The QAnon Conspiracy Theory is Proved Wrong after Inauguration

In the days leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, as my colleagues in Washington were getting ready to go cover the inauguration, I was checking in with the followers of QAnon.

Basically, people who believe in this QAnon conspiracy theory had locked into that date, January 20 —

— which they saw as kind of the final deadline, the true culmination of all of these beliefs and predictions they’ve been talking about for the last three years.

They were promised that Joe Biden would not actually be inaugurated that day.

Donald Trump would declare martial law and reveal all of these shocking and terrible government secrets and that Trump himself would get inaugurated for a second term —

— while Joe Biden would get arrested.

And the thing I was trying to figure out is like, when that doesn’t happen, when Joe Biden is inaugurated in contradiction of all of these prophecies that QAnon had believed, like, what would the millions of people who have been expecting this to happen do?

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, my colleague Kevin Roose on what happens to a conspiracy theory and its followers when it’s proven wrong.

It’s Friday, January 29.

Kevin, why is January 20 such a make-or-break moment for believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory?

QAnon at its core is a deeply date-driven belief system. So just to recap, Cliffs Notes version, QAnon is this big, sprawling conspiracy theory about this global cabal of satanic pedophiles who run the world. No basis in fact. It’s totally made up. But it got started in 2017 when Q, this anonymous message board poster who claimed to be a high level government insider, started posting these cryptic clues on a message board about what was going to happen — basically unspooling this theory about how Donald Trump was secretly working to take down this cabal and that there would be this day in the future, this moment of reckoning called “The Storm” or “The Great Awakening,” when Trump would reveal his plan, expose the deep state cabal, and bring its members to justice.

Mhm. And Kevin, does anyone know — I don’t know if this is measurable — how many people believe in this clearly false conspiracy of Q and his prophecies?

Well, it’s hard to say exactly. I mean, they don’t keep an official membership directory. But it’s almost certainly in the millions. I mean, Facebook, Twitter, these other companies that have taken action against QAnon accounts, have taken down pages and groups with millions of members between them. So this is not, like, a small fringe movement anymore. And what’s interesting is that it’s continued to grow really rapidly, even though from the start, lots of the predictions that Q was making weren’t coming true. Like the very first post in 2017 predicted that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested. And that didn’t happen, obviously.

And how do these people rationalize that?

Well, mostly they tell themselves, we must have misinterpreted the clue. Maybe the clue wasn’t wrong; maybe we just weren’t smart enough or savvy enough to understand what date Q really meant.

Hmm, it’s on us, not Q.

Exactly. So these QAnon prophecies, they come and go, and the goalposts get moved, and the explanations get reformulated. But one of the big setbacks for QAnon happens in November of last year when, to their great surprise, Donald Trump loses the election. QAnon believers had been told that Trump would win re-election in a landslide, and so they were confused. But they still had an out, because there was still this theory, this unfounded theory that the election had been stolen, and that when the truth about election fraud and other various conspiracy theories came out, they would be vindicated and Trump would indeed become a two-term president.

Hmm. So even this, the greatest setback to date, is somehow rationalized, incorporated into the Q belief system as something that can be explained.

Right. But all of this is sort of made more confusing and complicated by the fact that after the election, Q — this anonymous message board account that posts these cryptic clues — basically disappears. There are a couple posts since the election, but Q used to post 10, 20 times a day. And now these posts, these sort of clues that help people in the movement understand what’s happening, they’re basically gone. Q just disappears, stops posting, doesn’t really address the election at all. And so that creates a power vacuum in the QAnon community.

And what is the reaction among followers?

Well, some of them think that this is part of the plan, that Q has sort of gone incommunicado because things are heating up. There are various ways to explain why Q has disappeared. But what ends up happening is that instead of drawing their guidance from Q, people in this movement start looking to these influencers in the movement — these people who aren’t Q, or who they don’t believe are Q, but who sort of speak with authority about what’s happening in this progression toward The Storm or The Great Awakening.

And so where do these new influencers guide QAnon followers?

Well, they start to point people to another date, January 6, the day Congress is supposed to certify the results of the election.

And how do Q supporters start to think about that date? What’s supposed to happen?

So QAnon believers spend weeks leading up to January 6 convincing themselves and each other that Joe Biden is not going to be certified as the winner of the election by Congress. That maybe Mike Pence will step in and block it, or maybe Patriots will take to the streets themselves and sort of convince Congress not to certify the election results. That all of this is going to somehow end in a reversal of what’s been happening, and that Donald Trump will actually be declared the winner.

Well, one slice of that, of course, does materialize. People do storm the Capitol, including, as we now know, QAnon supporters. But they fail. And, of course, Joe Biden’s victory is certified. So how do QAnon supporters absorb that news?

Well, the reaction among QAnon believers to January 6 was kind of mixed and confused. Like there were believers who said, like, yeah, this was us. We did this. But there were also people who said, no, this wasn’t us.

And I heard some of that kind of mixed feeling about the riots when I called up a source of mine, this woman I had been talking to for more than a year, who believes in QAnon. She lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She’s a middle-aged white woman, went to Harvard. Her name is Valerie Gilbert. And I called her after the riots and sort of asked her what she thought had happened.

She said maybe it’s antifa, maybe it’s not. But she said that it didn’t shake her faith.

In QAnon, there’s this saying —

— “trust the plan.” And that’s sort of what they tell each other after these setbacks. They say, you know, trust the plan.

There’s a plan. And maybe we don’t understand what it is yet, or when it’s going to happen, but there is a plan. And it’s going to happen, so don’t lose faith. And that’s basically where she had landed.

I mean, it’s not all that dissimilar from how some people in religious communities feel about the Second Coming or the apocalypse. I mean, there have been lots of groups that have predicted things that have not come to pass, and they don’t lose faith after it. They just reformulate the belief and keep going.

When we come back, January 20.

So Kevin, tell me about January 20 as you experienced it.

Yes. I have two monitors in my home office, and one of them —

— I was tuned to a live stream on YouTube of Joe Biden being inaugurated. And on the other one —

I had arranged all of these, like, QAnon chat rooms and Telegram groups and Facebook groups. And basically trying to sort of have one reality on one screen and the other reality on the other screen.

Right. Literally split screen realities of the world.

Right.

And tell me what you see.

So the day starts off very hopeful for these QAnon believers.

They’re looking for symbols, like Trump gives his sort of going away speech, and they see that he has 17 flags behind him.

17 is sort of like a magic number in QAnon, because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.

So they say, like, oh, he’s sending a signal that this is the day that Trump is going to declare martial law and invoke the Insurrection Act and announce the mass arrest of all these elite pedophiles.

As inauguration started, politicians walk in, take their seats. These people that they believe are members of this global cabal of criminals — Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama — they’re all in one place.

So as you’re watching this, you’re seeing people continue to speculate, like, any second now, this is going to happen. This is going to happen.

Any second now. One person on that QAnon message board writes, “The next 48 hours will be like the entire Revolutionary War and the fall of Berlin compressed into two days. I have called off work so I can witness history in the making. What a time to be alive.”

And then as noon approached and Joe Biden was getting ready to actually take the oath of office and get sworn in as the president, they started to get a little nervous.

People just sort of trying to tell themselves that there was still time. Something could still happen.

And then —

— as soon as Joe Biden took the oath of office —

— and was officially the president, and Donald Trump was officially no longer the president, the mood really shifted.

They were getting despondent. People were saying, we’ve been played like fools. It’s over.

Granted, this wasn’t everyone. There were still some people who said, you know, I still trust the plan. You know, I’m still holding out. But a lot of people were getting very disillusioned.

They were leaving the group chats.

Some of the big QAnon message boards had so many people posting about their doubts and their disillusionment that they started banning these people, who they called “doomers.” So you weren’t allowed to post anything negative about QAnon, but that couldn’t contain this feeling that a lot of them were having that they had been lied to and betrayed. And that actually there wasn’t a plan.

So this theory that always seems to get reinvented, justified, explained, rationalized — all of a sudden, there are people who are suddenly acknowledging, we can’t defend this. This is not real.

Yeah, the scales fell from their eyes. And then later that afternoon, a couple of hours after inauguration, this guy, Ron Watkins, who used to run the site that Q posted on — some people have suspected that he actually posted as Q himself — he posts this message to his Telegram channel. He writes, “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able. As we enter into the next administration, please remember all the friends and happy memories we made together over the past few years.”

That does not sound like a believer. That sounds like somebody admitting it was all wrong.

Yeah, it was very weird. It was kind of like the real Q was “the friends we made along the way.” It was like it had a very “last day of summer camp” feel to it. This was one of the biggest, most prominent figures in the QAnon movement, and he’s basically saying, like, sorry, better luck next time.

What is the reaction to Watkins’s post?

There’s a lot of anger. People are furious. I think it’s important to understand that this is not a small part of these people’s lives. This is not like, you know, I had a fantasy football team that I really hoped was going to win the game, and they didn’t win the game. Like, people have lost years of their lives to this movement. And as I was watching these QAnon unbelievers kind of turn on the influencers in their movements, I was thinking about my conversations with Valerie Gilbert —

— who basically had told me that her belief in QAnon and other conspiracy theories had cost her a lot of her closest, longest relationships.

She’d cut off ties with her friends. She’d been estranged from family members. Like, QAnon had really become not just a thing that she believed. It had become her entire social life.

And so what happens to people like Valerie? Where do they go from here?

It’s a really vulnerable, uncertain moment for believers in QAnon. And I think some of them are doing what they always do — they’re pushing that date back. They’re moving the goalposts. But a lot of them are just sort of floating. They don’t know what or who to believe. And there are groups that are preying on that uncertainty. Like, it’s important to remember that QAnon has been in many ways like a very destructive and dangerous movement. Like there have been real acts of violence. There was a mob at the Capitol that was driven in some way by QAnon believers. And now some other extremist groups, white supremacist groups, far-right militias, have started trying to capitalize on this moment of confusion by recruiting QAnon believers into their movements and attaching them to their causes.

Really. So Kevin, is Q over in a certain sense? Is it on a path that is no longer sustainable, given what just happened?

I think the original form of QAnon — this conspiracy theory centered on the posts of this anonymous person on the internet that was all about Donald Trump defeating the deep state — I think that part may be close to over. But I think what QAnon represents, this kind of alternate reality of conspiracy theories and lies, this group of millions of Americans who don’t trust official explanations, who want secret knowledge, who are sort of creating their own truth out of fragments of stuff they read and see on the internet — I think that’s not going away anytime soon.

Have you talked to Valerie since the inauguration?

I have. And I asked her how she felt, now that her prediction about the inauguration had proven false.

She’s still very much a believer. In her mind, the fact that Joe Biden is the president doesn’t change anything.

Thank you, Kevin. We appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The South African variant of the coronavirus has been detected in the United States. Two cases of the more contagious mutation have been found in South Carolina. Neither involved people who had recently traveled to South Africa, suggesting that the variant has been spreading for some time within the United States. And on Thursday, General Motors said that it would phase out gas and diesel-powered cars and trucks by 2035, a historic change that will pressure rival automakers to do the same. G.M. says that it will only sell vehicles that produce zero tailpipe emissions. The move will have a major impact on the oil and gas industry, which relies heavily on gas-powered cars. Today’s episode was produced by Luke Vander Ploeg and Austin Mitchell. It was edited by Alix Spiegel and Paige Cowett, and engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Stuart Thompson.

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