dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

https://theweek.com/articles/930894/qanon-suddenly-everywhere–whether-people-realize-not

Tapping through Instagram stories recently, I was surprised to find my entirely normal friend sharing QAnon content. She was surprised, too, because she'd never heard the word "QAnon" in her life.

Three in four Americans could say the same, as of March, and only 3 percent then said they knew "a lot" about QAnon, which refers to both a conspiracy theory and the movement that has grown up around it. As I wrote while exploring QAnon's religious aspects earlier this year, the gospel of Q goes like this: There's a cabal of powerful figures in government (the "deep state"), business, academia, and media who make time for child sex trafficking, cannibalism, and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination. Q is the movement's anonymous digital prophet whose forum posts ("Q drops") reveal both the nature of the cabal and how the movement's messianic figure, President Trump, plans to defeat it.

Q drops are unfalsifiable to QAnon's true believers. Prophecies believed to have come true are taken as proof of the whole theory's veracity. Anything that doesn't pan out is evidence of the cabal's struggle to retain power. Whatever happens, Q is right. The inaugural Q drop, for example, promised Hillary Clinton would be arrested in late October of 2017. She'd be stopped from fleeing the country by the Marine Corps, Q said, and extradited if she made it across the border. The National Guard would be deployed to quell "massive riots" in response to Clinton's downfall.

None of this happened, of course — yet somehow the incoherent ramblings which forecast it sparked a movement anyway.

But I'm increasingly alarmed by a new realization: Knowing adherence isn't the only risk with QAnon.

Take my friend on Instagram. I clicked through to the post she shared and realized pretty quickly it was Q-connected content. One of the accounts the original poster credited with informing her perspective had a Q hashtag in its bio: #wwg1wga, an abbreviation for the grammatically obnoxious slogan of QAnon unity, "Where we go one, we go all."

But my friend had no idea what that hashtag meant. I don't think she even noticed it. She shared the post because it had a message against sexual abuse and trafficking of children, a cause she cares about deeply (and cared about before QAnon ever existed).

The author of that report, incidentally, had the exact same experience I did: An acquaintance unaware of QAnon shared Q content in her Instagram story. Her post was about child trafficking, too, and Facebook data the Times article cites — that "[i]nteractions on posts with the #SaveTheChildren hashtag … have grown more than 500 percent since early July" — suggests this phenomenon is widespread.

Many Americans, attempting to oppose abuse of children, are unwittingly evangelizing for Q. They may accidentally convert their friends. They may accidentally convert themselves.