It all started with a shitpost. Some person, yet to be identified, was roleplaying as a covert government agent on 4chan, the website perhaps best known for being a cesspool. They said Hillary Clinton was going to be arrested on October 30, 2017. And she wasn’t. But from that seed grew Qanon, a far-right conspiracy that’s outgrown borders, both international and online, and become perhaps one of the biggest threats to democracy in the 21st century.
It’s the focus of Will Sommer’s Trust the Plan, a short but insightful look into the world of Qanon and how it’s spread throughout the Republican Party, across the world, and left many broken lives in its wake. Sommer, a political reporter for The Daily Beast, takes readers into weird corners of the internet and far-right political rallies, showing how the self-described fringe has become the mainstream. It is a precinct and chilling book.
The conceit of Qanon is that he is a highly placed government agent - Q comes from a high-level security clearance - who is leaking plans on behalf of the Trump Administration. Q is aware of a gigantic government conspiracy involving the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and Hollywood that involves drinking blood, taking weird drugs, and satanic sacrifice. When reduced to its bare essentials, it’s obviously false: as Ben Franklin wrote, three can only keep a secret if two of them are dead. But, as Sommer shows here, it quickly spread thanks to social media’s laissez-faire attitudes towards hate speech and misinformation.
Sommer has been writing about the far-right for a number of years now, He started a newsletter in 2016 and was around for the Pizzagate scandal, a sort of proto-Qanon about how a Washington DC pizzeria was cover for child abuse; it ended with a gunman storming the restaurant and trying to gain access to a basement that wasn’t actually there. Among his peers, this experience makes Sommer particularly well suited for this beat.
He covers Qanon as it rose from 4chan and spread to different corners of the internet like Facebook and YouTube, where the cryptic posts were disseminated and amped up with lore and commentary. Moves like this made them more palatable for mass consumption while also smoothing out the rougher edges; one didn’t have to poke around a darker part of the internet to keep up on this lore.
What is especially interesting about Qanon, and a point that Sommer drives at effectively, is that unlike most cult movements there isn’t an especially charismatic person at the head of things. Q doesn’t exist and was likely the work of an internet troll or two: Sommer makes a convincing case that Ron Watkins, an internet entrepreneur and far-right troll, is behind the account. And there hasn’t been a new post from Q in years. But the movement doesn’t need him. It just builds on itself, adapting to new grifters and con-men as it goes along.
Cultural commentator Jeet Heer once wrote that Qanon was a self-selecting cult. He wasn’t quoted in Trust the Plan, but it’s hard not to think about that insight as one flips through Sommer’s reporting. The people who get on board with this often bring their own baggage which is exploited by leaders looking to bolster their ranks: it runs from race mongering to vaccine denialism to Satanic Panic-esque allegations of child abuse. The people who get into this do so by their own prejudices and they push back at people who point out all the fallacies involved with this group, which makes it hard for truth to breach their defences. These fallacies include not only what’s mentioned above, but also a strong conviction that only Donald Trump and the American Armed Forces are able to push back; in other words, that democracy cannot be trusted and a strong man, backed by force of arms, should be able to rule even against the will of the people.
Sommer also notes that social media companies were reluctant to tackle this problem until it became too big to ignore: when a riot in Washington DC led to the Capitol building getting breached in January 2021. Then, only after an act of violence that threatened to topple the transition of power to a new president, did a lot of these companies really take a stand. Why? Money. Writes Sommer:
“The American government had missed Qanon’s spread. Even if the government had wanted to step in, it wasn’t clear that there was anything legal to do about it. The social media companies profited from the engagement Qanon stirred up, right up until it threatened to no longer become profitable.” (pg 151)
Sommer’s words echo those of Theodor Adorno, who wrote about fascism in the mid 20th century:
“The libidinal pattern and the entire technique of fascist demagogues are authoritarian. This is where the techniques of the demagogue and the hypnotist coincide with the psychological mechanism by which individuals are made to undergo the regressions which reduce them to mere members of a group.” (pg 138, The Culture Industry)
Or, as Qanon propagandists put it, “Where we go one, we go all.”
Here in Canada, it’s sometimes easy to look at the United States and feel a little superior that we live in a different country. But Qanon is hardly an American phenomenon. It’s grown strong roots in Germany, where believers say that the German state is a legal fiction and only Trump can restore the country to its pre-World War Two glory. It’s big in Japan and Brazil, too. And Canada is not immune to this Qanon brain rot: Sommer profiles Romana Didulo, a bizarre would-be matriarch who is the self-declared “Queen of Canada,” roaming the country in a RV with a band of followers. Not mentioned in Sommer’s book is her recent brush with the law, when her followers tried to arrest police officers in Peterborough, Ontario, a move that went predictably badly.
There is not a lot that’s new for long-time readers of Sommer’s Qanon coverage here. There are no surprise revelations about who is and isn’t part of the cult, its origins, or the like. But it’s nice to have all this information in one place. And those less online people who may be baffled when their neighbour starts putting We the Fringe stickers on their car will find Trust the Plan a useful overview of the movement. As we gear up for another presidential election in 2024, and as a former President faces charges in a New York courtroom, Sommer’s book is as relevant as ever. Hopefully in a few years it won’t need to be.