On Tuesday, January 14, American Thinker put up an article entitled "An Introduction to Q."  It was one of the site's most popular articles for several days.  Since Tuesday, the American Thinker site and email account have been subject to several cyber-attacks.  There's no way to tell whether the attacks are related to the post, but the timing is thought-provoking.

For almost three years, there's been word on the internet streets about "QAnon."  Wikipedia — which is a great resource for uncontested information about historic events or people or such anodyne things as plant types, but a hard-Left domain for modern political information — introduces QAnon in the darkest way possible:

QAnon (/kjuːəˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged "deep state" against U.S. President Donald Trump and his supporters. The theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by someone using the name Q, a presumably American individual that may have later grown to include multiple people, claiming to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. Q has falsely accused numerous liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of engaging in an international child sex trafficking ring, and has claimed that Donald Trump feigned collusion with Russians in order to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d'état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. "Q" is a reference to the top-secret Q clearance. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto "where we go one, we go all." (All hyperlinks stripped.)

That sounds scary, icky, and definitely conspiratorial.

Deborah Franklin, who wrote the American Thinker Q article, disagrees.  In her article, she writes that there's good reason to believe that the Q phenomenon is not just a conspiracy theory by which confused, angry, and disaffected American conservatives try to explain why the Left has been successful in both politics and social policy.

Franklin explains that Q's hints, especially the way they tie together certain events and actions, have allowed Q followers to be a step ahead of world events, whether foreign or domestic. This prescience, Q supporters believe, proves that Q's cryptic pronouncements are not random predictions but are, in fact, solid advance intelligence.

Those who follow Q closely, says Franklin, believe that, rather than being a pajama-wearing loon playing head games from a suburban basement, Q is, in reality, a military intelligence operation.  Its purpose is to help people understand the stories that Leftist media outlets reluctantly report with only minimal detail or biased spin. 

The editors at American Thinker are agnostic about Q.  They realize it's perfectly easy to read the Q phenomenon either way.

That is, QAnon can be nothing more than a fancy conspiracy theory.  After all, the human mind is hardwired to find connections, even where none exists.

Alternatively, it could, in fact, be an intelligence operation laying a trail of crumbs that promise people that things that currently worry them — a transnational elite, a dishonest media establishment, and moral corruption in high places around the world — are not here permanently.  Instead, Q promises that there is a plan to deal with these problems, with Trump's government at the center of that plan.

Ultimately, when looking at Q, it really can go either way.

But here's an interesting coincidence: since January 14, the day American Thinker published Franklin's take on Q, the site has experienced several attempted hacks, something that's never happened before. 

On January 15, someone identified as from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam tried to get into American Thinker's email account.  At the same time, the first person from American Thinker who tried to sign into the account was then locked out of his computer because malware was trying to install itself.

On January 17, another hacker attempted to get into the American Thinker email.  Once again, thankfully, the system appeared to have foiled the attempt by shutting down before anything bad happened.  On the same day, another editor at American Thinker watched a computer tied to that same email account abruptly die.

On January 19, the email system again stopped working, rebuffing people's attempts to sign in.  This time, the attempt came from the Persian Gulf.

On January 20, the back-end of American Thinker was the subject of an attack, locking out the editors entirely.  Fortunately, American Thinker has superb tech support, so the lockdown was quickly foiled.

As mentioned above, the human mind is hardwired to find connections, even where none exists.  While that ability can occasionally lead us to the wrong places, it exists so that we can organize the chaos that is the world around us, enabling people to locate food and shelter and distinguish friend from foe.  This could just have been American Thinker's week to get hacked, or American Thinker might have put a target on its back.

Nevertheless, just in case either Q is the real deal or Q's opponents are worried (or know) that Q is the real deal, American Thinker will continue to post occasionally about the Q phenomenon in order to keep readers informed about what's either a really cool military operation or a really persuasive, giant conspiracy hoax.