Note: this email was originally sent on January 20, 2021. The date at the top of this archive page is from when it got moved over to a new email provider.
Today, around 5pm UK time, Donald Trump stops being the president. This is obviously a Big Deal for many reasons, but what I’m slightly obsessed by right now is the cumulative effect of the sheer psychic weight of his chaos aura being lifted from so many people at once.
Now, it’s likely that this will be felt more keenly by the minority of us who, for professional or personal reasons, struggle to detatch ourselves from the news firehose – for me, there’s certainly a residual effect of having been in the UK newsroom of a US media company, which for timezone reasons naturally meant that we were on Early Morning Trump Tweet duty for several years. (A former colleague told me last week, speaking of the time I greeted the first ragetweet of the day with the words “Daddy’s awake”, that it “chills me to the marrow every time I think about it”.)
But still, the Twitter ban last week was an interesting preview of what it might feel like: I wasn’t prepared for the subtle but undeniable shift in mood that came with suddenly not waking up in the morning thinking “oh god I wonder what he tweeted overnight”. I know I wasn’t the only one, and that effect will only be magnified when it’s not just tweets but executive orders that we no longer need to fret about. So I find myself pondering this unquantifiable, intangible, edge-of-perception shift that’s about to happen to the world’s anxiety levels. What does a global sigh of relief sound like? How does that ripple out into the world?
This is, of course, assuming that we make it the remaining few hours to inauguration without something terrible happening. On which note…
When a plan does not come together
Because I’m currently knuckling down to write a book about conspiracy theories (coming March 2022 from Wildfire Press), I’ve been thinking a lot about QAnon. And specifically, what happens to a belief system when the Storm that you’ve been promised for years is coming any day… simply doesn’t show up.
Q is leaving it rather late, isn't he?
— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) January 20, 2021
QAnon would seem to be deeply tied to Trump’s fortunes, and to the contours of American politics more broadly. While it’s grown into a sprawling web of interconnected and often contradictory beliefs, the original impulse behind the first Q posts on 4chan still remains close to its core: creating a narrative to reassure Donald Trump’s fans that the haphazard flailing of his presidency is in fact all part of a great game being played by a master tactician to outwit his enemies. In other words: he’s Batman, playing the role of Bruce Wayne in public. While the whole “cabal of Satanist paedophiles” aspect of the theory probably gets the most attention, equally important is the millenarian belief in the immenent arrival of “The Storm”, the moment when Trump will drop the act, round up the cabal in a single co-ordinated blow against the forces of evil, and usher in a new golden age. (As a side note: Donald Trump’s odd appeal to conspiratorial, millenialist, prophecy-driven beliefs predates the origins of QAnon.)
Even at this late stage, there remain many Q adherents who genuinely believe that The Storm will still arrive: that Trump will declare martial law shortly before the inauguration, the emergency broadcast system will spread the message to the whole population, and the time of reckoning will be at hand for the cabal.
So does that mean that, without Trump in power and plausibly able to execute his grand plan, QAnon will wither away? History would suggest that it’s probably not that simple.
What happens to true believers after predictions fall flat is the subject of a classic psychology book: Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter’s When Prophecy Fails from 1956, about a UFO cult coping with an apocalypse that never came. The study helped shape Festinger’s development of the theory of cognitive dissonance, describing the tricks our brains play on themselves to avoid the pain of having to hold onto contrary thoughts.
When Prophecy Fails makes clear that the failure of predictions to come to pass doesn’t necessarily mean doom for the belief system that made those predictions. In fact, it can lead some believers to strengthen the ferocity of their belief, avoiding the stress of contradiction by doubling-down on their certainty. This is particularly the case, they suggest, when the beliefs are so firmly held that they’ve had a material impact on the believer’s life; when the evidence of the prophecy’s failure to manifest is irrefutable; and when there is a support network of fellow believers around an individual who can reaffirm their conviction.
Those are all things that would seem to apply pretty well to many of QAnon’s devotees.
We covered this issue last month at Full Fact, as part of a look at QAnon’s growth in the UK – where many of the core tenets of the broader Qniverse have been smoothly incorporated into pre-existing British conspiratorial fears, with barely any reference to US domestic politics. As my colleague Rachael Krishna wrote:
The imminent end of the Trump administration in the US marks this moment out as a crucial one for whether a movement that exhorted followers to “trust the plan” can survive that plan apparently going off the rails. But the theory’s ability to thrive in the UK with little mention of the President suggests it may take more than an election to change things, and that QAnon has the potential to outlive the presidency that spawned it.
As Rachael notes, the growth of QAnon and Q-adjacent beliefs in the UK may provide a hint of the direction it will take in the future. It long ago stopped being a singular conspiracy theory and turned into something more akin to the Marvel Cinematic Universe: a broad narrative umbrella that could incorporate a dizzying range of stories, which may occasionally cross over, but could also go off and do their own thing. It entirely possible that this, uh, diversity of thought makes it particularly resilient – it may have the ability to stand firm even after the central pillar is removed. Its size and breadth also means that it can probably survive multiple schisms without losing critical mass.
It’s also not like QAnon hasn’t survived failed predictions before: the very first Q message was a prediction that was disproven within days, and that was followed by a string of further duds. None of that stopped its growth; indeed, it may have fuelled it, given that a focus on proselytising is one of the major ways that believers cope with failed prophecy. (This great article from Religion Dispatches goes into more depth into post-prophecy survival strategies and how they might affect QAnon, including how the research has moved on since When Prophecy Fails.)
QAnon is certainly at an inflection point with The Storm about to reveal itself as little more than light drizzle, but it’s unlikely to simply fade away as some might hope. It’s too big to fail. It may well change, it may break into distinct groups, but its legacy – even if just its ability to bring previously siloed conspiracy strains together and recombine them in novel ways – will stick around. And in the short term, it may become even more potent… and potentially more violent.
In When Prophecy Fails, the authors mention the example of Melchior Hoffman, a eschatological Anabaptist preacher in 16th century northern Europe. He believed that the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ was due to happen in 1533, in Strasbourg. When 1534 rolled around with our Lord nowhere to be seen and Melchior Hoffman in prison, it didn’t have the effect of denting his followers’ belief. Instead, a few days later, they seized control of Münster and held the city for around 18 months.
I’m not saying that this means QAnon followers are about to take control of, say, Dubuque, Iowa by force of arms. But it might be wise to not rule anything out.
Extra fun things to read or do
How the 40,000 members of a small UK Facebook page devoted to “requests to buy or sell agricultural land” woke up one morning to find it had changed to “content accusing Joe Biden of stealing the US election, anti-fascist campaigners of dressing up as Trump supporters to stage a false-flag attack on Congress, and Twitter of trying to censor the views of hardworking Americans.”
“I fact checked every public word Donald Trump said or tweeted for just under four years. The job was unrelenting. The job was unrelentingly weird.” – the indefatigable Daniel Dale (now of CNN, formerly the Toronto Star) reflects on the difficulty and value of fact checking, and the president’s “lying as a way of life”.
“It doesn’t matter which you heard” – Joe Biden’s use of ‘Hallelujah’ during the incoming administration’s Covid memorial service sends me running to the Wayback Machine to dig up and re-read Michael Barthel’s fantastic 2007 essay on the “curious cultural journey” of a song that we now know best as a cover of a cover, or even a cover of a cover of a cover, a process over which the style, mood and even the lyrics have all changed radically. Contains in-depth discussions of sad montages on The O.C., and graphs!
I feel like whoever was behind all those monoliths popping up around the world a few weeks back may be running out of ideas for mysterious appearances now.
There has been an important breakthrough in the study of dinosaur bums.