Despite these errors, Ms. Gilbert – a self-described mystic who has written all four books, with titles like ‘Swami Soup’ – me mostly an eccentric of the New Age who could use off-screen for a while. She despises the mainstream media, but she agrees to be profiled, and we keep in touch.
During a series of conversations, I learned that she had a long-standing suspicion of elite dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt it was bad among people she considered snobby rich kids. As an adult, she joined the left-wing anti-establishment, which advocates animal rights and supports the protest against the Standing Rock oil pipeline. She admires the hacktivist group Anonymous and looks up to whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted in the 2016 presidential election for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, after deciding that both major parties were corrupt.
Me. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016 when WikiLeaks posted a bunch of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. Soon after, she started seeing posts on social media about something called #Pizzagate. She’s been into conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate – who falsely claimed that powerful Democrats run a child’s store in a Washington pizzeria and that it was all set out in code in Clinton’s emails – blew her mind. If true, she thinks, it would bind all her suspicions about elite and explain the terrible truths they have covered.
“The world opened up to me in Technicolor,” she said. “It was like the Matrix – everything just started downloading.”
Pizzagate has me. Gilbert prepares for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychologist. It took over her life quickly and tore her politics sharply to the right. Apparently overnight, her Facebook feed switched from Change.org petitions and cute animal photos to Gateway Pundit links and ‘Killary Clinton’ memes.
Like many QAnon hards, Ms. Gilbert a purely virtual attachment to the movement. She said she had never attended a QAnon meeting, or even met another QAnon believer in person. She works from home as a freelance narrator of the audiobook, rarely leaving her apartment and skater when I ask if she will ever pick up the guns for Q.
“I’m a digital soldier,” she said. “I work through the computer.”
She was not at the Capitol riot, denying that QAnon was a violent movement. She said there was no evidence that the participants were QAnon believers, and suggested that they may have been antifa activists in disguise – all of which were widely rejected. She sounded frustrated because Mr. Biden was certified as the winner of the election – something Q never predicted, but she said it did not shake her faith.