In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as 'the calm before the storm'-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists.
But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called 'Q Clearance Patriot' began an elaboration all of their own. Q's wild yarn hinted at a vast conspiracy that satisfied the deepest desires of MAGA-America. None of Q's predictions came to pass.
But did that stop people from clinging to every word, expanding Q's mythology, and promoting it ever more widely? No. Conspiracy culture expert Mike Rothschild is uniquely equipped to explain QAnon, from the cults that first fed into it, to its embrace by Trump and the right-wing media. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere.
Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it's not going away.
