It’s only been eight months since Q stopped posting, but Mike Rothschild has been able to corral the firehose of data into the first major journalistic study of the fever dream that has tortured millions since 2018. He joins us as co-host this week just as his new book, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Cult, Movement and a Conspiracy Theory of Everything, drops. We’ll ask him about researching a “conspiracy of everything, what a leaderless cult means, how an online religion worships, and how, amidst catastrophic disconfirmation and deplatforming, we’re seeing new delta QAnon variants emerge.Show NotesThe Storm Is Upon Us: How Qanon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of EverythingQAnon Is Not Dead, It’s Evolving Into Something Far Worse
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Conspiratuality 57, the storm is mutating with Mike Rothschild.
It's only been eight months since Q stopped posting, but Mike Rothschild has been able to corral the fire hose of data into the first major journalistic study of the fever dream that has tortured millions since 2018.
He joins us as guest host this week, the same week as his book drops.
It's called The Storm is Upon Us, How QAnon Became a Cult, Movement, and a Conspiracy Theory of Everything.
And we'll ask him about researching A Conspiracy of Everything, what a leaderless cult means, how an online religion worships, and how amidst catastrophic disconfirmation and deplatforming, we're seeing new Delta QAnon variants emerge.
Mike, what an incredible, sleepless, manic achievement, achievement and I imagine sacrifice of mental health to suck on this two-year fire hose of data and put together like a really accessible and navigable map of what you call a conspiracy of everything.
And that's a phrase I'd like to return to because I think it says something very deep about the event itself, but also about our time.
Uh, So I think the publication date actually was Tuesday of this week.
We're recording on Thursday.
How out of date is your book at this point?
Well, I tried to write a book that I knew would not be instantly out of date.
So a lot of the chapters are exploring sort of the origins of QAnon, the component parts that you see when you strip away the new, you know, the new shimmy, new, sorry.
The new seeming sheen of social media, because everything that's in QAnon has been done before by somebody else in a different form.
So a lot of the chapters about some of the precursor scams and kind of the early days of QAnon, you know, that stuff is going to be is going to be evergreen.
But there did come a point in writing and then rewriting the book where we just had to stop.
You know, you couldn't, you could continue to tinker with it and never put it out.
And then it sort of becomes like a Star Wars special edition.
But, um, you know, at some point, you know, the story is just the story and whatever happens after the book comes out is going to have to be for another book.
Um, that, you know, Who knows who will write that book?
Maybe me, maybe someone else.
But, you know, I try to keep things as kind of evergreen and simple as possible with most of the book.
Well, I think you did a great job with that.
And as I said, it's accessible.
We've got a great roadmap.
It's kind of like a signature moment because the reporting has been, there's been a lot of good reporting.
There's been a lot of mediocre reporting, but it's been scattered in the same way that QAnon itself has been diffuse throughout the sort of digital ecosphere.
And so having it all in one place is a real, I think it's a real gift.
Yeah, I think with QAnon, there is a more right and a less right way to talk about it.
I don't ever try to single out anybody's work as not being up to par, because I don't know what that means.
But I try to talk about it in a very easy to prove kind of way, and to try to strip away some of the mystery with it.
Because I think a lot of movements like this, they seem so big that they seem like they're impenetrable.
There's no way to understand it.
So what I really wanted to do with the book was to boil it down for people who maybe knew what QAnon was and maybe seen something about it on CNN or maybe seen the HBO documentary or read some articles about it, but really didn't understand what it was and why it was important, why we're talking about this.
So I really wanted to write a book that would be accessible To any kind of reader, you know, I really wanted to stay away from some sort of an academic book because I'm not an academic.
It's not a world that I'm part of, so I wouldn't know how to do that.
But I really wanted to write something that if you just kind of thought these were a bunch of crazy people with t-shirts and bumper stickers, you could read this book and understand that this is a much bigger and much more meaningful movement than that.
I think one of the really tricky things that we've seen a lot, especially with people writing online about QAnon and trying to do something similar to what you've done, is the writing that's about sort of interpreting and understanding the conspiracy theory ends up being as convoluted and complicated and hard to penetrate as the conspiracy theory itself.
So yeah, I second that you did a fantastic job really making it accessible and lucid and coherent, joining the dots in a way that actually makes sense as opposed to having your own corkboard behind you.
Right, and I think it's very easy to invent a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory, but you haven't done anything other than satisfy your own desires to go down rabbit holes by doing that.
And it doesn't need it.
It's really not that complicated.
You know, the mythology is complicated, but the reasons why people believe this stuff are actually very simple.
And if you overcomplicate things, you lose that, I think.
One thing that I appreciate is that I think I hear an echo of what Colin Hoback's attitude was towards simply showing the figures in action doing what they're doing in ways that allow them to tell the story as normal human beings,
And his main point, other than, I mean, there's no proselytization, there's no sort of heavy analysis in the documentary, and so he really, I think I've seen him say in a number of comments that, you know, his main goal was to demystify and to really sort of draw the curtain back and see, well, if you have kind of normal people who are recognizable doing things that all human beings do, it's not as scary as it has to be.
Right.
And I really appreciated that.
About Cullen's documentary, in full disclosure, I was interviewed for it.
It didn't make the final cut, and he did a blurb for the book.
So, you know, I don't want to try to hide that.
But I also thought he did a really great job of focusing on the harm being done, while also trying to chase down who was doing this.
Because I think he went through This three-year journey that I've gone through of trying to find a better explanation for what is going on here and always just coming back to, it was just this thing that was really popular because it told a story that people wanted to be true.
And I really appreciated it with Cullen of, you know, going down the path of, oh, maybe it's Steve Bannon.
No.
Maybe it's, you know, these Italian anarchists.
No.
Maybe it's, um, whoever else.
Nope.
It just always goes back to Ron Watkins, who is, you know, a fairly disappointing figure to have done a bunch of this, but unfortunately it's probably the most accurate one.
It's a pretty great example of the banality of evil, right?
It's that sense of just like, oh, it was this guy.
It's just these guys.
There's no mystique.
There's no masks and capes.
They're not Darth Vader.
They're just people.
They're not geniuses.
They're definitely not geniuses.
They could be us.
Anybody is susceptible to the lure of a mass movement.
And if you think that you're not, you are maybe more susceptible to it.
Yeah.
I like how you drew on a lot of experts for the book.
One of the people you talked to is science and skepticism author and podcaster Brian Dunning.
Yes.
And I want to just pluck this one very pithy summation and you'll know what I'm about to say from page 89.
He says that for the followers, he's queuing on as the right journey, the wrong way.
What did he mean when he said that?
Yeah, I was a little taken aback by that quote at first, but with Brian's work, and I'm a huge fan of Brian, and I think he does a great job taking very complicated subjects and making them very digestible.
I think what it is, is the belief that to be a conspiracy theorist is really not that different from just being a person.
You are looking for answers.
You're looking for explanations.
You're trying to figure out what the hell is really going on here.
Who's lying to us?
Why are they lying to us?
Those are the right questions to ask.
We should always be asking ourselves, who's telling the truth?
Who can we trust?
How do we know we can trust them?
Who have we given power to?
Can we take it away from them?
Those are important questions to ask.
You know, I would never ever tell anybody to not ask those questions.
The problem is they're just looking for the answers in a, you know, cultic anti-Semitic murder conspiracy theory that seems like a like a prophecy cult.
You know, don't don't go there for the answer.
But by all means, the questions should be asked.
You mentioned the historical context and what I found of so much value is that there is a historical record now from this book.
Even though we've been tracking it, I've been following it, there were so many things that I learned.
With this podcast specifically, we focus on the wellness community and the crossover.
One aspect that I've always felt was important was that of individualism, because in wellness and yoga circles, there's this constant belief that abundance can be magically manifested, and you write about this a bit with the Omega scam and the Iranian currency.
From your perspective, how much of a role does individualism play in the wellness and the right-wing crossover?
Oh, it's huge.
This concept of health freedom is so big in this world.
This idea that no one's going to tell me what to do.
It's my body.
I live the way I want.
And if they're trying to keep things from me, I only want them more.
And it also dovetails with the big pharma conspiracy theory that the pharmaceutical industry, the doctors, the mainstream doctors in the hospitals, they want us to be sick.
They want us to be lethargic.
They want us to be stupid.
The pump is full of sugar and chemicals and drugs.
Breaking free of those chains, you can embrace the real life.
You can embrace your truth.
And that idea of secret and suppressed knowledge is enormously compelling.
It's compelling in wellness scams and frauds.
It's compelling in QAnon.
It's compelling in far-left conspiracies, far-right conspiracy theories.
And all that stuff merged during the pandemic.
They were all kind of separate circles, but they really work together very well.
Yeah, and on that note, I want to quote you back to yourself from page 56 on this topic of affinity fraud, which is such a great term.
Sometimes soon, there will be a world-changing event that will raise up high the lowest and bring down low the highest, and the elites will do nothing to stop it, because it's your last hope for a better and wealthier life that's free from the mental and financial chains they've put you in.
But a few enlightened warriors have broken the matrix.
They know the truth and they're fighting a secret war to get that truth out to you.
Day after day, these enlightened mystics are getting precious intel about the event, dispensing cryptic secrets on hidden channels and uncovering all the enemies that stand in the way of the great event.
And it's an event that you can be part of.
Just for a tiny investment, of course.
This is the world of affinity fraud, and it's a path that leads directly to Q. It seems like Shaney Goodwin, also known as the Dove of Oneness, is a key player in the spread of this digital prosperity gospel in terms of the overlap that we cover a lot, right?
Yeah.
And what's funny is hearing that, it really could be about anything.
You know, it certainly is Q and affinity frauds, but it's, you know, wellness stuff, health freedom stuff.
I mean, all of that stuff is the same.
Yeah.
It's like boilerplate Barnum statement.
Totally.
Big tent, come on down.
Totally.
Totally.
Snake oil, hokum that you could hear.
In any revival tent in the 1800s, and you can hear it on 8chan right now.
It's the same, and it's not mysterious at all.
But yeah, Shani and Nasara, my first real inkling that QAnon was something that really needed to be taken seriously, was when I connected all of the dots between the Intel scam thing that Nasara and the Iraqi Dinar had going, and I connected that to the Was really specifically the Devin Nunes memo of early 2018, this sort of secret document that was going to blow everything open.
And I just thought to myself, this just sounds like another version of Nasara without any money involved.
Instead, it's going to be like the bad guys brought to justice.
You don't even have to invest anything in that.
You just have to believe.
And I felt like that was so much more powerful and much more dangerous than anybody was giving it credit for.
But yeah, the Nassara thing is so fascinating to me, and it's one of those paths that I feel like a lot of journalists just kind of never figured out.
Like, everybody was trying to concoct conspiracies for who was coming up with this stuff, and they just didn't see the ladder that led right to this from things like Nassara, from things like the Dinar scam.
You know, this idea of secret intelligence foretelling a great event that you could be part of.
I mean, it's very simple.
And in those cases, the great event was there's all this money that you're going to get if you buy into this mythology.
And then if you send some money, it's going to come back to you, you know, a thousand fold sort of thing, right?
And then it seems like what happens is that with, you're saying that QAnon is able to bootstrap that into something that reaches a lot more people by removing the risk of the money scam, right?
Right, right.
Yeah, so you had, the way this started was you had this thing called the Omega Trust and Trading.
And it was this currency scam.
Well, it wasn't currency scam.
It was like an investment scam that started in Mattoon, Illinois in the early 90s.
And it was this guy named Clyde Hood.
It was this electrician.
He was like a bar bouncer.
I mean, just a guy.
And he convinced the people of Mattoon, Illinois, this very small town in downstate Illinois, that he had access to these investments called Prime European Banknotes.
And he was one of six people in the world who knew what this was and could access it.
And he'd helped Fortune 500 companies get Prime European Banknotes.
And he was now bringing it to his friends in this little vehicle.
Very evangelical community and you could buy a prime European banknote share for $100 and then it would roll over and it would roll over again and it would roll over again and finally at some point it would be released to you and you'd have millions of dollars for this tiny investment.
And Clyde Hood and like 18 of his cronies got insanely rich off it.
They were building giant houses.
They were driving classic cars.
They had so much money, they were carrying it around in sacks that would burst because they were so full.
And of course, they all got indicted.
And one of the marks who got taken in by this scam was this woman, Cheney Goodwin, who lived in Yelm, Washington.
Very New Age.
The home of Ramtha, yeah?
Yes, exactly.
The home of Ramtha.
So, very new agey, very cultic already.
She took Omega, the sort of investment aspect of it, and merged it with this thing called Nasara, which was this economic proposal that this guy named Harvey Bernard wrote in a book that, and I love this, is called Draining the Swamp.
And he sent it to every member of Congress, hoping that they would pass this economic reform that would eliminate consumer debt, bring us back to the gold standard.
I mean, there's all this stuff in it.
Of course, nothing happened with it.
But Cheney merged the secret law aspects of Nasara with the investment scam of Omega and turned it into this thing where these giant, you know, trillions of dollars in prosperity packets would be released to the people who were part of Nasara and who took her Intel updates and did what they were supposed to do and prayed really hard and sent her money and fulfilled her requests for a new laptop and stuff like that.
And then that started to fall apart.
And then you had the Iraqi Dinar scam, which was the same kind of thing, selling worthless Iraqi currency under the hope that it would revalue to its pre-Gulf War value.
So, a thousand dinars you could get for like 12 cents.
But then when the revalue was signed into law by whoever, it would suddenly be worth like $5,000.
So, you had people buying millions of dinar.
For like $900, sold by these firms that marked it up at 20%.
So it is the same thing.
Intel, about a great event that's always just about to happen.
And QAnon is just that, but there's no money.
So it's selling the good feelings that you will have when Hillary Clinton is hanged at dawn at Guantanamo Bay, rather than when you are given a prosperity packet or a whole bunch of money by your bank.
What the cognitive dissonance is and probably what makes it difficult for journalists to track the two together because QAnon doesn't, you know, involve any financial risk, but the promise is a revenge fantasy.
And I'm wondering about whether or not in the transition from the prosperity gospel stuff and these scams and, you know, how those
sort of participants flowed into the QAnon fold if they sort of cross some bridge of betrayal where oh you know it's we're not actually gonna the the government the deep state didn't actually set aside cash for us there is no real plan to save us economically that's because they must be demonic like what what happens in that flip
Yeah, I talked to Sean Robinson, who's a Seattle-based journalist who, as far as I know, is the only person who ever interviewed Shani Goodwin.
She died quite a while ago, I think in 2012.
Yeah.
And when I said, I asked him, do these people really still think that they're going to get the money?
I mean, these are people, this Nassara movement started in the late 90s.
It really blew up after 9-11.
And, you know, she kept it going for a decade.
And he said, basically, unless you were just a complete rockhead, it wasn't about the money anymore.
It was about the feeling of community.
It was about the anticipation.
It was about the secret knowledge.
You didn't even really think you were going to get the money anymore, but you never had a moment where you realized you weren't going to get the money anymore.
You just stopped thinking about it.
And it just became about Something big is going to happen at some point and we'll know it somehow.
So it strikes me as this endlessly deferred prophecy, but immediate sense of meaning and community and sort of being part of something that's somehow heroic.
And even though there's no money directly associated with participating, shall we say, in the QAnon story, All of those influencers who spring up and start becoming the bakers and start becoming the little celebrities on the scene, they're making a ton of money.
And you talk about the Amazon bestseller.
Yeah, that's the thing, you know, people are like, are the people behind Q ever going to be brought to justice?
You know, they're ever going to be held accountable?
And I say, well, they didn't really, I mean, whoever's posting the Q drops, they didn't really break any laws.
You know, there's not really a law against posting crap on the internet.
And I mean, they never got to the point where it was like, go and kill this person.
I mean, that's obviously a crime, but just sort of making vague pronouncements is not a crime.
But what rose up is this industry of promoters, of people who wrote the books, who made the podcasts, who, you know, printed the t-shirts.
And in March of 2019, and this is like, A year and a half into QAnon, this book called QAnon, An Invitation to the Great Awakening, hits number two in the top 100 books on Amazon.
It's got thousands of five-star reviews.
It's selling like crazy.
And then you get people like, oh, you can fake reviews.
You can fake sales.
I don't think they did.
I think people wanted this book.
People wanted to spend their money on somebody who reaffirmed the things they already believed.
You don't need astroturfing when you have a fanatical base of believers.
And, you know, this book was up for quite a long time.
There's still QAnon merch on Amazon, not as much, but you can still get that stuff.
You write that there's not a crime for essentially conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories are pretty baked in to our Way of thinking.
And you write that they're at least as old as writing, and probably much older.
You bring up the Julius Caesar example in the book.
And you also write there hasn't necessarily been an uptick in conspiracy theories because of the internet.
But then you point to people like Anthony Comello and Alpolas Sliman, who were indoctrinated very quickly into QAnon.
So even though there might not be more conspiracy theories now, What ways have digital spaces quickened the radicalization process?
Yeah, social media and the internet in general have made everything much easier to find, and I think that's probably the biggest difference.
I don't think humans are more conspiratorial.
We've always been conspiratorial.
But I think this stuff is now much more accessible.
Even going into the 80s, you really had to know where to find this stuff.
You had to know where the weird bookstore was, where the guy on the corner handing out the pamphlets and screaming about the gold standard was.
You had to go to the right gun show or truck stop or whatever.
With the internet, you can find that stuff literally in seconds, you know, stuff that you really had to work to get, you know, to tune into the right shortwave channel at the right time to hear the guy, you know, saying that there's a division of UN troops crossing the border.
You can get that anywhere now, easily, you know, and you can build up a following by saying it.
We've seen even post, you know, social media crackdown, people go to Telegram, and they just build up these gigantic followings, almost overnight, spewing out conspiracy theories, and they don't even put any work into it.
They just say the right stuff.
And the big promoters will share them because it's all a big closed circle of promoters.
And they just become like little celebrities overnight with not even really any creativity.
Just to, you know, throw a wrench into the intranet age of conspiracy theories, for our listeners, we're actually doing this on video conference, and so I'm going to hold up and show a newsprint edition of something called The Druthers, which appears in... Okay, so do you guys have the...
Free libraries that people put on their lawns, like their little houses.
Oh yeah, little free libraries.
Okay, little free libraries.
So I do a circuit walk and a jog and whatever, and there's a free library south of our neighborhood in a very wealthy part of what's called The Beaches in Toronto, and it's standing outside of a multi-million dollar home.
And there's all kinds of paperbacks in this free library.
And then every week or so, whenever this is published, there's five editions of it or five copies of it in it.
And it's, you know, I don't know if you see the title, but it's like death by lockdown.
It's, you know, death of health care, death of informed consent.
It's mainly anti-vax, anti-masking stuff.
You know, am I being selfish by wanting to not vaccinate?
That sort of thing.
Anyway, there are people who are still pre-digital.
I just want to put a pin in that.
Wow, that's cool!
I'm wondering though, have you seen any of this DIY, pre-digital effort put into QAnon stuff?
Maybe at the conventions?
Because this is a level of dedication that is not about going to Telegram and just ripping stuff off.
Oh, yeah.
There is an enormous amount of dedication by Q Believers.
You know, these people make their own t-shirts.
They make these videos that have really sophisticated production value.
And, you know, and some of them, you know, do podcasts and live streams every day.
You know, they make merchandise.
I've seen, you know, QAnon challenge coins, QAnon metal artwork, you know, QAnon shower curtains.
I mean, people are putting effort into this.
This is not just sort of, you know, reading, you know, about the end of the world and going, well, there's nothing I can do.
These people are really they put their their money and their time where their belief is.
How much of that would you say or do you think is true fanatical belief versus, hey, I can make some money off of this?
I think it is more fanatical belief than not.
You know, one of the things I wanted to do in the book was to sort of answer that question of, do these people really, really believe this crap?
And, you know, you can never really know what a person believes.
So I tried to find, Sort of social media footprints.
And I found a couple.
One with this guy, Neon Revolt, who was a very big influencer in the QAnon community.
Very big.
He's like an investor in Gab.
He wrote one of the big QAnon books.
It's, I think, the Second American Revolution or something.
Raised $130,000 through, I think it was Indiegogo, to write this book.
And this guy's a huge influencer, and it turns out the website, Logically AI, unmasked him.
And he's this failed screenwriter from New Jersey, which is- My home state.
There's a lot of Q going on in New Jersey.
I've heard.
Now, is this the same guy who then resold the book back to the people who crowdfunded it?
It's just staggering grift.
But I found some, you know, he nuked all his pre-Neon Revolt social, but I found on the internet way back machine some of his tweets sent under his real name, Robert Cornero.
And they are exactly the same as Neon Revolt.
I mean, this is the same thing.
And I had people reach out to me, a guy who was in a screenwriting class with him, who reached out to me and said, like, this is exactly who he is.
He is this racist.
He is this paranoid.
Neon Revolt's not a character.
It's just him with a different name.
And then I talked to somebody else who's a relative of a pretty major Q influencer.
I can't say who it is, but basically one of these people who's built up a huge following and this relative said, this is exactly who this guy is.
There is no separation between the character they play on social media and them in real life.
It's tempting to think of these people as like sitting back and like, ha, ha, ha, these, these marks, I'm fleecing them.
They, they really don't do that.
They, this is, they are, this is a community.
And some of these people have found a way to monetize it, but they're still part of the community.
It's not like an affinity fraud where one member of the community is consciously screwing other people in it.
They're all, they're all in this together.
Where we go when we go all, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a calling.
And then the, if they're able to monetize it, then they're, they're being blessed for their good work kind of thing.
Totally.
Totally.
It's the, the Lord's storehouse.
That's the part of the Omega thing.
Keep the Lord's storehouse full, send me money and it'll come back to you tenfold.
I mean, it's, it is, none of this is new and you can see exactly how it works.
You know, it's not mysterious.
So there's the community aspect, but in your title you describe and then go into some detail about those facets of QAnon that operate in a cultic manner.
We speak a lot about cults in the New Age wellness and spirituality movements on this show, and we know a lot of your sources that you use.
I'm really glad that you spoke with Alexandra Stein, for example, because her particular model of cult definition doesn't really depend upon, well, Is there charismatic leadership?
Is there transcendental ideology?
It's much more about how are the relationships organized and what's this sort of oscillation that people are going through constantly that trauma bonds them to each other through terror and love.
But at the same time your chapter on you know QAnon as a cult I think kind of exposes how cult theory from the pre-digital age has really had its ass handed to it in 2020.
So you know And I've watched these heroes of mine struggle with the questions that journalists like you ask them, which is, you know, well, who's the leader?
And can it be a leader?
Can it be a cult if there's no leader?
You know, how are people, is the ideology really cultic?
That sort of thing.
So how, you know, in speaking with these experts, do you think that the field of cult research is going to be useful here going forward and how so?
I think it can be useful.
And one of the things that I really was surprised and kind of heartened by in researching the book and talking to people like Alexander Stein and Mark Juergensmeyer is that they're all struggling with it, too.
At the point where I talked to them, I mean, maybe it's changed, but I doubt it.
They were all struggling what to call this.
Is it a cult?
Is it not a cult?
I don't know if you can really say that it's certainly not a traditional cult, and that term carries a lot of stereotypes with it.
You know, people in beige frocks tilling the soil.
That's not what QAnon is.
But there's no Jim Jones.
There's no L. Ron Hubbard.
There's no figure at the very top whose word is law.
Q wasn't really like that.
Trump didn't serve that purpose.
So you can't just say it's a cult and write it off.
But you also can't say it's not!
Yeah, I mean, from the perspective of what the indoctrination seems to produce within people, how difficult it is for them to abandon the way they've socialized into it, there are cultic effects.
But this issue of leadership is particularly difficult and I think it's really going to challenge cult theory to reconsider what it means when you have participants in an organization who are all deputized as leaders in some way towards really coercing each other into holding on to their beliefs, holding the line.
And I think, you know, that scene on January 6th that a number of researchers have described where, like, there are so many QAnons who are struggling in telegram watch parties as they're looking at—no, not the 6th, on the 20th—as the inauguration happens, And they're turning against each other or they're trying to support each other.
They really come from a position of they all thought they were heroes and that's not a cultic sort of scene that we're familiar with at all.
No, no.
And I think in terms of, you know, calling it, is it a cult or not?
I don't even think we need to be talking about QAnon.
I think we need to be talking about what's a cult.
And I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not, I am not a academic.
That's not my field of study.
I would never claim to know what that is.
But I think we have to leave behind these very stereotypical definitions of a cult or a cultic movement.
And re-examine just the way people find each other on the internet, because I think it's really all changed.
You don't need a compound anymore to have a cult.
You've got Telegram, you've got 8chan, you've got, you know, BitChute, you've got any number of these outlets where you can gather digitally with people that you will never meet in your life.
So Mike, the entire phenomenon of QAnon has sometimes been discussed, most notably by Reid Berkowitz, as being like a massive leaderless online alternate reality game.
Based on this notion that all players are doing their own research, which kind of echoes what Matthew was just talking about, in order to decode hidden meanings, detect conspiratorial agency, and then evangelize their revelations about the offline world.
So it's this online game where the revelations are about what's really happening out there.
And to me, this really relates to Michael Shermer's concept of patternicity.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, how our minds are likely predisposed by evolution to seek patterns and interpret agency and meaning in the coded language of the world, because this undeniably has survival value, but it also makes us vulnerable to becoming intensely invested in patterns that are not really there.
And the most striking example, I actually asked you about this on Reddit yesterday, the most striking example of this seems to be the Five Jihad case involving a tweet from James Comey that was interpreted to mean something especially ominous about a small town charter school's fundraising event.
Can you connect the dots on this episode for us?
Yes.
So I want to just start by talking about the alternate reality game definition, which I've never been fully comfortable with.
And I found that there are a number of people who work in that world who don't think of QAnon as an ARG at all.
And one of the things that I've kind of realized in doing this is that if you come to something like QAnon, which is a massive, massive tent But it's so much more complicated than that.
And in terms of looking at Q as a game, it doesn't really, you know, a game can be won or lost.
expertise in your own career, it only looks like that thing.
Um, so if you're an expert on blank, QAnon looks like blank, but it's so much more complicated than that.
And, and in terms of like looking at Q as a game, it doesn't really, you know, a game can be won or lost.
The game ends.
Q never ends.
There, there's always, if, you know, If you want to look at it as sort of a game, I look at it like a slot machine.
As long as you keep putting quarters in, the lights are going to keep flashing and the buzzers are going to keep buzzing, and you can play all day, all night, until you drop dead.
So that's kind of where I look at it in terms of that ARG aspect of it.
To talk about the five jihads, this is such a sad story.
So one of these Twitter trends going around, and this was summer of 2019, was the five jobs I've had.
So people list, you know, whatever five jobs they've had, they start out their lives.
James Comey jumps into it with, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but It ended up with like G-V-C-S-F, I think, was the acrostic of it.
And this anonymous Twitter user who goes by TopInfoBlogs, they're still around, I don't know why, decoded it that this was an acronym for Grass Valley Charter School Foundation.
Grass Valley is a very small town in Nevada County, California.
And they have a little charter school, and every year they have a little fundraiser, a little auction, and on their little fairgrounds.
So this top info blogs just decoded that this was Grass Valley Charter School Foundation, and that five jobs I've had was actually code for five jihads.
I don't know why a person would do that.
They tweeted this out and they tagged the very influential QAnon influencer, Joe M. One of the worst people in this sphere.
And to be clear about this, there was no connection to this Grass Valley Charter School whatsoever.
It was just the first letters of each word of the jobs that James Comey had listed.
And somehow someone went online and found that this fits, right?
Yep, they Googled it.
They worked backwards and they put it all together.
So Joe M, this guy, hugely influential, had like half a million Twitter followers, I think at one point.
He tweets out, hey, at Comey, nothing better happen at the Grass Valley Charter School fundraiser.
We see you.
Parents and the school and the organizers of this fundraiser immediately got bombarded by QAnon people, not threatening them, warning them that there was going to be an attack.
A false flag, right?
A false flag.
It was going to be a false flag.
Oh, because it was Friday.
So there was hashtag FF, follow Friday.
We're a false flag.
Yeah, I know.
It's like, what happened to you that your brain did that?
But they did.
And the school got bombarded with calls.
Parents were terrified.
I spoke a couple of times to the Foundation president who was like, I was up all night reading this stuff.
I was crying.
I was terrified.
They had to cancel the fundraiser because they couldn't be sure that somebody with a gun wasn't going to show up, not to do anything, but to protect the fundraiser from the deep state.
They had to cancel the fundraiser.
They were able to make some money from the auction, but then of course they had to cancel it again in 2020 because of COVID.
And then actually they canceled it again this year.
They'll probably never have another one.
So, and then Joanne was like, I don't care.
I was, it was a false alarm, but I did the right thing.
And, and, you know, screw these fact checkers.
We're protecting children.
I mean, it was, it was unbelievable.
And then of course there was an arrest that happens sometime later.
That's completely unrelated where someone seems to have explosives in their house and all of the unknowns are saying, there it is.
The future proves past, right?
Yeah.
Future proves past.
Two weeks later, this woman was arrested.
And I don't know the whole story, but there was a tip from police that this woman had some explosives in her house and she had like boarders or renters or something, and the police found pipe bombs in the closet of one of her boarders.
Now, this was weeks after the fundraiser was cancelled.
So the question I ask is, I'm sorry, was this woman supposed to bomb this fundraiser?
If she did, did she just sit around with pipe bombs in her closet for two weeks?
She was waiting for Comey's next tweet.
She was!
She must have been waiting for the next Follow Friday, you know?
Maybe she needed a new across day.
But it's like, really?
She's sitting around for weeks with explosives in her closet?
And then I think she pled guilty, but I think there was some mental health issue there.
I don't know the full story, but I mean, it was literally just working backwards.
And it was like, future proves past, except there was no past.
It was just a thing that these people made up and ran with.
Speaking of patternicity, what do you make of the John McAfee Instagram post?
Oh boy, so in case people are not up on this, yesterday John McAfee was found dead in his cell in Spain.
His extradition to the U.S.
had been approved.
So immediately the conspiracy theories start because no one just takes their own life.
And his last Instagram post, and this has all been pulled down now, but I got a screenshot of it, his last Instagram post that went up I think about 15 or 20 minutes after the news started to break of his death was just a giant queue.
Perfect.
Yeah.
And this is a guy who was really deep into a lot of really conspiracy stuff.
I mean, clearly, I mean, if you looked at his social, this guy, something was unstable with this guy.
And I don't know what it was, but this was a guy who loved his reputation as a troll.
And I think either him or somebody on his team was just trolling from beyond the grave, yet driving the conversation even after death.
Because that's what these people thrive on.
They thrive on being talked about because he's a public figure, so of course we're going to talk about him.
And of course we're going to talk about that his last Instagram post that went up after he was dead was a giant Q. Yeah.
Wild.
Wild.
And so to follow on from a couple of things that you've said and some threads that have been running through so far, this preoccupation with pattern seeking has also been called apophenia.
In which epiphanies that lead to false insights that seem profoundly meaningful become invested with importance.
And the term epiphania was actually coined by psychiatrist Klaus Konrad to describe one of the earliest symptoms of psychosis, usually associated with schizophrenia.
You talk in the book about several violent incidents associated with belief in Q in the years prior to 2020.
There's a whole list of them.
To what extent Do you think that mental illness played a role in those cases and in the Q phenomenon in general?
Like, what have you seen?
Yeah, I do think that there is a component of it that is driven by mental illness.
You know, I hesitate to say that about people.
I can't diagnose anybody.
I would never be qualified to do that.
But a couple of these cases have ended with the perpetrator found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Yeah, so the experts actually gave you an answer.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, like, the guy who killed the Gambino boss, Frank Kelly, his name is a Staten Island laborer named Anthony Camelo.
He was found unable, he was incompetent to stand trial.
So that really is the answer right there.
I mean, this was mental illness.
At work.
And you can see the signs of it in a lot of these other things.
The paranoia, the pattern-seeking, the fear that everybody's out to get them, that they're in danger, the kind of incomprehensibility, that's a word, of their language.
The signs are there, and I'm never surprised when somebody connected to this world is found to be mentally ill.
But at the same time, I think there are a lot of people who are not.
I think a lot of people really believe this, really want it to be true and are very lucid and sober about it.
Yeah, I have a hunch that there's a kind of continuum in terms of how susceptible people are, different types of people are to seeing these kinds of patterns and to becoming very invested in them and ending up prioritizing them in this way that is so wildly disorganized and emotionally intense that it starts to be prioritized over everything else.
One of the themes, Mike, that has been sort of chewed on by the QAA podcast is also the role of the opioid epidemic in the red-pilling process.
And I'm wondering if that rings true for you as well.
I don't come across it in the book, I don't think.
But, you know, I just, it was something that I think Julian Field in particular has brought up over and over again that there are these associations with, you know, I was taking this particular opioid, I was flat on my back with a back injury, I think he's talking about Mike Smith as he's conceiving of Out of the Shadows, and then that's the context for him being for him being pilled is chronic pain.
He's using a heavy medication and he's disappearing into an online world.
Is there more to follow there? - I don't know and that's not something that I get into in the book.
It's just, it felt like kind of one thing too many.
But I do think there is definitely an element of substances, you know, pain medication, drinking, that kind of gets to these people, and it rewires the way that you see the world.
And I mean, lots of people are able to take that medication or drink casually, and they don't fall into this stuff.
But I think for some people, those predilections toward substance abuse and toward paranoia and toward a feeling of, you know, everybody's out to get me, that all mixes together.
And Q is a great place to go if you are messed up and think somebody's after you, because Q is going to tell you, yeah, somebody is after you, and we're going to stop them.
There's also a way, and this shocked me in the book, in which notions of, you know, the internal self and mental health and whether a person has special skills deriving from their neurodivergence comes up as you reveal that, I've never seen this before, it shocked me that a lot of the bakers, the early bakers within the QAnon world adopted the term autists
to refer to themselves and quoting from you, proudly insinuating that they had a developmental disorder that let them see things others can't.
These were people who believed they could see the messages Q and the deep state were really sending.
They knew when Trump misspelled embedded informant using I instead of an E that Trump was shouting out, "Drop 753's use of I as its own sentence," and so on.
And so you also write that many Q believers see themselves as weaponizing their lack of social skills, their inability to read social cues and so on.
Is there an element to this self-identification that also sees itself as being persecuted by the medical industry, that sees itself as being vaccine injured perhaps?
I'm just sort of Trying to understand some of the context here, but there seems to be a connection.
Yeah, absolutely, there's a connection.
One of the people I talked to for the book, the only ex-Q believer who'd gone on the record was Jatarth Jadeja.
Great guy, you know, really, really cool.
But right before he fell into Q, he was diagnosed with ADHD.
He told me that he felt like his ADHD, it was keeping him back, and people didn't get it, and they didn't understand how his brain worked, but Q was a place where he could take that and use it for good.
They welcomed his difference, and it was something that he could use in the fight.
And that's really compelling.
And all of that mixes together with the pandemic, because suddenly you get these notions of, you know, vaccines are harmful, 5G technology is harmful, you know, Bill Gates is trying to kill all of us.
And so there is that feeling of like the medicinal industry, the pharmaceutical industry, doctors are being weaponized against the free thinkers.
And the free thinkers who may actually position themselves as survivors, and therefore they're able to sort of inform the rest of the world as to, well, this is what the pharmaceutical industry does to people.
Don't you know it?
This is what happened to me.
Right.
Yeah, and it ties in really nicely with one of the conspiracy theories.
I don't think I really talk about it much in the book, but the dead doctors conspiracy theory, the one pushed by Joe Mercola's girlfriend, Erin Elizabeth, I think.
Right.
That the big pharma industry is killing holistic doctors, vaccine renegades and chiropractors.
Right.
Because there's a lot of chiropractors and holistic healers in America, and at some point a couple of them will die around the same time of whatever cause, and that's a conspiracy.
That's all it takes.
Joe has survived so far, it seems.
Yeah, and it's just the same thing as the Clinton body count.
All these people connected to the Clintons are being murdered and the Clintons are connected to a lot of people and everybody dies at some point.
So having been in politics for four decades, people they are connected to will die.
That happens.
That's just statistics.
So it is over and over and over we see these natural events or maybe unnatural events that need to be investigated and don't have a handy explanation that are consumed by this conspiracy monster that needs an explanation for everything.
Anti-vaxxers hold a special place in all of our hearts here at Conspirituality.
And you write that Plandemic was one of the entry points for QAnon into Wellness World, as we mentioned earlier.
Mickey Willis has a new book coming out.
My former publisher, who I didn't know was an anti-vaxxer when I published with them, so that was fun to find out.
You also mentioned Wayfair, of course, Save the Children was the big hashtag.
But, you know, we are watching All of these figures that we're tracking move on and still take the ideology.
We're trying to figure out where the pivot is.
And I'm wondering, specifically in the wellness space, if you're seeing any pivots or do you know how QAnon, being leaderless in its way, how it will perpetuate in these spaces?
Yeah, I'm not seeing pivoting so far.
What I'm really seeing more is just a mixing together of everything.
So now you can find a person who's in this conspiracy world, and they will be an anti-vaxxer, but they will also think the election was stolen.
And they will also think that Hillary Clinton has a giant body count.
And they will also think that 5G is sending out microwaves into our brains.
There's no silos anymore.
Everything is now the same thing.
And if you want to call that QAnon, that's fine.
It's going to be something else down the road.
Yeah.
And yet, Mike, it seems to me that often those kinds of people, if you say, well, that's QAnon, they're like, no, no, no.
I'm not one of those crazy people.
No, no, no.
Yeah.
I'm not one of those crazy people.
I just, I just think 5G is, is probably really bad.
I just think all the same things that QAnon thinks, but I'm not that.
Well, it's interesting that in that way, the QAnon brand has, Both allowed wellness influencers to juice up their content with inflammatory rhetoric and a lot of heinous imagery while not committing to it whole hog.
I think what we see is amongst the influencers that we study is that there can be a flirting with the hashtags.
There can be coming close to the edge of talking about the, you know, the cabal in very explicit terms.
But then there's always a plausible deniability.
There's always a way of pushing it back.
But by that point, the damage is done because they've already juiced the algorithm to go towards more of that content for their followers.
They've already thrown it out there.
They have already.
Just in their, in their just asking questions.
They're, they're, they're enabling, they're making it okay to talk about this stuff.
And you get this with these Instagram influencers who have millions of followers and they put this on their own personal pages.
You know, we need to be talking about this.
What's really going on here.
It's not really making us, it's not saying anything, but it's endorsing these ideas simply by talking about them.
Yeah, and then saying something like, well, you know, only people who are not curious at all believe the mainstream narrative.
These are certainly questions that need to be asked.
So along those lines, in terms of this turning point that we on this podcast were really tracking and seeking to make sense of in real time, you write, in the blazing hot months of late summer 2020, with the pandemic showing no signs of abating,
The loose coalition of anti-vaxxers, anti-traffickers, anti-5G activists, COVID conspiracy theorists, anti-globalists, wellness advocates, terrified mothers, and crusaders for trafficked children, except not really, right, hit the streets and began to march.
They organized in cities all over America and around the world, often with little cohesion in their messaging, but with awareness and outrage in their hearts.
And with QAnon slogans on their sides.
So this does seem to be the point in the story where QAnon jumps the boundaries of being mostly about the chans and the ardent trumpets and crosses over into mommy blogger, Instagram influencer, yoga and wellness world.
How did how did you track that happening?
It was a lot.
I didn't go to any of the protests, mostly for COVID reasons.
I've got young kids and I just couldn't take any chances.
But there were enough people there who were filming, like the QAA guys went to the LA one.
And I was able to kind of get the sense of people who were just mad.
And, and, you know, they were mad that they were locked down.
They were mad that things weren't going their way.
But there wasn't really any drive to this.
There was no, there was no goal.
You know, I write about some of these videos that were taken that people just sort of milling around.
You know, some people don't even look like they're there on purpose.
And it's funny because that's a lot of what you also see with the Capitol riot.
You know, you have some people who are there, like they are hardcore there.
They're going to hang Mike Pence.
And then you got people who are just like, Hey, I'm here.
I'm taking a selfie.
I don't have any goal.
Don't arrest me.
It's Magapalooza.
Magapalooza.
Yeah.
And then there's the one guy who's, who's like having that intense argument with the, with the Capitol police saying, what are you doing?
And it's like everybody's there for their own conspiracy theory, and they're all just there together, reveling in them having the secret truth.
And by that point, it really wasn't even about Q anymore.
There's a great... God, it's one of my favorite moments in the book where one of the big Q influencers, Jordan Sather, he tweets like, I bet that guy's never read a Q drop in his life.
And he's the guy holding a where-we-go-when-we-go-all-sign-with-a-skull-mask.
Yeah, doesn't he have an AR-15 as well?
Like, he's pretty serious.
I think so, yeah.
Yeah, it's like, that's amazing.
I mean, this is your movement.
Tourist.
Jordan Sather, who should point out, because he's such a Q alien guy, but also has his own line of protein supplements, he very much fits in the profile of the crossover from the right wing over to wellness.
It's Secret Space Program.
It's medical bleach.
It's Epstein.
You know, it's anti-vax.
I mean, it's everything.
And getting ripped.
Yeah.
Getting ripped.
And, you know, raising your T-level.
Right.
I wanted to ask about, I think it's chapter 13 where you go through the legwork of disconfirmation.
So, you know, second to last chapter of the book.
I think that it was Mike Rains, the moderator for QAnon Casualties, who we had on as a guest, and I asked him about, you know, how do you get people back to reality?
How do you speak to QAnon members?
And he kept saying over and over again, you have to tell them that the drops are simply wrong.
You have to tell them that none of it worked.
You have to show them that nothing came true.
And reading through your list of everything that didn't actually happen, and you say right up at the front of the book as kind of a flag point, you say the earliest QAnon believers came face to face with something else they'd have to accept in order to subscribe to Q's mythology, which is disconfirmation.
I got this sense of how incredibly painful and almost masochistic the entire enterprise is.
That they have to be disappointed over and over and over again.
But then when I was reading your list I was wondering what do you think would have happened if one of those major events actually had come true?
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
I think a lot of people, well, they would do what they do anyway, which is declare that they were right.
And you can see that in the cue proofs, you know, and the one that I really get into debunking in the book is the McCain one.
And, you know, McCain, a cue drop with McCain standing at a podium with his hands up and his eyes closed, and the text is no name, which is cue's nickname for McCain, returning to headlines.
Who knows what that means.
It could mean anything.
A month later, to the hour when the drop goes up, McCain dies.
And they go, Q nailed it.
Q had it down perfectly.
Q knew to the second when McCain would die, clearly this was an execution.
Right.
This is an undeniable Q proof.
Mathematically impossible for this to be wrong.
But then you go into it and you go, what did Q actually say in that drop?
No name, McCain returning to headlines.
John McCain is a Republican senator, he's a presidential candidate, he was probably the most well-known Republican in the Senate, outspoken opponent of Donald Trump, and he was very sick.
That could mean anything.
He happened to die, I think 31 days later, but that could have been, he resigns, he announces retirement, he switches parties.
That could be anything.
What Q believers do when something happens is they find a way to make it correct.
And it's the same thing with the Comey tweet.
You work backwards, you end with the conclusion and you work backwards to figure it out.
It's the opposite of how science works.
But it's exactly how beliefs like this work.
You're right.
And you just need to prove that you're right.
Yeah.
And you, you also point out that the, because of the time change, the fact that the fact of those two pieces of information seeming to be down to the, to the second, right, actually we're off because it would have been an hour later or an hour earlier, technically.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because the time difference in Arizona.
I guess I'm trying to get at almost a reality question though about, so supposing that on live television, major networks, one of the executions that's being called for actually occurs.
What happens when there's incontrovertible evidence that the revenge fantasy that QAnon is preaching seems to actually be real?
Because there's this way in which the online world and what's happening in the real world and what's not happening seem to be elided in the brains of followers to the extent where If what they're actually fantasizing about comes true, I'm wondering if that's actually terrifying for them.
It might be.
And it's never happened.
You know, there's never been a Q-drop that made a specific prediction that actually came true.
If that were to happen, I mean, it would be a day where these people felt like their faith had paid off.
But at the same time, it would open up a whole new realm of questions that presumably you would ask.
Like, why didn't these other things happen?
Why did this take so long?
You get some of that with the tip-top proof.
Like, hey, this actually happened!
I mean, not exactly, because it was like three months later, but it's enough that it re-energizes your faith and you think, oh, we're seen, like he saw us and he's listening to us.
And any bit of confirmation there is just like, is like manna from heaven that you are on the right track.
Matthew, it sounds like you're kind of almost asking, like, you know, what if the UFO really did land on the lawn of the White House?
What if, what if, what if the Savior really did come down from the clouds?
What would they do then?
I guess, I guess the other, this is a little bit horizontal, but the other question that I think is related to this is that when the insurrectionists show up on January 6th,
They are so insular with regard to their world that somehow they believe it's okay to live stream their adventures back to Parler or to Gab or to publish them on Facebook.
As if somehow they live in their own parallel universe in which there is no surveillance of their social media, in which somehow they're going to be safe.
Oh, they're just going to be able to delete it or, you know, it's just a post or whatever.
So there's something about QAnon that was able to create this sort of hermetically sealed environment in which only imagined things happened.
And so I guess I'm wondering, I suppose one real thing that happens is that Ashley Babbitt gets shot on a live stream. - Yes. - And that doesn't really shake anything either.
That gets spun too. - But still, she's a casualty in that moment of this long-awaited point at the end of history where they're going to succeed, right?
I mean, I have to imagine that the most faithful, what do you think, Mike?
That the most faithful who were there at the insurrection and who were watching the insurrection rooting for that team, they really thought that they were going to succeed in what they were trying to do, supposedly.
They thought that they were going to succeed.
They thought that they were going to get to Mike Pence and something magical would happen.
So there would be no consequences, right?
There would be no consequences.
That's exactly it.
There would be no negative result for them because even if they failed, Trump would pardon them all.
Trump would make it all okay.
Daddy will see us and will approve of us and will, with his last act, will pardon us and we'll be fine and there will be no consequences.
And with something like Ashley Babbitt, you're seeing the consequences.
Right in front of you, you're seeing a woman shot dead while committing an insurrection as part of an angry mob.
But to them, that's not what happened.
To them, she was executed.
She was unarmed.
She was a patriot.
She was just expressing her grievances, her political questions, and the deep state executed her.
That's not what happened.
You've got this Capitol Police officer who has this mob setting down on him.
And these are the same people who are all about stand your ground, about you can't take my guns away.
And you're like, what would you do if you had a mob setting on you who had broken into your workplace, was screaming, was breaking things?
You don't know if they're armed or not.
Some of them are armed.
What are you going to do?
Are you going to talk to them?
Are you going to reason with them?
Are you just going to let them tear you to pieces?
No, you're going to fight back.
You're going to stand your ground.
But they just never, they're not able to do that.
They're not able to see it from the opposite side, because the only side that exists is theirs.
Just because people ask us about this all the time, and they asked me specifically about it too, when we talk about this crossover moment, right, where QAnon goes from being this
In one sort of very contained world into really exploding on social media and you start to have what gets called Pastel Q and you have Wayfair and Save the Children and all of the anti-back stuff and then SB 145 which is this bill where they're able to jump on it and say this is California legalizing pedophilia somehow.
There's something that happens there.
Where not only do you get plausible deniability, as we've said, but was it the case that there was something happening with the disseminators of the Q propaganda where it was like, we're going to keep it quiet that this is where it's originating from?
Well, that's always been part of Q. One of the reasons why these breads, these decoding threads took off on places like Twitter is because the early Q evangelists didn't want people going to HM.
Achan is, first of all, it's incredibly difficult to navigate, but it's, it's full of just the worst stuff.
And it's the kind of stuff that if you are a patriotic boomer who just wants to do your duty to help Trump, and suddenly like you go to Achan and then there's like a, you know, Holocaust denial memes and hardcore porn, you're going to run screaming.
So keeping people away from the source of the knowledge while also disseminating the knowledge became the kind of stock and trade of this movement.
And that became a lot easier when the Q promoters really took control of the movement.
You know, there's, and I write about this in the book, a lot of the major concepts in QAnon were never in QDrops.
Adrenochrome is never mentioned in a QDrop.
Q never talked about Save the Children.
I know there's other big concepts there that this all came from the promoters who found a way to broaden their own audience and get people back into Q. And they didn't even need Q at that point.
Q could have stopped much earlier than they actually did, and the movement still would have grown.
But there is a moment in this period, in the summer of last year, where some of the messaging is to stop saying QAnon as using the hashtags, all of that sort of thing, right?
Right.
Yeah, because during this period, we made a couple appearances on conference calls with people who were in the spiritual community, and it was about conspiracy theories and QAnon.
And every single time, there'd be two or three people who would say, hold on, hold on, what about Wayfair?
Yeah, that has nothing to do with QAnon.
Wait, wait, you're saying because I don't trust vaccines or because I believe in chemtrails, somehow I'm involved in this crazy thing called QAnon?
So we're seeing the effect in real time of people actually not thinking that they were related at all.
Yeah, and QAnon as a brand has a fairly limited appeal, and that term is fairly toxic now.
And I think Q, Ron, recognized that.
And fairly late in the game, Q made this drop of, there is Q, there are Anons, there is no QAnon.
I mean, it's a perfect thought terminating cliche.
Because now, anytime I mention QAnon, people are like, there is no QAnon.
You made that up.
The media made that up.
I'm like, no, it was used by an Anon, like November 2nd, 2017.
The most popular book in that community is literally called QAnon.
I mean, it's just, it's not even believable.
But what is the sound of one letter in the alphabet clapping, right?
Right, yeah.
And Q became so big and its mythology became so enmeshed in so many different communities that I'm not surprised at all that you had people who were like, wait a minute, I believe that Wayfair is trafficking children and I believe chemtrails are real, but I'm not a crazy Q person.
And it's the lies that these people are able to tell themselves are just spectacular.
And then as part of that, too, you mentioned something that we were tracking, which is the pattern of Instagram influencers not talking about QAnon in their main posts, but putting it in their stories that would disappear in 24 hours, but very consistently putting heartfelt messages out there about the questions we need to be asking.
Right.
It wasn't about their influencer brand.
It wasn't about, you know, their whatever essential oils they were selling or whatever.
It was about them personally.
And that builds a connection between the influencer and the followers.
It's not like, this isn't just another part of the brand.
This is her speaking to me personally about something that matters to her.
But you might miss it if you're not paying close enough attention, right?
Right.
Are you comfortable, Mike, with being a little bit as well as personal as you're comfortable being with how this process has been for you over the past two, two and a half, three years?
We know that a lot of journalists have found this to be a very difficult time.
I feel reading your book, you know, I've made a high blood pressure appointment.
And, and I'm just wondering, I'm just wondering, you, you described having small children, that's very busy as well.
How have you taken care of yourself and, you know, where do you, where do you think, where do you think this is going to take you?
Sure.
How I take care of myself is I try to look at this as a job.
I try to look at covering this movement as work and not as a personal crusade.
I'm not an activist.
I'm a writer and I'm a researcher.
So my job is not to save the world from QAnon.
My job is simply to understand it.
And that helps give me at least a little bit of remove that I'm not like, how am I going to save all these people?
I can't.
No one can.
That has to be done at the individual level.
So I try to get a little bit of distance from it.
I try to unplug as often as I can.
When I'm working, I'm working.
When I'm not working, I try to just step away from it.
I spend time with my family.
I get into hobbies.
Just the normal things that bring most people joy that conspiracy theories like QAnon strip away from people.
There's so much joylessness in that world.
And people talk about how they can't You know, they don't talk to their families anymore.
They can't enjoy the music that they used to love or the movies that they used to love because it's all cabal and pedophilia and all that stuff.
So, I try to enjoy those things because I can.
And I try to keep a room from it.
You know, obviously, I keep things fairly tight in terms of information.
Like, I don't talk about my family personally.
And I do get some crap from trolls.
I mean, the last name does not help.
But, you know, the crap that I get is much less than what any woman or person of color in any kind of public-facing job gets.
And I'm well aware of that.
Like, I'm aware that even just being a white man in this world keeps me somewhat insulated from the worst of it.
So I just, you know, I try to keep a certain amount of distance from it, even while I'm doing it.
