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Jacob Chansley, also known as the QAnon shaman, joins a crowd supporting former President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC.
QAnon began on the fringe website 4chan, where a poster calling itself Q left messages claiming to be a top federal official and purporting to reveal a “deep state” cabal trying to overthrow then-President Donald Trump.
Q grew out of the discredited ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy that top Democrats were involved in pedophilia and cannibalism from the basement of a Washington DC restaurant, but quickly gained steam with Q’ leaving ‘clues’ and claiming that Trump was going to take down the deep state
A central tenet of the conspiracy theory is that a cabal of child sexual predators including prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and “deep state” allies ran institutions and a global child sex ring.
It has become a “big top” conspiracy theory encompassing misinformation on topics ranging from alien landings to vaccine safety. Whenever the conspiracies turn out to be untrue, followers rationalize that the inaccuracies are part of Q’s larger plan.
QAnon followers say the so-called Great Awakening is coming to bring salvation.
The ‘Q’ posts, which began in 2017 on the 4chan message board, have also been published on 8kun, a rebranded version of the closed web board 8chan.
Major social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, have banned content associated with QAnon and have suspended or blocked accounts seeking to spread it. That forced much of the group’s activities onto platforms that have less moderation, including Telegram, Gab and Trump’s struggling platform Truth Social.
A growing list of criminal episodes has been linked to people who expressed support for the conspiracy theory, which US intelligence officials have warned could spark more violence.
QAnon supporters were among those who violently stormed the Capitol during the failed insurrection on January 6, 2021, which attempted to derail the 2020 election results.
In November 2020, two men drove to a Philadelphia vote counting site in a Hummer festooned with QAnon stickers and loaded with a rifle, 100 rounds of ammunition and other weapons. Prosecutors claimed that they were trying to interfere with the elections.
Last year, a California man who told authorities he had been lit by QAnon was accused of killing his two children because he believed they had snake DNA.
In August, a Colorado woman was convicted of attempting to kidnap her son from foster care after her daughter said she began associating with QAnon supporters. Other adherents have been accused of environmental vandalism, shooting paintballs at military reservists, kidnapping a child in France and even killing a New York City mob boss.
Last month, police fatally shot a Michigan man who they say killed his wife and seriously injured his daughter. A surviving daughter told The Detroit News that she believes her father was motivated by QAnon.