There Is No QAnon

How did a movement so influential manage to recede from view so quickly? The answer is camouflage: the movement purposefully obscured its origins to better spread its beliefs. This is partially due to overt instructions by Q, but the process largely occurred among adherents in a gradual and organic fashion.

In September 2020, Pew published a poll showing that the number of people who had “heard about QAnon conspiracy theories” had grown from 23 percent to a whopping 47 percent in the previous four months. Not long after, Q made the above-quoted post, a disingenuous denial of the very existence of QAnon, encouraging its promoters to distance themselves from what had become a toxic brand to avoid “surgical removal” of their content by platforms like YouTube.

Q was not wrong about that last part: there had been a concerted effort by government agencies working hand in glove with social media platforms to eliminate QAnon content in the name of combating disinformation. But online censorship aside, the process of self-obscuring had been happening for some time. The movement adapted like a virus to naturally arising antibodies in the form of horrified reactions by family members, friends, and mainstream media outlets.

In response to online censorship and the degradation of their personal relationships, QAnon promoters started hiding the letter Q and the number seventeen (the seventeenth letter in the alphabet is Q) in the images they posted online, studiously avoiding direct references to “QAnon.” This evolved into opting for associated concepts and slogans like “the Great Awakening,” “the Storm,” “Where we go one, we go all” (often abbreviated WWG1WGA), “Pedogate,” and, more successfully, “Save the Children” (much to the horror of the anti-child-trafficking organization of the same name).

In their quest to “redpill” those around them — the term for onboarding people onto the conspiracy theory — adherents tried and tested various methods and found that subtlety was less off-putting, at least at first. The trick was to get people to “do their own research” instead of demanding they embrace QAnon up front by sending them a link to the most popular early QAnon video, 2018’s Q: The Plan to Save the World.

In 2019 and 2020, the movement released a glut of more aesthetically competent documentary-style propaganda videos to meet the demand for less obvious fare, notably: Fall of the Cabal, Out of Shadows, and Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19. These paved the way for the actual theater release of the Q-adjacent child-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom in 2023, starring QAnon-promoting actor Jim Caviezel.

By then, the movement’s strange lingo had fallen out of the mainstream, leaving only the less controversial child-trafficking slogan “Save the Children.” The movement’s respectability-politics strategy worked. Sound of Freedom was released in theaters and grossed over $250 million worldwide. QAnon had successfully infiltrated popular culture.

The Men Who Stare at Posts

While the QAnon movement underwent this metamorphosis, various supportive public figures were forced to contend with its growing popularity. Interestingly, as QAnon migrated to larger platforms, early influencers failed to graduate from the margins to the mainstream. These included Dave Hayes (“Praying Medic”), Liz Crokin, David Marc Fishman (“X22”), Tracy Diaz (“Tracy Beanz”), Jeffrey Pedersen (“InTheMatrixxx”), Bill Mitchell, Coleman Rogers (“Pamphlet Anon”), Dustin Krieger (“Dustin Nemos”), Jordan Sather, and “Joe M,” who remains anonymous to this day. In fact, none of this original crop of influencers are among the most followed QAnon accounts on social media today, having been eclipsed by a handful of unhinged new-guard anonymous users. Pour one out for the pioneers.

But neither the new nor old guard of purist QAnon influencers have made much of a dent in the mainstream media. The spotlight is instead occupied by people who were already public figures with government jobs and just happened to cozy up to the movement.

Leaving aside professional right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and Jerome Corsi, both of whom embraced and then feuded with QAnon before it even hit the mainstream, three movement-adjacent figures come to mind: Michael Flynn, a retired three-star general and former national security advisor under Barack Obama who spoke at a QAnon event and is considered a hero by the movement; Marjorie Taylor Greene, a sitting Georgia congresswoman with a personal history of embracing QAnon; and Kash Patel, Trump’s current nominee for FBI director and a frequent guest on obscure QAnon talk shows.

Michael Flynn

Michael Flynn was lionized from the very beginning of the QAnon movement, his name appearing in Q’s posts thirty-nine times between 2017 and 2021. He is best known by adherents for popularizing the term “digital soldiers” in a November 2016 speech to the pro-Trump Young America’s Foundation, thanking the assembled “army” for their role in electing the president.

This was particularly noteworthy since Flynn had a long career as a senior-level intelligence officer with the US Army and once served as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. QAnon supporters have continued to identify as “digital soldiers” and frequently refer to an ongoing “spiritual war” between good and evil they believe themselves to be waging, a sentiment echoed by Flynn in speeches and op-eds. The retired general went so far as to trademark the phrase and sell digital soldier, WWG1WGA, and Great Awakening merchandise.

After being pardoned by Trump in 2020, Flynn appeared on multiple QAnon podcasts, including Bards of War and The MG Show. On July 4, 2020, he released a video in which he can be seen gathering around a fire with family members taking a military oath to defend the Constitution, which concluded with the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” His brother later unsuccessfully sued CNN for libel and defamation over their coverage of the video.

In May of 2021, Michael Flynn made a paid appearance at the For God & Country Patriot Roundup in Dallas, Texas. Various QAnon influencers attended the event, and its logo included an image of a cowboy hat with WWG1WGA printed on it.

All of this would seem to paint Flynn as a true believer, but he may be more of an opportunist. Despite the movement’s many financial contributions to and staunch support of Michael Flynn, a private recording that emerged in November 2021 captured him privately dismissing QAnon as “nonsense” and a “disinformation campaign” that he attributed to “the CIA” and “the Left.” In 2023, he publicly stated on X that he thinks Q is “a major psyop.”

He maintained that position until Donald Trump won the presidency a second time and overlooked him for a cabinet position. Since then, it appears he’s up to his old tricks. In December 2024, he used the slogan WWG1WGA in a reply to his own post ominously claiming he “still [knows] where the bodies are buried.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s case is different in that she was an avid QAnon supporter before entering politics. She has managed to rebrand enough to win and hold a seat as a congresswoman representing Georgia’s Fourteenth District.

In November of 2017, shortly after Q began posting, Greene broadcast a Facebook Live video during which she claimed that “Q is a patriot,” concluding that “there is a once in a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out. And I think we have the president to do it.” The video, which lasts twenty-nine minutes, also includes antisemitic conspiracy theories about “the Rothschilds and George Soros” being “puppet masters” of “global evil.”

Greene showed support for QAnon in X posts through December 2020, when she shared an article claiming that QAnon was “about millions of people waking up to the lies.” In February of 2021, just three months later, she made an apology on the House floor, claiming that she “stopped believing” in QAnon and that she thought “school shootings are absolutely real” and not “staged” as she had previously claimed. “These were words of the past,” she explained. “These things do not represent me.” Greene was nonetheless expelled by the US House of Representatives from two of her committees over her past remarks.

Although she professes to be a reformed conspiracy theorist, it appears that Greene continues to believe bizarre claims about weather control, which date back to a 2018 Facebook post she made referencing the Rothschilds again and “what looked like lasers or blue beams of light causing the fires,” referring to wildfires in California. In the wake of Hurricane Helene in October of 2024, she posted on X, “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”

Despite her deep involvement with QAnon, Greene continues to wield political power — a testament to the movement’s ability to recede from view without really going anywhere. She is currently heading the congressional DOGE subcommittee, which corresponds with the potentially unconstitutional Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s task force that is presently busy gutting federal agencies.

Kash Patel

Compared to Greene and Flynn, Kash Patel is a latecomer to QAnon. After a stint as a trial attorney with the Justice Department, he went on to play an active role in the Republican pushback against Russiagate — an investigation into alleged pro-Trump “Russian interference” in the 2016 presidential election. Serving as a senior committee aide to House Intelligence Committee chair and QAnon favorite Devin Nunes, Patel’s involvement earned him a mention in a November 2018 Q post, with Q simply stating: “Kashyap Patel — name to remember.”

A MAGA loyalist, Patel wrote a children’s book titled The Plot Against the King depicting Donald Trump as the victim of scheming royal court members Hillary Clinton (“Hillary Queenton”) and former FBI director James Comey (“Keeper Komey”). In his story, Patel casts himself as a wizard coming to the aid of “King Donald.”

His sycophantic defense of the president was handsomely rewarded: Patel has now been confirmed as the head of the FBI and is undergoing vetting by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has led to public scrutiny of his relentless promotion of QAnon. A Wired-commissioned analysis revealed that Patel appeared on “at least 53 episodes of 13 podcasts that have overtly promoted the QAnon movement and/or shared QAnon-related conspiracy theories.” “I agree with a lot of what that movement says,” Patel told a pro-Trump influencer in 2022, speaking about QAnon. Patel also repeatedly praised the movement in social media posts, interacting frequently with QAnon adherents and influencers.

Patel’s publication of a list of sixty “deep state” enemies in a book titled Government Gangsters led Senator Dick Durbin to warn in Patel’s confirmation hearings that Patel would “use the FBI to target his enemies — and not the enemies of our nation.” Durbin further stated that, prior to Patel’s confirmation, “multiple whistleblowers have disclosed to my staff highly credible information indicating that Mr Patel, a civilian, is personally directing the ongoing purge of senior law enforcement officials at the FBI.”

Under questioning by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, Patel explained that he had “publicly rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.” The statement seems in conflict with his extensive record of support for the movement. As of this week, the man who once vowed to turn FBI headquarters into a “museum of the deep state” is now the head of that agency.

The Information Wars

The living legacy of QAnon is much greater than the personalities who have smuggled its ideas into positions of political power. It’s alive in how Americans perceive our political agency, how we process current events, and how we interact with traditional and social media. The QAnon wave may have broken, but its sediment has settled deep into American political life.

QAnon adherents are not alone in perceiving themselves as “digital soldiers” fighting an “information war” between good and evil. Conceding a fact or perspective that is beneficial to your perceived opponents is akin to a retreat. This can be seen in the mirror narratives of Russiagate (purporting that Donald Trump was secretly a Russian agent) and QAnon (purporting that Donald Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of satanic pedophiles). Although the two are hardly equivalent, both of these belief systems have allowed their adherents to feel like they’re fighting to expose a hidden evil embedded in the highest rungs of power. They represent two narrative strains that have long held power in the United States: Cold War paranoia and satanic panic, respectively. Both movements saw supposed insiders spring up online, promising the imminent release of unseen documents and the arrest of their perceived enemies. Many adherents believed justice was just around the corner. Neither have led to tangible results for those invested in them.

Our eroding trust in the mainstream media and the proliferation of online alternative sources was always going to cause an information collapse, but QAnon hastened and colored it in a particular way. It mainstreamed the idea that we all must “do our own research” about current events. This “research” seeks to reveal hidden truths beneath the intentionally fictitious narratives provided by legacy media and institutions.

Liberals are not immune to this type of thinking: see Russiagate, or the tenor of some Joe Biden fans’ complaints about a secret plot to knock him out of the election, or the “BlueAnon” conspiracy theory that the attempted assassination of Donald Trump was staged.  However, the process of generating conspiracy theories from current events is more visible and pervasive on the Right. Recent examples include false claims about the pandemic, the idea that the furniture company Wayfair is trafficking children through their website, 2020 election denial, and the belief that shadowy government officials planned the recent California wildfires.

One of the longest shadows cast by QAnon is the resurgence of satanic panic in American cultural and political discourse. Today every large-scale public event seems to bring with it a debate over whether or not we’re witnessing a demonic ritual in disguise. This includes rap concerts, Grammy performances (criticized as diabolical by Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and political pundit Charlie Kirk), and even the Olympics’ opening ceremony (which drew the ire of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Elon Musk). QAnon has transformed what was once the domain of obscure online cranks into an acceptable subject of conversation for public figures on social media. It’s the most meaningful resurgence of satanic panic since the 1980s, when a wave of 12,000 unsubstantiated accusations of “ritual abuse by satanists” were made in the United States.

The accusations of pedophilia that were part and parcel of the QAnon movement and its precursor, Pizzagate, have also left a long cultural trail. A song in which a rapper accuses another of being a pedophile recently won multiple Grammys and was performed at the Super Bowl — not a QAnon doing, but perhaps an indication of growing cultural immunity to flippant child abuse allegations. In the shadows of this sensationalistic cultural phenomenon lies a more problematic development: the rise of online sleuthing and vigilante justice in the name of combating child trafficking.

In Arizona, a militia assembled from around the world in a hunt for imaginary child sex traffickers. In Missouri, a self-appointed “predator hunter” was accused of interfering with local police’s ability to prosecute alleged child abusers. Anti-child-trafficking educators have had to contend with the effect of the myths propagated by QAnon, which distract from the reality of how most trafficking occurs. Organizations that have been combating the issue for years were flooded with bogus stories of children being trafficked through the furniture website Wayfair, an event that also led the Department of Homeland Security to pause active investigations so they could look into the absurd conspiracy theory.

Especially after the success of Sound of Freedom, the GOP has been eager to integrate child trafficking into its messaging. The 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference compared the topic to “modern-day slavery.” On the campaign trail, Trump promoted Sound of Freedom and proposed the death penalty for “anyone caught trafficking children across our border” — this despite his immigration policies slowing down the effort to combat human trafficking during his first term. The issue, proven an effective talking point by the QAnon movement, will most likely continue to be used as a way to galvanize the Republican base. Concern for children’s well-being is a mainstream value. Why shouldn’t conspiracy theories about harming children be mainstream as well?

We Are All QAnon

The “QAnon-ization” of American life can be seen as a type of contemporary folk storytelling, an age-old mechanism to “reenchant” a sterile and alienating modern world and assert agency in a disempowering capitalist society. It can also be understood as a psychological coping behavior. In their book on conspiracy beliefs, Helen Hendy and Pamela Black write:

When US citizens experience intense life stressors (such as health, money, loneliness problems), especially when combined with the powerlessness symptoms of PTSD (memory problems, disordered sleep, hypervigilance, social withdrawal), those individuals might adopt extreme beliefs as “cognitive” coping mechanisms that offer them a sense of greater understanding, power, and community with like-minded others.

In a study of 977 Americans, Hendy and Black found evidence for a compelling three-step process that led to conspiracy theories: “life stressors → PTSD symptoms → extreme beliefs.” Structural and sociopolitical factors like disparity of wealth, the lack of a social safety net, institutional failure, the erosion of social bonds, and the rise of climate-related disasters all contribute to an individual’s life stressors and feelings of powerlessness. When people can’t resist these degradations in a practical way, they will attempt to reassert agency in ways that seem irrational.

Without an understanding of the power structures contributing to our immiseration, shadowboxing imaginary puppet masters on social media can feel like a more dignified alternative to submitting to an intolerable status quo. In an academic paper on conspiracy beliefs, Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M. Douglas write:

People of all eras and cultures are likely to believe in conspiracy theories, provided that they are confronted with societal crisis situations. Second, this relationship between societal crisis situations and belief in conspiracy theories is attributable to feelings of fear, uncertainty, and being out of control. These feelings instigate sense-making processes that increase the likelihood that people perceive conspiracies in their social environment.

QAnon’s most lasting impact is normalizing this way of responding to social crisis — and making it far less likely that people will seek alternatives, like concrete political organizing around necessary and achievable social and political reforms. Until we can build compelling reality-based political movements that address the worsening economic and social conditions that gave rise to QAnon — movements that give people the same feeling of recovering agency in a chaotic and disempowering world — the QAnon-ization will continue, whether or not the original label fades from the spotlight.