The Cult Dossier · No. 105 · Political / Terror
QAnon
Q; the Great Awakening
October 2017 – present · United States; spread internationally to Germany, Japan, Brazil, UK
XI. THERAPY, POLITICS AND THE SMALL GROUPS
Quasi-religious political conspiracy movement
Who led it
NO IDENTIFIED LEADER. Anonymous posts signed Q appeared on 4chan, then 8chan, then 8kun, from October 2017 to December 2020. Two forensic linguistics teams, reported in February 2022, concluded that the South African software developer PAUL FURBER probably wrote the first posts and that RON WATKINS, the 8chan administrator, took over around early 2018. Both deny it; nothing is proven.
What it worshipped and taught
No deity, though the movement uses explicitly religious language — the Great Awakening, the Storm, Where We Go One We Go All. Core belief: a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic child traffickers controls the world's governments, media and finance, and Donald Trump was secretly working to expose and destroy it. Doctrine included Adrenochrome harvesting from children, mass sealed indictments, and repeated prophesied dates for the Storm — none of which occurred.
Who was in it
Q; Jim and Ron Watkins; the promoters Tracy Diaz, Coleman Rogers, Jordan Sather; ASHLI BABBITT, killed during the 6 January 2021 Capitol attack; JAKE ANGELI (the QAnon Shaman); MATTHEW COLEMAN, who told the FBI he killed his two-year-old son and ten-month-old daughter in Mexico in August 2021 because QAnon and Illuminati theories had shown him they carried serpent DNA; the researchers Travis View, Mike Rothschild and Marc-André Argentino.
How it ended, or where it stands
Diffuse and ongoing.
The dead
Multiple murders by adherents; deaths connected to 6 January; numerous family estrangements documented
Of note
The most important structural development in the field this century: a movement with all the features of a high-control belief system — totalist explanation, us/them framing, isolation from dissenting family, escalating commitment, prophecy failure followed by reinterpretation — and NO LEADER, NO ORGANISATION, NO BUILDING AND NO MEMBERSHIP LIST. Every intervention model built since 1978 assumes there is something to leave. This one has nothing to leave.
Its timeline
- 28 October 2017 First Q post on 4chan.
- 2018 Migration to 8chan; QAnon signs appear at Trump rallies.
- 2019 FBI intelligence bulletin identifies conspiracy theory-driven extremism, citing QAnon, as a domestic terrorism threat.
- 2020 Massive growth during the pandemic, fusing with anti-vaccine and wellness communities (conspirituality). Facebook removes over 790 groups in August; Twitter suspends 7,000 accounts in July.
- 8 December 2020 Q stops posting.
- 6 JANUARY 2021 The Capitol attack. QAnon iconography is pervasive among participants; multiple convicted defendants cite Q beliefs. 5 deaths connected to the day; 4 police officers who responded later died by suicide.
- 20 January 2021 The prophesied inauguration-day mass arrests do not occur; the movement fragments but does not collapse.
- 24 JUNE 2022 AFTER MORE THAN 18 MONTHS, Q POSTS AGAIN on 8kun — shortly after the site changed the cryptographic salt behind tripcodes, which researchers say means the posts could have come from anyone with administrative access.
- 2021–2026 SCHOLARSHIP RE-FRAMES IT. Researchers increasingly treat QAnon not as an organisation at all but as a PERSISTENT MYTHIC FRAMEWORK — a set of narratives that survives by FRAME BRIDGING, brokering ties into wellness and lifestyle communities, anti-vaccine networks, militia and Patriot movements and the radical religious right. It has become a movement with a life of its own, INDEPENDENT OF ANY PARTICULAR POLITICAL FIGURE.
- 2024 THE PUBLIC RELIGION RESEARCH INSTITUTE CLASSES 19 PER CENT OF AMERICANS AS QANON BELIEVERS, up from 14 per cent in 2021, using statements such as that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles running a child sex trafficking operation. Counting adherents remains unreliable: most never self-identify, and hold partial or loosely connected beliefs rather than a coherent doctrine.
- 2025 THE MOVEMENT FRACTURES AGAIN, this time from within, over the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files — splitting between those abandoning the conspiracy outright, those doubling down, and those redirecting blame. The pattern is the same one it has survived before: disconfirmation followed by reinterpretation and realignment rather than collapse.
- 2021–2026 Continues in diffuse form. MATTHEW COLEMAN has still not been tried: in 2025 he was found incompetent to stand trial, a judge ordered forced medication, and his lawyers appealed to the Ninth Circuit.