The Q&ON conspiracy began, obviously, thanks to a bunch of opaque 4chan posts.

And by the end of the Trump presidency, you know, it's something that a lot more people have

heard of than a typical online conspiracy theory.

Nonetheless, like I said, you know, a lot of people aren't exactly sure what QAnon is.

They're not clear on that, you know, beyond the fact that it exists, that it might have

something to do with satanic interdimensional pedophiles and that it's taken hold within an

especially fanatical pro-Trump part of the Republican base.

So I think just as a kind of clearing of the ground at the beginning, it might be useful to start with some very bread and butter questions.

Where did Q&N come from? How did it spread? And what's the basic narrative that underlies this conspiracy?

Sure. So Q&ON is sort of a conspiracy theory worldview that launched in October 2017 with a series of anonymous

posts on the website 4chan from a figure named Q. Now, Trump supporters took this to mean that

this person has like a high-level Q security clearance and is sort of giving them messages from Trump.

And, you know, in terms of what Q&N means,

you know, there's a lot of different factions in Q&N, and they sort of believe different things.

But pretty much all QNan people believe that the world, as revealed to them by Q, is run by a cabal

of satanic cannibal pedophiles who have, like, tortured children in satanic rituals,

and that these people are in, like, the Democratic Party and in Hollywood and in banking,

and that they've controlled the world for centuries,

and that now Donald Trump was basically convinced to run by the military to take this cabal down,

and that someday there will be this big moment

called the storm in which Trump arrests

and executes all of his enemies.

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