
QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory and political movement, with its followers and believers being popularly called QAnoners. The movement has been described as alt-right, Islamophobia, white nationalist, and fringe, propagating the belief that a cabal of Satanist and cannibalistic pedophiles were pulling the strings of the American government through the "deep state", and that Donald Trump was speaking to his followers in a coded language which hinted at a day of reckoning which was codenamed the "Storm". On that day, the QAnoners believed that Trump and "patriotic" Americans who had taken the "digital soldiers oath" would rise up against the deep state and overthrow it. Other QAnon conspiracy theories included the idea that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was a CIA puppet, that Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had hired MS-13 to murder Seth Rich, that German chancellor Angela Merkel was Adolf Hitler's granddaughter, claimed that each mass-shooting was arranged by the liberal pedophiliac cabal, that George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other "liberal elites" were involved in an international child sex-trafficking ring, that the Rothschild family led a Satanic cult, and made several false predictions about the future.
On 28 October 2017, a 4chan poster calling himself "Q Clearance Patriot" claimed that President Donald Trump's cryptic description of a meeting of United States military leaders (which Trump called "the calm before the storm") was a prophecy concerning the upcoming "Storm" during which alleged suspects would be arrested, imprisoned, and executed for being child-eating pedophiles. The user claimed to have "Q" security clearance, and the "QAnon" conspiracy theory became popular due to its reuse of old conspiracy theories such as "Pizzagate" (the belief that pedophiles ran a human-trafficking ring from a Washington DC pizzeria) and the "Clinton kill list" (the belief that Bill and Hillary Clinton had ordered the assassinations of several of their former associates, including Jeffrey Epstein), as well as its motto "Where We Go One, We Go All" (WWG1WGA). By 2020, the group had a large following, and it drew media attention on 15 October 2020 after Trump refused to condemn the movement in a live presidential town hall with NBC journalist Savannah Guthrie, saying that he knew "nothing" of QAnon despite the movement hailing him as the savior of America; he also added that he was supportive of the movement's hatred of "pedophiles" and "cannibals". The movement reached its peak in late 2020, when QAnoners Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene were elected to the US House of Representatives as Republicans. However, it declined following Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential election, and several QAnon social media accounts were locked due to their association with the 2021 United States coup d'etat attempt.