eBay. It's a place to fall in love with new, pre-loved, vintage and rare fashion over and over again.

Your favorite designers, expertly authenticated. Yeah, eBay. Things people love.

This is Wired Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics.

I'm Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at Wired.

In late 2017, an anonymous user started posting cryptic messages on the online message board

4chan.

The user went by Q and claimed to be a government official with access to secrets.

The biggest secret of all, the poster wrote, was that the U.S. government is run by a small

faction of political elites.

Those elites are pedophiles who worship Satan and they control the Democratic Party and the

media.

The drops of cryptic and false intel that Q left online sparked a movement known as QAnon,

and it predicted that someday soon the deep state would be exposed

and the bad actors would be arrested en masse.

That day would be known as the Great Awakening,

and it would be spearheaded by the president at the time, Donald J. Trump.

Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand.

They like me very much.

The conspiracy spread like wildfire. A survey in 2023 found that a quarter of Americans believe that

Wall Street, the media, and the government were all run by satanic pedophiles. Wired has done a lot

of reporting on the tech and political side of QAnon. And some of that has been from David Gilbert, our resident Q&ONN expert joining me today from Cork, Ireland.

We're going to get into the impact of Q&ON on this year's election, but first, Jesselin Cook has just published a whole book about the actual people and families impacted by QAnon.

...