In an image from video provided by Robyn Stevens Brody, a line of men wearing helmets and olive drab body armor walk up the marble stairs outside the U.S. Capitol
“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” one Capitol Police officer told reporters, without identifying any specific group. “They had radios, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flashbangs… they strategically put two [improvised explosive devices], pipe bombs, in two different locations."
And yet, alongside the hobbyist commandos, old-school white nationalists and QAnon cultists in horned hats spotted in or outside the Capitol, there was also a piano teacher from Florida with a soprano voice described as a "rare gem"; a teenager enjoying the thrill of smoking in a government building; an elected member of the West Virginia state legislature; and a vice chairwoman of the Young Republicans of Oregon, her Instagram feed full of pictures posing with party brass, who was charged with unlawful entry along with her mother.
Terry Bouton, a historian of the American revolution who went to observe the event, described a grab-bag of "preppy-looking ‘country club Republicans’, well-dressed social conservatives, and white evangelicals in Jesus caps" alongside members of known extremist groups.
Everywhere Prof Bouton heard the same "bloodlust", with even "mild-mannered" people casually discussing executing politicians. And nobody, he added, objected to the Nazis.
How did open neo-fascism and wild conspiracy theories from the depths of the internet end up at the heart of a protest movement embraced by America’s governing party – not to mention sitting in the Capitol? In many ways, the events of Jan 6 were set in motion in Virginia in 2017, when far-Right groups united in support of a president who they saw as speaking their language.
A White supremacist drove his car into opposing protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer
The rally organised in the old Confederate city of Charlottesville, seven months into Mr Trump’s term was literally called "Unite the Right" – an age-old dream for many members of the fractious movement. White supremacist ideas had been boosted by the rise of the "alt-Right", a faction of young, internet-obsessed activists who had found lucrative careers in aggressive "meme warfare" for Mr Trump. Old hands hoped their hour had come at last.
In fact, the rally was a disaster. The murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer by a white supremacist who rammed his car into the crowd shocked the nation, sharply dividing the killer’s nominal allies. President Trump’s attempt to equivocate between the two sides increased the outrage. A galvanised anti-fascist movement began identifying demonstrators, forcing one from his job, and by 2018 the alt-Right was spectacularly imploding.
Around that time, however, another movement was malignantly growing in one of the darkest corners of the web. In 2017, a user known as "Q" began to post cryptic missives in the politics section of 4chan, an anything-goes message board thoroughly colonised by white nationalism. Q claimed to be a US government whistleblower, carefully lifting the lid on an incredible conspiracy.
Black Lives Matters supporters pose at a statue of Confederate leader Robert E Lee this week
The resulting movement, QAnon, was a kind of internet-age mystery cult devoted to interpreting Q’s scriptures. The story was that President Trump had been chosen in secret by the US military to deliver the world from a sprawling paedophile cabal that included top Democrats such as Hillary Clinton. Very soon, Q promised, Mr Trump’s enemies would be jailed or executed in a coup known as "the Storm". One central fantasy, about elites making drugs from children’s blood, mirrored the 800-year-old Blood Libel against Jews.
"QAnon was architected as the synthesis between a videogame and a religion," says Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook who defected in 2016 over its failure to control fake news. "If you think about it as an organism, it had an evolutionary advantage over every other conspiracy theory. It was like the Borg: it was willing to assimilate everything out there." With no firm structure or hierarchy, QAnon’s members collaboratively workshopped new conspiracies, discarding those that did not stick. Q seemed to pick the best ones and make them canon.
It was Facebook, and the coronavirus pandemic, that let QAnon go global. When lockdown trapped millions of Americans indoors with their screens, conspiracy theories began to spread immediately, multiplying and evolving as they went. Facebook and Instagram’s recommendation algorithms, designed to help people find new communities and interests, had already been accused of feeding fringe movements. Now those movements bloomed: anti-vaxxers, racist meme circles, anti-lockdown groups and the boogaloo subculture, a psychedelic remix of traditional US militias aiming to start or prepare for a second Civil War. The tumultuous Black Lives Matter protests and the cultural reckoning that followed also sparked deep anxiety for many Trump supporters.
Members of the Boogaloo Boys demonstrate during the Virginia Citizens Defense League on Monday
QAnon seemed to act like a matchmaker. Angelo Carusone, head of the left-wing US campaign group Media Matters for America, describes how his team watched it spread like wildfire through Facebook groups following President Trump’s tweets in April to "LIBERATE" Democratic states. It "cross-pollinated" itself with large mainstream communities such as suburban mothers’ support groups and new age believers. Some activists made a sport of getting the President to share their material with his tens of millions of Twitter followers.
Based on extensive monitoring, Mr Carusone argues that these behaviours made QAnon uniquely attractive to social networks’ algorithms. He says that Trump’s retweets injected "kinetic energy" into QAnon groups, prompting a flurry of excited discussion that pushed them up the rankings. Likewise, each "cross-pollination" may actually have retrained Facebook’s recommendation system to associate QAnon with new demographics and social circles, helpfully suggesting it to similar users with no direct link. "Facebook’s algorithm was operating exactly as it should, which is to make connections and introductions," says Mr Carusone. "It’s just that in this case, they were actually helping build an extremist network."
In other words, QAnon was fulfilling Charlottesville’s dream. Throughout 2020, Trump supporters who sought news and camaraderie online were increasingly likely to be dragged into a whirlpool of conspiracy theories and groupthink – not least by the President himself, who spent the election campaign predicting mass fraud. QAnon’s fantasy that leading Democrats were literally child-eaters proved popular across the movement, making violence feel increasingly reasonable. Throughout 2020, some people took matters into their own hands.
When polls closed in November, more than 320,000 people joined the first "Stop the Steal" Facebook group before it was shut down. But according to New York Times reporter Sheera Frenkel many then fled to smaller groups and more fringe social networks such as Gab and Parler, where they were bombarded with "truth bombs" from the thriving conspiracy factory. Q has been largely silent since the vote, causing some followers to lose faith in "the plan". The remainder have stepped up to fill the gap, generating new election myths that ended up at the heart of Mr Trump’s campaign to overturn the result.
A protester screams "Freedom" inside the Senate chamber after the U.S. Capitol was breached by a mob
Ultimately, however, the most important unifier may have been the personal appeal of Donald J Trump. Psychologists argue that his open contempt for standard political manners has acted as a "costly signal", inspiring singular loyalty in a wide range of people by showing that he is strong enough to fight for their priorities. Supporters frequently say they admire him for withstanding incessant persecution from his political enemies. Capitol intruders chanted "fight for Trump!" and described themselves as "Trump’s army", arguing about whether the President was happy about their actions.
The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which closely monitors radical US groups, says the country is now dealing with "a new strain of extremist: the pro-Trump extremist". "These people are motivated less by an explicit ideology and more by an idea they’ve internalised about who Trump is and what he stands for," a spokesman says. "Most of the participants were not active members of extremist groups. They had simply internalised years of extremist rhetoric from online forums – and from Donald Trump, among many others."
That "many others" alludes to the difficult truth that some of these movements are now thoroughly embedded in the Republican apparatus. Many Party grandees and officials embraced Mr Trump’s hope of a politics without compromise, while others were simply terrified of his base. The Stop the Steal group, and the January 6 protest, were organised by prominent conservative operatives and veterans of the Obama-era Tea Party movement. The next Congress will include two open QAnon supporters.
In the wake of January 6, some Republicans will want to break from Trumpism. Their problem may be that Trump’s mythos is now everywhere. Like coronavirus, QAnon-inflected fantasies now spread unpredictably through the population, popping up in police forces, veteran communities, and even, according to some reports, the military (National Guard troops sent to the Capitol are having to be vetted for their sympathies). One Democratic congresswoman’s chief of staff told the Boston Globe that when the invasion began, she went for the panic buttons in her office – only to find that all of them had been "torn out".
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