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David Reinert holds a large "Q" sign while waiting lớn see President Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 2, 2018. "Q" represents QAnon, a conspiracy theory group that has been seen at recent rallies.Richồng Loomis / Getty Images
In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan trang web, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together & plucked out of obscurity an anonymous và cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website"s message board.
Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming lớn be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, & it would eventually make its way from those message boards khổng lồ national truyền thông stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.
Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate aao ước conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q’s mysterious posts.
While the identity of the original author or authors behind “Q” is still unknown, the history of the conspiracy theory’s spread is well-documented — through YouTube videos, social truyền thông media posts, Reddit archives, & public records reviewed by NBC News.
NBC News has found that the theory can be traced bachồng to lớn three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon &, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to lớn help fund Qanon “research.”
Qanon is a convoluted conspiracy theory with no apparent foundation in reality. The heart of it asserts that for the last year the anonymous “Q” has taken lớn the fringe internet message boards of 4chan và 8chan khổng lồ leak intelligence about Trump’s top-secret war with a cabal of criminals run by politicians lượt thích Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite. There is no evidence for these claims.
In addition khổng lồ peeking into the mainstream, the theory has been increasingly linked lớn real-world violence. In recent months, Qanon followers have allegedly been involved in a foiled presidential assassination plot, a devastating California wildfire, & an armed standoff with local law enforcement officers in Arizona.
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Part of the Qanon appeal lies in its game-lượt thích chất lượng. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on the message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts alongside Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort khổng lồ validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.
There are now dozens of commentators who dissect “Q” posts — on message boards, in YouTube videos & on their personal pages — but the theory was first championed by a handful of people who worked together khổng lồ stir discussion of the “Q” posts, eventually pushing the theory on lớn bigger platforms & gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key lớn Qanon’s spread and the originators’ financial gain.
The anons
Before Q, there was a wide variety of “anon” 4chan posters all claiming lớn have special government access.
In 2016, there was FBIAnon, a self-described “high-level analyst and strategist” offering intel about the năm nhâm thìn investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Then came HLIAnon, an acronym for High Level Insider, who posted about various dubious conspiracies in riddles, including one that claimed Princess Diamãng cầu had been killed because she found out about 9/11 “beforehand” và had “tried lớn stop it.” Then “CIAAnon” và “CIA Intern” took to the boards in early 2017, and last August one called WH Insider Anon offered a supposed previews that something that was “going to lớn go down” regarding the DNC & leaks.
Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the “anon” genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to lớn Tracy Diaz, according lớn Diaz’s blogs & YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that tài khoản khổng lồ NBC News.
“A bunch of us decided that the message needed lớn go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” Furber said in an email.
Diaz, a small-time YouTube star who once hosted a talk show on the fringe right-wing network Liberty Movement Radio, had found moderate popularity with a couple of thous& views for her YouTube videos analyzing WikiLeaks releases and discussing the "pizzagate" conspiracy, a baseless theory that alleged a child sex ring was being run out of a Washington pizza shop.
As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according lớn Diaz, was lớn build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well.
On Nov. 3, 2017, just six days after the first 4chan post from “Q,” Diaz posted a đoạn Clip entitled “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon - Is it #happening???” in which she introduced the conspiracy theory khổng lồ her audience.
“I do not typically do videos like this,” she said, but citing Q’s “very specific & kind of eerie” posts, Diaz explained that she would be covering the 4chan posts, “just in case this stuff turns out khổng lồ be legit because honestly it kind of seems legit.”
That video, which has been viewed nearly 250,000 times, made Diaz one of the earliest people lớn seize on “Q” posts & decipher them for a conspiracy-hungry audience. Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a gọi for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon & PayPal accounts
Diaz’s YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have sầu been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter. Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube “research” as her sole source of income.
Diaz declined khổng lồ bình luận on this story.
“Because I cover Q, I got an audience,” Diaz acknowledged in a Clip that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.
Building a movement
To reach a more mainstream audience (older people và “normies,” who on their own would have sầu trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in a blog post she recommended they move sầu to lớn the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters và moderators show they created a new Reddit community called CBTS_Stream, short for Calm Before The Storm, where subscribers soon gathered lớn talk all things Q.
Their move sầu to lớn Reddit was key lớn Qanon’s eventual spread. There, they were able to tap inlớn a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to lớn Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups.
That audience then started to lớn head to 8chan khổng lồ check out the original source và interact directly with the posts. (Q posts moved from 4chan lớn its more toxic offshoot 8chan in November after a post claiming the original board had been “infiltrated.” 8chan became notorious for having no rules, and even hosting child pornography.)
8chan’s owner’s official Twitter tài khoản marveled at the influx of older, less internet-savvy visitors to his site, drawn by Qanon. “We joked about it for years, but #Qanon is making it a reality: Boomers! On your imageboard.”
Meanwhile, Diaz kept making videos, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Over the next several months, Diaz và the two moderators picked up tens of thousands of followers on Reddit & YouTube và added even more moderators lớn their 8chan và Reddit boards.
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They also began lớn break inkhổng lồ what might be considered the mainstream of the conspiracy world. Conspiracy theorist Dr. Jerome Corđắm đuối, an Infowars editor & a best-selling author of books about the “deep state,” had taken an interest in Q và was decoding the messages on the Reddit board. In December, Pamphlet Anon và BaruchtheScribe even made an appearance on InfoWars.
Corham mê has since disavowed the Qanon conspiracy và called the current Q poster “a fraud,” citing a supposed takeover of the channel by someone posing as Q in April. But last week, facing backlash from his base, Corham tweeted that he supports the Qanon movement và its supporters’ “excellent research.”
Soon, as Diaz explained on her blog, their expanding crew was spending all their waking hours in chat rooms on the gaming-focused forum Discord analyzing và decoding Q messages and planning for a larger dissemination of Q’s message.
In March, their Reddit board, which boasted some trăng tròn,000 subscribers, was shut down by Reddit for “encouraging or inciting violence và posting personal & confidential information,” và the moderators — Diaz and the rest — were banned from the site. Furber had already been booted from the site for allegedly threatening lớn reveal the personal details of another user, and was pushed out of the private Q discussion groups he had helped form.
“I was very definitely banished,” Furber said, noting that he believes Q’s board has been taken over by imposters.
By then, Pamphlet Anon, whose real name is Coleman Rogers, had developed grander plans. (NBC was able to lớn determine Rogers’ identity through property records that link the address where his business is registered khổng lồ his parent’s home page & lớn photos from his personal social truyền thông media trương mục. Those photos show him to be the same person who appears on YouTube as Pamphlet Anon.)
Rogers did not respond to lớn calls seeking phản hồi, but acknowledged his receipt of messages from NBC News via his website’s Twitter, writing in part, “WE DO NOT TALK TO FAKE NEWS.”
Network effect
Kicked off Reddit, Rogers hatched a new plan. He would replace the mainstream truyền thông — often a target of Q’s posts — with a constantly streaming YouTube network made up of the self-described “researchers” who were putting together Q’s clues.
Within a month, Rogers, 31, & his wife, Christimãng cầu Urso, 29, had launched the Patriots’ Soapbox, a round-the-clock livestreamed YouTube channel for Qanon study & discussion. The channel is, in effect, a broadcast of a Discord chatroom with constant audio commentary from a rotating cast of volunteers và moderators with sporadic appearances by Rogers và Urso. In April, Urso registered Patriots’ Soapbox LLC in Virginia.
Rogers & Urso use their channel lớn Điện thoại tư vấn for donations that are accepted through PayPal, cryptocurrencies or mail.
It was a natural progression for Rogers. A nhận xét of Rogers’ Facebook page shows he had been active in mạng internet politics và a staunch supporter of Donald Trump during the năm nhâm thìn chiến dịch, self-identifying as part of the “meme war” — the creation và dissemination of images and internet-style commentary that internet agitators on the chans và Reddit credit with Trump’s win. Rogers often posted memes about “liberal tears” as well as the ludicrous claims that Democrats murdered children and worshipped Satung — details similar to lớn those that would eventually khung the Qanon theory.
Rogers’ Facebook updates waned after Trump took office but started up again in the fall, when he began posting “Q” messages lớn both confused and supportive family and friends.
Rogers has publicly denied that he is the author of the “Q” posts, though his last visible Facebook post, published on Aug. 2, hinted that he might someday be associated with the theory.
“Ten bucks says you see my face on national news within a few weeks, saying that I"m ‘the mysterious hacker known as #Qanon,’” Rogers wrote, a reference to a CNN segment that mistakenly referred khổng lồ the trang web 4chan as a hacker.
Following a request for comment from NBC News, Rogers deleted every post on his Facebook profile after năm trước. Following another message from a reporter informing him that NBC News had archived his page, he deleted his Facebook account entirely.
Tables turned
As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, & the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet’s conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group.
Recently, some Qanon followers have sầu accused Diaz và Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz & Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing lớn a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers & Diaz may have sầu been involved in the theory from the start.
Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers khổng lồ both deny that they are Q and say they don’t know who Q is. There is no direct proof that the group or any individual members are behind it.
Still, Qanon skeptics have pointed to two videos as evidence that Rogers had insider knowledge of Q’s tài khoản. Some YouTube channels, like one named Unirock, are mostly dedicated khổng lồ poring over Patriots’ Soapbox livestreams & dissecting purported slip-ups.
One archived livestream appears khổng lồ show Rogers logging into the 8chan account of “Q.”The Patriots’ Soapbox feed quickly cuts out after the login attempt. “Sorry, leg cramp,” Rogers says, before the feed reappears seconds later.
Users in the associated chatroom begin to lớn wonder if Rogers had accidentally revealed his identity as Q. “How did you post as Q?” one user wrote.
In another livestreamed Clip, Rogers begins to analyze a supposed “Q” post on his livestream program when his co-host points out that the post in question doesn’t actually appear on Q’s feed và was authored anonymously. Rogers’ explanation — that Q must have forgotten lớn sign in before posting — was criticized as extremely unlikely by people familiar with the message boards, as it would require knowledge of the posting khổng lồ piông xã it out among mỏi hundreds of other anonymous ones.
In part because of the mounting claims against Patriots’ Soapbox, the web’s largest pro-Trump community has banned all mentions of Qanon. Reddit’s 640,000-thành viên community r/The_Donald phối up an autodelete function for mentions of Qanon’s claims, two moderators confirmed to lớn NBC News, believing the group of YouTubers is making posts as Q.
Still, Patriots’ Soapbox 24-hour livestream remains live on YouTube, broadcasting to its 46,000 subscribers. And despite the growing skepticism of the group, they still have their supporters who ardently believe sầu in the Qanon theory.
“The funniest thing about those who try to lớn discredit Q. They focus on whether Q is real or not, instead of the information being provided,” tweeted one follower. “NO ONE cares who Q is. WE care about the TRUTH.”