Thirty-two days out from the election and every hour reveals another layer of intensity. The more widely conspirituality and QAnon spreads, the more normalized mundane political violence becomes.
In this episode, Derek looks at how the virus of conspiracism is now overtly threatening the basic premises of voting, as Emperor Trump projects a fiction about electoral fraud, even as he loses his clothes. Matthew looks at a crucial part of this normalization: how Q himself, whoever he is, is now brandwashing, advising followers to abandon familiar Q-words. How then are resisters like Seane Corn to address this brainworm as it shape-shifts, co-opting the visuals of wellness and even the jargon of social justice? Julian steps back for a broader look, reviewing the pod’s discoveries and themes so far, and visualizing where they might lead.
We interview Mike Rains, one of the brave moderators of the 25K member subreddit QAnonCasualties, who has a lot to say about what the Q-hole feels like when it rips up hearts and homes.
Show Notes
Q suggests going stealth
r/QAnonCasulties
Donate via QanonCasualties SubReddit to a real charity that does real work to help combat child trafficking
Insights into the Personalities of Conspiracy Theorists
Why Do Some People Believe in Conspiracy Theories?
People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features
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You can keep up with us at Conspiratuality.net where we have all of our show notes and resources pages.
We are also on plenty of social media channels.
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Julian has been killing it with the memes, so that's at instagram.com slash conspiritualitypod.
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That's patreon.com slash conspirituality.
And before Julian goes over this week's show notes, I would just like to say that on a recent episode, I referenced a 9-11 study that had to do with a piece on memory that I was talking about a couple of weeks ago, and someone pointed out that What I said was that the study was referencing the fact that the towers were not shown on TV on 9-11 falling.
And I was wrong.
I did go back and find this study.
The study actually said that There was no footage of the first plane hitting the first tower on 9-11.
That wasn't shown on 9-12, but a number of people reported seeing it on 9-11.
So the actual implications for memory stand, but that specific was wrong, and I apologize for that.
I know it was a very traumatic day for a lot of us, so I didn't mean to misrepresent that information.
And thank you for pointing it out.
Yeah, thank you, and that's how we roll.
Episode 19, hurtling into the Q-hole.
32 days out from the election, and every hour reveals another layer of intensity.
The more widely conspirituality and QAnon spreads, the more normalized mundane political violence becomes.
In this episode, Derek looks at how the virus of conspiracism is now overtly threatening the basic premises of voting, as Emperor Trump projects a fiction about electoral fraud, even as he loses his clothes.
Matthew looks at a critical, excuse me, Matthew looks at a crucial part of this normalization.
How Q himself, whomever he is, is now brand washing, advising followers to abandon familiar Q words.
How then are resistors like Sean Korn to address this brain worm as it shapeshifts, co-opting the visuals of wellness and even the jargon of social justice?
I'm stepping back for a broader look, reviewing the pod's discoveries and themes so far, and visualizing where they might lead.
We interview Mike Raines, the moderator of the 25,000-member subreddit QAnon Casualties, who has a lot to say about what the Q-hole feels like when it rips up hearts and homes.
One thing I love about this podcast is the distribution of work going on behind the scenes.
The three of us are on Slack every day, planning episodes, sharing story ideas, discussing topics, working on segments, and plotting out social media.
We each bring our skills to the table in a complementary way.
I'll add one aside here briefly.
We do read everything that comes to us on Patreon, Facebook, and Instagram, but we haven't found a perfect solution for replying, and I apologize about that.
We'll keep improving the best that we can.
But like many collaborative projects, this podcast depends on every member of the team doing their job.
Projects work really well when that happens.
I've been on a lot of teams that didn't work out that well, and it sucks.
And I also live in a country that feels nothing like a team right now.
And that sucks even more.
My wife was on a text chain during Tuesday night's presidential debate while I, as usual, yelled into Twitter for 90 minutes.
She told me something I've witnessed often.
A few people on that chain can't believe they have to vote for Joe Biden.
He's not their guy.
I get it.
I donated to four other candidates before Biden locked up the nomination.
But here's the thing.
We live in a democracy, a fact that is actually in peril.
We know the Republican Party has been co-opted by a cult of personality, and we can't let the same thing happen to us.
Us.
I'm not even a registered Democrat.
My wife calls me one of the most conservative people she knows.
Like a lot of people, my thoughts on issues are complex.
There's a good chance that you, the listener, don't agree with me on at least a few topics.
And I have no problem with that, because I live in a country that, at least for my first 45 years, allows for open dialogues and heated debates on every topic imaginable.
Diversity doesn't only involve skin color or religious belief.
But we're actually losing that ability right now.
And I attribute at least part of that fact to the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
We know a few things about people susceptible to them.
They tend to distrust authority, have low levels of agreeableness, are more anxious, and feel lonely.
When you believe in one conspiracy theory, you're primed to believe in more of them.
And I've added links to all these studies in the show notes if you're interested.
So maybe you believe Dan Brown was actually writing a secret code about Jesus' bloodline.
64% of readers of the Da Vinci Code thought so in 2005.
And perhaps you think Amelia Earhart was abducted by aliens, or worse, that HIV was a government-funded project.
There are enough flat earthers and moon landing fakers to talk to.
The HIV one, like 9-11 and Sandy Hook truthers, are a level worse, because real people whose lives were impacted by those events are still alive and can hear your nonsense.
If you want to think about Princess Diana being alive or Osama Bin Laden being dead before the compound raid, fine.
But when you start talking publicly about events that still affect people deeply, you've gone from feeding an over-imaginative mind to perpetuating trauma.
As I discussed during my interview with Reagan Williams a few episodes ago, children that were actually trafficked are sometimes indoctrinated into conspiracy theories because they distrust authority figures.
QAnon is negatively impacting their mental health.
And the actual victims that QAnon devotees say they're fighting for are being more traumatized by these lies.
It's irresponsible.
And frankly, it's disgusting.
Conspiracy theories gain traction in times of distress.
So it's not surprising that 2020 has turned out this way, no matter how disorienting it is.
What concerns me more than anything are the nine months of mental and emotional priming that are leading into this election.
As we know, Trump doesn't signal what he's going to do.
He straight up tells us over and over again.
The last question on the debate Tuesday night really frightened me.
Although in truth, he's been talking about it for over two years in large part due to Bill Maher.
He's not leaving office.
I don't see him leaving willingly.
I don't see him leaving under any condition, including people knocking on the door with guns.
He'd be scarface.
I just don't see this man giving it up.
And I just think he has many cards he hasn't played yet.
He is not going to leave until he wants to leave.
I don't think he would even leave if he lost an election in 2020.
Oh, I'm the guy who says he's not leaving even if he loses the election.
People have been saying I'm an alarmist and I'm crazy because I keep saying he's not going to leave even if he loses.
I don't think he's leaving.
Even if he loses the election.
So I'm a third-rate respected comedian who says if he loses, he's not leaving.
No, I've been saying for a very long time now that I don't think he's leaving.
I will bet you a million dollars right now that if you lose the 2020 election, I'm right and you won't leave.
He's not leaving.
He probably will have lost the election, Trump, and he probably will not leave.
You know, he's made me part of his act because I always say he's not going to leave.
He's not leaving on January 20th.
Because if Trump loses the election in November, he's not going to leave.
I've been saying for a number of years that if Trump loses the election, he's not going to leave.
The Alex Jones documentary on PBS laid it out clearly.
You go from Area 51 and HIV to 9-11 and Sandy Hook.
And if you've gone that far down the rabbit hole, you're pretty much susceptible to any influence that you distrust.
Remember the founding principle of QAnon?
Donald Trump is the world savior.
And if you're peddling any of the propaganda that Q is spreading, you've been primed to believe the upcoming election is going to be rigged.
Given that that's the case, what do you think November and December are going to look like?
Let me conclude with two layers and tie this together.
The first, the more votes Biden gets, the harder it will be to dispute the victory.
So get over the he's-not-perfect mindset.
What he will do is what his former boss did very well, place competent people in high-ranking positions to try to steer this country back on some sort of course and maybe even make us a little bit better.
And that's why I opened this segment discussing the three of us on this podcast.
One reason conspirituality works is because there is no leader here.
We're just three friends having a conversation in an attempt to push this dialogue forward.
Biden is a lifelong politician.
And perhaps we forget that before Trump, the role of president was largely symbolic.
There was always power in the position, but there were checks.
And that balance is now gone.
The second layer isn't so optimistic.
The GOP is going to try to ram through their judge onto the Supreme Court.
Trump is going to contest the election.
And his administration is going to tie this up in the court for months.
We have to be ready for this.
It can't come as a surprise because they've been telling us to our faces that that's what's going to happen.
2020 is a dark era, and winter really is coming this time.
I don't have any special power of prophecy, but I do know, as with this podcast, we're stronger when united.
Unity and willpower is going to be needed when this battle heads into the courts.
There have been a lot of comparisons about 2020 to previous eras.
The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 19, the depression, Nazi Germany.
But really, this is new territory and it's scary.
And yet, this is where all of those teachings you've probably read about, studied, and maybe even taught for years or decades come into play.
If you're listening to this, you're probably in the yoga, meditation, or wellness community in some capacity, and all of those teachings were meant to prepare you for times like this.
I practiced with Dharmamitra when I lived in New York City, and he always used to say, doing yoga on a mountaintop is easy.
Doing it in the middle of New York City is where the yoga actually happens.
And we've got to make that happen right now, or else this spiritual practice we discussed was never really about rising up to meet the moment.
As the saying goes, you don't rise to any occasion, you only fall back on your training.
So train well.
So something really important has happened in the Q universe.
Now, whoever the leaders are, whoever Q is, whatever Jim Watkins is up to, and to be clear, we can't confirm that he's Q, but we can say that he can authorize Q's statements with the system of coding that 8kun functions with.
A Q drop appeared recently.
Its number is 4734, and it says this.
Focus on content.
Information.
Research for yourself.
Gatekeeper.
Noun.
A person that controls access as to information, often acting as an arbiter of quality or legitimacy.
An open internet allows innovators to bypass traditional gatekeepers and promote their work on its own merit.
A guardian.
Monitor.
DEPLOY CAMOUFLAGE DROP ALL REFERENCES RE CUE QANON ETC TO AVOID BAN TERMINATION CENSORSHIP INSTALL ALGOS SNIFFERS BYPASS KEEP CHARGING MIDNIGHT RIDERS REVERES MIDNIGHT RIDE DELIVERY OF FREE INFORMATION BYPASS CONTROLLED MEDIA NARRATIVE CUE
Okay, so what any dedicated anon is supposed to do with stuff like this is to quote-unquote bake it for meaning.
And so that's what I'll do, not as an anon, but actually drawing on my old literary theory background.
And actually, I'm only really going to bake the first line, which is fascinating.
It says, focus on content information.
So the story here, especially with, you know, the references to camouflage, is that Q leaders are going stealth.
This has already been happening through SoftQ or PastelQ fronts.
This is what Wayfair was.
This is Save the Children.
This is SayerG of GreenMedInfo missing a clear opportunity to denounce QAnon when I questioned him by email as to why he's using Q-related hashtags.
There's a whole bunch of people out there who are placing bets for and against the toxicity of the Q brand.
Another word from headquarters is to try to avoid censorship.
Q is instructing digital warriors to lie, to dissemble, and to focus on content.
Now, content is one of those terms that for my brain has a pre-digital meaning and a post-digital meaning.
Post-digital, it just means data, whatever magnetizes attention, filler.
It's what designers build space for and what content providers fill up.
And because there's infinite space, there's infinite content.
Content has been getting cheaper by the hour, and we're all being asked to fill up that void.
Now, before the internet, some of us used to speak of content much more specifically and in relation to form.
Is this a poem, we would say in literary theory class?
What are the constraints upon it?
Is it fiction, non-fiction?
Is it scientific discourse, historiography?
And one of the great innovations of postmodern theory, which I was immersed in, was the understanding that form and content are both indifferent but intrinsic to each other.
And some of this came from the media studies revolution of Marshall McLuhan, who's a patron saint here in Canada, who famously said, the medium is the message, which opens a can of worms.
Because it places in doubt the possibility that we can communicate meaning outside of the conventions we use.
Every literary genre up until that point had been based upon the premise that the author's ultimate meaning or even heart essence could be communicated faithfully, regardless of the medium.
This is the premise of all romantic literature, for example, which is why we fetishize Byron's tuberculosis and his young death, for example.
That era believes in the absolute communication between heart and page.
But with this new theory, suddenly there loomed the possibility of a kind of emotional paralysis or impasse.
A world in which humans were not communicating with their hearts so much as their media were communicating with each other, and oddly, pursuing their own ends.
A world in which language and art did not reveal truths so much as conceal them, but also cheapen them through infinite reproduction.
Language and imagery were understood to reproduce themselves, and this coincided with an explosion of study around notions of things like performance, including the performance of things like gender.
It all sounds prophetic, right?
Now, one of the writers that sent me into pure angst at the time was the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who wrote these devastating, crystalline little aphorisms about how in the absence of discernible meaning, and in the proliferation of images in the age of the spectacle, we increasingly feel as though we're living in a hall of mirrors, and that those mirrors are paradoxically empty, that they show us nothing.
My Baudrillard books are all in storage, so here are a few quotes I lazily snagged from Goodreads.
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent.
There is no alternative but to fill up the screen.
Otherwise, there would be an irremediable void.
And that's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
And what about the humans in that little window?
He says devastating things like, quote, "...smile and others will smile back.
Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are.
Smile if you have nothing to say.
Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say, nor your total indifference to others." Let this emptiness, this profound indifference, shine out spontaneously in your smile." And then finally, I'll pick this one apart a little bit.
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
So, let's just break down that list in relation to what we see in yoga and wellness culture.
Fragmentary sensations, both in the products of practices and also their actual gifts.
Eclectic nostalgia, especially when it comes to things like pre-modern medicine.
Disposable simulacra.
All we have to do is think of the, you know, reproductions of murtis that everybody has in their yoga studios and so on.
Promiscuous superficiality, which I think would have been a great name for Instagram, in which the, and then he says, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
So here's my point.
The trolls on 8kun understand meaninglessness, or at least they live it.
Remember that there's a nihilism at the heart of these discourses.
Before they pushed the red pill, they openly talked about having swallowed the black pill.
They understand fragmentary reality and meaninglessness, and we're not even getting into the possible influence of Russian intelligence and psyops, the way in which those emotions or those, you know, community qualities, those shared feelings might be militarized.
But wellness influencers and the culture at large have tried to pretend that this shift in meaning-making hasn't actually happened.
There's this really tenacious belief, especially within the yoga world that I'm familiar with, that one's inner goodness, illuminated by a ring light, is going to be enough.
That one's spirituality is going to somehow transcend the medium.
Now, the notion of the independent sovereign yoga achiever is often understood through the analysis of neoliberalism, that it is a persona contrived beyond material things like race and class, a lifestyle instead of a life, a way of being in the world that associates freedom with consumerism.
But I believe there's something else lying deep under the surface of wellness language.
Its tone and fervency are exactly what Jean Baudrillard describes when he writes that the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are its proposed goals.
The postmodern wellness influencer is actually trying to act as if the last 50 years of media hasn't actually happened.
It's kind of like, hey, Yoga Journal, 1942 called, they want their wholesomeness back.
They're trying to evince depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity in a world that has been drained of these possibilities.
Now I'm not saying that influencers and even myself don't feel these things or don't yearn for originality and meaning and so on.
I'm saying that we have no way of distinguishing these things as properties of themselves rather than products and performances.
And it's not anyone's fault.
It's just that we were naive to think that somehow the radiance of our hearts would just shine through all the noise.
And now, here we have it.
Q in a drop explicitly exploiting this particular weakness, saying to digital warriors, stick the content in however you can.
They know they can slip in under the wire of wellness branding because their hunch was right.
There was nothing really there but aspirations and pleasurable consumer experiences.
It's not just that the brain worm about pedophilia is both intoxicating and triggering, or that the antisemitism of naming something the cabal is grabbing onto latent bigotries.
That's all there.
But it's also, according to Baudrillard at least, that we live in a hollowed-out world of appearances.
And I can tell already that it's going to take a while for right-thinking, righteous rather, I suppose, wellness people, the ones who are appalled at this infiltration, to sort this all out.
Because the immediate instinct, from what I've seen, is to target QAnon as though it is insane, but yet shares those same values of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity.
So I'm watching some yoga and wellness people argue with QAnon as though QAnon was itself an organized cabal of evil yoga teachers, instead of an incredibly amorphous and opportunistic virus that injects content like DNA into the hollow shells of our late capitalist society.
There's a failure to grasp irony.
There's a belief in intentionality.
And it's hard for yoga and wellness people to grasp what the true meaning of shitposter is.
One of the things that aspirational wellness discourse does is that it makes people very bad at irony.
Sean Cord sent in our interview, I won't get cynical.
And I've thought about that statement for a while and what a cynical yoga rebrand would look like.
I think there could be something there.
But what I think I'm sure of is that if Q is abandoning its branding to focus on content, the answer to that is better content.
To change the channel.
We've talked a lot on this pod about how hard it is to have rational and grounded content compete against a fever dream.
So it's not just a matter of better production.
Better content also has to mean education, public health, and public safety.
It has to mean providing the space in which better content might naturally grow.
You know, Matthew, you read that Q transition pretty convincingly.
It was the perfect voice.
I want to comment a couple of things.
First off, that irony.
I mean, really well stated in the big picture observation about what's happening.
But I'm guessing everyone here watched the debate Tuesday night.
Actually, we haven't even talked about it, but seeing the... Did you watch in real time, Matthew?
I did, yeah.
But I have to say, I was...
I don't know whether real time is a good term for it because I dissociated through the entire thing.
I was tired.
I was tired.
Also, you know, we're homeschooling our boys here because the reopening procedures for the schools we don't consider to be good enough.
And one of the projects for the very precocious seven-year-old that we planned on was following the election a little bit.
And so he actually wanted to stay up and I really failed him actually, because as soon as it started and I could see where it was going and how violent it was going to be, I actually just shut down and he was kind of watching an amazement, having never seen I actually just shut down and he was kind of watching an amazement, And this was the first introduction and I finally had to mute it at a certain point.
I I had the presence of mind to mute it and to turn to him and I say, I need you to know that this isn't normal and that we're going to watch something that actually has to do with politics sometime soon, but we're not going to get it here.
And that's all I could manage to That is another reason I'm happy not to be a parent right now.
So many of my friends trying to explain to their children what's happening.
and have a deeper talk with him about why it was so dreadful. - That is another reason I'm happy not to be a parent right now.
So many of my friends trying to explain to their children what's happening.
I couldn't imagine how hard that is.
But going back to the irony and also cynicism, because I've always been a cynical person, and like sarcasm, cynicism and sarcasm both have a certain level of responsibility to them that I think people sometimes don't understand.
These are rhetorical tools.
They're not just Being frustrated.
It's not nihilism, right?
These are actual tools that we have in our tool belt.
And that moment during the debate where Biden called Trump out for injecting bleach and he said that was sarcasm, it's so indicative of one of the biggest problems here is not understanding the gravity of the office and the fact that people actually listen to what you say and take what you say as some sort of educated truth.
And I want to, just rolling off what you said, two examples come to mind.
First off, yesterday someone contacted us on Instagram that I was chatting with for a while, Danielle Bilardo, who's a cardiologist, and she was just mentioning as being a doctor who's intubated people and watched people die when she was, you know, the last six months, how hard that is on doctors and medical health experts.
And it's part of What I was referencing about not being able to understand basic levels of empathy when you go around spreading these conspiracy theories.
There are people who are in it, in the thick of it all the time that are doing the real work, and when they hear this nonsense that's going on, how damaging it is to them.
I'm really concerned about the public health future in America.
The second example came up when you were talking though, which is one of my closest friends, Dax Devlin Ross, who was on an early episode here when we were talking, this is years ago when Trump first took office, and him being a black man, a black lawyer who has dealt with a lot of bullshit in his life, and I've been there for a fair amount of it.
One thing he said always stuck with me about it.
It's not that racism has always been here.
It's a part of America.
It's part of the world.
But in America, we're not a post-racial society.
We never have been.
But what happened during Obama, and even during Bush, and for most of our lives, was that it was in the shadows.
And that meant that there was no megaphone for these people to spread their nonsense and proliferate in the numbers that we're seeing right now.
And he wasn't mad at that.
He was like, put them back there.
Put them back in the shadows where they belong.
And your referencing of producing good content, I think, is indicative of that and why it's so necessary of amplifying messages that need to be heard.
Because We've just been under a flood of really racist, xenophobic, misogynistic messaging for the last four years.
And it's not only about putting that back in its place, which is in the closet and as dark as possible, but it's also about amplifying better messages.
Yeah I was hearing something in there too that has to do with public discourse and I know this is kind of a cliche thing to talk about but you know I was struck how Last year sometime, or maybe it was the year before, somewhere in the midst of all of this madness, John McCain became a somewhat heroic figure to liberals.
Suddenly Democrats were talking about what a good guy McCain was because there's a sense of an A different era of conservative integrity and of being willing to have the conversation from a place where you feel like this is a good faith actor, even though you disagree with just about everything he's saying.
And there's something about what's happened with the trolling mentality and the shitposting mentality that you referenced, Matthew, that brings us to this place where I find now that if I ever get in a conversation with someone who is a Trump supporter,
The tone is one of absolute callous, mean-spirited skewering of any kind of bleeding-heart liberal, you know, any kind of empathy, any kind of pearl-clutching or butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth sincerity.
Like, they just go after that stuff in what is characterized by this kind of trolling, offensive, deliberately offensive, fuck your political correctness kind of attitude.
And it's devastating.
You know, it, it calls to mind, uh, I was, I was thinking also in Derek's segment about how, uh, my impression of voting everywhere, uh, I don't know what I'm saying.
I live in Canada now but I'm a dual citizen and I lived in Vermont for a number of years and in Wisconsin for a number of years.
Voting has always been this very moving, noble, civic experience in which usually the electoral officials or the town clerks are senior citizens and they, you know, they fold the papers correctly and they nod at you.
And there's this sense that the electoral process itself is like the third party in the room that, you know, people will be streaming in voting Democrat or Republican.
But the people who are actually sliding the ballots into the, into the, into the cardboard boxes, uh, that they are doing that on your behalf because they are holding a kind of public trust.
And so, you know, it's, it's like, uh, that seems pre-digital as well.
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a land or a scene of face-to-face interactions in small towns and mid-sized towns in which, you know, shitposting is just not what you would do Derek makes this point all the time.
People just do not behave towards each other in real life as they do in comment threads.
And so there's something about the technology as well that's completely skewed.
What's progressed?
And yeah, when it comes down to that last question in the debate, giving Trump this gateway to possibly provoke through white nationalist groups electoral violence, it's giving Trump this gateway to possibly provoke through white nationalist groups electoral It's almost like he's trying to make, this has already happened in Charlottesville and a thousand other places,
but it's almost like en masse he's trying to make the social media ethos jump the shark but it's almost like en masse he's trying to make the social media ethos jump the shark So that suddenly, what, are people going to be standing in line in election day and feel like they're in a Facebook thread?
Or are they going to feel like somebody's about to troll them, but they might also be concealed carrying?
It's just, it's kind of incredible.
And I wanted to say to you both that, you know, I'm not going to be there on election day, but I really hope that, gosh, I hope that it's peaceful.
My ballot is coming from Lake Delton, Wisconsin, and the electoral official there, the town clerk, has been emailing back and forth with me over signatures and registrations and stuff like that.
And it's all been really nice.
And so I hope that that's remembered.
Yeah, and that moment in the debate, it's so unprecedented, right?
Any previous pair of presidential candidates having a debate, if that question was asked, there would have been this kind of hush and this moment in which each candidate would say unequivocally, I absolutely condemn anything that is related to white supremacy.
And let's be clear about that.
Yes, well, that's the thing that I don't think... There's a parallel between the way in which Trump breaks all rules and the way in which 4chan breaks all communication.
In the sense, like, Trump is a shitposter and a bully.
Uh, and so he's standing, and so he's standing there on stage, uh, giving a remarkable, uh, this is what I'm going to do the, the Monday, uh, bonus podcast about actually is, is male violence in our political scene.
Uh, but, um, he's standing there giving just a pitch perfect performance of unbridled bullying.
Uh, and so, you know, there is nothing sacred, there is nothing, there is no sort of institutional buffer or etiquette or anything like that that's going to prevent him from creating the biggest spectacle that he can.
You're right.
You're right.
It's totally unprecedented.
You want one moment of that debate to take away.
It was the grace at which Biden handled the cocaine addict charge of his son.
First of all, for a man to bring the...
You want to talk about children and criticism?
That could have been the whole debate if Biden wanted to go there, but he's too much of a human being to do that and to bring that in, but to actually flip it and to turn it about the addiction problem, which is a huge issue in America, was just so graceful.
I wanted to point out, Jillian, though, I always laugh about McCain because, and again, it just shows this sort of tendency towards liberal disassociation from politics.
My first political lens in my life growing up in a small racist white community that went for Trump in 2016 when I look back.
My lens into black politics was Public Enemy.
And the song by the time I get to Arizona was written about John McCain, because he wouldn't push through Martin Luther King Day, Junior Day in Arizona.
But at the same time, I actually appreciate the way that he transformed.
So it's not about just, I'm not like you can, you know, pass People do grow, and especially in a nation that's supposedly a Christian nation where we talk about grace and forgiveness all the time.
Those are ideals to live up to.
So I'm not going to hold to that, but I did think how quickly, like Michael Cohen is a hero now.
And again, I appreciate what he's doing, but he created the problem in the first place.
We have to be a little bit more comprehensive in our thinking about who these people are and the acts and the roles that they play.
You know what I want to say about John McCain, whose record I don't know that much about, and I know a lot of people have a bunch of opinions about him, but there's something about his carriage and his diction and the fact that he, I don't think he ever sent an email or something like that.
That reminds me of the civic spaces of electoral politics, like it has that kind of, I mean, doesn't it feel like elections can work in part because People line up and they enter school gymnasiums, and they enter church halls, and they enter... Minds of firehouses.
Firehouses, right.
They enter places of common good and common service.
And so I'm hoping that those spaces, I don't know, get all the sage they need or whatever, that people can actually continue to appreciate that, oh, Here are the actual buildings and the structures where the security of our culture can reside and has resided in the past.
And along all of those lines, Derek, Scaramucci 2024.
Let's go.
Scaramucci and Kellyanne.
Is that the ticket?
That sounds good.
Or Sean Spicer, as he's exactly right.
Two episodes ago, we had our friend, prominent yoga teacher, Sean Korn, on the pod.
She had joined forces with a group of wellness influencers to make a stand against the QAnon messaging that has been steadily growing in influence amongst that tribe.
The social media posts this group created went viral and ended up generating coverage from Rolling Stone, the New York Times, WNYC's On the Media, and other outlets.
Several of those linked back to us, thank you, and used the term conspirituality to describe this phenomenon.
That week we were also guests on Jeff Krasno's Commune podcast, so if you're here because you follow Sean or Jeff or you stumbled onto us via a link on a news site, welcome!
We started this journey 19 weeks ago with some questions, some ideas, and a boatload of alarmed curiosity.
What we have found via our own journalism, discussions, study, and interviews with experts has been by turns surprising, predictable, banal, fascinating, heartbreaking, and most often just plain mind-boggling.
In the information age, misinformation is ubiquitous.
As Jonathan Swift famously noted, falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after.
Never before has this been more the case, given the now total algorithmic balkanization of our social feeds and the prioritizing of clickbait sensationalism for driving online ad revenues.
With everyone at home, anxious, resentful, and experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime level of mass uncertainty and enforced sacrifice, what has bubbled up to the surface of our collective psyche is very messy, to say the least.
Like many just becoming aware of it lately, we started off asking what could turn light and love healers, compassion-espousing yogis, and raw vegan female sexuality and empowerment coaches into evangelists for the gospel of Q?
The posts, the videos, the live streams, COVID denial, 5G alarmism, vaccine paranoia, rejection of quarantine measures, insistence on the power of natural immunity over masks, and on supposedly channeled information about a coming global spiritual awakening.
All of this seemed now to have dovetailed with an outlandish far-right narrative involving blood-drinking satanic pedophiles and a choose-your-own-adventure set of ever-evolving clues from the mysterious Q, who claimed to be a government insider with super high intelligence clearance.
The hero of Q's dark role-playing fantasy pantomime, you may ask?
Why, Donald Trump, of course.
But let's get one thing straight.
Q is most likely not a single person.
QAnon is not really a group or a political party.
It's not a structured propaganda organization.
This is much more akin to a very large online alternative reality game with ever-morphing rules, objectives, and tactics.
As a movement dreamed up on message boards that celebrate trolling, cultural and institutional disruption seems to be their main product.
And perhaps more than their overt allegiance to Trump, the chaos this creates is working in his favor.
But listen, it may be an alternative reality game, but the stakes are high.
So far, QAnon infection has led to one murder by firearm, one attempted vehicular murder, one woman stopped carrying knives trying to get close to Joe Biden after posting on social media that she was going to take him out, three custody-related kidnappings motivated by QAnon beliefs, one man stopped with explosives on his way to blow up a monument,
A total of eight arrests, including that of a man who, convinced erroneously that it was a child sex trafficking site, occupied a tower at a cement plant for nine days, while live streaming a video watched over 650,000 times.
And another of a man who sat with a loaded AR-15 in an armored truck at the Hoover Dam, blocking traffic for 90 minutes.
Of course, that list doesn't include the technically pre-Q Pizzagate debacle in which a man named Edgar Welch stormed and then fired a weapon three times inside Comet Ping Pong Pizza in a frenzied attempt to free children he believed were being held captive in the basement by Hillary Clinton.
The DC Pizza joint, as it turns out, has no basement and neither does Edgar Welch's current prison cell.
Despite being officially declared a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI, as we approach the election, there are at least 23 candidates for state legislature who have endorsed or given credence to QAnon.
If you're in the wellness subculture, the trends, going back a few months now, became clear.
It started with posts flooding your feed, first about 5G, then about propaganda, then about propaganda documentary Plandemic, then maybe about vaccines, then about sovereign freedom.
And quarantine as laying the groundwork for tyranny.
Then, about child sex trafficking.
These trends went in waves, but woven through all of it is the ever-present villain, Bill Gates.
Bill Gates wants to microchip the world for tracking and control.
He wants to depopulate the planet.
He's going to make even more money off a poisonous vaccine.
We never voted for him, or Fauci for that matter.
And besides, Gates predicted all of this in a TED Talk.
Look into it, man.
Obama predicted five years ago, as the pandemic happening right around now.
How do you explain that?
Unlike predictions based on early warning signals about pandemics, Q's frequent prophecies usually don't come true.
But believers endlessly reinterpret, keeping faith with a mystery beyond mere logical understanding that will be revealed when the Great Awakening arrives.
So this is perhaps where what we have learned starts to emerge.
The overlap between a new age mindset and this particular crop of conspiracy theories is fairly straightforward.
The term conspirituality first appeared academically in the title of a 2011 paper, The Emergence of Conspirituality.
Published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion, authors Ward and Voash talked about a synergy between the evergreen conspiracy claim that a covert group is controlling or seeking to control the world, and the New Age notion that humanity is undergoing a paradigm shift in consciousness.
Once combined, the narrative that this shift in consciousness can help overthrow or thwart the new world order of dark conspiratorial forces is set.
This overlap is perhaps defined by these three familiar tenets.
Nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.
We have noted, too, that the spiritual community has long been in training for some juicy conspirituality, well-practiced in rejecting critical thinking and science, convinced that part of waking up is seeking out hidden, synchronistic patterns as messages from the universe, and invested in forms of spiritual bypass.
that include avoidance of facing trauma, injustice, or dealing honestly with painful emotions, grandiose fantasies about in-group specialness and importance, and black and white thinking about who is chosen to awaken and who, on the other hand, is part of the unconscious, unwashed masses.
Lack of well-integrated healthy skepticism around spiritual beliefs and assessment of gurus also means that as the faux skepticism of overstimulating salacious and gruesome mythology sets in, the same kind of messianic emotional investment short circuits the same kind of messianic emotional investment short circuits any rational analysis that should quickly debunk it. - Thank you.
But conspirituality has a leadership and marketing style that reenacts the charismatic performance around which cultish dynamics flourish, looking almost exactly like successful toxic yoga groups.
Like those cults, these new groups foster the strange paralysis of disorganized attachment, which works by alternating between offering a safe haven and scaring members into dependence.
They're also very good at what Matthew describes as disaster spirituality with a nod to Naomi Klein.
The skill to capitalize on any moment of cultural instability.
Hey, there's a crisis and we're suffering.
Now is a great time to purchase our content of complete spiritual transformation.
But beyond this merely cognitive critique, we started to discover that there were important deeper layers to consider.
Theo Wildcroft and Jacqueline Antonovich helped us consider how people who have legitimately felt let down by institutions, brushed aside by an impersonal medical model, and failed by those who they thought were protectors, who would help them find justice, healing, equality, who would help them find justice, healing, equality, even happiness, may gravitate toward conspiracy theories.
Deserved mistrust towards pharmaceutical companies or corrupted science or politicians that either reinforce traumatic associations with power or never simply follow through on promises to advocate for their needs all feed into a paranoid mood that rides on a set of unaddressed emotions and injustices.
But the underpinnings of new age spirituality don't get off so easy.
The privileged opting out of politics in favor of a kind of fanciful non-dual oneness, posturing as above the fray, has perpetuated unconscious racism, entitlement, and a genuine confusion on the difference between far-right libertarian ideas and progressive principles that fit better with values of compassion and mindfulness.
Spiritual superiority wants to stand up as beyond fear and possessed of super-immunity via mind over matter or superfood supplements over pesky viruses, but also perhaps attuned to a higher cosmic purpose behind all this seeming chaos.
Giovanna Hyman helped us look at the shadow of unacknowledged ableism in communities obsessed with health and well-being, sickness as proof of spiritual inferiority.
For some conspiritualists, if it is not merely a hoax with over-reported numbers, then COVID death is a kind of culling of the herd or a doorway into the supposed fifth dimension already emerging on our plane of reality.
The libertarian entrepreneurial aspects of wellness culture and create-your-own-reality fantasies are also fairly frisky kissing cousins of right-wing prosperity gospel bootstrapping.
Then there are the big name influencers, all previously somewhat apolitical, benign, but now catching on to how the algorithms drive massive jumps in views, comments, likes, website traffic, and no doubt, sales.
From Zach Bush to Christiane Northrup to Charles Eisenstein and J.P.
Sears, Danielle LaPorte, even David Avocado Wolf, rejection of the mainstream narrative and delusions or even outright references, excuse me, and allusions or even outright references to cue buzzwords became more prevalent.
Only now using appeals to humor, open-minded philosophical sophistication, a return to nature, saving the children, and even feminism.
We talked with cult expert Steve Hassan about Trump supporters and Q followers and found his wise advice to stay emotionally connected with people you care about who may have gotten sucked in.
Be patient.
Don't debate.
Keep it personal and kind and wait for the intoxication to run its course.
We talked to head of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, who assured us the best thing to do is ignore, block, and move on from social media posts spreading misinformation.
Post your own accurate information instead, and don't boost their signal by engaging.
We talked with Regan Williams on how the very real issue of child sex trafficking is being weaponized in ways that actually not only interfere with legitimate organizations like her own, but do harm to survivors who are tragically vulnerable to conspiracy narratives.
Drop the Q rhetoric and support people doing the work on the ground.
But the cracks in our collective psyche continue.
We talked to Lauren and Leanna about trusted shamans preaching Q prophecy to groups emerging out of their ayahuasca trips, and we watched as conspirituality power couple Sayer G and Kelly Brogan not only decried masks as signs of submission and vaccines as an unnecessary evil,
But as former psychiatrist Brogan promoted dangerously unsupervised discontinuation of psych meds, which she labeled as being like rat poison.
John Rulak shared with us about longtime colleagues and friends from the sustainable food space getting red-pilled, and Jared Yates Sexton reminded us that in some ways the figures who built the myth of America itself were nourished on the empty calories of conspiracy theories all along.
Jules Evans traced the long-standing history of right-wing and even Nazi fascination with New Age beliefs and practices.
Turns out, this is nothing new.
So that's the journey so far.
We have no neat and tidy conclusions for you, just that truth matters and reality exists.
Kindness has never been more valuable, and if there is one spiritual opportunity in this crisis, it might be that there is plenty of get-your-hands-dirty work to be done using the tools and intentions of awareness practice to face the shadow of yoga and wellness culture.
But in the meantime, folks, buckle up.
The next three months are definitely going to be wild.
I was super moved to sit down with Mike Raines, who under the handle PokerPolitics is one of the brave moderators of an amazing subreddit called QAnon Casualties.
There are 25,000 members in this group as of right now, and it's growing very quickly.
And the stories that this subreddit collects are incredibly moving.
They're harrowing.
They show the speed with which QAnon is radicalizing people and isolating them within their communities and from their families.
How friendships are being torn asunder, how marriages are being broken up, how generations are being separated by this particular brain worm.
And I just think that Reins does such a great job, not only as a moderator, but also as somebody who is bearing witness to not only how the QAnon discourse is developing, but also what its impacts are.
So, here's my interview with Mike Reins.
Welcome, Mike.
Thanks so much for taking the time to do this.
Oh, I'm glad to do it.
I'll always take time to talk about QAnon and the damage it's doing to our society.
Alright, well, as the moderator of, or one of the moderators of QAnon Casualties, can you just start by running the numbers for us on the sub-activity itself?
How many members, posts, comments, what kind of daily activity you're seeing?
Well right now I just looked at under new and I think we see I see like about seven or eight posts that are less than 24 hours old.
We got four posts that are five hours old or less and We have, right now, over 25,000 members.
A little over 100 of them are online at this moment, but again, it's a weekday during the workday, so it's not peak Reddit time.
Right.
And these are massive numbers from when it first started.
This community was incredibly small and incredibly niche.
Pre-COVID, and then it saw a really awful increase in membership as QAnon spiked through COVID.
Well, that's what I was going to ask, because I think when I first came across the subreddit, maybe three weeks ago, maybe a month ago or something like that, that the membership was around 9,000.
And now you're saying that it's 25,000.
So COVID has been a huge surge point, it sounds like.
It really was because so many people were trapped in their houses in this event that had never happened in our lifetimes and they're online all the time and they want answers.
They want to know why this is happening and Q gives you very simple answers.
They just tell you the bad guys are doing this for bad reasons and sooner or later Trump will find a way to fix it and make everything good again.
And knowing that The truth, finding out the secret truth behind COVID is very intoxicating for people.
It's a great way to get someone hooked on this conspiracy theory because you know what's really going on.
Everybody else around you is an idiot who listens to what the television is telling them and the six feet distancing and blah, blah, blah.
That's all not true.
And the truth is that it's a shycom bio weapon trying to cost Trump the election.
Right.
Well, I mean, intoxicating is a good word for it because there's an incredible plausibility threshold to most of the mythology and it seems like QAnon has been able to, just as a discourse, been able to get people to believe some extraordinarily extreme things.
Oh, QAnon exists only to perpetuate this narrative that has existed for a long time of the Illuminati New World Order kind of stuff, where you have the shadowy cabal of people who secretly rule the world and are doing so in Satan's name.
That leads people down all these like really ridiculous roads where you have to believe all the really absurd things about everyone in media, Hollywood, politics, that they're all Satanists, that they all traffic, abuse, or murder children.
And it just creates this very dystopian us against them, God versus the devil world where You are a good guy, you're on the side of justice, and the bad people are just unapologetically, horrifyingly bad, and it gets to a point where there's really no action that's not justifiable in your fight against them.
I mean, when Trump made that comment about, maybe we need to postpone this election until we get things figured out, there were lots of people in QAnon that were like, you're right, postpone the election, because these bad people will cheat to win, and then the Antichrist will rise up, so gotta stop that.
Right.
Now, do you have a personal story you're willing to share about how you got involved with moderating this subreddit?
My personal story for moderating the subreddit was, my personal story is mostly just the fact that I saw the subreddit and then the moderator, the person who started it, asked people to join.
And I immediately volunteered because I know how toxic QAnon is.
I know how awful they are about brigading and attacking any place that is anti-QAnon, and it's such a good idea, having a safe space for people online to talk about the damage QAnon has done to their families and their lives, that I was just like...
It's just so, they're just so evil and they're so malevolent and they just hate dissenting thought that I was like I gotta get in there, I gotta help moderate, I gotta be a part of this.
My personal story kind of like vis-a-vis conspiracy theories hurting someone in my life is I had a friend who was very smart and he was
In his late teens and he was playing this card game called Magic the Gathering and he was making money at it in this like junior circuit where if you're under the age 18 you can make money for college playing the game and then I told him that you're going to age out of this it's not going to make you lots of money and you're really smart get into poker that's a game that you can make big money in.
He did that.
Then he got into day trading and he was crushing that.
But then he kept looking for the secret truth.
He kept looking for the hidden thing behind the curtain.
And the next thing I know, he's telling me about buying physical gold and silver because America is going to collapse.
The dollar is going to be worthless very soon.
And the next thing I know, he's living in the Philippines because he wants to get away from America before it falls.
And he's talking about Barry Ceruto being an illegitimate president and it's just like this really smart, really bright guy fell for all this stuff and just his quest for knowledge just led him down that road and like there was nothing I could do to try to help him not go into that stuff.
It's quest for knowledge, but it's also like, I'm thinking my seven-year-old has about a thousand magic, the gathering cards, and there's a quest for, there's also heroism.
There's, I suppose, the feeling that, you know, not only that you know something, but that you can do something about the world or within the world.
But everything that, that whole pathway that you describe, Everything involves a kind of secret that the person has to uncover and dive into, and I'm wondering, like, what would have satisfied that for your friend, do you think?
I know you're not a psychologist, not that I know, but I mean, what's your idea?
What's your gut there?
I really don't.
I don't know that you can be satisfied in that situation.
I don't know if you can ever stop pushing yourself to try to uncover the truth, whatever it is.
It's just something in you where you just feel like people are feeding you lies and that you're not getting legitimate information from the sources that you're dealing with.
And I mean, again, the thing was is that like he's making this money by being smarter than everybody else at day trading and poker.
So he thinks he's got the intellectual ability to discern what is right and what is wrong.
Right.
So he thinks he's on the right path and he thinks he's being led down the right path.
And then he's just finding more and more quote unquote truth.
And now he doesn't see how lost he is.
And it's just like really frustrating.
And it's just, Like that kind of searching it's something inside you that I don't know that it can ever be satiated.
Right.
It's really like in a way scary that an innocent thing like looking for truth or a lot of QAnon people are very religious and this is a spiritual thing to them this is like a because again it's a god versus devil battle there's Q quotes the Bible all the time.
Q uses the phrase God wins a lot to really emphasize the fact that their victory is the victory of righteousness and good against bad people who are doing terrible things.
Like, when you're dealing with those kinds of non—because it's not reason, it's not logic, it's not intellectual, it's some other need, either just some emotional thing you need to fill in your life, a spiritual need.
Those kinds of needs are very tough to finish.
They're tough to satiate.
You're just stuck being like, man, I'm lonely.
Now I'm less lonely, but I might get lonely again.
So it's really hard.
It's really hard to figure out what the end point of it all is and when do you stop going down the wrong path and find your way back to the right path.
And I think that's why the subreddit QAnon Casualties is so incredibly poignant to the whole unfolding history here, because what would otherwise be fulfilling and secure and offer love and meaning to people is being ripped apart by the ideology itself.
I mean, you're hearing from thousands of people who are having their families ripped apart.
What are some of the things that you're hearing?
The main thing you hear is just that people cannot believe how quickly it happens and how total the transformation is of their loved one.
That they had a person in their lives who was a smart, loving, attentive person, and now that person is very fearful, very distrusting of the outside world.
They have just completely absorbed to the QAnon hive mind. And now they just see everything in that black and white good evil mindset. And the only good in the world is what Q is saying. So everything else is bad. And that makes them very confrontational. It makes them very defensive.
And the person who, the normal person, the normie as we call them, is stuck dealing with a family member or a loved one who is now completely different from what they were just months ago or even like a month ago.
And You're just left horrified by this transformation this person has undertaken, and you wonder, like, can I get them back?
What do I say?
What do I do?
How do I engage on this?
And the other real terrible part about QAnon is that the mythos is intensely about proselytizing, so that QAnon supporter is going to try to convert you.
They're going to try to get you to buy in.
They're going to try to show you their evidence that they think is rock solid, that's going to look mostly gibberish to you, and now you're being confronted by the fact that they won't let it go.
They won't drop it.
Whenever you start talking to them, they have to bring it up.
They have to pitch it to you.
They're like, hey, yeah, the weather's nice out, but are you ready to go admit that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children?
Can we get to that yet?
It leads to these really ugly situations where you just can't even...
Have a relationship with that person anymore.
This person who could have been, they could have been your spouse, they could have been your partner that you had children with and now they're not who you knew for all those years.
One of the worst things I remember reading on the forums was a person talked about taking their child who was like five years old to be vaccinated and like their husband started crying because their child was about to be broken permanently by the vaccines.
The vaccines were about to do irreparable damage to their child.
Right.
The wife was taking them to get and... And was that a mingling of, of, I'm afraid of the poison of the vaccine or its potential to, to infect my child with autism plus, uh, you know, the notion that the child was being, uh, microchipped or was it, was it a whole bunch of concerns rolled up together?
I wish they didn't specify what, which one, which of the various anti-vax narratives the husband was worried about, but it was just, uh, This is the real problem with QAnon is that it is what I call a grand unifying conspiracy theory where all other conspiracy theories get absorbed into it.
So like the anti-vax movement, QAnon has gladly accepted all of them into their ranks because Basically, any bad thing that happens in this world, QAnon will just blame it on the same group of shadowy bad people.
Right.
So, 9-11, the shadowy bad people.
Vaccines, the shadowy bad people.
Global warming, the shadowy bad people.
So, you never have to worry about, will my crackpot, insane conspiracy theory be accepted by QAnon?
Because the answer is always yes, and the people behind it are always the same people.
So, QAnon had... QAnon, until COVID, Q had only made one Q drop ever about vaccines, and he basically said something to the effect of, they're not all bad, just like, it was just like a throwaway line, where he was like, vaccines, not all bad, but hey, and that was, and so the movement wasn't anti-vax at all in its initial stages, but when the anti-vaxxers ran to QAnon, QAnon just gave him a big hug and said, welcome in,
You're part of the club now.
You know, that's part of the Q drop history that I don't actually know anything about, is how the drops actually reflect the opportunism of groups joining.
I didn't know that part at all.
That's really disturbing.
Yeah, yeah.
Literally, the only time the word vaccines is used before May of 2020, which is of course obviously COVID time, it's just you listing off all these different words in all capital letters, money, power, control, slaves, sheep, pawns, blah, blah, blah.
And then at the bottom, it just in the middle, it says vaccines, brackets, not all.
So like, He was cool with some vaccines, not all vaccines, but whatever.
And then in May of 2020, suddenly he's just like posting stuff about vaccines and letting people know that like, hey, I'm okay with you guys being anti-vaxxers.
And The thing is, Q doesn't really lead so much as he just reads the room and follows what his followers are doing.
Right.
And two of his biggest followers, well, Dylan Wheeler just left the movement to become an even bigger neo-Nazi, but Dylan Wheeler, who was educating for liberals online, who was a big QAnon promoter, and Jordan Sather, who is still a big QAnon promoter, I remember at some point in the last year, both of them had like a poll that said, like, will you take a COVID vaccine?
And the results were something along the lines of 80-20 or 90-10 against taking the COVID vaccine.
Oh, and did they run their messaging according to that polling?
That I couldn't tell you.
I couldn't tell you if Q saw that and knew what to do, but it was very obvious that Sather and Wheeler had been anti-vax in the past and they are big QAnon promoters now.
So now the rank and file of QAnon are militantly anti-vax.
No rail against it.
I remember the QAnon Anonymous podcast went to a Save the Children rally in Hollywood and at some ill-defined point in the rally they were screaming about how they weren't going to let Bill Gates microchip them.
So they had transitioned from saving children to rejecting the COVID vaccine.
Yeah, and the third line there is that the child is being penetrated by something foreign, right?
That there's this connection always made between vaccination and rape, and that's kind of like the cabal secret sauce in there that combines violence and unwanted medical treatment.
It's very effective.
It's very effective.
I can totally see that as being a great way to scar people and scare them and get them intimidated and worried about this kind of thing, yes.
I have a question about the proselytization, because I'm wondering if this might be sort of an intuition question for you, but, you know, when family members are talking about their QAnon friends or family members trying to recruit them,
Do you have the sense that they are following instructions from the Q-drops or are they trying to just really get their families on side because they're in an incredibly lonely and absurd place and if they don't get some validation then they're really going to be lost?
Well, the thing is that it's not so much direct from Q, but QAnon itself is all about what they call the Great Awakening.
There's a lot of talk that they will give that Until enough people understand and embrace and accept QAnon, then the public at large will not be able to accept the horrifying truth of our world.
There's this narrative that constantly exists that like if we were to arrest Hillary Clinton tomorrow for her unspeakable crimes, that The rank and file citizens of America will reject the stone cold irrefutable evidence against her as being a lie and a deep fake.
And we idiots will run around rioting, protesting, hurting ourselves, causing civil unrest.
But only after QAnon has educated enough of America and gotten enough of America on board can that evidence be shown to us.
And then we will take it to heart and accept it as true.
And then Hillary can be arrested in a peaceful, tranquil society.
I'm really glad that you're telling me about that because I had thus far interpreted the Great Awakening as really kind of a metaphysical principle, as a spiritual event, but what you're saying is that it's actually a precondition for the indictments being able to be carried out peacefully.
Yes.
Joe M had the video, QAnon the plan to save the world, and they basically talked about how Q team and the military were ready to, if Hillary Clinton had won the election, stage a coup to prevent her from destroying the world.
but they knew that that would lead to massive societal unrest because us idiots who voted for Hillary didn't know that she was a child-murdering monster.
And Q's hope for a peaceful removal of the cabal and saving of society was for Trump to win a fair election and then slowly disseminate the information into our world such that we were willing to accept that the bad guys are who they are.
And so much of the time when some event happens or Trump says something stupid and then people laugh at him and then QAnon will be like, oh, Trump said this thing and they think it's dumb, but now everyone's looking into it and they're going to see the truth.
And now they're getting red-pilled.
And that's the big thing they're always talking about is red-pilling people.
Educating people, informing them.
And as it goes to following instructions, again, it's not from Q, but from the Chans and from Anons, there are red-pilling guides.
There are guides to lure people into this movement and to indoctrinate them slowly.
One of the big things they say is to play dumb, to just let the other person walk themselves down the path and get themselves radicalized.
Like, you talk to them and you say, like, you talk about vaccines and they say vaccines are cool, so you drop it.
And then you move on to the next thing and they don't concern about that, so you drop it.
You get to global warming and they're like, you know, it's been really cold for the past month.
I don't know if that's all that true.
Now you have an in.
Now you try to work common ground on the global warming thing.
And once you get them to agree that global warming is fake, then you start opening the door to the other things.
It's called crank magnetism, where once you believe one bad thing, you're more likely to believe other bad things down the line.
So they work on this very insidious plan of slowly turning you from reality and into QAnon over the course of time.
And again, they've published their works on 4 and 8chan about like, this is how you do it.
This is how you get them to go along.
It reminds me of cold reading.
It absolutely is.
Oh my God, we talk about that all the time.
Right.
Yeah, cold reading on the internet.
The big thing about the cold reading is Q has two slogans for that, which is one is disinformation is necessary, which discards all of his misses.
Every time Q makes a prediction that you can't validate, it was only a lie designed to freak out the deep state and make them overreact.
And Q never meant to do that.
And so all the misses are gone.
And whenever you can twist something to actually fit a prediction that Q said, that becomes future proves past, which means, Oh, Q got that one, right?
That was what he was going for.
And it's the exact same thing is where the psychic whiffs on three questions.
fourth question gets you thinking that they're talking about your, your uncle Robbie who recently died.
And then they harp on that fourth question, keep milking it, milking it, getting more information out of you.
And you only remember the fourth one because that was what you talked about for 45 minutes.
And it was also the most, yeah, it was also the most meaningful thing to you.
Absolutely.
Right.
Right.
Wow.
Okay.
So you're starting to get, I mean, this is an example of it, but you're starting to get a lot of mainstream attention from journalists who want to, who are trying to catch up and figure out what this is doing to American and now global society.
What What do you feel journalists really need to understand when they're reporting on QAnon and its impacts, and what do they tend to get wrong?
Uh, the one thing that, this is kind of a niche thing, but the one thing that I hear so many people say when they talk about QAnon and Q is, Q speaks in codes, and he really doesn't.
Q is very blunt, like his quote-unquote codes are basically the initials of the famous people.
So that when you can make that very small leap in logic from A.W.
stands for Anthony Weiner, you feel like you earned something.
But it's not a big deal, right?
It's not a big deal.
Anything that is quote-unquote a code is actually just Q asking a vague open-ended question that can have multiple answers.
The way QAnon works is that once one open-ended answer can't possibly be right, it's just forgotten about, we move on to the next one, so the question itself can never be wrong.
It's just your interpretation of what the answer to that question was was wrong.
Right.
The other thing, the big thing I would say for journalists is I so often hear them say stuff like, QAnon, a far-right radical conspiracy theory that states that Satanists who kill babies and hate America are fighting Donald Trump.
That's accurate, but in a way it's like so fantastic and fantasy-based that it Almost makes QAnon seem like this wild, almost exciting, adventurous ride where this crazy thing is happening.
And it also, in a way, belittles the movement.
Doesn't make it the threat that it truly is.
Right.
I think the most important thing, what I would say is if I had to introduce a subject on QAnon, I would say something to the effect of QAnon, a far-right conspiracy movement that claimed that Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and Huma Abedin were going to be arrested in late 2017.
And has been linked to numerous crimes, including a murder and many kidnapping attempts.
Ah, right.
So you're saying downplay the sort of cosmic battle stuff in your first introductions.
Right.
And really you would be therefore presenting a much more sort of I don't know, like commonplace political ideology that has domestic terrorist capacities or affiliations.
Right.
Because the thing is that the whole point of Q is that Q is a guy that is working at the right hand of Donald Trump and is giving us inside information that you couldn't get anywhere else.
And it is because of Q's powerful connections inside the government into Donald Trump that makes him important and it makes him special.
So to show that he has been wrong from the jump, that he started off saying things that didn't come true at all, makes him look bad.
And we don't have to dig into the Satanism.
We don't have to dig into the God thing.
Just keep it on the level of what Q claimed to be and what he claimed he was doing and how he was just wrong and how he's not doing those things.
It's really interesting.
It's almost like advice you would give to somebody reporting on Scientology, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's like, don't go into the 100th book of L. Ron Hubbard and what he believes about outer space.
Rather, let's just discuss what Scientology does to its members and how plausible that is and how the money works.
Yeah, so I get what you're saying.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, where's Miscavige's wife?
Let's talk about that.
Pretty concrete stuff.
Right.
Talk about the concrete things that Q has said.
QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that claimed a rocket was shot from a submarine in Air Force One in 2018.
QAnon honestly believes that.
There was an assassination attempt made on Trump on Air Force One when a rocket was shot at his plane.
From a submarine, which is a technology that doesn't exist.
Right, right.
It's just going back to the speed of radicalization for a moment.
A couple of things here, and this relates to how journalism portrays this movement.
BuzzFeed recently announced that it was going to use the word group delusion to refer to QAnon.
Which I thought was interesting, but I think it also carries this question of, you know, are we stigmatizing people with mental illness in that categorization?
But then also there's like the role of immersive online experience in the pathway of radicalization and how vulnerable people are to the algorithms of YouTube and Facebook and so on.
So I'm wondering, in the stories that you've heard, what are the vulnerable points that people are talking about when they talk about their family members?
Does QAnon have comorbidities?
It connects on so many different levels because you can do like conservative politics You can just be scared of liberals and like their agenda and you can just amp up that right-wing like pro Pro-life pro-gun all that kind of anti-immigrant.
You can just ramp up all that stuff which Q does and then you also have the spirituality side and the save the children side and the that It was never Q's initial thrust.
Q's initial thrust was always about Hillary Clinton and bad people getting arrested.
And Q had some throwaway lines about Haiti being used as a base for child trafficking and human trafficking.
Because protecting children is such a universal good in society, QAnon is very much willing to lean on the idea that their enemies are child abusers and they assault children and they're killing children for their blood.
That does lead to pretty quick radicalization.
Jessica Prim, the woman who posted on social media that she had to kill Joe Biden and then was arrested in her car having a nervous breakdown.
Her radicalization took only about a month and it was triggered by the fall of the Cabal video series.
And in that video series, they do talk about adrenochrome.
They do talk about children being killed for their blood.
And all that kind of stuff.
And there was a guy that was arrested in Massachusetts in a high-speed car chase with his family in the car.
And the same thing happened to him.
It's really not that hard to radicalize people once you've told them that their enemies are child abusers and child torturers.
The guy who shot up the Comet Ping-Pong, he did that because he was trying to find the children.
And once you've played the children card, you can't unring that bell.
You have condemned your enemies as the worst of the worst, and now there's no de-escalization possible.
There's no way you can say, well, Joe Biden's going to be the president, but it's okay because we're going to get through it.
There's no way that could possibly be true.
Joe Biden's going to unleash the pedophiles upon all of our children, and there's going to be carnage in America, and the anti-crisis is going to rise up, and all that kind of stuff.
You're bringing up something I haven't really – it's been in the margins, but I haven't really considered it, which is that the image of the pedophile is kind of like the endgame villain, right?
It's like, who would be worse?
What could be worse?
I mean, we've talked on our podcast about, like, you know, this is obviously the most terrible thing you could accuse somebody of, but as an icon, as a villain, it really doesn't, it doesn't get any worse than that, does it?
Well, it doesn't, but I mean, they still make it worse.
Like, Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile, and QAnon can't even let that go.
They have to call him a murderer and a satanic pedophile.
So it's just like, you just have to keep layering things on top.
But I mean, whenever I am engaging with these people, and it goes on for any period of time, at some point in the conversation, I'm accused of defending pedophiles, and I'm probably a pedophile myself.
And it's a very easy way to make yourself the good guy and your enemy the bad guy.
I remember some guy had a tweet that was like, we are anti pedophile, anti Satan, anti treason.
Does that make our enemies in favor of these things?
And it's like, no, you're only in favor of those things because they're universally good and you wrap yourselves up in them so that you can appear to be good to society who doesn't know any better about what you're doing.
Right.
It's incredible what therefore the QAnon devotee is able to imagine about their opponents then.
I mean, it's like, It's to even push yourself in a place where you'd be able to say, I believe so-and-so is a pedophile.
If they're a celebrity, if they're an icon, maybe you can sort of squeeze your imagination into that kind of spectacle.
But if you're talking about like a stranger on the internet, to be able to accuse them of such a thing is quite extraordinary.
I hadn't really, that's really kind of sinking in for me.
Yeah, I mean, it's just how this works, because the world's black and white.
There's good and evil, and the good is QAnon, and the bad is everyone else.
And this is really the most terrible part of QAnon, is that because the Great Awakening is a precursor to victory, When your family refuses to accept the red pill, when your family refuses to believe the truth that you are telling them, your family becomes as much of the bad guys as the evil celebrities.
Your family becomes just as bad as Hillary Clinton, if not worse, because at least Hillary Clinton's rich, powerful, and successful based off the evil things she's doing.
Your family is just morons who can't see the truth about Hillary, and because they can't see the truth about her, we can't arrest her, and that's so unfair!
I wonder if this is going to lead to, I mean it already has echoes of the satanic panic of the late 80s and early 90s, but I'm wondering if it's going to lead to a new rash of accusations against parents who refused to be red-pilled by their children being accused of being Satanist pedophiles themselves.
Have you heard that on the boards yet?
No, I haven't seen that yet.
But I mean, it is the echo of the satanic panic.
It is exactly that.
It is this just baseless, evidence-free allegation that these things are happening.
And when you dig through all the QAnon major promoters, They'll all tell you that Satanic Panic was true.
That all of those alleged crimes that were committed did happen.
Those children were abused.
The people that were accused and got away with it got away with it because the Cabal protected them.
And that Franklin, all of these daycare centers, those were real crimes.
And that eventually when Q wins out and the world is saved, Those abuses will be exposed.
So how do they track that against massive law enforcement efforts at the time during that historical sequence?
Digging and looking and digging and looking and uncovering no forensic evidence.
I mean, I suppose there's no forensic evidence for QAnon at all, and the absence of evidence is a kind of proof.
It's like they're really good at hiding it.
Is that the same story going on here?
Yeah, it's just that.
It's just that the cabal was the ones running the investigation.
They were the ones covering it up.
They kept the truth from us and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, it's just always the thing where if there's no evidence of the crime, that's proof there was a crime.
And when we do get evidence, Then it was just freedom fighters scoring a lucky punch.
They can never explain why a good thing could ever happen given the nature of the world they've created.
The world they've created is one where the bad guys have total control over everything and nobody can stop them.
Yet Donald Trump won election, which makes no sense if you try to wrap those two things together.
But they never care about that level of cognitive dissonance.
They never actually Explain how that worked out the way it did and how their world actually, their world, the Q world exists and how reality exists.
Because if you listen to them, you would have thought that like, and this is aside, I'm sorry for it, but you would have thought the 2016 election was like Donald Trump was media blacked out and Hillary got nothing but loving, adulating press.
Right.
And then a shocking thing happened on election night and Trump won and no one could see it coming.
You look at the real world of that election, and you have to remember that according to QAnon, every journalist, everyone in the media, all these people who are flogging emails, Hillary's pneumonia, the horse race, all of it, every single one of those people is basically going to be lined up against a wall and shot if Trump becomes president, and yet they were doing the things they were doing, and opening the door for Trump to potentially win.
And when you talk to them and try to get them to square that circle, they'll just call you fake news, that's not what really happened, and blah blah blah.
So that's the same thing with like these investigations into all these daycare centers and molestation charges, is that when you bring up that there was no evidence, they'll just say that the cabal hit it and that they intimidated the witnesses, that there were any good cops that got scared off the case.
They don't let the facts get in the way of the narrative.
That will never happen.
Right.
Alright, well, rounding down here, we have to hear about whether or not there are any success stories that you have about people recovering from this particular fever dream, and are there therapists and counselors out there who are doing some good work?
I don't know of any named therapists or counselors that have been able to pull people out of this.
There is a smaller subreddit than QAnon Casualties called Recovery with a Q instead of a C in the word recovery.
And that is for actual ex-QAnon members to talk about their stories.
And I believe that the moderator of Recovery is the person who started QAnon Casualties as well.
And they've just done incredible work and I salute them so much.
And recovery is, again, much smaller and it has far fewer people, but there are people on recovery posting about how they've left.
There are people on QAnon casualties who've had a loved one come back to them, who've had that realization, that moment where they just had something click in their head that QAnon is not telling them the truth and that something's not right about it.
And they were able to make the leap back to reality and get back out of the cult, which is awesome.
And it's very gratifying to hear that.
I have been doing my, basically just yelling on Twitter for like two odd years now.
But in that time, I've gotten so many people that have asked me how to save a loved one and a family member, and that's been agonizing.
But I remember this very vividly because I will always remember this.
I've had four people DM me on Twitter and told me that reading my stuff helped them get out.
And I will put that on my tombstone that I got four people out of QAnon.
That's the greatest achievement I've ever had in my life.
And it's so tough.
But the most important thing to understand about this kind of movement and this kind of belief system is that you're not going to get them out.
They're going to get themselves out.
You can only help a little in the process because they got into it for a reason and maybe one day if we get a really deep down conversation and talk to them you could find that reason and then extrapolate on it and work on it like a really long therapy session and over the course of a long time you might be able to help them but In general, the person who makes the decision to leave is them themselves.
And my two bits of advice for that is one, to try to get them away from the source, which right now because of COVID, it's so hard to get people to stay offline and not read all the stuff from all the QAnon promoters and watch the YouTube videos and read the Twitter.
And not get indoctrinated.
But if you can get them offline or whatever, that's great.
But the other thing you need to do is just tell them that if they ever have doubts or if they ever think about leaving, you will accept them back.
You will take them back.
Because one of the worst parts of groups like this is being in an extremist cult.
And thinking that society could never accept you back.
And I mean like, someone else I had talked to a long time ago said something to the effect of like, what do you, do you want the kid who's covered in swastika tattoos to think he has to be a white nationalist for the rest of his life?
Do you want to think that he can never come back to us?
And that's the thing, is you have to have that, you have to have that handout, that invitation to come back to the real world That's waiting for them on the other side So if they ever have that moment of doubt that moment of clarity where they're like, you know what?
Maybe maybe Jerry was right Maybe this is all a bunch of nonsense and they can give you a call on the phone You can have that talk because if you just tell them that like you're in the queue and on and you're an idiot I hate you and I don't want to talk to you again.
Now.
They think they're shut off I think the walls are closed in around them and all they'll ever have is this movement and that might be cathartic to you to tell them to pound sand and And it might be good for you in some way to do that, but just don't do it.
Just tell them, look, we're going to have to go our separate path now because you're doing this and I can't hear it anymore and I don't want you trying to red pill me, but...
Six months, a year down the line, if you ever think differently of this stuff, give me a call.
I'll answer that phone.
I will drop what I'm doing.
I'm here for you.
And I'll be there for you in that moment when you need me.
And just let them know that.
And that's so important.
Because one of the best recovery stories that I knew was a guy and his girlfriend, they were planning on getting married and then she got red-pilled And they worked it out and he kept the relationship going as best he could.
And then one day she just came to him and said, I don't think this is true anymore.
And it's like, that's, he was her bridge to sanity.
He was the way to get her back to the real world.
And because he just didn't shun her and isolate her and cast her aside, she was able to talk to him about these things and get back to where we are.
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