The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

JFK Jr. didn’t die! He runs QAnon! And he’s No. 1 Trump fan, omg!!!

Analysis by
Breaking News Assistant Editor, Features
August 5, 2018 at 1:37 p.m. EDT
During President Trump’s rally on July 31, several attendees held or wore signs with the letter “Q.” Here’s what the QAnon conspiracy theory is about. (Video: Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)

Now that everyone knows about QAnon — now that, ahem, a certain national newspaper has published at least a dozen articles about QAnon in the span of four days — we need to ask why not everyone is convinced the conspiracy theory is true.

Maybe it’s because QAnon is too true. Like, there’s just too much truth crammed into a single conspiracy theory alleging that President Trump is secretly waging war on an evil cabal of liberals who rig the elections, and run the CIA, and abduct children, and hid all the UFOs, and killed Princess Diana, and did Hurricane Katrina, and invented vampirism, and … [consults QAnon guide …]

It’s a lot, even for those who have spent months following the writings of “Q” — the anonymous insider who late last year began to reveal the outlines of the supposed global cabal and Trump’s supposedly secret plan to dismantle it.

For millions of people who learned about QAnon only last week, when seemingly every news outlet on the planet started to cover it, it can be downright overwhelming. No wonder people are skeptical.

We are here to help. Rather than try to prove the entire theory, we will simply examine one component claim, and the evidence for it, as an example of the meticulous research and robust body of evidence believers say supports all of QAnon. That claim is:

⚡⚡⚡ John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and joined Trump’s secret evil-fighting organization, where he writes 4chan posts under the pseudonym “Q”⚡⚡⚡

We thank the Daily Beast for alerting us to the truth bomb above, which is a relatively new one in the QAnon compendium. Our analysis follows, with the most important evidence surrounded by lightning bolt emoji for clarity.

⚡⚡ Liberals killed President Kennedy! ⚡⚡

Even since his first anonymous forum posts in late October, Q has made clear that only three U.S. presidents in modern history are not part of the evil cabal and that all of them were in great danger because of it.

“The ‘fix’ has always been in,” Q wrote in December. “No matter which party won the election (JFK killed/Reagan shot).”

Of course, Q was not the first person to see a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. But in a February post, Q revealed that Trump and his allies recite a daily prayer to JFK in the Oval Office.

“Rest in peace Mr. President,” it goes. “Since your tragic death, Patriots have planned, installed, and by the grace of God, activated, the beam of LIGHT.”

How QAnon, the conspiracy theory spawned by a Trump quip, got so big and scary

The “beam of LIGHT” refers to the secret organization to which Trump and Q belong, which formed in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, and is now finally strong enough to begin dismantling the cabal.

Q claims to be a high-level intelligence official within this organization, and obviously he must be — or how would he know about Trump’s secret prayer?

⚡  Then Kennedy Jr. was killed to make way for Hillary Clinton’s political career! ⚡⚡ 

According to the mainstream media (which is, of course, part of the cabal), JFK’s son died in a private plane crash 36 years after his father’s assassination — a tragic accident with no political consequences whatsoever.

Unlike many in his extended family, John F. Kennedy Jr. never ran for public office. After a year-long investigation, the federal government concluded that he had lost control of his plane while flying his wife and sister-in-law over the Atlantic Ocean on a hazy night in 1999.

Such was the official story, which Q blew out of the water with a 15-word truth bomb in April:

POTUS & JFK JR.
Relationship.
Plane crash 1999.
HRC Senate 2000.
The “Start.”
Enjoy the show.
Q

Q followed up with a link to a 1956 memo he had found on the CIA’s public website — which to the untrained eye appears to have nothing to do with the Kennedys but which contained the words “guided missiles” and, therefore, raised the possibility that the CIA blew up JFK Jr.’s plane with guided missiles.

These scant clues were all Q’s army of amateur researchers needed to fill in the blanks. Within hours of the post, they discovered that JFK Jr. had once been photographed with Trump. Therefore, they reasoned, the two men were probably close allies.

Q very deliberately noted that Hillary Clinton launched her political career with a U.S. Senate run the year after the plane crash. And while JFK Jr. was not a politician and had not been planning to run against her, he had apparently once thought about running for the Senate, and, therefore, Clinton’s associates in the cabal might have thought it convenient to kill him and his family with a missile and somehow conceal all the evidence rather than risk a Democratic primary fight.

Anyway, the QAnon scholars couldn’t disprove the possibility. And neither can you, and the opposite of disproof is proof. So, proven.

⚡ JFK Jr. is Q!!!! ⚡

QAnon believers have a saying (we believe they coined it), “Follow the white rabbit.” The white rabbit will lead you through the twisted caverns of deception, to the underground burrows of warm, fluffy truth.

Here is the deepest truth in this particular rabbit hole: John F. Kennedy Jr. is not really dead.

To be sure, not even Q has dared claim so in public. But as the Daily Beast wrote, the cryptic author went conspicuously silent for several weeks in July. During Q’s absence, another mysterious prophet, named R (“R is the letter in the alphabet after Q,” the Beast explains), began to post on the same forum, claiming that JFK Jr. faked the plane crash and then began secretly working to put Trump in the White House and destroy the Clinton/Illuminati/vampire cabal.

In which case, not only is JFK Jr. a key player in the QAnon conspiracy, he is Trump’s secret 4chan spokesman — Q himself.

This is, admittedly, an advanced theory. It’s so advanced that it took a popular QAnon researcher an hour and a half to explain it in a way that made any sense. We assume. We didn’t get to the end of the video.

Fortunately, Q’s scholars have turned up compelling visual evidence:

In the nine-month history of Q posts, these last revelations have been among the most incredible. Some wept when they learned of them. Certain minor complications later cropped up, including: Q returned from hiatus and denounced R. Also, that is not actually a picture of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s gravesite. But these are mere thorns in the white rabbit’s paw. We can all see the general gist of the truth.

⚡⚡ WOW JFK Jr. at a Trump rally!? ⚡⚡

QAnonism is not some tabloid trash conspiracy theory. Its claims are impeccably sourced, copiously researched and rigorously tested.

Thus, as the theory that Q is Kennedy Jr. became popular on the forums, QAnoners began to search for incontrovertible evidence. And they soon found it — in footage from Trump’s rallies.

A certain middle-aged man — roughly the same age that JFK Jr. would be, if he were alive — kept showing up in the crowd, often seated close behind Trump, at rally after rally.

The man was unshaven, bespectacled and had entirely different facial features than Kennedy. The similarities did not exactly leap out to the casual observer.

But as Yig Wilson put it on his news and analysis website, the Yig: “Well of course it wouldn’t. That would sort of defeat the whole purpose of their secret that they are alive and well. … It really isnt all that hard to add age to a person, or a bigger nose, or any number of things really. This one should fall under the common sense category.”

The research hit another apparent stumbling block when the man at the rallies was identified as Vincent Fusca, a Trump fan from Pennsylvania who had been following the president around in a “Trump Mobile,” which is not necessarily the behavior one would expect from a high-level operative in a top-secret counter-conspiracy, who had been one of the most famous people in the country before he faked his own death.

But we’re now at the bottom of the rabbit hole, and conventional logic might no longer apply. Just to be sure, The Washington Post contacted Fusca and asked whether he was John F. Kennedy Jr.

Fusca sounded confused by the question. “I’ve been to a lot of rallies,” he said. We asked whether he was aware of the QAnon theories. He said he was only vaguely so.

So we emailed Fusca a link to one of several YouTube videos that claims he is the living son of John F. Kennedy, and Trump’s top lieutenant in a secret war against evil, and asked him to get back to us with his thoughts.

It’s compelling stuff, after all.

Just a few other QAnon articles from this newspaper:

‘We are Q’: A deranged conspiracy cult leaps from the Internet to the crowd at Trump’s ‘MAGA’ tour

As the bizarre QAnon group emerges, Trump rallies go from nasty to dangerous

Why the QAnon conspiracy is the natural culmination of the Trump era

Trump’s most despicable supporters tell us who they are

How QAnon, the conspiracy theory spawned by a Trump quip, got so big and scary

The mystery of ‘Q’: How an anonymous conspiracy-monger launched a movement (if the person exists)

QAnon is terrifying. This is why.

Conspiracy theories are for losers. QAnon is no exception.

QAnon: Meet a real-life believer in the online, pro-Trump conspiracy theory that’s bursting into view

You’ll never guess how the QAnon conspiracy theorists feel about all this media coverage

Fact-checking QAnon conspiracy theories: Did J.P. Morgan sink the Titanic?