What is the future of QAnon? What the return of 'Q' means for QAnon and the far-right conspiracy movement.

• The anonymous leader of QAnon, who stopped posting in late 2020, has returned with several posts.
• The writing style, as well as the circumstances surrounding Q's return, have sparked skepticism.

After a year and a half absence, the anonymous leader of the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon returned last week without warning. The account known as "Q," that for years built a cult around its cryptic messages, posted several times on the online message forum 8kun and set off a wave of speculation among the conspiracy movement's followers.

Some QAnon adherents and influencers — microcelebrities in the far-right sphere who amassed fanbases translating Q's coded messages — were immediately skeptical of Q's return. But others have rallied around Q once again, and it's unclear what impact the return of the anonymous leader could have on the future of QAnon and US politics.

QAnon initially formed around Q's ominous messages that framed themselves as insider clues to the future of global politics, eventually creating a sprawling conspiracy movement that believed Donald Trump had a secret plan to save the world from satanic pedophiles. But experts told Insider it's now unlikely or at least uncertain if the Q account itself is even still necessary for the far-right movement's success.

"I would be surprised if this iteration of Q was as convincing — in being able to redpill the masses — as it was in the beginning," Sara Aniano, a disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, told Insider. "Especially because the ethos of QAnon has been so irreparably damaged since January 6th."

Q returned with several new drops in the last week

Q's first new post, over 15 months since the last drop in December 2020, asked readers, "Shall we play a game once more?" There have been several new posts since, including one that appeared to suggest Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who recently revealed explosive allegations about Donald Trump to Congress in the January 6 hearings, was a "plant."

The response to Q's return has been mixed. Much of the skepticism came from how the site changed its method for creating tripcodes, or converted passwords used for anonymous posters, right before Q's return posts, according to Vice. Q's tripcode was the only one that didn't change, which implied that someone behind the scenes at 8kun knew what was coming. Doubt has also surrounded the Q poster's writing style.

"Sorry to be that guy but these new Q drops just don't go as hard as the old ones," tweeted Jared Holt, a former resident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which researches disinformation. "I'm not totally confident that the author of them will be able to fully recapture the community, which has generally disseminated across the broader conspiratorial right wing at this point."

But some QAnon influencers celebrated the leader's purported comeback. One popular QAnon conspiracist told their 68,000 followers on Telegram on June 24, when Q first posted again, that they wanted "to just run around like a crazy person and scream with glee."

"The influencers that are super excited about the alleged return of Q seem to be all-in, and those who were already skeptical are kind of doubling down on that skepticism," said Aniano.

But even if most popular QAnon influencers end up denouncing the new Q drops or ignoring them, it might not be necessary for the movement to continue to have an influence.

"I definitely don't think Q is necessary, or even valuable, at this point," Mike Rothschild, a journalist and author who researches QAnon, told Insider. "The conspiracy landscape has changed a lot since the last Q drops in 2020, and people are getting antsy for concrete answers and action, not cryptic nonsense and rhetorical questions."

"These few weak drops aren't going to do much of anything except send people to 8kun, which has seen its usership drop drastically," Rothschild added.

QAnon influencers have replaced Q as the center of the far-right conspiracy movement

In Q's absence, a swarm of influencers including 8kun owner Jim Watkins and his son Ron Watkins, Jordan Sather, Liz Crokin, and the pseudonymous BioClandestine gained traction on social media and messaging platforms, most notably on the Telegram messenger app. They became known for propagating far-right conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine rhetoric and the false claim that Donald Trump was cheated out of victory in the 2020 election. Their audiences swelled independent of any Q drops.

Rothschild said many QAnon influencers have "long ago embraced the idea that 'we have it all' and that there's nothing Q could tell them that they don't already know."

BioClandestine, for instance, was a catalyst behind the spread of the baseless conspiracy theory that the US was manufacturing biological weapons in Ukraine, right around when Russia invaded the country. Others built up sizable communities in real life, like the far-right conspiracy theorist Michael Protzman, who led a cult to Dallas' Dealey Plaza where he baselessly claimed John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999 in a plane crash, would rise from the grave and become vice president to Trump.

Back in January, Holt told Insider that QAnon adherents had started to turn to Q-influencers as leaders in themselves, not channels to find out about Q drops.

"People are looking more to the influencers themselves for direction, less relying on them to translate a medium," said Holt.

Even though QAnon-world influencers haven't needed Q for the last year and a half, the return of drops could aid them by providing fresh texts to decode, Aniano said.

"The added benefit of Q's alleged return," Aniano said, is "that they now have more material to work with, it adds to their own personal narrative of being in this space. They will probably use it to grift and write more books and hold more conferences."