Q-Anon, and the Discursive Production of Influence
Grayson Kelly
FA-20
Grayson C. Kelly
Professor Boyd
10/23/2020
QAnon and the Discursive Production of Influence
Earlier this March, Utah-based “fashion, beauty, and parenting influencer” Jalynn Schroeder posted a meme to her 50 thousand Instagram followers that simply read, “SHOW UP EVERY DAY FOR SOMETHING YOU BELIEVE IN.” To the common Instagram user, the rose-gold square--appropriately tinted to fit in with Schroeder’s visually pleasing blush Instagram aesthetic--would present as another trite but earnest inspirational quote; a commonplace, cut-and-dried platitudinal adage serving little to no purpose, other than to garner mindless double-taps from followers. “Showing up”--a popular notion or perhaps maxim among the type of millennial who reads self-help books and goes to wellness retreats and drinks celery juice--doesn’t really mean anything at face value. “Even if people do not exactly know how to show up every day for something they believe in--” Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote for The Atlantic, “the basic spirit of the message is blandly uplifting for a millisecond during a bleary-eyed morning scroll through the feed.” While the image was irreproachable enough, Schroeder’s caption and the hashtags she wrote below the image proved to be more nefarious, miring her post in a sludge of conspiratorial theory: “##WWG1WGA #thegreatawakening #greatawakening #standout #wakeup #awakening #belief #abetterworld.”
Hashtags like “#WWG1WGA”--“where we go one, we go all”-- and “#thegreatawakening”--are social media initialisms commonly used by adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory. In her piece for The Atlantic, Tiffany wrote that “QAnon is flexible and convoluted, but generally posits that Donald Trump is locked in a battle with the ‘deep state,’” and is attempting to bring down a global cabal of “pedophiles and child traffickers that counts various high profile politicians and celebrities as co-conspirators.” (Tiffany) In a bizarre 14-minute Instagram video posted in March, Schroeder proudly recounted how the video indoctrinated her with the QAnon ideology: “I’m not a political person and I don’t get into those kinds of discussions,” Schroeder began with, “I’m going to call myself an Instagram friend or unlikely messenger. I’d definitely call myself an unlikely messenger because this isn’t what my platform has been about.” Schroeder details how a friend sent her an Instagram video--one that she initially dismissed as “crazy,”--but that stuck in the back of her mind for weeks after watching it. She began to become bothered by what she’d heard and seen in the video, so she decided to do her own research into QAnon and the global cabal it so adamantly aims to expose. Noting the power of her platform-- “I’m a mama of two, I have a lot of mamas following me”--Schroeder said that while the information she learned was “very hard to digest,” she’s ultimately grateful for the “truth.” “I’ve never felt more peace.”
Schroeder’s post, nestled between carefully curated photos of manicures, yoga poses, mommy-and-me matching outfits, and even gummy vitamin spon-con (sponsored content), is just one example of how the fringe, right-wing conspiracy theory has made its way from the darkest corners of the internet into the mainstream. According to an article in Political Research Quarterly, “recent polls show that conspiratorial beliefs are not only common, but that most Americans believe in one conspiracy theory or another.” (Uscinski et al., 57) Uscinski et al., who aimed to answer the question about why it is that people believe in conspiracies, first suggest drawing on traditional theories of public opinion that incorporate predispositions into explanations of information reception. “Every opinion is a marriage of information and predisposition: information to form a mental picture of the given issue, and predisposition to motivate some conclusion about it.” (Uscinski et al., 57) This idea is a means of digital meaning-making and knowledge production, something Gounari wrote about in Rethinking Critical Literacy. Gounari cited Henry Giroux, who said that “texts of numerous types now operate within global cultures of circulation offering new discursive forms, modes of literacy, and types of interaction.” (149) Gounari proposes a “global critical reading of virtual spaces”--like the ones that have enabled QAnon ideas to spread to people like Schroeder-- “as sites of public pedagogy with emerging new literacy perspectives” that could “shed light on both the limitations and the possibilities concerning agency, meaning-making, and identity formations in a globalization of virtual and real cultures characterized by enormous contradictions.” (149) Gounari wrote that in these online spaces, “individuals negotiate meaning, forms of knowledge and discourse, develop multiple identities, and are socialized in new discursive and material communities that galvanize specific histories, ideologies, and knowledge.” (151) This is the place where critical literacy and American beliefs in online-based, fringe conspiracy theories intersect, and highlights what needs to be examined deeper: the discursive production of influence.
These days, influence--especially that on social media--is a currency. Online “influencer culture” is not just online, anymore, and is inextricably tied to consumerism and the rise of technology. In her piece for The Atlantic, Tiffany noted that Instagram, “famous for aspiration and tranquil luxury, has become a home for paranoid thinking just like everywhere else online: influencers are mixing virulent distrust of the media and religious gratitude toward QAnon with sponsored posts for cool-girl clothing brands and beauty products.” Gounari wrote about how the internet and virtual spaces, like Instagram, need to be understood as sites of public pedagogy. In a different article for The Atlantic, writer Adrienne LaFrance has a similar view of just how pedagogical virtual spaces can be, noting that while the power of the internet was understood early on, “the full nature of that power--its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process--was not.” (LaFrance) Gounari pointed out that “texts, as social products and cultural products”--(for example, the video that indoctrinated Schroeder)--“can travel in milliseconds from one part of the planet to another and reach an unprecedented number of people.” (149) The internet enables anyone to reach masses of people at a scale previously thought impossible, and the “warping of shared reality” by conspiratorial beliefs that LaFrance mentioned is what leads to their real-life consequences. Take, for example, when a man showed up to a Washington D.C. pizza shop with an AR-15 in 2016 and fired three rounds inside the building. Radicalized on online forums, the man espoused beliefs linked to QAnon and said that he wanted to “self-investigate.” The warping of reality offers “the promise of a Great Awakening,”--think back to Schroeder’s hashtag #thegreatawakening--“in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed.”
Gounari wrote that it is unavoidable that “‘literacies’ in this new space create new forms of ‘illiteracies’ to which they are always dialectically situated.” (151) She also noted that online, “people use their own reality and lived experiences as the basis for their evolving literacy and it is through this language that they recreate their real and virtual worlds.” This ties directly to the earlier quote from Uscinski et al., who talked about how predispositions may “greatly affect peoples’ willingness to accept--or alternatively, resist--pervasive influence.” (49) In this context, those who possess a high enough amount of critical media literacy and technological literacy to accurately resist the “pervasive influences” of online conspiratorial thinking are Gounari’s “new literati,” or those who can access the global information village in ways that allow them to read, interpret, and deconstruct texts from a position of being in the world and with the world critically. This type of literacy provides “critical tools so learners can understand ‘their anxieties, fears, demands, and dreams,” according to Freire. (Gounari, 152) It makes sense then, that those who lack this type of literacy and its critical tools are more willing to believe conspiracy theories. Studies have shown that conspiratorial beliefs lead to negative political, social, and public health outcomes for the individual, including: risky sexual activities, decreased child vaccination, poor medical decisions, a propensity to accept violent behavior, low levels of trust in government, low levels of political efficacy, negative attitudes towards civil liberties and human rights, and lower levels of voting, donating, and volunteering. (Uscinski et al. 58) In turn, these people are disempowered and marginalized, not because they are “dumber” than anyone else, but because they lack the critical literacy to know better. Emancipation from this restricting and dangerous school of thought is possible through a critical literacy framework.
In an article for Mother Jones, writer Kiera Butler highlighted a story about a woman named Kristin Alden who moved her family to an upper-middle class neighborhood in Los Angeles in 2019. As one does in today’s world, she joined the local moms’ Facebook group, Moms of Conejo Valley. Alden figured it would be a good place to learn about activities for her 7-year-old daughter--or perhaps, it would be an online space where she could find other families in her neighborhood to take some hand-me-downs off her hands. At first, the group was normal enough. Sometimes, between posts about neighborhood-goings-on and recipes, a few moms had a habit of posting anti-vaxxer memes. Alden, who disagreed with the memes, ignored them, figuring it was rare enough of a happenstance to give her a reason to leave the group. It was only when the pandemic began earlier this year that the tone of the posts in the mom group changed. The anti-vaxxer moms got louder and seemingly began to multiply, posting rants about “tyrannical” mask mandates and civil liberties while referring to the pandemic as the “Plandemic,” claiming that “the coronavirus vaccine would contain tracking microchips made by Bill Gates” and that “the virus was created in a lab and is activated by masks”--both popular notions in the QAnon world. (Butler) While the posts were enough to give Alden pause, what really shook her to the core were the “dozens and dozens” of moms in her community that reshared the conspiracies and appeared to “rally around the blatant misinformation.” (Butler) Soon enough, posts that included the hashtags “#savethechildren,#pizzagate, #wayfairgate, #wwg1wga” dominated the Moms of Conejo Valley group, all key themes for the outlandish QAnon conspiracy--the conspiracy that, lest you forget, alleges that Democratic politicians and supporters traffic and sexually abuse children before torturing them and drinking their blood in a ritualistic sacrifice.
Saving children from pedophilic sexual abuse or murder, for that matter, is of course, an inherently valiant and well-meaning idea. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a doctoral researcher at Concordia University, wrote that “no one wants to take a public stance for child trafficking,” which could explain why moms like Alden felt uneasy about responding to the misinformative theories posted in her community group. In hard, confusing times like the ones we’re living through, people often find themselves grasping at straws to make sense of the things that are happening around them that may be confusing, difficult, or hard to explain. Conspiracy theories, at their core, are “a response to moments of social change and perceived social fracture.” (Merlan) “In an increasingly chaotic world,” Esther Wang wrote for the feminist media site Jezebel, “many of us are searching for meaning; many of us are looking for someone easy to blame; many of us feel disempowered, feel helpless, distrust our government and the institutions that shape our lives.” (Wang) According to Kevin Roose, a former religion reporter and writer for the New York Times, QAnon isn’t just a conspiracy theory-- “it’s a real time, interactive media making collaboration that gives people community, alleviates their sense of helplessness and unites them in a shared mission.” (Roose)
So, why attempt to humanize or understand the people who believe in and spread such dangerous misinformation? Critical literacy work, according to Vasquez et al., “needs to focus on social issues including inequities of race, class, gender, or disability and the ways in which we use language and other semiotic resources to shape our understanding of these issues. The discourses we use to take up such issues work to shape how people are able to--or not able to--live their lives in more or less powerful ways.” (307) After all, Gounari argued that literacy needs to be understood within a theoretical framework that makes issues of access central. Gee said that “literacy informs the understanding of the ways in which the world is read in particular times, places, and circumstances,” and this type of literacy has the power to be liberatory in that it becomes a medium and a force for human agency and political action and “enables human subjects to ‘read the word and the world.’” (Gounari 161) People who have not been privileged with access to the literacy required to reject conspiratorial beliefs and “read the word and the world” correctly are, at the end of the day, not the liars but the lied to: fellow Americans who feel lost or dejected and for whom access to certain types of literacy and knowledge--and in turn, power or liberation--is unattainable, or more restricted than it is for others. These are people who have been negatively impacted by the discursive production of influence. Once this means of meaning-making and knowledge production is seen as an injustice, a product of access inequalities that leave a certain group of people disempowered, we can begin to explore ways to transform it. By educating others or providing access, we can empower them in a multitude of ways.
Conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild told The New York Times that “if it’s someone you know” who believes in or espouses conspiratorial beliefs, “talk to them privately. Start by asking broad questions about their posts, like ‘What is this about? Can you explain it to me?’” (Grose) The goal here is to gather knowledge about their beliefs in a non-adversarial way, and to get them to “do the thinking” in an effort to get them to see that their logic isn’t holding up. Paul Offit, a doctor and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told the NYT that approaching the subject with kindness and empathy is key. Identifying the persons’ fears and what they are really afraid of can help you come to an understanding. He emphasized “[meeting] them where they are without calling them ‘crazy’ or dismissing them out of hand,” and “[responding] with facts.” (Grose) Catie Stewart, a communications director for a California State Senator who was the target of QAnon attacks, told the NYT a story about how one mother sent her a private message over Instagram that read: “you helped pass a bill in California for pedophiles. As a mother I need a clear understanding of what the laws that are being passed actually mean.” Stewart wrote back to the mother with a link to a USA Today article that fact-checked the conspiracy the woman was talking about. The mother replied: “OK, thank you for clearing that up. My heart literally dropped thinking that would be something California would do.” “It’s really important that if you see someone in your life spreading this, you explain to them the truth in a really kind way,” Stewart noted. “Sometimes it’s not going to work, but whoever you can get to, it’s one more person who is not going to spread this.” (Grose)
Works Cited
Butler, Kiera. “The Terrifying Story of How QAnon Infiltrated Moms' Groups.” Mother Jones, 23 Sept. 2020, www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/09/the-terrifying-story-of-how-qanon-infiltrated-moms-groups/.
Gounari, Panayota. “Rethinking Critical Literacy in the New Information Age .” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston, 2009, pp. 148–175.
Grose, Jessica. “Misinformation Is 'Its Own Pandemic' Among Parents.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 16 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/parenting/qanon-moms-misinformation.html.
LaFrance, Adrienne. “The Prophecies of Q.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 24 Sept. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/.
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 18 Aug. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/08/how-instagram-aesthetics-repackage-qanon/615364/.
Uscinski, Joseph E., et al. “What Drives Conspiratorial Beliefs? The Role of Informational Cues and Predispositions.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 1, 13 Jan. 2016, pp. 57–71.
Vasquez, Vivian Maria, et al. “Critical Literacy as a Way of Being and Doing.” Language Arts, vol. 96, no. 5, May 2019, pp. 300–311.
Wang, Esther. “Eat, Pray, Conspiracy: How the Wellness World Embraced QAnon.” Jezebel, 23 Sept. 2020, jezebel.com/eat-pray-conspiracy-how-the-wellness-world-embraced-1845066668.