The fi rst thing to say about QAnon is that you might well have heard of it. Pronounced “Q-anon,” it is a conspiracy you’d expect to be confi ned to the wilder fringes of the internet-claiming elite fi gures in politics, business and the media are Satanic paedophiles overseeing a global child traffi cking ring, while pulling strings that enable them to run the world.
This being the 2020s, however, QAnon is not purely an internet phenomenon but an idea with a toe-hold in the US Congress, and likely inspired a slogan recently used by the Texas GOP: “We are the storm.”
In QAnon parlance, “the storm” is an imagined reckoning against “deep state” paedophiles. Trump, according to the creed, secretly waged war against the cabal while president. The theory mutates, with believers spreading disinformation about Black Lives Matter, the pandemic and the US election-fuelling the Capitol riot, where believers present included the “QAnon Shaman,” complete with face paint and Viking horns, who sat in speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair