Under his pseudonym of InevitableET, or IET, he’s been one of the most prominent voices in the QAnon community since the very beginning of the conspiracy movement in 2017.
He is now, along with a host of other QAnon influencers who were simultaneously kicked off Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in the wake of the election and the Capitol insurrection, the driving force behind one of the most influential QAnon channels on Telegram.
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With Q failing to post an update in almost five months, IET’s voice and those of his peers have become central to a conspiracy community that tens of millions of Americans are following.
And what he’s sharing is antisemitism.
“IET is one of the most openly antisemitic QAnon promoters out there,” Mike Rains, a researcher who hosts the QAnon-focused podcast “Adventures in HellwQrld,” told VICE News. “Dude really hates Jews.”
Next month IET will take the stage alongside a sitting congressman, the chair of the Texas GOP, and former Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood at one of the biggest QAnon conferences to date.
Until now, he’s been known only by pseudonyms, including Incarnated ET, Inevitable ET, IET, or one of more than a dozen variations on this name.
VICE News has identified him as Craig Longley, a chiropractor from Texas who operates a physical therapy clinic in Denver. As well as fixing people’s backs, one former client of Longley says he tried to recruit her into QAnon in his office.
Longley has been hiding in plain sight during his time as a QAnon influencer, using his own image as profile pictures on various social media channels, but he’s been careful not to appear on video under his various pseudonyms.
At least once, though, he slipped up.
On August 4, 2020, Longley posted a short video on the “Real Inevitable ET” Instagram profile, which showed him reciting the QAnon Oath and identifying himself as IET.
Three people who know Longley from his chiropractor practice and his time working at a gym in Denver confirmed that the person appearing in the video delivering the QAnon oath and identifying himself as IET is in fact Craig Longley. (The sources were granted anonymity because they were concerned about backlash from Longley’s followers.) The three also confirmed that IET’s Twitter profile is a picture of Longley. The person in both the oath video and the picture appears to be the same as the one in videos of Longley, who did not respond to numerous requests for comment from VICE News via phone, email, and messages on social media, in which he was told that he had been identified as IET. The phone number for his clinic went to voicemail, and while emails sent to Longley’s work address were opened, according to tracking software, he never responded.
Longley appears to no longer be on Facebook or Twitter, but he can be seen in videos posted to his own physical therapy YouTube channel. The Longley in these videos appears to be the same person in the Instagram video delivering the QAnon Oath as IET.
Update: After this story was published, Craig Longley’s YouTube channel devoted to physical therapy was deleted. The glute-workout advice video that was originally embedded here from that channel has been replaced by a screen capture from the video.
IET’s real identity was confirmed to VICE News by, among others, Maria, a former client of Longley’s who didn’t want to use her real name due to fears of attacks from Longley’s QAnon supporters.
Longley is originally from Texas and, according to his LinkedIn profile, attended the University of North Texas and Parker University in Dallas, where he qualified as a chiropractor in 2012, before working with Whole Health Partners as a chiropractor in Dallas for a year.
“I am a sports-oriented chiropractor with soft-tissue, rehab, and strength and conditioning specialties,” Longley wrote in his LinkedIn profile. “My goal is to help people become functional by incorporating mobility and motor control through movements designed to prevent injury and increase longevity in their lives.”
By 2016, Longley had moved to Colorado. It is here that Maria said she met him at a CrossFit gym. Not long after, she said, she made an appointment with Longley after several people highly recommended him as a chiropractor.
Though she was initially happy with his service, the experience soon turned sour.
In November 2017, just weeks after the first messages from QAnon’s anonymous leader were posted on the fringe message board 4chan, Longley began talking to Maria about Jeffrey Epstein, Hillary Clinton, and the Obamas in his office after their sessions had finished, she said.
“He was effectively trying to redpill me,” she told VICE News.
Soon after, in 2018, Longley moved out of his shared office space and opened a brand new clinic called The Movement Project in downtown Denver. The clinic offers state-of-the-art cryotherapy treatment as well as massage and chiropractor services.
While all of this was happening in the real world, Longley was spending his time online building his anonymous profile as one of the leading voices of the growing QAnon community.
Under the moniker Incarnated ET, Longley built a loyal following of hundreds of thousands of people on Twitter. Unlike some QAnon influencers, Longley has embraced almost all of the conspiracies that have cropped up during the movement’s three years.
A quick review of an Instagram account he started in August 2020 after being suspended from Twitter, which has 30,000 followers, shows that he has embraced COVID-19 denial, election fraud conspiracies, claims that President Joe Biden is part of the shadowy cabal of elites running a child sex trafficking ring, and lots of antisemitism, including a claim that Jews are attempting to enslave the world.
“Certainly evangelical, ET also believes in chemtrails, ‘vibrational frequencies’ that govern the universe, sovereign citizen, Pizzagate,” a prominent QAnon researcher called Dapper Gander told VICE News. (Dapper Gander tweets anonymously due to fears that Q adherents will harass him and his family.) “He pushed March 4, he pushed that the container ship was full of smuggled kids. If you did a scatter-plot for ET you’d find beliefs from every corner of the conspiracy world, many of which rub up against the edges of more extremist belief systems.”
The result of embracing every new claim that pops up on the QAnon boards is that Longley has been wrong even more often than almost all other similarly prominent QAnon promoters. But this has not prevented him from building and maintaining a loyal band of followers. Just like most in QAnon, Longley responds to missed deadlines or failed predictions by deflecting criticism and moving the goalposts to another date or objective—a tactic that has allowed the conspiracy movement to grow despite repeatedly failing to accurately predict what was going to happen.
QAnon is a relatively new conspiracy theory, but its core beliefs are centuries old and are based on antisemitic myths, such as professed belief in the legitimacy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of Russian propaganda first published in 1903 that claimed a secretive group of Jews was plotting to take over the world.
Most QAnon influencers attempt to hide or ignore QAnon’s antisemitic foundations, but Longley appears to have no problem embracing them.
In 2018, Longley tweeted about imagining the day Trump would leave the White House, suggesting that all Jews would be “gone,” using the antisemitic three brackets “echo” symbol to identify Jewish people.
He has taken part in the “Blue the Jew” movement, where anti-Semites Photoshop images of Jewish people blue, a technique developed on fringe websites to use visual clues to disseminate hateful antisemitic messages while avoiding triggering mainstream platforms’ hate speech rules.
He also tweeted a link to a website that claims the claims made in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real.
Twitter has removed IET from its platform up to 20 times, but he reveled in the bans, posting updates on his Gab account showing all the accounts that had been banned and claiming his suspension must mean he was “over the target.” He always managed to return, using very slight variations of the name IET.
In 2019, he achieved his greatest moment on Twitter when then-president Donald Trump’s official Twitter account retweeted his inaccurate claims about the president’s impeachment.
Finally, in the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection, where QAnon followers played a prominent role, Twitter took decisive action against tens of thousands of accounts linked to QAnon, and Longley was removed for good.
By that point, Longley and his fellow influencers had plans to bring their followers with them to other platforms.
Longley’s new home is Telegram, where he has established a channel called “We The Media,” which has amassed over 210,000 subscribers. The channel describes itself as “News: By Anons for The People. Uncensored and Unstoppable.” It is run by IET, according to a post on his Parler account promoting the new group, which also outlined how a number of other prominent QAnon influencers would be involved.
He has also appeared with other prominent QAnon boosters on livestreams and podcasts on platforms such as YouTube and Apple Podcasts, as well as numerous fringe streaming services. While other participants appear on camera, Longley has refrained from appearing on video, preferring to use a profile photo instead.
“He has a strong, confident personality and is the de facto leader of a group of other promoters, having been the driving organizational force behind the creation of the ‘We The Media’ channel on Telegram, which is moderated by about two dozen of the formerly biggest names on Twitter,” Gander said.
The antisemitic theme is clearly in evidence in this group, with three of the 19 posts “pinned” by the channel’s administrators promoting antisemitic ideas, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Despite using pseudonyms, Longley has regularly used a real picture of himself in his profile pictures on mainstream social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube, as well as on more fringe sites like Gab and Telegram. A number of the photos used by IET were also posted publicly on the Facebook account of his girlfriend.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s election loss in November and Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, the QAnon movement has been in a state of flux. Since the group’s anonymous leader Q went silent in early December—possibly for good—the power of influencers like Longley has grown.
And next month Longley will make his first public speaking appearance in what is shaping up to one of the biggest QAnon conferences to date—even though the organizer, known as “QAnon John,” denies that it’s a QAnon conference. The For God and Country Patriots’ Roundup event is taking place in a city-owned hotel in Dallas and will be attended by Rep. Louis Gohmert and Allen West, the chair of the Texas GOP.
On the event’s website, Longley is simply listed as IET, alongside a photo and a promise that a biography is coming. Maybe now Craig Longley can fill in those details.
Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to the podcast “Adventures in HellwQrld” as “Welcome to HellwQrld.”
