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

by Will Sommer

At its heart, QAnon has a simple message: the world is run by a cabal of Satanic cannibal-pedophiles from the ranks of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and global finance who sexually abuse children and even drink their blood in rituals.

QAnon isn’t a one-time phenomenon. Instead, it’s just the start of the all-consuming conspiracy theory movements to come. Unless something changes, QAnon is a glimpse into our future.

The project grew out of my unusual passion for consuming huge amounts of right-wing media. I was raised in a conservative Texas family, where road trips meant listening to Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show and Ayn Rand audiobooks. I cried over Ronald Reagan’s funeral, and pored over a Bill O’Reilly book for teenagers for advice on how to handle dilemmas like smoking and premarital sex. But even after I left the party behind, I nursed a perverse appetite for Republican media personalities and the ideological struggles of the American right. For years, I spent my time at local news jobs slacking off by reading conservative columnists and blogs, tracking the outlandish personalities who were fighting for control of the conservative movement during the Obama administration.

But as Q ramped up his posting, releasing as many as thirty new messages a day, Furber began to reconsider. He noticed a string of what QAnon followers call “Q proofs”—irrefutable evidence that both Q and his ideas are legitimate. Those proofs gave Q credibility among 4chan users in a way that the whistleblowers that preceded him failed to do. Some of those earlier leakers talked about UFOs and eternal life, ideas that were hard to take seriously. But Q’s clues, at least initially, seemed to be grounded in some sort of reality.

First Q said something cryptic about power players making moves in Saudi Arabia. Then the Saudi monarchy really was convulsed by an internal purge two days later. Q posted a picture from an airplane window that 4chan users became convinced could only have been taken from Air Force One, suggesting that Q was a Trump insider posting on the president’s behalf. The skeptics started to come around on Q. There were fewer insults directed at Q on the board, replaced by requests for users to work together to research his claims.

QAnon has a unique ability to recruit people who have never considered themselves conspiracy theorists before. Pulling people in through the journey to understand the QAnon clues, it creates a community where people radicalize one another—or as Q has put it, to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. It comes with an entire religious and political agenda, a call for a world cleansed of everyone standing in the way of Trump and his supporters.

By the time Q first appeared on the forum on October 28, 2017, Trump had failed to deliver on his /pol/ supporters’ hopes. Construction had not begun on the border wall, and Mexico wasn’t paying for it. Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been investigating ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia for five months. Worst of all, Hillary Clinton was still not in jail. Q’s posts offered Trump’s fans an explanation for all the president’s woes. The issue was that the world’s problems were far worse than they had even imagined. Forget bringing jobs back from China or repealing ObamaCare—this was a life-or-death battle with Trump and his supporters on one side and decadent elites who drank children’s blood on the other. The wall would have to wait.

Three weeks before Q first appeared on 4chan, Trump summoned reporters to a surprise press event in the White House, where he posed for a picture with military leaders. “You guys know what this represents?” Trump asked reporters. “Maybe it’s the calm before the storm.” “What’s the storm?” one journalist said. “Could be the calm before the storm,” Trump repeated.

QAnon emerged in 2017 as a coping mechanism for Trump voters troubled by his stalled presidency. It was a fairy tale for people wondering why Trump hadn’t fulfilled his promises, recasting the struggling president as a hero of biblical proportions. But QAnon is also incredibly weird, and, to anyone outside of its influence, clearly delusional. That put Trump and his retainers in a bind as QAnon grew: How could they avoid alienating Q supporters and costing Trump votes in the process, while also making sure Trump didn’t become known more broadly as the QAnon candidate? As long as Q’s message was restricted to the internet, the Trump administration could avoid confronting that inconsistency. But there was one place where that contradiction couldn’t be avoided: a Trump rally.

For Republican officials, maintaining a polite distance from Q had some benefits. It meant they wouldn’t come off like lunatics to voters not already soaked in 4chan mind games. But it also meant that Q supporters wouldn’t be antagonized, either.

For Anons, Trump is a figure of messianic proportions, sent to destroy the pedophile cabal, usher in a thousand-year peace, cure diseases, and absolve their debts. To mark his primacy in their canon, they call him “Q+”—an even bigger deal than Q. So what does Donald Trump actually think of QAnon? For anyone else, the prospect of leading a global cult premised on lurid tales of sex and violence would seem overwhelming. But Trump seems to treat belief in QAnon like membership in a patriotic Trump fan club, no more outlandish than someone who rides in a Trump boat parade or owns MAGA hats in both their red and camouflage varieties. There isn’t much evidence about what Trump thinks privately about QAnon.

Backing QAnon after so long offered another benefit for Trump, aside from the votes of Q supporters: it satisfied his ego. In his simplistic view of the world, in which everything broke down as either pro- or anti-Trump, the president seemed to see QAnon as essentially a die-hard Trump fan club. They liked him, so they must be good.

Canadian extremism and religion expert Amarnath Amarasingam,

Few people actually appear to have been drawn into QAnon directly through Q posts on the chans. When I interview believers, they’ll name a YouTube channel they watch, or a hoax-riddled website that first drew them in. If QAnon is a house, Q just laid the foundation—the QAnon promoters built the structure.

“QAnon’s like, ‘Here’s a bunch of incomprehensible things, you guys do what you want with it,’ which is unheard-of for a movement like this,” Amarasingam told me. Promoters amount to a “priestly class” in QAnon’s hierarchy, interpreting the Q clues for believers like clergy for a congregation, Amarasingam said.

QAnon believers looking for JFK Jr. settled on Vincent Fusca, a then-little-known Trump fan.

Of all the maddening, incomprehensible things I’ve encountered in QAnon, Fusca might be the thing that drives me craziest.

It’s clear to me that Fusca doesn’t believe he’s actually JFK Jr., even though he’s never acknowledged that people think he’s Kennedy. But his position of power means that he can make QAnon real with just his presence, and his silence. It’s too disturbing, even for QAnon believers, to imagine a man letting people think he is JFK Jr. just because he enjoys taking selfies with his fans. The only solution has to be that Fusca really is JFK Jr.

The QAnon obsession with the Kennedys seems to play on believers’ longing for a lost golden age—the same halcyon period the cabal took from all of us. For older Q supporters, the John F. Kennedy assassination marked the most traumatic national event of their childhoods. The idea that Kennedy was murdered by the cabal gives his death meaning, and a way to set things right by embracing Q. In their eyes, JFK Jr.’s own tragic demise is redeemed if he instead faked his death to avenge his father and one day team up with Trump.

Few people have done more to lay the groundwork for QAnon than Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist turned mogul who was ranting about cabals decades before Q. As QAnon grew in its first months, an encounter with Jones was inevitable, setting the stage for a showdown that pit old-style conspiracy theorists against a new generation.

A partnership between InfoWars and QAnon would benefit both sides. For Jones and Corsi, it meant latching on to an energetic movement that generated fresh content for their broadcasts. For QAnon, InfoWars represented a direct pipeline to an enormous audience of the conspiratorially minded. But that initial partnership between Jones and Q would soon turn sour as they fought for control of QAnon.

As InfoWars began to co-opt Q, with Corsi as Jones’s chosen Q interpreter, the earlier QAnon promoters feared they would be displaced by their more established rivals.

Q’s attack on Jones and Corsi pitted the upstart Q and the little-known internet personalities spreading his message against two of the grandfathers of internet conspiracy theories. Surprisingly, Q more or less won. QAnon continued to grow, while QAnon believers who had once supported Jones now saw him as an agent of the deep state. After being exiled from QAnon, Jones started to attack it.

users attempted to radicalize one another into extremist ideologies with “redpills.” They would show each other a depressing, often skewed statistic—say, the long odds millennials faced to buy a house or figures purporting to show that the deck was stacked against white men. The posts were meant to make people angry, and they worked on Cornero.

For many QAnon believers, though, Q’s identity doesn’t matter. For years, they had been laying the groundwork to move on without Q. Supporters already had dozens of QAnon influencers to direct the movement, and plenty of forums beyond 8chan to discuss the clues. But most important, they had decided that QAnon was less about Q, and more about the beliefs Q and his followers had created together: their shared understanding of a world controlled by a Satanic pedophile cabal that could only be vanquished violently by Donald Trump.

As DiResta tracked where the groups overlapped, she noticed that joining one conspiracy theory group meant Facebook would prompt her account to join a group devoted to an unrelated, but equally false, belief. Facebook was pushing the conspiracy theory communities together, setting the stage for a superconspiracy like QAnon to take them all over. Right as QAnon started to infiltrate Facebook’s network in 2018, DiResta noticed prompts urging her dummy account to join QAnon groups. But the Facebook algorithm wasn’t just promoting QAnon to her antivaccine test account. It was also pushing people interested in other fringe movements toward Q. Facebook’s algorithm had turned into a massive funnel pulling people from unrelated conspiracy theory communities around the site into QAnon. Facebook’s QAnon groups turned into radicalization swap meets where antivaccine activists could trade extreme ideas with militia members and flat-earthers.

QAnon’s Twitter conspiracy theory machine became so powerful that it didn’t need Q himself to operate anymore. The movement had brought together enough freelance conspiracy theorists and given them enough social media clout that they could self-generate conspiracy theories on their own. The QAnon mob’s ability to grow mostly undisturbed by administrators on Twitter helped create a conspiracy theory that spread far beyond QAnon: the Wayfair sex-trafficking plot.

New Save the Children believers might believe in the cannibal-pedophile cabal, but many were also still liberals. Save the Children activists in Portland, Oregon, for example, paired a “Hang pedophiles” sign with an obscene sign attacking U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, infuriating QAnon’s conservative old guard.

Between March and July 2020, QAnon activity grew significantly on social media, rising by more than 77 percent on Instagram, 63 percent on Twitter, and 175 percent on Facebook, according to a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British think tank.

Stories like Omega or Q involve a huge number of people waiting for a world-changing moment that would never happen. When their predictions fail to come true, though, they commit to their beliefs even more, stunning people outside the movement who could see that they had been fooled. The question of why people believe conspiracy theories, even hurting their own interests in the process, has become a pressing one in a time where conspiracy theorists commit violence, destroy family relationships, and encourage one another to refuse vaccines.

when Syracuse University religion professor Michael Barkun became interested in conspiracy theories in the 1980s,

Historian Richard Hofstadter’s landmark 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which focused on decades of feverish anticommunism and conservative Barry Goldwater’s doomed presidential campaign, created the modern American field of conspiracy theory study.

Some budding conspiracy theory scholars had begun to feel that one of Hofstadter’s central claims—that conspiracy theories were an aberration in American politics, embraced only by the fringes—had stalled research in their nascent field. Contrary to what Hofstadter wrote, his critics said, conspiracy theories have been a powerful force in American politics and culture since before the country’s founding, all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials.

Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami professor who has been at the forefront of research on QAnon, summed up conspiracy theories in 2014 with a colleague as “an explanation of historical, ongoing, or future events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good.” Another academic definition holds that a conspiracy theory is “a text that falsely accuses a group of individuals of orchestrating a plot that has harmed or will harm society.”

Barkun writes, “Nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.”

QAnon is the latest American example of one of the most enduring kinds of conspiracy theory: a “superconspiracy,” a conspiracy theory that explains dozens of lesser conspiracy theories by blaming all of the events on what Barkun calls a “distant but all-powerful evil force.”

But even after Hood admitted that Omega was a rip-off, calling it a “scam” while testifying against one of his underlings, Omegans continued to believe. Hood, they thought, was being pressured by prosecutors to say Omega was a con.

Notably, considering her own five-figure tax debts, Goodwin said NESARA would also abolish income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service.

These days, NESARA, now often called GESARA—the “national” has been replaced by “global”—has become a key part of QAnon lore. As early Q believers tried to puzzle out the clues, conspiracy theorists who already believed in NESARA claimed Q was talking about their law. NESARA offers something personal for QAnon believers waiting for the Storm: a world without debts or disease. QAnon followers write “NESARA/GESARA” on their signs and tell one another about the perfect world that awaits them.

It was only after Miller’s second date for the Second Coming failed to materialize that Miller’s movement fractured in a moment that came to be called the Great Disappointment.

QAnon can seem focused on the present, with followers litigating the meaning of 8chan posts or Trump’s hand gestures. But its goal is a utopian one: the post-cabal world that follows the hyperviolent Storm, often with a NESARA-style economic utopia attached. Those hopes for their own personal betterment, with debts and diseases abolished, mean there’s more on the line for believers than who controls the White House. They think this affects the most important parts of their lives: their children, their finances, their health. This is personal for them.

Will there be a Great Disappointment for followers of QAnon?

QAnon is unmatched among modern American conspiracy theories in its ability to inspire violence. As of September 2021, 101 QAnon followers had been inspired to commit crime by their beliefs, a list that includes 61 defendants from the Capitol riot, according to data compiled by University of Maryland researchers. No other conspiracy theory, from 9/11 trutherism to birtherism, gets even close to inspiring that level of violence. Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate at Montreal’s Concordia University studying extremism, told me QAnon stands out among conspiracy theories in its ability to inspire violence. Argentino attributes that in part to the ubiquity QAnon achieved on social media, giving it a permanent online presence that makes it feel more pervasive in a way that earlier conspiracy theories didn’t. As a result, it has more of an influence on its followers’ minds.

There are books and news articles offering tips for “blue-pilling” loved ones out of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, nearly all of them premised on maintaining a civil relationship with the QAnon believer and avoiding confrontation or trying to debunk their beliefs. In time, the theory goes, the QAnon supporter will come out of the conspiracy theory on their own, and reach out for help in leaving QAnon. That passive strategy for dealing with QAnon radicalization may be the best approach. It’s also nearly impossible. It asks the family members of QAnon believers to shoulder an enormous burden, acting as a psychologist, epidemiologist, historian, debater, and social worker—all while having the mammoth amounts of patience required to put up with feverish ravings and verbal abuse.

Finding QAnon’s proliferation in his community “bizarre,” Heffernan researched how to bring people out of QAnon. He came to believe that many people were drawn into QAnon because of a lack of social connections in their real world, leaving them hunting for community online instead. To come out of it, they would need to see that social connection they were looking for outside of QAnon. Like other experts, Heffernan agrees that the best option is being emotionally available for a QAnon supporter when they reach that epiphany on their own.

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, one of the country’s leading cult researchers, has three criteria he uses for any group to be considered a cult: a “charismatic leader,” methods of “thought reform” aimed at changing how followers think in ways that keep them in the cult, and the “considerable exploitation” of followers.

While most cult leaders exploit their followers for money and sex, it still wasn’t clear what Q was getting out of fueling QAnon, cult expert Rick Ross told me. Whatever Q got out of creating QAnon—some political advantage or a sick amusement from stirring up strife—his goal wasn’t typical of a leader. “The idea that a cult leader would be anonymous and not appear and have no ability to be seen and adored—that goes contrary to what most cult leaders are like,” Ross said.

Analysts tracking QAnon think Germany has roughly 200,000 QAnon devotees active in online groups, making it the largest non-English QAnon community.

Miro Dittrich, a German researcher who tracks the far right in his country, watched in the first weeks of the pandemic as the marginal QAnon accounts he followed exploded in followers. One Telegram account he followed quadrupled in size in just a month, going from 20,000 followers to 80,000 followers, echoing similar lockdown-driven booms experienced by American QAnon promoters. Many of the German users seized on QAnon’s anti-Semitic themes, filling the newly popular groups with posts and memes attacking Jews.

In Germany, QAnon was embraced by adherents of the Reichsbürger, or “Reich’s Citizen,” a movement akin to American antigovernment sovereign citizens. Just like sovereign citizens in the United States, Reichsbürger members refuse to recognize laws they disagree with, avoid paying taxes, stockpile weapons, and engage in occasional violent clashes with the police. And, like American sovereign citizens, many of them have gotten deeply into QAnon. Reichsbürger members claim that the German government set up after World War II is a fiction, and that Germany is still under occupation by Allied forces. The real German government, they believe, is the German Reich that existed until 1945. They describe themselves as “citizens of the Reich” and give their allegiance to various crackpots who lead supposed Reich “governments in exile.” For Reichsbürger adherents, QAnon offers a vision for a final utopian moment that would end the Allied occupation.

After Q went silent, QAnon believers look to anyone aggressive or crazed enough to seize the mantle of leadership,