"4 Can Do More" Candidates Remove QAnon Conspiracy Reference on Facebook Group

The once fringe movement is gaining increasing representation in government.

A few years ago QAnon was a fringe conspiracy movement born on the “Chan” image boards—some of the darker corners you’ll find on the Internet. Its core set of beliefs are so ridiculous that few of us took it seriously.

Photo by Anthony Crider (CC BY 2.0)

We were wrong, of course. QAnon has grown and evolved and absorbed other conspiracy beliefs, surviving the failure of all past predictions and the disappearance of the mysterious “Q” from the Internet. As a game designer I’m grimly fascinated by the hypothesis that QAnon exists as a sort of living online game—one that plays its players.

This isn’t the venue to give an extensive breakdown on QAnon, and there are plenty of places to get good information including an overview published last year in the New York Times. But it started as a strong core belief that a group of Satan-worshiping pedophile elites run the government (including current and past presidents and other top Democrat politicians) aided by their evil allies in Hollywood. As described last year by Kevin Roose:

According to QAnon lore, former President Donald J. Trump was recruited by top military generals to run for president in 2016 to break up this criminal conspiracy and bring its members to justice. Many of these cabal members will soon be arrested, the theory goes, and some will be imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, while others will face military tribunals and be executed.

You’d think that’s plenty, but like a conspiracy amoeba QAnon has absorbed elements of 9/11 trutherism, X-Files-style UFO beliefs, and plenty more. And like many right-wing movements Qanon has plenty of racism and antisemitism baked in. It’s made some of the more insane rants by Alex Jones suddenly uncomfortably close to mainstream. House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has publicly endorsed Qanon beliefs in the past though she has since backed away from some those claims.

And that’s where our local school board elections come in. The “4 Can Do More” candidates have been very open about their right-wing positions, including that they believe in redistributing tax funds away from public schools in favor of private in a nationwide push for “school choice” legislation (even though most Georgians agree that our public schools need more funding). But they left a hint online that their beliefs are even more extreme (scroll through both screenshots below and see the last line of the Group Rules):

The above screenshots were recently taken of the 4 Can Do More online group hosted on Facebook. And for now we’ll set aside the blatant hypocrisy of a political coalition that runs on Transparency while limiting comments on their Facebook page and hosting discussions in a closed group. (Rule #2: “Being part of this group requires mutual trust. Authentic, discussions make groups great, but may also be sensitive and private. What's shared in the group stays in the group.”) But let’s look at that string of characters under Rule #1: WWG1WGA.

If you haven’t spent much time following ring-wing movements on the internet it may look like someone’s cat walked over the keyboard. But if you scroll up to the flag picture up top you’ll see both the characters and what it stands for:

WWG1WGA = Where We Go One, We Go All

If you Google the characters it will immediately bring up websites and news articles explaining Qanon, as well as links to get WWG1WGA merch like ball caps and bumper stickers. “Where we go one, we go all” is a signature catchphrase of the movement, along with “Trust the plan” and “The storm is coming.” This isn’t first time a Q supporter might have put the phrase out in public not expecting it to be recognized by outsiders. It’s a way of signaling to fellow supporters that they are not alone.

Leaving jargon and initialisms out in the open is a strategy to recruit like-minded individuals, a dog-whistle that might go unnoticed by folks casually scrolling. But within a few days of this screenshot the 4 Can Do More edited their group rules, removing WWG1WGA from anything we can see out in the open. They might have found out the phrase was spotted and that some of us know what it means.

I currently don’t know if any of the candidates or organizers of the 4 Can Do More coalition personally believe in or have promoted Q talking points. But looking at their policy positions and the way they manage their online presence it falls very much in line with what you’d expect from those who have openly supported Qanon beliefs—much like Rep. Marjorie Greene.

If nothing else, this small clue as to their beliefs and agenda gives us all the more reason to be intensely skeptical of these candidates. They should be directly asked about some of the key Q conspiracy beliefs to help our neighbors better decide their vote.