Qanon Conspiracy Accounts Are 'Gloating' Over Mueller Report, Despite Internal Dissent

Despite setbacks, QAnon conspiracy theory accounts championed the Mueller report on Thursday, promoting the false narrative that the special counsel and President Donald Trump were working together to imprison "deep state" Democratic operatives in Guantánamo.

The conspiracy revolves around ambiguous digital "breadcrumbs" from an anonymous figure named Q. Believers in the plot think Q is a high-ranking government official who, through these "breadcrumbs," is exposing the secrets of a global criminal cabal.

Adherents of the pro-Trump belief system regularly show up at the president's rallies, and a prominent QAnon account was cited by a Fox News reporter last month.

The conspiracy theory relies on baseless allegations that Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller were working together to expose a global cabal of elites involved in pedophilia and other crimes. The false narrative holds that Trump will file thousands of indictments to send prominent Democratic figures, including Hillary Clinton, to prison in Guantánamo Bay. Believers fuse a number of mainstream Republican talking points with conspiratorial and absurdist elements, creating a nebulous and adaptable theory.

On Thursday, believers reveled that, with the Mueller report public, Democrats would be exposed and punished for pursuing a Russian collusion scam.

"Hannity says it well. Each new development [is] a new nail in the coffin of this lengthy multi-part saga of disclosure. The only constant is that they have lost, that Trump is totally immune, and that the REAL criminals are about to see what we have been saving until now," posted Joe M, an influential QAnon figure who has over 108,000 Twitter followers.

Despite many excited expressions, some QAnon commentators were disgruntled by the report, which failed to provide the incriminating evidence against Democratic operatives that has long been predicted in ambiguous posts on 4chan and 8chan.

Travis View, co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, which discusses conspiracy theories, told Newsweek that disappointed believers are probably only a small portion of the community.

"It's hard to gauge the sentiment of a diverse community with no core doctrine like QAnon. But I wouldn't say there's a lot of discontent," he said. "Just a glance at the current posts on the QAnon Voat board [a social media platform used by right-wing figures] shows that there's a lot of gloating and saying things like 'it's time to play offense.'

View added: "Honestly, their biggest problem is with Trump saying 'I'm f***ed. They can't imagine Trump expressing weakness."

The Mueller report's release prompted a series of negative comments, according to The Daily Beast. The outlet noted that comments on the live stream of Patriots' Soapbox, a channel promoting QAnon, came from dismayed users.

Former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who previously promoted a theory supported by a number of QAnon believers that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was dead, used the Mueller report to throw barbs at the movement.

"As of this morning: Q and QAnon are dead," he tweeted Thursday.

But two major QAnon voices tried to dismiss Gorka's claims, and hundreds of QAnon believers filled the comments of Gorka's post, questioning his authority to comment on the movement.