David Hayes is better known by his online handle: PrayingMedic. In his YouTube videos, he exudes the even-keeled authoritarian energy of a middle-school principal. PrayingMedic is one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet. He has more than 300,000 Twitter followers and a similar number of YouTube subscribers. Hayes, a former paramedic, lives in a terra-cotta-roofed subdivision in Gilbert, Arizona, with his wife, Denise, an artist whom he met on the dating site Christian Mingle in 2007. Both describe themselves as former atheists who came to their faith in God, and to each other, late in life, after previous marriages. Hayes has been following Q since the beginning, or close to it. “Q Anon is pretty darn interesting,” he wrote on his Facebook page on December 12, 2017, six weeks after Q’s first post on 4chan.

Hayes is a superstar in the Q universe. His video “Q for Beginners Part 1” has been viewed more than 1 million times. “Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” Hayes says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”

darn interesting