For most of the Trump era, the delusional conspiracy creed that goes by the name QAnon—after the online alias of a supposed highly placed federal government official poised to expose and punish lurid forms of child sexual exploitation at the summit of deep-state power—seemed like an extremist fringe tendency on the American right. The unhinged transports of the QAnon faithful seemed more than a little reminiscent of the nineteenth-century moral panics over imaginary violent and sexual trespasses alleged to take place behind the walls of Catholic convents and abbeys—a collective Protestant hallucination that crested with the rise of the anti-immigration Know Nothing movement.
 
But what’s different about QAnon—which spurred its latest bout of online mania this month with invented tales of the furniture retail giant Wayfair allegedly transporting children marked for sexual slavery in pricey armoires and cabinets—is its proximity to institutional power and to allied crusades against sex trafficking across the political spectrum that often trade in similar fabrications. As New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant observes, QAnon has quietly set up shop in some of the most influential reaches of American life, including the White House. And this means, in turn, that the QAnon movement’s trademark paranoia and penchant for vigilante violence are increasingly common motifs in the rhetoric—and actions—of the Trumpian right:

The Wayfair meme was perfect for QAnon, driven as the movement is by people who believe they possess secret knowledge about how “elites” are buying, selling, abusing, and even devouring children. If you believe that, it’s not much of a leap to imagine that child trafficking is taking place inside an overpriced armoire. The danger escalates with the next logical leap: If that’s what the powerful are doing, what wouldn’t be justified in challenging them? QAnon has inspired its adherents to plot kidnapping “raids,” stage a standoff with an armored vehicle at the Hoover Dam, and attempt a citizen’s arrest that ended with a killing. The FBI’s Phoenix field office issued a memo last year about QAnon posing a potential domestic terrorist threat. None of this has kept QAnon isolated on the fringes; in fact, the group is now becoming a force in what passes for the mainstream of American politics.

Indeed, some 59 GOP congressional candidates professing QAnon sympathies have amassed more than 600,000 votes, according to a recent Washington Post study; Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn has taken a public pledge to the QAnon cause; and President Trump has signaled his own support for the movement by taking to Twitter with Q-themed messaging and hashtags.
 
Political observers might shrug off such appeals as part of the president’s increasingly desperate, scattershot effort to energize his base with any and all culture warfare that distracts attention from a raging pandemic, a tanking economy, and a mass movement for racial justice. But the real appeal of such messaging keys into far deeper and distressing currents of belief among the hard-line movement faithful. As journalists Jeff Sharlet and Adrienne LaFrance have argued, QAnon is an extension of long-standing obsessions that have convulsed the modern evangelical right. By tapping into a theology of unappeasable cultural evil on the left, QAnon serves to validate the crusading virtues evangelical culture warriors bring to electoral battles about a vast range of policy issues.
 
The Q worldview also importantly treats believers as initiates to a powerful strain of true understanding available only to a spiritual elect—a belief system that structurally echoes the speculations of first-century Christian gnostics, as Sharlet has argued. Scholars of Gnosticism have referred to it as a theology of power—and to judge by QAnon’s growing clout within the conservative movement, the stuff of persecution fantasy may well pay material dividends heretofore undreamt of in the realm of worldly power. QAnon may already be far afield from consensual reality, but that’s also long been true of the president who coyly promotes the movement’s message online. After all, evangelical culture warriors profess their allegiance to a God for whom all things are possible—even the mobilization of a major political party behind Know Nothing fantasies of gothic victimization and persecution.

—Chris Lehmann, editor