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In late October, just days before a different InfoWars-inflated conspiracy—about anti-fascist protesters plotting a civil war—was about to fizzle, a user identified as Q on the imageboard website 4chan started posting vague, portentous messages related to an approaching “storm.” The user claimed to be a high-level government operative, and the folks on /pol/, a subsection of 4chan with a history of spreading fake news, took notice—with some even believing it was President Donald Trump himself who was posting the messages on 4chan and on a similar website, 8chan.
Today, #Qanon (meaning Q, anonymous), also known as #TheStorm, is the web's fastest-spreading and most pervasive right-wing conspiracy theory. The ideas behind it are difficult for outsiders to understand—in part because it has come to be applied to almost anything by those who believe in its veracity—but here’s what you need to know about the biggest fake news story of 2018.
A meme celebrating a fake news story called #TheStorm. Twitter
A Trump quip gave life to #TheStorm
The date was October 5,a Thursday in an exhausting week in the news cycle. The Las Vegas mass shooting had claimed the lives of scores of innocent people days earlier, and no motives had been attached—pumping a whiff of conspiracy into the air. Trump, while speaking to his press pool and surrounded by military leaders for a photo-op, made cryptic remarks that have never been fully explained by the White House.
“Maybe it's the calm before the storm,” he said to the gaggle of reporters. “Could be. The calm before the storm. We have the world's great military people in this room, I will tell you that. And we're going to have a great evening. Thank you all for coming.”
A reporter requested clarification about what Trump said: “What storm, Mr. President?”
“You'll find out. Thank you, everybody,” the president said.
Trump’s tone sounded confident: Perhaps he was secure in the knowledge of some future revelation he couldn’t quite name—possibly something that could damage his political enemies. (The remark also came in the context of a heated back and forth with North Korea over that country's buildup of ICBMs, and could have been read to refer to that.) In reality, however, the remark just as easily could have been a troll carried out by a man with a documented history of playing games with the press. Still, some of his supporters took notice, and it cultivated a sense of expectation: When would the storm hit? What would it reveal?