'QAnon believers think there is a time coming very, very soon, when Trump is about to arrest all their enemies.'
Supporters of US President Donald Trump and the QAnon conspiracy theory popular on the fringes of the internet have latched onto the protests erupting after the death of African American man George Floyd.
They claimed 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested and signed off their message with the letter Q.Since then the theory has evolved to include a range of conspiracies about the Democrats and the deep state, from accusations they are trying to rig the upcoming election, to running child sex trafficking rings.
Mr Trump has on several occasions retweeted QAnon conspiracy theorists on Twitter, most recently on Monday when he retweeted a video reel of him talking about the “calm before the storm” a popular QAnon phrase referring to the impending mass arrests.Getty Images North America “If not a conspiracy theorist in every way, he is someone who gives a lot of room to conspiracy theories, more so than any other president before him, so that legitimises that move into the mainstream,” Professor Fleming said.According to conspiracy theorists, the ‘Great Awakening’ is an apocalyptic time of societal collapse, chaos and violence in which the global elites are overthrown and Mr Trump triumphs over the Democrats and other so-called ‘deep state’ forces.
He also noted the QAnon belief that Mr Floyd is just an actor who isn’t really dead and that the protests are being financed by billionaire philanthropist George Soros.AP “It presents Trump as a kind of messiah who is going to defeat the democrats once and for all. It presents Q as a sort of John the Baptist figure to Trump’s Jesus. It’s really an almost apocalyptic belief system and that does appeal to people's need to see politics as not just a series of human transactions but as having a metaphysical significance,” he said.
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