By Jim Geraghty
Monday, January 18, 2021
Friday afternoon, I wrote a Corner
post noting that the Trump-directed sweeping roundup of celebrity and
politician human traffickers promised by the “Q” of QAnon has not occurred and
does not appear likely to occur before the end of Trump’s presidency Wednesday.
This post stirred a surprising number of angry responses.
“Why are you obsessed
with QAnon?” This is, I think, the second or third time I’ve ever written
about it; the QAnon conspiracy theory has been around since 2017. For certain
folks, any attention paid to a topic they dislike is too much attention.
This is America, the First Amendment is still there, and
you’re free to believe in any nutty idea you like and free to speak about any
belief you like. The problem starts when those beliefs stir individuals to take
actions that harm other people.
The animating belief of the mob that took over Capitol
Hill — “a conspiracy of sinister elites stole election victory from Donald
Trump, Mike Pence can stop it but refuses, and only we and the president can
reverse this epic injustice”— overlaps quite a bit with the QAnon one — “a
conspiracy of sinister and Satanic elites is involved in child sex trafficking,
other government officials can stop it but refuse to do so, and only we and the
president can stop this epic crime.”
The guy in the buffalo hat and face paint, Jacob
Chansley, goes by the nickname “QAnon Shaman.” (His lawyer
says he’s hoping for a presidential pardon.) The AP
“reviewed social media posts, voter registrations, court files and other
public records for more than 120 people either facing criminal charges related
to the Jan. 6 unrest or who, going maskless amid the pandemic, were later
identified through photographs and videos taken during the melee” and found
“QAnon beliefs were common among those who heeded Trump’s call to come to
Washington.”
One of the objections to that Corner post was “paying
attention to this is a waste of time.”
Unfortunately, the QAnon conspiracy theory and its believers are now
consequential.
If ignoring strange beliefs would make them go away and
ensure that no one ever acted upon them in a way that harms others, we would be
on easy street. Alas, ignoring crazy or extreme beliefs does not make them go
away, and does not ensure that those believers will act in a way that does not
endanger others.
Recent years have demonstrated to us that no matter how
nutty you think an idea or claim is, somebody out there not only believes it,
but also that person is probably willing to do something terrible and violent
over it. The Nashville bomber believed
in “lizard people.” The man who killed worshippers at the Tree of Life
Synagogue in Pittsburgh believed
that Jews and George Soros were helping migrant caravans in Mexico. The
gun-toting delusional guy who barged into Comet
Ping Pong pizza was a Pizzagate believer. This predates the Trump era; in
2016, the FBI arrested
and indicted a Milwaukee man who was planning a mass shooting at a Masonic
Temple, believing that the Freemasons “are playing with the world like a game.”
But we have crossed a line from lone paranoid nuts to
larger groups, who are starting to communicate with each other, all with an
interconnected belief system. A recent
Yahoo article quoted Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser to the
president of the RAND Corporation and author of numerous books, reports and
articles on terrorism:
. . . the people behind Jan. 6,
2021, mobilized right-wing extremists of every stripe — white supremacists,
neo-Nazis, QAnon, anti-Semites, antigovernment militias, xenophobes,
anti-feminists — and brought them together as a movement in what amounted to a
Woodstock festival for extremists.
What was the name of the 2017 Charlottesville rally that
turned violent? “Unite the Right,” and it included white
nationalists, Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, alt-right true
believers, militia members, and seemingly every other variant of repugnant
anti-constitutionalist hatred.
The thing is, it’s not merely supporting Donald Trump
that makes someone want to charge Capitol Hill and physically
assault a police officer with a “thin blue line” flag. A lot of people who
want to villainize anyone to the right of the Brookings Institution will want
to blur the line between “QAnon Shaman” and any registered Republican, or
anyone who criticizes a Democrat.
But other people’s bad-faith efforts to obscure the
difference between a Republican and an anti-constitutional extremist only
increases our responsibility to draw those distinctions.
Some not-small chunk of the hardest of the hardline crowd
wants to shoot up Congress because our legislative branch will not submit to
their will. They’re trying to influence how lawmakers vote by threatening to
kill them and their families. That’s a parallel to jihadism, and a giant,
honking consequential short-term and long-term problem.
The long climb out of the economic pit created by the
pandemic is a big and pressing problem, as are Big Tech’s inconsistent rules of
acceptable discourse, and appetite to censor, along with the national debt, the
continued aggression of China, the plight of addiction, and I’m sure you can
think of others. But we must confront the possibility that after the pandemic —
which, by the way, isn’t over, and is in fact getting worse, as the
more-contagious strains spread faster than our ability to vaccinate people —
the single biggest and most pressing problem facing the country right now is
the proliferation of extremist ideologies that spur adherents to violence —
QAnon, the Proud Boys, Boogaloo, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and the rest
turning into our own homegrown terror equivalent of al-Qaeda. Antifa will offer
its own counterpart threat from the far left. Their ideologies and worldviews
may differ, but their methods are all violent.
Does the notion of a homegrown al-Qaeda seem overheated?
Maybe. But some
people who fought al-Qaeda for a living aren’t so sure.
Retired Army Gen. Stanley
McChrystal was formerly the head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq
and the commander of all U.S. and allied troops fighting the Taliban and
al-Qaida in Afghanistan. “I did see a similar dynamic in the evolution of
al-Qaida in Iraq, where a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor
prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to
a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their
violence. This is now happening in America,” McChrystal told Yahoo News.
A radical group of citizens have
adopted a very hardline view of the country, he noted, that echoes the Lost
Cause narrative that took root in the old South after the Civil War. “Only
President Trump has updated Lost Cause with his ‘Stop the Steal’ narrative that
they lost because of a stolen election, and that is the only thing holding
these people down and stopping them from assuming their rightful place in
society,” McChrystal said. “That gives them legitimacy to become even more
radical. I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and
facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.”
McChrystal’s closing comment in that article is, “Even if
Trump exits the scene, the radical movement he helped create has its own
momentum and cohesion now, and they may find they don’t need Trump anymore.
They can just wait for another charismatic leader to appear. So the fabric of
something very dangerous has been woven, and it’s further along than most
Americans care to admit.”
The Capitol Hill riot might turn out to be akin to
Oklahoma City bombing, or the Columbine shooting. Ironically, Oklahoma City
represents the better scenario.
Timothy McVeigh ended up discrediting the militia
movement he supported, because he transformed their image from one that some
Americans might agree with — “we are men who are angry with the government
and contend it does not respect our Constitutional rights” — to “we are
men who blow up buildings with day care centers and kill children.”
Thankfully, there’s already some evidence that the extremist groups are
starting to fracture; apparently
the QAnon stuff is too crazy for the other groups. Demonstrations at
state capitols were pretty minimal this weekend.
But Columbine inspired one
copycat after another; it represented a dangerous national ideation. To a
certain type of angry, isolated, alienated teenager or young adult, a mass
shooting was how they were supposed to express their rage.
Sooner or later, Congress is going to contemplate passing
some sort of legislation that will be deeply divisive and controversial. Will
the next group of angry extremists decide that the best way to stop Congress
from passing legislation they oppose it to gather thousands and attack the
Capitol building?
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