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

by Will Sommer

Kinzinger started what would become a lonely fight against QAnon’s proliferation within his party. After pro-QAnon candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican primary runoff that all but guaranteed she would soon join him in the House, Kinzinger declared that there was “no place in Congress” for QAnon. He cosponsored a resolution denouncing QAnon and recorded a video of himself debunking QAnon believers’ claims. In

For Kinzinger, the model for confronting his party’s fringes came from late Republican senator John McCain. During his 2008 presidential run, a woman at a campaign town hall told McCain she couldn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” Rather than ignoring her remark, McCain grabbed the microphone and corrected her. Obama, he said, was a “decent family man.”

Kinzinger warned McCarthy that his decision to back the stolen-election fiction would only increase the potential for violence on January 6. “Look, you’re convincing people the election was stolen,” Kinzinger recalled telling McCarthy. “You know damn well it wasn’t.” To Kinzinger, the Republican leader’s calculation was obvious: McCarthy knew the election wasn’t stolen, but he felt that incumbent Republicans would be destroyed by primary challengers if they admitted Trump lost the election legitimately. QAnon and its conspiracy theory thinking had infiltrated the party. Republicans were content to step aside and hope they wouldn’t be Q’s next victim.

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.”

The first QAnon congressional bid in the 2020 election came from Matthew Lusk, a political amateur in Florida. Lusk included a Q section on his list of campaign issues, urging Congress to take Q seriously as a source of “prophetic” information. If elected, Lusk assured me he wouldn’t use QAnon breadcrumbs to legislate—unless, of course, Q revealed some proof that he could use in a congressional investigation.

But then the QAnon candidates started winning. Jo Rae Perkins, an outspoken QAnon devotee in Oregon, won the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat, meaning she would be the rare QAnon believer to make it to the general election. That presented a problem for Republican leaders in Washington, D.C. Perkins’s win elevated her from the countless other eccentrics of all types who run for office every cycle, only to vanish from public view after losing their primaries.

The split between the candidates hoping to exploit QAnon and the dedicated supporters was typified by the two QAnon candidates who would make it to Congress in 2020: Lauren Boebert in Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia. For Boebert, QAnon seems to have been just another way to get votes. Boebert was versed in the kinds of culture-war issues that could propel someone to social media stardom. She ran Shooters Grill, a restaurant where the main draw was that the waitresses were armed. Boebert’s willingness to court controversy in search of political attention extended to QAnon. In an appearance on QAnon figure Ann Vandersteel’s show, Boebert appeared to awkwardly endorse QAnon, if only to avoid offending Vandersteel and her fans.

Boebert’s interest in QAnon was nothing compared to Greene, who had been on board with the conspiracy theory nearly from the beginning. Unlike Boebert, Greene was a dedicated QAnon supporter, which she proved by leaving a lengthy digital trail of support for QAnon. Greene signed on with QAnon in early 2018, long before there was any political advantage to it. Greene’s social media posts reveal someone who was deeply engaged in the world of QAnon. In June 2018, she posted on Facebook praising an “awesome post by Q today,” adding references to “WWG1WGA” and “Q+,” the code QAnon followers use for Trump. Greene was even active in QAnon debates over the authenticity of individual Q posts, insisting in a May 2018 tweet that Q’s posts were legitimate in a tweet that read, Trust the plan.

Greene acted out the racism and anti-Semitism at the heart of QAnon. She said progressive Democrats like Muslim members of Congress should “really go back to the Middle East if they support Sharia,” the Islamic law system, and said black voters are “held slaves to the Democratic Party.” In a 2018 Facebook post, she suggested that wildfires in California were caused by space lasers controlled by a group that included the Rothschilds—a Jewish family that has long been a trope of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Even people who don’t see themselves as QAnon followers have come to see QAnon as a respectable political position. Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who opposes Trump, has studied QAnon’s sense of acceptance within the party. In 2021, some news reports had claimed, often with little evidence, that QAnon was in shambles after Biden’s inauguration and Q’s disappearance. Yet while conducting focus groups of Republican voters after Biden’s inauguration, Longwell found that QAnon was more popular in the party than ever, even among average Republicans who didn’t consider themselves to be QAnon believers.

The rise of conspiratorial thinking among the Republican grassroots went beyond QAnon. It wasn’t necessarily that everyone was donning Q shirts or picketing their local pizza parlor. 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. “They have lost a sense of what is true generally,” she said.

There’s evidence that Q has already made inroads in the Republican Party’s highest echelons. A few days after Trump’s election defeat, Ginni Thomas—the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and a powerful activist in her own right—texted Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows with some good news. It might look like Trump had lost, she said, but she had just discovered that the election could have been a ruse to arrest top Democrats all along. Quoting from a QAnon website, Thomas shared the plan: Biden and his co-conspirators would soon be headed for Guantanamo Bay to face military tribunals.

Steinbart looks more like a YouTuber about to dole out video game tips than the globe-trotting spy he claims to be. He sketches out the world according to Steinbart, where the Titanic was deliberately sunk to kill critics of the Federal Reserve and the Swedish DJ Avicii died not by suicide, but from murder because he was about to expose the cabal. Now, Steinbart proclaims on camera, he is here to put the world right as an agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

People trying to grapple with the meaning of QAnon often call it a cult. There are obvious similarities, from the fact that these ideas could grow in a new follower’s mind to become the most important thing in their lives, to the way that leaders within the movement encourage members to cut off skeptical family members. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, one of the country’s leading cult researchers, has three criteria he uses for any group to be considered a cult: a “charismatic leader,” methods of “thought reform” aimed at changing how followers think in ways that keep them in the cult, and the “considerable exploitation” of followers. QAnon meets the third criteria easily, with believers duped into alienating those close to them and spending money on quack medical cures or QAnon merchandise. QAnon also has tools of “thought reform,” with the frequent use of what Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés” meant to stop QAnon believers from questioning the movement. Lifton explains thought-terminating clichés as “highly reductive, definite-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed” that can be repeated to prevent deeper thought. In QAnon, believers tell one another to “trust the plan” when everything in the world suggests there is no plan. When a Q prophecy fails to come true, they reassure themselves with the phrase “disinformation is necessary”—meaning that whatever QAnon prediction failed was really just a ruse posted by Q to confuse his enemies.

QAnon also has a central figure, but the anonymous Q fits awkwardly among the canon of dangerous, charismatic cult leaders. Q might be one person, or many, and his identity has never been confirmed. Most Q followers direct their adoration toward Trump, not Q. They see Trump as the world-changing messiah figure, with Q as just his messenger, albeit one who knows the future before it happens.

“The idea that a cult leader would be anonymous and not appear and have no ability to be seen and adored—that goes contrary to what most cult leaders are like,” Ross said.

Steinbart’s backstory as a superspy working for the military started to unravel after the indictment, when prosecutors were unable to find proof that he worked for his supposed employer, the DIA. But his name in QAnon had never been bigger. Thanks to the handful of videos he had posted before his arrest, he attracted more than 20,000 YouTube subscribers, plus roughly a dozen followers who showed up at his court hearings waving a Q flag. After one hearing, Steinbart was met outside by Jacob Chansley—the “Q Shaman” whose painted face and horned helmet would become infamous a few months later when he joined other rioters breaking into the U.S. Capitol. Chansley, already wearing the backwoods mystic by way of the World of Warcraft look destined for newspaper front pages and parodies, treated Steinbart like an elder statesman of QAnon. For his part, Steinbart—dressed in a suit for court and no face paint of his own—winced when Chansley gestured with his spear to emphasize his points about metaphysical truths and realms beyond our imagining.

Stiller’s journey to QAnon was typical among Steinbart’s followers. She had been researching conspiracy theories online for years, so when QAnon appeared it wasn’t a huge step for her to believe that, too. Stiller cast her QAnon beliefs in mystical terms. Q’s story, she said, proved that “dark forces” were keeping humanity in a “consciousness prison.” Stiller drew a clear line between her life before and after she discovered conspiracy theories. “I never really came back,” she said.

Much of that money, it emerged later, came from his followers, who had been assured they would receive high-ranking positions in the Space Force once Steinbart took over. Khoury estimated that he put at least $40,000 of his own money into Steinbart’s media operations and the Ranch, a figure Steinbart didn’t dispute.

When I talked to Kasey in July 2020, a month after she had first asked me for help, she was losing hope that her sister would ever leave Steinbart’s group. QAnon believers had recently pushed into the mainstream the idea that the furniture website Wayfair was smuggling children inside its furniture, and Steinbart’s crew, falsely, was taking credit for it. “She’s more into it than even before,” she said.

The fun-loving portrayal of life at the Ranch belied the fact that Steinbart faced a mountain of legal problems that could send him to prison for years. Steinbart’s bail conditions prohibited him from drinking alcohol or using drugs, rules he freely flouted in the company of his followers. Tellingly, the NDAs that visitors were required to sign prohibited them from discussing any such drinking or smoking “habits” they witnessed at the Ranch. But Steinbart’s drug and alcohol use became a vulnerability as some of his followers started to become suspicious about his claims.

Steinbart’s imprisonment shattered Steinbart Media Group. Their movement had been based on a clear plan: proving that Steinbart was Q, accessing his billions of dollars in cryptocurrency wealth, making the Space Force, and destroying the cabal. But now Steinbart was in jail indefinitely, with the prospect of months or years in prison to come. With their charismatic leader now in only sporadic contact via a jailhouse telephone, some of Steinbart’s remaining followers began to wonder what they were doing with their lives.

QAnon greatness had vanished. The Ranch collective dissolved in his absence. The post-riot social media crackdown on QAnon followers obliterated his YouTube and Twitter accounts. And while Steinbart claimed he had won new adherents in jail, many of his genuine followers had returned to their pre-Steinbart lives.

In the final days of the Trump administration, Byrne finagled his way into the White House and urged Trump to have the military seize election ballots.

Steinbart’s QAnon compound had failed, but in a way, he had found something even better. Thanks to Republican leaders’ willingness to accommodate QAnon and treat it as a legitimate faction of the party, Steinbart, an obvious grifter and charlatan who specialized in sucking vulnerable people dry to support his own delusions, would be treated like a credible political figure. He had even managed to insinuate himself into the team handling the Arizona ballot recount, becoming one of the audit’s staffers shortly after his release from jail.

Those theories about dark sexual rituals landed a mention in Morrison’s speech because Q had someone on the inside. Morrison had been friends for thirty years with a man named Tim Stewart. But when Stewart wasn’t hanging out with the prime minister, he led a double life as one of his country’s most devoted QAnon backers.