But what I do know is that Q is real and it's, and it's a group of patriots and President Trump's involved.

The first Q drop happened on October 28th, 2017.

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, not to introduce this, but just from afar, it's almost like a lot of the QAnon stuff kind of had that effect. Just you know, I didn't dig deep into that and don't, you know, and only know just the just the basic talking points about it. But one thing I did see that was felt like a constant was that there was always anytime they'd mentioned something that was just completely screwy, it was followed up with the ones that we believe to be real. Right. You know, there's just kind of this big, just kind of just put them all in the same bullshit. Exactly.

Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet, so like 17 is a big number within QAnon circles.

Meanwhile, you have the storm run by leftists and globalist intelligence agencies to take all the real stories of child sex trafficking and world government, the New World Order, and then make it look ridiculous and sound insane so that they can then say, see, none of it exists. And then imagine being the apologist for that and saying Tim Ballard's work of decades and the convictions and all of it's nothing.

They tell us to be pacified, to do absolutely nothing, that a man is riding in on a white horse to save this country. No, do not rise up. This oppressive government will take care of itself. The Constitution means nothing. Your inherent, God-given, inalienable rights, they'll be restored. Just wait because there's all kinds of white hats. You know, these people have been executed. They've gone to Gitmo. There's secret operations being run all over the place. Trust the plan. Don't be the plan. Trust the plan. And this is how they chilled patriotism and then set up January 6th in order to put people in jail and put the fear of God into people. Don't you ever think about rising up against this tyrannical government that is ushering in full authoritarian rule, complete absence of the rule of law, which is the only recipe. You know, ingredient that is required.

These people do choose. They do make choices. They say, this feels good. I'm going to embrace that.

QAnon taps into the same stuff that the anti-Semitism of 1840s France taps into. It moves at a different pace. The stories are told a little bit differently. But in the end, it's the same fears, the same hopes, the same need for villains and heroes and stories.

No, I mean, in reading Will's book, I kept coming back to these personal stories, and it's like, you know where QAnon begins? It begins with a medical bill. It doesn't begin on 4chan. It doesn't begin there. It doesn't begin in the 1840s. It doesn't begin when Jesus was like, hey, maybe don't let these people get in here. It was a medical bill that then started taking them down this terrible path. So all too often, what I'm seeing is the intervention point for QAnon and the like is way before QAnon ever shows up.

That's why Q was so popular because it was actionable. It wasn't, I'm going to read secrets of the Federal Reserve and I'm going to know what the insiders are doing, but I can't do anything about it. QAnon was, here's all the things that are going on. Here's what you can do. You can decode the drops. You can make a video. You can red pill your friends. You can show up at this rally. There were things that you could do. And yeah, a lot of it was busy work, but that's at least feeling like you're part of the solution.

Another big example of this is Q. I lost... Two and a half years ago, during the Trump campaign, about a third of our audience, it hurt us worse than de-platforming. But I knew the Q thing was fake. I knew the Pope and, you know, hadn't secretly been arrested.

Yeah, I think a lot of times when someone gets into QAnon or another conspiracy theory in a really hardcore enough way that I end up writing about them, you can kind of... There's often sort of a key that unlocks it, and you can sort of see the path. And often they identify it. They'll say, well, this thing happened to me, and that's why QAnon appealed to me. You know, for example, one guy who ended up in the Austin Steinbart group, he had this kind of crazy disease. I think he had cancer and ended up on disability and or couldn't get his disability approved. He couldn't work. So he's kind of angry at the world and the government. And then he discovers QAnon and says, well, wait. You know, no wonder this world is so screwed up. It's because of this cabal. Or, you know, someone like I wrote about a woman who got into QAnon during the pandemic and she was sort of cut off from everyone and, you know, she was sort of a shut in. And then as a result, you know, she was an easy mark for QAnon. So often there is kind of this or there's sort of an eccentricity this person's into really deep into Bitcoin.

Well, so many things like that, they are launching points so perfectly, because QAnon, much like a lot of other conspiracies, can... Metastasize to accommodate things. Like, if you're super into Bitcoin, then it's like, well, let me tell you about Nesera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, or the financial system conspiracies.

Well, so many things like that, they are launching points so perfectly, because QAnon, much like a lot of other conspiracies, can... Metastasize to accommodate things. Like, if you're super into Bitcoin, then it's like, well, let me tell you about Nesera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, or the financial system conspiracies.

From people I talk to, and in particular with QAnon and the Nesera aspect that's been built into it, they have this kind of utopian vision for after the storm, after Donald Trump kind of seizes power and imposes a fascist America. Obviously, they don't see it that way. But that debts will be abolished, or if you rent a house, you'll own it. And so if you have a ton of credit card debt and you can't realize you'll never be able to afford a house, there's a very personal appeal to that.

I mean, I think it's a couple things. I think the clues aspect, the idea of this guy named Q who's kind of dropping all these what they call breadcrumbs. The game aspect of it. Exactly. And so you're part of this broader movement and everyone is in discords kind of baking together, as they say, and kind of figuring it all out. And there's also this aspect of... The point is you're trying to evangelize and you're trying to kind of spread the word in what they call the Great Awakening so that when Tom Hanks is cuffed for drinking children's blood, that there won't be a civil war, that you're trying to spread the word amongst all your neighbors. So it's more active and there's more of this kind of climactic moment in the storm than if you're just getting into, let's say, JFK assassinations and you say, okay, I spent 10 years on this and I think I figured it out. It kind of doesn't go anywhere from there, but there's kind of like, you know, you're going to take on the boss level.

I mean, yeah, I mean, as you said, the red shoes thing, you know, they are convinced that anyone who wears red shoes is a, you know, you're signaling, you know, it's like your blood-drenched shoes, and so they'll get pictures of, like, Bill Maher in red sneakers, and they're like, look at this guy. You know, symbolism will be his downfall.

But from the people who have gotten out of it, it's usually some very specific thing. I mean, there was a guy, one of the, you know, what they call the Q-proofs, which are supposed to be how you prove QAnon is real. So, for example, there was one that Q said. They don't call them Q-proofs? Q-proofs. It's right there. Q-proofs, come on! You know, I like this. I think you're giving him too many good ideas between that and the Nelson stuff. We'll punch up any conspiracy theory for free! That's one of the problems with us. Alex Jones, if he listened to our advice, he would be in a much better place. We just do so much punch-up on terrible conspiracies. We went evil. Oh, we'd be so good at evil. You're watching the broadcast and you're just like, alright, this guy's got no charisma. He's gotta go. It is! Fire him! Get a new one! But yeah, I mean, in terms of, so for example, so one of them was that they interpreted that Q had said Trump will say tippy top at the Easter egg roll. And so then he said that and they said, oh my God, Q's real. Well, you can go back years and Trump is constantly saying tippy top. I mean, it's like him saying huge or telling a story about someone calling him sir. But when they package this in this way, it's very compelling. Well, this ex-QAnon guy, he sees a video debunking this and suddenly That just kind of flipped the gears in his head, and he goes, wait a minute, if that's fake, what else is fake? And then it kind of sends him down a more positive rabbit hole out of it.

You know, from the people I talk to, it's always someone who didn't really like being in QAnon, and they sort of felt it was their duty. I talked to this one woman who said, It was just sort of a horrible fact that I had to acknowledge that this was the fate of the world, but I really wasn't happy about it.

And you're hitting on something which is the role that really serious medical issues or medical debt plays, I think, in driving so many people into QAnon or other sort of fringe beliefs. Because, as you said, these are people who are raised with this belief that this is not... Just this incredibly cutthroat country, and if you get one wrong turn, your life is going to be ruined. And then they find that that is the case. Well, it's not an unreasonable belief, you know? Well, right, right, right. No, and then suddenly they hit this kind of skid, and then... Often through no fault of their own, or they have a drug issue or a mental illness issue, and then suddenly they find themselves abandoned, with the exception of the QAnon community, which is more than happy to welcome them and say, you know, this is not just the abysmal state of life, and you're just going to have to deal with it.

I talked to people in the book who said, okay, I'm going to gear up and I'm going to become the ultimate QAnon debunker and I'm going to sit my kid down and run him through it and then we'll just leave this QAnon thing in the past. But I was talking to someone who said, well, just show them the FBI statistics about human trafficking. It's not as widespread as people think. And then they'll say, well, let me tell you about the FBI. You know, and, you know, you can go on and on. Whereas people, you know, at the same time, they'll see some guy with a rumble channel as the most honest person out there.

You know, I think you make a good point here, which is that, you know, so many of these, obviously these conspiracy theories like QAnon are, and you guys often get into the background of what is sort of the kernel of truth at the heart of these things, but they are driven, I mean... I don't want to say, no, the government's always nice to everyone. How could you possibly think that? Or that there aren't conspiracies, or there aren't really weird, disturbing things in the news. And obviously these then kind of become the seeds that grow into the pathways for people to get into these conspiracy theories.

Okay, so now, to de-radicalize people from QAnon, you must... Ready yourself to prove exhaustively a conspiracy theory. Yes, absolutely.

You know, I think some people are. I think it's a relatively marginal aspect of it, but I don't think the number is zero. You know, there's a guy kind of affiliated with them named the Vaccine Police, who I think has endorsed that. But, yeah, like, you know, look, I've got to give it up to the QAnon people here. While that definitely is a thing, I don't think it's super mainstream. Because it's supposed to be like, or at least the way that some of those people sell it is like it's a remedy for the vaccine. You know, like, so, I mean, you gotta, if you accidentally got vaccinated, you gotta do something. Yeah, no, no, that's definitely, I mean, I think there's vaccine police guys into that. And Dr. Group! Dr. Group, for sure. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it is these, you know, I think that is one of those kind of homeopathic cures. And so, you know, it... It's not as unheard of as I might wish it was.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really already headed that way. We post occasionally, but not very much. And in the past, Q sort of played this papal-like role of deciding what's in the canon and not. And so Q said, the JFK Jr. stuff is not QAnon. And so that didn't entirely stop it, but people could refer to that and say, okay, we don't believe in JFK Jr. Whereas now, really, you can sort of do whatever you want. And so you have all these kind of mini-Qs popping up, you know, these just various QAnon promoters who sort of take it in different directions.

I think that is more prevalent, the bleach. Well, yeah, certainly. Yeah, because it's way more reasonable to drink bleach than pee, Dan. The MMR. If the bleach can clean your house, then it can clean you. That makes perfect sense. Yes, yes. No, Dan, you're absolutely right. I mean, that is a big thing.

I think the way that QAnon has successfully gone through the conservative feedback loop and then still come out the other side is kind of an amazing thing to me. Because it starts out at 4chan and then less than a year later... You're getting occasional drops on Fox News.

Q is a psyop to lead us around by our noses.

I think that the set systems for what they believe are easily traced back to which influencers indoctrination they support.

Yes. Oh my god. People believe... Okay, listen. Whatever you can think of, I've met people who believe it with all their heart and soul. People believe their kids are in the gutter. I've watched people break down in tears over this, so I know they're not thinking. And I don't mean grifters. I mean people giving the money.

But there is that, like, there's an inciting event that where you're at your lowest, there's a group that love bombs you, essentially, and then you're just in, you know? So if you're at your lowest point, your business isn't going so well, nobody's helping you out, you find a QAnon website, you're immediately love bombed with, guess what? You're so smart.

And my first inkling of seeing something there was beginning of 2018. So just a few months after the first drops came out.

But I started to get a little more concerned about it when I started to see the parallels in QAnon to these previous affinity frauds, the things I write about a lot in the book, the Iraqi Dinar scam, and then before that, Nasara, before that, the Omega Trust scam.

But what Q was selling wasn't that you're going to get rich. It was you're going to feel awesome when Hillary Clinton and John Podesta get the short drop from the rope at Guantanamo Bay. It was selling good feelings and it was selling the idea that these people that they've hated for decades are finally going to get what's coming to them.

It's both. Uh, with with the Q drops, uh, you know, the early story told by the Q drops of what the storm was originally supposed to be, you know, this, you know, this mass arrests unleashed by Trump through Twitter, uh, you know, the Marines of the National Guard called up. That very much seems like something you would read in a Robert Ludlam novel, in a Tom Clancy novel. I mean, that's another, you know, Pachenek thing, right? He's the co-creator of the Op Center series. I mean, he didn't really do much with those books, but he tried. Yeah, this, you know, you got this, you've got this sort of Tom Clancy-esque story being told, and it does seem very original. But at some point, that story kind of burned out. And then Q just kind of kept kicking the can down the road, which is the traditional thing that you get with this. And one of the things that really happened with Q is that there was a need for more content. This became really popular very quickly. So Q needed to just put more stuff out there. So there was a lot of stealing. You get a lot of repurposed memes. You get a lot of stuff grabbed off of blogs.

Yeah, the thing with Q is that it's very different from a lot of traditional conspiracy theories. Most traditional conspiracy theories about people out of power taking it back. That's where you get those like the secret counter coup and the deep state and stuff like that. With Q, it was we have the power and we're going to use it. So that's where that aspirational model comes in. That's where that hopium aspect comes in of we've got the power to do this. We just have to wait until all of the pieces are in place. Everything is perfect. Like there can't be any questions. Like it has to look legal. It has to be completely legit. And then we're going to round up hundreds of thousands of people and kill them. So with Q, it wasn't like a coup because it was already the people who were in power.

You know, one of the goals I really had with writing the book was to strip back the social media sheen of QAnon and reveal what the component parts were. And the component parts are all old. It's all stuff that's been floating around for decades, centuries. I mean, you go back to the blood libel of the 1200s or whatever it was. There's very little in QAnon that's new. So the parts of QAnon that work for people can be repurposed into new conspiracy theories, new personas. I mean, we saw that. We've seen that on Telegram this year where post-January 6th QAnon promoters have taken QAnon and taken it in a completely different direction. You've got people like Ghost Ezra, people like Patel Patriot, who are taking the mythology of Q and rebuilding it into something that works for them and that can get them viral fame and money coming. You know, everybody takes it in their own direction and some of it doesn't work and some of it does work. And that will continue on and on and on forever because people will always be susceptible to being told what to believe and being validated in what they think is true and in being part of a special secret community.

Yeah, there's a real sense of with QAnon of like, we're still doing this. Like we're still dredging up these stereotypes, you know, based on things like the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, these debunked myths that are knocked down over and over and over again.

QAnon as a brand really doesn't exist anymore. These conspiracy theories are just mainstream conservatism now.

Yeah, you get, there's been a lot of infighting in the Q influencer arena lately. You know, some people who are more stolen election, some people who are more anti-vax. There are some people who think Donald Trump really is the president. Some people who think Biden is technically the president, but Trump's going to come back. And they're sort of insulting each other. And then they're yelling at each other over money and over who is who is a real patriot. You know, you've got like Marjorie Taylor Greene feuding with Lynn Wood, who's feuding with Qtah, who's feeding, feuding with QAnon John. I mean, it's impossible to follow. There's no reason to follow.

I mean, that's kind of my view on this is this is the type of movement that is inevitably going to destroy itself. Yes. The question is just, are they, how quickly can they take us with them? You know, that's like, it's, it's just going to, they're going to eat each other alive. They're going to cannibalize each other.

And I think that's where the, you know, the cue drops come in of, you know, people ask me, are there going to be more Q drops? And I don't think there will be because they're not necessary. Yeah. The Q persona was taken as far as it was going to go. And you don't need new cue drops. Nobody goes to church and is like, hey, we need new books of the Bible. Right. They've got the Bible. They don't need anything else. They've got the Q drops. There's a Q catchphrase. You have more than you know. Well, they have it. The drops are there. They're taking them off into a million different directions. There never needs to be another Q drop.

It's that aspect of Q that is not quite like a traditional cult. There's no charismatic leader. There's no figurehead at the very top whose word is bond. With Q, like you do your own research, you are your own leader. And that allows these promoters to step in and take control and take their version of the movement spinning off in any number of directions.

I think one of the weirdest things that QAnon has actually revealed is that these people don't know how anything works. They don't know how civics works. They don't know how economics works. So you can kind of just tell them, like, oh, if you sign an executive, if the president signs an executive order, well, then it must be law forever, right? Right. You know, Biden tomorrow could sign an executive order that we are now all part of Panama. Yeah, totally. Right. And we would be part of Panama. That's how it works. You know, they just don't know how shit works.

But the biggest demographic for belief in QAnon is already being a conspiracy theory. Very few people, I mean, practically none that I've seen have been just like MSNBC watching, New York Times reading, you know, centrist Democrats who just one day just happened to go to X22 report or watch, you know, fall of the cabal and then suddenly got radicalized into thinking that there's a pedophile cult running the world. That's not how it goes.

I think the thing that gets missed a lot is that you can believe in something like QAnon and not be crazy, not be violent, not be stupid. You are just looking for something in the wrong place.

I mean, that's the thing you go back to with those early Q drops is that they told a story that people wanted to be true. It wasn't one of these like FBI Anon or White House Insider, one of these early, you know, Anon accounts who were like, I have all the secrets. I'm going to reveal everything. That's that's interesting, but it's not compelling. If faking that you have inside knowledge that Hillary Clinton is on the run and is going to be arrested on November 3rd, then you go, oh, I want that to happen. Let's follow this.

And the thing with QAnon is that, you know, as we've talked about, that iconography is starting to disappear. So, you know, it's sort of like being the best Betamax repairman.

And I think a QAnon probably has a bit of that too, but it's stolen. It's like hijacked from.

I also noticed everything Q said was the enemy bragging. It was the enemy. The mouth of Sauron. And so Q said, when the lights go out, that's when the roundups begin. And indeed, they are starting to SWAT team and kill and round people up during the box-outs. But it's us getting rounded up, not them. Also, that's some of the sick irony of President Q. So there you go, ladies and gentlemen.