QAnon and On

Van Badham's timely and horrifying book is subtitled A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults (at nearly 500 pages, it's not that short, actually, though it is extremely readable). To research QAnon and On, Badham did a deep dive into the dark corners of the internet, and she's painstakingly traced the shadowy origins and bewildering proliferation of online conspiracy theories. I was vaguely aware of something called Pizzagate, Gamergate and that Q was some kind of (probably imaginary) evil mastermind who whipped his followers into frenzies, but seeing the detailed timeline spelled out clearly was indeed shocking and disturbing. 

Perhaps the culmination of conspiracy thinking was the January 6th assault on the White House during which several police and protesters died. It's hard to unpack exactly how much Trump was responding to online calls for action from the likes of Q, and how much he was encouraging them -- perhaps it doesn't matter, because the end result is a tangle of hydra-headed and self-reinforcing spiral of lies and panic. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect is how quickly someone can be sucked into the quicksand of delusional belief, and how eager they can be to act on it: Badham outlines some tragic cases. There was the man who turned up at an innocent but demonised pizza restaurant, heavily armed and ready to rescue the children he was convinced were being held captive there. There was the woman who marched on the Capitol to support Trump and ended by losing her life.

Badham's advice for those who have lost loved ones down internet rabbit holes is to not break contact with them, however tempting that might seem, but to remain connected and gently remind them that there is a world beyond the closed universe of conspiracy message boards. One might even call it the real world.