Is QAnon winning at the box office? Variety reported that's what some critics are saying about the success of Sound of Freedom, a faith-based thriller about child trafficking, after it took in $40 million during its first six days of release. The movie's defenders say that its success proves that Hollywood all too often overlooks the potential of films that appeal to religious conservatives. That accomplishment "reflects a demand by an underserved audience who are hungry for entertainment that reflects their values and beliefs," said one analyst.

"However one chooses to slice it, Sound of Freedom has over-delivered on expectations in dollars and cents," Charles Bramesco wrote at The Guardian. The movie contains no explicit mention of QAnon — but it does seem to be "QAnon-adjacent." For one, it stars Jim Caviezel — best known for playing Jesus in The Passion of the Christ — who has a habit of promoting conspiracy theories about traffickers who harvest drugs from the glands of children. The themes are also strongly reminiscent of the Q conspiracy theory. Those unfamiliar with QAnon "may not pick up on the red-yarn-and-corkboard subtext" of the film, but for true believers, the movie is "a clarion call that leads right to the multiplex."

Those claims have seen pushback from conservative media outlets. Operation Underground Railroad founder Tim Ballard, whose organization inspired the film, went on Fox News to deny the QAnon associations. "Every show I've seen, they just like to throw the word out, QAnon," he said. "They make zero connection to the actual story."

'Moral panic' or realistic horrors?

On the surface the movie is a straightforward thriller, Sam Adams wrote at Slate. But it arrived in theaters in a "cloud of innuendo" by supporters "about who doesn't want this story to be told." And it is difficult to ignore Caviezel's press tour, in which he has discussed an alleged "black market where a barrel of children's body parts goes for a thousand times the price of oil." For all that, the movie is a "little nondescript," Adams wrote. "But that only makes it a better vehicle for other people's messages."

"It's not 'paranoid' or 'QAnon adjacent' to bring much-needed attention to horrors that are all too real," Madeline Kearns wrote at National Review. If the film fuels a "moral panic" about sex trafficking the result will be "at worst, wasted energy and a disproportionate use of resources." But it could turn out that Americans are underestimating the problem. The movie performs a valuable service by reminding us "as long as children are being abused … the rest of us ought to care."

"The exploitation of children is a real problem that no one (besides the exploiters) want," Rich Juzwiak wrote at Jezebel. What's more, Sound of Freedom is "well-acted, it looks expensive, and it moves at a rapid clip." But it's difficult to untangle the film from its right-wing associations, including endorsements from Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump. So of course the movie is designed to entice audiences. "I can't say I wasn't entertained in some way," Juzwiak wrote, and added: "That's how propaganda works."

Changing the movie business

The Wall Street Journal reported that the studio behind Sound of Freedom, Angel Studios, is looking to follow up on its success. While big studios increasingly rely on "big-budget crowd pleasers," others see "room to operate for releases targeting niche or underserved audiences." Another faith-friendly film — Jesus Revolution — grossed $52 million at the box office earlier this year. Sound of Freedom has an unusual business model: The studio crowdfunded the release, with 7,000 backers contributing as little as $10 apiece to ensure the movie appeared in theaters. "We realized that this black box that was the theatrical experience is now open to us," said studio president Jordan Harmon.

More than any lesson about sex trafficking, that business lesson might be the movie's most significant legacy. Expensive movies like the new Indiana Jones flick "must reach a blockbuster status to see any profit margins," Dhruv Sharma noted at Screen Rant. But Sound of Freedom was made for just $14.5 million. That means it "can break even without raking in as much revenue as bigger-budget movies."

Lara Logan, formerly a CBS News reporter and more recently a frequent Fox News guest, went so off-field on former Fox News host Eric Bolling's Newsmax show Wednesday night, Newsmax said she is no longer welcome on the right-wing network. Bolling brought her on to talk about immigration, and she ended up "pushing QAnon tropes, invoking blood libel, and fear-mongering about a 'global cabal' planning to 'dilute the pool of patriots' in the United States," The Daily Beast reports.

"Newsmax condemns in the strongest terms the reprehensible statements made by Lara Logan and her views do not reflect our network," Newsmax told The Daily Beast on Thursday. "We have no plans to interview her again."

Logan started her comments Wednesday by predicting the Biden administration is trying to engineer "a Reichstag fire" — an event the Nazis used to consolidate power and curtail liberties — then went on to claim she was shown a secret United Nations plan in which a "global cabal" would "dilute the blood of patriots" by importing 100 million immigrants, stating God knows "the open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world," and insisting Israeli intellectual Yuval Harari "and the rest of them at the World Economic Forum ... want us eating insects, cockroaches ... while they dine on the blood of children."

Fox News dropped Logan and scrapped her Fox Nation streaming show after she compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to a notorious Nazi doctor last year. Since then, The Daily Beast's Justin Baragona writes, "Logan has become increasingly associated with the QAnon community" and has "been openly peddling antisemitic tropes in recent months," often centered around "the Rothschilds."

"Conservatives often complain about being deplatformed," but "in this case, Logan has effectively been deplatformed by right-wing media outlets such as Fox News and Newsmax, two channels that often fuel complaints about the supposed censorship of conservatives," CNN's Oliver Darcy observes. "It shows that people like Logan are often exiled from platforms not for holding conservative views, but because they use their platforms in a grossly irresponsible way."

Former President Donald Trump held a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, over the weekend, "during which there were many bizarre moments, including what many observers have noted appears to be echoes of the propaganda put out by adherents of the deranged and occasionally deadly QAnon conspiracy theory," CNN's Jake Tapper said Monday night, "propaganda that Trump has repeatedly and unequivocally shared in recent weeks on his social media accounts."

A Trump spokesman told CNN that the music playing at the rally wasn't the QAnon anthem "WWG1WGA" — for "Where we go one, we go all," the QAnon rallying cry — but just a royalty-free song called "Mirror." At the moment the music started playing. though, much of Trump's Youngstown audience raised one finger, in what appears to be the sign for "Where we go one, we go all."

Stephen Colbert's Late Show has a lighter explanation for that one-finger salute.

People who study QAnon don't find Trump's overt embrace of the baseless conspiracy theory to be a laughing matter. "These are people who have elevated Trump to messiah-like status, where only he can stop this cabal," Georgia State University professor Mia Bloom told The Associated Press last week. "That's why you see so many images (in online QAnon spaces) of Trump as Jesus."

As Trump asserts his dominance in the Republican Party and faces increasingly perilous legal threats, "his actions show that far from distancing himself from the political fringe, he is welcoming it," AP reports. "Trump's recent postings have included images referring to himself as a martyr fighting criminals, psychopaths, and the so-called deep state," and he reposted an image last week of him wearing a Q lapel pin behind the phrase "The storm is coming."

"The 'storm is coming' is shorthand for something really dark that he's not saying out loud," Janet McIntosh, an anthropologist at Brandeis University who studies QAnon, tells AP. "This is a way for him to point to violence without explicitly calling for it. He is the prince of plausible deniability."

The Georgia Guidestones, a mystery-shrouded Stonehenge-like granite monument and roadside attraction in rural east Georgia, was destroyed Wednesday after an early morning blast reduced one of its four 19-foot-high granite panels to rubble. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation said the panel was damaged by an explosive device, and the entire monument was later demolished "for safety reasons" as investigators searched for clues to the vandal.

The GBI released surveillance footage showing the 4 a.m. explosion and a silver sedan driving away.

The Guidestones, outside Elberton, had attracted visitors but also conspiracy theorists since an anonymous patron, using the pseudonym R.C. Christian, paid for its construction in 1980. The four panels were inscribed with instructions for "the conservation of mankind" in 10 parts and eight languages, and the monument also served as a sundial and astronomical calendar.

"The inscriptions urge humanity to live harmoniously, rule fairly, and protect the environment," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. "But further instructions to limit the world population to 500 million and establish a world court have attracted criticism from fringe groups who fear the rise of a one world government or other baseless conspiracies."

Interest in the monument grew after Kandiss Taylor, a Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate, released a campaign ad in May pledging to destroy the Guidestones, which she linked to "the Satanic Regime," an apparent QAnon reference. Taylor, who came in third in the May GOP primary, tweeted Wednesday that God "can do ANYTHING He wants to do," including "striking down the Satanic Guidestones."

The destruction of the Guidestones shows that conspiracy theories "do and can have a real-world impact," Katie McCarthy, a researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, told The Associated Press. "We've seen this with QAnon and multiple other conspiracy theories, that these ideas can lead somebody to try to take action in furtherance of these beliefs." Right-wing personalities like Alex Jones had mentioned the Guidestones in years past, she added, but "they sort of came back onto the public's radar" because of Taylor.

Lee Vaughn, chairman of the Elbert County Board of Commissioners, agreed that Taylor's ad brought a lot of unwanted controversy, including from a pastor who came to a commission meeting from a neighboring county last month and talked for 20 minutes about the "evil" monument and why it should be removed. "Just thank goodness nobody was hurt," Vaughn told the Journal-Constitution.

The National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, closed indefinitely on Wednesday after years of wild QAnon conspiracy theories and mounting threats of violence, including a physical altercation last week with a Republican congressional candidate from Virginia demanding "to see all the illegals crossing on the raft," The Texas Tribune reports.

On any given day, hundreds of species of butterflies travel through the 20-year-old nonprofit sanctuary, the Houston Chronicle reports. "Birders from across the country visit the refuge to observe and photograph birds unique to the Rio Grande Valley, and thousands of local schoolchildren take field trips to the center each year."

In 2017, the National Butterfly Center sued the Trump administration to block construction of a border wall through its property. Two years later, "We Build the Wall" chief Brian Kolfage posted doctored photos of the butterfly sanctuary's dock, claiming it was being used for migrant transport and human trafficking. (Kolfage was later indicted for allegedly misusing funds for his nearby crowdfunded border wall.)

Right-wing conspiracists have been falsely claiming the National Butterfly Center is involved in sex trafficking and other crimes since 2019, and executive director Marianna Treviño-Wright has been getting threats. Former Texas state Rep. Aaron Peña (R) told her before last weekend's "We Stand America" border security rally in neighboring McAllen that she could be a target and should "be armed at all times or out of town," the Tribune reports.

The Virginia congressional candidate, Kimberly Lowe, arrived at the center on Jan. 21 and demanded river access, accusing Treviño-Wright of permitting "children being sex trafficked and raped and murdered," the Chronicle reports. After Treviño-Wright told Lowe to leave, Lowe tackled her, Treviño-Wright says.

Lowe disputes Treviño-Wright's account of events, but after news of the altercation spread, "We Stand America" banned her from the McAllen event. Lowe said she spent $2,500 for a "diamond VIP" ticket that would have included a private border tour with featured guests Michael Flynn, a QAnon favorite, and former acting ICE chief Thomas Homan. "I can't believe that the people who are supposed to be on my side of the aisle canceled me," Lowe told the Chronicle.

Jeffrey Glassberg, founder of the butterfly sanctuary's parent organization, the North American Butterfly Association, told the Tribune "it's incredibly distressing that the United States has come to the point where a really significant part of the public is just no longer tethered to reality."

The BBC has produced a podcast on QAnon called "The Coming Storm" in which journalist Gabriel Gatehouse attempts to understand why so many people bought into the conspiracy theory. "Where other series have tended to present QAnon followers as crackpots with a tenuous grip on reality, Gatehouse is respectful and maintains a curious rather than condescending tone," Fiona Sturges writes in the Financial Times.

Gatehouse and Jon Stewart dug into the topic on The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast, and they ended up in some unexpected places. If you take the main conspiracy theory points literally — Hillary Clinton and other global elites are in a cabal of blood-drinking pedophiles — "then obviously it's nonsense," Gatehouse said. "But if you take QAnon as a sort of parable," where a group of powerful actors are effectively running things behind the scenes, it makes more sense.

Stewart asked why QAnon followers would glom onto outrageous tales instead of that simpler populist argument. Gatehouse agreed that the "specificity" of Q's outlandish conspiracies helped it succeed where other LARP (live-action role play) "anon" accounts failed, but he also pointed to the "emotive" draw of child trafficking and QAnon's "participatory element." "People are deputized," Stewart said, and Gatehouse agreed, saying QAnon adherents "do their own research" and end up in bizarre places in their search for explanations on how they ended up "at the bottom of the pile."

Stewart suggested this search for "nefarious" scapegoats is in the same "universe" as the "the misinformation that the fascists used in the '30s" or even "the Salem witch trials," and Gatehouse said the big difference is that "the Nazis were in control of the message, but now we've got the internet, like, no one's in control of it." Right, "it's a crowdsourced misinformation campaign," Stewart said. He also suggested "the mainstream American media sowed the seeds for Q's virality by creating that adrenaline and cortisol in people's bodies of fear and always on the verge of disaster and catastrophe." Gatehouse agreed, they ended up talking about the apocryphal Donald Trump "pee tape."

Gatehouse also hinted at why the BBC might be interested in QAnon: "Well, you guys are always first, so wherever you go, we follow. So obviously the wheels are about to come off our democracy as well."

BBC correspondent Stephanie Hegarty also took a look at QAnon, and why it's so hard to quit.

One of the more unbelievable subplots in these divided times is the stated belief among some supporters of former President Donald Trump that John F. Kennedy Jr. did not, in fact, die in a plane crash in 1999, but instead is on the verge of revealing himself as a Trump supporter. This group turned out for Trump's weekend rally in Florence, Arizona, Politico's Meridith McGraw reported in a dispatch Monday evening.

QAnon influencer Michael Protzman, who organized a Great Pumpkin–like JFK Jr. reappearance party in Dallas last November, was spotted in the stands, and "one attendee was spotted wearing a red shirt with the faces of Trump, [John F.] Kennedy, and Kennedy Jr.," McGraw reports. Jim and Ron Watkins, believed by some to have started the QAnon conspiracy theory, recorded their attendance at Trump's rally for their fans online.

Arizona resident Ray Kallatsa, who told Politico he "definitely" wants Trump to run again in 2024, said he wants "JFK Jr." to be Trump's running mate. "I don't want to sound too much like a conspiracy theorist, but he's coming back," Kallatsa said. "He's supposed to reveal himself on the 17th if he's truly alive. I think we'll see him." JFK Jr. did not reveal himself, of course, as some parody accounts noted.

"Trump has always had one foot firmly in the camp with conspiracists on the right, starting with his promotion of birtherism during the Obama years," Politico reports. "Having been ousted from power, he has continued to adopt and amplify this world and its views, effectively solidifying it as the base of the Republican Party." You can read McGraw's dispatch, and see photos of some of the thousands of rally attendees, at Politico.

Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general hired then fired and finally pardoned by former President Donald Trump, has publicly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory, selling QAnon merchandise, recording himself taking a QAnon oath, and making a controversial appearance at a QAnon convention in Dallas in May. He seemed less enamored with QAnon in a phone call recorded and released by former ally Lin Wood on Saturday night.

In the recording, which Wood says is a Telegram call between himself and Flynn, the man purported to be Flynn says he thinks QAnon is "a disinformation campaign that the CIA created," adding: "I find it total nonsense. And I think it's a disinformation campaign created by the left."

"Wood's publication of the audio comes as part of a growing feud between Wood and Flynn and other figures active in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election," The Daily Beast reports. "The fight kicked off last week when recently acquitted Kenosha shooting defendant Kyle Rittenhouse, a former Wood client, accused Wood in a Fox News interview of deliberately keeping him in jail to raise money off of his case."

Wood accused of Flynn and other allies, like fellow pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, of abandoning him in the face of Rittenhouse's attack, and "the ensuing clash has consumed QAnon and other far-right communities over the past week," The Daily Beast reports, adding that it can't "verify the audio's authenticity, but Wood regularly records phone calls with his allies and reporters."

This call appears to have been made in early November, since Flynn points Wood to a Nov. 2 post by white supremacist radio host Hal Turner calling QAnon an embarrassing failure and endorsing mass violence. You can read more at The Daily Beast.

"Jacob Chansley, also known as the 'QAnon Shaman' from the January Capitol insurrection, has been sentenced to 41 months in prison," Seth Meyers said on Wednesday's Late Night. "Apparently it's hard to find a jury of his peers the same day there's a renaissance fair."

Yes, "the deer antler guy was sentenced to 41 months in prison for his role in the Capitol riot," Jimmy Fallon said on The Tonight Show. "Right now he's trying to use an antler to lift the keys off a guard's belt." Also on Wednesday, President Biden made his fifth presidential trip to Michigan, this time to highlight GM's electric cars. "May not mean much to you, but right now Delaware is like, 'Who the hell is she?'" Fallon joked.

"Since the passing of his landmark infrastructure plan, Biden's been taking a victory lap — literally," Stephen Colbert said on The Late Show, showing the president test-drive a new electric Hummer.

"Lately the news has been kind of repetitive and somewhat depressing, so I've got to say — and I hope this is never taken out of context — thank you QAnon," Colbert said. He ran through some of QAnon's "latest unhinged whack-job hijinks" including the "hundreds of QAnon believers" who "are still in Dallas waiting for JFK to show up" and the Chansley sentence. "Not only did Chansley commit the crime of looking like an idiot, he is one," he said. "After failing to find Mike Pence in the Capitol, he scrawled a note at the vice president's dais that read: 'It's only a matter of time, justice is coming!' Which, turns out, was a note to self." Chansley's 41-month sentence is "nearly three and a half years," Colbert added, "so with good behavior he could be out in time to storm the Capitol in 2024."

"Chansley is repentant — he gave a 45-minute speech to the court, during which he cited Jesus, Gandhi, and quoted The Shashank Redemption," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live, before pivoting to a newly invented phone your dog can use to video-chat with you. "Donald Trump doesn't have a dog — not since he broke up with Mike Pence, anyway — but he does have a MyPillow guy," Mike Lindell, who "scored a one-on-one interview with the man who will eventually bankrupt him," Kimmel added. "It was like watching a ventriloquist get interviewed by his dummy."

Federal prosecutors asked a judge Tuesday night to give "QAnon Shaman" Jacob Chansley 51 months in prison for his "now-famous criminal acts" that "made him the public face of the Capitol riot" on Jan. 6. The four year, three month sentence would be the stiffest handed down yet for the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, and it's at the top end of the federal sentencing guidelines.

Chansley, who pleaded guilty to obstructing Congress from certifying President Biden's electoral victory, is only the third Capitol rioter charged with a felony to have reached the sentencing phase, Politico reports. Prosecutors recommended 18 months for defendant Paul Hodgkins, but a federal judge gave him eight months. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is handling Chansley's case, is scheduled to sentence the third felon, former MMA fighter Scott Fairlamb, on Wednesday; prosecutors have asked for 44 months in prison.

Chansley merits the longer sentence because he spent months before the riot spreading disinformation about the election, he publicly gloated and "showed no remorse in the days after the event," he carried a spear-tipped U.S. flag into the Senate chamber, and he repeatedly refused commands from police officers, prosecutors write in their 28-page sentencing memo.

"What should have been a day in which Congress fulfilled its solemn, constitutional duty in certifying the vote count of the Electoral College, ensuring the peaceful transition of power in our nation, was disrupted by a mob of thousands on Jan. 6, 2021," and Chansley "was, quite literally, their flag-bearer," the prosecutors write. He "was among the first 30 rioters to penetrate the U.S. Capitol building," and he "then stalked the hallowed halls of the building, riling up other members of the mob with his screaming obscenities about our nation's lawmakers, and flouting the 'opportunity' to rid our government of those he has long considered to be traitors."

Chansley's lawyer, Albert Watkins, has said a sentence "significantly below" the 41-51-month guidelines would be appropriate and noted that by the time he is sentenced, Chansley will have already spent 10 months behind bars.

"Folks, in case you were wondering what your insane aunt is up to, you don't have to wait till Thanksgiving," Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show. "The latest in cutting-edge crazy is that hundreds of QAnon adherents gathered in Dallas, Texas, yesterday. The reason? They were expecting a big announcement from John F. Kennedy Jr.," who died 22 years ago. "Apparently the creme de la cray-cray believed that John-John faked his own death, went into hiding, and is now actually the Q that they follow on the internet," Colbert explained. "And they expected him to appear in public and reveal all of this yesterday in Dallas, at Dealey Plaza, by the grassy knoll. Oh, and they had to throw in the grassy knoll. Up till then it had the ring of truth."

"Shockingly, JFK Jr. did not show up in Dallas yesterday afternoon, due to his chronic case of NotAlive," Colbert said. "But the QAnon crowd didn't lose hope because rumors began to circulate that JFK Jr. would instead appear at a concert by the Rolling Stones that evening. Guys! Come on! You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find, you just might find, you get what you need — which is medication."

When JFK Jr. failed to appear at the Stones concert, some intrepid QAnon believers proposed "that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards is in fact President John F. Kennedy," Colbert laughed. "Okay, that is crazy. President Kennedy would be 104 years old, and Keith Richards is clearly way older than that."

"It's crazy that people actually believe this — I mean, if you're gonna believe that a band is the dead Kennedys in disguise, wouldn't you assume that band was the Dead Kennedys?" Jimmy Kimmel asked on Kimmel Live. "The Illiterati gathered by the hundreds because they believed JFK Jr. and JFK Sr. were going to re-emerge and reinstall Donald Trump to power — because obviously the Kennedys would be big Trump fans," Kimmel deadpanned. "I cannot overstate how crazy this event — that is getting almost no coverage — was." Seriously, "how many times does Q have to be wrong before they realize he's just making stuff up?" he asked. "They don't even know who he is. Maybe I'm Q! ... It's not out of the question. If I was, this is exactly how I would do it."

"In Dallas today, hundreds of these QAnon nuts gathered in Dealey Plaza to witness the triumphant return of John F. Kennedy Jr., who you may recall is dead — he died in a plane crash in 1999," Jimmy Kimmel said on Tuesday's Kimmel Live. "But these people believe he didn't actually die, he's been working as a secret agent of Donald Trump to put him in power." You might "find this hard to believe," he deadpanned, but "he didn't show."

At 12:29 p.m., the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and when neither JFK Jr. nor former President Donald Trump showed up a minute later, some suggested the dead Kennedys would show up at a Rolling Stones concert Tuesday night. "Still, the crowd stuck around for several hours, even as heavy rain started pouring down," Rolling Stone reports in a dispatch from Dallas. "This is like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin, but without the charm," Kimmel sighed. "It's crazy."

And even if JFK Jr. did rise from the dead and joined the QAnon supporters at the site of his father's murder, "do you think he would be on your side?" Kimmel asked. "Some of these bananas were saying John F. Kennedy Sr. was going to show up, too, which — JFK was born in 1917. Even if he was alive, he'd be 104 years old. Why not bring back Abraham Lincoln while we're at it?"

"The renaissance of JFK Jr. is an increasingly popular cornerstone of the QAnon conspiracy theory," Rolling Stone reports. "The theory postulates that JFK Jr. has been in hiding for years and will eventually reveal himself as Trump's running mate for the 2024 election." Some suggest Trump will then step aside and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn will be JFK Jr.'s vice president, Rolling Stone adds, and "the feverish fantasy concludes by claiming that Trump will become '1 of the 7 new Kings. Most likely the King of Kings,' a reference to a biblical passage in Revelations 17." JFK Jr. would be the one to anoint him king.

Kimmel also took shots at some of the "crazy people of below-average intelligence in Congress," notably Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), his "fellow whack-job from Colorado" Rep. Lauren Boebert (R), and "the genius from Georgia," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). You can watch that above.

Americans who attend church services at least once a month are more likely to view the QAnon conspiracy theory favorably than those who attend less frequently, an Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday finds. On the other end of the spectrum, Americans who say they never go to church are the most likely to view QAnon unfavorably.

The Economist reports it was seeking to test two theories, one being that Americans "who have no religious affiliation find themselves attracted to other causes, such as the Q craze." The other, which has been posited by the likes of Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), is that "modern strains of Christian evangelicalism ... do not satisfy all worshipers," causing them to "find community and salvation in other groups, such as QAnon."

The findings suggest the first theory likely isn't the case, while the analysis of the second one is more muddled. Though The Economist and YouGov do have data on how frequently people attend church, the survey doesn't dive into how satisfied individuals feel with their church community. "It is not clear whether those who have a favorable opinion of QAnon do so because they want membership of a social group, as Mr. Sasse and others claim, or because they are merely more suspectible to conspiratorial thinking," The Economist writes.

The poll was conducted between July 10-13 among 1,500 American adults. The margin of error was 3 percentage points. Read more at The Economist.

An anonymous survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting says their own father has been convinced it was a hoax and has even falsely accused them of "being part of it."

A Reddit user recently posted on the QAnonCasualties subreddit that they are a survivor of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, but that their dad believes it was a hoax and the QAnon conspiracy theory has "consumed his life." On Monday, Vice spoke with the author of the post and confirmed their identity as a survivor of the shooting, which left 17 people dead in 2018. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity and was referred to only as Bill, which isn't their real name.

"Back in January he saw the video of Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing David Hogg ([another] student) about the shooting being a false-flag operation, and while my dad was already into Q, he'd never gone down that particular rabbit hole and now he's convinced everything was a hoax and it breaks my f---ing heart," the Reddit post said.

The user goes on to say that their father has directly claimed to them, "You're a real piece of work to be able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened if it wasn't a hoax. Shame on you for being part of it and putting your family through it too."

"Bill" told Vice that their last semester at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was already "difficult enough with Feb. 14 marking 3 years since the shooting," but the fact that "my dad thinks the absolute hell we went through, where nine of the victims were in our class, is a hoax" has made matters worse, and he explained he hasn't shared this with his classmates because it's not a "pain I want to put on them."

After reports surfaced about antivirus software magnate John McAfee's death in a Spanish prison on Wednesday following the announcement that he was being extradited to the United States where he faced tax evasion charges, his social media team appeared to pull a "stunt" on his Instagram account, posting a "Q", likely in reference to the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, NBC News' Ben Collins reports.

Per Collins, McAfee frequently alluded to global conspiracies and alleged he was being targeted while publishing attention-grabbing social media posts.

Meanwhile, Marc-André Argentina, a research fellow at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation, pointed out that Jordan Wildon, who investigates digital disinformation, tracked down the exact time stamp of the post, which indicated "this was a planned post troll."

The FBI and the Homeland Security Department's intelligence office are warning that many adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory have become disillusioned as the movement's false prophesies keep not materializing, and some of those followers will likely turn to violence, according to a report released Monday by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

One main tenet of the QAnon conspiracy was "The Storm," where former President Donald Trump would stay in power and his enemies in the "cabal" would be tried and executed. At least 20 of the people arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection are QAnon followers, the report says. After President Biden won and took office, some QAnon adherents have come to believe Trump is the "shadow president," while others "likely will disengage from the movement or reduce their involvement" as Biden continues to be president.

A main concern, the two-page unclassified FBI report says, is that violent "adherents of QAnon likely will begin to believe they can no longer 'trust the plan' referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as 'digital soldiers' toward engaging in real world violence — including harming perceived members of the 'cabal' such as Democrats and other political opposition — instead of continually awaiting Q's promised actions which have not occurred." Believing in QAnon is not in itself a violation of any law, the FBI underscores.

Heinrich and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) asked the FBI for its QAnon assessment in December. "QAnon refers to a complex and constantly evolving conspiracy theory that is promoted by a decentralized online community that has morphed into a real-world movement," the report explains. "Its foundational principle holds that a corrupt cabal of 'global elites' and 'deep state' actors run a Satan-worshiping international child sex trafficking ring, and engaged in plots to conduct a coup against a former president of the United States while he was in office." You can read the two-page memo at CNN.

Former President Donald Trump really is focused on the absurd theory that he will somehow be returned to power in August, two people close to Trump tell The Daily Beast, confirming reporting by Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.

In the past few weeks, Trump "had begun increasingly quizzing confidants about a potential August return to power," The Daily Beast reports, citing the two Trump confidantes. "What's more, he claimed that a lot of 'highly respected' people — who Trump did not name — have been saying it's possible. Both of these sources said they decided not to tell the former president what they were thinking, which was that it's not going to happen."

There are people saying Trump will be returned to office — fringy lawyer Sidney Powell said so at a QAnon conference Sunday, for example — but "if Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly," MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. Lindell first made his prediction on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon's podcast in March, but he conceded Wednesday that "the month of August, for this, is subjective."

"It is my hope that Donald Trump is reinstated, after all the proof comes out, by the end of August, but I don't know if it'll be that month, specifically," Lindell told The Daily Beast. "That was my estimation. I spoke about it with my lawyers who said that they should have something ready for us to bring before the U.S. Supreme Court by July. So, in my mind, I hope that means that we could have Donald Trump back in the White House by August. That's how I landed on August, and I'm hopeful that that is correct."

It is not, obviously. Lindell's original theory was that he and his lawyers would present incontrovertible evidence of election fraud to the Supreme Court in April or May, leading to a 9-0 ruling to return Trump to the presidency and bipartisan buy-in over the summer that putting Trump back in the White House is the only right thing to do. Read more about Trump's interest in this fantasy, and its embrace by his grassroots fan base, at The Daily Beast.

Michael Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general and former President Donald Trump's first national security adviser, spoke at a QAnon conference in Dallas on Sunday, and he was widely criticized afterward for agreeing with an audience member that there should be a Myanmar-style coup in the U.S. Evidently, the idea of such a coup is popular in some QAnon circles as a way to get Trump back in office, and since Flynn also claimed falsely Sunday that Trump actually won the 2020 election, it isn't a stretch to assume he was endorsing a military putsch against President Biden.

On Monday, Flynn claimed he was misquoted. In a video of the event, asked why there can't be a coup in the U.S., Flynn replied: "No reason, I mean, it should happen. No reason."

Flynn said on Telegram "there is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not at any time called for any action of that sort," adding: "Any reporting of any other belief by me is a boldface fabrication based on twisted reporting at a lively panel at a conference of Patriotic Americans who love this country, just as I do." He claimed he said: "There is no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America)." Because we can't read Flynn's mind, it's possible that's what he meant to say. But it's not what he actually said.

Flynn's actual comments got cheers from the QAnon audience. "It would be very marginally less contemptible if he at least owned up to giving the crowd the fascist red meat they so clearly wanted," Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, wrote on Twitter. "But he wants to cling whatever last shred of mainstream respectability he imagines he enjoys and also take the applause and cash from QAnon," plus get invited on Fox News.

Retired four-star Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey told MSNBC on Monday night that "the Department of Justice is gonna be hard-pressed not to consider whether this language is criminal in nature." Flynn's rhetoric "is actually very dangerous," he added. "I think Mike Flynn has a mental health problem, to be blunt."

Flynn previously admitted under oath that he lied to the FBI about Russia — Trump eventually pardoned him — and after Trump lost, Flynn suggested he declare martial law in a handful of states Biden won.

Two new reports this week have offered seemingly contrasting data about the resiliency of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which helped inspire the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab on Wednesday reported that after last spiking in the days before the Capitol attack, catchphrases associated with QAnon have now slowed to a tiny "murmur" on the mainstream internet — a decrease attributed, in part, to a crackdown on conspiracy content by the major social media sites. But on Friday, the Public Religion Research Institute released a survey conducted in March showing that 15 percent of Americans believe QAnon's central notion that the government and media "are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation." The findings were very similar to a Morning Consult poll from January.

"Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants," PRRI's Robby Jones told The New York Times. "So it lines up there with a major religious group."

Taken together, the reports suggest QAnon retains a potent following, even as it has largely disappeared from public view. How — in our internet-driven age — is that even possible?

One possibility is that the social media giants were too slow to move. Twitter and Facebook started modestly restricting QAnon-related content last summer, during the George Floyd protests, but really cracked down after the insurrection. Twitter alone deleted 70,000 Q-related accounts in the days afterward. By then it was arguably too late — the conspiracy theory had already reached a critical mass.

But it's also true that censorship — even well-intended censorship — doesn't really end ideas so much as it pushes them underground. In the pre-internet era, Soviet dissidents passed around samizdat. These days, activists abroad use VPNs and other tools to get around the Great Firewall of China. Something similar (though less noble) may have happened here: The Atlantic Council's report didn't monitor private messaging apps like Telegram, which is known to be popular among QAnon followers.

The good news is that Q's growth has been curtailed. But the hard-core adherents probably aren't going anywhere. "Public posts are where fringe groups gain new adherents, but private discussions are where their most dedicated followers end up," Axios pointed out. Ideas are hard to kill. Even really bad ideas.

There is, not surprisingly, a sizable partisan divide in the people who believe in QAnon, the "outlandish and ever-evolving conspiracy theory" that a "cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles" runs the world, The New York Times reports. A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, released Thursday, found that 23 percent of Republicans, 12 percent of independents, and 7 percent of Democrats are QAnon believers.

Overall, the poll found, 14 percent of Americans believe in QAnon, 46 percent reject it outright, and 40 percent are doubters but don't rule it all out. When the pollsters asked specific questions — about whether "a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles" and child sex traffickers control the U.S. "media, government, and financial worlds," if "a storm" will soon "sweep away the elites" and "restore the rightful leaders," and whether "true American patriots may have to resort to violence" to "save" America — those numbers rose to 15 or 20 percent.

"These are words I never thought I would write into a poll question, or have the need to, but here we are," PRRI founder Robby Jones told the Times. "Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants," he added. "So it lines up there with a major religious group."

Combining the percentage of respondents who said they believed in the core QAnon tenets and the U.S. population, "that's more than 30 million people," Jones told the Times. Pew found that there were 36 million mainline Protestants in 2014, a drop of 5 million from seven years earlier, and both Pew and PRRI say fewer than 15 percent of Americans are mainline Protestants, a tradition that includes the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church.

PRRI and IFYC surveyed a random sample of 5,149 adults in all 50 states who are part of the Ipsos Knowledge Panel. The interviews were conducted online March 9-30, and the margin of error is ±1.5 percentage points.

You'd think adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory would feel vindicated by leaked allegations of sexual misconduct toward a minor by a sitting member of Congress.

After all, abuse of children by powerful people, especially federal officials, is one of the movement's biggest purported concerns. But Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) is the subject of just such a leak, and the QAnon response is not crows of vindication.

Gaetz is under scrutiny in a Justice Department investigation — a months-long inquiry that began during the administration of former President Donald Trump, of whom Gaetz is a vocal supporter — in connection to allegations that he engaged in a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl. He has vehemently denied the accusation, initially telling The New York Times he didn't know much about it but suspected "someone is trying to recategorize [his] generosity to ex-girlfriends as something more untoward." He also claimed the probe is part of a former federal official's extortion attempt which the Gaetz family has been working with the FBI to uncover. That rebuttal has raised eyebrows, including those of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who called his conversation with Gaetz about the investigation "one of the weirdest interviews [he's] ever conducted."

We don't know yet whether Gaetz is innocent or guilty. Few details of the allegations have been made public. His story about extortion and the FBI seems to have some basis in truth, but if reporting from The Washington Post is correct, the DOJ investigation preceded the extortion, not vice versa, as Gaetz suggested. Meanwhile, the DOJ probe is linked to a case against another Florida official who is going to trial for more than a dozen federal charges, including "sex trafficking charges related to a girl between the ages of 14 and 17."

Despite this uncertainty, QAnon followers have already reached a verdict: innocent. That's a curious and revealing thing. The Gaetz story, in broad strokes, seems like it would be huge news for the QAnon crowd, touted everywhere as "proof" that elite pedophiles have become so brazen even the deep state had to bestir itself to intervene. Its genesis under the Trump administration should make that explanation an easy fit. That's exactly how the Jeffrey Epstein story is used.

But Gaetz is a Trump ally, and QAnon is nothing if not tribal. The group's grand narrative — namely, that our government is run by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles being exposed by a pseudonymous intelligence official called "Q" — holds Trump as a messianic figure, and in-group loyalty is incredibly strong. Thus did QAnon community discussions in the Telegram app immediately jump to Gaetz's defense, dubbing the Times report yet another "SMEARING of MAGA Patriots."

"Typical Narcissitic [sic] Flying Monkey, projectionist, gas lighting, smear campaign playbook," wrote one user, employing a pop psychology term to describe The New York Times as an enabler of abuse. The journalists are "evil ... bastards [who] hate [Gaetz] because he fights back and calls them out!" said another. Some highlighted that the girl allegedly involved was 17 years old. (Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, so QAnon adherents sometimes think incidences of the number, like the 17 flags that stood behind Trump during his farewell address, are coded messages telling them to keep the faith.) Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), who has promoted QAnon in the past, backed Gaetz promptly, warning the story would become a "witch hunt."

Maybe she's right — we truly don't know yet. If Gaetz is innocent, his name may forever be unfairly tarnished by the leaked story. And regardless, he deserves due process, not "trial" in the court of public opinion. But the QAnon defenses of Gaetz go well beyond legal presumption of innocence or a prudent withholding of judgment. My read is that, given the choice, they'd shutter the DOJ inquiry entirely. Nothing to see here! By the way, Hillary Clinton murders kids and drinks their blood. Whaddya mean, show you evidence?

I suppose I don't find the tribalism surprising — or I shouldn't, anyway. Still, I do find remarkable the complete disinterest in exploring the possibility that a Trump-friendly official could be implicated in the very sort of crime QAnon ostensibly exists to reveal, stop, and punish by death penalty.

Many people get involved with QAnon because of a real and admirable concern about sex trafficking. In a column last year, I explained how a friend of mine unwittingly shared QAnon-linked content on Instagram because she sincerely cares about this and wanted to raise awareness. She'd never heard of Q, so she didn't recognize the telltale phrases in the post and its author's bio. She just wanted to help children in danger, and the QAnon movement deliberately co-opts anti-trafficking hashtags to take advantage of that kind of good intention.

My friend wasn't lured further into QAnon, but others are. Some of the people now dismissing all possibility of wrongdoing by Gaetz probably entered the QAnon world because they too wanted to help children in danger. When that good instinct came in conflict with the movement's tribalism, however, tribalism won. QAnon is so intellectually corrupt it degrades its believers' best ethical impulses, just as it so often degrades their relationships with their own children, their love of God and country, their basic ability to parse true and lies.

The movement's outlandish ideas are sometimes funny, but QAnon is not comedy. It's tragedy, and tragedy that spreads.

The "storm" never came. The mass executions of prominent Democrats didn't happen. Former President Donald Trump didn't declare martial law and institute a "New American Republic" via military coup. QAnon was a lie.

Of course, it was always a lie. The QAnon conspiracy theory's basic claim — that our government is run by a secret cabal of Satanist, cannibalistic pedophiles who have been exposed by an unknown federal official dubbed "Q" and will be defeated by Trump — is false. It is a destructive fantasy, a world-scaled detective game that plays on adherents' fears and tells them they are heroes, part of an army of secret-agent patriots by whose hand America will be saved. From the outside, it's ridiculous. From the inside, all-engrossing.

Inauguration Day was supposed to be the climax of the QAnon story. Well, technically it was Election Day, but after that came and went without a Trump victory, and dozens of Trump campaign lawsuits failed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear Trump's cause, and the storming of the Capitol didn't "hang Mike Pence," as some rioters demanded — after all that, Inauguration Day became the certain apogee. At 12 p.m. sharp, the anons said, Trump would take over communications systems nationwide, expose the traitors, and begin his second term. "Trust the plan," Q believers told each other.

But noon passed without incident. President Biden was duly inaugurated. Trump retired to Florida. And the Q movement fractured.

Some still cling to hope, at least as of this writing. "Anons, hold the line for a few more hours and maybe even a few more days," one influencer's post encouraged. "Victory is at hand," and even if "you choose not to trust Q at this moment, trust [Trump]." Others urged prayer — Q theorizing often has religious themes — and reaffirmed their faith in God and/or his servant, Donald. Could the real date of the big reveal be March 4, the original Inauguration Day?

In some variants, Trump was allowing the traitors to further incriminate themselves; in others, Biden is secretly on Trump's side ("Sleepy Joe," the sleeper agent — get it?). The wildest version I've encountered says the man we saw inaugurated is not Biden but Trump after an "experimental surgery" to swap their faces.

A few anons doubled down, declaring Trump himself a traitor to their righteous cause, a "part of the communist plan all along," and other things not appropriate to repeat here. "He sold us out. Its [sic] revolution time," said one anon. "Trump lied and failed [us]. Simple as that," another answered. The problem was not the story but the savior, they concluded. They'd hoped in a false messiah.

Some theorized the entire QAnon project was a covert project by the very secret cabal the movement imagines itself to oppose, a way to flush out those who know the "truth" so their voices can be silenced. "We can't stop what's coming," one poster mourned. "All of us have been brought out into the open." This splinter — scared, shocked, convinced they need to prepare for a dystopian future of persecution — may be most at risk of recruitment by the extremist groups reportedly hunting among Q's abandoned flock. "TO ANY AND ALL FEDERAL AGENTS," wrote one anon apparently of this persuasion, "EVERY POST I HAVE EVER MADE ON THIS WEBSITE IS SATIRE."

But still other QAnon adherents have realized they were conned: "I feel stupid." "Been played like fools." "Seems like we were duped." "OMG none of this was real." "And just like that Q was wrong." "All bullshit." "There is no plan."

Among this faction, a telling theme emerged: Even if it wasn't true, at least we built a community of purpose. At least Q taught the anons to stand up for themselves and made people pay attention to politics. "Even if Q was fake it brought us all 2gether." Ron Watkins, a former administrator of the forum site where Q started (and a plausible candidate to be Q himself), hit on this theme in his farewell note: "[P]lease remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years."

It's easy to gloat over this disenchantment, to reserve no sympathy for people whose digital LARP had them looking forward to martial law, dictatorship, and public executions. But there is something deeply sad here, too. QAnon feeds and feeds on loneliness. It further isolates the isolated. It ends marriages and breaks up families. It has a long record of estranging adherents from their loved ones; online support groups have sprung up for people losing their moms and dads, husbands and wives to Q's rabbit holes.

The Q slogan, "Where we go one, we go all," is meant to be a joyous rallying cry. In reality, adherents are traveling together to a state of anxious alienation. Their hope of violence and chaos was inexcusable, but for many it was born of real despair. If this week's events have loosened that delusion's grip, kindness and real friendship could help cast it off for good.

President Biden has taken office, former President Donald Trump is in Florida, and the U.S. still hasn't seen a mass arrests of Democrats or a nationwide blackout.

All of these facts were shocking for some followers of the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon, as they thought and hoped that Trump would somehow seize permanent power on Wednesday, NBC News reports. But as Biden was sworn in without a hitch, QAnon message boards lit up with followers who realized a violent overthrow of the government wasn't about to happen, that Trump had no secret plans to somehow stay in office, and that they'd been wrong for months, if not years.

Even Ron Watkins, the administrator of the extremist message board 8kun who may have even originated QAnon, posted a last-ditch call for unity that didn't acknowledge the harmful conspiracy theories he'd allowed to spread for years.

Still, just as the many flaws in QAnon's past predictions failed to dissuade supporters, some believers are continuing to make excuses for Wednesday's events and suggesting some sort of overthrow is still possible.

Tapping through Instagram stories recently, I was surprised to find my entirely normal friend sharing QAnon content. She was surprised, too, because she'd never heard the word "QAnon" in her life.

Three in four Americans could say the same, as of March, and only 3 percent then said they knew "a lot" about QAnon, which refers to both a conspiracy theory and the movement that has grown up around it. As I wrote while exploring QAnon's religious aspects earlier this year, the gospel of Q goes like this: There's a cabal of powerful figures in government (the "deep state"), business, academia, and media who make time for child sex trafficking, cannibalism, and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination. Q is the movement's anonymous digital prophet whose forum posts ("Q drops") reveal both the nature of the cabal and how the movement's messianic figure, President Trump, plans to defeat it.

Q drops are unfalsifiable to QAnon's true believers. Prophecies believed to have come true are taken as proof of the whole theory's veracity. Anything that doesn't pan out is evidence of the cabal's struggle to retain power. Whatever happens, Q is right. The inaugural Q drop, for example, promised Hillary Clinton would be arrested in late October of 2017. She'd be stopped from fleeing the country by the Marine Corps, Q said, and extradited if she made it across the border. The National Guard would be deployed to quell "massive riots" in response to Clinton's downfall.

None of this happened, of course — yet somehow the incoherent ramblings which forecast it sparked a movement anyway.

Q's influence is already significant in politics proper. A Q follower named Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia on Tuesday. As her district is solidly red, there's a strong chance we'll have QAnon in Congress come January. Greene may not be the only one, either: Axios counted 10 other GOP nominees with ties to Q. Forbes found several more. The Washington Post in July estimated almost 600,000 Americans have already voted for an openly pro-Q politician. Trump hasn't explicitly affirmed the theory, but he praised Greene effusively and has repeatedly retweeted QAnon posts. His press secretary once promised a Q supporter to ask Trump about Q's identity. His second son promoted a campaign rally with a Q graphic and hashtag.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided fertile ground for QAnon's growth, too. Various Q narratives have described the illness as a hoax to expand cabal power, hawked supplements as coronavirus cures, or spread myths, like the claim that having children wear masks puts them at greater risk of being trafficked. QAnon undoubtedly contributed to one in four Americans' belief that the pandemic was possibly or definitely "planned by powerful people."

It's difficult to estimate how many are knowingly involved in QAnon, but a guess in the low millions is reasonable. An internal Facebook investigation reported Monday found more than 3 million users have joined major QAnon groups or followed prominent QAnon pages. There's probably a lot of overlap within that total — a single user might be a member of multiple groups — but there are also no doubt plenty of QAnon users who haven't formally linked themselves to these bigger hubs of Q support. If Q's following is north of 3 million, that means roughly one in every 100 Americans gives Q some degree of credence.

That prospect is troubling enough. Some Q followers have become destructively obsessive, staying loyal to the theory at the price of total estrangement from their bewildered families. The movement's religious function is worrisome, too, particularly given its targeted appeal to some evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. As a fellow Christian, I lament that these adherents are being led astray by a false gospel which subverts the work of Christ — labels of "cult" and "heresy" are fair.

But I'm increasingly alarmed by a new realization: Knowing adherence isn't the only risk with QAnon.

Take my friend on Instagram. I clicked through to the post she shared and realized pretty quickly it was Q-connected content. One of the accounts the original poster credited with informing her perspective had a Q hashtag in its bio: #wwg1wga, an abbreviation for the grammatically obnoxious slogan of QAnon unity, "Where we go one, we go all."

But my friend had no idea what that hashtag meant. I don't think she even noticed it. She shared the post because it had a message against sexual abuse and trafficking of children, a cause she cares about deeply (and cared about before QAnon ever existed).

To my friend and the majority of Americans who likely still know nothing of Q, the movement's telltale phrases — "the storm is coming," "the calm before the storm," "nothing can stop what's coming," "trust the plan," "enjoy the show," and so on — won't suggest anything unusual. If you're not familiar with the movement, it's easy to miss these tip-offs. Q signs at Trump rallies might vaguely register, but a casual viewer is unlikely to connect them to what appears to be straightforward Instagram post about pedophilia and trafficking shared by a lifestyle influencer.

And who isn't concerned about pedophilia and trafficking? This is a big factor in Q's success. It builds on a universal human instinct and moral conviction: It is evil to hurt innocent children. There's no more accessible point of entry to a fringe movement than a statement every person of good conscience already supports.

QAnon has deliberately exploited online activism against child abuse for purposes of self-promotion, an approach at once tactically clever and ethically repulsive. Q followers co-opted the #SaveTheChildren hashtag, which began as a fundraiser for Save the Children, a century-old charity with no connection to Q.

"The idea, in a nutshell, is to create a groundswell of concern by flooding social media with posts about human trafficking, joining parenting Facebook groups, and glomming on to hashtag campaigns," explains a New York Times report on the strategy. "Then followers can shift the conversation to baseless theories about who they believe is doing the trafficking: a cabal of nefarious elites that includes Tom Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, and Pope Francis."

The author of that report, incidentally, had the exact same experience I did: An acquaintance unaware of QAnon shared Q content in her Instagram story. Her post was about child trafficking, too, and Facebook data the Times article cites — that "[i]nteractions on posts with the #SaveTheChildren hashtag ... have grown more than 500 percent since early July" — suggests this phenomenon is widespread.

Many Americans, attempting to oppose abuse of children, are unwittingly evangelizing for Q. They may accidentally convert their friends. They may accidentally convert themselves.

GOP candidates and Trump supporters are pledging allegiance to a nonsensical conspiracy theory. Here's everything you need to know:

What is QAnon?

It's a conspiracy theory claiming that world leaders, Democrats, and "deep state" U.S. intelligence officers are all involved in a global child sex trafficking ring that President Trump and his supporters are working to expose and destroy. Named for Q, a supposed military official who began posting anonymously on fringe message boards in 2017, QAnon promises a "Great Awakening" for patriots, who get a steady diet of "bread crumbs" on the internet — clues revealing aspects of this global plot. Thousands of Americans have enlisted as believers in QAnon, which the FBI calls a domestic-terror threat. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who initially pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russia, took the Q oath on a YouTube video on July 4, ending by reciting the slogan "Where we go one, we go all." Trump's son Eric posted the same slogan on Instagram this summer. Before the pandemic ended Trump's rallies, attendees had begun displaying "Q" on clothing and paraphernalia, and calling themselves Trump's "soldiers on the ground." At least 11 GOP candidates for Congress this year openly support QAnon.

Like who?

Jo Rae Perkins, the Oregon Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate. During her May victory speech, Perkins said, "I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, Anons....Together, we can save our republic." This year, 59 Senate and congressional candidates expressed some form of Q support and amassed nearly 600,000 votes, The Washington Post reports. While most nominees like Perkins are likely to get trounced in November, at least two are expected to win House seats. Lauren Boebert, who defeated incumbent Scott Tipton in the Colorado primary, has said, "I hope [Q] is real." Marjorie Taylor Greene, the front-runner in a GOP runoff in Georgia this month, calls QAnon "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out." She's gotten endorsements from Trump and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.

How did QAnon start?

On Oct. 28, 2017, a new user calling himself Q posted on 4chan, a right-wing site favored by white supremacists. "Q" was a reference to the clearance level for top-secret material such as nuclear weapons designs. Q predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton and used conspiratorial clichés like "Follow the money." His prophecies grew out of PizzaGate, the debunked theory that Clinton was running a child sex dungeon out of a popular Washington, D.C., pizzeria. (In 2016, a North Carolina man armed with two loaded guns and a knife went to the pizza place to free the children, only to discover the building had no basement and there were no kids.) Q has since posted hundreds of times on 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun, using a password-protected identifier to thwart imitators.

What are his beliefs?

Q prophesies an upcoming event called The Storm, when Trump will send thousands of traitorous elites to Guantánamo Bay. One absurd theory claims John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his fatal plane crash in 1999 and could emerge this year as Trump's running mate. Believers have been inspired to plot kidnapping "raids," and one follower, Anthony Comello of New York City, says Q inspired him to murder mafia boss Francesco Cali. Q's apocalyptic writings increasingly echo evangelical Christian beliefs about End Times, with Trump described as a messiah-like figure. "I feel like God led me to Q," said Laurie Shock, 57, of Ohio, who has spent up to six hours a day researching the theory.

How many followers are there?

It's impossible to say for sure, but social media indicates Q is exploding into the mainstream. Twitter recently banned 7,000 accounts that posted QAnon material, and Facebook is reportedly planning a similar crackdown on its 175-plus QAnon groups with a combined 1.4 million members. Q indoctrinator David Hayes has 377,000 Twitter followers, and his YouTube videos explaining the basic tenets have 33 million views. Candidates are eager to tap into this audience, even if they think QAnon is "a bunch of crap," said Sam Williams, a Republican who lost a House runoff election in Texas last month after retweeting Q hashtags and slogans. "I did that to gain followers," Williams said.

Can't Q be debunked?

A mountain of evidence against QAnon has piled up, but it seems to have made no difference: Hillary Clinton, for example, has not been arrested. Believers find affirmation in events like the arrest of financier Jeffrey Epstein on child sex trafficking charges. They're like "flat-earth adherents," said Alice Marwick, a University of North Carolina researcher, "who have a different way to interpret the world, which colors everything they see." For those who view Q as a religion, their beliefs by definition can't be falsified, while their deity continues to send signs to reinforce their faith. "He talks to us in codes," a woman named Diane told Vanity Fair last November after a Trump rally in Sunrise, Florida. "It's all about God! All about spiritual warfare. Trump will tell you that. Over and over."

Is Trump Q?

Some QAnon followers believe Trump himself is Q — the leader posting cryptic prophecies on message boards. Weeks before Q's first post, in 2017, Trump stood for a photo with military leaders at the White House and asked reporters, "You guys know what this represents?" He proceeded to trace an incomplete circle in the air with his index finger — the letter Q, supposedly — and said, "Maybe it's the calm before the storm." Followers believe Trump's randomly capitalized tweets contain secret messages, as when he tweeted, "I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE" in March, and a day later tweeted, "I am a great friend and admirer of the Queen." Delete most letters and both tweets read "I am...Q." One thing is certain: Trump has retweeted dozens of QAnon hashtags and released a campaign video last year that showed two supporters holding signs marked with Qs. In March, Trump retweeted a meme of him playing the violin, captioned with the QAnon slogan "Nothing can stop what is coming." Trump added, "Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!"

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.

QAnon adherents, insofar as I've seen photos of them at President Trump's campaign rallies or attached to reports on the conspiracy theory they profess, are remarkable mainly for how normal they appear. They look like Midwestern moms or the guy in your neighborhood who lets everyone borrow his pickup.

Still, QAnon isn't mainstream, at least not yet. A CNN poll published last month found 76 percent of Americans have never heard of it. But QAnon's affection for Trump and visibility at his events are raising the theory's profile — and the QAnon movement is evolving in a curious way: It's spawning a new religion, maybe even the first of new breed of religious organization in America.

The QAnon movement started on 4chan, an anonymous message board influential in online culture but generally considered outside the bounds of the respectable internet, not least because it has repeatedly made the news in connection to child pornography. That makes the site an odd first home for QAnon, whose narrative centers on a cabal of powerful figures in government, business, academia, and media who make time for child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination. Q is the movement's anonymous digital prophet whose forum posts ("Q drops," now migrated from 4chan to a similar site called 8kun) reveal both the nature of the cabal and Trump's heroic plan to defeat it. QAnon's most fervent followers reach a point of obsession, clinging to it even at cost of total estrangement from their bewildered families.

An in-depth report on QAnon in The Atlantic's June issue closes with the suggestion that QAnon could become the latest in a series of "thriving religious movements indigenous to America." But research from a Concordia University doctoral student, Marc-André Argentino, shows the church of QAnon already exists and seems poised to spread. Argentino attended an online QAnon church where, he reports, two-hour Sunday services with several hundred attendees consist of prayer, communion, and interpretation of the Bible in light of Q drops and vice versa. The leaders' goal, Argentino says, "is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement."

It's not inconceivable that they'll succeed, especially after pandemic restrictions ease and in-person gatherings resume. (The pandemic, of course, fits neatly into the QAnon narrative as a plot to oust Trump before the mass arrests and executions of cabal members can begin.) Many QAnon members express a desire for community, describing how they try to convert loved ones to their cause and browse QAnon hashtags to make like-minded friends. QAnon church would fill that need, as religious gatherings long have done.

That's what makes me think the church of QAnon may be a portent of things to come: Traditional religiosity is declining in America, but humanity will not cease to be religious. It will merely diversify its sources of increasingly customized religiosity. From lapsed evangelicals, as many QAnon adherents seem to be, to religiously unaffiliated "nones," people crave the community, meaning, and purpose church provides, even if they abandon or reject its teachings.

Satisfying that craving with politics and conspiracy theories isn't new, but the QAnon church's self-description as a church stands out. It's one thing for outside observers to characterize a political movement as religious in its enthusiasm or expectations of loyalty; it's another for participants to explicitly brand their own community as religious and start holding services.

Whether other groups, especially of dramatically different political persuasions, will make the same leap is difficult to say. Could we see something comparable on the left?

On the one hand, there is some unique resonance with this style of religiosity and the political right. QAnon builds on apocalyptic thinking common in parts of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in America. Q drops frequently include Bible passages, and the style of study of scripture and Q texts employed — the careful search for hidden prophetic meaning and correspondence to history and current events — is very much a creature of the religious right, an heir aberrant of Left Behind and The Late, Great Planet Earth.

On the other hand, one of the strangest things about QAnon is it's a conspiracy theory born of victory, not defeat. Trump is president, after all. But typically, "conspiracy theories are for losers," University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski told The Daily Beast. "Normally you don't expect the winning party to use them." And perhaps this is why QAnon is taking a religious form: Having Trump in power allows for hope where most conspiracy theories offer only an account of evil. QAnon adherents believe their work decoding Q drops contributes to an achievable final triumph. Forming communities, then, has a purpose beyond commiseration.

If the victory-born nature of QAnon is thus significant, we might look for similar "churches" to pop up elsewhere as the national balance of power shifts. A Democratic president in the Trumpian mold — a populist demagogue prone to attributing every failure to sabotage — could inspire something similar. I wouldn't expect the same Christian syncretism, but neopaganism (remember the story of the Brooklyn witches hexing Brett Kavanaugh?) or broadly new-age spiritualism might do the trick, producing a service with, say, meditation and a spell instead of prayer and communion.

Q, for one, would no doubt take this development in stride, adding it to the QAnon mythology for his followers — er, parishioners? — to parse next Sunday.

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A version of this article originally appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.

A City Council member in Cali­fornia took the dais and quoted from QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory about "deep state" traitors plotting against the president, concluding her remarks, "God bless Q."

A man spouting QAnon beliefs about child sex trafficking swung a crowbar inside a historic Catholic chapel in Arizona, damaging the altar and then fleeing before being arrested.

And outside a Trump campaign rally in Florida, people in "Q" T-shirts stopped by a tent to hear outlandish tales of Democrats' secretly torturing and killing children to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.

What began online more than two years ago as an intricate, if baseless, conspiracy theory that quickly attracted thousands of followers has since found footholds in the offline world. QAnon has surfaced in political campaigns, criminal cases, merchandising, and at least one college class. Last month, hundreds of QAnon enthusiasts gathered in a Tampa park to listen to speakers and pick up literature, and in England, a supporter of President Donald Trump and Brexit leader Nigel Farage raised a "Q" flag over a Cornish castle.

Most recently, the botched Iowa Demo­cratic caucuses and the coronavirus outbreak have provided fodder for conspiracy mongering: QAnon fans shared groundless theories online linking liberal billionaire George Soros to technological problems that hobbled the caucuses, and passed around bogus and potentially dangerous "treatments" for the virus.

About a dozen candidates for public office in the United States have promoted or dabbled in QAnon, and its adherents have been arrested in at least seven episodes, including a murder in New York and an armed standoff with police near the Hoover Dam. The FBI cited QAnon in an intelligence bulletin last May about the potential for violence motivated by "fringe political conspiracy theories."

Matthew Lusk, who is running unopposed in the Republican primary for a Florida congressional seat and who openly em­braces QAnon, said in an email that its anonymous creator is a patriot who "brings what the fake news will not touch without slanting." As for the theory's more extreme elements, Lusk said he was uncertain whether there really was a pedophile ring associated with the deep state.

"That being said," he added, "I do believe there is a group in Brussels, Belgium, that do eat aborted babies."

The seepage of conspiracy theorizing from the digital fever swamps into life offline is one of the more unsettling developments of the Trump era, in which the president has relentlessly pushed groundless conspiracy theories to reshape political narratives to his liking. In promoting fringe ideas about deep state schemes, Trump has at times elevated and encouraged QAnon followers — recirculating their posts on Twitter, posing with one for a photograph in the Oval Office, inviting some to a White House "social media summit." Recently, during a daylong Twitter binge, Trump retweeted more than 20 posts from accounts that had trafficked in QAnon material.

QAnon began in October 2017, when a pseudonymous user of the online message board 4chan started writing cryptic posts under the name Q Clearance Patriot. The person claimed to be a high-ranking official privy to top-secret information from Trump's inner circle. Over two years and more than 3,500 posts, Q — whose identity has never been determined — has unspooled a sprawling conspiracy narrative that claims, among other things, that Trump was recruited by the military to run for office in order to break up a global cabal of pedophiles, and that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation would end with prominent Democrats being imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay.

The anonymous posts subsequently moved to 8chan, where they remained until August, when that site was taken offline after the El Paso, Texas, mass shooting. They now live on 8kun, a new website built by 8chan's owner.

Some QAnon fans are hardened conspiracy buffs who previously believed other fringe theories, such as the bogus claim that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were an "inside job." But many QAnon adherents are everyday Americans who have found in Q's messages a source of partisan energy, affirmation of their suspicions about powerful institutions, or a feeling of having special knowledge. Some are older adults who discovered the theory through partisan Facebook groups or Twitter threads and were drawn in by the movement's promises of inside information from the White House (some QAnon devotees even believe that Trump posts himself, under the code name "Q+"). Others are seduced by the movement's wild, often violent fantasies, including claims that Hollywood celebrities are part of a satanic child-trafficking ring.

In online chat rooms, Facebook groups, and Twitter threads, QAnon followers discuss the hidden messages and symbols they believe to be exposed in Q's posts, or "drops" — for example, because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, a reference by Trump to the number 17 is seen as a possible signal of his support for them.

They watch Patriots' Soapbox, a YouTube call-in show devoted to coverage of QAnon, and other niche media projects that have popped up to fill the demand for Q-related content. Reddit barred a cluster of QAnon groups from its platform in 2018, after a spate of violent threats from members, and Apple pulled a popular QAnon app from its app store. But other social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, still host large amounts of QAnon content. In general, these platforms do not prohibit conspiracy theories unless their adherents break other rules, such as policies against hate speech or targeted harassment.

The frequent introduction of new symbols and arcane plot points to dissect and decipher has given QAnon the feel of a theological study group, or a massive multiplayer online game. In interviews, several adherents described QAnon as a "lifestyle" or a "religion," and said it had become their primary source of political news and analysis.

"It's more of a cult than other conspiracy theories," said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor at the University of Miami who studies fringe beliefs. "QAnon is not just an idea; it's an ongoing thing that people can sort of get into and follow along with that keeps them entertained."

With its core belief that the president is heroically battling entrenched evildoers, QAnon may be the ultimate manifestation of Trump-inspired conspiracy mongering. From the start, it was inexorably bound up with "Make America Great Again" communities online: The New York Times found last year that some 23,000 of Trump's Twitter followers had QAnon references in their profiles.

But QAnon has steadily migrated offline to Trump campaign rallies, where dozens of supporters can be found with Q paraphernalia, carrying signs and commiserating about the theory. In recent months, QAnon adherents have complained that security officials keep people from bringing their gear into the rallies; the campaign said it permitted only approved signs and licensed merchandise at its events.

Harry Formanek, a 65-year-old retiree who attended Trump's Florida rally in November wearing a QAnon T-shirt, said he learned about the theory after hearing allegations that top Democrats were running a child-sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor — the hoax known as "Pizzagate," which was something of a precursor to QAnon. Now, he said, he spends roughly an hour a day on QAnon-related websites and believes, among other things, that Trump signals his support with Q-shaped hand gestures during public appearances. "My friends think I'm crazy," Formanek said. "I mean, the proofs are just undeniable."

With its growth in popularity, QAnon's tangible presence is not limited to clothes, bumper stickers, and campaign signs, all of which can be found for sale on Amazon and at other retailers. The theory also showed up at Mesa Community College in Arizona, where an adjunct professor of English, Douglas Belmore, began working it into classroom lectures. He was fired last summer after students complained.

Belmore announced his dismissal on Twitter, saying, "Why aren't more professors, teachers, cops, pastors, and woke Americans everywhere NOT talking about this?" Later, he tweeted, "I pray that you see The Truth about POTUS and Q and their War against the trafficking of children," and posted a video clip of Trump at a rally pointing to a baby wearing a Q onesie.

On the campaign trail during the past two years, at least six Republican congressional candidates, as well as several state and local politicians, have signaled some level of interest in QAnon. Danielle Stella, a Republican congressional candidate in Minnesota whose campaign's Twitter account has "favorited" QAnon material and used a QAnon-related hashtag, was suspended from the platform in November after suggesting that the Democratic incumbent, Ilhan Omar, be hanged for treason.

In an email responding to questions about her position on QAnon, Stella said through a campaign aide: "The decision to side with Twitter regarding my suspension for advocating for the enforcement of federal code proves that The New York Times and Twitter will always side with and fight to protect terrorists, traitors, pedophiles, and rapists."

In San Juan Capistrano, California, Pam Patter­son, a City Council member, invoked QAnon in her farewell speech to the body in Decem­ber 2018, reciting a Q posting as if it were Scrip­ture. "To quote Q No. 2436," she said, "for far too long, we have been silent and allowed our bands of strength that we once formed to defend freedom and liberty to deteriorate. We became divided. We became weak. We elected traitors to govern us."

And in Montana, an elected justice of the peace, Michael Swingley, was reprimanded in November by a state judicial board for using his official email account to send an angry message to a journalist who had written an article skeptical of QAnon. Swingley wrote that, regardless of "whether Q is real," patriots were uniting because of it and "your world of fake news and liberal agendas that give away our country to foreigners and protect the Clintons and Obamas is coming to an end."

Beyond the mainstreaming of QAnon in certain Republican circles, a bigger concern for researchers who track conspiracy theories is the potential for violence by unstable individuals who fall under its sway, particularly in the fraught political climate of the 2020 election. In its intelligence bulletin identifying QAnon as a potential domestic terror threat, the FBI warned that partisan conspiracy mongering in the United States was being exacerbated by "the uncovering of real conspiracies or cover-ups" by political leaders. Social media was serving as an incubator for groundless theories and inspiring followers to take action, it said.

"Although conspiracy-driven crime and violence is not a new phenomenon," the bulletin said, "today's information environment has changed the way conspiracy theories develop, spread, and evolve."

Uscinski said that because some people with a conspiracy mindset are willing to entertain political violence, it was perhaps inevitable that as QAnon attracted a bigger following, it would eventually come to include a dangerous, if tiny, subset of adherents. "Once you reach a threshold of people," he said, "that particular apple is going to show up in the barrel."

The arrest of the apparent billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein at a New Jersey airport on Saturday on federal charges for crimes he was accused of during the Bush administration should not be surprising to anyone who has followed the news carefully. He may have escaped in 2008 with a ludicrous one-year stint in a county jail that he was allowed to leave six days a week, but his name has never quite been out of the headlines. Between 2008 and 2015 Epstein reportedly settled more than a dozen lawsuits from Jane Does alleging sexual assault; the youngest of his alleged victims was 14 years old.

The only question is why did it take this long? Why was the ludicrous deal that gave Epstein and his fellow conspirators immunity in exchange for a slap-on-the-wrist jail sentence ever allowed to go through in the first place?

The most obvious answer is, of course, that Epstein knows people. Lots of people. A list of his reported friends, business associates, and legal counselors reads like a #MeToo and Manhattan sleazebag All-Star team, with a few stringers pulled in from the media and both political parties: Woody Allen, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Mort Zuckerman, Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, Katie Couric, George Stephanopoulos, the current president of the United States. The obscene deal that kept Epstein out of what could easily have been a life sentence in prison was negotiated by Alexander Acosta, the current Secretary of Labor, who was then a federal prosecutor in Florida. In 2002, Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, removed references to Epstein's sexual activity from a profile, including testimony from alleged victims, according to the article's author. "He's sensitive about the young women," Carter is said to have explained. Won't somebody please not think of the children?

It will be at least another week before 2,000 or so pages of documents related to Epstein's exploits will be released following the order of an appeals court last week. When we finally see them we will likely be able to answer questions about the identities of the "numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well‐known Prime Minister, and other world leaders" who have also been accused of sexual abuse by Epstein's alleged victims. Is one of them a Razorbacks football fan? Who was the "famous prime minister"? Was Trump speaking from personal experience when he said in 2002 that Epstein "likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side"?

We should keep all of this in mind the next time we feel inclined to sneer at so-called "low-information voters," especially the kookier sort. You know the people I mean. Wackos. Gun nuts. 8channers. Conspiracy theorists in Middle America who watch InfoWars (one of the few journalistic outlets to discuss the issue of pedophilia regularly) and post about QAnon and "spirit cooking" and the lizard people. The news that a globalized cabal of billionaires and politicians and journalists and Hollywood bigwigs might be flying around the world raping teenaged girls will not surprise them in the least because it is what they have long suspected. For the rest of us it is like finding out that the Jersey Devil is real or turning on cable news and finding Anderson Cooper and his panel engaged in a matter-of-fact discussion of Elvis’s residence among the Zixls on the 19th moon of Dazotera.

Among other things, the Epstein case forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions about the real meaning of "fake" news. There is, or should be, more to being informed than fact-checking formalism. If you have spent the last few years earnestly consuming mainstream left-of-center media in this country you will be under the impression that the United States has fallen under the control of a spray-tanned Mussolini clone who is never more than five minutes away from making birth control illegal. If you watch Fox News and read conservative publications, you no doubt bemoan the fact that Ronald Reagan's heir is being hamstrung by a bunch of avocado toast-eating feminist witches. Meanwhile, Alex Jones's audience will tell you that America, like the rest of the world, is ruled by a depraved internationalist elite whose ultimate allegiance is not to countries or political parties or ideologies but to one another. These people believe in nothing. They will safeguard their wealth and privilege at any cost. They will never break rank. And they will commit unspeakable crimes with impunity, while anyone who dares to speculate openly is sued or hounded out of public life as a kook.

Which of these worldviews is closest to the truth?

If anyone needs to hear this, John F. Kennedy Jr. is dead.

Believers in the far-right circle of QAnon have long held the conspiracy that the son of the former president didn't die in a 1999 plane crash. And now, they've put a fresh spin on it, suggesting on their message boards at QMap that President Trump is set to announce the definitely deceased JFK Jr. as his 2020 running mate, NBC News Ben Collins reports.

A solid bunch of Trump supporters have long believed in "Q," someone with a high level of government clearance who allegedly shares coded messages hinting at Trump's purported efforts to uproot Democrats, Hollywood elites, and the so-called deep state as a whole. They've been seen sporting Q shirts at Trump events, and were out in full force at Trump's campaign launch last week. But Q hasn't been heard from in a month, prompting believers to post extended prayers for their safe return.

Some QAnon believers think there's a reason for Q's absence: They're saving a big announcement for the Fourth of July. As Collins put it in a tweet, "The more delusional Q fans" think Kennedy Jr. himself will reveal July 4 that he's alive and that he's replacing Vice President Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket.

Trump has said he's committed to keeping Pence on the 2020 ticket, but Q would probably find some way to spin the words that came out of the president's mouth.