Child’s blood: this is one of the founding elements of QAnon’s theories. And we find it in the form of a meme, like this video montage which shows the billionaire George Soros drinking blood from an infusion, on which is written “child’s blood”. Or during demonstrations of marches for the lives of children in 2020: “The blood of our children is on your hands #Adrenochrone”, proclaims a sign held up by a woman in Watertown in the USA.
To understand this obsession with blood and its anti-Semitic roots, you have to go back to October 2017. It was first via the 4chan forum (then 8chan and 8kun) that the cryptic messages of a mysterious Q were disseminated, which implied that he was a senior federal government official. Trump backers, QAnon followers mistakenly believe that the US and the West are run by a secret global cabal of blood-drinking “pedo-Satanists”. Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, billionaire George Soros, but also the Dalai Lama or Pope Francis would participate in this cabal. Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that was co-opted by QAnon along with others, falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton and her friends operated a child sex trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C.
The imaginary properties of adrenochrome
Then, beginning in 2018, blood took on an “increasingly prominent place in QAnon’s complex, ever-changing narratives and sub-narratives,” notes Wu Ming 1, a member of the Wu Ming writers’ collective, who works on the sociohistorical role of storytelling. For several years, he immersed himself in the QAnon conspiratorial nebula to draw out an in-depth investigation, Q like qomplot, how conspiracy fantasies defend the system (ed. Lux).
At the heart of this obsession with blood is adrenochrome, a derivative of adrenaline. QAnon followers attribute imaginary properties to it, adrenochrome becomes a miraculous elixir of long life. They are convinced, summarizes Wu Ming 1, that the leaders would keep thousands, even millions of children in slavery in underground camps, like under Central Park for example. These children would be constantly raped and tortured, would live in constant terror so that their blood would always be rich in adrenaline.
Originally a satirical story
This mind-blowing story does not come out of nowhere. It was imagined in 1971 by the American journalist, Hunter S. Thompson, first published in Rolling Stone magazine, which became a novel. Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas thus borrows from the style of the report, but its tone was satirical. “The adrenochrome passages were pure fiction,” Wu Ming 1 points out. At the time, it was obvious. But in 2018, Thompson’s description was integrated into the story. “QAnon interpreted it literally,” he continues.
And usually with QAnon and blood, it’s all literal interpretation. The same goes for the representation of billionaires or powerful blood drinkers, such as Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Tom Hanks, Joe Biden, etc. For Wu Ming, it is inspired in particular by the metaphor of capitalism as vampire, which Marx used in The capital.
At the foot of the letter
In many languages, blood is “a metaphor for life, energy, strength”, explains Wu Ming 1, who believes that with QAnon, blood is no longer understood as this metaphor of “labor strength, life time, proletarian existence in social relations”, but is just blood. “The powerful are portrayed as real vampires,” he wrote.
In general, conspiratorial fantasies are often characterized by “asymbolia, a tendency to interpret metaphors and other images literally”, points out Wu Ming 1. But these fantasies draw above all from a deep anti-Semitism, very present on 4chan, which has also relayed misogynistic and racist discourse. “QAnon’s Adrenochrome fantasies are a 21st century version of a very old tale, the so-called Libel of Blood, an anti-Semitic tale that raged across Europe from the 12th to the 20th century,” notes the writer.
A child murdered in 1144
To understand it, you have to delve into history and return to the myths of ritual crimes, of the child-killing Jew and the vampire Jew, who sucks blood and gold. “QAnon’s theories are part of cultural anti-Semitism of religious origin, which arose in the Middle Ages”, a period of persecution of Jews, underlines Joël Kotek, historian at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), specialist in the anti-Semitic image. In 1144, in England, the body of 12-year-old William of Norwich was discovered in the woods, murdered with strange wounds. A Benedictine monk reports hearsay and accuses the Jews of having committed a ritual crime to harvest the child’s blood. In 1475, the Jews were again accused of a ritual crime in the case of the drowning of Simon of Trent. But this time the idea is added that the blood of a Christian child is used as an ingredient for matzah, a bread that the Jews eat during Passover.
“From 1144 and until the 20th century, around 200 accusations of ritual crimes will travel all over Europe, the last of which took place in 1946, in Poland, after the Shoah, notes the historian. Arose in the Middle Ages, the rather surprising fantasy that the Jews would not be real men, that they would have menstruation. The only way for the Jews to save themselves would be precisely to use Christian blood as a source of youth. A thousand years later, this idea is found in QAnon. A drawing from the 15th century, transmitted by Joël Kotek, shows Simon of Trent, tortured and whose blood was collected by Jews. The video of George Sorros drinking child’s blood is part of this anti-Semitic imaginary.
Anti-Semitism, a conspiracy theory
A random ? No, a cultural code for Joël Kotek, that is to say “an answer that we have made up and which allows us to ward off anxieties. The Jews have always been used for that, to reassure people, by posing the idea that there is an agent of evil that prevents us from being happy. This is the function of anti-Semitism in Western Christian society. »
“What must be considered is that anti-Semitism must be perceived as a conspiracy theory, it is not simple racism,” continues the historian. It has its origin in the accusation of deicide and the myth of Judas who would have delivered Christ to the Romans for money. “Judas means ‘Jew’ in Hebrew,” he recalls. So, it is the Jew who delivers Christ while all the apostles, without exception, are Jews. In several illuminations of the XIIᵉ, XIIIᵉ century, we will represent Pontius Pilate as a Jew. That is the matrix of the idea of the Jews who plot, and there, to shed the blood of Christ. »
For Wu Ming, while QAnon theories are spreading in a very modern way on social networks, their content is “archaic, ancestral and boils down to a handful of ‘primary scenes’ and mythology, which have been recombined for centuries”. He interprets it as a diversionary narrative, which develops around “the rage, the anxiety, the nausea of living in a capitalist society, especially at a time of environmental disasters”. “Conspiratorial fantasies ‘divert’ rage and direct it to places where it becomes useless, or worse, becomes part of a reactionary agenda,” he says. Conspiracy fantasies divert the attention of millions from real and effective struggles against capitalism. »
“The need to find a culprit”
“A whole conspiratorial literature poses the Jews as paedocriminals, not only individually, but with the idea of an international conspiracy, analyzes Joël Kotek. There was Pizzagate in the United States, with Hillary Clinton, who is not Jewish, but who is Jewish. And then the Rothschilds and George Soros, etc. We are in an anti-Semitic and conspiratorial imagination, which needs the need to find a culprit. »
The Jew in this literature, he emphasizes, is not an inferior being, but “diabolical”. “And he indulges in satanic rites,” says the historian. And the satanic rite, par excellence, and the worst of crimes, is the crime against the child, of course. It’s the ultimate taboo, after killing God. And concludes: “It is always in times of crisis and change that anti-Semitism arises”, the illustration of this is the period of Covid-19, which brought to the fore and propagated QAnon’s theories at great speed.