This one surely has to rank amongst the dumbest CTs ever put out by anyone anywhere. And the history of the QAnon CT indicates the level of idiocy that the USA has fallen to.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
According to this rightwing fantasy, an anonymous source called “Q” was a high-level government insider who was revealing pieces of various secret plans and plots in a series of Internet posts, melding them all into one giant global super-conspiracy. While the thrust of the theory was that President Trump was pretending to collude with the Russians so he could work with prosecutor Robert Mueller to secretly investigate and then arrest prominent Democrats, the CT soon grew to encompass everything from the Titanic to the Alabama Crimson Tide football team to California wildfires to MS-13 to Hitler.
One fan breathlessly posted (in a statement that could be chiseled over the doors of every conspiracy theory that has ever existed), “Go deep enough down the rabbit hole and everything does seem to interconnect.”
The History
On October 28, 2017, a 4Chan poster using the identifier “Q-Level Patriot”, posted a cryptic message (in a thread titled “The Calm Before the Storm”) about a supposed plan to arrest Hillary Clinton (HRC) using the National Guard (NG): “HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am. Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.”
Clinton, who was Public Enemy Number One to the far-right fringe, had already been the topic of innumerable conspiracy theories and was already the target of several partisan Congressional “investigations”, none of which resulted in any findings of wrongdoing or any criminal charges. (Which nevertheless didn’t prevent Donald Trump and his supporters from gleefully chanting “Lock her up!” at his rallies.) Other fringe CTers declared that Clinton, Obama, George Soros, and other prominent Democrats were all “under investigation” for running sex slave rings and for conducting cannibalistic and blood-drinking Satanic rituals.
On November 1, Q followed up by posting another message claiming that sweeping arrests of prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta (the target of the earlier Pizza-Gate CT) would take place within days, on November 3 and 4: “My fellow Americans, over the course of the next several days you will undoubtedly realize that we are taking back our great country (the land of the free) from the evil tyrants that wish to do us harm and destroy the last remaining refuge of shining light. On POTUS’ order, we have initiated certain fail-safes that shall safeguard the public from the primary fallout which is slated to occur 11.3 upon the arrest announcement of Mr. Podesta (actionable 11.4).... We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all citizens. Organizations and/or people that wish to do us harm during this time will be met with swift fury – certain laws have been pre-lifted to provide our great military the necessary authority to handle and conduct these operations (at home and abroad).”
“QAnon”, as he would become known, implied that he was a high-ranking member of the military or political leadership (Q-Clearance is the security level necessary to gain access to nuclear weapons planning information). But of course on the Internet there was no way for anyone to verify such a claim, and there have always been “secret government insiders” posting what were standard crackpot conspiracy theories while asserting that they worked for the FBI, CIA, NSA, or whatever.
Of course, the predicted mass arrest of Hillary and other Democrats never happened, and Q should have fallen into forgotten obscurity then and there. (Although later devotees would eventually assert that the predicted arrests had in fact happened, clandestinely, and that most prominent Democrats are now secretly wearing court-ordered GPS ankle bracelets so they don’t escape.) But over the next few weeks, Q began posting a series of cryptic phrases and questions, such as: “HRC detained, not arrested (yet).” “Where is Huma? Follow Huma.” “This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).” “Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals?” “What is military intelligence?” “This is not a R v D battle.” “Why did Soros donate all his money recently?” “Why would he place all his funds in a RC?” “Mockingbird 10.30.17”.
Now, the crackpot community began to pay attention. They began referring to these obscure references as “bread crumbs”, and in true CT fashion they set out to “connect the dots”. Soon there were dozens of Internet “analysts” and “investigators” who were waiting anxiously for the next QAnon “drop” so they could “deconstruct” it and find the “hidden meanings”.
The story that emerged was convoluted and crazy, but was eagerly accepted by the crackpots. According to most versions, the conspiracy revolves around a huge battle of deception. When the candidate Donald Trump learned during the election that a secret cabal of Democrats inside the government (known to aficionados as “The Deep State”) was planning to suspend the Constitution and seize permanent power, he decided to defend the country with a meticulously-planned series of actions. First, he pretended to collude with the Russian foreign intelligence services to influence the election, so that after he took office he could secretly steer the resulting investigation towards the Deep State Democrats without revealing that he was on to them. To thwart the impending leftist coup d’etat, Trump was planning a series of surprise raids that would arrest most of the Democratic leadership and their supporters, put down the resulting riots and insurrections, and finally deliver the US back into the hands of the “True Patriots”. Rather than being an inept and inexperienced political naïf who was in way over his head, Donald Trump was actually an uber-ninja superhero secret agent who was deftly manipulating all the strings behind the scenes and who would, in one fell swoop, destroy the entire New World Order Conspiracy, lock them all up, and make America free again. As one QAnon supporter triumphantly declared, “Mueller was hired to investigate Clinton, period. If my theory proves to be correct, this will go down as one of the most brilliant sting operations in history.”
Soon, the whole CT story jumped from the obscurity of 4Chan and 8Chan to YouTube, as channels appeared which “explained” the “findings”. Conspiracy sites like InfoWars and Breitbart began to run stories. The Reddit group The_Donald (the same group which had earlier spread the Pizza-Gate CT), established several new subgroups, including CBTS (“Calm Before The Storm”) and “GreatAwakening”, which argued over interpretations (many of them contradictory) of the “bread crumbs”. From Reddit and InfoWars, parts of the QAnon story then jumped to mainstream Republican news sites. Mainstream press interest in the phenomenon peaked when groups of people holding “Q” signs (along with “WWG1WGA”—shorthand for one of the early Q’s catchphrases, “Where we go one, we go all”) began appearing at Trump rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania.
As the CT spread in visibility, it also spread in reach and depth. It soon became apparent that many people, perhaps dozens, were posting independently as “Q” (since 4Chan has no registration procedure, any number of users can all post under any name they like). The “drops” began to cover topics that grew wider and wider in scope. Many times, Q was simply recycling old conspiracy theories, including, along with alt-right standards like “Hillary’s emails” and “Benghazi”, some that had first appeared decades ago: there were hints of the “Titanic was deliberately sunk” CT (which prompted one fan to write, “honestly iv never heard of the titanic conspiracy but its def interesting”), and many mentions of the Illuminati and “George Soros” (for which, read “Jews”).
There was also the old “Hitler didn’t die” CT: “Hitler went off the then international currency of debt and issued his own currency instead. Germany then thrived more than any other country and was on the cover of every magazine as an economic miracle. Then they killed him. (well his power and country. He lived on in south america).” And there was even a new twist added to this oldie, when one “investigator” concluded that German President Angela Merkel was actually Hitler’s daughter through artificial insemination.
But there were also new CTs based on current events: the unsolved street murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich in 2016, for instance, was now attributed to a plot led by former Democratic Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who hired assassins from the Mexican gang MS-13 to kill Rich because he “knew too much” about the Clinton email “scandal”. In another CT assertion, the California wildfires in 2018 were, it was concluded, the result of secret military testing of directed-energy laser beam weapons, while every mass shooting that occurred, from Nevada to California, was attributed to “false flag” operations carried out by the “Deep State” to distract attention and “discredit” the crackpot fringe. A YouTube video of a flash of light was cited as “proof” that the Deep State had tried to kill President Trump by shooting down Air Force One with a missile. As for Trump’s meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, they too are all part of the plan: the CIA secretly installed Kim as President of North Korea, and he is now working for the Americans.
In one “bread crumb”, it was asserted that the display during a White House ceremony of an Alabama Crimson Tide college football jersey with the number “17” was a confirmation of the conspiracy—since “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet. And this hint was “authenticated” later when Trump mentioned in a speech that he had “visited Washington DC 17 times”.
Speculation about Q’s actual identity was rampant: some fans asserted that Trump himself was the Q source, others concluded that the secret insider was really John F Kennedy Jr, who had faked his own death in 1999 so he could go undercover to expose the Deep State.
On two occasions, the QAnon CT reached into the real world and, like the earlier Pizza-Gate CT, it involved people with guns. In June 2018, the Justice Department released the final report of its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, concluding that there had been no wrongdoing and no charges were warranted against anyone. But the QAnon network quickly drummed up the story that the FBI had secretly written a second report which listed all the prominent Democrats who were to be arrested.
On the very same day that the FBI’s report was released, a crackpot named Matthew Phillip Wright, a former Marine, packed an AR-15 rifle, two pistols, and 900 rounds of ammo into his homemade armored car (a pickup truck fitted with steel slabs, complete with gunports) and drove to the top of the Hoover Dam, where he parked in the middle of the road to block traffic and, gun in hand, displayed a sign demanding that the real report be released. After a 90-minute standoff he was arrested.
From his jail cell, Wright sent letters to several politicians, including President Trump, as well as Federal law enforcement agencies. “I am no seditionist,” he declared, “nor do I want to overthrow the government. I understand that the evil and corruption is limited to a select few in power and that the greater good is doing its best to combat this. . . . I simply wanted the truth on behalf of all Americans, all of humanity for that matter.” He ended his letter with, “For where we go one, we go all.”
A few months later, another crackpot named Michael Myer led a band of followers to “search” a factory in Tucson AZ that was owned by the Mexican cement company CEMEX. According to QAnon fans (who had apparently not learned their lesson from the Pizza-Gate fiasco), CEMEX was actually a front for an international child sex-slave ring run by prominent Democratic politicians. Myer had already been arrested earlier that year when he confronted a homeless camp that he had become convinced was hiding child sex slaves.
Shortly after the Wright incident, meanwhile, Reddit closed down all of the forums dedicated to the QAnon conspiracy theory, including GreatAwakening and CBTS. Although the only reasons Reddit cited were standard “violates terms of service” disclaimers, it was widely concluded that the move had come because of the real-world violence the groups had provoked, and because many commenters—including some former supporters—had now concluded that the whole thing was just a satire that had been intentionally set up by “leftists” to make Trump supporters and the alt-right look ridiculous. Some on the other hand asserted that QAnon was itself a “false flag” by the Deep State to discredit its opponents, while still others decided that the ploy was part of the Russian effort to manipulate public opinion in the US with Internet bots—a hypothesis that was strengthened when the Putin-sponsored Russia Today “news” outlet began running stories on Q. And finally, a few former CT supporters announced that they now thought the whole affair was a homegrown scam by some of the alt-right’s own members, who were making money by soliciting PayPal and GoFundMe donations to “support their research”.
After the Reddit forums were closed down, most of the remaining True Believers moved to the Voat platform, and most of them now accused Reddit of being part of the plot against them.
Today, although enthusiasm for the QAnon CT has diminished, it is still an active topic on YouTube and other forums.
The Reality
To understand the story of the QAnon CT, you have to understand the world of the Internet troll.
When the Internet and the World Wide Web first became available to the public back in the 90s, it was like the Wild West—there were no laws and no sheriffs, and anyone could post anything they wanted. Over the years, however, the Internet became dominated by a handful of social media forums—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook—which exercised more and more control over their posters and users. People who were either at the lunatic fringe or at the edge of legality found themselves pushed out of the mainstream social media, and were forced into the few remaining unregulated areas of the “dark web”.
One of the darker parts of the Internet is a rather obscure site called 4Chan, and its even more obscure (and darker) offshoot 8Chan. With complete anonymity and no rules, 4Chan and 8Chan became a haven for people who had been pushed from the rest of the Net: everything from credit card thieves trading stolen numbers, to child porn purveyors, racist Klansmen and Nazis, and crackpot fringers of all sorts from flying saucers to political conspiracy theories.
And perhaps inevitably, such a large collection of gullible and credulous people also attracted “trolls”. The trolls were tricksters and pranksters who thought up ever more creative ways to make fools of people (the term comes from the fisherman’s practice of slowly reeling his bait near a group of fish in hopes of getting a bite). Over the years 4Chan’s trolls were the source of an endless stream of Internet memes, everything from “rick-rolling” (posting links that purported to be something exciting or interesting but were really just Rick Astley’s mediocre video of “Never Gonna Give You Up”), to “Lolcats” (photoshops of cat photos with humorous or sarcastic text superimposed), to “Pepe” (a cartoon frog who presents various satirical messages). The loose hacker group Anonymous, which targets people and organizations of various ideological stripes for harassment, also grew out of 4Chan commenters.
For most of the 4Chan trolls, the sole reward was the satisfaction of laughing at the gullible and stupid (referred to as “lols” or “lulz”, from the Internet acronym for “laughing out loud”), and the ultimate prize was to use an elaborately crafted ruse to fake people out and make fools of them. These players were called LARPs (“Live Action Role Playing”), a name adopted from a subset of Dungeons and Dragons fans who actually dressed up in padded armor and held live “battles” in empty fields. The more complex the online LARP and the more rubes who got hooked by it, the bigger the lulz.
But a small subset of the 4Chan trolls also had ideological and political motives behind their trickery. They were inspired by the “culture jammers” of the 1960s hippie counter-culture who criticized social structures by making fun of them (probably the most famous of these being the Yippies who threw dollar bills from the visitors gallery at the New York Stock Exchange, treating everyone to the sight of Wall Street traders in suit and ties scrambling madly over each other to grab every dollar). For the ideological trolls, the targets are very specific: the purpose of a LARP is to reel in ideological opponents with a well-crafted “meme”, simply to make fools of them. And if a particular bit of trickery not only fakes out the gullible but is also taken up and spread in all seriousness by the press, then so much the better—that meant bigger lulz and a bigger reward.
In 1999, a collective of Italian anarchists calling itself “Luther Blissett” began posting on various online forums, and published a book titled Q, which was a story set in the time of the medieval European Reformation but was actually an allegory of contemporary politics. The main character is an aide to the Pope who, under the alias “Q”, surreptitiously prints and distributes broadsheets which help foil the Protestant efforts to undermine the Catholic Church. By 2017, the “Luther Blissett” collective had disbanded, and some of them had formed another group called the Wu Ming Foundation.
When the QAnon posts began to appear, the Wu Mings thought it looked awfully familiar: “A guy using the moniker Q, obliquely posing as a state employee going anon, is feeding tedious bullshit to nazis. Uhm... Looks like someone’s using our novel Q and the Luther Blissett playbook in order to... what? Take the piss out of the alt-right? ??”
We’ll probably never know who Q actually was: the possibilities are many, and the nature of 4Chan makes it impossible to discover anything, particularly since there were probably dozens of people posting as “Q” at the height of the show. It may be that the entire thing was planned from the start as a political satire, perhaps based on the “Luther Blissett” example. It may instead be that the original poster was just another paranoid CTer on the Internet who was posting silly fantasies, but the identity was then taken up by a group of people who saw the opportunity to run with it and have some fun by trolling the gullible. It’s impossible to even tell if any given QAnon “investigator” or “commenter” is for real, or is just playing along with the joke. Even the people at the Trump rallies waving “Q” signs could have been True Believers—or just LARPs who were hoping to push a silly Internet story into the media for the ultimate lulz prize.
What is apparent, however, is that (whoever was behind it) the QAnon roleplay was perfectly designed to appeal to the conspiracy theory fans and suck them all in before playing them like a fiddle. It had all the elements that CTers love: it focused on their favorite Bad Guys and gave new reasons to hate them, but also made their favorite Good Guy the superhero of the story. It almost never made any actual assertions, but, like a newspaper horoscope, it simply offered vague generalities, cryptic “bread crumbs”, and nonexistent dots for the CT fans to interpret and connect for themselves (something they always like to do anyway). And it even left an escape valve for itself: at one point Q asserted that he was intentionally lying at times, since “Disinformation is sometimes necessary”. The result was a perfect CT bubble, in which people could project whatever they wanted to believe into the conspiracy, anything that happened anywhere could (with sufficient interpretation) be fitted into the Grand Conspiracy Theory, and even “disinformation” which turned out to be wrong (and there was a lot of it) actually proved that the CT was true.
For the crackpots, the entire QAnon adventure was a perfect trolling trap—and they fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
NOTE: As some of you already know, all of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of books I am working on. So I welcome any corrections you may have, whether it's typos or places that are unclear or factual errors. I think of y'all as my pre-publication editors and proofreaders. ;)