‘My faith is shaken’: The QAnon conspiracy theory faces a post-Trump identity crisis

Q has gone quiet before. But the abrupt lack of posts since last Tuesday — Election Day, which the anonymous figure had touted for months as a key moment of reckoning — has sparked speculation and alarm among the movement’s most ardent followers.

Some QAnon proponents have begun to publicly grapple with reality and question whether the conspiracy theory is a hoax. “Have we all been conned?” one user wrote Saturday on 8kun.

Wrote another: “HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q???? MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED THE PLAN. TRUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???”

Trump’s defeat threatens to undermine the tale that Q, a supposed top-secret government operative, has woven over years: that Trump and his allies would soon vanquish a cabal of “deep state” child abusers and Satan-worshiping Democrats, exiling some to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

QAnon believers treat Q’s thousands of cryptic posts as scripture, and many stretch to connect them to real-world events, often in nonsensical ways. Some prominent Q believers said Trump’s back-to-back golf outings over the weekend were proof that the president was in control and that all was going according to plan.

Others connected Rudolph W. Giuliani’s bizarre Saturday news conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, on an industrial block in Philadelphia between a crematorium and an adult-video store, with two Q posts in the past year in which he used the words “landscape.”

One QAnon account, known as Praying Medic, told his more than 400,000 Twitter followers that many supporters “had to be talked off the ledge” in the past week but that Trump’s strategy remained in motion, tweeting: “He’s going to stick the knife in and twist it. He has no plans to leave office. Ever.”

Travis View, a researcher and co-host of the podcast “QAnon Anonymous,” said he expects that whoever is behind the Q “drops” — as Q’s messages are known — is just waiting to see how things shake out. Q has disappeared for weeks at a time before, shaking some loyalists, including during a three-month absence last year following a public revolt over the message board’s ties to real-world terrorist attacks.

In the meantime, QAnon’s devoted fan base has been left to struggle with the meaning of Trump’s election loss — which many argue was actually a win.

“The majority reaction from QAnon followers has been outright denial,” View said. Many expect Trump will seal his reelection through his team’s so-far-unsuccessful legal skirmishes, and “if that doesn’t happen and Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20, the cognitive dissonance will be absolutely as big as it’s ever been for QAnon followers.”

Many of Q’s posts read like conspiratorial gibberish. They generally outline how shadowy forces have gained power over the American republic and how Trump is cleverly working behind the scenes to engineer their destruction.

Q’s last “drop” featured an Abraham Lincoln quote about “a new birth of freedom,” an image of a big American flag and a YouTube link to the theme song of “The Last of the Mohicans,” the 1992 movie about the French and Indian War.

That YouTube page has itself become a town center for Q believers, with more than 35 million views and 27,000 comments. One of the most popularly voted comments reads: “It’s not just about trump, it’s good versus evil , light versus darkness! Victory of the light!!”

Q’s posts have no set schedule, and the network of pro-QAnon websites has sought to reassure anxious followers about Q’s absence since Election Day. “Q has been dark for 7 days,” the website Q Alerts states. “At times Q strategically goes dark for days, weeks or in some cases months. Be sure you have some type of Q Alerts in place so you are notified when Q drops again.”

“Do not worry. Do not be afraid. THERE IS A PLAN. IT IS A GOOD PLAN,” the QAnon supporter Major Patriot tweeted last week.

As QAnon’s influence and popularity grew since the first Q drop in 2017, a robust network of sites has emerged to assemble and aggregate Q’s posts for a broader global fan base. But Q’s posts continue to be released only on 8kun, the rickety message board once known as 8chan that revels in hateful bigotry and violent memes.

The site saw a major change of its own on Election Day, a few hours after Q’s last post, when Watkins tweeted that he was resigning following a “self-imposed civic duty protecting the final fortifications of online free speech.”

Ron Watkins and his father, 8kun owner Jim Watkins, are among the only people on the Web who can verify the authenticity of Q’s messages using a unique identifying code attached to each drop. The strange arrangement has fueled theories that the two are behind the Q persona, which both men have denied.

Ron Watkins said in an interview Monday with The Washington Post that he resigned to focus on “areas of my life that need some TLC,” including his health and marriage, and that he intended to devote more time to his new hobby of furniture-making, “building things with my hands and mastering a traditional craft.”

He said that his father — through the holding company Is It Wet Yet, which Jim Watkins founded in Mississippi last year — would take over the site, and that he had “no thoughts or insight into why Q” hadn’t posted in a week.

Asked for comment, Jim Watkins said only, “I never have time for you.”

It’s hard, however, to know the truth about Q’s next steps. Fredrick Brennan, who founded 8chan and worked with Jim and Ron Watkins until 2018, said that both men “lie constantly” and that “it’s so hard to even give them the minimum amount of trust.” (Jim Watkins earlier this year accused Brennan of “cyber libel” in the Philippines, where both men ran the company, after Brennan tweeted that he seemed to be “going senile.”)

The last week, Brennan said, has shown how much the movement has begun to grow beyond Q itself, as a core group of prominent pro-Trump influencers began pushing viewpoints beyond the anonymous figure’s central teachings. Many of those influencers have also sought to profit off their growing audiences through paid subscriptions and online sales.

Over the past week, Brennan said, “the major influencers have set themselves in narratives without Q saying anything.”

The election did provide QAnon believers some cause for optimism, including winning representation in Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a booster of QAnon talking points, won her unopposed House race in Georgia. Lauren Boebert, who earlier this year said she hoped Q was real but who has since sought to distance herself from the conspiracy theory, also won a competitive race in Colorado.

They have also gained subtle nods of support from Trump’s political following. On a town hall stage last month, Trump said he knew nothing about QAnon but echoed one of its audience’s central talking points: that “they are very much against pedophilia.”

Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller further bolstered the conspiracy theory last month by baselessly claiming that Biden would incentivize “child trafficking on an epic global scale.” Trump’s former adviser Stephen K. Bannon also said on a podcast last month that QAnon “appears directionally to be correct.”

Rita Katz, the executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, said she expects the QAnon following will continue to grow online, regardless of who created or operated its presence online.

“It’s a dangerous network. It’s a dangerous movement that truly believes that Biden and other Democrats are killing kids,” Katz said. “And now, with Biden’s projected victory, the QAnon movement believes with the same zealous certainty that the whole thing is a sham. And that’s a major problem, because … these aren’t a bunch of harmless keyboard warriors — they’re adherents of a movement that has resulted in real-life violence.”

The FBI said last year that QAnon and other “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” represented a major terrorism threat. Its supporters have been linked to kidnapping plots and violent threats, including in 2018, when an armed man in Arizona barricaded a bridge at the Hoover Dam with an armored truck.

QAnon followers have more recently pushed one another to keep the faith. On the far-right message board Gab, one user reposted a Q drop from June: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

For some core QAnon believers, who call themselves “digital soldiers,” the election seemed to fuel new calls for violent action in the real world.

“WAR,” one QAnon account wrote shortly after the race had been called on Saturday, in a tweet that has been retweeted more than 1,000 times. “Patriots will handle from here,” it read, alongside a “storm” emoji.