QAnon creeps from shadows to target Republican mainstream (2024)

In the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol last year, social networks began a purge of accounts and groups linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory that had been so visibly displayed by the rioters.

The anonymous poster known only as “Q” had halted his cryptic online posts, or “Q drops”, the month before, in the days after Donald Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. In the weeks that followed the insurrection, hundreds of people who stormed Congress were tracked down and arrested.

With Trump gone from the White House and Q falling silent, it appeared that January 6 had been a watershed for the conspiracy movement. The “Storm” that believers claimed was coming to sweep away the cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles at the heart of American politics — led by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and “elites” from Hollywood and the mainstream media — had blown itself out.

After an 18-month hiatus, however, a new message was posted on the anarchic online community, 8kun, last week. “Shall we play a game once more?” read the post. It was signed, “Q”. More messages followed. “Are you ready to serve your country again?” said one, followed by: “Remember your oath.”

Message boards and social networks lit up with feverish speculation at the meaning of Q’s return. When one follower asked about his long absence, Q replied: “It had to be done this way.”

In fact, Q never went away. A study earlier this year found that QAnon has gained support in the year since the Capitol riots. As the US approaches its midterm elections in November, dozens of candidates, most of them Republican, are running on QAnon-adjacent campaign platforms in primary races across America.

QAnon’s deranged, quasi-biblical rhetoric about Satanists and paedophiles harvesting children’s blood, and the call to arms to destroy them, have crept into the political mainstream.

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New data from the non-partisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that the proportion of Americans who believe the main tenets of QAnon rose from 14 per cent in March 2021 to 18 per cent in March this year. Crucially, the proportion of people who dismiss the movement out-of-hand has softened sharply. In March last year, 40 per cent of Americans rejected QAnon’s beliefs completely — the figure is now 30 per cent.

With Trump refusing to leave the political stage, and instead seemingly plotting his return to the White House, believers have latched on to his “Big Lie” claim that the 2020 election was stolen, with one conspiracy theory fuelling another. Trump’s defeat in a “rigged” election, and the ultimate failure of January 6, has appeared to only reinforce the belief that a new storm is coming.

“We’re still in a place after the Trump presidency, after January 6, heading two years into a Biden administration, where we see Americans still harbouring these beliefs,” said the PRRI chairwoman, Melissa Deckman. “Not a majority, but not an insignificant amount either.”

The PRRI survey found support for QAnon across all demographics and social groups, despite being overwhelmingly concentrated among conservatives and Christian nationalists. One in four Republicans are QAnon supporters, and are more than twice as likely as Democrats to believe in the theory, but Deckman noted that the drop in Americans who reject QAnon altogether “cuts across all party groups”.

“It’s not just the loner living in their mum and dad’s basem*nt who’s endorsing QAnon,” she said. “Social networks show they’re just as likely to have comparable numbers of friends and friend groups. So it cuts into larger segment of the US population than you might suspect.”

Belief is fuelled by media consumption. “We found that QAnon supporters are a lot more likely to follow far-right media sources,” said Deckman. “We’re talking about OANN (One America News Network) and other extreme conservative and far-right news sources.”

Republican politicians have seized on the festering sense of distrust and malaise left behind by Trump and the events of January 6. With primary elections ahead of the midterms under way, a review of public records, social media posts and campaign materials by the website Grid found at least 78 candidates aligned with QAnon running for office in 26 states across the entire nation.

Some of these candidates sit firmly in the political fringes, but others are on the brink of high office. Doug Mastriano, a devout follower of Trump’s Make American Great Again (Maga) movement, who was at the Capitol on January 6 and recently spoke at a QAnon-affiliated conference, won the Republican nomination for the governor’s post in Pennsylvania. Mastriano is now one election away from running the biggest swing state in the US, with power over its election system at the next presidential race in 2024.

In Arizona, another swing state with the highest number of QAnon-supporting candidates, Kari Lake, a Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorist, leads the primary race for governor. Mark Finchem, also backed by the former president, is the frontrunner for Arizona’s secretary of state.

Finchem is alleged to have links to the far-right Oath Keepers and has openly touted QAnon theories about paedophiles in the heart of government.

“We’ve got a serious problem in this nation . . . There’s a lot of people involved in a paedophile network and the distribution of children, and that makes me absolutely sick,” Finchem told the religious conservative broadcaster Victory News last year. “And unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of elected officials that are involved in that.”

QAnon already had its supporters in Congress — the pro-Trump Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have both shared QAnon conspiracy theories.

Mainstream Republican leaders found a national platform with the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson in April. The first black woman nominated to the bench, with her confirmation fulfilling a campaign pledge by President Biden, Jackson faced a barrage of hostile questioning from Republican senators that Deckman said was “peppered with nods and winks” to QAnon believers.

Without the votes to block her confirmation, Republicans on the Senate judiciary committee seized on a claim that Jackson had issued lenient sentences to convicted paedophiles. Before the hearings even began, Senator Josh Hawley issued a tweet suggesting that Jackson’s record — rated “impeccable” by the American Bar Association — “endangers our children.”

“It was a sort of wink and nod to the support that was out there . . . That was interpreted by QAnon supporters as evidence she was part of this cabal of paedophiles,” said Deckman.

“GOP rhetoric is tapping into these themes because it really riles up their base in ways that they think is very effective ... It was tapping into those QAnon beliefs without having to say the word QAnon.”

The White House condemned Hawley’s comments to Jackson as an “embarrassing QAnon-signalling smear,” but the attacks reached their target audience. Threats of violence towards Jackson, which were egged on by right-wing commentators, abounded online.

“Democrats really doing their best to secure the paedophile vote for future elections this week,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr, the former president’s eldest son.

Prior to the 2020 election, Trump was seen by QAnon supporters as a saviour-like figure who would fulfil their apocalyptic vision of a storm that would sweep away American elites.

If he does seek to avenge his defeat in a rematch with Biden in 2024, QAnon believers would flock to his banner again. The groundswell of support for the movement since January 6 last year, however, has underscored that QAnon has a life and momentum of its own.

“I suspect Q reappeared because the political calculus was there . . . Irrespective of Trump, these beliefs have a life force because of social media,” said Deckman. “These ideas are still out there and they’re not going away.”

Open your eyes. Many in our govt worship Satan,” said the post on the 4chan platform in October 2017 (Hugh Tomlinson writes).

The first of these “Q drops” or “breadcrumbs”, from an account named “Q Clearance Patriot,” would spawn a conspiracy theory that would obsess the American right, inspire scores of violent attacks across the US and climax with the January 6 riot at the Capitol last year.

Many of the supporters of Donald Trump who stormed Congress in an attempt to halt certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, carried signs declaring loyalty to the anonymous poster known only as “Q”.

“Trust the plan,” said one. “Q sent me,” said another. January 6 was believed to be the arrival of “The Storm” that QAnon believers had waited for, when Trump and his allies in the US military would declare martial law and round up their political enemies. The beginning of “The Great Awakening” was at hand.

Beliefs

Trump was woven into the movement’s beliefs from the start. According to QAnon lore, he had been recruited by American generals to wage a secret war on Satan-worshipping paedophiles within America’s political, business and media elites.

Along with Democratic leaders such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, figures including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama were accused of molesting children and eating their victims to harvest the chemical adrenochrome.

Trump avoided endorsing the movement but said its followers were “people who love our country”. Posing alongside his military chiefs at the White House in 2017, however, Trump said: “You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.”

QAnon believers took this to mean that the president was sending them a coded message about his plan.

When the Storm reached its peak, this cabal would be imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay. The ringleaders would face military trial and execution. Trump would unmask them and restore America to greatness.

QAnon soon expanded to incorporate other conspiracies, including the existence of UFOs and the notion that 9/11 was a government plot.

Origins

Many QAnon followers were already obsessed with the “Pizzagate” theory, which gained currency in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Followers believed left-wing Satanists let by Clinton were running a child sex ring from a popular Washington pizza restaurant. One man even drove to the capital from North Carolina and fired a rifle inside the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria.

From there, it was a short step for followers when Q emerged in 2017. Over the coming years, almost 5,000 Q drops were posted, peppered with cryptic slogans and pro-Trump messages.

Who is Q?

Q claimed to have high-level security access he called “Q clearance” sparking rumours he was a senior military official.

This year, however, forensic linguists announced that they had solved the mystery of Q’s identity. The two studies, one Swiss and one French, used a mathematical analysis of linguistic and writing styles to identify the South African tech journalist Paul Furber and internet message board operator Ron Watkins as the creators of the movement.

Contacted by The New York Times, both men denied they were Q, although the French study insisted it had identified their writing in Q’s posts with 99 per cent accuracy. Furber, 55, claimed that Q’s writing “took over our lives.” “We all started talking like him,” he said.

Watkins, 34, a conspiracy theorist who ran the 8kun platform where QAnon posts began appearing 2018, simply simply said: also said: “I am not Q.”

Violence

For many, QAnon was just another online social community but the movement drew hardline supporters from the far right and its calls to violence were soon acted on in the real world. QAnon believers have been charged in connection with kidnappings, assassination plots and the 2019 murder of a New York mafia boss. The same year, long before the January 6 riot, the FBI declared QAnon a potential terrorist threat.