'A QAnon "Digital Soldier" Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling
[...] a Harvard-educated writer and actress[...]
[...] opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.
Ms. Gilbert, 57, is a believer in QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Like all QAnon faithful, she is convinced that the world is run by a Satanic group of pedophiles that includes top Democrats and Hollywood elites, and that President Trump has spent years leading a top-secret mission to bring these evildoers to justice.
She unspools this web of falsehoods on her Facebook page, where she posts dozens of times a day, often sharing links from right-wing sites like Breitbart and The Epoch Times or QAnon memes she has pulled off Twitter. On a recent day, her feed included a rant against Covid-19 lockdowns, a grainy meme accusing Congress of “high treason,” a post calling Lady Gaga a Satanist and a claim that “covfefe,” a typo that Mr. Trump accidentally tweeted three years ago, was a coded intelligence message.
“I’m the meme queen,” Ms. Gilbert told me. “I won’t produce them, but I share a mean meme, and I’m kind of raw.”
[...] Ms. Gilbert’s elite pedigree — she attended the Dalton School in Manhattan and worked on The Harvard Lampoon with Conan O’Brien in the 1980s — illustrates the wide range of people who have ended up in Q’s thrall. And her story hints at how hard it will be to bring those people back to reality.
[Her earlier posts were] mostly advocating for environmental causes or support for Jill Stein, who was the Green Party’s presidential candidate.
She also posted several feel-good stories, like one about how a cow and a tortoise became friends, as well as recommendations for books on Amazon (including her own).
[...] What attracts Ms. Gilbert and many other people to QAnon isn’t just the content of the conspiracy theory itself. It’s the community and sense of mission it provides. New QAnon believers are invited to chat rooms and group texts, and their posts are showered with likes and retweets. They make friends, and are told that they are not lonely Facebook addicts squinting at zoomed-in paparazzi photos, but patriots gathering “intel” for a righteous revolution.
[...] “These people aren’t drooling, mind-controlled cultists,” Mr. Rothschild said. “People who are in Q like it. They like being part of it. You can’t debunk and fact-check your way out of this, because these people don’t want to leave.”
I first met Ms. Gilbert in 2019, a few months after she had gotten seriously into QAnon. Friendly and soft-spoken, she explained that Hollywood elites conducted Illuminati blood rituals behind closed doors, that former Representative Anthony Weiner’s laptop contained a video of Hillary Clinton committing murder, and that photos from a recent meeting between Mr. Trump and Queen Elizabeth II proved that he had secretly dethroned her.
[...] She had dabbled in conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate — which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and that all of this was detailed in code in the Clinton emails — blew her mind. If it was true, she thought, it would connect all of her suspicions about elites, and explain the horrible truths they had been covering up.
“The world opened up in Technicolor for me,” she said. “It was like the Matrix — everything just started to download.”
[...] Pizzagate primed Ms. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychic. It quickly took over her life, and yanked her politics sharply to the right. Seemingly overnight, her Facebook feed switched from Change.org petitions and cute animal photos to Gateway Pundit links and “Killary Clinton” memes.
[...] She works from home as a freelance audiobook narrator [ut oh]
[...] She said there was no proof that the [Capitol riot] participants were QAnon believers, and suggested that they might have been antifa activists in disguise — all things that have been widely debunked.
[...] (She once spent several minutes explaining how a domino-shaped ornament on the White House Christmas tree proved that Mr. Trump was sending coded messages about QAnon, because the domino had 17 dots, and Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet.)
When she solves a new piece of the puzzle, she posts it to Facebook, where her QAnon friends post heart emojis and congratulate her.
[...] She thinks the danger of Covid-19 is overblown, and refuses to wear a mask (except at the grocery store, where she has no choice). As a result, her neighbors steer clear of her, and she feels their wrath every time she steps outside.
“I am called names and abused,” she told me during a recent call. “A 90-year-old woman who lives in my building cursed me out today on the sidewalk.”
[...] She compares Manhattan to Nazi Germany, and speaks bitterly about the friends she has lost.
[...] Their daily well of QAnon content is drying up, and their favorite QAnon influencers have been barred by every app except Calculator and Stocks. Some are openly threatening to denounce Q and leave the movement if Mr. Biden is inaugurated.
But the meme queen is undeterred. She trusts Q’s plan, at least for a little while longer, and she wants them to trust it, too.
“Be prepared, and stay cool,” Ms. Gilbert wrote to her Facebook friends recently. “Slow and steady wins the race. We’re in the home stretch now.”'
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