After Citibank IT specialist Jason Gelinas was outed last week as operator of the main QAnon website, reporters went to his house in New Jersey hoping for a statement from him, but all they got was, “QAnon is a patriotic movement to save the country.” Such a disappointment. Wouldn’t it have been wonderfully refreshing if he’d said something like, “Yeah, easiest scam in the world, it brought in over 3K a month on Patreon. And here’s the weird thing: the nuttier the posts, the more it brought in! All legal, too!” (Gelinas is now on enforced paid leave from Citigroup pending an investigation of his moonlighting activities.)

“Behind the enemy powers, the Jew.” WW2 Nazi propaganda poster portraying Jews as engaged in An international behind-the-scenes conspiracy with the Allies, hence the British, U.S. and Russian flags. (Holocaust Memorial Museum)

In case you’ve been sensibly avoiding the news for the past two or three years, QAnon supporters are right up there with Flat Earth and Chemtrail crazies, except they tend to act out their craziness in violent ways, according to the FBI. Their beliefs are your classic “deep state” stuff, reminiscent of hundreds of years of anti-Semitic propaganda claiming that Jews covertly run the world, drinking the blood of Christian children in the process. In the case of QAnon, the world is secretly being controlled by a worldwide cabal of Satanists whose members include a network of Hollywood pedophiles who run underground camps where children are, yes, milked for blood. Fortunately for the rest of us, Donald Trump is leading the battle against the Dark Forces, having already feigned the whole Russia conspiracy in order to prevent Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros from staging a coup d’état. (Trump’s response: QAnon adherents are “people who love our country.” This, despite the FBI last year identifying the movement as a potential domestic terror threat.)

QAnon appears to be the logical successor to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory of 2016. Remember that? It culminated in a 28-year old guy from North Carolina who trusted an online site claiming that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington DC, harbored child sex slaves in its basement as part of a child-abuse ring led by, you’ve guessed it, Hillary Clinton. The kids’ would-be rescuer fired an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in the restaurant before being arrested.

The scary part of all this nonsense is how many people buy into it. According to web analytics company SimilarWeb, Qmap.pub, the main “Q drops” site (where anonymous conspiratorial memes are posted) received 10 million visitors last July. Who are these 10 million folks who are apparently willing to believe extreme and—to most of us—absurd and obviously recycled claims? Anyone with a smattering of history knows that international conspiracy theories have been around forever, in which Freemasons, Illuminati, Jews, and/or godless communists secretly run the world. These theories had a field day during the Red Scare of 1947-1957, egged on by Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Or maybe our overlords aren’t even human: shapeshifting aliens control the Earth, according to British writer David Icke. You can’t make this stuff up.)

A deep-state conspiracy theory for the ages: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903, described in detail a Jewish plan for global domination. It was soon shown to be entirely a hoax, which didn’t stop Henry Ford from arranging for half-a-million English language copies to be distributed throughout the U.S. in the 1920s. This is the title page from a 1920 Boston edition. (Wikimedia)

Since I don’t know (as far as I’m aware) any QAnon believers, I can only guess at who they are. They’re frustrated with the status quo, obviously, which puts them in line with all of us. And they’ve got to be lonely and remote, looking for some sort of human contact in their late-night forays into the darker corners of the internet. We humans are gregarious by nature, we crave socialization, we want to feel part of something greater than our immediate contacts. Which is why social networking services like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and the rest are so popular. Facebook, for example, has over 2.5 billion monthly active users—that’s one in three of everyone alive today! YouTube and WhatsApp each have over two billion.

So I’m imagining millions of anxious, socially-isolated folks, having lost their trust in the government or any sort of moral leadership, checking QAnon and other weird conspiracy sites and finding solace in simple good-versus-evil paradigms which explain the confusion and chaos of our world. Forget evidence! Any reports to the contrary—including this one—can be easily written off as, “Well, obviously, you’re part of it!” Such is the nature of groupthink conspiracy theories. Which, as I see it, puts believers firmly in the role of gullible victims, rather than brave souls who have seen the light.