BuzzFeed News reports:

What is QAnon?

It’s not easy to describe, but one thing we know to be true: It’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s bigger.

What started as a thread on the anonymous message board 4chan has long since entered the mainstream: Questions about QAnon have been asked in the White House press room, and a Q follower is poised to be voted into Congress later this year.

When QAnon started appearing several years ago, journalists fumbled to concisely explain it to mystified readers, and usually settled on far-right conspiracy theory.

The shorthand largely stuck. But QAnon is much more complicated and convoluted — and dangerous — than other conspiracy theories. The QAnon belief system has inspired violence and crime across the United States, leading the FBI to label it a domestic terrorism threat in 2019.

The editors at BuzzFeed News have become uneasy about using conspiracy theory to describe QAnon, which has grown to encompass a whole alternative world of beliefs and signals. The copydesk has to stay on top of language and note when terms become stale and reductive; QAnon has shifted, and so should how we write about it.

QAnon is a collective delusion, and that’s what BuzzFeed News will be calling it from now on.

The name QAnon itself is a portmanteau: Q refers to the highest level of security clearance a Department of Energy employee can attain — credentials claimed by someone posting as “Q” on anonymous message boards, beginning in 2017 with prognostications about a supposed ring of child abusers and sex offenders in the Democratic Party and the “deep state.” Although their predictions started out very specific, when those were not fulfilled, they became more and more vague.

And when we say vague, we mean incomprehensible. One of Q’s posts reads, “_Comf D-TT v891 0600 yes. green 1 0600. Bunker Apple Yellow Sky…yes Godspeed. Q.” (Followers claimed those tea leaves referred to an aircraft accident in England.)

The nebulous nature of Q’s dispatches has been a blank slate onto which other deeply troubling conspiracies have been projected. “Birthers,” for example, who promoted the easily disproven claim that Barack Obama had been born outside the US and was therefore ineligible to be president (it’s now being applied to another Black aspirant to the White House, Kamala Harris), and anti-vaxxers, who want to deny lifesaving vaccines to children, have entered the QAnon universe. Some QAnon conspiracies are deeply rooted in anti-Semitism, and they have amplified efforts to demonize George Soros. [Continue reading…]