Rabbit holes, no longer inhabited by the quirky creatures of Lewis Carrol’s imaginings, have become the domain of other kinds of species: trolls and web centipedes working their way beneath the political landscape. Instead of being places of safety for prey, these rabbit holes are dens for predators, who surface to hunt above ground and then, having found a trail, close in en masse for the kill.
In 2013, Australian journalist Van Badham found herself attracting savage responses when she started writing on feminist topics for the Guardian. The trolls were “misogynists, racists, homophobes and downright fascists” who harassed her first with online attacks and then with threats of physical violence and parcels of obscene material delivered to her doorstep.
Feminism is one subject that triggers these assailants; vaccines are another, as California-based researcher Renee DiResta learned when she helped organise a campaign to promote child vaccination in 2014. The trolling began on social media but then entered the real world, as it had in Badham’s case, after her address was posted online. Photos of her baby son appeared on websites alongside accusations that she was a pharma-paid baby killer. Videos portrayed her and her fellow campaigners as fascists and devil worshippers.
Both women responded by determining to find out just what was going on down in the burrow. Badham adopted a range of online personae to penetrate the networks of communication on 4Chan and 8kun, where “free speech absolutism” was facilitated by anonymity. It was confronting and often dangerous work. Her 2021 book QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults documents how alt-right conspiracy cults formed and how they engage with major political events using memes and narratives designed to confuse reality and invention.
DiResta extended her activism to a rigorous enquiry into the adversarial collectives that had attacked her. Following her appointment as research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory, she developed the more academic approach taken in her new book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. She traces the genealogy of ideas behind the convictions of the QAnon cult, explains their social contexts and diagnoses their interaction with changing technologies. Her overriding concern is with how the ideas of this internet movement have intensified the crisis of disinformation in real-world politics.
Elle Reeve, a reporter whose encounters with internet conspiracy cults also started around 2014, decided to follow the trolls back to their lair, not as a virtual identity, but in person. There she met the wizards, gurus and influencers who are the subject of her latest book Black Pill. The title alludes to the red pill/blue pill dilemma in The Matrix: take the blue pill, and you will be returned to normality; take the red, and what you have taken for normality will be revealed as a comprehensive and mischievous scheme of deception; from there, you will enter a new, larger and more intense reality. The black pill, Reeve says, turns this alternative form of delusion to “a dark and gleeful nihilism.”
Unlike Badham and DiResta, Reeve was not prompted in her quest by a trolling experience. She tells the story of a very different introduction to the kinds of aggression she expects to witness. As a teenager, she and her family were harassed by a neighbour who stalked, threatened, and intimidated them over several years. After a dismissive court ruling treating it as a “both sides” issue, Reeve’s father was acutely concerned for her safety. It was an anxiety Reeve herself didn’t share. At fourteen, she was an accomplished gymnast. “I had extreme endurance, I was fast and agile, and I’d developed a high tolerance for pain. And I was very, very angry.”
If it is this anger that drives her into the murky world of QAnon, the tone of the book and her demeanour in interviews indicate she has it well under control. Her skill is to evade the role of investigative journalist, which would immediately make her the target of hostility, by seeking out personal connection rather than information, and doing so in a way that appears non-judgemental.
Although she never disguises her identity, in a sense she remains under cover. In the midst of situations turning very nasty, including the Unite the Right riots in Charlottesville and the 6 January insurrection, she is effectively an embedded reporter, following the movements of the instigators. Returning to the world of “normies,” though, she lays her cards on the table. Her subtitle, “How I witnessed the darkest corners of the internet come to life, poison society and capture American politics,” leaves the reader in no doubt where she stands.
Amid the rapidly proliferating literature on disinformation, these three books share a focus on the relationship between the QAnon cult of the past decade and the current propaganda environment. The fact that they are all written by women, with each drawing on experiences of personal threat, gives them a sense of purpose that is compelling.
They identify a central pattern: conspiracies are formulated from false or invented evidence, narratives go viral, outrage is generated, and actions are planned to give vent to the anger. “Something coming out of virtuality and making itself real” is philosopher Nick Land’s formulation.
Land, a key influence on the alt-right ideology that gave rise to QAnon, used the term “hyperstition” (a conflation of “hyper” and superstition”) for the syndrome by which fantasy becomes actualised through sheer force of belief. Badham devotes attention to the overlapping phenomenon of “larping.” Larp, an acronym for the “live action role play” that was core business in the communities she was monitoring, enabled the creation of “bespoke realities.”
“Pizzagate” is a definitive example. This episode began as a rumour circulating in various online hate campaigns against Hillary Clinton, whose run for the presidency in 2016 stirred up alt-right misogyny and threatened the supremacy of their adopted champion, Donald Trump.
The Clintons had for some time been characterised as paedophiles on QAnon channels. To put some seemingly authentic details into the mix, it was alleged that they ran a child-kidnapping ring from the premises of a Pizza restaurant in Washington. The young victims were kept in a bunker under the dining area; when they had served their purpose, they were taken to the “kill room,” a windowless chamber accessed through a side door in the kitchen area.
Far from undermining its credibility, the outlandishness of the scenario traded on the “red pill” premise that the truth is hidden because it is extreme. Soon the restaurant was receiving 150 abusive phone calls a day. Broadcaster Alex Jones ran with the story on his program Infowars, with a video titled “Down the #Pizzagate Rabbit Hole.” Things came to a head in December when a twenty-eight-year-old man decided to mount a raid with an assault rifle. Amid terrified customers, he shot off the lock to the “spooky” door in the kitchen, to reveal a supply cupboard. The restaurant had no basement.
Even such stark reality-testing, though, failed to defuse a culture of conspiracy that continued to generate violent events, including the Charlottesville riots, at which Reeve was present as an observer. White supremacy and misogyny were core ingredients of the rage that fuelled them, born of an ideology combining early-twentieth-century eugenics and neo-Nazi role-play.
Reeve’s curiosity about the intellectual dimensions of the alt-right movement led her to Richard Spencer, one of its founders. Spencer had a degree in English Literature from the University of Virginia and an MA from Chicago. Clean-cut and stylish, his image and gift for plausible-sounding high theory made him the poster boy for white nationalism, though his capacity for organisational leadership, as Reeve deduces, was weak. She witnessed a series of his tirades, ranging from rhetorical virtuosity to episodes of infantile meltdown.
Despite, or even because of, his rampant anti-feminism, women were drawn to him. Some female members of his inner circle were ready to cooperate with a doctrine of “white sharia” that would mandate wearing the hijab at all times, and deprive them of voting rights and birth control. What began as a stunt, a thought experiment, became a provocative meme, then an actual prospect. “I just have to separate the meme from these guys,” one increasingly anxious woman told Reeve.
The story of QAnon and the alt-right has been told extensively and variously over the past decade, and seemed to have come to a head in 2016. During the next few years, its key figures began to peel off, either through disenchantment or because they got themselves into legal trouble. With the Trump presidency, the dark world of the rabbit burrow surfaced into broad daylight and claimed reality status as the MAGA movement.
DiResta tracks how this scaling up occurs through Trump’s 2016 campaign, with the intensification of foreign influence on social media, and in the new level of political traction gained by far right factions in the Republican-controlled congress during the early years of his presidency. In her words, “now a symphony of influencers, algorithms and crowds work tirelessly to construct intricate belief systems.” She diagnoses the situation as an unprecedented interaction of crowd psychology and algorithmic manipulation. Her predominant concern, though, is with how we may achieve some effective reassertion of civic responsibility.
Collectively, these three recent books on QAnon and its sequel offer important insights into a peculiarly American cultural phenomenon that might be characterised as an addiction to counter-realities. The overture, “They’ve been lying to you,” acquires the force of an epiphany, so those who swallow the red pill no more want facts than a heroin addict wants a salad sandwich. Facts may be healthy, but your whole system is crying out for something fiercer and more transformative.
The pathologies of QAnon may be less urgent at this moment than geopolitical propaganda operations, such as those of revealed last week by the Department of Justice when it announced that thirty-two Russian government-sponsored internet domains were being seized. The sites — “created by the Kremlin to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian interests, and influence voters in the United States” — are designed to persuade any unwitting reader, not just those primed with a red-pill conversion. But the consistent feature is the seduction of a revised sense of reality through a reversal in cultures of trust. •
QAnon and On: A Short and Shocking History of Internet Conspiracy Cults
By Van Badham | Hardie Grant | $36.99 | 480 pages
Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
By Renee DiResta | Public Affairs | $59.99 | 448 pages
Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
By Elle Reeve | Simon & Schuster | $62.99 | 304 pages
