QAnon: The Protocols of Christian Zionism

QAnon’s brand of conspiracy and disinformation has parallels in past political and religious movements that can reveal how it flourishes and the direction it might take. The QAnon altered perception of reality strengthens the threat of rising neo-Fascist and militia movements. Fictional conspiracies are the tools to suppressing opposition and maintaining power despite minority support.

QAnon’s slander bears similarity to the fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and to traditional anti-Jewish tropes. QAnon maintains the world-dominating cabal premise of the Protocols, but replaces Jews with the Democratic Party as the boogeyman. Despite this anti-Jewish foundation, other aspects of QAnon, driven by its defining Evangelical Christian characteristics, are informed by real Zionism’s relevance and Trump’s aggressive support of Israel. Perceptions of Zionism and Protocols-Zionism wind toward QAnon in related paths.

Explicit to QAnon is a progressive/liberal demonization and a belief in powerful secret societies. Underpinning it is Evangelic Christianity, chauvinistic nationalism, apocalyptic themes, paranoia, and Fascism.

2.

Zionism as an organized political movement started in 1896 as a response to continued persecution of Jewish minority communities, spurred by Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet Judenstaat. The first Zionist Congress was held in 1897 and was conducted openly with the goal of establishing a Jewish home — internationally recognized and legally accomplished.

The Protocols was put together a few years afterward by Russian security operatives using a mishmash of generally unrelated previous sources including fiction, political satire, and political treatise. But it gained real popularity following World War I.

The Protocols purports to be an account of Jews and Freemasons planning a world state under their hegemony. They had agents covertly in place, and the press and banks were their foremost tools. The inclusion of freemasonry lent the appearance of an existing framework of secret societies.

This is the deep state concept that the president trumpets and QAnon has latched onto. The America First agenda appeals to this fear of globalization lest outside conspiratorial forces subsume American individual rights and culture. The Protocols argued that liberalism and socialism were the tools to subsuming power and subverting Christendom. QAnon’s concern is a patriotic capitalism and the protection of Christian values — appealing to the socially and fiscally conservative Right and Evangelicals.

Another enduring anti-Jewish trope accused Jews of using the blood of Christian children for ritualistic purposes, especially for Passover. This rumor led to real world violence against Jews. It is mirrored by a disturbing two-fold QAnon fabrication. One supposes powerful Democrats drink children’s blood for restorative powers. The other is the notion of a wide-ranging cabal of pedophiles among Democratic elites, which neatly brings together both the blood libel threat to children and the deep state concept in the Protocols. This has produced real-world violence and harmful disinformation.

Eurocentrism pervades both theories, slightly oversimplified under the term white nationalism. In the Protocols, Europe needs to be protected from the plague of Jewish financial control and cultural degradation. America’s enemy is cultural change stemming from immigration — primarily Islamic and hispanic — and an inflated threat of crisis from the progressive push for egalitarian financial constructions. White nationalism informs this and is certainly part of it, but the larger boogeyman is the threat to traditional American values — represented by foreigners and Democratic Party atheism and anti-capitalism.

Zionism is not easy to satisfactorily define en masse — partly from the sharp opinions the state of Israel elicits but also from the success of the Protocols in negatively re-defining it. Zionism now denotes more than the establishment of a home, but it also connotes a number of highly negative concepts. This is what conspiracy theories do — they muddy the waters, they obfuscate, they create negative connotations, and they make it difficult to discuss policy without being drawn into unrelated forays and presented with logical fallacies.

In late 1917, coordinated British and Arabic forces drove the Ottoman Turkish military from Palestine. At the same time, the British government released the Balfour Declaration, declaring support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British supported Zionism for a collection of reasons including creating war allies and creating allies for larger imperial motives. Similar to Americans of today, they also possessed a grandiose conception of their own significance that dovetailed with a pro-Jewish altruism informed by religion as well as actual and pseudo history.

3.

An apocalyptic, imperial Christian Zionist sentiment informs the QAnon movement in its rhetoric of prophecy. QAnon partisans have equated it with a religion or cult, entitling it The Great Awakening, and it bears resemblance to previous ecstatic religious movements in US history.

The Second Great Awakening was a fervent religious revival occurring mostly during the beginning of the 19th century, becoming especially prominent by the 1830s. It was characterized by highly emotional itinerant preaching, conversions, and the establishment of new denominations. It was active throughout the US and was particularly influential in upstate New York.

An identification of English-speaking Christians with the so-called lost ten tribes of Israel became prominent at this time. Tradition has it that Jews are descended from two of the original twelve tribes of Israelites. Concurrent movements occurred in America and England that hypothesized that the missing Israelites had migrated to those countries and were now its Christian inhabitants. The reasoning behind this wide-spread belief is hard to pin down, but part of it is the notion of Jewish people as chosen by God and the desire of Christian adherents to identify themselves as special and chosen. The scholarship of the concept, incidentally, is unsound.

This Christian Zionism had far reaching influence. It was a founding concept of the Mormon church in the 1830s along with the understanding that these Christian Americans would be gathered together to form a new Jerusalem. The Millerites, also founded in upstate New York, were an apocalyptic cult that believed in the Israelite concept and in the impeding second coming of Jesus Christ in 1844, which did not occur. After this prophecy failed (The Great Disappointment, as its known) its followers justified various alternative theories. A faction later reorganized as Seventh Day Adventists, a well-known current member being Secretary of HUD Ben Carson. The Methodist and Baptist movements were greatly invigorated by the Second Great Awakening and saw a substantial increase in numbers.

Concurrently, in Great Britain John Wilson promulgated a similar theory, which become more wide-spread in the 1870s, known then as Anglo-Israelism and now as British-Israelism. It continues to have a small presence, but it morphed in the United States primarily into the Christian Identity movement, yet another current far Right movement disposed to the concepts of QAnon. In American, Howard Rand emphasized Jewish impurity from Christians, and starting in the 1930s promulgated an anti-Semitic message more in conjunction with Fascism, which led to Christian Identity.

In the Anglo-Israel Papers Edward Hine, a foremost proponent in the 1870s, explained that Jewish people must be gathered together as a pre-cursor to the second coming of Jesus and the apocalyptic judgement. Notably, Anglo-Israelism and British-backed archaeological and historical pursuits in Palestine were appealing movements that may have factored in disposing support for Zionism in the first place.

In this way, Fascist-leaning and Evangelical QAnon followers, influenced by a conspiracy lifted from the anti-Zionistic Protocols, are also steeped in a related Christian Zionism. It is a reason, along with Israel’s perceived opposition to Islam, that Evangelicals support Israel. Their support is both religious and American imperial. These different influences explain the somewhat contradictory nature of the Right’s and QAnon’s relationship to Zionism — using its negative tropes while supporting it.

4.

The lesson taken from Protocols-Zionism is sobering. The penchant to believe information that is demonstrably false is not easily curable. False narratives can radicalize followers and induce a willingness to commit political and physical abuses against imagined threats. Misinformation can be combatted with consistent dissemination of factual information, but in a highly stratified political climate this solution is only moderately effective.

Conservative-fueled false narratives have fed into and created a Cognitive Dissonance, where contradictory beliefs are being mentally reconciled. Information is interpreted to support pre-existing conclusions, and conclusions are maintained despite contradictory evidence. QAnon supporters carry on imagining that Democratic elites are on the verge of arrest while numerous Trump associates are indicted during his administration. The friendly relationship between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein does not affect the QAnon stance that Trump is heroically fighting pedophilia. Under this disinformation campaign, the arrests and convictions of numerous Trump associates is further evidence of a deep state and not the more logical conclusion of guilt.

Trump has portrayed much of the established media as unreliable. Legacy media are branded as collectively pushing lies if their coverage is inconsistent with the Confirmation Bias of Trumpism. Whereas, obscure internet sites of dubious origin and little accountability are seen as revealing hidden truths — just as in the Protocols. The sheer amount of strongly partisan conservative media that traffic in half-truths or shoddy scholarship while simultaneously projecting the unfettered supremacy of a liberal media is astounding.

Trump greatly exacerbated this trend but it existed before his arrival. The conspiratorial John Birch Society, founded by Robert Welch, saw a heyday in the 1960s. Once on the Republican fringe, its views are now a mainstream component of the Trumpist ideology. Right-wing groups, preaching isolationism (American First), Christian theocracy, anti-progressivism, and a reduced (gutted) federal government are not new.

Disinformation affects solutions to real problems. A well publicized US Marshals Service child welfare operation somewhat pretentiously dubbed Operation Not Forgotten took place in August. Social media discussion illustrates the stark difference in perceiving events based on partisan affiliation — fed by the sex trafficking paranoia pushed by QAnon. The Right viewed the Marshals’ operation as primarily law enforcement based. Michael Hobbes in the Huffington Post wrote an article explaining the specifics of the operation. He provided causes and solutions, citing a failure of the social safety network, underfunded foster care, preventative services to help the vulnerable, and the need for vigorous victim recovery services. Interestingly, financing these types of social services has long been anathema for the Conservative movement. Hobbes explained that some children were “saved,” but many were at risk from poor parental care, medical conditions, or were themselves suspect in criminal activity. For those inundated with QAnon filtered vocabulary and social media propaganda, the nuance was lost, and Hobbes was criticized as nitpicking. In this way, the conspiracy theory creates very different realities and belies solutions that should garner wide spread support.

In a Protocols reality, wealthy pro-Zionist Jews like the Rothschilds were painted as part of a cabal, and working-class Leftist partisans were tarred with the same brush. In QAnon, Democratic elites use African-American protestors, the historically most disenfranchised Americans, to further their ends while George Soros undermines democracy, Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring, and Bill Gates creates Covid to vaccinate people with 5G. The Left’s analogous argument — corrupt capitalists such as Trump maintain an uneven economic structure by garnering the support of religious conservatives and poor, under-educated, or racist whites — has no underlying conspiracy.

5.

Much like QAnon, the Protocols came at a time of heightened partisanship. The wide dissemination of the Protocols coincided with the post-war political violence that presaged the rise of Fascism. Trade unions, communists, socialists, and progressive liberals argued for fundamental political change due to long-standing economic inequality. Leadership failures brought about wartime destruction and death and exacerbated the subsequent flu pandemic. The popularity of the Protocols-derivative QAnon is alarming in conjunction with the sharp uptick in Rightist militarism, authoritarianism, and quasi-religiosity under Trump and fomented by him.

Fascist movements usurped power through armed militia movements and violent suppression of political opposition in combination with a veneer of electoral legitimacy. German Freikorps, militia groups of former soldiers and a pre-cursor to the Nazi SA, assassinated German Leftist politicians. Mussolini marched with thousands of armed men to Rome and then dispensed with democracy. Those events were fed by economic unrest, societal changes, and the belief in false conspiracy theories such as the Protocols.

Trump’s popular rally cry, “Lock her up,” is an incitement to violence against political opponents, no different from the 1922 assassination of Jewish German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau by Freikorps members. The levy against Clinton is largely visceral and politically concocted. This is the confluence with QAnon, which supposes that Clinton is guilty of nefarious crimes, the same way Rathenau was a member of the fabricated Elders of Zion.

The term Fascism is bandied about with either misunderstanding or purposeful disingenuity. It is by definition politically Right, arising originally almost as an oppositional bulwark against Communism and progressivism. It promotes a militaristic nation-first policy, supports autocracy, the suppression of opposition, and has contempt for democratic standards and cultural liberalism. Our American Fascism also embraces an apocalyptic Christianity and pseudo-theocracy as defining characteristics. QAnon has co-opted the plot of the Protocols and also embraces the Fascist notion that the individual is subservient to the nation and the political ideology — summarized succinctly in the axiom: Where We Go One We Go All.

This new American movement has adopted the trappings of Fascist propaganda, employing tribal symbols to separate themselves out and act as signifiers. Popular defining symbols include co-opting the OK hand gesture or using memes or graphics such as Pepe the Frog, My Little Pony, Hawaiian shirts, and especially the Confederate Flag. The list goes on. The Proud Boys and like groups have their own emblems. Even the unusually garish displays of American flag colors favored by the Republican Party act as a signifier, an uber nationalism. QAnon has a number of stock phrases like “the calm before the storm” or “do your own research” as in-group notifications. Even the MAGA slogan itself implies a lost Golden Age and is at heart antithetical to the notion of progressivism.

In a self-fulfilling prophecy, armed militant groups have aligned when possible with legal law enforcement to confront Americans protesting the excessive violence of law enforcement — the irony of which seems completely lost. This has led to Kyle Rittenhouse killing protesters and being hailed as a hero by QAnon adherents. Recently it led to a plot to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, with the possibility of a mock trial and execution. The masterminds of which were defended by Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who had appeared with them at rallies. In this climate, it is unsurprising that in her confirmation hearing Amy Barrett could not remember that Assembly was a First Amendment right.

The threat of violence by organized and heavily armed Fascist-style groups is palpable and active. This violence is exhorted by the president, and its perpetrators emboldened in his name. Removal of Trump will not end these threats. He has benefited from — as much as caused — this paranoia. A more savvy politician could further harness these militants in a way that Trump, who is erratic and at times inept at applying the levers of government, has not.

The QAnon-Trump faction has demonized of the literal concept of anti-Fascism. On point, they have embellished and ornamented antifa, the idealogical opposition to their own authoritarianism, as a cohesive specific terrorist organization.

6.

The American Left is in a quandary. The prevailing political philosophy is to employ democratic reform to achieve progressive policy. But this philosophy is fractured when the relationship between the popular vote and presidential and senatorial representation has been starkly unbalanced for twenty years, allowing the Republican Party to practice majority rule from a minority position with no incentive to moderate its views to achieve a popular majority. American institutions are not immune to corruption and have been strained by an administration willing to bend democratic standards and break with their spirit.

The suppression of opposition, always a tactic of southern conservatives, has taken on all new forms — incredibly long lines to vote in racial minority areas, attacks on absentee balloting, misleading mailings, online disinformation, vexatious litigation, and collusion with foreign governments to name a few. A Democratic majority should take drastic steps to end the continuation of Jim Crow tactics. Voter suppression practiced in majority conservative states against the progressive population is not a political tool to be employed at the discretion of state governments. It is unconstitutional and criminal, and the federal government can and should take steps to aggressively combat it. The denial of voting rights and the acceptance of minority political factions usurping power through a pretense at electoral legitimacy is the mark of Fascist authoritarianism.

The Democratic Party has a significant popular majority, but the undemocratic apportioning of representation has led to this bizarre triumph of a conspiratorial minority. Even calls to “defend the Constitution” are in service of perpetuating the Republican Party’s minority hold on power despite popular electoral defeats. It is a situation that cannot continue unabated without either drastic electoral reform by a Democratic majority or an increase in political violence.

It is not the time to tread lightly. QAnon and Trump Republicans have trafficked in mass misinformation. A change in the White House or a change in the senate majority will not end these tactics. The lies have been so common and so brazen and the loss of a cognitive reality represented by QAnon so willful that the Republican Party now famously operates on alternative facts — perhaps destined to be the most enduring epigram of Trumpism. But alternative facts are not a legitimate political perspective, they are lies, a false narrative, a conspiracy theory. The progressives and the Democratic Party should confront these threats forcefully on all fronts, pursue the truth, and be prepared to defend that truth however necessary. Appeasement will not work.

The author’s MA thesis was on Zionist thought in British publications leading up to WWI, concentrating on propaganda, religion, history, and imperialism. He worked as an editor at a history publisher.