Will Sommer - Trust the Plan

For Juliana

Don DeLillo, Libra

Contents

Writing about Q, the anonymous figure behind QAnon, can be difficult because so little is certain about Qs identity. We dont know whether Q is a man or a woman, or whether its one person or many. For simplicity, and because the best investigations into Qs identity have all focused on men, I use male pronouns for Q throughout the book.

I changed the names of people who talked to me about their family members involvement in QAnon, to protect their privacy and give them the freedom to talk about QAnons effect on their lives. I have also used pseudonyms for minors involved in court cases.

The morning of January 6, 2021, a few hours before Congress would vote to certify Joe Bidens electoral win, hundreds of Donald Trumps most fervent supporters encircled the U.S. Capitol. Some of the protesters were setting up gallows for lawmakers who supported the stolen election. Others prowled in military-style body armor, zip ties in hand. Across town, Trump was giving a speech near the White House, urging tens of thousands of his voters to join the crowd already at the Capitol to show strength.

Outside of Congress, the scene rippled with anger and open promises to commit violence if Trump wasnt reinstalled for four more years. Red hats and Trump flags featuring a muscular, armed Rambo-style Donald were popular. But there was another symbol in the swelling mob, too: a flag with a single letter. A Q .

Therese Borgerding, a middle-aged Trump fan from Ohio, had traveled to Washington with her own gear, carrying a giant blue cardboard Q on a pole twice her height, and a neck gaiter that put a large red Q over her mouth. She wanted to tell me something: not about Joe Biden or Donald Trump, but about the children in the tunnels.

As Borgerding told me, nefarious forces led by the most powerful people in the worldtitans of Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and big businesshad 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 worlds 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 arent even earthquakesthey are seismic events created when the Army demolishes the pedophile lairs underground.

Borgerding told me she was getting this information from a secretive military intelligence agent called Q. He posited that the whole tunnel operation was run by a globe-spanning cabal of bankers, politicians, and Hollywood stars who could only be stopped by Donald Trump. Now Borgerding and thousands of her compatriots had come to Washington to make sure Trump stayed in office until his God-given mission to destroy that cabal and bring America into a new Christian era, free of war and disease, was accomplished. Rescuing the mole children was just one part of that plan, healing a symptom of a terminally sick world that only Trump could save.

Theres criminals in there that need to be arrested, Borgerding said, gesturing across the street toward the Capitol building. The Democrat Party has done Satanic rituals on little children. For Borgerding and many others at the Capitol that day, the vote count in Congress wasnt just about who would be president. It was a physical struggle with Satan himself, a fight for the soul of the world. The Capitol was the latest battlefield in a brewing war, and they were on the front lines.

By the final days of the Trump administration, conspiracy theories abounded. Republicans concocted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by rigged voting machines or even a rogue CIA supercomputer; for liberals, there were fantasies in the Steele dossier about Trump paying prostitutes to urinate on a bed Barack Obama once slept in.

Trump broke into politics by pushing conspiracy theories about Obamas birthplace, then fueled his campaign with a series of similarly bizarre claims about his fellow Republican opponents. He suggested that Senator Marco Rubio wasnt eligible to be president and that Senator Ted Cruzs 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 Cruzs father shot JFK, what was off-limits for his followers?

The conspiracy theory boom had practical benefits for both politicians and internet hucksters. People convinced that Democrats drank childrens blood, or that Hillary Clinton ran an assassination squad gunning down her foes in the streets of Washington, came into view for Republicans as motivated grassroots activists and voters. The GOPs budding conspiracy-theorist bloc opened their wallets to buy zinc pills and meal kits to stock their apocalypse bunkers. But they also provided the raw material to keep their favorite politicians in office, donating to campaigns and the legal defense funds of Trump allies. Fearful that the lunatic fringe was no longer so fringe, most Republican lawmakers avoided attacking them.

Conspiracy theories had been gaining ground in the Republican Party since Obama was elected. But there was only one that had the power to move its supporters offline, to turn the usual online trash talk into thousands of people in the streets willing to march for their beliefs, and sometimes do worse than that. It had more resources and staying power than all the others combined. Borgerding and millions of other Americans had signed on to the biggest conspiracy theory of them all: QAnon.

In October 2017, someone calling themselves Q appeared on the anonymous, anarchic message board 4chan, posting a handful of cryptic messages claiming that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month.

More messages followed, filled with unexplained acronyms and fresh warnings that a secret military operation would soon take place. Most of the people who read those first posts laughed them off. But a few 4chan users who had been obsessed for years with other conspiracy theories latched on to Qs posts. They interpreted his one-letter handle as a reference to the Energy Departments Q-level security clearance, a sign that these messages were coming from deep inside the Trump administration.

Clinton was never arrested, but Qs messages kept coming. His handful of 4chan acolytes started repackaging the clues, turning them into more accessible YouTube videos or Facebook posts. Those explanations drew in more people. 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 first, the new recruits were Trump supporters eager for tales about how the presidents enemies would be destroyed. But Qs narrative grew beyond Trumps base, thanks to social media platforms that boosted provocative content. It attracted people who had never thought of themselves before as Trump fans. They were shocked by QAnons tales of sexual depravity, then lured in by the promise that Q could explain a chaotic world.

QAnon is still going. It has alienated thousands of people from those close to them and destroyed friendships and marriages as people red-pilled by QAnon have failed to see why their children, parents, or spouses refuse to join in the fight against the cabal. QAnon has also broken out of the United States, spreading to Canada, Europe, and Japan. QAnon has evolved since its launch in 2017, inspiring factions that include QAnon yoga groups and others that believe Trump owns medical technology that can cure any disease. It has absorbed dozens of lesser conspiracy theories, and even inspired a handful of real-world murders. That makes it hard for the average news consumer to understand just what QAnon followers actually believe. Is it that the cabal is run by lizards from another planet? Or that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is Q himself? Is it one or the other?