What happened to QAnon? And if Trump comes back, does the conspiracy theory? https://t.co/uqZjcI0Rqy
— Philip Bump (@pbump) April 3, 2024
Philip Bump, at the Washington Post — “What Happened to QAnon?”: [gift link]
As the 2020 election approached, President Donald Trump had two problematic groups of supporters that he didn’t want to alienate. One was the Proud Boys, an extremist group that had already earned a reputation for engaging in violence against opponents. The other was more loosely knit: adherents of the QAnon movement.
QAnon was problematic for very different reasons. While there had been crimes linked to the movement (including at least one killing), the political challenge was primarily that the most fervent supporters held views that were somewhere between bizarre and deranged. There’s an international cabal of prominent people in entertainment and the Democratic Party that worships Satan and traffics children to ingest a chemical they produce? Got it.
Those views sat at the extreme, certainly. But even more anodyne manifestations of QAnonism were dubious, centered on an anonymous figure, Q, who allegedly worked in the Trump administration and was helping the president combat the evil deeds of his enemies. Q began posting cryptic messages online a few months into Trump’s presidency, with tens of thousands of people subsequently parsing them for hidden meaning.
By mid-2018, QAnon was a prominent part of Trump rallies. Supporters held up signs or large “Q’s” to get on camera, with success. By early 2019, after a spate of news stories drawing attention to the movement’s bizarre beliefs, adherents reported being asked to hide any Q insignia at the president’s rallies.
Then the election rolled around. Trump’s campaign slowly began to embrace members of the movement, recognizing its scale and loyalty to his politics. He refused to condemn even the more extreme forms the movement took and, only weeks before Election Day, even endorsed the idea that QAnon members were combating child trafficking…
Interesting Read: “What Happened to QAnon?”Post + Comments (39)