Don’t Trust the Plan, Fellas

Q-Anon was the best piece of performance art in the last two decades. It was better than Bob Lazar talking about UFOs stored at Area 51 on national television. It was better than a few thousand college dropouts getting psyop-ed into believing the Earth is flat on Reddit. It was stunning. Brave. Powerful. Especially that last one.

I don’t mean to gloat. The Q-Anon psyop was one most of us spotted from a mile away. Even if we wanted to believe in some sort of six-dimensional chess going on at the highest levels of our government, seasoned conspiracy theorists were well aware by the time Q had started to hit Facebook that the thing was a ruse. One thing you pick up from being involved with this sort of thing is to trust your gut and to distrust anything that has mainstream appeal. If it takes off on a mainstream platform like Facebook, then at best it’s controlled—at worst, it’s a straight up psyop through and through. Q didn’t seem right at the get-go, but the Facebook mainstreaming of it into a “movement” only confirmed it.

Is the world run by Satan-worshiping pedophile elites? Well, it’s certainly not much of a leap to assume that. Some of us remember PizzaGate before it was given that moniker. Some of us read about the Dutroux Affair or McMartin Preschool. Most of us know about Jimmy Seville by now. The number of pedophiles who worked and still work in Hollywood is something of an open secret. And then there’s the weird stuff going on with Bohemian Grove. All of these things have their own separate backgrounds. They might even by somewhat isolated from one another. But what can’t be denied, despite what the mainstream press has managed to spin, is that there is a lot of smoke around these sorts of topics. Whether the fires are localized brush fires or raging infernos, in these cases specifically, will probably never be known; however, anyone who takes a look around at the trends in our decaying culture can’t help but see a pattern.

I joke about Q, and it’s worth joking about it now especially. But the problem is that the Q narrative and phenomenon did a lot of damage to just about anyone with sympathies right of center. The only people it hasn’t touched are the people so far to the right that they’re simply not on the political spectrum anymore—by which I mean people with strong convictions who don’t participate in politics and have no hope of doing so. There aren’t that many of them around, and if you think you’re one of them, chances are that you’re probably not.

For the rest of us, Q-Anon theorizing went from quirky but off-kilter Facebook posts from estranged boomers in your life to national headlines. Trump favorably alluded to it a few times in speeches. The media maneuvered to vilify it after that. Then, some weeks ago, it seemed to be responsible for breaking into the Capitol building. The speed of this escalation is another reason for suspicion, but our topic here isn’t really to determine whether or not Q was a through-and-through government op from the beginning or whether it simply became one after picking up steam. In the grand scheme of things, it makes little difference. Q-Anon’s importance is what it did to conspiracy theorists, the grand narrative of conspiracy theorizing, and the right wing as a whole. And it’s not good.

Death of the American Conspiracy Theory

Conspiracy theories are as American as apple pie and muscle cars. They’ve been used to garner attention as much as they’ve been used to spread disinfo and distract people. For every legitimate assessment of events like the assassination of JFK or the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11, there are at least a dozen absurd theories presented to muddy the waters and poison the wells.

And that’s not even getting to the dynamic introduced by grouping any attempt to question an official narrative under the label of ‘conspiracy theory’; one need not think too hard to notice the leap in judgment it takes to consider beliefs about a flat Earth are comparable to thinking that there was more going on behind the final flight of Mohammad Atta than a simple case of Islamic extremism. More extreme ideas are introduced for public consumption—or at least given more attention than they deserve—in order to delegitimize the more plausible explanations of events that certain powerful interests don’t want mainstreamed.

This dynamic has been a staple of American public life for the last sixty years. There were conspiracy theorists prior to 1964, but a brief study of the term reveals that it was the assassination of Kennedy that really tipped a lot of this off. The thick smoke surrounding the circumstances of JFK’s murder, Oswald himself, Jack Ruby, and all the different players behind the administration and investigation had gotten too many people thinking, so the term “conspiracy theorist” was thrown around in the press to quell some of the interest. Toss out some absurd ideas about unrelated events, group them under the same umbrella term, and presto: you can delegitimize whatever you want with such a method.

As such, it goes without saying that all conspiracy theories are not created equal. Questioning the moon landing is not on the same level as questioning the shape of the Earth, and neither are on the same level as questioning the official story of, say, how three sky scrapers on Wall Street imploded from two plane strikes. Likewise, particularly in the case of 9/11, suggesting a coordinated effort to bring down a few buildings in mostly-controlled demolitions is a far cry from simply suggesting that the US Government knew about the attack ahead of time—and again, both are wildly different from positing beliefs in holographic planes, satellite-operated explosive lasers, or low-yield nuclear bombs in basements.

The takeaway here is that there are degrees of reasonableness for any given theory, and conspiracy theories are no different. The problem arises when the information isn’t always credible due to concerted efforts of various parties to keep information access limited. Disinformation campaigns, too, make it difficult sort out the truth the way needles blend into haystacks. And if this already sounds far-fetched, keep in mind that this is all standard propaganda methodology that the alphabet soup agencies have been intimately acquainted with since even before their present organization. To innocently assume that they wouldn’t wield these measures against America’s own population is more than just a little naive.

Conspiracy theories, especially more reasonable ones, are usually only taken seriously by a small minority of people. The internet has changed this a little bit, offering access to both materials, information, and counter-narratives in enough abundance to widen the audience, but it’s still somewhat of a cult phenomenon. A lot more people today believe that the events of 9/11 were not in reality what was sold to America; opinions and speculation, however, varies widely as to what those events actually were. Was there a controlled demolition of all three towers? Were the planes responsible for bringing them down at all? Was Osama bin Laden involved with the plan to begin with? How involved was the US Government? And what was going on with a certain group of foreign agents from our Greatest Ally doing on the scene? The answers to these questions varies a lot depending on who you talk to.

So people investigated. Some did more legwork than others. They asked questions. They didn’t always get answers, but the ‘community’ around what became known as “9/11 Trutherism”, an amusingly derogatory term applied to it by media rubes, didn’t exist to feel good. The community, if you could even call it that, existed to study the event and promote better explanations of it. And, as it goes with conspiracy theories, the explanations were plural—many agreed on specific points, but most differed on laying the blame. Despite agreeing on what probably wasn’t the case, no one tended to agree completely on what actually was the case.

This is where the Q-Anon conspiracy theory really went off the map.

Q-Anon gained a following. It gained a massive audience. It formed an e-cult, found success on Facebook, reached—as these things go—widespread appeal. It attracted boomers. It found shills, grifters, merchandising. Most importantly, it tapped into and then sculpted a narrative. Q-Anon was a story being lived in real-time. It wasn’t a conspiracy theory, it was a TV show with thousands of protagonists, many of whom were the audience members themselves. It offered an appeal to vanity and the inclusion in a grand storybook narrative; better yet, it afforded its followers a degree of reassurance that someone, somewhere was in control.

Q-Anon didn’t invent its own theory. For one thing, it didn’t have to, and for another, no good psyop does. The elites are Satanists? That idea has been around for decades—millennia, if we’re to liberally interpret the historical data and the tendency of complex societies to bend toward demon worship. The elites are pedophiles? To some extent, that’s not even a theory; the Seville and Epstein scandals, particularly the latter, made it irrefutably clear that there are child predators operating sex trafficking rings in very prominent places (and the less said about whatever the Clintons were doing in Haiti, the better). There’s a globalist oligarchical structure that has pillaged the country, and Trump was elected to fix it all? That’s not even theory at all; that was literally what happened in 2016.

The broad theory behind Q-Anon didn’t bring anything new to the table, and it didn’t connect dots that hadn’t already been connected before—with varying degrees of credibility. What Q-Anon brought to the table was a new praxis for all of this. “Trust the plan.” Trump has guys on the inside. There’s a Trump regime at work within the Regime. He’s got agents in the deep state. Shadow government. Patriots. Trust the plan.

Trust the plan means do nothing. It means put your faith in princes. It means, hey, sit back champ, professionals have this covered. It might look like the world is going to hell in a hand basket, but fear not: good guys in suits are taking care of the problem. It means do nothing and believe the incredible.

It also means, “trust your government.”

This is insane. Insidious. And worse, it’s poisonous.

Who Q-Anon is or was isn’t relevant. It could have started as a prank by some anon on 4chan. It could have been a psyop from the beginning, planted by some bored agent at the CIA. Maybe it was a legit insider trying to leave breadcrumbs. Whatever it was, it turned into something else over the years—influenced by trolls and pranksters, bad actors, grifters, and if I had to guess, there was probably some deep state disinfo sprinkled in for good measure. But everyone manipulating the Q-Anon narrative understood its most important feature: inaction. Trust the plan.

Passivity vs. Complacency

Passivity itself isn’t necessarily the problem here, however. Truth be told, what can we expect to do to about an oligarchical apparatus that controls most of the information flow? For the most part, nothing. Passive resistance is doable—resisting the propaganda you recognize, avoiding their programming, fighting their social engineering efforts—but actively curtailing their efforts is, for most of us peons, impossible. You aren’t going to topple an international cabal that controls governments, the banks, the media, and has programmed social discourse so well that it practically controls people’s minds. You’re not Neo, you’re just someone who is at least partially aware of the machinery running the show.

We’re intuitively know of this, of course. We can speak about organizing online, staging peaceful demonstrations, forming independent presses to preserve information. To a degree, these things should be pursued, too. But they must be pursued without ego, without expectation of recognition. Twitter banned the president of the United States from using its platform. Amazon got Parler shut down. All right wing efforts online are living on borrowed time. If you start something like this, and you get big enough, your head will be on the chopping block. Rival platforms are worth attempting to set up, but given the dominance of Silicon Valley, they will never be truly viable alternatives to the ones cracking down on counter-narratives. They get big enough and they’ll either get nuked or go turncoat. Look at Stream.me. Look at Dlive.

Just to be clear: I’m not saying don’t set up these platforms, or don’t use them if they’re available. What I’m saying is that if you’re in the habit of content creation or consumption on the right, expect to be platform hopping a lot. Expect to have to do some legwork in order to find where your favorite commentators have had to flee to next. I’m also saying not to expect this to change under the Biden/Harris administration, and given what was demonstrated on both November 3^rd and January 6^th, it can be safely assumed that no government official will ever lift a finger to challenge this problem. Tech censorship is here to stay.

But while we can acknowledge this, the momentary blackpill is that writing about these changes, producing videos condemning the cultural revolution, and publishing self-help books only makes so much of a difference. We can convince ourselves that every little bit counts, but for the foreseeable future, we’re stuck with the oligarchs and whatever pockets of like-mindedness that their inattentiveness or incompetence allows to exist.

In light of that, passivity to the reality of certain verifiable conspiracy theories isn’t to be unexpected, nor is it to be particularly condemned. Simply knowing about what’s going on can help you plan smarter, prepare for future events better, and—should things take turns for the worst—remain level-headed when things really start to go south.

To some degree, any sort of so-called redpill fosters passivity—and the more you learn, the more passive you end up becoming as a result. The sheer size and scope of the liberal oligarchical machine defies imagination, and the extent and success of the social engineering over last century is equally if not more impressive. The efforts of a handful of guys on the internet aren’t going to destroy the machine.

But Q-Anon didn’t just foster passivity. It fostered complacency. While knowledge of these workings can breed a certain sense of smugness, it tends also to breed fear or despair alongside it. This is best combated by a strong maintenance of one’s interior life: clinging to the Sacraments, a regular prayer life, devotions to particular saints, cultivation of virtue and piety. It’s no coincidence that those who study these sorts of things, and who haven’t actively cultivated their interior lives, end up alcoholics or maniacs. Part of it is the lifestyle that led to getting into this field, but the other part of it is that it’s not a particularly pleasant field to be in.

This is somewhat typical for your average conspiracy enthusiast, and in fact, even for your average reactionary. But Q-Anon, again, was not like this; the phenomenon didn’t tend to result in people clinging more closely to the cultivation of their virtue—nor, interestingly, did it result in the steady and unhappy darkening of their outlooks on politics. Instead, it filled people with a baseless hope. It cultivated a satisfaction that they were secure in a certain knowledge about the world and about the future, and this was founded on that hope that Q was right. It was all a lie, at least as it got going, but it was a comfortable lie for people utterly disenfranchised by our country’s liberal elite.

Q’s narrative offered its cult this personal sense of complacent gratification, but this was only possible because of a more terrible fault: they had the audacity to believe that the government, despite the areas where it was compromised, remained a government of and for the people. They thought the American dream of self-governance still applied. They believed the great liberal lie that the country’s entire civic identity rests on. Despite the bureaucracy, the authoritarianism, the corruption in the legislature, the extent to which the judicial system was compromised—Q Anon was only sensible for as long as you believed that ‘good’ civic Americans could thrive enough within the government to rise through its ranks. Trusting the plan meant trusting the government, and no conspiracy theorist ever trusts the government. That’s the whole reason conspiracy theorists are called conspiracy theorists.

This is part of the tragedy of the Q-Anon conspiracy. The complacency it fostered drove a stake through the entire ethos of the American conspiracy theory narrative; too many jumped onto the bandwagon and too many found themselves wrapped up in a cult whose answer to any question was “trust the plan” or “don’t blackpill each other.” Conspiracy enthusiasts are supposed to want to dig into things themselves, yet Q-Anon proponents were more interested in throwing their shovels away and trusting that somebody, somewhere was digging for them.

Q-Anon Is Not Going Away

If you think that the Q conspiracies and followers are going away because Trump has left office, think again. Some of the Q predictions before Biden’s team took the White House were patently insane, but now they’ll go into overdrive. Already, the loyal followers of this psyop—those that are left, as many have thankfully gotten shocked out of the charade by the events of January—are desperately trying to hold the ‘movement’ together. Don’t get blackpilled! That’s what the global Satanic pedophile elite want!

What exactly this means is anyone’s guess. If you trusted the plan, then the sincere question deserves to be asked: what exactly was the plan? What is the plan now? Who are you supposed to be trusting? Jeff Sessions was supposed to be your guy. William Barr was supposed to be your guy. Mike Flynn was supposed to be your guy. Donald Trump is apparently still supposed to be your guy. But they aren’t, and they never really were; they were all career politicians, save for Trump, and he was a billionaire businessman from New York. There’s something to be said for saying one thing and doing another, for backroom deals, for fooling the opposition—that’s just standard politics. But the 4-D chess that we’re supposed to believe characterized Q-Anon’s version of the Trump administration has no relation to reality.

More than this, however, is the fact that the method worked. Q-Anon succeeded in doing two things: pulling dissatisfied boomers into a state of complacency and subsequent demoralization, and giving the proponents of the main narrative—the media, mostly—an enormous target upon which to heap the blame for everything related to whatever questions their talking points. Being a “Trump supporter” isn’t enough in a political environment when Trump has been publicly disgraced and run out of office. A bigger target is needed. Q-Anon fits the bill perfectly.

Still wondering what was going on with Jeffery Epstein? You must be into that Q-Anon stuff, too. Think the election results were the direct result of obvious and intentional voter fraud? That sounds like Q-Anon territory. You still remember the Las Vegas shooting? You’re probably a Q-Anoner. Remain unconvinced that masks and lockdowns are an appropriate response to the COVID crisis, and you believe that the new vaccines are pretty dubious? That’s a conspiracy theory, so it’s definitely Q-related.

Q-Anon attached itself to being incredible, continually embraced claims that proved to be wrong, and now, in 2021, got tied to a violent incident at the Capitol that the media now refers to as an insurrection. This isn’t just bad press, this is a series of catastrophically bad takes and bad looks. This isn’t even relevant when it comes to speaking to the opposition about Q-adjacent things, either—that ship sailed years ago. This is relevant because Q has taken the face of most of the right, even for those of us who openly and utterly reject it.

If you question the main narrative, you’re a conspiracy theorist. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, you’re part of the Q-Anon cult. If you’re a Q-Anoner, you’re a violent insurrectionist. If you’re a violent insurrectionist, well, you should see how this works. Calling people Trump supporters, especially as they organized under red MAGA hats, was enough to form a brand identifiable with right-America—just as Obama worked his rising sun branding into an identifying marker for liberal-America. But just calling someone a Trump supporter wasn’t enough to get them put on lists. Q-Anon has reached the notoriety and created a spectacle big enough to do that.

The Q-cult will probably endure. While it’s impossible to speak with any specificity, it’s safe to presume that it has lost a majority of its informal membership in the wake of a mass arrest-less presidential inauguration. That, after years of non-starters and false premonitions, should have been enough to discredit the whole theory for a majority of its proponents. Some, however, whether out of grift, stubbornness, emotional investment (cope), or some other mysterious reason, will hold out for years to come, until Trump dies or some other psyop manages to take its place.

But the Q image is definitely here to stay. Q will be used as the effigy of right-America that, like Charlottesville, like the Capitol scuffle, will be bludgeoned in the liberal-dominated public spaces to demoralize the Regime’s opposition. Like how the term “racist” now simply refers to white people, how “sexist” simply refers to men (and periodically to white women).

Q is a weapon that certain segments of the right held onto believing it was a gun, but it was a grenade this whole time, and the left has already pulled the pin.

Conclusions

News broke on Wednesday that the user behind Twitter account Ricky Vaughn was arrested for spreading memes online back in 2016. He helped popularize the Draft Our Daughters hashtag, as well as the vote-by-text troll that, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost five thousand people took seriously. The feds got his dox from the thoroughly disreputable Paul Nehlen, arraigned him, and have a volume of what now passes for evidence in a federal court: tweets, reports of tweets, group chat logs, and memes.

Let’s be clear, this guy wasn’t some kind of insurrectionist—a term that the media is all too willing to level at Capitol tailgaters nowadays. He didn’t advocate for overthrowing any governments, stalking or harassing or harming any person or figure, forming militias, nothing. He made politically-charged memes on the internet. Now he’s facing ten years in prison, and all for activity that is half-a-decade old at this point.

This is the future. You cannot afford to trust the plan. This is the plan. This has been the plan. The plan you have to take notice of is the one that’s coming for your family, for your chat logs, for your internet activity, for your bank accounts and assets. The currently-unfolding GameStop market mischief will undoubtedly result in the unwashed masses getting locked out of certain soon-to-be-overregulated sectors of investment banking. Big Tech is already maneuvering into position for a new phase of unprecedented internet censorship. Things are going to get bad and they’re going to get weird, and you need your eyes wide open if you don’t want surprises ripping your future away from you.

Q-Anon has driven the wedge between the two Americas even deeper. Communication across the divide, once already nearly impossible, has gotten more strained as a result. It’s tempting to wish for the elites who accomplished this narrative to take their masks off, but their masks came off last year. It’s tempting to hope that the open manipulation of the narrative, the outright slandering of people that is to come, and the censorship and lockouts will be enough to redpill enough Americans that they’ll wake up and take their country back. We should certainly pray for these things, but some sort of mass Great Awakening isn’t going to happen. Incremental action is the best we can strive for.

We should take two things away from the Q-Anon fallout: first, that its a label the right now has to live with, and second, more importantly, we should focus our efforts on circling wagons more than on half-baked indulgences in grand schemes. When someone insists we should trust the plan, we should be asking “whose plan?” and “what is the plan?” When someone insists that there are guys on the inside working for our interests, we shouldn’t believe them.