Qanon is a person or group behind an unhinged right-wing conspiracy theory that is really too stupid to elucidate (you can listen to this Reply All if you’re really interested); it’s a kind of trumpian Pizzagate successor that includes great, unhealthy lashings of secret Democratic pedophile rings (because far-right assholes are more worried about imaginary children in nonexistent pizzeria basements than they are actual children in ICE cages).
Anonymous is the “ensemble” (a term coined by hacker anthropologist Biella Coleman who wrote the definitive book on Anonymous, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy) that pulled off a series of daring hack-attacks “against several governments, government institutions & government agencies, corporations, and the Church of Scientology.”
Anonymous summons its freefloating membership to action through weird, meme-y videos that essentially announce victory in some glorious campaign; if enough people are energized by the video to take action, then (sometimes), the campaign actually takes place.
The latest of these videos attacks the person/persons behind Qanon, blaming the phenomenon for stoking hatred and fear in easily misled people; “Someone is going to get hurt, so we have to put our foot down and start some shit with you all.”
So perhaps some people will assemble under the Anonymous banner and do something about Qanon and maybe that will have an effect on Qanon’s actions. But on the other hand, Qanon’s followers are trumpian in the sense that they are willing to forgive any lapses in logic in their cult leader, so even if Anonymous publishes the true identity and motives of Qanon, and even if these are damning and terrible, it’s easy to believe that it will have no effect on Qanon conspiracists, who could very well just dismiss the revelations as fabrications intended to obscure the truth.
The anarchist hacking group slammed the QAnon conspiracy as potentially dangerous and driven by a “brainless political agenda” in a video posted Sunday to what is widely considered the most reliable Anonymous Twitter account.
“We will not sit idly by while you take advantage of the misinformed and poorly educated,” the group said in the video, which was posted with the hashtags #OpQ and #OpQAnon.
The video depicts various figures with Anonymous masks acting out certain aspects of the QAnon conspiracy against a constant backdrop of the letter “Q.”
The video claims that Anonymous “knew who was responsible for Q” and thought it was funny at first. However, the group now believes the conspiracy theory has gone too far.
Anonymous vows to take down, expose QAnon [Brett Samuels/The Hill]