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

by Will Sommer

The polling shows that QAnon believers don’t always look like the wild-eyed mob at the Capitol. They could have a conversation with you about the weather, then casually mention that the government controls that weather. They could be parents at your children’s school, fellow customers in the grocery store, or politicians—all of them divorced from reality by a conspiracy theory that began with a few much-mocked posts on 4chan.

... or they could be your wacky neighbors, if you live in a predominantly red county. ugh.

For Q believers, it was the kind of providential acknowledgment they had been waiting for since QAnon began two years earlier. “Q Baby” started trending on Twitter, mentioned more than 38,000 times. For some, Trump pointing at the baby became a moment of near-religious gratification. His gesture meant there was no more “plausible deniability” that QAnon was real, one blogger wrote. The Q Baby is a symbol of Good prevailing over Evil, a Q fan tweeted. The baby represents the dawn of a new era. Never mind that Trump couldn’t have seen the Q marked on the back of the baby’s shirt.

For Kinzinger, the model for confronting his party’s fringes came from late Republican senator John McCain. During his 2008 presidential run, a woman at a campaign town hall told McCain she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Rather than ignoring her remark, McCain grabbed the microphone and corrected her. Obama, he said, was a “decent family man.”