Goodbye Q: Qanon and the Great American Conspiracy Theory

Written By: Joseph Pallas

Qanon may be finally, winding down. Many of its adherents had the last vestiges of their faith in the theory, which positioned Donald Trump as the leader of a god ordained effort to topple a cabal of child sacrificing satanists that made up many of the political elite of the United States, shattered by the uneventful spectacle of Joe Biden’s inauguration. Q’s years of promises that ‘the storm’ would finally come, that there would be a wave of arrests and public trials revealing the dirty and depraved dealings of those in the upper echelon of political power labelled as enemies of the people, proved ultimately hollow as the American empire continued to function as it always had. There are still some vestiges of the follower base present and accounted for, and many of the most ardent were present during the storming of the United States Capitol building on the sixth of January, though the bulk of momentum behind the movement is dissipating into various offshoots lead by a variety of other ultra-conservative figures or into unfocused nothingness. Qanon may soon be resigned to the dustbin of history as an aberrant insanity that was an outlier in political discourse, but that is not what it or conspiracy theories on the whole should be dismissed as.

Granted, it is quite easy to make a dismissal of conspiracy theories as nothing more than idle speculation on par with belief in the supernatural that are occasionally weaponized for a political goal. After all, the narrative nature of a conspiracy theory is one of its integral concepts and one of the key drivers of its infectiousness, but even with this lyrical aspect to their construction, like any good lie, there is always a kernel of truth that lies at the centre. In the case of Qanon it’s that its targets, while likely not conducting human sacrifices and personally engaging in child trafficking, are indeed upper echelon members of a hegemonic power structure that exists in a mostly hereditary social class that lies above elected officials, or in brief members of the bourgeoisie. A plethora of other famed conspiracy theories have drawn upon the same fact, from Lyndon LaRouche’s assertion that the British royal family is secretly controlling all of the world’s governments to David Icke’s idea that those in these positions are not human but in fact a reptilian race of lizard people posing as humans, and though a critique so cleanly cut along class lines would usually be one posited by the left the absolute majority of these theorists and their proponents are hard line right wingers.

At first glance this will seem wholly contradictory, but in actuality it’s one of the key reasons that these ideas form and are disseminated in the first place; to provide patchwork answers to the inherent contradictions of capitalism. These kind of conspiracy theories exist to provide a semblance of identifiable order to what looks like pure chaos in the form of bourgeois democracy. They are efforts by the uninformed and uneducated to understand the machinations of the powerful and the mechanisms of how they run the system for their own benefit. The Q faithful themselves imbibed wholly in the jingoism of American expansionism and its worldwide economic pilfering whilst rallying against what they saw as a globalist elite who were in actuality the ones undertaking this imperialism. The raw ideology of their qualm, and what the right would seize on with the ‘Make America Great Again’ Rhetoric, was that this middle class who are the primary proponents of Qanon were no longer the beneficiaries of this pilfering in a monetary or a social sense. Rather than making the ideological leap of identifying themselves as affiliated more strongly with the proletariat, they instead bough into a narrative constructed to explain why they no longer had their middle class status and its privileges.

In doing so many of the fundamental truths of the American experience needed to be obfuscated, reversed, or even outright denied. The outward had to be turned inward. Their deified leader Donald Trump and his cohort proved either unable or uninterested to conduct any amount of the imperialism necessary for the propagation of this system as seen in their failed attempts to start wars with Iran and Venezuela. Interestingly, these failures in warmongering were spun as peaceful pragmatism, the repudiations of globalism, and an aversion to getting the United Sates bogged down in yet another forever war. Concurrently running were the administrations diplomatic efforts with Russia and North Korea, both still enemy states within the American zeitgeist, which similarly had their intentions reversed in being painted as a clever ploy by the wily leader to ingratiate himself into the evil cabal and gain further access. The rest was standard, falling back on military and operator worship, racist and particularity antisemitic tropes, and resting on the immense inertial weight of conservative cultural memory that hearkened back to a simpler and more cleanly class segmented existence for many. Here we see echoes of the conspiracy theories of the past reflected in Q, and it’s here we can begin to analyse them in a broader historical context.

“Why is it easier for people today to believe that they are under the influence of child eating cultists or reptilians instead of the people who own everything?”

Conservatives propagating and likely playing a hand in forming widely held conspiracy theories has its roots, much like nearly every other conservative tactic in use to this day, in the monarchist and then fascist movements that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, while likely not the first, is one of the earliest examples of a fully formed and widely distributed modern conspiracy theory that claimed to expose a Jewish plan for global domination. Like any other conspiracy theory it contained a kernel of truth, that being Eastern European Jews lived in culturally and economically insular communities due to constantly being driven away from larger communities through persecution and pogroms, and then proceeded to fill in the rest of the way to their predetermined conclusion with fanciful suppositions full of spurious and outright false accusations. Nevertheless it was incredibly effective at influencing the populace, both the poorer peoples that it was likely intended towards and some of the aristocracy like the infamous Prince Felix Yusopoff, and briefly strengthening the wavering control of the Russian monarchy. Even though it was originally printed in Russia in 1903 notable U.S capitalist and fascist supporter Henry Ford would order hundreds of thousands of copies printed and distributed in the 1920s.

In the same vein both the central European fascists movements were arguably driven by one more more conspiracy theories that consisted of one central truthful idea surrounded by hateful speculation and conjecture. Mussolini’s Italian fascists were spurned by the belief that Italy was being subverted from within by communists aligned with and supported by the Soviet Union, stemming from the fact that the Soviet Union and Italian communists existed and were fighting the monarchist and capitalist hegemony currently in place. The Nazi Party formed and were centralised around the concept that Germany had lost the First World War due to traitorous elements within the nation, and it indeed was true that Germany did lose the war. In both cases these processes of thought ran contrary to the Marxist forms of historical materialism and class analysis, and yet in both cases the respective parties gained support from the working classes by co-opting socialist and communist talking points and intermingling them with nationalist rhetoric. This begs the question; Why was it easier for the people of Weimar Germany and the Kingdom of Italy to believe that they were under the influence of communists and Jews instead of the landholding classes who possessed all the influence, and why is it easier for people today to believe that they are under the influence of child eating cultists or reptilians instead of the people who own everything?

There are number of reasons for this, though a majority of them stem from interjections from said owners in disseminating viewpoints positive towards them and the mechanisms that propagate their economic and political power. It’s no coincidence that the bulk of economic force in Australia is governed by or affiliated with the owner of a media conglomerate, the most prevalent example being the empire of Rupert Murdoch who played a hefty role in distributing Q and other conspiracies to the masses through his television networks. Qanon and many other contemporary conspiracy theories are centred on the incontrovertible fact that there are major imbalances from an economic and ideological perspective between classes, and in spreading these Murdoch is aiming to posit himself away from the neo-liberal targets of these movements and direct the frustrations caused by those away from any possibility of material analysis by an informed and educated public block as this could very well lead them to Marxism as it has led other disaffected groups in the past. This was functioning quite well up until the time came to deliver upon the promises of Q and by extension Trump, and when both failed to pull their respective triggers the movements and the platforms that spread began to withdraw their support in fear for their bottom lines in a neo-liberal dominated marketplace.

The fervent Q followers who so readily accepted Fox news as a shining beacon of conservative truth among a sea of washy liberal media have now begun to turn away en masse from the television channel that has now been forced to make peace with the Biden victory and the Republicans likely dumping Trump as their leader. They turn now into their insular online spaces that were formerly protected by Trump’s presidency making the viewpoints they espoused politically relevant, but more and more of them are finding that these privately owned and operated platforms are not the open avenues they seek. Twitter banned Trump in the wake of the Capitol riot and his continued insistence that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and it now seems as though both major portions of the United States political spectrum are following the machinations of their corporate overlords and save for a few die hards are dumping any connection they have to the far right and the ‘free speech’ arguments that have been at the centre of political discourse for over a decade now. Qanon’s followers and their right wing compatriots, who so confidently waltzed into the Capitol building with little to no fear of consequence, are now learning firsthand that their politics will only be supported as long as they’re conducive to the powers that be and the will of the capitalists.

One should not feel especially bad for them as they failed to make this realisation despite over a century of history comprised of endless class antagonisms and the political writings that have accompanied them, and that the beliefs at the core of their world-views are almost uniformly classiest, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and vilifying towards any other group that could be deemed a minority. Yet the core of their worldview, that they are intrinsically and fundamentally different from those in power, is one couched in a solid appreciation of class politics that has been twisted into a vitriolic repudiation of the ineffectual solutions posed by the neo-liberal and neo-conservative structures. The neo-liberal position proves especially unsuited to dealing the inherent contradictions of capitalism in this regard as its focus on removing the signifiers of class, race, and sexual inequities without address the inequities themselves provides nothing to interpret the material word through apart from intention and rhetoric, which past U.S Democratic party lead administrations have proved is wholly useless. Their inability, along with the inability of the mass media, to shake the adherence of the Q followers along with the adherents of every other conspiracy theory that hinges on class is worrying, yet at the same time something of a dimly hopeful reminder that the majority of the population has some base understanding of how the world truly functions and where the onus of guilt lies even if it is covered by excessive amounts of bumper stickers and tinfoil hats. As Oliver Stone posited in his 1991 film JFK, it’s not the man who the pulled the trigger that matters so much as those who gave him the rifles and put him in position, and conspiracy theorists to this day are still focused on the former rather than the latter.

“In attempting to harness these narratives to prolong its life, capitalism is inadvertently digging its own grave, and we must work in combating this through political education of the masses so that we don’t all share it”

This should not lead to any kind of common core forming between conspiracy theorists and leftists at large; while they can readily identify the same enemy that we can they do not do so for the same reasons as we do and are, in essence, not fighting the same fight. The continued existence of this type of person should instead serve as a reminder that with an engaging enough presentation and even the smallest kernel of truth one can convince people of nearly any position, and even those who seem the most strongly inclined against the cause of communism very well could hold a few of the same core beliefs that you do. Even Andrew Bolt and Sean Hannity have begun openly speaking about class antagonisms recently, framing them as problems that can be solved with a William F. Buckley-esque return to ‘classical values’ as if those antagonisms didn’t exist in some storied past. It comes down to not only informing people of who their opposition is but also why they are opposing forces; it’s all well and good to say “eat the rich”, but that should be followed up with an explanation of who the rich are, how they got so rich, and why the should be eaten in relation to those two statements. Preventing exactly this kind of political education is at the core of the capitalist strategy, and it’s why every kind of information available from textbooks, to news reports, to advertising is soaked in ideological worship of capitalism. The neo-liberal drowns in the same waters in which the conspiracy theorists swims with delight, one struggling to make sense of fundamentally flawed system while the other happily patches over the fissures with flights of fancy. Qanon will not be the last tale that conservatives indulge in, though it may prove to be the ur-text from which all future ones imprint off, which is an equally fascinating and terrifying thought. In all likelihood in attempting to harness these narratives to prolong its life, capitalism is inadvertently digging its own grave, and we must work in combating this through political education of the masses so that we don’t all share it.