It was early June and “Penny Farthing” had finally had enough.

“I’ve been a faithful reader of this site since like 2008 but I have just about had enough of the QAnon garbage that gets posted lately. The very first post I read here was about Gary Busey trying to use gold doubloons as legitimate currency and tbh I would just like more of that please.”

Posted to the celebrity gossip blog Crazy Days and Nights, the remark distilled the frustration many readers had been feeling as scandalous tidbits of Hollywood intrigue got crowded out by what another longtime reader described as “ludicrous QAnon horror stories lifted from Twitter.”

The post Penny Farthing was replying to was a “blind item” claiming an actor had forced his friend to join a “rape club” (commenters guessed it referred to Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt). Another was an item about Bill Gates using the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to test experimental new foods on people in developing nations. Multiple posts have accused Tom Hanks, a frequent Q target, of licentious behavior on a yacht belonging to Hollywood mogul David Geffen. And an ongoing parade of posts describe Hollywood stars abusing minors.

Since 2006, people have come to CDaN for blind items that run the gamut from true (Kaley Cuoco getting divorced) to ridiculous (Beyoncé faked her pregnancies) to fantastical (Anna Wintour and Bob Marley had a secret baby together). The site has a well-earned reputation for being both prescient and endlessly entertaining, so it was hardly surprising that its devotees were irked by blind items that seemed to refer to QAnon, the collective delusion that (I can’t believe I’m writing this) a satanic cabal of Trump-hating, child-abusing, moneyed elites runs American politics and media.

Blind items are a form of gossip where the actual name of the person is left out and some of the details are obscured. It’s like a game: In the comments, readers can guess who the celebrity might be. For example, “this one-named A+ list foreign-born singer is about to release an album” (Adele). This mechanism is oddly similar to QAnon’s, which also involves a pseudonymous insider posting cryptic message “drops” about famous people.

“I stopped reading when the Q stuff started,” Annie Tomlin, a former CDaN fan, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s really disturbing to see this right-wing conspiracy theory bullshit show up in gossip.”