Fake News: State Of The Union Guests Were NOT Wearing "Q" Flag Pins

Fact Check

  • by: Ryan Cooper
Fake News: State Of The Union Guests Were NOT Wearing "Q" Flag Pins

Did several guests at the recent State of the Union wear American flag pins with the "Q" logo on them? No, that's not true: While supporters of the so-called QAnon conspiracy theory claimed that several guests were wearing "Q" flag pins, we enhanced the images in question. The pins actually featured what appears to be a presidential seal, not the letter "Q."

The claim originated from a video post published by And We Know on February 6, 2020, titled "AWK NEWS 2.6.20: [DS] coup attempt against POTUS will not go unpunished" (archived here).

Users on social media only saw this:

AWK NEWS 2.6.20: [DS] coup attempt against POTUS will not go unpunished.

The narrator on the video showed several individuals who he claimed were wearing American flag pins with a "Q" on them at President Trump's State of the Union address on February 4, 2020. The suggestion was that this was a silent nod to the anonymous individual who believes that the "deep state" is actively plotting against Trump.

One of the individuals shown in the video wearing a pin was Jody Jones from Farmersville, California. His brother was murdered by an illegal immigrant.

Here is a high-resolution photo of Jones in the U.S. House Chamber on Capitol Hill during the speech. Lead Stories enhanced that image, and it's clearly not a Q but rather what appears to be a U.S. presidential seal.

Screen Shot 2020-02-10 at 3.01.50 PM.png

At a distance, the red stripe from the flag may give the appearance of a curly Q, but it is not.

Others suggested that even a young boy was seen wearing a Q flag pin, but it appears to be the same style pin that Jones was wearing:

Some websites have been hawking Q-adorned flag pins, but they look nothing like what anyone was wearing at the State of the Union address.

We wrote about fake news on YouTube before. Here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper, a staff writer and fact-checker for Lead Stories, is the former Director of Programming at CNN International, where he helped shape the network's daily newscasts broadcast to more than 280 million households around the world. He was based at the network's Los Angeles Bureau. There, he managed the team responsible for a three-hour nightly program, Newsroom LA.

Formerly, he worked at the headquarters in Atlanta, and he spent four years at the London bureau. An award-winning producer, Cooper oversaw the network's Emmy Award-winning coverage of the uprising in Egypt in 2011. He also served as a supervising producer during much of the network's live reporting on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict in 2006, for which CNN received an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Read more about or contact Ryan Cooper

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