On Election Day in 2024, as voters cast their ballots, Elon Musk posted a campaign music video supporting Donald Trump’s bid for president. Set to Van Halen’s “Jump,” with a montage of 1980s cultural references and images of Trump in various strongman poses, the video includes a line about “PATRIOTS” in which the “O” turns into a “Q,” a reference to the online conspiracy theory QAnon. Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.” As a scholar of conspiracy theories and extremism, I’ve watched QAnon seep from the margins into mainstream American politics over the past decade.
While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. As we near the 10-year anniversary of QAnon, these theories continue to haunt America’s politics. Building on the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which claimed Democrats were trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant based on interpretations of Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails, QAnon appeared on 4chan in October 2017 with claims that Clinton was about to be arrested.
That’s when someone calling himself Q claimed to be an intelligence operator trying to expose the “deep state,” a purported shadow government secretly controlling global events in pursuit of a satanic agenda. QAnon invited users to build the theory by decoding messages on social media. That work, Q claimed, would expose a satanic cabal of pedophiles among the elites.
The theory is an example of what author Naomi Klein has called a “conspiracy smoothie,” mixing existing theories into a vast conspiracy map, which absorbs existing conspiracy theories about events such as 9/11 or the JFK assassination into itself. The result is a sprawling theory combining paranoid interpretations of current events with historical conspiracies. Polls suggest that 20% of Americans had favorable views of QAnon as late as 2022.
Many of Trump’s nominations for high-ranking posts were figures who had previously been considered on the fringes of national politics. Some of them have brought conspiracy theories into the highest echelons of government. FBI Director Kash Patel, for example, has been sympathetic to QAnon.
He appeared on a show hosted by a QAnon influencer before being selected to run the agency. Kennedy Jr. has advocated anti-vaccination conspiracy theories also shared by QAnon. I’m particularly fascinated by the ghost of QAnon – how the theory continues to haunt politics today.
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