On January 6, the world witnessed a riot at the very heart of the United States of America. As pictures circulated, a shirtless man, carrying a spear 6-feet long and adorned in a cayote-skin headdress, buffalo horns, what he describes as “war paint,” made a visual mark. After arrested, he simply posed the question, “Wasn’t Jesus arrested?” He considers himself a QAnon shaman.
The siege on the US Capitol came after a call by Trump to his supporters to protest the approval of the results of the recent presidential election. The scene went chaotic when the demonstration turned out in what President Biden called an “insurrection.” The Trump fanbase broke in, disrupted the lawmakers, took pictures of themselves, stole properties, and caused the death of five.
The Washington siege, however, could not come out of thin air. The event was merely the visible tip of the iceberg representing a tumor in American politics today that is not so far from the Philippines’ own political scene. Originating in 2017, the QAnon lore is a network of conspiracy theories and fake news which hails Donald Trump as a messiah and the rest (especially the Democrats) as pawns of the deep state, or the ruling elites supposedly working behind the scenes of everyday bureaucracy.
The QAnon world-building started on a message board when a user named Q started dropping crumbs, cryptic messages believed to be exposing the evil truths of the status quo and which stem from the higher levels of the American government. The whole plot revolved around an otherwise legitimate problem: pedophilia. Each QAnon, a subscriber of Q, puts themselves in the mission of propagating the conspiracies, attempting to overturn the fight. Words like light and darkness are not uncommon in the community, and in this picture, they represent the good side.
But if it’s just a web of fake news, the thriving voice of QAnon begs the question: Can’t we just fact-check for them to save them from their illusion? There can be no simple answer, because first, these are people who have already cast their doubt on the status quo, part of which is the traditional media; second, it’s a network of information that seemingly verify each other. To destroy one means to destroy the entire string of stories. Truth is corresponding, not merely concrete.
This brings us to a local phenomenon of the same breed to which we gave the name DDS Cinematic Universe — that the Marcoses own tons of gold given by a certain Tallano family, that the Aquinos are communists, that Davao is the safest city in the world, just to name a few, are all but true in this alternate world. And like what QAnon has become, this local belief thrives in the interfaces of various websites, Facebook pages, and YouTube channels, forming a coherent doctrine where a set of select figures are held to be the main heroes.
Journalism, evidence-based or whatnot, is futile if its very existence is undermined as an apparatus of the status quo to control the common people. What is light to us may be darkness to the average QAnon or DDS, a temptation from Satan to pull them away from their imagined path to liberation. To them, this is the same jagged road of ridicule that the greats, as Jesus and Gandhi, had walked, and they, too, have to suffer the same persecution. And indeed, the QAnon shaman is explicit about this.
The political analyst Richard Heydarian used the term democratic fatigue to explain the rise of populism around the globe. The immensity of support that people have put on charismatic political figures indicates a collective desperateness to escape the present order. Liberal democracy, for all its decades in place, did not manage to bring global economic equality and only furthered the division of the rich and the poor in some countries. So, what use is there in keeping faith in the same political thought time and time again?
But of course, this is not an endorsement of the myths surrounding people like Trump nor a criticism of democracy. There is, however, a line to investigate on how we have reached our current political climate. I refuse to believe that the answer is as simple as they are bad and we are good. There must be, along the lines of this chapter in human history, a tight knot to acknowledge, untie, and redo.
