Q Queries

The decentralized internet movement Q–anon has been in the news.

I first heard of Q in 2017, by way of The Prophecy Club, which is a Christian End-times prophecy group, active since the early 90’s. They sprang up in response to the visions of a Romanian immigrant to the U.S. named Dimitru Duduman. I was more interested in this sort of thing in the late 90’s than I am now but have kept an eye on them since our first encounter. In 2017 I was listening to a podcast in which they were raving about sealed indictments waiting for corrupt career politicians, impending social collapse with martial law declared while military tribunals mete out justice to denizens of “the Swamp”. It was a strange and exciting mix: an anti-communist Romanian visionary’s testimonies crossed with Bible prophecies on the downfall of the U.S, politics, apocalypse and revolutionary justice all in one. At this same time I became aware of many YouTube commentators referring to “Q” and “Q-anon”. There seemed to be much obsession with symbology, and the idea that highly-placed anti-globalist Patriots in Trump’s administration were planning to right many wrongs. It sounded interesting but improbable, yet still, the anti-Trump hysteria and the rage of the anarchist Left and BLM mobs made it seem possible. I listened to a few Q analysts and got a taste of the divergent strands within the Q community.

But the crackpot numerology, the repetition of internet rumors and the shallow sloganeering got to me quickly. The idea of reading geopolitical prophecy into cryptic “crumbs” of information from anonymous postings on social media sites seemed silly. By mid-2018 I lost interest and started calling people Q-tards on internet threads. I mocked them for their rancid popcorn and their numerological delirium. I learned about the origins of Q and began to consider it as a psychological operation geared toward rank and file right-wingers. This was not decided all on my own. I was persuaded by the well-researched discussions at We’ve Read the Documents. So I unsubscribed from the three or four Q-friendly channels I had been listening to and generally wrote off anyone who sounded like a true believer.

But then in the summer of 2020 I read an Atlantic article on Q. It was surprisingly impartial and well-written. After that, late summer and fall of 2020, I noticed a sudden hysteria in the normie press regarding Q, as if they had just discovered it. All at once the lamestream media were outdoing each other to big-up Q as some sort of dangerous extremist conspiracy theory. I found their alarm contrived and hilarious. If there is anything I despise more than Q-tards raving about numbers, dates, Gematria (look it up!) and “Trusting the Plan”, it is Fake News ! So I decided to jump back on the Q bandwagon just to push against the new wave of alarm from the antichrist propaganda of state media. And I still held on to some hopium that the stolen election would be avenged . . . but I was also prepared for all the Q hysteria to dissipate.

I honestly think that at this point Q has become a folk religion which started as a CIA or US military psy-op. It caught on so wildly that it morphed and mutated into the crackpot cultic faith of the internet Patriot Right. There is really nothing offensive in it. It synthesizes a desire for cleansing of corruption, patriotism, faith in the Bible and vengeance fantasies with conspiratorial zeal. I also think some of the appeal of this perspective can be traced back to Pentecostal/Charismatic manias inspired by the Book of Daniel, Revelation, and certain utterances of Christ. Having been burned by Pentecostal fires myself, I lump the hardcore Q-tards in with those charismaniacs who can’t stop taking Daniel and Revelation as literal truths to be decoded. That said, I continue to find in Q-anon and the resulting hysteria a mine of poetic riches.