QAnon Has Gone Global
Shortly after Jarmo Ekman starts livestreaming his get-together, an older woman walks into view wearing something you wouldn't expect to see at a small Finnish hotel: a MAGA hat. She blows a kiss to the camera and shows off her hat like a model.
“What a beautiful hat,” Ekman says. “As you see there are a lot of Trump fans here, of course, as it is a Q meeting.”
It’s July 11 and around 50 people are meeting at a hotel in Dragsfjärd, a small community two hours east of Helsinki, for a weekend QAnon festival. While walking through the crowd, Ekman stops to speak to a man wearing a nametag made of duct tape with Bono written on it.
“This is the first Q weekend festival ever in this world,” says Bono. On his shirt are the words “QAnon Army Finland.”
“Armies” like this can be found in Germany, France, and the U.K., as well as in Canada, Japan, and Iran. All of them support QAnon, a vast conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is waging a war against the “Deep State” made up of elite families, politicians, and celebrities, which also just happens to connected a massive child sex trafficking ring and is currently using COVID-19 to entrench its power.
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Even Ekman’s Q meeting in Finland has grown. Ten months ago, he held another Q gathering in Helsinki where he was only able to get 19 people out.
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Mike Rothchild, a U.S.-based journalist who covers QAnon and has written a book on the subject.
“I never expected this to get any international reach,” said Rothschild. “What does some U.S. military intelligence role-playing game have to do with life in Japan or Finland where you have different problems and a much different Bogeyman? I think maybe what we're seeing is that the Bogeyman is always kind of the same for a certain online right-winger.”
Not everyone is surprised. Ekman said he’s not shocked he could get 50 people to a Finnish hotel to celebrate something whose true epicentre is over 7,000 kilometres away. Like many within the Q movement, he believes it's part of something bigger.
"I disagree that Q’s messages have been only centred around U.S. politics. There is great diversity on the covered topics," Ekman said. "There is a global spiritual awakening unfolding, of which Q and Trump are a major component."
Even though he says he was “awakened” to ideas like Q in 2014, he believes he's part of something that's only just begun.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkym ... one-global
