Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America

by Will Sommer

They were headed to 8chan, a less-popular chan-style board whose users behaved even worse than 4chan’s denizens. 4chan, Q declared, had been “infiltrated” by his enemies. It was time to move QAnon to a place that was solely his own.

Inspired, he finished coding the first version of 8chan two days later. Brennan launched 8chan with remarkably permissive rules, even by the standards of chan sites. While 4chan might boot groups that engaged in high-profile online harassment or other unsavory activities, Brennan didn’t have those concerns. Under Brennan’s rules, anything legal under U.S. law was allowed on 8chan.

Brennan had launched 8chan just a few months before the start of Gamergate, the right-wing backlash and harassment campaign aimed at women working in video games. After being banned from 4chan, as QAnon would be years later, Gamergate found a home on 8chan. To its advocates, Gamergate was about protecting a gaming industry they saw as overrun by liberal activists. In practice, Gamergate “activism” often amounted to organizing online harassment mobs that targeted female video game journalists and developers.

When a reporter asked him whether imageboards like 8chan had become known for “misogyny” and “nihilism,” Brennan said that was just the price of free speech.

In 2019, a North Carolina woman named Carol created her first Facebook account. She favorited the pages for Fox News and Donald and Melania Trump, and liked memes making fun of Democrats. Facebook’s algorithm—the programming that determines what recommendations users like Carol receive—wanted her to go further. Two days after joining Facebook, Carol received recommendations to like a page called “Q WWG1WGA,” which used a fiery Q as its profile image. A few days after that, Facebook recommended she check out another QAnon page illustrated with a screenshot of a Q clue. The page’s slogan: “Do you believe in coincidence?” Carol wasn’t a real person. She was the creation of Facebook employees testing how the site’s algorithm would nudge a woman fitting Carol’s profile—a conservative southern mother—toward conspiracy theories and disinformation. By populating the Carol account with “likes” for only mainstream conservative figures, they were able to see how the site’s algorithms encouraged users to check out QAnon and other conspiracy and fringe theories even when they had shown no interest in them in the first place.

Conspiracy theory beliefs can promote other negative behaviors, too. Believers in conspiracy theories that AIDS was created by the government are less likely to use condoms during sex, one study found. Another group of researchers found that conspiracy theorists are much more likely than the average person to support political violence.

A 2013 study found that 63 percent of Americans surveyed held at least one conspiratorial belief when asked to choose whether they believed in any of four conspiracy theories: whether Barack Obama was covering up significant information about his early life, the government knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks, or the 2004 or 2012 elections were marred by severe voter fraud.

There’s no one factor that makes someone believe in conspiracy theories. But after talking to QAnon believers for years, I’ve started to notice some commonalities that go beyond politics. They often seem angry about the state of the world and their place in it. Conversely, they get a special pleasure in the knowledge they think Q has shared with them, reveling in the secrets that set them apart from the average person. As one believer put it to me with a smile, they know the news before everyone else. In a confusing world, a conspiracy theory like QAnon gives people something to put their faith in.

NESARA and QAnon both fall into a category of political or religious movement called millenarianism: the belief that a utopian world is right around the corner.

QAnon has found plenty of pathways into new believers’ minds. QAnon reaches vulnerable people who feel dislocated in the modern world, assuring them that their lives have a greater meaning and that the people they dislike are inherently evil.

The Q clues are so vague and have enough empty spaces that anyone can feel like their own favorite political movement is part of Q’s army.

When Biden put his hand on the Bible and the military failed to swoop in to arrest him and put him on trial, QAnon believers should have realized that Q’s much-discussed plan wasn’t coming to fruition. The 100,000 sealed indictments waiting to send their enemies to Guantanamo Bay weren’t real. Trump would no longer be the god-emperor-in-waiting.

To them, Biden’s win wasn’t proof that Q was lying to them—it just meant that the deep state was more powerful than even Q realized. The Storm hadn’t been canceled; it had just been postponed. Q’s posts had taught them everything they needed to know about the world. Now they needed to put those beliefs into action offline.

For all QAnon’s talk about revolution, it had imposed a complacency on its believers. There had been no need to get involved in politics, because Trump and the Q Team had everything handled behind the scenes. QAnon slogans told supporters that they were “watching a movie” and to “get the popcorn.” They should “trust the plan” and accept that there were “patriots in control.” But the new breed of QAnon leaders made clear at the conference that they wanted more action.

“The only way is the military,” the video stated, over video of spec-ops soldiers, fanning out in a field with their rifles drawn. The crowd of hundreds stood up and applauded. They loved the video’s message: only a fascist takeover of the government could save America.

Ultimately, I think the best solution to conspiracy theories comes from building a government that fulfills its citizens’ basic needs, so people aren’t driven to find comfort in conspiracy theories in the first place.

QAnon believers sometimes have legitimate critiques of how the world runs, but they decide to blame individual people in a cabal for their problems, rather than the entire economic system. Austin Steinbart–follower Michael Khoury, for example, was driven into QAnon after his application for Social Security disability benefits was denied. He came to feel that the government didn’t care if he lived or died. QAnon offered him a way to act on that disappointment.

If people are driven to conspiracy theories because they feel disrespected in their lives, then the solution is to treat all people with more dignity. I believe that anything that broadly improves conditions in the United States, from a universal daycare program to a minimum wage increase, would do more to keep people out of movements like QAnon than any kind of targeted anti-disinformation effort could.

No one may be less protected, though, than the people who are targeted by QAnon. Innocent people find their lives upended because Q becomes fixated on a social media post they made. It’s time for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to take online harassment by conspiracy theorists more seriously.