Basically, it’s a conspiracy theory worldview that launched in October 2017 with a series of anonymous posts on the website 4chan from a figure named “Q.” Now, Trump’s supporters took this to mean that this person has a high level Hugh “Q” security clearance and was giving them messages from Trump.

In terms of what QAanon actually means, there’s a lot of different factions in QAnon and they sort of believe different things. But pretty much all QAnon people believe that the world, as revealed to them by Q, is run by a cabal of satanic cannibal pedophiles who torture children in satanic rituals, that these people are in the Democratic Party, in Hollywood and in banking, and that they’ve controlled the world for centuries. They also believe that Donald Trump was basically convinced to run by the military to take this cabal down, and that someday there’ll be this big moment called “The Storm” in which Trump arrests and executes all of his enemies.

The polling on this is kind of all over the place, but I think conservatively we can say that between 10 and 30 percent of the GOP is either like hardcore QAnon or has somewhat signed on to a lot of its ideas. And even that I would say is probably at the lower end of reality, so that would just be a conservative guess.

Before QAnon started, there were all these characters on 4chan that were sort of pretending “I’m a leaker in the FBI” or “I’m a leaker somewhere in the NSA” and stuff like that. But for whatever reason, QAnon really caught on, and I think that’s thanks to a combination of things.

One is that there’s this gamification element: the clues are very vague, so people can really get whatever they want out of it. For anti-vaccine people, for example, it’s about vaccines. If you’re obsessed with Fox News and Sean Hannity, it’s about the Russia investigation, etc.

Then, there’s this aspect of people who spend their time doing their research calling themselves “digital soldiers.” So, it’s like: you are the equivalent of a soldier, but all you have to do is spend a lot of time on the internet. I think it’s a very dramatic way to see the world and so a lot of people have been pulled into it for that reason too.

QAnon was lucky in a way in that it had some people who already had YouTube and Twitter accounts with big followings who latched onto it (I think of Jerome Corsi, for example, who was kind of one of the kings of the birther conspiracy theory and is tight with Alex Jones). So there were all these people who have seen in QAnon a thing that they could make a buck off of and promote. Some of those people have since had falling outs with QAnon but I think they’re one of the reasons it was able to go as far and fast as it did.

This is interesting, yes. I think, first of all, that is true, because I think younger Republicans are probably having more interactions directly with the alt-right. So the initial QAnon-type person is more or less in line with what we think of when we think of a Trump supporter: older, white, probably an evangelical Christian and, frankly, more likely to fall for something on the internet.

Because younger people, even Republicans, with more experience on the internet see this stuff and just think “Oh, that’s 4chan, I know what that is… I’ve seen like a bunch of crap for a decade on 4chan and I’m not just going to assume that that’s actually Michael Flynn typing away.” But, especially during the pandemic — when obviously the world seems a lot crazier and people have more time at home, or maybe they’ve been laid off — we’ve seen the rise of this broader kind of QAnon.

So now you’ve got more women and young people, and more black and Hispanic people getting into it, often through this “save the children” push (which is a vague anti-sex trafficking thing). You even have yoga-type people getting into the picture. So the question of what a typical QAnon person looks like is now really, really in flux.

One thing that’s really interesting about QAnon is that, because it’s so big with boomers — and because the Kennedy family looms very large for them in general — JFK is a very big deal. QAnon has kind of subsumed many other conspiracy theories: 9/11 Truth, vaccine stuff, and also the JFK assassination. So that’s been sucked in too and people think “JFK stood up to the cabal and that’s why they killed him.”

And so Trump is, for them, the first non-cabal president since JFK. This narrative re-enters the picture after Q disappears for a little while and someone named R claims that JFK Jr (who died in a 1999 plane crash) in fact faked his own death to get revenge for JFK’s killing and join up with Trump to be Q.

So there’s this very intense JFK Jr Faction that is widely reviled by a lot of other QAnon people. I ran into it at the Trump 4th of July event in 2019 at the Trump hotel, where all these women were wearing JFK Jr masks. And I asked, you know, “What does this mean?” and this lady said “He’s alive!” and then sort of ran away. And then there’s a guy they think is JFK Jr in disguise — Vincent Fusca, who’s obviously not JFK Jr but really leans into it. He wears a George magazine shirt and clearly wants people to think that he’s JFK Jr.

It is unusual to see a group that’s actually in power create their own conspiracy theory because they’re more often about rationalizing why a group believes it’s been robbed of power. But they had it. For me, the explanation is that Trump during the campaign made all these promises and people just thought all their personal issues would be solved if only Trump was elected. But then, when he did get into office and it was just tax cuts or him being bogged down with the Mueller investigation, they had to come up with excuses for why their hero was failing to really do anything for them. And I think the answer became “Well, you know, even though it appears that Republicans have total control of the government, the deep state is actually undermining him.”

So then it becomes much bigger than just winning an election and Trump is having to take on this centuries’ old evil. The corollary to that is it’s also just a lot more fun to see politics in that way compared to being like “Oh my gosh, like, can we get this out of committee?” or “Maybe they’ll use budget reconciliation?” That’s very boring stuff, and given that Trump attracted so many people who were not familiar with politics, you can easily see why they would prefer a tale of demons and witches and stuff like that.

Yeah, this is a case in Sequim, Washington, which is a pretty sleepy retiree town in which the mayor’s job is essentially to set the agenda at the local meetings. But the guy is a QAnon supporter and is very open about it and tells all his citizens “check out these QAnon videos” and wears a little Punisher pin to his meetings, and refused to quarantine after traveling to South Dakota. He’s a pretty hardcore QAnon guy, and it’s sort of thrown the town into chaos. His critics say he fired the city manager because the guy was not into QAnon, so there’s also clearly a lot happening behind the scenes there.

But yes, I think it’s seeping into a lot of random places. I was struck a couple of years ago, when Mike Pence went to Florida and one of the people guarding him was a local SWAT team guy who had a bunch of QAnon patches. So suddenly this random police department had to be like “Why are you a QAnon guy?” and he then makes a cause out of saying “I can wear my QAnon gear when I’m here.”

I think what’s interesting to me is how QAnon has sort of seeped into all these different facets of life: you have QAnon Instagram influencers and you have Q kids — kids younger than ten years old who love QAnon. It’s very weird stuff.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is very much a way of seeing the world outside of just politics or Donald Trump. It applies to anything. It applies to entertainment and culture too because they think celebrities are big time cannibals and all that sort of stuff.

Joe Biden’s inauguration is maybe the most pivotal moment for QAnon since it started, because it’s all premised on the idea that Donald Trump is the president and so, if he’s not the president what happened? Initially they were expecting these mass arrests: right up until fifteen minutes before Biden was sworn-in and they all thought “Oh, this is going to be good. This is my super bowl and it’s going to be huge.”

And then Kamala Harris gets sworn-in and they’re like “Oh, that’s a little weird, they’re really taking it down to the wire…” and then, when it became clear that Biden was actually president the initial reaction on the forums was one of physical sickness. Stuff like “I want to throw up. I look like an idiot. I’ve been telling everyone in my family that they’re big dumb asses and they need to get ready to learn about the cabal, but now I look like a fool.”

So there was initially a lot of revulsion feeling that QAnon had ripped them off. But then, within a couple of hours, they had circled the wagons and were saying “Wait a minute: maybe this Q plan was a little ambitious, but that’s only because the deep state is so bad. Maybe it’s that Trump is going to come back in 2024. Maybe what Q taught us is real and we still think Comet Ping Pong is a pedophile dungeon, but maybe The Storm isn’t ready.”

The big thing right now is the idea that Trump is secretly going to take power in a couple of months. They’ve really gotten into this. What’s funny about QAnon is the way that it’s constantly evolving. So now, for example, they’re saying that the United States is only a corporation and it’s been owned by the City of London since 1877.

Plus they’re getting into a lot of sovereign citizen language. Now, Trump is going to come back in March and run the new American Republic so that essentially this can be a new country. That’s the latest theory and it remains very intensely focused on Trump. But yes, when he seems to be backing away from them, what do you do?

I think we’re going to see some QAnon followers, hopefully, come to their senses and drop off. But I don’t think there’s gonna be a huge number of them, and some are going to get even more hardcore because they’ve been tested and are now even more committed to it.

I think maybe the Q branding is going to be considered a little cringeworthy for them because the theory has so obviously turned out to be wrong. But the messaging of QAnon and these related conspiracy theories may continue — in the same way that after the Comet Ping Pong shooting people stopped saying “Pizzagate” but then that reemerged as QAnon, which was essentially the same thing but with a less tarnished branding.