When viewed within the corpus of 4953 similar posts that accreted over the months between October 2017 and December 2020, Drop #199 was nothing out of the ordinary; indeed, already in this early moment in its history, 鈥淨 Clearance Patriot鈥� was laying down a pattern to which many subsequent Q drops hewed: a series of leading questions insinuating ever deeper levels of deception. Uploaded on November 22, 2017, onto the internet message board 4chan where it jostled for attention with weird pornographic subgenres and openly racist memes, Drop #199 took the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal as its specific point of departure. Q鈥檚 questions suggested that the deal had been less about diplomacy and more about kickbacks to Democrat politicians: 鈥淗ow much money was hand delivered by plane(s)?鈥� The venality allegedly had a backstory, as one would come to appreciate by asking 鈥淲ho paid for BO [i.e., Barack Obama] to attend Harvard?鈥� and 鈥淲ho was the biggest contributor to the CF [i.e., the Clinton Foundation]?鈥� As scandalous as all this was, if one wished to know why such dirty secrets remained secrets, then it was necessary to ponder the next question: 鈥淲ho controls the MSM [i.e., the mainstream media]?鈥� But it wasn鈥檛 just the misinformation spread by the 鈥淢SM鈥� and the misdirection it practiced. An even more profound manipulation was encoded into the very words and terms we use, as Q suggested with the penultimate question of this post: 鈥渨hat does the word 鈥榗onspiracy鈥� mean to you?鈥�
It might, however, be necessary to back-up a little by first reminding ourselves of QAnon and of how, like a strange fever-dream, it came to grip the minds of many Americans during the first Trump presidency; exactly how many remains hard to say, yet the inroads that QAnon made into the American psyche were indicated not least by the high visibility of its insignia at the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Obviously, not just Anons (the name acolytes of Q gave themselves) but many other American voters failed to see anything overly disqualifying about the desecration of democratic political norms as illustrated by the events of that day, yet contrary to some prognostications, the return of Trump as president has failed to bring about any real return of QAnon. This curious absence has remained true even if some have construed from the Epstein Files a validation of QAnon鈥檚 fixation on sex rings and human trafficking. Admittedly, the files were a double-edged sword for the QAnon mythology. At the very least, the sordid story undermines the core QAnon narrative that Trump leads a crack team of patriotic officials committed to restoring decency and transparency to American politics.
So, given that we are seemingly justified in adopting the past tense when speaking of QAnon, we can ask: what actually was it? Was it a cult? Or a game? Or a scam? In fact, depending upon one鈥檚 perspective, the QAnon movement can assume the guise of all these things. As for the core idea animating this movement and unifying its different aspects, it helps to turn the question posed in Drop #199 back on its source: 鈥淲hat did the word 鈥榗onspiracy鈥� mean to Q?鈥� In fact, reading through the drops makes evident Q鈥檚 susceptibility to a common conceptual slippage: 鈥渃onspiracy鈥� serves as shorthand for 鈥渃onspiracy theory.鈥� The QAnon creed posited a conspiracy theory alleging a comprehensive deception of the American people as orchestrated by the Democrats and their deep-state stooges. Q repeatedly bristled at the way the 鈥淢SM鈥� turned this allegation into 鈥渟omething shameful鈥� (thus the wording in Drop #199) by characterizing it as a conspiracy theory. Why should any shame attach itself to the exposure of a conspiracy, particularly a conspiracy as nefarious as the one that, according to Q, lurked in the darkest recesses of the deep state? In numerous other posts Q vented at how the 鈥渃onspiracy label鈥� (i.e., more accurately, the conspiracy theory label) was deployed to demean and defame the heroic crusade determined to defeat this evil.
The whole QAnon saga supplied the background music to my own investigation into conspiracy theories. Because my ambition was to craft a historical account, my focus was initially far removed from internet message boards and social media. Instead, I spent years immersing myself first in eighteenth-century polemics denouncing the machinations of Jesuits and Freemason, then nineteenth-century newspapers reporting on crimes such as assassinations, and then mid-twentieth-century tracts of social science laying down the principles of a legitimate understanding of society and history. There was actually a genuine research agenda underpinning this miscellany of material. It is notoriously difficult to define what a conspiracy theory is. For historians, this troublesome indefinability corresponds to a high degree of uncertainty about where they first appear in the historical record; depending upon the definition, one could find them either everywhere in history, stretching all the way back to antiquity, or alternatively first in medieval times, or perhaps first in the Enlightenment, or maybe first in the fully-fledged modernity that we are fated to inhabit. My idea was to offer a counterproposal: instead of focusing on conspiracy theories themselves, let鈥檚 focus on the concept of conspiracy theory since it is far easier to narrow down the appearance of the concept than the appearance of the phenomenon it denotes. Thus, the key question for me became: when, where, and why did people first start to use this term and thereby to indicate an awareness of conspiracy theory as a distinct and distinctive way of viewing the world? My plan was then to work back from an insight into the emergence of the concept to a more precise understanding of what a conspiracy theory is.
A brief summary of the results could begin by taking note of the absence of the term from the eighteenth-century polemics and counter-polemics they elicited (even if these polemics themselves served as vehicles for what we today recognize as conspiracy theories). Instead, in the late nineteenth century police investigating crimes and journalists reporting on these investigations began to intermittently invoke the term 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� to denote a working hypothesis about a specific, unsolved crime. In the mid-twentieth century, 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� started to then appear in context quite distinct from detective work: social scientists, along with historians sympathetic to the insights of social science, invoked the term to critique an understanding of history that had secularized apocalyptic expectations of an imminent cosmic clash between good and evil. The second half of the twentieth century then was witness to a merger of these two versions of the concept after these versions had emerged from their distinct contexts; the 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� generated by detective work and the 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� generated by critiques of secularized apocalypticism fused into a single concept animated by the somewhat contrary and even contradictory impulses it derives from each branch of its forked genealogy. Hence the recurring difficulties in trying to define it.
Admittedly, an inquiry focused on concepts and invested in the meanings they convey exposes itself to suspicion about its value鈥攐r, one might say, its intellectual price鈥損erformance ratio. Is all the effort worth it? 鈥淭hat鈥檚 just semantics鈥濃�攖hus the familiar objection that is made whenever nitpicking about nomenclature seems to get in the way of engagement with substantive realities. But sometimes this 鈥渘itpicking鈥� reveals itself to be the best way of getting at these realities. Furthermore, the sensitivity to terminology is not some academic idiosyncrasy because it also runs through the material under examination. Thus, Q鈥檚 gripe about the bias baked into the 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� label not only repeats itself like a leitmotif in many of the Q drops (and this although the actual author of the posts operating behind the alias of Q is suspected to have changed in the course of QAnon鈥檚 history); it also percolated down into the Anon community. Within the first minutes of the first episode of Cullen Hoback鈥檚 engrossing 2021 documentary Q: Into the Storm, an Anon observes how 鈥渢he media鈥檚 trying to label it [i.e., QAnon] as a conspiracy theory. It鈥檚 interesting how they use that. You know, the 鈥榗onspiracy鈥� word.鈥�
This annoyance about the usage of 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥� reflects the concept鈥檚 conflicted status, which in turn maps onto the genealogy sketched above. One side of the concept enabled Q to affect disdain about the way allegations of conspiracy were ridiculed, given that these allegations emerged from honest attempts to follow the evidence, join the dots, and make inferences. 鈥淒o Your own Research!鈥� was the mantra intoned by the QAnon community to promote and validate the 鈥渄etective work鈥� undertaken by Anons. Those dishing out the ridicule could, however, very reasonably maintain that Q and the Anons were not just disinterestedly hypothesizing about a possible conspiracy; rather, the notion of an evil deep-state conspiracy became axiomatic to the way they saw the world. This was the other side of the concept; outside observers and commentators mobilized it to flag the way QAnon had both adopted and adapted an age-old apocalyptic script within which the deep-state conspiracy had become a premise of their research rather than a conclusion reached as a result of it. In its opposition to a sinister cabal engaged in unspeakable abuse of children, in its commitment to a 鈥淕reat Awakening鈥� that would expose this evil, and in its anticipation of an imminent, purgative storm (鈥淭he Storm is upon Us!鈥�), Q was reenacting temporalities and dichotomies long associated with millenarian cults.
Yet as gratifying as it might be to discover how QAnon corroborates an account of conspiracy theorizing rooted in the analysis of very different historical material, every repetition of a historical pattern also varies it in ways that force us to rethink our interpretations. One way in which this pressure to revise and reconsider an interpretation becomes obvious is to examine more closely the so-called 鈥渞esearch鈥� that Q encouraged. To what degree was this exclusively online research equivalent to old-fashioned detective work, or even to the amateur detective work undertaken by earlier communities of conspiracy theorists such as those determined to expose the 鈥渢rue鈥� story of Kennedy鈥檚 assassination? The comparison reveals the very different nature of the 鈥渞esearch鈥� in which Anons became absorbed. The amateur sleuths devoted to cracking the case of the Kennedy assassination were investigating a past (and very real) event. By contrast, the crimes whose depravity allowed Q and the army of Anons to indulge in ecstasies of righteous indignation were imagined to be ongoing and continuous; indeed, the Anons saw themselves not only as researchers but also as recruits to a virtuous counterconspiracy that, under Trump鈥檚 leadership, would thwart the blood-curdling conspiracy helmed by an all too familiar cast of Democrat or Democrat-aligned villains: the Clintons, Obama, George Soros, and so on.
Thus, if in the case of the Kennedy assassination there was indisputable evidence of a crime while speculation circled around the identity of the criminals, QAnon seemed to invert this relationship: the identity of the criminals was never in question while the crimes, even if not entirely imaginary (one thinks again here of Epstein) were largely products of projection and fabulation. Another complementary factor must, however, also be considered in attempting to understand how lurid fantasy fused with the notion of solid research. This factor has to do with the drastic reconfiguration of the media landscape. Clearly, the analog evidence of yesteryear constrained and disciplined investigation far more rigorously than the connectivities that proliferate in the digital world鈥攁nd do so with scant deference to distinctions of true and false. In the pre-digital era, the photograph might, of course, have been doctored, but tampering with the documentary record in this manner required far more effort than is currently needed to photoshop a digital image. Likewise, the report in the police file could conceivably have been forged or planted or redacted, but as a source it remains more reliable than a post on a Facebook page or a message on a social-media feed. A detail related by the journalist Gabriel Gatehouse in his book The Coming Storm is revealing in this regard; he traces QAnon back to role-playing games in which a precursor of Q took on the make-believe task of coordinating a secret operation against a deep-state cabal; participants were then assigned the task of filling in the 鈥渇acts鈥� that were yielded by internet searches and whose status as 鈥渇acts鈥� was protected by a wanton disregard of contrary evidence. This element of play continued to permeate the QAnon movement throughout its career. By contrast, the conspiracy theorists of the Kennedy assassination were hardly inclined to equate their mission with a game; in other words, they weren鈥檛 just playing at being detectives but sincerely trying to correct the incompetent or corrupt detective work previously carried out by accredited officials and rubber-stamped by higher authorities.
Admittedly, a caveat is in order: for some associated with QAnon, the element of play loomed much larger than for others since the movement meant different things to different people at different stages of its history. In terms of attitude and emotional investment, there was thus a clear distinction between the tech-savvy gamers at home in the world of internet message boards on the one hand and on the other the masses of 鈥渘ormies鈥� who first began to consume the QAnon in the more palatable version made available first in Reddit forums and then on social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. To the degree that QAnon was therefore a game, it was one in which one could play or be played.
From this angle, QAnon can begin to look more like a scam. Of course, 鈥渟cam鈥� is also not entirely accurate. The motives were not purely financial, and, insofar as they were, those who engineered the deception never seem to have fully mastered the art of effectively profiting from it. But the possibility that Q was hoodwinking the Anons raises the possibility of another characterization that allows us to return full circle to our own point of departure: to what degree was QAnon itself a conspiracy鈥攁nd indeed a conspiracy far more real than the deep-state one it embedded into the core of its creed?
In this regard, the conceptual slippage that we observed above assumes a deeper meaning. It is important to point out that this slippage was not specific to the Q drops; in fact, as soon as one has been sensitized to it, one begins to notice how prevalent the collapse of the distinction between conspiracy and conspiracy theory is. Thus, even a commentator such as the journalist Will Sommer could give Trust the Plan, his account of the QAnon movement, the subtitle The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Reshaped the World. Should that be 鈥渃onspiracy鈥� or 鈥渃onspiracy theory鈥�? Admittedly, to the degree that 鈥淨 Clearance Patriot鈥� elided the difference, conceptual slippage seems akin to a Freudian slip鈥攁n unintended admission of realities that occurs when the conscious mind lets it guard down and allows the unconscious mind to speak its truth. Drop #199 ended its series of questions by declaring that 鈥渢he world cannot handle the truth,鈥� but there were undoubtedly also truths that Q could not state openly without disbanding the cult, torpedoing the game, and fessing up to the scam that the QAnon movement represented.
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg was a research fellow at the Forschungszentrum Gotha, University of Erfurt, and then on the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at the University of Cambridge before joining the Bibliotheca Hertziana鈥揗ax Planck Institute for Art History in Rome.