The Storm Is Upon Us ventures into the eye of QAnon
Author Mike Rothschild is less interested with uncovering the identity—or identities—of Q than he is with tracing QAnon’s causes and effects
Anyone closely following the events that culminated in the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol might agree that there is no calm before the storm. There is anxiety-riddled anticipation, immeasurable quantities of fear, a dread-darkened prescience of what’s to come—all tiny tempests within a broader superstorm—but nothing resembling calm. You didn’t need a weatherman on January 5 to know the nation was gonna blow.
Calm comes after, with the disposal of malevolent actors and the wreckage they leave behind, followed by reflection, and finally the inevitable flood of essays, documentaries, and books seeking to decipher the storm’s winds.
In The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became A Movement, Cult, And Conspiracy Theory Of Everything, Mike Rothschild cleverly traces a through-line from the Capitol riot back to QAnon, the internet conspiracy cult—created from equal parts white slavery myth, satanic panic, and MAGA-style conservatism—directly inspired, if not inadvertently conjured by, Donald Trump. On October 5, 2017, surrounded by the nation’s top-ranking military officers in the White House’s State Dining Room, Trump dropped a prophesy that, for true believers, would transform the failed businessman-turned-failed president into the Nostradamus the 21st century deserved. “You guys know what this represents,” he garbled while motioning around the room, causing heads of war to curiously crane their necks. “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” He continued, chest puffed and rocking side to side like a schoolboy who’d just taken first prize in the annual Idiot Bee: “Could be. The calm before the storm.”
With the supposed leader of the free world spouting fortune cookie cryptograms for his small army of fascist-leaning fanboys, while standing beneath—let’s not allow the irony to go unspoken—George Peter Alexander Healy’s monumental portrait of Lincoln as philosopher-president, it became apparent for the umpteenth time that no storm lay on the horizon. The storm already inhabited the White House.
Twenty-three days later, an anonymous user named “Q Clearance Patriot” posted a comment that should have been buried beneath the hourly avalanche of detritus that filled a popular political message board on 4chan, a website trafficking as a safe space for Neo-Nazis, illegal porn traders, incels, terrorist wannabes, conspiracy theorists, and other shitposters:
Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM – 8:30
AM EST on Monday – the morning on Oct 30, 2017.
Regurgitated by the internet’s most dunderheaded of it-could-happeners, unremarkable, hackneyed posts like this—soon known as Drop #0—originated from the 2016 Republican National Convention’s unofficial rallying cry of “Lock her up!” A follow-up reply added ludicrous details to the developing “story”: “extradition already in motion… passport approved to be flagged… expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.” The messages were nothing more than deplorable fan fiction, a LARP written on a lark.
Clinton’s day of reckoning passed without incident, of course, as did all of the promised developments in what the next 150-plus drops, furiously posted through mid-November, called Operation Mockingbird: the arrests of former Clinton staffers John Podesta and Huma Abedin, the mobilization of the National Guard and naval fleets to counter a forthcoming surge of national and global uprisings, the mass execution of liberals, and the unmasking of a devil-worshiping, immortality-seeking cannibal cult led by Democratic and Hollywood luminaries who fed upon children. The Great Awakening, the messenger called it, was imminent.
The burgeoning QAnon community, named for the high-level security clearance purportedly possessed by the anonymous patriot, appeared unfazed that a top-ranking intelligence official who sought to expose a global child-kidnapping cabal issued his missives on a website flooded with pedophilia. Anons cheered when Q’s drops increasingly touted reliably racist and anti-Semitic tropes, targeting Barack Obama (predictably called “Hussein”), George Soros, and the Rothschilds (the author of The Storm Is Upon Us makes a point to relationally distance himself from the family that has spawned countless conspiracies). If posts read as if a cat had walked across Q’s keyboard, as in Drop #231, it was all the more proof that this was very real: