Luckily for her, Rebecca Lanis wasn’t home when her father shot and killed her mother and severely wounded her sister earlier this month. So she was able to help offer one explanation for the otherwise inexplicable act: Her father had collapsed into the world of conspiracy theory after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. That includes the conspiracy known as QAnon, which Lanis in a Reddit post blamed unequivocally for muddying her father’s mind.
“It’s like he got possessed by a demon,” she wrote.
This is not the first time that QAnon has been intertwined in a murder. In early 2019, a man purportedly in the sway of the conspiracy theory shot to death a reputed gangster on Long Island. At the time, Marymount Manhattan College psychology professor Cheryl Paradis explained to The Washington Post that political rhetoric, like popular culture, could shape the paranoid delusions of the mentally ill. But in a May 2019 bulletin, the FBI made clear that it saw QAnon as something more dangerous.
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“The FBl assesses anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part,” it read, “to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” That included potential “targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the likelihood of violence against these targets.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, this warning was made manifest. Prominent among those who stormed the Capitol were explicit adherents to QAnon — the dangerous idea that there is a cabal of powerful pedophiles including prominent Democrats and cultural elites that Trump is silently working to dismantle.
And after years of playing footsie with the movement, Trump has begun openly embracing it — even as the federal government’s years of warnings about violence linked to domestic extremism grow louder.
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Trumpism and QAnon are inextricable, as I wrote in August 2018. (The headline: “There’s a virus in Trumpland.”) QAnon’s portrayal of Hollywood and political elites not just as culture-war opponents but as actually evil was simply an elevation of the anti-elite rhetoric that’s at the heart of Trump’s political pitch. But it also, as one Trump rally attendee told me then, helped to reframe Trump’s messy presidency as ordered.
“It’s like there’s a larger design,” he said. “Despite all the chaos the country is going through, there is a backbone of what’s taking place behind the scenes.”
When he was president, Trump’s team generally tried to keep the movement at a distance. Likely recognizing that associating closely with a deranged conspiracy theory had more downside than up-, Trump supporters reported being asked to hide overt symbols of support for QAnon.
But as his reelection bid neared, Trump began to explicitly praise the movement. First, he offered his congratulations to Marjorie Taylor Greene for winning a House GOPprimary in Georgia — when Greene was primarily known nationally as someone who had embraced QAnon. Asked about the idea a few days later, Trump shrugged.
“I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” he said to a bemused White House press corps. Asked specifically about the idea that he was serving as a warrior against a satanic cabal of pedophiles and cannibals — a more extreme iteration of the theory — Trump didn’t say no but, instead, “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it.”
“It’s like he got possessed by a demon,” she wrote.
This is not the first time that QAnon has been intertwined in a murder. In early 2019, a man purportedly in the sway of the conspiracy theory shot to death a reputed gangster on Long Island. At the time, Marymount Manhattan College psychology professor Cheryl Paradis explained to The Washington Post that political rhetoric, like popular culture, could shape the paranoid delusions of the mentally ill. But in a May 2019 bulletin, the FBI made clear that it saw QAnon as something more dangerous.
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“The FBl assesses anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part,” it read, “to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity.” That included potential “targeting of specific people, places, and organizations, thereby increasing the likelihood of violence against these targets.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, this warning was made manifest. Prominent among those who stormed the Capitol were explicit adherents to QAnon — the dangerous idea that there is a cabal of powerful pedophiles including prominent Democrats and cultural elites that Trump is silently working to dismantle.
And after years of playing footsie with the movement, Trump has begun openly embracing it — even as the federal government’s years of warnings about violence linked to domestic extremism grow louder.
Sign up for How To Read This Chart, a weekly data newsletter from Philip Bump
Trumpism and QAnon are inextricable, as I wrote in August 2018. (The headline: “There’s a virus in Trumpland.”) QAnon’s portrayal of Hollywood and political elites not just as culture-war opponents but as actually evil was simply an elevation of the anti-elite rhetoric that’s at the heart of Trump’s political pitch. But it also, as one Trump rally attendee told me then, helped to reframe Trump’s messy presidency as ordered.
“It’s like there’s a larger design,” he said. “Despite all the chaos the country is going through, there is a backbone of what’s taking place behind the scenes.”
When he was president, Trump’s team generally tried to keep the movement at a distance. Likely recognizing that associating closely with a deranged conspiracy theory had more downside than up-, Trump supporters reported being asked to hide overt symbols of support for QAnon.
But as his reelection bid neared, Trump began to explicitly praise the movement. First, he offered his congratulations to Marjorie Taylor Greene for winning a House GOPprimary in Georgia — when Greene was primarily known nationally as someone who had embraced QAnon. Asked about the idea a few days later, Trump shrugged.
“I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” he said to a bemused White House press corps. Asked specifically about the idea that he was serving as a warrior against a satanic cabal of pedophiles and cannibals — a more extreme iteration of the theory — Trump didn’t say no but, instead, “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it.”