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.

Trump broke into politics by pushing conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, then fueled his campaign with a series of similarly bizarre claims about his fellow Republican opponents. He suggested that Senator Marco Rubio wasn’t eligible to be president and that Senator Ted Cruz’s father helped kill John F. Kennedy. Now Trump was the most powerful man in the world, the conspiracy-theorist-in-chief. His constant promotion of outlandish lies throughout his presidency gave his fans permission to dive headlong into conspiracy theories themselves. If the president really thought Cruz’s father shot JFK, what was off-limits for his followers?

QAnon believers came up with a word for radicalizing new members: red-pilling, like the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves, lost in a dream world, takes the red pill and sees his life as it really is.

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. The U.S. military, which has resisted joining the otherwise all-encompassing cabal, recruited Donald Trump to run for president to oppose this evil group of elitists. And someday soon he’s going to purge all his foes in a violent, cathartic moment called “The Storm,” with his opponents ending up either imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay or executed by military tribunals. All of the world’s problems—and yours—will be solved forever. QAnon’s dream of the Storm persisted even after Trump left office with his purge unfulfilled. Q’s followers brushed off their electoral defeat and the apparent failure of Q’s prophecies. Perhaps the deep state was too hard for Trump to defeat this time. But he could always try again, with help from Q and his supporters.

They described themselves as divine warriors given a task from God to target specific people they saw as devils on the earth: Obama, for example, or billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. The theory and the community that surrounds QAnon has come to encompass many things: sex, religion, politics, terrorism, and even health, as believers encourage

a symptom of the world we live in, a product of unchecked social media platforms, a crumbling education system, rampant political polarization, and the crumbling of offline communities. Q’s followers have responded to modern life by retreating into a violent fantasy that exists parallel to the real world. 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.

Talking to QAnon supporters outside the Capitol on January 6, I was struck by how many of them were convinced the Storm was at hand that very day. But not one had the same idea of what that meant. Perhaps Trump would lead the protesters to the Capitol, bursting into the Senate right as Vice President Mike Pence betrayed the country to the cabal by certifying Biden’s win. Or maybe Pence was on Team QAnon himself, and would oversee the Storm as police arrested the Democratic election-riggers in the chamber.

Online one night, I discovered a story that would change both my life and American politics forever: Pizzagate. I noticed that a minor alt-right figure named “Pizza Party Ben” had blanketed his Twitter feed with videos and pictures from a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, obsessing over its menu and decor. Ben wasn’t alone—all over the right-wing internet, people were posting videos about Comet. The videos weren’t sinister in themselves. Most of them just showed kids eating pizza or playing on the restaurant’s Ping-Pong tables. I had been to Comet Ping Pong, too, and enjoyed it. If these guys also liked the pizzeria, I thought, at least we had that in common.

I sent Ben a message to ask why he was so interested in Comet. He wrote back, saying only that the pizzeria was involved in “many strange coincidences.”

Death threats poured in; amateur Pizzagate detectives began wandering around the restaurant, livestreaming their investigations to viewers eager to get a glimpse into the devil’s den.

Then, in December 2016, a Pizzagate believer, Edgar Maddison Welch, stormed into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle, convinced that he needed to rescue the children being abused in the pizzeria’s basement.

Soon after that, in April 2018, I watched as hundreds of QAnon believers marched in the streets of Washington, demanding an end to the Justice Department’s investigation into the Trump campaign and chanting “Where we go one, we go all.” That march made clear to me that QAnon was, for its believers, about much more than a weird internet rumor.

Q’s predictions about the Storm would soon come true and force the cabal to release a long-hidden cure for cancer. A woman whose child was bullied in school because he was autistic said she wasn’t worried about her son. Soon Trump would make the cabal release their autism cure, too.

Reporting more on QAnon turned me into a target. Leading conspiracy theorists accused me of being a deep-state operative covering up for the pedophile cabal.

This idea born from the internet’s depths had alienated thousands of people from those close to them, destroying friendships and marriages. Whether you knew about QAnon or not, it could affect you—hurting vaccination rates in your town, or convincing a deluded man with a gun that he’s carrying out Q’s orders.

as I watched QAnon grow. What happens when a portion of a country buys into a mass delusion?

alerted by an acquaintance of Strong’s that he was getting deeper into QAnon. Before heading to Washington, Strong hung a Q flag outside his house and purchased a new truck, claiming that the Storm would soon absolve his debt. He told an acquaintance that January 6 would mark the start of World War III.

Georgia resident Rosanne Boyland had been drawn into QAnon during the coronavirus lockdown, telling friends about the cabal and the mole children. A friend later said that Boyland, a recovering drug user, had become “brainwashed” by QAnon after seeing echoes of her own childhood in its claims about crimes against children. Boyland died after a mob of Trump supporters trampled her on their way to attack police.

Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt had come to Washington for what she claimed would mark the Storm. Babbitt had followed QAnon since February 2020, tweeting pictures of herself in a Q shirt and boasting about her skills at red-pilling new converts. Draped in a Trump flag, Babbitt was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to break into the Speaker’s Lobby.

A character named “High Level Insider Anon” told Trump supporters that Clinton used her private email server to sell American secrets to the Chinese government. 4chan users thrilled to the stories of FBIAnon, a supposed FBI insider with confidential dirt on the federal investigation into Clinton.

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.”

Support for QAnon rises among more conservative groups. Twenty-seven percent of white evangelical Christians in the AEI poll, for example, said QAnon’s claims were at least mostly correct.

QAnon is a dark dream about sanctioned violence against political and cultural enemies. It threatens to undermine democracy, laying the groundwork for an authoritarian takeover justified on the grounds that Democrats and other liberals are child-eating pedophiles. How, QAnon believers ask, can we coexist with people like that?

As the rest of the internet became aware of 4chan, so did neo-Nazis, who began flooding into the site after

Donald Trump was a dream candidate for /pol/. In debates, he trolled his debate opponents with taunts as mercilessly as they did to their foes online. Both Trump and /pol/ users had the same concerns, calling Mexican immigrants “rapists” and sharing a sense that the United States needed a strong leader to arrest its decline. They dubbed him the GEOTUS—the “God-Emperor of the United States,” in a nod to an ancient, pitiless galactic dictator from the military strategy game Warhammer 40,000. While /pol/ wasn’t large enough to sway any election with their own votes, its users became an online engine for Trump, pumping out viral meme images to support his campaign.

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.

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?

Reason magazine called the Tampa rally QAnon’s “coming out party.” Liberal late-night talk show host Bill Maher donned a hood and claimed that he was Q, issuing a top-secret directive for followers to stay home on Election Day. NBC News reporter Ben Collins summed up QAnon for baffled newcomers, comparing it to a dangerous drug known to cause psychosis: “Pizzagate on bath salts.”

Campaign staffers struggled to hide an increasingly obvious fact from both cable news cameras and swing voters: a growing swath of Trump rallygoers had become obsessed with adrenochrome, cabals, and the Storm. The campaign was faced with the challenge of separating the QAnon brand from Trump, a problem made even harder by Trump’s curious refusal to come out and say QAnon wasn’t real. Some

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.

Trump brought up QAnon backer Lauren Boebert, who had just pulled off a surprise primary win in a Colorado race for the U.S. House. Boebert, Trump said, believed in “that Q-an-uhn.” “People say they’re into all kinds of bad things and say all kinds of terrible things about them,” Trump told McConnell. “But, you know, my understanding is they basically are just people who want good government.” Stunned White House aides laughed “in terror.”

Until Twitter banned him in January 2021, Trump was the site’s biggest promoter of QAnon accounts, often retweeting Q promoters multiple times a day to tens of millions of his supporters. Just a month after QAnon first appeared on 4chan, Trump retweeted his first Q account, a poster called “MAGAPill.” Trump praised a list MAGAPill had posted of his accomplishments, adding that he wished the “Fake News would report” on the document. But the account was also filled with conspiracy theories, including rumors of “ancient occult magic” at the Vatican and child-sacrifice rituals featuring Hillary Clinton and pop star Lady Gaga. The MAGAPill retweet was just the start. Trump eventually retweeted QAnon supporters at least 315 times between 2017 and 2021, according to liberal watchdog group Media Matters.

Trump himself shifted from quietly signaling to Q believers to defending them in public. After QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene won a primary runoff in Georgia, Trump praised her on Twitter, then all but embraced QAnon supporters as a segment of his base during a White House press conference.

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.

QAnon promoters, like the often-contradictory ideas that coexist within QAnon, come in a sweeping variety of options. Some take basic pro-Trump ideas from Fox News and talk radio and shape them around Q, offering relatively mundane tales of Trump foiled by duplicitous intelligence agencies and federal prosecutors. On the other end of the spectrum, other QAnon promoters allege that the world is controlled by reptilian aliens from another planet.

So much of QAnon is premised on the idea that both Q’s plan and the cabal’s misdeeds are taking place in plain sight, if you only know where to look. A star in the Democratic convention logo? That’s a Satanic pentagram. At the same time, the cabal has grown so arrogant after centuries of power that they feel comfortable celebrating their villainy publicly through coded Instagram posts or notable articles of clothing. Wearing red shoes, for example, is supposedly a telltale sign of being a cannibal-pedophile. As one popular QAnon aphorism goes, “Symbolism will be their downfall.”

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.

Jones was obsessed with the New World Order—the idea that shadowy forces were conspiring to make a single world government and turn ordinary people into serfs. Jones grew to become the country’s leading conspiracy theorist during the Obama administration.

While Jones boosted QAnon on his network, Corsi became InfoWars’ official liaison to the Q faithful. Corsi is one of the fathers of modern American conspiracy theories. He helped demolish John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign by smearing him with a group called “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” a group aimed at undermining Kerry’s reputation for heroism in the Vietnam War. Corsi was also one of the most outspoken promoters of “birtherism,” the idea that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore not eligible to be president.

QAnon believers came to fear the influence of “paytriots”—QAnon slang for false “patriots” who were only interested in their own “pay.” Suddenly, in May 2018, Q addressed the split in a series of 8chan posts, warning believers to not “fall victim to con artists.”

As the sole source for verified Q messages since January 2018, 8chan had become the center of the QAnon universe. But it went down for months starting in August 2019, after a gunman in Texas posted his racist manifesto on the board before murdering twenty-three people in an El Paso Walmart. That shooting followed two other white supremacist massacres, at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and a synagogue in Poway, California, which were also announced beforehand by their perpetrators on 8chan. The Christchurch gunman even posted a link on 8chan to a livestream of the shootings. Brennan felt sick as he watched his brainchild become a stage for some of the world’s most depraved, violent minds.

Ron Watkins backed away from Q after the Capitol riot, when interest in Q’s identity reached a new height. Two weeks after QAnon believers helped breach the Capitol and two QAnon supporters died in the riot, Watkins said, effectively, that the election fraud hunters should respect the transfer of power and “go back to our lives as best we are able.”

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.

Existing QAnon believers figured out on their own how to leverage Facebook to spread their ideas. By 2020, Facebook had thousands of QAnon groups and tens of thousands of believers on its site.

By encouraging content that sparked reactions, Zuckerberg inadvertently made his platform into fertile ground for QAnon. QAnon started on the chans, but it would never have become the force it is without major social platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

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.

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.

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.

In the first days of the pandemic, QAnon users on Twitter spread a rumor that talk show host Oprah Winfrey had been arrested and charged with abusing children. They focused on a supposed bulge in Winfrey’s pants leg during an interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, claiming it was proof that Winfrey was wearing an ankle monitor after being arrested by Q’s allies. Oprah is a witch and was part of a child sex trafficking cult, one Twitter user wrote, in a typical post about Winfrey. The claims against Winfrey were ridiculous. But QAnon users were able to use their presence on Twitter to turn the allegations against Winfrey into the top trending topic, introducing the idea of Satanist Oprah to unsuspecting Twitter users. Winfrey even responded herself, tweeting that her mansion had not been raided and that the pedophilia claims were NOT TRUE.