victims. Research using mock juries found that women are more prone to believe young victims of sexual assault, find them to have suffered more harm, and blame the perpetrators more, whereas men are more likely to question the victim’s testimony, find them to be less harmed, and feel that the victim might share some of the responsibility for the assault.10
In short, the sexual misconduct of high-profile politicians—their embarrassing denials and their failure to redeem themselves, magnified by the political system’s ineffective reactions—likely resulted in many people’s distrust of the U.S. government, especially of the Democratic Party. Women were most likely to be affected, as they tended to react stronger to violators of sexual norms, are more likely to blame perpetrators, and generally side with the victims of sexual misconduct.
With the outrage sparked by real news stories, Q-conspiracy theories are focused on the sexual violation of children by high-profile predators. These started with Pizzagate, as we discussed in Chapter 2. Though completely fabricated and since disproved, the conspiracy theory likely cost Hillary Clinton votes in the 2016 presidential election.11 The narrative tradition of child victims of sexual and physical abuse perpetrated by depraved global elites and Hollywood celebrities from a secret cabal continued in the more recent Q-conspiracy theories.
The reference to Hollywood elites in QAnon narratives likely stems from actual sex scandals involving powerful men taking advantage of much younger women. The #MeToo movement emerged alongside QAnon and the highly publicized trial of Bill Cosby, “America’s Dad,” famous for playing a patriarch The Cosby Show in the 1980s. By 2005, Bill Cosby had become the center of a sex scandal when he was accused of drugging and raping more than 50 women.12 Most of the victims were much younger than Cosby, who was in his 40s and 50s when the assaults took place. Six of the victims were under 18 at the time of assault, and one was 15 years old.13 Between 2005, when the initial accusations against Cosby surfaced, and 2014, when one of his victims succeeded in suing him, he vehemently denied all accusations, calling them “preposterous” and questioning the accusers’ credibility.
At the same time as Cosby denied allegations against him, sex scandals entangled another Hollywood titan: Harvey Weinstein. Like Cosby, Weinstein’s accusers numbered in the dozens, and were all considerably younger than he, including one 16-year-old.14 Like Cosby, Weinstein denied any wrongdoing. And like Cosby, he ended up convicted in court and sentenced to prison. Both Cosby and Weinstein were married at the time of their assaults.
Like the political elites, these members of the Hollywood elites violated public trust. Their repeated denials contributed to the breakdown of the worldview tenet that held Hollywood in high esteem. As with Washington, DC, Hollywood sex scandals resonated strongly with women, especially Republican women who believe in traditional gender roles.
What connected the dots into a full-blown conspiracy theory for Ceally Smith was a news story about Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein had been photographed and filmed with a number of high-profile political figures, including politicians, academics, entertainers, and even members of the British royal family (Prince Andrew). While in federal custody on charges of trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors, Epstein was found dead in his prison cell. When Smith read that Epstein’s death had been ruled a suicide, it didn’t ring true. She went online, searching for alternative explanations to the official story. Soon, she found Q lore about powerful pedophiles running extensive networks of sexually and physically abused children. Smith became a convert to QAnon.15
Conveying their concerns over abused children, QAnons display slogans such as “save the children” and “stop child trafficking” on their clothes, social media pages, and on the signs they carry at protests and rallies.16 QAnons believe that Donald J. Trump (whom they refer to as Q+) is the only person who can put an end to the ongoing atrocities. The irony of Trump’s documented association with Jeffrey Epstein—a convicted trafficker and sexual abuser—as well as a number of lawsuits filed against Trump by women and girls—accusing him of harassment, misconduct, or rape—is lost on the QAnon followers. QAnons dismiss all criticism of Trump. We address this paradox later in the chapter.
Thus, when Donald Trump repeatedly claimed that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, many QAnon followers were willing to do whatever it took to save their leader, the man they viewed as the only hope for the abused children. One such believer was 49-year-old Christine Priola, a former occupational therapist for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, now indicted on federal charges for storming the Capitol building on January 6. On January 8, two days after her participation in the violent insurrection that left five dead and dozens injured, Priola quit her job. In her resignation letter, she wrote: “. . . I will be switching paths to expose the global evil of human trafficking and pedophilia, including in our government and children’s services agencies.”17
Although progress has been made toward gender equality in the United States, women are still doing much more than men where it comes to buying food and cooking,18 raising children,19 and taking care of the sick.20 In each of these domains, science used to have the final word on what was right and wrong. However, in recent years, the role of science in women’s lives changed from the arbiter of truth to an ambivalent, even dangerous force.
Buying healthy food has become a challenge that requires keeping up with an ever-growing amount of information, including whistleblower reports about the food industry, changing government food standards, news stories about food-borne sickness and recalls, and creative ways in which food manufacturers obscure the truth about their products. Pesticides, hormones, GMOs (genetically modified organisms), added chemicals—stabilizers, colorings, and preservatives—all products of science, have made finding wholesome, healthy food an uphill battle. And women are mostly the ones waging this battle against tricky and deceitful science.
Mothers feel pressured to keep up with news of which chemicals to avoid to keep their children safe and healthy. BPA (Bisphenol A) in baby bottles, deaths from wrongly labeled baby medicine, toys that leach brain-damaging lead—news stories like these abound. Conflicting scientific advice on what’s best for babies and children is also common. Scientists previously advised formula for babies but then insisted that formula made babies less intelligent, and less healthy. Scientists said to avoid all allergens for the first two years of life, but then they found that avoidance actually causes allergies. In the United States, with very little help from community or government, the burden (and the guilt) for anything going wrong with a child is almost entirely on the mother. With the stakes sky high, it’s easy for mothers to become overwhelmed with fear and anxiety about conflicting and insidious science in their children’s lives.
Healthcare is another domain where science enters women’s daily lives. Medical misogyny (a tendency of doctors to overlook or dismiss women’s symptoms as psychosomatic) leaves many women physically harmed and feeling neglected and stupid.21The rising costs of prescription drugs and medical care have put basic care out of reach for many people in the United States. The prescription painkiller scandal exposed actual conspiracies by pharmacy executives, scientists, and physicians to get people addicted to their products, and then profit off them again, by offering treatments for the addiction.22 This has left many bitterly disappointed in the science and practice of medicine. When drugs that cost a fortune actually harm rather than heal, trust in science erodes, while suspicions of medical pain-for-profit schemes grow.
Where science made women feel dumb, QAnon makes them feel clever for “connecting the dots” of an all-encompassing conspiracy theory. The choice between trusting the scientists or trusting Q is a no-brainer for QAnon women.
As a former employee of a pharmaceutical company and a recovering painkiller addict, Lauren Witzke experienced firsthand the depravity of bad scientists responsible for the opioid crisis.23 Witzke supported anti-scientific Q-conspiracy theories, including the “flat earth” theory. On her social media, she repeatedly posted the QAnon pledge WWG1WGA (where we go one, we go all) and was photographed wearing a Q-branded T shirt.24
With the brunt of discredited medical science borne disproportionately by women, their personal experiences, amplified by lack of control over important domains of their lives, led many to seek the “truth” of QAnon’s red pill about vaccines. Some of the most popular QAnon conspiracies revolve around nefarious vaccine manufacturing: microchip trackers that Bill Gates would put into “vaccines” and other vaccines causing autism and diseases that Big Pharma creates to get rich off the kids’ suffering. They believe that COVID-19 was manufactured in order for the elites to get rich off the pandemic. When vaccines for COVID-19 became available, more women than men were distrustful about their safety, and refused to take them. The gender difference in rejection of the COVID-19 vaccine (45% versus 33%) is believed to be due to more women (than men) who believe conspiracy theories.25
One such woman is Rachel Powell, a 40-year-old mother of eight who was on an FBI “Wanted” poster for her involvement in the January 6 storming of the Capitol before she was indicted. Powell’s online activity suggests her dive into the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories was precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns.26
Before the pandemic, Powell seemed content to raise her eight children (all homeschooled), tend her garden, care for her chickens, and occasionally sell surplus produce at a local farmer’s market. Online, she expressed concerns about Trump as a presidential candidate and her amazement that so many people supported him. But after the onset of the pandemic, Powell began attending anti-lockdown protests, driving as far as 40 miles to join them. She got her information primarily from Alex Jones and Rudy Giuliani. Her views on Trump changed, and in the 2020 presidential election she cast her ballot for him. Powell’s vocal advocacy against mask wearing resulted in her expulsion from the farmer’s market. That didn’t dampen her fervor. “I’m unashamedly a super spreader,” she posted on her Facebook timeline, along with a video of a mask-less dinner party. In another Facebook posting, Powell wrote, “I won’t get a vaccine either. I hear what you’re saying about the whole world being in on the conspiracy as far as the corona virus goes.”27
Powell’s radicalization culminated in her breaking the windows of the Capitol building:
Videos show her, wearing a pink hat and sunglasses, using a battering ram to smash a window and a bullhorn to issue orders. “People should probably coördinate together if you’re going to take this building,” she called out, leaning through a shattered window and addressing a group of rioters already inside. “We got another window to break to make in-and-out easy.”28
Powell was protesting against an election that Trump falsely claimed had been stolen from him, a lie that both Rudy Giuliani and Alex Jones repeated. The emotional truth of this single mother of eight toiling every day to feed them healthy food and keep them safe was shaken by the deadly virus she could not comprehend or control. Her fears were soothed by QAnon’s elaborate denials of COVID-19. There is no danger, QAnon posts proved: It’s all a lie, no need to wear a mask or worry about it. Having found social and emotional support in the QAnon community, Powell also embraced their radical ideology about the “stolen” election and the radical action to “stop the steal.”
The Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal began unfolding before public eyes in the 1980s. By 2020, over 3,000 priests from around the world had been credibly implicated in systemically abusing children as young as 3 years old.29 Like politicians and Hollywood elites, the Catholic Church denied any wrongdoing. Church leaders dismissed, silenced, or settled individual cases, keeping offending priests out of trouble by transferring them to different parishes and maintaining the façade of moral authority. But the narrative spun out of control when newspapers like the Boston Globe spread the horror of the abuse beyond the Church’s ability to keep it quiet.
The abuse violated children. It violated public trust—if you can’t leave your children alone with a priest, with whom can you leave them? And it debased the church’s moral authority.
Perhaps because of the resonance of the Catholic Church scandal, stories about child sex abuse in other religious traditions began coming out. Social media, especially the #MeToo movement, encouraged victims to speak out, and in doing so to find a community and strength to seek justice, such as #ChurchToo.
Reports of children sexually abused by rabbis in the Orthodox Jewish community have been denied and suppressed for decades, before being exposed.30 Similarly, although the Dalai Lama knew about sexual abuse by Buddhist teachers, it wasn’t until a whistleblower conducted her own investigation, amassing the testimonies of dozens of victims from decades of abuse, that the Dalai Lama made any public mention of it.31 In the Protestant community, too, it wasn’t until female bloggers began digging through court and police records, sermons and emails, and publishing about the widespread sexual abuse of children that the Protestant church made any effort to reconcile with the issue.32 Likewise, Islamic religious leaders were implicated in the Middle East, Europe, and North America.33Even outside of organized religions, spiritual leaders of mainstream yogic traditions (e.g., Ashtanga,34 Bikram,35 Anusara36) have been credibly accused of sexual abuse.
Across the board, those who claimed moral authority refused to abide by their own rules. Their respective religious traditions disregarded the victims entrusted in their care. The result was another worldview tenet cracking.
Disgust and outrage at this systemic failure led some to abandon their religion. Ten percent of young Protestants have left the church because they found the clerical sexual misconduct was not taken seriously.37 Likewise, 11 percent of Catholics said they were considering leaving their religion because of how the Church handled the sex scandal.38 Less obvious, but no less significant, was the broader effect of this mass unfreezing: disconnection from norms that spiritual traditions used to provide.39 Seventy percent of Catholics surveyed said they felt the Church was in a crisis that “demanded immediate attention.”40 For the majority, their religious tradition was no longer the cornerstone of their worldview upon which they could seek refuge from life’s uncertainties. There was no sanctuary to be found in religion, no moral clarity. The religious community, shaken by the trauma of the abuse and the embarrassment of the system’s failure, fractured as well.
With loss of moral clarity, those who turned to QAnon for answers and comfort found all that they could no longer believe religion was fit to offer: ideas about good and evil; a spiritual community in other followers; a spiritual practice in connecting the dots and opening their minds to the “truth”; and a savior in Donald J. Trump. In fact, QAnon could be a kind of religion.41
Addressing one of the root causes of radicalization among its followers, QAnon narratives satisfy their outrage against religious authorities. One such story is about Pope Francis being arrested and charged with 80 counts of child sexual abuse.42
QAnon narratives—featuring sexually abused children and powerful, secretive perps, including Oprah, Tom Hanks, Bill and Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and the Rothschild family43—stem from factual stories of children sexually abused by powerful people. The fear and outrage mothers feel when contemplating something like that happening to their own child can be overwhelming and disorienting. But a community of similarly worried others creates a buffer against the anxiety. In Q lore, real stories about people who were supposed to represent “good” doing evil things evolve into stories about the cabal of powerful and famous people who are known as “good” (i.e., Tom Hanks, Oprah) but are actually eating children in their spare time.
The fear and uncertainty that drove people to QAnon are assuaged by vague plots against the bad guys (the cabal) and faith in the good guys (Trump and the QAnon community). From feeling isolated and out of control, a QAnon follower high on Q lore begins to feel that, although things are perilous, the QAnon community is in this together. They will do something to protect the children. They have powerful allies fighting on their behalf. A little fiction can turn fear and uncertainty into belonging and agency.
Traditional gender roles have been changing in the United States since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. People in their 70s remember a time when a woman’s place was in the kitchen, and the husband was the sole breadwinner. For many in the United States, those were the good old days, a paradise lost: a Great America, which Trump promised to return in his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Partly because of this appeal, Trump won the majority of white women’s votes in both the 201644 and 202045 presidential elections.
Traditional gender roles, missed by many white women, limited their abilities to pursue dreams outside of home and family. But as U.S. laws opened up these opportunities, and the expectations of women changed to include a college degree and a paying job, the responsibilities for keeping the home and raising children continued to rest overwhelmingly on women’s shoulders. Working women still do more of the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and childrearing, only now they have to do all those things after work.46
In the workplace, women are not paid as much as men for the same job47—that is, if women can even get the same job, because men get more than twice as many promotions as women.48On a daily basis, women face discrimination in the workplace in the form of microaggressions, hostilities, and work–life balance, adding up to a stressful environment fraught with anxiety and frustration.49 In other words, women who aspire to more than the traditional gender roles still have to carry their burdens at home, and pay a high price for their ambitions at work.
For women who do not wish to have a career, an idyllic Little House on the Prairie is often out of reach, as few families can live comfortably on a single income anymore. Especially for white, suburban women, who were raised with the expectations of having their mothers’ life one day, the evolution of the social construction of gender is not a welcome change. They often find themselves between a rock and a hard place, feeling inadequate for not achieving the career goals society imposes on them and wistful for the lifestyle they can’t afford without achieving those goals. It seems women in the United States have been served a kind of Pyrrhic victory, where they are damned if they strive for more traditionally male roles and damned if they don’t.
For women who cherished traditional gender roles, the expanding definitions of gender and marriage have added insult to their already injured self-identity. If their idea of self has been constructed around being “a good girl,” smiling, and serving homemade food, then people like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who openly challenge authority, threaten their foundational beliefs. If marriage has been their life’s highest aspiration, then the fact that now marriage could be between two men besmirches their dream. If their ability to have children has been their greatest ambition, and their self-identification is primarily as a mother, then recognition of transgender women as their equals insults their values.
The shifting gender roles have cracked a worldview tenet for many women, especially white Republican women. In QAnon, they seek a respite from this unfreezing. The idea of Donald Trump as the ultimate masculine hero who would rescue abused children, smite the cannibals and pedophiles, and Make America Great Again became irresistible.
Tall, blonde, and rich, Trump embodied the Prince Charming they envisioned. He was neither of the government nor of Hollywood and thus was immune to the shadow cast over them. Instead, Trump represented business, perhaps the only monolith of the American Dream that still towered above the raging storms of crumbling authorities, shifting norms, and diminishing values.
Money still has value. People who have it are still better off than those who don’t. And people who have A LOT of it, well––they must have something extra special about them, like a superpower. It certainly seemed to be the case with Trump, given how often his name popped up in their daily lives. He was on TV. Landmark buildings bore his name. He owned casinos, the magical places where anyone could get rich. Trump Steaks, Trump Ties, and Trump University showcased Trump’s reach. He seemed omnipresent, and, after he became president, omnipotent.
Trump’s open contempt for the establishment only proved he railed against the discredited institutions and was on QAnon’s side. His disdain for outspoken women proved he respected traditional gender roles. Trump’s campaign chant “Lock her up!” reassured QAnons that the cabal member Hillary Clinton would get what she deserved.
Trump praised QAnon followers as people who “love our country” and “are very strongly against pedophilia.” “I understand they like me very much,” he said about QAnon, “Which I appreciate.”50 Trump amplified QAnon-promoting accounts on Twitter.51 Nobody else offered any solace to these people’s broken dreams and shattered worldviews. Trump alone seemed to have tuned into their desperation and their need for inspiration. His speeches and tweets, as untethered to reality as QAnon’s collective psyche, didn’t provide details, plans, or names. They sounded as vague as QAnon conspiracies. He told nightmarish stories of women being tortured by foreign gangs and promised to build a great big wall to keep Americans safe. The virus would disappear like magic, he prophesized.
Trump’s repetition of phrases low on information but high on emotion resonated with QAnon followers: “many people said” and “we’re going to get them” and “tremendous” and “huge” and “believe me.” They wanted to believe. That’s why they came to QAnon in the first place: to find new things to believe in after the old beliefs crumbled.
Ashley Vanderbilt, a 27-year-old mother, began to spend a lot of time online after she was laid off from her job at a construction company. On TikTok, she watched video after video suggested by the app’s algorithms. Her belief in QAnon grew, and with it, her faith in Donald Trump. In Ms. Vanderbilt’s mind, Trump became a messianic figure who could do no wrong. At one point, she recalls asking herself, “Am I putting Trump above God?”52
And so, with their belief in Trump as their savior, QAnon women twisted facts to accommodate fiction: Accusations against Trump were attempts to frame him by the evil cabal and his powerful enemies. The mass media were owned by Soros, so naturally they were lying to bring Trump down. COVID-19 was a hoax. The lockdowns were intended to undermine Trump’s presidency. The election was being stolen by the cabal, aided by the mainstream media. Only Trump could save the children. Only Trump could bring down the cabal. And so QAnon had to “stop the steal.”53
Gina Bisignano, a California beauty salon owner, wore a red Trump 2020 sweatshirt to an anti-lockdown rally where she screamed homophobic slurs at a passing woman. As the woman recorded, Bisignano doubled down, demanding “Are you a boy or a girl?” “You probably had an abortion this morning,” she said. After the video went viral,54 Bisignano’s salon’s online ratings took a nosedive. So did her fortunes. When she was filmed again, at the January 6 riot in Washington, DC, Bisignano said that she had lost her business. “I love my country, and I love my president, and I’m a single mother, and I love our Lord, and they can’t take that away from me,” she said tearfully. “[Jesus] is our king, and Trump is our president,” she said. Bisignano was indicted on seven counts for her role in the January 6 riots.55
The four major worldview tenets presented here—government and elites, science, religion, and gender roles—have each been undermined; belief in them has been shaken in recent decades. The resulting mass unfreezing has left many feeling anxious, lost, powerless, and out of control. Each of these emotions contributes to an increase in the conspiratorial mindset.56 The anger against the systems that betrayed them inspired many to quest for a red pill and a rabbit hole of “alternative facts.” With the convenience of social media at their fingertips, QAnon followers found much more than that.
FolQlore
Storytelling is as old as humanity itself. Narrating difficult experiences helps make sense of individual emotions––that’s why talk therapy can be so helpful.57 Collective myth-making also helps communities to process shared trauma.58 From this perspective, QAnon offered a way to cope with disappointments and frustrations by collectively narrating around shared experiences.
FolQlore satisfies four important needs for QAnon followers: a need to feel smart (cognitive utility); a need to feel connected (social utility); a need to feel positive emotions (emotional utility); and a need to feel like one’s life has a purpose (personal utility). Figure 3.1 illustrates these needs and how they relate to the four major truths we’ve been discussing.
As much as QAnon narratives are about children, children are not what motivates QAnons. Mind-warping stories illustrate this paradox. Josh Jennings, for example, was an avid QAnon devotee. His Facebook timeline was peppered with the #SaveTheChildren hashtag and multiple postings condemning physical and sexual abuse of children. In real life, however, Jennings was charged with physically abusing and eventually murdering his girlfriend’s 10-month-old daughter.59
Then there’s Cynthia Abcug, whose son was removed from her home by Child Protective Services as a victim of Munchausen by proxy, a psychological disorder where the mother intentionally sickens the child to get attention for herself.60 Lenka Perron, the QAnon follower who later left the movement, was less violent but no less hypocritical. She found herself spending so much time on QAnon forums about saving (theoretical) children that her three (actual) children—11, 15, and 19—were largely left to fend for themselves and eat takeout.61 Similarly, Lauren Witzke, the #SaveTheChildren-posting QAnon follower and (failed) Republican senatorial candidate, proposed cutting welfare benefits from poor families and supported Trump’s immigration policy that separated children as young as nursing infants from their mothers, with no plans to reunite them.
For QAnons like Jennings, the “children” are unrelated to any real child. Rather, they are a symbol, a disembodied idea of innocence and goodness. The needs satisfied through QAnon are not some abstract children’s needs. They are the followers’ own needs: to belong; to feel important, smart, superior; to escape fear and embarrassment; to imbue their lives with purpose and meaning. In their unfrozen worldview, “children” is a distant North Star that guides them away from their bad present and toward a better future. They see themselves as “catchers in the rye”—the imaginary heroes for the imaginary children in imaginary danger.
QAnon appeals to people who, for decades, have been feeling talked-down to—by their sleazy, neglectful government; by cunning, arrogant scientists; by pickpocketing, selfish billionaires; by hypocritical clergy; by lying, manipulative media. In the land of the free, these people haven’t had the sexual freedoms of Hollywood or Washington. In the land of the brave, they fear saying something politically incorrect and being “cancelled”—losing their business, their job, their friends. Promised justice for all, they’ve seen a very different justice for the elites.
They have been infantilized by the system. And so they crave fairy tales to help process reality. They seek a story to tell their stories, to reflect their struggles, and to inspire their hopes. Hollywood has lost its credibility, all its superheroes worthless, and so they seek a different kind of a superhero. That’s what Q offers.
QAnon encouraging its followers to do their own research—to connect the dots and to share their theories—is an ingenious marketing move for building a loyal base of repeat customers. When the efforts of research culminate in a “discovery,” the experience becomes rewarding, activating pleasure centers in the brain.62 It certainly helps that there are no wrong answers in the folQlore: Any “dot” can be connected with any other. The more fantastical the resulting story, the more of a “Whoa” moment for the seeker. The dopamine hit of making narrative connections can easily become addictive.63 People find themselves spending more and more time online, digging deeper and deeper into folQlore.
In solving QAnon puzzles, people feel proud for discovering “the Truth” that the powerful wanted to keep secret. They feel smart for putting the puzzle together. And they feel superior to those still in the dark. These feelings of pride and intellectual superiority add up to QAnon’s cognitive utility.
Social Utility
Even before the pandemic, Americans were leading relatively isolated lives. The average population density in the United States is 92 residents per square mile64 (versus about 143 residents per square mile in Europe).65 Most U.S. residents (70%) live in detached houses66 in small towns and suburbs where they have to drive to get to work, school, or the grocery store.67 Americans also work more hours and take fewer vacation days than Europeans.68American preferences for personal cars, detached homes, and more income result in long and lonely commutes, with less time and fewer venues for socialization. Taken together, these factors contribute to the stark difference in feelings of loneliness between Americans (46%)69 and Europeans (6%).70
COVID-19 lockdowns made an already dire situation worse.
More physically isolated, more overwhelmed by additional demands placed on them by homebound children, and more stressed about the threat of the deadly virus, women disproportionately suffered from increased loneliness during the pandemic.71 Social media offered a much-desired respite.
Psychological studies have discovered that social isolation increases conspiratorial thinking.72 It’s no wonder, then, that lonely women found QAnon an inviting social milieu.
Exploring QAnon’s alternative reality, QAnon followers encourage one another’s efforts, assuage their doubts. and support their discoveries. Their online hive always buzzes, never sleeps, and is reachable at the stroke of a finger. In the real world, many QAnons experience hostility and rejection by what they call the cancel culture. Some, like Gina Bisignano, have lost their livelihoods for expressing their beliefs. Others have lost connections with friends and family. But in the online QAnon bubble, they encounter people who “get them.” Here, they feel understood and appreciated.
Deep inside, QAnon followers might suspect the folQlore stories are untrue. But they suspend disbelief, because the stories stand for something that IS true: the shared idea that there’s “something wrong with the world” and that they are part of an elite group––red-pillers—who know “the Truth” and will do something about it together. “Where we go one, we go all” (WWG1WGA) QAnons claim. Nobody is alone, the slogan implies, as long as they are part of QAnon. This social utility is far more important than facts.
There’s a caveat, however.
Just as Q-conspiracy theories are only vaguely related to reality, so, too, the QAnon online community is only vaguely real. Other members don’t truly know you or care about your life; you can’t count on them to help you shovel the driveway after a snowstorm or to sit with you through a crying spell.
The more time they spend on social media, the lonelier people feel.73 QAnon creates a vicious cycle, with followers withdrawing from real-life social circles, feeling lonely, resorting to QAnon community on social media, and in the end feeling even lonelier. The cost of building online connections is alienation from real-life ones.
Emotional Utility
Within the QAnon community, facts are beside the point. What matters instead are shared emotions. QAnons are scared of the same things, be they COVID-19, vaccines, or California forest fires. When made to feel anxious, people tend to seek the company of those who are anxious about the same threat.74 They’re right to do so, because being in the company of similarly anxious others does in fact reduce anxiety.
Not only companionship, but also the content of QAnon helps to deal with difficult emotions. Conspiracy theories that deny the horrific reality of school shootings like Sandy Hook or Parkland offer an escape from the dread that one’s own children could be shot. Fear of COVID-19 can be overwhelming . . . unless there’s actually no COVID-19, just a seasonal flu and a sinister cabal trying to grift public funds while people are in lockdown. The adrenaline released in response to fear is repurposed for outrage: Someone is making out like a bandit off our suffering!
From feeling bad about oneself for not being able to protect one’s children from shootings, or one’s loved ones from COVID-19, QAnons go to feeling good about having figured out the conspiracy theory and being in on “the plan” to stop it. Blaming the cabal, Bill Gates, or George Soros relieves the pain of blaming oneself. As folQlore transforms helplessness, fear, and anxiety into outrage, QAnon serves an emotional utility.
But here, too, there’s a caveat.
All the pleasant feelings––pride, belonging, righteous anger––come at a price. The cost of embracing feel-good narratives divorced from reality is the shock of having to face reality from time to time. When facts defy folQlore’s predictions (as they did when Biden won the 2020 presidential election), QAnon members experience high anxiety, as well as thoughts of self-harm and suicide.75The outrage that feels so much better than helplessness and fear can occasionally spill into radical action that lands one in jail, or leaves one dead on the steps of the Capitol building. Like drugs of addiction, conspiracy theories provide a quick emotional fix, but over time, they can destroy users’ lives.
Personal Utility
Some QAnons seem to have stumbled into the conspiracy theory world as a result of losing their footing in the real one. Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot and killed during the mob breach of the Capitol on January 6, had trouble transitioning to civilian life after she left the military. In QAnon, she found the purpose her civilian life lacked. A similar path characterized the QAnonization of 51-year-old Lt. Col. Ret. Larry Brock76 of Texas. Brock was photographed inside the breached Capitol building carrying plastic zip-tie handcuffs, presumably meant to restrain kidnapped lawmakers. After a highly successful military career, Brock couldn’t find the same thrill and fulfillment until he discovered QAnon. Another “zip-tie man,” Eric Munchel,77 came to storm the Capitol with his mother, Lisa Eisenhart, with whom he was still living. An unemployed bartender, Munchel had a criminal arrest record for violent assault. His social media featured pictures of him sporting military gear, a tentative association to the high-risk, high-status life he wanted but couldn’t have––until QAnon. Rosanne Boyland, trampled to death by the mob storming the Capitol, was a recovering drug addict with a history of drug-related arrests. Her QAnonization was an attempt to fill her life, devastated by years of substance abuse, with meaning and purpose.
But for many QAnons, it wasn’t unemployment, addiction, or trouble with the law that sent them searching for the red pill. Neither economic anxiety nor teenage rebellion drove their radicalization: Two thirds of those arrested for participation in the January 6 riot were 35 or older, and 40 percent owned a business or held white-collar jobs.78 One surprising finding, however, points to the importance of threatened worldviews and shifting value systems. Most who came to “the Storm” did not come from deep-red pro-Trump states. Rather, they came from battleground states where Biden won close to half the votes.79
While social norms can be deeply entrenched in established Democratic or deeply Republican states, in battleground states the battles rage not only over votes, but also over all the things the votes represent: marriage laws, gender norms, the role of religion and science in school curriculum and daily lives. It is in the battleground states that the shifting of worldview’s tectonic plates is most salient and mass unfreezing most prevalent.
Research on radicalization has consistently found that the subjective matters more than the objective when predicting violent trajectories.80 Relative deprivation is more predictive of anger and resentment than objective deprivation.81Their bank accounts may not have been in distress, but that didn’t help the psychological distress of changing culture and eroding social norms. Highly subjective “life meaning” is a better predictor of overall well-being than objective economic measures.82
One of the predictors of meaning in life is awe, the experience of “perceptually vast stimuli that transcend one’s ordinary reference frame”83––like the “Whoa” moment QAnon followers experience when, escaping their relative deprivation, they connect the dots into a pattern. Their pain and anger transcend ordinary reference frames, filling their lives with meaning.
To those searching for meaning in the devastated sociocultural landscape, QAnon promises to make everything better. Personally discovering “the Truth,” followers experience awe, and their lives become more fulfilling as a result. Contemplating “the plan” and carrying out “the Storm” filled them with the significance they so desperately sought. In this, QAnon provided a personal utility.
The caveat here is obvious. If life’s meaning is based on a conspiracy theory, it’s as strong as the conspiracy theory’s weakest link. When Trump left DC instead of assuming the presidency and proceeding with the promised arrests of the cabal, when “the plan” failed and the forecasted “Storm” was barely a drizzle, those who invested their well-being into the lie felt betrayed. “Trump just used us and our fear,” said a disgruntled Lenka Perron.84 “It’s obvious now we’ve been had. No plan, no Q, nothing,”85 said a post on a QAnon forum. Another post said, “It’s like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal.”86