Mia Bloom - Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of Qanon

PASTELS and PEDOPHILES

INSIDE THE MIND OF QANON

Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

REDWOOD PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2021 by Mia M. Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 9781503630291 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503630611 (ebook)

Cover photograph: Evelyn Hockstein
Cover design: Rob Ehle

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the brainchild of the director of Stanford University Press, Alan Harvey. After eight months of trying to solicit a manuscript about QAnon and either getting no response from journalists covering the Q beat (whom IMiawill not name, but you know who you are) or being ghosted by a prospective author, Alan joked that at this point I probably knew enough about QAnon to write a book myself.

He was half right. Having the opportunity to work with the most brilliant psychologist on radicalization, Dr. Sophia Moskalenko, allowed us to get this book finished in record time. We both thank SUP for turning this manuscript around so quickly. Thank you, Alan Harvey, Caroline McKusick, Tim Roberts, and Jennifer Gordon for your helpful insights and editing.

I want to thank my colleagues in the Department of Criminology at Georgia State University and especially Volkan Topalli and David Maimon at the Evidence-Based Cybersecurity Research Group, whose access to the dark net allowed us to glean unique insights for this book.

We are beholden to the Minerva Research Initiative, and especially to David Montgomery, Rebecca Goolsby, Harold Hawkins, and Toni Haynes. My ability to write and conduct new research is directly correlated to the fact that Minervas 12-plus years of support has reduced my teaching load, allowing me to focus more on research than teaching. This research was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research Grant #13275485SC1000013887. We do not represent the Department of the Navy or the Minerva Research Initiative; any mistakes or errors are exclusively our own.

The GSU grad students working on the project have been extremely helpful, and while we thank all of them, two in particular deserve special mention: Kristian Warpinski created graphic representations to help shape the models for becoming involved with and exiting QAnon; and Bhashithe Abeysinghe, in response to a text message late one Saturday night, was able to scrape almost all of Parler before Amazon stopped web hostinggenerating a database of materials that scholars will be able to use in the future. We thank Cynthia Miller-Idriss for her support and endorsement of this project.

Having to explain the addictive qualities of conspiratorial thinking to my seminar students forced me to articulate convoluted and complex processes in a digestible fashion. To that end I also owe Kari Pricher, Sophie Varon, Susan Chun, Jennifer Griffiths, and Danelle Garcia a debt of gratitude for allowing us the opportunity to present this research to a massive audienceand, to Anderson Cooper, for being as obsessed with QAnon as it is with him.

I, Sophia, would like to thank: Mia Bloom, for setting me up on a blind date with an idea that I ended up falling in love with; Alan Harvey, for his visionary support for this project; Isabelle, Kai, and Erik, for putting up with Mom writing day and night for a few weeks; Kristian Warpinski, for giving my graphic ideas a digital form; Caroline McKusick and Jennifer Gordon, for helping to make the book a much smoother read; Tim Roberts, for keeping this unusually brisk production organized and streamlined.

Last, but not least, we thank our friends and their spouses for their friendship and encouragement.

We dedicate this book to Albus, Margosha, and Mimi.

Mia Bloom

Sophia Moskalenko

CHAPTER 1

LOONY LIES AND CONSPIRACIES

Making Sense of QAnon

Background and Context

The screen is dark with eerie music playing in the background. The music reaches a crescendo, and a flaming Q appears as a deep voice reveals, 8 million children are missing! According to the video, the children are being bred specifically for their blood and body parts, they are missing birth certificates so there is no way to trace them, and our (U.S.) government is doing nothing about itin fact they are participating in the blood lust. The only person on the planet, who can save the children, is Donald John Trump.

Welcome to the universe of QAnon.

QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory from the darkest underbelly of the Internet. Named after the Department of Energys highest level of security clearance, a Q clearance is related to access to nuclear weapons designs but not to other national security concerns.

QAnon burst onto the scene in October 2017 with predictions that the National Guard was about to arrest Hillary Clinton. On October 28, an anonymous user browsing the /pol/section of 4chan, a notorious alt-right imageboard, saw a post that read, Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM8:30 AM EST on Mondaythe morning on Oct 30, 2017. This user would later adopt the name Q Clearance Patriot (shortened to Q). Q hinted that they were a military officer in former President Trumps inner circle; their writingsalmost 5,000gave birth to the QAnon conspiracy theory.

This original Q post was on the 4chan site, which was launched in 2003. There have been several chans, including 2chan, 4chan, and 8chan. Historically, the chans, which originated in Asia, were the purview of involuntary celibates (incels), anarchists, and nihilists before spreading to the United States. The 4chan site hosts discussion boards dedicated to different topics, from anime and manga to video games and porn.

As QAnon evolved, it moved from 4chan to other social media platforms, and its messages spread to Facebook, Instagram, Parler, TikTok, and even to Nextdoor and Peloton. In a short four years, QAnon metastasized from a fringe movement on anonymous message boards into a cultlike movement, with millions of followers around the worldone that has captured the imagination and practically seized control of the Republican Party. More surprisingly, it has ensnared many women, causing incalculable damage to families and resulted in murders, kidnappings, and intense partisanship in U.S. politics, as you will read in this book.

David Gilbert from Vice News explained that:

QAnon followers come from all walks of lifethey are liberals, conservatives, PhDs, lawyers, doctors. There are highly educated people that fall into these movements and it is dangerous and remiss to pigeon-hole QAnon followers according to educational attainment or social status.

Marc-Andr Argentino, a PhD candidate from Montreal who studies the conspiracy, criticized the Democratic National Committee when they launched a $500,000 ad campaign in February 2021 that offered the GOP a choice between being the party of QAnon or appealing to college educated voters. Argentino insisted that QAnon comprises people of all educational levels, and he railed on Twitter: Can we stop saying these are uneducated people, that they are crazy and wear tinfoil hats?

The increasing number of people who believe in QAnon and the range of socioeconomic and educational strata to which it appeals mean that it is highly likely someone in your family or among your friends believes that QAnon is real.