The hacker group known as Anonymous says it will target and take down the people behind the conspiracy theory “QAnon,” which came to prominence recently when believers showed up at Trump rallies.
The hackers posted a video warning QAnon that they were coming for them.
The anarchist hacking group slammed the QAnon conspiracy as potentially dangerous and driven by a “brainless political agenda” in a video posted Sunday to what is widely considered the most reliable Anonymous Twitter account.
“We will not sit idly by while you take advantage of the misinformed and poorly educated,” the group said in the video, which was posted with the hashtags #OpQ and #OpQAnon.
The video depicts various figures with Anonymous masks acting out certain aspects of the QAnon conspiracy against a constant backdrop of the letter “Q.”
The video claims that Anonymous “knew who was responsible for Q” and thought it was funny at first. However, the group now believes the conspiracy theory has gone too far.
“Someone is going to get hurt, so we have to put our foot down and start some shit with you all,” the group said in the video.
What is the QAnon conspiracy?
According to Q, nearly every president before Trump was a “criminal president” who was part of an evil global organization of Satanist pedophiles. It also claims members of the US military who are not working for the global pedophile cabal supposedly approached Trump and begged him to run for president so that they could purge the government of the deep state operatives without a military coup.
Q claims Trump is not under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, but that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are. And Trump is actually working with Mueller.
Q regularly drops clues that followers call “crumbs,” which are meant to predict things. For instance, he claimed John Podesta would be arrested or indicted Nov. 3, 2017 — which, of course, didn’t happen.
There’s a lot more to the conspiracy, all of it even more bizarre than this. Anonymous claims to know who is responsible for starting the conspiracy mongering and the group is promising to target and expose them.
BuzzFeed says it’s very likely that QAnon is a lefty prank on Trump supporters. The authors of an Italian novel titled “Q” say some of the theories are similar to the plot in the book.
“Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There’s no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank. But who’s pulling it on whom?” they said.
They also point to the fact that even this article runs the risk of being sucked into the QAnon vortex and just adding more fuel to the fire. “If [QAnon’s] perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the Luther Blissett Project), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one?”
Pathetic, sad, frightening — the fact that millions of people are sharing QAnon conspiracy theories is a testament to widespread ignorance and paranoia on the right. Of course, the lefty crazies have their own conspiracy theories involving Trump, the Koch brothers, white people, police, oil companies…the list goes on and on. Stupidity is not limited to one ideology or political belief system. It is an equal opportunity affliction that is spread proportionally across the political spectrum.
The lack of critical thinking skills it takes to believe this nonsense — or almost any conspiracy theory on the right or left — threatens to undermine democracy and destroy the country.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member