WASHINGTON - Until recently, the fringe conspiracy theory known as QAnon was largely an American phenomenon — a belief that U.S. President Donald Trump is secretly battling a “deep state” cabal of pedophiles that control the world.
The far-right theory has gained adherents throughout the United States as the 2020 presidential and congressional campaigns heat up. Trump has repeatedly retweeted messages from accounts that promote QAnon while more than a dozen Republican candidates running for Congress have embraced some of its tenets.
All this has sparked concerns about conspiracy-theory-driven domestic extremists that the. But QAnon is no longer exclusively focused on U.S. politics.
Fueled by worldwide anxiety over the coronavirus pandemic, the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory has gone global, with adherents popping up in at least 71 countries, according to QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino.
“There has been massive growth,” said Argentino, a Ph.D. candidate at Canada’s Concordia University and an associate at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology.
Conspiracy theories thrive in times of crisis, experts say. With anxious people around the world trying to make sense of the killer pandemic as leaders struggle to deal with it, QAnon has found an enthusiastic audience with the promise of salvation from tyranny at the end of a struggle dubbed "The Storm."
Outside the U.S., Germany, though spared the worst of the pandemic, has become home to the largest number of QAnon followers overseas, according to Argentino. One German QAnon channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram boasts 120,000 members.
In the past month, the biggest growth in QAnon’s international followers has come from Brazil, a pandemic hotspot where the virus has killed more than 100,000 people.
Here is a primer on QAnon:
“Q” is an online persona claiming to be a government insider with Q-level top security clearance and knowledge of the deep state's inner workings. The anonymous poster first appeared online in October 2017 when he went to the 4chan image board with a wild premonition: Former secretary of state and Trump Democratic rival Hillary Clinton would soon be arrested and riots would ensue.
The prediction, needless to say, proved false, as did many others that followed, including the forecast of mass indictments of other Democrats. But that did not stop Q from continuing to post about Trump’s “secret war” against a deep state cabal of pedophiles, with his cryptic online "drops" parsed and amplified by a growing ecosystem of believers.
Thus was born a new conspiracy theory movement, with Q taking off where earlier “anons” such as “FBIAnon” and “CIAAnon” had petered out. What made QAnon stick was that it came on the heels of Pizzagate, a 2016 conspiracy theory that claimed the Democrats were running a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza shop.
No such thing was ever uncovered. While Q's latest ramblings are focused on the deep state's efforts to thwart Trump's reelection, child abuse and sex trafficking remain a constant in its belief system.
In his last, long-winded "drop" on July 31, Q ranted that the coronavirus pandemic was partly designed to help "shelter" presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden from appearing in public and participating in debates and to .
"At the core of the current interpretation of this ideology, QAnon believes President Trump is the person who will save the world from this network of bad actors and he will uncover the Deep State that exist in the United States and overseas," said Kevin Grisham, associate director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University at San Bernardino.
QAnon promoters say the deep state is all real, and they reject the notion that they "worship" Trump or "Q."
“Qanon is a worldwide group of non-violent truthers/patriots dedicated to God, saving our children from trafficking, and removing the Satanic DS (Deep State),” prominent QAnon promoter Joe Stroh, who goes by "Obiwan Qenobi" on social media, recently tweeted.
Despite rampant speculation, no one has unraveled the mystery person behind Q. Outside QAnon circles, few take him as a real insider. Many experts believe more than one person may have been behind the Q account over the years.