Foreign powers have intensified QAnon conspiracies to sow discord in the US

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This week, a House Select Committee began investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Many police officers like Sgt. Aquilino Gonell bore their testimony.

“I feel a loss of oxygen and I remember thinking to myself,‘ This is how I’m going to die, defending this entrance, ’” he said.

Some of the rioters that Gonell and other officials at Capitolwere QAnon fought were followers who subscribed to the conspiracy theory that claimed Donald Trump as a kind of savior who would defeat the pedophiles that Satan worships in so -called “deep state.”

Related: QAnonand the storm of the US Capitol: The offline impact of online conspiracy theories

Author Mia Bloom studies extremism and terrorism. The latest book, “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon,” is about the rise of this group, with co-author Sophia Moskalenko.

Related: Parler brings together millions of Trump supporters

Bloom joined The World host Marco Werman to discuss the rise of QAnon and its international reach.

Marco Werman: I think everyone hears about QAnon. But in short, what is it? How did it start? How big?

Mia Bloom: QAnon is one of the irrelevant conspiracy theories that started under the bottom of the internet, and the main premise of QAnon is regime and recycled anti-Semitic tropes, conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church , and the world is controlled by this global cabal of mostly Democrats, but also Hollywood elites who trade in children. They rape children, and then they drink their blood. And for the longest time, it’s a fringe movement. And then suddenly, in March 2020, we saw a 600% increase in the number of people joining message boards, Facebook groups, Twitter. And so, there was a massive increase. So now, instead of it being a fringe movement, what we have is up to 30 million Americans believe that there is a running blood cabal running things.

What happened to QAnon after former President Trump lost the election?

On the one hand, we have some people who are extremely depressed. We have others who still maintain hope that things will work out, that the election results will be reversed. And then, there’s a third category we’re talking about in our book, “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon,” that I wrote to Sophia Moskalenko, where they actually outright denied everything that happened. The election was stolen. And so, we see QAnon’s transition from talking about the cabal drinking the blood of pedophiles to Dominion vote machines. Here we see the forerunner of what will happen on January 6th.

Was there an original author of QAnon or was it grown organically?

Studies have been done to look at the “Q-drop” and there are nearly 5,000. And what happens is that over a period of time, the grammar changes, the spelling changes, the use of capital letters changes. There are so many variations that if you are someone who is learning language style, it will be obvious that it is not the same person all the time.

What is Q-drop?

So, Q-drops are the cryptic messages that were originally left on message boards, first 4chan and then 8chan. But this is usually just in many ways a puzzle. The reason why it is so important is because these Q-drops encourage people to do their own research. People are absolutely not told what to think. They knew it for themselves. But those Q-drops were preceded by leading to a specific conclusion. And so, here goes the psychology of QAnoncome. As people thought for themselves, they were very happy with themselves. They are very smart. And then, only they can see and imagine it. And then also, it inspires the almost natural instinct that now I have to tell everyone and all my friends that I have met and I will share it.

Let’s talk about January 6, the focus of the hearings in Congress. What was the role of QAnon in the uprising?

We watch the insurrection on a live feed in real-time. And the people who are QAnon supporters are really easy to choose from the crowd because they will have a giant Q flag or they may even wear a “Q” on their chest. And you also have, you know, this well -known figure, Jake Chansley, known as the Q Shaman, you know, with face paint and horns and body tattoos. True, I think, there is a perception that this rebellion is exclusively a QAnon uprising when in fact, the QAnon people seem to have combined the crowd, but the most dangerous elements in January 6 are groups we know, this militia groups, Keeper of the Oath, Boogaloo, Three Percent, KKK, Patriot Front. We don’t see most people believing in QAnon as the equivalent of ISIS. But whether someone is a neo-Nazi or a Patriot Front or an Oath Keeper or Three Percenter, they are dangerous. If they believe in QAnon, then there is the problem.

QAnon is also of interest to us because it looks like there are some international connections. The Soufan Group, which looks at extremism and global security, they released a report that pointed to Russia and China as QAnon weapons, whose two governments use social media to sow discord among Americans. Do foreign powers have a responsibility to create QAnon or allow it to grow?

Absolutely And in fact, in the book, we discussed and spelled out how in the beginning, in October of 2017, when you started to have people like Tracy Diaz, or known as “Tracy Beanz,” who posted about on QAnon on his YouTube channel, he’ll take that Q-drop and walk the viewer through how to figure out what the Q-drop means, connecting to either something Donald Trump said or something that he tweeted. We know that Russian accounts, the internet research agency that was heavily involved in the 2016 election, they reinforced that content. And now, Russia and China also have problems with QAnon. And so, almost one of the ironies is that while Russia tried to magnify it, now they themselves must deal with it.

So, you say that there are QAnon followers in Russia and China. Are they threatening the authority there?

Thus, QAnon has followers in 85 different countries. And what’s unique about QAnon is the flexibility to be in a new environment and take in a lot of local flavor. There is QAnon in China, there is QAnon in Russia. When they arrive in a foreign place, they connect with local groups. So, for example, in France, they allied with the Yellow Jackets movement. In the United Kingdom, they are connected to Brexit. We even have QAnon trying to make in-roads into Israel. And there are a number of Hebrew-language QAnon channels, which is very funny and interesting because QAnon is really anti-Semitic.

Who else in the world believes this? I mean, supporters of Yellow Vesters and Brexit. Why?

You know, we said in the book and how weird it is for countries that we often assume, if not anti-American, maybe neutral, they still love Donald Trump. And so you can see Trump’s signs at QAnon anti-vaccine demonstrations in Greece, or in France, or in the UK, and it’s a little scratcher.

This lecture has been edited and expanded for clarity.

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