One of the first questions Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick for FBI director, faced during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Thursday was whether he was a “follower or promoter of QAnon.”
Patel’s response to committee chairman Senator Chuck Grassley was unequivocal: “I have publicly rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.”
This isn’t true. Patel’s claim that he was not a promoter of QAnon is undermined by years of his very public and overt promotion of the QAnon community.
Patel, along with President Donald Trump, has been one of the main driving forces in keeping the QAnon community alive in the years since messages from the anonymous Q figure stopped being published on fringe message board 8chan. Patel has repeatedly praised the movement on social media platforms like Truth Social, appeared on dozens of podcasts that promote the conspiracy theory, and created an entirely new trend within the movement. He even signed copies of his children’s book with a QAnon catchphrase—though Patel subsequently claimed he used the phrase because of its connection with a movie.
Patel has long been a figure of interest for the QAnon community. He was named in the so-called Q-drops posted to fringe message boards by the eponymous leader of the movement, who claimed to be a government insider seeking to help unmask a deep-state plot against Trump.
“Kashyap Patel – name to remember,” a Q-drop read back in 2018 when Patel was working as a senior committee aide to then House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes.
In 2022, when Patel became a director at the Trump Media & Technology Group, Patel worked to entice the QAnon community to join Truth Social.
“We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement,” said Patel on a June 2022 episode of the Patriot Party News show. “And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.”
One of the key parts of that effort was the creation of a @Q account on Truth Social, which was done by the site’s own developers.
“Having a beer with @q right now,” Patel wrote on Truth Social in February 2022, just days after the platform went live. The @Q account responded the following day, saying they were once again with Patel, and asking followers: “Alright anons, where are we kicking it tonight?”
That post included the hashtag #FlannelFridays, which quickly took hold with the QAnon community after Patel promoted it, inspiring new memes and followers who dressed up in flannel. “It’s become this massive thing online,” Patel told Russia disinformation promoter Tim Pool during a podcast interview in 2022.
In 2022, he told pro-Trump influencer Mary Grace: “I agree with what a lot of that movement says.” In recent years, Patel has even published his own enemies list of 60 people he claims are “members of the deep state,” a central tenet of QAnon.
Patel also regularly praised the QAnon movement for its “research” skills.
“I’ve seen on Truth Social how good these researchers are, and I kind of wish I’d had some of them when I was doing Russiagate,” Patel said in another podcast with a conspiracy channel. “I talk with the president all the time, and we’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.”
When Patel released a series of children’s books in 2022, he posted to Truth Social an image of himself signing copies of one of his books, The Plot Against the King, with the explicitly QAnon-linked hashtag #WWG1WGA, which stands for “where we go one, we go all.” The book features a besieged King Donald and a wise and loyal wizard named Kash, who helps his monarch. In the sequel, The Plot Against the King: 2000 Mules, Patel pushed election-denial conspiracies.
Patel has not limited his promotion and endorsement of Q to Truth Social. Since January 2021, Patel has appeared on “at least 53 episodes of 13 podcasts that have overtly promoted the QAnon movement and/or shared QAnon-related conspiracy theories,” according to an analysis conducted for WIRED by researchers at Advance Democracy, a nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research.
One of the podcasts Patel appeared on most regularly was the Stew Peters Show, hosted by Peters, an antisemitic antivaxxer.
When asked by Senator Dick Durbin during the hearing on Thursday if he was aware of Stew Peters, Patel said: “Not off the top of my head.” Durbin reminded Patel: “You made eight separate appearances on his podcast.”
Addressing the conversation on his show later on Thursday, Peters said: “Clearly, Kash Patel is lying. He absolutely does know who I am.”
Patel’s rapid rise within the US government and potential ascension to the role of FBI director was viewed among QAnon adherents as the moment they had all been waiting for, when the deep state would finally be unmasked, enemies rounded up and arrested, and public executions carried out.
Rather than seeing Patel’s disavowal of QAnon as a betrayal, a review of posts on platforms like Truth Social, Telegram, Gab, 4chan, TikTok, and X show people on QAnon message boards defending his comments and praising his performance.
“THERE IS NO QANON, SO KASH TOLD THE TRUTH!!” one QAnon influencer posted on Telegram, referencing the false claim within the movement that the term QAnon is simply a construction of the mainstream media.
“He basically said they are not conspiracies but rather the truth, love it.” a follower responded.