Jordan Holmes and Dan Friesen dissect Mike Rothschild’s decade-long study of QAnon, tracing its absurd origins—like Hillary Clinton’s "walking boot" arrest—to affinity frauds like Iraqi Dinar scams. Rothschild reveals how stolen memes, hoaxes (e.g., Angela Merkel as Hitler’s daughter), and mainstreamed tropes (COVID denial, stolen election claims) flow through 4chan, Reddit, and right-wing media before looping back into conspiracy circles via Trump’s tweets. The movement’s fracturing—seen in feuds between Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon John—hints at self-destruction, yet its core exploitation of grievances persists, now repackaged on Telegram by figures like Ghost Ezra. Ultimately, QAnon’s collapse may be inevitable, but its influence reshapes broader conspiracy narratives, leaving behind vulnerable believers who need better exit strategies. [Automatically generated summary]
Speaking of which, it's very funny that even the book world that we live in, he has to put in parentheses every time he puts his name, Mike Rothschild.
But the thing that you find with a lot of sort of old money families is that they don't address this stuff at all.
Like they don't, they don't talk about it.
Like there's no, and I've looked for this stuff.
I've looked for members of the Rothschild family going on the record and talking about this stuff, and they don't talk about it.
It doesn't exist for them.
They just live their lives because they know that anything that they throw into that particular fire is just going to be used as proof that it's all true.
You can't prove that you're not something.
So you just don't talk about it.
You know, you get that a lot with these older money families, you know, these families that have passed down a lot of wealth and have been the subject of rumors.
I've been writing about conspiracy theories for about 10 years.
I mean, most of it just, you know, on blogs and for no money.
I mean, obviously.
But I've been interested in the subject for much longer than that.
I really got into the whole idea of conspiracy theories as storytelling through Coast to Coast AM.
I used to listen to Art Bell a lot.
And I, you know, I never believed any of it, but it was so outside of my own sort of middle-class suburban existence, talking about UFOs and the Illuminati and suburbs.
So this was, I was really into this as a form of storytelling.
And so I sort of drifted into it more and more professionally.
And so I wrote, I had an opportunity to write my first book, which came out beginning of 2020.
But long before that, I started to look at QAnon.
And my first inkling of seeing something there was beginning of 2018.
So just a few months after the first drops came out.
And I started seeing tweets about John McCain and Hillary Clinton wearing orthopedic walking boots, not because they'd like hurt their feet like the rest of us peasants, but because they were wearing ankle bracelets that were secret because they'd been arrested in a purge called the storm.
And I'm like, oh, this is awesome.
I've got to dive into this and see where this is going.
But I started to get a little more concerned about it when I started to see the parallels in QAnon to these previous affinity frauds, the things I write about a lot in the book, the Iraqi Dinar scam, and then before that, Nasara, before that, the Omega Trust scam.
And these, some of these things have been running since the early 90s and have built a lot of people out of a lot of money using the same kind of setup.
This sort of all-knowing guru who has access to secret intel that they will dole out to a select few people who are the special chosen ones who will know what to do when the great change event happens.
And it's always about to happen.
And there's always some dark force that gets in the way just as everything's about to change.
And with the dinar scam, I mean, the level of minutiae that went into this of these anonymous gurus with these names like Wolfie Man and TNT Tony, who are just like these scam artists.
These scam artists who are in like Kansas City, who also have like secret access to the inner workings of the Iraqi foreign ministry.
And they were supposed to the dinar revalue has already been announced in the mosques.
Stand by to get your to get your secret 1-800 number to call in when you'll be told where to go and you need to have these code words and you need to dress up and you need to not tell anybody where you're going and bring your dinars in a metal case in a Faraday cage.
I mean, it's like on and on and on.
And it works like a lot of conspiracy theories do, as you guys know, that the more arcane detail you load onto something, the more believable it becomes.
The more vague something is, the less real it seems.
And I think another element, too, is like when you have all those details and all of these weird steps that you need to take, if you get tricked by one, you really don't want to admit you got tricked by that one.
And so you go for the second and the third and the fourth step.
You know, one of my favorite details with the Omega trust scam, which was the precursor to Nassaro, which was this grift, this longtime grifter who promised that he had access to prime European banknotes that only five people in the world knew about.
It's just such, I don't know how I mean, like, I don't even know how I would be able to tell you that I have secret European notes, let alone strangers.
I mean, when you look at the social mobility numbers through class systems and you realize that nobody from the lower class is even moving up to the middle class, there's no greater con than the American dream.
And you, and that's a really, it's a really useful way to look at something that seems really complex, like the dinar, like QAnon, to break it down into the simple idea of that's not how this works.
This, this is not possible.
This is not how things happen.
You know, money does not simply appear like that.
You can't just become a billionaire overnight with the stroke of a pen and have all your friends be billionaires and have money have any value anymore.
Then you start to fall back on, well, that's what they want you to think.
You know, they don't know what we know.
We have the secret knowledge.
They don't know.
They're asleep.
It's that feeling of specialness that you get when you are consuming conspiracy media and it's being reflected back to you of, I know something you don't know.
One of the things that I think is really interesting about framing QAnon that way or looking at it from that perspective too is like, you know, it doesn't appear to be similar necessarily in the same way as those.
Those are like very clearly, I want money kind of schemes.
Whereas I think externally, you view QAnon as like, wow, this is ideas or it doesn't seem as much of like a money machine.
And that was what was really troubling to me was with something like Nassara, the dinar, there's the financial aspect of it.
And most people are kind of savvy enough to know that you can't buy a million dinars and somebody signs a piece of paper and you're a millionaire.
Like most people know that that's not how money works.
But what Q was selling wasn't that you're going to get rich.
It was you're going to feel awesome when Hillary Clinton and John Podesta get the short drop from the rope at Guantanamo Bay.
It was selling good feelings and it was selling the idea that these people that they've hated for decades are finally going to get what's coming to them.
You know, it is absolutely no surprise that the first post by Q was Hillary Clinton is on the run.
She's going to be extradited.
There's going to be riots.
The National Guard's going to come out into the streets.
Yeah, I think something that's so it's it's I don't know if people recognize, but like in those communities and conspiracy and right-wing communities in particular, like Hillary Clinton's like catnip.
Like if you want to pitch something kind of silly, attaching her to it is we've seen this over and over again through years and years on Alex's show.
Like Larry Nichols was able to create a cottage industry for himself, just coming up with nonsense, but saying like, Hillary.
It's just a different kind of show and it's not as fun.
It's not as like we're going to figure this out together.
And Bell was skeptical.
I mean, that's one of the things about his show is that if somebody called in and had some cockamamy story, like he wasn't just going, aha, that totally happened.
I believe that completely.
He would actually sort of talk about this and try to tease out, is this possible?
Did this happen?
I mean, look, the guy was also a crank, but he was at least sort of a selective crank, if that's a thing.
So Pachenek is one of those guys, and you get a lot of this in this world.
These guys who are sort of quasi-military connected, quasi-intelligence-connected, and they've turned that into a persona where they know everything and they have all the secrets and they can see through everything.
And they're like the most dangerous people in the world because they're the only ones who are willing to tell the truth.
Through some kind of an accident, they ended up stumbling on to like the P, I guess that's more just like Bill's mythology, but yeah, they have something that they can't ever prove, but they know for sure, and they can't be killed over it because if they get killed, then you'll know it's true, right?
I um, I think that uh, it's you know, you're comparing or you're bringing up like Robert David Steele and uh Steve Pieczenik in sort of the same uh area is is is is relevant, uh, except I don't know what like, do you know if Robert David Steele actually was in the FBI or anything?
Like he makes a lot of claims, whereas Steve Pieczenik was in the State Department, he did kill Al Damora, yeah, yeah, but he did do a lot of that stuff, yeah.
It's it's always it's always hard with these guys because they're such bullshitters and they lie so much all the time that you you kind of never quite know where you are, so you just have to take their claims as they come rather than sort of do that deep dive into their backstory because so much of it is just so murky and built around their own mythology.
So, it's it's never quite as satisfying to try to dig in and sort of figure out who these people really are in terms of the QAnon uh posts and the like, uh, not coming directly from uh the uh cadre of uh potential cues.
Um, are people just make do you feel do you get the vibe that people are just making stuff up whole cloth or are they stealing it from somewhere?
Uh, with with the Q drops, uh, you know, the early story told by the Q drops of what the storm was originally supposed to be, you know, this, you know, this mass arrests unleashed by Trump through Twitter, uh, you know, the Marines of the National Guard called up.
That very much seems like something you would read in a Robert Ludlam novel, in a Tom Clancy novel.
I mean, that's another, you know, Pachenek thing, right?
He's the co-creator of the Op Center series.
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I mean, he didn't really do much with those books, but he tried.
Yeah, this, you know, you got this, you've got this sort of Tom Clancy-esque story being told, and it does seem very original.
But at some point, that story kind of burned out.
And then Q just kind of kept kicking the can down the road, which is the traditional thing that you get with this.
And one of the things that really happened with Q is that there was a need for more content.
This became really popular very quickly.
So Q needed to just put more stuff out there.
So there was a lot of stealing.
You get a lot of repurposed memes.
You get a lot of stuff grabbed off of blogs.
There's, I think, fairly early on in Q, there's a four-drop list of Rothschild central banks.
Again, not a thing.
That's not how banking works.
But it's a huge conspiracy, like Rothschilds and central banking and the Federal Reserve.
But this list of Rothschild central banks had been floating around since 2012 or 2013 from some anonymous blog, and then somebody else grabbed it and somebody else grabbed it.
And then Q grabbed it and somebody else will grab it.
The same thing happened with there was a Q drop where Q insinuates that Angela Merkel is the daughter of Adolf Hitler.
And I don't know if it'll ever bear out or actually if there's any credence to it at all.
But when we were going back and looking at some of the lead up to the 2016 election, Steve Pieczenik was on Alex's show talking about there being a secret coup of military people on the inside.
It's being, yeah, being that Achan is like full of child pornography and mass shooter manifestos.
I mean, there's that great moment in the documentary, Q into the Storm, where Liz Crokin is being told by Cullen Hoback that, you know, there's, there's child porn on Han.
And she's like, well, you know, Q is fighting, is fighting the child pornographers.
He's like, you know, Han's full of child pornography.
And she has that look on her face, like somebody kicked her dog or something.
It's just not computing with her how vile this place is.
And I think some of that has to do with like the, you know, the audience of this being a little bit older and maybe people who aren't as familiar with the realities of these message board sites, like some of them and the character that they have and what goes on there.
And there's, there's a reason that the Q ecosystem really revolved around these websites, these sort of aggregators that would post the drops after they went up on 8chan or 8kon, where you didn't have to go to the place.
That's the thing that I was really struck by is like it wasn't, it was almost distilling less than it was laundering.
It was like they took out the craziest parts that were on 8chan and they put them one step below and then one step below until the thing that was valuable suddenly shows up on Fox News.
And then people go from Fox News to the next step back up to the next step back up until they get more and more extreme.
So it was kind of a weird almost fluctuation of trickle-down bullshit being pushed back up into a feedback loop.
It's definitely a pyramid where sort of the worst stuff is like 8-chan and just the really swampy Reddit stuff, like places that most people just don't go.
And it moves upward to the more legitimate right-wing blogs and more legitimate right-wing social media.
Then it winds up on InfoWars.
Then it winds up on like Gateway Pundit.
Then it winds up on Fox News.
Then Trump tweets it.
And then it just goes right back down.
I mean, it really was a well-developed system.
I don't know that anybody like sat down and developed it.
It just, that's just how information flows with these people because nothing gets in.
It is a bubble and there are no, there's no light that pierces that bubble.
It is all suffocating darkness and paranoia and anger all the time.
I was wondering, because I was reading through this book and the beginning of QAnon happens so similarly to just all cults, you know, that just like progression of step-by-step process.
And I was seeing it happen.
And now that it just seems so replicable.
Do you know what I mean?
Like there are so many possible new QAnons if you go to any of these different spaces.
People are trying to create that phenomenon again.
You know, every one of these things is a little bit different, but they're also really similar.
You know, one of the goals I really had with writing the book was to strip back the social media sheen of QAnon and reveal what the component parts were.
And the component parts are all old.
It's all stuff that's been floating around for decades, centuries.
I mean, you go back to the blood libel of the 1200s or whatever it was.
There's very little in QAnon that's new.
So the parts of QAnon that work for people can be repurposed into new conspiracy theories, new personas.
I mean, we saw that.
We've seen that on Telegram this year where post-January 6th QAnon promoters have taken QAnon and taken it in a completely different direction.
You've got people like Ghost Ezra, people like Patel Patriot, who are taking the mythology of Q and rebuilding it into something that works for them and that can get them viral fame and money coming.
You know, everybody takes it in their own direction and some of it doesn't work and some of it does work.
And that will continue on and on and on forever because people will always be susceptible to being told what to believe and being validated in what they think is true and in being part of a special secret community.
It also sucks because like these are kind of the feelings and thoughts that I have when I when I look at this stuff and I you know, I wrestle with Alex primarily.
And it is hard to fight those feelings of like, well, this is just something that humanity is always going to have to deal with.
It's not something that can ever be like, well, we've fixed it.
And it sucks to be talking to somebody else who researches a lot of this stuff.
But I do think I did appreciate in the book also that you did very clearly delineate that blood libel part.
Like that's such an important piece of like what makes some of this like the archaic anti-Semitic tropes being cooked into a lot of these conspiracy theories is something that I think a lot of people may miss or may not want to address.
Yeah, there's a real sense of with QAnon of like, we're still doing this.
Like we're still dredging up these stereotypes, you know, based on things like the protocols of the elders of Zion, you know, these debunked myths that are knocked down over and over and over again.
But it doesn't matter to people who want these things to be true.
And everything that they do is validated by the idea that, yeah, there are wealthy string pullers who are making their lives miserable.
And the rising tide of progressivism is canceling their way of life.
It's making it, you know, wrong for them to tell the jokes they used to tell, worship the way they used to.
They can't say certain words.
Oh, they can't, you know, eat 25 burgers a week anymore.
I just, I just want somebody to come out and be like, look, we've got thousands of years of unbroken hatred towards the Jews, and we're just not going to stop now.
And Q really, whoever made those posts really understood that, that understood the way these tropes work, why they work, understood how they are communicated effectively on places like 4chan, and was able to exploit that.
I mean, whoever did, whoever wrote these drops really did know what they were doing.
They really understood American evangelical hucksterism and exploited it kind of brilliantly.
That's a really interesting perspective that I don't think I've heard a lot because I think a lot of people look at, you know, QAnon and think like, ah, this is all stupid.
And like, you know, hearing you say whoever did this was like they knew what they were doing is fascinating to me.
And the idea that they knew what they were doing doesn't necessarily mean that there was some grand conspiracy behind it, that it was some like military great psychological warfare.
You just have to know how hateful conspiratorial people think.
And if you spend enough time in places like 4chan, you can do that.
That's not that difficult.
And of course, we've seen things on 4chan, things on Reddit go mainstream viral.
We've seen it with Rickrolling.
We've seen it with Slenderman.
I mean, we know where this stuff comes from.
Pizzagate.
We know where this stuff comes from.
It's not a mystery.
People just believe it because they want to, because it's a good story and it validates things that they already believed.
And it's what I think you guys are great at is breaking this stuff down into why does it matter?
What about it matters?
What can be discarded?
How does it affect us?
And that's a really, really important thing to do is to, as much as we really like to get into the weeds and the details, that's not where most people live.
The degree to which fake stories were shared by the older Americans who got into QAnon is enormous.
I mean, people passing around this stuff because you just don't have the discernment to tell real from fake.
And you think, well, these people wouldn't lie to me.
They're my friends.
I've gotten to know them.
I hear their stories and their struggles.
Like they would never not tell me the truth.
Well, that's the basics.
That's the basis of how affinity fraud works: somebody in a community, like a trusted member of a small insular group, ruthlessly exploits the rest of the people in that group.
So one thing I definitely wanted to ask about is, you know, the biggest intersection, I think, between Alex Jones and QAnon directly is the affair of Jerome Coursey.
And I, and the timing with this stuff is always really murky, but he got really into it.
Like he was tweeting relentlessly about Q, like decoding the drops, you know, trying to figure out what was going on, tying it into his own personal stuff.
Alex was talking about how the White House wanted Coursey covering 8-Chan.
I mean, just bizarre stuff.
And then, of course, like so much of the Alex Jones world, Jones just turned on it on a dime.
And then it was disinfo.
And he talked about he talked to somebody who played golf with QAnon and like the, you know, five people who were running QAnon and now it's been taken over by Mossad.
I mean, like, like, you know how it is.
It's like, this is the most important thing in the world.
I, I, my own personal opinion, I don't really have anything that backs this up other than just knowing the people involved, is that he was trying to co-opt it and it was getting bigger and it was a threat to him and it was a threat to the sanctity of the InfoWars empire because it was it was a little bit more participatory and a little simpler.
Like against it was a game, yeah.
It was a puzzle that I mean, never mind that there was no solution to the puzzle, there was just more puzzles.
But I think he started to see it as a as more of a threat and less as something that he could sort of integrate into his own mythology.
I don't know if I have anything solid to back that up, but that's my sense too.
Like, you know, he's had this period of decades where he's essentially been the authority on a lot of this kind of conspiracy bullshit.
And you have something like Q, it threatens that authority because there's decentralized, you know, as you put it, gurus and stuff that he is no longer necessary as a gatekeeper for this stuff.
And Q is really good at allowing people to rise up and create their own version of this and profit off.
You know, you have these promoters, these people I talk about in the book, these people like In the Matrix and Joe M and Jordan Sather and on and on and on, these sort of original QAnon promoters who are making the videos and the podcasts and the live streams and the merchandise.
And they didn't need Alex Jones.
They thought Alex Jones was a sellout, was a patriot, was controlled up.
You know, they're doing this without any training.
They're just building this from the ground up.
And I can see that if you're somebody like Alex Jones, you're going, these people are a threat to me.
And the big promoters all kind of have their own niche.
Like Jordan Sather is really into like the wellness stuff and the secret space program.
Drinking the bleach, if I were drinking the bleach, the MMS, the miracle medical solution, or whatever.
Do not ever take that.
Some of them have really disappeared.
Joe M was one of the really big Q grifters.
He's the guy I write about in the book who got that charter school fundraiser canceled by sharing this interpretation of a James Comey tweet that there was going to be a false flag attack.
But then, you know, a lot of them have gotten into sort of evangelicalism.
Of course, the pandemic is all completely mixed up with it.
The stolen election is all completely mixed up with it.
And this is what I talk about with the evolution of Q is it's now just everything.
QAnon as a brand really doesn't exist anymore.
These conspiracy theories are just mainstream conservatism now.
You know, you get people who used to be in these completely different worlds of big pharma conspiracy theories, you know, anti-you know, where's Barack Obama's birth certificate conspiracy theories.
This is now all the same thing.
They all believe that vaccines are poison, masks are slave muzzles, Donald Trump is still the real president, the deep state controls everything.
You know, run for school board, everything is now everything.
And it makes it very difficult to pin down how to deal with some of these things because it's all interconnected and it all bolsters everything else.
So these this new generation of Q gurus, they're just, they're sort of pumping out everything.
Everything is related to everything else.
And it's a very lucrative persona if you do it well.
I actually, over the weekend, I was looking at Twitter and I saw like some video of on a recent episode, we were making fun of the Patriot Street Fighter.
And because I went and looked at his tour dates, he was advertising his tour on Alex's show.
And so I was looking at the tour dates and everything passed like four days in advance was all location TBD.
Like he didn't have any venues.
I'm like, ah, look at this.
This is never going to happen.
And I saw a video and it was like a full, full, like a conference room.
And granted, it looked like a bunch of, you know, pretty much just all old white people, but it still was like, that's a lot more people than I would have expected to be hanging out with the Patriot Street Fighter.
No, they, they, they would have, you know, they had a September 11th event, I think it was last year, where there was like 120 people at the Washington Monument.
That was a big deal.
And now they, there are so many of these things that they are poaching guests from each other.
Mike Flynn was supposed to speak at the Patriot Double Down, and he got a better offer from some other conference happening in the same weekend.
The way the way you're describing it, it almost like I have a real like sort of ominous feeling of it almost, it almost feels like tenants are being formed, you know, like a canonization of like a belief system is like in progress.
And we're sort of seeing it happen through these conferences and these online fights.
Yeah, it's, it's, you know, it's so, it's so weird because I have a lot of similar feelings about like a lot of the Alex stuff, but it never feels quite like it has the ability to formalize like QAnon does or like to turn into something else.
Like I think both of them are primarily scam-oriented.
You know, like Alex is a pill scam and QAnon, the various promoters are, you know, basically attention economy scamming and what have you.
But the danger of QAnon turning into something different is so another thing than like right, like just pure right-wing conspiracy stuff.
I'm working on a theory about Alex actually providing a weird sort of bulwark against something along the lines of QAnon by having more control over that space.
You know, he creates almost a bottleneck there.
And I think what we're seeing is that what happens when you let all the steam out is a massive diffuse organization that nobody can have any control over, you know?
And never mind that they were using that term right at the very beginning, that the most popular pro-Q book is literally called QAnon, an invitation to the great awakening.
They all bought it, but then they decide that that term never existed.
Yeah, the deep state mapping project and all that stuff, because it makes you look insane.
Yeah, it makes you look like the red strings and the corkboard.
And, you know, it makes you look like a raving lunatic.
Whereas, you know, somehow insinuating that Donald Trump is still the president because he signed some executive order 12 years ago and his, you know, time-traveling uncle used Tesla technology.
I think one of the weirdest things that QAnon has actually revealed is that these people don't know how anything works.
They don't know how civics works.
They don't know how economics works.
So you can kind of just tell them, like, oh, if you sign an executive, if the president signs an executive order, well, then it must be law forever, right?
And it's, it's, you know, they don't know how banking works.
They don't know how money works.
They don't know how the media works.
They, it's a, it's a misunderstanding of the basics of the world filtered through the way that they want things to be or the or the way that things used to be and are not anymore.
And they cling to that and they cling to the reality that they have created for themselves.
And that reality is a lot more entertaining and has them a lot more successful and has the bad people eventually being punished and has somebody in control.
And that's really what we all want is somebody in control.
It is it is both incredibly basic psychology and the most incomprehensible garbage that you will ever stumble upon.
And somehow these people are able to kind of have one foot in each and like make it work for themselves and rationalize away the failures and the cognitive dissonance and the obvious fraud.
And it just, this is the world they want to live in and nobody's getting them out of it.
But there was one dude who, whenever he believed that the world was going to end, so he went to his own house, stood up on top of his roof, and at the stroke of midnight, just fell off and he died.
And the more I thought about that, the more I was like, oh man, that guy is so stupid.
He could have survived.
And then now, looking at all these QAnon people, that guy is easily the happiest person ever to live in that cult, right?
And one of the things that I see so often about all the narratives around QAnon is look at how bad these people on 8chan and 8kon and are all look at how bad all of these people are.
But no one is at all dealing with the fact that the reason it is easy to believe in QAnon is because all of the systems have failed these people.
Like it's not like they were doing great.
You know, you go into these hoping that Hillary Clinton is murdered by the government because the 90s weren't great.
And, you know, I get asked a lot about the demographics of QAnon.
And yeah, it's primarily white.
It's, you know, split down the middle men and women, upper, you know, middle class, upper middle class.
But the biggest demographic for belief in QAnon is already being a conspiracy theory.
Very few people, I mean, practically none that I've seen have been just like MSNBC watching, New York Times reading, you know, centrist Democrats who just one day just happened to go to X22 report or watch, you know, fall of the cabal and then suddenly got radicalized into thinking that there's a pedophile cult running the world.
You were already a Barack Obama birth certificate person.
You were already somebody who had their sort of knowledge base rewired by Trump winning and exposing all of the corruption that you thought you thought about, but you never could put into words.
That was already your world.
You were already listening to InfoWars.
You were already reading Gateway Pundit or Breitbart or whatever.
She was just the next rung on the ladder.
And of course, a lot of people are coming to that ladder from different things, but it's anti-vax stuff.
It's big pharma conspiracy theories.
It's, you know, anti-5G, anti-Bill Gates, anti-globalism, super, super hardcore Bernie Sanders who thought Hillary screwed him out of the nomination in 2016.
Whatever it is, there is a conspiracy theory for you, and it will lead to QAnon because QAnon involves all of it.
Yeah, like if you're eight steps down the road, no matter what road it is, it's easy to take those two steps to get to the final point.
But if you're like at step one or you're not even down that road, you're not going to, it's not attractive enough of a conspiracy to get you to be like, yeah, I'm going to go from zero to 60 on this.
I think, I think that one of the things that we always talk about, and it just is like when if you're, if you deal with the complexity of a lot of issues and events that happen in the world, a lot of these conspiracies don't really make sense.
But if you don't want to deal with that and you want to look at things kind of in a sort of overly simplistic black and white way, they're like heroin.
And I mean, you, you know, again, you look at this shit right now and you see Mansion and cinema are like, well, you know, everybody wants this stuff, but I guess we're paid enough to say fuck off.
And it does make sense for you to think, fuck it, I want Trump to just stroke a pen and do this because these people are fucking corrupt.
And one of the things that I think is really key, I think it's close to what you're getting at, is that like, I think that it's so relevant to make fun of the thing, but not the people.
And I think people kind of make the mistake of making fun of the people who believe this stuff as opposed to mocking the idea.
But I will mock those people, you know, all the time.
But the actual like rank and file believers, the people who are really stuck in this, I do have empathy for those people because I think they're caught up in something that is way worse than they think it is.
And at some point, the rug is going to get pulled out from under them.
And then what do you have left?
Who is left in your life that wants to hear about this, that wants to help you after you've said and done possibly reprehensible or illegal things?
And I have a lot of empathy for the people who are caught up in this.
And, you know, it is that classic thing of like, you know, when you go down the road towards this, you don't take the first step knowing that it's going to lead to something reprehensible.
Let's say, or, you know, it's, there's, there's a rational, maybe pseudo-rational reason why, you know, you go down the road and then before you know it, you're far down into muck territory.
If faking that you have inside knowledge that Hillary Clinton is on the run and is going to be arrested on November 3rd, then you go, oh, I want that to happen.
And if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this because it would be if you're just telling people that everything is awful all the time, eventually people, some people like that, but I think most people will tune out.
I think the thing that keeps me going is people do get out of QAnon.
People do find the weakness and the dangling thread to pull on.
And then the whole thing falls apart.
People are capable of walking away from this.
And people are capable of understanding it and of maybe looking out for the signs that somebody they care about is getting radicalized into Q or a Q adjacent conspiracy theory.
And then they maybe have read my book or they've listened to you guys and then they kind of know what to look for a little bit.
And then they could maybe stop it before it goes a little bit too far.
That's my hope is that as we go forward into this, more XQ people will come out and sort of talk openly and on the record about their experience.
I mean, you have something like Scientology, where there is a very large group of apostates who are fearlessly speaking out about this without fear of the repercussions that they're going to have.
Q is just too new to have that.
You just, the people who have left it, they're reintegrating into the world.
They can't launch the podcast yet because they're still grappling with it.
The chance, I mean, once you kind of know what buttons to push and who is the audience that can be riled up with this kind of culture war red beat, I can imagine it becomes tempting to cash in and you're tired of like fighting for scoops and you're tired of like butting your head against the government and the big media.
And then you go, shit, I'm going to, I'm going to cash in.
And at the same time, you have to keep some of yourself back, knowing like, like Alex, like, I know COVID's real, but I keep it to myself to make sure that nobody fucking takes that next step, you know?