Suddenly 'Q' of the QAnon conspiracy theory has returned after a years-long hiatus
But, something isn't quite right.
As if enough currently isn't going on in the world, a major name in far right-wing communities has returned and conspiracy theorists are ecstatic.
Q, the anonymous person (or persons) who created the QAnon conspiracy theory in 2017, suddenly started posting on 8kun once again on Friday night, the same day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It had been 563 days since Q had last posted to his followers on the site.
"Shall we play a game once more?" posted the Q account to 8kun for the first time in over a year and a half. The post was signed "Q."
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The individual now using the Q account continued with two more posts later that night.
When asked by another 8kun user about their absence, Q replied, "It had to be done this way."
"Are you ready to serve your country again?" Q wrote in the third post. "Remember your oath."
QAnon is a far right-wing conspiracy theory that claims, among many other things, that former President Donald Trump is waging a war against a cabal of global Satanic baby-eating child-trafficking pedophiles made up of Hollywood elites and Trump's political opponents.
Q posts, known as "Q Drops" to QAnon believers, first began shortly after then-President Trump mentioned the "calm before the storm" in front of the press during a meeting with senior members of the military in 2017. QAnon followers believe Trump was referencing an event they've dubbed "The Storm," in which Trump's political enemies would be arrested. For example, in the earliest days of QAnon, in October 2017, Q posted about how former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was soon to be arrested. (Nearly 5 years later now, that claim has yet to come to fruition.)
When a mob of pro-Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Trump, a number of individuals in the crowd were QAnon believers. Perhaps the most well-known of the rioters went by the name "QAnon Shaman."
Since then, QAnon believers have spent the past 18 months denying QAnon is a real thing in order to evade social media bans and speculating that President Joe Biden is imminently going to be removed from office. With so much disappointment from events that didn't come to pass, many QAnon believers were thrilled to see the return of Q on 8kun.
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However, researchers who have been debunking these conspiracy theories since their inception have made an interesting observation.
Something is off with the Q account on 8kun.
8kun, formerly known as 8chan, is an anonymous imageboard much like 4chan but filled with even more extremism and far-right rhetoric. Users on the site post completely anonymously. There is no need to sign up for an account.
However, users can choose to associate themselves with a tripcode, a random string of characters assigned to a user's posts. This basically helps others identify that the same user is behind a multitude of posts on the website.
The user behind the new Q posts has the same tripcode as the user behind the old Q posts on 8kun. (Note that Q first started posting on 4chan in 2017 before moving to the site then known as 8chan months later. Researchers have determined that it's very likely the Q posting on 8kun since 2018 and the original 4chan Q are separate individuals.)
So, this means that these new Q posts are from the "real" Q, right? Sure, but as Frederick Brennan, the former owner of 8chan who sold the site to its current owner Jim Watkins, claims, the tripcode for Q shouldn't be the same.
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Jim's son and "former" administrator of 8kun, Ron Watkins, previously claimed that the site's tripcodes are regenerated every few months and become completely different. This means that the Q account should not have the same tripcode it had when it last posted on 8kun around 18 months ago. The only way this could happen is if an administrator or someone else with access to 8kun's backend altered the tripcode manually, according to Brennan and other QAnon researchers. Even some QAnon believers are getting skeptical about the recent posts.
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QAnon researchers have long believed that Jim and Ron Watkins either posted as Q on their website, 8kun, or knew who was posting as Q. In the HBO documentary, Q: Into the Storm, filmmaker Cullen Hoback spoke to Ron Watkins a number of times. In an interview in the final episode of the series, Ron slips up and all but admits to Hoback that he is Q, although he has later denied being behind the account.
8kun owner Jim Watkins, for his part, claims to have been giving a speech when the new Q posts were published. However, Watkins also confirmed that the posts "look legit."
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So, why has Q returned?
As of now, it's unclear. But the timing is certainly interesting if you believe Ron Watkins is Q. Ron is currently running for Congress in Arizona. So far, the campaign hasn't been going very well.
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Perhaps Q is back to conveniently endorse Watkins in order to help his fledgling campaign, some QAnon researchers have speculated. Or maybe Q has bigger plans. After all, Hillary Clinton has yet to be arrested and Joe Biden is still the President of the United States.
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