The QAnon conspiracy snowball gets bigger and dirtier: A visit to the GreatAwakening subreddit

By David Futrelle

By now you may be familiar with the broad outlines of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which might be described, in essence, as Pizzagate on steroids.

As True Q Believers see the world, the heroic Donald Trump, with the help of numerous “patriots” inside the government and out, is fighting a grand battle against the vast Illuminati pedophile baby-eating cabal that secretly controls the government (and the world). And, yes, Q Believers have actually convinced themselves that the top cabal figures (including Hillary Clinton) are literal “pedovores” who drink the blood and eat the flesh of babies.

But as horrific as it all sounds, Q Believers think that Trump is actually winning his battle against the baby eaters, armed with literally tens of thousands of sealed indictments that will be used to arrest the key cabal members — in government, business, and Hollywood — when the time is right. Q Believers need only keep their eyes on the prize. “Trust the plan,” Q has assured them numerous times in his (their?) cryptic messages on 8chan.

While the basic thesis of QAnon Theory is already plenty weird, the details are even stranger — and they get stranger still by the day. QAnon is a giant dirty snowball of a theory, growing ever larger as it careens down the mountainside, picking up new sub-theories with every new rotation. The mysterious Q drops new “crumbs” virtually every day, and each one is pored over and taken apart by a small army of self-designated Q interpreters, who use the new clues to spin out new theories and add new enemies to Q’s ever-growing enemies list.

I spent several hours today going through just some of the topics posted over the past 24 hours in the GreatAwakening subreddit — Reddit’s main forum for Q Believers, with nearly 60,000 subscribers. Here are a few of the not-actually-true things I, er, “learned” in the process.

Financier, convicted sex offender, and former Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein has nuclear missile silos hidden beneath tennis courts on his private island

Q Believers have spent a great deal of time examining aerial photos of Epstein’s island hideaway, which they have taken to calling “pedophile island” because of all the reputed underage sex parties that have been rumored to have taken place there. (Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008, so that’s not an altogether fanciful scenario,)

Anyhoo, they’ve been suspicious about his tennis courts for a while and now they think they’ve found proof that they were built to hide missile silos. Or maybe the tennis courts don’t exist at all, and the photos available through Google maps have been doctored!

“I did a lot of map comparisons of E Island a few months ago,” WOWs_JohnPRyan writes.

I also noticed the “tennis court” cover by G maps. I initially thought that section was actually a sacrificial area or a burn area … the thought of missile launchers never came to mind, but I can see how it fits now.

Wait, so Google is in on the coverup? 0oDassiveMicko0 points the accusing finger of blame at Google/Alphabet Inc’s … former Executive Chairman, for some reason.

So, Google maps have superimposed a fake tennis court over what looks like a missile silo, where Apple maps shows what´s really there? Is that right? If so, Alphabet (Google parent company) and Eric Schmidt are 100% complicit. He is a Jew, too. If this is true, this is highly significant!

To someone called tlbt, the nukes help to explain why so many people (allegedly) go along with the vast (alleged) Illuminati pedophile conspiracy.

This post is about protecting/forcing the practice with the threat of thermonuclear hellfire. Like, holy shit, imagine thinking you’re part of the elite, finally get invited to a private island to connect with other power players, then get shown missiles that will destroy everything you love. Then you’re forced to participate in a sinister ritual (which is documented, blackmail) before you can go back up the elevator and back to what you thought was normal life. Sounds like a way of controlling powerful people to me.

Now some GreatAwakening commenters have convinced themselves there are similarly hidden nuclear missile silos in Vatican City. Yep, that’s right: the Pope is packing some nuclear heat!

Red shoes symbolize blood spilled in ritual sacrifices, and have to be earned

A GreatAwakening commenter called akilyoung explains:

I theorize that the red shoes worn by certain people are earned, not worn ‘just because’.

IMO..they represent blood on the feet. To be initiated into this death cult, you must kill virgins in a Babylonian style death ritual.

Akilyoung ties this theory in with discussions elsewhere in r/GreatAwakening of a pool owned by alleged Illuminati pedovore Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper’s mom):

The pool with nooses? The virgins are strung up, and the initiate cuts them (wont get into details) and bleeds them out. The initiate is walking around in their blood doing his evil work, and ends up with red feet.

Thus they wear red shoes to symbolize their deeds, and SYMBOLISM WILL BE THEIR DOWNFALL.

Weird. I think I owned some red sneakers once. I just bought them from a shoestore. No virgin murder necessary.

Anderson Cooper is a “satanic pedophile” who orders kids to rape from a catalog

Reddit’s Q Believers have been examining a picture of CNN’s Anderson Cooper sitting in his office looking at what appears to be printouts of news stories from the web; behind him lurks a life-sized standee of Honey Boo-Boo. Some Q Believers have managed to convince themselves that Cooper is looking through a child sex slave catalog trying to decide on a child to rape.

QAnonMaga reports that

Q pointed out the papers on the table they are from a catalog where you order kids to have sex with the writing was enhanced and enlarged photos of a boy and girl and Cyrillic language he was so arrogant he let the photographer take a picture of illegal stuff.

Huh. Here is the highest-resolution of the picture I could find online, posted on a site devoted to Q “research.” Here’s an enlarged version of the papers that Cooper is reading.

I see what looks like a picture of an adult couple. I can’t read any of the words; I don’t see any distinctly Cyrillic letters.

Here’s what Q thinks he saw in that same picture:

Hey, who are you going to believe? Q or your lying eyes?

I’m going to stick with my lying eyes. I guess when you’re putting forth the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, you need to be a little, er, creative in your interpretations.

Ok. I’ve saved the most horrifying new Q discovery til last. Brace yourself.

Recent XBox Live outages are evidence of cabal members trying to clean up evidence of their nefarious plots that they shared with each other in … Xbox Chat?

“So Q drops that he knows they were communicating with Xbox chat,” writes HouseSlytherin.

Which probably means Q has the chat logs. They double down and try and erase all that information on the server? Doesn’t that make them guilty of another crime? Assuming they were government employees at the time, they are deleting public record.

So Microsoft is part of the cabal too? OH NOES.

“Upsetting that now even gaming isn’t safe,” writes a female gamer calling herself Vexxlyn.

Gaming has always been a comfort thing for me ever since I was a little girl with my first game boy, knowing microsoft was betraying me kind of hurts.

Now obviously I’m skeptical of virtually all QAnon claims. But I don’t have a hard time believing that if there were a vast Q conspiracy Microsoft would be in it up to the neck. Clearly the company that brought us both Clippy and Windows 7 is capable of ANYTHING.