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

by Will Sommer

As Borgerding told me, nefarious forces led by the most powerful people in the world—titans of Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and big business—had forced these children to live in thousands of miles of underground tunnels. Hidden out of sight, these “mole children” are terrorized by pedophiles until their bodies produce adrenochrome, a highly coveted liquid that celebrities and the world’s richest financiers drink to stay young. Now Trump and the military were using the global Covid-19 pandemic as a cover to rescue the children. The Navy hospital ships deployed to respond to the virus were secretly treating the rescued mole children. For that matter, most earthquakes aren’t even earthquakes—they are seismic events created when the Army demolishes the pedophile lairs underground.

As the death threats started to arrive in my inbox, it was hard to ignore the fate of other people who had angered QAnon fans. A QAnon believer murdered a New York Mafia boss, part of a botched attempt to bring him to a mythical tribunal. Another QAnon supporter murdered his own brother, convinced by theories, fringe even within QAnon, that his brother was a lizard-person.

Carol wasn’t a real person. She was the creation of Facebook employees testing how the site’s algorithm would nudge a woman fitting Carol’s profile—a conservative southern mother—toward conspiracy theories and disinformation. By populating the Carol account with “likes” for only mainstream conservative figures, they were able to see how the site’s algorithms encouraged users to check out QAnon and other conspiracy and fringe theories even when they had shown no interest in them in the first place.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a report on the Carol experiment in 2021 as part of a huge cache of internal documents she had taken from the company. Haugen’s leaks revealed that Facebook had known for years about its role in fueling the movement’s growth. The leak revealed that Facebook, far from being a neutral platform, had accidentally turned itself into a major QAnon recruiter in its quest for more users and activity.

The Reddit crackdown scattered QAnon’s growing online community, leaving new recruits scared or otherwise unable to post on 8chan with nowhere to go. But Anons soon found their way to sites that had both more potential recruits and more complacent executives. Social media platforms offer some obvious benefits for anyone looking to spread a conspiracy theory. Before the internet, a lone crank pushing strange ideas might have struggled to find allies in his neighborhood, or even his town. But on social media, conspiracy theorists can search the world for people who agree with them.

The Facebook employees behind the Carol test account weren’t the only people noticing how the site’s algorithm was helping to grow QAnon. In 2015, Stanford University disinformation researcher Renée DiResta set up a dummy Facebook account of her own to track antivaccine groups. Facebook’s recommendations initially pushed her account to conspiracy theories like “chemtrails,” the idea that planes spray mind control chemicals from the air. The algorithm also introduced her to a world of quack medical cures like colloidal silver, which turns users’ skin permanently blue. 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.

Facebook’s recommendation engine relied on a user’s previously expressed interests on the site, setting up a conspiracy theory rabbit hole for users to explore. Express interest once in anything conservative or pro-Trump, and you had a goo...

Facebook took QAnon to membership levels it never would have reached if it had remained on a far smaller site like 8chan. Unlike Facebook, 8chan lacks the kind of hyper-engineered algorithm aimed at ensuring that users stay logged in and posting. When Facebook finally banned QAnon in October 2020, the movement was widespread enough on the site that cleaning up QAnon meant deleting more than 5,600 groups and 50,000 Facebook profiles.

As QAnon established its recruiting methods on YouTube and Facebook, Twitter became the place where QAnon went to inflict pain on the outside world. In Twitter’s information free-for-all, QAnon believers were able to blend in and push their ideas. Some pro-Q figures amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on the site, decoding Q’s posts and connecting current events to their vision of the world. Because of the size of the QAnon community on Twitter, its accounts could easily dominate the site’s “Trending” page, putting QAnon hashtags in front of millions of people. People working in politics or media also love using Twitter, meaning that the site was an easy way for QAnon users to reach them. After an apparently oblivious Fox News host on the Fox & Friends morning show read a tweet from a major Q account on-air to show that Trump’s latest executive order was a hit with the public, believers rejoiced at their newfound respectability, declaring, “We are the news now.”

Save the Children overlapped with the rise of other new QAnon brands on social media. There was “Pastel QAnon,” so named because of its style of QAnon promotion: images couched in a soft Instagram aesthetic filled with friendly colors and cursive fonts. There was also “QAmom,” named after its appeal to mothers concerned about children’s welfare. All three trends represented a change for QAnon. It had managed to morph on social media from the bloodthirsty Punisher-skull image of its first months into something less intimidating.

The fear and anger that surround pandemics have always made fertile ground for conspiracy theories. In medieval Europe, fear of the Black Death inspired widespread violence against Jews, who were blamed for propagating the disease. Mass pogroms during the plague exterminated more than one thousand Jewish communities across Europe, while judges ruled that Jews had spread the disease by poisoning wells. During cholera outbreaks in the 1830s, rumors spread that doctors and other government agents were spreading the disease to cull the number of poor people reliant on welfare programs. In Russia, mobs broke into cholera hospitals to attack medical staff, while rioters in Great Britain targeted doctors over rumors that cholera patients were being murdered so their bodies could be sold to medical schools.

QAnon social media campaigns also sent believers scrambling to their local hospitals—but not to help anyone. In April 2020, less than a month after the shared trauma of Covid’s emergence seemed to galvanize and unite most people around the world in support of its victims, Anons began urging one another to #FilmYourHospital. Armed with their smartphones and under the impression that the pandemic was either overblown or entirely fake, they filmed empty hospital lobbies and parking lots. At least one Film Your Hospital ringleader even bypassed security in a hospital to storm a coronavirus ward to prove the virus wasn’t so deadly. If the situation was so serious, Film Your Hospital proponents asked, where were all the patients? The empty parking garages could, of course, be explained by the fact that hospitals banned visitors and canceled most non-Covid-related procedures to avoid spreading the disease. But the videos became more grist for the QAnon content mill.

In May 2020, a well-produced video called “Plandemic” rocketed across Facebook, receiving eight million views in a week. The video starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a scientist with a history of making bizarre claims. Her reputation as a researcher had been badly damaged in 2011 by a controversy over a paper she wrote positing that chronic fatigue syndrome was caused by a virus. Mikovits’s paper on the mysterious illness had initially seemed to be a breakthrough, but the journal that published it retracted her findings after other labs failed to replicate them. Rather than grappling with the failure, Mikovits turned her back on the mainstream scientific community entirely. When Covid started, she began alleging that Fauci had concocted high-level plots against her.

Most doctors refused to prescribe either drug for Covid-19, citing their unproven effects. The physicians who were willing to write scripts to anxious believers seized on that opening—for a price. Some doctors promoting ivermectin united in a group called America’s Frontline Doctors, which they used to promote the drug as a Covid treatment. They also charged roughly $100 for an online consultation. Online, patients complained the group directed them to pharmacies that overcharged them by hundreds of dollars.

The appeal of the belief that unseen, malevolent forces control the world isn’t restricted by racial, gender, or class boundaries. Blaming personal failings on the misdeeds of an unseen cabal has an obvious emotional appeal, relieving a person of taking responsibility for their own problems. It’s also a simple way to explain a complex world. Rather than accept that random, chaotic, deadly events can happen out of nowhere, the believer can simplify the world by blaming tragic events on a conspiracy.

There’s no one factor that makes someone believe in conspiracy theories. But after talking to QAnon believers for years, I’ve started to notice some commonalities that go beyond politics. They often seem angry about the state of the world and their place in it. Conversely, they get a special pleasure in the knowledge they think Q has shared with them, reveling in the secrets that set them apart from the average person. As one believer put it to me with a smile, they know the news before everyone else. In a confusing world, a conspiracy theory like QAnon gives people something to put their faith in.

“Many of them are perfectly normal,” Barkun said of conspiracy theorists. “It would be nice to say, ‘Well, they’re all crazy people,’ but they’re not.”

NESARA and QAnon both fall into a category of political or religious movement called millenarianism: the belief that a utopian world is right around the corner. Millenarian movements get their name from early Christians, who thought the world would change with Jesus’s return at the millennium. More recently, scholars classify millenarian movements as groups that believe the world will experience a final epochal change that brings in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. Often, the only people who will benefit from this new world are those who believed beforehand that it would happen. They can be religious or secular. Soviet communism, Nazism, and Islamic terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS have all been described as millenarian movements.

When conspiracy theories fail to come true, supporters are faced with a choice: admit they were wrong and deal with the humiliation, or commit to their beliefs even further.

QAnon’s focus on the concept of “Satanic ritual abuse” can seem absurd, but it is not unprecedented. The movement’s fixations on child-trafficking and occult abuses are built on the ruins of an earlier hysteria: the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, when the fear that otherwise normal professionals around the country may be abusing children in Satanic rituals suddenly became an urgent issue. Both QAnon and the Satanic Panic demonstrate how adults who often have the best intentions can lose all sense of what is real when faced with grotesque stories about children being abused by devil-worshipping cults.

The Satanic Panic lives on today in QAnon, down to specific imagery used in both cases. Planes became a key part of the Satanic Panic hysteria after several children in unrelated cases claimed that they were taken by plane to the rituals. Today, QAnon believers analyze publicly available flight trackers to find child-smuggling planes, or study flight logs that they claim prove Chief Justice John Roberts flew to an island owned by Jeffrey Epstein.

Holmseth’s obsession with Picazio lasted for nearly ten years, but he didn’t appear to have convinced anyone else to join his crusade against her. Holmseth could rage about the lawyer on Twitter, but he had fewer than twenty followers. Then QAnon began, and Timothy Holmseth went from a crank with a blog to a heroic whistleblower fighting the cabal.

For QAnon believers like Holmseth, the imagined cabal’s activities are in the pursuit of something more concrete than just worshipping the devil. They want a mysterious substance called adrenochrome. To the most radicalized QAnon believers, this elusive substance can only be found in the brains of children who have been sexually tortured in Satanic rituals and is highly sought after for its energizing qualities.

Adrenochrome is a real substance, created in the body when adrenaline is oxidized. In the 1960s, researchers speculated that it could be somehow linked to the appearance of schizophrenia. But adrenochrome’s place in QAnon lore appears to truly derive from its unearned position in counterculture fiction as the ultimate psychedelic, a stand-in for a mythical illicit substance described in books like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

In reality, adrenochrome is an uninteresting chemical substance. On drug experience forums, people who are inspired to try the drug complain about headaches, and say they generally had a boring experience. Terry Gilliam, who directed the Fear and Loathing movie, has said that Thompson explained to him that he had invented adrenochrome’s powers.

The cabal wouldn’t need to create a global harvesting network to get their hands on adrenochrome. Since it relies on the simple process of oxidizing adrenaline, anyone with an adrenaline-filled EpiPen meant to fight allergic reactions could expose the adrenaline to oxygen to create the drug.

QAnon’s adrenochrome obsession also highlights the anti-Semitic beliefs at the movement’s center. The idea that elites—and powerful Jewish people—are torturing children to use their substances in Satanic ceremonies is a direct echo of “blood libel,” the idea that Jews use Christian children’s blood for rituals, which dates to the Middle Ages

In 1144, the body of a twelve-year-old boy named William was discovered outside the English town of Norwich. While William’s killer was never found, his death took on an enormous importance in the area after a monk wrote an investigation of William’s death that claimed he had been killed by local Jews for his blood, which they needed for an annual ritual.

The monk’s account of William’s murder inspired claims that Jews were behind more child murders. The allegation that Jews were killing children for their blood spread across Europe, inspiring pogroms and violence against Je...

QAnon apostates almost never leave the movement because of treatment from a therapist or psychiatrist, according to Pierre. Instead, people who walk away from QAnon often describe experiencing a personal “disillusionment” with the cause that had nothing to do with the efforts of loved ones or mental health professionals. It can be as simple as personal fights with other believers, losing faith in a once-beloved QAnon leader, or stumbling upon a debunking video that somehow pierces their reality-denying defenses.

One thing experts who have studied QAnon exit methods almost all agree on is that the most obvious and temporarily satisfying option—a full-frontal debunking assault—is also the worst. Reacting to a QAnon believer’s claims with anger, ridicule, and insults about tin-foil hats will only cause them to shut down or sever the relationship. Many QAnon believers are drawn to the conspiracy theory because they feel marginalized or disrespected, according to Dannagal Young, a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware who researches what drives people to believe in misinformation. Mocking QAnon to them only demonstrates further that they’re not valued in their real-life community. Because their beliefs in QAnon aren’t driven at their heart by a desire to truly understand the world, trying to dissuade a believer with facts might not work.