QAnon influencers hope to unite the right in a sea of blood.
Not merely rhetorical violence, though that’s important. QAnon is violence in its ideology, in its end goal, and in its imagination: the “Storm,” a military coup where Donald Trump defeats the so-called “Deep State” and arrests and executes their opponents in something very much akin to the white supremacist Turner Diaries’ Day of the Rope. We saw it on January 6, when coup plotters erected a makeshift gallows and shouted “Hang Mike Pence.” That blood lust hasn’t gone anywhere, even if some humorous headlines about dissension in the Q ranks is distracting attention from the underlying bloodlust at the heart of the movement.
QAnon has been in the news because two of its biggest figures, Lin Wood and Michael Flynn, are at war with each other. As a result, QAnon influencers have been forced to pick sides and engage in endless recriminations.
Romana Didulo, who called herself the QAnon “Queen of Canada,” called on her 70,000 Telegram followers on November 21 to murder healthcare workers, writing, “Shoot to kill anyone who tries to inject Children under the age of 19 years old with Coronavirus19 vaccines/ bioweapons or any other Vaccines. This order is effective immediately.”
This is, of course, the heart of QAnon—mass executions—but calling on her followers to actively begin the process is not an everyday occurrence; one wonders how the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada’s” followers will respond to her arrest.
Another mid-level QAnoner, Jarrin Jackson, posted a video calling for the formation of an unorganized militia on November 30th, essentially calling for the same things as Didulo but with more plausible deniability.
The newfound need to murder their enemies sooner rather than later is an attempt to create unity. Joe Oltmann, a mid-level QAnon influencer, called on Q acolytes via Telegram on November 28th to cease fighting amongst themselves, saying “We have to stop the chaos and stand on one of either side. The side of ‘we need more’ and the side of ‘build the gallows’. I’m not going to take a side on the American movement. I’m going to stand in the gap on the side of ‘build the gallows’. I want the fights to stop, but I also understand I am my own man as they are. They will figure it out or they won’t.”
He does not mean this metaphorically: “Build the gallows” is the end point of QAnon.