In July, Twitter—after years of unheeded warnings—removed from its platform more than 7,000 accounts that were tweeting conspiracy theories from the QAnon universe, a move estimated to have affected more than 150,000 accounts related to those that were purged. National Public Radio called it “the most wide-reaching and aggressive response to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory that any social media platform has ever undertaken.”
And yet, QAnon’s presence remains robust, thanks in part to the work of Trump-enabling hard-right “Twitter verified” influencers who advance QAnon talking points, often minus overt QAnon branding.
To you, James Woods may just be that actor who’s played a bunch of creepy roles. But to people on the hard right, Woods is a digital warrior, and maybe even a friend of Q, the mysterious entity whose cryptic messages on far-right message-board channels form the core of the central QAnon conspiracy theory—the false claim that top Democrats and Hollywood figures are running a Satanic child-sex-trafficking ring, and that President Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to “save the children.” Woods has 2.6 million followers on Twitter, to whom he has tweeted messages remarkably similar to those of QAnon adherents. Consequently, his is the favorite among Twitter-verified accounts of those posting from QAnon-related accounts. The non-profit research group, Advance Democracy, Inc., found that more than 50,000 QAnon-related Twitter accounts either mentioned or retweeted Woods approximately 1.6 million times between Jan. 1 – Aug. 2020. The research organization says that, as of September, all of those 50,000 accounts remained active.
And Woods is not the only Twitter presence with more than a million followers who plays this game. ADI identified five key players in Twitter’s million+ club who are involved in the propulsion of false claims embraced by the QAnon community. Each account bears a blue checkmark badge next to the tweeter’s name—Twitter’s signal to its users that the account is somehow significant. Twitter executives define the blue checkmark in a more understated manner: “The blue verified badge on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.” Twitter users tend to view it a sign of prestige and credibility. After all, by Twitter’s own criteria, the blue-checkmark account is “of public interest.”
In addition to Woods’, the accounts of Donald Trump Jr., Turning Point USA Executive Director Charlie Kirk, radio personality Dan Bongino, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton and BLEXIT Foundation principal officer Candace Owens are all Twitter-verified, have more than 1 million followers and advance QAnon messaging. With the exception of Trump Jr., each has been mentioned or referenced in a “Q drop,” one of the messages left by the enigmatic Q on the 8kun internet message board, a haven for those who wish to post anonymously. (Hence the “Anon” part of the movement’s name.)
Here are some of the public-interest bon mots offered by Woods:
Funny thing about that tweet: It’s a lot like a tweet linked to in a Q drop, and Woods’ tweet was made only an hour after the Q post appeared.
The Twitter link in that Q drop goes to this:
Then there’s Bill Mitchell, the Trump superfan with an online video show who got permanently booted from Twitter for creating a new Twitter identity in order to evade a previous Twitter suspension. He may not have had a million followers, but he had more than half that many, according to The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, and he regularly regaled them with QAnon conspiracy theories—and, unlike others, freely bandied about the QAnon name. The QAnon community returned the favor, ADI found, yielding Mitchell thousands of retweets from QAnon-related accounts. One tweet featuring disinformation about the coronavirus—which Mitchell dismisses as a hoax—garnered more than 3,100 retweets from accounts in the QAnon community. Another favorite topic of Mitchell’s among QAnon adherents is the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, whom Mitchell tars with the usual tacit anti-Semitic smears one finds elsewhere on the right-wing internet. In a June 20 tweet no longer available on the internet, Mitchell wrote:
Arrest Soros, seize his records and freeze
his assets and 99% of this chaos you see on
our streets ends tomorrow.
Retweet if you agree.
That one got 1563 retweets from QAnon-related accounts. Until Twitter threw him out, Mitchell was a blue-checkmark tweeter. In July 2019, he was invited to Trump’s White House “social media summit,” which The New York Times’ Kevin Roose described as a gathering of “right-wing trolls.”
QAnon claims are so easily dismissed as too crazy to be believed that the danger posed by the movement, designated by the FBI as a potential domestic terrorism threat, is often overlooked. To understand the threat, one needs to focus on the second part of the narrative—the part that promises that all of these Democratic and Jewish leaders smeared by Q and Q’s followers will meet with bloody vengeance on the day that the hero Trump rounds them all up in mass arrests and executes them. Consider the impulses of some of the most unhinged of the conspiracy-minded. Remember Pizzagate? That was the internet conspiracy theory that posited a child-sex-trafficking ring involving top Democratic leaders that was ostensibly run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. A man drove up to the nation’s capital from North Carolina to rescue the non-existent victims, having armed himself with an AR-15 assault rifle and a pistol. He shot a round into an interior door as the families who had been eating inside fled for the exits.
And those are just QAnon’s central claims. The QAnon network is a transmitter of all manner of conspiracy theories, many of them part of right-wing lore for years or even decades: The purported war of the “deep state” against Donald Trump, the anti-Semitic trope of Soros as a puppet-master, and of “spygate,” a fantasy about a “deep state” that had it in for Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, the evidence for which is the fact that the FBI was keeping tabs on conversations between agents of the Russian state and Americans; some of those Americans, it turned out, were working with Trump campaign. Another common theme is that America is headed for civil war because of the savagery of the left.
Woods also advanced a phantasmagoric QAnon claim that the liberal Twitter influencer Chrissy Tiegen is linked to Jeffrey Epstein, and is a pedophile. The online assaults consequently endured by Tiegen made her “worried for my family,” she wrote on Twitter, so she deleted 60,000 of her own tweets, she said, and blocked some 1 million accounts from engaging with hers. (The QAnon spreaders had gone into her Twitter archives and pulled out tweets in which Tiegen stated her disgust with such exploitive television programs as TLC’s “Toddlers and Tiaras” in a sarcastic manner, promoting them as to be taken literally.)
With 2.4 million Twitter followers of his own, Dan Bongino is the fourth-most popular verified Twitter account within the QAnon community, according to ADI. (He also claims more than 3 million followers of his public Facebook page.) On Feb. 14, a tweet with a link to his show appeared in a “Q drop.” The research group found that between Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, some 4,700 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted (or both) tweets from Bongino’s account.
Bongino, radio personality and coauthor of “Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,” is a favorite commentator of the president’s, who gifted Bongino with a blurb for his book:
‘Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump,’ is terrific. He’s tough, he’s smart, and he really gets it. His book is on sale now. I highly recommend!
—President of the United States, Donald J. Trump
In 2016, the president took to Twitter to declare his appreciation of Bongino, as chronicled by The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani, Asawin Suesbsaeng and Lachlan Markay.
With 1.1 million Twitter followers, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton is a top influencer in the hard-right realm. Dating back to 2016, Fitton, who helms a non-profit organization that takes in tens of millions in donations each year, has been flogging the main claim of “Spygate,” with allegations that the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign on behalf of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is the top target of QAnon adherents. They want to see her executed.
Fitton has a knack for advancing exactly the kind of narrative that QAnon enthusiasts build upon. As far back as November 22, 2016, Fitton was calling on Trump to arrest the candidate who won more of the popular vote than he did. In fact, he claimed on Fox News that the Justice Department was “broken” for not having done so already.
In February 2017, Fitton took to the CPAC stage to claim that Michael Flynn—the retired general and Trump national security adviser who was fired after being accused of lying to Vice President Mike Pence regarding Flynn’s communications during the presidential transition phase with Sergey Kislyak, who was then Russia’s ambassador to the United States—had been done wrong. Flynn, it was learned, had been coaxing Kislyak not to respond to sanctions imposed on Russia by the Obama administration in response to the federation’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential race—with the inference that the Trump administration would lift them once Trump was inaugurated.
Flynn himself is a QAnon buff, even recording a video of Flynn family members and the retired general himself reciting the QAnon slogan, “Where We Go One, We Go All.” (Julian Feeld of the investigative QAnon Anonymous podcast tweeted it here; CNN has the full video and some backstory here.)
Travis View, who hosts the QAnon Anonymous podcast, noticed this tweet from Fitton, who accused Facebook of “censoring QAnon” in its purges of QAnon-related accounts.
In the time period studied by ADI (Jan. 1 – Aug. 1, 2020), more than 39,000 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned or retweeted Fitton some 721,000 times. Those accounts, the research group says, remain active (as of September).
The president himself retweets Fitton or @JudicialWatch with some regularity. Tweets by Fitton have also been linked in at least three Q drops.
Charlie Kirk is another favorite of the president’s; Trump gave him a shout-out during a rambling speech he delivered at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference at National Harbor, Md. Kirk is said to be close to Donald Trump Jr., and a 2018 fundraiser Kirk held at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, is reported to have reaped $5 million in a single night with the help of Trump Jr., according to ProPublica’s Mike Spies and Jack Pearson. “Over the last year, the president has delivered remarks at the organization’s conferences three separate times,” they write, also noting that Kirk’s book, “The MAGA Doctrine,” was promoted by both the president and Trump Jr.
Conceived as a right-wing presence on college campuses, Kirk’s Turning Point USA has become a full-on Trump-boosting organization. It is also a tax-exempt non-profit. For Kirk, the Trump train has proven to be a gravy train. At TPUSA’s 2012 founding, his annual salary was $27,000; he’s now paid $300,000, according to ProPublica. Kirk is 27 years old.
Among Twitter accounts that are part of the QAnon infrastructure, Kirk’s is the third most popular Twitter account, according to ADI. And, as of August, his account was following some 557 QAnon-related Twitter accounts. Kirk’s name and image appeared on a flyer for Q Con Live!, a QAnon conference that was to have taken place in Fresno, Calif., this month, but appears to have been canceled.
Among the conspiracy theories that have been folded into QAnon’s toxic brew is the president’s false claim of widespread voter fraud, a cause that Kirk has taken up.
Kirk has also aligned with Christian nationalists, co-founding the Falkirk Center at Liberty University with the disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr.
Kirk’s former TPUSA colleague Candace Owens recently organized a Trump campaign rally at the White House featuring members of her group, the Blexit Foundation, which claims to inculcate conservative values among Black Americans. At an April 2019 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Owens testified that white nationalism and racism are not real threats to Black Americans, claiming that discussion of the threat posed by white nationalism was nothing more than campaign rhetoric from Democrats. She also claimed that President Richard Nixon’s use of the racist Southern strategy was “a myth.”
A top influencer in the hard-right sphere, Owens has 2.6 million Twitter followers, and was apparently scheduled to speak at the canceled Fresno Q Con Live! event, according to the same flyer for the event (above) that featured Kirk. (A different Q Con Live! event convened in Arizona that same weekend, but neither Kirk nor Owens appeared as speakers.)
Although Owens does not have a high level of engagement with the QAnon community on Twitter, she did get some attention from QAnon-related accounts when she began tweeting disinformation about the novel coronavirus. Her account was linked in a Q drop on June 10. Her linked tweet accused the Black Lives Matter movement of being a “shell company.”
Here, the Q drop linking to Owens’ account.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, boasts 5.5 million followers on Twitter. And while he’s careful to not engage himself with QAnon-related accounts, he sure is popular in the QAnon community, not only for his proximity to the epic hero (his father) at the center of the core QAnon theory, but for messaging that gets QAnon enthusiasts excited—including the notion that Michael Flynn was unfairly prosecuted and convicted. (Flynn pleaded “guilty” to lying to the FBI.)
Nearly 47,500 QAnon-related accounts either mentioned and/or retweeted Trump Jr. on Twitter approximately 950,000 times, according to ADI. The May 2020 tweet shown below received 8,078 retweets from QAnon-related accounts.
While the final outcome of the Flynn case has yet to be determined, he’d have to imagine that signals from the Trump family are looking good for a pardon or commutation.
Also in May, according to The New York Times Magazine, Trump Jr. took to Instagram to call Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden a “pedophile”—signal-boosting a central claim of the QAnon conspiracy theory, without giving a direct shout-out to the movement. Pretty slick.
