When the QAnon conspiracy theory first emerged back in 2017, Dave Hayes was one of the first prominent figures within the movement whom we began covering. 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 Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, where his videos attempting to explain the “real meaning” behind Q’s cryptic posts regularly racked up hundreds of thousands of views.
In May 2019, Hayes used his position as one of the leading “experts” on Q to boldly declare that mass arrests of prominent Democrats and thousands of business, media, and entertainment leaders would happen within a year, which would destroy the Democratic Party for a generation.
The promised arrests, of course, never happened. What did happen is that former President Donald Trump was voted out of the White House in 2020, Q disappeared, and Hayes was banned from just about every mainstream social media platform.
But Hayes is not giving up. More than two years after he confidently and falsely predicted that mass arrests would happen within a year, Hayes is still promising that the arrests are going to happen any day now.
Appearing on fellow QAnon conspiracy theorist Greg Harvey’s livestream program Monday, Hayes insisted that Americans will wake up one day soon to the news that hundreds of high-ranking leaders and members of the press have been arrested.
“I think one of these days people are going to wake up, and they’re going to hear that 200 or 300 members of the cabal—from the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, and members of Congress, [James] Comey, [James] Clapper, [John] Brennan, Susan Rice—that they’ve all been arrested,” Hayes said. “I do believe a mass arrest is coming. I actually had three dreams about that—at least that I can remember—three dreams about mass arrests happening on one day. Just boom, all these powerful people taken in, arrested. I think one day in the not too distant future, I think [John] Durham will probably take a bunch of U.S. Marshals and just put the little silver bracelet on a whole bunch of these members of the cabal, and it’s going to happen suddenly.”
“There’s a whole lot of people in the media that need to be arrested,” Hayes continued. “If you read the statute on treason, sedition, and subversive activities, and you get to the part of advocating the overthrow of the government, it is a violation of federal law to use the press to advocate for the overthrow of the government, and members of the press knowingly pushed lies in an attempt to remove Donald Trump from office. That was an attempt to overthrow the government.”
Harvey then piped in to note that members of the press “got executed as well during Nuremberg,” referring to the series of trials held at the end of World War II in Nuremberg, Germany, with the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice
“Yup,” replied Hayes. “And members of the press need to be held accountable because they are just as culpable as anybody in the CIA or the White House.”
