QAnon (/ˈkjuː.əˌnɒn/) is an American far-right political conspiracy theory and mass political movement. It is centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known as "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children operate a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against the former U.S. President Donald Trump during his term in office. Some experts have described QAnon as a cult.
Followers of the conspiracy theory say that Trump was planning mass arrests and executions of thousands of cabal members on a day known as "the Storm" or "the Event". QAnon supporters have named Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, high-ranking government officials, business tycoons and medical experts as members of the cabal. QAnon has also claimed that Trump stimulated the conspiracy of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the sex trafficking ring, and to prevent a coup d'état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. A number of media sources have described QAnon as antisemitic or rooted in antisemitic tropes, due to its fixation on Jewish financier George Soros and conspiracy theories about the Rothschild family, a frequent target of anti-Semites. QAnon's conspiracy theories have been amplified by Russian and Chinese state-backed media companies, social media troll accounts, and the far-right Falun Gong-associated Epoch Media Group.
Although it has its origins in older conspiracy theories, the first post by Q was in October 2017 on the anonymous image-board website 4chan. Q claimed to be a high-level government official with Q clearance, who had access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. Q soon moved to 8chan, making it QAnon's online home. Q's generally cryptic posts became known as "drops", which were later collected by aggregator apps and websites. The conspiracy theory expanded into a viral phenomenon and quickly went beyond Internet culture, becoming familiar among the general population and turning into a real political movement. QAnon followers began to appear at Trump reelection campaign rallies in August 2018, and Trump amplified QAnon accounts on Twitter through his retweets.
Originating in the United States, there are now considerable QAnon movements worldwide. The number of QAnon followers is unclear, but the group maintains a large online following. Following increased scrutiny of the movement and its hashtags, mainstream social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook began taking action to stop the spread of the conspiracy theory.
A number of controversial, sometimes violent incidents have involved QAnon followers. Members of the movement actively took part in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, during which they supported Donald Trump's campaign and waged information warfare in an attempt to influence voters. After Joe Biden won, they were involved in efforts to overturn the results of the election. Several associates of Donald Trump, such as General Michael Flynn and two members of his legal team, Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, have promoted QAnon-derived conspiracy theories. When these tactics failed, Trump supporters – many of them QAnon followers – attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This was a watershed moment for QAnon and led to a further, more sustained social media crackdown on the movement and its claims.
Background
Pizzagate
According to QAnon researcher Mike Rothschild, "while Q has a number of precursor conspiracy theories and scams... no conspiracy theory feeds more immediately into Q than Pizzagate". Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory that began with a leak of Clinton campaigner John Podesta's emails, which Pizzagate promoters believed contained a secret code detailing child sexual abuse. Pizzagate followers said that high-profile Democrats were sexually abusing children at a Washington, D.C. pizzeria, which led to an armed attack on the establishment by a gunman who believed the theory.
The allegations of child sexual abuse and the centrality of the Clinton family to this abuse became a key part of the QAnon belief system, but in time the Clintons' centrality to this was de-emphasized in favor of more general conspiratorial claims of an alleged worldwide elite of child sex-traffickers. Q has referred to a number of Pizzagate claims without using the term. QAnon followers often used the hashtag #SaveTheChildren to promote the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Influence of 4chan culture
The investigative journalism website Bellingcat has called /htg/ or "Human Trafficking General" threads on the /pol/ board of 4chan "the missing link" between Pizzagate and QAnon. Instead of focusing on a limited supply of email material to comb through, the /htg/ culture allowed users to actively participate in the imagined storylines. A key /htg/ poster was Anonymous 5 (also known as "Frank"), who claimed to be a child prostitution investigator. But the lack of a coherent narrative was a constraint on the /htg/ trend, and it never achieved Pizzagate's popularity.
The main tenets of the QAnon ideology were already present at 4chan before Q's appearance, including claims that Hillary Clinton was directly involved in a pedophile ring, that Robert Mueller was secretly working with Trump, and that large-scale military tribunals were imminent. His posts specifically targeted individuals who were highly hated in the community beforehand, namely Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros. Bellingcat says that the idea of the "Storm" was copied from another poster named Victory of the Light, who predicted the "Event", in which mass, televised arrests of the "Cabal" were forthcoming.
Previous "anons"
In its most basic sense, an "anon" is an anonymous or pseudonymous Internet poster. The concept of anons "doing research" and claiming to disclose otherwise classified information, while a key component of the QAnon conspiracy theory, is by no means exclusive to it. Before Q, a number of so-called anons also claimed to have special government access. On July 2, 2016, the anonymous poster "FBIAnon", a self-described "high-level analyst and strategist" who claimed to have "intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case", began posting false information about the 2016 investigation into the Clinton Foundation and claimed that Hillary Clinton would be imprisoned if Trump became president. Around that time, "HLIAnon", standing for "High Level Insider Anon", hosted long question-and-answer sessions, dispensing various conspiracy theories, including that Princess Diana was murdered after trying to stop the September 11 attacks. Soon after the 2016 United States elections, two anonymous posters, "CIAAnon" and "CIAIntern", falsely claimed to be high-ranking Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers, and in late August 2017, "WHInsiderAnon" offered a supposed preview that something that was "going to go down" regarding leaks that would affect the Democratic Party.
Origin and spread
A user named "Q Clearance Patriot" first appeared on the /pol/ board of 4chan on October 28, 2017, posting in a thread titled "Calm Before the Storm", a phrase Trump had previously used to describe a gathering of American military leaders he attended. "The Storm" later became QAnon parlance for an imminent event in which thousands of alleged suspects would be arrested, imprisoned, and executed for being child-eating pedophiles. The poster's username implied that they held Q clearance, a United States Department of Energy security clearance required to access Top Secret information on nuclear weapons and materials.
Q's first post said that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, which would cause massive unrest and be followed by numerous other arrests. A second message was posted a few hours later, saying that Clinton was being "detained" though not arrested yet, and that Trump was planning to remove "criminal rogue elements". The post also alluded cryptically to George Soros, Huma Abedin and Operation Mockingbird.
Many other messages followed and an Internet community soon developed around interpreting and analyzing posts attributed to Q, and several of these conspiracy theorists became minor celebrities within the community. Followers started looking for "clues" that would confirm their beliefs, including in the most commonplace phrases and occurrences: in November 2017, Trump sipping water from a bottle was interpreted as a secret sign that the mass arrests would soon take place.
Though QAnon immediately integrated Pizzagate's theory of secret child sex-trafficking rings operated by the elite, it went much further by implying a worldwide cabal and by incorporating elements from various other conspiracies. One of the earlier rumors spread by QAnon followers was that such figures as Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and Senator John McCain had already been arrested and indicted, and were wearing ankle monitoring bracelets during their public appearances. In the following months, the QAnon community helped spread other rumors such as the "Frazzledrip" theory, which purported the existence of a video showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin murdering a child, drinking her blood and taking turns wearing the skin from her face as a mask.
In November 2017, Paul Furber, Coleman Rogers, and Tracy Diaz, two 4chan moderators and a YouTuber respectively, worked together to promote QAnon to a wider audience. This involved setting up the r/CBTS_Stream subreddit, where subscribers came to talk about QAnon. The subreddit was permanently closed in March 2018 due to incitement of violence and posting private information. QAnon spread to other social media, including Twitter and YouTube. Rogers and his wife, Christina Urso, launched Patriots' Soapbox, a YouTube livestream dedicated to QAnon, which they used to solicit donations. U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert was a guest on the channel.
Also in November 2017, posts by Q moved to 8chan, with Q citing concerns that the 4chan board had been "infiltrated". Thereafter, Q posted only on 8chan. In August 2019, 8chan was shut down after it was connected with the El Paso shooting and other violent incidents. Followers of QAnon then moved to Endchan, until 8chan was restored under the name 8kun.
QAnon first received attention from mainstream press in November 2017; Newsweek called it "Pizzagate on steroids". Gossip columnist Liz Crokin, a Pizzagate follower, was one of the first public figures to embrace QAnon and became one of the movement's most prominent influencers. Television host Sean Hannity and entertainer Roseanne Barr spread news about it to their social media followers in early 2018 and the conspiracy theory gained traction on the mainstream right. At this time, InfoWars host and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed to be in personal contact with Q. This led to the presence en masse of QAnon followers at a July 2018 Trump rally for the midterm elections in Tampa, Florida, the first visible presence of QAnon followers at Trump rallies. Some Christian pastors introduced their congregations to QAnon ideas. The Indiana-based Omega Kingdom Ministry tried to combine QAnon and Christianity, with Q posts and Bible quotes both read during church services. More generally, QAnon's rise coincided with increasing radicalization and violent episodes in American far-right movements.
Sites dedicated to aggregating the Q posts, also called "drops" or "Q drops", became essential for their dissemination and spread. QMap was the most popular and famous aggregator, run by a pseudonymous developer and overall key QAnon figure known as "QAPPANON". But QMap shut down shortly after a September 2020 report was published by the fact-checking website Logically, which theorized that QAPPANON was a New Jersey-based security analyst named Jason Gelinas. Multiple online communities were created around QAnon: in 2020, Facebook conducted an internal investigation which revealed that the social network hosted thousands of QAnon-themed groups and pages, with millions of members and followers.
According to Reuters, Russian-backed social media accounts promoted early QAnon claims as early as November or December 2017. In 2018, Time called Q one of the 25 most influential people on the Internet. Russian government-funded Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik have amplified the conspiracy theory since 2019, citing QAnon as evidence that the U.S. is riven by internal strife and division. In 2021, a report from the Soufan Center, a research group focused on national security, found that one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon posts in the U.S. between January 2020 and February 2021 originated in foreign countries, primarily Russia and China, and that China was the "primary foreign actor touting QAnon-narratives online". The far-right Falun Gong-associated Epoch Media Group, including The Epoch Times, has also been a major promoter of the conspiracy theory.
University of Southern California professor and data scientist Emilio Ferrara found that about 25% of accounts that use QAnon hashtags and retweet InfoWars and One America News Network are bots.
International following
Sign of the "Q Society of Australia"
QAnon spread to other countries, including the U.K. and France since 2020. In January 2021, researcher Joel Finkelstein told The Washington Post that the German and Japanese QAnon movements were "particularly strong and growing", though according to a later report by The New York Times, the Japanese version (also known as "JAnon" [Japanese: Jアノン]) remains a fringe belief even among conspiracy theorists.
Between March and June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, QAnon activity nearly tripled on Facebook and nearly doubled on Instagram and Twitter. 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. 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. In Russia, a similar conspiracy theory, the "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. Many Canadians have also promoted Qanon. A February 8 article in The Guardian, described the 2022 Ottawa convoy protests as the result of an co-ordination between QAnon, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine, and anti-government organizations. One in four Britons are said to believe in QAnon-related theories, though only 6% support Qanon. Martin Geddes, listed by the anti-racist advocacy group Hope not 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.
The movement has also spread to Spain and Latin America, with countries like Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Paraguay and Brazil having an online presence. La Nación said in 2020 that the Facebook page "QAnon Costa Rica" was spreading misinformation and fake news, called to depose President Carlos Alvarado and extolled right-wing figures such as far-right presidential candidate Juan Diego Castro Fernández and controversial deputies Dragos Dolanescu Valenciano and Erick Rodríguez Steller. In Spain, the far-right Vox party was accused of endorsing anti-Biden conspiracy theories linked to QAnon in its Twitter account by claiming that Biden was the candidate "preferred by pedophiles". An RTVE news report found that most Spanish QAnon supporters identified Vox as their preferred political party.
Pastel QAnon
Pastel QAnon, identified by Concordia University researcher Marc-André Argentino, is a collection of techniques aimed predominantly at indoctrinating women into the conspiracy theory, mainly on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and YouTube. It co-opts the aesthetics and language of social media influencers, often using personal anecdotes and gateway issues (i.e. child sex-trafficking) to frame QAnon beliefs as reasonable.
Claims
Q's posts
A QAnon logo based on a white silhouette of a rabbit, which signifies Q telling his audience to "Follow the White Rabbit", i.e. discover the hidden truth by doing their own research about the theory
Q made thousands of posts on 4chan and 8chan/8kun. These "drops" were often allusive, cryptic, and impossible to verify. Some posts included strings of characters that are allegedly coded messages. Q used a conspiratorial tone, with phrases like "I've said too much" or "Some things must remain classified to the very end". To sustain his followers' faith in a final victory over the "cabal", Q used recurring phrases such as "Trust the plan", "Enjoy the show", and "Nothing can stop what is coming". Q's messages typically claimed that everything was going as planned, that Trump was in control and that all his adversaries would end up in prison. Q also encouraged followers to do their own research by telling them to "Follow the White Rabbit". QAnon followers used the "White Rabbit" reference both as a hashtag and as the name of a Facebook group that had around 90,000 members in 2020. Becoming increasingly vague over time, Q's posts allowed followers to map their own beliefs onto them and develop new variations of the theory.
Author Walter Kirn has described Q as an innovator among conspiracy theorists by enthralling readers with "clues" rather than presenting claims directly: "The audience for internet narratives doesn't want to read, it wants to write. It doesn't want answers provided, it wants to search for them." But the messages in Q's posts often hinged on specific predictions that turned out to be false, such as:
Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested and would attempt to flee the country.
John Podesta would be arrested on November 3, 2017, and public riots would be organized to try and prevent the arrest of other public officials.
A major event involving the Department of Defense would take place on February 1, 2018.
People targeted by Trump would commit suicide en masse on February 10, 2018.
There would be a car bombing in London around February 16, 2018.
A "smoking gun" video of Hillary Clinton would emerge in March 2018.
Something major would happen in Chongqing on April 10, 2018.
There would be a "bombshell" revelation about North Korea in May 2018.
The Trump military parade would "never be forgotten".
The Five Eyes "won't be around much longer".
Mark Zuckerberg was going to leave Facebook and flee the United States.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey would be forced to resign "next" (in the context of the prediction of Zuckerberg's resignation).
Pope Francis would have a "terrible May" in 2018.
On multiple occasions, Q has dismissed these incorrect predictions as deliberate, claiming that "disinformation is necessary". 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". The numerous false, unsubstantiated claims Q has posted include:
That the CIA installed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a puppet ruler.
That U.S. Representative and former Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz hired Salvadoran gang MS-13 to murder DNC staffer Seth Rich.
An apparent suggestion that German chancellor Angela Merkel is Adolf Hitler's granddaughter.
That Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and others are planning a coup against Trump and are involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring.
That the Mueller investigation was actually a counter-coup led by Trump, who pretended to conspire with Russia in order to hire Mueller to secretly investigate the Democrats and expose the child sex-trafficking ring.
That the Rothschild family leads a satanic cult. This is a centuries-old antisemitic trope against the family.
The cabal and the "Storm"
Outside the US. Capitol during the January 6, 2021, riot, a Trump supporter carries a placard depicting Jesus in a MAGA hat with the QAnon hashtag "#WWG1WGA" visible in the lower right
QAnon's core belief is that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of "Satan-worshipping pedophiles" whom Trump is secretly battling to stop, and that Q, an anonymous entity, reveals details about the battle online. The cabal is thought to cover up its existence by pulling the strings of politicians, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Q's revelations imply that the destruction of the cabal is imminent but also that it will only be accomplished with the support of the "patriots" who make up the QAnon community. This will happen at a time known as "the Event" or "the Storm", when thousands of people will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or to face military tribunals, the U.S. military will take over the country, and the result will be salvation and utopia on earth. QAnon beliefs imply the rejection of government officials other than Trump and his closest associates as well as of mainstream institutions and media.
A number of journalists have debunked QAnon's basic tenets. Its proponents have been called "a deranged conspiracy cult" and "some of the Internet's most outré Trump fans". QAnon's precepts and vocabulary – such as "the Storm" and "the Great Awakening" – are closely related to the religious concepts of millenarianism and apocalypticism, leading it to be sometimes construed as an emerging religious movement. QAnon followers, while seeing Trump as a flawed Christian, also view him as a messiah sent by God.
One key tenet in QAnon's narrative until the 2020 election was the recurring prediction that Trump would be reelected in a landslide and spend his second term bringing about the "Storm" by undoing the deep state, disbanding the cabal and arresting its leaders. Trump lost the election and Q stopped posting one month later—the last post was on 8 December 2020. Mike Rothschild, author of a book on QAnon, said that he doubted Q would ever come back, as the movement had "outgrown the need for new drops" and Trump's election loss had invalidated the core QAnon prophecy. But he added that Q may resume posting if "the community really needed new drops to keep it moving forward". QAnon followers continued to search for previously unseen clues in old posts, or worked on their own by creating new spin-offs of the theory. They subsequently made predictions about Trump somehow remaining president or returning to power, such as:
Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, 2021, would be an elaborate trap set for the Democrats, who would be arrested en masse and executed while Trump retained power.
Trump would be inaugurated on March 4, 2021, as the 19th president.
Trump would be inaugurated again on March 20, 2021. After this failed to transpire, QAnon "delayed" again the "re-inauguration" date to August 13, 2021, which also failed.
The Arizona audit would prove election fraud, handing the state to Trump, and other states would follow suit in a "domino effect", resulting in Trump being reinstated as president.
The 2021 California gubernatorial recall election result would be proven fraudulent, which would catalyze a national fraud audit, resulting in Trump coming back to power.
John F. Kennedy (35th President of the United States, who was assassinated in 1963) or his son John F. Kennedy Jr. (who died in a plane crash in 1999) would appear alive in front of a crowd in Dallas on November 2, 2021, and announce Trump's reinstatement as president and the installation of Kennedy Jr. as vice president.
Child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice
QAnon effectively merged with Pizzagate by incorporating its beliefs, namely that children are being abducted in large numbers to supply a child trafficking ring, which the followers equate with the cabal. They also see Trump as the only person fighting this criminal network. Added to this is the belief that politicians and Hollywood elites engage in "adrenochrome harvesting", in which adrenalin is extracted from children's blood to produce the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. This comprises claims that children are tortured, or sacrificed in Satanic rituals, to harvest the adrenaline that comes from fear. The aforementioned "Frazzledrip video" in which Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin allegedly murdered a child was said to depict an "adrenochrome harvest". One version of the QAnon theory posits that the child abusers use adrenochrome as an elixir to remain young.
#SaveOurChildren graffiti on a bridge in Lufkin, Texas
In June 2020, one group calling itself the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force—despite having no connection with the Pentagon or any U.S. governmental agency—attracted attention by spreading false claims about tens of thousands of children being held hostage and tortured in New York City. Also by 2020, some followers began using the Twitter hashtag #SaveTheChildren (#SaveOurChildren was also used), coopting a trademarked name for the child welfare organization Save the Children, leading to an August 7 statement by Save the Children on the unauthorized use of its name in campaigns. In September, Facebook and Instagram tried to prevent #SaveTheChildren being associated with QAnon by redirecting users who searched for the hashtag to the child welfare group; in October, Facebook announced that it would try to limit the hashtag's reach. In the same period, QAnon followers also created a conspiracy theory claiming that furniture company Wayfair had secret arrangements to sell and ship victims of child trafficking.
Similar groups in both the U.S. and the U.K. helped organize street protests that they say raise awareness of child sexual abuse and human trafficking. These protests and hashtags have often avoided social media restrictions and tend to attract more women and a more politically diverse and younger crowd than typical QAnon groups, including people opposed to Trump and his leadership. These groups are considered to be linked to the Pastel QAnon community.
Some of the conspiracy theories about the death of Jeffrey Epstein have also brought people to Qanon.
Other QAnon beliefs
QAnon Anonymous, a podcast dedicated to analyzing and debunking the QAnon movement, calls it a "big tent conspiracy theory" due to its ability to constantly evolve and add new claims. QAnon has incorporated elements from many other preexisting beliefs: besides its immediate predecessor Pizzagate, the theory has added features from much older conspiracy theories, such as those about the Kennedy assassination, U.F.O.s and 9/11. Some QAnon followers have also expressed belief in the reptilian conspiracy theory, asserting that the Satanic cabal alleged to be in power consists of shapeshifting reptilian humanoids.
Due to overlap between the two movements, some QAnon followers have also joined the sovereign citizens, a loose grouping of anti-government tax protesters whose set of pseudo-legal beliefs implies that most laws and taxes are illegitimate and can be safely ignored.
In 2018, Q said that "vaccines [not all]" were part of the Big Pharma conspiracy theory. But as the anxiety and isolation linked to the COVID-19 pandemic fostered a rise of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine discourse, many in the QAnon movement used the pandemic to promote Qanon. Very little of this was directed by Q posts, and Q did not mention the pandemic until March 23, 2020 (when it called COVID-19 the "China virus"). But influencers in the QAnon community were openly anti-mask and anti-vaccine, and helped spread denial ism as well as other misinformation about the pandemic. Notably, QAnon conspiracy theorists touted drinking an industrial bleach (known as MMS, or Miracle Mineral Solution) as a "miracle cure" for COVID-19. Some QAnon followers have said that the pandemic isn't real; others have claimed that it was created by the "deep state". QAnon adherents also helped promote the conspiratorial video Plandemic.
Analysis
The analysis of QAnon has been concerned with the identity of Q, and continuity thereof; the elements and motifs that make up the conspiracy theory; and its appeal to and reception by the general population.
Identity of Q
The Q persona was that of a well-connected individual with access to highly sensitive government information, who put himself at risk by dispensing his knowledge to 4chan, then 8chan/8kun users. He used a calm, authoritative tone, rarely interacted with other posters, and never argued with those who disagreed with him. In 2021, Bellingcat analyzed several little-known posts published by Q during the days that followed his first "drops": while containing text identical to later messages unambiguously authored by Q, these posts also showed Q being "out of character" and behaving in a manner similar to 4chan's other anonymous posters. Bellingcat's theory is that the author of these messages had not yet perfected the Q persona and was still settling into the voice of his online alter ego, which implies that he was originally one 4chan poster among many instead of a powerful government insider.[175]
Multiple individuals
Some researchers believe the pseudonymous entity known as Q has been controlled by multiple people in cooperation. A stylometric analysis has suggested that two people likely wrote Q's posts, and that their "distinct signatures clearly correspond to separate periods in time and different online forums". An analysis of metadata of images posted by Q found that they were likely posted by someone in the Pacific Time Zone.
By design, anonymous image-boards such as 4chan and 8chan obscure their posters' identities. Those who wish to prove a consistent identity between posts while remaining anonymous can use a trip-code, which associates a post with a unique digital signature for any poster who knows the password. There have been thousands of posts associated with a Q trip-code. The trip-code associated with Q has changed several times, creating uncertainty about the poster's continuous identity. Passwords on 8chan are also easy to crack, and the Q trip-code has been repeatedly compromised and used by people pretending to be Q. 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 trip-code.
Paul Furber and Watkins family
Since the Q trip-code was uniquely verified by 8chan's server and not reproducible on other image-boards, 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. This means that Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan, and his son Ron Watkins, who used to administrate the message board, are two of the few people who can definitively say who Q is. Fredrick Brennan, the original owner of 8chan, said in June 2020 that "Q either knows Jim or Ron Watkins or was hired by Jim or Ron Watkins". He later said that "If [Jim Watkins is] not 'Q' himself, he can find out who 'Q' is at any time. And he's pretty much the only person in the world that can have private contact with 'Q'."
Jim Watkins
Ron Watkins
In September 2020, Brennan speculated that the Q account was initially run by another person, with Jim and Ron Watkins taking over in late 2017 or early 2018. Brennan's theory is that the original 'Q' poster was Johannesburg resident Paul Furber, a 4chan moderator and one of the first QAnon promoters, and that Ron Watkins seized control of the account away from Furber by using his login privileges as 8chan's administrator. Furber has denied that he was Q. Both Jim and Ron Watkins have said they do not know Q's identity and have denied being Q.
Documentary filmmaker Cullen Hoback spent three years investigating the origins of QAnon and its connection to 8chan, conducting extensive interviews with Jim and Ron Watkins and Fredrick Brennan. In the last episode of Q: Into the Storm, the 2021 HBO docuseries 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.
Hoback viewed this as an inadvertent admission by Watkins, and concluded from this interview and his other research that Watkins is Q. Watkins again denied being Q shortly before the series premiered.
On 19 February 2022 the New York Times reported that linguistic analysis of the Q posts by two forensic linguistic teams indicated that Paul Furber was the main author of the initial Q posts, and Ron Watkins took over in 2018.
Other hypotheses
There has been much speculation about Q's motives and identity. A range of theories, held by both QAnon followers and critics, credit Q's posts to sources including a military intelligence officer, a Trump administration insider, a Live Action Role-Playing game created by the puzzle organization Cicada 3301, a left-wing artist collective, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, or Trump himself.
Slogans and vocabulary
The spread of QAnon has been accompanied by a series of slogans, catchphrases, buzzwords and hashtags that helped boost its popularity and online presence. Terms like the "cabal" or the "Storm", and Q's recurring phrases like "Trust the plan" or "Enjoy the show" are among the most popular. Q's "drops" are also known as "crumbs" (the term has been used by Q) or "breadcrumbs". In turn, followers of the conspiracy who analyze these posts have called themselves "bakers" who assemble the "crumbs" to make "dough", or "bread", as they weave the clues into a better understanding of the narrative.
One of the earlier rallying cries used by QAnon followers was "Follow the White Rabbit". A popular QAnon slogan is "Where we go one, we go all" (frequently abbreviated to "WWG1WGA"). The phrase "Do your own research" (or "Do the research") encourages people to look for "clues" that will confirm QAnon narratives. "Q sent me" has been a declaration of "allegiance" to Q.
Other common phrases in QAnon parlance include "white hat" (a Trump supporter), "black hat" (someone in league with the "deep state"), "Great Awakening" (the point at which the public "wakes up" to the truth), "red pill" ("taking the red pill" means achieving QAnon "awareness"), or "sheeple" (a disparaging term for people who believe the mainstream media narrative and not Qanon). "17anon" has sometimes been used as an alternative spelling of QAnon (Q being the 17th letter of the alphabet) and a way of circumventing social media algorithms.
Derivative elements
As it incorporates elements from many other conspiracy theories, QAnon naturally displays similarities with previous narratives, imageries and moral panics, whether political or religious in nature. In Salon, Matthew Rozsa wrote that QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", the title of his 1964 essay on religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. QAnon's vocabulary echoes Christian tropes, such as the "Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgment Day) and the "Great Awakening" (evoking the reputed historical religious Great Awakenings of the early 18th century to the late 20th century). According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil". Some QAnon supporters say the forthcoming reckoning will be a "reverse rapture": "a revelation that means not only the end of the world but a new beginning", according to American political author Alexander Reid Ross.
Like Pizzagate, QAnon has some resemblance to the Satanic panic of the 1980s, when hundreds of daycare workers were falsely accused of abusing children.
Anti-semitism
Definitions
Manifestations
Adrenochrome-harvesting claims have been linked to blood libel by QAnon followers (who believe in the truthfulness of both) and people who have researched QAnon. Blood libel is a medieval antisemitic myth that says Jewish people murder Christian children and use their blood to make matzo balls for Passover. In February 2022, sculptures of Simon of Trent depicting the blood libel were used to promote the adrenochrome-harvesting conspiracy theory.
The Washington Post and The Forward magazine have called QAnon's targeting of Jewish figures like George Soros and the Rothschilds "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article in August 2018 asserted: "Some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories." But Ethan Zuckerman and Mike McQuade have argued that QAnon "is more anti-elite than explicitly anti-Semitic".
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism.
An antisemitic canard published in 1903 called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has intersected with QAnon conspiracy theories, with Republican QAnon fan Mary Ann Mendoza retweeting a Twitter thread about the Rothschild family, Satanic High Priestesses, and American presidents saying, "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion is not a fabrication. And, it certainly is not anti-Semitic to point out this fact." Mendoza sits on the advisory board of Women for Trump and was scheduled to speak at the 2020 Republican convention until news of her Twitter activity came out; she later denied knowing the content of the thread. Similarly, Trump has denied knowledge of QAnon except that QAnon fans like him and "love our country".
Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton described QAnon as a "Nazi group rebranded", and its theories as a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
An April 2021 Morning Consult poll found that 49% of Americans who believe in QAnon agree with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that 78% of Americans who agree with the Protocols also believe in Qanon.
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