To US President Donald Trump, its followers are “people who love our country.” To the FBI, the movement is a potential US terror threat. To anyone who has logged on to Facebook over the past few months, it might just be a friend or family member who has started to show an alarming interest in child trafficking, the “cabal” (or scheme), and conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and COVID-19.
This is QAnon, a wide-ranging and baseless Internet conspiracy theory that reached the American mainstream this month. The movement has been festering on the fringes of right-wing Internet communities for years, but its visibility has exploded over the past few months amid the social unrest and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A QAnon supporter is probably heading to the US Congress, the president (who plays a crucial role in QAnon’s false narrative) has refused to debunk and disavow it, and the successful hijacking of the #SaveTheChildren hashtag has provided the movement a more palatable banner under which to stage real-life recruiting events and manipulate local news coverage.
Illustration: June Hsu
“QAnon” is a baseless Internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe a cabal of Satan-worshiping US Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world, while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.
QAnon followers believe that Trump is waging a secret battle against this cabal and its “deep state” collaborators to expose the malefactors and send them all to Guantanamo Bay.
There are many, many threads of the QAnon narrative, all as far-fetched and evidence-free as the rest, including subplots that focus on John F Kennedy Jr, nephew of former US president John F Kennedy, being alive (he is not); the Rothschild banking family controlling all of the banks (they do not) and children being sold through the Web site of the furniture retailer Wayfair (they are not).
Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, former US president Barack Obama, philanthropist and former financier George Soros, Microsoft Corp cofounder Bill Gates, actor Tom Hanks, talk show icon Oprah Winfrey, model and social media innovator Chrissy Teigen and Pope Francis are just some of the people whom QAnon followers have cast as villains in their alternate reality.
CONSPIRACIES
QAnon has its roots in previously established conspiracy theories, some relatively new and some a millennium old. The contemporary antecedent is Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 US presidential campaign when right-wing news outlets and influencers promoted the baseless idea that references to food and a popular Washington DC pizza restaurant in the stolen e-mails of then-Clinton campaign manager John Podesta were a secret code for a child-trafficking ring.
The theory touched off serious harassment of the restaurant and its employees, culminating in a December 2016 shooting by a man who had traveled to the restaurant believing that there were children detained in the restaurant’s basement in need of rescue.
QAnon evolved out of Pizzagate and includes many of the same basic characters and plotlines without the easily disprovable specifics, but QAnon also has its roots in much older anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
The idea of the all-powerful, world-ruling cabal comes straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fake document purporting to expose a Jewish plot to control the world that was used throughout the 20th century to justify anti-Semitism.
Another QAnon canard — the idea that members of the cabal extract the chemical adrenochrome from the blood of their child victims and ingest it to extend their lives — is a modern remix of the age-old anti-Semitic blood libel.
THE BEGINNING
On Oct. 28, 2017, “Q” emerged from the primordial swamp of the Internet on the message board 4chan with a post in which he confidently asserted that Clinton’s “extradition” was “already in motion” and her arrest imminent.
In subsequent posts — there have so far been more than 4,000 — Q established his legend as a government insider with a top security clearance who knew the truth about the secret struggle for power between Trump and the “deep state.”
Although posting anonymously, Q uses a “trip code” that allows followers to distinguish his posts from those of other anonymous users (known as “anons”).
Q switched from posting on 4chan to posting on 8chan in November 2017, went silent for several months after 8chan shut down in August last year and eventually re-emerged on a new Web site established by 8chan’s owner, 8kun.
Q’s posts are cryptic and elliptical. They often consist of a long string of leading questions designed to guide readers toward discovering the “truth” for themselves through “research.” As with Clinton’s supposed “extradition,” Q has consistently made predictions that have failed to come to pass, but true believers tend to simply adapt their narratives to account for inconsistencies.
For close followers of QAnon, the posts (or “drops”) contain “crumbs” of intelligence that they “bake” into “proofs.” For “bakers,” QAnon is both a fun hobby and a deadly serious calling. It is a kind of participatory Internet scavenger hunt with incredibly high stakes and a ready-made community of adherents.
COMING OF AGE
It is certainly not by accident that anonymous posts on 4chan became a full-fledged conspiracy movement. Anonymous Internet posters who claim to have access to secret information are fairly common, but they usually disappear once people lose interest or realize that they are being fooled.
(Liberal versions of this phenomenon were rampant during the early months of the Trump administration when dozens of Twitter accounts claiming to be controlled by “rogue” employees of federal agencies went viral.)
QAnon might have also faded away if it were not for the dedicated work of three conspiracy theorists who latched on to it at the very beginning and translated it into a digestible narrative for mainstream social media networks.
A 2018 investigation by NBC News uncovered how the trio worked to promote and profit off QAnon, turning it into a broad, multi-platform Internet phenomenon.
An entire QAnon media ecosystem exists, with enormous amounts of video content, memes, e-books and chatrooms, all designed to snare the interest of potential recruits, then draw them “down the rabbit hole” and into QAnon’s alternate reality.
THE FAITHFUL
Nobody knows how many people believe in QAnon, but it is fair to say that there are at least 100,000 people. Experts in conspiracy theories have said that belief in QAnon is far from common.
While at one point, 80 percent of Americans believed a conspiracy theory about the assassination of John F Kennedy, a poll by Pew Research in March found that 76 percent of Americans had never heard of QAnon and just 3 percent knew “a lot” about it.
The largest Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon had about 200,000 members in them before Facebook banned them in mid-August. When Twitter took similar action against QAnon accounts in July, it limited features for about 150,000 accounts.
In June, a Q drop that contained a link to a year-old Guardian article resulted in about 150,000 page views over the next 24 hours.
These are approximate figures to draw a conclusion from, but in the absence of better data, they hint at the scale of the online movement.
In general, QAnon appears to be most popular among older US Republicans and evangelical Christians. There are subcultures within QAnon for people who approach studying Q drops in a manner similar to Bible study. Other followers appear to have come to QAnon from New Age spiritual movements, from more traditional conspiracy theory communities or from the far right.
Since adulation for Trump is a prerequisite, it is almost exclusively a conservative movement, although the #SaveTheChildren campaign is helping it make inroads among non-Trump supporters.
QAnon has also spread to Latin America and Europe, where it appears to be catching on among certain far-right movements.
THREAT OF VIOLENCE
For those who truly believe that powerful figures are holding children hostage to exploit them sexually or for their blood, taking action to stop the abuse can seem like a moral imperative. While most QAnon followers would not engage in violence, many have, or have attempted to, which is why the FBI has identified the movement as a potential US terror threat.
Participation in QAnon also often involves vicious online harassment campaigns against perceived enemies, which can have serious consequences for the targets.
QAnon is also gaining traction as a political force in the Republican Party, which could have real and damaging effects on democracy in the US.
Media Matters has compiled a list of 77 candidates for congressional seats who have indicated support for QAnon and at least one of them, Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, is likely to win in the US elections in November.
As the hero of the overall narrative, Trump has the unique ability to influence QAnon believers. On Wednesday last week, at a White House news briefing, he was given the opportunity to debunk the theory once and for all.
Instead, he praised QAnon followers as patriots and appeared to affirm the central premise of the belief, saying: “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there, and we are, actually. We’re saving the world from a radical-left philosophy that will destroy this country and, when this country is gone, the rest of the world will follow.”
QAnon believers were jubilant.
‘SAVE THE CHILDREN’
Participating in QAnon is largely made up of “research” — that is, learning more about the byzantine theories or decoding Q drops — and evangelism.
Most of the proselytization relies on media manipulation tactics designed to catch users’ attention and send them into a controlled online media environment where they will become “red-pilled” through consuming pro-QAnon content.
QAnon followers have for years used a wide range of online tactics to achieve virality and garner mainstream media coverage, including making “documentaries” full of misinformation, hijacking trending hashtags with QAnon messaging, showing up at Trump rallies with Q signs and running for elected office.
A very potent iteration of this tactic emerged this summer with the #SaveTheChildren or #SaveOurChildren campaign. The innocuous sounding hashtag, which had previously been used by non-governmental organizations working to end child trafficking, has been flooded with emotive content by QAnon adherents hinting at the broader QAnon narrative. (It does not help that the debate around human trafficking is full of bogus statistics.)
On Facebook, anxiety over children due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a resurgence of the anti-vaccine movement and QAnon-fueled scaremongering about child trafficking have all combined to inspire a modern-day moral panic, somewhat akin to the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s.
Hundreds of real-life “Save Our Children” protests have been organized on Facebook in communities across the US and around the world, but these advocates are unaware that in driving local news coverage designed to “raise awareness” about child trafficking, they are encouraging people to head to the Internet, where a search for “save our children” could send them straight down the QAnon rabbit hole.
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