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

by Will Sommer

France has a militant QAnon network far more organized than anything seen in the United States. It soon became clear that French QAnon’s ambitions went far beyond a family court dispute. Searching one of the alleged kidnapper’s houses, investigators discovered chemicals that could be used to make explosives.

Daillet’s group allegedly intended to overthrow the French government—or, as members put it in QAnon terms, stop the “Satanist, pedocriminal elite.” As of this writing, Daillet faced criminal charges over the kidnapping plot and an alleged terrorist plan to attack vaccination sites.

The conference’s speakers covered a range of topics, from the evils of vaccines to the importance of battling Satanic “Luciferians” in your everyday life. Shirts that said “Save the Kids” on the front and “What Are the Tunnels?” on the back were especially popular with the attendees. But there was one overarching message: QAnon followers were no longer content to follow Q. Now that he had gone silent, they were stepping up to carry his message into the real world on their own.

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.

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.

While some believers reacted to their disappointment with Q’s failed predictions by abandoning the group, others burrowed deeper into hate. Those new variations on QAnon were even uglier than the ones that had come before. A Telegram account under the name “GhostEzra,” posing as a former Trump administration official, introduced Q believers to virulently anti-Semitic memes. GhostEzra became one of the most influential QAnon accounts on Telegram, recruiting QAnon believers into a more viciously anti-Semitic version of the core conspiracy theory.

Worst of all, the idea of a deep-state cabal that operates with impunity has become ingrained in the Republican Party’s mindset. Senate Republicans fought Biden’s nomination of Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson by accusing her of being pro-pedophile—a ludicrous charge that’s impossible to imagine being deployed pre-QAnon. Even conservative voters who laugh at believers’ excesses have bought into the idea that the 2020 election was stolen by a cabal whose crimes are always just on the verge of being exposed. A year after the Capitol riot, an NPR poll found that two-thirds of Republicans still believe Biden stole the election from Trump. If Republicans think elections aren’t legitimate, then it’s more likely that they’ll support any measure to take power. American democracy will enter a death spiral.

Many Democrats also believe conspiracy theories or aspects of the “terrible thing that happened that may one day be undone,

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. Throughout my reporting, it became clear to me how many people found QAnon because they felt marginalized. While QAnon is a conservative movement, the post-Storm world it promises is far to the left of anything that Bernie Sanders could imagine: the destruction of major pharmaceutical companies, the cancellation of all personal debt, and renters inheriting the property they live in, among other things. 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.

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. Of course, waiting for single-payer health care in the United States is about as quixotic as hoping for the Storm.

It’s time for law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, to take online harassment by conspiracy theorists more seriously.

Most of all, I want people in power to seriously consider the threat posed by new conspiracy theories before they reach this point. For too long, QAnon was brushed aside by politicians and too many in the media as an internet curiosity that didn’t pose a serious threat—right up until its believers tried to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021.

My reporting is indebted to the work of other people who covered this beat from the beginning, including Mike Rothschild, Jared Holt, Brandy Zadrozny, Ben Collins, and Paris Martineau.

The hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast—Travis View, Julian Feeld, and Jake Rockatansky—have also done excellent work on the world of Q.

Cullen Hoback’s HBO documentary, Q: Into the Storm, broke new ground on Q...

This book is only possible because of the encouragement from readers and listeners who have supported my reporting: first the subscribers to my newsletter, Right Richter, and then on Fever Dreams.