Mia Bloom: Inside the Mind of QAnon

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Transcript

Episode 68 July 18 2021

SPEAKERS

Sam Goldman, Mia Bloom

Mia Bloom 00:00

The rest of the world is seeing more and more of this Q-Anon conspiracy…. It’s this closed information bubble. It’s an echo chamber… We under-reacted to a growing domestic terrorism problem… And this concern is about the military, the degree to which it has infiltrated into military circles… It’s interesting because in places where fascism is taking hold, you have the ability to control the media and to avoid any kind of disconfirming information… It’s in democracies as well as authoritarian governments. It’s not something that requires a limited freedom of expression. It’s also not contingent on having full freedom of expression.

Sam Goldman 00:55

Welcome to Episode 68 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. Refuse Fascism exposes, analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show. Today, we’re sharing an interview with Dr. Mia Bloom, author of a new book about the Q-Anon movement that went from lunatic fringe conspiracy theory to a core component of the Trump fascist movement, and motivation for many of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

Half a year after that assault on the peaceful transfer of power, the current president, the one who the fascists were trying to prevent from taking power said, “We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” Joe Biden said this just this past week, not about January 6, but about the current moment we’re in. Then he went on to secure voting rights, lead his party to ban the filibuster, indict Trump and all his co-conspirators and demand an end to all reconciliation efforts with a thoroughly fascist GOP. No, no, none of that happened. And to be honest, there’s no reason to rely on the Democratic Party to do those things to oppose and defeat this fascist movement. Trump, the leader of that failed fascist coup in January, has not been silenced by a social media ban, but has been very active speaking at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference – ed), touring the country, dialing in to Fox News to praise the January 6 insurrectionists and meeting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about how the Republicans can retake Congress. He is in fact still THE leader of the GOP and as more people than ever before, perhaps, recognize, a fascist. Just because you don’t have to see his tweets on your timeline anymore, doesn’t mean he’s been sidelined by any means. And the grip he still holds on the Republi-fascist party should not be underestimated.

As it came out over this past week, the US military under General Mark Milley’s command recognized at some point that Trump was trying to instigate a fascist coup. The fact that people like Mark Milley or Bush speechwriter David Frum, who were in various ways complicit with the rise of fascism, say that Trump is a fascist leader should be taken very seriously. Personally, I think one of the biggest takeaways from Milley’s fear of a Trump coup is that we shouldn’t be relying on the decisions of individual actors from within the regime next time. In this moment, where more people and people of influence are using the word “fascism” to identify Trump, his movement and the GOP, we cannot sit back and say, “See, we were right.” Although we were, and since we were right about this, it might be worth digging into deeper what else we were right about, like what’s required to stop fascism. We have to act now, forcefully intervening in these often hesitant, self-serving sloppy and Ill-conceived conversations, using them to solidify public opinion around an accurate understanding of what fascism is, what we’re up against, why this is happening, and what it’s going to take to stop it. And that is what you’re doing when you listen, engage with and share this show. As we’ve said before, and will definitely be saying again: fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies, the worst of insults to hurl at someone. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Once in power, fascism’s defining feature is the essential elimination of the rule of law and democratic and civil rights. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny and the aggressive reinstitution of oppressive “traditional values.” Truth is obliterated and fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build their movement and consolidate power.

In today’s episode, we’re focusing on the obliteration of truth, fascist mobs and threats of violence. Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 rioter who was killed by a Capitol Police officer was not just a Trump fanatic, but a Q-Anon adherent. As the fascists aim to turn her story into a rallying cry for their movement and potentially other violence, it’s important that we understand what she believed and where those beliefs come from, and how those beliefs continue to motivate and embolden a large chunk of the Trump movement. With that, here’s my interview with Dr. Mia Bloom. We’re recording this a few days after the six month anniversary of the coup attempt that prominently involved Q-Anon believers, including the now martyrized Ashli Babbitt, descending on the Capitol to fight for Trump, who they believe is their savior. Q-Anon believers hold positions that represent the Republi-fascist party, not as fringe rejects, but as renegade rising stars. Dr. Bloom along with her co- author wrote, “in a short four years Q-Anon metastasized from a fringe movement on anonymous message boards into a cult-like movement with millions of followers around the world, one that has captured the imagination and practically seized control of the Republican Party. And well, what is going on? How did we get in a situation where those that believe in lizard people became a central and driving force behind the ‘Stop the Steal’ protests that led to the Capitol siege? And is this movement done after their quote ‘storm’ didn’t come to be?” To help us in understanding this, I’m chatting with Dr. Mia Bloom, co author of ‘Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of You and Me’, and international Security Fellow at New America, professor at Georgia State University and a member of the evidence-based Cybersecurity Research Group. Welcome, Dr. Bloom. Thanks for coming on.

Mia Bloom 07:01

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Sam Goldman 07:03

So I guess I want to start with what motivated you to write this book.

Mia Bloom 07:08

It’s actually a funny story. I’m ordinarily an academic, and I was given this wonderful opportunity to have my own series of Stanford University Press. And it was an opportunity for me to publish first generation scholars, scholars of color, women, who in the grand scheme of things as a result of the pandemic, we were seeing a disproportionate impact on men versus women in terms of their “productivity,” because women were required to do the vast majority of child rearing, and then homeschooling. There was just a lot for the women to do. Having this imprint allowed me to go up to women and say, “do you want to publish with Stanford University Press?” which is a great press. About a year and a half ago, I contacted the president of the press and said, “You know, I know we have our ordinary ideas of trying to support BIPOC scholars in first generation. But I think we should do a book on Q-Anon.” And so he said, “Okay, so who are you going to ask?”

So I started doing research to figure out who were the notable minds that were working on Q-Anon, because it wasn’t yet as big a thing as it is now. And, a number of people, you know, either they ignored the emails, or they ghosted me, or whatever, it was very frustrating. The president of the press, who’s also a friend of mine, tried to get a young scholar and got a bunch of excuses. And he turned to me said, “You know, at this point, I bet you could write a book.” And I said, “Well, I mean, I could write a half a book.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you find someone and maybe you guys can write a book together?” So Sofia Moskalenko was the leading expert in the psychology of terrorism. She’d written something like three or four books on radicalization. I knew of her but maybe we had exchanged, I don’t know, five words in a few years. I approached her with this idea, and she said, “what would you need?” I said, I don’t know, we sort of want a few chapters – we totally catfished her. We ended up taking turns writing chapters, but then writing chapters together. And I was so excited to work with someone who had sort of the same work ethic is me and the same energy level as me, and I didn’t have to rewrite her sections. We were looking at each other going, well, you know, “We’re both short immigrant Jewish women.”

It just worked. We did it quickly. I’ll be honest with you, we managed to turn it around quickly. And the press ,to their benefit, also, in production, turned it around the way a press would turn around a book if Melania came out with a tell-all book, that’s how quickly they would turn it around. So we were very lucky. Stanford University has a part of the press that’s for trade, for normal people. And we wrote it, because we knew that there were a lot of people with questions that I was listening to in the news. Or I would read an article in The Atlantic or The Daily Beast and see anti-Semitic tropes and think, what are the tropes? Or anti Catholic tropes? What are they — tell me more, fill in those blanks. Don’t presume that I already know about this thing. Talk to me like I’m starting from square one. And so we did that, not in a way where we talk down to the audience, because we know our audience are intelligent men and women, mostly women, I’m guessing, but intelligent people who have questions.

Sophia came up with this fantastic idea at the end of FAQs, partly because it had the letter Q. But also, if you’re talking to a family member, and they believe in Q-Anon, start asking them these questions, because they won’t be able to answer and then you’ll have the answer. And that’s how you plant the seed of doubt. You get them to the point where they can’t answer you. And then you’re looking at them, and they’re looking at you. And that’s where the doubt creeps in. And that’s what we needed to exploit. We didn’t want to call people who follow Q-anon idiots or cultists or stuff like that. We wanted to explain that we understand that many of the people were pulled into Q-Anon for very good reasons. They thought they were helping children. They had very altruistic tendencies. They actually wanted to help like Fred Guttenberg says “Be the helper.” And we didn’t want to treat them like they were the dregs of society. But we also differentiated between the people who were making money off of Q and manipulating them. And so if those people like Lin Wood or Sidney Powell, or General Michael Flynn, or former President Trump goes to jail for the Ponzi scheme, I’m okay with that. But I want you to get your second cousin or your mother in law or your work colleague out safely.

Sam Goldman 11:35

Thank you for that. Dr. Bloom. I think that’s a really important distinction. As we’re continuing this conversation, I really encourage listeners to keep that distinction. Can you briefly tell our listeners who may not follow this story? In basic terms — I encourage people to go read the book and dig deeper — but in basic terms, what is Q-Anon? What do they believe? And most importantly, why is this movement so dangerous?

Mia Bloom 12:00

Q-Anon is a baseless conspiracy theory that presumes that there is an elite cabal — or as Marjorie Taylor Greene calls them a “cable” — of blood-drinking elites that are like puppet masters. They’ve been controlling the world for decades, or eons, or however long. The argument is that these Democrats and these elites which also include very famous and prominent Republicans and the House of Windsor, the royal family in the UK, and the royal family in Holland. By the way, I didn’t know there was a royal family in Holland until I saw that Q-Anon was saying they were blood drinkers. They argument is that the military approached President Trump and asked him to run for president because only Donald Trump could save the children from this horrible trafficking, pedophilia, blood drinking cabal. So it starts with this very much a trope built on anti-Semitism about a shady cabal manipulating things like the puppet master; adds to it layers, the blood drinking. There’s a long history of what they called blood libels from the 12th century on. The argument was: Jewish people were killing unbaptized babies to take their blood to make matzohs, which was what they ate at Passover.

What I did was, let me assume you know, nothing. So let me assume that what’s a matzah, but also maybe people didn’t know that Jews have this crazy restriction against any blood. And so I could go and point to Leviticus and give you from the Bible where it says no blood allowed, but also explain, I think a lot of people didn’t realize when they make something kosher, what the kosher means it was to get the blood out. And so part of what I wanted to do was walk someone through, which was a labyrinthine conspiracy theory step at a time. And then as I’m walking through explaining it along the way. And so this is where we’re at, we’re at this point where Q-Anon has grown so large that Anna Merlon talks about it, you know, as a conspiracy singularity, that it’s so big now that it has picked up all the adjacent conspiracies next to it. And now we see that Q-Anon isn’t just about Pizzagate, and anti-George Soros, and it’s anti-5g, and it believes that there’s lizard people walking around in human form, and that the earth is flat, that the moon landing was faked, and so on and so forth. So there’s so many different conspiracy theories that long predate Q-Anon that have been subsumed under the Q-Anon umbrella.

Sam Goldman 14:38

I think that that’s really an important point that I took away from reading the book, in addition to kind of looking at the way that the pandemic fueled the rise of Q-Anon, that was something that I was able to understand differently than I had. In the book, you point some of the factors: people are lost at home, they’re spending more time online, they’re now having economic instability, they’re scared. All these different factors that kind of were a recipe in many ways for that attraction.

Mia Bloom 15:06

I definitely have this idea that when people are discombobulated, and like you said, scared, for whatever reason, the conspiracy theory makes people feel better that there’s a plan. It might be an evil plan, but they’re happier thinking that there is some mastermind evil plan than thinking that bad things happen to good people. And so for example, someone’s crossing the street and gets hit by a bus. No, no, no, no, the bus driver was aiming for them. You know, again, the conspiracy theory is very attractive to people who want to find answers. And especially we were living in sort of a constellation of different crises. We had a racial justice crisis because of what happened with George Floyd. And so many people of color were coming out into the streets and talking about their experiences. At the same time, we were having an economic crisis, because things were shutting down, people were losing their jobs. We had a health crisis, and there was a virus we could not see that was microscopic. We needed to explain all this and for whatever reason, when the movie Plandemic, this short fake documentary about what was going on with Coronavirus, that it was a bio-weapon from China; that Anthony Fauci was a bad guy. That was the gateway drug, if you will, that brought in not just people who love Donald Trump, because there’s a lot of people that believe in Donald Trump in a way that many of us find puzzling. But at the same time, it also brought in left-wing women, women who were vegans, women who practiced yoga, women who were anti-vaccine. And so you were now not just appealing to one side of the political spectrum, but to the entire spectrum of women at least.

Sam Goldman 16:00

Could you speak a little bit more to how much Q-Anon began to overlap with other anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and what you think the implications for public health there were?

Mia Bloom 16:57

I wrote a book a few years ago on ISIS. It was about the use of children by terrorist groups. The method that I used to collect the information was using this semi-encrypted platform called Telegram. And Telegram is originally, it’s owned by a Russian company. Pavel Durov, who created Russia’s Facebook, called VKontakte. ISIS, and many of the jihadi groups found a very inhospitable environment in 2015. And they left for the most part because they were being shut down; Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all the platforms you can access. And they went to the semi-encrypted platform called Telegram. And I thought: this is where the bad people go when they’re being kicked off of platforms. And we saw Q-Anon was de-platformed in the summer of 2020. Reddit banned it in 2018. Reddit knew right away, but it took a few extra years and almost too little too late for Twitter and Facebook. And so on Telegram when you’re following these Q-Anon channels, some of whom have as many as 400,000 – 500,000 followers, they are very, very anti-vaccine. And they are pushing this idea that if you take the vaccine, you’re gonna die. They’re showing pictures of babies who took the vaccine, and now the baby is dead, even though we know no one under 12 has taken the vaccine. Or they will find someone who took the vaccine, posted into social media, you know the card we were all posting, and then died a few weeks later of possible natural causes. “You see the vaccine kill them.” They are constantly pushing the same kind of garbage that people see on Fox News, where the Murdocks and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, they’re all vaccinated, but they’re pushing this narrative that is decidedly anti-vaccine. What we’re seeing in Q-Anon is like Fox News on steroids. Its ethos is now not just about the pedophiles, and the blood drinkers and save the children. It’s anti-vaccine. It’s really, really anti-LGBTQ. The T’s more than anyone but it’s anything having to do with justice, or social justice warriors. And now it’s even started talking about critical race theory. And it’s just basically this echo chamber. And it’s a closed information system, what we in terrorism used to call the terror echo chamber where with every conversation and iteration, you’re getting more and more upset, and you’re getting wound up. And that’s what these channels are doing. They’re winding people up against the vaccine and trying to convince hundreds of thousands of people that if you take the vaccine, that’s a death sentence. It’s really dangerous because we’re seeing now the outcome that the people who are dying of COVID-19 now, 99% are unvaccinated.

Sam Goldman 19:37

It’s truly horrific. I wanted to go back to something that you brought up regarding the anti-Semitic history that Q-Anon leverages and creates as part of its narrative. Many people knew about the impact of PizzaGate before Trump was even elected and know about little pieces of the Q-Anon puzzle, is how I think about it. Before we were recording, we were talking about people say things like there’s anti-Semitic tropes, but don’t understand what those tropes are, or the violent history of, let’s say the pogroms, that are being leveraged in this very modern way as it spread on the internet. But it’s in fact very old, ancient, in some ways, hatreds. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that, and in particular, the infamous Elders of Zion theory, and if and how you see collaboration between Q-Anon forces and more traditional fascist groupings of white supremacists, such as the Proud Boys or Patriot Front or those types of groupings.

Mia Bloom 20:43

I still have two friends from high school, one of my friends bought the book, and she called me laughing, and she said, I remember this lecture from Hebrew school. And I was like: “was it Morah [teacher in Hebrew] Tooke?” [feigning friend responding] “Think it was Morah Hottel.” It was so funny, because there’s a section where I’m talking about anti-semitism, and we were really super careful as academics. We cited all of our sources, and there’s hundreds of footnotes in the book, it’s not done in a way that it looks like an academic book. But if you’re an academic, and you wonder — well, where did she get that? — you can find the source. But there’s a section on the antisemitism where there are no sources because I was recreating the stuff that we had learned in school, because we had studied anti- Semitism, almost in every other course. In Hebrew school, you would learn about the blood of babies that were allegedly used for matzoh. And then also knowing that koshering food took out all the blood. So this idea that Jews drink blood, so antithetical to Orthodox Judaism or conservative Orthodox Judaism, be anyone who’s practicing, and going back in time to the 12th century, all the way to the 20th century in the United States. I didn’t know that there had been a blood libel in Sarasota, so that’s where the footnotes start appearing again. I’ll tell you why it’s important. Linca Perone, who’s one of these famous former Q-Anon women who got out, and she’s done a great service. She’s done the talk show circuit, and she’s been on The Chat and The Chew and The View and all the shows. When she was asked, she said, Well, I didn’t see any anti Semitism. But the thing is, if you don’t know that the blood drinking, or that mentioning Janet Yellen, or George Soros or the cabal, you may not realize that that was the anti Semitism. So part of it was also to educate the audience that, by the way, when you see this, this is what it’s referring to. And I had the opposite. I was doing a new research project to show the elements within Q-Anon that were quite racist. Post Civil War tropes from Reconstruction, horrible stereotypes of people of color are embedded within Q-Anon’s messaging. And so I went to go look for some of the stuff that we were using for analysis. I came across a bunch of channels that are Q-Anon in Hebrew. So me and a young woman who’s a fluent native speaker, we went through all the channels. And what’s crazy is that Q-Anon is trying to appeal to Orthodox Jews, despite the fact that it’s a racist, anti-Semitic trope. What the Hebrew channels were saying was not that dissimilar to what the English channels were saying.

And so we thought — we did this with ISIS as well — we looked at what do they say in Arabic versus what do they say in French versus what do they say in Russian? Because we’re trying to figure out, are there differences across the languages? And so I published last week in Haaretz, this article looking at Hebrew Q-Anon, and it’s crazy. They made me take out all the names of the Israeli celebrities, they were afraid of being sued, but they’re saying the same things about some of their celebrities — I wouldn’t have known who they were — that they say about Christy Teigen and Oprah and Tom Hanks. I have to tell you, that when I was reading it, I remember I had questions. Like: “Tom Hanks, everybody loves Tom Hanks, what’s the Tom Hanks thing?” So I wanted to find out, why do they hate Tom Hanks? So I put a little bit of that into the book. But this is where sunlight has this cleansing or sanitizing effect. I think the more we know about where Q-Anon comes from, we can maybe inoculate populations who want to do the good things that we want to do. We want to help kids, we want to prevent trafficking, we want our children to inherit a better planet than the one we’re leaving, that kind of thing. And that does not mean being out of Q-Anon, that means channeling your positive energies elsewhere. This is again, the reason why I didn’t stop the research with just the book. I kept going. I want to inoculate communities of color and I want to let Jewish people know this is a really crazy anti-semitic theory that you are now promoting.

Sam Goldman 24:39

That’s essential work, and I think that one of the things that this brings to mind is that those with the most certitude in this moment are the most out of touch with reality. And that actually by participating in conspiracy peddling, they’re actually standing in the way of efforts to, for instance, save the children or stop human trafficking. So I think that’s a really important point. In terms of the bringing the truth to light and looking at the history is one of the really important parts that I learned a lot from. I had a gut feeling about it, but, you know, when you have a gut feeling, and you don’t really have evidence to back you up, this was like a really helpful thing to give me that evidence. That history was around the draping in religion, that Q-Anon is actually very steeped in religion. And people are saying: “these are total lunatics, it’s the most fringe thing.” And then you look at some of the things that they believe in, and you dig a little bit deeper, and those roots are in more traditional religions that seem totally not harebrained to the majority of the US population. And so I think that it’s interesting to me to see, for instance, in particular, the evangelical movement, and within Catholicism, both the attraction to Q-Anon amongst that base, but also how maybe that attraction is because some of the ideas are seeded there.

Mia Bloom 26:01

It absolutely resonates. I have close evangelical friends, and everyone, for the longest time, when I became friends with them, they were saying “oh, they’re gonna try and convert you.” And I was like, they know that’s a lost cause. They’re my neighbors, they have a key to my house, so that’s the level of friendship. They were both coming from different parts of Christianity before they became evangelicals. And they talk about discovering Christ and having Christ in their life. It’s almost like Christ as a living and breathing entity that is with them every single day at every single moment and guiding them. And they are firm believers. And they are very, very nice people. I mean, they have a key to my house. But, they are single issue voters, and they were Trump supporters. And so I was able to talk to them once before and after the election. And I said, I don’t get it. You guys are very moral and principled. You’ve got this candidate who is raw dogging porn stars and cheating on his wife a month after the baby is born. And she says to me: “What’s raw dogging?” I went: “ok, let’s go to the next question please.” But, when I was reading about how people had come and seen the light of Q-Anon, discovered the truth of Q-Anon, felt now it was incumbent upon them to proselytize. It was exactly the way Amy describes how they became evangelicals. This idea that there is a cosmic war of good versus evil, that Satan is on Earth embodying, for them, because they are not Democrats, for them, it was certain Democratic politicians. And it was so similar.

When you see that Q-Anon is very popular — it’s one in three evangelicals believe in Q-Anon, almost that high, which is a lot. I know that evangelicals constitute 14% of the population, but there are very powerful 14%. When you watch that Netflix show The Family, or when you see about the way evangelicals make it or break it for primary candidates. Because they really do; they’re very active voters, and they’re very engaged. So the third thing was, I knew that Amy had lived abroad in a number of different countries, and evangelicals are like Mormons in the sense of it’s a proselytizing religion. And because it’s resonating so much with evangelicals, it’s not just that Q-Anon is spreading here in the US among evangelicals. When they go to Gabon, or Zaire or Cameroon or Ghana, or wherever they’re going, they’re going to bring those Q messages with them. And so we do have to be concerned. Now, interestingly enough, I haven’t seen as much Q-Anon interest among Mormons, but I would have had the same concern. I mean, the fact remains is that there is no one religion that is more susceptible or less susceptible to Q-Anon. I think we’ve seen Q-Anon in all religions, and it’s very counterintuitive. The Orthodox Jews really were confusing, given they are going to recognize the tropes, and they’re going to realize that protocols. I think it was really also important that a lot of evangelical ministers were very hesitant to contradict Q-Anon, because they were worried about losing their parishioners. And I would say that losing one or two parishioners is worth having their leaders come out against it. In the same way that we’ve seen the son of Billy Graham, who got his COVID-19 inoculation he’s come out in favor of it. There’s been a number of evangelical ministers who have basically taken the position that the vaccine is a gift from God, and so let’s all get vaccinated. But we are seeing it in certain communities, and these communities are also the same communities that voted for Trump. They’re also the same communities that are most vulnerable to Q-Anon. So it’s really hard to tease apart where one thing ends and the other thing begins.

Sam Goldman 29:51

So basically, we’re looking at a group of people that are energized by this really unhinged notion that Jews drink children’s blood that originated with this fake story from the ancients, right? It’s got to be a tiny amount of the population just like a tiny amount of Trump supporters, right?

Mia Bloom 30:09

Well, you would think so, but AEI — which is American Enterprise Institute, a Republican conservative think tank — ran a series of surveys. Turns out that the number of Americans who believe some element of Q-Anon — but the most obnoxious one being that there’s blood drinking Democrats that are having sex with and trafficking children, then killing them for their blood — puts it at around 12 to 13%. We’re looking at, on the low end of the scale, of 30 million Americans. Now AEI also found that 6% of the people who believed in it identified as Democrats. So Linca Perone, for example, was a Bernie supporter. And it was because Q-Anon jumped from the sort of underbelly of social media, the chat rooms in the channels, and it went to places like Instagram, which are very graphic and image laden, and places where women are. That’s their preferred platform. They got the vegans and the yoga moms, and they got the women who believed in natural childbirth, and breastfeeding, and you know, all of these pure body concepts. I found out in doing this research that the Nazis were really into yoga too, which, you know, made me so uncomfortable when I practice yoga, thinking, what would Hitler have done? Downward facing…fuhrer.

But you have a lot of people who are ordinarily what I would have considered to be left wing. I don’t know a lot of Republican vegans. And this is what was so surprising. The other thing that was really surprising was the extent to which it had spread to Canada, France, UK, Germany, Australia, Indonesia. And I remember thinking, wouldn’t Muslims be immune? Like, you would think that there would at least be one religion that would say: “No, any new religion we object to.” So we are trying to see how it changes as it goes from country to country. And the example that I gave was a sticky ball rolling down a hill picking up things along the way. In France and has a local flavor. In France, it’s connected to the Yellowjacket protests. In Britain, it’s Brexit. In Germany, it’s anti-refugee and anti-foreigner. And in France, it’s Islamophobic. In Iraq and Egypt, it can’t be Islamophobic. So it’s changing as it moves. And because it’s changing — but the core point about the blood drinking cabal stays the same — so not everyone who’s Q-Anon believes in every element of these Q-Anon adjacent conspiracies.

One of the things that, for example Mick West says, in his book ‘Escaping the Rabbit Hole’, you have to find the limit of someone’s belief where even the conspiracy theorist says, oh, no, that’s too far. And then work your way back from there. In other words, establish the parameters of what the person believes, and then start asking questions. And that’s where because the way our psychology works is fairly consistent. If I tell you, you know, everything you believe in is wrong, you’re going to double and triple down and you’re gonna, confirmation bias, you’re only going to hear the parts that confirm what you already believed. That’s not the best approach. Fighting with people is not the way to get them out of Q-Anon. Insulting people is not the way to get them out of Q-Anon. The fact is, the Republican Party is manipulating this group. They see them as useful idiots to reelect Republican congressmen and senators in 2022. And the same people who were very vocally against Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was running in the primary last summer. And in fact, someone like Steve Scalise donated money to her opponents, and Kevin McCarthy said she was a cuckoo bird. When she won, they had to embrace her, and it’s the reason why Republicans are so slow to be anti Q-Anon, and it might also explain why they’re very hesitant to have a 911-like commission to investigate what happened on January 6.

Sam Goldman 33:56

A recent New York Times article was sharing the public religion research in student interfaith youth corps, data about Q-Anon being now as popular as some major religions. One of the things that I remember underlining was that Republicans, those who trust far right news outlets like OANN and Newsmax were more likely to believe these statements than other Americans because it’s feeding them that all day every day.

Mia Bloom 34:23

It’s this closed information bubble. It’s an echo chamber. And in fact, the irony is, if you’re truly devoted to Q-anon and you’re on their channels, they say that OANN, and Newsmax and Fox are Luciferian. They say don’t even get your news from them. Get your news exclusively from us. These are platforms I’ve never heard of, and websites I’ve never heard of. So the way Telegram works; the reason ISIS liked it so much. You’re on the platform. It semi-encrypted. You can join links, but they have administrators sometimes that will kick out people who seem suspicious, that we don’t think you’re one of us. When you’re on the platform, you don’t have to leave the platform to watch a YouTube video or to do a download. And so it keeps you enthralled. And it’s the way in which ISIS fostered a certain amount of emotional dependency that people were not leaving to go do other stuff. They were staying online engaged all the time. There were even psychological reasons.

So with ISIS, sometimes you would get movies, sometimes you get a poster, sometimes you get a gif, sometimes you get a news story, or in other words, they mix it up a little bit so you don’t get bored, and you don’t leave. And we’re seeing the same thing with Q-Anon, that they don’t want you leaving the screen. You are going to be on this for hours at a time, and it’s going to take over your life. And this is what Linca Perrone talks about. When she says she stopped even making dinner for her kids. The content I have to tell you is very upsetting. Because it’s curated. It’s high production value. And if you are not certain that Q-Anon is a baseless conspiracy theory, it might start to make sense. And, like the case that a broken clock is correct twice a day, when they get something right, then basically they make the argument see everything we got was right, we just have to point to this one thing. When it was announced that Bill and Melinda Gates were getting a divorce, the Q-Anon channels were the first ones to say it was because of Jeffrey Epstein. And so if they get anything right, and it was accurate, now the people are going to be like, then everything here that I’m reading is honest, because I checked, it’s true. And that’s why they sometimes sprinkle in real stories, so that if someone is checking on them, like oh, I double checked, it is legit. And it’s very much about keeping you at this level of arousal, not like the good arousal, but the bad arousal, where you’re going to react that the slightest different thing, you’re constantly going to be anxious. It’s anxiety inducing. And it’s not a surprise that consumption of the Q-Anoon material is actually bad for you, because it’s going to give you nightmares, it’s going to make you fight with your family, it’s going to make you want to tell everyone to eff off. It’s really, really bad. And so we wanted to hopefully bring families back together by saying, yeah, we know your second cousin, you know, with the tinfoil hat, you don’t want to invite them for Thanksgiving anymore, but here’s how you bring them back to the light. Don’t leave them twisting by themselves with this crazy conspiracy. Because now if you cut them off, they have no off ramp, they have nowhere to go, they have no incentive to leave. Because if they leave, they’re gonna leave the only friends they have now because none of their real life friends are talking to them.

Sam Goldman 37:24

So one thing that I think confuses people a lot is how and why did this really random group, this random mix of people come to view Trump as the good guy in this mythology about “creepy” elites? Why Trump?

Mia Bloom 37:40

I mean, that’s a great question. That is a question that I don’t think we adequately answered, because I don’t think we know enough. I remember being so surprised. We know the Q-Anon that was in French, or the Q-Anon that was in German or Italian. The French don’t like Americans in general. The fact is that they really didn’t like Trump. So the fact that they still had Trump as the superhero. Japan was the only place where it was General Michael Flynn and not Trump. And I think it has something to do with his charisma — that he occasionally was using terms that they say, Oh, you see, he’s with us. And so they divide the world into people who are wearing a black hat, who are the bad guys and the people wearing the white hat, who are the good guys. And because he refused to come out against them, and he sort of added to it. By the time October 2018 comes around, and they start showing up at Trump rallies in Florida, and people holding giant Q signs, and babies wearing a Q onesie and t-shirts and sweatshirts, and you name it. I don’t think initially President Trump was aware of Q-Anon, but after those rallies he had to be, and even if he’s not that bright — the people around him call it malevolent creativity, the evil geniuses. You can be smart and still not be a good person. So I’m sure that the people in his campaign figured out very quickly Oh, we can use this to our benefit. And that’s why we saw changes where people who were totally anti-Q-Anon — and some Republicans refused. Someone like Denver Riggleman from Virginia said I’m out, like no, Q-Anon is crazy. Other Republicans either stayed silent and complicit, or jumped in with two feet like Mo Brooks or Madison Cawthorne. We know the two Q-Anon Congress people Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. But there’s a lot of Q curious people now like Matt Gaetz.

This is the same question I asked Amy about evangelicals. It is unclear to me that if your group is about protecting children, you select as your representative, somebody who’s been accused in Trump’s case something like 30 different times of sexual harassment, including against very young girls at his beauty pageant. In the same way that Marjorie Taylor Greene is now on tour with Matt Gaetz, who is facing an indictment for trafficking and 17 year old. And people who’ve been promoting Q-Anon have been arrested for child porn. It’s one of these things where it might be about projection; that the people who are engaged in the exact precise activities that are so horrific are the ones who are pushing this conspiracy theory. I didn’t give you a satisfying answer, and I know that I didn’t, because it’s not something I can explain. And when I asked my evangelical friends about why would you support? The explanations they gave me required so much mental acrobatics, that it’s very hard to follow the logic, when at least for evangelicals, it was very basic. We don’t want abortion. We want judges. That’s all they have to say, but they have to couch it in a different way. I don’t find President Trump to have that charisma, but people who support Donald Trump, I mean, the way they see him when they post images of Donald Trump, they’re not posting the obese Donald Trump wearing adult diapers with the man boobs. They’re showing Donald Trump and they’ve photoshopped his head on to Rocky’s body, but like 1977 Rocky, not, you know, now Sylvester Stallone Rocky. And they look at Trump and they see this through rose colored glasses. That’s the only explanation. That if you are for Trump, you’re not seeing all of the negatives. You’re only seeing his positives. And I think by the same token, when you’re not for Trump, you mostly only see the negative. So I think it could be hard for someone like me, who is very much not a Trump supporter to ever understand what anyone would support him, let alone think that he is like Jesus on Earth.

Sam Goldman 41:35

One brief question that I had when I was looking through Dr. Bloom’s book, she has a section where she’s talking about the global rise, and it’s not just an American phenomenon, that it’s spreading. Do you see any correlation between places where it’s really taking hold and places where fascism seems to be on the rise? Like, is it becoming more of a thing in places like Hungary or Turkey or Brazil than it is in places where there aren’t the same kinds of fascist movements? Or is that not a thing?

Mia Bloom 42:08

Really, it’s interesting, because in places where fascism is taking hold, you have the ability to control the media, and to avoid any kind of disconfirming information. It is in Hungary, but it’s not in Turkey. I wanted to show you this, because this is in the book, and you can see the red is where Q-Anon has spread and has Facebook groups. And it’s not necessarily that it’s the leading five countries, always United States and Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Indonesia. And you see in Indonesia, there’s just a little bit of red, but it’s still among the highest countries posting. And it’s almost all of South America, and in fact, Venezuela should be red as well, but not Greenland. A lot of the poor of the Muslim world has managed to resist and I think that part of that can be explained by: it’s not appropriate to talk about pedophilia in Arab culture. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. Of course, it’s happening, but you don’t talk about it.

The other thing is, there’s some very strict Islamic ideology against believing in new religious movements. So for example, hardcore Sunni Muslims, they don’t consider Mormons to be Christians, and they don’t consider Nation of Islam to actually be Muslims. So that’s one view that after Muhammad, that’s it, no more prophets. New prophets came after Muhammad, but they are not embraced. So I was thinking that maybe they have like a certain amount of resistance to it. But we are starting to see not so much the spread of Q-Anon in Arabic, but we are seeing a lot of conspiracy theories around anti-vaccine and about COVID. And for me, what was ironic is initially ISIS was saying Muslims can’t get COVID. And then when Muslims started getting COVID, they said, well, it’s a gift from God. It’s basically telling you that you have a limited time to be a martyr for the cause. And it’s better to die a martyr than die at home alone from COVID. But be that as it may, you see that the only continents that are relatively free are Greenland, much of the Middle East and Africa. But the rest of the world is seeing more and more of this Q-Anon conspiracy. And so because it’s spread to places like China and Russia, and India and Pakistan, it’s in democracies, as well as authoritarian governments. It’s not something that requires a limited freedom of expression. It’s also not contingent on having full freedom of expression.

Sam Goldman 44:33

That’s helpful. I’m going to take the conversation in a different direction, and probably a direction that perhaps you don’t get asked a lot about, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about. The aftermath of the war in Iraq, which was based on lies, has led to widespread loss of truth in “the establishment”, and I was wondering if you could talk about if and how this has created fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

Mia Bloom 44:57

You know, the uptick in conspiracy theories happened after John F. Kennedy was shot. There was a perception that the investigation into his shooting was not transparent. It’s the lack of transparency and lingering questions that really do fuel any kind of conspiracy theory. One of the reasons why the 911 Truthers didn’t really sort of take off as much is we had a very thorough investigation into the events leading up to 911. What happened, what went wrong, what could have gone better? We should have listened to Ali Soufan years before, that kind of thing. And not having a proper investigation into January 6 allows Republicans to say it was actually Antifa. And point to one person who might have been Antifa who was arrested and ignore the 600 people who were clearly pro-Trump. Ashli Babbitt that you mentioned at the beginning, that’s a very good example. So she was the first person to die at the Capitol. And initially, she was a martyr. Within 24 hours, they accused her of secretly being antifa. And then the far right groups and neo-Nazi types embraced her. And now we’re having former President Trump at every rally asking “who shot Ashli Babbitt?” And every time he says that, I think in my head “who framed Roger Rabbit”, just cause it rhymes, but anyway. Mo Brooks is saying it and Sidney Powell is saying it.

if you really wanted to answer these questions, you would have a commission, but they didn’t want a commission. And it’s really problematic that past is prologue. If we’ve learned nothing from history, there’s a few things: One) not having a proper investigation of John F. Kennedy and having so much of it redacted allowed conspiracy theories to fester till this day, until Oliver Stone’s movie, lots of people regardless of what their political affiliation is, think that there was more than one shooter on the grassy knoll. Second) our reaction to Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of 911 was a massive over-response. We overreacted. And in doing so we under-reacted to a growing domestic terrorism problem in this country. I’m hesitant to look at Q-Anon and say we have 30 million possible ISIS level threats. I don’t think so. I think though, your intuition was spot on that the people who might be a hybrid, so they’re an Oathkeeper, or a Boogaloo or a Patriot Front, those are the ones to worry about. Also, because a little over a year ago, General Michael Flynn pledged allegiance to Q-Anon, the concern is about the military, the degree to which it has infiltrated into military circles. Now these are people with skills. And if you think about it, Ashli Babbitt, who was a veteran of four tours, she had military skills, that’s how she was, you know, trying to get in to Congress to go after the lawmakers.

This is where we have to be concerned not just about conspiracies. We really have to be concerned about even if the women aren’t violent the way Ashli Babbitt was, they are going to be raising a generation of children who believe these conspiracy theories and who are going to have to be deprogrammed when they get to school, or they’re going to homeschool their kids. And we don’t know if we’re going to have negative outcomes from that. It’s a whole of society approach, that it’s bad for the institutions of democracy, it’s corrosive. It undermines people’s belief in accurate media reporting. It undermines people’s belief that their voting matters because they genuinely believe that the election was stolen. So there’s so many different things going on that I would say we do have to be concerned. We ignore it at our own peril, and we have to take it seriously. But we don’t have to respond to it the way we responded to 911.

Sam Goldman 48:42

Your last round remarks reminded me something that we did a roundtable around COVID and conspiracy theories not too long before the insurrection. And one of our co- initiators, Andy Zee said something that I think connects to this a lot: “Lunacy like this, when laughed at and shrugged off masks the danger to humanity when a huge section of America is completely unhinged from reality, and fervently believes their alternate fact-free reality as morally superior and essential for their lives. This destruction of the truth is a key factor in the forging of a fascist space, a fascist leader and fascist rule. And we have lived it for four years.” And then he goes on to say, “and it’s breen metastasizing for forty.” I think that it’s worth thinking about what the significance of this movement is for our listeners. And I encourage people to think about what danger is posed on the lines that Dr. Bloom was talking about.

Mia Bloom 49:40

I’ve been sort of the calming face; I’ve been trying to bring the temperature down. So I’ve been a political scientist for three decades, and I study genocide, like Rwanda. When you dehumanize the other side, and the stages of genocide include dehumanization, there’s no compromise. If you believe the other side are a bunch of demon worshipping, blood-drinking, child-killing pedophiles, there’s no middle ground. And so there is the possible future. Because we know if in 2022, if Republicans get back the House and the Senate, there are huge possibilities that people’s votes, and especially people of color are going to be whittled down. All those rights are going to disappear. There’s not going to be a John Lewis voting act. They’re going to keep packing the courts at the state level, not just at the Supreme Court level. So there is the danger that this level of belief is potentially activated in the future, that there’s no compromise, there’s no forgiveness, there’s no winning you over to my side, because I’m able to convince you that my ideology is more persuasive than what you believe, because I think that you’re a subhuman Satanist killing kids. So I would prefer to have my more Pollyanna approach of “let’s help the people out.” I’ve heard Elizabeth Newman from DHS say that this is the future ISIS, and even Merrick Garland, when he said, the concern is that people are going to be so disappointed that these prophecies did not happen, that they’re going to turn around and turn to violence. And I’ve been saying, yes maybe, or maybe a lot of people will fall by the wayside. Some people will start having doubts. This is where we want to stimulate the doubters and limit our expectations, because we’re not going to get everybody out.

Sam Goldman 51:27

And that leads me to where do you see this movement going? Do you feel like it’s fizzling? Are they still talking about Trump being reinstated in August? Where do you see this going?

Mia Bloom 51:39

Well, I was asked a question about whether Trump’s saying that he was going on tour, I guess, with Pompeo where they were going to be charging $7,000 a ticket. A number of Q-Anons were upset: “Wait a second, you’re supposed to be reinstated in August, why are you going on tour?” I haven’t seen as much of the Q-Anons moving on from Trump. It’s like “I can’t quit you.” They can’t quit Trump. We are living in very interesting times where we don’t know if many of the same politicians that are pushing the conspiracy are about to be indicted with federal and state level charges, and how that’s going to impact people if it becomes leaderless. It’s relatively leaderless other than having this idea of Trump. And that’s what makes it different from a religion. And that’s what makes it different, I guess than a terrorist group. But it does share some of the elements in terms of the passion of the belief systems, or the way in which they recruit people. Those are common themes.

We have to be very careful, we have to help people become more media literate, to question our sources. And you know, Sophia, who is a trained and certified social psychologist, and clinical psychologist, some of the things that she suggests in the book are very easy fixes. Apparently, just going out for a walk makes you a little bit more immune to misinformation. Just having the fresh air, being out in the nature, being away from your screen. And so some of the things that we’re suggesting are things like: Limit the screen time; don’t sort of be fixated and stay on for hours and hours at a time. Realize that a lot of the stuff that you’re seeing on social media, check it before you repost and not just that passive aggressive message from Twitter: “do you want to read that first?” That’s not enough. We have to label things, if it’s fake news, it’s fake news. And we know that with the real media, if they make a mistake, there’s gonna be a retraction. Are these sources that ever admit “actually, we made a mistake. We reported this incorrectly. We accidentally said this and not that.” That’s actually a good sign, that means that they’re willing to admit they made a mistake, and here’s the correction. If you have a platform that never admits mistakes, and doubles and triples down, that’s not going to be a good source of information. So this is where it’s incumbent upon us to generate better quality material, like your podcasts.

But also, if we have friends or family or co-workers that have slipped down that rabbit hole, it’s up to us to help them back. Shutting them, unfriending them, attacking them, that’s not going to do anyone any good. So we are suggesting a very different approach, which is empathy and kindness. And we got this idea, because we’ve been working on countering violent extremism for over a decade, and Sophia, even more so, even more than me. That’s not how you get terrorists out of a terrorist group. We want to help people have happy family lives because this has impacted families at such a level that you’re seeing new stories about kids who are no longer talking to their parents, but parents not talking to their children about people ripped apart. And that was one of the things we wanted to address. We wanted to help people. That’s the reason we’ve been doing what we’ve been doing for three decades. You don’t go into counterterrorism for the money. You go into it because you want to save some lives.

Sam Goldman 54:58

Thank you Dr. Bloom, for coming on and talking with us and sharing your expertise and perspective. You can follow Dr. Bloom on Twitter @MiaMBloom, and a link to her book ‘Pastels and Pedophiles’ is in the show notes.

Mia Bloom 55:16

Thank you so much for having me. It was absolutely a pleasure.

Sam Goldman 55:19

Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism podcast. This week marked what some are calling a second wave of “Trumpism is fascism” recognition, where people briefly awake from their slumber to recognize the reality that’s pummeling us in the face. As folks tuning into this podcast, you know that denying it doesn’t make it go away. Now is the moment to really seize on and deepen people’s understanding of what fascism is, what we so narrowly escaped, why this is happening and what’s needed. You join this work when you hit subscribe, when you weigh in on these conversations happening online, when you share this episode, and the show in general with your friends and family. If you want to help this show, it’s simple. You can rate and review us on Apple podcasts or your listening platform of choice you can chip in to support the show by clicking the donate button at RefuseFascism.org Venmo Refuse-Fascism cash app Refuse Fascism, and be sure to let us know it’s off of hearing this podcast. As always, I want to hear from you. Share your comments, ideas, questions or lend a skill. Tweet me @SamBGoldman. Or you can drop me a line at [email protected] or leave a voicemail by calling (917)426-7582 can also record a voice message by going to anchor.fm forward slash refused dash fascism and clicking the button there. You might even hear yourself on a future episode. Thanks as always to Lina Thorne and Richie Marini for helping produce the show. In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.