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

by Will Sommer

In June 2020, a prominent QAnon leader who went by the name “The Amazing Polly” tweeted that she was suspicious of the online furniture retailer Wayfair. She noted that some cabinets on Wayfair were being sold at astronomical prices, roughly $15,000 each. The cabinets were often sold under female brand names like “Yaritza” or “Samiyah.” My spidey senses are tingling, she wrote. What’s with these “storage cabinets”? Extremely high prices, all listed with girls’ names. The Amazing Polly didn’t spell out her exact concerns, but other QAnon supporters stepped in to puzzle out the connection between the furniture names and their absurd prices. The conspiracy theory they created held that the furniture model names represented real children who had been abducted.

Before QAnon’s explosion on social media, the average Q believer looked a lot like a Trump voter. They were more likely to be evangelical Christians, white, and older. They wore plenty of Trump red.

Save the Children’s origins began earlier that summer, when Facebook started deleting some QAnon content. To avoid the ban, believers organized around a hashtag used by Save the Children Fund, a child welfare charity founded in 1919. By operating under Save the Children’s name, they figured, they could dodge Facebook’s rules. But “Save the Children” came to encompass more than just a way to hide from Facebook’s moderators. Instead, it became a rallying cry for a social media–centric trend that embraced QAnon’s tenets about widespread Satanist abuse of children but had nothing to do with the Q drops or orthodox QAnon. Save the Children played on old QAnon tropes, but it arrived at a time of especially high interest in child sex-trafficking. The suspicious 2019 jailhouse death of wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, officially a suicide by hanging, prompted new public interest in the idea of powerful elites abusing children. That created an opening for a kind of QAnon that reached beyond its usual base of Trump supporters.

Save the Children demonstrated QAnon’s ability to shapeshift online into different communities, hijacking them under the idea of protecting children. Starting in 2017, QAnon had worked mostly on Trump supporters. But by 2020, QAnon was able to exploit a new kind of person’s suspicions about world elites and the abuse of children. Thanks to social media, QAnon’s ability to grow was no longer restricted to Trump and the Republican Party.

The final crackdown came after the Capitol riot. In its aftermath, Twitter and Facebook announced that they had deleted thousands more QAnon accounts on their sites. The social media platforms had finally acted against QAnon. But by then, it was too late. The tech giants had allowed QAnon to proliferate on their sites at the most crucial moment of the movement’s growth: the coronavirus pandemic. Chapter

QAnon believers soon came to see Hanks, once as uncontroversial and universally beloved as an actor could hope to be, as a pillar of the cabal’s Hollywood wing. Hanks’s youthful good looks had persisted into his sixties, something that conspiracy theorists pointed out could be the sign of an addiction to adrenochrome, an invigorating substance QAnon believers think is derived from torturing children. When Hanks went public with his Covid diagnosis, QAnon promoter Liz Crokin announced that Q’s operatives, dubbed the “white hats,” had “tainted their adrenochrome supply with the coronavirus.”

Hay was joining a new generation of QAnon believers created by the pandemic. As people around the world found themselves with more time to spend online and as their lives grew more uncertain and the world more foreign-seeming than ever, interest in QAnon boomed. For new Q recruits like Hay, that meant entering a scary new world where it was hard to tell what was true.

As QAnon’s popularity grew exponentially during the early days of the pandemic, Q himself barely acknowledged the virus. Q had promised for almost three years that globe-shaking events were just around the horizon. But when one arrived, Q fell silent. That left QAnon leaders and their followers a void in which to invent their own response to the pandemic. The result was a web of conspiracy theories that would become jumbled and contradictory even by QAnon’s standards. Masks were meant to test the population’s compliance with the rise of a global dictatorship, or to cover up human trafficking by making it impossible for kidnapped children to ask bystanders for help. The virus was a hoax, no more harmful than the flu. Or it was incredibly deadly, cooked up by China and the U.S. government’s Dr. Anthony Fauci to sabotage Trump’s reelection. The vaccines came with microchips for tracking citizens, or they would cause a mass die-off to ensure that tech mogul Bill Gates and his associates could finally rule the world.

Some of the pandemic’s most iconic places became fodder for QAnon theorizing. After a Christian charity set up a field hospital in New York’s Central Park for overflow Covid patients, QAnon personality Timothy Charles Holmseth claimed the tents were really being set up for a far different purpose. The pandemic was a cover for military attacks on the cabal hidden deep underground in their pedophile bases, Holmseth explained. Once the battles were over, the rescued “mole children” would be rehabilitated in those Central Park tents.

The coronavirus gave QAnon new life. But as Q followers on every tier of the movement refused to take the vaccine, their beliefs turned fatal. At its core, QAnon is about distrusting institutions. The media, the government, and big business are all out to get you and your kids. The only people you can trust are Q and Trump. That deep-rooted suspicion would make QAnon an obstacle in a public health crisis that required people to trust government officials and pharmaceutical companies. It also drove QAnon believers to seek alternatives. From the pandemic’s first days, QAnon was a clearinghouse for coronavirus treatments that were, at best, useless and, at worst, potentially lethal. QAnon leaders and social media groups first embraced hydroxychloroquine, the inexpensive antimalarial drug that Trump promoted as a quick cure for the pandemic. Hydroxychloroquine’s promise faded, and was all but abandoned by QAnon after Trump didn’t take it himself while hospitalized with the virus. But the miracle potion pushers didn’t stop there. Q’s base pivoted quickly to ivermectin, a drug typically used to eliminate worms. Again, there was no solid evidence that ivermectin successfully treated the virus. But it was also cheap, giving believers what they saw as a loophole to avoid Big Pharma’s Covid regime. The drugs were a revelation for Q’s flock. They didn’t have to accept a cabal vaccine filled with microchips or a fatal chemical cocktail brewed by Bill Gates. They could take ivermectin ...

QAnon rallies were bound to become superspreader events. Hundreds of unmasked QAnon fans packed a Pennsylvania gym one day in July 2021 to see a tomahawk-toting QAnon leader named Scott McKay—or, as he’s known to his fans, the “Patriot Streetfighter.” McKay sliced the air with his ax and gushed over the idea of executing Democrats. But as McKay shouted and his fans cheered, the air at the rally turned into a coronavirus soup that would sicken McKay and his entourage and eventually kill his elderly father.

All these Q personalities appearing at one event wasn’t an accident. The Tulsa conference would mark QAnon’s new guise as a mainstream conservative movement opposed to pandemic restrictions. I knew I had to see it for myself. But security was tight. In the lead-up to the conference, organizers had talked a lot about the need to look out for attacks from left-wing antifascist “Antifa” activists—a threat that seemed remote in an exurb a half-hour drive from Tulsa, and a thousand miles away from anything that might be called an Antifa hotbed. Organizers had also announced that they would keep all but the most right-wing reporters out.

Behind us, two other women who had just met one another swapped Q’s latest conspiracy theories at a rapid clip. Biden wasn’t really the president, and the White House we saw on TV was just a set at entertainment mogul Tyler Perry’s studios in Atlanta. The massive container ship that had recently blocked the Suez Canal was carrying child slaves for the cabal.

Vandersteel took the stage, she focused instead on her pet theory that the British Crown spread the coronavirus to get revenge for the American Revolution: “They want their colonies back!”

The real pandemic, Wood said, was child sex-trafficking. The conference might be about “Health and Freedom,” but nothing was more important to Wood than “the health of the little children.”

I watched them cheer Wood on for nearly an hour, applauding him and egging on his call for Democrats to face firing squads, it became clear that they were ready to move on to something far more ambitious and dangerous than protesting mask laws. 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.

Stories like Omega or Q involve a huge number of people waiting for a world-changing moment that would never happen. When their predictions fail to come true, though, they commit to their beliefs even more, stunning people outside the movement who could see that they had been fooled. The question of why people believe conspiracy theories, even hurting their own interests in the process, has become a pressing one in a time where conspiracy theorists commit violence, destroy family relationships, and encourage one another to refuse vaccines. But when Syracuse University religion professor Michael Barkun became interested in conspiracy theories in the 1980s, there was practically no research in any academic discipline into why people became enthralled with them. As he worked on a book about a conspiracy-theory-crazed extremist Christian sect that had motivated white supremacist terrorists around the country, Barkun wanted to know more about conspiracy theories and what role they played in American politics.

Contrary to what Hofstadter wrote, his critics said, conspiracy theories have been a powerful force in American politics and culture since before the country’s founding, all the way back to the Salem Witch Trials.

Joseph Uscinski, a University of Miami professor who has been at the forefront of research on QAnon, summed up conspiracy theories in 2014 with a colleague as “an explanation of historical, ongoing, or future events that cites as a main causal factor a small group of powerful persons, the conspirators, acting in secret for their own benefit against the common good.” Another academic definition holds that a conspiracy theory is “a text that falsely accuses a group of individuals of orchestrating a plot that has harmed or will harm society.”

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.

They embraced British conspiracy theorist David Icke’s claim that the world is controlled by reptilian aliens, blaming the lizard-people for delaying the Omega payoff. The Omegans’ unflagging hopes created some sad scenes. Online, Omegan leaders insisted that Navy SEALs had been dispatched, possibly disguised as pizza deliverymen, to deliver the massive payoffs to investors on a particular date. Omega shareholders took time off work so they could wait at home for their millions of dollars, peeking out their windows when a pizza man passed by. The money never arrived. Others raised money for Hood’s bail, convinced that he could turn Omega into a success if he could just get out of jail long enough for one more trade.

These days, NESARA, now often called GESARA—the “national” has been replaced by “global”—has become a key part of QAnon lore. As early Q believers tried to puzzle out the clues, conspiracy theorists who already believed in NESARA claimed Q was talking about their law. NESARA offers something personal for QAnon believers waiting for the Storm: a world without debts or disease. QAnon followers write “NESARA/GESARA” on their signs and tell one another about the perfect world that awaits them. Researchers have struggled to find what makes certain people more likely to support and believe in conspiracy theories. Some research suggests that people with Manichean worldviews who see the world as more black-and-white are more likely to support conspiracy theories. Other factors that indicate a tendency toward conspiracism include preferences for strict hierarchies, holding a dark view of human nature and higher distrust of other people, and viewing the world as a jungle where “the strong dominate the weak.” Conspiracy theory believers often display obsessions with the sufferings of their own identity group—their religion, their race, their country—at the hands of sinister outside groups.

“They give you a sense that you are one of the few people who’s learned to see through the deception and the bullshit,” said Peter Knight, a professor at the University of Manchester who studies conspiracy theories.

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.

A police officer her uncle was dating convinced the family to stock up on emergency supplies, claiming that the country would essentially be shut off for ten days as Trump reestablished control against the deep state. 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.

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.

QAnon can seem focused on the present, with followers litigating the meaning of 8chan posts or Trump’s hand gestures. But its goal is a utopian one: the post-cabal world that follows the hyperviolent Storm, often with a NESARA-style economic utopia attached. Those hopes for their own personal betterment, with debts and diseases abolished, mean there’s more on the line for believers than who controls the White House. They think this affects the most important parts of their lives: their children, their finances, their health. This is personal for them.

Instead of asking for their money back, Omegans showed up outside the courtrooms where Hood or other Omega conspirators were on trial to show support for the people who had conned them.

Historians and psychologists have pointed to several factors driving the Satanic Panic. One, it came as America was grappling with a history of ignoring genuine allegations of sexual abuse, making people more willing to believe claims no matter how improbable they seemed. It has also been described as a symptom of larger fears about social change, including the increasing number of working mothers reliant on daycare. “Recovered memory and the day care and ritual abuse hysteria drove the social repression of two ideas,” Beck writes in his account of the Satanic Panic. “First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly did not want to save it.”

But the most dangerous parallel the Satanic Panic holds for QAnon comes from the amateur investigators, driven by their frustration with police indifference to attempt some detective work of their own. With little support from official authorities, QAnon believers have stepped up, building online and in-person networks willing to protect children when no one else will. If the police aren’t going to do something about devil worshippers, they’ll do it themselves.

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. After it’s been harvested from the children, the adrenochrome is distributed to the top Democrats, Hollywood celebrities, and bankers in the cabal and acts as a liquid fountain of youth that will keep them alive. 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.

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

foundational source for conspiracy theorists, first in Pizzagate and then in QAnon. It’s also helped fuel anti-Semitism within QAnon, where Jewish people like billionaire Democratic donor George Soros and members of the Rothschild banking family are seen as puppet-masters controlling the world.

The world was introduced to QAnon violence in the summer of 2018, when a thirty-year-old Nevada car mechanic named Matthew Wright decided he was sick of waiting for the Storm. Facing post-traumatic stress disorder, a possible case of bipolar disorder, and $20,000 in unpaid medical bills, Wright had just one thing to look forward to: the June 2018 release of a Justice Department report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Wright had lived on the margins of society since being discharged from the military for undisclosed medical reasons. Using his mechanic skills and equipment, he had turned his truck into an improvised armored vehicle straight out of Mad Max, stocked with an AR-15 rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and gun slots he could use to aim out through the defenses. Later, police described the vehicle as “armored like a Brinks truck.”

The Justice Department report turned out to be just as much of a letdown for QAnon believers as Q’s backtracking suggested it would be. While it included enough material about the FBI investigation for Democrats and Republicans in Washington to argue over it, the report wasn’t a knockout indictment of Clinton. It certainly didn’t launch the Storm. That was too much for Wright, who used his amateur armored truck in protest to block a highway between Nevada and Arizona that stretched across the Hoover Dam.

QAnon is unmatched among modern American conspiracy theories in its ability to inspire violence. As of September 2021, 101 QAnon followers had been inspired to commit crime by their beliefs, a list that includes 61 defendants from the Capitol riot, according to data compiled by University of Maryland researchers. No other conspiracy theory, from 9/11 trutherism to birtherism, gets even close to inspiring that level of violence.

For mothers like Abcug, the version of QAnon promoted by the Children’s Crusade offered a more comforting reality than the real world. These parents hadn’t lost custody of their children because of mental illness, abuse, or drug addiction—they were victims of the deep state whose children had been kidnapped. And like every other branch of the government, it turned out that social workers, too, were working for the pedophile-cannibals.

All sovereign citizens believe the same basic thing: whether by choice, birth, or grammatical trickery, they have somehow become “sovereign” and separate from the laws of the United States. A sovereign citizen facing a tax evasion charge, for example, might claim that a gold-fringed flag in a courtroom means the judge is operating under maritime law, and thus unable to enforce laws on land. This approach means that sovereign citizens can get into hopeless, sometimes comical situations during police stops or court hearings. Compilations with names like “Sovereign citizens getting owned” have racked up millions of views on YouTube.

There comes a moment in every new Q follower’s life when the person closest to them realizes that they aren’t joking. The Facebook binges and the sudden adoration for Donald Trump have been waved off until now. The stray remarks about missing children and experimental vaccines have been chalked up to eccentricities. But eventually there’s no more denying it: your wife, or your son, or your father now believes in QAnon, and they want you to join them. For the person outside QAnon, there’s a scramble to the internet that mirrors the Q believer’s own frantic online searching weeks or months earlier. Adrenochrome? Underground bases? What-Anon?

David, Lucy, and Nathan were lost deep in a novel kind of personal unraveling: family alienation through QAnon. Ever since the fateful day Nathan started talking about mass arrests in Hollywood, their family had been thrown into a wilderness with no obvious way out. “I don’t think that people who don’t have a loved one involved with this have any idea how bad this is,” David said. QAnon’s

From the outside, Nathan appeared to be living much the same life he had before he discovered QAnon. But for those closest to him, the Nathan who existed before Q was gone. In his place was an angry, frustrated young man with a monomaniacal interest in fantasizing about the Storm. QAnon made Nathan’s life smaller and sadder, and strained his relationships with everyone around him. The arrests Nathan predicted that day never came, but that family meeting was just the start of his attempts to red-pill, or convert, his parents. He argued with them constantly, and used any opportunity to steer them back to the conspiracy theory. In a way, David had to admit he was impressed by QAnon’s ability to explain the entire world. Leaked texts showed actor Armie Hammer fantasizing about cannibal sex acts? More proof that Q was right about the Hollywood sickos. Elon Musk launches a rocket into space? A chance for Nathan to mention that the moon landing was faked.

There was the mother who had to find a way to explain to her ten-year-old son that he couldn’t see his uncle anymore, because he had become obsessed with QAnon. A woman whose husband picked up a cocaine habit so he could stay up decoding late-night Q drops, and carried on affairs with fellow believers he met online to get an understanding he couldn’t find in his marriage to a Q skeptic. I heard from more than one person who was surprised to find that their spouse, now a QAnon believer, suddenly didn’t want to vaccinate their children.

Nathan had always been drawn to strange ideas. As a teenager, he was fascinated by Bigfoot and aliens. But Nathan’s interest in conspiracy theories didn’t take off in earnest until the pandemic began, when Nathan moved back in with his parents and his social circle shrank down to the walls of his home. Without roommates around, he had been spending a lot of time on his laptop. Nathan gave up any pretense of living in the real world after coming out as a QAnon supporter. He spent his days locked up in his room at his parents’ house, smoking marijuana and reading the Q boards. He emerged only to get food and pressure his parents to watch QAnon videos. Their arguments became repetitive, always starting with Nathan making some bold claim, like that John F. Kennedy would return to life to run as Trump’s vice president.

“I can’t understand it,” David told me. “For a rational person to fall for this stuff, how do you sympathize with them? How do you put yourself in those shoes?”

The most common QAnon story involves a conservative who already likes Trump becoming convinced, through QAnon, that Trump is a messiah figure. But by 2020, QAnon had evolved far enough into its “Pastel QAnon” form to appeal to a left-wing, New Age hippie who loved health food and esoteric spirituality.

At night, Jake read his mother’s Twitter posts to track her descent into QAnon. Brenda claimed that the January 6 rioters were working for Antifa. When a massive winter storm knocked out electricity across Texas, she posted conspiracy theories claiming that the snow was artificial, meaning that the snow was being created by a weather control machine to punish a red state. Eventually Twitter banned Brenda, forcing her into more obscure online communities like the messaging app Telegram and conservative social media network Parler. Jake found it harder to follow her there, but by then, he had all but given up trying.

What I found out from talking to people involved in reducing QAnon’s harm is hard, but unavoidable: there’s no guaranteed way to dissuade a QAnon believer. “The reality is that we don’t really know what really works or if anything does work to get someone out of QAnon,” Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, a University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatrist who has studied QAnon, told me. For one thing, 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.

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.

He called me again in July 2021. Now Nathan had latched on to a new QAnon rumor that claimed the Chinese army was storming across the Canadian border into Maine. There were videos of strange lights in the darkness. There would be a climactic battle, then the Trump restoration. The Storm finally seemed to be at hand.

“It didn’t die with Trump like I thought it would,” David told me. “The critical thinking that doesn’t take place is astonishing.” By August, Nathan’s QAnon enthusiasm seemed to have settled down a little. Now he was getting into the all-beef diet, a diet favored by conservative college professor and author Jordan Peterson, who had become a sort of father figure for lost young men.