Beginnings

At 4:44:28 PM EST on October 28, 2017, the user(s) who would come to be known as “Q” created a post in the /pol/ thread on 4chan, an internet imageboard where people could anonymously share text or images. This thread stood for “politically incorrect,” where a culture of far-right rhetoric reigned supreme. Q referenced another user’s post that read: “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45AM–8:30AM EST on Monday – the morning on Oct 30, 2017.” Q reposted it, and clarified:

This first drop by Q contains the foundational themes of the movement: A suspicion of progressivism and Democratic Party leadership in general and Hillary Clinton in particular; the alignment of the US military with Q, who is supposedly an intelligence insider; claims of violent upheaval that mirror eschatological, Endtime thinking; the overturning of the perceived corruption of the status quo; and a participatory culture of “proof checking” Q’s claims through doing one’s own research on the internet.

The QAnon mythos describes Q as an intelligence operative, or operatives, in the Trump administration with “Q” level security clearance who provides anonymous posts of classified information on publicly accessible internet imageboards. These “Q drops,” as they are known, supposedly disclose the efforts of the Trump administration to root out corruption in the government and culture of the United States of America. This corruption stems from a secret “cabal” of elite leaders in the United States and around the world who are Satan-worshipping pedophiles and are engaged in the trafficking of children. It is these corrupt officials who are really running the show in American society as part of the “deep state.” They are the ones responsible for the decline of economic progress and “American” cultural identity over the past half-century. QAnon followers believe Donald Trump was tapped by military intelligence to run for president in 2016 to identify these deep state conspirators and reorient America to the path of righteousness. This would be achieved through the cabal’s destruction in what is known as “the Storm,” a violent reckoning that would usher in “the Great Awakening,” the broad enlightenment of the population to the truth that QAnon supporters knew all along.

QAnon has complex roots in a variety of historical phenomena tied to the politicization of conspiracy theory in American life (see Hofstadter, Reference Hofstadter1964; Barkun, Reference Barkun2013). What we call conspiracy theorizing is a longstanding feature of human culture and folklore (Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023) that continues in novel narrative forms today (Speakman, Reference Speakman2025). QAnon evolved out of the online narrative mechanics that gave rise to the proto-QAnon conspiracy known as Pizzagate in 2016, as well as the misogynist Gamergate harassment campaign of 2014 to 2015 (Badham, Reference Badham2021: 63–91, 117–66; Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 22–3, 56–7). On Dec 4, 2016, a man entered a family pizzeria in Washington, DC called Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle and shot off a lock to a door to free the children supposedly being held in the basement by pedophiles linked to Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats. He was inspired by information gleaned from anonymous imageboards and chatrooms online, and when he opened the locked door only to find a storage closet, he ended up surrendering peacefully to police, admitting that “the intel on this wasn’t 100 percent” (Hannon, Reference Hannon and Hannon2016). Gamergate was a misogynist cyberbullying campaign directed against video game designer and writer Zoë Quinn, who was harassed with sexist comments and violent threats after publishing a game she hoped would help people suffering from depression. In both cases, it was anonymous internet chan culture that leveraged internet-based communication dynamics to galvanize people to a common cause with consequences in the real world. Gamergate and Pizzagate showed the way internet-based technologies could be used to construct reality and structure meaning for those consuming the information. Those initially behind QAnon were ready to pick up Pizzagate’s signs, symbols, and narrative of suspicion against pedophilic cultural elites and repackage it into a new mythos (Badham, Reference Badham2021: 163–5).

We can identify other conspiratorial influences on QAnon before Pizzagate. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 was a catalyst for those voicing resentments about a changing America. Bond and Neville-Shepard identify two proto-QAnon conspiracies during Obama’s presidency that mark the beginning of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories like QAnon as a “method of political attack” – the Birther movement, which questioned whether Obama had been born in the United States, along with “the ‘born again racism’ of the Tea Party,” which referred to the self-imposed name of a group of GOP representatives who organized to challenge the Obama agenda (Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021: 684). Preceding this suspicion of Obama, the rise of the 9/11 Truther movement contested the official narrative surrounding the causes of the events of September 11, 2001, often alleging it was an inside job by the Bush administration (Barkun, Reference Barkun2013: 173–5). This doubt was expressed through new online forms of communication previously unavailable to human discourse and represents a degree of normalization of conspiracy theory in American culture. For example, it was in response to 9/11 that the conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist (2007)Footnote ⁴ offered a QAnon-esque attempt at crafting a meta-conspiracy that explained the macro-level connection between various world events in the past and the present to make sense of this particularly uncertain point in history (Barkun, Reference Barkun2013: 178).

The economic shifts in the 1980s and 1990s were another factor that saw increased globalization and the loss of middle-class jobs due to the outsourcing of domestic labor to foreign lands. This resulted in growing wealth inequality and rising suspicions of a New World Order, where fears of a one-world government first emerged on right-wing talk radio (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 50, 106). Radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and political candidates like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot were instrumental in propagating these ideas, which exacerbated feelings of resentment among the listening public (see Ganz, Reference Ganz2024). The rising tide of white Christian nationalism during this time influenced QAnon as well (Andre, Reference Andre, Austin and Bock2023: 198–203) as evangelical Christianity and conservative talk radio played mutually reinforcing roles during the culture wars of the 1990s, when the Moral Majority movement saw its version of the country losing out to a secularized, diverse understanding of American identity (Armaly et al., Reference Armaly, Buckley and Enders2022).

Other sources point to the satanic panic of the 1980s, when the rise of mass media and television in Western culture led to claims of satanic influences in popular culture that threatened children, like heavy metal music or the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Concern about pedophilia is a common feature throughout the history of human culture and is often based on fear of enemies or undesirables (Vrzal, Reference Vrzal2020); mass media merely provided a greater pool of resources from which one’s fear of enemies could be cultivated. Heyes shows how the satanic panic continued to percolate in American culture after the 1990s, eventually finding expression in QAnon (Heyes, Reference Heyes2024: 183–204; cf. Balmer & Ladner, Reference Balmer and Ladner2024: 199–200). Like the satanic panic, there are parallels to the role of conspiracy narrative in QAnon and the Salem witch trials of 1692. Just as the witch trials stemmed from increasing urban-rural conflict, and the satanic panic from the economic pressures of the 1980s household, QAnon is responding to uncertainties brought about by a “transnational logic,” where the needs of the globe usurp the needs of the local community (Bromley & Richardson, Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 160–4).

Balmer & Ladner’s study (Reference Balmer and Ladner2024) shows the foundation of QAnon’s theopolitical prophecy in the influence of the Christian Evangelical theology of Jerry Falwell and discusses how QAnon is an extension of the Christian Right’s response to the satanic panic of the 1980s and the Clinton conspiracy theories of the 1990s. Falwell can be seen as something like a proto-QAnon influencer among evangelical Christians, with the QAnon movement picking up his zealous message of Endtime prophecy and fear of globalization (see Balmer & Ladner, Reference Balmer and Ladner2024: 183–204). Finally, QAnon’s fear of a global cabal controlling the world reflects antisemitic conspiracy tropes expressed in the proto fake news propaganda found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [1903], as well as QAnon’s claim that elites are harvesting “adrenochrome” from the blood of children. These are coded reflections of antisemitic charges of blood libel popular in the medieval era as a slander against Jews (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 23–32; Glucklich, Reference Glucklich2025).

The Impact of QAnon on American Culture: 2018–2022

In 2021, Edward Tian of Bellingcat.com created a timeline of almost 5,000 Q drops to understand how QAnon grew by adapting to contradictions in the communication environment through a flexible and changing narrative.Footnote ⁵ Q’s drops were responding to themes in current events affecting Trump. I am using Tian’s timeline as a foundation and will fill it in with information from other secondary sources, as well as my own analysis of some of Q’s posts, to establish the observable influence of Q-related communication on American culture.

Q’s first drops were initially ignored on 4chan, with many Anons identifying them as another example of a LARP, or live-action role-playing game common in chan culture (see Badham, Reference Badham2021: 167–231). Tracy Diaz (aka TracyBeanz), Paul Furber (aka BaruchtheScribe on 4chan), and Coleman Rogers (aka Pamphlet Anon on 4chan) are credited with “sparking” QAnon by amplifying the movement in its initial days via their social media and imageboard platforms (Zadrozny & Collins, Reference Zadrozny and Collins2018). Six days after Q’s first post on 4chan, Diaz posted a QAnon explainer video on her YouTube channel for Liberty Movement Radio, where she covered WikiLeaks and the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. The three Anons would go on to establish the subreddit, CBTS_Stream, which stood for the “Calm Before the Storm,” a reference to Trump’s comment in the White House on October 6, 2017 (Kaplan, Reference Kaplan and Miller2023: 196–7). It became the name of a second /pol/ thread on Nov 1, in which Q identified as Q Clearance Patriot for the first time,Footnote ⁶ and was a sign-off in Q’s posts beginning the next day.Footnote ⁷

After a dispute on 4chan claiming Q’s board had been infiltrated, Q then migrated to 8chan in early January 2018. 8chan was another anonymous imageboard platform with even less moderation than 4chan. Furber was likely responsible for Q’s initial posts on 4chan, with Ron Watkins likely taking over authorship after Q’s migration to 8chan, owned by Jim Watkins, Ron’s father (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 61–6; see Kirkpatrick, Reference Kirkpatrick2022; Cafiero & Camps, Reference Cafiero and Camps2023). 8chan’s password was hacked, and for a time multiple people were posting as Q, but eventually the Watkins would gain control (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 14–15). The dispute between Furber and the Watkins revolved around making Q more accessible, so Furber established the subreddit “r/thegreatawakening,” with the move of QAnon conversation out of the chans and into Reddit as “the first pivotal move that allowed QAnon to tap into a larger audience of likeminded conspiracy theorists” (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 13–14).

Some of the first offline observations of QAnon’s influence were seen in April 2018, when a group of protestors marched in Washington, DC against the Justice Department’s investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign while chanting “where we go one, we go all” (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 10). This phrase from the 1996 movie White Squall would show up more than twenty times over the course of Q’s posts, with its acronym WWG1WGA occurring over 215 times, from April 3, 2018, to October 15, 2020.Footnote ⁸ WWG1WGA emerged as the QAnon rallying cry, whether printed or vocalized, and became an acronym for a common identity that saw itself as the bulwark against corruption. In late May 2018, QAnon’s ideology would contribute to vigilante justice like Pizzagate, when Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer occupied a cement plant near Tucson, Arizona, alleging the site had been used by a child sex-trafficking ring and posting pro-QAnon-related content to explain it (Ruelas, Reference Ruelas2018). On June 15, thirty-year-old Matthew Philip Wright used a truck and a weapon to block access to the Hoover Dam and held up a sign that said, “release the OIG report” (Sommer, Reference Sommer2018; Torres-Cortez, Reference Torres-Cortez2018). This referred to a report on an FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. QAnon followers saw the release of the report as anticlimactic, alleging there was instead a second report hidden from the public (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 132–4). Wright’s sign posted on his armored truck referred to this second report believed to be in Trump’s possession, which allegedly proved Democrats illegally conspired against President Trump’s election campaign.

The period from July 29 to August 4, 2018 saw an initial spike in interest in QAnon in wider American culture, which was likely due to journalists taking interest in the movement and explaining QAnon as a pro-Trump conspiracy theory (Tian Reference Tian2021; see Bank et al., Reference Bank, Stack and Victor2018; Cassin & Wendling, Reference Cassin and Wendling2018; Chang, Reference 73Chang2018; Van Prooijen, Reference Van Prooijen2018; Wong, Reference Wong2018; Zadrozny & Collins, Reference Zadrozny and Collins2018). On July 31, several Trump supporters donned Q shirts and signs at a rally in Tampa (Foreman, Reference Foreman2018), and the transition from summer to fall saw Q’s posts reflect a “major call to action” as the movement ramped up its support for Republicans in the 2018 election (Tian, Reference Tian2021).

What is interesting is Q drop 1785 on August 1, which contains what looks to be a smartphone screenshot of trending posts on Twitter, with “QAnon” listed at number seventeen.Footnote ⁹ Q then lists a total of thirteen articles from MSM (mainstream media) sources that discuss the rise of QAnon, with drop 1786 stating, “You are now mainstream. Handle w/care. The Great Awakening. WWG1WGA! Q.”Footnote ¹⁰ While the image itself may be manipulated, since the number seventeen is used in the movement in reference to Q as the seventeenth letter of the alphabet, these posts nevertheless represent a feedback loop relevant for a systems theory analysis of QAnon. Q, the anonymous poster(s) driving the movement of Anons, is recognizing that the wider public understands the movement as “QAnon.”

Q went silent for three months, from August 2018 until they re-emerged on 8kun – a rebranded 8chan – in November. The question of authentic authorship did not seem to disturb QAnon adherents, however, and would go unnoticed by the majority of QAnon supporters. Q’s identity did not matter; what Q was revealing mattered, and most of this information was being discussed on mainstream social media sites by this time (Sommer Reference Sommer2023, 72).

Within a year, a movement that began entirely online gained sufficient popularity to warrant study and concern by the wider population as more violent episodes appeared related to QAnon’s messaging (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 46–52). In January 2019, Bucky Wolfe killed his brother with a four-foot-long sword by stabbing him in the head, allegedly because he thought his brother was a lizard-person, an unrelated conspiracy theory that was absorbed into the QAnon narrative. Wolfe was a self-proclaimed member of the far-right militia organization, the Proud Boys, despite being denied membership because he was struggling with mental health issues. Sommer’s analysis of his social media accounts shows Wolfe’s affinity for right-wing and QAnon-related content and ideas (Sommer, Reference Sommer2019). In mid-March 2019, twenty-four-year-old Anthony Comello allegedly murdered an organized crime boss (Bella & Epstein, Reference Bella and Epstein2019). When Comello appeared in court, his ties to the QAnon movement were clear when he displayed a hand with a large letter “Q” and MAGA-related phrases written on it, with his attorney admitting Comello’s actions were influenced by the QAnon narrative (Bump, Reference Bump2019). In early May 2019, QAnon followers interpreted a tweet by then-FBI Director James Comey to include a coded message that indicated a Jihad-inspired terrorist attack was going to take place at a fundraiser for a small school in the Sierras outside of Sacramento, California (Veklerov, Reference Veklerov2018; Rothschild, Reference Rothschild2021: 74–8). When these conspiracy-minded people contacted Grass Valley Charter School and local and federal law enforcement about the alleged plot, the community acted with an abundance of caution and canceled the event. While QAnon communication did not instigate the panic, its retransmission via Facebook persuaded people to act on false information. On May 30, 2019, the FBI released an intelligence bulletin acknowledging that conspiracy theories can be affiliated with domestic terrorism threats – it specifically mentioned QAnon by name (Winter, Reference Winter2019), and examples of violence occurred during the pandemic of 2020 (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 155–8).

While empirical research shows QAnon communication contains violent rhetoric, the same research shows it does not necessarily call for direct acts of violence (Planck, Reference Planck2020). Burton and Moskalenko show that given the number of QAnon supporters, they are not statistically more likely to commit acts of violence and crime and are “no more radical than other Americans” (Reference Burton and Moskalenko2023: 194). Rather than focusing on QAnon’s content as the source of violence, other researchers point to the mechanics of anonymous online chan culture itself as the source of violent rhetoric (Keen et al., Reference Keen, Crawford and Suarez-Tangil2020). The no-rules atmosphere of 8chan, for example, provided the context for the commission of two white supremacist shootings in the spring of 2018, first in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then in Poway, California. Both were announced by the perpetrators on the platform, and in the case of the Christchurch shooting, it was live streamed (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 16; Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 66–7).

QAnon’s third year of influence in 2020 began with Q and the bakers (Anons who interpreted Q’s drops) casting doubt on the first round of President Trump’s impeachment hearings, and later the science of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting protective measures during the pandemic often correlated with whether one consumed information from traditional media sources or from sources communicating conspiracy theories (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 6–7). There were three issues that shaped the social climate of 2020 to which QAnon was responding: COVID-19 and governmental lockdown measures; the expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Brionna Taylor, and George Floyd; and the 2020 presidential elections (Edwards, Reference Edwards and Miller2023: 154). Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind Covid-19 was a self-produced film that was one of the leading sources of viral disinformation during the pandemic after it came out on May 4, 2020 (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 72; Nazar & Pieters Reference Nazar and Pieters2021; Beres et al., Reference Beres, Remski and Walker2023: 192–8; Lee et al., Reference Lee, Bao, Wang and Lim2023). The film argues that COVID-19 was manufactured, intentionally released, and that lockdown measures were being used by the government to exercise control over people; it was shared and amplified by many of those influenced by the QAnon narrative.

QAnon supporters, seeing Trump as their political messiah, interpreted these events as signs of apocalyptic chaos in the world for which the re-election of Trump was the only solution (Bond & Neville Shepard, Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021; Macmillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022). Prior to the pandemic lockdown, QAnon was relatively unknown by most Americans. It was during this time of lockdown measures that life pivoted online, leading to a greater probability of exposure to the QAnon narrative. Over the summer of 2020 visible signs of QAnon support began to appear more at Trump election rallies. The wider media coverage did not correlate with more involvement in QAnon beyond its core demographic as is usually assumed, however (Uscinski & Enders, Reference Uscinski, Enders and Miller2023: 154). Bloom and Moskalenko note that “In March 2020, QAnon Facebook groups increased by 120 percent, and posts with QAnon hashtags or content increased by a whopping 174 percent” (Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 44). What was once an explicitly right-wing conspiracy theory found affinity with a wider population.

Always adaptable as a participatory culture (see Marwick & Partin, Reference Marwick and Partin2022), QAnon appropriated hashtags like #SaveTheChildren, leading to its eventual spread to Instagram, where the themes of anti-child trafficking and exploitation were discussed (Kaplan, Reference Kaplan and Miller2023: 200–3). “Pastel QAnon” emerged from March through September of 2020 (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 94–6) and is described by Argentino as the way Q-related ideas spread to a wider and younger audience through “a network of female influencers that began on Instagram” who “started their careers as lifestyle bloggers, fitness instructors, diet influencers, esoteric spiritualists, or alternative healing advocates” (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 91). These influencers used the Instagram templates that reflected a pastel color aesthetic to promote their message, the opposite of what would be seen on the functional aesthetic of the chans (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 92). Most of the women identified in the Pastel QAnon movement were already established social media entrepreneurs before they became QAnon influencers (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 98). The pastel aesthetic itself led to a “softening” of QAnon’s far-right ideology such that it received far less scrutiny by the outside world than did the explicit right-wing rhetoric and imagery circulated on the chans (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 33–7, 58–63; Demuru, Reference Demuru2022: 594–601; Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 101–3).

2020 was also a presidential election year and 107 candidates for office had links to QAnon, 37 of whom were women (Kaplan, Reference Kaplan and Miller2023; Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 103). The only two candidates elected, however, were Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Tian notes how Q emphasized anew the deep state conspiracy, alleging that Presidents Reagan through Bush were complicit in its activities, with particular attention turned to Joe Biden, Trump’s presidential challenger. Trump was asked about his opinion about the QAnon movement during the Republican National Convention that summer, to which he said he had little knowledge, but knew the movement had affinity for him (Tian, Reference Tian2021).

On October 31, 2020, Q posted three drops (4944–4946) rallying his followers for election day saying things like “Are you ready to finish what we started?”,Footnote ¹¹ “Are you ready to hold the political elite [protected] accountable?”Footnote ¹² and “Are you ready to take back control of this Country?”Footnote ¹³ with another post that day containing only a link to a recorded launch of the Space Shuttle Discovery from April 27, 2011.Footnote ¹⁴ On election day, November 3, 2020, Q posted an image of a large American flag atop a tall flagpole towering over lush and verdant countryside with a link to a YouTube video playing the main theme song from the 1992 film, The Last of the Mohicans, perhaps to draw a parallel between Q’s followers and the righteous mission of the protagonist in the film to protect his friends and family.Footnote ¹⁵ Below the YouTube link, Q cut and pasted a quote from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. -Abraham Lincoln Nov 1863 Together we win. Q” (original typography).

The election was close, but on Nov 7 it was called for Joe Biden. Trump immediately contested the results, but Q stayed silent until Nov 12, when an image of the American flag was posted captioned with, “Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing! Q” (4950). Q’s next post (4951) less than an hour later asked a question raised many times over the course of Q’s drops: “Shall we play a game?” Q then bracketed the first letters in the phrase “[N]othing [C]an [S]top [W]hat [I]s [C]oming” and posted a link to a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency webpage for the National Council of Statewide Interoperability Coordinators, known by the acronym, NCSWIC.Footnote ¹⁶ Q then asked, “More coming? Why is this relevant?” and then continued to ask about safeguarding elections from foreign interference. Q then provided a final, cryptic explanation: “It had to be this way. Sometimes you must walk through the darkness before you see the light Q.” The next day Q posted (4952) the single word “Durham,” with Q’s final post of the initial cycle on December 8, 2020, containing only a YouTube link to a music video summary someone made of the successes and triumphs of the Trump presidency and the MAGA movement, set to the soundtrack of Twisted Sister’s 1984 heavy-metal classic, “We’re Not Gonna Take It.”Footnote ¹⁷

And just like that, Q stopped posting. Q did not post before, during, or after the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, despite eyewitness accounts of Q-related language and insignia heard, carried, and worn by many of those gathered there that day (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 6). While Q never explicitly called for violence, the relationship between technology and rhetoric shows that QAnon was a “radicalizing and mobilizing force” that facilitated the mass coordination of some individuals into staging a violent coup against a democratically elected United States government (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 163). January 6 was a turning point for QAnon, with QAnon followers representing nine percent of the total number of people charged with a crime for their actions that day (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 158). Major social media platforms banned QAnon-affiliated pages and content, with many fleeing to other platforms such as Parler, Gab, and Telegram.

Argentino describes this time as “a balkanization of the QAnon ideology” with four effects: it led to online communities like We the Media that sought to preserve the canonical posts and other material associated with the mythos; it gave rise to new influencers and a “neo-QAnon” movement such as Sidney Powell and Lin Wood’s efforts to “stop the steal” as part of Trump’s strategy to dispute the 2020 election results; it helped established QAnon influencers remain active; and it allowed QAnon ideology to blend with other far-right extremist movements, much of which appeared on the Telegram page, Terrorgram, a hotbed for far-right extremist rhetoric (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 175–85; see Rastogi et al., Reference Rastogi, Hill and Kogan2025). Argentino points to three major influencers in this neo-QAnon era: GhostEzra, a Telegram user who “adapted QAnon narratives to fit with neo-Nazi, Christian identity, and ethnonationalist narratives and ecosystems”; Michael Brian Protzman, leader of Negative48, a “QAnon-based, new religious movement” that believed JFK and JFK Jr. were still alive and were going to return to lead the United States; and Canadian influencer Queen Romana Didulo, who claims that her royal title was secured by Q and those secretly working with Trump to continue his efforts against the deep state after the election (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 188–92). Telegram was instrumental in the success of these influencers and other post-January 6 QAnon movements, and all three of these influencers communicated rhetoric that encouraged or resulted in harm or violence (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 192–3).

Posts attributed to Q remained dormant for over two years, until June 24, 2022, when someone posted, “Shall we play a game once more? Q.”Footnote ¹⁸ Once again, this was an election year with congressional seats up for grabs, and Q seemed to be interested in addressing the hearings on the January 6 Capitol insurrection taking place that month, raising questions about surprise witness Cassidy Hutchinson. Q encouraged everyone to “Trust the plan,”Footnote ¹⁹ but then Q didn’t post again until Nov 6, 2022, raising questions about the financing of Ukraine in post 4959. Q’s next post on Nov 7 expressed concerns about election integrity on the eve of the midterms. Q posted again on November 8 at 11:01 PM, well after the polls closed in most states, speaking of “endless” lies, wars, inflation, oppression, subjugation, and surveillance, asking and stating, “Who will put an end to the endless? Taking control.” Q continued to post over the month of November, seemingly trying to reinvigorate engagement, but it appeared to fall flat. Q’s final post on November 27, 2022, asked about what’s coded in our DNA, who put it there, and why. In a way, Q’s final post of the second cycle provides a window into the fundamental articulation of the problem of evil that lies at the heart of those who share Q’s resentments about the current state of things: “Mankind is repressed. We will be repressed no more.” Q ended with a warning that people are at war for our DNA and that we need to protect it. Q’s final word in this post other than Q’s one-letter signature was “Ascension.”Footnote ²⁰ Q has not posted since.

Summary

This brief history outlined the thematic foundations of QAnon in anonymous online chan culture and conspiracy movements. Then a timeline of the movement from Q’s first to final post was provided, showing a correlation between QAnon communication online and offline action. The cryptic poster known as “Q” asked questions rather than disclosed new information and provided users with what amounted to an interactive narrative that adapted over time, shaping their pre-QAnon biases about government overreach and social grievance, into a cohesive mythos of meaningful interpretation. While a short-lived movement, Q-related communication online bound people from vast distances together in common cause and identity from 2018 to 2022.

Sourcing the QAnon Mythos

There is debate concerning which Q drops count as “official,” given the selective role aggregator sites play in presenting QAnon material (Papasavva et al., Reference Papasavva, Aliapoulios, Ballard, Cristofaro, Stringhini, Zannettou and Blackburn2022). Argentino divides the source material of QAnon beliefs into three categories: Proto QAnon, Canonical QAnon, and Apocryphal QAnon (Argentino: Reference Argentino2026, 19). The first pertains to the communication dynamics of chan culture where the Q drops began; the second is Q’s posts themselves on 4chan and 8chan/8kun; and the third pertains to the period after Q’s last drop and neo-QAnon. We can further divide the canonical material into two categories: the primary and secondary QAnon canons. The primary canon would be the Q drops themselves as the necessary condition for the movement, and the secondary canon would be the interpretations of these drops by “bakers” that would achieve authoritative status among Anons.

The primary and secondary canons emerged simultaneously as Q posted, bakers interpreted, and Q learned of those interpretations, which were then incorporated into a future Q post – repeated over time with the amplification dynamics of social media (Bromley & Richardson Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 169–70). Q does not tell the whole story in any given drop but rather lays a foundation for the participatory role of the bakers to provide a more complete, but forever ongoing, interpretation of the narrative (Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023: 246). The bakers’ efforts functioned to establish “American greatness” as what Luhmann calls a “contingency formula” (Reference Luhmann2013: 107), a constraint on the interpretation of meaning, selecting content that reinforced an emerging orthodoxy pulling along both Q’s posts and other Anons into a system of meaning that elevated Trump and disparaged his enemies (cf. Luhmann Reference Luhmann2013: 191–5; Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023: 248).

Early representations of a stabilizing QAnon mythos can be found in the works of social media influencers Praying Medic and Neon Revolt, who picked up the efforts by Tracy Diaz and 4chan board moderators BaruchtheScribe and Pamphlet Anon to bring attention to Q’s drops in early November 2017 (Zadrozny & Collins, Reference Zadrozny and Collins2018; Cafiero & Camps, Reference Cafiero and Camps2023). Praying Medic is a popular YouTube influencer whose real name is David Hayes. He used the video platform to discuss various aspects of evangelical Christianity prior to his involvement with QAnon. Argentino describes Hayes as a “Qvangelical,” whose analysis of Q drops “regularly portrays the battle between QAnon and the ‘deep state’ as QAnon battling against satanic forces, which he characterizes as spiritual warfare” (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 60). In May 2018, Hayes published his “Q for Newbies” podcast,Footnote ²¹ which was an effort to distill information gleaned from Q’s drops and his chan-based discussions with other bakers into a coherent narrative in a series of published videos. From January 14, 2018 to Dec 1, 2022, Hayes published over two hundred and fifty YouTube videos interpreting Q drops, offering a wellspring of content for future research on the development of the QAnon narrative.Footnote ²²

Neon Revolt is Robert Cornero Jr. from Neptune City, New Jersey, an early follower of Q (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 53–7). Nick Backovic discovered Neon’s identity and describes Cornero as “among the most prolific Q influencers, especially when it comes to producing written material about the movement” (Backovic, Reference Backovic2021). While Neon Revolt has a book-length analysis from 2019 called Revolution Q: The Story of QAnon and the Second American Revolution, his nascent understanding representing the core QAnon mythos can be found in a blog post from July 2018 that would become shared time and again amongst the Q-curious: “Who is QAnon? An Introduction to the QAnon Phenomenon #QAnon #GreatAwakening.” This source is significant because it marks an early attempt to systematize Q’s drops into a single narrative in textual form for “normies” – those mainstream social media users unfamiliar with how people communicate on the chans.

Neon Revolt’s early systematic treatise is important for other reasons. Backovic notes that Ron Watkins, who likely authored the most Q drops (Cafiero & Camps, Reference Cafiero and Camps2023), was influenced by Neon Revolt’s method of blog post. Second, Bond and Neville-Shephard (Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021) identify later book-length, inside-the-faith sources that reflect and build on this core narrative posted by Cornero (see RedpillTheWorld, 2019; WWG1WGA, Reference Captain and Nemos2019; Anonymous Conservative, 2020).

When these sources are compared with Neon Revolt’s 2018 analysis, as well as that of the proto-QAnon canon and the historical influences discussed in Section 1, we see that Cornero is not inventing a belief system but rather organizing embryonic sentiments and themes into a cohesive narrative through the formation of metaphors that articulate the immanence/transcendence code according to the systems theory of religion. QAnon provides an opportunity to explore digital ethnography (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 9–10) and observe the real-time “coding” of belief formations we describe as religious (see Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 36–104).

The Gospel of Q, According to Neon Revolt

Neon Revolt was well versed in the online mechanics of chan culture. Cornero’s blog postFootnote ²³ begins by recognizing that those who are reading it probably are not his “regular” readers but instead landed on his page because of their interest in QAnon: “You’ve just heard the term ‘QAnon’ … you want to know more.” He says he is breaking from his usual craft of writing for a specialized chan audience and is instead writing for the Q-curious neophyte who needs the very basics to understand what Q is really saying. Cornero leads by cultivating an esoteric perspective, admitting he cannot just come out and say what QAnon is, because it will be “really hard to believe anything I have to say, even if you are politically aligned with me.” Instead, it requires a “dramatic paradigm shift” regarding one’s assumptions about the world. Cornero states that he spent eight months processing 1600+ Q drops, and while his goal is not to convince anyone of the truth of QAnon, he does want to provide the reader with a primer on the movement “to help you understand what’s happening during what will undoubtably [sic] be a volatile, confusing time.” He warns the reader that they might feel “a bit incredulous” after what he tells them.

Cornero begins from the macro-level view of history: “The world has long been held hostage by a group of power-brokers I have collectively called ‘The Cabal.’” This group controls what happens in the world, and has the power to run governments, exchange money, and wage war. “They see us as disposable pawns,” he says, a “disposable resource” that is leveraged by the Cabal through class strife, economic instability, and international war. The Cabal is a historical lineage of families that have exercised control over the world for thousands of years, whose contemporary goal is “the destruction of the West by any and all means, and the creation of a global megastate.” This sentiment invokes the fears of the New World Order government, a long-held conspiracy theory in right-wing and evangelical Christian circles (Kline: Reference Kline2021, 49). Cornero then notes that “a large portion of The Cabal are members of a secret society that is little more than a Neo-Babylonian death cult, and the higher you advance in the cult, the more mutual blackmail is required of you.” Membership requires the potential leveraging of compromising information to get the member to comply. This is an important point for the non-falsifiability of the QAnon mythos, as this premise explains any unfavorable information about Trump to be generated by self-preservation to cooperate with the Cabal that holds compromising information about the person critiquing Trump. The type of material includes “recording individuals in honeypots, pedophilic acts, and participation [in] human sacrifice,” often as willful participants. Pedophilia functions as the axiomatic moral taboo in the QAnon mythos, as the charge of pedophilia allows the QAnon adherent to dismiss moral concerns surrounding scapegoating when exacting harassment on the target of QAnon conspiracies (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 142–4; cf. Cunius & Miller, Reference Cunius, Miller and Miller2023: 77–81).

Key to the mythos is that Hillary Clinton and former president Barack Obama were two high-ranking members of the Cabal who took their power and influence for granted, never imagining that Clinton would lose in 2016. Cornero says we learn from Q that Obama and Clinton were plotting Russia’s demise. The goal for the Cabal was to get the United States and Russia to fight each other, thus taking out the two threats to their hegemonic control in one fell swoop. While the idea of this plan was certainly implied early on in Q’s posts, Q calls this the “16 Year Plan to Destroy America” for the first time in Q drop #570, on January 21, 2018 – ten days after Neon Revolt’s blog post that calls it the same thing.Footnote ²⁴ Q drops reveal Obama to be a “Manchurian president,” an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Cornero alleges that Hillary Clinton is a “literal practicing witch” who had “dining rooms” on Jeffery Epstein’s private island “where, until recently, stood a sacrificial temple to Babylonian [sic] fertility gods like Ba’al and Minerva.” It was in these dining rooms where she supposedly feasted on the flesh of children.

At this point in the narrative, Cornero recognizes that he warned the reader the information he is disclosing about the Cabal “was going to be a hard redpill to swallow.” This is a reference to enlightening the uninformed of the truth á la Morpheus’s role in the 1999 science fiction movie, The Matrix (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021:79–80). Redpilling is the way the movement spreads, by challenging people to think outside the box not by providing evidence, but by cultivating a hermeneutic of suspicion: “Almost everything you think you know about the world is wrong … a deliberate lie, made up to perpetuate the power of this Cabal,” Cornero assures the reader, in an attempt to justify the fantastic nature of the narrative. The Obama administration’s agreement with Iran, the Paris Climate Accords, and rising tensions with a nuclear North Korea “all tie into this 16 year plan.” But here Cornero does not offer evidence. Rather, he appeals to the experience of the problem of evil and a sense of apocalyptic revolution to explain the ills of the world: things can still become great “once this evil is purged from our lands.”

Cornero then pivots to the micro level to explain who Q is, a Trump administration insider trying to “disseminate information to the American people directly.” The identity of Q is admittedly a mystery, and Cornero and others recognize that Q may be a team of people working with Trump. This anonymity, however, does not detract from the veracity of Q’s drops. As other Q supporters will state, Q’s identity does not matter, the drops are disclosing the truth independently of who is disclosing it (Anonymous Conservative, 2020: 81; Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 71–2; cf. Sayers et al., Reference 81Sayers, Passmore, Egerland, Vásquez and Chovanec2025: 313–14). Q is not saying anything new about who or what is to blame for the problems in America. Liberals, Democrats, Hollywood elites, Silicon Valley executives – all have been objects of right-wing political suspicion since the 1980s, often overlapping with concern about globalization expressed in concurrent left-wing labor movements. Trump’s presidency was unique in that he was somehow able to unify the politically disaffected from different backgrounds (Kamola, Reference Kamola2021: 231–4), and so the Anon who is already a fan of Trump or is suspicious of the government may see in Q’s drops a window into what is finally being done to rout the nefarious actors from American government and culture perceived to be responsible.

Turning to methodological concerns, Cornero walks the reader through where they can find the Q drops by first discussing Q’s genesis on 4chan. He notes that the /pol/ imageboard on 4chan stood for “Politically Incorrect” and “was a major hub of operations during the Trump campaign, disseminating Trump memes at high velocity, and directly influencing the election in very tangible ways.” Cornero then regales the reader with images of what he claims to be the first time Trump and his cohorts interacted with chan culture on July 30, 2016, when Trump retweeted a post from the account “Patriotic Pepe,” a user who was highly involved in the /pol/ thread. One might ask why the Trump administration would turn to anonymous, unregulated and hate-filled imageboards to disseminate classified information about the administration’s ongoing efforts to rout the corrupt Cabal from our government and the world. “Because it was one of the last mediums of truly free-speech [sic] online,” Neon Revolt replies. Here Cornero mistakes a lack of editorial oversight for greater accuracy in truthfulness because the content is unregulated: “Anyone could come here and say exactly what they wanted” unlike “regulated, policed, and sanitized platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.” Cornero believes this freedom to post without oversight cultivates “a crowd of people who not only have a thick skin, but have a certain kind of intellectual rigor not found among the general public.” Cornero seems to suggest that because the anonymous nature of chan culture lends itself to people posting all sorts of distasteful things, then those who participate in the site somehow have a more critical lens of analysis because their enculturation helps them better distinguish between mere hyperbolic attempts at getting attention from the disclosure of accurate information (cf. Badham, Reference Badham2021: 193).

Cornero’s post contains insightful analysis into the selective mechanics of QAnon’s emerging orthodoxy through his discussion of Q’s migration from 4chan to 8chan. Q was soon noticed after posting, and despite Cornero’s romanticized perspective, the lack of editorial oversight on 4chan resulted in skeptical posts by antagonists challenging Q’s narrative almost immediately. Anons refer to this as “shilling,” that is, someone replying to a post in a challenging or skeptical way. According to Cornero, “it came out that all the moderators of the /pol/ board had been compromised by the Deep State,” and were no longer “suitable” for Q’s drops. Here, we see the assumed blackmail mechanics at play in mitigating efforts at falsification: Early challenges to the truth of Q’s posts are explained away as examples of the very issue Q is trying to bring to our attention. Even in a 4chan thread, people are acting on behalf of the deep state in questioning Q because the Cabal has compromising evidence against them, although those actors know Q is speaking the truth. Because of this “shilling,” Cornero confirms that Q then migrated to the imageboard 8chan. He then discusses how Q adopted a consistent “trip code” so users could track Q’s identity across these anonymous posts on the new platform and verify authorship.

Since Q’s posts may appear nonsensical to those untrained in the ways of interpreting Q drops, Cornero explains Q’s method for communicating. First, Q introduces a condition on which the entire epistemology of the QAnon movement rests: if Q is indeed a military intelligence insider, then this insider cannot use normal channels of communication, nor be direct, because this would be illegal and prosecutable according to our national security laws. This serves to reinforce why Q is choosing the anonymous chan boards. However, if Q were to raise questions based on the intelligence to which Q had access, then this can lead others to do their own research and reach the same conclusions that Q would prefer to state directly if it weren’t for national security laws. To achieve this, Q employs a “Socratic style of posting … where Q will often present two (or more) seemingly separate topics, and challenge us to see if we can establish a relationship between the two.” The implied assumption – à la Q’s second post invoking the Operation Mockingbird conspiracy theory positing the CIA’s control of mainstream mediaFootnote ²⁵ – is that crowd-sourced approaches to verify Q drops are more truthful. As one becomes more familiar with Q’s posts, the clearer the “layers of meaning” can be seen. For example, Q’s posts often repeat phrases to include certain abbreviations, or even intentional misspellings. Other markers, such as “Alice & Wonderland,” appear throughout Q’s posts “to either hint at a hidden meaning, or reinforce an idea in relation to what he’s presenting.” Alice referred to Q, and Wonderland referred to Saudi Arabia, notes Cornero – “the bloody Wonderland.”

Q must engage in this coded subterfuge because Q’s drops are part of an ongoing operation in military intelligence circles since 2013, when loyal generals aware of Obama’s role in the 16-Year Plan contemplated a coup against him. According to Cornero, “Q is but one part of a larger plan to restore America to greatness.” Instead of confronting Obama head-on, these loyal generals encouraged Trump to run for president. For those disappointed that the arrest of Hillary Clinton has not yet occurred as Q predicted, Q is telling them to “trust the plan” and that all variables are accounted for. Cornero goes on: “Q’s goal, simply stated, is to create a crowd-sourced parallel construction for the general public to see and understand [emphasis in original].” This is possible because Q is apparently working with the military and the National Security Agency and has the evidence on bad actors, but they cannot use the evidence because the NSA obtained the info illegally through prohibited bulk data collection methods. That’s why Q needs the Anons to figure it out through conducting research. Not only is one able to figure out for oneself what Q really means, but one has a duty to do so because the movement needs “digital warriors” for the cause. QAnon advocate General Michael Flynn (ret.) said as much (Flynn, Reference Flynn, Captain and Nemos2019: 11).

Cornero observes that Q’s real problem is not access to information, but “getting the general public on-board” because it “requires a complete narrative switch” to initiate the “#GreatAwakening.” The entire network of those profiting from the Cabal’s infrastructure must be taken down publicly:

Q’s attempts are meant “to shake the great bulk of the American population awake, and disabuse them of any lingering vestiges of the narrative that’s been fed to them by The Cabal for years, and years, and years.” Trump cannot just attack the Cabal head-on through arrests, because that would ensure chaos as the network was disrupted, thus promoting the Cabal’s goal of sowing “death, destruction, division, chaos, and control.” Cornero sees protests against Trump in his early presidency as products of the Cabal’s “brainwashing,” and QAnon’s programming is necessary to counteract the fictions. Normal legal recourse is insufficient to address the depth of the Cabal’s control, as they’ll be exonerated by their allies in government. Instead, military tribunals far away from Washington DC are necessary to ensure justice is served: “you still need somewhere to lock them all up (at least the ones you’re not sentencing to death),” Cornero reminds the reader. According to Q, “Gitmo” – the US military base in Guantanamo Bay – is one of those places.Footnote ²⁶

Cornero closes his analysis by reminding us that Q asks us to “trust the plan,” with all its “many layers, pieces, and players” involved. Q drops should be considered a message of hope, because they show that “the good guys are winning,” and that “[j]ustice is coming to America, and there will be a great restoration for ALL of us as these evildoers are removed from positions of power and influence, and even from the face of the earth.” Cornero says the Anons on the imageboards are merely “the very first ones to bear witness to Q,” who see themselves as the “vanguard” of Q’s revelation known as the “Great Awakening.” And to confirm the magisterial status of the bakers, Cornero states that “this is the role Q himself has given us. It’s why I started this blog …. It’s why I wrote this very essay: to help you and others heal and understand and help bring peace and prosperity back to the nation.” Finally, Cornero tells his readers that they too have a role: “Just as I have done my best to help you understand, it will soon be your job to help others understand.” Cornero encourages the reader to use his essay as a resource and provides links to other QAnon sources before concluding by identifying what he believes to be the fifteen most important Q drops that articulate the mythos just described.

Summary

The present section identified the foundational sources from which the QAnon narrative is constructed and conducted a close reading of one of the earliest articulations of its narrative considered authoritative by QAnon adherents and current scholarship. There are many other conspiracy theories associated with the movement that are not yet incorporated into this early communication record of its ideas (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 33–7). This lends credence to the idea that we can view QAnon as a living religion (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 19–45) because of the way it adapts and changes through internet-based communication over time. We will analyze the QAnon mythos in relation to conspiracy theory, consumerism, and conspirituality in later sections, but next we must continue our empirical analysis of QAnon and discuss its method of communication in more detail.

Crumbs, Bakers, and LARPing

Q’s posts were not unique but rather emerged from a form of participatory storytelling popular in online chan culture known as LARPing – live-action role playing (Badham, Reference Badham2021: 169–74; Speakman, Reference Speakman2025: 97–101). Specifically, QAnon’s LARP dynamics parallel Cicada 3301, a participatory puzzle that appeared on 4chan in 2012 (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 6–11). Many 4chan users initially called out Q for being yet another LARP and were unconvinced it was anything different from the previous government-insider LARPs found on 4chan posted by users FBIAnon and MegaAnon, among others, in an “anon genre” on the chans (Badham, Reference Badham2021: 172–3; Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 4). Like QAnon, these accounts alleged some form of insider status, and some Anons would play along with the story being told and would comment in a way that kept the story going.

The LARP is a form of ritualized intra-group co-operation that reproduces QAnon’s system of meaning. Ritual is a foundational “building block” of religion as a complex adaptive system that helps humans survive as a social species (Purzycki & Sosis, Reference Purzycki and Richard2022: 142–9). Other people’s beliefs matter to us, because those beliefs reduce uncertainty as to who is a member of the group and therefore deserving of resource allocation. Ritual helps establish knowledge of those beliefs as a mechanism for in-group social representation (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 3). The performance of ritual validates belief and manages fears through repeated socialized action that structures the meanings, values, and perceived dangers of the group’s identity. This helps explain the charge of “shilling” leveled against those early 4chan users who laughed off Q in recognizing that Q drops were likely just a government-insider LARP rather than a disclosure of classified information. A shill would be one doubting the reasons for that cooperative ritual, which in turn questions the meaningful narrative needed for it to emerge in the first place. The ritual of doing research and communicating it to others then becomes a microcosm of the mythos itself, which explains the need to ensure that the repetition of the ritual is done frequently and accurately. In their discussion of QAnon as a gamified LARP, Overwijk and de Zeeuw observe that “To play the game and to win requires both a reflexive awareness of its status as a game (observed from without) and a blind commitment to its unfolding as if it wasn’t (observed from within)” (Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 135). Although QAnon may indeed be just another LARP, it nevertheless represents the gamification of Q’s followers’ epistemological commitment to a sense that something is wrong with the world, becoming a forum for its socialized expression (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 108; Kaplan, Reference Kaplan and Miller2023: 204–6).

Chan culture knew that Q was far from the first Anon to claim government insider status, but it was those unfamiliar with chan culture who encountered polished explanations on mainstream social media platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook that led to QAnon’s initial growth through the first half of 2018 (Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 73–85). Facebook was particularly instrumental in spreading Q-related information to an older audience unfamiliar with the dynamics of chan culture’s form of narrative construction. Far from a LARP, these “normies” saw in the Q drops a narrative that justified their suspicions about the government and a changing America. It was on these platforms that users familiar with the Q drops on 4chan would take Q’s “crumbs” of information and develop them into a cohesive narrative for a wider audience in discussion forums, videos, podcasts, and other internet media (see Sayers et al., Reference 81Sayers, Passmore, Egerland, Vásquez and Chovanec2025). Women were instrumental in the early spread of QAnon, with Lisa Clapier encouraging her followers on Twitter to #FollowTheWhiteRabit and Tracy Diaz with her early explainer videos of the Q drops (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 8–9).

QAnon influencers are referred to as “bakers,” because they took the cryptic ingredients from information Q dropped on the chans (“crumbs”) and crafted them into a wider narrative that established the boundary between in-group and out-group. Bakers clarified QAnon’s mission and guided followers in the mythos by helping readers see the meaning they needed to see by building upon the consumer’s biases and assumptions (see Nemes, Reference Nemes2023: 105–8; Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023: 248; Sayers, Reference 81Sayers, Passmore, Egerland, Vásquez and Chovanec2025: 312–13). The bakers were arguably more influential than Q because the major sources of information on QAnon consumed by people were mainstream social media accounts that interpreted Q drops and shared Q-related content rather than the Q-curious analyzing the Q drops themselves on the chan boards (see Hughey, Reference 76Hughey2021; Marwick & Partin, Reference Marwick and Partin2022; Sommer, Reference Sommer2023: 68).

The QAnon narrative may have incubated in chan culture as a LARP, but when it scaled up to mainstream social media platforms and spoke to people unfamiliar with that culture – but who nonetheless harbored analogous resentments against “the establishment” – they saw in Q a Trump insider who offered explanations that directly addressed their suspicions, not an internet troll messing with people (Speakman, Reference Speakman2025: 98). If it were not for the bakers, it is likely Q’s posts would have had less impact and would never have left 4chan where they first began. Whether an entrepreneurial opportunity (Conner & MacMurray, Reference Conner and MacMurray2022: 14) or genuine concern, the bakers were instrumental in crafting the communication paradigm of QAnon, leading to the conversion of many acolytes into the ways of “seeing” QAnon truths in the mundane dynamics of social and political life (see Green et al., Reference Green, Trella, Biddlestone, Douglas, Sutton and Miller2023: 38–9; Alber, Reference Alber2025).

Take the Red Pill and Do Your Own Research

Those who have been enlightened by the bakers have the moral duty to share the good news with others by circulating Q drops and their interpretations (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 65). Rejecting the idea that QAnon recruitment involves pseudoscientific ideas like brainwashing, Richardson notes that “QAnon participation can more easily be explained by social psychological theories on persuasion and attitude change that assume active agency on the part of participants,” uniquely facilitated by the internet (Richardson, Reference Richardson and Miller2023: 109–10). The form of cyber-street evangelization that emerged in QAnon is known as “redpilling,” named after the scene in the 1999 movie The Matrix where Morpheus gives the protagonist, Neo, a binary choice between taking a red pill that reveals the dangerous truth, or a blue pill that will keep him in the safety of ignorance (see Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 79–80). To redpill someone, then, is to help them see the truth told by Q.

As a form of participatory culture, interpreting Q drops gave QAnon a game-like atmosphere that involved the Anon in the mission and so provided a sense of purpose and meaning (Davies, Reference Davies2022: 60–79; cf. Speakman, Reference Speakman2025: 95–7). Throughout Q’s thousands of posts, cryptic and rhetorical questions are raised encouraging people to do their own research into those questions by using the tools of the internet, which helps reinforce the loyalty of followers who have felt “infantilized by the system” (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 106; cf. Reinhard et al., Reference Reinhard, Stanley and Howell2022). Q’s posts were strategically vague and so never directly called for any specific collective action beyond individuals doing their own research and sharing Q’s messages with others (Linvill et al., Reference Linvill, Chambers, Duck and Sheffield2021). Even the list of ten things the new Anon can do to make a difference in the final chapter of the inside-the-faith edited volume, QAnon: Invitation to the Great Awakening, enumerates personal actions rather than collective actions (WWG1WGA, Reference Captain and Nemos2019: 257–8). Most of the ways listed are unclear as to how they will make a difference beyond giving the individual the feeling of making a difference. According to Linvill et al., “The ‘fight’ Q calls for is a digital one” (Linvill et al., Reference Linvill, Chambers, Duck and Sheffield2021: 14; cf. Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 8). It is Q and Trump who are taking care of things, and the QAnon adherent is merely to research and spread the word that it is taking place and otherwise “enjoy the show.”Footnote ²⁷

One of the ways QAnon adherents were called to participate was to make memes, and Maurer’s analysis (Reference Maurer2024) focuses on the spread of conspiratorial thinking and right-wing ideology through leveraging memes. Over time, absurdism leached into the once playful meme culture such that transgressive behavior evolved into a valued trait: that is, using memes to challenge established cultural norms. Maurer describes how image-based memes on the internet facilitate belonging through negotiating the boundaries between the in-group and out-group, “[leading] to a sense of belonging for those who can read the memes” (Maurer, Reference Maurer2024: 47; cf. Dawkins’, Reference Dawkins1989 [1976] conception of memes as forms of cultural transmission). Clothed in benign visual representations, posters online gain social capital by leveraging memes to promote absurd, anti-establishment, and countercultural, but no less authoritarian, sentiments. Mauer points to the use of the “Pepe” meme, a sad-looking, anthropomorphic frog, in far-right internet culture, as an example, much to the chagrin of Pepe’s original creator (Maurer, Reference Maurer2024: 51). Matt Furie created Pepe in 2005 as a vehicle to communicate feelings of anxiety and ennui with the caption “feels good, man,” but the co-option of the Pepe meme by right-wing rhetoric has led the Anti-Defamation LeagueFootnote ²⁸ to identify it as a vehicle for communicating implicit forms of hate speech (cf. Dilley et al., Reference Dilley, Welna and Foster2021).

One of the fallacies of the early internet age was the assumption that the internet would be a democratizing force, necessarily, because it provides a forum in which the market of ideas can take place in real time, involving the common person as well as experts (Miller, Reference Miller2021). This idea is best expressed in Steve Clarke’s “hyper critical atmosphere” interpretation of the internet (Clarke, Reference Clarke2007). Clarke understood internet communication to facilitate critical communication so fast that conspiracy theories would not be able to grow because they will be criticized and rebutted more quickly. Daniel Miller understands Clarke to be “half correct” insofar as “the Internet is likely increasing the speed at which such a ‘degenerating research program’ can be constructed/maintained/modified” (Miller, Reference Miller2021: 15.) With Clarke writing in 2002 and then 2007, Miller notes that he was unable to predict the way in which the very structures of the internet that facilitate a “hyper critical atmosphere” can be tailored via algorithm to create enclaves of communication where certain thoughts can incubate unencumbered in social media echo chambers. As Cornero discusses in his QAnon primer, Q’s use of anonymous imageboards was confirmation for those already suspicious of mainstream media. Chan culture facilitated the spread of QAnon because it was a method for communication that circumvented the alleged monopoly on social representation held by the mainstream media sources (see Hannah, Reference Hannah2021; Bromley & Richardson, Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 168–70).

QAnon adherents spend a lot of time contributing to the theory building of the overall mythos of the movement such that while its claims are baseless, one can agree with Miller that “it produces an extreme-rightwing perspective with its own internally coherent empiricism and epistemology” (Reference Miller2021: 15, original emphasis). Marwick and Partin draw on the work of media scholar Henry Jenkins’ research in fan studies and describe QAnon as a “participatory culture” characterized by how easy it is to get involved and its ability to cultivate community through recognizing individual contributions (Marwick & Partin, Reference Marwick and Partin2022: 5). While participation is generally considered a good thing, they challenge this assumption with observations about “dark participation,” or instances where “participatory culture has been corrupted by trolls, conspiracy theorists, and hate groups” (Marwick & Partin, Reference Marwick and Partin2022: 2). QAnon is paradigmatic of participatory culture, albeit one that embraces rather than eschews chaos. In the political and cultural sphere of American life, QAnon shows that such participation was never intended to be positive and inclusive of the whole community. Instead, participatory culture is a value-neutral concept, and dark participatory cultures like QAnon can be dangerous for democracies when they promote a weakening of voting and civil rights and the strengthening of authoritarian forms of government (Marwick & Partin, Reference Marwick and Partin2022: 3).

Summary

Recommunicating the forms of meaning contained in the Q drops as interpreted by the bakers through LARPing, researching, and redpilling was intrinsic to the emergence and stabilization of QAnon as an autopoietic, or self-generating, system of meaning. The anonymous meme culture that began on 4Chan in the early 2000s laid the foundation for a new type of mytho-poetic storytelling that is dependent on the communication complexity afforded by internet technologies. It was through the ritual of participating by “doing your own research” and the improvisational mechanics of the LARP that in and through these virtual communities some people began to find a feeling of purpose, a sense of belonging, and answers to questions of existential concern through the language of QAnon. These communities helped them make sense of their feelings of resentment at their perceived loss of status and identity in a quickly changing world (Allen et al., Reference Allen, Morris, Kern, Boyle, McGlinchey and Miller2023: 176–92).

The Relationship between Conspiracy Theories and Religion

If the systems theory of religion understands the immanence/transcendence code to resolve the problem of persistent uncertainty (Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 37, 72, 137, 169), then we can clearly see how conspiracy theorizing addresses this concern today. QAnon can be considered a conspiracy-based response to ontological insecurity in “Second Modernity” – that is, the information age that emerged from the consumer-based, globalized socio-economic order established after the Second World War (Fitzgerald, Reference Fitzgerald2022). The liberal political, social, and economic order has failed to deliver its promise of upward mobility for many, particularly those who were once secure in decades past. Invoking Marx’s famous articulation of religion, MacMillen and Rush (Reference MacMillen and Rush2022) note how QAnon’s system of meaning-making functions as an “opiate” that provides the intellectual salve for the wounds of rising unemployment and loss of high-wage jobs, all while providing a sense of positive possibility. QAnon represents “the sigh not so much of the ‘oppressed’ creature, but the shout of the disappointed, aggrieved” (MacMillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022: 995). CTs arise not only within marginalized communities, but whenever there is a perceived loss of agency and status regardless of any actual loss in society (see Van Prooijen & Douglas Reference Van Prooijen and Douglas2018, 901; Bond & Neville-Shepard, Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021; Meyer & Miller, Reference Meyer, Miller and Miller2023).

QAnon’s leveraging of CTs can therefore be evaluated through the lens of relative deprivation theory in sociology (see Caputo-Levine & Harris, Reference Caputo-Levine and Harris2022). The grievance of QAnon supporters is rooted not in economic oppression alone, but in the experience of the loss of a sense of de facto cultural power in comparison with other demographics, and therefore in a sense of an eroding identity in the national narrative (MacMillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022). QAnon appears to be a middle-class movement among white, conservative-leaning Americans who perceive a threat to their status. Alexa Rogalla, for example, shows an inverse correlation between poverty and QAnon affiliation beyond a certain threshold that “suggests that once a community becomes saturated in poverty, interest in QAnon is less likely” because such communities must spend their time addressing the economic concerns of daily life rather than conducting Q-related research (Reference Rogalla2022, 33). Instead, the same study shows that changes in the demographic diversity toward an increasing non-white population “triggers communities to higher rates of QAnon support” among homogeneously white populations (32; cf. 23, 3), but a decreased correlation among communities that are racially diverse (34). This shows that QAnon is more of a status threat response by a culturally dominant group who feel their sense of identity being assaulted by a demographically and economically changing America (45). Granted, the QAnon mythos is born of many legitimate grievances that adversely affect most Americans. These include the United States’ history of foreign entanglements and military intervention at the expense of domestic policy development and the lives of those who serve in uniform; and, perhaps most importantly, the massive disparity in wealth inequality and with it a loss of dignity that has only grown since the 1980s. Rogalla’s research shows how QAnon exploits these valid grievances by leveraging conspiracy theorizing to address the demographic strain perceived to be a threat by dominant cultural groups.

Despite its logical fallacies, the QAnon movement provides a simplified system of meaning that justifies and explains the resentments of the aggrieved, personifying the solution to their resentments in President Donald Trump. Van Prooijen and Douglas identify three insights about the structure of conspiracy beliefs gleaned from the emerging field of CT studies. First, underlying psychological processes lead to conspiracy theorizing as an interpretive mindset. Second, belief in a particular CT is often tied to one’s social context and political ideology, but conspiracy theorizing itself is not limited to any single context or ideology. Third, a person is more inclined to believe in CTs in response to social structures that increase feelings of vulnerability and, by correlation, “conspiracy beliefs are high particularly among members of stigmatized minority groups” (Van Prooijen & Douglas, Reference Van Prooijen and Douglas2018: 898). Expanding on the first two insights, they then identify four empirical qualities of beliefs in CTs. First, they are consequential in that they can impact one’s health and social standing. Second, they are universal in that they appear across cultures and history. Third, they are fostered not by rational analysis but by intuitive thinking and socialized, emotional sense-making driven by pattern recognition among chaotic causes, attributing agency with some sort of plan for those causes. Finally, they are fundamentally social phenomena in that they only qualify as a CT when the theorizing assumes dangerous intentions of outsiders relative to the ingroup (Van Prooijen & Douglas, Reference Van Prooijen and Douglas2018: 899–903).

While CTs have persisted throughout history, but especially in the modern period, it is their form that has changed since the 1960s. CTs have evolved from a “secure” paranoia that sees a fixed antagonistic force relative to one’s social identity – such as the CIA – to an “insecure” paranoia that adopts a hermeneutic of suspicion ad infinitum toward expert narratives in general – such as the elites or educated classes (Fitzgerald, Reference Fitzgerald2022). It is this vulnerability that led many to turn to mass media and, later, internet-based technologies to find and craft answers, imbuing these secular structures with a sense of meaning and causal agency reflecting the immanence/transcendence code of systems theory despite their secular character (cf. Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023; Nemes, Reference Nemes2025: 46–50). For example, it is Q as an “intelligence insider” who is delivering the truth of what the president is doing to crush the deep state and so restore “American greatness” (cf. Anonymous Conservative, 2020).

The need for belonging and the fear of losing community is certainly a concern expressed by many QAnon followers (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 23). Bloom and Moskalenko’s psychological analysis discusses how belief in CTs often coincides with the breakdown of normative systems that inform one’s own worldview; one’s sense of meaning can be torn down when “personal distress is compounded by an unraveling of social norms that tether us to reality.” It is this tipping point in psychology that “[sends] one looking for Morpheus and his red pill” (Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 82). They point to the social development of conspiracy theorizing as a way to process communal trauma, and observe that the communication of QAnon “folQlore” has cognitive, social, emotional, and personal utility. Decoding Q’s drops helps one feel like an expert, rather than ignorant; this in turn makes one feel like they are part of a unique community, which in turn addresses the anxieties of persistent uncertainty, thereby providing one with a sense of mission and purpose in life (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 103–12). QAnon shows how explanations will adapt to accommodate socialized participation, especially in the face of fear, anxiety and perceived marginalization, whether or not those feelings are justified (see Allen et al., Reference Allen, Morris, Kern, Boyle, McGlinchey and Miller2023; Bessarabova & Bandas, Reference Bessarabova, Banas and Miller2023).

CTs and the Cognitive Science of Religion

CTs offer a narrative that connects various issues to a common explanation, providing an etiology for otherwise chaotic events. CTs reflect similarities with religious beliefs due to overlapping epistemological mechanics in human cognition and inference. Fundamentally, CTs explain the problem of evil in contemporary language. Barkun offers three characteristics of the “conspiracist worldview” that bear resemblance to religious explanations of experience: “Nothing happens by accident …. Nothing is as it seems …. Everything is connected ….” (Barkun, Reference Barkun2013: 3–4, original emphasis; see Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 7–8). Juan Antonio Roche Cárcel’s analysis of QAnon identifies a parallel between CTs and religion by considering what we know about the role of magic in religion. Whereas magic is an action that “represents a means to control phenomena,” conspiracy theories represent “a secularised magical thinking” where what is “hidden” holds explanatory power because it represents the possibility of causation beyond the actuality of the everyday experience of our sensory observations (Reference Roche Cárcel2023: 6–8). Similarly, Susan Greenwood notes how CTs like QAnon draw on magical consciousness as a rejection of established explanations and sees conspiracy thinking as a participatory “mode of thought” that draws on analogical language rather than logic to imbue meaning to our experience in the world and construct new explanations (Reference Greenwood2022: 4–6).

The field of cognitive science of religion (CSR) considers religious beliefs to endure due to their persistent relevance in human experience tied to evolutionary survival (see Boyer, Reference Boyer2001; McCauley, Reference McCauley2011). CTs and religion are both rooted in the cognitive tendency to identify patterns and attribute agency to various non-agential causes, even if the relationship between causal entities is too complex and chaotic to identify (Allen et al., Reference Allen, Morris, Kern, Boyle, McGlinchey and Miller2023: 180–1). CSR reveals the evolutionary advantage to this inference dynamic: if you are camping and believe that the rustling in the bushes is a dangerous animal and so leave the campsite, your vacation may be ruined, but you are at least alive and can procreate, passing down your genes. Ignore the rustling and pretend it’s just the wind when it is in fact a dangerous animal, you may not be alive anymore to procreate and pass down your genes. In other words, it is safer to assume an agent when there is none. This contributes to what many in CSR describe as a “hyperactive agency detection device” developed over time in the evolution of our cognition that helps explain those events that threaten our being and remind us that we’re not really in control (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 3).

Rather than presenting a single conspiracy theory, QAnon communication exhibits a conspiracy-mindedness, an epistemological orientation that will “see” the machinations of agency behind threatening events in the world (Macmillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022: 991). QAnon functions as a “danger narrative” – not one of outsiders, but “a narrative of ultimate betrayal” where those who were tasked with leading America sold out and exploited their fellow citizens (159–60). QAnon’s claim of an amorphous cabal as responsible for the ills of the world could be considered an abstract representation of believing a bear is in the rustling bushes, but this time “the bushes” are the persistent anxieties of life in a media-connected, globalized, and market-based society. Agential concepts are invoked socially to inform one’s inability to change one’s circumstances, and so one must trust the interpretation of the beliefs communicated by the group to benefit from its resources (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 3).

Non-falsifiable agency – including, but not limited to, supernatural agency – underlying CTs and religion is delivered through adaptations in the symbolism of metaphors crafted from the conceptual content relevant to an historical epoch. While the symbolic representation of the causes of nefarious agency has changed from supernatural to natural human action in the case of QAnon, such agency remains beyond falsification, usually due to the CT adherent moving the goalposts of explanation, such that the premises and argument can never be defeated with evidence to the contrary (Miller, Reference Miller2021: 15; Green et al., Reference Green, Trella, Biddlestone, Douglas, Sutton and Miller2023; Meyer & Miller, Reference Meyer, Miller and Miller2023; Simmons & Carnahan, Reference Simmons, Carnahan, Austin and Bock2023: 93). In the past, the ills of the world were blamed on tricksters or supernatural deities, but today it’s the one-world government of the administrative deep state, with prophecy delivered by an intelligence insider (see Bromley & Richardson, Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 166–8; cf. Anonymous Conservative, 2020). From a systems theory point of view, conspiracy theorizing contributes to the production of Luhmann’s contingency formula, a constraint on the interpretation of the immanence/transcendence code fashioned from content found in the communication environment of Second Modernity (cf. Luhman, Reference Luhmann2013: 105–7, 229–31).

If giving agency to the rustling in the bushes helps the human survive biologically, then communicating a conspiracy narrative that binds the group together helps one survive socially (Green et al., Reference Green, Trella, Biddlestone, Douglas, Sutton and Miller2023: 39–41). Social representations are concepts shared by a group and so cultivate an operational expertise among members of a community that allows them to move about their daily lives through facilitating group cohesion around similar ideas (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 6). The socially constructed truth cultivated by CTs is a “functional knowledge,” that, while often factually false, allows laypersons to subvert the authority of the expert by supplying an alternative explanation made accessible through communication complexity, that is to say, via mass media and the internet (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 7). “Anchoring” is the naming of an object or event that classifies it relative to words and concepts linked to other things, while “objectification” is the concretizing of abstract ideas in language via metaphor. Franks et al. call anchoring and objectification “two facets of the reconstruction of expert knowledge in common sense” observed in communications between individuals made possible by mass media technologies (Franks et al., Reference Franks, Bangerter and Bauer2013: 6–7).

Anchoring and objectification select for and against social representations in a way similar to Richard Dawkins’ idea of the “meme,” or memory unit that is passed down over time as cultural transmission (Dawkins, Reference Dawkins1989 [1976]: 192). From a systems theory point of view, once a meme has become sufficiently anchored and objectified to convey meaning, it can continue to reproduce itself through the sustained communication of the meme shared between individuals over time. While this would hold for the memetic character of all communication systems in systems theory, a religious system emerges from communicating memes that convey the immanence/transcendence code, as interpreted and recommunicated by individual psychic systems in a social environment. A religion, then, would be considered an autopoietic (self-sustaining) stabilization of the communication of this code among a population over time.

From a systems theory perspective, religion does not have to be defined by belief in supernatural agents or the worship of the group. Instead, its definition resides in the socio-cognitive suppression of other possibilities of interpretation for securing the creation of meaning along the immanence/transcendence code. As we see in the case of Q’s claim to “do your own research,” discussed in Section 3, conspiracy theorizing, as distinguished from any one conspiracy theory, epistemologically facilitates such a socio-cognitive suppression of other forms of meaning through praxis and participation, broadly conceived, rather than through rigorous critical analysis of the underlying claims of the CT (cf. Luhmann Reference Luhmann2013: 107).

While we usually point to the conspiracy theorist as the exception to rational dialogue, from a societal point of view it may be a failure to reproduce the communication of the CT narrative that results in ostracism and the existential concerns that come with such stigmatizing. Signaling one’s belief in a CT may be quite rational when considered from the perspective of social survival, especially if one is trying to ingratiate oneself into a new community, as people did on the chans and with QAnon (Simmons & Carnahan, Reference Simmons, Carnahan, Austin and Bock2023: 94–5). QAnon is an example of the way CTs reinforce a form of anti-expert tribalism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-scientific populism by taking advantage of epistemic crises that arise in times of uncertainty (see Morelock & Narita, Reference Morelock and Narita2022: 1021). Bromley and Richardson show how QAnon’s success at propagating its conspiracy narrative is due to its “insurgent media network” that consistently messages “resistance to institutionally controlled news sources” through “citizen journalists” providing information that reinforces the conspiracy narrative already systematized by the bakers for participants to consume (Bromley & Richardson, Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 169). CT epistemology, plus the ability to exercise it through communication technology, shows the fragility of scientific explanations and rational analysis. It also reveals that people will return to forms of mythic narrative when logical explanation fails to provide the sense of meaning needed to survive and thrive in the world (see McCauley, Reference McCauley2011: 113–17, 152–4).

Qvangelicalism: The Adaptation of Christianity to QAnon’s Mythos

One way CTs relate to religion can be seen in the way established religions employ CTs to promote their interests (Robertson 2025: 4–5), and there is a clear syncretism between QAnon and American Evangelicalism (Trollinger & Trollinger, Reference Trollinger and Trollinger2025, 354). Chase Andre identifies “five categories of religious rhetoric” that have tilted evangelical Christians toward QAnon: a sense of civil religion common to life in the United States; individualized spiritual language similar to New Age thinking; the idea of spiritual warfare against the world; specific references to Christian theological content; and, finally, Christian nationalism (Reference Andre, Austin and Bock2023: 193–200). Argentino coined the term “Qvangelical” to describe this phenomenon, particularly in those churches emerging after 2020 where there was a blending of Q’s message with dominionism, the idea that the government and its leaders and the public sphere should be aligned with the Christian faith (Reference Argentino2026: 26, 58–61, see FN 24, p. 43; Robertson Reference Robertson2025: 116). The Great Awakening is itself a term that has appeared multiple times in American history in reference to various Protestant revival movements, and it appears 65 times in Q’s drops.Footnote ²⁹

A search of Q drops shows that “God” appears 264 times, “Satan” appears 15 times, “Evil” 156 times, but “Jesus” only appears once by Q in direct relationship to a Christian theological interpretation in the form of a prayer.Footnote ³⁰ Some popular prayers do appear, but theological language is mostly absent. “Trump,” however, receives 439 hits on a search of Q drops.Footnote ³¹ While Q’s drops are not explicitly Christian, Christianity does appear to be the default established religious context to which Q appeals when wanting to draw on transcendental sentiment, like referencing the need to “put on the full armor of God” from Ephesians 6:10–18 (New International Version) over fifteen times.Footnote ³² In Post 2441, Q presents an image of the biblical text of 2 Chronicles 7:14, highlighted in a way to resemble the American Flag.Footnote ³³ QAnon influencers like Praying Medic and RedpillTheWorld (2019) clearly interpreted Q drops through a theological lens, adapting their interpretation of Christian theology to the information provided by Q rather than the other way around. For example, RedpillTheWorld claims that “[d]eceivers infiltrated the seminaries,” and provides her own correction of twelve errors taught regarding Evangelical Christian interpretations of the Book of Revelation (RedpillTheWorld, 2019: 20–39).

Roman Catholic Christians were also influenced by the wider QAnon mythos (Joyce, Reference Joyce2020; Tarzia, Reference Tarzia and Navarini2025). For example, the schismatic Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (excommunicated by the Vatican in 2024), wrote an open letter to President Trump on June 7, 2020, in which he mentions the deep state four times. He eventually imports the idea into the Catholic Church when he says, “just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God” (Viganò, Reference Viganò2020, original emphasis). This letter was reposted by Q.Footnote ³⁴

While Q’s mythos would be rejected by most American Christians, it nevertheless facilitated the conversion of some politically aligned Christians to its way of seeing apocalyptic agency in the world. Bond and Neville-Shepard describe how many CTs cast the conflict between good and evil forces as historically significant, not merely for the lives of individuals, but for all of reality. Such eschatological framing establishes an “us versus them” dynamic and helps motivate the nascent community to work together against a perceived existential threat (Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021: 4–5, 10–11). This allows the believer in the CT to understand their own existence as living within a fulcrum in time, wherein their life and actions will bear cosmic fruit (3–4). What is unique about QAnon relative to CTs and religion is what Bond and Neville-Shepard describe as its “Presidential Eschatology”:

Indeed, Trump is described by RedpillTheWorld as “anointed and appointed” by God for ushering in the Great Awakening accompanied by the Storm, a violent purge of the unrighteous elites from American government and culture (2019: 98). QAnon’s call to participate in the violent reckoning against this cabal mirrors the apocalyptic eschatology of the Book of Revelation and “invoke[s] a feeling that there is a desperation for holy war,” with the cosmic conflict dualism of the battle between Christ and Satan reflected in the battle between Trump and the deep state as the fulfillment of Christian scriptures (Bond & Neville-Shepard, Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021: 7).

If Trump is the messiah figure in the QAnon mythos, he is an imperfect one. Rather than Trump’s unethical behavior disqualifying him from public office, some evangelical Christians see in Trump someone analogous to leaders whom the God of Abraham used in the past despite their moral failings: King David, who ruled a united Israel and Judah despite committing adultery; or Cyrus the Great, a gentile who nevertheless acted righteously when God used him to free the Israelites held in Babylon. Trump and the greater good are one, his political power is a tangible sign of God’s will, and QAnon is in service to this cause (Bond & Neville-Shepard, Reference Bond and Neville-Shepard2021: 8).

For QAnon, Trump’s presidency makes possible an immanent eschatological reality where those preventing the aggrieved from success and happiness are cast away in righteous destruction. RedpillTheWorld understands the kingdom of God prophesied by Daniel to be ushered in through the violent overthrow of a New World Order and reads “(Q/Patriots warriors)” into a quote from Matthew 11:12 as evidence for the role of the Anons in the Great Awakening as the stewards of that righteous violence (2019: 15). When filtered through the lens of QAnon, the transcendental and ethical concerns of New Testament theology – living righteously with God and others through an ethic of concern for the poor and marginalized because all humans are created in the divine image – are subordinated to the immanent concerns of actualizing political power (see Balmer & Ladner, Reference Balmer and Ladner2024: 203). QAnon’s apocalyptic vision desires engagement and battle with the fallen world over and against a transcendent renewal through ethical eschatology (MacMillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022: 993). Two main characteristics of QAnon’s brand of apocalypticism can be identified: a sense of victimization by the world’s injustices and politicization of messianic expectations (MacMillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022: 992). Trumpism in general, and QAnon in particular, seek a restoration of glory rather than an overturning of reality as such (MacMillen & Rush, Reference MacMillen and Rush2022: 1002).

As Simmons and Carnahan put it “rather than identifying with the oppressed, contemporary white evangelicals identify as the oppressed” (Reference Simmons, Carnahan, Austin and Bock2023: 92). They describe evangelical Christianity as promoting a social form of conspiracy theorizing, making it uniquely susceptible to CT movements like QAnon: “The basic formula for such social conspiracists is that if my oppressed community thinks X, then everyone who holds non-X is obviously wrong, probably an oppressor, and should be not only ignored but also defeated in what evangelicals often consider a ‘battle for the soul’” (Simmons & Carnahan, Reference Simmons, Carnahan, Austin and Bock2023: 93). This type of social conspiracism sees itself as a victim, resulting in a “Teflon hermeneutics whereby all criticism just slides off” (Simmons & Carnahan, Reference Simmons, Carnahan, Austin and Bock2023: 93, original emphasis). In response to these interpretations, there is a growing number of Christian theologians addressing QAnon and conspiracy theory belief in general as antithetical to the faith tradition (see Austin & Bock, Reference Austin and Bock2023).

Summary

This section discussed the epistemological relationship between conspiracy theorizing and religious inferences, such as belief in supernatural agents causing natural phenomena, showing how both stem from the hyperactive agency detection modules in human cognition. It then discussed the social advantage of participating in the communication of the CT narrative, particularly when one is trying to ingratiate oneself into online communities. Finally, it discussed how some established religious communities leveraged the QAnon CT for their own religious interests, such as the Qvangelical wing of QAnon.

CTs are a socialized, inferential response to heightened anxiety and feelings of insecurity, where social identity is cultivated by the communication environment providing the individual with access to the inferential and (supposedly) factual resources needed to reach the conclusion proposed by the CT. Conspiracy theorizing is not itself representative of religion, however, and the conspiracy theory itself does not equate to religious belief. Rather the socio-cognitive factors of CTs discussed above show that CTs represent a disturbance in the communication of the dominant narrative of causal agency, such that organizing socially around that new narrative can facilitate the emergence of religion in communication. Put in the language of systems theory, not all CTs facilitate the emergence of religion, because CTs do not in themselves tap into the immanence/transcendence code. They must be interpreted as such – hence the role of the bakers and doing one’s own research in QAnon.

QAnon operated as a super or meta conspiracy theory, adapting other CTs and even evangelical Christianity to be used as resources in the communication of its mythos of “American greatness.” Data from QAnon supports Van Prooijen and Van Vugt’s conception of the “Adaptive-Conspiricism Hypothesis” (ACH), in which conspiracy theories are considered to be functionally adaptive rather than superfluous byproducts of human evolution (Van Prooijen & Van Vugt, Reference Van Prooijen and Van Vugt2018). Using the ACH insight, we see that QAnon was able to adapt to information pressures in the communication environment in the form of other CTs by subsuming the forms of meaning in those CTs into its own system of interpretation, and in so doing sustain its self-generation (autopoiesis) and grow in complexity in its ability to communicate its interpretation of the immanence/transcendence code on the systems theory model. As de Zeeuw and Gekker point out, QAnon emerged from an online and gamified participatory culture that “allows for conspiracy-believing to become enacted (and rewarded) through platform play” (Reference Zeeuw and Gekker2023: 9). This is why QAnon cannot be understood completely if studied just as a CT – rather, it is a community bound together through communicating interpretations of CTs resulting in a novel construction of the immanence/transcendence code for psychic systems to consume. As Amarasingam et al. conclude, understanding QAnon as a “hyperreal religion” that draws upon elements from popular culture and Second Modernity – including the content of CTs and the cognitive and social mechanics of CT epistemology – offers a more complete understanding of the phenomenon (Reference Amarasingam, Argentino, Johnston, Mosurinjohn and Miller2023, 286).

Consumerism as Implicit Religion

Consumerism offers a clear context for understanding IR as a theoretical framework for the study of NRMs in relation to internet communication. On the one hand, the internet is the product of consumerism. Since the end of the World War II, the consumer economy has driven western expansion in the economic sphere. Coupled with the geopolitical demands of the Cold War, the post-war consumer economy led to the rapid development of communication technologies, including the internet at the end of the twentieth century. On the other hand, consumerism expresses itself in QAnon through the various mass media references that litter its mythos as a hyper-real religion (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 53–66;). The concept comes from Adam Possamai (Reference Possamai2005), who applied Jean Baudrillard’s’ philosophy of consumer culture to religion. Baudrillard understood consumerism to produce simulations of reality, where the production of meaning did not correspond to the real-world, but in relation to an internal logic where signs and symbols generated by consumer culture produce a simulacrum of meaning with no correspondence to anything outside the commodified sign/symbol relationship. Possamai claims that “[h]yper-real religion refers to a simulacrum of a religion, created out of, or in symbiosis with, popular culture, which provides inspiration for believers/consumers” (Possamai, Reference Possamai2012: 1). In QAnon, the ideas, themes, and content of popular culture are leveraged to construct its system of meaning. Paradoxically, global consumerism at once facilitates the emergence and growth of QAnon and its mythos, while at the same time is criticized by the movement as the source of the Anon’s discontentment with the establishment.

As with conspiracy theorizing, there are structural overlaps between consumerism and traditional expressions of religion. Kurenlahti and Salonen posit the idea that consumerism represents IR because “consumerism is not so much about individual materialistic tendencies, but more about the formation of transcendent meanings that are inherently social and existentially significant by nature” (Reference 77Kurenlahti and Salonen2018). They identify three religious functions of consumerism: social, existential, and transcendental. The social function mirrors the classical function of religion identified by Émile Durkheim: that religion is a social mechanism for constructing a common world. Meaning, purpose, values, authority figures, and so on all serve to reinforce various social norms held in common by the group. The authors extend this classical function of religion to consumerism and argue that the “communication of values” is lived out through product choices, with the organization of communities around brand-associated beliefs functioning like a “consumer tribe” (Kurenlahti & Salonen, Reference 77Kurenlahti and Salonen2018).

The existential function of consumerism promotes the way in which individuals encounter and develop meaning in the post-industrial era, where “the good life” constituting one’s identity is achieved through the acquisition of products or services. While owning luxury products is often marketed as representative of the good life, the point is more fundamental: It is not just what you buy, but that you can buy at all that is of existential significance for the consumer culture. We are not purchasing products that help us define our lives; rather, the meaningful context for our lives is constructed and expressed through the products and services we purchase as a “shared performance” that articulates a mythology unique to western culture (Kurenlahti & Salonen, Reference 77Kurenlahti and Salonen2018).

Finally, the transcendental function of consumerism as IR can be seen in the symbolic meaning generated by consumer culture. As marketing semiotics shows, products are marketed as representations of the meanings and values behind the brand’s identity that are shared by the consumer (Oswald & Oswald, Reference 79Oswald and Oswald2012). Much time is spent on ensuring the logo, font, their mutual aesthetic, and other aspects of advertising convey this meaning, for example. The symbolism behind design choices that convey meaning is present in traditional forms of religion too, where figurative representations of that which is beyond representation is signified in the sacred object, symbol, or ritual, and often must conform to specific parameters to convey meaning appropriately. Products have more than functional value; they represent the meaning with which the consumer identifies (Kurenlahti & Salonen, Reference 77Kurenlahti and Salonen2018). On the consumer model, goods and activities are a physical representation of self-actualization’s perceived transcendent end delivered immanently through functional means. Given consumerism’s social, existential, and transcendental functions, we can see that it is a novel forum for providing a supply of meaning to address the demand of psychic systems delivered through market-based dynamics.

Consumerism, Conspirituality, and QAnon

Where CTs traditionally focus on secular concerns, postulating a conspiracy of human actors, conspirituality situates CTs within a wider metaphysical system of meaning, value, purpose, and identity, usually informed by the content of New Age spirituality and other forms of esoteric or occult thinking and practice. Conspirituality is a term originally coined by Charlotte Ward and David Voas as “a hybrid of conspiracy theory and alternative spirituality [that] has appeared on the internet” (Reference Ward and Voas2011: 103). Where CTs are usually “male-dominated, often conservative, generally pessimistic, and typically concerned with current affairs” the holistic milieu of New Age spirituality “is predominately female, liberal, self-consciously optimistic, and largely focused on the self and personal relationships” (Ward & Voas, Reference Ward and Voas2011: 104). Ward and Voas describe conspirituality as a “political-spiritual philosophy” and a “web movement” that is based on two premises reflective of CT and New Age thinking, respectively: (1) that there is a “secret group” trying to control politics and society, and (2), that humanity is undergoing a form of awakening toward a more holistic understanding of reality. Solutions to this conspiratorial control are found in the paradigm shift in awareness the particular conspiritualist tradition is promoting, and participation in that tradition is often mediated through the consumer economy.

Beres et al.’s recent work (Reference Beres, Remski and Walker2023) is an introduction to conspirituality and its connection to QAnon. It provides a deep dive into the way the entrepreneurial and consumer dynamics of the yoga and wellness world often led yogis and other influencers to leverage conspiratorial and authoritarian sentiments packaged as spiritual enlightenment to increase their influence and grow their practices. They report coming to the recognition that Ward and Voas’s definition of conspirituality was itself a justification for an interpretive lifeway clothed in the language of an academic research article (Beres et al., Reference Beres, Remski and Walker2023: 19–20). They argue that the article appearing in the Journal of Contemporary Religion provided an air of authority to grant it justification as an area of study in academia, a move indicative of much of what they deconstruct about conspirituality in their analysis: that conspiritualists claim an epistemic authority that circumvents established paradigms of knowledge in such a way that reinforces their own, without holding their own epistemology to the same level of scrutiny as they apply to critiquing established systems of knowledge.

Conspirituality is a term employed in NRM scholarship today not to justify this type of thinking, but to explain it in the context of IR. Asprem and Dyrendal (Reference Asprem and Dyrendal2015) show that conspirituality is not unique, contra Ward and Voas, but is rather a predictable outcome of our postmodern age. It expresses the structural features of what Colin Campbell identified as the “cultic milieu,” where the post-war economy of Second Modernity created not only a consumer context for products, but also for ideas, ideologies, and lifeways (C. Campbell, Reference Campbell1972; see also C. Campbell et al., Reference Campbell, Houtman, Watts, Houtman and Watts2024). Campbell’s cultic milieu recognizes that society today has produced the conditions for the emergence of many NRMs, often only short-lived associations, such as QAnon. Conspirituality is not so much a new movement that draws on a new “mode” of thinking – where alternative spiritualities meet conspiracy theories – but rather the result of IR expressing itself in a particular and historicized communicative context within a cultic milieu (Asprem & Dyrendal, Reference Asprem and Dyrendal2015: 9, 25). Conspirituality, then, can be understood as a digital expression of IR that emerges in relation to the leveraging of stigmatized knowledge for the sake of social capital in a consumer-based economy (see Asprem & Dyrendal, Reference Asprem and Dyrendal2015: 18).

Conspirituality uses legitimation strategies for establishing knowledge that are common to the modern esoteric tradition – such as clothing arguments in a rhetoric grounded in science – but at the same time spiritualizes science by claiming that it hasn’t pursued investigation far enough to recognize that there is a nonmaterial dimension at the root of physical reality which the esoteric concern can identify (see De Jong, Reference De Jong2018 [2013]). A truth, value, or sense of meaning is already front-loaded into the interpretation of what is observed. This might explain why QAnon followers were comfortable with an anonymous “Q,” because the content hit on the right narrative suspicions that affirmed existing beliefs. If one already knows that science or the media can’t be trusted because the elites are controlling it, why not listen to what Q has to say? And if what Q has to say confirms one’s suspicions about expert narratives, then the identity of Q is irrelevant. What matters is that someone is speaking the “truth,” despite one’s awareness that Q is possibly a LARP (see Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 84–112; Bromley & Richardson, Reference Bromley, Richardson and Miller2023: 165).

The LARP itself fulfills the self-description function of the systems theory of religion as a method of meaningful distinction, because it can convey a truth relevant for communication between psychic systems despite its fictional narrative (cf. Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 257). Add to this the archetype of the hero’s journey common in mythic narrative á la Joseph Campbell (Reference Campbell2008 [1949]), and we see how these legitimation strategies are employed in conspirituality circles like QAnon to place individuals in a dualistic worldview, where they play a central role in the heroic activity of ridding the world of evildoers (De Jong, Reference De Jong2018 [2013]: 124).

The internet, consumerism, and social media allowed conspiritualist, yoga, and wellness practitioners to leverage an entrepreneurial business model to turn their spiritual practices into a thriving livelihood. This often resulted in a cult of personality emerging around the leader and their interpretation of the world contributing to their economic success (Beres et al., Reference Beres, Remski and Walker2023). When conspirituality sentiment encountered QAnon content online during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, it was like throwing conceptual gasoline on an inferential fire, as conspiritualists adapted their worldview to Q’s message. While the early mythos described by Neon Revolt speaks little of supernatural or metaphysical realities beyond frequently alluding to “evil” or “evildoers” and calling Hillary Clinton a practicing witch, many in the wellness and yoga community found in QAnon an explanation for their own suspicions of the powers grounded in various and often contradictory metaphysical commitments (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 72–8).

The spiritual language of QAnon appealed to many in New Age, wellness, and yoga communities during the pandemic, as they were already suspicious of Western medical practices and the industrial food supply (see Butters, Reference Butters2022; Demuru, Reference Demuru2022; cf. Meltzer, Reference Meltzer2021). However, these suspicions did not leverage politicized conspiracy thinking until the COVID-19 pandemic when the ideas of Q reached wellness influencers susceptible to conspiritualist thinking (Demuru, Reference Demuru2022). Demuru describes this memetic syncretism as a “translation of a specific narrative plot that travels from one semiosphere to another one, acquiring new shapes, contours and nuances” resulting in twofold consequences (Demuru, Reference Demuru2022: 595). On the one hand, the influence of wellness on QAnon focused the concern of elite oppression beyond economic and political concerns to that of the self and one’s own awakening and enlightenment. CT thinking was spiritualized beyond mere political function to express a form of metaphysical conflict dualism. On the other hand, wellness broadened and became political as a social identity where one’s personal transcendental well-being depends on everyone working together to challenge the elites in power (Demuru, Reference Demuru2022: 595).

This memetic syncretism led to the rise of “Pastel QAnon” discussed in Section 1 (Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 87–121). Already bakers of New Age and conspiratorial meaning for their own digital communities steeped in the language of New Age spirituality, these influencers helped QAnon’s far-right political ideology spread by softening its message, using a pastel social media aesthetic, using hashtags like #SaveTheChildren, and situating Q’s message in the context of self-actualization, enlightenment, and a holistic worldview (Bloom & Moskalenko, Reference Bloom and Moskalenko2021: 38–78). This influence appears to have had lasting effects well after the marked decline of the QAnon movement after January 6, 2021 (Peterka-Benton et al., Reference Peterka-Benton, Benton and Penney2025).

Hughes (Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024) considers the QAnon movement to be a religious and marketing phenomenon, and evaluates it through the concept of the occult economy:

Occult economies emerge from a confluence of factors: social, political, and economic, that have led to a rise in far-right populism by those in America who have lost hope and have felt left behind by the Great Recession (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 123). Like CTs, occult economies emerge when confidence in free-market dynamics collides with the realities of the neoliberal order in response to threats in the social status of dominant groups (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 124). Those who have achieved success are considered to have produced their wealth through magical means, because that is the only way to explain how the elites in society achieved their success while the working person struggles to survive (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 123–4; cf. RedpillTheWorld, 2019: 27). Hughes notes that QAnon reflects the dynamics of a multilevel marketing (MLM) scheme in the occult economy in “the production of magical commodities [that seek] to harness the apparent magic behind obscene, abstract wealth” (Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 127). QAnon promotes the idea that disproportionate wealth is not problematic for society; it’s just that they don’t deserve it, reflecting the “bipolar character” of the occult economy (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 127; cf. RedpillTheWorld, 2019: 116). This character of the occult economy then could be considered an abstraction of the scapegoat mechanism in human evolution, where the one accused is at the same time considered to be mysterious, and so justifies the use of violence by social authorities (see Riordan, Reference Riordan2021: 244–5).

Much like a conspiritualist wellness influencer, Donald Trump serves as QAnon’s “business guru” (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 125). According to Hughes he is a populist who rejects professional expertise in favor of his own gut instinct. He builds his mythical identity in participatory conversation with his fan base as they seem to recognize the magical character of his success. Trump confirms the assumption in their minds that the façade of “enchantment, spectacle, and performance” are fundamental to success in America’s economy (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 125–6). The magic cuts both ways. On the one hand, those rejected by QAnon, such as Hillary Clinton, are said to have achieved their wealth through supernaturally nefarious means. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s success is messianically ordained, with an expertise that must be hidden behind a curtain of anonymity. If Trump is the Messiah, then Clinton is the “witch,” who has achieved her success not due to shrewd political tenacity, but rather “from practices of black magic, including human sacrifices” (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 126). Just as those seeking economic salvation pin their hopes on misunderstood financial concepts by imbuing them with magical allure, so too is there someone(s) with the talent to prevent this magic from happening. So “the quest for wealth becomes a witch hunt,” according to Hughes (Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 130). It is the occult economy that facilitates “this process of personifying complex political-economic dynamics,” with Clinton “offering a convenient screen on which to project their nightmares” (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 131). If Trump represents the messianic cult of personality in which QAnon finds its solution, then Clinton represents the evil oppressing them.

QAnon products themselves reflect this occult economy and parallel the marketing dynamics found in conspirituality with thousands of QAnon products – from clothing to posters to books (Rothschild, Reference Rothschild2021: 70–2). Hughes points to the book, QAnon: Invitation to the Great Awakening, self-published on Amazon in 2019, as selling interpretation itself, “with its promise to give readers access into the mind of Q” (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 127). Hughes concludes that, “through the interweaving of MLM aspirations and QAnon mythology, products such as these come to represent a kind of sympathetic magic in the occult economy: everyday consumables imbued with the power and promise of the Q-eschaton” (Hughes, Reference Hughes, Einstein and Taylor2024: 129). Recalling our discussion of IR, there appears to be a religious character to QAnon’s product market, and yet, QAnon “exists apart from any actual transcendental referent” like God, that is binding for its mythos (Hannah, Reference Hannah2021: 6). If anything, this referent is one’s self-actualization realized through consumer-based participation in the immanent presidential eschatology of Trump’s maintenance of political power, a message that QAnon products signify to followers both implicitly and explicitly.

From the perspective of systems theory, we see in QAnon magical and conspiracy thinking drawing a distinction according to political preference, motivated by consumer concerns. QAnon is just as much a syncretic tradition between consumerism, wellness, and CT thinking as it is between American Evangelicalism and CT thinking because its mythos is a crowd-sourced movement constructed in real time (see Bellingcat.com, 2021; Argentino, Reference Argentino2026: 151). The conspiritualist version of QAnon emerging from the pandemic of 2020 was a more complex adaptation of the basic narrative plots laid in the early days of Q’s first drops and their systematization by early QAnon bakers in pursuit of the contingency formula of “American greatness.” Tangherlini et al. recognize that where Pizzagate had a specific goal in mind, “the QAnon conspiracy theory does not aim for completion,” as it has an “open-ended nature, characterized by an ongoing process of fitting new narratives into the overarching framework” (Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023: 26).

With these factors in mind, it is more appropriate to define QAnon as a new religious movement that leverages conspiritualist epistemology rather than just a conspiracy theory per se. While QAnon rhetoric was, of course, apocalyptic and divisive at the level of our national discourse, its “non-exclusionary rhetoric” and “big tent” concerns about evil transcended political party or religious affiliation, attracting people from a variety of backgrounds for different reasons during early days of the pandemic (Butters, Reference Butters2022: 8). Indicative of QAnon as an outgrowth of communication complexity, the foundational levels of QAnon’s mythos of “American greatness” remained relevant as the evolutionary “attractor” conveying the immanence/transcendence code in its system of communication. In other words, those who were not inclined to accept Christian or New Age interpretations of Q’s motivations could remain committed to the more political or cultural concerns while allowing these new interpretations into the fold, so long as they reinforced this foundation. As such, QAnon is not so much a species of conspirituality, but rather a vehicle through which conspiritualist epistemology found expression (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 138).

Summary

In this section we briefly discussed the concept of implicit religion to describe how people participate in forms of meaning making and community building in “secular” spaces that have analogous significance in the lives of many as do those who continue to identify with traditional forms of religious expression. We then discussed the relationship between consumerism as a form of implicit religion, with conspirituality emerging from an individualized approach to meaning formation that draws on conspiracy epistemology as an epistemic and social legitimation strategy. As noted about evangelical Christians in Section 4, some who participated in conspirituality in wellness spaces found their interpretation of the immanence/transcendence code reflected in the QAnon mythos, and depending on their level of interest and engagement with internet-based technologies, further adapted their understanding to reinforce QAnon’s contingency formula of “American greatness.”

Writing, Printing, and Interiorization

The invention and use of writing in ancient Mesopotamia predated even the earliest signs of Axial Age thinking. Jan Assmann (Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012) understands the shift toward theoretic culture to be a third-level development of the invention of writing, after its initial role in specialization for the administration of the economy, and a second stage where literacy was used to preserve cultural memory in the recording of narratives (see Assmann, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012: 258–9). The third level of literacy emerges from the other two to leverage theory for the conceptual organization needed to build an even more complex society. Government, city planning, trade, diplomacy, and the use of iron tools were other societal conditions necessary for the emergence of Axial Age thought, but developments in writing and communication technology during the archaic period facilitated a more effective exchange of ideas with the potential to challenge established systems of meaning and authority (Bellah, Reference Bellah2005: 73; Veidlinger, Reference Veidlinger2018: 35). The binding of papyrus pages into books was instrumental in the spread of Christianity throughout the Greco-Roman world, for example (Oliver, Reference Oliver, Sin-wai, Kin-wah and Ming2024: 320).

It often takes time to see the impact of new technologies on individuals and society. While the communication complexity of the pre-Axial Archaic period originally leveraged writing to preserve systems of state power, over time writing would be used to mount a conceptual revolution on the questions of human nature and human community (see Bellah, Reference Bellah2011; Assman, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012). While the idea of “world religions” is problematic (Masuzawa, Reference Masuzawa2005; cf. Luhmann: Reference Luhmann2013: 196, 199–200), Assmann notes that what characterizes these traditions is the way the expansion of proximity in communication afforded by writing “disembedded” systems of thought “from any territorial, political, ethnical and cultural frames … [which] found a new kind of transnational and transcultural identity by forming a new form of memory which is canonized scripture” (Assmann, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012: 271; cf. Luhmann: Reference Luhmann2013, 199). Where previously meaning that communicated the immanence/transcendence code was cultivated in ritualized proximity, the advent of writing promoted relative autonomy in the realm of meaning construction. With the ability to read, an individual can privately grapple with existential concern and access ideas offering potential solutions independently of group proximity where oral and ritualized forms of communication convey meaning (Assmann, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012, 270–1).

From the perspective of systems theory, writing coded meaning in a physical substrate, allowing for the replication of specific concepts and practices between psychic systems over time (Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 144). Luhmann describes the impact of writing as “a vast expansion of the realm of virtuality” in which the actual is made present in the form of meaning. It had the result of “destroy[ing] (previously) effective mechanism[s] of stabilization” for the social system by communicating the experience of meaning through introspection and abstract representation (Reference Luhmann2013: 185). And if one person can read, then they can communicate what is written orally to others. Thus, the spread of Axial Age religions needed only a single literate individual in any given community to share the written information with others. We see this in QAnon with the way the limited number of bakers knew how to “read” a Q drop on a chan thread and interpret it for the masses on social media.

From a critical perspective, it is inaccurate to say that all religions are tapping into the same truth or transcendent reality. Rather, systems theory asks us to think of religions as stabilizations in the communication of what individuals and their communities perceive to be true about the character of reality along the immanence/transcendence code of distinction in communication (see Krech, Reference Krech2025). Veidlinger’s analysis shows how the “transcendental breakthrough” of the Axial Age that appealed to metaphysical truths to guide our lives and society can be explained in terms of the truth-constructing ability afforded by advances in communication complexity rather than by appeal to transcendental principles or realities (Reference Veidlinger2018: 34). What the Axial Age shows us, then, is the way writing facilitated the memetic selection pressure necessary for new forms of meaning to constrain future interpretations of experience and direct social organization and resource allocation accordingly. Put simply, writing allows for concepts to influence people in a different way than did orality, helping organize them together despite communities being separated across space and time. We observe a similar phenomenon with QAnon and its use of the internet (see Keen, Reference Keen, Crawford and Suarez-Tangil2020; Butters, Reference Butters2022).

Printing likewise facilitated the evolution of religion by further privatizing experience and accelerating knowledge transfer. Block-printing was instrumental in the spread of Buddhism in China (Oliver, Reference Oliver, Sin-wai, Kin-wah and Ming2024: 320–1), and Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press influenced the Protestant Reformation and the Modern Period in the West (Eisenstein, Reference Eisenstein1980; Gondos, Reference Gondos2020). Rubin (Reference Rubin2014) offers an empirical and quantitative analysis showing a high correlation of the spread of Reformation ideas in urban centers that specialized in printing (cf. Becker et al., Reference Becker, Pfaff and Rubin2016). Printing was fundamental to Luther’s success, in addition to the patronage and protection he received under Frederick the Wise, because printing the Bible in German rather than Latin circumvented the Catholic Church as the gatekeepers of biblical interpretation by “placing the Gospel directly into the hands of the laity in vernacular languages that could be accessible by all” (Gondos, Reference Gondos2020: 30). Füssel notes how the printing of pamphlets by Luther and other reformers employed an “instructional nature” where “fundamental questions of theology could be grasped by the man in the street when presented as a game of question and answer” (Füssel, Reference Füssel2005: 168). In printing the Bible in the vernacular, Luther intended for Christians to compare the interpretation of the Catholic Church relative to their own experience of faith in God’s grace, derived from a copy of the text in a language they could understand (Füssel, Reference Füssel2005: 163). If the individual could not read, then they were encouraged to find someone to read the text for them (169).

We see here, then, a parallel with Q’s call to “do your own research.” Printing further interiorizes the encounter with the information by privatizing access via reading (or listening in proximity). Moreover, disturbances in the continuity of an operating social narrative may emerge if one finds support for their thoughts in the communication environment for which there is no counter-pressure to challenge the novel source of information. Through being formed by ideas in books, one may no longer defer to the authoritative constraint on interpretation from the priest or the Church, but instead one may begin to communicate alternative interpretations to others who are likewise accessing writing and printing to communicate these ideas. One may then find success or resistance for their ideas in the communication environment that emerges from these advances in technology, and form community accordingly (cf. Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 191).

The privatization of experience afforded by printing had a social impact as the household became the focus of Protestant theological development rather than the socialized context of the Catholic Mass due to the presence of Bibles in the Protestant home (Gondos, Reference Gondos2020: 30). Advances in communication technology do not seem to replace ritual but rather technology allows people to form new rituals that reinforce the symbolic interpretation of meaning they are constructing together in the conceptual space afforded by the technology. That one’s thoughts and inner experience is formed through our communication with others, and so is never truly independent of language and symbolic cognition, just reinforces the point of the systems theory of religion.

Finally, and as we’ve already discussed, mass media in Second Modernity facilitated the rise of New Age spirituality, consumerism, and other individualized approaches to implicit religion in the twentieth century. What we notice in this period is an acceleration in the ability of people to access new ways of thinking through the communication complexity inherent in the consumer economy, thus giving rise to a higher volume of sustainable NRMs in this period than in previous eras.

Postmodern No More: The Internet, the New Clarity, and QAnon

What we see from this brief survey is the way that communication technology mediates one’s internal experience in relation to others, and the way those same technologies allow others to inform and shape one’s internal experience. Digital religion is a field that explores the impact of the internet on religion, showing it to be an accelerant for the diversification of both established and novel religious thought and practice (H. Campbell, Reference Campbell2005; cf. Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 196–7). Religion and the internet today are understood to be mutually reinforcing because religion and media are not distinct but intrinsically related to one another through the way media structures and delivers meaning for individuals (H. Campbell, Reference Campbell2005: 312–13; H. Campbell, Reference Campbell2017b: 19; Aupers & de Wildt, Reference Aupers, de Wildt, Rohlinger and Sobieraj2021: 12–14; Hoover, Reference Hoover2025 [2006]).

While writing and printing facilitated the replication of orality and ritual across space and time in distinct participatory spaces, internet-based technologies today facilitate a return to oral and ritual proximity in virtual space. As Assmann puts it, orality and ritual are ever-present as the “natural media of cultural memory” (Assmann, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012: 259); thus, a viral social media dance craze, for example, may not be as far from the building blocks of religion as we might think. As with any complex adaptive system, the fundamental communicative building blocks required for the emergence of a religious system persist across time and express themselves in different historical contexts of communication complexity.

Communication complexity today parallels the conditions for another tipping point like the Axial Age and the Modern period. The internet has contributed to changing attitudes with its cybernetic, or feedback, approach to concept construction that synthesizes inputs from individuals into the construction of authoritative concepts rather than dispensing those concepts top-down from a centralized authority to individuals (Veidlinger, Reference Veidlinger2018: 135–40, 176). Observing an example of this tipping point in QAnon, Tangherlini et al. note that “the broader QAnon framework has proven to be a powerful generative engine to drive social media and the folkloric process of narrative consensus building” (Tangherlini et al., Reference Tangherlini, Shahsavari, Holur, Roychowdhury and Miller2023: 248). Where the immanence/transcendence code was first communicated through physical proximity, then expanded via writing and later printing, the internet and smartphones today allow for the visual and aural representation of social and physical behavior in virtual presence despite being physically distant. And the impact of artificial intelligence on this milieu will likely be even more significant.

Many say we are living in a “post-truth” era, where cultural metanarratives have been effectively deconstructed and discarded, leaving many with a feeling of disenchantment and a loss of any sense of meaning or truth to the world. Critique has achieved its postmodern goal of deconstructing expert metanarratives to the point of people cynically interpreting any claim to truth as related to “false masks of power” and therefore no more authoritative than stigmatized narratives if the information does not fit one’s need for meaning (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 132–3). Overwijk and de Zeeuw (Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023) point out that most people are uncomfortable with an actual “post-truth” communication environment, and instead seek expert narratives in which their identity is in one way or another secured through a sense of belonging. They prefer the language of “the New Clarity” because “post-truth” is insufficient to explain the construction of new forms of normative truth established through “awakening” movements like QAnon (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 144; cf. Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013, 192–5).

QAnon and other conspiritualist movements are symptomatic of the New Clarity and its separating or segregating knowledge in self-justifying epistemic bubbles as a solution to postmodernism’s deconstruction of socially binding metanarratives (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 135). Such movements can be considered NRMs when it is observed that their communications sustain their community as a self-justifying epistemic bubble. We see in QAnon empirical evidence for how internet-based communication, which facilitates the playful bricolage of combining elements from various sources, results in the memetic selection of specific concepts. This in turn precipitates an interpretive constraint on some psychic systems that stabilized the signs and symbols of their communication of the immanence/transcendence code, thereby facilitating the emergence of QAnon as an NRM (cf. Altglas, Reference Altglas2014: 475, 482). The internet makes such memetic sustainability possible, and is described as the “midwife” of the New Clarity, delivered from the “postmodern womb,” with social media as the “dominant infrastructure” that supports a diversity of movements (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 145).

In our complex communication environment today, we have transitioned from group-level incredulity to a hyper-individualized sense of incredulity as represented in contemporary New Age spiritual movements, “allowing seekers to pick and choose as if on a supermarket aisle” (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 139–40; cf. Motak, Reference Motak2009). This permits people to find or construct like-minded community by sifting through information on the internet to find data that supports their interpretive worldview and sense of belonging (Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 139; cf. Nemes, Reference Nemes2023: 108–110).). The New Clarity, then, can be described as postmodernism, with its totalizing deconstruction of metanarratives, filtered through something like romanticism’s turn to the subject as the epistemic ground for truth, where the interpretation of the self emerges in experience as sacrosanct and unassailable (see Overwijk & de Zeeuw, Reference Overwijk and de Zeeuw2023: 131–7; cf. Luhmann, Reference Luhmann2013: 191–2).

Summary

This section showed that established religious contexts adapt and change when new ideas can be sustained through leveraging advances in communication technology (Veidlinger, Reference Veidlinger2018; cf. Assmann, Reference Assmann, Krech and Steinicke2012: 260). Communication technology gives individuals and groups the material and informational resources needed to form and access meaning in communication that would otherwise be unavailable to them due to spatial limitations. As we see in the case of chan culture, internet-based communication has further led to the hyper-individualization of experience (cf. Luhman, Reference Luhmann2013: 191), facilitating the anonymous expression of a cynical attitude against the neo-liberal economic order where the one who cares the least, wins. Advances in communication technology, specifically internet imageboards and social media, facilitated the rise of QAnon because they allowed individuals to exchange and riff on metaphors that spoke to them about their experience of disaffection, justified or not. The technology itself crafted the interpretation of meaning that would become the QAnon mythos, delivered through the participatory communication methods of LARPing, researching, and redpilling. QAnon is a clear example of the blurring of boundaries between religion and media in the digital communication environment, and it gives us a real-time window into the way communication via the internet is facilitating yet another change in the religious landscape.