QAnon is the recent conspiracy theory in the US that refuses to go away. Someone has been using the name QAnon, short for an Anonymous person with Q Level Security Clearance, since 2017 to post cryptic messages to the internet, pretending to be a government insider leaking secrets.

The latest prediction from QAnon has been that JFK Jr would appear (opens new window), alive, in Dallas, Texas where his father, president John F. Kennedy, was assassinated back in 1963. JFK Jr died in 1999 in a plane crash, but QAnon has so far both given his followers mixed messages - saying both that JFK Jr is dead, and that he faked his death and is alive and in hiding, running a secret group of paedophiles.

Not only was JFK Jr due to return last week , but he would also take on the role of Vice President alongside Donald Trump, who would be given back his rightful place as President of the USA. This feeds into the popular idea in the US that the election was stolen from Trump by the Democratic party, and follows multiple failed predictions from QAnon that the election result would be overturned and Trump would be declared the new President.

Hundreds of people turned up at the Dealey Plaza in Dallas last week, hoping to see JFK Jr’s return - they expected a parade, and some were holding Trump/Kennedy election signs. Unsurprisingly they were disappointed to find that the return of the prodigal son did not happen.

What’s interesting to me here is that, for many people including myself, the JFK conspiracy theory was one of the first conspiracies I heard about - and it’s one that has an air of believability to it. The conspiracy merely suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the one to fire the shot that killed president Kennedy, and that someone else was involved in the shooting - likely from a "grassy knoll". This theory was popularised by a 1991 Oliver Stone movie called JFK, starring Kevin Costner, which detailed some of the conspiracy ideas that had been written about in a couple of books.

The JFK assassination conspiracy is a far cry from other classical conspiracies, like the idea that the moon landings were faked, or that the pyramids were built by aliens. It was likely a gateway conspiracy for an entire generation of people, many of whom now find themselves believing the silly idea that JFK’s son will return from the dead and run the country with Trump, created by an anonymous poster on the internet who has absolutely no credibility.