Kash Patel is the hero QAnon has been waiting for

And contrary to popular belief that QAnon supporters tend to be older people with more time to spend on conspiracy websites, PRRI data shows that 22 percent of people under 50 believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, compared with only 14 percent of those over the age of 65.

“I don’t suspect that belief in conspiracy theories like QAnon will dissipate anytime soon,” Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI, told WIRED. “Trump supporters in particular are already prepared to support conspiracies that are not based on any facts at higher levels than the general public.” Coupled with historic levels of distrust in government and a number of other institutions among many Americans, the conditions that allow such theories to fester and even thrive will unfortunately not be going anywhere anytime soon.”

Trump’s return to the White House was widely celebrated by the QAnon community, whose members believe that all the wild predictions made by Q in their thousands of posts will now come true.

“The general consensus is that Trump will crush the Deep State and that all the evil members will go to jail as soon as possible, that we will go back to the gold standard and the Fed will be destroyed,” Mike Raines, a researcher who closely follows the QAnon community , WIRED reports. “Ukrainian biolabs will be exposed as the source of Covid and (Anthony) Fauci and company will be sentenced to death for crimes against humanity.”

This can be seen in Telegram channels and fringe platforms such as Gab and Truth Social, where QAnon influencers have gone into hiding after the mass purge of QAnon accounts on major platforms in 2021. after the attack on the Capitol.

But increasingly it can also be seen on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and most notably X, which from the takeover of billionaire Elon Muskprovided fertile ground for the conspiracy to flourish, in addition to providing income for influencers who could monetize their nonsense.

Meta, TikTok and X did not respond to comments about QAnon’s content on their platforms.

“It certainly doesn’t help that under Musk, QAnon’s unsubstantiated conspiracy theories have flourished all over X, giving them a huge audience and legitimacy,” Cook says.

Among those who took to what was then called Twitter after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was Trump. Forced to post on his own little platform, Truth Social, he quickly embraced QAnon wholeheartedly, promoting QAnon-affiliated accounts nearly 1,000 times, according to analysis from October by Media Matters.