Latest uncomfortable experience: interview with a QAnon devotee. Now that I’m transitioning into conducting a few hundred interviews this year for my dissertation work, I’m completely curtailing my active practice of being uncomfortable so I can put on my academia hat. That said, sometimes an opportunity is too good to pass up. In this case, I had the chance to talk directly with an adamant believer in QAnon.
The uncomfortable part of this experience is not the fear of being sucked into some conspiracy or stress that I can’t hold my own in a convo, though I get some could have this concern. For me, this was the challenge and deliberate practice of being so open, gracious, and sincere in trying to understand how one believes such a theory rather than laughing, interrupting, walking away, or shutting off. Recently, at BAM, we’ve been doing a lot of work to “respond,” the emotional intelligence choice rather than “react,” the pure emotion choice. I don’t need to tell you what humans typically do, especially right now in America’s climate. A discussion with a QAnon believer is probably your varsity level kind of practice. That said, I’ve had a few uncomfortable experiences now with pro-lifers, 2nd amendment diehards, and so forth, so I’m getting decent at these interactions and keeping my best straight, curious face in tact.
I got in touch with this QAnon believer because he’s the dad of a friend I have. This friend is horrified and increasingly distant from her dad, understandably. It doesn’t help that her dad is constantly telling her to “be ready” for the “Great Awakening” to happen. (That was predicted by QAnon with the inauguration but has since been moved to early April for reasons I don’t get. Nonetheless, be ready, my interviewee pleaded.)
Before this interview, I thought about channeling childlike wonder. If an adult came up to you and said, “Hey, did you know there’s this big fat guy up in the North Pole that’s watching your every move? Yeah, he’s going to deliver presents all over the world to good girls and boys with all his reindeer. Oh, there’s one that has a red nose that lights up, too,” then how would you respond as a five year old child vs your crusty adult self? Granted, I was already a crusty adult as a child who “did not play well with others in her age group,” according to one report card from preschool. Still, this is the mindset I went into.
My interviewee sent me a Youtube link as a primer for what QAnon was about. Not going to lie: I laughed out loud many times during this video. The dramatic graphics and music, the rhetorical questions, the heroism of Donald Trump are sensational. It’s a pure emotional play with no actual facts or mention about how, for instance, the Queen, Obama, the Bushes, Oprah, and Miley Cyrus are actually all criminals in some international mafia scheme. I told myself to reel it in for my interviewee though I wondered if I was getting punked. Maybe QAnon is a meta punk. The believers actually don’t believe it but are so amused that the public believes they are believers. That seems more plausible because really: was I about to talk with a functioning adult who would say to me sincerely, “No, but really, Santa gets down all the chimneys on Christmas Eve."
The convo started with my question of how my interviewee got to know about QAnon. For him, it was Donald Trump’s insistence in “draining the swamp” that pricked his ears. My interviewee also had a long history of being on interested in politics and in love with America, he mentioned. He watched a lot of World War 2 movies growing up, met Kennedy once (and is convinced the government killed him), was part of the Green Party years ago, and wanted to create his own party at one point. I asked how he sources what he knows about QAnon and any facts that support it. He responded nonchalantly, “It’s out there if you look for it.” A few seconds went by, as I was so struck by this. I said, “Oh indeed. That’s the internet,” but he didn’t pick up what I was conveying. I would call his response the slogan of the internet, the perfect phrase that encapsulates the horrors and delights the internet is.
Our conversation wound all over the place. That since Kennedy’s assignation, the world has been in total turmoil, that citizens around the world are being pinned against each other to stay distracted by things like Black Lives Matter, that Biden is currently in Culver City on a set that staged the whole inauguration, that Trump was recruited to legally and diplomatically show the world of this international crime ring that includes Putin to Beyonce who are currently aiding communists in China and sexually abusing children. It’s so wild and wide. My questions just spurred more matter-of-fact responses. It’s as if I continually asked, “so how does Santa get to ALL the houses of boys and girls around the world in one night?” Continual answer: “With his reindeer.”
This was perhaps the oddest and most vexing conversation I’ve recently ever had. It leads to a lot of existential questions: Are you insane? Am I insane? What is the requirement of reality? Clearly none.
Here's a screenshot of the opening scene of the video that was sent to me.
