Trust the Plan

Will Sommer is a media reporter for The Washington Post. He previously worked as a reporter for The Daily Beast and the co-host of the podcast Fever Dreams. His work covering QAnon and other conspiracy theories has been featured in multiple documentaries, including HBO's Q: Into the Storm. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his family.

‘Punchy and well-reported … Sommer is the perfect person to tell this story. He traces the rise of lawless message boards like 8chan, he profiles the key players, he chronicles QAnon’s influence on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he sneaks into QAnon rallies, he analyzes Republican reactions to the blight in their fields, and he breathes deep of the madness, while staying blissfully sane himself’ New York Times‘Sommer emerges to offer a close examination of the rise and continued presence of QAnon on the US political landscape. Detailed and impeccably researched, Trust the Plan is essentially a crash course on a volatile and vocal segment of the US population’ Guardian‘Will Sommer has established himself as the expert on America’s right-wing fringe. Now he’s exploring the damage that Donald Trump and the QAnon theorists who adore him have wreaked on the country. With kidnappings, murders, and Satanic rituals, this is a story so bizarre, only Will Sommer could report it’ The Atlantic‘Will Sommer 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 road map to one of the strangest and most disturbing movements of modern politics. Writing with insight, empathy, and historical expertise, Will masterfully documents how a random anonymous internet post on Reddit in 2017 rose up and swallowed the Republican Party’ Garrett Graff, author of Watergate: A New History‘This is an absolutely fascinating and deeply troubling book. Rage-inducing and heartbreaking, it’s a rigorously researched, energetically written examination of a phenomenon laughed off for too long as fringe silliness’ Booklist