The excesses, hypocrisies, and injustices of U.S. colonialism are coming to a breaking point, whether colonialism’s defenders want to face this reality or not. Fires of unprecedented magnitude are hitting the Pacific Northwest, regardless of the denialistic climate attitudes that continue to prevail among the area’s reactionaries. U.S. Covid-19 deaths are rising again, especially among the rightists who ignore the seriousness of the health crisis due to MAGA conspiracy theories. The country’s unemployment rate is continuing to regularly hit spikes, despite the last half-century of claims from free-market fanatics about how deregulation, privatization, and austerity will lead to prosperity.
Amid this slow-motion societal breakdown, America’s fascist movement is rapidly growing. The pandemic, with its tendency to inflame the imaginations of reactionaries, has exploded belief in the antisemitic conspiracy theory QAnon. Q is expanding into the colonial consciousness, taking on the form of paranoid demagoguery about the country’s institutions being infiltrated by Jews and Chinese communists. Q even has increasing amounts of believers among candidates and officials for state and local office, in addition to the one U.S. Congress member who aligns with the QAnon movement and its antisemitic beliefs. These cult members continue to long for a military coup that will purge the country of “evil,” and that will restore the sanctity of the supposedly flawless settler-colonial constitution.
After then, it’s assumed, our deteriorating conditions will somehow be corrected. Analysis on socioeconomics and class consciousness are totally lacking from this cult’s echo chambers, and from the echo chambers of the broader fascist movement; in this alternate reality they’ve constructed, all that matters is pleasing “God,” whether that entails holding faith in Q’s promises, or backing Israel to fulfill the Biblical end times prophecy, or spreading baseless rumors about a Chinese Covid-19 lab leak.
This is the delusional thinking of a colonialism that subconsciously knows it’s growing weak, and that’s blindly lashing out with the hope that this will save capital and empire from the revolutionary forces which seek to abolish the illegitimate state of “America.” It’s the equivalent of the conspiracy-mongering that Colombia’s neo-Nazi propagandists have been putting forth in reaction to the recent anti-colonial protests.
In the case of Colombia, every societal facet that opposes the neo-colonial government’s neoliberal agenda — from civic society to human rights groups to protest leaders — is accused of being part of a broad-ranging conspiracy orchestrated by foreign governments. This narrative has been used by Colombia’s rightists to justify world-shocking acts of military, police, and paramilitary violence against the protesters. A development that holds ominous similarities with the QAnon movement’s vision for brutal military crackdown against those deemed to be serving the “cabal” of blood-drinking pedophile elites.
QAnon, the claims about China being to blame for the pandemic, the hoax about the election being stolen from Trump, the antisemiticpropaganda about Antifa being a Soros conspiracy, and the other far-right narratives that our society is being flooded with are preparations for an Americanized version of Colombia’s pre-emptive counterrevolutionary terror campaign. Paranoid capitalists like CEO Mike Lindell (who’s advocated for a military coup to restore Trump to the White House), the types of law enforcement officers and military personnel who stormed the Capitol this January, the American Uyghur nationalists who are training for combat with help from anti-communist warfare funds, and the petty-bourgeois right-wing preppers who are arming up to defend their stolen rural indigenous lands in the event of societal collapse are building towards the same kind of paramilitarism. Their goal is to crush whatever liberation struggle emerges in the coming decades of deteriorating conditions.
It’s no wonder why Canada has also become a hotspot for QAnon, with numerous Canadians reporting a recent alienation from their relatives who’ve become utterly obsessed with the realization of “The Storm” (as Q’s believers call the expected military crackdown). Given the history of Canada, and of all the other settler-colonial states, this is unsurprising. As The Outline’s Alex V Green has described, Canada’s genocidal formation
…mirrors that of all colonial states. It’s a pattern that Marx once described as “primitive accumulation,” the principle economic drive of colonialism. Through the enclosure and seizure of resources, for the purposes of their privatization, entire populations and regions are brought into the scope of a ruling class which now owns the means of production and has the power to exploit workers with no choice but to accept the conditions forced upon them. So while Canada is not unique as a colony, it’s done a particularly poor job of adapting to its new status as a “country.” Canada lacks a cohesive identity or sense of itself as anything besides “not the US.” Our population is tiny, spread mostly along the southern border, and in most of the land mass — the parts claimed by “the crown” and private companies, and largely inhabited by Indigenous communities that have lived there since the beginning of human memory — anything resembling state services or essential infrastructure is few and far between. Even the few defining things we can claim as “Canadian,” like socialized medicine or pristine wilderness, are under threat by conservative politicians with an eye for privatization. The pattern of primitive accumulation continues.
What does this have to do with QAnon, or with the Sinophobic, antisemitic, anti-science, and anti-communist mind viruses that correlate with it? The colonial occupation of this continent is the root of all of these conspiracy theories, because embracing paranoid delusions is how the rightists rationalize their continued support for the colonial order in the face of this order’s mounting contradictions. Like in the Latin American settler-colonial countries, where the property-holding white elites are stoking fears of “Castro-Chavismo,” vaccine nano-bots, and supposed leftist election fraud, descending deeper into the right-wing conspiracy psychosis is the coping mechanism of this continent’s reactionaries.
As Raul Diego of Mintpressnews has observed in an analysis on how QAnon has garnered disproportionate support from law enforcement members, Q’s rhetoric is a modern manifestation of the narratives about apocalyptic prophecies and Christian persecution that settlers here have long turned to:
QAnon simply overlays a direct political layer to this ideology using Trump as a savior figure. Any tolerance their followers show towards Israel and the president’s Jewish son-in-law is only part of the “plan” they must trust, and not a departure from the staunchly xenophobic movement, which is ultimately a modern form of what has been termed “British Israelism” — the belief that the Anglo Saxon race is the true chosen people — which runs deep in American Settler psychology and is expressed not only via QAnon messaging, but through far more mainstream media sources like Ann Coulter and Fox News; both of whom target the rust and bible belts where versions of the QAnon narrative have been amalgamating for years as people try to cope with their increased disenfranchisement.
It’s appropriate that Israel, the settler-colonial state where colonialism’s evils have so far become most undeniable in the modern era, shares British Israelism’s linguistic theme. The U.S. and Canada are nothing but larger versions of Israel, ones that have succeeded at stealing more territory from this continent’s equivalent of the Palestinians. As this continent’s African and indigenous nations grow their shared movement for anti-colonial revolution, and consequently strengthen their international solidarity with Palestine, the fascists are concocting lies which tie these liberation movements to bogeymen like China or the fictitious Jewish “cabal.” Their goal is to further dehumanize the colonized in preparation for a counterrevolutionary campaign of bloodshed, where the Kyle Rittenhouses, Proud, Boys, and Three Percenters of the coming generation do what Colombia’s paramilitaries are doing.
No moment of salvation will come from this doubling down on religious fanaticism, xenophobia, and colonial chauvinism. All that will come are continued efforts from the state to crush civil liberties, as the Biden administration recently did by expanding the government’s authority to target those it deems to be “radicalized.” Anti-colonial groups like the armed African organization the No Fucking Around Club, which is vilified as “extremist” alongside the right-wing terrorists, are the prime targets of this counterrevolutionary repressive campaign.
As QAnon enables this crackdown, the U.S. military will drive forth with its stated plans for domestic intervention in the event of climatic catastrophes and class uprisings. The colonized peoples will be targeted the most by these intensifications in state violence, which is already happening as nonwhite communities come under threat from an ever-more militarized and deadly police state.
Eventually, when the country’s poorly managed privatized electrical grid breaks down under climatic pressure, the military will be sent in to try to stabilize the country’s urban centers. Armed drones, which Canada’s settler state is close to acquiring in preparation for a similar crackdown, could easily be used against the population. And the militias and vigilantes that the country’s fascist movement has been cultivating will be fighting right alongside the U.S. government, because they share the government’s goal of exterminating those who seek to liberate the land from colonial occupation. Facing increasing global isolation and internal weakening of capital, colonialism on this continent is retreating into grandiose fantasies of violent purges, fueled by a desperate desire to expand its primitive accumulation and to turn U.S. imperialism inwards.
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