Figure 1.1. Number of QAnons supporting congressional primary candidates. Source: Bhashithe Abeysinghe.
LOONY LIES AND CONSPIRACIES
Making Sense of QAnon
Background and Context
The screen is dark with eerie music playing in the background. The music reaches a crescendo, and a flaming Q appears as a deep voice reveals, “8 million children are missing!” According to the video, the children are being bred specifically for their blood and body parts, they are missing birth certificates so there is no way to trace them, and our (U.S.) government is doing nothing about it—in fact they are participating in the blood lust. The only person on the planet, who can save the children, is Donald John Trump.1
Welcome to the universe of QAnon.
QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory from the darkest underbelly of the Internet. Named after the Department of Energy’s highest level of security clearance, a Q clearance is related to access to nuclear weapons’ designs but not to other national security concerns.2 The conspiracy theory conceives that former President Trump is fighting a battle against a “deep-state” cabal of Democratic saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex or for their blood.3
QAnon burst onto the scene in October 2017 with predictions that the National Guard was about to arrest Hillary Clinton. On October 28, an anonymous user browsing the /pol/section of 4chan, a notorious alt-right imageboard, saw a post that read, “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM—8:30 AM EST on Monday—the morning on Oct 30, 2017.” This user would later adopt the name “Q Clearance Patriot” (shortened to “Q”). Q hinted that they were a military officer in former President Trump’s inner circle; their writings—almost 5,000—gave birth to the QAnon conspiracy theory.4
This original Q post was on the 4chan site, which was launched in 2003. There have been several “chans,” including 2chan, 4chan, and 8chan. Historically, the chans, which originated in Asia, were the purview of involuntary celibates (incels), anarchists, and nihilists before spreading to the United States. The 4chan site hosts discussion boards dedicated to different topics, from anime and manga to video games and porn.5
As QAnon evolved, it moved from 4chan to other social media platforms, and its messages spread to Facebook, Instagram, Parler, TikTok, and even to Nextdoor and Peloton. In a short four years, QAnon metastasized from a fringe movement on anonymous message boards into a cultlike movement, with millions of followers around the world—one that has captured the imagination and practically seized control of the Republican Party.6 More surprisingly, it has ensnared many women, causing incalculable damage to families and resulted in murders, kidnappings, and intense partisanship in U.S. politics, as you will read in this book.
There were 97 QAnon-supporting candidates in the 2020 primaries, of which 22 Republicans and 2 Independents were victorious and ran in the November 2020 elections. In 2021 a freshman senator from Georgia was removed from her committee assignments; a second freshman senator from Colorado is being investigated for aiding and abetting a failed coup. And, instead of shunning the baseless conspiracy, the Republican Party appears to have embraced it. Statistics show a steady climb in the percentage of QAnon believers in the United States from 5 percent in 20197 to 10 percent in 2020 to 17 percent in February 2021. An NPR/Ipsos poll revealed 17 percent of Americans believe a group of Satan-worshipping, child-enslaving elites want to control the world. Equally disturbing is that another 37 percent aren’t sure whether the allegations are completely false.8
David Gilbert from Vice News explained that:
QAnon followers come from all walks of life—they are liberals, conservatives, PhDs, lawyers, doctors. There are highly educated people that fall into these movements and it is dangerous and remiss to pigeon-hole QAnon followers according to educational attainment or social status.9
Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate from Montreal who studies the conspiracy, criticized the Democratic National Committee when they launched a $500,000 ad campaign in February 2021 that offered the GOP a choice between being “the party of QAnon or appealing to college educated voters.” Argentino insisted that QAnon comprises people of all educational levels, and he railed on Twitter: “Can we stop saying these are uneducated people, that they are crazy and wear tinfoil hats?”10
The increasing number of people who believe in QAnon and the range of socioeconomic and educational strata to which it appeals mean that it is highly likely someone in your family or among your friends believes that QAnon is real.
What is QAnon? Why do ordinarily sane people believe something so outrageous? How did we get here? And can we fix the problem?
This book seeks to answer all of these questions. We examine the possible identity of Q, trace the origins of QAnon to long-entrenched anti-Semitic tropes, explore why women have been especially vulnerable to QAnon, and explain psychologically how Q has managed to take root in the U.S. body politic.
What Is QAnon?
By now, you have probably seen and heard about QAnon: a baseless conspiracy theory that claims there is a secret cabal of devil-worshipping Democrats and elites that feed off the blood of children. Like its predecessor Pizzagate (discussed in Chapter 2), which was another social media rumor alleging that Hillary Clinton was operating a child-trafficking scheme from Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, QAnon began on the chans in a series of forum posts. Its origins are hotly debated: Did it start as a puzzle, or a joke, or even as the basis for a live-action role-playing (LARP) game? The nature of QAnon and the complexity of the posts changed as it moved through different areas of the Internet before ending up on the Facebook feed of your family and coworkers. The core conspiracy claim of QAnon is that there is a “deep state,” and the only person who is capable of fighting it and preventing a dystopian future (like the one depicted in film The Purge) is Donald Trump.
No one really knows definitively who Q is.11 Theories vary widely, according to Vice News and HBO documentaries tracking down the identity of Q. Some say that it is Edward Snowden, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, or even Alex Jones.12 The HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm settled on Ron Watkins, the son of Jim Watkins—known by his computer alias “CodeMonkeyZ.”
Q began posting in October 2017, feigning that they were a high-level intelligence operative with a Q-level security clearance. Based on months of research by Vice News, there appeared to be several possibilities for Q’s identity, four of which we present below.
As researchers have sought to identify who Q is and debate the likely identities, it is equally plausible that whoever was posting as Q might have changed a few times—a literary ruse used in shows like Gossip Girl or Bridgerton. Terrorism expert Clint Watts has likened Q to the fictional character “Dread Pirate Roberts” in the film The Princess Bride.13 In the film there is no ONE pirate named Roberts, but the name is passed down every few years to someone else. Westley explains this baton passing to Buttercup:
Roberts had grown so rich, he wanted to retire . . . he told me his secret. “I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts, . . . my name is Ryan; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts. . . . He was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Patagonia.” It was the name that mattered.14
It is also possible that the original Q began posting for the LOLs or “lolz”—as they call “shit posting”—by adding vague Nostradamus-like predictions. This is what most people without much experience with 4chan might have misunderstood: that much of the content was meant to be sarcastic or not serious. At the outset it was not clear whether Q was real or a fictional game. But its gamelike characteristics were precisely what appealed to the 4chan audience and kept them engaged. Vice News investigated and observed:
Part of the QAnon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on a message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts alongside Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.15
So let’s begin with the first person claiming to be Q.
Manuel Chavez III (aka Defango)
Manny Chavez, whose gamer avatar goes by the name Defango, claims that he invented the idea for Q but only as a live-action role-playing (LARP) game.16 These games are popular online and in real life, and the players all know that it is a game. People dress up as soldiers from the Civil War and re-enact famous battles at Gettysburg or dress up as knights and joust at medieval fairs. In LARPs, usually everyone knows they are fake and just for fun.17
Chavez claims that Q was a LARP game that grew out of an online puzzle, Cicada 3301. These complex online puzzles began on 4chan in 2012, and they captivated their audience of hackers and online gamers. The challenging puzzles were designed to sustain the user on the platform for hours at a time. There is some speculation even today that these Cicada puzzles were actually created by U.S intelligence agencies as a kind of audition to help them identify talented young people to for recruitment into the CIA. The puzzles leveraged valuable skills in hacking, cryptography, or code breaking in order to succeed.18
Not long after Chavez claims to have developed the idea for Q, a rival named Thomas Schoenberger (who has also been suggested as being Q) stole the puzzle out from under Manny. Schoenberger allegedly created a new Cicada puzzle in which he could “radicalize smart people.”19 After Schoenberger took over the Cicada puzzles, the images and references grew darker. Schoenberger employed iconography from the occult and Nazi symbolism. In Schoenberger’s puzzle, one of the greatest prizes you could win was the “Spear of Destiny” (the weapon that Roman soldiers used to torture Jesus Christ on the Cross), which was also a treasured Nazi symbol.20
QAnon has been compared to LARPs because it employs many of the same design structures and intermittent rewards. According to game designer Reed Berkowitz, QAnon “has a game-like feel to it that is evident to anyone who has ever played an online role-play (RP) or LARP before.”21 Like online platforms whose goal is to sustain user engagement and keep them online by offering a variable schedule of reinforcement, the Cicada puzzles ensured people would remain engaged for hours and hours at a time, figuring out the solution to the next level and the next.
In the early 2010s, there were many anonymous characters online. 4chan was full of posts that claimed to be from some (likely fictional) “highly placed government official.” QAnon was not the first “anon” poster on the message boards in cyberspace; there had been others like High level anon, FBI-anon, CIA-anon, White House insider-Anon, and many more. But those other anons failed to catch on in the same way that QAnon did, nor did they successfully migrate to other platforms, becoming accessible to non-techie gamers or LARPers. So while the Cicada puzzles became increasingly popular after 2012, in 2017 an influential Twitter handle @snowwhite7Iam (the anonymous account of Lisa Clapier) encouraged people to leave the Cicada puzzle and to “follow the white rabbit” to participate in a new game. QAnon used the familiar metaphor from Alice in Wonderland.
Clapier, a media producer from Los Angeles, was a longtime activist and conspiracy theorist who had been involved with several left-wing movements including Occupy Wall Street, Julian Assange, Anonymous, the original Cicada 3301 puzzle, and finally QAnon.22 Her persuasive tactics successfully pulled people out of the Cicada puzzle and directed them down the proverbial rabbit hole to the world of QAnon. In the first 10 days, after November 8, 2017, over 100,000 tweets containing the hashtag #FollowTheWhiteRabbit were posted to Twitter.23
Women on social media helped push the move to QAnon. In November 2018, 24 of the 29 accounts promoting the move from Cicada to Q (83%) used female avatars (although this is no guarantee that they were women). One, a YouTube influencer named Tracy Beanz (real name Tracy Diaz), played a major role. She posted a dozen YouTube videos in which she deciphered Q posts for her audience. Her videos were watched over 8 million times. Beanz provides some early insight into the profit motive for amplifying Q, as she included links to her Patreon or PayPal accounts in all her videos.24
In 2018 several high-profile Republican politicians and “celebrity” Trump supporters like James Woods, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, and disgraced “historian” Dinesh D’Souza were key nodes pushing the hashtag #FollowtheWhiteRabbit or other Q-affiliated slogans.25
Q became the narrator of a tale that cast Trump as the central hero in an epic global struggle, doling out the story in thousands of posts known as “Q drops,” first on 4chan, then on the even more outré 8chan and its successor site, 8kun.26
In his interview with Vice News, Manny Chavez explained that the paradigm of leaving clues or breadcrumbs, known as Q-drops, originating from the Cicada puzzles.27 People familiar with puzzles would recognize the similarity with QAnon right away. Then devoted QAnon enthusiasts, called “bakers,” would gather together the various Q-drops and post their findings on aggregator sites, with open APIs (application programming interfaces) like Facebook and Twitter.
It is worth clarifying that the Internet is comprised of open APIs (things you can find and view on Google), encrypted and semi-encrypted platforms (WhatsApp, Telegram, Hoop Messenger messenging sites), and the dark net. We hear more now about the encrypted and semi-encrypted platforms because they have been used by terrorist groups like ISIS or the Proud Boys to plan attacks. Encrypted sites are only accessible to members of channels or chatrooms, and navigating these semi-encrypted platforms is challenging. The dark net, or dark web, is not easily searchable and is often the venue for illegal activities like buying drugs, human trafficking, or other shady activities. Most of what happened with QAnon occurred first on the message boards and only later moved to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The technique of leaving little clues as Q-drops enabled QAnon influencers to convince their audience that they were “figuring it out for themselves” when in fact the clues or Q-drops were pre-seeded in such a way that the conclusion was predetermined, just as it had been in the Cicada puzzles. This could be compared to a therapist guiding their patient or a lawyer leading a witness. Chavez explained:
Basically all of the methods and systems used within QAnon are direct copies of weapons grade psychological warfare tools embedded into a puzzle. I mean who gets their information from a shady guy posting on a pedofile [sic] board?28
QAnon operated anonymously on the message boards and maximized this anonymity by using automated accounts. QAnon also used “sock accounts,” intended for deception by using fake names, as well as automated algorithms that could share content to hundreds or even thousands of people simultaneously, called “bots.” While we know now that Facebook algorithms suggested QAnon groups, even before QAnon used Facebook it had tweaked the algorithms to amplify QAnon content so that it might appear at the top of any search result. We also now know that there was “malign foreign influencers” that amplified the QAnon messages by boosting the hashtags and “liking” the posts to game the algorithms.
Going back to the online gamers and the Cicada puzzles, these were the same people initially involved with Q when it began leaving cryptic posts on 4chan.29 However, not everyone believes Manny invented Q, partly because he has mocked the QAnon movement. Chavez claims that he has also been the target of multiple accusations of stalking, harassment, and even pedophilia by Tom Schoenberger.30 Schoenberger was interviewed extensively in the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm and pointed to a number of possible QAnon influencers that drove the movement from the message boards to the mainstream, but they also might have shared information with Trump loyalists to leverage QAnon support for the president.
Jim and Ron Watkins, Father & Son
The next possible candidate for who might be Q is the father and son duo of Jim and Ron Watkins. Cullen Hoback, the HBO documentarian, claims that Ron Watkins let it “slip” that he was Q, although the fact that Watkins was controlling the Q-drops and had already been identified by Fredrick Brennan made the revelation somewhat anti-climactic.
After its emergence on 4chan, whoever was posting as Q found himself in need of a new platform when 4chan became inhospitable because of the Gamergate backlash in 2014. You may recall that Gamergate was a controversy on 4chan in which female game developers were horribly cyber-bullied and harassed. The harassment campaign included doxxing (publishing personal details or emails and addresses) as well as death threats and threats of sexual violence. Gamergate is the origin of many of the worst elements from the Internet’s repulsive underbelly that we see today, including incels (involuntary celibates), men’s rights activists, misogyny, and racism. It is likely that many of the QAnon posts were problematic for the 4chan moderators, who kicked off thousands of accounts because of Gamergate. Many of the people who were de-platformed by this expulsion migrated to 8chan, a new message board that had been created by Fredrick Brennan, a disabled teenager from Brooklyn. Brennan created 8chan in 2014. One assessment of 8chan was that it was a fringe Internet image board best known for pornography, racism, and assorted illegal content.31 Jim Watkins, a former helicopter repairman for the U.S. Army, alleged that 4chan had been “infiltrated by enemies”32 and rationalized the departure from 4chan to 8chan.
An alternative explanation for why QAnon moved from 4chan to 8chan was that Jim Watkins was looking for an excuse to seize control. Watkins was trying to persuade the original founder of 8chan, Fredrick Brennan, to work with him in 2014. Jim and his son Ron became Brennan’s partners once the 8chan message board became too large for Brennan to handle by himself. One reason why people assume that the Watkins father and son might be Q is that Brennan claims that he can read the computer code on the boards that point to Ron Watkins leaving the Q-drops.33 According to Brennan, in the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm, the irony that Jim Watkins might be Q (given that QAnon fancies itself as saving children from sexual exploitation) is Watkins’s own history as a pornographer. 34
For some people, QAnon is more of a religious movement than a conspiracy theory. Like most of the Judeo-Christian faiths, there is a core set of beliefs that stem from revelations in a text. “In this case, that text didn’t appear on stone tablets handed from a mountaintop or on golden plates buried in the ground in upstate New York, but through a series of cryptic postings on a website best known for racist memes and the manifestoes of mass shooters.”35
In 2016 Brennan quit 8chan. In doing so he gave complete control of the platform over to Jim and Ron. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, Jim Watkins sought to capitalize on Trump’s victory and create his own right-wing news channel to compete with Breitbart. Watkins called it The Goldwater and posted stories about the Clinton body count (following the allegations of their murder of Seth Rich) and pedophilia and the FBI impounding Democrats’ laptops (sound familiar?).36 The online news channel didn’t succeed, hilariously because it was named after the Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, and many of the 8chan members assumed it was a Jewish site. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Watkins admitted: “They all think we’re a bunch of Jews, because [Goldwater] is a Jewish name. There’s [sic] a lot of people who think that the Jews are running the world.”37
Q began posting on a dedicated 8chan sub-board called CBTS_Stream (Calm Before the Storm)38 beginning in December 2017. At this time, the CBTS board was managed by a South African conspiracy theorist named Paul Furber. Furber would later feud with Jim Watkins over control of the board and its content. Q portrayed itself as being the most incredible intelligence insider in history. But accessing these message boards was primarily the purview of the young and the technologically adept. To enable easier access to the materials for a broader audience, Furber decided to use Reddit to post QAnon information. Reddit is a popular website that aggregates content based on users’ likes. Users can submit posts, and members vote up or down, which changes its rankings. If the users “upvote” a post, it will appear to be higher on the rankings and get more visibility. Subreddits are smaller versions of Reddit. Furber created a new Subreddit devoted exclusively to Q content and called it “r/thegreatawakening.” The move to Reddit was the first pivotal move that allowed QAnon to tap into a larger audience of likeminded conspiracy theorists. Being on Reddit also meant that discussions about Q-drops were no longer the purview of the fringe message boards. Reddit was a more accessible platform.
As QAnon moved from fringe message board sites to more mainstream ones, it found a new audience: Not the 20-year-old gamers who frequented the chans or Reddit, but the over-65 boomers on Facebook via posts on dozens of public and private Facebook groups.39
From Reddit, QAnon supporters began to ardently proselytize their “truth” on Facebook and other social media platforms to their friends and family. QAnon became so popular it produced a dedicated YouTube channel; Facebook was flooded with Q-related posts, memes, and images and found an ever-increasing audience receptive to its messages.
Once QAnon became more popular, Jim Watkins observed other people were able to monetize it.40 During this period, the story gets complicated. There were several apparent sources for the Q-drops, and they often reflected the author—changing tone, punctuation, style, and even spelling. Paul Furber felt that since he created the original message boards, they were “his.” Anyone connected to the message board could post as Q, and several people at the time did. This included the couple responsible for “Patriot Soapbox,” a round-the-clock YouTube channel for QAnon information and discussions.41 Coleman Rogers and his wife Christina Urso ran Patriot Soapbox and were dedicated Trump supporters. The password for the 8chan site (which was “mattock”) was easily hacked, allowing the couple, Furber, or Watkins to post what appeared to be competing or contradictory Q-drops.42 As journalists have attempted to identify who Q is, they have been unable to determine who was responsible for the materials on the QAnon Subreddits.
For the most part, the HBO docuseries Q: Into the Storm presents the elder Watkins seeking to control the QAnon message boards without interference from Rogers, Urso, Furber, or anyone else.43 Once the Q account had been hacked, Jim Watkins had the excuse he needed to create a brand new message board for which he maintained sole control. Using his unique access as the owner of 8chan, Jim had his son Ron (known on the channel as “CodeMonkeyZ”) exclusively authenticate Jim’s posts as “coming from Q.” In doing so, Watkins delegitimized anything Furber, Rogers, or Urso had posted previously on CBTS. QAnon followers watched in real time as Q announced that “he” was abandoning the CBTS board for a new message board—created by Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan and authenticated by Ron Watkins (the site’s administrator).
When Jim created the new board, Q’s writing style changed. Q began using all caps and incomplete sentences, posting acronyms and abbreviations instead of full sentences. The HBO documentary alleged that Watkins’s posts attempted to implicate Trump’s ally Steve Bannon. The “Great Awakening” Subreddit had over 70,000 followers, but in 2018 Reddit banned Q for “posting content that incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses . . . [All of which got] users and communities banned from Reddit.”44 Reddit moderators to the Q Subreddits—Tracy Beanz (Diaz), Coleman Rogers, his wife Christina Urso, and even Paul Furber—were all banned from the site.45
While Reddit had banned QAnon content, moderators, and Subreddits in 2018, 8chan remained a cesspool where racists and right-wing extremists congregated. Even though he had originally created it, Fredrick Brennan began calling for 8chan to be shut down once it became the platform of choice for mass casualty shooters and terrorist attackers to live stream their deadly operations.46 Brennan did not want to be associated with this material.47 In contrast, Jim Watkins advocated for limitless protections for free speech. This included hate speech and even the live streaming of 17 minutes of killings in March 2019. Brenton Tarrant, the mass killer in New Zealand, had posted his manifesto to 8chan before carrying out his deadly shooting attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, that left 51 people dead. After the massacres in New Zealand, Watkins refused to take Tarrant’s 74-page manifesto down, even after it became clear what had transpired and that people might emulate this kind of attack.48 New Zealand and France jointly declared in the “Christchurch Call,” which committed the signatories to the elimination of terrorist and violent extremist content online.49
As the conspiracy picked up more followers and new converts, locating Q-drops became a cottage industry. Apps were designed to provide push notifications the moment a new Q-drop was released. Nevertheless, the message boards remained very difficult to navigate for people who were not as tech savvy.
In the fall of 2018, Q followers began showing up at Trump rallies brandishing Q signs or wearing Q-branded clothing. Up until 2018, Jim Watkins had been unable to profit off of 8chan’s QAnon posts; however, he did eventually monetize QAnon to a degree. Jim Watkins initially wanted power and influence, but after seeing how some of the influencers were benefiting financially from QAnon, he might have wanted “in on the action.” While Watkins was posting on 8chan, Jason Gelinas, a Citibank executive, became an ardent QAnon supporter.50 Gelinas’s descent into QAnon was prompted, as we explain in Chapter 3, by a feeling of something being “not quite right.”
Like many of you, I felt that something wasn’t right in the world, that our country was headed in the wrong direction,” he wrote. “Then something magical happened in 2016 that defied expectations—a complete outsider to the political establishment, Donald J. Trump, won the presidential election! Amazing. A glimmer of light in the darkness.51
The message boards and Subreddits were still challenging to navigate for the uninitiated. In April 2018 while working at Citibank, Gelinas designed a website dedicated to offering Q-drops in a user-friendly setting. Gelinas called it Qmap.pub. Qmap was designed for people who had little to no computer experience. In contrast to the message boards, Qmap used a minimalist design with pull-down menu options, a search function, and icon buttons for curated content. This new venue increased the popularity of QAnon. Each Q-drop was titled (rather than numbered as it was on the message boards), and tabs across the top of the screen enabled users to sort drops by theme, hashtag, or a category such as “suspicious deaths.” On the left side of the screen Jason had placed icons: chess pieces, a globe, or a skull for quick access.52 Gelinas generated thousands of dollars every month with donations to his Patreon account thanks to a site that allowed people with limited technological skills to do their own research without having to read through the chan message boards and collect them. Once Gelinas was unmasked as the owner of Qmap in 2020, Citicorp fired him.
By 2020, Qmap.pub drew 10 million visitors a month and played a pivotal role in turning the obscure and incoherent fringe conspiracy into a cult-like following with political repercussions.53 During this same period in the leadup to the 2020 election, Jim Watkins launched a super-PAC called Disarm the Deep State, where people could donate to him to help spread the QAnon message and offer financial support to QAnon-supporting political candidates such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.54 In the 2020 primaries, there were 97 QAnon-affiliated candidates in 30 states.55 Twenty-four went on to compete in the November 2020 election.
ABC News has reported that Ron Watkins was most likely Q, since Jim and Ron were the “two most clearly associated” with the Q-drops.56 The theory that Watkins is Q has been popularized in the “Reply All” podcast, episode 166.57 In the summer of 2019, Cloudflare, 8chan’s cybersecurity provider, cut ties with the platform, and 8chan went dark for three months.58 For as long as 8han was down, QAnon did not post any drops or updates. Then QAnon flickered back to life as 8chan was reborn as 8kun and now was completely under Watkins’s control.59 The only account able to post to 8kun was Q, and the three-month lag resulted, according to Cullen Hoback, in only the QAnon supporters sticking with the new site.
Figure 1.1. Number of QAnons supporting congressional primary candidates. Source: Bhashithe Abeysinghe.
Robert David Steele
Another identity floated for Q is Robert David Steele, an alleged CIA analyst with years of intelligence experience:60 “alleged” because when we had CIA colleagues look him up, they found nothing. Because of the secrecy around someone in the CIA in either the DO (Directorate of Operations like Valerie Plame) or the DA (Directorate of Analysis like the fictional character Jack Ryan) there is no way for anyone to check if someone had a 20-year career in the agency or was in Langley for a few weeks as a low-level analyst. Steele claims to have been a high-level operative and told Vice News that QAnon was “the most sophisticated intelligence operation in history.” Steele has authored multiple conspiracy-oriented books with titles such as False Flag Attacks: A Tool of the Deep State and Pedophiles and Empire: Satan and Sodomy in the Deep State and other conspiratorial texts. Vice News spent months trying to identify the real Q behind the movement. Steele went on YouTube in February 2017, before the first Q-drop, and discussed many of the hallmark tropes associated with QAnon including adrenochrome,61 pedophilia, and warnings about the deep state.62 His videos aired three months before Q began posting on 4chan.
Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
The fourth candidate for Q is that he is a high-level White House insider, like Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (or someone closely connected to him). There is a great deal of speculation as to why President Trump refused to disavow the QAnon conspiracy during the 2020 campaign. There are an additional set of allegations that QAnon supporters point to statements from President Trump that could not possibly be a coincidence. In one Q-drop, Q suggested that Trump would use the term “tip top” and shortly thereafter, Trump appeared on the balcony of the White House with First Lady Melania Trump and the Easter Bunny. Trump called the bunny “Tippy Top.” For QAnon believers, this was proof.63
The reason why people might suspect that General Flynn was involved with Q is because by 2019, most QAnon-related posts on the encrypted app Telegram, the right-wing social media platform Parler, or on other sites included a (now disabled) link to Flynn’s legal defense fund.64 As Q often hinted, “follow the money.” General Flynn himself pledged allegiance to QAnon on July 4, 2020, in which he added the phrase to the standard oath of office “Where we go one we go all.” Flynn then posted the video to Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms ensuring that his oath of allegiance went viral. On General Flynn’s website, he sold Q-branded items, T shirts, and other merchandise evem after this material was banned from Etsy and Amazon.65
“Where we go one we go all”: This phrase is usually used as a hashtag in an acronym #WWG1WGA. In QAnon mythology, cited in Martin Geddes’s writings (and their posts on social media), the phrase comes from an inscription on the bell66 on John F. Kennedy’s sailboat. The boat, Victura, is now part of the JFK Library on the campus of UMass Boston. There is no inscription on the bell (in fact, there is no bell). We checked. Nor is it on the Kennedy family’s other boat, the Honey Fitz. The phrase on the bell is a fabrication from the mind of Martin Geddes, a British QAnon conspiracist. This lie, like so much of QAnon lore, was ripped off from a Hollywood film: the 1996 movie White Squall starring Jeff Bridges, in which there is a bell on their boat with that very inscription. The screenshot from the film is widely circulated among the QAnon supporters as evidence of JFK’s connection to Q.
We may never know definitively who Q really is or was or whether Q has been different people at different times. The Vice News documentary leaves the question unanswered, whereas the HBO documentary settles on Ron Watkins. That said, most followers of QAnon don’t necessarily care who he (or she) actually is since the movement has spread beyond any one individual. According to Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic, QAnon has grown beyond its identity.67 A (now) deleted Twitter account expressed this view succinctly: “NO ONE cares who Q is. WE care about the TRUTH.”68
As you read this book, you might wonder where on earth did these ideas come from? You might also be surprised as you read here that many of the most outlandish QAnon claims have existed for hundreds of years and found a warm reception in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Russian Orthodoxy.
QAnon emerged in the aftermath of Pizzagate when Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to Washington, DC, to liberate the hypothetical children from the basement of the pizzeria Comet Ping Pong. Pizzagate was a 2016 conspiracy theory revolving around suspicions of Democratic politicians trafficking in children. Like QAnon, Pizzagate was a conspiracy theory born on the 4chan message boards and spread by far-right media influencers like Alex Jones’s InfoWars show, Jerome Corsi, and Michael Flynn Jr., son of disgraced General Flynn. In 2016, after driving from North Carolina to DC, Edgar Welch found no children in the basement—in fact, the building did not have a basement. We discuss Pizzagate in greater detail in Chapter 2.
Despite the fact that Welch testified that he was wrong, the same people who believe in QAnon believe that Pizzagate was real. It is worth noting that much of the controversy and rumor mill about Pizzagate was spread by far-right websites and promoted by alt-right activists like Mike Cernovich and the Flynns.69 Foreign actors—such as troll farms in Vietnam, the Czech Republic, and Cyprus—further amplified the false allegations.70
Pizzagate received a rebirth in 2020 on the social media platform TikTok. Michael Flynn Jr. continues to promote Pizzagate till today. Several conspiracies have merged into QAnon, many of which existed prior to 2017. For example, QAnon believes that in addition to the blood-drinking cabal of Democrats, there are lizard people who inhabit this earth in human form. Anna Merlan has likened QAnon to a “conspiracy singularity,” where many conspiracies are merged into a melting pot of unimaginable density. Instead of Q absorbing the adjacent conspiracies, she describes that all the conspiracies come together and overlap, drawing upon one another’s constituents.71
Watching anything about QAnon you will undoubtedly hear that it is a “baseless conspiracy theory with anti-Semitic overtones.” But what exactly does that mean? To appreciate how much of QAnon is old wine in new bottles, we need to briefly explore the history of anti-Semitism.
The Anti-Semitic Roots of QAnon
In order to understand where QAnon derived its most shocking claims, we need to delve into the history of European anti-Semitism and the even longer history of hostility to Jews by the Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox (Eastern branch) Church.
Russian Czar Nicholas II looked upon the Jewish population in his empire with disdain. The Jews had been a troublesome lot not only because they had rejected the Lord Jesus Christ but also because they posed a danger to czarist rule over all of Mother Russia. A generation earlier, Jews had been blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. Between 1880 and 1910, Russian authorities amplified anti-Semitic conspiracies in order to distract the people from their poor living conditions or from imperial corruption; Russian authorities encouraged violence against the Jewish residents of the Pale of Settlement, a geographic area where Jews were permitted to live as they could not freely live anywhere they chose. These paroxysms of violence were called pogroms. They erupted periodically but were perfectly timed around Ash Wednesday and Easter and emboldened by fiery sermons from the pulpit.
In 1900 during the reign of Czar Nicholas II, a new lie emerged that claimed the Jews sought to rule the world by leveraging their (ill-gotten) money and their intelligence to manipulate trusting Christians. As with any anti-Semitism, such views were oxymoronic: Jews were simultaneously strong but weak, manipulative yet easily duped, to be feared and to be scorned.
In 1902, the czarist secret police forged a document to support the fiction about this Jewish plot to take over the world that built upon existing conspiratorial beliefs about the Jewish need for blood and the danger Jews posed to unbaptized babies. Originally published in 1902–1903 under the title Anti-Christ in Russian, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (The Protocols) became one of the most widely disseminated anti-Semitic tracts of all time.
The Protocols Were the Original Fake News
The Protocols, published as a pamphlet, are allegedly the minutes of meetings held by Jewish elders in Prague, which took place at a Jewish cemetery. The cabal came together to discuss how they would carry out their plan to rule the world. Several themes in The Protocols remain full of tropes that exist today: that Jews seek to rule the world; that they control the media; that Jews are responsible for pornography; and that this secret cabal controlled the politicians. Overall Jews had a corrosive and corrupting effect on everyone and everything around them.
The implications in the tract rendered every negative event traceable back to the Jews. Every disaster, emergency, or political upheaval could likewise be traced back to the Jews’ evil plan. Events that had nothing to do with Jews—such as the French Revolution—were still blamed on the Jews as part of their devious scheme. Jews could be simultaneously blamed for both capitalism and socialism (these are diametrically opposed ideologies).
In allocating blame for emerging political movements to the Jews, the czar sought to insulate himself from the political upheaval that was spreading throughout Europe in favor of representative democracy and diminishing the power of antiquated monarchies. By attacking Jews, the Russian secret police was really attacking secular ideologies that threatened to overthrow the czar.
As the pamphlet circulated throughout Central and Western Europe, its origins were revealed to be fake. The tract had plagiarized sections of Maurice Joly’s The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satirical French novel attacking the monarchy, and Hermann Goedsche’s 1868 novel Biarritz. In one chapter, Goedsche envisioned a nocturnal Jewish meeting in a cemetery where they discussed plans to rule the world. In 1872, the chapter from Biarritz was published in St. Petersburg as a freestanding document (not as part of a fictional novel). As the chapter made its rounds through various capitals in Europe, different authors added more details to the narrative. Eventually the chapter was combined with Joly’s material and became the basis of the Russian secret police’s forgery. The fact that parts of the story had been plagiarized from two different novels and merged was temporarily forgotten. In so many ways, the same way that QAnon lore has been constructed from bits of literature and film storylines is mirrored in the way that The Protocols came together.
The Times of London unmasked The Protocols as a fake; nevertheless, anti-Semites propagated the forgery as documentary evidence of Jewish malfeasance. The first non-Russian edition was a German translation published in 1920, followed by translations to Polish, French, and English. That same year, automobile mogul and well-known anti-Semite, Henry Ford published an Americanized version of The Protocols under the title The International Jew. It remains the most widely disseminated work of anti-Semitism, translated into every language and in circulation throughout the world until today.
Adolf Hitler folded The Protocols into his own writings, specifically Mein Kampf. During the rise of Nazism, what previously had been justification for hating Jews for religious reasons (for having killed Christ) was substituted with a more sophisticated justifications for hating Jews for scientific reasons. Hatred of Jews was no longer simply a function of them being Christ killers but Germans considered Jews to be a race set apart by genetically different and inferior characteristics. These inferior elements could not be overcome via assimilation into society or even by conversion to Christianity. Jews were dangerous or threatening because of their blood.
As Hitler rose to power after 1933, the Nazis published 23 different versions of The Protocols. Its ideas and themes were folded into Nazi and Soviet propaganda. Hitler’s worldview reaffirmed there existed a racial struggle (Kampf) for survival of the fittest. For Hitler, Jews were the source of evil, disease, social injustice, and cultural decline. Capitalism and all forms of Marxism, especially communism, were blamed on Jews and their global conspiracy.
After 1948, The Protocols found welcome reception in Arabic translation, and it became a bestseller in the Middle East. Stories of Saudi princes handing out leather-bound illuminated copies to distinguished visitors was a longstanding joke within the State Department, as visiting U.S. politicians had to find evermore creative ways to get rid of the gift since they could not be caught with this material without ruining their political careers.
Conspiracy theories are a common way to explain a precarious world. People seek plausible explanations when things go wrong. Conspiracies offer comfort and reassurance that there is a higher power behind seemingly random events. While The Protocols might have been inspired by elite political ambitions, they resonated with the rank and file because they harkened back to historic religious anti-Semitism that blamed Jews for rejecting Christ as their savior and Lord.
The Catholic Church shifted its emphasis from preaching that Jews had rejected Christ to alleging that they had murdered God. Characteristic of most conspiracy theories, there were innate contradictions—Jews were both weak and powerful. They were inferior but also dangerous. The Church’s accusation of deicide was not renounced until the second Vatican Council (1962–1965) finally repudiated the fallacious charge that the Jews had killed Christ.72 Throughout Europe, Jews were treated as unwanted aliens and every few years would be blamed for the spread of disease or some other black swan event like a plague. The Church continued to promote the idea that the Jews were in league with the devil and portrayed them as using the blood of Christian children for ritual sacrifice.73
Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the second Vatican Council. It is alive and well in the United States. During Trump’s first presidential campaign, he aired a two-minute ad, entitled Trump’s “Argument for America,” that was full of anti-Semitic tropes. The ad focused on billionaire George Soros, then Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellin (now secretary of the Treasury), and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein—all of whom are Jewish—juxtaposed with images of Wall Street and Washington, DC, to convey to allegedly “economically anxious” Trump supporters that Jews were to blame for the financial state they were in.74 One consistent feature of many of the conspiracies that are now a part of the QAnon meta conspiracy is that George Soros is almost always the bogeyman. Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, is the common thread from Pizzagate, to QAnon, to Dominion voting machines. Soros appears to be the villain in every conspiracy narrative.
Even in the hours before the failed insurrection of 2021, Trump supporters gathered at the Ellipse, flanked by Rudy Giuliani and Don Junior, to watch a video. The propaganda in the film used subtle images to imply that it was Jews who controlled the Democrats and manipulated social justice campaigns like Black Lives Matter to undermine white America.75 The imagery in the video played to people’s worst fears and featured prominent Jewish representatives and senators in order to hammer the message. The star of the video was, naturally, George Soros.
Disinformation about Soros is the one common feature across several conspiracies including Pizzagate, QAnon, and a variety of additional conspiracies in Europe. Roger Stone and Alex Jones disseminated disinformation about George Soros for years on InfoWars, and social media—and the right-wing media bubble of Fox News, One America News, and NewsMax—till today seem obsessed.76 Soros has been the persistent bogeyman for the right wing and target of conspiracy theorists for years. Cesar Sayoc—who sent pipe bombs to CNN, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and movie stars in 2019—also targeted George Soros.77 QAnon’s obsession with Soros and the allegations about a powerful cabal of Satanists is derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The other focal point for QAnon is the chemical substance adrenochrome, allegedly harvested from terrified or tortured children. QAnon promoter and alleged intelligence operative Robert David Steele has hundreds of videos posted to YouTube discussing adrenochrome. Recall, the Church under Pope Pius initiated the fiction about Jews’ need for blood as part of ritual sacrifice (called blood libel) to achieve two self-serving goals. One was to encourage families to baptize their children. This benefited the Church financially regardless of a family’s ability to pay. Convincing parishioners that unbaptized children might be used for ritual sacrifice ensured a continued stream of income. The other motive was the expediency of having a reliable scapegoat. When disaster strikes and people might question the existence of God, the Church had a villain to blame, ensuring their flock’s continued devotion.
Adrenochrome: The Modern-Day Blood Libel
According to QAnon, Adrenochrome is the chemical compound that is produced from children’s blood when their adrenalin is activated during pain or torture. QAnon has convinced its followers that the evil cabal of Democrats and their Hollywood proxies who oppose Donald Trump torture children and extract this chemical from their bodies, which they then use as a recreational drug, or to maintain their youth, or get high. Or, after Tom Hanks announced in March 2020 that he had contracted coronavirus, adrenochrome was touted as a cure for COVID-19.
The only thing that is true about this conspiracy is that adrenochrome is a real chemical substance: C9H9NO3. It is the metabolic byproduct produced by the oxidation of adrenaline (more commonly known as epinephrine). It is what is in an EpiPen if you are allergic to bees or peanuts. Science writer Brian Dunning explains that “Adrenochrome has some limited pharmacological use in a few countries. It is easily synthesized, widely available, and inexpensive—there is no need to harvest it from children or anyone else.”78
Although by no means a narcotic substance (it is not listed as a controlled substance by the U.S. government), adrenochrome has appeared in works of fiction over the years. Aldous Huxley mentioned its alleged effects, which he likened it to mescaline intoxication in the The Doors of Perception (1954), although he never tried it. Adrenochrome is also mentioned at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange (1962), and Hunter S. Thompson portrayed adrenochrome as having hallucinogenic properties in his 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Taking full literary license, Thompson decided to depict adrenochrome as some kind of wild psychedelic drug.”79 Like so many other parts of the conspiracy, QAnon blends elements from fiction with historic anti-Semitism.
As part of the QAnon conspiracy, they believe children are being sacrificed for their blood. QAnon is a modern-day blood libel80 that leverages many of the historic anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews and the blood of babies. The first mention of adrenochrome as part of the Q conspiracy is traced to a 4chan post of a video (which is no longer available) entitled “Jew Ritual BLOOD LIBEL Sacrifice is #ADRENOCHROME Harvesting.” Copies of this video are still on YouTube.81 From 4chan the idea of adrenochrome spread to Alex Jones’s InfoWars to build on the narrative.
The accusation of Jewish malfeasance resulted in blood libels from the middle ages up until the twentieth century.82 Blood libels originated with the Catholic Church that disseminated the falsehood that Jews needed Christian blood to bake unleavened bread (matzo) for Passover, or alternatively that they drank the blood as medicine or used it as an aphrodisiac.83 In the twentieth century, Nazi propagandists used blood libels as proof that Jews were a threat to Germany. Their newspaper Der Stürmer devoted an entire issue to blood libels and accusations of the master Jewish plan to murder non-Jews.84
A blood libel even occurred in the United States. In September 1928, 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths went missing in Massena, New York. A rumor that Jews had kidnapped and killed her as part of a religious ritual gained traction, leading police to question local Jewish leaders and the town’s rabbi about her disappearance. The theory quickly caught fire, finding believers not just among the townsfolk but also in powerful figures such as state police officers and Massena’s mayor. The girl was found the following day alive and unharmed.85
Blood libels flourished in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in part because of explicitly anti-Semitic newspapers and political parties whose raison d’etre was to diminish Jewish influence. With the exception of Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent, not many U.S. newspapers were dedicated to attacking Jews. In contrast, almost a hundred years later, social media and the Internet provide ample opportunities to express the most hateful views and disseminate racist materials. The allegations that QAnon makes about adrenochrome are the modern manifestation of a blood libel.
Consider for a moment how completely nonsensical this allegation is. Anyone familiar with Jewish dietary laws, called kashrut (kosher), knows that Jews have an antipathy toward blood.86 As part of the koshering process, the proteins are subject to a kind of brining, salting and soaking in water three times. The only reason to process meat in this way is to extract the residual blood.
The antipathy toward blood might have been a reaction to the pagan religions that existed during early antiquity as Judaism evolved into a faith. In the sixth century Jewish dietary laws began to be codified in the Babylonian Talmud, although the first dietary exclusion is found in Exodus, commanding “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk” (Exodus 23:19), thereby prohibiting the mixing of milk and meat. The prohibition against consuming blood appears in Leviticus 7:26–27: “Moreover you shall eat no blood whatever, whether of fowl or of animal, in any of your dwellings. Whoever eats any blood, that person shall be cut off from his people.”87
Jewish religious law forbids the consumption of any blood, human or animal. But accusations of ritual murder vilified Jews and have been used to justify the pillaging, torture, burning alive, and expulsion of countless Jews throughout the history of European anti-Semitism.88
The Storm, Lizard People, and Dominion Voting Machines
QAnon is a meta conspiracy theory that folds in adjacent or complementary conspiracies. People who believe in QAnon are more likely to believe that COVID-19 is a hoax or are anti-5G, anti-mask, anti-vaxx; believe that the moon landing was faked and that 9/11 was an inside job. Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer explains:
As a sort of mega-conspiracy theory, QAnon can encompass a wide array of other, often conflicting conspiratorial beliefs. Not every QAnon believer holds to the same tenets of QAnon, and the most committed are often engaged in furious online battles with each other over the exact meaning of a QAnon clue.89
QAnon believers are eager for the day of reckoning they call “the Storm,” in which Trump will arrest his political opponents and send them to Guantanamo Bay or execute them. QAnon devotees believe that they will play a role in this purge by educating everyone else about QAnon and celebrate the “Great Awakening.”90 Many believed this “storm” would come on January 20, 2021, and that Joseph R. Biden would not be sworn in as the 46th U.S. president. Instead he, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the attendees of the inauguration would be marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and shot or hanged.
Most all of the Q predictions over the years have not materialized: Hillary Clinton is not in jail, Barack Obama was not indicted and wearing an ankle monitor, nor was Michelle Obama discovered to be a man. However, supporters were able to suspend their disbelief with every failed prediction. The inauguration was a particularly difficult prophecy to get wrong, and the result has been that some QAnon believers experienced deep melancholy, suicidal ideation, or engaged in self-harm. While many people have left QAnon, others doubled or tripled down despite the failed prophecies.
One of the more unusual adjacent theories involves Donald Trump being a time traveler and that some of the blood-drinking members of the cabal are actually lizard people.91 The lizard people conspiracy emerged in the UK. David Icke, a former football (soccer) star and news presenter for the BBC, wrote 20 books about the presence of lizard people beginning with his 1999 The Biggest Secret, in which blood-drinking shape-shifting reptilians from the Alpha Draconis star system were plotting again humankind. Icke alleged that many global leaders such as the Rothschild family, the British royal family and the Bush family were all actually a race of Anunnaki lizards. According to his many books on the subject, an alien race of reptilians has altered human DNA, and lizard people live among us.
Interestingly enough, there was a feedback loop between this conspiracy theory and science fiction. When Icke was writing about lizard people, the previous decade a show appeared on ABC called V (1983). In the show, a race of reptilians had come to earth under the pretense of being peaceful, but under their exquisite human disguises, they were evil rodent-eating lizards. Icke had watched the show and added details to his books about lizard people inspired by the science fiction plotlines. In another book, Icke referred to the alien lizards as Archons. This name was then used in the film series, Men In Black. Icke identified the Draco constellation from which the lizard people had evolved. J. K. Rowling named her villain Draco Malfoy of the Slytherin House, represented not by a lizard but by a snake.
When V returned to television in 2009, the show’s writers allegedly read Icke’s books to get ideas for plotlines,92 including the aliens’ having sent sleeper agents decades before their arrival to access the highest levels of government and undermine human society. Thus there is a reciprocal loop between the lizard conspiracy theory and science fiction about lizard people.
One possible explanation for why conspiracy thoeries resonate is that there is an element of familiarity. If someone has watched a film or a TV show that includes some element or detail echoed in the conspiracy theory, they might be more inclined to believe it because some part of their memory fails to distinguish between a fictional memory and a factual memory.
Take, for example, the QAnon adjacent belief in the Dominion voting machine conspiracy. The owners of 8chan and likely one of several Q posters, Jim and Ron Watkins both aggressively pushed the falsehood that Dominion machines deliberately switched 2020 general election votes intended for Trump to Biden through a manipulated algorithm.93 Seventy-five percent of Republicans believe there were voting irregularities, and social media (amplified again by foreign actors) intensified the conspiracy around a campaign to “Stop the Steal.” Further, the conspiracy theory intimates that Dominion did this deliberately and would silence any whistleblowers who came forward to present evidence of their wrongdoing.
One possible reason why this explanation was disseminated is that it sounded plausible. In 2006 there had been a film entitled Man of the Year with that exact same storyline. The film, starring Robin Williams as a Jon Stewart-like comedian, runs for president as a joke but wins. A computer programmer discovers that the voting machine algorithm confused by double consonants or vowels defaulted votes to Williams’s character. The voting machine company, worried that the revelation would hurt the company’s bottom line and its ability to sell the machines globally, moves to silence the programmer. The people who fabricated the Dominion voting machine controversy didn’t have much imagination and seemingly copied the storyline from a movie that was not widely seen and received 21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In the comment section of reviews online, someone writing in 2020 commented, “wow life imitating art.”
Like the unscientific allegations about adrenochrome’s hallucinogenic properties that originated in literary fiction, the Dominion voting machine scandal was pulled from a Hollywood plotline. The myth about the bell on JFK’s boat is drawn from a Hollywood movie. For a group that claims to hate Hollywood as much as it does and refers to it as “Pedowood,” it certainly plagiarizes a lot of their mythology from Hollywood scripts.
To underscore Q’s dependence on Hollywood, on Election Day 2020, the Q account posted a photo of an American flag, an Abraham Lincoln quote, and a link to a clip of a song from the 1992 movie Last of the Mohicans.94 Then Q went silent.
There is a pressing need to understand why millions of people believe in this baseless conspiracy theory in which so many of their key tropes can be so easily and quickly debunked. Not only is QAnon a threat to the United States, but the conspiracy theory is spreading globally faster than the coronavirus that has amplified its popularity. This book will explain why people choose to believe in conspiracies and what psychological strings QAnon pulls to attract converts and keep them committed. QAnon has ruined families, it is increasing suicidality, and it is likely wrecking any hope of bipartisan governance. In Chapter 2, the book takes a closer look at how women are the unexpected powerhouse movers and shakers of QAnon. Chapter 3 delves into the psychology of conspiratorial beliefs, Chapter 4 offers some suggestions to help people escape the rabbit hole to get their family and friends out of QAnon and come back into the light. Chapter 5 explores the global spread of QAnon, and Chapter 6 debunks many of the QAnon myths and explains why QAnon has targeted specific individuals.