![]() ![]() “People in the QAnon community feel like they are banding together to uncover the real truth behind the scenes,” said View, who works as a marketer for a San Diego company and says he uses the pseudonym to protect himself. Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher who co-hosts The QAnon Anonymous Podcast and has written about QAnon for the Washington Post under his pseudonym, said the sense of community forged by QAnon believers has helped it endure beyond the lifespan of other conspiracy theories.Ī QAnon t-shirt appearing at the front of a group of Trump supporters. The disruption, which ended when the imageboard relaunched in November under the new name 8kun, hardly spelled the end of QAnon. The messages migrated to 8chan until a string of mass shootings by gunmen who posted manifestos on the site led to it getting forced offline in August. The first Q "drop” appeared on the 4chan imageboard in October 2017. Another core belief is that thousands of deep state operatives and top Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Obama, will be rounded up and sent to Guantanamo Bay during an event called “The Storm." Kennedy Jr is a Trump supporter who faked his death in a 1999 plane crash. Some major Trump supporters, including former White House aide Sebastian Gorka, have denounced QAnon.įor more than two years, followers have pored over a tangled set of clues purportedly posted online by a high-ranking government official known only as “Q.” Asked about QAnon in 2018, then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump “condemns and denounces any group that would incite violence against another individual.” The bulletin specifically mentions QAnon.Ī Trump campaign spokeswoman and a White House spokesman didn't respond to emails seeking comment. Source: AP Increase in QAnon following could trigger violenceĬonspiracy theories are nothing new, but experts fear the powerful engine of social media and a volatile political climate have ramped up the threat of violence.Īn FBI bulletin in May warned that conspiracy theory-driven extremists have become a domestic terrorism threat. What started as an online obsession for the far-right fringe has grown beyond its origins in a dark corner of the internet.Ī Trump supporter holds up a giant Q sign before entering one of the president's campaign rallies. The couples bonded over their shared interest in QAnon, which centres on the baseless belief that Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the “deep state” and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic paedophiles and cannibals. ![]() The Jacobsons met Chrisy and her husband, Paul, hours earlier in the line to get into the Jan 14 rally. The Geneva, Illinois, resident declined to give her last name in part because she said she wanted to avoid negative “attention." ![]() “I think it was,” replied their new friend, Chrisy. “Was that a 'Q'?" added Jacobson's husband, Randy, 64. “He just did it?” asked Diane Jacobson, 63, of Racine, Wisconsin. She turned to the couple on her right and excitedly asked, “Did you see the ‘Q’?” The 51-year-old woman believed the president had traced the shape of the letter “Q” with his fingers as a covert signal to followers of QAnon, a right-wing, pro-Trump conspiracy theory. President Donald Trump was more than halfway through his speech at a rally in Milwaukee when one of his hand gestures caught the eye of a supporter standing in the packed arena. ![]()
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