What childhood events later transform an aspiring screenwriter into a QAnon influencer? Travis made his way through a nearly 500 page book to find out. DON'T MISS THE 2ND EPISODE EVERY WEEK! SUB AT PATREON.COM/QANONANONYMOUS Music by Pontus Berghe (www.chapelone.com)
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| And the result of that crowdfunding is this 483-page paperback book, complete with full-color images and fancy French flaps. | |
| And here's what it says on the back cover. | |
| Who is QAnon? | |
| There's a revolution going on in America. | |
| And up until this point, most had no idea anything was happening at all. | |
| Unbeknownst to the general public, an insider embedded deep within the Trump administration was given a nearly impossible task. | |
| Neon, no using this awesome voiceover for your own advantage. | |
| Just calling that out now. | |
| Assemble a team of patriots, military intelligence types who knew the real score. | |
| Bypass the media and create a parallel construction. | |
| Engage with a select group of superlative civilians so that they can spread the word. | |
| Systematically expose a worldwide death cult that has seeped into all levels of power in all countries and which has ruled for generations. | |
| And finally, dismantle this evil cabal before exposing these criminals in front of the entire world and dragging them in to finally face justice for their countless crimes against humanity. | |
| Along the way, thousands of digital soldiers volunteered their time, their energy, and their resources to advancing this cause. | |
| And as the world of QAnon spread, their ranks and exploits grew. | |
| I, Neon Revolt, feel privileged to come myself among their ranks. | |
| This is my story. | |
| This is the story of Anand's and the Great Awakening. | |
| This is the story of QAnon. | |
| in It goes over basic claims about who Q purports to be, Pizzagate, birtherism, individual Q-proofs, Angela Merkel is secretly related to Hitler, that sort of stuff. | |
| Normal stuff. | |
| Yeah, normal stuff. | |
| So I'm not going to go over all of that and rehash it for our beloved Patreon supporters. | |
| But what I am going to do is I'm going to zero in on one chapter that I personally found fascinating, and that's Chapter 4. | |
| And we're going to actually spend the majority of our time going over that chapter. | |
| And I'm going to kind of like skim over the rest of the book. | |
| And the reason is, is that chapter four is so fascinating, is that Neon talks about his life and how he became a devotee of Q. And that's interesting because one thing that really drives me to try and figure out QAnon is that on a certain level, I'm baffled why anyone would think that this whole grand narrative is an accurate account of the world. | |
| Like, what goes on inside of a person's mind to make them actually sincerely believe that something like this is true? | |
| And fortunately, Neon tells a story. | |
| Now, I'm of the opinion that Neon Revolt is actually kind of a bright person. | |
| I think he has deranged, demonstrably false beliefs, but he demonstrates in his work that he is kind of smart and creative. | |
| Now, I think there's this sort of misconception that if you are a smart person, then you'll believe true things or you'll advocate for moral positions, but I just don't think that's true. | |
| But it leaves us with a question. | |
| So, how does someone as smart as Neon get radicalized into a community and a belief system as deranged as QAnon? | |
| Well, fortunately, he lays it all out in this book in chapter four, which is entitled, You Are Taking Back Control. | |
| And that chapter is 54 pages, which is about 11% of the entire book. | |
| So it's like an affirmation that he wrote for himself. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You are taking back control. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| He's looking at himself in the mirror in the morning. | |
| Yeah, it's interesting. | |
| It's basically about, mostly about how little control he has over his life and what happened to him in his life. | |
| But now I can post my way into feeling better. | |
| That's right. | |
| So even though I think it's the most interesting chapter of the book, Neon includes a disclaimer that almost apologizes for even including it. | |
| One disclaimer before we embark on this chapter. | |
| This is the most autobiographical chapter in the book. | |
| Many of my readers will undoubtedly be more interested in what I have to tell them about QAnon than in me, and may mistake this chapter as a mere exercise in vanity. | |
| But I realize in writing all this that I am but one lens through which to view Q. I certainly have my own biases, which the more astute readers may have already started to pick up on, and for which I do not apologize. | |
| By the end of the chapter, I hope you'll see these biases more clearly. | |
| So, in the interest of helping you better understand this particular lens, I've included this chapter, which talks about the origins of my work. | |
| How I came to cover Q and the events leading up to all this. | |
| Now, Neon, if you want to take some of that $150K and hire me to read the audiobook, I absolutely am open and available. | |
| What the fuck? | |
| Within minutes? | |
| My DMs on Twitter are open at RealRoktansky. | |
| Within minutes of saying you can't use this, you're trying to get him to hire you. | |
| Well, for money, apparently. | |
| Incredible. | |
| You'll take money from Travis View, who paid for this book. | |
| You'll take some of Travis's hard-earned money, which he was about to laud over you for taking, which obviously he doesn't apply the same moral standards to himself as a contributor to the campaign. | |
| Fair enough. | |
| Listen, this is the episode in which we completely morally collapse in on ourselves in every fucking way. | |
| Try to get hired by them, give them money. | |
| Big piece of papaya. | |
| Who gives a shit? | |
| I'm going to tattoo myself with the fucking word Q. This podcast is on a very good course. | |
| I think we're... this is great. | |
| Chapter 4 opens with Dian describing a low point in his life, one day in September of 2017, | |
| which happens to be the month before the very first Q-drop appeared. | |
| He says that he felt empty, tapped out, numb inside, and unable to get out of bed. | |
| He was around 30, had been working at a grocery store for low wages for five years, And his long-distance Canadian girlfriend had just dumped him. | |
| Man, I know how that is. | |
| Come on! | |
| He's literally the stereotype of, yeah, I've got a girlfriend, she lives in Canada. | |
| Yeah, you know what? | |
| God, I hate getting dumped by my imaginary girlfriend. | |
| No! | |
| The thing is that he included this in the book. | |
| I believe him, because who would make... If you were to make up a girlfriend, you'd make up a real-life girlfriend that you see in real life. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, this is so painful. | |
| I feel it rings true. | |
| I was completely alienated. | |
| This is the exact example of how capitalism leaves us alienated and void and empty and then we're like, hmm. | |
| I too have felt betrayed by a Canadian girlfriend. | |
| I empathize with our friend Mr. Revolt. | |
| So as he describes it, her father had stepped in and decided that Neon was unfit for his | |
| daughter. | |
| So, pity. | |
| Whoa. | |
| Jesus, Neon. | |
| I know. | |
| This is painful, man. | |
| It is, it is. | |
| Come on. | |
| You know what? | |
| I appreciate Neon for being so open and vulnerable in this chat. | |
| You know what? | |
| I kind of do. | |
| He could have made up talking about how he was such a badass in his 30s or his 20s. | |
| Everything was going well for him. | |
| But this is the part of the infomercial where it's you pretend that you don't know how to pour orange juice out of a carafe or something. | |
| Even then he could have made it sound like mildly frustrating. | |
| Not like my girlfriend who lives a thousand miles away in Canada dumped me over Skype. | |
| Not even dumped me. | |
| She has such low volition that her father Told her to do something, and she did it. | |
| Or she lied to me by using her father as an excuse. | |
| Every part of it is really sad. | |
| Don't make me like Neon Revolt. | |
| Don't do this to me, Travis. | |
| Don't make me feel compassion for him. | |
| I'm trying to impress upon you that a lot of this rings authentic, because who would openly admit this? | |
| Absolutely heartbreaking. | |
| So from here, the chapter flashes back to various scenes earlier in his life that led up to this point. | |
| The earliest when he was five or six years old. | |
| One day, when he was upset with his mother, young Neon gave his mom the double middle finger. | |
| By his mother's furious reaction, he realized that he had done something horrible and so he ran and hid. | |
| I love it! | |
| Fuck you mom! | |
| Fuck you mom! | |
| This book rules! | |
| By his mother's furious reaction, he realized that he had done something horrible, and so | |
| he ran and hid. | |
| Here's how Neon describes it. | |
| The only way I can describe what happened next was that it was like that scene in Jurassic | |
| Park where the kids are hiding from the velociraptors in the kitchen. | |
| So well hidden was I that I could see my mother, roving back and forth through the house, shouting my name, like some kind of furious bloodhound who had lost the scent of its prey. | |
| Wait, so, okay, first he compares his bomb to a Velociraptor, then, incapable of maintaining the analogy until the end of the same paragraph, shifts to a bloodhound. | |
| Yep. | |
| Well, listen, on one side, this is hilarious. | |
| On the other side, it's also bad writing. | |
| Hey, win-win. | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| On another side, on a third-dimensional side, he references a great movie, Jurassic Park, which shows that he's got great taste. | |
| And who hasn't seen that scene and been like, that Velociraptor's exactly like my mom? | |
| My mom, after I flicked her off with both swears. | |
| And who, years later, wouldn't write that into a book if they did think that, you know? | |
| Yeah, you're right. | |
| He's smart. | |
| You're right, Travis. | |
| You know what? | |
| He's as smart as you. | |
| All right, I have to gloss over that ownage. | |
| Eventually, his mother caught him and then spanked him until his butt was blistered and raw. | |
| Wait, wait, blistered? | |
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| Thank you. | |
| Thanks. | |
| I love you. |