The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything

Written by Mike Rothschild

Narrated by Joe Barrett

***

"An ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole that is QAnon, and even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit." - Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm

In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as 'the calm before the storm'-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called 'Q Clearance Patriot' began an elaboration all of their own.

Q's wild yarn hinted at a vast conspiracy that satisfied the deepest desires of MAGA-America. None of Q's predictions came to pass. But did that stop people from clinging to every word, expanding Q's mythology, and promoting it ever more widely? No.

Conspiracy culture expert Mike Rothschild is uniquely equipped to explain QAnon, from the cults that first fed into it, to its embrace by Trump and the right-wing media. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it's not going away.

(p) 2021 Octopus Publishing Group

• Language: English
• Publisher: Octopus
• Release date: Jul 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800960473

Mike Rothschild

MIKE ROTHSCHILD is a journalist, author, and the foremost expert in this ever-changing QAnon conspiracy theory. He is a contributing writer for the Daily Dot, where he explores the intersections between internet culture and politics through the lens of conspiracy theories. As a subject matter expert in the field of fringe beliefs, Mike has been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and Yahoo - among many others. He is also a frequent speaker, and podcast and radio guest on the topic of conspiracy theories, including NPR's weekly show "On the Media" and a Vice documentary.

Reviews for The Storm Is Upon Us

[rockhead515-580421 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Free from the library.
Very interesting.
Learned alot about this phenomena.
Well written with a good flow to it.

[bodagirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An incredibly informative and readable primer on the QAnon conspiracy theory. The book is divided into three parts: Origins (from when Q started posting to 2019), Escalation (the boom of QAnon due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election), and Fallout (analysis of the group). Rothschild connects QAnon to several other conspiracy theories and really brings out the human aspects of this movement both the believers and those affected by them.

[fionaanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Comprehensive and informative. And contains actual primary source material, unlike some books on this topic.

[magonistarevo-625111 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have a sick fascination with the phenomenon, though one level removed: I don't engage with the toxic source material but I do enjoy its trainspotters in the Q Anon Anonymous and the Conspiratuality podcasts.

This is one of the few attempts at a history of Q-Anon that acknowledges the origins of Q-Anon properly and puts the phenomenon into the context of other right wing conspiracy theories, including Nesara pyramid schemes and thousand year-old blood libel antisemitism. It also does a great job of tracking its evolution from NEET internet nazis to hardened conspiracy weirdos to facebook boomers and then instagram wellness gurus.

The gripe I have, and it is major, is the author's use of anarchy or anarchic to describe 4Chan. It's just incredibly sloppy use of language. Where these folks politically self-identify, they self-describe as fascists, "libertarian" capitalists, national socialists, patriots, nationalists. They crave and preen for order at all cost of human life and dignity, not anarchy. Aside from self-descriptions, these are people who share child pornography which only exists because of a society based on ageist heteropatriarchy, trade in vigorously white supremacist memes, and engage in hero worship about heads of state. They explicitly call for military dictatorships, for the police to gun down people in the streets, for the military to take control of civilian life. This is not a state of anarchy, this is a very specific and highly curated order of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the disgusting underbelly of our current society, as far from anarchic as you could imagine. To call this anarchy or anarchic is a complete misnomer.

[swmproblems · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

You'll feel like a Q expert by the time you are done with this book. Great book and definitely not a waste of your time.