QAnon ain't over—it's on your television. It's been mainstreamed, networked, and remixed. Senior online extremism and disinformation researcher, Alex Kaplan of Media Matters joins Julian to share his reporting on the latest developments. 2024 is fast approaching. Under the looming shadows of legal calamity, Trump is rallying the Anons on Truth Social while Mike Flynn and his grifter-entourage roadshow preaches hellfire and ivermectin anti-vax election denial at an evangelical church near you. Can't make it? Sit back and grab the remote.
Show Notes
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Hello Conspirituality listeners, Julian here with a brief titled Roku Q, the sequel.
It's about new developments in the mainstreaming of extremist disinformation and propaganda as we head toward another election year.
I'll be joined in a few minutes by Alex Kaplan to share his reporting.
As we watched in real time during 2020, the conspiracy cult known as QAnon jumped the rails from the internet's seedy underbelly onto major social media platforms and then into the live-action world.
QAnon banners and t-shirts started showing up in TV news footage from Trump rallies.
And a rash of crimes across the country, from kidnappings to murders to armed standoffs with police, were all linked to this strange, new, and now familiar, extreme political religion.
Mommy bloggers circulated what would come to be called Pastel Q on social media and rallied their followers to marches claiming to support saving the children from sex trafficking while actually recruiting for Q.
By the time our friend, prominent activist and American yoga leader Shawn Korn and her colleagues had made a public Facebook and Instagram declaration opposing QAnon, it had infiltrated the community enough to elicit waves of abusive comments not only from random trolls, but also from yoga students and teachers who had found a resonance between their spiritual beliefs As we then hurtled toward the November presidential election in 2020, conspiritualists we'd been tracking for the previous six months were preaching a New Age version of the prophesied storm.
The more standard version predicted public executions of Democrat and celebrity elites as the satanic pedophile Cabal was defeated and Trump delivered America back to Jesus.
But conspiritualists like alt-med grand-dame Christiane Northrup and prominent channelers Laurie Ladd, Magenta Pixie, and Phil Goodlife framed this great awakening as a sort of science fiction ascension into a fifth dimensional new age spiritual reality.
But then Trump lost the election, and multiple post-hoc prophecies all failed to launch, the storm fizzled, and almost a thousand capital insurrectionists languished in jail.
Surely, the long strange trip of QAnon was finally over.
Well, not really.
Early on, we kept trying to articulate that this is not like a political party, or a non-profit organization, or even an activist group.
There are no card-carrying members, no official leaders.
As they love to say, there's no QAnon.
There's just Q.
And the Anons.
But if QAnon circa 2020 was just the latest synthesis of recycled conspiracy theories and Manichaean religious tropes, then it couldn't really be over.
Not any more than antisemitism or racism are over.
QAnon mainstreamed far-right conspiracism, as evidenced by the rise of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn, as well as the now ubiquitous culture war moral panics about white reproductive rates, critical race theory, and the existence of LGBTQ people.
It appears that Donald Trump really is running again, albeit under the shadow of multiple potential legal calamities.
And his posts on Truth Social are actively reasserting solidarity with QAnon.
But there's a new development, or at least it was new to me.
Media Matters Senior Researcher Alex Kaplan broke the story I'm referring to, and I spoke to him about it this week.
He specializes in disinformation and online extremism.
Alex, welcome.
Thank you for having me on.
Absolutely.
It's such a pleasure to finally talk to you.
Listen, I wanted to have you on today specifically because of your story from the middle of February about a new QAnon dedicated channel called Burrow, of course, that had popped up on Roku's streaming service and was also running ads on the social media platform Meta, which people may know was formerly called Facebook.
But let's put a pin in that for right now, because before we go there, I think it makes sense to dig a little further back into your excellent reporting.
You know, it turns out that Roku has a storied history with this kind of content.
So, back in 2019, they removed Alex Jones' InfoWars channel, and then during 2020, you reported on channels by prominent QAnon influencers that were showing up on Roku as well, and on some other streaming platforms.
So, catch us up a little on that backstory if you would.
Yeah, so Roku has, I would say, had a history of dealing with conspiratorial extremist content.
Well, they originally had InfoWars on the platform.
They took it down when, around the time a lot of multiple platforms were starting to take down InfoWars.
The following year, I found a channel that was dedicated to QAnon that was set up by essentially a couple of prominent QAnon influencers and it appears that Roku didn't know about it somehow and they did remove the channel after I reported and wrote about it.
They didn't catch also a couple years ago a InfoWars is actually benefiting on the platform.
They had set up another channel that was dedicated to InfoWars content and Roku didn't catch this either.
And again, they only took it down hours after I reported it and wrote about it.
And now we see this channel that only launched in December that's done very well according to its own internal metrics, hundreds of thousands of installations.
And this time, even though Roku knows about it, because I've written about it, how well it's doing, even though they claimed to have told, or they told to a news outlet that they were looking into the channel, they have done nothing since.
I asked Alex next if this was a noteworthy new development in the realm of disinformation, given that streaming platforms combine the convenience and open-ended flexibility of the internet.
With the seeming legitimacy of being like a cable TV provider.
He explained to me that extremist content had been available on streaming services for at least the last few years.
In late 2020, for example, as social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube were all cracking down finally on QAnon content, At least 10 different channels dedicated to their conspiracy hate-mongering still had a home, not only on Roku, but on Amazon Fire and Apple TV as well.
But perhaps more of the essence than their apparent obliviousness at the time, Kaplan's reporting continues to expose, now, a lack of enforcement of these streaming services platforms' own explicit terms of service.
I should know, by the way, of some of these streaming platforms like Roku.
The reason I've written about these and reported some of them is because Roku has rules, you know.
They do actually have a content policy.
So theoretically, they do not allow certain types of content.
And under Roku's own president, given that they took down a QAnon channel in 2020 and took down InfoWars, they have made a president that suggests that this types of content like QAnon and InfoWars does violate its rules.
That's why it's notable that these channels have been up there, or sometimes Roku hasn't enforced their own rules.
So that's the reason why I'm reporting about them.
There's a reason why.
It's not me even saying it, it's Roku, their own rules saying it.
Notably with the Burrow channel, one of the people behind it has taken, I would say, somewhat of a victory lap.
Uh-huh.
...around Roku not doing anything about the channel.
He's claimed that either the channel doesn't violate its policies, which, again, given its rules and precedent, seems extremely dubious, or claimed that even Roku secretly supports what the channel is pushing.
There's no... Again, I can't speak to that, but all I can say is that, you know, Roku's, you know, sometimes these inability to enforce their own rules, you know, I guess can embolden some of these people.
Yeah, yeah.
So the InfoWars story that you mentioned is interesting, right?
That they took down InfoWars in 2019, pretty shortly after it had gotten onto the platform.
But then they seemed to sort of find a way to slide under the radar with a channel called Banned Video.
Do you know how they were able to get away with that and what happened?
I've gotten the sense that Roku's policy for getting channels on may be a little lax.
I can't say for sure, but that's the sense that I've gotten.
And that they may not catch things until it's noticed maybe by others.
Um, but again, I mean, it's notable that they did suggest that ban evasion is not allowed on the platform, given that they took down the channel just hours after I reported it.
So I'm not exactly sure what their process is for channel approving, but I got the sense it's not.
The most scrutinized.
Yeah, they probably should be issuing back pay to you for doing this job.
You're the quality control guy right now enforcing their terms of service.
Alright, so you wrote about Burrow, which is this new channel, back in early January when it had already been stalled over 300,000 times in its first 20 days.
And you said it was trying to gain traction on Roku by soliciting advertising, it seems like, from viewers.
You quote them as inviting any Alex Jones type stuff, right?
Tell us more about Burrow.
Yeah, so this is a channel that is launched by some conspiracy theorists that is essentially dedicated to QAnon conspiracy theory content and similar types of content.
Essentially, it's a collection of videos, a lot of videos.
They're divided into different sections.
You can find your section on Pizzagate, a section on Q, literally called Q, so directly QAnon, explicit or well-known QAnon films like Out of Shadows or Fall of the Cabal.
Those are very well-known QAnon films, or Pizzagate-like films, pushing that type of stuff.
Also, it's anti-vaxx.
It also pushes some InfoWars content.
So, you know, it's got lots of different things that, as I've said, should violate Roker's rules.
It does feature ads.
Um, and again, one of the people behind the channel has said when he was asking for people to help get advertising for the channel, he said, Oh, we can maybe do something like Alex Jones stuff as ads to promote.
Um, and they, since then, um, there have been apparently more ads on the channel.
Um, they are promoting stuff, I guess, like some, you know, I would say stuff that's, Tends to be more conspiracy theory friendly products, let's say that.
You write that in because you've done a follow up article now that I guess it's maybe been a month or five weeks later, it's been installed another 100,000 times.
At least 400,000 times.
This is the internal metrics published on Bureau's site.
So they've released their own internal metrics showing how many installations it's got because they're bragging about it.
They've used it as a selling point.
I mean, this is interesting, right?
Because there's a way that I think for a lot of people who follow this stuff, there's been a sense that like, okay, QAnon is like, so 2020, like, why are we still talking about QAnon?
And yet, it seems like with channels like this, my concern would be that it's the continuing sort of mainstreaming and maybe breaking through into normie audiences that might, you know, some of this content has got to be new for somebody, right?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think there has been a somewhat, I would say, since 2021, maybe a little bit of a misunderstanding about what QAnon has become.
I remember seeing around that, you know, soon after Biden took office, a claim that QAnon was dying or was dead.
And that was a misunderstanding of what it was.
It had become this cohesive infrastructure, people that had, you know, kind of coalesced through social media and even with the social media crackdowns that, you know, happened months before, right around the time Biden took office.
Had they gone to other alternative social media platforms, they still had a lot of people in there.
And they had multiple QAnon influencers, they still had massive followings.
And even with the mostly, I would say, fading of There haven't been many new Q posts.
Q was silent for 18 months, between December 2020 until June.
you know, between December 2020 until like June, last June.
But since then, you know, QAnon has kind of moved to, from trust the plan to, you know,
it's time for us to be the plan.
You know, Q woke us up, Q told us what we need to do, you know, we got it from here.
And it's become like this, I call it this online anti-reality network that has become a tool and a ally that could be helpful for other conspiracy theorists, particularly, I would say, anti-vaxxers and election denialists.
Yeah, I mean, do you think it's fair to say that even though the intense gamification of the initial sort of wave, maybe we say 18 months or so, or maybe more than that, of QAnon gaining, you know, very rapidly gaining a lot of followers and giving Giving this group of people something fascinating to pay attention to that seemed like it was very addictive at the time, even though we've moved beyond that initial phase, all of the conspiracy themes, all of the extreme right-wing political preoccupations have only continued to be central to these people's political lives and what they focus on.
Yeah, I mean, QAnon, you know, I think it encouraged, you know, the Anons or its supporters to dig, you know, quote unquote, dig into stuff, right?
Because, you know, it was part of that game thing, gaminization, as you would say, encouraging them to, you know, work on or interpret the Q clue,
you know, the clues, supposed clues from Q, they've applied that to other things
to that other conspiracy theorists have tried to take advantage of.
If it's okay, I'm gonna give a prominent example.
There's this election denial group called True the Vote.
They became famous last year through the debunked false conspiracy theory movie 2,000 Mules.
After that movie came out, they struck an alliance with the Anons.
The two heads, I would say, of the organization are a man and woman called Katherine Engelblatt and Greg Phillips.
And they openly talked about how the Anons could be allies and they were so impressed by, you know, how much they would dig into stuff.
And then they wound up using them openly.
They fed them supposed information about an election software company and asked them essentially to dig into this election software company.
And that's what they did.
And then through the vote, started sharing their supposed findings.
They did.
They took advantage exactly of what QAnon had become.
Obviously, it was conspiracy theory stuff, but in a way, those two better understood what QAnon had become than a lot of people out there, because they understood that these people were useful for their agenda, that they could dig into stuff, supposedly.
You've got this grassroots network of independent researchers, right?
Yeah, and just like a lot of more, what people think of as more traditionally defined spiritual cults or religious cults, when the prophecy doesn't come true, the cult doesn't just go, okay, we're done now.
Let's give up on this.
No, they moved the goalposts, they changed the prophecy, they evolved their ideology, and the leader starts giving rationalizations for why everything didn't happen the way he had said it was going to.
Yeah, and I actually think, notably, in this case with QAnon, it was also the followers.
It's not Q that's been saying, actually, you guys were the plan.
I'll give you an example, besides what I was saying with people saying before, you know, we're the plan now.
Kind of a big example of this has been, so Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor under Trump, has become a celebrated figure in the QAnon community.
He has essentially Supported at a certain level, QAnon himself, you know, he took that QAnon oath, I would say infamously, in 2020.
He's done other things.
July 4th.
Yeah.
He has encouraged, I would say since 2021, people to get involved at local politics.
He says local action equals national impact.
And that saying has become extremely influential in the QAnon community.
There's like a QAnon, for example, like a QAnon message board, a major QAnon forum literally has like that phrase on its side.
To give an extent of how much it's spread, and it has led to growth of QAnon involvement in local politics.
So you kind of saw this movement, I would say, among its supporters to reinterpret QAnon as, we are the plan, it's time for us to take action.
It was kind of revisionist.
Yeah, yeah, and so then you have this supposed grassroots movement of people showing up at school boards and city council meetings and, you know, that seems like the next iteration.
Yeah, no, it became really big.
Again, in part thanks to stuff like Michael Flynn calling for people to get involved in local politics.
You did have QAnon supporters getting involved, but school boards.
A prominent example, I'll just give a prominent example of this.
There was a, I believe it was 2021, there was a the school board in like California that they were trying to have a meeting and essentially they got like harassed by I think it was like this anti-mandate group at the time and they basically got chased out of the room and then this group claimed to become they like went into the room and they claimed themselves like the new school board and one of the people claiming and then they voted uh as opposed president uh of this new school board obviously this is not legal this was not
Not at all.
But notably, this supposed president had suggested on social media that he supported QAnon and was friendly with a QAnon influencer who's actually now has been on the Reawaken tour.
His name is Scott McKay.
And this president, quote unquote, said on social media that this guy basically encouraged him to take the kind of actions that he was taking and Scott McKay on his show openly bragged about what the guy did.
That's a pretty direct, I would say, tie between the QAnon community and this impact on school boards.
There were other examples, but that one really stuck out to me because it's so direct and so stark.
That's amazing.
It's like, we're just going to come in and do a coup on the school board and install our own people.
Yeah.
And then the influencer was like, this is great.
He was texting me.
He was like, oh, the guy was texting me about it.
I mean, yeah, pretty direct.
That's amazing.
I mean, on an even more sort of grim note, I feel like, you know, with the rise of Daily Wire, with how the Daily Wire have turned into a subscription service now that is reaching I think they have more than a million subscribers last I checked, and with a lot of the legislative steps that people like Ron DeSantis are taking, even though they're not openly promoting QAnon, they seem to have very effectively picked up the threads of moral panic, right?
Child sacrifice, great replacement, the moral degeneracy of liberals, we have to protect our children from these people.
Do you see some of these developments I get the sense that, you know, the spread of QAnon, which, you know, I mean, again, the premise of it is involving, like, this cabal, Satan-worshipping pedophile.
into this much more prominent space?
I get the sense that, you know, the spread of QAnon, which, you know, I mean, again,
the premise of it is involving like this cabal, Satan-worshipping pedophile.
I get the sense that it has popularized within the Republican Party.
And you know, QAnon is tied to the Republican Party.
I mean, it is a conservative fundamentally, it's a far-right movement.
So when I say tied to, it's because of that.
And it has grown in influence in the Republican Party.
That is undeniable.
I mean, there are now members of Congress who have, at one point or another, expressed some level of support for Warren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, even if both of them, you know, try to claim to disavow now.
I think that there has been some level of popularity in QAnon, I mean, in QAnon with the Republican Party, and it has probably in some level brushed off On messaging, what have you.
I mean, I just remember like last year when, for example, President Biden nominated Justice, well now Justice, Katanji Brown-Jackson to the Supreme Court.
The biggest kind of Republican attack against her was that she was secretly like pro-pedophile.
And, you know, some of the community did pick that up.
You know, they did like that attack.
And I do think in some way this is kind of like a continuation of, I guess, the satanic panic of the 80s.
Yes.
But, you know, I do think there has been some level, probably, of connection between the growth of QAnon and the rise of claiming, you know, people are basically using pedophilia as some type of attack.
Yes.
Yes.
I mean, when I hear Matt Walsh standing outside the Tennessee Capitol and saying we are in a battle of good versus evil because the people over there want to mutilate your kids' genitals and we are fighting for our children, even though I'm not saying it's literally QAnon, it's a form of rhetoric that has become sort of mainstreamed, I think, as a result of All of this activity over the last few years.
And if you remember in 2020, there were these Save the Children protests, which was actually just QAnon, but the people behind it kind of tried to hide what QAnon was around saving the children, right?
It was about protecting children as a way to get people into this space.
I'm not saying people who like the Daily Wire are trying to get people into QAnon, but what I'm saying is that there was a sanitization of some of QAnon For some, that maybe made it more potent.
Anything else you want to say before we close today, Alex?
I just think it's important to note, just again, how alarming it has been.
A couple of things.
Just alarming that the QAnon movement community has really gotten strength in the anti-vaccine election denial movements in ways that I don't think people have quite understood.
Some major figures in the last few years in those realms have become pretty tied with the QAnon community.
I don't want to get into the weeds, I don't need to get in the weeds with people, but it's become very extensive.
And additionally, former President Trump himself has increasingly become, he keeps promoting explicit QAnon content on True Social.
That has included him, now multiple times, amplifying QDrops.
On True Social, on his True Social account.
That's an alarming development.
And we now know he said nice things about QAnon, so he seems to, I don't know, we see them as allies, helpful maybe.
I think that emboldens the community going forward.
I mean, we all remember a few months ago the QAnon song that was at the Trump rallies, and he used it originally in a Rumble video.
This is a sign that QAnon is becoming still influential.
And if Trump becomes the nominee again, we could have a Republican nominee who is, I would say, openly associated with QAnon now.
I think all that's alarming.
In his most recent article on the Roku story, Alex reports that Meta is profiting from the promotion of the new QAnon channel Burrow by allowing it to run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and in their Messenger app, thus violating Meta's own policies.
Thanks so much for listening.
We'll see you on the main feed or on the bonus episodes you can access through Patreon and Apple subscriptions.
