At the height of pandemic lockdown, I often went on aimless strolls through my neighborhood in an effort to stave off cabin fever. On one such outing, I came across a poster, amateurishly made and visibly besieged by the elements, that featured an image of World Economic Forum (WEF) chairman Klaus Schwab speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government alongside a YouTube video URL and a quote reading: “What we are very proud of, is that we penetrate the global cabinets of countries with our WEF Young Global Leaders . . . like [Justin] Trudeau.” No further commentary was included, but the implication was clear: here, the poster darkly intoned, was the head of the WEF caught on tape admitting that multinational elites run the world — that the prime minister of Canada is not a patriot but a puppet of larger forces hell-bent on enforcing their wills from above.

The image has stayed in my mind because it’s such a perfect encapsulation of the way conspiracy theory tends to operate. At a certain level of abstraction, its premise — that the world is a deeply unequal place and that a self-serving consensus holds among its most influential elites — wasn’t entirely wrong. Yet, somehow, the rather banal realities of elite power (sourced, in this case, to a video publicly available on the Kennedy School’s YouTube channel) was blown up into a revelatory fantasy of conspiracy unmasked and global evil exposed.

As a political fable the whole thing conveys an attractive moral simplicity. If a tiny group of individuals is really complicit in all of your problems, the business of solving those problems becomes incredibly straightforward. When you cut off the head of a snake, after all, the torso it has wrapped around you will quickly slacken and die.

In October, 2017, an anonymous post on the message board 4chan made a bold announcement: “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM-8:30 AM EST on Monday — the morning on October 30, 2017.” Subsequent posts elaborated that President Donald Trump and his administration were making plans for the arrest and preparations for the chaotic events it would inevitably set off.

For reasons that will never be fully understood, these posts somehow stood out enough amid the deluge of content posted to 4chan every day to trigger one of the most sprawling, sinister, and fascinating right-wing subcultures of the twenty-first century. The initial prediction obviously never came true. But QAnon — the epochal and millenarian conspiracy theory it spurred — quickly seemed to grow in inverse proportion to the accuracy of the eponymous “Q’s” predictions.

Having since metastasized into a globe-spanning phenomenon, the basic story of QAnon is by now well-known. As the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer explains in his excellent new book, Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America:

At its heart, QAnon has a simple message; the world is run by a cabal of Satanic cannibal-pedophiles from the ranks of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and global finance who sexually abuse children and even drink their blood in rituals. The US military, which has resisted joining the otherwise all-encompassing cabal, recruited Donald Trump to run for president to oppose this evil group of elitists. And someday soon he’s going to purge all his foes in a violent, cathartic moment called “The Storm,” with his opponents ending up either imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay or executed by military tribunals. All of the world’s problems — and yours — will be solved forever.

Here we have the essential ingredients of QAnon: a familiar theory of shadowy elite rule grafted onto a horrific story of organized child abuse; an undercurrent of right-wing nationalism and a reverence for institutions like the military; a collection of antagonists who all hail from liberal America; a simulation of grassroots political participation in the form of cryptic, anonymous posts that can be endlessly deconstructed and decoded; and, finally, a fantasy of violent purges and the promise of a coming utopia.

Beyond these basic contours, QAnon is endlessly complex, factional, and adaptable to a seemingly limitless number of different causes, contexts, and grievances. Understanding its genesis is important, not only because it has torn apart families and inspired real-world acts of violence, but because it may represent a new template for conspiracy theory in an age of media oversaturation and democratic paralysis.

In this respect, Sommer’s book — enriched by immersive reporting and informed analysis — is an engaging and useful treatment of a sinister and endlessly slippery subject. Having tracked and reported on QAnon since it first emerged in 2017, he has an unmatched ability to explain its convoluted (and often competing) mythologies and make its obscure idioms and language legible to the reader.

In an early chapter, for example, he cites a Q post from October 28, 2017, which read:

Mockingbird

HRC detained, not arrested (yet).

Where is Huma? Follow Huma. 

This has nothing to do w/Russia (yet). 

Why does Potus surround himself w/generals? 

What is military intelligence? 

Why go around the 3 letter agencies? 

They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control.

This is not a R v D battle.

Why did Soros donate all his money recently?

Why would he place all his funds in a RC?

Mockingbird 10.30.17

God bless fellow Patriots.

Just like the posts on any obscure subreddit or web forum, Q’s messages mean virtually nothing unless you’ve spent hours consuming them already. But as Sommer explains, everything above would be instantly legible to an average Q devotee: “Mockingbird” referred to a real-life CIA operation during the Cold War; “3 letter agencies” referred to the CIA, FBI, and NSA, who have supposedly been infiltrated by the cabal; “This is not a R v D battle” meant that both major parties had similarly been infiltrated; “Huma” was Hillary Clinton confidant Huma Abedin, who Q claimed was secretly working with the patriotic faction Trump and his generals would soon lead into the promised land.

One important takeaway from Sommer’s book is that this insularity is a significant part of QAnon’s appeal. By understanding and interpreting Q posts, followers could partake in a fantasy of endless intrigue and identify themselves as soldiers in a righteous crusade. The ambiguity of the posts, moreover, left ample space for competing interpretations, spawning a whole network of Q microsects and streaming enterprises — with different partisans advancing their own analyses and competing for new chunks of territory on Q’s ever-expanding frontier.

In this sense, there is something quintessentially American and Protestant about QAnon, beyond the unavoidable fact that many of its most zealous adherents are conservative evangelicals. At the level of grassroots interaction, it is a priesthood of believers speaking in chan-ified tongues and experiencing a personal relationship with their chosen God. The vehicle for this anarchic individualism, however, is ultimately a marketplace of competing brands and franchises. And, as in your average megachurch, there is a concurrent reverence for authority and hierarchy — QAnon’s theology foregrounding, above all else, the US military and its one-time commander in chief, Donald Trump.