QAnon has recently been thrust into the spotlight due to the riots at the Capitol building on January 6th. Many people were completely blindsided by the event. My parents are a good example: they live in a liberal bubble in the suburbs of New York, and aren’t all that great at using technology. They’re on Facebook quite a bit, but not in the dark corners where “patriots” talk about the elites harvesting adrenochrome to have psychedelic trips (more on that later). We talked about how this could ever happen in America, who could do such a thing as storm the Capitol, where did these people come from, etc. For your average viewer of MSNBC, this probably did come as a rude awakening. But for people who monitor alternative media, as well as Parler, /pol/, and thedonald.win, it did not come as a surprise: it had been years in the making.

This kind of thing started way back in the early days of Obama’s presidency. Youtube was rife with conspiracy about Obama’s rumored FEMA camps that would be used to re-educate or exterminate the true patriots of the nation who would stand up to Islam and Communism. People were so scared about these camps that they started to form militias amongst themselves to train in combat and survival skills. The enemy they saw was not just the radical Islamist Commie Barack HUSSEIN Obama, but a shady orgnaization/idea known as the New World Order. The New World Order conspiracies had a very vast range: from people believing that RFID microchips would be planted into their skin utwittingly during a vaccine and serve as the mark of the beast, to a belief that the American dollar would be abolished in favor of an “Amero” (American version of the Euro), to the ultimate belief that all countries would be abolished in favor of a shadowy one-world government that would rule in tyranny forever.

Obviously, none of those predicitions happened. Obama didn’t come for anyone’s guns, he didn’t implement Communism or radical Islam, and he was pretty pro-corporate power for a socialist. But, the internet was much bigger in 2016 than it was in 2008, which only meant that there was more space for conspiracy. A large change from 2008 to 2016 is that in 2016 there was a much more fleshed out online fringe right wing media sphere that could push out conspiracy content to a wider audience. That is exactly what ended up happening. What had once been reserved for dark corners of the internet started appearing in more mainstream outlets that sounded credible: InfoWars, large subreddits, and others. The next step in the viral online conspiracy saga is something that most Americans have probably heard of: Pizzagate.

Pizzagate is an online conspiracy that alleges that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Huma Abedin and others were using a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C. called Comet Ping Pong to taffick minors. Offshoot branches of Pizzagate claim that almost all Hollywood celebrities are in on it, using the trafficked children for Satanic rituals, pedophilia, and, you guessed it, Adrenochrome harvesting.

Adrenochrome is a chemical produced in the brain under conditions of stress. In order to make Adrenochrome, the conspiracy goes, you must first torture the trafficked children.

Not all Pizzagate believers buy into everything in the conspiracy, but they all do believe in the core belief of Hillary kidnapping children. The theme of children being harmed is common in right wing conspiracies, as we will see later in this article. The proof provided for the Pizzagate conspiracy was mostly due to the leaked emails from the Clinton campaign, with some people finding questionable language that they believe alluded to pedophilia and human trafficking. Right wing grifters began to publicize this information, namely Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec. This culminated in an armed man driving hours to Comet Ping Pong in order to “save the children”, of course finding no children there. One of the main points of the conspiracy revolves around kids being held in Comet’s basement, which the restaurant doesn’t even have.

Eventually, Pizzagate got absorbed into the larger QAnon conpsiracy. Many of the beliefs from Pizzagate carried over: Adrenochrome harvesting, child trafficking, pedophilia, a desire to “save the children”, and a cabal of Hollywood, political, and media elites are all common beliefs in the QAnon conspriacy. 4chan is also heavily involved in QAnon, just as it was in Pizzagate and the militia movement/NWO conspiracy before that. QAnon could be described as Pizzagate on a larger scale, with a familiar set of characters. Much more people areaware and buy into QAnon than Pizzagate, and there is another set of Youtube channels and Twitter accounts dedicated to explaining what the mysterious Q means in his “drops”, just as there were Youtube channels and Twitter accounts dedicated to explaining what Hillary and John Podesta really meant in their leaked emails.

These people didn’t just wake up one day and decide to storm the Capitol building: most have been being radicalized by alternative media and anonymous image boards for a decade now. For some believers, they’ve been radicalized for much longer than that by AM conservative talk radio. If you haven’t been looking in the right places, you’d never know it. Now that America has woken up to the dark underbelly that is internet radicalization, we have to work to deprogram those who fell victim to it. While some are too far gone by now, it isn’t too late for all of them.