Will Sommer: The Power of QAnon

Good

morning. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is February twenty first two thousand twenty three. And a new book is out today, trust the plan, the rise of QAnon, and the conspiracy that unhinged America by Will Summer. This is the way Garrett Graff, who’s the author of Watergate in New History described what Will Summer has been spending the last seven years doing.

Will summer all but invented serious cultural reporting on the far. Right? In having the worst corners of the Internet, so that the rest of us could understand them. And his new book on QAnon serves as a vital roadmap to one of the strangest and most disturbing movements of modern politics. Writing with insight, empathy, and historical perspective, will masterfully documents how a random anonymous Internet post on Reddit?

In twenty seventeen, rose up and swallowed the Republican party. Will Sommer joins me on the podcast. First of all, congratulations on the new book, Will. Thank

you, Charlie. As you said, it’s been a long time coming and, you know, I put my sanity on the line here, but

I’m happy with the results. Okay. So that was actually my first question. Is how do you spend seven years in this fever swam, you know, basically mainlining crazy pills every single day and and not lose your mind. I asked this seriously because because I’ve been following you for years, and I know how you must spend your time at them.

But at some point, do you ever, like, open the door, emerge from the basement, see the sun, and realize, oh my god. You know, there’s there’s a rational world out here.

Mean, it’s so funny you say that. Certainly, there are times when I’ll be, you know, talking to my wife or something about, you know, the latest ins and outs of some right wing fameball’s career. And then I’ll just say, you know, this is pretty crazy that I’m this deep in it. My backstory is that I I grew up in a conservative family in Texas. And so you know, certainly nothing about keyword unbelievers.

But, you know, I I grew up, you know, as listening to the Fountainhead on Family Road trips and, you know, lots of Bill O’Reilly and stuff like that. So I really consumed a huge amount of it. And then, you know, I went to college, my politics changed, and the Iraq War happened, and all this stuff. So I kind of fell out with the GOP, but but I still just for whatever reason I love it, and I I followed it, you know, they were all these great characters in the, you know, the Obama administration, Ben Shapiro, people like that who got on the scene. So for whatever reason, I just have a high tolerance for it and I really get a kick out of it, you know, and sometimes I gotta detox, sometimes I gotta turn off the unit out for the day.

Well,

I would think you’re the politics reporter at the Daily Beast, and I wanna talk about some breaking news that you had. The subhead of your book is the rise of Q1 on and the conspiracy that unhinged America. So did Q1 on unhinged America or was America unhinged before QAnon? In other words, was the unhinging a precondition for the fact that its immune system to QAnon had been completely destroyed? I think that’s a great point.

I think QAnon could not exist

if everything had been going great in America up till then. I mean, in the book I explore how, you know, Cunan is has been very successful at gathering decades of other conspiracy theories and these kind of alternative lifestyle movements and, you know, whether it be weird medicine or, you know, these these kind of fringe political groups. Certainly, I mean, I would date this stuff back to, you know, as a serious fact, in the GOP, certainly to the Obama administration when, you know, people were convinced with jade helm, for example, that, you know, Obama was gonna imprison every conservative in Texas. And stuff like that. But QAnon really hit at the right time.

It just sort of capitalized on this. This Trump is movement, this idea that, you know, things were really out of control. And, you know, took it from there. Well, just to put things in in the

context, I mean, obviously, Marjorie Taylor Green, who’s been associated with QAnon, you know, continues to rise in Republican ranks. She is now a member of the homeland security committee. I just can’t get over the fact that here here she is deciding that now is a great time to talk about you know, secession, a civil war between, you know, red and blue states and and all of that. And she’s on the homeland security. The new chairman, help me out with this one.

The new chairman of the Michigan Republican Party just elected over the weekend, an election denier who had run for secretary of state and been absolutely Shalak lost by fourteen points, more than six hundred and fifteen thousand votes, and yet refused to concede She is now the new chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. Donald Trump did not endorse her, but is congratulating her, calling her a great election denier. And the cherry on top of all of this is that she’s pretty hardcore queuing on too, isn’t she? She is. I mean, this is Christina Karamo.

This is someone

who has said that abortion is child sacrifice and and not in a a metaphorical way, but, like, literally a satanic practice. She said all these various kind of things about, you know, devil worship. But for me, the most interesting thing about her is that she was part of this coalition of QAnon believers who ran for a secretary’s estate office across the country in twenty twenty two, basically with the idea that this time we control elections because these Democrats keep stealing them. But the interesting thing is this group was put together by a guy who’s who’s basically a kind of a down on his luck PI out in Washington state. But they believe that he’s JFK Junior in disguise.

Oh my. So she appeared at this QAnon convention with him in Las Vegas, and then it you know, they were saying, we gotta, you know, we gotta take back the country. You know, QAn’s gonna do it. So now, this is the person who’s running the Michigan GOP. The other thing is, you know, that election to to run the party, came down between her and another really prominent election denier.

So it’s not as though the the rational faction just narrowly lost. No. They Rational faction was headed by the

guy that lost by nine points for attorney general, but apparently, you know, committed the cardinal sin of actually conceiving the election. And now that’s No. That shows how weak you are. If you actually can see the left view, it should be more like her who loses by fifteen points and or fourteen points and refuses to concede. The reason I’m bringing this up because this is an important thing I think for people who have not immersed themselves in all of this, is that it’s easy to hear some of these really really crazy stories out there and think, well, okay, that’s just the fringe, but the phenomenon that we’ve seen over the last seventy years, or maybe you could say the last twenty years, has been the way that fringe crazy ideas move from the far reaches of the fever swam and become mainstream.

I mean, this is part of the problem that ideas that we might have just simply shrugged off as, you know, your crazy uncle over there. Now suddenly are very, very influential in the Republican Party. So when we’re talking about QAnon, and and I wanna talk about QAnon, specifically, but also conspiracy theories. You note that conspiracy theories have been gaining ground on the Republican Party since Obama was elected. But there’s a long history, right, of conspiracy theories on the right.

You go back to nineteen sixty four, you have Richard Hostat, or writing about paranoid style in American politics, you go back even further than that into the protocols of the elders of Zion, people who have toyed with conspiracy theories. So, I mean, there’s a long history, right, of people who believe they have the secret knowledge and it’s played a bizarre role in on the right, you had the John Burke Society back in the nineteen sixties. So Put this into context for me. How is q one on? How does it relate to this longer history of conspiracy theories?

And what makes it distinctive? Or is it just the latest iteration of what, you know, Bill Buckley had to wrestle with in nineteen sixty three? You know,

it’s interesting. I I think it’s both in some ways. I think it it’s sort of a culmination of decades of conspiracy theories and and also it it has something unique about it. So know, a lot of folks probably know this, but QAnon started in twenty seventeen with this figure named Q, who’s doing these anonymous kind of cryptic posts, like, Hillary Clinton will be arrested by the end of the month, stuff like that. And it grew from there.

And so it’s kinda created this whole world view where Donald Trump is at war with this pedophile cabal of Satanists who run the Democratic Party and he’s gonna arrest them all and execute them and then we’ll live in a utopia is kind of the the short form of it. But the genius of QAnon is that because it has this kind of superstructure, clues, this guy named Hugh who, you know, maybe it’s Michael Flynn, you know, they think, or maybe it’s Donald Trump himself. So because of this, it can kind of suck in just decades of conspiracy theories. And because it’s so vague, you can get whatever you want out of it. I talked to a guy who was a big JFK assassination guy.

And so suddenly when he sees QAnon, he thinks, okay, all this stuff I know, this is what it’s been leading up to is this kind of Ethiopian moment of QAnon. And so in that way, the QNON manages to it’s, you know, it’s sort of the academic term as a super conspiracy. So it fits all of these other ones within that umbrella. So for someone who, let’s say, during the Obama administration, you’re looking at Jade Helm, you’re looking at the birther stuff, and you’re saying, well, why are all these kind of individual things happening? These these weird conspiracy theories, you know, that Glenbeck might be talking about.

Why is this happening? And then, Hugh says, this explains it all. This is the code. Exactly. And rather than just kind of sitting on our hands and posting on message boards on free Republic or what have you, you know, this is what we can do something about it.

We can tell people. And then someday, this great moment’s gonna

happen. And we’ll get revenge on our end. Alright. So the ground had been laid for all of this. And you you talk about the rise in in twenty seventeen.

By then, Donald Trump was already president of the United States. I mean, he he written the power by by trafficking and pushing conspiracy these. Right? I mean, about, you know, Obama’s birthplace plays, about Ted Cruz, father being involved in the assassination of JFK, Marco Rubio’s eligibility for office. You describe him as as Trump became the conspiracy theorist in chief and you write that his outlandish lies, gave his fans permission to dive headlong into conspiracy theories themselves.

This is interesting because So it’s out there. The ground has been laid, but it was as if Trump gets into office and has this key and he unlocks the door and you see a permission structure to believe the most bat shit crazy ideas out there. That’s

exactly right. I mean, during the Obama administration, we can look at a lot of these conspiracy theories as kind of building up and but still, you know, I I think the average mainstream Republican would say it’s a little crazy to me. And then you have Trump who rode to power on birtheism, essentially, who says, oh, yeah. That stuff’s real. Also, as you said, I mean, Ted Cruz’s dad shot JFK, all this really crazy stuff.

So then people who, I think, for emotional reasons, might be drawn to conspiracy theories because you know, it feels true. It feels true that Hillary Clinton is eating kids in a basement, in a in a Washington pizzeria. It feels true that these, you know, democrats who are so liberalized. It feels true. Exactly.

And then suddenly, you know, he makes it socially acceptable to believe that. Why would it feel true

to any I mean, What were they marinating in for years to get to the point where they would go? Yeah. Hillary Clinton eating baby’s faces in the basement of a pizza parlor. That that sounds right to me. Okay.

Yeah. I mean with this. Where’s the leap? Where’s the leap? Right?

I think in that case, I think, like, PizzaGate, for example, which is sort of a precursor to q and you know, you think about all this talk about these these out of touch Democratic elites and, you know, they’re oh, look at these art performances they go to and and stuff that often has a great of truth to it in that, you know, I look at it and I say, well, yeah, I guess I wouldn’t hang that out of my house looks a little weird, you know. But then the leap to, you know, this means that they’re eating children. I think it’s hard for you and I don’t understand because obviously we’re not we’re not marinating in that. But then I I think another factor here is the rise of social media. And so that people can sort of turn each other on and indoctrinate one another so that in the past before the Internet, you might have a guy on your block who believes some crazy stuff and everyone’s always saying to him, you’re crazy.

Cut it

out, you know. Whereas now, these atomized people can connect with one another and say, maybe I’m not so crazy because, you know, there’s a thousand people on this YouTube channel who agree with me. Well,

I mean, obviously, there are people who simply exploit this, there are the hucksters, there are the grifters, the people who sell the zinc pills and the meal kits for people who wanna go into their bunkers, you have politicians that figure that okay, we won’t challenge you because I need your votes. But then you have the people who genuinely believe all of this. So talk to me a little bit about January sixth because you are outside the capital on January sixth and you walked around talking to Q and A supporters who explained to you why they were at the capital. So so tell me, I just before we get into some other stuff, you know, who these people are, so you talk to a woman named Teresa — Mhmm. — about why she was there.

Okay? I mean, first of all, I mean, how did you identify the queue people? I mean, were they they’re, like, where were in the queue signs? Several cute flags.

Well, I was gonna say, yeah, in her case, you know, you didn’t have to be a real sleuth because she had

a giant queue on a pole that she was carrying her out. Okay. Tell us about Teresa and what she believed. Sure. So so this is before the riot happened.

And

so I was walking around and and people were chanting, you know, like, where we go on, we go all, which is the big queuing on slogan. And so I had a sense that there were a lot of queuing on believers there. And then I ran into her and she had this giant queue. And so I said, you know, what brings you out today? And she just started rattling off queuing on stuff, and she said, well, you know, all of these children are kept in tunnels underground and, you know, where they’re terrised by the cabal.

And, I mean, we’re talking about, you know, a tunnel network across the entire country. And these are called the bold children. And this is a very common queuing on belief, I should say, culture. And so that, you know, whenever there’s an earthquake, it’s because the military is is waging war underground and all this stuff. And, I mean, she’s laying this stuff out, and this is someone I mean, she’s not a start grading lunatic.

I mean,

she’s saying

this stuff in sort of a very casual way. And then, you know, she said, and, you know, today, I think, is gonna be this is kind of this big moment. I mean, a lot of Q1 believers there. I thought it would be the storm, which is sort of the term for the big climactic moment where everyone from from Barack Obama to Tom Hanks gets arrested and in prison. Wait.

Why why why would we arrest Tom Hanks? Oh, because they think he’s kind of a big rig leader of the Hollywood pedophiles, if you

can believe it. Okay. That sounds right. I gotta take a deep breath here because, okay, so you have the mold children in the underground tunnels. Mhmm.

And they’re terrorized by pedophiles. Until they produce a certain chemical? How do you pronounce it? It’s called Adrena Chrome. Okay.

Adrena Chrome. And then this Adrena Chrome is then consumed by celebrities, financiers, politicians to stay young? That’s correct. Well, this seems very specific that they believe this. And so you say that she’s not stark raving crazy.

She’s a normal person who believes in the mold children. They terrorize them until they produce this this adrenaline like chemical which they then drink and she says the other, that that sounds right to me. And

these

people vote. That’s right, Charlie. And, you know, if you look at polls for for the average person in the instinct just to say, alright. Well, we’ll found a a couple nuts and he wrote a book about it. But if you look at polls, I mean, we’re talking I think in the most conservative polls, we’re talking millions of people

here. And so, you know, It is disturbing. It went against a little bit. You read about a guy named Kevin who worked for the FAA. Who believed that that his

debts, his personal debts would be wiped out by from solving all the world’s problems. This is another January sixth guy and he bought a giant truck and he put a big old q and on sticker on it and someone said how can you afford that truck? And he said, don’t worry about it because when Q and A happens, all my debts are gonna be paid off. This is something that I think is often underplayed when people try to understand Q and A. Is that there’s a personal, utopia aspect to it.

The it kinda builds on these other conspiracy theories that claim that when this moment happens, when Donald Trump becomes dictator for life, that all debts will be abolished, that let’s say you rent your house. Well, you’ll own that house now, that all diseases will be cured. So I talk to people who, you know, have cancer and don’t have insurance and they say, well, the good news is that, you know, soon my cancer will be cured because Donald Trump’s gonna arrest Hillary Clinton. So you can see really the pathos and the emotional stakes for people. Yeah.

It sounds like a cult though. Do you describe it that way? You know, for some people, I I certainly think it is. I mean, I I think, you know, they’re sort of varying degrees of belief in it, but I think for the people who are really in it, and certainly the people on January sixth, you know, in both Teresa and and this Kevin Gentleman both did end up getting criminally charged for their actions. I would say, yeah, I

mean, I it certainly feels like a cult. Okay. So you have a woman named Roseanne who’d been drawn into QAnon during the lockdown told friends about the cabal and the children, and she was recovering drug addict who was trampled by a mob. On their way to attack police and, of course, Ashley Babbot. She was there because she thought it would mark the storm.

Yeah. So to the people at least who died on January sixth were hardcore queuing on the leavers. We know before January sixth, Ashley Babbit tweeted, you know, this is the storm. And so you can understand you know, I maybe understand isn’t the right word. But you can really when you look at these people’s lives, you can see beat by beat What leads them into q and on is often some kind of personal or financial tragedy, and then they kind of escape into this fantasy world.

And that radicalizes them and it makes them you know, put yourself in Ashley Baba’s shoes. If you believe that the world elites are doing the most depraved crimes against children and that in this new world, you’re you’re gonna be valorized as sort of one of the early, the first believers, you know, that then, you know, she ends up crawling through the window and the speaker’s lobby and getting shot. I know I’m throwing a lot out. I just

No. No. No. No. No.

I’m I’m actually just trying to get my head around who these people are. Okay. So they believe all of these things. They believe and there’s that utopia element to all of this that January six marks the storm that they would be these arrests. Even the wife of supreme court, justice Clarence Thomas, and Jenny Thomas, you know, four hundred suite where, you know, prominent Democrats were arrested and put on these prison barges and everything.

So there’s a lot of specificity in the predictions about what is going to happen. You have to trust the plan. There is a plan. But so many of the things that people were told were going to happen clearly did not happen. So talk to me a little bit about how people who follow queue process that.

That they’d been told that x, y, and z would happen on this date and that these things were going to unfold. They didn’t unfold. I remember reading some things after January six where there was at least some people looking around going, jeez, maybe I shouldn’t trust the plan. Maybe, in fact, this stuff, you know, wasn’t going to happen. So how do they process the predictions and the prophecies that fizzle out.

Yeah. I

mean, this is really one of the most fascinating parts about q and on. It is how the believers handle the cognitive dissonance here. And, you know, one of the biggest moments for this was when Biden was inaugurated because they thought, you know, okay, after January sixth, they’re putting up all these fences and, you know, the national guard is flooding into DC. Maybe that’s because that’s gonna be the big arrest. Finally, you know, they they’ve led Biden into the trap.

Of course, everyone from the outside says no, it’s because you guys tried to overthrow the government. That’s why they have to do this. So at that moment, I talked to when Biden was sworn in, all these Q and A believers were so upset. I talked to one believers that she threw up or she wanted to throw up because she just felt so sick, like everything she believed had fallen apart. But then pretty quickly, people kind of reformat their heads.

And it’s often because they’ve invested so much in the desk their sunken costs. Yeah. That’s exactly right. You know, their friends and family have said, you know, you’re an idiot, you know, all this stuff. And so they wanna say face and so some people certainly admitted they were wrong, but I think the majority they go back and they say, well, maybe the plan wasn’t exactly what we thought.

But I guess the deep state was just a little too tough for us and Trump will come back. Don’t worry. Some of them believe that Trump is still president, that the Biden presidency is Now, bear with me here, is being filmed at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. That sounds right. Yeah.

Now now now you’d mail your by again. Okay.

Alright. Okay. I’m often suspected. No. You know,

for example, I talked to one woman and, you know, I said, well, you know, this doesn’t seem real at all, you know, that that Trump’s own power. And she said, well, you know, haven’t you ever seen how Hollywood makeup works? You know, that might be Trump over there. You know, and so they they really keep inventing more things or they tell themselves, well, maybe the plan as Q laid it out to us isn’t real. But would Kew taught us about the world that there’s this cabal of of course, there’s all these kind of antisemitic overtones as well.

This cabal run by George Soros and they drink children’s blood, that is real. So maybe he just kind of like laid it out for us, and then the real thing is gonna happen in the future, and we just kinda have to keep the

faith. Conspiracy theories. Paranormal. UFOs. During the entire nineteen seventy one debacle of this red die number two, Parents all around America were buying Frank and Berry, so only a few days after the cereal was released, kids all across the country.

Started being rushed to hospitals. All of them had one symptom in common.

Theories of the third cop on YouTube or wherever you listen.

Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about the relationship between QAnon and antisemitism because you explain that one of the core tenets of QAnon is the world is run by a cabal of satanic cannable pedophiles from the ranks of the Democratic Party, Hollywood and Global Finance, who then sexually abuse children and even drink their blood in rituals. Okay? The New York Times reviewed your book and that points out that this theory, they write, has direct echoes of blood libel, the antisemitic myth pervasive in the middle ages, the Jews murdered Christian boys to use their blood in religious rituals. It does feel as if this is a successor, but it’s well, it’s twenty twenty three.

It’s not thirteen twenty three anymore. And yet, that blood libel has reemerged. What is the relationship between them? I mean, is it has it been this recessive gene that’s just sort of, you know, motored on, stayed, you know, underneath, you know, blow a lot of people’s radar screen, and then social media comes along

and There

it is again. Yeah. I mean, it’s

fascinating. You know, certainly, pre q and on, pre pizza gate, you know, it’s not like blood libel was a really common thing we discussed as is society. It really came up. Yeah. Right.

And I mean, this is something that dates back to the middle ages, this idea that Jewish people were murdering children often to make the bread they used during Passover. I mean, this was a really serious issue. These rumors, to the extent that thousands of people were killed because they would set off these pogroms across Europe. And the pope had to come out and say, you know, this isn’t true and the the stuff persisted into the twentieth century. This was really revived as you said, I mean, around the time of QAnon, when he really dig in on the so called evidence that this is true, it is some random neo Nazi who wrote something in the nineties.

And that they’re saying, well, you know, this guy wrote about it. And, you know, of course, he is drawing on the protocols that the elders’ eye on and stuff. And so, you know, Q and A believers often say, oh, no, this isn’t anti Semitic. It’s just coincidental that, you know, all our targets are are in Hollywood or in banking

and, you know, it’s George Soros and all these other prominent Jewish people. So one of the strangest parts of your book and there are many strange parts. Is the role that Hunter s Thompson may have played in all of this? Now, people need to bear with me here. In fact, the New York Times review point out that you explained that Thompson wrote in Fear and Loading in Las Vegas, which at one time was one of my favorite books.

You know, this gonzos psychedelic classic. He wrote about this rare drug called Adrenacrum. Right? So only he get from a living body and and he said, you know, it makes, you know, pure masculine, seem like ginger beer and everything and how, you know, he wired. But it was fiction.

Right? I mean, when Hunter Thompson wrote about it, he was making it up. So do you think that the queue people got it from that book and like, this is true. This is really going on. Absolutely.

That’s one hundred percent where they got it. Drenacrum is a real thing and it

and it occurs in the brain. It it’s just kind of a as the Times Review says, it’s more SaaS gorilla than than whiskey. And it’s just kind of a random substance you can get it from exposing adrenaline to oxygen. It’s just not that big a deal in the real world. But in this case, it was mentioned by Hunter S.

Thompson and a couple other kind of psychedelic writers in the sixties and seventies. I think because it sounds cool. Right? It sounds Adrina Chrome, you know, it kinda sounds cyberpunk. And the key thing here in Fear and Loving in Las Vegas is that this character in the book says, I got it from a pedophile.

And so there’s the Adrena Chrome pedophile connection. Right? And then really from there, it takes off. I mean, if you look at YouTube videos from Fearnthing in Las Vegas, the movie, all these people are saying, you know, q set me or, you know, this is real. This is because a lot of times, yes, they recognize this movie as fiction, but they think well, you know, this person is really telling the truth in his coded way or the cabal would kill them.

For example, when Chandra has Thompson killed himself, that they look back at that and they say, that was really the cabal that did it. You know, they just see all these clues. I mean, these are people who are who are used to dealing with symbolism and really making big logical leaps. But that is absolutely where they get the adrena crumb thing from. Okay.

So talk to me a little

bit about the role that Donald Trump specifically has played. I mean, there’s a lot of people who trafficking conspiracies. As you mentioned, Glenn Beck, there’s Alex Jones, there’s a lot of folks out there who’ve been pushing it. But Trump plays a unique role in empowering and enabling this. What exactly is going on there?

So Trump is sort of the,

you know, he’s the Messiah figure at the center of Q and A. I mean, he they think he was recruited by the military to take on the evilest people in the history of the world. When he was president, all they wanted was him to acknowledge that QAnon was real. And so they would harass White House reporter, they would talk about sneaking into the White House themselves, you know, and and sort of setting off some alarm bells with the Secret Service. And they they just wanted him to say, yes, Q is real.

Because in their own lives, people are saying, you know, you’re an idiot, and they just really want that validation. And so for a while, the Trump campaign, when they kind of start recognizing this in twenty eighteen, there was one rally where all these cute people appeared and they got on cable news. And that was sort of a big moment for queuing on where everyone said, wait, what what is this? So the Trump campaign, they banned q shirts at rallies, and they kinda they don’t wanna alienate them though. I mean, I I think any normal president would have come out and said, hey, this is nuts.

Get a

life. Mhmm. But instead they they like the

enthusiasm. They say, hey, why don’t you go over here and maybe a little away from the cameras? Then in twenty twenty, Trump starts getting more pertinent questions about Q and M, particularly as Q and M believers start committing violence. And so reporters say, well, you you disavowed this belief that you’re taking on the pedophile cabal. And Trump says, well, maybe I am.

What’s wrong with that? Who’s to say that’s not true? And he’s kinda doing this thing where, you know, he seems to see them as as a super fan club and that he he doesn’t wanna disown them. And in fact, as we’ve seen since he left the presidency, now he’s posting memes where he’s wearing q clothes and

stuff. I mean, he’s really actively embracing q and on that. Okay. So I actually thought this was pretty significant. I mean, I was about to say shocking, but none of this is any shocking.

Well, of course, it’s shocking. But when he posts memes of himself with the slogans of QAnon, he is sending a very direct message. There were songs at some of his rallies that queue supporters viewed as this is our national anthem, right, or when people held the finger up, you know, one finger, you know, where goes one, when you know, there go we all. I mean, so there have been a number of what from a queue supporters perspective were clear signals. There’s enough deniability for Trump to say, well, I didn’t really mean that, but they think he means it don’t they?

Oh, one hundred percent. And, you know, every time you know, Trump might seem to

deny it or to distance himself from it. They’ll say, you know, one of the key and unknown slogans is disinformation is necessary. So so every time something that kinda contradicts their beliefs happens. They say, oh, don’t you get it? You know, Trump has to to throw the cabal off the set, you know, or or he has to this is an elaborate he’s playing four d chess perhaps.

And so they really are are so deep in it that, you know, everything he does, they they see his confirmation. And frankly, a lot of times, they have good reason to be because, you know, for example, truth social, his social media network, part of their strategy, they said explicitly, was to be a home for Q and A and to be a place where that could kind of wink at Q and A.

You write about the, you know, the families that have just been torn apart by all of this. And I think that a lot of people listening to this can identify with the way that the politics in the last decade has, in fact, you know, destroyed friendships, destroyed relationships. But QAnon has been particularly toxic. I mean, you talk about, you know, the everyday stories of families torn apart because of queuing on, not necessarily involving the writing at capital or accepting a fascist takeover. Right?

I mean, this is a story of, you know, bonds, destroy, you know, parents, siblings, spouses just completely flored by the fact that they have family members obsessing over the storm. Let’s talk a little bit about that because this is not just happening out there. It’s infiltrated so much of culture that these families have been just torched by this.

Yeah. I mean, it really is one of the the greater tragedies of q and on. Just this way that, you know, just randomly, you know, someone really close to you can get turned on to QAnon in in a lot of different ways. And then it becomes kind of this battle to then indoctrinate the the person who doesn’t believe in QAnon because if you look at it from the Q non believers perspective, you know, this is the the most shocking thing in the world and you want the person you love to be saved, you know, you want them to believe in it too. And then you start to wonder, well, you know, if my wife doesn’t believe in QAnon, does that mean that, you know, is she working for the cabal?

Or or has she been brainwashed? And so these families, you know, on the the lesser side, it just becomes this endless argument. You know, I I followed this family in the book, their their adult son gets into queue and on. And suddenly, he’s telling his dad, oh, you know, oh, you know, Tom Hanks, you know, that guy’s gonna get arrested soon, and the dad is, what is he talking about? And often, these people their lives are kinda derailed because, you know, I don’t have to go to work.

I don’t have to pay my debts because q’s gonna happen soon or they don’t wanna vaccinate their children for for any childhood illness because, you know, that’s a that’s a cabal plot. Oh, yeah. And so it’s it’s these various really tragedies where sometimes it’s a person who can seem a little eccentric already and then they

just they just go off the deep end. I’m just trying to imagine how how you have a conversation with somebody who you’re sitting around having a beer, you know, around the pool and somebody says, you know, Tom Hanks is is a pedophile with, you know, children in caves. What is the reasonable response to that? Other than are you out of your fucking mind? Yeah.

And and often that

that is the response.

I know

people ask me all the time. How do I get, you know, my my relative, my thousand, my son out of Q1 on. I don’t have an easy answer. I mean, the psychiatrists who have looked at this have said, you know, well, just maintain the relationship, you know, and sort of gently introduce stuff. But it’s really hard, you know.

It’s often, this is a person who is sort of looking at the non believer as kind of an idiot. They’re saying, don’t you see all this evidence dummy? This father I talked to, he was like, you know, my son is just condescending to me all

the time because I don’t believe in his crackpot theory. So many people are we talking about? Is there any way to quantify this? We know that there are very prominent individuals who have placed significant roles on the right in the Republican Party. But what are we talking about here?

Are we talking about four or five hundred thousand people who believe this this bad shit crazy stuff or or what? I’m not trying to pin you down on a specific number, but but what is your sense of how big this is right now in America? Sure.

So in the United States alone, I would say it’s easily over ten million. Killam. It is, you know, the polls we see, the number is very conservatively. It’s like three to ten percent. People will identify as cute and on believers when you make it wider and say, you know, do you believe that there’s a global cabal that, you know, abuses children and drinks their blood?

That’s higher, that’s in the teens. You know, when you look at these numbers and you say, oh, well, only seven percent of people believe in Q and A, but it’s a huge it’s a huge country. Right? And so, I mean, that’s more than than some major religions in

the United States. So we we probably should have gotten to this earlier in the podcast, but I guess here’s the question. I mean, there are a lot of these conspiracy theories floating around Q1 on is a specific thing because people believe that there is some anonymous guy named Hugh who has this code, who has the plan, who is who’s totally wired in Will, who is q? So this is a great question. So it’s never really been I mean, that’s sort of the ultimate question.

Right? So it’s never been

conclusively proven. I think the best evidence we’ve got and it’s really laid out well in this HBO documentary called Q into the storm that’s on HBO Max. Yeah. So basically, Q starts on Fortune, which is sort of this anarchic racist message board. And some guy and start saying, hey, I’m Hugh.

Right? And and so for Hugh and I’m believers, they think it’s maybe it’s Michael Flynn, maybe it’s Don Junior, maybe it’s Dan Scavino. But in reality, it’s most likely this kind of random guy in South Africa who started

it,

a guy named Paul Furber, kind of a nobody. Who is involved in conspiracy theories. Then he moves it onto another message board called eight cham, and then in this in what I think is the most believable explanation, the operators of eight Chan who are a father and son duo named Ron and Jim Watkins in the Philippines. They’re they’re Americans who live in the Philippines. They just steal it.

They hijack it. And so these are truly some of the weirdest guys. I mean, it’s it’s in this documentary. I mean, they are the father’s involved in all these kind of sex online businesses. Okay.

The sun is is very deep into kinda anime culture. And so, basically, all of the evidence, I would say, points towards them as running it to sort of draw more attention to eight Chan, which of course then also became a big site for mass shooter manifestos and really kind of discover the Internet. So that is who I would say is, you know, they deny it, although sometimes Ron will say, oh, maybe it was me, you know, kind of winking. I mean, he ran unsuccessfully for Congress. In twenty twenty two, said?

Yes. So so these are some really weird guys. But, ultimately, for q and on believers, it it’s got to the point where it doesn’t matter because as it started to point towards Hugh is literally a guy in his moms or in this case his dad’s basement, they started to say and like I said, well, it doesn’t really matter. Q is just kind of a a wise, you know, he’s kind of the John, the Baptist, pointing us. He’s just a wise guy who knows the future.

And so we can, you know, forget Q, I call it q and on without q. We kind of move forward into the future with what he taught us and we kind of abandoned q himself.

Okay. So it’s a guy from South Africa named Paul. It’s taken over by this father’s son team. What caused it to sort of jump the spark? Going from a few message boards, you know, read by incels to this big thing.

What happened for this to become big. I mean, because there’s a lot of shit out there.

Right? Yeah. I mean, on

on these you know, not everything becomes big. So you got this guy sitting in his underwear, you know, between video games and he’s coming up with this stuff. There’s gotta be hundreds of people, you know, putting out that kind of shit on the on the Internet. What was it about this? Who made it happen?

That’s what I’m getting at.

Yeah. And and really, Q wasn’t even the first kind of fake leaker on Fortune. There were all these kind of predecessors who were saying, hey, I have all the information about Hollywood or the FBI. Right. And so with In Q’s case, It just was last sewn to by a couple conspiracy theorists on YouTube who had their own kind of successful operations pre q, including a woman named Tracy Dean’s who went on to hold a position in the South Carolina GOP.

So these people, there’s something that kind of vibes with them about queuing on in particular. And they say, okay, let’s take this. I mean, these they kind of create their own group and they start really just hammering it out in ways that are much more approachable So they start posting about it on Facebook. They’re making YouTube videos. They’re on Twitter.

And so from there, you know, a lot of Q and A believers have never really interacted with the posts on a channel where you kind of have to wade through all this anime and all this this porn and all this stuff. And they just kind of they get in a much more palatable ways. And that’s where you have these these kind of interpreters spring up. I call them in the book, cues priests. Because q’s kind of this, like, occluded figure.

And these people say, well, you know, here’s what q’s telling me. And, of course, a lot of them are getting

very rich in the process. Sort of like Delphi or the priest at Delphi, trying to interpret all this. So you’ve had a hell of a run on this because you’ve been writing about this for a while. And back in September, you know, twenty nineteen, somebody else was mistaken for you. I mean, because they they’re aware of what you do.

And the speaker, you know, called out this person as you and the audience turned on him in boots. So at one point, you shut down your social media accounts. And you started skysing yourself when you went to the pro Trump events? I mean, because they were they were after you for a while, weren’t they?

I mean, it’s really intense. Yeah. Still. I mean, definitely, like, you know, I I definitely got a home security system when I got a house. You know, there’s kind of varying degrees of it.

Some of them, but kind of I I think sort of see it as a game or some people think that, well, will summer he’s really working for the queue because that’s why he writes about it so much. He’s kind of getting the word out in a backdoor way. At January sixth before the riot happened, I I was walking around and someone goes, Will Summer. And I was like, oh, god. And it was a cute one on guy who wanted a selfie.

Because, you know, oh, it’s we’re we’re all in this together, man. Obviously, I I declined. You know, I certainly get a you know, my share of death threats. I went to this cute non event in Dallas. And I I grew out my beard and I I wore a hat and sunglasses.

And I was kinda walking around and and then eventually Michael Flynn gets up there and he says, Well, the problem is we got some reporters who snuck in. And I was kinda looking around like, well, who would do that? And then I realized I’m kinda getting surrounded by members of their private security force. And then suddenly, I’m getting bounced out. And so, you know, it has been a very very strange journey.

As you said, you know, there was this other one where I’m sitting there in the front row, I’m not in a disguise, and then they think some other guys me and they say, we all know that scumbag, Will Summers here. He’s right there, and then some random queuing on guys, they think is me, and he’s going, no, it’s not me. They

go, booh, get him. Alright. You’re laughing about this. I’m laughing about this, but Seriously, I mean, you’re dealing with some pretty deranged folks out there and, you know, we clearly, the been an uptick in in violence. It doesn’t take that many people.

I mean, so how worried are you? And I’m I’m not trying to make your paranoid or anything. It’s just that you’re dealing with some pretty crazy guys, most of whom have guns.

Yeah. And and as you said, I mean, it really only takes one one crazy person to do something. I mean, you know, a cute and unbeliever murdered the head of one of the biggest mafia families in the country. So, you know, I mean, obviously, they can I’m sure a guy who had some protection himself and was very paranoid. So, you know, they can get you, unfortunately.

You know, it it’s certainly something to be aware of. As you said, I mean, there was a there’s all this queuing on violence out there, which I get into in the book. You know, there’s a woman who kind of unfortunately is lawyer who kind of just crosses their radar and they decide that, you know, she’s an agent of the cabal. And I don’t think it’s it’s too short to say that it ruins her life. I mean, it just destroys her business.

She has to go into hiding. You know, this is one aspect of the book that I really tried to get across to people is, this can just randomly happen to you. You can be mining your own business and let’s say you’re in a viral video or something and then they say that person’s a sicko and then they get out to destroy you.

Well, I mean, if in fact, you do actually believe that a certain person is murdering babies so they can drink their blood or whatever. You know, if you actually believe that, then there’s a motivation deck. I mean, no, PizzaGate was before kewed on. Right? I mean, this is this is back in twenty sixteen, you know, this belief that that there was this this this this cabal doing things to children in the basement of ping pong pizza.

And a guy shows up with a rifle because he wants to liberate the children. Right? So, I mean, this can happen. And frankly, if you accept that worldview, then it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen. Exactly.

I mean, I talk to was it kind of the first guy to discover PizzaGate?

Because all these characters I followed were tweeting about comet ping pong, a restaurant I I go to in DC, and I thought, maybe these guys and I aren’t so different. Maybe they they like comment ping pong too, and I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. But I talked to the owner of it as it was breaking. And he said, yeah. There’s a couple wackos on Reddit.

I’m not too concerned. And then a month later, as you said, I mean, a guy who has hopped up on info wars, busted in, and he fires awesome shots. And and this is what I think is so reprehensible about both these kind of random Internet promoters of queuing on all the way up to someone like Donald Trump or Michael Flynn. Is these guys are promoting QAnon and you’re hopping people up on these things that if you believe them and plenty of people do, the only thing to do is to commit violence because if you think that, you know, these children are being abused in a Washington pizzeria, these are life or death steaks. And, you know, in this case of of this gunman, I mean, he he fell for it.

And, you know, as the cops were dragging him away, he said, I mean, there’s some dark comedy to this. He said, you know, I guess my intel was wrong. I guess my intel was wrong. Okay. So your day job is a politics

reporter for the Daily Beast, and I just wanted to ask you in a few minutes we have left about a story that broke over the last twenty four hours James O’Keefe who ran Project Veritas, a very, very high profile, right wing grifter media figure been around since the early days of the Obama administration. Apparently, out at project Veritas, he recorded a, what, a forty five minute video where he’s, you know, ripping the the board of directors. So, Will, what happened? I know this is kind of inside baseball, but you know, James O’Keefe and Project Veritas was, you know, has been a major player on the right for a very long time. What happened to James O’Keefe?

How did he

jump the shark? Yeah. So this is really one of the craziest stories going on right now. And I think it’s one that’s gonna have a huge impact on the conservative movement if he stays

out of the

game. You know, this is a guy I call the the often the prankster prince. I mean, he’s always doing his undercover videos. I mean, he and he’s been very successful. I think it disrupting left wing groups.

People may remember his acorn sting when he dressed like a pimp.

That kinda made him. Right? Exactly.

Exactly. He was a major liberal group that he just completely destroyed. So essentially, what what’s going on is there’s this rift between James O’Keefe and the Board at Project Veritas. To the extent that there’s been a lot of signs of trouble there for for about a year, the FBI rated his house and some other people’s houses over the theft of Ashley Biden’s diary. James O’Cree said he didn’t do anything illegal, but some people who sold them the diary had been have pleaded guilty to crimes.

So that’s ongoing. He got sued by an employee who was claiming that essentially, the environment there is completely out of control that, you know, they were having these parties and an employee overdose on drugs that James O’Keefe was pulling up porn on his computer at work. I mean, it was like an animal house, but in a very twisted way. And you

had the musicals Right? I mean, he’s he’s like, bully in the musical theater. So he he’s a huge musical theater nerd. I mean, this is so weird. This

is why you my love test is really weird. You know, reporters like, you kinda keep the lore. Right? And then when this stuff comes, it’s like, oh, yeah, here’s the video of James O’Keefe and he loves musicals so much. So he spent twenty thousand dollars and I wanna be clear on something project Veritas is supposed to be a nonprofit.

So he spent twenty thousand dollars that they’ve admitted to improperly on his role in a musical production of Oklahoma. He played the star curly. And and this, you know, it sounds fake, but it’s real. Yeah. And so they had to essentially apologize to the IRS over it.

So what appears to happen is that the the board who are all hardcore James O’Keefe people, I mean, they’re being portrayed now as, you know, George Soros agents. But I think, you know, from their perspective, what they’re saying is, this was illegal. I mean, we could not condone this spending. They claimed he was spending tens of thousands of dollars on a private jet to go meet a guy who who might repair his boat or that he was taking private cars everywhere to the tune of more than a hundred thousand dollars. I love the fact that they had choreographers on staff,

you know, for for their various events that because they had to do the dance steps and everything. Like like all non profits do, they recorded these elaborate videos to

they would have kind of a a take on the print song controversy, and James O’Keefe would do this music video. And I I remember this coming out at the time, and I was like, oh, yeah. I guess that’s James O’Keefe’s thing. But then you think about it and you think, wait a minute. You know, it’s so weird.

And meanwhile, his employees say he’s been a nightmare to work for They filed this memo with the board that a third of the staff side that said, you know, if you got cross wise with him, you know, they called it a public crucifixion. They said he was just really vicious to them. And so on Monday, it seems like he did a you can’t fire me. I quit to the board. He recorded this really crazy video.

He’s crying. He’s really sweaty. You know, private vouchers will probably collapse over it because now all these donors are mad at the board. At the same time, the board is saying, well, this is not an organization to fund musicals. So this is definitely one

to watch. Oh, no. I think it’s definitely one to watch. And that there was some controversy yesterday because there was a line in the New York Times story that, you know, James O’Keefe had risen to prominence during the Trump years and a lot of people pointing out. No.

He was very prominent long before Donald Trump came along, that whole Acorn undercover video. That was in the early Obama administration. I remember that very well. The book is trust the plan, the rise of QAnon, and the conspiracy that unhinged America by Will Sommer, it is out today. Will is politics reporter for The Daily Beast.

Congratulations on the book Will, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you so much, Charlie. And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow and we will do this all over again.

The

Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, an engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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