A heavily-tattooed protester wearing horns and a fur hat, who is believed to be a QAnon conspiracy theorists known as the ‘Q Shaman’
Credit: Win McNamee/Getty
As insurrectionists breached the US Capitol building last night, they waved flags and placards adorned with Trump slogans and tenets of his presidency.
Among them was a heavily-tattooed protester wearing horns and a fur hat, who is believed to be a QAnon conspiracy theorists known as the ‘Q Shaman’.
Surrounding him were Confederate flags and "stop the steal" signs. At the top of the steps into the building was another placard that repeated the falsehood that "Joe Biden is a pedophile".
The baseless claim owes its origin to QAnon, a millenarian conspiracy theory that perpetuates the idea that the world is secretly controlled by a cabal of Satanist elites, who traffic children for sexual abuse purposes and to drink their blood.
In October, President Trump confessed that he didn’t "know much" about the QAnon movement other than the fact they "like me very much, which I appreciate".
While the President did his part in whipping up the crowds in Washington into a frenzy, the conspiracy group also had a hand in driving events to boiling point.
The role of QAnon
Last year, Facebook announced that it was banning all accounts linked to the movement from its platform, marking a significant escalation in its approach to conspiracy theories.
Yet the baseless theory behind QAnon has made increasingly significant inroads to the mainstream of the US Republican party. In September, Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials from the Trump campaign dropped at the last minute plans to attend a fundraiser organised by a couple who have spread QAnon memes.
In subject matter it echoes earlier false theories, like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s. But it also has a specifically political bent. Followers believe that only Donald Trump can save the world.
It might seem strange that such a theory would end up on the Presidential stage, but its beginnings are even stranger.
The dark corners of the web
In the wake of the November 2016 elections in the US, a series of posters on the niche messageboard 4chan, mostly known for hosting taboo content including violence and porn, claimed to have an inside track on the tightly-contested election, posting cryptic messages about topics including 9/11, Hillary Clinton and Russia.
Most of them sank without trace. But one — Q — transcended that corner of the internet to become first a popular internet phenomenon, and then a very tangible political force. How exactly did this happen?
In 2018 US media site NBC identified three online actors as the architects who took the theory mainstream in late 2017.
Two were 4chan moderators known online as Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, who oversaw the messageboard /pol/ where “Q” first started appearing. According to blog posts and tweets by YouTuber Tracy Diaz, online alias Tracy Beanz, the pair reached out to her about the posts after she made a YouTube video about them, on November 3, saying Q “kind of seems legit”.
“A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” BaruchtheScribe, a South African whose real name is Paul Furber, told NBC.
About | QAnon
Almost instantly, supporters’ efforts were “highly coordinated”, write US communication professors Whitney Phillips and Ryan Milner in You Are Here, an upcoming book about misinformation.
“Armed with cheat sheets full of time-tested manipulation strategies—including ironic humor, zippy memes, and canned talking points—QAnon proponents began working across platforms to push the story as far as possible.”
4chan isn’t exactly a user-friendly experience for people unused to the deeper corners of the internet. The group’s migration to a Reddit discussion forum known as the Calm Before the Storm (later banned by the social media site for inciting violence) marked a major step in its movement towards the mainstream.
“I knew how much those folks hated ‘normies’ on their page, so I came up with the subreddit,” Diaz wrote in a Twitter thread.
Moving mainstream
From there it moved to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. By the start of 2018, QAnon followers, who tend to be in the “baby boomer” demographic, were filtering back to the messageboard, leading 8chan to tweet: “We joked about it for years, but #QAnon is making it a reality: Boomers! On your imageboard.”
YouTube was also becoming a major gathering place. The two moderators appeared on conspiracy theorist and YouTuber Alex Jones’s channel InfoWars shortly after Christmas 2017, exposing the posts to his millions of subscribers. A 24/7 QAnon livestream channel known as Patriots’ Soapbox was founded by PamphletAnon.
All this work paid off the following summer, when journalists covering a rally in Tampa, Florida, were greeted with a sea of Q t-shirts and banners, “all the better to bait reporters with,” Phillips and Milner write. Mainstream journalists writing explainers and FAQs spread the theory to new audiences, delighting its supporters.
Patriots’ Soapbox 24/7 YouTube livestream regularly has 1,000 people tuning in, and collects donations from supporters via fan site Patreon, PayPal and in cryptocurrency. Tracy Beanz also collects cash from supporters via PayPal and Patreon, where she says donations have allowed her to buy new equipment, hire a research assistant and convert a room in her home into a studio.
Aoife Gallagher, an analyst at extremism think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said that influencers use “every online resource and platform available to them to make money from the spread of QAnon content".
“It’s safe to say that those involved from the beginning, or those who have followed the QAnon movement closely since the beginning, are aware of the initial intentions behind those who started it, yet many continue to push Q’s outrageous claims and make a lot of money while doing it," she added.
They’ve also broken into the political mainstream. In recent months a flurry of right-wing US political figures have appeared on Patriots’ Soapbox, including Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert and Trump campaign director of press communications Erin Perrine. It has even found its way onto US TV service Roku.
We still don’t know who is making the posts, or why and how they started happening. Over the years “Q”’s posting habits have changed leading to speculation and infighting about takeovers and imposters.
In pictures: Donald Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol Building
Q posts stopped appearing on 4chan weeks after they started and swiftly popped up again on 8chan, an even less closely-moderated but similar site.
In 2019 8chan shut down after it was used by several mass murderers to publish “manifestos”, and Q disappeared for several months before reappearing on 8kun, a functionally identical site launched to replace 8chan by its owner, Jim Watkins.
It’s clear that association with the theory has led to power and money for many. 8kun "is pretty much just a depot for QAnon posts now," wrote NBC reporter Ben Collins in a Twitter thread. Watkins now also operates a Super Pac, a US political fund dedicated to supporting candidates who push QAnon theories.
Statistics from analytics site Alexa show that 8chan’s audience almost exclusively overlaps with aggregators used to pull Q posts onto a dedicated site. A Patreon linked to one such aggregator registers donations of almost $2,500 a month.
Many of those involved in the initial spread of Q have become disaffected with what it has become. One of them is Furber, who via his Twitter account now promotes posts from a new anonymous user. Known as “Big D*** Anon”, his “insider information” includes the idea that the Trump family are time travellers.
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