QAnon
Introduction
QAnon has been the biggest thing on the internet for a very long time. I was all over the news, social media and its supporters never held back from rallies and demonstrations. So what exactly is QAnon and what made the conspiracy spread like fire? QAnon is an American conspiracy theory but more than that, it’s like a political cult built around the conspiracy theory, which revolves around a few claims made by Q, who is an anonymous individual claiming to be a government official.
It all began when somebody named Q started posting stuff claiming that he has confidential information about the government and the opposition. He gave secret clues about the coming “great awakening.” A large percentage of people have neglected to believe in a conspiracy that has no roots and no proof, yet a certain percentage believes that it is all true and Donald Trump is going to save their country from evil.
QAnon supporters believe in a theory that Hilary Clinton and numerous celebrities are members of the murderous child sex ring. The rumors were spread across the states that Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, and others eat children in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood group. The movement went viral through a moment called “the storm” which meant imprisonment of the opposition leaders, celebrities, and people from media who were involved in the “demonic activities.”
Epicenter Of The Conspiracy
It all originated from a post made by a user on 4chan named “Q Clearance Patriot.” On October 28, 2017, he posted a thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” which was in reference to a tweet by Trump which said “the calm before the storm” describing the gathering of United States military leaders that he attended. As explained and believed by the supporters, the word “storm” referred to a mass arrest that was supposed to take place under Trump’s supervision. It was claimed that those who were involved in “child-eating evil activities” will be put behind the bars. A social media community soon developed after interpreting and believing in what the user named Q was posting and many individuals pulled a mass following and became minor celebrities within the cabal.
The moment first received attention from the mainstream press in the last month of 2017 and in the early months of 2018 the conspiracy theory received traction from the mainstream right. The news took a hype upon social media when the television hosts Sean Hannity and Roseanne Barr published the news on their accounts. Many rallies took place and the believers of QAnon attended Trump’s rallies as well.
The moment catches a pace when president Trump indirectly started promoting the conspiracy theories. The main spread was made by aggregating the Q posts through dedicated sites. One of the most popular aggregators was QMap which was run by a pseudonymous developer and overall key QAnon figure known as QAPPANON. Logically, which is a fact check website, published a report against the claims made at QMap because of which it eventually had to shut down.
What Do They Believe?
QAnon supporters have been accusing Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking government officials of being a part of the evil club. They claim that Trump was planning a mass arrest of thousands of cabal members, which was to take place on the day known as “storm.” They also believe that Trump is an undercover agent who has been recruited for the mission to save the country from all these people.
Along with all the baseless accusations, they have claimed that Kim Jong Un is not an actual entity, but a puppet ruler appointed by the CIA. Some of the QAnon’s claims have been described as anti-Semitic which is hostility to prejudice towards the Jews and discrimination against them. Surprisingly, these theories have been amplified by Russian and Chinese state-backed media agencies and social media troll accounts.
The theory began when somebody named Q posted on an anonymous image-board website 4chan who was presumably an American. As of the information extracted from the assessments, the posts have been made by two individuals but now it is possible that Q is backed up by a group of people now. Q has always claimed to be a high-level government official with Q clearance and that is where the name “Q” came from. He claims to have access to confidential information of the Trump administration and its opponents. After QAnon, many other similar accounts posted such stuff such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon and WH Insider Anon. The moment was spread across the border as well, such as it took on the heat in the United Kingdom and France and grew in Germany and Japan.
Conspiracy Crossed The Borders
The UK and France can be considered as the spotlight areas for the movement after America. Though the movement originated in America, it took hype across the borders as well with particularly strong growth in Germany and Japan. Between March and June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, QAnon activity nearly tripled on Facebook and nearly doubled on Instagram and Twitter. German Reichsbürger groups adopted QAnon to promote its belief that modern Germany is not a sovereign republic but rather a corporation created by Allied nations after World War II, and expressed their hope that Trump would lead an army to restore the Reich.[92] In Russia, a similar conspiracy theory, the “Union of Slavic Forces of Russia” or “Soviet Citizens”—which claims the Russian Federation is a Delaware-based LLC that occupies the legal territory of the Soviet Union—also became susceptible to QAnon beliefs. By that time, QAnon had spread to Europe, from the Netherlands to the Balkan Peninsula. It maintains an especially strong following in Germany. Far-right activists and influencers have created a German audience for QAnon on YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram estimated at 200,000. Many Canadians have also propagated QAnon. One in four Britons is said to believe in QAnon-related theories, though only 6% support QAnon. Martin Geddes, listed by the anti-racist advocacy group Hope not to Hate as an influential British promoter of QAnon, was described by that organization as “[running] one of the most popular QAnon Twitter accounts in the world” in October 2020.
A February 8 article in The Guardian, described the 2022 Ottawa convoy protests as the result of coordination between QAnon, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine, and anti-government organizations.
Claims
According to Travis View, a host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast who has studied the theory and written about it extensively for The Washington Post has described the essence of the conspiracy theory as:
” … There is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything. They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal’s wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Donald Trump and the U.S. military—that everyone backs him and the evil cabal—was it not for “Q”. And what “Q” is is basically a poster on 4chan, who later moved to 8chan, who reveals details about this secret behind-the-scenes battle, and also secrets about what the cabal is doing and also the mass sort of upcoming arrest events through these posts.”
In 2018, Q alleged that “vaccines” were part of the Big Pharma conspiracy theory. Very little of this was directed by Q “drops”, and Q did not mention the pandemic until March 23, 2020. Q’s posts have become more cryptic and vague, allowing followers to map their own beliefs onto them. This has led Australian psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to emphasize the “self-sealing” quality of the conspiracy theory, highlighting its anonymous purveyor’s use of plausible deniability and noting that evidence against it “can become evidence of [its] validity in the minds of believers”. QAnon’s first prediction was that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested and would attempt to flee the country. This prediction failed.
Who Is Q?
According to some researchers, the pseudonymous identity known as Q has been controlled by multiple people in cooperation. By design, anonymous image boards such as 4chan and 8chan obscure their posters’ identities.
There has been much speculation about Q’s motives and identity. The tripcode associated with Q has changed several times, creating uncertainty about the poster’s continuous identity. When 8chan returned as 8kun in November 2019 after several months of downtime, the Q posting on 8kun posted photos of a pen and notebook that had been pictured in earlier 8chan posts to show the continuation of the Q identity and continued to use Q’s 8chan tripcode.
A range of theories, held by both QAnon believers and critics, credit Q’s posts to sources including a military intelligence officer, a Trump administration insider, an alternate reality game created by the puzzle organization Cicada 3301, a left-wing artist collective, or Trump himself. Both Watkins denies knowing Q’s identity. Since the Q tripcode was uniquely verified by 8chan’s server and not reproducible on other imageboards, and Q did not have another means of communication, Q was not able to post when the website went down after the 2019 El Paso shooting.
In the last episode of Q: Into the Storm, the 2021 HBO doc series he produced from this research, Hoback showed his final conversation with Ron Watkins, who stated on camera, “I’ve spent the past … almost ten years, every day, doing this kind of research anonymously. Now I’m doing it publicly, that’s the only difference. … It was basically … three years of intelligence training teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before but never as Q”.
Watkins then laughed and corrected himself, saying, “Never as Q. I promise. Because I am not Q, and I never was.” Others have suggested that QAnon and a similar conspiratorial movement in Ukraine constitute a pro-Russian fifth column. In January 2021, after the storming of the Capitol, many prominent conservatives, such as Steve Bannon and Bill Still, began to denounce QAnon, calling it a “psyop” created by U.S. intelligence or the FBI.
Popular Opinion
According to an August 2018 Qualtrics poll for The Washington Post, 58% of Floridians were familiar enough with QAnon to have an opinion about it. In less than a year of existence, QAnon became significantly recognized by the general population. Of those who had an opinion, most were unfavorable. Positive feelings toward QAnon were found to be strongly correlated with being susceptible to conspiracy thinking.
A September 2020 Pew survey of the 47% of respondents who said they had heard of QAnon found that 41% of Republicans and those who lean Republican believed QAnon is good for the country, while 7% of Democrats and those who lean Democratic believed that. According to a March 2020 Pew survey, 76% of Americans said they had never heard of QAnon, 20% had heard “a little about it”, and 3% said they had heard “a lot”.
An October 2020 Yahoo-YouGov poll found that even if they had not heard of QAnon, a majority of Republicans and Trump supporters believed top Democrats were engaged in sex-trafficking rings and more than half of Trump supporters believed he was working to dismantle the rings.
According to an expert in online conspiracy, Renee DiResta, QAnon’s pattern of enticement is similar to that of cults in the pre-Internet era where, as the targeted person was led deeper and deeper into the group’s secrets, they become increasingly isolated from friends and family outside the cult. In the Internet age, QAnon virtual communities have little “real world” connection with each other, but online they can number in the tens of thousands. Rachel Bernstein, an expert on cults who specializes in recovery therapy, said, “What a movement such as QAnon has going for it, and why it will catch on like wildfire, is that it makes people feel connected to something important that other people don’t yet know about.
It would be a validation of QAnon, the far-reaching conspiracy theory movement to which Justin had dedicated much of the last three years with increasing intensity. The truth would finally get out, Justin thought.
“After that, the entire world would be liberated, everyone would be happy,” Justin recalled thinking.
Unlike so many of his fellow travelers, Justin — whose last name is being withheld by NBC News at his request to protect his privacy — would ultimately crawl out from the dark place QAnon and his own mind had taken him. That would take time, and he needed help. But his story, which unfolded over the last year through in-person interviews and phone calls, illustrates a singular and winding path away from QAnon.
The president wasn’t commemorating QAnon’s long-promised day of justice, but instead rehashing a litany of baseless claims about the election, whipping up his followers with a dictate to march to the Capitol and “show strength.” It soon became clear there would be no great reveal. According to Justin, and supported by metadata in his photos and dozens of videos taken by him, as well as archives of videos from inside the Capitol, he didn’t venture past a second barrier or up the steps of the Capitol, which was marked by a gate and a line of police officers. What he was seeing at the base of the stairs was enough.
Police officers sprayed the mob with pepper spray as Justin filmed a few feet away. Someone menaced, “There’s a reason they call it a thin blue line!” Then a cry of “Charge!” came from out of nowhere, and people in the front, some in combat gear, began slamming up against the guardrails, facing an outnumbered and seemingly rattled police line. “I saw their eyes change,” Justin said of the crowd. “You know, when somebody gets really angry, and you just feel like they’re going to go nuts?”
The mob, the flag, the violence. Justin thought: It didn’t feel right.
“It got me,” he later said. “I was supposed to be a part of a movement, but did I just get duped?”
By the time the pandemic struck, Justin was already having a hard time keeping his QAnon obsession and his real-life separate. He stopped doing his laundry and started talking to people at work about QAnon. He fired up a Twitter account where he followed QAnon influencers, amassed a few hundred followers, and posted constantly about conspiracy theories and support for Trump. Most of the accounts Justin interacted with are now gone, probably among the 70,000 accounts swept up in Twitter’s 2021 QAnon purge.
There’s also the basic danger of what QAnon followers actually believe. It’s one thing to have a polarized political discourse with heated disagreements; it’s another to have millions of Americans who think, with complete sincerity, that the leaders of the opposition party are kidnapping and cannibalizing innocent children.
Combine those violent, paranoid fantasies with the fact that QAnon followers have been charged with committing serious crimes in Q’s name, and it’s no wonder people are worried.
Top 13 Facts About The QAnon Conspiracy
A majority of American residents, who are aware of the conspiracy theories, believe that it’s true.
QAnon supporters anticipated that Jan. 20 would be the day of “Great Awakening” or “The Storm.” None of these things occurred on Jan. 20, 2021 when the world watched as Joe Biden took the oath.
As “proof” some of the claims say that flags are proof that power has been turned over to the military and the Insurrection Act or martial law has been invoked, meaning the Biden inauguration was not valid and Biden will be arrested for treason.
Americans with high political knowledge are more likely to have heard of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
At the time of publication there has been no sign of credible evidence that any type of martial law has been invoked from any official sources, including the relevant state departments, lawmakers, the military or the White House itself.
The posts claim that the military has “full control” or “power has been turned over to the military”, which is not true at all.
Many of the posts say that the transition to military power was facilitated by the Insurrection Act or Martial Law neither of which have been invoked, as explained above.
Some posts allege that “Biden is President of nothing” and “the whole Biden inauguration was not valid”.
QAnon experts have reported on how, according to its adherents, March 4 constitutes a new deadline for the group that watched the inauguration come and go without the events they expected. More on the significance of March 4 for QAnon believers can be seen here.
The FBI has described QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The conspiracy theory has been linked to several criminal acts over the past couple of years.
With no evidence to go on, they claimed Podesta’s use of the word “pizza” was a code word for pedophilia and that Comet Ping Pong was holding children hostage for Clinton and her allies to abuse.
Since then, QAnon found a loyal following on the largest social media platform in the world — and during the coronavirus pandemic.
There’s also a question of whether QAnon’s claims could violate defamation laws. Since the conspiracy theory makes many salacious, unproven allegations about public figures, there could be grounds to sue the QAnon supporters who espouse them.
Some FAQs Or Also Ask Question
What Is QAnon?
It all began when somebody named Q started posting stuff claiming that he has confidential information about the government and the opposition. He gave secret clues about the coming “great awakening.” A large percentage of people have neglected to believe in a conspiracy that has no roots and no proof, yet a certain percentage believes that it is all true and Donald Trump is going to save their country from evil.
What does WWG1WGA mean?
Their rallying cry is “where we go one, we go all,” a line from the 1996 Jeff Bridges sailing adventure “White Squall” that they misattribute to President Kennedy. The phrase is frequently abbreviated to “WWG1WGA,”
Is QAnon a conspiracy?
It all originated from a post made by a user on 4chan named “Q Clearance Patriot.” On October 28, 2017, he posted a thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” which was in reference to a tweet by Trump which said “the calm before the storm” describing the gathering of United States military leaders that he attended.
What QAnon followers believe?
QAnon supporters have been accusing Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians and high-ranking government officials of being a part of the evil club. They claim that Trump was planning a mass arrest of thousands of cabal members, which was to take place on the day known as “storm.” They also believe that Trump is an undercover agent who has been recruited for the mission to save the country from all these people.
Tanya Sharma
Writer
13angle
