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

by Will Sommer

Once it became clear that QAnon believers were welcome in the Republican Party, it was only natural that they would start running for office themselves. I had been covering QAnon for almost a year in December 2018 when I started to see the first signs that, incredibly, QAnon believers were gaining a foothold in politics. By then, QAnon supporters regularly flooded into Trump rallies, and a QAnon promoter had posed for a picture with Trump in the Oval Office. But the idea of a QAnon believer wielding real governmental power was still hard to imagine. That changed with Pamela Patterson, a city council member in the small California town of San Juan Capistrano who became the first visible QAnon believer in an elected position. After losing her reelection bid in 2018, Patterson devoted her goodbye speech at a town council meeting to her love for Q. She read out a Q clue during the meeting and closed with a flatly pro-QAnon message. “God bless America,” she said. “God bless Q.”