By Carlos Taylhardat, originally written for 3 Narratives News

Editor’s note (updated December 2, 2025): This article was first drafted when QAnon still felt newly exposed. It has been updated to reflect Donald Trump’s mass pardons for January 6 defendants in his second term, new research on QAnon’s psychology and media ecosystem, and the way QAnon-style thinking now shapes debates over the Epstein files, COVID-19, transgender rights in sport, and AI-driven disinformation.

“The Storm is upon us.” — QAnon slogan

In October 2017, an anonymous post titled “Calm Before the Storm” appeared on the fringe message board 4chan. Signed only as “Q,” it hinted at a secret war between Donald Trump and a hidden cabal of global elites. What looked like one cryptic post became hundreds, then thousands. Together they formed a story that would pull millions of people into its orbit, fracture families, and help set the stage for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In the echoing corridors of the internet, few movements have stirred as much fervor and fear as QAnon. To its followers, it is a citizen-led revolution, a digital resistance exposing buried crimes. To its critics, it is a shape-shifting cult, using online forums, wellness circles, churches, and podcasts to seed paranoia and rupture relationships. Both sides insist they are defending human morality. The question is what they are building in the process.

At 3 Narratives News, we try to understand such movements in three layers. In this story, we follow QAnon through:

• Narrative One — how believers see themselves as “digital soldiers” in a war for truth.
• Narrative Two — how researchers, families, and officials see a cult-like ecosystem with real-world costs.
• The Silent Story — what QAnon reveals about our loneliness, our media, and the age of AI-fueled misinformation.

I. Narrative One: The Digital Awakening

“We are the news now.” — QAnon community mantra

From the inside, QAnon does not feel like a conspiracy theory. It feels like a mission.

Believers call themselves “digital soldiers.” They gather on message boards, encrypted chats, livestreams, and small-town church groups to “decode” the world. The early “Q drops” on 4chan and 8kun were rarely straightforward. They mixed riddles, numerology, biblical allusions, and hints about sealed indictments and global child-trafficking rings. The vagueness was the point. It invited participation.

For many followers, the first attraction was not the darkest claims about satanic elites. It was the promise that there was a hidden pattern beneath events that otherwise felt chaotic and humiliating: the opioid crisis, lost jobs, wars that never seemed to end. Q framed all of it as a single war between Good and Evil — with Donald Trump cast as a flawed but chosen instrument of justice.

Inside Telegram channels and YouTube comment threads, you can still see the sense of purpose that gives QAnon its emotional power. Parents swap screenshots of supposed “drops” late at night. Retirees who once watched cable news now spend hours combing court dockets and flight logs. Local business owners talk about “taking the red pill” and discovering that every scandal, from Jeffrey Epstein to COVID-19 lockdowns, is part of a single script.

Key phrases bind this community together. “The Storm” is the long-promised day when the cabal is exposed and punished. “The Great Awakening” is what happens when enough ordinary people “wake up” and join the fight. “Trust the Plan” reassures those who doubt when predictions fail or dates pass quietly. “Where We Go One, We Go All” — WWG1WGA — becomes both slogan and vow.

For believers, these are not just hashtags. They are mission code. Learning the language means joining the family. It is why, when Donald Trump began referring to January 6 defendants as “hostages” and issued sweeping pardons for nearly 1,600 of them at the start of his second term, many QAnon supporters did not see clemency as a concession to extremism. They saw it as proof that the “patriots” had been right all along — and that their patience with “the Plan” had been rewarded.

In this narrative, QAnon is not about being fooled. It is about finally being taken seriously. Followers often describe years of feeling dismissed by mainstream media, politicians, or even their own families. QAnon offers them a story in which they are not merely spectators to history but protagonists. They are the ones who stayed up late, did the research, connected the dots, and refused to look away.

Seen this way, QAnon is less about a single figure named Q and more about an identity: the belief that you are “awake” in a world of sleepers, part of a hidden network of people who see what others cannot — or will not — see.

II. Narrative Two: The Cult and the Cost

“I’m worried she’s in serious danger.” — Kasey Mayer, about her sister Kiley

From the outside, the same movement looks very different.

Researchers who track online extremism describe QAnon as an “always-on” conspiracy system. It has no fixed headquarters and no official membership list, but it operates like a recruitment funnel. Anonymous messages appear. Influencers translate them on podcasts and live streams. Smaller accounts repeat those interpretations, adding local flavor. By the time the content reaches Facebook groups, church circles, or wellness retreats, it often feels less like a theory and more like a revelation.

One 2021 study that analyzed hundreds of thousands of QAnon-related tweets found that most users were not inventing new claims but amplifying existing ones — retweeting, reposting, and remixing material from a handful of core promoters. The result was a dense echo chamber where every world event could be folded into a single story about good versus evil and where contradiction rarely survived more than a few comments before being drowned out.

Experts in cult dynamics see familiar patterns. Movements like QAnon, they say, offer three powerful rewards: a sense of special knowledge (“we see what others cannot”), a sense of mission (“we are protecting children and saving the country”), and a sense of belonging. Each “drop,” each coded phrase, each viral meme becomes a test of loyalty — and a small hit of meaning.

Therapists who work with former cult members describe how language itself becomes a barrier. QAnon’s insider terms — “sheeple,” “NPCs,” “MSM,” “cabal,” “The Storm” — do more than summarize ideas. They create a world in which only insiders are fully human and critics are, at best, blinded and, at worst, part of the enemy machine.

The Mayer Sisters

The cost of that language shows up far from Washington, in living rooms and group chats. In early 2020, a woman named Kasey Mayer began noticing a shift in her sister Kiley’s Instagram posts. The sunsets and brunch photos gave way to QAnon slogans and videos by a young promoter named Austin Steinbart, who claimed — improbably — that he was Q himself, sending messages back in time from a future version of America.

By that summer, Kiley had moved to Steinbart’s makeshift Arizona compound, a suburban house his followers called “The Ranch.” She joined a small group of disciples who saw Steinbart not as a YouTuber chasing clicks but as the linchpin of a cosmic war. Kasey tried everything: calm conversations, panicked calls, late-night pleas. She told a reporter she feared her sister had joined a “twenty-first-century, internet-enabled version of Charles Manson’s family,” only this time the doors to the compound were algorithms and livestreams rather than locks and fences.

Kasey never got her sister back. She died of a heart attack at twenty-seven. In later videos, Kiley spoke of Kasey’s death from inside the QAnon world she had chosen. That tragedy is one story among many documented by journalists and researchers: parents whose adult children cut off contact, spouses who can no longer share a news broadcast without fighting, siblings who discover they now live in different realities.

For these families, QAnon is not an abstract debate about “free speech” or “doing your own research.” It is the empty seat at a holiday table, the contact name that lights up less and less often. It is a person who is physically present but emotionally elsewhere.

January 6 and the Pardons

The most visible cost came on January 6, 2021, when a crowd — including many people steeped in QAnon slogans and imagery — stormed the U.S. Capitol. Some carried “Q” signs. Others wore T-shirts referencing “The Storm.” The riot left a trail of injuries, deaths, and one broken tradition: the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Federal prosecutors brought the largest criminal case in Justice Department history. Hundreds of people were charged and sentenced. Then, on January 20, 2025, as he began his second term, Donald Trump signed a sweeping clemency order forgiving nearly 1,600 people charged or convicted in connection with January 6, including prominent QAnon-linked figures. In the months that followed, he continued to grant individual pardons, describing many of the rioters as “hostages” and “patriots.”

For critics of QAnon, that day and its aftermath are the clearest evidence that the movement is not harmless “research” but a radicalizing force. They see a straight line from anonymous “drops” on fringe message boards to shattered glass in the Capitol and an American president embracing conspiracy narratives as the basis for official policy.

In this narrative, QAnon is not enlightenment. It is a system that rewards people for abandoning shared facts, replacing them with a story that can justify nearly any action — from cutting off family to charging through police lines.

III. The Silent Story: What QAnon Reveals About Us

Beneath the slogans and clashes, there is a quieter story. It is not just about one movement, one set of posts, or one president. It is about the conditions that made QAnon possible — and that now allow its logic to spread into new fights.

Psychologists who study conspiracy beliefs talk about three basic needs that such stories meet:

• Understanding — the need to make sense of a confusing world.
• Control — the need to feel less helpless in the face of large, frightening events.
• Belonging — the need to feel part of a community that sees and values you.

Those needs become sharpest in times of crisis: a pandemic, an economic shock, a bitter election, or rapid changes in culture. QAnon arrived at exactly such a moment and offered a simple frame for everything from trafficking scandals to vaccine debates: nothing is random, everything is connected, and your skepticism sets you apart from the blind masses.

By 2025, that frame has outgrown Q itself. The Q drops have slowed or stopped, but the pattern remains. Its traces show up in fights over the Epstein files and the real horror of missing girls, in campaigns against “woke ideology” that fold every gender or race debate into an apocalyptic story, and in Telegram channels that promise secret knowledge about vaccines, war, or climate change.

Technology has accelerated that pattern. During the 2024 U.S. election, it became easy for anyone with a laptop to generate convincing fake images and audio. Deepfaked ballot videos, synthetic news clips, and edited speeches circulated in Q-adjacent spaces and beyond. The message was not only that certain elections were corrupt. It was that nothing could be trusted — except the community you already belonged to.

Researchers have also traced how foreign influence campaigns piggyback on QAnon themes, amplifying anti-Western and anti-globalist narratives through sympathetic influencers and meme networks. Real grievances — about inequality, corruption, or abuse — are blended with invented plots. The result is an information ecosystem where it becomes harder to tell where sincere belief ends and manipulation begins.

QAnon’s history matters now because its method has outlived its origin story. Take a real scandal. Mix in invented villains and cosmic stakes. Wrap it in spiritual language and patriotic imagery. Then tell people to “do your own research” in feeds shaped by algorithms that reward outrage. That recipe can be reused by almost any cause, from anti-vaccine campaigns to state-backed disinformation.

For newsrooms, including our own, this raises hard questions. How do we cover real abuses of power — like trafficking, corruption, or abuse of office — without feeding the engines that turn every headline into proof of a grand cabal? How do we investigate honestly while being transparent about how we use tools like AI in reporting, as we explain in our policy piece “AI in the Newsroom: Truth, Lies, and What Readers Should Know”?

And for families, QAnon forces a different kind of work: learning how to set boundaries, preserve relationships where possible, and protect children and older relatives from online spaces that can pull them in slowly, post by post.

In that sense, QAnon is not only about “them,” the people who believe. It is about “us”: the systems that reward anger more than nuance, the platforms that profit from engagement more than understanding, and the societies that leave many people feeling unheard until a voice on a message board tells them they have been chosen all along.

IV. Conclusion: Questioning Without Losing Each Other

“Think for yourself. Question everything.” — QAnon motto

At the core of QAnon lies a paradox. It urges people to question everything — governments, media, corporations — yet often punishes them for questioning the movement itself. To leave is to “wake up” again, this time from the dream that you were the only one truly awake.

Albert Einstein once wrote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” The lesson of QAnon is not that questioning is dangerous, but that it can be hijacked. Curiosity can be turned inward, used to test our own favorite stories, or turned outward, used only to attack our enemies. One kind of questioning builds shared reality. The other erodes it.

In an era of AI-generated images, algorithmic feeds, and constant crisis, the hardest work may be the quietest: pausing before we share, checking sources, listening to people we disagree with long enough to understand them, and staying in conversation with those we fear we are losing.

QAnon will not be the last movement to promise secret knowledge and simple answers. The challenge for all of us is to build ways of seeking truth that do not require us to lose our grip on reality — or on one another.

Key Takeaways

• QAnon began as a series of anonymous online posts in 2017 and evolved into a global movement that blends real scandals with invented conspiracies.
• Believers see themselves as “digital soldiers” decoding clues in a war between good and evil, gaining a sense of purpose, identity, and community.
• Researchers and families see a cult-like dynamic in which ambiguous language, echo chambers, and charismatic promoters isolate people from loved ones and shared facts.
• January 6 and Trump’s mass pardons show how QAnon narratives can move from message boards into street-level violence and presidential policy.
• The “Silent Story” is about systems, not just individuals — the social media platforms, economic anxieties, and political incentives that make QAnon-style thinking attractive.
• QAnon’s method has outlived Q: its story structure now shapes debates on trafficking, vaccines, gender, and elections, especially in an age of deepfakes and AI-generated content.

Questions This Article Answers

What is QAnon and where did it come from?

QAnon is a conspiracy movement that began in 2017 when an anonymous figure known as “Q” started posting cryptic messages on 4chan. Those messages spun a story about Donald Trump secretly battling a hidden cabal of elites involved in corruption and child abuse. Over time, the movement spread beyond fringe forums into mainstream social media, churches, wellness communities, and political rallies, turning into a broad worldview rather than a single theory.

Why do people join and stay in QAnon?

People are often drawn to QAnon during periods of uncertainty or loss. The movement offers three powerful rewards: a sense of understanding in a confusing world, a feeling of control in the face of fear, and a community that calls them “awake” while others are “asleep.” The coded language, constant “decoding,” and shared rituals make it emotionally difficult to step away, even when predictions fail or relationships suffer.

How did QAnon influence January 6 and what changed afterward?

QAnon slogans and symbols were visible throughout the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Many rioters believed they were answering a call to stop a stolen election and trigger “The Storm.” In Trump’s second term, his mass pardons for January 6 defendants reinforced the idea, for many QAnon supporters, that they had been “patriots” rather than criminals. For critics, the pardons showed how deeply conspiracy narratives had penetrated formal politics.

How has QAnon changed between 2017 and 2025?

QAnon has shifted from a centralized focus on Q’s posts to a looser, more diffuse style of thinking. The language and logic now appear in campaigns about child trafficking, “woke ideology,” vaccines, transgender athletes, and global institutions. QAnon is less a single movement than a template: take real grievances, plug them into a story about a hidden cabal, and share them through influencers, memes, and AI-generated content that can be difficult to fact-check in real time.

What can families do if a loved one falls into QAnon?

Experts and families suggest a few practical steps. Avoid public shaming, which can push people deeper into the movement. Set clear boundaries around harassment or hateful content, but keep communication lines open where possible. Ask questions rather than launching into fact-checks; often the goal is to rebuild trust, not win a single argument. And seek support — from therapists, support groups, or others going through the same thing — so that you are not carrying the burden alone.

Sources and Further Reading

• “The Flashing Warning of QAnon” — The New Yorker
• “QAnon Is a New American Religion” — The Atlantic
• “The Spectacular Rise and Fall of a QAnon Commune” — Vanity Fair
• “Their Loved Ones Are Obsessed With QAnon Conspiracies. It’s Tearing Their Families Apart.” — PBS NewsHour
• “QAnon, Authoritarianism, and Conspiracy in Alternative Spiritual Spaces” — Frontiers in Sociology
• “Authoritarian Politics and Conspiracy Fictions: The Case of QAnon” — Humanities
• QAnon — Wikipedia overview
• QAnon — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• “The Toll of QAnon on Families of Followers” — Harvard Gazette
• “Deepfakes, Memes, and Artificial Intelligence in Elections” — NPR
• “Trump Issues 1,500 Pardons Over January 6” — The Guardian