The Literature of QAnon: From 4chan to January 6, Will Sommer on Reading the Authors of Conspiracy Theories

Journalist Will Sommer joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his new book Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, a history of the rise of the cultish right-wing group. Sommer, a reporter for The Daily Beast, has covered QAnon since its inception and explains its origins, what—and who—drives it now, and how he handles interviewing people who believe the world is controlled by a satanic cabal of celebrity pedophiles. He also reads an excerpt from the book.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Rachel Layton and Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode: 

Whitney Terrell: Your book opens with a step by step explanation of how QAnon got started. Could you give our listeners a brief gloss on the high points just to get them situated in time?

Will Sommer: Absolutely. So in October 2017, this figure named Q started posting on this anonymous message board called 4chan. We don’t know Q’s identity, but their supporters came to believe that it’s someone close to Donald Trump, maybe his social media guy, maybe it’s Don Jr. They think Q is posting coded messages to alert us to the world as it really is. So Q pops up and he says, “Hillary Clinton will be arrested by the end of the month,” for example. These messages spin out and create this whole worldview.

And this conspiracy theory, which, briefly summed up, is that the world is controlled by a satanic pedophile cabal, featuring everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to Tom Hanks, and that these people each drink children’s blood, participate in satanic rituals, and eat children.

The second half is that Donald Trump is going to take these people down, there’s gonna be this big moment called “The Storm,” when the people I mentioned go to Guantanamo Bay, and the rest of us live in a utopian Trump dictatorship. So you know, even that is a lot, and QAnon gets much crazier than that, but that sums up what they believe.

WT: It sounds so dumb when you describe it. They have spent so much time not saying what it actually is. It’s like the literary device of only hinting at that bad stuff. When you summarize it, it sounds so insane.

WS: Exactly. When I interview QAnon people at rallies and stuff, they say, “Well, I’m just interested in the corruption.” And I say, “Well, what do you mean by ‘the corruption’?” They say, “All right, let me tell you about the mole children,” stuff like that. And so, yeah, that’s certainly been my experience.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: When you’re reporting on this, you have to, not exactly keep a straight face, but… you have to give us that whole gloss pretty straightforwardly. This sounds like a distinctive reporting challenge.

WS: It is. I mean, certainly, you don’t want to be just constantly reacting and saying, well, that’s just ridiculous, even though the book opens with me interviewing a woman at January 6, who is saying things like, “I’m interested in rescuing children I believe are held in tunnels deep underground,” and all this stuff. And so I say a lot of things like, “Well, that’s interesting,” or “I’ve never thought about it that way.”

And you just write it down, and then afterward you have to lock into that mindset. For me, one of the interesting challenges of this job is following these ideological strands. And when, ultimately, these people are often playing in a land of make believe, I think about these QAnon factions that will say the people who think John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive are ridiculous. You know, we’re the serious evidence-based QAnon believers. So they have these fascinating disagreements, but then it results in things like January 6, there are these murders, all these just bizarre things. And so, for me, it’s been a very interesting thing to follow.

VVG: Yeah. And it is actually, as you say, really serious. In your book you note that Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas plays a role in a core tenant of QAnon. We are a podcast that claims that everything you see in your social media feed has already been written about in literature, so our antenna went up at that reference. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

WS: Yeah, this is really interesting. So a core part of QAnon belief is “why does this cabal want to control the world?” What are they doing? They believe that these world elites are sexually torturing children in satanic rituals, because this is the only way to get children to produce this substance called Adrenochrome, which they drained from their brains. And again, millions of people believe this. They think this substance is like the Fountain of Youth and this is why celebrities don’t have wrinkles and stuff.

Now obviously this is called botox, right. They believe this is Adrenochrome. And Adrenochrome is a real thing. It’s a substance that comes from just oxidizing adrenaline. It’s a useless kind of thing to have. But the Hunter S. Thompson connection here is that in the 60s and 70s, this was because it sounds cool, right? It sounds like the ultimate drug or something. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he is with his lawyer, and the lawyer’s giving him all these drugs and he says, “Here’s Adrenochrome, this is this crazy drug and you can only get it from a pedophile.”

So that is sort of the origin of this idea of Adrenochrome. It’s this kind of satanic drug that’s popular with pedophiles, and it’s the ultimate drug and that is where they get it from. It’s to the extent that if you watch a YouTube clip of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it’s now, all these people saying, “Q was right, this is this is real.”

WT: I do really love that Hunter S. Thompson is somehow the source for this. Yeah, speaking of conspiracy theories, I did have an ex-wife of my uncle who dated him for a while. So I have a Hunter S. Thompson connection of my own. He was a crazy guy. So drinking the blood of children brings up the centuries old antisemitic blood libel myths, where supposedly rabbis drank the blood of children.

And the grand global conspiracy aspect has similar themes to the discredited “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a fake propaganda document that’s supposed to be minutes of a meeting where Jewish leaders conspire to control the world. So is QAnon just repackaged antisemitism for a new generation? Or is there more to it than that?

WS: I think there’s more to it, but really, at its core, it does have this sort of antisemitic animus. You mentioned the Jewish blood libel, which was something I was not familiar with, until I started reporting on QAnon and this idea, dating back to, I think, the 13th century, that rabbis were kidnapping Gentile children and basically grinding them up and using their blood for matzah bread.

This idea, now in the 21st century, people have this idea that people like George Soros and these other prominent Jewish people are once again drinking children’s blood. And you know, this is not just an echo of it, you have varying degrees of QAnon “evidence.” But when they start saying, “Here’s the proof of it,” it often is that they dig up the protocols of the Council of Elders of Zion or some Neo Nazi writings from the 70s that refer all the way back to the Middle Ages. I think, before you really start digging in, they don’t say, “this is about Jewish people,” but you know, they pitch themselves as this non-racist, patriotic movement. But when you start getting deeper into it, that’s really what it’s based on.

Will Sommer

 • Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America • “Fever Dreams” (The Daily Beast)

Others:

 • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson • “What is QAnon, the Viral, Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory?” by Kevin Roose • Thomas Pynchon • George Soros • T.S. Eliot • The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot • Ezra Pound • Wallace Stevens • Q by Luther Blissett • Bhagavad Gita • Wu Ming Foundation • “Who is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints” by David D. Kirkpatrick • Clerks • Army of Darkness • Franklin Leonard • Slumdog Millionaire • Ron Paul • “The only guide to Gamergate you’ll ever need to read,” by Caitlin Dewey, The Washington Post • David A. Fahrenthold at The Washington Post; David A. Fahrenthold at The New York Times