In this photo illustration, Donald Trump's TRUTH Social account is seen on a mobile device with an image of a QAnon sticker in the background in Washington, DC on September 13, 2022. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
As the expected red wave failed to materialize in the midterms last week and former President Donald Trump baselessly claimed the election had been stolen (again), new Q drops landed.Usually new communiqués from Q during a pivotal moment in American politics would send shockwaves through the QAnon conspiracy community. It would be shared everywhere and endlessly broken down to find hidden meaning buried with the short, staccato sentences. Advertisem*nt
[Credit: PRRI]
The Election Day Q drop was ignored for a number of reasons. Firstly, all the evidence points to the fact that the post, like a flurry of messages last June, was written not by “Q”—a fictitious secret insider in Washington— but by Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun. (Watkins and his son, Ron, have long been suspected to either know the identity of the person making the Q drops, or of being “Q” themselves.)The first election Q drop, which was posted on November 6, simply asked a bunch of questions (the topics included Ukraine and Hunter Biden) and ended by telling readers their “vote matters” and that they “have all the tools you need” to “take back control.” The second post, on November 7, focused on election fraud and once again told people to go out and vote. The third, on Election Day, just talked about “endless” things.“In the past, when Q would post, you would get a whole bunch of other posts with people talking about what Q wrote but it seems like nobody cares anymore,” Fred Brennan, the founder of 8chan who is now dedicated to bringing the site down, told VICE News. Advertisem*nt
‘They look like a trilogy that started with Spielberg being the director and ended with some amateur.’
“It doesn't work to throw out a couple of these things and then run away for months,” Rothschild said. “The reason why Q worked as well as it did, why it was so compelling to so many people, is because it was a sustained story that kept feeding you new content, new rabbit holes, new research avenues. This is just like a bunch of questions and then nothing.”Over the course of just over three years, from late October 2017 to December 2020, the person behind Q posted just shy of 5,000 messages, first on 4chan and then on 8chan (now called 8kun). These messages became QAnon’s sacred text.In the past, every new Q drop was greeted with huge excitement within the community, endlessly analyzed and taken apart to find some hidden meaning or link to the real world. Advertisem*nt Advertisem*nt
It’s obvious that while the QAnon movement has irreversibly impacted American politics, the Q poster themselves has lost impact. There are multiple reasons why this occurred. The long break in communication led the community to craft conspiracies themselves. Others fell to sub-communities within the movement—some lending their faith to Michael Protzman in Dallas who preached the return of JFK Jr., others to Romana Didulo, the QAnon Queen of Canada.“The average Q believer, if they were to be shown these drops, would probably accept them, even though they are clearly fake,” Brennan said. “But you have this influencer corp that dictates what is good doctrine and what's bad doctrine essentially. They haven't accepted these new Q drops at all. [Watkins] really has not been able to get the influencers on his side, at all.”While this may be bad news for Watkins and 8kun, which has been unusable for large periods of time in recent months due to constant attacks, for the wider QAnon community it appears as if Q’s absence has done little to slow the movement’s growth.It has always been difficult to track the scale of QAnon belief among Americans. That became even more difficult when QAnon supporters attempted to ditch the name altogether in 2021. The central role played by QAnon supporters in the insurrection significantly tarnished the movement and brought unwanted attention from lawmakers and the media. And so QAnon supporters simply decided to abandon the name, citing an October 2020 Q drop that said: “There is Q. There are Anons. There is no QAnon.” The post went on to add that QAnon was something made up by the mainstream media to tarnish the movement. Advertisem*nt
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And that’s why the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonpartisan research group, decided that a different approach was needed. Instead of asking directly if someone supports QAnon, the PRRI researchers asks respondents if they agree with the core tenets of the conspiracy theory: Advertisem*nt
Americans who mostly agree with these three statements are considered QAnon believers, those who mostly disagree with them are considered QAnon doubters, and those who completely disagree with them are considered QAnon rejecters.The results suggest nearly one in five of the adult U.S. population believes QAnon conspiracies are real.The number of people who believe in QAnon conspiracies jumped by 33 percent in the last year to 19 percent, while the number of people who completely reject QAnon conspiracies has dropped to just 30 percent of the population, down from 40 percent last year.
Today, one of the biggest driving forces in bringing these conspiracies to a larger audience in the last 12 months is the increasing adoption of these beliefs as mainstream orthodoxy within the GOP.“The fact that Republicans have co-opted some of this does serve to increase belief,” Natalie Jackson, director of research at PRRI, told VICE News. “The more people you have repeating conspiracy theories, the more people hear them, and it allows them to continue reverberating around.”Trump has led this charge by openly embracing QAnon on his own Truth Social (his social media platform) channel—sharing pictures of himself with explicit QAnon slogans, and even a post that linked back to the text of an original “Q drop.” Truth Social has its very own Q account that has 223,000 followers. Trump has shared explicitly QAnon-inflected content. And Jackson believes that Trump’s impending announcement of his plan to run for president again in 2024, combined with his likely return to Twitter, could drive even more interest in QAnon. (Although Americans are at least somewhat adverse at voting QAnon candidates into office.)“I think it is a very good possibility that with Trump more back in the spotlight, and possibly active again on Twitter that we see an uptick in willingness to believe these conspiracies,” Jackson said.In the meantime, however, while QAnon remains massively influential, Q simply does not.