QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory. It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal. The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested. No part of the theory is based on fact.

Although preceded by similar viral conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, the theory proper began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by "Q", who was presumably a single American individual. It is now likely 'Q' has become a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon.

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QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", the title of his 1964 essay on religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. QAnon's vocabulary echoes Christian tropes—"The Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgement Day) and "The Great Awakening"—evoking the reputed historical religious Great Awakenings of the early 18th century to the late 20th century. According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil." Some QAnon supporters say the forthcoming reckoning will be a "reverse rapture": not only the end of the world as we know it, but a new beginning, with salvation and utopia on earth for the survivors.

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The Washington Post and The Forward magazine have called QAnon's targeting of Jewish figures like George Soros and the Rothschilds "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article in August 2018 asserted: "some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories".

The Anti-Defamation League reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism.

The Czarist hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has intersected with the QAnon conspiracy theories, with Republican QAnon fan Mary Ann Mendoza retweeting a Twitter thread about the Rothschild family, Satanic High Priestesses, and American presidents saying that "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion Is Not A Fabrication. And, It Certainly Is Not Anti-Semitic To Point Out This Fact." Mendoza, who sits on the advisory board of Women for Trump and was scheduled to speak at the 2020 Republican convention until news came out of her Twitter activity, later denied knowing the content of the thread, although anti-Semitic references appeared in the first few tweets. Similarly, Trump has denied knowing anything about QAnon except that QAnon fans like him and "love our country."

By 2020, QAnon followers were advancing a theory that Hollywood elites were engaging in "adrenochrome harvesting," in which adrenaline is extracted from children's blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. Adrenochrome harvesting is rooted in antisemitic myths of blood libel dating to the Middle Ages that Jews murder Christian children for their blood for use in religious rituals. QAnon believers have also promoted a centuries-old antisemitic trope about an international banking conspiracy orchestrated by the Rothschild family.

Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has described QAnon as a "Nazi group rebranded", and its theories as a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon