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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The Republican National Convention begins today. Apparently, two apprentice producers have been tapped to help run the show, and President Trump will be speaking every night, which means it might have a bit of a Trump rally vibe, but without as many, you know, diehard Trump fans in the crowd, obviously.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if you've watched footage from those before-time Trump rallies, you may have noticed some of those diehards hoisting some strange signs. Signs with messages about Q. Q is shorthand for QAnon. It's a political conspiracy theory for people who like their conspiracy theories with a little side of bonkers.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, if you're not familiar with QAnon, here's a quick crash course according to the Anti-Defamation League. QAnon followers, quote, believe world governments are being controlled by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles who will eventually be brought to justice by President Trump.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The most far out of these beliefs say that celebrities and political elites actually farm children in underground caves so that they can drink blood, which supposedly staves off aging.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beacham, you've been following QAnon for Vox. Why is it getting less Anon all of a sudden?
--:-- Zach Beacham: Well, there are two reasons. The first one is that a woman with a very long record of supporting QAnon named Marjorie Taylor Greene, a businesswoman in Georgia, won a Republican primary in an extremely safe Republican seat in August.
--:-- Zach Beacham: So basically what that means is somebody with this extensive track record of saying QAnon stuff is almost certainly going to Congress. The second reason is that on Wednesday, President Trump at a press conference refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: During the pandemic, the QAnon movement appears to be gaining a lot of followers. Can you talk about what you think about that and what you have to say to people who are following this movement right now?
--:-- Zach Beacham: Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much. Which I appreciate.
--:-- Zach Beacham: You know, that was a predictable result of the way the reporter asked the question, which was not great. But also, and more fundamentally, this is the president praising a conspiracy theory that has been linked to violence, like murder, actual murder, and other federal crimes.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Last year, the FBI labeled the movement a potential domestic terror threat. I've heard these are people that love our country and they just don't like seeing it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I don't know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.
--:-- Zach Beacham: The president not denouncing them or not saying anything that would be like, look, these people are really, really out there is given the specific nature of this conspiracy theory, which is basically oriented around Donald Trump secretly being the savior of the world and secretly doing all these things they think he's doing.
--:-- Zach Beacham: I mean, this is so likely to add fuel to this particular fire and so likely to encourage QAnon supporters that it's breathtakingly irresponsible on the president's part.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Was this the first time the president really addressed this conspiracy or that it reached a platform that high?
--:-- Zach Beacham: Yeah, I mean, press secretaries have been asked about it before, but this is the first time that he's been this direct about QAnon. And it's certainly the closest the president has come to giving tacit endorsement to a conspiracy theory that claims that Hillary Clinton eats children, which is a thing QAnoners actually believe, not exaggerating.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Message to Hillary It Alex Jones You can run on When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped I have zero fear standing up against her
--:-- Zach Beacham: Tell me more about this potential Congress member who's a member of the Q tribe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Marjorie Taylor Greene is her name. She lives in Georgia, where she has owned a construction business with her husband since 2002.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which is like a normal enough small business person profile for somebody running for Congress. But this is a woman who built her public profile by, in no uncertain terms, propagating the QAnon conspiracy theory.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Q is a patriot. He is someone that is very much loves this country and he's on the same page as us and he is very pro-Trump.
--:-- Zach Beacham: She released a whole 30-minute video about her belief in QAnon and all of the things that she found persuasive in it. Now, there's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cable of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out. And I think we have the president to do it.
--:-- Zach Beacham: And so I'm very excited about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She had a now-defunct website that posted pro-QAnon content in a September 3rd, 2018 post from Marjorie Taylor Greene for Congress. She talked about how Q, the key figure in QAnon, was warning of false flags and then speculated that demon possession or military-grade intelligence developed weapons like voice of God technology were being used to manipulate these school shooters into the false flags.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, it's real wild stuff. She said awful things about Muslims. We have an Islamic invasion into our government offices.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Proposed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. I will not apologize for standing up against George Soros, even when they want to call me an anti-Semite.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: She made an ad, published it on her Facebook page, where she, in more or less no uncertain terms, threaten violence against any Antifa members that visited her area of Georgia.
--:-- Zach Beacham: President Trump declared Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. She was holding a gun during this video.
--:-- Zach Beacham: I have a message for Antifa terrorists. She cocked the gun during the video. It's pretty clear. Stay the hell out of Northwest Georgia. You won't burn our churches, loot our businesses or destroy our homes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Marjorie Green and I approve this message. And the video was suspended from Facebook on grounds that violated their terms of service, which prohibit threats against specific groups.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Even setting the QAnon stuff aside, Taylor Greene is a really extreme Republican candidate, even by Republican standards. But the QAnon stuff takes it to a whole new level.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We should be clear here, though, that a lot of Georgians who supported her in the primary knew exactly what she stood for and knew exactly what kind of tie she had to this conspiracy theory.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Yeah, I don't think that's a stretch. There's a reason why she was able to out-raise and out-compete another conservative Republican who billed himself in the primary as conservative but not crazy and went after her for the sort of nuttery and the links to QAnon.
--:-- Zach Beacham: And she won pretty decisively. And she hasn't said anything like this since she won the primary?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, I don't believe she said anything that pro-QAnon since winning the primary.
--:-- Zach Beacham: I think she's trying to mainstream herself a little bit. But she is being accepted by the Republican Party and is going to have seats on committees and stuff like that based on what we're hearing right now from the House Republican leadership.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So she needs to play by their rules a little bit. The extent to which she will succeed in doing that, like I said, I really am skeptical.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Did Trump react to Green's win? Did he have anything to say about it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, Trump is a big Marjorie Taylor Greene fan. President Trump tweeting congratulations today to QAnon conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene.
--:-- Zach Beacham: The president calling Greene a, quote, future Republican star and a real winner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a chance that other QAnon candidates might pop up for this 2020 election, or is she the only one?
--:-- Zach Beacham: Yeah, by some counts, there are up to 20 people who will be appearing on the ballot in November who are QAnon believers or sympathizers.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Honestly, everything that I've heard of Q, I hope that this is real.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Some congressional candidates, like Lauren Boebert in Colorado, promoted the conspiracy theory to friendly media outlets before later calling QAnon fake news.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Other candidates, like Republican Joe Ray Perkins, who's running for the U.S. Senate seat in Oregon, have come out as true supporters.
--:-- Zach Beacham: This is a conspiracy theory that grew out of absolute faith in Donald Trump. It is deeply linked to Republican partisanship and really specifically support for Donald Trump and can't be untethered from that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: After the break, the origins of QAnon.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach, who is Q? You know, if I knew, I would be putting that on Vox.com right now.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Q originally was an anonymous poster on 4chan, where everyone is anonymous. 4chan, if you're not familiar with it, is like a real internet cesspool that is loosely affiliated, maybe even strongly affiliated, depending on who you talk to with the alt-right.
--:-- Zach Beacham: They have actually threatened me before, so I know what it's like. But Q is a poster on 4chan, and posters on 4chans are called Anon. So Q Anon, that's how the name of the movement began.
--:-- Zach Beacham: So you would know it was Q because they would sign their messages with a dash Q at the very end of them.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Now, Q is generally taken to refer to a level of classification in the U.S. government, Q-level classification. It's a very high level of access to government information.
--:-- Zach Beacham: So the implication by this person signing Q and claiming to have inside information about what was going on inside the government and about this sort of secret behind-the-scenes stuff is that Q is a government employee, someone very, very high up, who knows things that ordinary people don't and is now leaving little breadcrumbs, which is what Q and non-supporters call his messages, and they always say his.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So we'll assume for this conversation that he's a he, though we have no idea who Q actually is. And they'll read these sort of cryptic messages written by Q and read a lot into them and use them to build out what is an almost theological view of how politics works.
--:-- Zach Beacham: And what is the theology of Q? Oh, boy. We're really getting into it now, Sean.
--:-- Zach Beacham: I think we should start with Pizzagate. You know about Pizzagate?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, I used to go there and play ping pong with my niece and nephew, and so I would not be taking them to a place that had pedophilia in that establishment.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Pizzagate started on the internet shortly before Election Day, when right-wing sites that make up fake news spread rumors that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex trafficking ring in D.C. Out of a restaurant in D.C. called Comet Ping Pong.
--:-- Zach Beacham: A 28-year-old Edgar Welch fired at least one round into the restaurant floor with an AR-15 rifle like this one. After police arrived, Welch surrendered peacefully, saying that he was trying to rescue the children he was sure were hidden inside.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So is this some sort of, like, foundational moment for QAnon?
--:-- Zach Beacham: Yeah, I think a lot of Q's description of the world came out of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Namely the idea that Democratic Party elites are involved in a secret ring of pedophilia and child trafficking and that this is something that Donald Trump is trying to expose.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Does that sound like something you are behind? Well, I haven't heard that, but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing? I mean, you know.
--:-- Zach Beacham: QAnon is a fantasy of Trump power and Trump goodness. You're trying to make sense out of the chaos of the Trump presidency if you're a hardcore Trump supporter, if you really believe that he's somebody who is working to save America and make it great again.
--:-- Zach Beacham: And so you've developed this demonized portrayal of your opponents. In some ways, it's a really natural outgrowth of one of the primary motivating forces in American politics, which political scientists call negative partisanship.
--:-- Zach Beacham: You know, you support your party because you hate the opposing party, not necessarily because you love everything that your party stands for. And so you think of Democrats not just as your political opponents but if you a Republican but as fundamentally illegitimate threats to the nation
--:-- Zach Beacham: QAnon takes it one step further and says they not just illegitimate political opponents they actual sex criminals and murderers
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then they marry this with a very Trumpy cult of personality But just thinking about the origins of QAnon in some 4chan message board, some guy posting under the name Q, it just sounds like this could have easily just been a bad joke.
--:-- Zach Beacham: That has spiraled wildly out of control. Yeah, it's entirely possible that that's what happened.
--:-- Zach Beacham: We're all pretty certain that Q is not some high-up figure in the Trump administration or U.S. government. But Q could be anyone, right? It could be just some random person who thought it would be funny to start pretending that they were a member of the Trump administration.
--:-- Zach Beacham: This actually was a fairly common thing on 4chan, and then they stopped being funny when QAnoners started killing people.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there is one QAnoner who thought there's a mafia boss who is in on this. And so he went and killed him, went to his house and killed him.
--:-- Zach Beacham: 24-year-old Anthony Camelo is behind bars right now for the shooting death of Francesco Frankie Boycali, the reputed boss of the Cambino crime family. This was in March 2019.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And there's another person who derailed a train in California as part of what seems like a QAnon thing.
--:-- Zach Beacham: There are examples. And those are ones we know about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does it have any mainstream traction outside of President Trump's sort of quasi-endorsement last week?
--:-- Zach Beacham: It depends on how you define mainstream, right? Like, you've gotten some validation from the Trump children, Eric Trump, and specifically posted a QAnon meme on his Instagram page.
--:-- Zach Beacham: You've got some right-wing celebrities, people like Curt Schilling, the former Red Sox pitcher who has become a far-right political figure and is an avowed QAnon supporter.
--:-- Zach Beacham: And then you have Roseanne Barr, who has also promoted the same thing. But it's that kind of person.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What about people in the media? Is this a Fox News-approved conspiracy?
--:-- Zach Beacham: It's not really a Fox News thing. It seems like this is something that is too fringy even for Fox, but flourished really on alternative right-wing media and social media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, as the Republican National Convention kicks off, is there a way for the party to distance itself from these sort of fringe conspiracy theorists when the dude in charge is sort of welcoming him into the tent?
--:-- Zach Beacham: I mean, individual Republicans can do what they want, but it's difficult to break with Trump on issues like this when he sets the tone, because he'll condemn you in a tweet if you do anything that seems like it is condemning something that Trump has done or even mildly criticizing it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they're probably not going to want to do that.
--:-- Zach Beacham: What's to be done then? I mean, this isn't the Tea Party. These are violent conspiracy theorists who have actually killed a person who have gone to a family restaurant with weapons.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, what you need is to cut them off at their source where they really flourish. And that's social media, right?
--:-- Zach Beacham: This is a conspiracy theory that has done its best recruiting work on Facebook, where there have been hundreds of different QAnon groups with millions of followers in total.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And Facebook has just finally, belatedly started cracking down on these groups.
--:-- Zach Beacham: Facebook banned about 2,000 groups pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory, accusing them of promoting violence and leading to crime.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So Facebook took action last week. Is it too late? Has this already gone too far?
--:-- Zach Beacham: I mean, we're on the cusp of having our first elected representative in Congress with QAnon ties. Yes, she's almost certainly going to Congress.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But these ideas are so closely tied to Donald Trump that it's unclear to me how they evolve in a world where he's not president.
--:-- Zach Beacham: It could be that if Joe Biden wins, that QAnon just sort of disappears because you don't need something that mentally reconciles you to the chaos of a Trump administration.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And your energy as a hardcore base Republican goes towards opposing Joe Biden and developing horrible things to do and say and think about him.
--:-- Zach Beacham: My guess is even if QAnon disappears, the style of demonization of the opposition that it represents is not going away.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We're here to take the country back. We're not playing around.
--:-- Zach Beacham: If Joe Biden wins, I'm scared for America because I believe that QAnon will have something to say about it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we are large. We are strong. And where we go one, we go all.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Zach Beauchamp, he's a senior correspondent at Vox and one of the hosts of our worldly podcast.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram from This One's Today Explained. The team includes Bridget McCarthy, Efim Shapiro, Jillian Weinberger, Halima Shah, Amina Alsadi, Muj Zaydi, and Noam Hasenfeld, who makes some music too.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder makes even more bops. Cecilia Lays, our fact checker, and Liz Kelly Nelson is the editorial director of Vox Podcasts. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
