The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer.
Political conspiracy theories originated before the founding of the republic. The 17th century Salem witch trials revealed the devil’s putative efforts to corrupt colonial Massachusetts. In the 1790s, Federalists labeled Jeffersonian Republicans agents of French Revolutionary terror. So-called Know Nothings in the 1850s built a political movement around the idea that Irish immigrants were actually Papist invaders. Some Kansas Populists in the 1890s accused the British Royal Family and the (Jewish) Rothschild bank of manipulating grain prices to impoverish farmers.
In 1916, Madison Grant’s book, “The Passing of the Great Race,” warned that eastern and southern European immigrants were replacing “Nordic” Americans. Congress put his ideas into law while the young Adolf Hitler called Grant his “inspiration.” During the Red Scare of the 1950s, Sen. Joe McCarthy charged Democrats and top Army generals such as George C. Marshall with masterminding a Communist “conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”
Never before, however, has a president described a movement that claims the world is controlled by Satanic-worshipping pedophiles who molest and eat children as “people who love their country ... and like me.”
Trump’s embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory brought wider attention to a movement that previously thrived on the darker margins of social media (Q is shorthand for a high level security clearance). Midway through 2017, anonymous posts by “Q” on Facebook, Twitter, and less-savory chatrooms (called “Q drops”) described an existential struggle between President Trump and a “deep-state” cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic, pedophiles who consumed their victims’ bodies to extract life-extending chemicals. Its leaders were said to include prominent Democrats (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and others), the Hollywood elite (Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey and many more), Dr. Anthony Fauci and socially active billionaires such as Bill Gates and George Soros.
Trump, Q predicted, would expose and vanquish this conspiracy.
Q and his followers frequently reference cover-ups of UFO encounters, the deaths of various Kennedys and the 9/11 attacks. Estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands, Q followers often appear at Trump rallies and believe these assertions to varying degrees. Evoking Biblical images of Armageddon, members of the QAnon virtual social community anticipate a final reckoning referred to as “the Storm.” The internet became a force multiplier and accelerant of crazy, or what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style in American history.” The FBI labeled the group a potential terror movement.
These apocalyptic anxieties are less original than often assumed. Versions surfaced during the 1980s and early 1990s when pre-internet mass media — such as supermarket tabloids and talk radio — warned of rampant child kidnappings, an epidemic of “multiple personality disorder,” gruesome UFO abductions and widespread Satanic abuse of children.
Like today, many of these phenomena reflected the erosion of social and cultural norms caused by changing family patterns, evolving roles for women and gays, challenges to established racial boundaries, and the erosion of good paying blue collar jobs and upward economic mobility that flourished in the aftermath of World War II.
1980s media outlets raised the alarm of rampant child kidnapping, pressing food distributors to place photos of missing kids on milk cartons. Congress passed several laws to expand federal oversight of the problem, including establishment of a National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In its mid-1980s assessment, the agency reported that nearly 750,000 children went missing annually. Parents imagined kidnappers lurking in every supermarket aisle and playground. In fact, 500,000 of the missing were teenage runaways who usually returned home. Nearly all the rest were children taken by a non-custodial parent during a contentious divorce. “Stranger kidnappings” were, thankfully, quite rare, usually around 100 annually.
Tabloids and talk radio created a snowball effect that transformed individual testimonials of illness, abuse, or abduction into ritualized accounts of family, community and government conspiracies. A collision between orthodox science and “populist” or “junk” science (think hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19) emerged with widespread testimonials by people who claimed to suffer from multiple personalities after a variety of traumas.
Authors with few credentials published popular books claiming that as many as one-third of children experienced some form of abuse at home or in day care centers which resulted in memory loss or multiple personalities. They drowned out psychiatrists who considered “dissociative identity disorder” a rare condition. In reality, many victims of abuse had more trouble forgetting than remembering violence.
Lurid reports of “Satanic Ritual Abuse” in the 1980s described how trusted caregivers, often in day care centers, victimized the young. Actual child abuse, like kidnapping, bore little relation to these revelations. Sexual predators were more often family members than strangers. Think Uncle Bill fondling his niece in the basement after Thanksgiving dinner than Miss Laura or Mr. Phil engaging in lurid sado-masochistic rituals during nap time at Merry Moppets Day Care.
By the time the frenzy abated in the mid-1990s, dozens of innocent child care workers were convicted in show trials where “recovered memory specialists” convinced juries that perpetrators had sodomized and eaten hundreds of children. Never mind that police found no bodies, boiled bunnies or underground torture chambers.
Accounts of alien abduction paralleled tales of Satanic abuse and recovered memory. Self-described abductees were typically poor, less educated, rural, mostly white males. The “buzz” on UFOs held that since the 1940s, the U.S. government covered up evidence of alien visitation. Unlike low-budget “creature features” of the 1950s, quality films such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “E.T.” (1982), and “Cocoon” (1985) seemed to validate these beliefs. By the late-1980s, abductees held conventions where, assisted by hypnotherapists, they spoke of their encounters. Aliens sought out solitary drivers on lonely roads, beamed them aboard a spacecraft, then probed them to extract DNA, eggs or sperm to produce mutant life forms. Female victims reported being impregnated by aliens, returned home, then re-abducted to have their half-human babies harvested.
Although QAnons’s claims are far more partisan than these accounts, they share a certain “DNA.” All describe powerlessness in the face of unaccountable forces that have shattered “traditional” truths. They seek recognition of harm, punishment of the guilty, and redemption. Oddly, Q has said little about one case that parallels the depiction of a pedophile conspiracy, that of the late Jeffrey Epstein.
For two decades, the convicted sex offender along with his circle of prominent pals (including Donald Trump, Allan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton and Britain’s Prince Andrew) skated largely above the law despite the open secret of Epstein sexually abusing girls and young women. Real crimes, apparently, lack the allure of imaginary conspiracies.
