QAnon,
the biggest thing on the Internet
since that time Kim Kardashian's butt was thirsty.
It has been all over the news, social media,
and, this weekend, QAnon supporters
even held demonstrations in cities across America.
But what is QAnon?
Well, let's find out in another installment
of our ongoing segment If You Don't Know, Now You Know.
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If you know anything about QAnon,
you've probably heard that it's a conspiracy theory.
But the truth is it's more like a political cult
built around a conspiracy theory
and then crossed with a big book of word search puzzles.
And if that sounds complicated,
well, wait till you hear what they believe in.
NEWSWOMAN: For believers,
Q is an anonymous government official
who posts classified information
about a covert battle between the president
and a malicious ring of celebrities,
political elite, and the so-called deep state.
NEWSMAN: This anonymous poster, Q,
was giving secret clues
about the coming "great awakening."
The central theme here is that Hillary Clinton
and many of the world's other politicians and celebrities
are members of a murderous child sex ring.
NEWSWOMAN 2: Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey,
Tom Hanks and others eat children
in order to extract a life-extending chemical
from their blood group.
They believe that a group of military generals
recruited President Trump to break up this conspiracy
and end their control of the government and the media.
NEWSMAN 2: Donald Trump, in the QAnon view,
is going to save us from this,
in a moment called "the storm."
His tweets are misspelled for a reason.
-WOMAN: Ooh, really? -When he does "covfefe"
-and "the smocking gun"... -"Covfefe."
it's all code for what he's telling us.
Okay, I want whatever these people are smocking,
because Trump's typos are a secret message?
Man, I wish people were this forgiving
when I did stupid shit.
"No, you guys don't get it.
"When Trevor threw up at that party,
he was showing us it's what's on the inside that counts."
But, look, this guy's also not wrong.
President Trump's tweets are misspelled for a reason,
and that reason is...
(quietly:) he can't read.
Now, look, if Hillary and Oprah
were eating children to live longer,
I would be horrified,
because that is such a waste of magic blood.
You feed those kids to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, people.
Priorities!
But there's no way this conspiracy theory
is actually true.
And, look, I believe a lot of crazy shit, okay?
I believe the TSA confiscates all our lotion
in order to secretly sell it back to us at Walgreens.
I believe possums are just dogs without makeup.
I believe no one has actually ever broken up with me.
They've just all been abducted by aliens.
But this conspiracy theory is crazy
even for conspiracy theories!
I mean, set aside everything else.
You're telling me Trump is doing something heroic
but, instead of taking credit for it,
he's keeping it a secret?
That is the most unbelievable thing I have ever heard.
Plus, if you're wondering how it's possible
that Trump can be leading the fight against the pedophile ring
when he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years,
well, according to Q,
Trump has been undercover since the '90s,
which I believe.
I mean, if there's one thing Trump is known for,
it's his famously long attention span.
So how did this insane theory take off?
Well, partly, it latched on to fears
about the real phenomenon of human trafficking,
partly, it fed off ancient anti-Semitic tropes
about elitists who drink the blood of children,
but, mostly, it was just the good old Internet.
NEWSWOMAN: QAnon first emerged
in the months after President Trump took office,
starting on fringe Internet message boards
before spreading to social media.
The pandemic has only made things worse.
And so these people are just there all day.
Facebook groups have grown exponentially with QAnon.
NEWSWOMAN 2: In just four months,
membership of the biggest public QAnon groups
rose by 700%.
We saw a lot of groups who are wellness communities,
people who are interested in alternative health,
people would-- uh, the algorithm would sort these people together
with the QAnon people.
They would say, "Oh, alternative health?
"Maybe they're into anti-vax.
If they're anti-vax, maybe they're into Donald Trump."
And within one or two clicks,
people would go down these very bad paths.
Yep, that's how this shit always goes on the Internet.
It feels like, at this point, the entire purpose of Facebook
is to funnel everyone
towards the craziest conspiracy theories possible.
Because people will join a group about cycling
and then, five hours later, they're like,
"Hillary Clinton is a mountain goat, people!
She's an actual goat!"
And it's not surprising that the pandemic turned out
to create the perfect conditions for people to get radicalized.
Some people joined QAnon,
some people ordered Pelotons,
and neither of them will shut up about it.
This also shows you how much the Internet is ruining our brains.
When Shakespeare was quarantined during the plague,
he was like, "Maybe I should write King Lear."
Now people are sitting around during coronavirus, going,
"I wonder if I could prove
that Tom Hanks has sex with the devil."
Either way,
starting from the swampiest parts of the Internet,
QAnon gradually picked up followers
and eventually grew into a major online movement.
And it hasn't seemed to matter
that many of the things it predicted over the years
just never came true.
Early on, they were claiming
that Robert Mueller was secretly investigating
and gonna indict the cabal of Democratic leaders
and that President Trump was secretly working
with Mueller's team.
President Trump has secretly created a police force,
by the way, to arrest them
and force them to wear ankle bracelets.
NEWSMAN: The belief is that, somehow,
the late JFK Jr. is alive
and helping Trump clean up the deep state.
NEWSWOMAN: Nearly all of these clues,
including that Hillary Clinton was arrested,
turned out to be wrong.
But the batting average doesn't seem to matter.
You can present them with evidence.
You can demonstrate how the predictions have gone wrong.
And they don't seem to care.
It's just, again and again,
that Q is bigger than anything
that they can be presented with to the contrary.
That's right. It doesn't matter
how many of Q's outlandish predictions fail to pan out.
It never seems to have an impact on the movement,
and that, my friends, is the classic sign of cult behavior.
Once you're invested enough in something,
you will make any excuse for its failures.
So please don't be looking for logic here.
That's not how cults work, okay?
Cults don't follow logic.
They follow whatever the cult tells them.
That's why you always see cult leaders go so quickly from,
"The sacred aliens have chosen us" to
"Weird news, guys. The sacred aliens told me
"I should bang all of your wives.
"I guess it must be for our redemption
"or something to go somewhere.
I-I... I pick her."
So, thanks to this religious fervor,
QAnon took over the Internet,
and it would have been fairly harmless
if it had just stayed on the Internet,
you know, like Momo.
(laughing): That thing was a joke.
What was...?
That was weird.
But the scary thing about QAnon is what happened
when it jumped from the screen to the streets.
NEWSWOMAN: This is not just a bunch of online crazy talk.
It's dangerous in real life.
NEWSMAN: The FBI says QAnon and their many conspiracy theories
are a potential domestic terrorism threat.
The North Carolina man who shot up this D.C. pizza restaurant
looking for nonexistent pedophiles believed
in similar theories.
NEWSMAN 2: On more than one occasion people believed
to be followers of QAnon have shown up,
sometimes with weapons, in places
that the character told them were somehow connected
to Anti-Trump conspiracies.
In June, a man armed with a rifle and handgun
drove an armored vehicle to the Hoover Dam
on what he said was a mission from QAnon.
NEWSMAN 3: "QAnon followers have allegedly been involved
"in a foiled presidential assassination plot,
"a devastating California wildfire,
"and an armed standoff
with local law enforcement officers in Arizona."
NEWSWOMAN 2: In July, a 24-year-old man was charged
in the shooting death of a reputed mob boss.
His attorneys argued he was motivated by QAnon.
Written on his hand in the courtroom were QAnon symbols.
You cannot be serious.
Can you imagine being a mob boss,
and you get whacked by a kid from a message board?
Not a rival, just some random kid?
You'd almost want them to lie in your obituary
and say you were a snitch.
But this is insane.
QAnon people are out in the world doing real things--
shootings, hijacking, kidnappings!
Of all the bad advice I've gotten on the Internet,
nothing ever came close to making me murder a mob boss.
The worst advice I ever got was
to use toothpaste to get rid of pimples.
But I ate the entire tube of toothpaste,
and all I got was a tummy ache. Pimples didn't go anywhere.
And even with sporadic real-world violence,
it might be tempting to dismiss QAnon
as just another lunatic fringe,
but it's actually becoming pretty close to mainstream.
In fact, there are roughly 50 Q supporters
who ran for office in the Republican Party this year.
And it's almost certain that
one of them is actually going to be in Congress next year.
Although, maybe that's a good thing.
Nothing will prevent them from getting anything done better
than being in Congress.
Congress-- the only people
with a lower approval rating than QAnon.
And then, of course, there's President Trump.
He's the big hero in all of these QAnon stories,
so he could shut this down quickly by saying,
"Guys, none of this is true.
"Q isn't a real person, and, besides,
"if there was a sex group
"with all the most important people in the world,
you know I'd try to be in it."
Yeah, that's what he could do.
But instead, he has come out
and declared that QAnon are some very fine people.
NEWSWOMAN 1: At President Trump's rally in Tampa,
the image was hard to miss.
The letter "Q" on signs and T-shirts.
We are finally putting America first!
NEWSMAN: The Trump campaign even included QAnon signs in an ad.
NEWSWOMAN: President Trump has used
his own social media accounts
to promote QAnon followers and content nearly 200 times.
President Trump praising supporters
of the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory.
He told reporters he heard
that QAnon followers are people who love the country and him.
Well, I don't know much about the movement,
other than I understand they like me very much,
uh, which I appreciate,
but I don't know much about the movement.
Uh, I have heard
that it is gaining in popularity.
And these are people that love our country,
and they just don't like seeing it...
NEWSWOMAN: Well, at the crux of the theory is
this belief that you are secretly saving the world
from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals.
If I can help save the world from problems,
I'm willing to do it, I'm willing to put myself out there.
Yeah, you see, it doesn't matter that QAnon is a dangerous cult,
and all of their beliefs are complete fiction.
President Trump is on board.
Trump's approach to QAnon is basically the same
as that Backstreet Boys song.
He doesn't care who you are, where you're from,
what you did as long as you love him.
And honestly, people, nobody should be surprised
that Donald Trump is embracing QAnon.
Donald Trump was always going to embrace QAnon.
The surprise is that he's president.
So that's QAnon in a nutshell.
It's a violent delusion that spread from the Internet
to prey on vulnerable people
and infect an entire political party.
Or maybe I'm just saying that
to throw you off the real story.
And if you don't know, now you know.