The rise of QAnon and far-right extremist
QAnon, or Q for short, a far-right conspiracist has managed to spread from the vicinity of only a few people to millions of more people in just three years.
Its main conspiracies consist of prominent Democrats who are secretly in on child-trafficking rings and torturing them. For most people, it would be laughable to believe in such an absurd idea; but for Trump-supporters and far-right extremists, it explains everything.
The anonymous user ‘Q’ first appeared in 2017 on the imageboard ‘4chan’, claiming to have special access to sensitive government information. Initially, Q was similar to the other right-wing conspiracists and posted the predominant content that other users also posted. However, they soon latched onto the pizza gate conspiracy theory and made it the foundation for its soon-to-be rapid growth.
The pizza gate theory alleged that Hilary Clinton was running a child-trafficking ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Everyday words such as ‘cheese’, or ‘pizza’ were interpreted as code words related to child trafficking.
Democrats dismissed this outlandish theory, underestimating the lengths people would go to because they believed in it. After the January 2021 Capitol insurrection, they were shown otherwise. Many of the rioters in the event were part of the QAnon group and believed what they were doing would help Donald Trump win back the presidency and ultimately gain control over the U.S. again.
Over the years, former President Donald Trump fueled many of these preposterous theories with his words. In the 2016 election, he repeatedly encouraged chants of ‘lock her up’, referring to his opposition, Hilary Clinton. He has encouraged white extremists to proceed in their actions and has never openly condemned their actions. In the first of the 2020 election presidential debates, he told the white-extremist group, the ‘proud boys’ to ‘stand back and stand by.’
During his presidency, Trump has not brought back hatred, bigotry, and violence, rather he has exposed how deep those roots go. The 2021 Capitol insurrection proved that these people should never be underestimated.
In the past year, QAnon has suddenly gained a rapid number of followers, following the outbreak of COVID-19. With Trump silently supporting claims, but never outrightly, QAnon supporters started coming up with new ideas, that the virus wasn’t real, but if it was, that it was made by the ‘deep state’ in an attempt to foil Trump’s reelection campaign.
It is interesting to note that the then government supposedly supposed to defend and fight for Americans, all Americans, was doing short of nothing to declare these claims false. These claims being that the coronavirus was (and still is) a real threat; that the death toll numbers were fake; and that they had nothing to worry about. In its own way, the American government had become the cause for its own failure.
In January 2021, after seeing the damage QAnon and pro-Trump supporters could cause, social media platforms began the grand deplatforming. After restricting Trump's access to his accounts, they started going after QAnon and other such groups. Twitter permanently suspended thousands of accounts associated with the insurrection; Tiktok blocked QAnon related searches, and Facebook has removed hundreds of QAnon groups.
What’s startling is that the groups Facebook found had millions of members and followers. This begs the question of why security personnel hadn’t been able to foresee something of this extent happening. How could they not, with all this information at the fingertips, have predicted a riot.
America has had many problems that they have never seemed to be able to get rid of. However, with Joe Biden now as the 46th president, they have at least a small chance of changing. Most Americans want change, but to do so, they must go back to the very foundations upon which the United States of America was founded on and reform its policies. Only by doing this, will they get rid of QAnon and other extremists, and change for the better.
