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

by Will Sommer

As it turned out, Q’s disappearance wasn’t all that disruptive to the movement he’d made. Even before Q stopped posting, QAnon believers started to lay the groundwork for him to vanish. Having a single leader posed too many problems. If he was discovered to be a weirdo sitting in a basement somewhere, they’d be embarrassed. Worse, if Q came out and revealed that he had run the entire movement to troll gullible Trump supporters, QAnon would be discredited entirely. Instead, as the years passed and the Storm failed to arrive, QAnon leaders and followers started to distance themselves from the original narrative about Q’s identity. Perhaps Q wasn’t really a high-level intelligence official, the thinking went. Maybe his predictions didn’t come true. But what was important was what he taught us about how the world works. They ditched the embarrassing QAnon story line about the Storm and predictions that never materialized, but kept all the talk about the cabal, deep-state corruption, and mole children. They created QAnon without Q.