“We Are Q”

Posted by: on October 15, 2020

QAnon supporters claim that they were asked to cover up their “Q” identifiers and other QAnon-related symbols at a Trump campaign rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, on August 15, 2019. Although one person who was asked to turn his “Q” shirt inside out when he entered the rally identified the person who asked him to do so as a Secret Service agent, the agency denied this, saying in an email to The Washington Post, “The U.S. Secret Service did not request, or require, attendees to change their clothing at an event in New Hampshire.” QAnon supporters also claim that their visibility at Trump rallies has been suppressed for months.[124]

In August 2019, a video posted online by “Women for Trump” late in July was reported to include “Q”s on two campaign signs. The first sign, which said “Make America Great Again“, had a “Q” taped to it in the corner. The other side, “Women for Trump” had the “O”s in “Women” and “for” pasted over with “Q”s. The images which included the altered signs were clearly taken at a Trump campaign rally, which have increasingly attracted adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, so it is unknown if those particular signs were selected for inclusion deliberately or not.[125] The video has since been taken down.[126]

In July 2020, Business Insider reported that according to Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group, Trump’s reelection campaign relied on a network of QAnon-related accounts to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media, especially Twitter. An analysis of 380,000 tweets sent between early April and the end of May 2020, and another of the most popular words used by 1,000 accounts, showed that the QAnon network “is playing a key role in generating and spreading Trump’s propaganda.”[127]

The Washington Post reported at the beginning of August 2020 that adverts for Trump’s campaign had shown images of supporters with prominent QAnon merchandise. Thousands of comments on YouTube saw these details as signs of victory.[42]