On Wednesday, the Washington Monthly took a deep dive into how supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory are viewing the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the article, while many of them are dismissing it as a hoax, a large number believe the “social distancing” protocols are in fact cover for President Donald Trump to begin the final phase of the operation, which they refer to as “The Storm” — a reference to a cryptic remark Trump made to members of the press during a White House photo-op in 2017.
“This means mass arrests and we know this is going to happen worldwide, so they needed a cover to restrict travel and get people prepared to have an interruption in supplies while a financial reset and the arrests occur. President Trump is trying to tell Americans to be prepared under the guise of a pandemic,” wrote one QAnon supporter on Facebook. “The stock market needs to adjust down in order to do a complete reset and move us to a gold backed currency and get rid of the Fed. The stock market has been falsely inflated for awhile. The CV is the perfect ‘crisis’ to make a lot of it work.”
Left out of this conspiracy theory is any explanation of why Trump initially didn’t take coronavirus seriously, and suggested it would go away on its own.
The QAnon conspiracy theory, named after an anonymous poster on internet message boards who claimed to be relaying classified government information, posits that all of the chaos and incompetence over the last three years of the Trump administration has been a cover for Trump to secretly plot mass arrests of Democrats and liberal celebrities, who are posited to be part of a world-spanning child sex trafficking ring. Some supporters believe that Trump has been working hand in hand with former special counsel Robert Mueller, or even a secretly still-alive John F. Kennedy, Jr.
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