Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
313
result(s) for
"QAnon "conspiracy""
Sort by:
The other pandemic : how QAnon contaminated the world
Imagine a deadly pathogen that, once created, could infect any person in any part of the globe within seconds. No need to wait for travellers, trains, or air traffic to spread it, all you need is an internet connection. In this investigation, Pulitzer Prize winner James Ball decodes the cryptic language of the online right and with a surgeon's precision tracks the spread of QAnon, the world's first digital pandemic. QAnon began as an internet community dedicated to supporting President Trump and intent on outing a global cabal of human traffickers. A short, cryptic message posted by an anonymous user to a niche internet forum in 2017 was the spark that ignited a global movement. What started as a macabre game of virtual make-believe quickly spiralled into the spread of virulently hateful, dangerous messaging - which turned into tragic, violent actions.
BOOK
Pastels and pedophiles : inside the mind of QAnon
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK / TOP 10 RECOMMENDED READ
Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity.
In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as \"Q\" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of \"pastel QAnon,\" answering the call to \"save the children.\"
With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.
Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.
Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.
eBook
Christian Nationalism and Political Violence: Victimhood, Racial Identity, Conspiracy, and Support for the Capitol Attacks
What explains popular support for political violence in the contemporary United States, particularly the anti-institutional mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol in January 2021? Recent scholarship gives reason to suspect that a constellation of beliefs known as “Christian nationalism” may be associated with support for such violence. We build on this work, arguing that religious ideologies like Christian nationalism should be associated with support for violence, conditional on several individual characteristics that can be inflamed by elite cues. We turn to three such factors long-studied by scholars of political violence: perceived victimhood, reinforcing racial and religious identities, and support for conspiratorial information sources. Each can be exacerbated by elite cues, thus translating individual beliefs in Christian nationalism into support for political violence. We test this approach with original survey data collected in the wake of the Capitol attacks. We find that all the identified factors are positively related to each other and support for the Capitol riot; moreover, the relationship between Christian nationalism and support for political violence is sharply conditioned by white identity, perceived victimhood, and support for the QAnon movement. These results suggest that religion’s role in contemporary right-wing violence is embedded with non-religious factors that deserve further scholarly attention in making sense of support for political violence.
Journal Article
A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins of QAnon on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board and its initial reception as a potential LARP, we analyze it as an instance of participatory online play that fosters deep engagement above all. Drawing on concepts from play and performance studies, we theorize the dynamics by which QAnon developed into an influential conspiracy narrative as instances of “conspiracy fictioning.” In particular, we revive the notion of hyperstition to make sense of how such conspiracy fictionings work to recursively “bootstrap” their own alternate realities into existence. By thus exploring the participatory and playful engagement mechanisms that drive today’s conspiracy movements, we aim to elucidate the epistemological and socio-political dynamics that mark the growing entanglement of play and politics, fact and fiction in society.
Journal Article
A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization
Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.
Journal Article
The Religious Genesis of Conspiracy Theories and Their Consequences for Democracy and Religion: The Case of QAnon
Here, we will approach Conspiracy Theories (CTs) and, specifically, QAnon following the three traditional sociological fields of research. After an introduction in which we contextualise CDTs socially, culturally, economically and politically and in which we establish a conceptual map of what they mean, on the historical level (1), we will clarify their religious genesis, through the main analogies between them, magic and religion and their practices and rituals, as well as the conversion of conspiratorial agents into social agents of a religious nature. On the analytical side (2), we will deal with the QAnon belief system. Finally (3), from a critical perspective, we will describe the causes and harmful consequences of QAnon, both for religious sentiment itself and for democracy. We will conclude by pointing out that QAnon affects the coherence and stability of religious beliefs and democracy; in fact, it can be seen as libertarian authoritarianism and populism, advocating a sick freedom, the ultimate expression of the modern feeling of individual powerlessness and of a Modernity that has failed to deliver on its promises.
Journal Article
German Corona Protest Mobilizers on Telegram and Their Relations to the Far Right: A Network and Topic Analysis
The Querdenken movement, the leading force behind German corona protests, is suspected of being a gateway to far-right attitudes due to radicalizing inward-oriented communication on Telegram. To investigate potential connections of this movement to the far right and alternative media—and to explore key topics of the Querdenken network over time—we analyzed 6,294,955 messages from 578 public Telegram channels via network analysis and structural topic modeling. This analysis revealed that Querdenken’s subcommunities preferably forward content from far-right and QAnon communities, while far-right and conspiracy theorist alternative media channels act as content distributors for the movement. Four main topics appeared in the Querdenken network with varying prevalence over time and across different communities: promotion, QAnon, right-wing populism, and COVID-19 conspiracy theories. Our results highlight potential directions for future research and practical implications, for example, that political decision makers should account for the increasing influence of the QAnon movement on Querdenken mobilizers’ Telegram activity.
Journal Article
Evangelical Identity and QAnon
The presidency of Donald Trump saw the rise of a new kind of conspiracy in QAnon. The internet-assembled meta-conspiracy has grown to include elements of other growing conspiracies such as the anti-mask movement and anti-vaxxers. As it has grown, QAnon has attracted significant support for its beliefs from white evangelicals who also supported Trump in huge numbers in both 2016 and 2020. In this integrative review of literature, I explore the reasons that QAnon has performed so well so quickly, finding justification for conspiracy theory support among evangelicals in the theory of cognitive dissonance. QAnon has found a foothold in evangelical circles during worldwide pandemic, which has left many evangelicals unmoored from their spiritual family and susceptible to other realms of community online. The conspiracy theory has infiltrated evangelicalism by using the language and concerns of Christianity in its messaging and by attempting to justify evangelical support of Donald Trump. Although traditional media are quick to point out the theory’s inconsistencies and failed prophecies, this paper finds that the harm QAnon has done to the evangelical community may only be undone through spiritual connection and practice.
Journal Article
CueAnon: What QAnon Signals About Congressional Candidates and What it Costs Them
Most research investigates why the public embraces conspiracy theories, but few studies empirically examine how Americans evaluate the politicians who do. We argued that politicians portrayed as supporting QAnon would garner negative mainstream media attention, but this coverage could increase their name recognition and signal positive attributes to voters with low trust in media who would feel warmer toward those candidates. Although we confirm that candidates friendly toward QAnon receive more negative media coverage, our nationally-representative vignette experiment reveals that QAnon support decreases favorability toward candidates, even among seemingly sympathetic sub-populations. A follow-up conjoint experiment, varying whether candidates support QAnon, replicates these findings. This paper is one of the first to highlight the potential costs of elite conspiracy theory support and complicates popular narratives about QAnon.
Journal Article