A Storm is Coming

Subsequent QDrops—as the riddle-like postings from the individual or individuals thought to be Q came to be known—solidified Anons’ conviction that a covert war was raging behind the scenes. One faction in that war, led by Trump, wanted to save America; the other was led by a secretive cabal of maleficent elites who wanted to destroy America as part of a larger plot to impose dictatorial rule over all humanity. Nothing less than the future of the human race was at stake in a cosmic battle between good and evil.

A number of scholars and journalists—including Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic, and religion professor Amarnath Amarasingam and extremism scholar Marc-André Argentino in a joint article for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point—have provided important perspectives on the rise and spread of the QAnon phenomenon and its potential danger, as well as its roots within, and specific appeal to right-wing expressions of Christianity. But the religious undertones of the movement are even more specific than that, and understanding it requires recognizing the apocalyptic imagination expressed by key QAnon influencers: a presentation of horror and hope that mirrors Trump’s political rhetoric and continues a tradition of deploying visions of tribulation and redemption in the political discourse in American social life.

Of course, Trump did not remain in office and his political enemies were not arrested, nor did he take power in a military-backed coup, as some Anons thought might happen. The alleged plan Q cryptically communicated to the Anon community did not materialize. In the aftermath of the devastating violence at the Capitol on January 6, some Anons, like the infamous QAnon Shaman, expressed remorse.^[4] However, others viewed these seeming failures as part of a larger plan. They saw Trump’s apparent defeat as part of an ongoing conflict between the forces of darkness and tyranny and the forces of light and freedom. And even as some former Anons distanced themselves from Q, their references to the apocalyptic narrative inherent in QAnon discourse remained. QAnon’s popularity seems to have declined since the violent events of January 6, at least for now. But the apocalyptic imagination it nurtured—and the radical rhetoric and violence those stakes seem to justify—will be part of the American political and social landscape for the foreseeable future.

The Apocalyptic Imaginary

Going back to its Greek roots, “apocalypse” refers to something being uncovered or revealed. The word derived its popular meaning—the destruction of the world in some cataclysmic event—from its association with the Bible’s Apocalypse of St. John, alternatively titled in English translations as the Book of Revelation. In her 2012 book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, & Politics in the Book of Revelation, religion scholar Elaine Pagels discusses how early Christians, from around 100 to 300 C.E., began to distinguish between those who were saved or damned based upon their position toward specific doctrines. “Ever since,” she writes, “Christians have adapted [John’s] visions to changing times, reading their own social, political, and religious conflict into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes.”^[5] Examples of this abound through early centuries of the first millennium, to the time of the Reformation when both Catholics and Protestants accused each other of being manifestations of the Antichrist, to the popular Left Behind series of books and films that blended 19^th century dispensationalism with the popular 20^th century tropes among some evangelicals about the Antichrist emerging from the European Union. Pagels, however, goes on to say that John’s apocalyptic vision in Revelation “appeals not only to fear but also to hope.”^[6] Her point is that alongside the scripture’s horrid images of judgment and death, there is also the promise of “a glorious new world” in which the faithful will enjoy “abounding…joy and delight.”^[7]

These have been the two dimensions of Christian apocalypticism since the early centuries of the tradition: the sheer terror and violence of the End Times and of central figures like the Beast, and the promise of a new reign of righteousness and peace after the defeat of God’s enemies. Further, as Pagels notes, apocalyptic visions often incorporate the authors’ social and political views. Though Q conspiracies have been popular among White evangelical Protestants, both of these points from Pagels’ work are clearly visible among the Anons regardless of their individual tradition.^[8] Specifically, QAnon apocalyptic discourse plays on the tropes of horror and hope as Anons simultaneously read QDrops as confirmation that evil forces are at work to destroy and enslave good people and that these forces will be defeated if the faithful will just, in the often repeated words among Anons, “trust the plan.”

That much is visible in considering the work of three major QAnon influencers: the popular videos produced by a QAnon content creator who goes by Joe M; a book titled QAnon and 1000 Years of Peace: Destroying the New World Order and Taking the Kingdom of Christ by Force!; and podcasts and interviews with a Q “interpreter” who goes by the online name Praying Medic. These examples demonstrate the power of apocalyptic imagery to the Q movement and how, even where influencers aren’t explicitly invoking Christian beliefs, the apocalyptic narrative of enduring and overcoming evil is key to understanding how Anons imagine history unfolding during the Trump presidency and now.

The Coming Storm

In a video originally posted on October 17, 2018, an anonymous content creator known as Joe M, under the tag “Storm is Upon Us,” posted a video titled “Q—We Are The Plan.”^[9] In it, he explained that the world has come “under the growing influence of a vast transgenerational criminal mafia” known as “the Deep State or the cabal.” Agents of this powerful group, he continued, now occupy the “highest levels of power in government, corporations, and education… [and] most dangerously of all, they achieved almost total influence over the media.” Over flashes of images of Beyoncé and George Soros, he claimed that the cabal was responsible for human trafficking and drug cartels, as well as creating “false narratives” of racism and colonialism to weaken peoples’ resolve to push back against “globalism.” Where that failed, he asserted, they perpetrated devastating wars. They also engaged in ritualistic abominations and installed “rogue operators” within the American government to weaken the military and political opponents and funded even the Islamic State. They intended to destroy humanity, he claims, even while they sought to dominate it. And the conspiracy targeted the United States specifically because it represented the hope of the world.

While the cabal had been aiming for an “endgame” that would have resulted in nuclear destruction, explained Joe M, it was thwarted by Trump’s unlikely election in 2016. And in the aftermath of that sea change, the cabal was losing ground thanks to “patriots” who were fighting to end their stranglehold on humanity. And when they won, Joe M continued, a new world of possibility would open up. Free energy technologies once kept from the public, to “force our dependency on their fossil fuel monopolies,” would be released; cures for diseases would be unveiled; new scientific advancements would improve people’s lives in every conceivable way. Further, the income tax—which the narrator said was “illegally imposed to pay back interest on loans taken from the cabal banking system”—would be abolished, ushering in an era of economic freedom and prosperity. In short, paradise will be realized in an age of peace, plenty, and freedom. Trump’s war on the Deep State, aided by Q, would lead to the revelation of a “global human renaissance the likes of which we have never seen.” The video concludes with the appeal for the viewer to “be the plan,” as the words “Q Be The Plan” is flashed in stylized silver letters on the screen.

Another video by Joe M posted on January 28, 2019, titled “Q—Dark To Light,” reiterates this narrative, but with more attention to the use of nostalgia, recalling times when Americans took pride in their country.^[10] Here again, the narrator talks of the cabal’s “endgame,” a key component of which was Hillary Clinton’s run for president. Had she won, Joe M says, the world would have been plunged into a worldwide “nuclear holocaust” within eight years—a fate only averted by the “miracle” of Trump’s election. Now, with the aid of “the plan” led by “brave patriots,” the cabal was losing their hold on the people and on our government. Although he didn’t name it as such, Joe M painted a picture of what evangelical Christians call spiritual warfare, explaining that “raging around us is the final phase of a vast shadow war, not between nations but between the forces of good and the most unimaginable of evils.” With this, the video concludes with the assurance that Q is here to make this war intelligible to the public and ends with the exhortation:

Joe M reinforces this narrative in a video from March 8, 2019, titled “Q—The Plan To Save The World.”^[11] In this video, once again, he blames the global criminal cabal for every imaginable atrocity and for deceiving the world into believing that “human nature” is behind the suffering in the world. Whatever the mode of suffering—crime, racism, poverty, child sex trafficking—he exclaims that “it was the criminals all along.” However, once again, he asserts that the tide has turned in favor of righteousness. Trump and “brave patriots” have achieved victory “against the greatest force of evil the world has ever known.” Yes, we have endured horrors, but still, there is hope if our faith and commitment hold.

The several videos originally posted by Joe M in 2018 and 2019 demonstrate how, while biblical references were plentiful in the Q community, they weren’t the only outlet for Anons to express their apocalyptic readings of QDrops. Whether or not they were explicitly Christian or made reference to scripture, QAnon content frequently followed a common pattern: describing the horrors of the present perpetrated by an evil cabal to point to the promise of hope in the future when they are defeated.

A Thousand Years of Peace

In other contexts, references to the Bible and to Revelation are more pronounced. One such example is QAnon and 1000 Years of Peace: Destroying the New World Order and Taking the Kingdom of Christ by Force!, published in October 2020, and written by a woman who goes by the name Melissa Redpill The World. The term “red pill”—adopted from the 1999 film The Matrix, and a common term among the Alt Right and other right-wing circles—means “to be woken up.”^[12] Melissa explains that she wrote the book to help readers “untangle the maze of confusion and fear that has surrounded the book of Revelation.” Her aim in the book, then, is to use the Bible to shed light on the revelations from Q and to use Q to further explain the meaning of the Bible. She’d felt a calling to do this kind of work, she writes, after what she calls “the Great Awakening” in October 2016. This refers to October 2, 2016: the day on which she believes a number of children being kept in underground tunnels—one common conviction of QAnon adherents—were rescued, and ritual Satanic sacrifices and worship were interrupted, ushering in an era of resistance led by Trump and his allies. This date, like so much of Q lore, is tied to a vague statement made by Trump during the 2016 Presidential campaign that “there is light at the end of the tunnel.”^[13] 

She also invites readers to join her and her “band of patriots” on the YouTube website for “Freedom Force Battalion.” Many of the videos associated with this account have been deleted, but the Freedom Force Battalion group still has a presence on other sites, including Gab and on a website called freedomforce.live.^[14] Both sites engage in interweaving biblical references, discussion of Q topics, and copies of QDrops in an interpretive framework to make sense of current events and to prepare for what might be happening next. The freedomforce.live site offers Q merchandise; Melissa’s book in audio, print, and in Spanish translation; as well as links to outside sources like statements from Trump and other posts associated with her Gab account. When describing her work on the freedomforce.live site, Melissa explained:

The last word represents a common QAnon catchphrase—variations on “It’s going to be Biblical”—that underscores how enmeshed the movement has become with certain expressions of conservative Christianity, just as Melissa Redpill’s efforts represent a specific weaving of Christian apocalyptic tradition with QAnon conspiracism. And all of these have merged in the movement’s feverish support for Trump. Playing on older tropes in American evangelical discourse, Melissa writes on freedomforce.live concerning the book that she was compelled to do research concerning “the book of Revelation, and discovered that the New World Order IS the Beast of Revelation!” She explains further that the fight now involving Q was one in which they “are exposing this evil cabal and will destroy them, and then have 1,000 years of peace on earth.” However trying the times are, she continues, the “BAD NEWS IS ONLY FOR THE CABAL,” and “Humanity is being rescued!” Apocalypticism wedded to contemporary political events has been in style among U.S. evangelicals since at least Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson’s bestselling 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, but it continued in a new form as Q’s popularity peaked in 2020. 

Through the exposition of key passages from the Bible, often interwoven with statements from Q or interpretations of the Bible passages in light of QDrops, Melissa Redpill establishes the absolute vileness of the enemy “cabal” and exhorts the reader to fight the enemy for the sake of establishing a pure and wholesome society. She describes the opposition as satanically inspired and guilty of the most shocking crimes, including the ritual murder of children and human trafficking. She alleges that all of this is facilitated by political corruption and global organized crime networks that include political elites, the Illuminati, the Rothschild family, major corporations and banks, celebrities, and those whom she calls “fake Jews.” (Although she doesn’t explain what she means by this last phrase, it echoes the current of antisemitism that runs through the movement, which historian Deborah Lipstadt notes is common among Trump’s base of Christian support despite their apparent philosemitism and support for Israel.^[16])

All of these actors, she argues, were part of what she calls “a worldwide criminal pedo mafia.” But after the “Great Awakening,” and the revelations from Q, she writes, “We are holding on, overcoming, keeping [Jesus’] words, and helping Him smash their evil kingdom to bits!” When this evil cabal is finally and inevitably destroyed, those loyal to God “will be kings and priests and reign with Him [Jesus] on the Earth.” The “NWO [New World Order] satanists” may seem to have the upper hand now, she argues, but soon Jesus will conquer this enemy and usher in the days of peace and justice on the earth. And amid the satanic and pedophilic horror of the Beast and its agents, hope remains assured because of the Word of God and because of “our Q Army, with Q posting periodically, helping us stay together and focused.”

Interestingly, on January 23, 2021, Melissa Redpill self-published a new revision of her book, with a new title—End Times and 1000 Years of Peace—and references to Q all but eliminated. The text still makes references to her “Great Awakening,” the importance of the 2020 election, the “Worldwide Mafia Cabal of satanists,” and apocalyptic passages from the Bible, but QDrops play no specific role in the discussion. She mentions Anons once, concerning “Patriots destroying the Deep State,” but explicit references to Q are gone. However, Melissa Redpill is still quite active in purveying the apocalyptic narrative she wove in her earlier work. After the failed insurrection, she seems to have set about to reframe her apocalypticism for a post-Q environment.

The Devil Has Only a Short Time

Dave Hayes, also known as Praying Medic, is among the most prominent Q influencers: a frequent presence on various podcasts and, as of 2020, in mainstream news reports concerning the lawsuit he and others filed against YouTube after they were banned for sharing videos that might provoke violence.^[17] Hayes has self-published several books, including Divine Healing Made Simple (2013), Seeing in the Spirit Made Simple (2015), and American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare (2015), which, according to the book’s description, draws upon “scenes from the popular film American Sniper” to “[give] readers a look inside the mind of a well-prepared kingdom soldier.”

In an interview posted on YouTube in July of 2020, Hayes describes how he came to be involved with QAnon. He believes Q is an “open-source intelligence operation developed by the U.S. military and backed by President Trump.” And he became a Q researcher and influencer after he began frequently dreaming of Q—dreams he believed were sent to him by God, as a “divine assignment… to follow Q” and “decode Q’s posts.” Much like Melissa Redpill stated, Hayes sees his mission as performing the kind of incisive and interpretative work that his listeners can’t devote themselves to, “sort[ing] through” QDrops and associated material to “put it in some context” for his audience. “I consider this,” he said, “to be a service to my fellow man.” In this way, Hayes positions himself as a teacher for the Q community, using divinely-inspired insights from his dreams to decode QDrops and explain how they bear on current political and social events.

Hayes’ view of prophecy, though, is different than Mellissa Redpill’s. Rather than seeing QDrops as a means for prophetic guidance for future events, Hayes explains in the interview that he sees the posts as a means to put events into context. Regarding the cryptic nature of the QDrops, Hayes explains that Q cannot clearly state what is going on because of “national security laws,” but also because of “bad actors” in the “Deep State” whom Q and his allies are trying to evade. One might then see that for Hayes, the point of Q’s mission is to not predict the future. Hayes argues the point of the drops is to create a sense of awareness of what Trump and his allies are doing to thwart the malicious plans of the cabal, not to predict what will happen next. He argues further that Q’s message is essentially that “the two-tiered justice system” that has allowed wealthy and elite people to escape justice is being dismantled, and this message “gives people hope.”

On his own podcasts, Hayes discusses a number of topics—including “How God Speaks through Emotions,” “How God Makes His Plans Come to Pass,” and general news analysis—alongside his interpretation of QDrops. An example of this is a podcast from June 20, 2019, in which he discusses QDrops with news about Trump’s position toward Iran, as well as Q posts that he believes are signaling that the CIA and Deep State actors are secretly in charge of North Korea.^[18] In his exposition of these connections, Hayes discusses the usual QAnon fare—CIA and Deep State operatives controlling nations that engage in human trafficking and are connected to the larger machinations of the cabal. But in this podcast, the pattern of horror and hope continues. The “globalists” are cast as fighting a losing battle against Trump and his allies and Trump’s effort to ensure that such corruption never occurs again will lead to “public trials and…public executions,” likely conducted by the military to achieve “justice.” On the other side of this carnage is the implication of a hopeful future, free of corruption or demonic cabals.

That podcast, of course, was recorded during the Trump presidency with the full expectation that Trump and his allies would prevail. At this time, too, Q was still quite active. However, once Trump seemed to have lost all legal avenues to remain in office, the tone of Hayes’ exposition began to change. In his show on January 8, 2021—recorded two days after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and titled “Welcome to the Second American Revolution”—Hayes attempts to explain why the electoral count had gone against Trump and Pence hadn’t done more to help him stay in office.^[19]

Trump had been compelled to make every legal effort to retain power, in spite of the futility of legal challenges to voter fraud in such a corrupt system, Hayes said. But now that those avenues were exhausted, “non-civilian options” could be pursued, and Hayes continued that it appeared to him that “military intervention is on the way.” He offered two possible scenarios: either the military directed by Trump would overthrow the government, or there would be such civil unrest brought on by “pissed off patriotic people” that the military would have to intervene and take control of the government. While Hayes claimed he was praying for peace, he also promised that no peaceful transition of power could happen. Looking at the presence of the National Guard and the perimeter around the Capitol in January, Hayes called it proof that corrupt government actors who subverted the election “know what’s coming.” However changed the circumstances might be, the apocalyptic narrative of first horror, then hope, persisted, as Hayes predicted that the devastation of another revolutionary war would eventually give way to peace under an uncorrupted government free from the influence of a “globalist shill like Biden.”    

In a more recent podcast, Praying Medic participated in an interview posted on March 15, 2021.^[20] In it, Hayes holds out hope that the war against the “cabal” that was started under Trump will still end favorably. While many believed that, following Biden’s election and Trump’s departure from Washington, Q forces have lost, Hayes encouraged listeners to “look at the big picture.” Over the last 100 years, he said, globalist forces have been “brainwashing people” through higher education, the media, and other forms of indoctrination to accept “socialism,” using the New Deal and Social Security to normalize socialist solutions, as progressive steps toward a globalist world order. Until Trump emerged, there seemed to be no stopping these forces from implementing their agenda to “enslave us” under a “global government.” And although Trump may have lost political power for now, Hayes said the revolution Trump started would continue, and eventually, he and his allies will be victorious. Rather than seeing the Trump electoral defeat as a refutation of Trumpism, Hayes thinks that those behind the alleged “agenda,” like the Rothschild family and George Soros, recognize that their time is short and that they will ultimately lose.

Describing the cabal’s efforts as ultimately doomed, Hayes quoted a portion of Revelation 12:12, which states “For this reason, rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you with great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time.”^[21] Here, too, Hayes references the hopeful possibility of the U.S. military overthrowing “the Biden regime,” rooting out the cabal and its allies and establishing a new, righteous regime. So despite the seeming hopelessness of the situation in which Trump has lost the presidency and no plan to keep him in power, including military action, materialized, Hayes is still hopeful that disappointment will give way to the inevitable victory over evil.

The Politics of Doom

            In her June 2020 Atlantic article on QAnon, journalist Adrienne LaFrance argues, “QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years,” offering “a polemic to empower those who feel adrift.” Concerning this particular influence on Anons, scholar Marc-André Argentino adds, “QAnon has become a hermeneutical lens through which to interpret the world.”^[22] This is certainly true for Joe M, Melissa Redpill The World, and Praying Medic. But the apocalyptic narrative structure found among Anons and Q influencers is not exclusive to those circles, nor is it likely to fade from American political life in the near future. 

In 2016, political scientist Alison McQueen, author of the 2017 book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, noted that then-presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump posed as a “prophet of Doom.”^[23] His speeches frequently featured references to some dread event befalling America, usually at the hands of “illegals” or terrorists, should citizens fail to heed his call to “make America great again.” Although she notes that Trump “injects his own dangerous brand of megalomania into the country’s apocalyptic tradition,” his blending of terror and hope in American political discourse was not new. McQueen writes, “it is easy and even comforting to think of apocalyptic rhetoric as marginal and extremist, as beyond the pale of mainstream politics,” but this is not the case. Rather, she continues, “visions of tribulation and redemption also find their way into the mainstream of American politics.” McQueen’s thesis has been explored in other scholarly works, like Matthew Avery Sutton’s 2014 book, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, which argues that apocalyptic language has shaped not just American evangelicalism but also Americans’ political sensibilities. In short, Anons are the latest expression, perhaps a distinct one, of the kind of rhetoric long present in U.S. political discourse. And there is no reason to expect that this trend will cease even after the fever for Trump and the interest in QDrops dissipates.

Nonbelievers shouldn’t underestimate the power of these narratives. Of course, as Amarasingam and Argentino have stated in their article for the Combating Terrorism Center, “the QAnon ecosystem” may play a role in “radicalizing uniquely vulnerable individuals with experiences of trauma or mental illness and the consequent threat QAnon could pose to public security.” But at least as important is how this sort of discourse overlapped with the populist rhetoric Trump used to gain office; the particular resonance of apocalyptic narratives among the U.S. Right; and the stunning fact that two freshman congressional representatives, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have had explicit association with Q conspiracism. The proliferation of conspiracist thinking among U.S. Christians—whether about COVID-19, Jeffrey Epstein’s death, or full embrace of QAnon—has become so noticeably that multiple pastors have expressed their concern, as Religion News Service noted last August.^[24] A January survey by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, assessing U.S. views on conspiracy theories and political violence,^[25] found that Republicans who identify as evangelical Christians are more likely to believe the 2020 election was fraudulent, that the “Deep State” actually exists, and in the theories espoused by QAnon. As evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today reflected, what was even more concerning is that the survey indicates that “white evangelicals also stood apart from other religious groups when asked about the potential for violent action,” with “41 percent of those surveyed completely or somewhat” agreeing that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent actions.”

The concern, then, is not only that a few rogue actors may take the bloody visions provided in the QAnon ecosystem as a call for violent action. As Religion News Service’s Katelyn Beaty noted last August, the conspiratorial ideas associated with QAnon are “no longer fringe.” Nor, as McQueen has argued, is apocalyptic thinking in U.S. politics unique to Anons. We must consider that even when the Q movement fades, many Americans and their representatives will still commit themselves to apocalyptic visions of the world and its problems, and will continue to describe their ideological and political opponents as villains who must be eliminated to pave the way for paradise, rather than fellow-laborers in building the future we all must share. Q may have begun to fall out of fashion as of January 2021, but apocalypticism is always in vogue.