Will Sommer’s Trust The Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, like his reporting for The Daily Beast, takes on the herculean task of explaining that dangerously wild world to the “normies.” In the extensively reported book, he manages to humanize but not downplay the threat of this ever-expanding “super conspiracy.”
Sommer started covering the fledgling movement back in 2017, among the first journalists to point out that people should pay attention to it. Adherents of the wide-ranging, often anti-Semitic conspiracy have committed murders, ransacked the U.S. Capitol, and are now members of Congress. As a February 2022 poll found, one in five Americans believe in QAnon conspiracies (it’s one in four for Republicans).
HarperCollins
Even if “Q,” whomever they may be, isn’t still posting, much damage has been done. From the disturbing message boards of 4chan and 8chan, to the halls of the nation’s Capitol, its madness has touched millions of Americans and many more around the world.
Trust the Plan is a fantastic, quick read that shows the QAnon conspiracy’s real human toll: from family lawyer Kim Picazio whose life was upended by one QAnon promoter’s baseless claim that she was a part of a “cabal that kidnapped and trafficked children,” to the men and women that broke into the Capitol on January 6th. Sommer also tells the story of those desperate to get some understanding of what has happened to their loved ones who were now “digital soldiers” to QAnon. Many reached out to the author just trying to find a way to get their loved ones deprogrammed and back into a normal life that didn’t involve late nights decoding Q drops, furious that the arrests of politicians and celebrities haven’t happened yet.
It may be easier now to ignore these issues festering in online forums, or to downplay their real effect. But if we are to trust all that’s covered in Trust the Plan, we should know better.
Zach Roberts: What got you into covering QAnon and this world?
Will Sommer: I grew up in a pretty conservative background in Texas, and [I consumed] a lot of talk radio and Fox News and stuff. And then my politics changed in college. But I really kept up with this passion for covering rightwing media. Then in 2016, I would be at parties and people would say, “Have you heard of Milo Yiannopoulos or Ben Shaprio? And I would think, ‘Oh, you have no idea about all the lore on this guy.’” One day, my wife said “How about instead of bothering me about this, you write a newsletter?” And so I did. And then I got hired over at The Daily Beast. QAnon got on my radar in late 2017, about a couple of months after it started.
It really is just so weird. I went to a QAnon march in April 2018 and there were maybe like 100 or 200 people. And I thought, “Wow, this is totally crazy. This is the high watermark. It’s never getting bigger than this.” Obviously, that was not the case . . . It’s just such an interesting topic; it has so many characters; it touches on so many things, right? It’s crime and belief, and politics and religion.
Q: Well, as you describe, it’s the “super conspiracy.”
Sommer: It really is. It pulls in so many different things. So, I thought [that] after several years of covering these people, there was enough material for a book.
Q: When I’m covering this kind of world, one of the biggest things you’re constantly asking is what should be published and what shouldn’t? Where do you draw that line between giving something attention, and thus a platform, versus just ignoring it? That’s the conversation, especially after January 6, I’ve noticed that people on Twitter bring up—like, “why are you even covering this?”
Sommer: I think, for liberals or people who are not really on the right, there’s this sense that people really wanted to say, after Trump left office, “Okay, we're normal again. We don’t have to cover this stuff anymore.” But I don’t see any evidence that we are going back to normal anytime soon.
I always tried, with QAnon or anything else, to ask myself, “When does it move offline? When is it no longer [just a] 4chan drama?” In the summer of 2018, a QAnon believer blocked off a highway near the Hoover Dam. And he had some guns and was clearly motivated by QAnon. And I thought at this point, “We have to trust the audience enough to say, ‘oh, you’re not promoting QAnon or whatever.’ ” At some point, you have to treat people like adults and say, “This thing is inspiring murders, believers are getting elected to Congress.” People deserve to have it explained to them just how this is motivating our politics.
Q: How much do you think that there’s a self-perpetuating cycle of the merch that has been connected to QAnon? For instance, you write about the QAnon book that was a best-seller on Amazon.
Sommer: That’s a great point. QAnon definitely has a community feel. There’s different aspects to it, like the game aspect. It’s so vague and you can [follow] the clues and it’s all for a community keyed into this idea of “We know the truth and no one else does.” And then there’s the aspect [that’s] certainly much more forward-thinking than the JFK assassination [conspiracy theories], just to use one example. Because, it’s saying this “storm is coming” and there’s going to be this big moment that we can all pin our hopes on it. Whereas you know, let’s say you devote ten years of your life to the JFK assassination, it’s like, all right, I think this one Mafia guy did it. Oh, he died thirty years ago.
Q: How much do you think that Donald Trump ever actually understood or knew about QAnon?
Sommer: It’s so hard to know about that guy. But what we’ve seen from the public statements is that he sees them as sort of the Trump super fan club. And he’s really loath to denounce anyone who loves him. So he’s happy to kind of play with it. In the White House press briefing, [reporters say], “oh, they think you’re out to get these Democratic pedophiles.” He says, “well, what would be wrong with that? You know, maybe we are doing that.”
Q: With Trump, it’s always about making it about him and that’s what I’ve found with talking to people who are Q-related is that they’re the center of this conspiracy—they’re the only ones that know about it. It makes their lives interesting.
People really wanted to say, after Trump left office, ‘Okay, we're normal again. We don’t have to cover this stuff anymore.’ But I don’t see any evidence that we are going back to normal anytime soon.
Sommer: It seems insanely fun. I mean, you know, up until it’s not . . . . And so there’s that appeal, you join this community online. You can go to QAnon meet-ups and maybe your debts will be abolished when the Storm happens. Often, I think of the evangelical aspect of it, and not like Christian evangelical, but just how spreading the word is underplayed where they say it’s the great awakening and QAnon believers are tasked with telling everyone this. So when Tom Hanks is arrested [Hanks has been a regular focus of QAnon conspiracies] [and] a civil war breaks out, we all have this role in it. I was really struck by this interview that Vice did with some QAnon believers who said essentially, “We know the news before it happens.” And that sense of agency and importance that it gives you seems to be a big part of it.
Q: Why do you think so many people were surprised by what happened on January 6? The signs were there, they weren’t hiding the fact that they wanted violence.
Sommer: I don’t want to suggest that I was like laying it out either. But I think there is this impulse in the mainstream media, people who look at this stuff for a living, to constantly be reverting to the norm and thinking that we’ve gone back to normalcy. Obviously, Biden had been elected, so maybe there was this feeling of like, “okay, you know, the crazy period is behind us.”
But then you see in the lead-up, there were two incidents in Washington, D.C., where Antifa and the Proud Boys fought after the election, and so I knew something was going to happen. But as you said, I thought maybe there would be some brawling or maybe, a bunch of arrests.
Q: Is the Republican Party just part of QAnon now? They all seem to draw on different parts of the super conspiracy.
Sommer: That’s a great way to put it. The larger thing about it is a sort of free-floating conspiracy—where anything that happens is a conspiracy theory. So for example, with the Chinese balloon thing, we see people on the right saying, “Well, this is meant to cover something up, in the United States, whether it be the train derailment or [whatever] . . . nothing is as it seems.”
In the book, I get into Michael Barkun’s definition of a conspiracy theory. It’s essentially this idea that, “nothing is as it seems, everything is connected.” And certainly that is the case on the right. I think it's fair to say a majority of Republican voters feel that way. And certainly a majority of Republican politicians are afraid to say otherwise. That seems crazy, but QAnon has really mainstreamed this conspiratorial thinking in the party.
Q: One of the big things I like that you do in the book is humanizing the people around [QAnon believers], those affected by them, and the people trying to bring them back.
Sommer: It’s so hard. My heart breaks for these people because it is this really impossible condition that you can find yourself in where you have a family member who is a little kooky for a while. And then suddenly they’re saying, “Okay, we aren’t vaccinating our kids.”
You know, “We’re not going to eat this.” Or in extreme cases, “I’m going to throw away my life to go follow JFK Jr. in Dallas” or whatever. Fortunately, there are now more resources online. There’s the Reddit QAnonCasualties forum, where people who have been through this, work through it together.
But really, the QAnon believers themselves have to come to this realization on their own where suddenly, the belief in Q gets dislodged for some reason. And then they start saying, “Wait a minute, if that’s true, what else did QAnon promoters lie to me about?”
Q: Is there any coming back from this? Polling says that sizable numbers of Americans still believe in QAnon.
Sommer: In the long term, we’re in for this kind of conspiratorial thinking playing a major role in the GOP and thus in America more broadly. People look at these polls and they say, “Oh, well, only 6 percent or 10 percent of the American voters believe in QAnon or the core tenets of it.”
But that’s millions of people. Like, how many people does it take to do a January 6-style [coup attempt] or something like that? There’s really this kind of tendency to downplay it. What I hope to do with the book is present this as a real thing. And whether it’s named QAnon or something else going forward, this is something we really have to grapple with, society-wide.