Chapter 7: COVID-19 and the Acceleration of Q

The COVID-19 pandemic marked the moment when radicalisation moved fully into embodied life. For many SNCs, the pandemic was not a new cause of belief but an intensifier and a crisis that condensed the political, media, and digital currents traced throughout the previous chapters. What had started as moral permission in Trump-era politics had been normalised through conservative media and then personalised through online life, and had now converged in a single, albeit global, event. Isolation, uncertainty, and constant exposure pulled those forces together, collapsing the boundary between private experience and public ideology. This chapter argues that COVID-19 acted not just as a catalyst but as an accelerant by transforming slow-moving crises of trust into immediate struggles over truth, safety, and care. In the process, belief became embodied as masks, vaccines, and physical illness turned into moral signals through which loyalty, defiance, and fear were negotiated in homes and communities. The pandemic actively brought radicalisation down from the abstract realm of discourse into the tangible realities of bodies and relationships. This chapter traces how distrust in expertise became a moral stance, how digital immersion deepened isolation, and how health itself became a site of political and emotional struggle. Together, these dynamics show how the crisis did not simply challenge trust but reorganised it, shifting authority from institutions to the intimate networks where moral meaning now resided.