There are run-of-the-mill QAnon proponents, and then there is Dave Hayes. Hayes has been among the leading proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory – the idea that insiders within the Trump administration have been dropping hints for years about a supposed plan to take down the “deep state” and its worldwide satanic pedophilia network consisting of Democrats, celebrities and anyone they disagree with on politics – from its early beginnings, and his videos promoting and explaining QAnon’s cryptic postings have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. Specifically, Hayes perceives his role as “red-pilling you [the QAnon movement] about God” and to serve as a prophetic messenger for the Lord to whoever is behind the QAnon account(s) – or in other words: Not only has Hayes deluded himself into thinking that there is a group of heroes working covertly within the administration to provide hints about Trump’s heavenly battle with the deep state to the public; he has deluded himself into thinking he is on the supply side of QAnon information, which must surely count as something close to a world record in delusion.
Let’s allow him to explain himself: “Sometimes I will post things on Twitter and it is cryptic and you don't understand it,” says Hayes. “If you don’t understand the stuff I post on Twitter, that’s fine; it’s not for you,” or in other words: what he posts is more or less random strings of nonsense that he nonetheless accepts as infallible truths (and note how God and Q, according to Hayes, operate in more or less exactly the same way – indeed, Q is, according to Hayes, a “PSYOP” orchestrated by Trump and the military just like “Jesus was a PSYOP from God”). And yeah, “sometimes I put out cryptic, weird messages,” but “that’s just kind of how prophetic people are. God gives you a message, you deliver the message. It is up to the receiver to understand it. You’re just the messenger. My job is not always to explain the message, my job is to give the message and somebody else is going to have to figure out what it means.” He likens his role to that of a postal carrier who simply delivers messages to people’s homes but isn’t supposed to stick around to explain the messages to their recipients. “Sometimes I get message for Q and his team”, in which case he interprets it as: “God shows me, ‘Hey, this is what Q is doing, this is where it’s going, this is what’s happening down the road.’ And I will post things on Twitter and those messages are for Q.” So, he doesn’t really even need to bother with the Q middleman – whatever falls into his deranged imagination is automatically a deep truth to be shared widely and guide future policy; the ideas of reason and evidence and coherence as constraints on what to believe is so far from Hayes’ mode of thinking that it can just as well be dismissed as a leftist conspiracy. “And I will say this, delivering messages for the God of the universe, there isn’t a job that is much cooler than that,” says Hayes. And people listen; lots of people, apparently.
Apparently God thinks that Hayes is “the bee’s knees” and has accordingly been speaking to him for a while: “God has been speaking to me in dreams for about eight years and I have a long history of God revealing things to me about the future in dreams. And I’ve come to rely heavily on the revelation that I receive from God in dreams. It’s proven to be pretty darn accurate, as long as I interpret it correctly” (a lot hinges on the latter qualification, apparently). It was also God who confirmed the legitimacy of QAnon to him through a prophetic dream: “God started speaking to me about Q in dreams in December [2017]” in an attempt to help open his eyes to the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated incidents. “Since then, I’ve probably had well over 75 or 80 dreams about Q”, including dreams about “people that I think are going to be arrested pretty soon, that Q has been alluding to arrests coming” (God also told him that it is all “about the children”, i.e. “saving children that are being trafficked” for procurement of adrenochrome through ritual Satanic sacrifices).
Hayes has written at least one book on Q, Calm Before the Storm, which is ostensibly the first in what he says could easily be a lengthy series of Q Chronicles that possibly includes a screenplay. Earler books from his hand include Hearing God’s Voice Made Simple; Defeating Your Adversary in the Court of Heaven; and American Sniper: Lessons in Spiritual Warfare. To monetize his conspiracy ramblings, Hayes registered Praying Medic as a religious nonprofit in Washington State in 2018.
What God told Dave
Hayes allegedly had a dream in 2016 in which God showed him a world “where there was no poverty, there was no sickness, there was no homelessness” – “everywhere I went, there was lavish abundance” – for those who voted for Trump; accepting Trump, by voting for him, is apparently the path to salvation; for everyone else, however, there was suffering. One day, says Hayes, “our grandchildren are going to look excitedly into our eyes, and beg us to tell them, once more, their favorite story; how Q and the Patriots saved the world.” Even religious fanatics need to rethink their view of the end times, according to Hayes given that Trump is creating a Utopia:
“Now we have Trump. If Trump manages to get rid of the deep state, if Trump manages to get rid of the Rothschilds, George Soros, and all of the people that are funding wars, then if Trump manages to destroy this globalist agenda, he is going to destroy the New World Order. The rule of the banksters is coming to an end, the deep state is being gutted, and I believe Trump is going to defund all of them, destroy the New World Order, destroy the globalist agenda and he is going to be very successful in destroying and eliminating all that stuff that has been built over the last 100 years. Trump’s presidency and what he is doing on a geo-political scale should make every one of you go back to the Bible and look again at your understanding of the End Times, the Last Days.”
Heck, even “the cures for diseases that they have hidden from us are going to be revealed” by the Trump administration.
In 2019, Hayes predicted that mass arrests of prominent Democrats and thousands of business, media, and entertainment leaders would happen within the next year and destroy the Democratic Party for a generation: “likely hundreds of members of Congress – most of them Democrats, some Republicans – they’re going to be arrested and they’re going to be prosecuted for corruption. It’s going to happen. We’re going to see a lot of people in Hollywood rolled up and prosecuted for corruption.” After all, the Trump administration had, according to Hayes, already before the 2018 midterms warned members of Congress that they were going to be prosecuted if they remained in office, and by refusing to resign they’ve sort of brought this upon themselves: “some of them are probably going to go to Gitmo, and some of them may be executed”. The actual charges Hayes thinks will be brought against these people remain somewhat unclear and are probably unimportant anyways.
Among obvious candidates for (public) execution were John Kerry and Barack Obama, on the grounds that they (and other members of the deep state) were actively and covertly working to thwart Trump’s efforts to broker a peace deal with Iran because they want to create a global conflagration that will destroy the United States and create a one-world government. Like Democrats in general, Obama and Kerry hate the US and patriotism; the Biden administration even – and apparently unbeknownst to sheep-like observers – “declared war on patriotism, and the FBI is leading the charge” (the January 6 insurrectionists were “prisoners of war”). Among Republican candidates for execution you might find Sebastian Gorka, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists at one point tended to like but who also called QAnon activists ‘garbage’, whereupon they promptly placed him in the category deep state agents.
According to Hayes, these events will take place imminently – “the storm is coming and there is nothing anyone is gonna do to stop it” – and have been imminent since at least 2018.
Hayes’s predictions between 2020 and 2024 were, of course, framed in terms of stop-the-steal conspiracy theories, though he would usually not bother with fake or silly evidence for these ideas, preferring instead to appeal straight to God told him. Just days before the Biden inauguration, for instance, Hayes claimed that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was sending out coded messages on Twitter revealing that Trump had a secret plan to stay in office, a conclusion based on perceived correspondence with what Hayes imagines was exactly what God was telling him personally. Accordingly, he consistenly predicted that various wingnut efforts, like the Arizona election audit, would uncover massive voter fraud across the board.
Of course, Q’s predictions have consistently failed, but Hayes has an explanation for that, too, in order to counter Q’s detractors (or “the doubtfags”, as he calls them): Q has to lie “for the purposes of psychological operations.” Remember that “Q did warn us on the front end of the conversation that a lot of what he was going to put out was going to be disinformation”; in other words, the failed predictions are all part of the plan and contrary to appearances, the miserable track record of Q predictions is, in fact, evidence of Q’s infallibility. So it goes. Meanwhile, Q followers shouldn’t worry about “globalists” trying to “starve us to death and destroy our economies” because God will miraculously “multiply the food we have” and allow cars to run without gas (you can trust this prediction since it’s based not merely on Q’s messages but on a dream).
Means
After the 2020 election, when naïve people wondered whether QAnon would go away, Hayes was among those (repeatedly) calling for a military coup against Biden (probably “an illegitimate president” and “the representative of a foreign government inserted into our political system”), saying that the military was “the last line of defense against tyranny, and I think they’re going to be forced to step in” on the model of what had recently happened in Myanmar, where the military overthrew the civilian government and imprisoned its leaders over claims of voter fraud (many QAnon followers had already applauded Myanmar’s military, calling it a model for what should happen in the United States). It is, however, important to remember that the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, was not an attempt at anything like this but a deep state false flag operation carried out by Black Lives Matter and antifa to cover up the fraud that stole the election from Trump. There is a fine example of the analytical tools Hayes’ uses to arrive at these sorts of conclusions on display here.
Indeed, Hayes warned against Trump running in 2024, since it might just lead to “a redo of the 2020 election” with all its perceived (and soon to be exposed) election fraud and claimed that it would be better if “the military takes over” (though he did, of course, simultaneously warn his listeners about how the Biden administration, as he saw it, was shockingly trying to impose martial law). And signs that this was how it was all set up were everywhere, in Hayes’ mind; for instance, Trump obviously “set up the withdrawal from Afghanistan” with the intention that Biden would “botch it” and be removed via the 25th Amendment, at which point the military would step in (before then-Vice President Kamala Harris could be sworn in), “make mass arrests, and restore Trump to the White House” (observation of the 25th amendment evidently disappeared at some point in Hayes’s train of thought).
Keep in mind that QAnon is, as Hayes sees it, not a conspiracy theory but “the end of all conspiracies”, since Q is, eventually, going to “expose the truth on most of those historical events,” including “the sinking of the Titanic, what the Federal Reserve is all about, 9/11, a lot of things that we don’t even think about. Q has occasionally talked about aliens and UFOs, and I think that at some point down the road, Q is going to have shined a light on a lot of subjects of interest to a lot of people.” Hayes’s list also includes “the JFK assassination, Sandy Hook, whatever”.
The Deep State
Trump’s fight is a hard one, of course: it’s a “zero-sum game” (Hayes had apparently not quite learned a new expression) to the death. The mythical deep state, run by the Democrats and their allies in Hollywood and the media, are as powerful as they are scrupulous. For instance, in 2020, the Democrats knew that the COVID-19 pandemic (a “plandemic”, according to Hayes) “was coming from China” and they intentionally timed the impeachment case against President Donald Trump to distract him in hopes of crashing the stock markets, ensuring “100 million people losing their jobs”, and maybe “killing 5 or 10 million people” because, well, that’s what the deep state is for.
In an interview with fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Sean Morgan in 2020, Hayes claimed that Q had also exposed a “deep state” plan to use the George Floyd protests as cover to “take down Trump’s Twitter account, take down communications in North America, and then try to possibly storm the White House and physically remove President Trump from office” (something, remember, that Hayes explicitly supports doing if the president was Biden and the stormers MAGA cultists). Citing a typically incoherent “Q drop”, Hayes also said that the reason nothing ever happened was not that Q was wrong but that by revealing the plans in a cryptic fashion and “telling hundreds of millions of people around the world what the deep state was going to do”, Q had foiled the plan by revealing it (the rest of us sheeple really fail to grasp how important and influential Q is). And as Hayes sees it, the George Floyd protests were really a carefully choreographed affair: “The deep state works in secret. The riots in the protests, that is meant to look organic, but it was actually orchestrated and carefully planned ... You can’t risk having the public know that you had planned this whole thing all along”.
As for media, at least conventional media is a mouthpiece for Satan (“They’re corrupt. They’re evil”), and God has shown Hayes that President Trump is waging “a battle to the death” against the media. “Trump is going to destroy the mainstream media, and there is going to be a media that comes and replaces the mainstream media and that media is us”, where ‘us’ refers to MAGA’s “army of digital soldiers”. Frighteningly, Hayes doesn’t seem to be completely off about this prediction.
As for political violence, Hayes thinks that it is important for the MAGA movement to have extremists who are advocating violence because that forces the establishment to “negotiate with rational people like us” (he obviously complained that HBO’s documentary about the conspiracy theory portrayed QAnon followers as a bunch of “oddballs and outcasts”, which they emphatically aren’t: they’re rational people dammit).
Hayes’ views on medicine
Hayes has of course parroted anti-vaccine nonsense as well, in particular in relation to the Covid vaccine, which he thinks is, at best, unsafe (it isn’t). Now, how does Hayes square this assumption with his belief that Trump is infallible and that Trump not only recommended but took credit for the development of Covid vaccines? As opposed to most antivaxxers and antivaccine-adjacent dingbats in the MAGA crowd, Hayes has actually (repeatedly) tried to address this particular instance of glaring cognitive dissonance; according to Hayes “Trump allowed vaccine makers to ignore all safety protocols [utter bullshit] in order to rush dangerous COVID-19 vaccines to market so pharmaceutical companies would be sued out of existence: ‘What if this whole thing is a freakin’ set-up to take down Big Pharma?’” asks Hayes. Do not let the glaring stupidity of the suggestion make you overlook what the hypothesis reveals about the ethics Hayes thinks God has taught him.
The suggestion, however, does fit with Hayes’s general view of medicine. Hayes wants to dismantle the whole current health-care system in favor of a God-ordained health-care system based on faith healing: “God gave me a dream back in 2013 or 2014. And in that dream, He showed me that He has a health care system that He wants to implement that is going replace our current health care system. And, uh, let’s see… No appointments necessary, no deductibles, no side effects… It’s not like we’re going to take out the wrong kidney if we pray for you. No iatrogenic damages. No lawsuits, no liability.” As he sees it (in a chat with MAGA cultist and antivaccine activist Patrick Gunnels), these days “people are becoming awakened to the fact that, if we partner with God, we could get to a point – literally get to a point one day where we really don’t need a health care system.” To support his claim, Hayes tells the story about a faith-healing hospital in Spokane, Washington, run by a man named John G. Lake between 1915 and 1920, which was so successful that the medical establishment had it shut down to maintain their income base. It really should be needless to point out that Hayes retelling of the John G. Lake story is a complete fabrication. Note also that Hayes has tried his hand at faith healing himself.
Diagnosis: He’s risen to something akin to stardom in the QAnon movement, presumably primarily because he is, unlike many QAnon subscribers, somehow able to hold a thought for two sentences without lapsing into a tangent about how his family is in cahoots with Santa Claus to poison him through his medications. We do, however, suspect that he actually believes at least some of the stuff he produces and that, among his readers and viewers, there are (in fact plenty of) people who actually think he is onto something and not only cynics watching a cognitive trainwreck for laughs.
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