The QAnon-ification of the World
What happens in American culture wars doesn't stay in America
This article is a guest post by Ayman Eckford.
On January 6, 2021, a roaring mob launched an unprecedented attack on American democracy in an attempt to help President Donald Trump hang on to power. The attempt failed, but the man at its head is once again running for president, and the growing influence of his MAGA movement could have devastating effects on LGBT people, both in the US and globally.
One of the most infamous moments from January 6th was the image of a man clad in red, white, and blue face paint and a Viking-style horned hat joined by a mob decked out in the iconography of the “QAnon” movement. These rioters did not come to Washington DC merely to express their political opinions — they believed they were saving the world. In his book, Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America (2023), Washington Post media journalist Will Sommer interviews numerous MAGA supporters who insist that Donald Trump is a messiah who will save the world from a Satanic pedophile Cabal. This cabal, they say, uses kids to get adrenochrome, a supposed miracle drug used by Hollywood celebrities, American tycoons, and, of course, Democratic politicians to stay forever youthful. Other journalists and scholars have reported similar claims. (adrenochrome is an actual biomolecule produced in the human body by the oxidation of adrenaline, however it has no known pharmacological use.)
This peculiar mix of blood libel-style conspiracy theories and Satanic Panic-style hysteria isn’t just complete nonsense, it’s also dangerous. QAnon, as a cohesive movement of plucky patriots in star-spangled tinfoil hats waiting for the next breadcrumb from the elusive government leaker known as “Q”, basically died out in the months and years since the US Capitol Riots. But its core beliefs have spread throughout the MAGA movement. QAnon Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert sit in Congress. Others have been elected at the local level. What began on the troll imageboard 4Chan, possibly as a joke, is now openly acknowledged and embraced by Trump, who has reposted a picture of himself wearing a Q pin with the QAnon slogan “The Storm is Coming”, and published dozens of Q-related posts on his social media platform Truth Social. According to a 2023 poll, 25 percent of Americans (up from 15 percent in 2021) believe that “The government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshiping pedophiles.” The poll found that 29 percent of Republicans (up from 23 percent in 2021) support QAnon.
All of this QAnon energy has supercharged and merged with the “groomer” panic, in which LGBT people, or really anyone who supports LGBT rights, is baselessly accused of “grooming” children. This canard of LGBT people being child abusers was previously used to justify the discrimination of queer people in the 20th century. Now it’s back.
During my years of LGBT activism in Russia, one of the most wild cases I personally dealt with was a young lesbian girl who experienced “corrective” rape. Her father organized the rape of his own daughter to “cure” her from what he termed “homosexualism” through having sexual contact with a man. So-called corrective rapes against lesbian and bisexual teenagers occur all over the world, including the US. But that’s not the kind of child sexual abuse MAGA is interested in — the kind that actually exists. Worse still, they harbor sexual predators among their own, up to and including Trump himself, who was found guilty in 2023 of sexual abuse. This movement has sacrificed the safety of real young people in the name of chasing nonexistent monsters down a rabbit hole of alternate reality.
The wild ideas of QAnon also intertwined with other MAGA conspiracy theories, including those that portray LGBT people as agents of “international communism.” As someone who grew up in post-Soviet Ukraine, this notion seems particularly ridiculous. From a young age, I knew that gay and bi people were persecuted in the Soviet Union and considered to be “Western spies” (as they still are today in modern Russia, sadly). I knew that I was trans long before I was even aware of the term, much less anything about Marxism. In fact, during the most active years of my LGBT activism, my favorite author was Ayn Rand! (It’s worth noting that for a long time, libertarians stood at the forefront of LGBT rights.)
As is always the case with the MAGA movement, every accusation is a confession. Even as they advance every variety of anti-LGBT conspiracy, they themselves are engaged in a real anti-LGBT conspiracy in plain sight. Project 2025, an agenda spearheaded by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, would, if enacted, be perhaps the single biggest legal assault on LGBT rights in US history. Primarily led by former Trump officials (at least 140 contributed to it) and deeply connected to Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, Project 2025 would eliminate anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people by erasing terms like “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from federal laws. Similarly, the agenda seeks to restrict the application of the Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which extended the protections enumerated in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to LGBT people. The project would launch a wide-ranging campaign against trans rights, strip funding from LGBT initiatives both domestic and abroad, and overhaul education policy to remove anything LGBT-related and replace it with regressive, homophobic “family values.”
What scares me most, as an LGBT activist who has operated across multiple countries, from Ukraine and Russia to America and the UK, is what this agenda could mean for LGBT rights around the globe. Most Americans don’t seem to fully understand just how influential US cultural trends are. What happens in America doesn’t stay in America, it echoes across the world.
In recent years, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has taken to blaming the “Global West” for undermining traditional values and promoting “dozens of genders”, while the Belarusian government recently labeled all content featuring LGBT relationships as a form of pornography. The wording that Eastern European autocrats use to justify their discriminatory policies is routinely borrowed from Western far-right conspiracies. Even at LGBT activism events in Saint Petersburg, we discussed the Stonewall riots, Harvey Milk, and the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco’s gay community more often than the persecution of gay and bi people in the Soviet Union. The same is true for Ukraine, Belarus, and most of the former Eastern bloc countries — American LGBT history is better known in these LGBT circles than the history of their own dissidents. This phenomenon is all the more striking considering how hard Putin, an ex-KGB agent, is working to recapture the so-called glory days of the USSR.
In the past five years, I’ve watched in horror while friends all around Eastern Europe and the Northern Caucasus began parroting ideas from QAnon and MAGA conspiracies on their personal social media pages. Ordinary folks who aren’t hyper-political now repeat lies lifted straight from the “America First” crowd. Even Russian feminists who hate the movement’s misogyny and Chechens who abhor its anti-Muslim bigotry have still absorbed elements of its thinking. The success of the MAGA movement in the US means more radicalization of everyday people in other countries too.
In Eastern Europe in particular, the most important information often spreads quietly behind closed doors. The Soviet legacy has taught people, through long and painful experience, to hold one set of views in public — the “party line” — and another in private. Many progressive “activists”, for example, who champion racial and ethnic equality among friends, defend Russian police attacks on Chechen, Dagestani, or Central Asian communities in public. Others espouse anti-racist views in front of their Western progressive colleagues, while being hardcore racists among their Russian friends.
I have seen firsthand that many of the ideas spreading behind closed doors in these countries are profoundly influenced by QAnon and MAGA conspiracies. On social media pages or private Telegram channels, I have seen more people than I can count — people who don’t speak a word of English — unknowingly regurgitating something Marjorie Taylor Green said the day before. By the time the content is translated, rephrased, clipped, and reposted dozens of times without attribution, people have no idea where it came from. I’ve even seen MAGA content spread in this way through post-Soviet media and Russian television.
The American culture war has become a new pandemic, the true “mind virus” infecting people worldwide. If Trump returns to power, it could get even worse.
Another pressing concern is that many non-Western LGBT organizations basically exist on money that comes from the West in general, and the US in particular, such as the Metropolitan Community Church or ILGA’s influential North American office. When the war in Ukraine began, it was American LGBT groups and the Biden Administration who helped Ukrainian LGBT people survive by relocating to the US. Of course, to MAGA conspiracy theorists, this is just more evidence of the global cabal they see in their fever dreams. Given half a chance, the movement will slash many of these initiatives.
Contrary to what MAGA propagandists like Tucker Carlson and self-identified “MAGA communists” like Jackson Hinkle espouse, Russia is not a model for the West. It’s a deeply unfree, corrupt society ruled by a vindictive and violent dictator. The nation I had to flee for my safety is not a place to admire, much less mimic. Therein lies the path of darkness. I am not an American. Nor am I a leftist. I don’t get a vote, and yet the outcome of the 2024 US elections will affect me and millions more around the globe. All I can do is worry out loud and hope that Americans spare a thought for how their actions and ideas change lives in far-off countries — for better or for worse.
See also: “There Can Be No Culture Peace Without Moderates”
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 | A guest post by
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AI is going to make it worse. Imagine a world where Steve Bannon can do his daily three hour podcast in a dozen languages simultaneously.
Exactly.
Though, there's one detail I feel the need to point out:
"Most Americans don’t seem to fully understand just how influential US cultural trends are. What happens in America doesn’t stay in America."
I would argue that is only partly true. Because from what I've seen, if it doesn't directly affect them, there's no shortage of Americans who simply don't give a damn.
Which if you ask me is far worse.