Q&a Review for Pance and Panre Powered by Prepu Pdf
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. Y'all would look similar any other American. Y'all could exist a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler'south plate. You could be the young human in headphones beyond the street. Yous could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. Only you are hard to identify just from the way you lot look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you downwards. You lot empathise this sounds crazy, but you don't care. Yous know that a minor group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet's strings. You know that they are powerful plenty to corruption children without fear of retribution. Yous know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive citizenry of the deep country. You know that merely Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are office of the plan. You know that a clash betwixt good and evil cannot be avoided, and y'all yearn for the Groovy Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the contemptuousness of the ignorant. Yous must find those who are like y'all. And you must be prepared to fight.
You lot know all this because you lot believe in Q.
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I. GENESIS
The origins of QAnon are contempo, but fifty-fifty so, separating myth from reality tin can exist hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of ii, who until Sunday, Dec 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the modest boondocks of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a ix-mm AR-15 burglarize, a half dozen-shot .38‑caliber Filly revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his motorcar; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-fifteen rifle across his chest; and walked through the front end door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Comet happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my then-baby daughter tried her showtime-ever sip of water. Kids gather at that place with their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands perform on the weekends. In the back, children claiming their grandparents to Ping-Pong matches as they look for their pizzas to come out of the big clay oven in the middle of the eatery. Comet Ping Pong is a dear spot in Washington.
That day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-fifteen rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, simply especially at a place like Comet. As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at 1 point attempting to employ a butter knife to pry open a locked door, earlier giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a minor computer-storage closet. This was non what he was expecting.
Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, equally Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks fabricated public a trove of emails stolen from the business relationship of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton'southward presidential entrada; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the eatery'south possessor, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish corners of the cyberspace (such as 4chan) and then spread to more than accessible precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to "pizza" and "pasta" were interpreted as code words for "girls" and "fiddling boys."
Soon after Trump'due south election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started rampage-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice "the lives of a few for the lives of many" and to fight "a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard." When Welch finally found himself inside the eating place and understood that Comet Ping Pong was but a pizza shop, he set up down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had past so secured the perimeter. "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent," Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.
Welch seems to have sincerely believed that children were existence held at Comet Ping Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, describing him equally a defended begetter, a devout Christian, and a man who went out of his way to intendance for others. Welch had trained equally a volunteer firefighter. He had gone on an convulsion-response mission to Haiti with the local Baptist Men's Association. A friend from his church wrote, "He exhibits the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply information technology." Welch himself expressed what seemed similar genuine remorse, saying in a handwritten notation submitted to the approximate by his lawyers: "It was never my intention to impairment or frighten innocent lives, only I realize now just how foolish and reckless my determination was." He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Pizzagate seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is at present a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news aqueduct One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal activity by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio prove, apologized for promoting Pizzagate.
While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate bulletin: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with information technology. Judging from a surge of activity on the cyberspace, many others had found ways to motility beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If yous paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, yous could meet in real fourth dimension how the cadre premises of Pizzagate were existence recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could go on to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; virtually its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left fly and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could too—and this would prove essential—read near a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.
All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, "Q," posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but information technology has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It as well displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, information technology has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a motion of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction tin be explained away; no class of statement tin can prevail against it.
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Conspiracy theories are a abiding in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them equally inconsequential. But equally the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to crave willful incomprehension. I was a metropolis-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site chosen Honolulu Ceremonious Trounce in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run past publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, every bit all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn't a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest role. I recollect the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even encompass this "birther" madness? Every bit it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated plenty people to give Trump a launching pad.
Ix years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump at present president, a series of ideas began barmy in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the "deep state," the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the earth; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was office of a plot to injure Trump's reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their manner onto Trick News and into the president's public utterances. As of belatedly last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.
The power of the net was understood early on, but the total nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining ceremonious society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet likewise enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a calibration Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 burglarize to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into existence where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of land. Information technology offers the promise of a Great Enkindling, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently equally the turn of the century.
QAnon is emblematic of modern America'southward susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them. Just it is also already much more than than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a move united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are probable closer to the start of its story than the end. The grouping harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The fashion it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory only the birth of a new organized religion.
Many people were reluctant to speak with me nearly QAnon every bit I reported this story. The movement's adherents accept sometimes proved willing to take matters into their own hands. Last twelvemonth, the FBI classified QAnon as a domestic-terror threat in an internal memo. The memo took note of a California man arrested in 2018 with bomb-making materials. According to the FBI, he had planned to attack the Illinois capitol to "make Americans aware of 'Pizzagate' and the New World Society (NWO) who were dismantling society." The memo also took note of a QAnon follower in Nevada who was arrested in 2018 later blocking traffic on the Hoover Dam in an armored truck. The homo, heavily armed, was demanding the release of the inspector general's report on Hillary Clinton'due south emails. The FBI memo warned that conspiracy theories stoke the threat of extremist violence, particularly when individuals "claiming to act every bit 'researchers' or 'investigators' single out people, businesses, or groups which they falsely accuse of being involved in the imagined scheme."
QAnon adherents are feared for ferociously attacking skeptics online and for inciting physical violence. On a now-defunct Reddit board dedicated to QAnon, commenters took delight in describing Clinton's potential fate. One person wrote: "I'm surprised no one has assassinated her yet honestly." Another: "The buzzards rip her rotting corpse to shreds." A 3rd: "I want to come across her blood pouring downward the gutters!"
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When I spoke with Clinton recently nearly QAnon, she said, "I merely go nether their skin different anybody else … If I didn't have Clandestine Service protection going through my mail, finding weird stuff, tracking the threats against me—which are still very high—I would be worried." She has come to realize that the invented reality in which conspiracy theorists place her is not some baroque parallel universe but really one that shapes our own. Referring to internet trolling operations, Clinton said, "I don't think until relatively recently most people understood how well organized they were, and how many different components of their strategy they have put in place."
II. REVELATION
On October 28, 2017, the anonymous user at present widely referred to as "Q" appeared for the first time on 4chan, a so-called paradigm board that is known for its grotesque memes, sickening photographs, and barbarous teardown culture. Q predicted the imminent abort of Hillary Clinton and a violent insurgence nationwide, posting this:
HRC extradition already in movement constructive 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. Usa M's will conduct the operation while NG activated. Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty ten/30 across most major cities.
And so this:
Mockingbird HRC detained, not arrested (however). Where is Huma? Follow Huma. This has cipher to do w/ Russia (yet). Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals? What is military intelligence? Why get around the 3 letter of the alphabet agencies? What Supreme Court case allows for the use of MI 5 Congressional assembled and approved agencies? Who has ultimate potency over our branches of military w/o approval weather condition unless ninety+ in wartime atmospheric condition? What is the military code? Where is AW being held? Why? POTUS will non go on tv to address nation. POTUS must isolate himself to foreclose negative optics. POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a commencement pace was essential to costless and pass legislation. Who has access to everything classified? Do yous believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy. Whoever controls the office of the Presidency controls this dandy land. They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control. 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 God bless fellow Patriots.
Clinton was not arrested on October 30, just that didn't deter Q, who continued posting ominous predictions and ambiguous riddles—with prompts like "Discover the reflection inside the castle"—often written in the form of tantalizing fragments and rhetorical questions. Q fabricated it clear that he wanted people to believe he was an intelligence officer or military official with Q clearance, a level of access to classified data that includes nuclear-weapons design and other highly sensitive material. (I'm using he because many Q followers do, though Q remains anonymous—hence "QAnon.") Q's tone is conspiratorial to the betoken of cliché: "I've said besides much," and "Follow the money," and "Some things must remain classified to the very end."
What might have languished as a lonely screed on a single image lath instead incited fervor. Its profile was enhanced, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News, by several conspiracy theorists whose promotion of Q in turn helped build up their own online profiles. By at present, nearly three years since Q's original messages appeared, at that place take been thousands of what his followers call "Q drops"—messages posted to paradigm boards past Q. He uses a password-protected "tripcode," a serial of messages and numbers visible to other image-board users to point the continuity of his identity over time. (Q'southward tripcode has changed on occasion, prompting flurries of speculation.) Equally Q has moved from one image board to the side by side—from 4chan to 8chan to 8kun, seeking a rubber harbor—QAnon adherents accept only become more than devoted. If the cyberspace is ane big rabbit hole containing infinitely recursive rabbit holes, QAnon has somehow establish its way down all of them, gulping up lesser conspiracy theories as it goes.
In its broadest contours, the QAnon belief system looks something similar this: Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that decadent world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep land; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them. ("These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED," Q wrote in ane mail.) The eventual devastation of the global conduce is imminent, Q prophesies, but tin be accomplished merely with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q's clues. To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press. I of Q's favorite rallying cries is "You lot are the news at present." Another is "Enjoy the bear witness," a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When the world every bit we know information technology comes to an end, everyone's a spectator.
People who have taken Q to heart similar to say they've been paying attention from the very beginning, the mode someone might brag most having listened to Radiohead before The Bends. A hope of foreknowledge is part of Q's appeal, equally is the feeling of being office of a secret community, which is reinforced through the use of acronyms and ritual phrases such every bit "Nix can stop what is coming" and "Trust the programme."
One phrase that serves as a special touchstone among QAnon adherents is "the calm before the storm." Q beginning used it a few days after his initial post, and it arrived with a specific history. On the evening of October five, 2017—not long before Q offset made himself known on 4chan—President Trump stood beside the first lady in a loose semicircle with xx or so senior war machine leaders and their spouses for a photo in the Land Dining Room at the White House. Reporters had been invited to watch as Trump's guests posed and smiled. Trump couldn't seem to stop talking. "Yous guys know what this represents?" he asked at one indicate, tracing an incomplete circle in the air with his right index finger. "Tell us, sir," one onlooker replied. The president's response was self-satisfied, bordering on a drawl: "Peradventure it's the calm before the tempest."
"What's the storm?" one of the journalists asked.
"Could be the at-home—the calm before the storm," Trump said once again. His repetition seemed to be for dramatic consequence. The whir of camera shutters grew louder.
The reporters became insistent: "What storm, Mr. President?"
A brusque response from Trump: "You'll find out."
Those 37 seconds of presidential ambiguity fabricated headlines correct away—relations with Islamic republic of iran had been tense in recent days—but they would besides go foundational lore for eventual followers of Q. The president's circular hand gesture is of particular interest to them. You may think he was motioning to the semicircle gathered effectually him, they say, but he was really cartoon the letter Q in the air. Was Trump playing the role of John the Baptist, proclaiming what was to come? Was he himself the anointed one?
Information technology's impossible to know the number of QAnon adherents with whatsoever precision, but the ranks are growing. At least 35 current or former congressional candidates take embraced Q, according to an online tally by the progressive nonprofit Media Matters for America. Those candidates have either direct praised QAnon in public or approvingly referenced QAnon slogans. (1 Republican candidate for Congress, Matthew Lusk of Florida, includes QAnon under the "issues" section of his campaign website, posing the question: "Who is Q?") QAnon has by at present made its way onto every major social and commercial platform and any number of fringe sites. Tracy Diaz, a QAnon evangelist, known online by the name TracyBeanz, has 185,000 followers on Twitter and more than 100,000 YouTube subscribers. She helped lift QAnon from obscurity, facilitating its transition to mainstream social media. (A publicist described Diaz as "actually private" and declined requests for an interview.) On TikTok, videos with the hashtag #QAnon have garnered millions of views. There are as well many QAnon Facebook groups, enough of them ghost towns, to do a proper count, simply the most active ones publish thousands of items each twenty-four hours. (In 2018, Reddit banned QAnon groups from its platform for inciting violence.)
Adherents are always looking out for signs from on high, plumbing for portents when guidance from Q himself is absent. The coronavirus, for instance—what does it signify? In several of the large Facebook groups, people erupted in a frenzy of speculation, circulating a theory that Trump's conclusion to wearable a yellowish tie to a White House briefing virtually the virus was a sign that the outbreak wasn't real: "He is telling united states there is no virus threat considering it is the exact same color equally the maritime flag that represents the vessel has no infected people on board," someone wrote in a mail that was widely shared and remixed across social media. Three days earlier the World Wellness Organisation officially declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Trump was retweeting a QAnon-themed meme. "Who knows what this means, simply it sounds expert to me!" the president wrote on March 8, sharing a Photoshopped epitome of himself playing a violin overlaid with the words "Zippo tin stop what is coming."
On March 9, Q himself issued a triptych of ominous posts that seemed definitive: The coronavirus is real, but welcome, and followers should not be afraid. The first mail shared Trump's tweet from the night earlier and repeated, "Nothing Tin Stop What Is Coming." The second said: "The Great Enkindling is Worldwide." The third was simple: "GOD WINS."
A month after, on Apr 8, Q went on a posting spree, dropping nine posts over the span of six hours and touching on several of his favorite topics—God, Pizzagate, and the wickedness of the elites. "They will stop at nothing to regain ability," he wrote in 1 scathing post that alleged a coordinated propaganda try past Democrats, Hollywood, and the media. Another accused Democrats of promoting "mass hysteria" nigh the coronavirus for political proceeds: "What is the principal benefit to go along public in mass-hysteria re: COVID‑xix? Recollect voting. Are y'all awake yet? Q." And he shared these verses from Ephesians: "Finally, be stiff in the Lord and in the strength of His might. Put on the total armor of God so that y'all will be able to stand house against the schemes of the devil."
Anthony Fauci, the longtime manager of the National Establish of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has get an object of contemptuousness among QAnon supporters who don't like the bad news he delivers or the style he has contradicted Trump publicly. In 1 March printing conference, Trump referred to the Country Department as the "Deep Country Section," and Fauci could be seen over the president's shoulder, suppressing a laugh and covering his face. Past then, QAnon had already alleged Fauci irredeemably compromised, considering WikiLeaks had unearthed a pair of emails he sent praising Hillary Clinton in 2012 and 2013. Sentiment about Fauci amongst QAnon supporters on social-media platforms ranges from "Fauci is a Deep State boob" to "FAUCI is a BLACKHAT!!!"—the term QAnon uses for people who back up the evil cabal that Q warns about. One person, using the hashtags #DeepStateCabal and #Qanon, tweeted this: "Watch Fauci'southward hand signals and trunk language at the press conferences. What is he communicating?" Another shared an image of Fauci standing in a lab with Barack Obama, with the caption "Obama and 'Dr.' Fauci in the lab creating coronovirus [sic]. #DeepstateDoctor." The Justice Department recently approved heightened security measures for Fauci considering of the mounting volume of threats confronting him.
In the final days before Congress passed a $2 trillion economic-relief package in late March, Democrats insisted on provisions that would arrive easier for people to vote by mail, prompting Q himself to weigh in with dismay: "These people are ill! Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing."
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3. BELIEVERS
On a bone-cold Thursday in early January, a crowd was swelling in downtown Toledo, Ohio. By lunchtime, vii hours before the offset of Trump's first campaign rally of the new twelvemonth, the line to go into the Huntington Center had already snaked around 2 city blocks. The air was electric with possibility, and the whole scene possessed a Jimmy Buffett–meets–Michigan Militia atmosphere: lots of white people, a skilful bargain of vaping, red-white-and-bluish everything. Down the street, someone had affixed a two-story banner beyond the acme of a burned-out brick building. It read: president trump, welcome to toledo, ohio: who is q … military machine intelligence? q+? ("Q+" is QAnon shorthand for Trump himself.) Vendors at the event were selling Q buttons and T-shirts. QAnon trade comes in a great variety; online, you can buy Groovy Enkindling coffee ($fourteen.99) and QAnon bracelets with tiny silvery pizza charms ($20.17).
I worked my way toward the back of the line, making small talk and asking who, if anyone, knew anything about QAnon. One woman's eyes lit upward, and in a single fluid motion she unzipped and removed her jacket, then did a trivial jump so that her back was to me. I could see a Q made out of duct tape, which she'd pressed onto her reddish T-shirt. Her proper noun was Lorrie Shock, and the first thing she wanted me to know was this: "We're not a domestic-terror group."
Shock was born in Ohio and never left, "a lifer," as she put it. She had worked at a Bridgestone factory, making machine parts, for about of her adult life. "Real hot and dirty work, but good money," she told me. "I got three kids through school." Today, in what she calls her preretirement task, she cares for adults with special needs, spending her days in a tender routine of playing games with them and helping them in and out of a swimming pool. Shock came to the Trump rally with her friend Pat Harger, who had retired after 32 years at Whirlpool. Harger's wife runs a catering concern, which is what had kept her from attention the rally that 24-hour interval. Harger and Shock are old friends. "Since the 4th form," Harger told me, "and nosotros're 57 years old."
At present that Shock's girls are grown and she's not working a factory job, she has more time for herself. That used to mean reading novels in the evening—she doesn't own a television—but at present it ways researching Q, who first came to her notice when someone she knew mentioned him on Facebook in 2017: "What caught my attention was 'research.' Do your own research. Don't take anything for granted. I don't care who says information technology, even President Trump. Practise your own research, make upwards your own mind."
The QAnon universe is sprawling and deep, with layer upon layer of context, acronyms, characters, and shorthand to learn. The "castle" is the White House. "Crumbs" are clues. CBTS stands for "calm before the storm," and WWG1WGA stands for "Where we become ane, we get all," which has become an expression of solidarity among Q followers. (Both of these phrases, oddly, are used in the trailer for the 1996 Ridley Scott motion-picture show White Squall—lookout man information technology on YouTube, and you'll see that the comments section is flooded with pro-Q sentiment.) There is besides a "Q clock," which refers to a calendar some factions of Q supporters use to try to decode supposed clues based on time stamps of Q drops and Trump tweets.
At the height of her devotion, Daze was spending 4 to six hours a day reading and rereading Q drops, scouring documents online, taking notes. Now, she says, she spends closer to an hour or two a day. "When I start started, everybody thought I was crazy," Shock said. That included her daughters, who are "very liberal Hillary and Bernie supporters," Shock said. "I still beloved them. They think I'm crazy, just that'due south all right."
Harger, as well, once thought Shock had lost it. "I was doubting her," he told me. "I would send her texts proverb, Lorrie."
"He was similar, 'What the hell?' " Daze said, laughing. "So my comment to him would be 'Do your own research.' "
"And I did," Harger said. "And information technology's like, Wow."
Taking a folio from Trump's playbook, Q often rails confronting legitimate sources of data every bit simulated. Shock and Harger rely on data they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don't read the local paper or picket any of the major television networks. "Yous can't watch the news," Shock said. "Your news channel ain't gonna tell united states shit." Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not and then long agone, he used to lookout man CNN, and couldn't get enough of Wolf Blitzer. "We were glued to that; we e'er have been," he said. "Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what'southward happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that'southward going to happen." I asked Harger and Stupor for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to practise the inquiry myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton'due south arrest, they said that deception is role of Q's plan. Shock added, "I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen." Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.
Harger wanted me to know that he'd voted for Obama the get-go time around. He grew up in a family unit of Democrats. His dad was a spousal relationship guy. But that was before Trump appeared and convinced Harger that he shouldn't trust the institutions he ever thought he could. Stupor nodded alongside him. "The reason I feel like I can trust Trump more than is, he'due south not part of the establishment," she said. At one signal, Harger told me I should look into what happened to John F. Kennedy Jr.—who died in 1999, when his airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha'south Vineyard—suggesting that Hillary Clinton had had him assassinated. (Alternatively, a contingent of QAnon believers say that JFK Jr. faked his death and that he'south a backside-the-scenes Trump supporter, and maybe even Q himself. Some anticipate his dramatic public return then that he can serve every bit Trump's running mate in 2020.) When I asked Harger whether at that place'due south any prove to support the assassination claim, he flipped my question effectually: "Is there whatever evidence not to?"
Reading Stupor's Facebook page is an practice in contradictions, a toggling between banality and hostility. There she is in a yellow kayak in her profile photo, bright-red hair spilling out of a ski hat, a giant smile on her face up. There are the photos of her daughters, and of a granddaughter with Shirley Temple curls. Notwithstanding Q is never far away. On Christmas Eve, Daze shared one post that seemed to come straight out of the QAnon universe but also pulled in an older, classic conspiracy: "X marks the spot over Roswell NM. X17 Fifth Force Particle. X + Q Coincidence?" That same day, she shared a split post suggesting that Michelle Obama is secretly a human. Someone responded with skepticism: "I am still not convinced. She shows and acts evil, merely a man?" Shock'due south reply: "Research it." There was a post claiming that Representative Adam Schiff had raped the body of a dead boy at the Chateau Marmont, in Los Angeles—Harger shows up here, with a "huh??" in the comments—and a warning that George Soros was going after Christian evangelicals. In other posts, Daze playfully taunted "libs" and her "Trump-hating friends," and also shared a video of her girl singing Christmas carols.
In Toledo, I asked Shock if she had any theories almost Q's identity. She answered immediately: "I think it'southward Trump." I asked if she thinks Trump fifty-fifty knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously disruptive for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make information technology easy to publish quickly and often. "I think he knows mode more what we think," she said. Only she also wanted me to know that her obsession with Q wasn't about Trump. This had been something she was reluctant to speak about at first. Now, she said, "I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction. I feel like if it was deceitful, in my spirit, God would be telling me, 'Plenty's plenty.' But I don't experience that. I pray about it. I've said, 'Begetter, should I be wasting my fourth dimension on this?' … And I don't feel that feeling of I should cease."
Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary picture Feels Proficient Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential ballot, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family unit in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew and so, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the state, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack "all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies." Jones went on: "I call back the same kind of person would all all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and outset feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and brand sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he'due south been married multiple times, he's clearly a sinner. Simply you are trying to notice a way that he is somehow part of God's plan."
You can't always tell what kind of Q follower you're encountering. Anyone using a Q hashtag could be a true believer, like Daze, or merely someone cruising a site and playing along for a vicarious thrill. Surely there are people who know that Q is a fantasy but participate because there'south an element of QAnon that converges with a live-action role-playing game. In the sprawling constellation of Q supporters, Shock and Harger seem prototypical. They happened upon Q and something clicked. The fable plugged neatly into their existing worldview.
IV. PROFESSIONALS
Q may be anonymous, just leaders of the QAnon motion take emerged in public and congenital their own large audiences. David Hayes is amend known by his online handle: PrayingMedic. In his YouTube videos, he exudes the even-keeled disciplinarian energy of a center-school main. PrayingMedic is 1 of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet. He has more than 300,000 Twitter followers and a similar number of YouTube subscribers. Hayes, a former paramedic, lives in a terra-cotta-roofed subdivision in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife, Denise, an artist whom he met on the dating site Christian Mingle in 2007. Both describe themselves every bit former atheists who came to their organized religion in God, and to each other, late in life, later on previous marriages. Hayes has been following Q since the beginning, or close to it. "Q Anon is pretty darn interesting," he wrote on his Facebook page on December 12, 2017, six weeks later on Q'south start postal service on 4chan. That aforementioned twenty-four hours, he wrote about a sudden calling he felt:
My dreams have suggested that God wants me to keep my attention focused on politics and current events. After some prayer, I've decided to do a regular news and current events show on Periscope. I'1000 trying to do one broadcast a day. (The videos are also being posted to my Youtube aqueduct.) That is all.
Hayes is a superstar in the Q universe. His video "Q for Beginners Part 1" has been viewed more than 1 million times. "Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to exist conspiracy theorists," Hayes says in the video. "I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don't accept anything against people who similar to follow conspiracies. That'southward their thing. It'southward not my thing."
Hayes has developed a following in function because of his sheer ubiquity only as well considering he skillfully wears the drape of a skeptic—I'm non one of those crazies. Hayes is not a QAnon hobbyist, though. He's a professional. There are income streams to be tapped, modest but expanding. On Amazon, Hayes'south book Calm Earlier the Storm, the kickoff in what he says could easily be a ten-volume series of "Q Chronicles," sells for $fifteen.29. Hayes writes in the introduction that he and Denise take devoted their attention full-fourth dimension to QAnon since 2017. "Denise and I have been blessed by those who have helped support u.s. while we set bated our usual piece of work to inquiry Q's messages," he wrote. He has published several other books, which offer a glimpse into an earlier life. The titles include Hearing God'southward Vox Made Simple, Defeating Your Adversary in the Court of Heaven, and American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare. Hayes registered Praying Medic every bit a religious nonprofit in Washington State in 2018.
Hayes tells his followers that he thinks Q is an open up-source intelligence performance, fabricated possible past the internet and designed by patriots fighting abuse inside the intelligence community. His estimation of Q is ultimately religious in nature, and centers on the idea of a Great Awakening. "I believe The Great Awakening has a double application," Hayes wrote in a blog post in November 2019.
It speaks of an intellectual awakening—the sensation by the public to the truth that we've been enslaved in a corrupt political system. But the exposure of the unimaginable depravity of the elites will lead to an increased awareness of our own depravity. Self-awareness of sin is fertile footing for spiritual revival. I believe the long-prophesied spiritual awakening lies on the other side of the tempest.
Q followers agree that a Peachy Enkindling lies alee, and will bring salvation. They differ in their personal preoccupations with respect to the here and now. Some in the QAnon globe are highly focused on what they perceive as degeneracy in the mainstream media, a perception fueled in equal measure by Q and by Trump. Others obsess over the intelligence community and the notion of a deep country. An agile subsection of Q followers probes the Jeffrey Epstein example. There are those who claim knowledge of a 16-twelvemonth plan by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to destroy the U.s.a. by means of mass drought, weaponized disease, food shortages, and nuclear state of war. During the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, some Q followers promoted the idea that Trump was secretly working with Robert Mueller, and that the special counsel's study would both exonerate Trump and atomic number 82 to mass arrests of members of the decadent cabal. (The eventual Mueller written report, released in April 2019, neither exonerated Trump nor led to mass arrests.)
These divergent byways are elemental to QAnon's staying power—this is a very welcoming belief arrangement, warm in its tolerance for contradiction—and are also what makes it possible for a applied man like Hayes to play the office that he does. QAnon is complex and confusing. People from all over the internet seek guidance from someone who seems levelheaded. (Hayes was quick to answer to my emails but declined requests for an interview. He complained to me that journalists turn down to see QAnon for what it really is, and therefore cannot exist trusted.)
The nearly prominent QAnon figures have a presence across the biggest social-media platforms and image boards. The Q universe encompasses numerous blogs, proprietary websites, and types of chat software, also as alternative social-media platforms such as Gab, the site known for anti-Semitism and white nationalism, where many people banned from Twitter accept congregated. Vloggers and bloggers promote their Patreon accounts, where people tin pay them in monthly sums. At that place's likewise money to be fabricated from ads on YouTube. That seems to exist the primary focus for Hayes, whose videos have been viewed more 33 million times birthday. His "Q for Beginners" video includes ads from companies such as the vacation-rental site Vrbo and from The Epoch Times, an international pro-Trump newspaper. Q evangelists have taken a "publish everywhere" approach that is half outreach, half redundancy. If one platform cracks down on QAnon, as Reddit did, they won't have to kickoff from scratch somewhere else. Already embroiled in the battle between good and evil, QAnon has involved itself in another boxing—between the notion of an open web for the people and a gated internet controlled by a powerful few.
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V. WHO IS Q?
Whatever new belief organization runs into opposition. In Dec 2018, Matt Patten, a veteran SWAT-squad sergeant in the Broward County Sheriff'southward Part, in Florida, was photographed with Vice President Mike Pence on an airport tarmac. Patten wore a patch on his tactical belong that bore the alphabetic character Q. The photograph was tweeted by the vice president's part and then went viral in the QAnon community. The tweet was quickly taken down. Patten was demoted. When I knocked on his door on a gloomy day in Baronial, no one answered. But as I turned to leave, I noticed two large bumper stickers on the white mailbox out front. One said trump, and the other said #qanon: patriots fight.
Late last summer, Q himself lost his platform. He had migrated from 4chan (fearing that the site had been "infiltrated") to the image board 8chan, and and then 8chan went dark. Three days before I stood on Patten's doorstep, 22 people had been killed in a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and police revealed that the declared killer had posted a manifesto on 8chan only before conveying out the attack. The episode had eerie similarities to two other shootings. 4 months before, in April 2019, the suspected shooter in a murderous binge at a synagogue in Poway, California, had posted an anti-Semitic letter on 8chan. Weeks earlier that, the man who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques had posted a white-supremacist manifesto on 8chan.
After El Paso, 8chan's owner, Jim Watkins, was ordered to evidence earlier the House Committee on Homeland Security. Watkins had bought the site four years earlier from its founder, Fredrick Brennan, now 26, who eventually cutting all ties to 8chan. "Regrettably, this is at least the tertiary human action of white supremacist extremist violence linked to your website this twelvemonth," wrote Representatives Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, and Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama, when they summoned Watkins to Capitol Loma. "Americans deserve to know what, if anything, yous, as the possessor and operator, are doing to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan."
8chan had already lost crucial services, which had forced it to shut down. The CEO of Cloudflare, which had helped protect the site from cyberattacks, explained his decision to drop 8chan in an open letter of the alphabet after the El Paso shooting: "The rationale is simple: They take proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths." Watkins promised to proceed the site off the cyberspace until after his congressional advent. He is a onetime U.S. Regular army helicopter repairman who got into the business of websites while he was still in the armed services. Among other things, in 1997, he launched a successful porn site called Asian Bikini Bar. On his YouTube aqueduct, where he posts nether the username Watkins Xerxes, he oftentimes sings hymns, reads verses from the Bible, praises Trump, and touches on themes underlying QAnon—alert confronting the deep country and reminding his audience members that they are now "the actual reporting mechanism of the news." He besides shows off his fountain-pen drove and practices yoga. When he arrived on Capitol Colina, in September 2019, Watkins wore a bulbous silver Q pinned to his collar. His testimony was behind airtight doors. In Nov, 8chan flickered back to life every bit 8kun. It was sporadically accessible, limping along through a serial of cyberattacks. It received assistance from a Russian hosting service that is typically associated with spreading malware. When Q reappeared on 8kun, he used the same tripcode that he had used on 8chan. He posted other hints meant to verify the continuity of his identity, including an image of a notebook and a pen that had appeared in earlier posts.
Fredrick Brennan's theory is that Jim and his son Ron, who is the site's ambassador, knew 8kun needed Q to attract users. "I definitely, definitely, 100 percent believe that Q either knows Jim or Ron Watkins, or was hired by Jim or Ron Watkins," Brennan told me. Jim and Ron have both denied knowing Q'due south identity. "I don't know who Q is," Ron told me in a direct message on Twitter. Jim told an interviewer on One America News Network in September 2019: "I don't know who QAnon is. Really, we run an anonymous website." Both insist that they care about maintaining 8kun only considering it is a platform for unfettered free speech. "8kun is like a slice of newspaper, and the users decide what is written on it," Ron told me. "There are many different topics and users from many different backgrounds." Merely their interest in Q is well documented. In February, Jim started a super PAC called Disarm the Deep Country, which echoes Q's messages and which is running paid ads on 8kun.
Brennan has long been feuding with the Watkinses. Jim is suing Brennan for libel in the Philippines, where they both lived until recently, and Brennan is actively fighting Jim'southward attempts to become a naturalized citizen there. "They kept Q live," Brennan told me. "We wouldn't be talking near this correct now if Q didn't go on the new 8kun. The entire reason we're talking near this is they're directly related to Q. And, y'all know, I worry constantly that there is going to be, equally early equally November 2020, some kind of shooting or something related to Q if Trump loses. Or parents killing their children to save them from the hell-world that is to come because the deep land has won. These are real possibilities. I just feel like what they have done is totally irresponsible to keep Q going."
The story of Q is premised on the need for Q to remain anonymous. It'due south why Q originally picked 4chan, one of the last places built for anonymity on the social web. "I've often related Q to previous figures like John Titor or Satoshi Nakamoto," Brennan told me, referring to two legends of net anonymity. Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the unknown creator of bitcoin. John Titor is the proper noun used on several message boards in 2000 and 2001 by someone claiming to be a armed forces time traveler from the yr 2036.
QAnon adherents run into Q'south anonymity as proof of Q's credibility—despite their deep mistrust of unnamed sources in the media. Every faction of QAnon has its own hunches, alliances, and interpersonal dramas related to the question of Q's identity. The theories fit into three broad groups. In the beginning grouping are theories that assume Q is a single private who has been posting all lone this entire fourth dimension. This is where you lot'll detect the people who say that Trump himself is Q, or even that PrayingMedic is Q. (This category also includes the possibility, raised past people outside of QAnon, that Q is a lone Trump supporter who started posting every bit a class of fan fiction, non realizing it would take off; and the thought that Q began posting in order to parody Trump and his supporters, not anticipating that people would take him seriously.) The 2d group of theories holds that the original Q posted continuously for a while, but so something inverse. This second category includes Brennan's thought that the Watkinses are now paying Q, or are paying someone to carry on as Q, or are even acting equally Q themselves. The third group of theories holds that Q is a collective, with a minor number of people sharing access to the business relationship. This third category includes the notion that Q is a new kind of open-source military-intelligence bureau.
Many QAnon adherents see significance in Trump tweets containing words that brainstorm with the letter Q. Recent earth events have rewarded them handsomely. "I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen & the Britain," Trump began one tweet on March 29. The day before, he had tweeted this: "I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE." The Q crowd seized on both tweets, arguing that if yous ignore most of the letters in the letters, you'll find a confession from Trump: "I am … Q."
VI. REASON VERSUS Organized religion
In a Miami coffee store last year, I met with a human who has gotten a flurry of attention in recent years for his research on conspiracy theories—a political-science professor at the Academy of Miami named Joseph Uscinski. I have known Uscinski for years, and his views are nuanced, securely informed, and far from anything yous would consider knee-wiggle partisanship. Many people assume, he told me, that a propensity for conspiracy thinking is anticipated along ideological lines. That's wrong, he explained. It's better to recollect of conspiracy thinking every bit independent of party politics. Information technology'due south a particular form of listen-wiring. And information technology's by and large characterized past credence of the following propositions: Our lives are controlled by plots hatched in hole-and-corner places. Although we ostensibly live in a democracy, a small grouping of people run everything, merely nosotros don't know who they are. When big events occur—pandemics, recessions, wars, terrorist attacks—it is considering that secretive group is working against the residual of us.
QAnon isn't a far-correct conspiracy, the way it's oftentimes described, Uscinski went on, despite its apparently pro-Trump narrative. And that'due south because Trump isn't a typical far-correct political leader. Q appeals to people with the greatest allure to conspiracy thinking of any kind, and that appeal crosses ideological lines.
Many of the people well-nigh decumbent to believing conspiracy theories run across themselves every bit victim-warriors fighting against corrupt and powerful forces. They share a hatred of mainstream elites. That helps explain why cycles of populism and conspiracy thinking seem to rise and fall together. Conspiracy thinking is at in one case a cause and a consequence of what Richard Hofstadter in 1964 famously described as "the paranoid style" in American politics. Merely practice not make the mistake of thinking that conspiracy theories are scribbled only in the marginalia of American history. They color every major news event: the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landing, ix/11. They accept helped sustain consequential eruptions, such as McCarthyism in the 1950s and anti-Semitism at any moment you choose. Only QAnon is different. It may exist propelled by paranoia and populism, but it is also propelled by religious religion. The linguistic communication of evangelical Christianity has come to define the Q movement. QAnon marries an appetite for the conspiratorial with positive beliefs about a radically different and better time to come, one that is preordained.
That was role of the reason Uscinski's mother, Shelly, 62, was attracted to QAnon. Shelly, who lives in New Hampshire, was tooling around on YouTube a couple of years ago, looking for how-to videos—she can't remember for what, exactly, perchance a tutorial on how to get her car windows sparkling-clean—and the algorithm served upwards QAnon. She remembers a feeling of magnetic attraction. "Like, Wow, what is this?" she recalled when I spoke with her by phone. "For me, it was revealing some things that maybe I was hoping would come to pass." She sensed that Q knew her anxieties—equally if someone was taking her train of idea and "actually verbalizing information technology." Shelly's frustrations are wide, and directed primarily at the institutions she sees as broken. She's fed up with the education organization, the financial organization, the media. "Even our churches are out of whack," she said. One of the things that resonated most with her about Q was his cloy with "the fake news." She gets her information by and large from Fox News, Twitter, and the New Hampshire Matrimony Leader. "In my lifetime, I guess, things have gotten progressively worse," Shelly said. She added a trivial later: "Q gives us hope. And it's a good thing, to exist hopeful."
Shelly likes that Q occasionally quotes from scripture, and she likes that he encourages people to pray. In the end, she said, QAnon is about something and then much bigger than Trump or anyone else. "At that place are QAnon followers out at that place," Shelly said, "who suggest that what nosotros're going through now, in this crazy political realm we're in at present, with all of the things that are happening worldwide, is very biblical, and that this is Armageddon."
I asked her if she thinks the end of the world is upon us. "It wouldn't surprise me," she said.
Joseph Uscinski is disturbed by his mother's conventionalities in QAnon. He's not comfortable talking about it. And Shelly doesn't quite appreciate the irony of the family'due south situation, because she doesn't believe QAnon is a grade of conspiracy thinking in the first place. At i point in our conversation, when I referred to QAnon every bit a conspiracy theory, she quickly interrupted: "Information technology's not a theory. It's the foretelling of things to come up." She laughed difficult when I asked if she had ever tried to become Joseph to believe in QAnon. The answer was an unequivocal no: "I'm his mom, and so I dear him."
VII. APOCALYPSE
Watchkeepers for the Finish of Days tin can easily find signs of impending doom—in comets and earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. Information technology has always been this way. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share his prediction that the 2d Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers, known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as the Bully Disappointment. Just they did not surrender. The Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-twenty-four hours Adventists, who now accept a worldwide membership of more than twenty million. "These people in the QAnon community—I feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in their beliefs, as the Millerites were," Travis View, one of the hosts of a podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic assay, told me. "That makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to get away with the cease of the Trump presidency."
QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who experience adrift. In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This fashion of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place—and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Expiry in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century, and in William Miller'southward New York in the 19th century. It is true in America in the 21st century.
The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-solar day Saints are thriving religious movements ethnic to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the kickoff decades of their existence. People are expressing their religion through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q'due south teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot exist confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains accented. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Smashing Enkindling is coming. They'll wait as long every bit they must for deliverance.
Trust the plan. Relish the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.
This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming." It was published online on May xiv, 2020.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/
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