BILL PRESS (HOST): I know we could talk about Alex Jones all morning, but there are other conspiracy theories out there. The one that I find baffling -- and I didn't even know about it until Tampa a week or so ago -- these people in that Tampa rally with “Q” signs. They're just like the letter Q, and suddenly everybody's supposed to know what that means.
CRISTINA LÓPEZ (MEDIA MATTERS): So it's QAnon.
PRESS: QAnon, yeah.
LÓPEZ: Yeah. It's the new conspiracy theory that's becoming mainstream among the Make America Great Again part of the internet. This actually started way back in October 2017, and it came out of a pretty innocuous, you would say, comment from Donald Trump who said, “this is the calm before the storm.” And that was interpreted by his following as something was brewing -- something was coming up. So it's still a question who is this person --
PRESS: What is -- what does QAnon stand for?
LÓPEZ: So “Q” is a poster on the internet that started on message boards that are anonymous. It started on 4chan and now it has migrated to 8chan, which is even more anarchic and has even less controls. And basically it's “anon” from anonymous --
PRESS: Yeah, ok.
LÓPEZ: -- because it's an anonymous poster, and this anonymous poster started pushing out the narrative that they were an official within the Trump administration that has a high security clearance, the Q security clearance, and that because of that they are -- they know of all the secret plans that Donald Trump has behind the scenes to kneecap the deep state and uncover a supposed existing ring of pedophilia, in which powerful celebrities and Democratic politicians are involved. So this is kind of a stir fry from all the conspiracy theories that we saw becoming popular in the 2016 campaign, Pizzagate and that sort of thing.
PRESS: I was going to say is this more Pizzagate?
LÓPEZ: But it's stir fried into this conspiratorial sort of behind the scenes, intelligence, secret government strategizing. So it's basically --
PRESS: This is really weird.
PETER OGBURN (PRODUCER): It's so far out there.
LÓPEZ: It's Pizzagate with a face lift. The problem is it has a lot of people who believe it.
