Episode 121: Secret Society of the Spectacle feat Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House
Matt Christman leads us further into the blinding light of our society of the spectacle. Are human beings truly well-suited for their role as "homo economicus"? And how do belief systems like QAnon and concepts like the "deep state" play into all of this? We hector Matt with the help of Liv Posting.
↓↓↓↓ SUBSCRIBE FOR $5 A MONTH SO YOU DON'T MISS THE SECOND WEEKLY EPISODE ↓↓↓↓
https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Follow Matt Christman: http://twitter.com/cushbomb
Follow Liv Posting: http://twitter.com/livposting
QAA Merch / Join the Discord Community / Find the Lost Episodes / Etc: https://qanonanonymous.com
Episode music by Pontus Berghe, Matthew Delatorre (http://implantcreative.com), Doom Chakra Tapes (http://doomchakratapes.bandcamp.com)
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 121 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Society of the Spectacle episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
The long shadow of the Deep State casts itself across the crowd, gathered to finally hear the seven trumpets sound.
But as they gaze up at their monolith-shaped savior, and the minutes pass, the statuesque man emits no call.
Murmurs make their way through the dark masses.
Is this not the end?
Has the storm been delayed?
Soon anger erupts, not at the president, of course, but rather at the shadows blanketing the crowd.
People turn on one another as they scramble for the thinning slivers of remaining light.
Grifters and merchants, once talentless nobodies, spring up from the crowd to embolden and monetize the despair and fury.
Then a solitary sound, like the dying note of some ancient instrument.
The masses watch in horror and elation as their savior's body begins disintegrating.
And for just a moment, faces in the crowd are illuminated by stray beams of light.
But not for long.
Just as the president disappears, a smoke-like miasma fills his space, hanging malevolently.
In it, faces appear, cycling wildly.
H.W.
Bush.
Richard Brannan.
John Foster Dulles.
Jared from Subway.
Furious, the crowd bays at the shapeless monolith, demanding the return of the shadow cast by that other guy, the one they like.
Soon they are fighting among themselves in the darkness once more.
But the monolith remains.
This week we've invited Matt Chrisman of Chapo Trap House to lead us further into the blinding light of our Society of the Spectacle.
Along the way we'll touch on disputed concepts like the Deep State and fighting disinformation, but also the current rifts forming in the Republican Party and the possibility of a new collective project in spite of our current homo economicus shaped prison cells.
And Liv Posting will be joining us, she had some questions for him as well.
But before all that, QAnon News!
First up, Senate Democrats request a threat assessment of QAnon from the FBI.
A group of 14 Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, wrote FBI Director Christopher Wray to request a full accounting of the threat posed by QAnon.
They also requested analysis on, quote, the role of foreign influence actors in nurturing and amplifying QAnon.
Chuck Schumer posted this tweet after the request was announced.
QAnon is a threat to our democratic institutions.
Their disinformation has amplified hatred and violence.
We are demanding that the FBI be up front about the threat to our democracy and national security posed by QAnon movements, foreign and domestic.
So, I mean, this might be, I mean, a genuinely interesting pivot for the Biden administration is that they may look more deeply into right wing extremism, you know, in the in the U.S.
And that might mean we're going to get captured by the deep state.
You know, finally, we'll see.
For my next story, Sidney Powell's final Kraken lawsuit dismissed by the courts.
Ah, the final wet fart in just a long, humiliating series of squeakers.
The last tentacle of the kraken has been severed from its behemoth body, cast out into the sea.
QAnon lawyer Sidney Powell has filed lawsuits in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin as part of a campaign to overturn the results of the election.
The last of these cracking lawsuits, the Wisconsin one, was finally dismissed by U.S.
District Judge Pamela Pepper in a 45-page ruling.
That ruling says this in part.
After that ruling, Sidney Powell retweeted a tweet by QAnon promoter Major Patriot, which says this.
I don't want Trump to win as a result of a court ruling.
I don't want Trump to win as a result of military action.
I want Trump to win when Biden and Harris not only concede but also confess their crimes on national television in order to avoid capital punishment.
Awfully baffling for a lawyer to say, I don't want to win in court.
That doesn't matter to me.
Adding to the legal failures of the allies of the Trump campaign, the Supreme Court rejected a suit filed by Texas seeking to prevent Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin from casting their electoral votes for Biden.
Adding insult to injury, none of the three justices appointed by Trump dissented.
That's what happens when you appoint someone to a lifetime position and then you can't take it back.
Like, they don't give a shit.
Yeah, they don't give a fuck about you.
They could say fuck off forever.
Especially if your latest, I guess, attempt to do something in politics is just an enormous, humiliating, pants-shitting show.
This development evidently demoralized a lot of digital soldiers.
So one of the original QAnon promoters, Tracy Diaz, aka Tracy Beans, took to Periscope to berate anyone who felt like it was over and Biden really was going to be president.
In a war, when you lose a battle, you don't cry in your Cheerios and go home.
We would never have gotten anywhere in this country if we acted that way when we had lost a battle.
If you want to keep fighting for what is right, this election was rightfully won by President Trump.
If you want to keep fighting for this country until the very last avenue that exists is gone, stay here.
If you don't, move out of the way and stop demoralizing the fellow soldiers that are standing on the battlefield who still have the fight in you.
Stop demoralizing everybody.
Stop it.
There's this weird, I don't know, mindset in MAGA world where, like, acknowledging reality is a kind of defeat.
Like, just recognizing the fact that, you know, I guess we fought as good as we can, but it's just an inevitability.
That's a kind of weakness or a failure in their mind.
Like, it's like they think of, like, the Trump presidency as Tinkerbell.
If you stop believing in it, then, like, it goes away.
It dies.
I guess it was always here, but they've sort of devolved into sort of like Independence Day speech, like platitudes, just like, we will rise on the battle to keep fight.
Like it's, there's nothing, there's no substance there.
It's, it's pure emotion.
Yeah.
They just want to feel like warriors.
They want to feel like victors and like, and like believing that there's some sort of miracle that Trump is going to pull off to make him magically win the election is just part of, you know, getting that good high feeling of like, you're on the winning side.
So what's next for QAnon followers?
Many are holding out hope that the military will swoop in and save the day to prevent a Biden administration.
They often point to a 2018 executive order signed by Donald Trump titled, Executive Order on Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in the United States Election.
Among other things, that executive order requires the Director of National Intelligence to submit a report on foreign election interference 45 days after the election.
So the deadline for that is this coming Friday.
Oh boy!
In the QAnon imagination, this coming report will show that China interfered with the election so severely to effectively invalidate it.
And this will cause Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and cement his power via martial law or something.
There's a lot of yada, yada, yada, honestly, with these explanations.
Like, there's this report that's going to come out, and it's going to be explosive, and then Trump wins.
QAnon followers are obsessed with these disposable heroes.
First, they thought that Jeff Sessions was going to rush in and save the day, and then they said, trust Ray.
And then they thought Barr was going to do it, and then Horowitz, and then Durham, of course, who's now a special prosecutor, apparently.
And then they hoped that Ellen Wood was going to do it, and of course, Sidney Powell.
And of course, they've all let them down.
And so finally, their last sort of ditched effort is the Director of National Intelligence, who is going to write a required report.
And this will somehow save the day.
And honestly, what's most likely to happen is that the report will come out and it'll say, just like in 2016, they'll say, yes, there were instances of interference, but it was not enough to, you know, move the needle of the election or affect the election outcome in any ways.
At which point the QAnon people will dig in and they'll say, well, but there was interference because that's never happened before, you know?
Other QAnon followers are more accepting of the inevitability of Biden's inauguration.
For example, I spotted this tweet thread from a popular QAnon follower named Anon661.
What if a Trump second term was never actually part of the plan?
We know Trump was merely the face of the alphabet team, not the mastermind.
So hypothetically, let's say Trump loses all of his court battles, Biden and Harris step in, and quote, the plan officially begins.
At that point, military intelligence could really show themselves and officially take over the shadow government.
Trump couldn't be blamed.
He and his family, having served honorably, would be someplace safe while the real battle takes place.
You're spitballing here, but when you spend as much time thinking about this shit as I do, your brain starts working overtime.
Admittedly, this line of thinking is well outside of the box.
I'm just curious if anyone else has wondered this as well.
Has Q ever mentioned a Trump second term?
I love this because I've been waiting for it.
I've been waiting for the plan that will finally become real during the Biden administration.
And I see a little trickle of that kind of thinking coming through in the QAnon community.
Let's see how popular it gets.
Yeah, I think this Punisher skull wearing a Santa hat has a point.
Matt is a co-host of the Chapel Trap House podcast and has been publishing solo vlogs for a while now as well.
Welcome back to the show, Matt.
I think it's the third time?
I believe so, baby.
I'm in the three-strike club.
I am now out.
Speaking of the three stars, the three strikes, Michael Flynn has been on this kind of tour of like far-right media outlets.
I sent you a few clips.
There's like Bongino, of course, but he also went straight up on one of the oldest QAnon shows, In the Matrix and Shady Grooves Show.
And I mean, what do you think of this development, this new Flynn?
Get the digital army going.
You digitally arm it.
You do it, guys.
You digitally do it.
You're gonna digitally make it happen.
I'm proud of you guys.
You're all digital warriors.
What I was struck by most of all is just how familiar he sounded in just that he sounds
like everybody on every side of the political spectrum who is undergoing the task of trying
to convince people that there is any reason to pay attention to politics, that they have
any effect on it.
And it's this combination of just con artistry of saying, keep paying attention, keep watching,
most importantly keep funding whatever I'm doing and paying attention to me.
And then self-delusion, the sense that if we keep doing this it's going to lead to something.
But I think whether or not they're aware of it, and really that's the only difference you have is degree of self-awareness among these people.
Everybody is at base just trying to Monetize, directly or indirectly, the continued delusional American faith that the political system is in any way vulnerable to the concentrated will of its citizens.
Even things as powerful as memes.
I mean, the power of memes is as a...
As a soporific and as a placebo, you're blasting out memes you feel like you're accomplishing something.
And as long as everybody around is invested in telling you you are accomplishing something, including people who you hate, who take those memes seriously because it justifies whatever scam they're running on their credulous supporters, then they are powerful.
But they'll never do what they're telling you they'll do, which is actually change anything.
But there has been change in terms of the sleight of hand just getting shoddier.
I mean, how shoddy can the sleight of hand get?
Well, if there's no alternative, it'll get as bad as it's allowed to get, which will be very, very bad.
The spectacle is so important that even the right is doing basically stolen valor for posting.
They want them to post so much that it's like, you are like a soldier.
This is your war.
It's amazing.
Yes, this is your war!
On the left, that's what people are being convinced of all the time, that there's activism involved in tweeting and posting and in listening and absorbing media, that it has a tectonic relationship And on that interview with Matrix and Shady Groove, I mean, it sounds like Flynn sort of hints that he's launching some kind of online platform for the digital soldiers.
Watch this space!
On Re-Listen, I think he was basically kind of taught, he's just very bad at speaking, just bottom line.
Forming sentences.
So the digital soldiers thing, I think he meant to say like, you are the digital soldiers, that's just his code word for the QAnon people, like that entire fucking mass of screaming people.
And then, you know, they're going to get some capabilities soon.
And I think he means, I'll give you the intel so you can go and fucking unleash the memes and go to protests.
Yeah, you will have, I will, give me the money, I will give you the armor, I will arm you for the digital battle to come.
What is the fraud that, I mean, a guy like Flynn, his success comes in his probable the fact that he doesn't even know that he's scamming these people.
He's as much scamming himself as anybody because he has the brain of a fruit fly.
But the central fraud is the idea that there is any kind of relationship here.
And what's amazing is that with this, with the election, you are seeing in real time That the relationship between QAnon and the Republican Party is essentially mirrored to the relationship between the left, whatever you mean by that, and the Democratic Party.
Because there is an ask here.
Stop the steal.
And you have all these Republican politicians saying, we want to stop the steal!
We will stop the steal.
We're going to do it.
And you guys are going to help us do it.
But it's not going to happen.
Because the actual interests of the Institutional Republican Party have nothing to do with keeping Trump in office.
And everything to do with maintaining the fiction of the system as such.
With both parties signing off on it.
And so they will, in their face, over the next month, waiting up until Inauguration Day, string these people along until they're all just standing there with their mouths open watching Biden be inaugurated.
And that will be the closest thing to a Great Disappointment, Millerite, come to reality moment as we're going to see.
And then the real question will be, what comes after that?
A new narrative where Biden is actually Trump now.
That would be amazing.
Behind the scenes.
Give them two months of cyberpunk, they absolutely will think that.
There is no depth.
I mean, they already believe in clones.
They already believe in microchips.
I mean, it's just whatever.
Whoever, whatever random Chan poster or Twitter person or Reddit, Redditor, comes up with the best plot line for, you know, 2020 to 2024.
Trump is actually like a chloroform-like looking piglet, you know, that lives like Kwato inside Biden's belly now.
And you can tell because of the way that Biden's eyes twitch and he repeats words and stuff like that.
I want to talk to you also a little bit about, you know, lately we've seen social media companies and other corporations basically allying with the government and the intelligence apparatus to fight what they call disinformation and conspiracy theories, which I consider that, like, our podcast covers that.
But I somehow am cringing at their definition of it.
So, I mean, what do you think we're looking at here?
Well, I mean, what we're looking at here is an attempt to put the genie of a post-authority media landscape back in the bottle, which, I mean, you cannot do.
It will not work.
How are they going to try to manufacture some sort of consensus reality?
It will not take.
Because the strings are too visible.
Everyone knows who is on what side.
Everyone knows what platform and which politician and which media company.
Everyone knows in their mind, or they think they know, what they stand for.
And so there will be no accommodation.
All those little notes that Quitter is putting on all of Trump's posts to say, this is disputed.
None of that impacts anyone's actual beliefs about what's happening.
And can't.
And there will always be, because there will be this alienation from the official narrative, there will be a huge demand pool for alternatives.
And as long as the technology exists to provide people with that, it will be satisfied.
And it does seem like the technology is advancing, but at the same time there's more surveillance.
There's now a denser network of cell phone GPS locations through 5G.
So, do you think that the acceleration of technology will have that democratizing effect in any way?
Like, they can keep fleeing to parlors and clones like that?
Well, it's less about whether or not they actually stamp out these beliefs and change
the mind of any of these Republicans than whether or not they're able to, to themselves
and their shareholders and to some imagined public, justify themselves.
And thanks to their hegemonic control and the monopolization of media and technology,
they'll be able to do that at whim.
Their attempts even to assert it is really more about just pride, honestly, and about
advertising their own power to themselves and to the people within the greater sphere
of the enthralled masses who actually do listen to official narratives.
Than about changing the opinions of anyone outside of that, because at the end of the day, all are our opinions.
All these QAnon people, except for the most febrile tendrils of instability, are just consumers like everybody else, and their contribution to politics, no matter how alienated they get from the establishment version of reality, will amount to purchases.
It will amount to spectacles of indulgence like going to these protests or wearing a shirt or annoying their family members but nothing that cannot be absorbed and recuperated within the greater system.
And it seems like even like the leaders of the movements are themselves sort of subsumed into the spectacle as we see with how much reality TV Trump watches and like something you mentioned before about how like Flynn there's a certain element of Flynn that is sincere and not cynical that he sort of believes it too.
And it seems like that's a very particular phenomenon, I guess, of the Republicans.
Like, it seems like a lot of the Democrats still have this sort of cynical distance to the base.
But, you know, inevitably, it seems like they will also be, like, subsumed into the spectacle.
Now, everyone has to be subsumed.
Even if you're a part of this machinery at any level of power, you have to have a story you tell yourself every day about why you're doing it.
And with Republicans, you see the process since Reagan of the true believers slowly marching up into the highest echelons of power.
They're not fully there yet, but you can see the move.
And that's because there's less cognitive dissonance between being a Republican elected
official or media figure and carrying out the Republican agenda, the actual one, as
opposed to the public face of it.
Whereas there is an inherent tension and conscious tension among Democrats between what they're
telling their supporters and what they know is possible, which means that they will take
longer.
And but I mean, they're also hostage to their own ideological insanity, the idea of like
pragmatic progressivism that they take seriously.
And that's as delusional as the as the Republicans belief in, you know, the secret bases and
the lizard people.
But more boring.
The function is the same.
You end up filling the same roles in the same system.
I wanted to talk as well about the concept of the deep state, which is now just way more common.
It's not just Alex Jones talking about it.
You hear it on the left, you hear it on the right, and everybody has a totally different definition for it, basically.
Do you think it's a useful word at all?
I mean, I think it's kind of here to stay anyways, but what do you think of the different conflicting versions?
Well, I mean, at this point, deep state just means, the deep state is the remainder of the math problem of living in an America that has certain values that you assume are enduring and real, and that you are a part of, and an American people that you imagine yourself psychically to be part of, and America as it's lived and experienced, and that you are alienated from.
How can these two things be?
And the answer is, well, there's this deep state.
And the thing is that that's actually accurate.
That is true.
The difference between America as we understand it to be as a project and its manifestation in the world are the functions of the state alienated from the political process that endure regardless of political outcomes.
But there's no, there's nothing beyond that because even their alienation is immediately rendered sterile by its investment with the narratives of QAnon or any of the other sort of political fairy tales that we tell ourselves.
Because there's no, like the solution, what's the solution to the deep state?
Post.
I'm sorry, you're telling me that there is a cabal of people who are actually right next to the most material expressions of American power in the form of its clandestine services, its military, its surveillance capabilities, its monetary structures.
It's judiciary and media superstructural elements, and you're gonna post them out of office?
You're gonna post them out of their ratholes?
Well, I mean, there's posting and then there's journalism, right?
Writing an article about PRISM.
Is that a form of posting?
I mean... Yeah, it's all just posting.
Like, okay, now you know about PRISM.
Now what?
Yeah, right.
Oh, you know, what if it just came out, yeah, you know those deep underground military bases filled with dissected aliens and cloned celebrities and kidnapped children?
Yeah, that's real, now what?
Well, you're right, actually, because the thing is, it's like, okay, now you know about PRISM, now what?
Well, the now what is that you build the narrative that builds off one piece of truth of PRISM into something that is completely fantastical, you know, more interesting, like underground bases, like all of that stuff.
one humming server. I mean we see that with QAnon all the time where they'll
take one thing that's true you know like like the you know like all the Epstein
shit and then say that well because that is true it is also true that Hillary
Clinton has mole children you know buried under her you know chappatequois
you know farmhouse. They know that the server room is a boring setting too
because they had to have a CIA versus what was it The police fought the CIA?
No, it was a military raid in Germany.
CIA versus army shootout at the server farm in Hamburg.
Absolutely my favorite story of the QAnon election era, for sure.
Yeah, tell me about this map.
Is it good?
Is this server farm map good?
And what happened there with the CIA?
I know you've been following this closely, so I want to know, what was that battle like?
It was intense, man.
There was a heavy kinetic engagement between patriotic, white-headed Defense Department special operators and CIA contractors from Afghanistan who were there to protect the servers, the stolen Trump ballots, the aliens, all of the celebrity clones.
Actually, they had to pour chlorine in all the celebrity clone tanks.
They lost a whole batch.
That's going to put them back significantly for next year.
You sort of elaborated before about how QAnon fits into relation to the spectacle for Republicans, but it's interesting how you mentioned how like posting on the left relates to a sort of a similar relationship to the Democrats.
Which reminds me a lot of, uh, the DOJ spent, like, billions of dollars trying to, like, um, spy on anarchists on Twitter in Portland.
Yeah.
And the only thing they found was who was cancelled.
It had literally no actual reference to, like, real organizing on the ground.
Nope.
Just finding out who can't show up to the cookout.
Yeah, yeah.
Exiled from the cookout. This is the raw stuff. This is the raw intelligence. Yeah
Yeah I mean maybe maybe like we can hold the DOJ accountable if
they Understand the arguments of why those people are cancelled
and they can they can do better in their own lives I gotta say it would be funny if the if the anarchists
ended up bringing down the deep state just because They observed this culture of you know
Total distrust and paranoia and and self-seeking and it just slowly infects
Like through the first through the people who watch it you know in the in the server farms for the NSA or whatever
and then they just slowly bring that into their office politics and
And before you know it, everyone in the Deep State is denouncing each other for problematic content.
And for acts, and there's just no one there to operate the chemtrail machines and the fluoride brainwashing mechanisms anymore?
To a certain extent, more of the political bureaucracy is being integrated into this.
And I think especially with like Trump.
And I wonder what the conclusions of this sort of aesthetic, aestheticization of politics at the upper levels, in like a really more sort of cohesive sense, will have on politics But I guess to a certain extent it'll just embolden the spectacle.
Because you know, Trump was amazing for the spectacle.
Oh yeah.
He has posting brain.
He's purely online.
And it only accelerated it.
Yeah.
And I mean you might actually get, if it goes far enough, you could get a thing where some of this QAnon stuff about different factions of the government being controlled by different political factions.
That might end up coming true, you know, and they might end up start competing with each other on explicitly ideological grounds, but the end result will be the same.
It'll essentially just be a further lobotomization of the state's capacity for organization, which we're already seeing.
Like, the state is supposed to be the executive committee of the bourgeois.
They're supposed to take the interests of individual capitalist enterprises and express their collective self-interest And transcend their, you know, specific desires that they can't see past.
Well, you know, the entrepreneurialism of American politics with the breakdown of party discipline means that now everybody at every point is acting like a capitalist within the state structure itself for the political angle or at the political level.
And then over time, that's inevitably going to filter down into the bureaucracy.
And all it will mean is that the state will continue carrying out its role just less competently.
So, as conditions get worse, as crises accumulate, the state will be, at every level, from bureaucratic to political, be less able to meet reality as it is emerging, and instead, outcomes are going to be determined by this spectacular ideological contest that's not actually connected to any of the real questions and crises that need to be resolved.
Yeah, you've mentioned that capitalism with Chinese characteristics seems to have a competent state structure, that they aren't dealing with a lot of these issues.
Do you wonder if that will be an issue for them in the future?
Is this an issue that's eminent to capitalism and capital acceleration?
It is an inevitable outgrowth of capital acceleration, but the difference really more than anything comes down to the conditions of capitalists emerging in the United States versus in China.
And, more specifically, the fact that the United States is the most capitally developed country.
It was the one that wound every other country around itself, especially after World War II, basically, and reshaped the entire global economic order around itself.
And China got on board, but way later.
So, its social structures have not been liquefied the way that ours are.
Which means that that state capacity to manage capital interests can still be exercised.
And it seems like they're actually doing that.
I mean, I don't think it means something that billionaires can get fucking blown away in China.
If you're the wrong billionaire who does the wrong type of corruption, they will take you in a room and blow your brains out, which is an inconceivable outcome in the United States.
Just go to jail is an inconceivable outcome.
And when you have, I mean, that is a difference in state capacity to regulate capital.
That is a distinct difference.
But, I mean, if China takes over, they become the new headquarters of global capitalism.
If they were able to avoid just the accelerated crisis, reducing all social order into cantons of hyper-exploitation, and they were able to stabilize something out of this, eventually it would happen to them too!
But it would take a while.
It would take a long while for them to get to where we are.
Right, right.
Their QAnon would be more like a Metal Gear plotline with ghosts and vampires.
I can't wait for that.
The hopping vampires would be involved.
But it would all be structured like Dark Souls.
You can't really ever understand what's happening.
Yeah, I would much rather believe that.
If Chinese QAnon emerges, that will be my ideology when I'm like 70.
Absolutely.
Very nice.
Can you elaborate on the pervasive concept of homo economicus, both in general American politics and online relationships?
So, homo economicus is this term for human nature as conceived by American libertarian economic theory that took over completely after 1980 and is now like the hegemonically enforced conception at the elite level through college and through politics and through media of what it means to be a human.
And the premise of it is that the human being is a self-seeking economic agent.
Individual humans exist to advance their own personal economic well-being.
Therefore, what flows from that, and the prescriptive element of it is, is therefore we need to have institutions that allow for human nature to express itself.
And the only way to do that healthily is to create a totally frictionless market whereby people can seek that economic advancement.
Now, the thing about that is that that's insanity and madness and it's literally brainwashing gibberish as a description of some fundamental facet of human nature.
But what it is, is an accurate description of what humans actually are.
Act like when you put them in a system that is completely dominated by market relationships.
So what those economists did was not to discover some truth about human nature, it was to provide a philosophical and political and ideological justification for turning us into that.
And the thing about it is that a society governed that way, especially one that has access to the technological capacity that we who, will destroy itself.
Will destroy its biome because if you are not connected to anything but yourself then everyone will seek their own advancement at the expense of others and at the expense of our collective environment and ecological biome which is not owned by any person which is why Homo economicus is an insane concept because We are embedded in biological relationships that transcend our individuality.
And a society that forgets that will destroy itself.
As to whether we can overcome it, I don't know.
But if we do, it will be because people essentially deprogram themselves.
And the only way that's going to happen, it can't happen through self-contemplation.
It can't happen through exposure to media or conversation.
It can only happen through lived experience of connection and those connections breeding
a alternative understanding of the self and one's motivation and one's reason for being
that allow for coordinated activity.
And coordination of regular people is the only thing that can defeat a structure that
depends for its continuation everyone continuing to act in a lobotomized conception of self-interest.
This is like a reverse therapy session where I'm getting satisfying answers to questions
that worry me but I'm coming out of it feeling much worse.
I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry.
No, I mean, it's true.
I see it in my own life.
I mean, even just these two years researching QAnon, you're observing this sort of existential loneliness.
And the people that are trying to fix that within themselves are just going down a path that, like you said, is never going to result in any kind of meaningful change or happiness.
And it's because we've been told and taught and programmed That if you want to really get the most out of being an
American, you have to do it by advancing your own sort of personal status and collecting
wealth.
Yeah, GTA.
That's why the political thesis and antithesis that is now driving our politics are the figures
of Obama and Trump, which are two altering, conflicting visions of how to do that, how
to actualize through the pursuit of self-advancement.
advancement.
One is, play by the rules.
And the other is, fuck the rules.
And that's it.
And now we're going to fight over that.
But the basic premise of both is the same.
Because they're both psychopaths.
Both Trump and Obama got where they are because they embodied the sociopathy of the moment.
They're like those Hegelian figures like Napoleon who Embody what the times demand which is to be fully motivated at like a spiritual level but by only your own advancement which is does not come naturally to us and which we fight and which is what makes life in this thing miserable for so many people.
It's not just because people aren't equipped to succeed.
cognitively or something, that's part of it. Another part is that we spiritually
seek something else and there's a conflict between those things that
hinders us. It makes it impossible to put all of our energy towards that goal. For
Trump and Obama, they have a fully sociopathic view where they have
completely disconnected themselves from anything beyond themselves and that
means that they can put their entire souls, which they have, we all have souls,
they can put their entire souls into a thing that for the rest of us we just
can't do that.
Because there's that vestige, there's an echo, there's a humanity that we could hear.
There's not just a humanity, but a connection to everything.
But we can hear the chants of Pandora.
the background and guys like Obama and Trump represent those who have most successfully
adapted to the homo economicus model.
But we can hear the chants of Pandora.
Yes, we live on Pandora.
We can bring it back.
I mean, yeah, essentially we need some sort of meaningful antithetical like world historical
figure movement that actually acts in relation to other people.
Yeah.
I know you've mentioned like John Brown.
Yeah.
I think that's an ideal of this character, somebody who transcends their individual relationships
for a greater moral cause.
Yeah, because like John Brown, there were two ways to be against slavery broadly in
the antebellum America.
There was the middle class moral objection to slavery that people like William Lloyd
Garrison had.
And then there was the working class and smallholding farmer material objection to slavery, which
was generated by the fear of being having to compete with slave labor or having in the
future where the South is victorious, having you or your family rendered slaves because
of your inability to be.
Become a master because you don't have access to the capital to do so.
And the moral case was correct, but it was disconnected from the lived experience, to use a horrible word, of these people, like these comfortable Boston Brahmins who could just sit around and drink tea and think about how bad slavery was.
For a rude mechanic or a smallholding farmer, their convictions were fired by actual daily struggle and pain and alienation.
But that pain and alienation was, because it was so personal, it was not connected to some theoretical idea that black people are in some way you, are some way part of you.
John Brown was able to be the catalytic figure he was because he married the moral, spiritual,
middle-class objection to slavery with the small-holding, personalized misery.
He was a guy who was a poor man his entire life, wildly in debt, struggled to avoid going
to debtor's prison his entire life, and so had that agony.
But that agony did not manifest in a mere concern for him and his family.
He translated that pain into a universal suffering that he saw that needed to be addressed.
And it was because he was in that position of lived experience of alienation and pain that that moral objection to slavery could be expressed through a practice that actually accomplished something besides selling newspapers and filling lyceums across the Northeast.
I wonder which like potential issue has the capacity to do that in a modern context.
I mean, like, given I'm thinking like a lot of prison abolitionists think that, like,
prison abolition is an extension of the abolition of slavery.
And like, given how important anti-black racism is in, like, the politics and even like consciousness
of America, this has really been the catalyst of the recent protests.
I wonder if the modern contemporary John Brown that might lead us towards a potentially anti-capitalist
position could be in relation to, like, police violence, potentially.
I don't think so.
And I think the difference between now and that era is that slavery was the signal issue in politics.
It was the issue that the political parties could not accommodate because it was sectional.
And that was because you had these two distinct political cultures in the North and the South.
We don't have that now.
I would say that the slavery of the now is wage slavery, as anti-slavery people like John Brown and Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips said at the time.
They said, first this, August Willits, the German communist who became a Civil War general, we fight to end slavery so that we can advance the cause of the worker more broadly.
And then that cause advanced for a bit, then it came back.
And the American history has been the backwash of that failure to advance the struggle to I don't think it could be police violence just because of how siloed it is and how its experience is mediated.
task politically now it is to sharpen that actual conflict and I think the
challenge then is what is the issue and I don't think it could be police
violence just because of how siloed it is and how how its experience is mediated
like it is a it's racialized without there being a a planter class basically
You know what I mean?
Like, there is no planter class of the police state or of the carceral state.
There is a planter class of wage slavery, of capitalism, and it's literally the ruling class.
But what that will be, I don't actually know.
But I do know that the fundamental issue will be the fact that those without access to capital are being told Every day of their lives that the future will be immiseration for them, that their children's lives will be worse than theirs, and worse in ways that they can't even imagine.
And that the only thing that will stop that is if we change the way that the economy is structured.
And I guess, yeah, it needs to be an issue that can't be subsumed into culture warshit.
Exactly.
Because as soon as it's into the political spectacle, then it's just like, it's melt, all the substance melts away.
And you have polarized the working class people too, because they're observing this thing
and they're observing all of the symbols, the collision of symbolic orders and of values,
all of which are fake, but are the entirety, the sum of political identity in this country.
And that anything that reinforces that will end up just dissolved.
Because what was the end result of the summer's uprisings?
It ended up being vote for Democrats.
And it kind of has to be, because it's a question that can be answered, that can be funneled
into the partisan conflict.
But the questions of distribution of resources cannot be, because neither party wants to redistribute shit!
They won't even make the overtures or the public displays, like the Democrats and their cultural allies will, about police violence and racism.
Slightly unrelated question, but we're seeing a pseudo-split, or at least an aesthetic one, in the Republican Party between the more like hue-oriented fringe and the sort of establishment Republicans manifest itself in, for instance, Sidney Powell saying Republicans should not vote in the January 5th runoff.
Amazing.
If the Georgia governor doesn't help flip the state for Trump, is this like a meaningful division in any sense?
And what is it going to look like, do you think, after Trump leaves office?
I honestly don't know.
It depends on a lot of things.
Trump himself is going to determine a lot of this.
It's really up to Trump in a lot of ways, and I don't know what he's going to do.
It looks now like he's just going to decide that the way—it's so funny because all of this, this entire crisis, is entirely precipitated by his refusal to admit that he lost something.
It's pure ego.
It has nothing to do with any meaningful political project.
Which is why the idea that Trumpism can be some vehicle for working-class alienation is absurd.
It's entirely bound in one dude's ego.
One old COVID-ridden freak's ego.
That cannot be translated into anything beyond that.
Uh, and so he has been negotiating essentially with himself on how to accommodate losing in a way that will not break his brain.
And right now it looks like the only way he can do it is if he essentially acts like it's his presidency, something that is happening without his involvement, but that he can resolve by winning again.
And he'll just, it looks like he might just spend this entire term running for reelection.
And if that's the case, the only thing I can see coming from that is the Republican Party just finally and irrevocably revolving around the specific desires of Trump, because they know that that's what his voters like.
The one thing I sort of assume is that whatever form that takes, the Republican establishment as such will find a way to accommodate it, as they have so far.
Because they're not pushing for anything that they can't say yes to.
They're not pushing for anything that is non-negotiable.
Which is not true among the left.
Which is not true among those who are trying to challenge the Democratic Party.
Well, we're fucked.
Until we're not!
People talk about fucking George Soros, they love to do the little puppet thing where it's like he has the strings.
There's not been a guy in recent history I can think of than Trump who can, against his own party, against anything, he can just move a large amount of the population into anything he chooses.
I don't know, that's kind of, is it unique do you think Matt, or is that just a repeat of history?
We are in new territory just because of how quickly everything gets absorbed into our understanding of reality and of how much we can pick and choose which reality to live in.
So Trump has definitely accelerated to a new point, the degree to which consensus versions of reality have broken down.
But the thing that freaks out a lot of liberals about that, and they say, this is terrifying, that I think is in its own way delusional, is the assumption that that has some sort of resonance, that has a meaning beyond just the personnel and who makes off with the money, who secures the bag.
Because none of it can change anything.
So you heard it, people.
He is saying you need to get online and post the Trump-Dr. Manhattan meme.
And so that understanding will be out there and we'll understand it and it'll be good and it'll change stuff.
The funniest possible result is that like the establishment Republicans, which I guess they wouldn't want to do this, but they fully, you know, they see the Trump contingent like with Sidney Powell saying that you shouldn't vote for the runoff as an issue that they don't want and they sort of try to push it off.
And then Trump, or some sort of relation to Trump, attempts to make some sort of third party, which is like a third point in the spectacle almost.
Yeah, you can imagine a world where they seat Biden and Trump feels betrayed by the Republican Party and decides to destroy it.
He's not really a politician and never has been.
He is a guy who likes to be on TV.
If he's going to try to create some third poll, it'll be around a different media outlet.
It would not be a political project.
And then maybe if it became dominant enough, it would create its own third party.
But as I said, I don't think any of the content, any of the political demands of whatever that third epistemic reality created around Trump Any of it would really be non-negotiable for the Republicans.
They would just absorb it.
I guess Trump fundamentally is just like a dog chasing his own tail.
He only cares about himself.
The only way to explain the way Trump moves is in relation to How his, you know, post-COVID, like, sort of on-energy-saver-mode brain would imagine there be, like, a benefit?
Exactly, yes.
I could imagine him thinking, like, oh, well, I love doing rallies because people come out and say they love me.
Yeah.
No, I can see him just keep doing rallies forever, but they don't have to be for anything.
He just wants to go there and have people say that he's nice.
If there's going to be a third-party energy in this Biden-Hunger chancellorship, and I sure hope it happens, it'll be on the left, because the left demands are not absorbable into the Democratic Party, which means that If some poll opposed to Democratic prerogatives emerges, it will be inherently antagonistic.
So it'll have to have its own party structure in opposition to the Democrats.
I can imagine both happening too.
Honestly, yes.
It would be easier for the second to happen after the first.
Oh yeah, if there's some Trump party that starts eating into the Republican base, that would definitely give a lot more Democratic voters a license to vote for a fourth party because they wouldn't have that disciplinary mechanism in place of you're electing Republicans by definition if you don't support Democrats.
Where the last party was destroyed through the wigs was over like an explicitly material issue.
The ironic twist in history would be that like one of the parties would be destroyed or that other parties would grow out of purely aesthetic issues.
Yeah.
Although that's that's clearly less of a likelihood.
Yeah.
But I mean if it's if we have a fully aestheticized politics maybe it makes sense that that they will break up on aesthetic lines.
Mm-hmm.
I have a question that relates to how difficult it is to sort of like even discuss any issues
with QAnon followers, like individually, one-to-one.
It's the fact that their imagination is so limited.
Like when I try to get them to entertain the idea that their whole QAnon worldview is mistaken,
they don't – they still – they can't – they still believe then basically in the
adrenochrome farms and Hillary Clinton eating babies and like there's just 100,000 people
who have committed crimes so heinous they deserve to go to Gitmo.
They still believe all that, but they stop believing that there's going to be any justice.
They stop believing that there's going to be a solution.
And in that sense, I feel like the only things that they can see in their imagination is either Q coming to the rescue or complete existential despair.
Why do you suspect they are so constrained?
And is there any way to get someone who is in that situation to broaden their horizons?
Maybe there are greater possibilities about why they feel this way, why they're in this situation, and possible political solutions.
Well, because where would they encounter it?
Where would they encounter any alternative explanation for why things are the way they are?
Where would they encounter one that would have explanatory or persuasive power in their lives?
Not anyone they know, not anyone they talk to day-to-day, certainly nothing they see on their media feeds.
It will not come spontaneously, and it never does.
It comes from cooperation.
It comes from people discussing things, comparing notes, understanding mutual experiences of alienation and oppression.
And we don't have those in this country.
We have boutique consumer experiences.
And that means we're only ever on our own to figure out what's happening.
And what that really ends up meaning is we are at the mercy of the media we consume.
Um, cool.
It's so cool, it's so great.
I would also imagine that like, Q people really like a simplistic understanding of the world.
Because the world is incredibly complex, difficult to understand.
And something like Q, it's almost like theological.
It gives you like, there are good guys, and then there are bad guys, and they're fighting.
And then it will resolve itself.
Everything in culture tells you that's how the world works.
Including the mainstream culture.
Everything in culture tells you that's how the world works.
Where will the intervening conception come from?
It has to come from talking to people who you have a shared experience with, and we don't do that anymore.
We can't.
It's not even a choice.
It's not something that our day-to-day lives accommodate or can assimilate.
But, I hate ending on a terrifyingly depressing note.
Oh, let's see this one.
How's he gonna reel it back in?
The way I reel it back in, and the thing is, this is what freaks people out when I say this, is because they're like, shit, well, then we're fucked because where else could it come from?
We are still human beings, you know?
We do still live lives.
We still have struggle.
We do still know each other.
And conditions change.
The conditions of our lives change.
Not for the better, but they change, and those changing conditions create, in every moment, new opportunities for people to come together in little tesseracts and little fractals, and then to generate new understanding of the world that they can operate from.
And to say it can't come from the media is liberatory.
It means you can consume media as it's meant to be consumed, as entertainment, not fraught with the idea that it's going to somehow change the world depending on which thing you click on, which thing you choose to believe.
That's going to come from sparks flying around you, not in the ether of your media consumption.
So like I said, the Dr. Manhattan Trump memes, arm them digital soldiers, we're heading out to battle.
At Cushbomb is your Twitter, and they can find Chapo Trap House, obviously, wherever the podcasts are.
And how do people get into the Cushblog?
I know there's like a live schedule, but then they also get archived?
They're all archived on YouTube.
That's probably the easiest place to see them.
Because I don't have a set schedule, and it's kind of when I have time and I can sit down.
But they all end up on YouTube.
And please subscribe to the YouTube page because our poor producer Chris, he puts them all on there, he edits them, and he really wants this thing that you get from YouTube when you have 100,000 subscribers.
It's a big award shaped like the YouTube arrow.
It's like a curio, like a paperweight or something.
He really wants one.
So subscribe to the YouTube page.
Yeah, help them build some sort of curio museum for Trap House fans.
Yes.
Is there anything else you wanted to plug?
Avatar.
Watch it again.
It's really good.
Go rewatch Avatar.
You can listen to the Chopper episode about that, which was a good time as well.
Prepare your bodies and minds for when the vaccine hits and Avatar 2 and 3 usher us out of these dark times.
Every tentacle and every hole.
It's going to rule, man.
I can't wait to dock with every person I meet just in the street.
We're all going to be coming out of that theater docking.
Space docking our way to freedom.
Just docking tongues in each other's bodies.
I just want to find some other Americans with shared life experience that I can commit Zahalu with.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
We can connect our ponytails together and have a better understanding and maybe things won't be so bad.
Yeah, let's do it.
Thanks so much for coming on again.
It's always a pleasure, Matt.
Yeah, great time.
Thanks, guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnon Anonymous.
And for everything else we have QAnonAnonymous.com where you'll find merch,
a link to our discord, access to the last episodes, et cetera.
Listener until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now today's Auto-Q.
One.
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.
Two.
The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered.
Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at.
The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images, where even the deceivers are deceived.
The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living.
3.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification.
As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness.
But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness.
The unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
4.
The spectacle is not a collection of images.
It is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.
5.
The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass media technologies.
It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.
6.
Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the present mode of production.
It is not a mere supplement or decoration added to the real world.
It is the heart of this real society's unreality.
In all of its particular manifestations, news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment, the spectacle is the model of the prevailing way of life.
It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.
In both form and content, the spectacle serves as a total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system.
The spectacle is also the constant presence of this justification, since it monopolizes the majority of the time spent outside the modern production process.
