I accidentally created QAnon conspiracy believing Hollywood stars control world
IT’S the insane and baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that bizarrely claims famous figures like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey drink blood to make themselves younger.
But it’s now been revealed that the discredited online movement QAnon was first linked to the president by an “ignorant” YouTuber, who just months earlier had protested AGAINST his 2016 election win.
In the new Netflix documentary, The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem, a man referred to as Isaac explains how he spread rumours that that an anonymous blogger called Q worked for Trump and had “insider knowledge of the future.”
Thanks to YouTube videos, which racked up 20,000 hits in less than 24 hours, Isaac accidentally became a ringleader of the movement, which ridiculously believed the world is run by Satan-worshipping paedophiles – and Trump was recruited to bring this group to justice.
By the time Isaac realised his mistakes, and tried to warn members it was all a hoax, it was too late.
By January 6, 2021, QAnon had become so powerful that thousands of its believers stormed the Capitol – the centre of US Government – in protest over Trump’s presidential loss, leading to hundreds being charged with federal crimes.
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Isaac was a Freshman student in New York City in 2016, when Trump was elected president over Hillary Clinton, and he says he initially “swung really far-left”.
“I was shocked,” he recalls. “The New York Times had predicted Hillary at 91 per cent, no one thought this could happen and it did.”
Isaac was one of the thousands who marched outside Trump Tower the day after he was elected, screaming and chanting things like “New York hates you” and “Not my president”.
He says: “It was madness, people were yelling and screaming. It was just total rage.
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“Being in that mob was so hateful and sort of hit me like a wrecking ball all at once, this is not what I signed up for.
“Then we had this new guy in charge saying, ‘We’re going to drain the swamp’ – it gave people some sort of hope the world could change.”
As Isaac turned from a Trump hater into a Trump supporter, a post on anonymous forum 4chan, from someone called Q, caught his attention.
It read: “Nothing is random. Everything has meaning. +++”
Seven minutes later, Trump tweeted “+++”.
Isaac posted a video to YouTube about this tweet, saying: “We know, for a fact, Q is real.”
By the next morning, it had already got 20,000 views.
“It was a whirlwind of, ‘What did I just do? What have I stumbled on?’” he recalls.
He immediately started posting more videos about Q on his YouTube channel, and it began “growing like wildfire,” as thousands caught on and began spreading more misinformation on 4chan.
One of Isaac’s videos speaks about a 4chan post he saw of a picture of Trump and some of his cabinet standing in the White House with their thumbs up.
“Their thumbs connect and make a Q,” he earnestly stated.
In some more of Isaac’s fanciful YouTube videos, seen in the Netflix documentary, he is seen telling his viewers: “There’s a person on the inside leaving us breadcrumbs, like you guys aren’t getting the whole story, here’s what’s going on behind the scenes.
“Q is about getting to the truth. He knows a lot of the secrets they have – and that’s why he’s such a threat…
“The information he’s given to us has been extraordinary…The letter Q is everywhere.”
And Isaac was by no means the only QAnon YouTuber getting his information from 4chan.
There are many other video clips in the documentary, including one woman who says: “Q is a patriot – we know that for sure. Some of the things he’s spoken about on 4chan have shown us that, for sure.”
Tinfoil hat theories
With more and more jokes about child sex abuse and paedophilia popping up on 4chan, alongside these Q theories, slowly but surely people started to believe insanely outlandish conspiracy theories.
The main bogus conspiracy theory that members of QAnon believe is there is a group of Satan-worshipping elites including top Democrats – and Trump’s biggest rivals – like President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Oprah Winfrey and Hollywood actor Tom Hanks, as well as religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama, are also said to be in this cult by delusional fantasists.
QAnon also believes that the reason Trump was elected as president in the first place was because he’d been secretly recruited by top military generals in order to break up the group of Hollywood elites, and would eventually bring its members to justice.
But, while he’d managed to convince thousands of people of Q’s existence, Isaac slowly started to realise it wasn’t real when “nothing had happened” on any of the dates given by ‘Q’.
The people behind QAnon posts were just some dudes in a basement who predicted Trump’s tweets
Isaac
“This hope of radical change he promised never seemed to come into fruition,” he says. “Eventually I learned many of the commenters [on Youtube] were actually behind QAnon posts and they were just some dudes in a basement who predicted Trump’s tweets.”
He adds: “They really took advantage of people looking for answers about the world around them.
“I had to tell people it’s not real; ‘Q dies today. It’s just a bunch of manipulative scammers, using me to push the Q narrative.’”
It was already too late, however.
The comments on Isaac’s video denouncing Q’s existence included: “It doesn’t matter if it’s real. It’s more entertaining than Game of Thrones,” and simply, “It is real.”
He continues: “It wasn’t well-received at all – I got a mountain of dislikes and hate comments. It was like talking to a wall.
“There was nothing I could’ve said.
“Once you realise nothing’s going to happen, you think what is going to happen to these people?”
It’s unsurprising that QAnon members didn’t want to listen to Isaac, as the documentary shows that they were believing a lie the whole time.
‘Deranged’ supporters
In actual fact, Q never predicted Trump’s tweets.
What actually happened was that the person behind the original post Isaac saw doctored the timestamps to make it seem like Q was predicting the future.
Q’s post was at 5.07pm while Trump actually posted almost an hour earlier at 4.15pm.
“It was just trolls originally, like ‘look at all these fools, they actually believe this’,” one former 4chan user says.
Fredrick Brennan, founder of 4chan rival 8chan, explains: “Trump’s fans thought he would have some kind of clandestine plan to bring people to justice.
“His followers saw what they wanted to see and ran with the lie
“The people who support QAnon need some way of proving they’re the people who got the short end of the stick.
“They see elite people who get richer and richer, saying ‘Everything’s fine, we represent the truth,’ and people end up hating the truth.
“They do the same thing as people on 4chan, they start falling into the internet, falling into fantasy.
“It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to feel good and, little by little, the ‘truth’ sounded deranged.”
Killing in the name of QAnon
The bizarre theory has gained cult status among some followers, with Q-related products such as T-shirts, mugs, and jewellery available.
Believers have also been at the centre of violent crimes since Isaac started sharing videos about it.
In 2019, Anthony Comello was charged with murdering the underboss of New York’s Gambino crime family.
In court, he appeared with scribblings, including a “Q”, on his hand, and his defence team blamed the killing on him being obsessed with conspiracy theories, believing the mobster was a member of the “deep state.”
On October 15, 2020, Trump refused to condemn the QAnon conspiracy theorists – insisting: “I don’t know them”.
But that same year, when he claimed the reason he lost the presidential election to Biden was due to fraud, QAnon believers continued with their theories.
After he started tweeting that the result was a lie, thousands of people stormed the Capitol shouting “Stop the steal” and “Fight for Trump”, on 6th January 2021.
And Frederick notes that it wasn’t just pro-Trump supporters there.
He says: “It was an internet-generated event, full of people who love Christ, people who love Trump, conspiracy theorists, just people who are totally deranged and believed in this mass delusion.”
Some QAnon believers maintain that Trump is still the lawful president, and, since the storming of the Capitol, 964 people have been charged with federal crimes, and 465 of those have entered guilty pleas.
