QAnon supporters fail to see the real conspiracy – and it is destroying them

The American right plays footsie with QAnon because it helps deflect attention away from their own criminal behaviour, writes Borzou Daragahi

QAnon supporters – mostly white, right-wing Americans – began finding each other in real life, holding demonstrations in city streets (Reuters)

For decades, westerners have been fond of looking down on the Middle East as awash with conspiracy theories. These include popular contentions that secretive cabals of Americans, Brits or Jews were behind everything, from changes in national governments to changes in the weather. Scholars have devoted entire studies to what one paper described as the “prevalence of this type of thinking in the Arab-Iranian-Muslim Middle East”.  

But with the widespread emergence in the United States and elsewhere of the unhinged and persistently dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, the west is having something of a “hold-my-tin-foil-hat” moment, as it embraces a narrative so bizarre, it makes the political fables circulating within the coffee houses of the Middle East seem quaint.  

QAnon, which spread from the depths of far-right online chat rooms about four years ago, is the theory that Donald Trump and a secret band of US military officials are waging a battle to overthrow a cabal of powerful politicians, financiers and Hollywood celebrities who engage in paedophilia and drink the blood of children.