Or is it all of the above?
By Thom Hartmann for the
Already, one believer has murdered two of his children, saying they had “serpent DNA” and had to be killed to
save humanity. There’s evidence that a majority of the people who stormed the US Capitol on January 6th, leading to more
than a half-dozen deaths and nearly overthrowing our republic, were solidly within the Qanon cult.
This isn’t quite as weird as it sounds; mass
death or even murder of unbelievers, often for political or “End of Days”
rationales, is a familiar trope within multiple world religions.
Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in
Israel, which is frequently the target of evangelists trying to convert Jews in
anticipation of the End Times.
Many of these evangelists are quite upfront about their belief that in the end times, in preparation for the return of Jesus, all but 144,000 of the roughly 7 million Jews in Israel must die.
And those who survive will all be converted to Christianity
and “wear the names of the Father
and Son on their foreheads throughout eternity.”
When that happens, Jesus comes down from the sky.
It’s a belief that millions of Christians — and
a solid majority of white Evangelicals — fervently hold, and one of the reasons
why there’s so much support for Israel among the Republican white
Evangelical movement: that’s where the mass death
has to happen to bring back Jesus.
Jim Jones and David Koresh were proponents of such End Times beliefs, among others, and Hitler leaned heavily on Christian themes and prophecy to justify his slaughter of Jews, Gypsies and gays.
“In defending myself against the Jews, I am
acting for the Lord,” Hitler said.
“The difference between the church and me is that I am finishing the job.”
There are similar death-cult movements within
Sunni Islam, most famously offshoots of the Wahabism that’s as widespread in Saudi Arabia as Evangelical Christianity is in the
United States.
In both cases, the death-cult aspect of these
religions has emerged in just the past two centuries; the most spectacular
unveiling of Wahabism’s willingness to kill was seen by the world on September
11, 2001 at the former World Trade Center in New York City.
Much like the “Old Testament” documents numerous
slaughters called for or approved by G-d (particularly
in the Book of Joshua), the Hindu Vedas detail multiple, sometimes genocidal
wars, both as metaphors for the “battle for inner
peace and enlightenment,” and as actual historical stories.
So what are we to make of the apparent reality
that several million Americans — many sucked into this by Facebook and other
social media, just like the killers in Myanmar — are followers of a religion
that either predicts or calls for the murder of Jews
and Democrats?
So far they’ve racked up an impressive record,
by American cult standards. They include, as reported by Lois Beckett at The Guardian:
- · “An Arizona resident blocks a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an armored vehicle. He later pleads guilty to a terrorism charge.
- · “A California man is arrested after being found with what appeared to be bomb-making materials in his car, in an alleged plot to blow up a satanic display in the capitol in Springfield, Illinois.
- · “In Staten Island, a 24-year-old man allegedly murders a leader in the Gambino crime family.
- · “A QAnon supporter allegedly smashes up the Chapel of the Holy Hill in Sedona, Arizona, while shouting about the Catholic church supporting human trafficking.
- · “Montana police arrest a QAnon supporter from Colorado in connection with an alleged kidnapping scheme.
- · “A Kentucky mother is charged with kidnapping twin daughters.
- · “A man is charged with intentionally derailing a freight train near the navy hospital ship Mercy in Los Angeles.
- · “A woman is arrested after driving to New York and allegedly making threatening statements against Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.
- · “A Boston man leads police on a 20-mile car chase while livestreaming himself talking about QAnon.
- · “Corey Hurren, a reservist in the Canadian Rangers, allegedly rams a truck through the gates of the prime minister’s residence in Ottawa.
- · “A Texas woman is arrested after allegedly chasing and crashing into a car, then telling police she thought she was chasing a pedophile
- · “Utah woman arrested in Oregon for allegedly kidnapping her young son”
All, apparently, in the name of Qanon, the
religion that has now become the core of their lives.
And that doesn’t include the better-known
instances, like the guy who shot up a pizza joint near DC looking for the basement where Hillary Clinton hid
children whose blood she was going to drain to obtain adrenochrome.
Or the fellow who blew himself up
in front of the AT&T building in Nashville to stop the lizard people.
One theory is that a “tribe of the mentally ill” are finding each other through Facebook and other social
media and being led by Donald Trump, himself a case study in mental illness.
The University of Maryland’s National
Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism notes that 68 percent of the open Qanon followers
arrested at the US Capitol on January 6th who had also committed crimes before
or after that coup attempt “have documented mental health concerns, according
to court records and other public sources.”
Their psychological issues included
“post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and
Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”
The “Qanon Shaman” of so many iconic 1/6
pictures has now pleaded mental illness as his reason for showing up at the
Capitol, as have two others who “were found to be mentally unfit to stand trial
and were transferred to mental health care facilities.”
Of the six women arrested on 1/6 who’d also
committed crimes before or after the coup attempt, the researchers note, “all
six…have documented mental health concerns.”
But that’s probably far too glib an explanation:
tens of millions of Americans are members of odd cults, many that believe in
the end times, and most mental health professionals would be reluctant to call
them all mentally ill.
Another theory is that Qanon is meeting some
deep social or psychological need for people who otherwise feel marginalized in
society. A year of lockdown from Covid could certainly exacerbate this
loneliness and search for community and belonging.
Or maybe it’s just the power of Facebook’s
algorithm and new “group” system. At the very least, it’s been mobilizing
Qanon-friendly/aligned white people across small-town America.
Last summer on a warm Sunday night in the small Oregon town of Klamath Falls about 200 locals showed up downtown with guns, baseball
bats, and whatever other weapons they could find around the house to fight off
the busloads of Black Antifa marauders who they believed Jewish billionaire
George Soros had paid to put on a bus in Portland and was sending their way.
Of course, George Soros had done no such thing
and there were no busloads of Black people. But the warnings were all over the
Klamath Falls Facebook group, and, it turns out, similar Facebook groups for
small towns all over America.
Literally, from coast to coast, that weekend
white residents of small towns showed up in their downtown areas with guns,
rifles, hammers, and axes prepared to do battle with busloads of Black people
being sent into their small white towns by George Soros.
Nobody's sure whether these messages, which
activated frightened white people across the nation, came from local white
supremacist groups trying to gauge if they could actually kick off a second
American Civil War, or whether they came from some foreign government trying to
tear America apart.
But they worked.
In the tiny town of Falls, Washington,
frightened white people brought out chainsaws and cut down trees to block the
road leading to their town.
In South Bend, Indiana police were overwhelmed
by 911 calls from frightened white people wanting to know when the “Antifa
buses” were arriving.
And in rural Luzern County, Pennsylvania, the
local neighborhood social media group warned people that busloads of Black
people were “organizing to riot and loot.”
Similar stories played out that week from
Danville, California to Jacksonville, Florida, as documented by NBC News.
A few weeks ago, Facebook announced they were banning Qanon groups from the platform, but if their history
banning rightwing extremism and Covid lies is any indication, it’ll have little
impact.
So what do we do about cult-aligned neighbors
who are fantasizing about killing Jews and Democrats?
The FBI has already designated the group as a
domestic terrorism threat, although the laws against domestic terrorism are
somewhere between weak and non-existent.
And for good reason: if you’re a progressive,
for example, would you want the force of the federal government coming after
you for “domestic terrorism” during a Trump or Josh Hawley
administration? That’s exactly what’s happening in Russia, Hungary and
Turkey at this moment, by way of taking down political opponents of those
authoritarian regimes.
Deprogramming cult members is a terribly weak
game of whack-a-mole. One of my closest friends worked with Ted Patrick back
in the 1980s deprogramming cult members who’d been kidnapped or lured away from
their cults. It was the tiniest of drops in the bucket, although the
deprogramming industry may re-emerge as Covid wanes.
Or are most of these people just so deeply
craving social connection and meaning in their lives that Qanon is, for the
moment, meeting those needs?
If so, and that was probably the case with many
of the cults that were widespread in the 1970s and 1980s, odds are as the cult
is discredited they will fall away and join organizations that offer a
healthier outlet for their social and activist needs.
That’s certainly what happened in the 1980s
around the McMartin Preschool “ritual satanic child abuse” allegations that
bear such a striking resonance to Qanon’s assertion that Democrats are drinking
children’s blood in new Satanic rituals.
Given that millions of Americans are now members
or followers of Qanon, it’s also possible the religion will undergo the same
kinds of transformation that many of today’s smaller but mainstream religions
have.
The Seventh Day Adventists, for example, started
out as a doomsday cult and are now a healthy and respectable Christian
sect. Ditto for the Mormons, the Salvation Army, and, some would argue,
the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
On the other hand, if the emerging leadership in
Qanon continues to center the religion around deifying Trump and fantasizing
about killing Jews, Democrats and elected officials, it’ll continue to evolve more and more in the
direction of being a political hate group like the Klan, which has its own set of Christian-align and anti-Semitic theories.
To that end, the FBI is now tracking the
movement.
It’s not surprising that America — which has
been an incubator for weird cults for much of our history, particularly in the
1600s and the late 19th century — has come to this place with this newest cult,
which is now spilling over worldwide.
And there are still open questions about how
much of the Q activity in this country is being incited or driven by foreign actors.
Over time, Qanon will probably either become
more of a mainstream religion/social club with a gradually normalizing belief
set, or will continue down the anti-Semitic and racist rabbit hole and shrink in
size as their willingness to condone violence becomes more problematic.
However this all shakes out, if a member of your
circle of friends or family has fallen into the cult, cutting them off
altogether may be the least useful strategy: it will just drive them deeper
into the cult, seeking a replacement for lost friends and family and affirmation
of their new worldview.
If they’re hoarding weapons and talking about
killing Jews and/or Democrats, though, it’s a good idea to flag family members
and let someone in the law enforcement community know.
Freedom of religion is one of America’s top values
and deserves respect. Terror groups, on the other hand, have no place in a
civilized society.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of American Healthcare and more than 30+ other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute and his writings are archived at hartmannreport.com.
