The baseless conspiracy theory, which imagines Trump in a battle with a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex, helped drive the [January 6th] events and facilitate organized attacks.... QAnon devotees joined with extremist group members and white supremacists at the Capitol assault after finding one another on Internet sanctuaries: the conservative forums of TheDonald.win and Parler; the anonymous extremist channels of 8kun and Telegram; and the social media giants of Facebook and Twitter, which have scrambled in recent months to prevent devotees from organizing on their sites.
That has QAnon devotees as one of many sets of people who joined together. I can't tell what the proportions were or even when these sets merged into a single action. I'll read on.
QAnon didn’t fully account for the rampage, and the theory’s namesake — a top-secret government messenger of pro-Trump prophecies — has largely vanished, posting nothing in the past 35 days and only five times since Trump’s election loss....
So, there's no person called QAnon who's leading or purporting to lead any of the recent actions. We're just calling some leaderless group "QAnon devotees." Please note that I am merely interpreting sentences I'm reading in WaPo, not making any statements about anything I know or believe.
On fringe right-wing platforms and encrypted messaging apps, believers are offering increasingly outlandish theories and sharing ideas for how they can further work to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 contest — with violence, if necessary. The fervent online organizing seen ahead of last week’s assault has begun building again....
This is a frustrating read. I am searching to understand the extent to which the January 6th event was planned, and now I see that they are doing it "again," but what are they doing again? What was the organizing? I see that it was "online" and "fervent," but I don't know what they did before they showed up in person and did what they did. And how do I even know that the fervent on-line people were the same set of people who showed up in person?
[ADDED: The end of the article discusses some individuals who participated in the breach of the Capitol and who also followed QAnon theories.]
Frustratingly, this article purports to shed light on the workings of conspiracy thinking, but the article itself indulges in the mechanisms of conspiracy thinking!
Thousands more have flocked to QAnon-affiliated spaces on the private-messaging app Telegram. One 12,000-member channel was so overrun with new members that those behind the forum temporarily froze the chat feature....
Is 12,000 a big chat group? I'm willing to believe QAnon is a big and dangerous force, but this article isn't giving me enough facts. There are conspiracy theorists talking on line, and January 6th happened — connect it up!
In 2017, a writer on the anonymous message board 4chan, styling themselves as Q, wrote posts spinning a dark and cryptic fantasy — detailing how Trump was working tactically to dismantle the “deep state” cabal that controls much of the world. For years, QAnon spun a tale in the militant language of good against evil, promising that Trump, a soldier messiah, would strike down a global cabal of pedophile politicians and Satanist media elites in a day of reckoning called the “Storm.”
The siege, for some believers, was seen as that online theory coming to life....
Some believers! And who are these people? As it reads, it seems that there was some vivid conspiracy theory on line, and whatever happened on January 6th happened, and some people who believed in the conspiracy theory also believed that what happened on January 6th had to do with the conspiracy theory. That's not connecting it up! That's saying that some conspiracy theory people fit new information into their conspiracy theory. Yeah, that's how conspiracy theory people think!
Much of QAnon devotees’ energy has in recent months flooded to false allegations that Trump had been robbed of an election victory. The QAnon-boosting attorneys Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood led a failing pro-Trump attempt to overturn the election. The QAnon conversation online had pivoted from taking down a global cabal to targeting a more specific mission: “Stop the Steal.” So when Trump invited supporters to Washington for mass demonstrations on Jan. 6, the day Congress was set to certify Biden’s victory, researchers said pro-Trump agitators and QAnon believers saw it as a demand for action. “Be there,” Trump tweeted last month. “Will be wild!”
I await further investigation and hope they can be conducted with professionalism.
