The World of Far-Right Social Media Thinks Everyone is a Clone
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
After the January 6th insurrection, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the major social media platforms started to ban groups that promoted conspiracy theories. These recently booted alt-righters flocked to alternative sites such as Telegram and MeWe, where they continued more or less the same as they did before, claiming that a vast government conspiracy had taken over America.
On these fringes of the Internet, it’s common to see far-right conspiracy theorists allege ideas that border on the truly bizarre. Many are still convinced that Trump never lost the election. Entire groups are devoted to conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which supposes that an elite cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the world. Some believe that liberals are extracting an imaginary substance called adrenochrome from children to keep themselves young.
Stranger still, many believe that politicians such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton are actually clones or elaborate deepfakes. These theorists exist in an alternate reality where nothing we see on the news is actually true — clues of which can be “discovered” in between the frames of government videos and decoded in the words of public statements.
This desire to “uncover the truth” is an old impulse that is not limited to the Internet's conservative peripheries. When we look at the annals of history, people have blamed clones for their problems for hundreds of years.
“More Arrests, Deaths & Resignation/Terminations. Down they go, one by one!” writes one user on the Telegram group Q-Tip. They posted this alongside a series of screenshots of news articles of various deaths and resignations, implying that these are people Trump has taken out in his war against the “deep state.” This post has been seen by over 67,000 users, with over 170 comments, and it's one of the thousands of similar posts on the Q-Tip page.
A major component of the QAnon theory is that Trump will eventually overtake these elites in an event called “the storm,” which is depicted as a biblical experience when he finally does drain the swamp of all of its nefarious elements. In the meantime, he is waging an allegedly secret war against this cabal of Satanists, who then use their influence in the press to “misconstrue” these events as resignations and deaths. Many of the posts on QAnon feeds are reposted screenshots users claim are “evidence” of the latest body count in this unseen and fictional battle.
Like most conspiracy theories, none of this information holds up to scrutiny. For example, one of the articles Q-Tip mentioned earlier in that post was an associated press piece about how Pennsylvanian state senator John Blake recently resigned his seat to work for US Representative Matt Cartwright. John Blake resigned at a public event covered by press outlets ranging from CBS to FOX.
Somehow we are supposed to believe that all of this was a ruse — reasoning that falls apart the moment you think about it more deeply. If an organization was powerful enough to control members of Congress and the Associated Press (as well as the half dozen press organizations present at this event), why would they still make the details of the cover-up public? Why not stage a heart attack or a car crash or, at the very least, a cover-up that doesn’t require a convoluted backstory with a sitting member of congress? And, of course, that’s the logical inconsistency from a relatively obscure person. This line of questioning becomes even more absurd for public figures such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who have come into contact with thousands of people.
The answer that has emerged from this corner of the Internet is that these people are fake. They are either cloned in some seedy science fiction lab controlled by the “deep state” or digital deepfakes (i.e., synthetic images or videos). “They are using clones. A technology that they have had for 50 years…But it’s not just Hollywood, it’s Washington, [the] Vatican, Royals, World Leaders, Famous People! From all over the world!” remarked one QAnon adherent on Telegram.
“BBC literally ran a story during…Christmas stating that the message from the Queen was a deep fake,” reads another post from the group We The Pepe. “Do you think the Queen is still alive, or do you think she’s 6 feet under?” This post implies that Queen Elizabeth the II has died and has long since been replaced by a series of deepfake videos and images. As of writing this, the queen is very much alive, but a scroll through these groups would have you believe that a host of living, breathing celebrities are actually a part of the conspiracy.
From Nancy Pelosi to Jeff Bezos, nearly every mainstream political figure has been accused of not being real by members of QAnon. Clones, doppelgängers, and bodysuits have been a facet of this ideology since the onset. QAnon is often cited as starting in October 2017 when a poster called Q made an obscure post on a 4Chan message board about how Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month. This event obliviously never occurred, and so adherents filled in the dots. According to some, she had been captured, and the deep state had replaced her with an actor or clone.
Even before Q’s first post, the idea that Hillary Clinton was not “everything she appeared to be” had been circulating for years. When Hillary collapsed of pneumonia on the campaign trail in 2016, conspiracy theorists took it as “evidence” that she was something else. Some claimed that she was relying on a body double. While others ludicrously asserted that in 1998 the entire Clinton Family had been eliminated and cloned beneath Camp David.
What compels someone to believe in something so truly bizarre?
We cannot know from a single post why an individual might cling to a conspiracy theory. Researchers have come up with a variety of explanations. Conspiracy theories correlate with higher social media usage and lower education levels (though all education levels are affected). A person might adhere to this way of thinking due to a desire for knowledge and certainty or maybe out of a longing for security. They may wish for a sense of cognitive closure. There’s even evidence that narcissism can also correlate with conspiracy theories, as individuals and groups scapegoat their failings onto a fictitious or real enemy.
A common element that seems to tie a lot of these disparate threads together is a longing for control. Conspiracy theories are prevalent in groups that do not have a lot of power or conversely perceive themselves as deserving of more of it. Some research indicates that conspiracy theories are prevalent in societies with less successful democracies, where trust in institutional authority is low. Others have argued that conspiracy theories are prevalent among disenfranchised groups rebranding themselves as “heroically in the possession of secret information.” Members of a dominant group, such as the white supremacists on the far-right, can use conspiracy theories as a pretext for why they should have even more power (e.g., we need to stop the clones).
Of course, none of this starts or ends with ludicrous claims on online message boards. Believers of QAnon have been linked to over a dozen violent incidents ranging from attempting to derail a freight train to kidnapping to trying to stage an insurrection of the US Capitol. QAnon adherents were there alongside other white supremacists on January 6th, and they will undoubtedly be participating in similar actions in the future.
While there may be a genuine sense of anger and grief among far-right conspiracy theorists, they are ultimately rationalizing the preservation of an authoritarian regime. They are clinging to any justification that lets them maintain the fantasy that Donald Trump is a hero, and the thing a lot of them have chosen to explain away all of his inconsistencies is that clones are real.
This theory may seem far-fetched, and it is, but as we shall see, the psychological foundations are centuries in the making.
“They also replace people with doubles. For many years they recruited look-alikes who would serve their ends. Now they are perfecting cloning technology that will let them replace anybody.”
That comment is not QAnon-related but is a post from a message board speculating whether actress Meagan Fox is secretly a clone. The self-proclaimed Doppelganger and Identity Research Society is a forum dedicated to unearthing the clones and body doubles of our society’s most rich and famous. This forum is filled with examples of people arguing that a wide range of celebrities, from Paul McCartney to Beyoncé, are not who they appear.
Spotting doppelgängers is a favorite pastime of these commenters, and it's a trend that’s been happening a long time. We talk of actors and politicians having clones and body doubles in the modern era. Yet, hundreds of years ago, the go-to explanation among many people was supernatural beings such as fairies, trolls, spirits, and elves. The word Doppelgänger, in fact, was a term coined by writer Johann Paul Richter in 1796 to describe a concept in German folklore of how all living creatures have an identical, invisible spirit acting as their double.
When we look at folklore traditions across Europe, we see these larger-than-life figures as forces of nature. Spirits such as fairies are blamed for everything from weather patterns to the success and failure of crops. For example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the queen and king of the fairies, Titania and Oberon, are so powerful that their marital quarrel has disrupted the natural world. Their fight has caused rivers to flood and crops to wither.
One thing fairies and other supernatural beings were commonly accused of doing was abducting children and replacing them with an imposter, known popularly today as a changeling. These creatures were considered to be evil by many, and they were a cause for anxiety. As a character remarked to a concerned parent in J. F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860/62): “It is not your son you have got. The boy has been carried away by the ‘Daoine Sith,’ [spirits], and they have left a Sibhreach [changeling] in his place.”
Many parents were not happy with these alleged abductions and performed any task to get their original child back, ranging from animist rituals to tactics that were far more brutal. J. F. Campbell’s story starts with a father collecting empty eggshells to detect if their child is a changeling and ends with them tossing their “fake” boy into a fire. It was normal for parents to inflict intense abuse on these “imposters” in the hope that the faeries would feel bad enough for the changeling to bring the original child back. In the words of Richard Sugg in their essay Fairy Scapegoats: A History of the Persecution of Changeling Children:
“To the end of the nineteenth century, and probably later, such children were ritually abused by their own parents to this end. Immersed in rivers or placed at the margin of coastal tides, stood on hot coals or hung over fires, exposed in freezing weather, bathed in poisonous foxglove essence, beaten, threatened and subjected to forms of exorcism, these babies and children sometimes survived, sometimes not.”
A sad truth we must acknowledge with this history is that many of the changeling stories are of children who were sick, disabled, or neuroatypical. The child depicted in the Popular Tales of the West Highlands, for example, was discovered to be a changeling because he fell ill and “ took to his bed, and moped whole days away.” Other stories depict changeling children that are deformed or behaving erratically.
We see this in the etymological lineage of the word oaf (archaically spelled auf or alfe), which today means a stupid, uncultured, or clumsy person, but was originally used to describe a changeling child. The word is believed to trace its roots to the Middle English alven and elven, meaning fairy or elf. Its usage may have changed over the years to generally apply to an unintelligent person, but the original, ableist meaning survives in the words historical evolution.
The changeling myth was used as a subconscious pretext to give some parents “an out.” It gave them a sense of control in a world ruled by diseases and genetic disorders that they could not understand. It doesn’t make the routine torture of changeling children acceptable, but it does allow us, in a small way, to understand what was happening. These parents were using this conspiracy of faeries as a defense mechanism to reckon with suffering, and in some cases, as a way to misdirect their anger and shame over having a child with a disability onto the child itself.
That impulse to use conspiratorial thinking to explain away “bad things” has never left us. We see it today in how parents are convinced vaccines have given their children autism, condensing a complicated process we do not fully understand (i.e., why someone gets autism in the first place) to a single source they can control and ward against. It’s present in how people blame the coronavirus on 5G technology. Conspiratorial thinking is quite natural. As social psychology professor Dr. Karen Douglas remarked on the American Psychological Associations’ podcast:
“People have always believed in conspiracy theories. As far back as we can remember, people have been having these conspiracy beliefs and having these suspicions about the actions of hostile collectives of individuals. This is just the way that we are wired up to some degree.”
There is nothing particularly unique about the conspiracy theories we see promoted by white supremacists, including the clones they believe control the world.
As we have just shown, people have been blaming their problems on a duplicate other for centuries. Fairies and other spirits may have been the justification hundreds of years ago, but now it’s a perverted understanding of science via clones and deepfakes. Members of the alt-right have used this mentality to create a world where they are the valiant heroes in a struggle against an all-powerful deep state.
There will undoubtedly be some adherents who abandon this justification now that Trump's power has diminished. Much of the QAnon worldview is centered on Donald Trump, and despite what many may claim, he is no longer in office. There is only so much cognitive dissonance that some individuals will be able to maintain before setting the QAnon conspiracy away for good. As one of them recently posted in the group R Trust the plan:
“I feel abandoned. Trump was supposed to save us from communism. I put my trust in him. It is now gone. There is no plan. It’s finally hitting me.”
It’s unlikely, however, that this burnout will affect the majority of adherents. After the attempted January 6th insurrection, a staggering 8% of Americans claimed that the QAnon conspiracy theory was “very accurate” in a Morning Consult poll. If the online activity we have noted is any indication, many will continue to believe in it. Once someone can explain away every inconsistency by saying, “a clone did it,” it becomes tough to argue with them.
We need to understand that this has nothing to do with facts and logic and has everything with finding a worldview that gives people a sense of control. Conspiracy theories are about allowing individuals to make sense of events and feelings they do not understand or wish to process, and it has been happening for a long time. People on alt-right message boards cling to the screenshots of newspaper headlines in much the same way parents of alleged changelings clung to discarded eggshells to identify evil. They are rituals meant to alleviate unrelated stress and anxiety.
While we have started to make some headway in combatting this distorted way of thinking, there is no magic bullet. Debunking campaigns and education efforts may be effective as a form of prevention, but conspiracy theories are generally hard to combat once they have become firmly entrenched within an individual’s mindset. We still understand so little about people's susceptibility to conspiracy theories over time. Some research suggests that improving people’s material well-being is one of the best ways to combat them, which means that conspiracy theorists will require robust support networks to change their behavior.
If we want to mitigate conspiratorial thinking, we need to recognize that this is not a conservative anomaly but a modern iteration of an ancient impulse. No one is immune to it, and unless we start developing some social tools to combat it, the specter of clones and doppelgängers will continue to haunt us for years to come.