How extreme devotion to Trump and QAnon poses a unique threat

Post-truth is defined as “relating to or existing in an environment in which facts are viewed as irrelevant, or less important than personal beliefs and opinions, and emotional appeals are used to influence public opinion.” The prefix “post” means not a time after truth, but rather an age in which the truth has become irrelevant. Oxford Dictionarie named it word of the year in 2016, when its usage increased 2,000% over 2015, and since then its relevance has only grown. The 2020 presidential election demonstrated how time and time again the truth was discarded in favor of misinformation and wild conspiracy theories surrounding, among other topics, voter fraud, Antifa, and of course, QAnon. 

QAnon is a conspiracy theory centered around the belief that an all-powerful cabal of Satan worshipping Democrats and celebrities are running a pedophile ring and that Donald Trump is going to defeat them. The theory began when an anonymous user—who claims to be a high-ranking government official and is referred to as “Q” by believers—began posting on 4chan in 2017. Though it emerged and spread largely on the internet, it has had plenty of real world consequences, most notably the events on January 6th. Plenty of QAnon adherents could be found in the mob that stormed the Capitol building, including the man with red-white-and-blue face paint and horns who refers to himself as the “Q Shaman.” The rioters’ actions were motivated by the “Big Lie,” the belief that the election was fraudulent and that it could be corrected with violence. This devotion to a blatant lie is unmistakably post-truth, just like the rest of QAnon’s web of conspiracy.

It may be tempting to chalk up the rioters and QAnon adherents to the likes of a small cult whose believers are dangerous yet few in number. However, many people have bought into the conspiracy theory—56% of Republicans partially or fully believe in QAnon, according to a poll conducted last September, up ten percentage points from one year prior. During the 2020 election cycle, 97 Congressional candidates openly vouched their belief in QAnon, two of which were elected and currently serve in the House of Representatives. One of them is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was recently stripped of her duties on two Congressional committees after she espoused her beliefs that the Parkland shooting was staged and “Jewish space lasers” caused the 2017 California wildfires. 

After going into a deep-dive on QAnon and people like Greene, it’s easy to feel like the world has gone crazy. This growing and more vocal belief in cartoonishly outlandish conspiracy theories is indicative of how our politics, the way we form our opinions, and the spread of information are becoming more and more post-truth. For many Americans, former President Donald Trump is the culprit who started this trend. Making over 30,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency, Trump once said, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” in reference to the “fake news” broadcast about his trade tariffs in 2018—a quote that, like many QAnon details, reads like satire.

But post-truth itself can’t be traced back to just one politician or conspiracy theory, and it certainly didn’t begin just within the last four years. Author Yuval Noah Harari writes about how humanity has always relied on collectively imagined beliefs, such as sports or money, to allow millions of people to cooperate and operate according to the same rules. These shared fictions have been largely beneficial and are important in setting humanity apart from other animals. However, he agrees that the phenomena of recent years is abnormal. “Though we have always relied on made up institutions and ideologies to unite us and drive forward society,” he writes, “now more than ever before we are seeing the weaponization of lies.” The behavior observed in Trump and other post-truth leaders is uniquely dangerous because they not only ignore the truth but go to war with it.

Sverre Spoelstra continues this thought in his analysis of post-truth leaders. Echoing Harari’s sentiments, he writes about how politicians speaking in abstracts or fictions is nothing new. All throughout history, successful leaders have not spoken just in objective truths because that will not garner them support—they need to inspire people with visions of the future. Instead of focusing on the facts, they divert attention to their own reality, using illustrative language that cannot be fact checked because it is not true or false. The truth is pushed aside in order to gain supporters and paint the leader as someone made more extraordinary by the vision they create. But Trump takes this a step further. Spoelstra writes that “post-truth leaders like Trump are in a constant battle with factual reality.” Instead of simply avoiding the truth and distracting his supporters with grandiose promises, Trump combats facts head-on, doggedly arguing with things that can be easily proven true, like the results of the 2020 presidential election. 

The Capitol riot, which left five dead and countless more injured or traumatized, happened as a direct result of Trump’s manipulation of reality. The basis of the rioters’ anger was a lie about the results of the election, one that was perpetuated by other GOP politicians who spent January 6th and the days after denouncing the madman they enabled and hiding from the monsters they helped him create. Post-truth politics and their consequences are upheld not just by those who tell the original lie, but also by the people who echo it. If we want to protect our sacred institutions of democracy and preserve reality, we must use science, logic, and facts against the crowds of very outspoken people who use post-truth rhetoric to try to convince us that what we’re seeing isn’t real.