When the QAnon conspiracy theory first emerged back in 2017, Dave Hayes quickly became a prominent figure within the movement. Operating under the online handle of "The Praying Medic," Hayes was one of the leading self-declared “decoders” of Q drops and had built up a substantial following on social media, where his videos attempting to explain the "real meaning" behind Q’s cryptic posts regularly racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
During the Trump administration, Hayes used his "expertise" in decoding Q drops to repeatedly issue warnings and make wild predictions, including claiming in 2019 that a wave of mass arrests would happen within a year that would permanently destroy the Democratic Party, and predicting that then-President Donald Trump would have Barack Obama and John Kerry executed by the military.
None of Hayes' Q-based predictions came true, so he's now come up with a retroactive explanation: Q had to lie "for the purposes of psychological operations."
During an appearance on the "Reading Epic Threads" program last Thursday, Hayes said that he sympathizes with his fellow QAnon conspiracy theorists who are frustrated by the fact that Q's predications never came true, but insisted that they must realize that that is all part of the plan.
"No one has has been more pissed off at Q than me for the three years we sat through of waiting for the arrests, thinking that the arrests were just around the corner—like it was just gonna happen, this next week we're gonna see people arrested—and it never happened," Hayes said. "So I have as much frustration as anyone does about how long we've been waiting for the arrests to happen."
"However, 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," he continued. "Disinformation designed to make the bad guys make wrong moves. So you had to get real with that. If you're going to buy on to the Q thing, you have to know up front that half of what Q is going to tell you is not going to be true. It's for the purpose of psychological operations, and that's just how it is."
