Despite these illusions, Ms. Gilbert – a self-describing mystic and wrote four books, with titles like “Swami’s Soup” – most of the time seemed like a New Age eccentric who could spend some time away from the screens. She disdains the mainstream media, but agreed to receive a profile and we kept in touch.
During a series of conversations, I discovered that she had long been suspicious of elites since her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered wealthy snobby children. As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, defending animal rights and supporting protests on the Standing Rock pipeline. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous and admired whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt.
Ms. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016, when WikiLeaks posted a collection of hacked Clinton campaign emails. Shortly thereafter, she started seeing social media posts about something called #Pizzagate. She had been involved in conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate – who falsely postulated that powerful Democrats were running a child sex trafficking network in a pizzeria in Washington and that all of that was detailed in code in Clinton’s emails – left her crazy. If it were true, she thought, it would connect all her suspicions about elites and explain the horrible truths they had been covering up.
“The world opened up for me in Technicolor,” she said. “It was like the Matrix – everything started to go down.”
Pizzagate prepared Mrs. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British medium. This quickly took control of his life and pushed his policy dramatically to the right. Apparently overnight, his Facebook feed changed from Change.org petitions and beautiful animal photos to Gateway Pundit links and “Killary Clinton” memes.
Like many diehard QAnon, Ms. Gilbert has a purely virtual attachment to the movement. She said she had never attended a QAnon rally, or even met another QAnon believer in person. She works from home as a freelance audiobook narrator, rarely leaves her apartment and scoffed when I asked if she would take up arms for Q.
“I am a digital soldier,” she said. “I work through the computer.”
She was not in the Capitol riot and denied that QAnon was a violent movement. She said there was no evidence that the participants were QAnon believers and suggested that they could be disguised antifa activists – things that have been widely denied. She seemed frustrated that Biden was certified as the winner of the election – something Q had never predicted – but said it did not shake her faith.