The Bulwark Podcast - Will Sommer: The Power of QAnon

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Conspiracy theories had been gaining ground in the GOP before Trump, but after he became conspiracy-theorist-in chief, many of his fans dove into conspiracies too. QAnon now has 10 million followers, and Trump is the messiah figure at its center. Will Sommer joins Charlie Sykes today. Will Sommer's "Trust the Plan": https://www.harpercollins.com/products/trust-the-plan-will-sommer?variant=40493482541090 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Good morning and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. It is February 21st, 2023, and a new book is out today, Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America by Will Sommer. This is the way Garrett Graff, who's the author of Watergate and 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, inhabiting 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 2017 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 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 swamp, basically mainlining crazy pills every single day and not lose your mind. I ask this seriously because I've been following you for years, and I know how you must spend your time in them.

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 a rational world out here? I mean, it's so funny you say that. Certainly, there are times when I'll be talking to my wife or something about the latest ins and outs of some right-wing fame balls career. And then I'll just say, this is pretty crazy that I'm this deep in it. My backstory is that I grew up in a conservative family in Texas. And so, certainly nothing like QAnon believers. But I grew up, I was listening to The Fountainhead on family road trips and lots of Bill O'Reilly and stuff like that. So, I really consumed a huge amount of it. And then 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 I still just, for whatever reason, I love it. And I followed it. There were all these great characters in 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 got to detox. Sometimes I got to turn off the internet for the day. Well, I would think so. You're the politics reporter at the Daily Beast. I want to talk about some breaking news that you had. The subhead of your book is The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America. So did QAnon unhinged America. So did QAnon 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? You know, 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, QAnon 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 kind of fringe political groups. Certainly, I mean, I would date this stuff back to, you know, as a serious faction in the GOP, certainly to the Obama administration when, you know, people were convinced with Jade Helm, for example, that, you know, Obama was going to 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 Trumpist 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 the context, I I mean, obviously Marjorie Taylor Greene,

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 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 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 shellacked, lost by 14 points, more than 615,000 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 QAnon too, isn't she? She is. I mean, this is Christina Karamo. This is someone who has said that abortion is child sacrifice and not in a metaphorical way, but like literally a satanic practice. She's had 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 secretaries of state office across the country in 2022, basically with the idea that it's 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 basically a kind of a down on his luck PI out in Washington State, but they believe that he's JFK Jr. in disguise. So she appeared at this QAnon convention

with him in Las Vegas. And then, you know, they were saying, we gotta, you know, we gotta take back the country, you know, QAnon's to do it. So now this is the person who's running the Michigan GOP. The other thing is, you know, that election to run the party came down between her and another really prominent election denier. So it's not as though the rational faction just narrowly lost. No, the rational faction was headed up by the guy that lost by nine points for attorney general, but apparently, you know, committed the guy that lost by nine points for attorney general, but apparently, you know, committed the cardinal sin of actually conceding the election. And now that's, no, that shows how weak you are. If you actually concede the election, you should be more

like her who's by 15 points and or 14 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 seven years, or maybe you could say the last 20 years, has been the way that fringe crazy ideas move from the far reaches of the fever swamp 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 I want to talk about QAnon specifically, but also conspiracy

theories. You note also conspiracy theories. You note that conspiracy theories have been gaining ground in the Republican Party since Obama was elected. But there's a long history, right, of conspiracy theories on the right. You go back to 1964, you have Richard Hofstadter writing about the 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 Birch Society back in the 1960s. So So put this into context for me. How is QAnon, 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 1963? You know, it's interesting. I think it's both in some ways. I think it's sort of a culmination of decades of conspiracy theories. And also it has something unique about it. So, you know, a lot of folks probably know this, but QAnon started in 2017 with this figure named Q, who was 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 kind of created this whole worldview where Donald Trump is at war with this pedophile cabal of Satanists who run the Democratic Party, and he's going to arrest them all and

execute them, and then we'll live in a utopia is kind of the short form of it. But the genius of QAnon is that because it has this kind of superstructure, the clues, this guy named Q, 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 utopian moment of QAnon. And so in that way, QAnon manages to, it's sort of the academic term is 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 weird conspiracy theories, you know, that Glenn Beck might be talking about? Why is this happening? And then Q 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 going to happen, and we'll get revenge on our enemies. All right. So the ground had been laid for all

of this. And you talk about the rise in 2017. By then, Donald Trump was already president of the United States. I mean, he'd ridden the power by trafficking and pushing conspiracy theories, right? I mean, about Obama's birthplace, about Ted Cruz's father being involved in the assassination of JFK, Marco Rubio's eligibility for office. You describe him 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 sort of 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

batshit crazy ideas out there. That's exactly right. I mean, during the Obama administration, we can look at a lot of these conspiracy theories just kind of building up. But still, you know, I think the average mainstream Republican would say, oh, that's a little crazy to me. And then you have Trump, who rode to power on birtherism, 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 Washington pizzeria. It feels true that these, you know, Democrats who are so liberal. 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 sounds right to me. Okay. 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 QAnon, you know, you think about all this talk about these out-of-touch democratic elites and, you know, they're, oh, look at these art performances they go to and stuff that often has a grain of truth to it in that, you know, I look at it and I say, well, yeah, I guess I wouldn't hang that art in 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 to understand because obviously we're not, we're not marinating in that. But then 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, well, 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 want to go into their bunkers. You have politicians that figure that, OK, 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 6th, because you were outside the Capitol on January 6th, and you walked around talking to QAnon supporters who explained to you why they were at the Capitol. So tell me, before we get into some other stuff, you know, who these people are. So, you talked to a woman named Teresa about why she was there, okay? I mean, first of all, how did you identify the Q people? I mean, were they, they're like, where were the Q signs? Were there Q flags? Well, I was going to say, yeah, in her case,

you know, you didn't have to be a real sleuth because she had a giant Q on a pole that she was carrying her out. Okay, tell us about Teresa and what she believed. Sure. So this is before the riot happened. And so I was walking around and people were chanting, you know, like, where we go on, we go all, which is the big QAnon slogan. And so I had a sense that there were a lot of QAnon believers there. And then I ran into her and she had this giant Q. And so I said, you know, what brings you out today? And she just started rattling off QAnon stuff. And she said, well, you know, all of these children are kept in tunnels underground and, you know, where they're terrorized by the cabal. And I mean, we're talking about, you know, a tunnel network across the entire country. And these are called the mole children. And this is

a very common QAnon belief, I should say. And so that, you know, whenever there's an earthquake, it's because the military 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 stark raving 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 going to be, this is kind of this big moment. I mean, a lot of QAnon believers there thought it would be the storm, which is sort of the term for the big climactic moment where everyone from Barack Obama to Tom Hanks gets arrested and imprisoned. Wait, 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.

All right, I got to take a deep breath here because, okay, so you have the mole children in the underground tunnels, and they're terrorized by pedophiles until they produce a certain chemical. How do you pronounce it? It's called adrenochrome. Okay, adrenochrome. And then this adrenochrome 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 mole children. They terrorize them until they produce this adrenaline-like chemical, which they then drink. And she says, yeah, that sounds right to me. And these people vote.

That's right, Charlie. And if you look at polls, for the average person, the instinct is to say, all right, well, Will found a couple nuts, and he wrote a book about them. But if you look at polls, I mean, we're talking, I think, at the most conservative polls, we're talking millions of people here. And so, you know, it is disturbing. A little bit. You read about a guy named Kevin who worked for the FAA, who believed that his debts, his personal debts would be wiped out from solving all the world's problems. This is another January 6th guy, and he bought a giant truck, and he put a big old QAnon sticker on it. And someone said, how can you afford that truck? And he said, don't worry about it,

because when QAnon happens, all my debts are going to be paid off. This is something that I think is often underplayed when people try to understand QAnon, is that there's a personal utopian aspect to it. It kind of 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 going to 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 certainly think it is. I mean, I think, you know, there's 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 6th, you know, in both Teresa and this Kevin gentleman, both did end up getting criminally charged for their actions. I would say, yeah, I mean, it certainly feels like a cult. Okay, so you have a woman named Roseanne who'd been drawn into QAnon during lockdown, told friends about the cabal and the children, and she was a recovering drug addict who was trampled by a mob on their way to attack police. And of course, Ashley Babbitt,

she was there because she thought it would mark the storm. Yeah. So two of the people at least who died on January 6th were hardcore QAnon believers. We know before January 6th, Ashley Babbitt tweeted, you know, this is the storm. And so you can understand, you know, 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 QAnon. It's 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 Babbitt's shoes. If you believe that the world elites are doing the most depraved crimes against children and that, you know, in this new

world, you're going to be valorized as sort of one of the against children. And that, you know, in this new world, you're going to 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 in the speaker's lobby and getting shot. I know I'm throwing a lot out at you. No, no, no, no. I know. 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 utopian element to all of this, that January 6th marks the storm, that there would be these arrests. Even the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginny Thomas, forwarded a tweet where

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 Q 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 6th, where there were at least some people looking around going, geez, 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 QAnon 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 6th, okay, they're putting up all these fences and, you know, the National Guard is flooding into DC. Maybe that's because that's going to be the big arrest. Finally, you know, they've led Biden into the trap. And 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 that moment I talked to, when Biden was sworn in, all these QAnon believers were so upset. I talked to one believer who said 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 into this. Sunk in cost.

That's exactly right. Their friends and family have said, you're an idiot, all this stuff. And so they want to save 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 you know i guess the deep state was just a little too tough for us and you know 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 being filmed at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. That sounds right. Yeah, now you're buying in.

Okay, all right. Okay. I'm often suspected. No, I'm going. 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 Trump's still in 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 really keep inventing more things, or they tell themselves, well, maybe the plan as Q laid it out to us isn't real. But what Q taught us about the world, that there's this cabal of, of course, there's all these kind of anti-Semitic 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 going to happen in the future,

and we just kind of have to keep the faith. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the relationship between QAnon and anti-Semitism, because you explain that one of the core tenets of QAnon is the world is run by a cabal of satanic cannibal 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 points out that this theory, they write, has direct echoes of blood libel, the anti-Semitic 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 2023. It's not 1323 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 sort of, you know, motored on, stayed, you know, underneath, you know, below 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-QAnon, pre-Pizzagate, you know, it's not like blood libel was a really common thing we discussed as a society. It really came up. Yeah.

Right. 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 this stuff persisted into the 20th century. This was really revived, as you said, I mean, around the time of QAnon, when you really dig in on the so-called evidence that this is true, it is some random neo-Nazi who wrote something in the 90s. And that they're saying, well, you know, this guy wrote about it. And, you know, of course, he's drawing on the protocols of the elders of Zion and stuff.

And so, you know, QAnon believers often say, oh, no, this isn't anti-Semitic. It's just coincidental that, you know, all our targets 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 points out that you explain that Thompson wrote In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which at one time was one of my favorite books, you know, this gonzo psychedelic classic. He wrote about this rare drug called adrenochrome, right? Something you only could get from a living body.

And he said, you know, it makes, you know, pure mescaline seem like ginger beer and everything and how it was, 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 Q people got it from that book? And like, this is true, this is really going on? Absolutely. That's 100% where they got it. Adrenochrome is a real thing and it occurs in the brain. It's just kind of a, as the Times Review says, it's more sarsaparilla 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

60s and 70s. I think because it sounds cool, right? It sounds adrenochrome, you know, it kind of sounds cyberpunk. And the key thing here in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is that this character in the book says, I got it from a pedophile. And so there's the adrenochrome pedophile connection. And then really from there, it takes off. I mean, if you look at YouTube videos from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the movie, all these people are saying, you know, Q set me or, you know, this is real. Because a lot of times, yes, they recognize this movie is fiction, but they think, well, you know, this person is really telling the truth in this coded way or the cabal would kill them. For example,

when Hunter S. Thompson killed himself, they look back at that and they say, that was really the cabal that did it. You know, just see all these clues. I mean, these are people who are used to dealing with symbolism and really making big logical leaps, but that is absolutely where they get the adrenochrome 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 conspiracy, there's 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

QAnon. I mean, 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 reporters. They would talk about sneaking into the White House themselves, you know, and sort of setting off some alarm bells with the Secret Service. And 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 2018, there was one rally where all these Q people appeared.

And they got on cable news. And that was sort of a big moment for QAnon where everyone said, wait, what is this? So the Trump campaign, they ban Q shirts at rallies, and they kind of, they don't want to alienate them, though. I mean, I think any normal president would have come out and said, hey, this is nuts, get a life. But instead, they like the enthusiasm. So they say, hey, why don't you go over here and maybe a little away from the cameras. Then in 2020, Trump starts getting more pertinent questions about QAnon, particularly as QAnon believers start committing violence. And so reporters say, well, you disavow 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

kind of doing this thing where he seems to see them as a super fan club and that he doesn't want to 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 QAnon now. 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 Q 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, you know, there go we all. I mean, so there have been a number of what, from a Q 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, 100%. And, you know, every time, you know, Trump might seem to deny it or to distance himself from it, they'll say, you say, one of the QAnon slogans is disinformation is necessary. So every time something that kind of contradicts their beliefs happens, they say, oh, don't you get it? Trump has to throw the cabal off the scent,

or he has to, this is an elaborate, he's playing 4D chess perhaps. And so they really are so deep in it that everything he does, they see as confirmation. And frankly, a lot of times they have good reason to because, you know, for example, Truth Social, his social media network, part of their strategy, they said explicitly, was to be a home for QAnon and to be a place where that could kind of wink at QAnon. 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 of the the Capitol or accepting a fascist takeover, right? I mean, this is a story of, you know, bonds destroyed, you know, parents, siblings, spouses, just completely floored 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 greater tragedies of QAnon. Just this way that, you know, just randomly, you know, someone really close to you can get turned on to QAnon in a lot of different ways. And then it becomes kind of this battle to then indoctrinate the person who doesn't believe in QAnon in a lot of different ways. And then it becomes kind of this battle to then indoctrinate the person who doesn't believe in QAnon. Because if you look at it from the QAnon believer's perspective, this is the most shocking thing in the world. And you want the person you love to be saved. You want them to believe in it too. And then you start to wonder, well, if my wife doesn't

believe in QAnon, does that mean that is she working for the cabal or has she been brainwashed? And so these families, you know, on the lesser side, it just becomes this endless argument. You know, I follow this family in the book. Their adult son gets into QAnon and suddenly he's telling his dad, oh, you know, oh, you know, Tom Hanks, you know, that guy's going to get arrested soon. And the dad is like, what is he talking about? And often these people, their lives are kind of derailed because, you know, I don't have to go to work. I don't have to pay my debts because Q's going to happen soon. Or they don't want to vaccinate their children for any childhood illness because, you know, that's a cabal plot. And so it's these various really tragedies where, you know, sometimes it's a person who can seem a

little eccentric already and then they just go off the deep end. I'm just trying to imagine 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 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 often that is the response. People ask me all the time, how do I get my relative, my spouse, my son out of QAnon? I don't have an easy answer. I mean, the psychiatrists who have looked at this have said, well, just maintain the relationship and sort of gently introduce stuff. But it's really hard. 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? You know, 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 this crackpot theory. So how many people are we talking about? Is there any way to quantify this? We know that there are very prominent individuals who have played 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 batshit crazy stuff or what? I'm not trying to pin you down on a specific number, 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 10 million. It is, you know, the polls we see, the number is very conservatively, it's like 3% to 10% people will identify as QAnon 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, and you look at these numbers and you say, oh, well, only 7% of people believe in QAnon. But it's a huge, it's a huge country, right? And so, I mean, that's more than some

major religions in the United States. So 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. QAnon is a specific thing because people believe that there is some anonymous guy named Q who has this code, who has the plan, 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. So basically, Q starts on 4chan, which is sort of this anarchic, racist message board.

And some guy starts saying, hey, I'm Q, right? And so for Q and unbelievers, they think it's maybe it's Michael Flynn, maybe it's Don Jr., 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 Ferber, kind of a nobody, who was involved in conspiracy theories. Then he moves it on to another message board called 8chan. And then in this, in what I think is the most believable explanation, the operators of 8chan, who are a father and son duo named Ron and Jim Watkins in the Philippines, 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.

And it's in this documentary. I mean, the father's involved in all these kind of sex online businesses. The son is very deep into kind of 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 8chan, which, of course, then also became a big site for mass shooter manifestos and really kind of the scum of 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 2022. Sad. Yes. So these are some really weird guys. But ultimately, for QAnon believers,

it's gotten to the point where it doesn't matter. Because as it started to point towards Q is literally a guy in his mom's or in this case, his dad's basement, they started to say, like I said, well, it doesn't really matter. Q is just kind of 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-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?

Yes. 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 got to be hundreds of people, you know, putting out that kind of shit on the internet. What was it about this?

Who made it happen? That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. And really, Q wasn't even the first kind of fake leaker on 4chan. There were all these kind of predecessors who were saying, hey, I have all the information about Hollywood or the FBI. And so within Q's case, it just was latched onto by a couple conspiracy theorists on YouTube who had their own kind of successful operations pre-Q, including a woman named Tracy Beans, 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 QAnon in particular. And they say, okay, let's take this. And 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 QAnon believers have never really interacted with the posts on 8chan, where you kind of have to wade through all this anime and all this porn and all this stuff. And they just kind of, they get it in much more palatable ways. And that's where you have these kind of interpreters spring up. I call them in the book, Q's 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, you know, the priest at Delphi, you know, 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, 2019, somebody else was mistaken for you. I mean, because they're aware of what you do. And the speaker called out this person as you, and the audience turned on him in booed. So at one point, you shut down your social media accounts, and you started disguising yourself when you went to the pro-Trump events? I mean, because 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 definitely got a home security system when I got a house. You know, there's kind of varying degrees of it. You know, some of them kind of, I think, sort of see it as a game, or some people think that, well, Will Summer, he's really working for the Q, because that's why he writes about it so much. He's kind of getting the word out in a backdoor way. At January 6th, before the riot happened, I was walking around and someone goes, Will Summer! And I was like, oh God. And it was a QAnon guy who wanted a selfie because, oh, we're all in this together, man. Obviously, I declined. I certainly get my share of death threats. I went to this QAnon event in Dallas and I grew out my beard and I wore a hat and sunglasses and I was kind of death threats. I went to this QAnon event in Dallas, and I grew out my

beard, and I wore a hat and sunglasses. And I was kind of walking around. And then eventually, Michael Flynn gets up there and he says, well, the problem is we got some reporters who snuck in. And I'm kind of looking around like, well, who would do that? And then I realized I'm kind of 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 guy's me. And they say, we all know that scumbag, Will Summers here, he's right there. And then, you know, some random QAnon guy they think is me. And he's going, no, it's not me. And they go, boo, get him. All right, 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, you know, clearly the, there's been an uptick in violence. It doesn't take that many people. I mean, so how worried are you? And I'm not, I'm not trying to make you paranoid or anything. It's just that you're dealing with some pretty crazy guys, most of whom have guns. Yeah. And as you said, I mean, it really only takes one one crazy person to do something. I mean, you know, a QAnon believer 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 pretty paranoid. So, you know, they can get you, unfortunately. You know, it's certainly something to be aware of. As you said, I mean, there's all this QAnon violence out there,

which I get into in the book. You know, there's a woman who kind of, unfortunately, this 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 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 minding 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,

if you actually believe that, then there's a motivation to act. I mean, no, Pizzagate was before QAnon, right? I mean, this is back in 2016, you know, this belief that there was 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 talked to, I was kind of the first guy to discover Pizzagate because all these characters I followed were tweeting about Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant I go to in DC. And I thought, well, maybe these guys and I aren't so different. Maybe they like Comet 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 of 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 InfoWars busts in and he fires off some shots. And this is what I think is so reprehensible about both these kind of random internet promoters of QAnon, 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 these children are being abused in a Washington pizzeria, these are life or death stakes. And in this case of this gunman, I mean, 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 politics reporter for the Daily Beast. And I just wanted to ask you in the few minutes we have left about a story that broke over the last 24 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 45 minute video where he's, you know, ripping the board of directors. So, Will, what happened? I know this is kind of inside baseball, but, you know, James O'Keefe in 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 going to have a huge impact on the conservative movement if he stays out of the game. You know, this is a guy called often the prankster prince. I mean, he's always doing his undercover videos. I mean, he and he's been very successful,

I think, at disrupting left wing groups. You know, people may remember his acorn sting when he dressed like a pimp. That kind of made him. Exactly, exactly. I mean, he's a major liberal group that he just completely destroyed. So essentially, 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 about a year. The FBI raided his house and some other people's houses over the theft of Ashley Biden's diary. James O'Keefe said he didn't do anything illegal, but some people who sold them the diary had 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 they were having these parties and an employee overdosed 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 like really in the musical theater. So he's a huge musical theater nerd. I mean, this is so weird. This is why reporters like me who kind of 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 $20,000. And I want to be clear on something. Project Veritas is supposed to be a nonprofit. So he

spent $20,000 that they've admitted to improperly on his role in a musical production of Oklahoma. He played the star Curly. And this sounds 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 claim he was spending tens of thousands of dollars on a private jet to go meet a guy who might repair his boat, or that he was taking private cars everywhere to the tune of more than $100,000. I love the fact that they had choreographers on staff, you know, for their various events, because they had to do the dance steps and everything. Like all nonprofits do. They recorded these elaborate videos to, they would have kind of a take on the Prince song controversy, and James O'Keefe would do this music video. And 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.

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 signed that said, you know, if you got crosswise 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, Project Virtus 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 there was some controversy yesterday because there was a line in the New York Times story that, you know, James O'Keefe, who 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 and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.