QAnon is a hugely popular and complex conspiracy theory. The original central mythos is that former President Trump was engaged in undercover operations against a Satanic paedophile cabal containing high-ranking Democrats and members of the Hollywood elite. In this reckoning, President Trump confronted a shadowy elite making up the ‘Deep State’. QAnon members anticipate a day of reckoning when members of this cabal will be arrested and executed. The movement was founded by the eponymous Q, an anonymous poster on the internet using the handle Q Clearance Patriot, who provided cryptic prophecies along with claims of an insider status in the government as a military intelligence officer. It capitalised on the reach of the earlier ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy. Pizzagate held that former White House chief of staff John Podesta’s emails were full of coded messages pointing to a child sex trafficking ring run out of a pizza parlor in Washington D.C. QAnon folded its themes of child abuse and elite exploitation into its structure. It also hit a chord with followers of established conspiracy theories 9/11 truthers and ‘birthers’ who believed that Barack Obama’s American birth certificate was false – but grew much larger, engaging beyond hardened conspiracy theorists and creating a vast infrastructure across multiple platforms.
While the majority of the movement’s activism takes place online and there have been no calls to violence from Q, the compelling nature of its stark good-and-evil narrative has led to violence on the part of its followers. The QAnon movement has led to several killings, a botched attempts to kidnap President Biden, a few child kidnappings – and most notoriously, the attack on the Capitol which resulted in several deaths – and catapulted the movement into public awareness. Particular targets of QAnon were Hillary Clinton and George Soros, both visualised as leaders of the shady elite, and responsible for grisly crimes against children.
In 2017, the first ‘Q’ postings appeared on the unregulated site 4chan, infamous for its juvenile and dark sense of humour, as well as far-right politics. However, it was the emergence of QAnon on mainstream social media that propelled its follower numbers into the hundreds of thousands. This occurred despite the falsification of some of Q’s pronouncements, with the belief system of QAnon followers proving to be both resilient and creative in the face of dis-conformation. Although predicted events – such as the arrests of Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey – did not materialise, many faithful members readjusted their expectations rather than doubt the movement.
The QAnon movement achieved a particular synergy with Donald Trump, who retweeted content from hundreds of QAnon members, catapulting the conspiracy in front of tens of millions of followers. While some platforms worked quickly to remove Qanon-connected material, it flourished on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube drawing in more attention, often from older, more technologically naive followers than previously. Over the Trump campaign, the movement became increasingly visible offline, with protestors holding cryptic references to QAnon’s
As it expanded, so did its mythology: a magpie confection of pre-existing conspiracy theories, far-right millenarianism and pop cultural references, aggregating tropes and beliefs into a hodge-podge ideology. Some of this was generated by the wider QAnon community, rather than from Q, such as the idea that children’s bodies were being used to create the fantasy drug adrenochrome. With the catalysing power of the internet and the mass of individuals involved, the QAnon framework proved able to generate mythology without the prompting its founder. Due to the inchoate nature of QAnon’s positions, many beliefs that originated from the conspiracy theory were able to filter into mainstream politics without necessarily being connected with .
The social and emotional stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic increased the psychic vulnerability of many people, and under the perspective-warping influence of lockdown.Insecurity, fear and confusion are major drivers of conspiratorial thinking. QAnon ideas funnelled popular anxieties into a community which combined new conspiracy theories into the pre-existing mixture at a point where experts and leaders were unable to provide clear explanations or guidance. QAnon’s responses to the pandemic included vaccine avoidance, suspicion of 5G towers and attributing the virus to Bill Gates. Some QAnon followers claimed that the vaccines were in fact mind control drugs. In 2020, CNN identified that QAnon-related Facebook pages and groups logged at least 12.8 million interactions between the beginning of the year and the last week of September, most of these at the height of the coronavirus crisis.
The flexibility of QAnon – it’s ability to absorb items from the contemporary zeitgeist into its porous worldview, when allied with its tremendous reach and growth online led to the movement growing exponentially during the Covid-19 crisis. Around one in five QAnon believers in America identify as white evangelical Protestants. QAnon also showed itself to be able to mobilise a different demographic from most radical groups, which tend to attract disaffected young males. By contrast, QAnon had huge appeal with New Age believers and left-wing and liberal people as well as its base amongst hardcore Republicans and Donald Trump supporters. With its concentration on victimised children, it also had an appeal to women and mothers in particular, with female-dominated platforms like Instagram also hosting significant amounts of QAnon related content. Middle-aged and older demographics appear to be particularly vulnerable due to a lack of digital literacy, with many younger people enduring difficult relationships with parents and grand-parents who have whole-heartedly committed to the QAnon belief system.
As Q’s prophecies foundered with the failure of Donald Trump to win the election, the movement fell into crisis. Supporters attacked the Capitol Building in Washington on January 6th 2021 in an attempt to prevent the counting of the electoral college votes that would formalise Joe Biden’s presidency. Rioters overran the building, whilst occupants of the building were forced to evacuate or shelter within the building. Five people died during the event, and 138 police officers are injured. Trump himself had promoted the idea that the election had been illegitimate, which fired up the rioters. The building was looked and vandalised; rioters erected a gallows, calling for the execution of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence. Pipe bombs and molotov cocktails were found at the site. This event became headline news, and catapulting QAnon into public knowledge.
Despite its origin as a particularly American phenomenon, the pliability of the ideology and its quick proliferation of support led to regional forms of QAnon beliefs – in each country finding a way to add their own preoccupations to the Q mythology, often placing a local populist leader in the role that Trump plays in American QAnon mythology, and casting other actors in the roles of Hillary Clinton and other supposed members of the criminal elite. In Germany, for instance, QAnon theories place Angela Merkel at the centre of a conspiracy and claim that her arrest is imminent. In Canada, a self-decreed ‘Queen’ commanded her followers to cease paying utility bills, leaving many of them without services. QAnon theories are also popular in Brazil, Australia and Japan – amongst 71 territories where the movement has a presence. QAnon ideas are present in a variety of languages, making their reach hard to measure. Meanwhile, troll farms in China and Russia magnify and produce QAnon-aligned content as a means of unsettling democracies, according to research published by the Soufan Centre.
Polls show that despite the events at the Capitol, QAnon retains tremendous support in the States, with around 22% of Americans believe that a “storm” is coming, 18% think violence might be necessary to save the country and 16% hold that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles, according to four surveys carried out by the Public Religion Research Institute think tank. Besides Q’s origination on 4-chan (and subsequently 8-chan and 8-kun) many other online platforms have been spreading its ideas, particularly alternative social media sites such as Parler, Gab and Donald Trump’s own platform Truth Social, where Trump continues to boost QAnon content.
Q ceased posting after two years and 3,500 posts in 2020, re-emerging in advance of America’s mid-term elections in June 2022. However, many long-term followers are sceptical that these posts were made by the original Q, pointing to irregularities around the security codes used. Jim Watkins, the owner of the platform 8-kun on which the most recent ‘drop’ appeared, was standing for . Meanwhile, in Q’s absence, ‘influencers’ spreading far-right Q-derived conspiracy theories proliferate on Telegram and other social media platforms.
The persistence and growth of QAnon phenomenon both indicates the dangers of conspiracy thinking, and the psychology that underlies it – as well as the potential of the internet for spreading misinformation. Untethered from the pronouncements of its primary figure, the movement continues to generate further conspiracy theories. Some 40 candidates who have expressed support for QAnon were seeking political office in the US in 2022. The infrastructure created by the movement provides a means to spread conspiracy theories which is flexible, resilient and has tremendous reach across multiple demographics. The QAnon movement has shown itself to be hugely capable of mutation, and although it may have passed its peak, it seems possible that it will become endemic and continue to circulate. It also represents the vulnerability of large populations to conspiracy theories spread via the internet. Both of these factors likely to affect politics into the future both in America, and internationally. Despite this, there have been few attempts to redress the impact of QAnon beliefs through programmes to reduce vulnerability to misinformation on the internet, particularly amongst older people, to reduce its spread across internet platforms, and to de-radicalise those seduced by QAnon and other harmful conspiracy theories.