QAnon is the one conspiracy theory to rule them all
Chris Cillizza
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
QAnon is the one conspiracy theory to rule them all
Chris Cillizza
Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large
Updated 3:16 PM ET, Wed August 1, 2018
How a right-wing conspiracy is going mainstream
(CNN)If you watched any of President Donald Trump's campaign rally in Tampa, Florida on Tuesday night, you likely caught a glimpse of people holding up signs with "Q" or "QAnon" printed on them. Those people are adherents of a broad-scale conspiracy theory that pits President Trump against a global elite seeking to murder him.
Yes, you read that right.
With QAnon moving from the fringes of Internet thought into something much closer to the mainstream, I reached out to the Daily Beast's Will Sommer, who has been writing and thinking smartly about QAnon since its inception. (Read his full explanation of QAnon here.) Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.
Cillizza: Let's start simple: Where the heck did QAnon come from? And do we have any sense how many "members" it has or whether it is growing?
Sommer: QAnon started last October, when an anonymous person or group of people called Q started posting cryptic clues on 4Chan. Trump supporters eventually found these clues, which they call "breadcrumbs," and spun them into a whole counter-narrative that's contrary to just about everything that's actually happening in the world.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/01/politics/qanon-trump/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_allpolitics+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Politics%29