Nicky Woolf writes about his year-long investigation into the conspiracy theory that’s become a cult – and how he identified the person he believes is behind it
On 13 January 2021, I got a message on Twitter from a source. “I will tell you something for my own safety,” he wrote. “On Friday at 2 I will meet with FBI in my mom’s house.”
The source’s name is Fred Brennan, and this was big news. He’s the creator of a website called 8chan. It’s what’s known as a “chan site”, a type of site notable for the roiling, nihilistic and often truly horrible content that proliferates on them. On 4chan, the largest English-language chan site – from which 8chan was spun off – there are message boards specific to certain interests, where people can anonymously post and comment on other people’s posts. The more comments a post gets, the higher up the board it gets pushed, so there’s more incentive to say something outrageous. Almost anything goes, but there are moderators – “janitors” – who can remove illegal content.
8chan has almost no moderation, and users can create their own message boards. It’s where the perpetrators of the 2019 Christchurch and El Paso shootings posted their manifestos.
It has another claim to fame, though. 8chan is the home of QAnon.
At its core, the QAnon conspiracy theory holds that a shadowy cabal of satanist, baby-eating paedophiles – led by Hillary Clinton – are secretly controlling the world; and that Donald Trump is leading a movement to overturn it. What makes it so dangerous is how organic it is. QAnon absorbed other conspiracy theories – the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, anti-vaccine movements, and more – digesting and integrating them into itself as it grew.
In fact, it’s not really accurate any more to call QAnon a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy ecosystem; an all-encompassing conspiracy worldview. In scores of interviews I have done with people who’ve lost family members to QAnon radicalisation, almost all of them used the word “cult” – though sometimes it seemed almost like a nascent full-scale religion.
QAnon believes in a coming day of judgement called, interchangeably, “the Storm” or “the Great Awakening”. And at the core of it there is this enigma. Treated by believers with mythical reverence, there is an anonymous figure at the heart of QAnon, purportedly a senior US government insider. Taking the name from the US Department of Energy’s equivalent of top-secret security clearance, the poster called themselves “Q”.
