What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally
What Is QAnon: Explaining the Internet Conspiracy Theory That Showed Up at a Trump Rally
Do you remember Pizzagate? It’s a little like that: a web of baseless conspiracy theories. And its supporters were highly visible at an event for the president in Florida.
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Some attendees at President Trump's rally in Tampa on Tuesday wore T-shirts with a block letter Q.CreditChris O'Meara/Associated Press
By Justin Bank, Liam Stack and Daniel Victor
Those watching President Trump’s rally in Tampa on Tuesday couldn’t help but be exposed to a fringe movement that discusses several loosely connected and vaguely defined — and baseless — conspiracy theories.
- Aug. 1, 2018
In one shot on Fox News, the president was partially obscured by a sign in the crowd reading “We Are Q.” In another shot during the president’s speech, a sign promoting the debunked Seth Rich conspiracy theory, with the hashtag #Qanon, came into focus in the center of the screen. Some attendees wore T-shirts with a blocky Q. Others held up signs with the letter.
They were all self-described “followers of Q,” an anonymous person or group of people who claim to be privy to government secrets. That supposedly classified information has been revealed on the ***** and 8chan message boards and spread around mainstream internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Q has attracted people — the exact number is hard to know — eager to consume his “bread crumbs,” or new details in a sprawling web of conspiracy theories.
What is going on?
Just give me the basics so I can minimally understand what’s going on
Here is the short version: Q claims to be a government insider exposing an entrenched, international bureaucracy that is secretly plotting all sorts of nefarious schemes against the Trump administration and its supporters. The character uses lingo that implies that he or she has a military or intelligence background.
It’s a stew of various, but connecting, conspiracy theories that generally hold Mr. Trump as a conquistador battling a cabal of anti-American saboteurs who have taken over government, industry, media and various other institutions of public life in a plan to … well, the overarching goals of the nefarious actors are not clear.
A woman holding a “Q” sign at a Trump rally in Florida on Tuesday night.CreditRod Millington/EPA, via Shutterstock
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CreditRod Millington/EPA, via Shutterstock
The slightly longer version
A growing group of people (more on the scale and scope of that community below) are coalescing around a collection of theories and half-thoughts that they believe reveal an untold story of current world events. To decode what they believe is actually happening, followers of Q sift through the president’s tweets, government data sets or news articles.
Ben Decker, a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, described followers of the QAnon narrative as “an interactive conspiracy community.”
Sometimes followers of Q just look for signs that he exists. A popular Rosetta Stone they use is to look for uses of the number 17 (the letter Q’s placement in the alphabet). So when Alabama’s football team presented Mr. Trump with a jersey with the number 17, it was taken as coded signaling of Q’s influence. (The team was visiting the White House as the champions of the 2017 college football season and had presented President Barack Obama with a jersey bearing the number 15 when it visited after winning a championship in 2015.)