We have a chat with long-time QAnon researcher Mike Rothschild, author of upcoming book 'The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything'. One of our central topics: is QAnon "dead"?
Mike Rothschild's Book: http://bit.ly/StormIsUponUs
Follow Mike: https://twitter.com/rothschildmd
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Welcome, listeners, to a bonus episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, The Interview with Mike Rothschild.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
In this bonus edition of the QAA podcast, we're speaking to Mike Rothschild, a journalist and longtime reporter on QAnon.
He's also a repeat guest.
Mike's been interviewed about QAnon for the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Yahoo News, and many other outlets.
His most recent book is The Storm is Upon Us, How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.
Mike, thanks for coming back on the show.
Thanks for having me back.
Does it feel good to beat Will Sommer?
Yeah, you know, what's that phrase, you know, be first, be the best, or, you know, be the most outrageous?
Well, it's not going to be the best, probably won't be the most outrageous, but it is first.
Nice.
Wow, we're really excited about this.
You'll always have that over Will.
I will.
So Will, if you're listening, just remember, you were second.
But probably better.
Yeah, we've been doing this since like the middle of 2018, and I remember when I started feeling that anxiety creep up that QAnon was something worth paying attention to, I tried to see who else was covering it, or who at all was covering it, who was pumping out information about this.
It was basically like you and Will Sommer, and there were like a few articles on Right Wing Watch.
But it was a very sparsely covered subject matter all the way back in like early 2018.
So when did you first start when this first appear on your radar?
I started seeing stuff about QAnon on Twitter probably end of 2017 beginning of 2018.
And my first intro was seeing pictures of John McCain and Hillary Clinton wearing orthopedic walking boots because not because they had you know injured their feet as normal people do.
But because they were wearing secret ankle bracelets because they'd been arrested in a purge called The Storm.
I thought that was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my life.
So I decided I got to track this down.
I got to figure out what this is.
And I very quickly became troubled by it because it has, as we talk about in the book, it has a lot of links to these long running scams.
These things like the Iraqi Dinar and Nassara.
That have gone on for decades and have liberated quite a few people from a lot of money.
And where I got really concerned was QAnon wasn't selling anything.
It wasn't a financial investment.
It was selling the good feelings that you will have when you watch Hillary Clinton drop from a gallows.
And I thought that this was like a whole new level of bad.
And I started to get really concerned.
And for a while it was like you were saying it was just me and you guys and Jared and Will and a couple other people.
And then I think everybody else realized, oh, we should have been paying attention to this thing the whole time.
Obviously, you know, you getting there first and having the last name Rothschild was just an unfortunate coincidence.
Yeah, very unfortunate for you.
You know, I've just tried to run with it.
Oh, early days, The Chance could not shut up about it.
They still can't.
They still can't.
Even when the mainstream media started covering it, it was usually, it was first in reaction to the Tampa, Florida Trump rally in the end of July in 2018.
And everyone, every outlet sort of ran their explainer, like, what is QAnon?
And it was like, you know, it was 800 words long, and there was this feeling of like, well, we've covered that subject matter.
We talked about this, never have to talk about it again.
Right, it was this silly fringe thing.
And I don't know, I feel like even then, even when, you know, sort of the attention of editors all across the country was aimed towards QAnon, they didn't quite get how troubling it really is.
Right.
And that was – at that point, the Hoover Dam thing had already happened.
The guy barricading himself on Hoover Dam or outside of Hoover Dam with the sign reading, release the OIG report, which came straight from a QDROP.
This was already violent.
This was already running up a list of crimes.
But people just didn't connect it.
It was like, those people are crazy.
They're doing their crimes.
These people over here are crazy.
They're waving signs.
They're wearing Q t-shirts that they made themselves.
But nobody was really putting together, like, maybe we should do more than mock these people.
We should mock them, some of them.
But we should also take this really, really seriously.
And you can do both.
Yeah, I think there was some difficulty in wrapping your head around it because on the one hand you had sort of your average Trump supporter who, you know, everybody sort of wrote off as crazy and cultish in its own right.
And stupid and poor.
And then you have QAnon, which is at that point a subsect but seemingly the same kind of madness.
Yeah, I think people just, you know, sort of wrote it off as like, oh, well, these are just like more fervent, you know, more fervent sort of Trump, you know, supporters.
Yeah, I think that what has always protected QAnon is its ludicrousness.
And, you know, the fact that a lot of people who are otherwise educated, who are supposed to cover these things in like technology or journalism, It was like, OK, OK, but there's no way this can possibly be relevant in American politics.
It's too ludicrous.
It's too out there.
It's like it's almost like, you know, they sort of rejected it as something that could possibly be important because it's just so outrageous.
Right.
No one is no one is stupid enough to believe this is real.
Well, it's not about being stupid.
It's about wanting to believe it's real.
And a lot of people want to believe it's real.
Yeah, making that decision.
Yeah.
Having the part of your brain that goes, eh, you know, it's probably not true, but I don't care about that.
You know, I don't care about that.
It doesn't need to be true.
It needs to be true for me.
Yeah, because the way I feel, the way it makes me feel, that there's some kind of justice, that there's some kind of narrative that I can wrap my head around is more important than having, you know, journalists who I don't like anyways, you know, verify a set of facts.
Who are in on it.
Yeah, who are in on it, exactly.
Now, was there a moment when you realized that this was not going to be a fringe thing anymore?
Because it started out fringe, even in 2018.
It was fringe, and I thought I'd be quarantined.
My whole fantasy, when I first started covering it, was that someone smarter than me and more powerful than me and more resourceful than me would recognize that QAnon was a big deal, and they would pick up the ball and run with it, and then fix it.
I don't know how, exactly.
But I was like, surely it can't be me tweeting about these crazy things in my apartment.
I can't be the person who has to take care of this.
Yeah.
I would say that for me, the moment where I realized that this was really here to stay was probably March 2019, where you'd had the midterms and the Republicans had gotten completely wiped out in the midterms.
So now this idea that Q had posited of a red wave.
I mean, everybody knew that was a lie.
That wasn't going to happen.
If there was a moment of disconfirmation to walk away from QAnon, it was then.
But instead in March you had that huge Tampa – not the Tampa rally, the Grand Rapids
rally with a line of people that went on for what looked like a mile carrying Q crap and
wearing Q shirts and tweeting about it and it was a huge presence there.
At the exact same time you had the QAnon, an invitation to the Great Awakening book
go to number two on the Amazon top 100 of all books.
I'm looking at this.
I'm going, "These people are showing up to rallies.
They're spending their money on these books.
This is here to stay.
Whatever this is, it is now – the pea is in the pool and it's not coming out."
The entire pool is purple.
Yes.
From the urine dye.
And nobody's getting out.
Nope.
They like it.
Julian, you had that, right?
Growing up, where if you peed in the pool, there was a dye that turned the water purple.
Is that even real?
That is a real thing?
I don't think I've seen this personally.
They did it in Chicago suburbs.
I know it exists, but I think they only do it for naughty kids like you.
Is this the specific pool they sent you to?
No.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think we all had a moment that we realized it would get bad.
But did you ever think there was, like, there was at least a ceiling, that there was, like, as bad as it gets?
Like, I never thought that there would be members of Congress who were QAnon promoters who got that.
I had the, I know this sounds naive, but I thought that surely even the Republican Party would put a stop to that before it got quite that bad.
Yeah, I never thought you would see actual winning members of Congress.
I figured there would be perennial candidates and the sort of outsiders who grab onto this for publicity, which did happen.
But yeah, the fact that there are actual Republican members of Congress who think that this stuff either is real or think it's real enough to kind of go with it.
And like you said, I was waiting for the mainline GOP to at least denounce the idea of these people being like the head of a trafficking ring.
Like, you can you can dislike Democrats, you can yammer about socialism, but once you start talking about leading Democrats and leading people in Hollywood being pedophiles at the very top of a giant trafficking ring that's, you know, drinking the adrenaline of children, That seems like a fairly easy thing to denounce and not lose votes, but at that point it was all so enmeshed together that you couldn't denounce it without losing votes.
And we saw some of these margins in some of these states were razor thin, and you can't do anything to push people away.
So you kind of give a mealy-mouthed denunciation-ish of some of the mythology, but you never call out the people who believe it because you can't lose their vote.
Well, and furthermore, I mean, you ascribe a, you know, and to quote them directly, an evil quality to Democrats.
And this is to a, you know, a solid base of people who are also, you know, religious, who do believe in good versus evil, and that there is a war being waged behind that.
So, yeah, even if you're denouncing, like you said, some of the crazier aspects of the lore, like JFK Jr.
is still alive.
You know, whatever, that, you know, Barack Obama is a lizard person.
To continue and say, well, but these people are evil, they are doing evil to your Christian base, that's a line that you can't really come back from once you cross it.
And progressivism is this evil tide that is taking away your way of life, that's canceling how you were raised and how you think and how you worship, and it becomes very compelling.
But I mean, it's kind of interesting because I know about a third of America believes in hands-on healing in a Christian sense and stuff like that, and these are just things that Republicans are used to not denouncing or turning against.
They're just beliefs that That, um, you know, maybe the majority of the Republican people that are elected, they don't particularly, uh, believe it, but they're not going to go out there and make a big hubbub about it.
And I think in some ways they just thought, well, here's another one of those, another one of those, like, I guess more on the bircherite side of things in this case, but a belief that's crazy and just a majority, like a decent amount of my base believes it.
And I'm just not going to address it if possible.
Um, but that wasn't, you know, I mean, that did not account for how big and how, um, organized and how much culture it would create that would not account for that for the music for the the gatherings you know just the pure the real culture we saw flow from it and that's when I remember being Travis in the early days started to get worried doing that
QAnon music episode.
We were really feeling bad.
Yeah, yeah.
That's that.
I mean, we're thinking about that.
It's like, oh, there's like, it's not just like, you know, a movement.
It's like a community.
It's this shared sense of meaning and togetherness.
And there's almost, there's this spirituality that flows from this bloodlust.
Yeah, that made me realize like, oh, this is something solid that may be with us in one form or another for generations.
Yeah.
But I think also these people are used to holding things in abstraction, like the invisible war between Satan and God, and the demons and the angels fighting just beyond the veil of perception.
They're used to holding that.
So QAnon was, I think, for many people, that.
And then the majority of what they actually did was post with each other excitedly, and then get together to have fun, to feel like they're not the only ones believing this shit.
Right.
But then there's, of course, other people who are way different.
That for them, this isn't just something held in like a semi-fictional state in their mind that they're kind of used to integrating into their own reality.
And they're like, well, no, I have to do something about this, actually.
Or I'm too mentally ill to know that I shouldn't do something about this.
Right.
And if you really feel like children are being kidnapped and sexually exploited for their adrenaline, if you really feel like the election has been stolen and the president is fake, You have to do something about it.
You can't just sit there and allow it to happen.
You have to fight back.
And that's where Q is so different than so many of these other conspiracy theories.
You know, the anti-Masonic stuff, the anti-Catholic stuff, the anti-Semitism.
That's always about something that's being done to you, and you really can't do anything about it except know about it.
With Q, you're a soldier.
You're in the fight.
And that is so compelling to people.
Yeah, I thought it was really interesting.
Like you pointed out, normally conspiracy theorists are super despairing.
There's this idea that there's this cabal that's so super powerful there's nothing you can do about it.
But all of a sudden, Q comes along and they're saying, like, no, there's a hyper-competent, super-powerful force that can match the cabal in the form of Q and the White Hats and Trump because he plays 5D chess and possibly can time travel.
There's a plan, and everybody wants there to be a plan.
Right, but they kind of mostly want to watch it like they do the rest of reality on the news, or in the TV, or in this case in the screen of the computer, which was the new evolution.
This is basically just like Fox News viewing with an extra screen.
It's just like a new version of the...
Yeah, just back and enjoy the show, but you could also indulge in some cyber harassment
and call yourself a digital soldier if you want.
Do a little bit of gamer games.
Second screen experience.
There's an ARG being played over Tucker where you get to harass his enemies.
Well I do think though, you know, especially with, you know, what we saw during the Dallas
conference, because so much has not come true, or everything has not come true, you know,
Trump didn't get reelected, there were no mass arrests.
What we're seeing, at least on the influencer side, you know, a lot of those people that
were up on stage, you know, talking to the audience, the narrative has shifted from,
you know, trust the plan to you are the plan.
You know, I mean, we specifically saw that.
Who was it?
Was it Jason Sullivan who said that you are the plan?
You know, and so that's a problem is when you make all these prophecies and they don't come true, you know, you have to keep people involved, you know, because there's this political sort of weight to it now and in terms of your electorate.
And so I think that we are seeing this shift in the ideology from inaction to, you know, you have to be doing stuff.
And not to say that they're saying, you know, you've got to storm your local offices and stuff, but they are promoting these grassroots sort of tactics.
Travis and I saw it at the latest Save the Children rally where there was a woman who's running to replace Gavin Newsom as California's governor.
And she was saying, you know, you know, get into local office, get involved, you know, get on your neighborhood councils, you know, we gotta, you know, win this from the ground up, which is terrifying.
Right.
And it's also been GOP orthodoxy for decades.
They know that those local elections, the school board, the town council, those are tiny elections and a lot of Democrats just don't vote in those.
We somehow think that, you know, Democrats somehow think only the four year election matters.
They all matter.
And Republicans know that, and these elections are very often decided by a couple dozen votes.
And if you get out there and run a really loud, attention-getting campaign by grabbing onto some QAnon crap and getting a little bit of press about you, suddenly people know who you are, and they vote for the person that they recognize.
So it's—I mean, as strategy, it's kind of brilliant.
Couple dozen votes, man.
I'll do that in three memes.
Tops.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about, I guess, the current state of QAnon.
I want you to address a controversial article that was published in the LA Times recently.
It was authored by journalist Virginia Heffernan and headlined, Reports on QAnon's Death Aren't Exaggerated.
It calls QAnon a cult that's defeated and says QAnon's power is waning.
And she makes these claims because Q stopped posting late last year.
Sidney Powell said there is no plan at the recent Dallas QAnon conference.
And she says that the arrests that resulted from the January 6th insurrection crippled the movement.
Now, Virginia Heffernan, I really like her work.
I like her book, Magic and Loss.
Oh, oh, oh, please, Travis, let me step in and tell you that she is the person who wrote the Hillary Clinton is more than a president.
She is light.
This person's a lunatic.
What do you mean you respect her?
She's out of her fucking gourd!
I wouldn't call her a lunatic per se.
Per se!
Before we get to that, I was like, I assume you read that article.
Yes, I did.
What is your perspective on that?
I would say that with a lot of writing about QAnon, if you're not marinating in this cesspool of crap all day, it's really easy to miss a lot of the nuance with a movement like this.
I think that QAnon, as we have understood it from end of October 2017 to January 20, 2021, is done.
The Q post drops, bakers bake the breads, the dissemination goes out, Praying Medic does a video, In the Matrix does a podcast.
That's done.
We know that there is not going to be the storm.
Joe Biden is not presumably going to arrest himself.
He's not that doddering.
So I think in that sense, the QAnon that we have been following and watching and writing about is dead.
The problem is that the movement is not.
And these movements never die.
They just turn into something else.
And I think that's the nuance that's missing from that piece.
It's dead as we know it, but it's still alive, so it's kind of a zombie.
And it's hard to write about something like that.
I'm just going to read you the opening of her article on Hillary Clinton.
Wait a second.
Hillary Clinton is more than a president.
The subtitle is, she is an idea, a world historical heroine, light itself.
And so let me just read you the opening.
When people told me they hated Hillary Clinton, or far worse, that they were not fans, I wish I had said in no uncertain terms, quote, I love Hillary Clinton.
I am in awe of her.
I am set free by her.
She will be the finest world leader our galaxy has ever seen.
This is the person who said QAnon is over.
I understand that we want to discuss this, but is this even a topic that anybody serious in this field is actually... I mean, yes, yes.
I think that this column was hotly discussed on Twitter quite recently.
among like 12 people.
Yeah, it's tiny, Travis.
I mean, for us it's big, but like the world does not understand what this, you know, what Virginia is about.
Well, yeah, especially because the world gets on the freeway, and one out of 30 cars has a where we go one, we go all sticker on the back.
The end of the article just finishes with a sentence, Hillary is Athena.
Okay.
I was going to ask, if you do think that we will ever see another Q drop or somebody who is posing as Q, if they would even be able to verify that it was the original Q, does it even matter?
Well, I don't think it does.
And I think we saw that during the Dallas thing.
We saw the one post from B, and the big Q promoters were like, no, it's not Q. There's no trip code.
It's not Q. And it faded very quickly.
People just didn't buy it.
And I think what we're seeing now is not Q drops, but we're seeing the same thing from Ron Watkins.
If you're following Ron's telegram, they're Q drops.
They were when he was tweeting, and I actually DM'd him.
I said, hey, do you have any comment on the fact that your tweets read exactly like QDROPS?
And he writes me back, and he's like, well, I don't know what QDROPS look like.
That's your department.
Like, okay, Ron, sure.
But these are QDROPS, but they're getting out to a much bigger audience, and they don't have to put up with the rigmarole of a trip code and of, like, Dave Hayes and Jeff Peterson fawning over you and trying to interpret what you're saying, they're going out to a much bigger audience without the toxic baggage of that term.
So I think, you know, in an evolution of getting out secret intel, I think this is really the next natural step.
Yeah, I mean, I've always been frustrated by the sort of downplaying of QAnon.
That's just been persistent amongst a lot of journalists throughout its life.
I remember when Trump lost the election, there were some snarky comments from conservative commentators that were like, oh, What will people on the QBeet cover now?
This was before the insurrection and stuff.
There's this belief that there's no way this can keep going.
It was a very strange article to write just a couple weeks after a three-day, $500-a-head Q conference, which was a huge upgrade from the QAnon events prior.
This is the biggest QAnon event of all time, and you're saying the movement is dead?
I don't know.
I feel like it's more wishful thinking.
It's like there's this part of people's brains, if you're educated or maybe a little liberal, you say, there's no way this can take hold.
There's no way this can keep going.
And if we say it's dead, it's dead.
It ain't coming back.
So, yeah, we're talking about QAnon putting on its big boy pants.
I think we've seen this most acutely in the way that QAnon has infected the Arizona so-called recount, or audit, that's going on right now.
We have Doug Logan, who is the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the firm that's conducting this so-called audit.
It was directly interacting with Ron Watkins.
We have other people involved, like Bobby Pitton, who was also admitted to directly interacting with Ron Watkins.
So he's still kind of like a behind-the-scenes puppet master in some ways, sort of manipulating people's media perceptions of what's going on and trying to basically make sort of sour people on democracy and sort of cause even more rifts.
Yeah.
And what I look at the Arizona audit as is maybe the next bastion of what the next prophecy is going to be.
Because for three whatever years the prophecy was the storm, the mass arrests, you know, Guantanamo, all of that stuff.
Hillary's going to be in chains and she's going to get the short drop in the damp Cuban twilight and everything's going to be perfect.
That's not happening now.
And of course, as we know, believers in prophetic movements don't suddenly say, well, I guess I've been had.
I'll go back to my regular life.
Your regular life is boring compared to this.
So you stick with it.
And so what the prophecy is now is Trump is going to be restored to office.
The deception will be revealed.
That was everything that was happening between the election and the inauguration was, you know, the courts are going to step in.
The vice president is going to step in.
The military is going to step in.
None of that happened.
So now they're banking on the reinstatement.
So that's where the March 4th stuff came from.
That's where the Maricopa County frenzy comes from.
Now they're baking all these other audits that are going to happen.
This is the next thing that they need to believe in.
And now they're saying that Trump can come back in August.
And reportedly, according to multiple sources, this is something that Trump himself believes.
Yeah.
And maybe he does.
Who knows?
It's a real, real downgrade from beliefs that, you know, there's going to be a mass purge that will crush my enemies, too.
I just want Trump back in office.
I want it the way it was before.
Yeah, a few months ago.
Right.
Yes, there's so much concession.
It's like just just they you know what I'll bet even if he wasn't back in office Just let him back on Twitter so he can yeah shit clothes.
Yes, and he can own the libs like yeah, they would be happy Oh, yeah, that would be yeah, I think it would be enough.
It would be enough if you just got back on Twitter But you know, I think we're also entering into a four-year cycle that is going to be the new standard for America around elections.
Oh, God, I know.
We had a fucking meltdown after Trump, and they had a meltdown after Biden, and it's all just like this big game of kind of false left-right.
But the bottom line is, every single time now, it's going to be heavily contested.
People are going to say it was a cheat, and there's going to be lawsuits.
And there's going to be investigations.
And that's just what's going to happen, whether or not they're valid.
You can be like, oh, the audit is completely invalid.
It's run by a QAnon wacko.
But that's whatever.
That's their version.
Doesn't matter.
Of doing the Mueller report or something.
The thing is that drives me crazy, and I think we're seeing it happen now, is you look at 2016 to 2020.
2016 to 2020, their guy was in office and all they did was talk about Hillary Clinton.
Clinton who you know...
you know, had no political power basically after she lost and Barack Obama.
And now Biden has gotten elected, we did the impossible, we got Trump out of office
and all they're doing is talking about Trump. It's like, oh my god, I've seen this unfold.
It's every four years, we're just going to talk about the last person that was president incessantly, how bad they were, how many crimes they did, until the next fucking person, whatever party it is, it doesn't matter, you're going to be talking about the crimes of the last administration forever and ever.
Amen.
Hey, it's 1115 and Trump is still going to prison.
If things progress by this, it's just a question of how many four-year cycles it'll be before they actually hang a politician.
Yeah!
It's 2074 and Trump is still going to prison.
Right, yep.
It's cyberpunk.
We're living in cyberpunk and Trump and Hillary both prisoned together.
We're headed to the off-world colonies and Trump is still going to prison.
Imagine if they actually sent both Trump and Hillary to jail.
How funny that would be.
A utopia!
The funniest thing in history.
We have nothing left to talk about.
It would be the end of the world.
All podcasts are cancelled.
America would just be like timeline resolved and just shut down like a Windows operating system.
Like, I'm going to bed.
It would be like Piemania just kicks you out of the game.
You just wake up in like a pink slimy bubble like Neo and the Matrix into some like new weird reality.
Goddammit, I can't figure out my login to the United States of America.
It's not working.
Yeah, I mean, I was really concerned that, you know, this sort of signals a possible, like, really dramatic fracturing of reality in sort of American political life.
You know, at least people were, at one point, they're able to agree on, like, some things.
Like, who is president.
Right.
Some real basic stuff.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, they're able to agree, okay, this person, I don't like it, but this person is the president of the United States.
Now they have some people who are so far gone, they're thinking that, No, Trump is president, or Trump will soon return, or at the very least, Trump will soon become president because the last election was illegitimate, even though there's no constitutional mechanism to sort of decertify an election.
So I mean, yeah, this is like my real worry is that people are just going to, you know, just continue to peel away and break away and get into a bubble.
To the point where we're just not living—it's not a matter of not living in the same country.
It's like we're just not living in the same reality in any meaningful sense.
Travis, I believe that if we continue to apply this podcast and the rational, reasonable approach and write good books like what Mike is doing, we can get the majority of the United States to believe the president is Ulysses S. Grant.
Well, I mean, this is the new project.
The immortal Ulysses S. Grant has become PERMA president.
The last pre-corporation president.
I think not enough people know who Ulysses S. Grant is.
I think we're better off pulling for somebody like Peter from Family Guy.
Travis, I don't know if you asked this, but I think this is a really good question that
you had, which was to Mike, is how you think that January 6th affected QAnon and how things
changed for the movement after that incident.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, January 6th, I remember I was – I had the TV on because I was writing.
I was like furiously trying to get to the finish line.
And I'm watching this.
I'm going, what is happening here?
Like everything that I've been worrying about is actually happening but it's happening in this weird slow motion way where these people have like breached the Capitol and they're gonna go hang the Vice President but some of them are just kind of walking around like it's like it's like it's a revolution but it's kind of Like a lethargic revolution?
And I'm watching, I'm like, what is happening here?
How did all of this happen?
And looking at January 6th, I mean, I wasn't surprised at all that these people got together in D.C.
They all said they were going to do it.
And I wasn't surprised they marched on the Capitol.
I was surprised they got in.
I was surprised they were actually successful because they're so often unsuccessful.
But what I think January 6th did was it kind of marked the final merger between the QAnon mythology and these much more hardcore, much more violent groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and this sort of 3% umbrella.
Because for so long, people like Oath Keepers thought QAnon people were just a bunch of couch-dwelling boomers who didn't have the balls to do anything.
And now it's like there's no separation in any of it.
You're a stolen election truther, but you're also an anti-vaxxer.
And you also think that there are trafficking rings.
And you also think that you need to own an AR-15 to go take on the UN tanks that are going to come rumbling down your street.
Everything is everything now.
And I think January 6th was kind of the final marker in that, that there are no silos anymore.
Everything is now one gigantic conspiracy theory of everything.
like the subtitle of my book, The Storm is Upon Us.
See? See?
Well done. Well done.
What's interesting with talking about Q, about Q basically dying or QAnon leaving,
is that all the conditions that got us to this point, that created QAnon, that merged them into
this final insane spectacle where half the people were probably asking themselves, "Is this real?"
deal.
Just like the people watching it on TV were.
Those conditions actually haven't changed at all.
So the idea that the next mutation is somehow a death is so unreasonable because all the things fueling it are still very much in place.
Other than perhaps the one little thing of like basically Donald Trump not accomplishing what I want but like secretly he is.
Now that isn't as much as play on the right just because they're not in that cycle of the four years, but that's about it, right?
I'm most intrigued by is that what's going to happen to the QAnon movement after Trump dies one day?
Because the parallel I always make is with L. Ron Hubbard, Scientology, because a Scientologist thought that L. Ron Hubbard like ascended to another plane of reality.
He dropped the body.
And after decades of researching Dianetics and how to live forever, please don't sue us Scientology.
Uh, researching Dianetics and how to live forever and how to cure all these crippling war wounds that he had.
Like, he's not supposed to die, much less be, like, morbidly obese and, like, diabetic and a chain-smoking pill popper, which he was at the end of his life.
And so you get David Miscavige, who stands up at this gathering in LA, like, LRH has dropped the body.
He is now studying Dianetics on a higher plane.
The whole crowd stands up, applauds.
Bam!
There you go.
Yeah, nothing.
Yeah, you know the meme where Jesus is standing over your shoulder while you're doing like woodworking or whatever?
It'll just be Trump now.
Yeah, it will.
Hillary Clinton is light itself.
She is Athena.
That brings us to kind of a bigger sort of question, which is why are our politicians deities?
Right.
Why do we look to these people?
Why are they gods?
Why are they gods, no matter who?
Do we crave God so much?
These are people who are working class, who are paying money out of our tax that we earn doing shitty jobs so that they can rule over us and make six-figure salaries.
I don't understand this deifying what are supposed to be public servants.
Why are we even here in the first place?
And the deifying of Robert Mueller when all that was going on.
Right.
That's not the person you need to be looking at.
If something happens with that, great.
But don't count on it.
Yeah.
Don't count on Trump still going to prison.
Which is really funny because I think we talk about how populism is such an issue and people will argue that there's populism on the left and populism on the right.
But nobody I know was actually making a god out of Bernie.
It was always a useful leader for a political movement.
Right.
Meanwhile, you have, yeah, like you were saying, Mueller is like
literally in Game of Thrones coming to like end the winter or whatever. I don't fucking know. Whatever insane stuff.
And Hillary is a being of pure light and shit.
Right.
It's like this is one of the issues here is that we want monarchs.
Right. Yeah. Well, and also to deny what is completely in front of you.
I mean, there were all these memes of Mueller and the guy who did the coloring book where Mueller is this, like, golden guy.
And then he got up in front of the Congress and he was kind of like a stumbly, bumbly old man who couldn't hear very well and wasn't really sure, you know.
And then still after that, people were like, No, he's a god.
I think he's just playing it.
It's all part of the plan.
And if you're saying that on the left or the right, whatever, you've lost something.
You missed something, if that's your stance.
I guess I'm stupid, but I thought the Democrats would know better in some ways.
And so when you spend three years studying QAnon and seeing how their ideology sort of snowballs and gets into a bigger thing, it's easy to identify everywhere.
And it starts very small with just, like you said, there's a plan.
There's a meaning, there's a reason, there's a connection, and I don't know if we come back from that.
I kind of think that people like us are just going to forever be screaming into the void, and we'll have a handful of people that go like, yeah, we see it too, and that the majority of Americans are kind of like, wow, you're part of the problem.
I don't know.
I don't know where we go from here, honestly.
It's not about just being a rationalist.
I think it just, like, speaks to the fact that we're not getting anything.
We're not getting a sense of, like, anything rational happening in the world around us that leads to the conditions that we're in.
And we're not getting anything spiritual either!
So we're fucking starving on both ends.
And then, of course, you can prey on those people with, like, a memorandum from the FBI that you've decoded in a pretty rational way.
Or you can prey on them by being like, yeah, the babies are actually being, like, fed to the demons by Hillary.
Right.
And it's the same hunger, I think, in the culture for both a rational world that we can understand where justice and there's meaning and order and some of the things in government that we vote for or that our money gets sent to, but also a spiritual thirst, which is fine.
I don't think that that's what anybody is arguing against.
Yeah, and that's one of the real driving forces in writing the book was to lay out for people that QAnon didn't start. It was the next
iteration of something that we've always had. A need for control, a need to know who
the good guys and the bad guys are and a need for meaning in meaninglessness. We've always
had that. We're always going to have it. It's never going to be one fact check away from
being eliminated. That's just not the way humans work.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
We've been speaking with Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us, how QAnon
became a movement, cult, and conspiracy theory of everything.
When can people pick up that book, Mike?
The book is out June 22nd, so a little over a week from the day that we are recording this.
You can currently pre-order it.
Basically anywhere you can pre-order books, anywhere from Amazon to Bookshop to the website of Melville House, my publisher.
You can get a Kindle, you can get an audiobook, I can get a hardcover, maybe you can get it in like Braille, I don't know, but the book is available and anybody who is even slightly interested, not just in QAnon, but in why we believe stuff that doesn't seem like it's real will find something of value in this book.
We'll put the links in the notes of the episode for you listeners.
So yeah, go click those links and pre-order the book, folks.
One of the things that I've been looking for are former QAnon believers to speak on the record about their experiences.
This is something that almost no one has been able to find.
There are a few, and you know, there's Jatarth Jadeja, who I talk to in the book.
There's a couple of other people.
But there is a real dearth of former believers who are willing to speak on the record about this.
And I would love to connect with some for this book and for future projects.
So if that is you, if that's somebody you know, please reach out to me.
You can DM me on Twitter at RothschildMD.
You can email me, RothschildMD, at ProtonMail.com.
I would love to talk to you and help get your story out there.
And I know a lot of people have walked away from QAnon, but there's a lot of embarrassment.
There's a lot of shame.
You don't have a movement of vocal apostates with QAnon the way you have with a lot of other things.
So please reach out to me and we can go from there.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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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-Tune.
Hey guys, Jeff Janssen, Global Fire Ministries International.
Tonight, 6pm EST, President Trump, yes they're calling him President Trump, is going to be addressing the GOP and the nation.
I'm not sure if it's televised, probably not.
It'll be a live stream for sure.
I'm sure he's going to be talking about the five states.
From Georgia, you know, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
But we'll watch what happens.
I said by spring, which starts officially June the 23rd, we'd be dancing in the streets.
The Trump administration is on its way in.
The pedophilia Biden administration.
The fake administration.
Biden's administration is on its way out.
I don't care if you like it or not.
It doesn't matter.
We all know what took place.
And God is going to do something amazing in this nation.
