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The video is full of monumental symbolism. Lightning strikes the computer-generated sky, which is covered in the golden letters “The Great Awakening.” An off-camera spokesperson talks about celebrities, politicians, Hollywood actors who sexually abuse children. The voice thunders: “Put on the armor of God so that you can face the devil’s plans. Our fight is not against blood and flesh, but against the forces of this dark world. “A chat message on the Telegram platform from the same user to a video of Federal President Simonetta Sommaruga:” She will also remain responsible. “
The man who posted the messages on the group chat looks as gentle as a lamb during a conversation in his apartment. A 46-year-old man from Solothurn who is in a wheelchair due to multiple sclerosis. When he talks, he doesn’t seem angry, but rather nice and pleasant to talk to him. He calls himself a “digital soldier”. A soldier of the conspiracy movement QAnon.
More and more Q-Anon followers appear at Trump events.
© Keystone
This claims that a Satan-worshiping elite, operating a worldwide child sex trafficking network, has allied itself with a “state within a state” against US President Donald Trump. Trump is fighting them, leading to a “doomsday” with mass arrests of journalists and politicians. The theory revolves around a person who has been using the name “Q” every few days since 2017 and who has expressed himself on unknown websites and posed as a US intelligence officer.
The FBI classifies QAnon as a terrorist threat
In the United States, the Q movement has long since ceased to be a fringe phenomenon. He appears more and more often at Donald Trump events. Several Q-Anon supporters are running as Republican candidates for the United States Congress. But it is true that an American conspiracy theory cannot penetrate the center of Swiss society. OR?
Yes it can. She is already here.
Scattered throughout the towns of the Central Plateau, in the villages of Central Switzerland, and sometimes in the big cities, there are people who think that Q is real. There are web designers, junior soccer coaches, housewives, office workers, freelancers. Many of them seem to be in mid-life. They just have a pretty crazy hobby. A hobby that the FBI classifies as a terrorist threat.
For religion expert Georg Schmid, one thing is clear: QAnon is booming in Switzerland. Especially since influential esotericists have incorporated different parts of the QAnon theory into their worldview. “In Switzerland there are around 300,000 esoterically oriented people. I guess about 100,000 of them believe different parts of the QAnon conspiracy theory, ”says Schmid. Since the Corona lockdown, the number of members on Q-Chats has increased nearly fivefold.
QAnon is a mega conspiracy theory. A hat that adapts to everything. Sitting at his kitchen table, the Solothurn man said he believed the Titanic was deliberately sunk, that planes sprayed chemicals, and that the British Queen could be a reptile. When asked if he thinks the earth is flat, also a popular conspiracy theory, he reacts a bit indignant: “That’s where I draw the line.”
A young man from central Switzerland in his twenties, after completing an apprenticeship as a caretaker in a cleaning company, is also a Q-fanatic. He talks on the phone about globalization, the exploitation of the prison, which Switzerland is subjecting to the EU. Things you also hear at a regular customer table. Then the young man turns around. Connect all of this with a secret elite trying to establish a new world order. And he believes in Q. He says it like he’s talking about the weather.
Q-Anon supporter says: “There are a lot of weirdos”
Fundamental to QAnon is the belief that there is a secret pedophile society made up of prominent politicians and unknown thread pulls. It is also sometimes claimed that these satanic elites kill children for a raw material that will keep them young. Swiss
QAnon believers don’t buy it all. They both believe in some form of human trafficking network; the history of Satanism doesn’t really convince them. The central Swiss distanced himself and said: “There are a lot of weirdos spreading nonsense.”
The Swiss center is the administrator of a Swiss QAnon Facebook group with 2,500 members. The Solothurn man operates a small channel on the Telegram messaging service with a hundred subscribers. They are not large numbers, but people like them are the decisive vector of how QAnon spreads in Switzerland.
Georg Schmid says: “QAnon is not a cult.” There is a lack of hierarchies and central authorities. “Diffusion through the ‘peoples’ is the most important factor for the growth of the movement.”
QAnon’s candidate, Marjorie Taylor Greene, won her constituency for the Republican nomination in Georgia. Her entry into the United States Congress seems certain.
© Keystone
About a year ago, the Solothurn man saw a friend’s Facebook post about Q. He asked what it was about. The friend recommends a YouTube video. The 46-year-old watches the three-hour movie on his iPhone in one go.
It has been viewed over a million times on YouTube alone. The video almost took your senses off. It presents a completely contradictory history of the last hundred years: an anti-reality program. Distilled and reduced to a simple story. Good against evil. And the protagonist, the spectator himself, whose mask is suddenly torn from his face. Who suddenly sees what it really is like? It is a crazy and wrong story. But one with staggering appeal to people who are prone to it.
In the Solothurner’s tidy apartment there is a small old laptop in the corner and next to it a beige screen, as we know it from the 2000s. On the other hand, it shows supposed evidence of his convictions on one of the newer IPhones, a XL model. QAnon is perhaps the first real smartphone conspiracy move. It takes place completely between the believer’s head and the screen of his cell phone. Computers are no longer necessary. Internet only.
There is no link from Telegram chats to reality.
The virtual headquarters of QAnon followers is the Telegram messaging service, where you can anonymously connect to chat groups and channels. They form a self-referential network. A link leads to the next chat group, to the next conspiracy page, to the next video on Youtube. Back to reality does not show any links. The young man from Central Switzerland says: “As others read ’20 minutes’ on their mobile phones, I read Telegram. For example, during breaks. “QAnon costs him about 30 minutes a day. The Solothurn man talks zero to five hours a day.
And what role does Donald Trump play in this mess? In Solothurner’s apartment, a significant scene takes place during the two-hour conversation. In response to the question of what speaks for him that Q is real, the 46-year-old refers to the president of the United States. In a desperate battle for every vote, he recently said of QAnon supporters: “You like me very much, which I appreciate.” And: “I heard that it is the people who love our country.” For the 46-year-old, Trump’s coldly calculated response is an indication that Q is working with Trump.
In the United States, a QAnon supporter recently shot and killed a man who he believed was part of the conspiracy. The Solothurn man says, “I firmly reject violence.” He’s personally believed. When someone in his chat group asked when “we’re going to kill Obama,” he threatened to kick the violence fanatic out of the chat. By his threat that Sommaruga would be “held accountable,” he meant that he should be brought to justice due to crown regulations. And he did not even finish the video in which there is talk of a “fight” against the authorities, so he did not see the passage.
Sect exprte Schmid estimates that the potential for violence of radicalized QAnon supporters is high: “If someone really believes that there is a pedophile elite holding children captive, the violence can seem very legitimate.”
What to do? There are not many options. Schmid says: “It is important that there are offers on the Internet that provide critical information about the illogic of such theories. If someone searches Google afterwards at the beginning, they have to see results like this. “
