QANON CONSPIRACY ENDORSED BY ‘MINECRAFT’ CREATOR MARKUS ‘NOTCH’ PERSSON
The QAnon conspiracy is an evolution of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory claiming the non-existent basement of a Washington D.C. area pizza restaurant is a hotbed of sex trafficking —part of a larger child sex slave network of elite pedophile rings operated by prominent members of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, James Comey, Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign manager John Podesta. Evidence is either nonexistent or spurious in the extreme, such as stills taken from concerts at the restaurant, which Pizzagate adherents claim depict Satanic child abuse rituals, and a fixation on the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic.
After the 2016 election and the victory of Donald Trump, Pizzagate involved into the more elaborate QAnon conspiracy, beginning with anonymous 4chan posts from a person or people called Q, believed on faith to have high security clearance and access to the Trump administration’s inner workings. Q adherents believe Trump is enacting a secret plan to undermine the Deep State aligned against him, culminating in the mass arrest of complicit politicians and celebrities—an event known in QAnon circles as “The Storm” or “The Great Awakening.” The QAnon conspiracist belief in secret tribunals and arrests whisking away Democratic politicians to Guantanamo Bay manifests as a fervent desire to see all political enemies of the right arrested and the government overthrown by Republican authoritarian powers.
Repeated false predictions hasn’t shaken the core of Q’s supporters, who quickly embraced Notch’s message.
Q’s cryptic, oracular posts have allowed for multiple interpretations of the conspiracy theory to flourish. Since QAnon is so diffuse adherents can believe anything from a vaguely populist, revolutionary impulse to the widespread theory that JFK Jr. faked his own death and is now teamed up with Trump to bring down a Satanic pedophile elite. It’s hard to say exactly what version of the conspiracy Notch is endorsing, though he does offer some hints.
“Someone is definitely posting under that name, and whoever it is had gotten people digging real deep to uncover the truth,” Persson wrote, later posting to Twitter the QAnon adherent catchphrase WWG1WGA (“Where we go one, we go all”).
Notch has so far declined a wager of “any amount” with leftist podcast Chapo Trap House host Matt Christman, who bet “a specific Q prediction of your choosing (ideally a high-profile arrest of a named Deep State traitor) does not occur by a given date, also of your choosing.”
Notch’s belief in the QAnon conspiracy is far from his first endorsement of right-wing, reactionary politics. He has previously called for a Heterosexual Pride Day to counter Gay Pride, claims “gender shaming” is used to silence men online and called a fellow game designer a “c-nt” in defense of the Gamergate harassment movement.
https://www.newsweek.com/qanon-conspiracy-minecraft-creator-notch-markus-persson-1351465
All for a LARP?