The author of the largest modern conspiracy theory Qanon almost stopped leaving messages. But his movement continues to live

Qanon is the latest conspiracy movement in the United States, which appeared at the end of 2017 and has since attracted tens of thousands of thousands of both ordinary Americans and celebrities since then. In less than two years, the mysterious anonymous anonymous on the forum 4Chan wrote thousands of posts with hints of a certain “plan” of President Donald Trump, urging his followers to decipher his messages. Q hinted at large -scale cleaning and arrests of the leadership of the Democratic Party of the United States and other opponents of Trump, but not one of his predictions came true, and soon Q was paused. Nevertheless, this not only did not disappoint his fans, but also gave a new impulse to the movement.

"Calm in front of the storm"

The Qanon movement was not spontaneously originated, but on a specific day after a specific information farm - at the end of October 2017 at the Political Forum / Pol / anonymous 4chan image in a thread called “Calm Before the Storm). Trump himself said the phrase “this is a lull in front of the storm” at the meeting with his military advisers on October 5, 2017, putting everyone in his mystery - no comments clarifying what he had in mind, neither from the president himself, nor from the White House, it was not followed.

On October 28, the first post appeared in the thread on / pol / that said:

The order to extradite HRK [Hillary Rodam Clinton] starting in several countries yesterday in case of trying to escape across the border. Passport on special control from 12:01 of the night on October 30. The mass riots of opponents and other attempts to escape from the United States are expected. The operation will be carried out by the US Armed Forces, NG [National Guard] is put on combat readiness. Proof: October 30, find the NG fighter in any of the large cities and ask if he is on combat duty.

After that, the mysterious author who hinted that he has the highest level of access to state secrets, wrote thousands of posts, the general meaning of which is about the following:

• He is included in the deeply classified circle of the closest advisers to President Trump, who is instructed to fulfill a certain grandiose plan and convey its maintenance to the American public, bypassing the "mainstream media" - which, of course, are controlled by malicious puppeteers and are engaged in the misinformation and rolled of the public.
• There is no chaos in the White House: on the contrary, everything that happens is all unexpected resignations, the defeat of the Republican Party in the Alabama elections, and so on - this is part of the Trump plan to clean the ranks and identify the traitors. Moreover, the object of investigation of the special prosecutor Robert Muller was not Trump, but Hillary Clinton and her environment, and the real “Russian conspiracy” weaves just them. The investigation is only a cover, in fact, the president helps special prosecutor Muller to reveal the conspiracy of the Clintons (as well as Barack Obama, George Soros, Rothschilds, the Saudi Royal Family and others).
• The leadership of the Democratic Party and many American celebrities worship Satan and are involved in the giant international scheme of trade and sexual exploitation of young children (this is in a sense an expanded and supplemented versionof Pizzage -an earlier conspiracy theory that appeared shortly before the 2016 presidential election in the United States.)
• The US intelligence services are also compromised by the conspirators, so the US Armed Forces and the National Guard will be engaged in cleaning directly by Donald Trump. That's it, at any time-Q calls even specific dates-arrests will begin, which will be accompanied by riots. This is the “storm” that Trump spoke of.

Q hinted that he was in the immediate vicinity of the President, leading to the proof of photographs allegedly aboard the Air Force One presidential aircraft, or “predicting” the content of the following Tvites Trump. The first Q Qami posts looked like a list of marks, which the author called " bread crumbs ." “Who did Potus meet yesterday [the abrreviating President of the United States]? Was the prosecutor general of Sehnz there? What is the name of the company that carried out the repair of the White House? Why can't you carry phones to some rooms? "

To these questions, readers were invited to find answers on their own - than many participants of 4Chan and the followers of Trump and took up, coming to even more exotic and incredible conclusions than their anonymous source. Qanon became a kind of “universal theory of conspiracy”, which included almost all well -known conspiracy theories, hoaxes and their characters, from Atlantis, reptiloids and Masons to Vladimir Putin (he plays the role of one of the world leaders in this universe, which is controlled by the worldwide conspiracy of the devil -worshipers, but he understands this and actively counters it).

Exit to offline

For several months, the movement has vanished tens of thousands of supporters who recorded hundreds of hours on YouTube and wrote millions of tweets, deciphering the more vague and abstract hints Qhan, and then on another anonymous imageboard of 8Chan. Proponents of Qanon find each other according to certain hashtags and clothes with the letter Q or the abbreviation wwg1wga (“What We Go One, We Go All” - “Where we are all, we are all there”). Fans also appeared among celebrities - for example, the television series star Rosanna Barr or the creator of the Minecraft game Marcus Person nicknamed NOTCH, who in March 2019 wrote a tweet “Q is telling the truth. Do not believe the media. ”

Qanon quickly spilled out of the Internet into real life: on June 15, 2018, 30-year-old Matthew Fillip Wright, who was driving an armored car and armed with an automatic rifle, blocked the highway leading to the Dam of the Gover in Nevada. Wright demanded to “publish the report of the inspector general,” referring to the report of the General of the General of the US Department of Justice Michael Khorovitsa based on the results of the investigation of the FBI actions in Hillary Clinton. The report actually came out the day before, but Q hinted that only a substantially edited version would be available to the public, and the full contains a lot of compromising information about Hillary Clinton, the leadership of the Democratic Party, the FBI and other enemies of President Trump. There are no hints of the real existence of the “full version of the report”.

None of the predictions Q has come true, he almost stopped writing

Neither Hillary Clinton, nor Barack Obama, nor their mysterious puppeteers were arrested, and Donald Trump never revealed the global conspiracy of the Pedophile satanist. The report of the special prosecutor of Müller, who was so waiting for the fans of Qanon (after all, Muller, in their opinion, actually secretly worked with Trump, and did not investigate his ties with Russia), was released in April 2019, and there was not a single mention of any mysterious conspiracies. But all these obvious inconsistencies did not disappoint the majority of Qanon fans at all - on the contrary, the movement continues to gain new adherents.

Then he practically fell silent q-instead of more or less coherent sentences, his posts on imageboards first turned into random sets of letters and symbols, which fans consider some ciphers or codes, and then completely disappeared. In 2017, Q gave out posts dozens every day, but for the whole of May 2019 he wrote only three posts, and then he was silent for a whole month at all. Who is the author of all these posts remains a mystery. If we do not take into account the assumption that this is a truly high -ranking employee of the President Trump administration, the most realistic guesses boiled down to the fact that this is a large -scale mystification from a bored troll, possibly a journalist or political opponent of Trump, who wants to expose the president’s fans with gullible fools.

When Q was silent for a month, the journalist of The Daily Dot Mike Rothschild decided that his story was over, and asked his Twitter question to Kanon fans: they say, what will you do next, because the new “crumbs” are clearly not worth waiting for? (True, on June 27, after Rothschild's article , Q wrote three more posts with a difference of a few minutes: one with some supposedly encrypted hubby and two with the phrases “for God and the country! Patriots, fight. Q” and “Get ready. Q”).

Having talked with Qanon adherents - both ordinary and famous, with hundreds of thousands of followers - Rothschild came to the conclusion that the silence Q not only did not lead to the weakening of the faith of his fans, but also strengthened it and gave a new impetus to the movement. They are still firmly firmly, Rothschild writes, believe in a certain “plan” of President Trump and continue to decipher the riddles left by Q. Now his posts, repeatedly preserved and archivated for the disappearance or removal of forums, serve as a kind of sacred scripture, whose true meaning should be comprehended independently, in the process of “opening their eyes” to themselves and others. The manipulations of politicians and the media. The most dynamic and massive conspiracy therapy has healed its own life, getting rid of the need for its creator.

Alexey Kovalev