Which raises a question: why was Q’s audience so eager to read antisemitic intent into Q’s text? What Q had insinuated was that, as a /pol/ user in a different thread correctly summarized, martial law would be declared around November 4, 2017, and Trump would round up and execute his domestic opposition – including the Jewish bugbears of many a right-wing conspiracy theorist: George Soros and the Rothschilds.īut then, departing from anything Q had implied, this second /pol/ user added: “kikes hang soon after in military tribunals?” Oddly enough, Q had never explicitly said that Jews would be killed en masse, or Israel would be destroyed. Say bye bye to pissrael,” and “TRUMP IS GONNA NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES THE JEWS!” – referencing Hitler’s bloody purge of rival power centers inside and outside the Nazi Party. In a two-minute span, the thread’s creator wrote, “Fuck off already kike…. AN ANON DROPPED SOME INTERESTING INFORMATION!” This user started a thread titled “GUYS WE NEED TO DIG. Its creator was a 4chan user who was either Q’s first superfan or possibly Q (a suspicion which arises because this user posted about Q roughly 60 times in three and a half hours, trying to drum up interest in Q’s storyline). The first time anyone created a space to discuss Q’s posts was Octo– just Q’s second day of activity. Within six months of Q’s first posts, some of Q’s followers had created sites called “aggregators.” The aggregators collected Q’s content and presented it in a medium far removed from the open-sewer atmosphere of 4chan and 8chan, making it more palatable to “normies” – the kind of people who would likely never visit 4chan or 8chan, in part because the culture there is so repulsive.Īntisemitism has been part of QAnon culture since its inception. QAnon began on 4chan but spread rapidly to the more-mainstream internet, first by way of Reddit communities such as r/conspiracy and then via other social media.īetween October of 2017 and December of 2020, Q made almost 5,000 posts (known as “Q drops”). Ostensibly to prevent mass panic during the apprehension of the cabal, Q chose to leak the general outlines of this plan to the online communities of 4chan and, later, 8chan.īy sharing the plan, Q claimed, part of the population would be forewarned and could explain the benevolent nature of Q’s actions to their neighbors, who might otherwise find it suspicious that all of Trump’s enemies were being arrested, then given show trials and executed. The eponymous Q of QAnon, according to the theory’s lore, is part of a team of military intelligence operatives and high-level civilian insiders (the “Q Team”) that will eventually dismantle the cabal, in collaboration with former president Donald J. QAnon is a sprawling conspiracy theory that alleges (among other things) that Hollywood and the upper echelons of the Democratic Party are controlled by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles. Those who remain are, by definition, more deeply committed than the ones who’ve left.īefore we delve into the movement’s history, though, it would probably be wise to explain what QAnon is.

Only in recent months, after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, has this comparatively mainstream crowd begun to drift away.

However, when QAnon exploded off 4chan and 8chan into the wider internet, the movement attracted a crowd that was less habitually antisemitic than the early adopters had been. During that period, some of QAnon’s foremost proponents – including its single most successful recruiter – indulged in overt antisemitism. This is not to say that antisemitism was absent, or even dormant, between QAnon’s beginning and the current moment. QAnon’s antisemitism has been most visible at two points: its beginnings – when it emerged from the swastika-studded fever swamp that is 4chan – and the present, when the most popular QAnon influencer, GhostEzra, is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich, and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews. If there is a single thread that links QAnon’s origins, its current state, and where the conspiracy theory is likely to go in the short- to medium-term, it’s antisemitism.

Ghost ezra telegram