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New Age communities are driving QAnon conspiracies in Brazil

Some two dozen people dressed in yellow and green gathered at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach on August 23, in what seemed like yet another pro-Bolsonaro protest, commonly held to praise Brazil’s president since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

But when a young man wearing a T-shirt with a skull-shaped image of the US flag began to speak, it became clear that there was something different — and slightly odd — about this gathering.

“I’m going to use code for a few words so social media doesn’t censor me,” the young man says in a video of the event he posted on Facebook. He shows the group a poster with the heading “To Research,” bearing a list of terms most likely unknown to many Brazilians—“New World Order,” “Pizzagate,” “Operation Storm.”

These terms all relate to QAnon — a US-born conspiracy movement that postulates that US President Donald Trump is fighting a global elite that runs a centuries-old pedophilia ring through a secret operation called “Storm.”

The movement evolved out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed that Democratic Party officials, including Hillary Clinton, were running a secret child trafficking scheme run in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, DC. About a year after the theory was debunked, an anonymous user identifying as “Q Clearance Patriot” posted a cryptic message on the 4chan imageboard suggesting Clinton would be arrested in the following days — which never materialized.

“Q” has subsequently posted several times claiming to have critical intel, and in the past three years, Q's anonymous followers have coalesced into a global collective delusion who puzzle over QAnon “drops,” with a presence on every major social media platform.

QAnon emerged in the US, but its plasticity makes it easily adaptable in a Brazilian context. President Bolsonaro — a Trump-worshipping, coronavirus-skeptic — rode to power on the promise of ridding Brazil of corruption, leftism, and other evils, and whose legion of highly-connected supporters vehemently distrust traditional media.

It isn't surprising that QAnon terms would eventually be slapped onto protest signs at a pro-Bolsonaro gathering in Copacabana beach. What is perhaps somewhat surprising is the name of one YouTube channel, written on one of the signs amid a list of must-follow QAnon YouTubers: “Ensinamentos da era de Aquário,” or “Teachings of the age of Aquarius” in Portuguese.

Although that name doesn't immediately signal QAnon lore, this is one of the largest YouTube channels that openly supports QAnon in Brazil. Its owner, Luciano Cesa, has amassed a legion of 200,000 subscribers in less than two years, and his success signals a growing interest — especially among Brazilian New Age groups — in the movement's beliefs.

These spiritual and pseudoscientific communities, which encompasses a range of practices such as shamanism, crystal healing, reiki, yoga, and numerology, are playing a prominent role in introducing and domesticating QAnon narratives to non-American audiences.