Wild conspiracy theories have a way of seeping into public discourse these days, thanks in part to the divided nature of U.S. politics, the growth of websites that actively promote them, such as InfoWars, and the capacity for fake news to spread virally on social media without any fact-checking or oversight.
Enter “Q.”
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.
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.
The “Q” internet posts began appearing three weeks after Trump’s cryptic remark about “the storm.” The anonymous user would ask questions referring to the idea that Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros could potentially be arrested or detained, and would make random claims such as: “This has nothing to do with Russia (yet),” apparently referring to his own internet writings. People started cobbling together the posts and reporting them to one another as clues in what they saw as a larger puzzle. One phrase that gets bandied about a lot on #Qanon threads is “Follow the white rabbit,” referring to the turn of phrase used in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland and the 1999 film
The Matrix, which has been mined for allusions by Trump supporters since he launched his campaign back in 2015.
If you search the hashtags #TheStorm and #Qanon on Twitter, you will find users connecting the prophesies of “Q” to—well, pretty much anything. Do you incorrectly believe that Clinton aide Huma Abedin was doing tacit work for the Sunni Islamic organization Muslim Brotherhood during Obama’s tenure as president? That will be revealed in the forthcoming "storm" of information, if you want. Do you imagine that the rapper Jay Z, who recently drew Trump’s ire for remarks he made about black unemployment, is in cahoots with Soros, the billionaire philanthropist? “The storm” will exposethat nonexistent plot in time. Are you angry about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into alleged acts of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election? Then you’re free to imagine that “the storm” will one day reveal that investigation to be a front for the
real Russian collusion, which the conspiracists say took place at the behest of perpetual far-right scapegoats like Clinton and Obama. (It did not, for what it’s worth.)
