I’m going to be dreadfully frank here and acknowledge that my knowledge of the QAnon movement has mostly been limited. I’ve been aware but not fully aware, but after yesterday I have a much wider scope of knowledge than before.
Yesterday I went for a stroll in Prospect Park and decidedly found myself in a conversation with a young woman after she stopped one of my reporters and asked if he’d be willing to shoot for her upcoming project. Unknowing to either of us, as it turns out, she was a supporter of the otherwise controversial and widely panned conspiracy theory aka the QAnon movement.
According to The Conversation, the QAnon movement is almost like a new form of alt-right religion. The faction, if you will, believes in otherwise fairly dangerous conspiracy theories that involve Donald Trump; the “Deep-State”, and the Demoncrats (aka the Democrats as they’re often referred to by the extreme alt-right crowd.)
While she appeared to be a fairly pleasant young lady — it struck me that her conversation began with: “Hi, I need to know if you’d be willing to shoot (he had a camera) my project next week?.”
Before it transformed into: The government is trying to take over our liberties and civil rights by using drones and this virus as means to transform the world in which we live in. There’s no need for masks; there’s no need for social distancing, this is a movement to take over the world. I want Trump to continue to do his great work, but Cuomo is trying to stop that.”
Puzzled the conversation continued before she offered to pay the photographer to actually do the job. I thought it was the most interesting conversation I’ve heard in a while — because for roughly 15 minutes we managed to get fairly deep into the mind of one of the most controversial movements in modern day.
It’s interesting that people believe that the virus doesn’t exist and that it instead is an attempt to take over the world and implant people with a contact tracing app or else. Weirdly enough, somehow 5G came into the conversation even though I didn’t quite understand the correlation between 5G and the Coronavirus.
In our next series, we’ll actually be exploring the rise of the QAnon movement now that a candidate for public office who openly supports said movement appears to have gained serious traction in the U.S.
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