Our Last-Mile Problem With QAnon

Anti-disinformation work seems to have boomed of late, but is a lot of it just well-educated people writing reports for each other on how bad the problem is?

Friday, I spent part of the day at Organizing 2.0, which like last year was again a virtual event attended by several hundred progressive organizers and digital strategists from all over. While most of the sessions were about tech and tactics, one that really caught my attention was called “’Deprogramming’ QAnoners and the Alt-Reality Community.” “Our body politic now includes millions of voters who enthusiastically support alternative versions of reality, akin to actual cult members,” read the session description. “Our focus will be on rhetoric, behavior, and practices that help rescue loved ones and community members from collective delusions.”

Last September, the Pew Research Center did a survey of US adults and found that while only about half had heard of QAnon, 41% of Republicans who had heard of it said it was a good thing for the country. The survey didn’t dig into what exactly about QAnon they might have been endorsing—the idea that then-President Trump was engaged in a hidden battle against a Satanic cabal of Democrats and celebrities who abuse children, or the vague notion that Q was telling the truth about Democratic plans to “steal” the election and Trump’s eventual triumph, or the coming of martial law that would purge the government of traitors.

A more recent survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute done in late January found that 29% of Republicans indeed believed that Trump “has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.” 17% said that statement was mostly accurate, 12% said it was completely accurate. 43% of Republicans say they’re uncertain if this is true, while just 30% reject it as inaccurate. The AEI survey also found that the vast majority of Republicans doubt that Trump encouraged the January 6th attack on the Capitol (only 15% think he did) with half blaming Antifa; and nearly 60% believe that “a group of unelected government officials in Washington, DC, referred to as the ‘deep state,’ had been working to undermine the Trump administration.

About one-quarter of Americans identify as Republicans; 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020. So while it’s true that there has always been support for other far-out beliefs, like the idea that 9-11 was an inside job or that Barack Obama was actually not an American citizen, the prevalence and longevity of these beliefs among a large chunk of the Republican party base is a real problem. What’s surprising is that no one appears to own this problem.

The session was moderated by Suzanne Turner, a strategic communications consultant, and featured remarks from Janja Lalich, founder of the Cult Recovery and Information Center, Katia Ramos of the Latino Community Foundation, and two therapists who specialize in working with victims of cults, Rachel Bernstein and Beth Matenaer. They all had a similar core message: the number of people affected by these beliefs has “exploded” in recent years, and they are deluged by people—often family members or friends of QAnon believers—desperate for help in saving their friends or salvaging working relationships. (As Michael Smerconish recently noted, after he did an XM Radio report on QAnon with Harvard’s Joan Donovan and went to the phones, “An alarming number of people who called in and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a brother, a sister a spouse caught up in this, and I don’t know what to do, because I just can’t reach them with any rational thinking.’”)

Since the inauguration of President Joe Biden, which should have signified the collapse of the QAnon theory that The Former Guy was secretly on the verge of arresting the whole Democratic cabal and would remain in power, support for the QAnon cult has broken three ways, Bernstein said during the panel. About one-third are “despondent” about the world and the shattering of something they had invested so much energy in. Another third are “disillusioned” but still grasping at signs that maybe the QAnon gospel would come true. And the last third, she said, are “determined,” like the supporters of cults who show up outside courtrooms to support their leader even after they’ve been arrested by the authorities.

Two things really struck me during this session. First, that very often the people most deeply engaged in trying to help others out of cults are ex-cult members themselves. Lalich talked about her past experience in a radical Marxist group, the Democratic Workers Party, for about ten years starting in the 1970s, which she came to believe was a cult. This makes sense at a number of levels. Who better to engage with people caught in a warped reality than someone who understands intimately why that is so seductive. Christian Piccolini, a former white nationalist, now runs the Free Radicals Project, which works to help disengage people from hate movements.

Second, and more troubling: The QAnon problem appears to be nobody’s problem. Or, rather, it appears to be a private problem, something to be dealt with by individual therapists, worried family members and a handful of activists, rather than a collective problem. Lalich’s Cult Research center is a one-person operation. So too is Piccolini’s Free Radicals Project, at least judging from its most recent 990, which shows an income of $66,000. Bernstein’s informative weekly podcast Indoctrination is barely being sustained by her listeners, after three years of her building it up out of her own pocket. Mike Rothschild, an expert on the QAnon conspiracy, is self-employed. (You can pre-order his book, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.) Other than the US military, which has set up a “Countering Extremism Working Group” and recently held a 60-day service-wide “stand-down” to address the issue, I don’t know of any institution or NGO of any size that is trying to directly engage believers in QAnon or other extreme conspiracies. A few organizations that do appear to have meaningful programs engaging the QAnon constituency include: RuralOrganizing.org (see its toolkit on Fighting Misinformation in Small-Town and Rural Communities), The Rural Organizing Project, and the Western States Center (see its toolkit, Confronting White Nationalism in Schools).

This is despite the flowering in the last five years of a whole cottage industry of research centers, academic studies, journalistic conferences and tech summits on disinformation. I’ve lost track of the number of reports that have graced my inbox on the ways that tech platforms amplify or fail to block conspiracies like QAnon, or how far-right groups are using social networks to keep organizing, etc. Since 2016, my friend Craig Newmark has given at least $170 million to groups focused on defending trustworthy journalism, fighting harassment of journalists, supporting cybersecurity election integrity, according to Forbes. In 2017, the CUNY School of Journalism (now called the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY) launched a $14 million News Integrity Initiative with primary funding from Facebook, with the goal of “helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.” That same year, the Omidyar Network announced $100 million in funding for journalism outlets and to organizations combating hate speech and the spread of false information. The Annenberg Innovation Lab launched a “Truthiness Collaborative” to “advance research and engagement around the misinformation, disinformation, propaganda and other challenges to discourse fueled by our evolving media and technology ecosystem. Now in just the last year, there’s a plethora of new organizations with names like the The Forum on Information and Democracy, Digital Citizens Alliance, the Coalition for a Safer Web, and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

None of this is bad, but after an hour listening to therapists who spend their time dealing with the actual victims of rampant disinformation, it seems to me that many of these well-intentioned groups are basically full of well-educated people writing reports for each other to read. (And if that criticism hurts, I’ve been one of those people, maybe still am.) The resilience of the QAnon myth suggests this is another version of the “last-mile” problem I wrote about last week. Unfortunately, if we aren’t strengthening the people and organizations that actually engage, face-to-face, with community members in the alternative reality system that now pervades a big part of the Republican base, we’re not really moving the needle. Maybe a few funders can shift their priorities in this direction?

Odds and Ends:

-Facebookification continues, as this Washington Monthly investigative story by Dan Froomkin, detailing how the New York Times has quietly started taking millions of dollars a year from Facebook as a “partner” in its Facebook News program, amply shows.

-Here’s Carole Cadwalladr, one of Facebook’s toughest critics, failing to answer a direct question from Alex Kantrowitz about whether Cambridge Analytica “could really manipulate us based on the data it collected.” She says, “I think it’s a stretch to suggest that Facebook’s targeting technology doesn’t work, considering that the advertising is a trillion-dollar industry across the world. I personally find it a stretch to believe that advertising doesn’t work given the huge amounts of money that go into it. And I find it a stretch to think that the more information you have about individuals and the more highly you’re able to target them, that doesn’t have an impact. I can’t see how we can’t take them seriously.” The word “work” is doing a lot of work in that answer.

-Twelve megadonors have given one out of every thirteen dollars spent on US elections since Citizens United, a total of $3.4 billion since January 2009, Issue One reports. Even if you subtract the $1.4 billion spent by Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer on their doomed candidacies in 2020, that’s still a lot of money from a tiny group.

-Some good news for those of us who argue that grassroots Democratic organizing in purple and red districts is worth doing for the long-term; the short-term impact of running for local office appears to be a “reverse coattail” effect that helps statewide Democrats. That’s the finding of a new study by Run for Something, as Isabella Grullon Paz reports for The New York Times. “The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” says Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.” According to the study, Joe Biden performed 0.3 percent to 1.5 percent better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, across eight states where precinct data is available.

-End times: These “sonifications” of black holes and distant galaxies are, um, out of this world! (h/t Dan Hon)