What the Hell Is QAnon? The Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory, Explained

If you're lucky, before last week you had only ever heard of QAnon from some of Roseanne Barr's less racist tweets. Because it was possible to live your life completely unaware of the new, dumb conspiracy theory taking off online until it finally spilled over into the real world thanks to Donald Trump. Recently, people who buy into QAnon have been visibly showing up at Trump rallies and campaign events, wearing T-shirts and signs to show that they're in the know and they support a president who is supposed to be secretly fighting an international ring of billionaire pedophiles.

But if you're one of those lucky people who doesn't spend lurking on or reading about the seedier parts of the Internet, QAnon is likely a big mystery for you. None of us want to have to know about this thing. But since it's spilling into the real world now, here are some of the basics about this convoluted and elaborate conspiracy.

What exactly does "QAnon" mean?

The whole thing started on 4chan. An anonymous user going by "Q," a reference to the highest level of security clearance, began posting in October of last year. According to Q, who claims to be one or more people high in the Trump administration, all past presidents have been involved in shadowy criminal dealings centered mostly on an international pedophile ring and a global sex trade of child slaves. Featuring prominently in this are the usual boogeyman: Barack Obama, the Clintons, George Soros, the whole gang.

Is that not Pizzagate?

It sounds a lot like it, doesn't it? Think Pizzagate but bigger, more complicated, and dumber. In fact, this is a pretty boiled down explanation considering how complex and grandiose the whole conspiracy is. For example, Q's first post read in part:

Basically, Q was claiming that Hillary Clinton was being arrested, and there would be shortly be protests and lots of other high-profile secret pedophiles trying to run away. The fact that none of these things happened doesn't seem to have tipped anyone off that none of it was true.

This came just days after Trump appeared at a photo op with military leaders and their spouses, and he told the reporters taking photos that it was "the calm before the storm." When asked what the hell that means, he just replied, "You'll see." Many people assumed that Trump was archly alluding to a new war he wanted to start, and others thought, equally likely, that he was just randomly throwing words together to build up drama and keep living his life as one unending reality show promo. To them, "the Storm," an alternate name for the whole QAnon scheme, was the pending round up and imprisonment of all these billionaire liberal pedophiles and send them to Guantanamo Bay.

So Trump isn't just leading this shadow fight, he's also supposed to be aware of Q sharing all this online?

Yep. In fact, as NPR reports, some of the QAnon followers think that Trump himself might be Q. But regardless, QAnon mythology says that Trump is aware and involved. As woman named Rachel Young attending the Trump rally in Pennsylvania told NPR's Jeff Brady:

More than that, Q devotees think that the entire Russia probe is a sham. Not in the typical Republican sense where people throw the term "witch hunt" around, but in the sense that Robert Mueller and Trump are secretly working together to expose these elite pedophiles. All the publicly-known indictments, the angry tweets, the stuff about Donald Trump Jr. being the biggest dummy alive, all of that is a part of an elaborate ruse to throw off the scent.

This seems like a big leap of faith of take all that seriously.

You mean because Trump seems incapable of keeping secrets, or of not taking credit for things? Or because his only interest with other rich people is to give them tax breaks? Well, Q assures everyone that these are all schemes that have been in the works for years to throw off the president's enemies.

But it's so outlandish, how are people being drawn to this?

There's something psychologically comforting about the whole idea, the thought that someone is in charge and is running everything exactly the way it needs to be run. Vice points out that a common phrase from Q followers and alt-right figures is "trust the plan," i.e., have faith that Trump is completely in control and nothing is going on the way it shouldn't be.

On top of that, it's important to keep in mind who the villains are here: the rich. The elites. The people who already have all the money and influence. One person interviewed at that Pennsylvania rally told NPR, "He's saying all these things about how they lead, how they—these rich people using their money to kind of, like, manipulate the masses." And the thing that's most unsettling about that is that it's true. Or at least a nugget of it is. Billionaires have been building and consolidating power and political influence like crazy in the last few decades, but it's all for much more mundane goals like destroying environmental protections or rolling back corporate taxes or infiltrating Harvard Law to fund pro-business classes. That stuff is scary and daunting but it doesn't have the action movie urgency of a bunch of kids needing to be rescued.

Do we know anything about who Q is?

In a word, no. There's no way to even know if Q is one person or more than one, though there's speculation among the credulous that he or she is actually a team of people. BuzzFeed News has actually uncovered a new conspiracy theory growing off of this one: Namely, that QAnon is a prank being pulled on Trump supporters by a bunch of leftists. The impetus for this is a 1999 Italian novel called Q written by Luther Blissett. Now, Luther Blissett doesn't exist. It's the name used by a network of leftists and anarchists—covering artists, activists, and agitators—in Italy in the '90s. The plot of Q is weirdly similar to the conspiracy that Q is peddling online, and that's driving speculation that Q's claims are just an attempt to make the right look completely unhinged.

Are there any long dead public figures, possibly part of a political dynasty, that QAnon claims are really alive and planning to soon reappear?

Oh my God, yes! John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is secretly a Trump supporter (though everything he does is secret since he's secretly alive). In fact, liberals had JFK killed and would have taken out JFK Jr. next, to make way for Hillary's political career, had he not gotten ahead of them. Now, he's Q, or one of the people who is Q, or working with Q, or at least down with what Q's doing. According to Will Sommer at The Daily Beast, this is actually coming from "Ranon" (because "R" comes after "Q"), a new user who started posting research in July when Q took an oddly long break between dropping clues. Anyway, JFK Jr. allegedly appeared at a Trump rally, according to all this.

I'm very tired now.

Well, get used to it. There's a chance that now that the whole debacle is getting media attention it may start to dissipate, but the fact that we got to a point here it's spilling into the real world and people are showing up at rallies wearing QAnon swag? That's probably not a good sign of anything.