Q Drops Begin

2017

Date: 28 October 2017 first post · Place: 4chan /pol/ · later 8chan · later 8kun · Figures: 'Q,' anonymous poster · Tracy Diaz, early YouTube popularizer · Coleman Rogers and Christina Urso, /CBTS_Stream/ moderators · Ron and Jim Watkins, 8chan operators · Tags: Conspiracy, Larp, MovementBuilding 01. The First Drop On 28 October 2017 an anonymous user posts to 4chan /pol/ claiming to be a high-clearance government official with Q-level security access. The poster, soon called Q, predicts the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. Nothing happens. Q keeps posting anyway. Three moderators of a /pol/ research thread named 'Calm Before The Storm' rip Q's posts off the board nightly and reformat them as YouTube videos with portentous voiceovers. The audience compounds. Within months Q has tens of thousands of decoders parsing every post for hidden meaning. 02. Trust the Plan The architecture of QAnon is meme-native. Every Q drop generates derivative images, infographics, decoded screenshots, prophetic threads. The slogans 'where we go one we go all,' 'trust the plan,' and 'the storm is coming' become Twitter signatures, license plates, T-shirts. By 2020 QAnon is a global movement with believers elected to Congress, with adherents at Trump rallies in QAnon shirts, with the FBI classifying it a domestic terrorism threat. It is the first conspiracy whose entire structure, including its prophet, is a 4chan greentext thread that never stopped. Sources • Mike Rothschild, 'The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything' (Melville House, 2021) • Cullen Hoback (director), 'Q: Into the Storm' (HBO, 2021) • Reed Berkowitz, 'A Game Designer's Analysis of QAnon,' Medium, 30 September 2020