When President Trump approached the podium at his rally last night in Duluth, Minnesota, he paused for a split-second to gesture to a man wearing a shirt emblazoned with the letter “Q.”
The Q on the man’s t-shirt refers to the right-wing conspiracy theory known as “The Storm” that has thousands of adherents online. The theory goes like this: President Trump is not actually under investigation for possible collusion with Russian officials in 2016, but rather he is secretly working overtime to dismantle a global network of Satanic pedophiles involving some of the most powerful global elites and to share information about this secret project. According to the theory, Trump has ordered top-level officials to disseminate cryptic pieces of information—known as “crumbs”—to a bunch of random people on 4chan and 8chan who spend hours trying to put the puzzle pieces together. The conspiracy theory has been spread by the likes of Infowars and by comedian Roseanne Barr, but some conspiracy theorists have recently begun to allege that the whole operation was compromised once the unknown authors of the Q posts started to criticize one-time Q believers like Jerome Corsi and David Seaman of attempting to profit off the movement.
And as crazy as all of that sounds, it apparently didn’t stop anyone on the Trump advance team from giving someone advertising this theory front-row VIP access at last night’s rally.
#Qanon I'm all over Twitter. President Trump pic.twitter.com/wkjeW5Q3qX
— RealRobL (@Q_ANONBaby) June 21, 2018
As you’d expect, fans of the QAnon conspiracy went wild.
Followers of the conspiracy theory claimed that Trump gesturing to the cheering man wearing the QAnon shirt was irrefutable proof that the theory is real. Even the anonymous author of the Q posts noticed the man, posting “Now that’s what I call a VIP!”
The Q poster also wrote that he and his colleagues who were supposedly responsible for the QAnon theory “left the decision on timing” to Trump about when he would reveal his ties to The Storm and that “today, at the rally, he made his decision.” The poster told followers to look “for more direct confirmations” in the future.
Q also shared a Facebook post claiming that a man got on a table at the Trump rally and started to expound on the QAnon theory and says that he started a call-and-response chant of the QAnon catchphrase, “Where we go one, we go all.” Q wrote back, “We hear you, Patriots!”
QAnon adherents also suspect that Trump may have made a hand gesture during his speech to signal to them.
