The QAnon Movement Isn’t Dead. From What I Saw in Dallas, It’s Just Evolving.
The outlandish conspiracy theory has made legions of believers into political activists. And the Texas GOP benefits from that.
Sidney
Powell, crusading lawyer of Dallas, is drowning much closer to home.
It’s late May, Memorial Day weekend, and she’s speaking to a crowd of
nearly a thousand self-described truth seekers. “Truth is the armor of
God,” she tells the rapt audience at Eddie Deen’s Ranch, a kitschy
wedding and event venue in an awkward corner of the city’s gargantuan
convention-center complex. “Deception is destroying this country,” she
says. Heathens and unbelievers are “terrified, absolutely terrified of
the truth.”
Powell is one of the stars of the “For God &
Country Patriot Roundup,” a three-day conference with ties to QAnon
where the followers of Q will ponder, among other weighty subjects, the
dangerous infiltration of Jews and members of the Chinese Communist
party into American institutions; the nation’s secret space program; the
growing number of karate dojos owned by child-traffickers; and the
possibility of kickstarting a military coup to remove Satan-worshipping
pedophiles from government. In between, they’ll hear from prominent
figures in the Texas GOP. Boxed lunches will be provided.
Of
the tens of speakers, though, only Powell is in a position to deliver
the catharsis the crowd needs. She won fame as the most animated member
of former president Donald Trump’s legal team during the interregnum
between the 2020 election and Joe Biden’s inauguration—so animated that
Trump eventually disavowed her. For those who believe the last election
was a fraud of world-historic proportions, Powell was the keeper of the
“kraken,” a mythological sea monster, which would be “unleashed” at any
moment, with undeniable evidence of a sweeping conspiracy, and Trump
would be returned to the White House. That, of course, did not happen.
One might expect that her biggest fans would be wondering why.
This
is the biggest Q get-together since—well, since the storming of the
U.S. Capitol building in January, in which five people died. And here’s
what Powell’s got that will bring the shaky edifice of the deep state
tumbling down: Mike Lindell—that’s the proprietor of MyPillow.com, for
the uninitiated—has been working “on evidence of actual votes being
flipped,” Powell says. “That’s still being verified.” The election audit
currently underway in Arizona, she promises, will “find evidence of
four hundred to five hundred thousand fraudulent votes for Biden.” That
would be enough evidence for the legislature to “decertify the
election.” That, combined with events elsewhere, could mean that Trump
would be reinstated as president in August.
Powell
does not have much to show for her efforts. Even more grimly, she tells
the audience of QAnon adherents, there might be no “storm” coming.
“There are no military tribunals that are going to solve this problem
for us,” she says. “It’s going to take every one of us rolling up their
sleeves.” Be the Q you want to see in the world, in other words.
Then
she exits the room, leaving only her well-staffed merch table, which,
in Eddie Deen’s Western-themed space, sits in front of two large,
light-up cacti. Copies of Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice
are going for $50. Signed copies are $100, with a “personalized
message” for a mere $50 more. The real steal, though, are the “Release
the Kraken”–themed tote bags and T-shirts, which go for $30 and $35,
respectively. Powell’s table sits next to another for a company called
Patriotic Strong, which promises to cure chronic pain with things it
calls “quantum energy patches.”
The emcee bounds onto the stage after Powell departs. “Are you guys ready to party?” he shouts. “Do patriots know how to party?”
Is QAnon finished? Many would like to think so. “QAnon’s coherence, allure and leadership are over,” wrote columnist Virginia Heffernan in the Los Angeles Times in June. Q itself—the person or persons whose anonymous posts fueled the QAnon movement—vanished like a puff of vape smoke
earlier this year, after too many promises made to believers soured.
Hundreds of the rioters who stormed the Capitol have been arrested,
including the infamous horn-hatted Q Shaman.
When Biden was inaugurated, part of the palpable sense of relief among
his half of the country was that they would no longer have to think
about guys with names like “the Q Shaman.” Surely, their time had
passed.
Maybe not. “What we’re seeing now is a kind of second
iteration of the movement, under Biden. It looks and sounds slightly
different, but the energy and larger worldview is still there,” says
Jared Holt, a fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab of the
Atlantic Council, who has spent much of the last few years following the
QAnon movement. It might be less prominent in the discourse since its
peak after the election, Holt says, but there’s “no shortage of
individuals radicalized by QAnon floating in the political atmosphere,
and some of them have expressed aspirations for cementing influence in
the broader GOP.” That means running for party positions, school boards,
and other local offices—the same play enacted successfully by the tea
party a decade ago. The left-wing watchdog group Media Matters for
America recently tallied 38 Q-friendly candidates running (most as Republicans) for congressional seats. Three of them are in Texas.
In February, a poll by the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute found that 29 percent of Republican voters
agreed with the proposition, central to QAnon beliefs, that “Trump has
been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that includes
prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” According to the same poll,
more than two thirds of Republicans agree with Powell that massive fraud
put Biden in power. And Powell’s assertion that Trump could be
reinstated as early as August, echoed by Trump himself, has taken on a
life of its own. On June 26, at Trump’s first rally since leaving
office, some of his supporters predicted violence if the reinstatement
didn’t happen.
The conference at Eddie Deen’s is a rare
opportunity to gather with Q adherents in person. Some eight hundred
attendees paid at least $500 each to attend the conference, which
consists primarily of a long list of speakers, many of them
inexperienced, and some free food. (Attendees could purchase VIP
tickets, which allowed them to enjoy a happy hour with General Michael
Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, for $1,000.)
They have sacrificed a lot of time, and a lot of money, to be here.
There are two kinds of speakers at the event: those who seem to believe, and those for whom the belief of the former group is useful. The first group includes the social-media influencers that constitute the major generative force of the Q phenomenon. If Q is the Messiah, these are his apostles. Now that Q has disappeared, they are left to reinterpret and keep alive Q’s 4,953 posts and find ways to turn his message into something future generations can inherit.
Brad Getz, a former New York City construction surveyor, came to
Eddie Deen’s to give a sermon, a dense disquisition on Edward Bernays,
an Austrian public-relations pioneer whom he identifies as one of the
New World Order’s first propaganda chiefs. But first, a reading from the
book of 8kun, the website formerly known as 8chan. To steady a wavering
heart, return to first principles. “This is post 4462,” Getz begins.
“‘Division is man-made. Unity is humanity. Trust yourself. Think for
yourself. Only when good people collectively come together will positive
change occur.’” How could the media—the liars who say QAnon is a
dangerous cult—possibly object to that? They focused on the
craziest-sounding tenets of Q eschatology—the idea that JFK Jr. is still
alive and in hiding, waiting to lead a revolution, for example—because
they were terrified that the public would read the posts themselves, and
hear their “overwhelmingly positive message.” This is a common theme.
Just “point one percent of the drops involve pedophilia or satanism,”
says Bernie Suarez, a former cohost of 911 Free Fall, a podcast advocating for the proposition that the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives.
Even the speakers who embrace the more challenging
parts of the Q belief system seem to be backing away—if only to better
serve the mission. Influencer Jason Frank takes an admirably pragmatic
line. “I don’t always talk about Pizzagate, I don’t always talk about
adrenochrome, I don’t always talk about the satanic rituals,” he says.
He pauses, choking up. “Because I figured the quicker we could get
everyone involved, the quicker we could make it stop.” (Pizzagate is the
theory that global elites are engaged in widespread child sex
trafficking. The theory centers on Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C.,
pizzeria and table-tennis bar. Adrenochrome is the material the elites
supposedly harvest from murdered children to extend their own
lifespans.)
The Q prophecies are in the past. “It doesn’t matter
what Q does; it doesn’t matter what Trump does,” Frank says. “We are the
storm. We are the plan.”
The other speakers,
the professionals, are careful not to engage with the fringier beliefs.
Neither do they denounce them. Even Powell, when asked if “Talmudic
Judaism is the fist in the glove of the deep state,” gives a
scrupulously nonjudgmental reply: “I have no idea.” Several speakers are
Trump administration veterans—including George Papadopoulos, a Trump
campaign adviser who served jail time for lying to federal
investigators—and they stick to the script, telling stories about their
tenure.
Texas Republican congressman Louie Gohmert, typically the
strangest man in any room he’s in, is here one of the sanest,
delivering a stem-winder that ranges from the works of Dostoyevsky and
Orwell to the ordeal of ordering meat loaf at Mar-a-Lago to the economic
dysfunction of the Soviet Union. But at the end of a lot of riffing, he
gets down to business. “Listen,” he says, “we can’t lose sight of the
importance of 2022 and 2024 for the preservation of democracy.”
That goes double for Allen West, the recently resigned Texas
GOP chair turned gubernatorial candidate, who had the party adopt a
slogan—“We Are the Storm”—that comes straight from QAnon’s eschatology.
West shares the messianic outlook of QAnon, the belief that he is part
of some burgeoning redemption of America. He comes onstage to the tune
of Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” He gets a rapturous
reception.
“I am a walking miracle,” he tells the crowd. When he
was running for party chair, he survived a high-speed motorcycle
accident on Interstate 35, the kind of crash one isn’t supposed to
survive, he says. “God is still on the throne,” he says, and “you have
been made for a time such as this.” As he speaks, West is facing
criticism from Texas Republicans who say he shouldn’t be here. But he’s
preparing a run against Greg Abbott in which he will need every ounce of
support he can muster among the party’s activist base. Why wouldn’t he
be here?
Flynn, bemoaning the Republican party’s failure to help
Trump enough, tells attendees not to give money to the Republican
National Committee. Gohmert and West are here to say the opposite: stay
with us, stay engaged. Keep voting and volunteering. Whatever else QAnon
has done to the brains of the faithful in attendance, it has made them
politically active. The GOP as a whole is unlikely to repudiate them, so
long as they remain useful. That’s the way the party has dealt with
fringe movements and beliefs for a long time: with toleration, from a
distance.
The tenets of QAnon are not altogether crazier than the
stuff that has been percolating on the far right for decades and that
has been seamlessly integrated into the party: Jade Helm, sharia law, the militia movement of the nineties.
In 2011, I covered a similar conference held by the Waco Tea Party. At
one seminar, a Dallas tea-party activist educated attendees about
Executive Order 13575. The numbers, she pointed out to gasps, added up
to 21, as in Agenda 21, a United Nations–hatched environmental plan that
was then the subject of many conspiracy theories. The order was a
Trojan horse, she promised, through which President Obama would take
control of the nation’s seed-distribution network—while the UN deployed
an army of block captains and informers to crack down on the use of
trans fats and fast food. That woman, Katrina Pierson, was a prominent
Ted Cruz supporter before becoming the national spokesperson of the
Donald Trump presidential campaign.
But at what cost does the
party play footsie with this crowd? “How many of you were there on
January 6?” Andy Meehan, a Pennsylvania Republican and failed
congressional candidate, asks the audience in Dallas. Dozens of hands go
up. Their anger should now be directed at the GOP, Meehan says. “The
RINO [Republican in Name Only] establishment is killing us, okay? It’s
not the Democrats.” He urges the audience to begin taking over the party
from below. Then he plays his harmonica.
The
most worrying note of the conference is sounded by Flynn. For most of
his remarks, he sticks carefully to his script. But on the second day, a
man stands up to ask him a question. “I’m a simple Marine,” he says.
“Why can’t what happened in Minimar happen here?” He means Myanmar,
where the military recently took control from an elected government and
set about imprisoning, executing, and torturing the opposition. QAnon
has been looking jealously at the coup for months. At least somebody felt the pleasure of rounding up their enemies this year.
Flynn’s
response is unambiguous. “No reason,” he says. “I mean, it should
happen here.” His reply is met with applause and cheers. It is so over
the line that it precipitates an international media frenzy—it is the
breakout moment of the conference. But it isn’t enough to scare away
West, who gives his speech about an hour later. Once West is done, he
invites Flynn back out on stage—whereupon Flynn endorses him for
governor. West smiles.
There is much madness
in the history of this country. There is so much madness in the history
of this corner of downtown Dallas, even. Almost a hundred years to the
day before the Patriot Roundup, the Klu Klux Klan marched down Elm
Street a few blocks away from Eddie Deen’s. Its klaverns and kleagles
and wizards ran the city,
so much that they could abduct and torture citizens with impunity.
Nearby is Dealey Plaza, where a president was murdered in a sort of Cold
War fever dream with a bizarre cast of characters. Between the two is
El Centro College, where in 2016 an embittered Afghanistan war veteran
shot five police officers before being killed by a police robot. All of
this in an area of a few blocks.
On the last day of the
conference, while attendees are munching on cinnamon rolls from the
breakfast bar, Powell strides back on stage, in her resplendent armor of
truth. “The first order of business this morning is to dispel a
horrible incident of fake news,” she says. “The fake news has grossly
distorted what General Flynn said yesterday in response to a question
about Myanmar. There are no circumstances in which he urged the military
to take any action to unseat the president.”
Of course, the faithful at this conference believe Trump is the
president, so it’s unclear exactly what she’s saying. Powell says the
organizers had “the full recording of everything that was actually
said.” Flynn’s remarks (which were reported verbatim) were “simply not a
fair or accurate representation of the conversation.” The audience, the
same audience who cheered what Flynn had said previously, cheers just
as hard for the revelation that he didn’t say it.
I’ve had about
enough. My head hurting, I take a pamphlet on those quantum energy
patches on the way out the door. Powell’s voice booms on the speakers as
I walk into the sunlight. “These are the times,” she says, “that try
men’s souls.”
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