They are dismissed as further evidence of the fondness of Americans for cults and conspiracies. But the followers of the enigmatic Q are said to include close advisers to President Trump – and some on the conservative fringes of the Catholic Church
In August 2018, during Pope Francis’ visit to Ireland, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Vatican nuncio in Washington D.C., published an 11-page “testimony” claiming that Francis and several American cardinals and archbishops had teamed up over the years to cover up sexual abuse by clerics, and in particular had failed to address the crimes and misdemeanours of Theodore McCarrick, who had been appointed as Archbishop of Washington D.C. in 2001 in spite of several warnings about his behaviour.
Archbishop Viganò blamed (and named) several Church leaders who had protected a widespread “homosexual current” in the Vatican and said that Francis must resign. A lengthy Vatican report into how McCarrick rose so high in the Church is apparently ready to be released.
In the midst of the global Covid-19 lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter protests and associated riots in the United States, precipitated by the horrifying murder by a Minneapolis policeman of the African American George Floyd on 25 May, Viganò has crackled and dazzled his way back into the news. He first published an excoriating personal attack on the current Archbishop of Washington, the African American Wilton Gregory, who had denounced Donald Trump’s visit to the St John Paul II Shrine in Washington as an attempt to manipulate the symbolism of a sacred space for a partisan objective.
Viganò kicked back, slamming Archbishop Gregory and other US religious leaders aligned with him as “subservient to the deep state, to globalism, to aligned thought, to the New World Order which they invoke ever more frequently in the name of a universal brotherhood which has nothing Christian about it, but which evokes the Masonic ideals of those who want to dominate the world by driving God out of the courts, out of schools, out of families, and perhaps even out of churches”. Viganò concluded: “Do not follow [false shepherds], as they lead you to perdition.”
Then last Saturday Viganò published a remarkable – even by his standards – open letter to President Trump, purporting to explain the causes of the world’s current malaise. What is going on, he asserts, is an attempt by the malign “deep state” to hold on to power by all means possible, in the face of the concerted efforts by President Trump to bring it down. At bottom, the struggle is a spiritual one. An elite is determined “to demolish the family and the nation, exploit workers ... foment internal divisions and wars, and accumulate power and money”. And “just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God. Thus the Invisible Enemy, whom good rulers fight against in public affairs, is also fought against by good shepherds in the ecclesiastical sphere.”
The world is at a crossroads, the battle has to be won, Viganò declares. “I dare to believe,” he tells Trump, “that both of us are on the same side in this battle, albeit with different weapons.”
The open letter to Trump, dated 7 June, Trinity Sunday, was first published on the Canadian ultra-conservative Catholic LifeSiteNews website at 11.59 am Eastern Time on 6 June. At 2.32 Eastern Time a link to the PDF of the letter was posted on the QAnon message board. The link was placed above an extended quote from Ephesians 6: 10-18 – a favourite Biblical reference of Q’s – urging followers to “put on the armor of God”, since the struggle is “not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil on the heavenly realms”. Sentiments eerily echoed in Viganò’s letter to Trump.
So who is Q? His (or her or their) followers do not know, but many of them believe that Q is a team of ten or so high-level military intelligence operatives who are close informants and advisers to Trump. Since emerging on the internet in October 2017 Q has amassed millions of followers, in the US and overseas. Running through Q’s posts is a loathing of the media other than conservative outlets such as Fox News (though they are not always to be trusted, either); a visceral disgust of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and all things Democrat; and a Christian evangelical reading of the spiritual battle between good and evil in the world. In recent months, inevitably, Q’s followers have claimed that the coronavirus might not be real; or, if it is, it has been created by the shadowy elite that secretly runs the world and is now drumming up a public health panic in order to damage Trump’s re-election chances. The eventual destruction of the global cabal is imminent, they belive, but can only be accomplished with the support of patriots. A new golden age will follow the “storm” we are now entering, and a “Great Awakening” is coming that will overcome the evil forces.
It looks as if Viganò wants to tell President Trump, the Q team, and Q followers, that he is one of them. One of Q’s favourite phrases is “Dark to Light”. Viganò talks about the “mercenaries” who are “allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light”, among other dark-light references. In referring to the promised storm, Q likes to post the scene from the 2009 vigilante thriller Law Abiding Citizen, with the clip in which Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) declares: “I’m going to bring the whole f***ing diseased corrupt temple down on your head. It’s going to be biblical.” Viganò uses the term “biblical” twice, and italicises it. And Trump’s controversial holding-up of the Bible outside St John’s church was immediately seen by Q followers as a promise to his enemies: “It’s going to be biblical.”
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