QAnon And Conspiracy Theories: An American Political Tradition | Meet The Press Reports | NBC News

[Music] hello there i'm chuck todd and welcome to meet the press reports where we take a look beyond the day-to-day headlines to dive deep into a single subject in american politics and today that subject is q anon no you can't ignore it so what is it where did it come from and is it unique to the trump era here's what we do know q anon is a blanket conspiracy theory that one of our experts today describes as the granddaddy of conspiracies because it sort of includes all of them and essentially gobbles up all other conspiracy theories in its path and it's more religion these days than a political movement and we're going to get to that in a little while as well but there is a very dark and dangerous component that people on all sides of the political spectrum have to be wary of and that has to do with the fact that the american political system we've been here before from the early days of this country's founding there have been government skeptics turned conspiracy theorists but until very recently these folks weren't armed with the tool that they now use to propagate their message social media on that front there are signs of good news a number of platforms have attempted to crack down or ban q a including new moves by from facebook this week but the most important defining characteristic about q anon is that it is a political conspiracy theory it's chiefly a pro-trump one q anon followers consider president trump their savior and as the president chooses not to turn away any supporter it's becoming mainstream the republican party now needs to acknowledge its existence because it has a q on problem well the party rid its ranks of q anon will it let it get mainstreamed by turning a blind eye and letting it flourish do you believe there's a ring of high-profile politicians who are kidnapping and sacrificing children i do believe that we don't sit behind a tv to see what's going on with the media lying to us every minute we need to go out and find out it also believes that there's a cannibalistic uh ring of pedophiles i didn't say it couldn't be true but i didn't say it could be true q anon once a fringe phenomenon is now exploding online a symptom of how susceptible america is to a conspiracy theory supercharged by the power of social media it began in the the outreaches of the internet on a chat board called 4chan in october 2017 and it alleged there was a kind of group of satanic conspirators buried deep in the u.s government who were working to undermine the u.s nation and that donald trump was battling these uh conspirators the atlantic's adrian lafrance has spent months studying q anon and its shadowy origins this mysterious figure q is someone with military intelligence who's secretly working with donald trump to take down high profile democrats who are in private abusing children henan has now become this sort of goulash or casserole of all the various conspiracy theories out there kim holberg says her fiance left her after being drawn into the q on conspiracy online the anti-vaxxers and the chemtrail people and the flat earthers and the spygate people and obamagate and et cetera et cetera all of that has now found a home according to analysis from dineta on cuanon supporters 63 are white 58 are male 55 percent of a household income of less than 75 000 a year and just 30 percent have a bachelor's degree or equivalent and 58 percent are supporting donald trump for president it is at its core of pro-trump conspiracy theories i've heard these are people that love our country and they just don't like seeing it so i don't know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me the president has retweeted q and unlinked accounts hundreds of times and boosted congressional candidates who supported it like georgia republican marjorie taylor greene who is running now virtually unopposed and who mr trump has called a future republican star there's a once in a lifetime opportunity to take this global cable of satan worshiping pedophiles out and i think we have the president to do it trust of the theory it is this belief that you are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals does that sound like something you are behind well i haven't i haven't heard that but is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing i mean you know if if i can help save the world from problems i'm willing to do it trump campaign ads have featured supporters with q anon paraphernalia and the republican party has grappled with whether and how to distance itself big mistake this is a group of nuts and kooks and he ought to disavow but dozens of candidates nearly all republicans have voiced support this month the house voted to condemn q a resolution is adopted but 17 republicans and one independent voted against the resolution central to the q and on cult is a loss of faith in government more than 60 percent of q anon supporters believe there soon will be a civil war in the united states it's a force that erodes our shared reality at a time when divisions our country in our country are already extraordinarily stark propelling it are racist and anti-semitic tropes just 33 percent completely agree that senator kamala harris is a natural-born citizen eligible for the presidency and the fbi has labeled q anon a domestic terror threat we have had cases where that properly predicate cases involving violence where people have been motivated by some of those conspiracy theories in 2017 a north carolina man was sentenced to four years in prison after firing a gun in a dc pizza restaurant where he was looking for a non-existent child trafficking ring run by democrats all an internet lie in 2018 a q anon supporter was arrested after a standoff on hoover dam he faces terrorism charges now q and on accounts have become central to the spread of disinformation on the coronavirus in the middle of march this year at the same time pretty much as lockdowns were coming in throughout the world conversation about q on online skyrocketed according to dyna nearly half of qnn supporters say the coronavirus isn't real and half say 5g cellular technology is responsible for its spread q and on accounts have pushed the conspiracy theory that president trump is not sick with the virus but carrying out secret missions in an imagined war i believe that president trump was approached by military and it's been a plan that's been in place for decades so joining me now our former fbi special agent and nbc news national security contributor clint watts executive editor of the atlantic adrian lafrance and our own uh nbc news correspondent morgan radford who you just saw there conducting an interview with one of those q followers uh welcome all of you to meet the press reports morgan i want to start with your experience particularly with that gentleman because i'm sure you feel the same way that i i do i apologize if i'm speaking for you which is it just like how is it that people can believe i mean it's so out there and i guess you know i'm watching you and at times that guy looks like he's gonna laugh or not did you get the sense he was serious or winking and nodding or what was your reaction 100 serious chuck i mean these are people who believe it you say it's out there and it may sound out there to you or me or people watching this segment but it's not as out there as we think in terms of the reaction the public reaction the number of people who believe in this this is a phenomenon that's almost a classic case of rise and reaction you know when we were first reporting on this like when you saw that there there were just so few people who really understood what q anon even meant and yet you would find these groups of people who would literally travel to trump rallies together because their belief was so strong but even in march of this year just three percent of people said that they had heard a lot or read about q anon now that number is 37 and when they surveyed republicans one in three republicans now believe that q anon is mostly true and so now you're seeing this reaction where this thing has gone from online to offline from voters to now candidates so you now have people who are candidates who say that even if they don't believe everything that q anon says they essentially say this is a voting block and we can't afford to dismiss them so while it seems out there it may not be as far off as you think there are people beside you next to you in the grocery store with you who believe this and clint i guess that's the that's the struggle here and i think perhaps why some of in official washington and official silicon valley have struggled to crack down because you don't know what is just a kooky thing on the internet versus what's dangerous on the internet that's right chuck that's always the challenge the problem is once it grows so uh just like we're talking about there went from three percent to 30 in terms of awareness it's grown over the last two years you and i have talked about it several times it's grown exponentially and that's only possible really because of social media you could not uh generate such content you could not create such conspiracies and you could not advance them to such a scale without social media the problem is once it hits a critical mass once it's this sizeable that it starts to take over the political movement it is now becoming part of a political belief system what differentiates it from past uh movements we've seen think back to occupy or the tea party both from roughly the same period they organized collectively but they had a set of an agenda that they wanted to advance politically q anon doesn't q anon literally believes that the federal government is been infiltrated and they need to almost destroy it at times you'll hear second civil war you know bringing the deep state down that literally is saying we're going to get rid of the state so if these people are elected to power what is their agenda or what might they do and i think that's where the overlap with extremism uh the fbi's warnings get really concerning well and the fact is i want to put up i mean these are just some headlines from the last two years of where q anon believers took matters into their own hands you had one we brought up the hoover dam it was somehow the mob and q anon ended up uh linked to the same thing a suspect was radicalized it turned out it wasn't uh having to do with the mob even though they they thought it did and clint how much of a problem now is q anon as a as a a violent um i guess actor or an uh an instigator i think what's fascinating about q anon is it's really the amalgamation of everything in the conspiracy world and so as it grows what i always tell people is you have a base of people who are just interested in it you have another subset of that that are real supporters or believers then you have a small subset of any one of these groups that blows up that believes the only way to achieve the objectives of the movement is to resort to violence that might be a small fringe but as the group grows that small french becomes larger and larger just today we're talking about michigan militia overlap with a wolverine militia overlapping uh possibly with other militia groups out of state uh likely overlapping with conspiracies so when you start putting all of this together it snowballs into a dangerous uh time whenever you have politicians running for office and you have a president that won't disavow them going into election day who says that it's rigged and you may need to take it in your own hands or you may need to watch what's going on at polling places adrian lafrance you have and i remember when you wrote this piece because it really sort of sent chills down my spine because you said hey this is more than just a conspiracy theory this is more than a fringe group this is turning into a religion explain why you've compared it to a religion this is something that surprised me in my own reporting i set out to understand who would possibly believe this thing and why and whether there really were true believers or whether you know to your first question people were just sort of winking or nodding at this thing knowing it was ridiculous and what i found and which really surprised me the more people i talked to who really believe it that they were deriving this sense of deep almost spiritual serenity from their belief in cue and if you look at the way that people find community the way they interpret the sort of foundational text of these cue drops it it more and more just began to resemble a baby religion born on the internet adrian is there a uh is there a for lack of a better term a stereotype of a queue and on a follower by age or by income or by affiliation i think there is i mean i saw some of the data you put up earlier in the segment which was really interesting and it's hard to track because we don't have a registry of cue believers um and it's very hard to know among the sort of q activity online what is genuine versus bot networks versus anything else but um the sense just from where you find cue folks out in the real world often at trump rallies you know you see a lot of overlap between trump space and hughes base and that's because the qnn is at its very core of pro-trump conspiracy theory all right uh adrian morgan and clint i want to pause here we've talked about q and on the current problem but as i mentioned at the beginning of the show these conspiracy theories have actually always reverberated on the surface of american politics and it rises to the mainstream every so often and we deal with it so we asked a few historians and experts if q anon really is unique or is it just a modern manifestation of a world view that's always been here the united states has is a deeply conspiratorial nation i mean it has had conspiracy theories right from the american revolution all the way through to the 20th century into the 21st century the deep state idea has been around for a long time and you could find instances going back decades where people were talking about the deep state in the town of northern missouri is the headquarters of the minutemen an extreme right organization arming itself to save the country from its internal enemies we believe that our nation especially our government even has been deeply infiltrated by uh communists and communist sympathizers so this conspiracy theory it you know dates back to the middle ages right it we can trace it to the 80s with satanic panic or blood libel the anti-semitic jewish conspiracy when kennedy was killed in 1963 the conspiracies surrounding that and then at the vietnam war and the real conspiracy that was watergate there was a general increase in distrust of american expertise american authority government legitimacy there was a kind of proliferation of conspiracy theories that came out of that many of these groups in the past like the john birch society and certainly the lyndon larouche group have believed in conspiracy theories there is the john birch society with its publication american opinion what's different now is the connectivity and the amplification of social media so before when you might have a couple of crazy people in a town that think this insane thing now what what social media algorithms have done is on youtube it said oh you believe in in chemtrails or that 911 was an inside job here let me show you this crazy conspiracy theory and it leads you down these trails i think there is always fertile ground for conspiracy thinking in the united united states politics and in us history this notion of american exceptionalism that because america sees itself as a special nation with a special mission there's always the search for the kind of internal enemy or the enemy who will bring the nation down if you were to look at kennedy conspiracy theories for example there isn't just one conspiracy theory there are numerous so all sorts of different actors have been accused of taking part in that with q and on that idea has been put on steroids where all q really puts out is this basic idea that there's a deep state that's perhaps trafficking children or is up to other other things that are really no good but then the clues q puts out allow followers to go anywhere they want with it so it really is a choose your own adventure game where people can pick whatever enemies they don't like they can make up whatever crimes that they might be involved in and they can make whatever predictions they want about what's going to happen tomorrow all right uh so let's bring back clint adrian and morgan and i guess i want to center our conversation of okay how do we eradicate or i guess deprogram uh when it comes to cueing on with the john birch society mainstream republicans and conservatives most famously uh william f buckley at national review basically banished the john birch society from the conservative movement and that worked back then there was no internet to do that um this republican party hasn't necessarily done that with one voice but clint watts with in this age of social media the republican party said we want no part of q anon and donald trump said it would that make it go away it won't make it go away entirely but it would help dramatically in terms of this part of the reason this continues is because political opportunism has led people to continue to advance it or as q would say you know he's signaling or it's a code uh they go into his tweets and they identify certain things uh that essentially suggests that he supports it but if the president were to come out and all of the republican leadership and democrats for that matter too and say this is complete nonsense i support the intelligence community i support the federalist system i support the government uh there's nothing to it it would put a huge dent into it i think even further on it would still try and continue for a while uh but ultimately these things do tend to burn themselves out and sadly in some cases it's when reality collides with the conspiracy and it is disproven and that can be in very dangerous ways like not believing in wearing a mask right or uh that the government's under the control of pedophiles when it turns out it's not or you have an armed sort of uprising or revolt and the rest of the group turns and says wait you know we're not part of this violence and it begins to implode on itself you know morgan radford uh one of the ways that cue has tried to keep itself mainstream itself has been through the hashtag save the children and in fact a lot of sort of of groups that are are that actually work on trying to stop child traffic child sex trafficking which is a real problem have been infiltrated by cue and what are they doing about this it's hard to combat right chuck i mean that's part of the problem because you can't always see it and ultimately it kind of goes back to your previous question this is about community right this is a modern opportunity for a very old motivation so i don't think that this is something that would necessarily go away but it's something that might change its form i mean think about how many times you and i have been on your show talking about the reports we've done on white supremacists on anti-semites and then now cute these are very closely related things that ultimately come down to a sense of community every time i talk to one of these these guys a guy who left the kkk he said he did it because of community when i talk to the q anon supporters they say this is a community because only we have the correct information only we have the truth and make no mistake chuck this particular vertical of belief is a is a trump era phenomenon this is something that started only one year after he took office and you see parallels his presidency right in this belief system a belief system that says don't trust the media there are bad guys and there are good guys we have enemies we're the good guys and we're here to stop the bad ones this almost religious notion as adrian mentioned of dark versus light and so that's why it's so hard to your point of these organizations who want to stop them from infiltrating because how do you how do you combat a conspiracy theorist chuck i mean even when i'm doing these these interviews right at these trump rallies and you say well you know barack obama has not been arrested does that deter your faith does it shake your faith in the belief in cue and this anonymous and they all say no and so if you're operating from a conspiracy theory that the inherent definition of a conspiracy theory is that you're starting with a conclusion and you're looking for evidence to support that conclusion so it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and very difficult to stop for precisely that reason chuck all right adrian so if somebody's watching right now and says and it's like like the woman we featured whose fiance essentially left her for the conspiracy theory if and i have friends or family that have gone down these holes i've tried to talk them out of it what do you do what would you tell somebody if a member you know they said hey uh somebody i love is going down this rabbit hole how do i de-program the the people who look at this and have thought about the best way to combat it would tell you unfortunately as a journalist that just presenting people with facts doesn't necessarily matter um but that asking questions does and so um things like how many people would have to be in on this for it to be true and and certainly taking a posture of curiosity rather than combativeness um i think also just approaching people with love and respect while questioning but the truth is to morgan's point it's really really hard to sway people who are you know plugging this conspiracy theory into a pre-existing worldview and then cherry-picking data to support it so it's it's a real problem and very difficult to get people to understand what's actually real and adrian do you think anything that the social media companies do to try to get rid of it would get rid of it or will it is this something that will always find a way until as clint put it it burns itself out i think there are things that could help i also think that for the real social giants it's too little too late i mean you saw reddit have some success with cracking down on qnan years ago facebook has just started and we're talking about a two billion user platform so playing whack-a-mole with two billion users is not really effective also just before i joined you today i went and checked on facebook and was still able to join conan group so i think we also have to question how effective that that maneuver is um and how much of a pr statement it is versus a a really effective crackdown clint watts adrian lafrance morgan radford thank you for giving us this education on queuing on it's a bit scary but i hope folks learning more about it can also act on their own as well anyway thank you all up ahead i'm obsessed with a fresh new look for the same old nonsense [Music] finally i'm obsessed with change it may be inevitable but not all of it is good we've been talking about q anon during this episode but we haven't talked about one of its big problems not that it's a ludicrous conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of satan worshiping human trafficking baby eating politicians but that it's a ludicrous conspiracy theory about a secret cabal of satan worshiping human trafficking baby eating politicians with a public relations problem nbc news learned recently that q anon leaders yes they exist are urging their followers to drop the q anon label from their online post because those posts are being blocked twitter and now facebook are increasingly cracking down on q a and that's no good for the conspiracy theory business so here's what was posted on the message board account at the center of this whole mess deploy camouflage drop all references re-cue q and on etc to avoid band slash termination so it appears that one of the most odious corners of the internet is now taking a page from corporate america when all else fails rebrand a new name a new logo wipe that tarnished image clean make people forget there's a ton of rebranding going on these days as america faces an ongoing reckoning over centuries of racial injustice several well-known brands have finally begun to retire names and logos with deep-seated problematic racial connotations uncle ben's aunt jemima and cream of wheat to name a few though it has surely come far too late these companies have ultimately come to terms with the fact that america cannot and will not abide relics of an unjust past and they've been forced to do it out in the open now that's rebranding though for good it's helping move this country forward even just a little bit but then there's rebranding for something far far different q anon cloaking its twisted dangerous insidious nonsense in a new secret identity but still as twisted and dangerous and insidious as ever so be on the lookout for the new q anon in social media feeds proffering the same old bunk with a fresh coat of toxic paint it would be truly unbelievable if not for so many people believing it so that's all the time we have for this episode thank you so much for watching join us for our next episode when we're going to look at the war over judges how the lone unelected branch of government became a political battleground and why that has a lot more to do with the breakdowns in our other two branches thank you for being with us for meet the press reports join us on nbc news now or anytime binge away all of our episodes on peacock right now [Music] [Music] hey thanks for watching our youtube channel follow today's top stories and breaking news by downloading the nbc news app you

Channel: NBC News

Views: 660,093

Keywords: Meet the Press

Id: ift5nxcSrII

Length: 27min 13sec (1633 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/larry_sellers_]

2024 primary is gonna come down to JFK Jr. or deep fake John Wayne.

[u/big_nothing_burger]

My dad follows Q stuff but supposedly doesn't support Trump anymore. He's just waiting for America to collapse, war with the secret commie deep state Jews, and doesn't care much beyond that.

[u/pekak62]

QAnon Supporters support abject moronic stupidity, the inability to discern truth from absolute garbage, and generally the rejection of rational thought.

[u/scisco77]

I think we actually have an example of fake news, because that is some bullshit.

[u/tiddayes]

I think they may mean that 58% of trump supporters believe Q anon BS

[u/UQ5T6NBVN03AFR]

If it's not bullshit it's a sign the thing has metastasized from a cult into a religion: they're no longer worshipping a living person, just the ideals. Not sure which is worse.

[u/MananaMoola]

Maybe they don't support anyone? I know people, who aren't Q, who seldom vote and could care less about any candidate because they see them as all the same (which is largely true.)

[u/iHeartHockey31]

Some of them bought into the Q stuff so hard, they see Trunp as having failed at his mission to stop the deep state. They're upset he didnt keep nonsensical promises to lock up hillary. They support whatever q-spouting republican is running against whoever trump supports.

For example a lot of them are upset that Trump dropped Sidney Powell, that trump supported someone running against Lin Wood in a GOP thing in SC. Its like they bought into his lies so hard, they suddenly dont think he's doing enough to solve all the imaginary problems he convinced them existed.

Depending on what aspects of Q they believe, they feel like trump didn't do something he should have. For example, why didnt he pardon all the insurrectionists? Why didnt he mention babbit for months? Why is he ignoring all his supporters that tried to overthrow the government and not speaking out about them?

Essentially Trump & qAnonsense created such a strong a powerful imaginary enemy, even Trump couldnt defeat it or eventually succumbed to "the establishment". Trump's been banning q merch from rallies etc.

Lesson, if you're going to create imaginary problems & imaginary enemies, make sure you've defeated them.

Additionally, a lot if the hard-core neonazi militias (that may or may not buy into qAnonsense) got really pissed at him bc he DIDN'T sign the insurrection act or declare martial law and do whatever was supposed to happen after that.

[u/ottatisgv]

I know plenty of new age (Q-age) people say they don’t necessarily support trump, but “everyone else is a satanic pedo” so they think he is the next best thing.