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

by Will Sommer

My wife, sick of hearing about all of the conservative pundits I spent so many hours tracking, had an idea: maybe I could write about these characters and conspiracy theories for a wider audience, instead of talking about them every night at dinner.

A March 2021 poll of 5,149 adults conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 15 percent of respondents believed the core QAnon belief that the world’s top institutions are run by “Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”

QAnon had adapted to the pandemic and grown its base in the process. But as the pandemic receded, QAnon was returning to its origins and bringing those new recruits along to a darker place. Covid had just been a gateway to the story at the heart of QAnon: violent fantasies of political murder.

Hood always promised to deliver the profits on a specific date a few months in the future, but he never came up with the money. Omega investors could call a hotline where Hood left prerecorded messages with his latest excuse, claiming, for example, that Earth’s magnetism had delayed the financial transfer by interfering with Hood’s satellites. Over the five years Hood ran the hotline, he updated the prerecorded message seventy-two times, always moving the date of the great payoff just a little bit into the future.

Another survey taken in 2011 found that 55 percent of Americans polled believed in at least one conspiracy theory when presented with seven options, ranging from the idea that Jews and oil companies caused the Iraq War to the claim that George Soros is deliberately destabilizing the American government.

Amanda’s grandfather posted a meme on Facebook claiming that Bill Gates was being tried in India for injuries caused by vaccines. But her grandfather didn’t believe the meme, because he had read another post claiming that Gates had already been executed.

In We Believe the Children, a history of the Satanic Panic, author Richard Beck describes an incident that blew up on the McMartin prosecutors. After a boy testifying at a hearing confidently identified several people he claimed to have seen at a Satanic ritual, Buckey’s defense attorney showed the child a picture of another man and asked if he, too, had been at the ceremony. The boy answered without hesitation that the man had participated in the ritual. Buckey’s attorney, triumphant, showed the picture to the rest of the courthouse. It was martial arts star Chuck Norris.

In her focus groups, Longwell found that Republicans she interviewed were increasingly living in what she called a “post-truth nihilism.” They saw reality as a multiple-choice question, where you could select the facts you most preferred. They didn’t bother to investigate whether what they received from Facebook or conservative social media outlets was true. For them, there wasn’t a single truth. Instead, you could choose whatever was most comfortable to believe.

Q believers aren’t swayed by policy white papers—they exist in a fantasy world where children are shipped in Wayfair cabinets and eaten in pizzeria dungeons.