Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I'm your host.
And today we are sitting in front of a stack
of sources that is, well, it's quite frankly,
a little overwhelming. It's a heavy stack. It
really is. We've got court documents. We've got
psychological studies. We've got archives of
deleted Internet threads. And we've got political
analysis stretching from, I mean, all the way
back in 2016 to where we are now in 2026. And
it's a heavy topic. There's no way around that.
There isn't. We are tackling a subject that I
think a lot of us think we know. You know, we've
seen the headlines. We've seen the memes. Maybe
we've even had an uncomfortable Thanksgiving
dinner or two because of it. Right. We are talking
about QAnon. But the goal today isn't just to
say, hey, look at this wild conspiracy theory.
The goal, based on the materials we have, is
to really decode the machinery behind it. Exactly.
Because if you just dismiss it as crazy people
on the Internet. Yeah. You miss the actual story.
You miss the how and the why. And the story is
so much bigger. Yeah. So much bigger. The story
isn't just about what they believed. It's about
how a massive, decentralized, interactive storytelling
event, essentially a game bled into reality,
hijacked global politics and completely rewrote
the worldview of millions of people. It's the
ultimate example of the Internet is real life.
I mean, it doesn't get more real than this. It
really doesn't. And honestly, looking at the
timeline we're about to cover, it's terrifying
how fast it'll happen. Yeah. So here's our mission
for this deep dive. We're going to try and answer
the question. How did a cryptic user on an anime
message board claiming to be a high -level government
spy convince normal people, we're talking teachers,
nurses, grandmothers, that the world is run by
a satanic cabal? And the big question, why, despite
every single prediction failing, does this narrative
still stick? Why is it so powerful? And we're
going to look at the cost, because this wasn't
free. No, there was a human cost, a profound
human cost in violence, in broken families and,
you know, in the erosion of truth itself. So
let's unpack this. The sources are really clear
on this point. To understand QAnon, you can't
start with Q. No, you can't. You have to start
with the prequel. You have to go back to 2016
to a pizza place in Washington, D .C. Pizzagate.
Pizzagate. This is the foundation. It's the blueprint.
Without Pizzagate, there is no QAnon. So set
the scene for us. It's the 2016 election. Tensions
are incredibly high. Off the charts. And WikiLeaks
drops this huge cache of emails from John Podesta,
who is Hillary Clinton's campaign chair. Now,
I've looked at these emails in the source material.
They are. Honestly, they are aggressively boring.
They're so mundane. They're purely administrative.
It's what are we ordering for lunch? It's can
you make this meeting? It's fundraising logistics.
Just the day to day grind of a political campaign.
But this is where we see the birth of a very
specific mindset, a mindset that drives everything
we're going to talk about today. Yes. The mindset
of do your own research. Which sounds good on
paper, right? We should all do our own research.
Ideally, yes, of course. But in this context,
research meant something very different. It meant.
Starting with a conclusion that these elites
are evil monsters and then forcing the evidence
to fit that conclusion no matter how absurd.
It's working backwards from the answer. Precisely.
So these internet sleuths on Fortan and Reddit
started combing through Podesta's emails. They
saw references to cheese pizza or pasta or walnut
sauce. And instead of thinking, oh, they're having
a campaign lunch, they thought, what? They decided
it was code. They developed this whole lexicon.
They theorized that cheese pizza stood for CP,
which they took to mean child pornography. Okay.
They decided pasta was code for something else,
hot dog for something else. They built an entire
secret language out of, well, out of nothing.
And they centered this entire theory on a real
establishment, Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor
in D .C. And why that place? Its owner, James
Elefantis, was a donor to the Democrats. And
some of these email chains were about fundraisers
that had been held there or were connected to
them. So they drew a line. A very thin line.
An incredibly thin line. And this wasn't just,
hey, this place is suspicious. The sources show
they built elaborate digital maps of the building.
They were analyzing photos from its Instagram
account. What were they looking for? They claimed
there were underground tunnels, kill rooms, and
dungeons beneath this pizza place where children
were being held captive. They anorized the artwork
on the walls, which was just local modern art,
and called it satanic symbolism. It became an
absolute frenzy. And this is the critical moment.
This is where the digital world crashes, I mean,
violently into the physical world. Because on
December 4, 2016, Ann named Edgar Madison Welch
decides he's seen enough online. Right. This
is the moment it stops being a game. It stops
being a thought experiment. Who was he? Welch
is a father from North Carolina. He grabs his
AR -15 rifle and a .38 revolver, gets in his
car, and drives all the way to D .C. He walks
into Comet Ping Pong in the middle of the day.
And there are people there. There are families
there, people eating lunch, kids. And he walks
in, armed for war. In his mind, he's a hero.
He's there to save children. He's there to self
-investigate. That's the term he used with police.
He fires shots into a locked closet door because
he thinks that's where the dungeon is. He forces
the terrified staff and customers to unlock the
back rooms. And what does he find? He finds nothing.
He finds pizza dough, he finds tomato sauce,
he finds kitchen supplies, and crucially, he
finds no basement. The building didn't even have
one. The building didn't have a basement. The
core of the theory was physically impossible.
So he surrenders. He walks out with his hands
up, and you would think, logically, that this
is the end of the story. The theory is tested.
A guy with a gun went in and checked. There are
no kids. Theory debunked. But that is not what
happened at all. No. In the world of conspiracy
theories, contradictory evidence isn't a reason
to doubt. It's just proof of a deeper, more sophisticated
cover -up. So what did they say online? The believers
didn't say, oh, we were wrong. They said it was
false flag. Or the police were in on it. Or,
my favorite, they moved the kids right before
he got there. This is a key dynamic we're going
to see over and over today. The theory is completely
unfalsifiable. Exactly. But there's a consequence.
A real one. After the shooting, Reddit, Twitter,
and other mainstream platforms finally cracked
down. They banned the Pizzagate subreddits. They
said, okay, this is getting people almost killed.
Enough. So the community was homeless. Briefly.
But you can't kill an idea by banning a forum.
The idea was already out there. They just migrated.
They went to the fringes of the internet, specifically
to 4chan. 4chan. The Wild West. The absolute
Wild West. For those who don't know, it's an
anonymous image board with virtually no rules.
No moderation to speak of. It's chaotic. And
on the poll board, that stands for politically
incorrect, these displaced Pizzagate believers
started congregating. They formed new threads.
They called them HTG, which stood for Human Trafficking
General. So they kept the core idea alive. So
you have a pre -existing army of people. They
are angry. They are suspicious. They are absolutely
convinced that the elites are trafficking children.
And they are all gathered in one place, waiting
for a leader. They were dry tinder. They just
needed a spark. And that spark came on October
28, 2017. The first drop. The very first drop.
A new user appears in these threads. They don't
call themselves Q yet. The first signature is
Q Clearance Patriot. Let's talk about that name
for a second. Q Clearance. That's a real thing,
right? It's not just made up. Oh, it's very real.
It's a Department of Energy security clearance
level, a very high one. It grants access to top
secret restricted data, specifically regarding
nuclear weapons and materials. So immediately,
just by choosing that name, this user is establishing
a kind of authority. They are saying, I'm not
just another guy in a basement making things
up. I'm in the room. I have the nuclear codes.
Precisely. It's an immediate appeal to authority.
It makes people sit up and pay attention. And
the first post was not vague. It was the very
specific, very high stakes prediction. I have
the text here. Let's break it down. It says HRC
extradition already in motion effective yesterday
with several countries in case of cross -border
run. So HRC, that's Hillary Rodham Clinton. Right.
And it continues. Passport approved to be flagged
effective 1030 at 12 .01 a .m. A specific date
and time. Expect massive riots organized in defiance
and others fleeing the U .S. to occur. USMs will
conduct the operation while NG activated. Ms
for Marshals, NG for National Guard. And then
this part. Proof check. Locate an NG member and
ask if activated for duty 1030 across most major
cities. It's a bold swing. It's testable. Usually
horoscopes and psychics keep things vague so
they can't be pinned down. This is a concrete
prediction. And spoiler alert for anyone who
was alive in 2017, Hillary Clinton was not arrested
on October 30th. No. There were no riots. The
National Guard was not activated. Nothing happened.
He was a complete and total dud. Now, historically
on 4chan, when an anonymous poster makes a prediction
like that and it fails. They are mocked. They
are laughed off the board immediately. We've
seen it before, right? The sources mention FBI
-anon and C -anon. Exactly. People had tried
to do the same thing before, this insider persona.
But they fizzled out the second their info proved
fake. They were gone. So why are we talking about
Q? Why didn't Q just disappear on October 31st
like all the others? Because Q changed the rules
of engagement. When the prediction failed, Q
didn't apologize. Q didn't stop posting. Q just
kept going, but changed the style completely.
How so? Q moved from just giving news or predictions
to creating a game. A game. Yes. This is what
game designers call an ARG, an alternate reality
game. Or you might hear the term LARP, live action
role play. Q started posting cryptic clues. Well,
kind of clues. Strings of numbers. Blurry photos
taken from a plain window that people would try
to geolocate. And a lot of Socratic questions.
Things like, why does the media never mention
this? Who benefits? Follow the money. Follow
the white rabbit. Exactly. That was a huge part
of the lexicon. Q stopped telling them the answer
and started telling them to find the answer.
Q used the phrase, here are the crumbs. You bake
the bread. That is brilliant in a terrifying
way. It is. It's psychologically incredibly sticky.
Because if I just tell you a fact, you might
believe me or you might not. But if I give you
a puzzle and you solve it. You own it. You own
it. If you're the one who connects the flight
logs of Jeffrey Epstein to a timestamp on a Trump
tweet to a line in an old movie, you feel a rush
of dopamine. You feel smart. You feel like you
discovered it yourself. It flatters the user.
It says, you are smarter than the sheep. You're
not just a passive consumer of news. You are
an investigator. And that created the community.
They call themselves bakers. They would take
these cryptic drops and spend hours, days analyzing
them, creating these elaborate charts and diagrams.
decoding what they called kill codes. So it wasn't
just reading content. It was participating in
a massive multiplayer intelligence operation.
That's exactly how they saw themselves, as digital
soldiers in an information war. So the failure
of the Hillary prediction didn't matter in the
end. It didn't matter at all because the game
was too fun to stop playing. And the narrative
that emerged from this game, well, that's where
we get into the core mythology because it expanded
way beyond just Hillary Clinton. Let's try to
map out this mythology. Because to an outsider,
it just looks like a random collection of every
conspiracy theory ever. You know, JFK is alive,
5G towers cause disease, vaccines are a plot.
But there is a core structure, right? A central
story. There is. At its heart, it's a classic
dualistic narrative. Yeah. It's good versus evil.
It's a holy war. So let's start with the evil,
the cabal. Right. The central tenet of QAnon
is that the world... for centuries has been secretly
controlled by a satanic cabal. Who's in this
cabal? It's a who's who of their political and
cultural enemies. Top Democrats, so the Clintons,
Obama, Biden, Hollywood celebrities like Tom
Hanks, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and...
Globalist business leaders George Soros and Bill
Gates are always at the top of that list. But
the accusation isn't that they're just, you know,
greedy or corrupt, which is a common political
attack. No, it goes much, much darker than that.
It's incredibly graphic. The accusation is that
they are, and this is their belief, Satan -worshipping,
cannibalistic pedophiles who systematically traffic,
torture, and murder children. It's not just political
disagreement. It's a charge of absolute ultimate
moral evil. And that's the point. It completely
dehumanizes the opponent. You can't negotiate
with someone who eats children. You can't compromise
with them. You have to destroy them. It's an
existential battle. OK, so that's the villain.
Who is the hero in this story? Donald Trump.
Of course. In the QAnon lore, Trump isn't just
a reality TV star who stumbled into politics.
No, he was specifically recruited years in advance
by a group of loyal military generals. they call
them the white hats, to run for president for
one single purpose. To take down this cabal.
To take it down from the inside. This recontextualizes
his entire presidency for them. Completely. If
you were a Q follower, every time Trump did something
that looked chaotic or maybe incompetent or just
plain confusing to the mainstream media, you
didn't see chaos. No, you saw strategy. You saw
5D chess. Trust the plan. Trust the plan. That
was the mantra. That phrase was everywhere. If
he fired someone, it wasn't because... of a disagreement.
It was to clear the board for the next phase
of the operation. And if he tweeted a typo, I
remember Kafei. Kafei was a huge one for them.
To you or me, it's a funny typo. To them, it
wasn't a mistake. It was a coded message to the
Patriots, a signal that the plan was in motion.
It made the entire belief system bulletproof
against any external criticism. In the endgame,
what was this all building towards? What were
they waiting for? They were waiting for the storm.
or sometimes they called it the event. The storm,
where does that come from? It comes from a real
-life quote from Trump himself. Back in 2017,
he was at a photo op with military leaders, and
he gestured to them and said to the press, you
know what this represents? Maybe it's the calm
before the storm. And a reporter asked, what
storm, Mr. President? And he just said, you'll
find out. And Q took that and ran with it. Ran
with it and built the entire eschatology around
it. The storm was the prophesied day where the
military would finally step out of the shadows.
They would arrest the thousands of cabal members
en masse. And then what? Military tribunals,
executions. They believed it would all be televised.
And then after this violent purge would come.
The Great Awakening. A utopia. A utopia. A world
where debt is wiped out, diseases are miraculously
cured with hidden technologies, and the world
finally knows the truth. I want to dig into the
vocabulary a bit more because if you were online
between 2017 and 2021, you saw these hashtags
everywhere. The big one. WWG1WGA. Where we go
one, we go all. It sounds very profound. It sounds
very, I don't know, almost... biblical or something.
It has that weight to it. It sounds like something
from a founding document. But it's not. No. It's
from the 1996 Ridley Scott sailing movie White
Squall. The movie with Jeff Bridges. That's the
one. It's a line he says to his crew of students.
It's literally on the movie poster. But for QAnon,
it became this sacred oath of unity. It reinforced
that digital soldier identity. We are in this
together. It's amazing how they pull from pop
culture. And then there is a term that I think
creeps people out the most. We have to talk about
adrenochrome. Yes, we do. Because this is what
connects the Cabal theory to the child trafficking
theory. It's the mechanism. What on earth is
adrenochrome, according to them? Okay, so in
the QAnon mythology, adrenochrome is the reason
the elites are trafficking children. The theory
is that they torture these children because extreme
fear and pain caused the adrenal gland to flood
the body with adrenaline. Okay. They believe
that if you then harvest this adrenalized blood,
which they call adrenochrome, and you drink it
or inject it, it acts as a kind of fountain of
youth. It extends your life. It gives you a psychedelic
high. It grants you power. It sounds like a vampire
myth. It's a modern vampire myth. It's grotesque.
But let's look at the science here because this
is where a hard fact check is really important.
Adrenochrome is a real chemical compound. So
it does exist. It exists. It is simply oxidized
adrenaline or epinephrine. It's what happens
when adrenaline breaks down. But the effects,
the life extension, the high. It has absolutely
no rejuvenating or hallucinogenic properties.
None. If you ingested it, the scientific literature
says it wouldn't make you high. It would probably
just give you a headache or make you nauseous.
And most importantly, you do not need to torture
children to get it. You can just buy it. You
can buy it from a chemical supply catalog. Laboratories
use it for certain types of research, like testing
for schizophrenia or blood clotting. It's synthesized
in a lab. It's a pink powder. It is not some
magical elixir harvested from fear. So where
did the idea come from? Why do millions of people
believe that Hillary Clinton drinks this stuff?
Again, it's from fiction. Not a medical journal.
No. It's from Hunter S. Thompson, the gonzo journalist.
In his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he
writes a scene where his character takes adrenochrome.
He describes it as this terrifying, potent psychedelic
derived from the adrenal glands of a living human.
But he made it up. He admitted it himself. In
the DVD commentary for the movie adaptation,
he says he completely fabricated it. It was a
satirical exaggeration of the drug culture of
the 1970s. So QAnon took a plot device from a
drug fueled satirical novel and treated it as
top secret medical intelligence. That's exactly
what happened. It's fascinating how the lines
blur for them. Movie quotes become sacred texts.
Fictional drugs become real conspiracies. It's
like they built a new reality out of pop culture
scraps. It speaks to the demographics, maybe.
These are people who consume media. They understand
these tropes. It feels familiar to them in a
strange way. It's a story they already know.
Speaking of demographics and spread, we need
to talk about how this moved from the dark corners
of 4chan to, well, to my aunt's Facebook feed.
Because 4chan is... The user interface is terrible.
It's deliberately hostile. It's anonymous. It's
full of pornography and racial slurs. It's not
user -friendly at all. No, your aunt is not browsing
4chan. But she is browsing Facebook and Instagram.
And this is where the mechanism of spread comes
in. You had a layer of middlemen, of entrepreneurs
really. We call them aggregators. So like apps
and websites. Yes. Developers built sites like
Qmap .pub or apps for your phone like Qdrops.
These tools did something very important. They
scraped the raw posts from 4chan and later 8chan,
and they stripped away all the offensive context.
They cleaned it up. They cleaned it up. They
stripped away the porn, the slurs, the chaos,
and they presented the Q drops in a clean, slick,
professional -looking interface. Like a news
feed. Exactly. It looked legitimate. It looked
like a news source. You could get push notifications
on your phone, new draw from Q. It made the content
accessible to normies, regular people who would...
never venture onto an image board. And the social
media algorithms, I assume, helped this along.
They helped immensely. You have to remember,
platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed
to do one thing. Keep you on the platform for
as long as possible. Maximize engagement. Right.
And what is more engaging than a mystery thriller
where the stakes are literally the fate of the
world? So if I watch one video about a conspiracy
theory, the algorithm says, hey, you might like
this QAnon video. Or it's even more subtle than
that. The source material shows that if you are
in a natural parenting group or an anti -vax
group or even a yoga group, the algorithm identifies
that you are someone who is skeptical of mainstream.
You're a certain kind of customer. You're a certain
profile. So it starts suggesting other groups.
Maybe it suggests a group about... Saving the
children. And this leads us directly to Pastel
QAnon. This was a term I hadn't heard until I
read the stack, but it explains so much about
what happened in 2020. It was a massive and deliberate
rebranding. In the beginning, QAnon was very
male, very aggressive, very military, all camouflage
and skulls and eagles. Pastel QAnon was the softening
of the image to appeal specifically to women,
particularly mothers on Instagram. Explain the
aesthetic. What does that look like? Think of
the standard influencer aesthetic you see on
Instagram. Soft beige filters, pretty cursive
fonts, great lighting, a nice photo of a latte
or a yoga pose, or a well -decorated living room.
But the caption isn't about coffee. No. The caption
says, Did you know there are thousands of children
trapped in underground tunnels right now? We
have to wake up and save them. It's a bait and
switch. A jarring one. It's a Trojan horse. And...
The key to this was hijacking the hashtag, hashtag
save the children. Which is a real charity. A
real, legitimate charity that has done great
work for a century. But in 2020, QAnon followers
flooded that hashtag. They completely took it
over. So if a well -meaning mom logs on and she
wants to help children, she searches that hashtag.
And she is instantly bombarded with QAnon propaganda
disguised as inspirational lifestyle content.
She sees a post from a mommy blogger she trusts,
someone she's followed for years. and that blogger
is now talking about the cabal. And it bypasses
your critical thinking filters. Completely. Because
it's framed as protecting children. Who doesn't
want to save children? It's a universal moral
good. And if you question it, they have a built
-in defense. Oh, you don't believe this? What,
do you support pedophiles? Exactly. It weaponizes
empathy. It takes a mother's most powerful instinct,
the instinct to protect the innocent, and it
channels it into a radical political delusion.
It was an incredibly effective recruitment tool.
There's also a geopolitical angle here that we
can't ignore. The sources mentioned the Sufan
Center report. It wasn't just organic grassroots
growth. No, not at all. We have very clear evidence
from intelligence agencies and researchers that
foreign state actors, specifically Russia and
China, were amplifying QAnon narratives online.
Why would they do that? I mean, do they believe
in Q? Oh, no, they don't care about the narrative
at all. They care about the chaos. It's classic
information warfare. It's a playbook they've
used for decades. So what's the goal? The goal
is to weaken your adversary from within. If Americans
are at each other's throats fighting about imaginary
satanic cabals and stolen elections, then we
aren't unified. We aren't paying attention to
actual geopolitical threats. It erodes social
cohesion. It was a very low cost, very high reward
way to sow discord in the United States. It's
a sobering thought. We were tearing ourselves
apart and foreign intelligence agencies were
just standing back and pouring gasoline on the
fire. That's a perfect way to put it. But I want
to get to the mystery that I think everyone asks
about. After all this, who is Q? The million
dollar question. For years, the speculation was
wild. People thought it was General Michael Flynn.
Or John F. Kennedy Jr., who they believed faked
his own death. Some even thought it was Trump
himself. Right. Or a team of rogue CIA agents.
The theories were as grand as the conspiracy
itself. But the forensic evidence, the actual
data, points to something much more, I don't
know, banal. Is that the right word? Banal, but
fascinating. We have two separate teams of computer
scientists, one French, one Swiss, who perform
what's called stylometric analysis on the entire
corpus of Q -drops. Stylometry. Sounds fancy.
Break that down for us. It's basically linguistic
fingerprinting. Everybody has unconscious habits
in how they write or type. Do you use among or
amongst? Do you put two spaces after a period?
Do you use certain misspellings or turns of phrase
consistently? When you have thousands of posts,
thousands of data points, these patterns become
a unique fingerprint. So you can match the writing
style to a known author? With a very high degree
of statistical confidence, yes. And what did
the fingerprint show? It showed that there were
likely two main authors over two distinct periods.
Okay, carried one. The very early days on 4chan,
the first few months, the writing style is a
near -perfect statistical match for a man named
Paul Ferber. And who is Paul Ferber? He is a
South African software engineer and, crucially,
a moderator on the poll board where Q first started
posting. He was one of the very first people
to hype up Q. He started YouTube channels and
websites dedicated to decoding the drops almost
immediately. So the theory is he just started
it himself. The theory is that he started the
LARP. Maybe to drive traffic to the board, maybe
just to have fun and see what would happen. A
kind of digital prank that got out of hand. But
then you said the style changed. Yes. Around
the time the Q posts moved from 4chan to a different,
even more lawless website called 8chan, the voice
shifted significantly. The vocabulary, the sentence
structure. Everything changed. And the second
author? The stylometry points directly to Ron
Watkins. Ron Watkins. We know that name. We do.
He's the son of Jim Watkins, the man who owned
and operated Achan. Ron was the site administrator.
He was the one running the website day to day.
This makes perfect sense from a technical standpoint,
right? Because Q used something called a trip
code. Right. A trip code is a kind of digital
signature on these anonymous boards. It's a password
-protected code that proves the person posting
today is the same person who posted yesterday.
It authenticates the user. But if you are the
administrator of the entire website. Like Ron
was, you control the database. You know all the
passwords. You can take over anyone's trip code
whenever you want. So the theory is that Ron
Watkins saw this queue phenomenon taking off
and essentially hijacked the account from the
original poster to drive traffic and engagement
to his own failing website. And there is that
incredible moment in the HBO documentary queue.
Into the storm. I remember watching it and I
literally stood up off my couch. The Cullen Hoback
documentary. It's the closest we will probably
ever get to an actual confession. Describe that
scene for anyone who hasn't seen it. So it's
the final episode. The filmmaker, Cullen, is
interviewing Ron Watkins. Ron is talking about
his time running 8chan and his crusade for what
he calls free speech. And he makes a slip. He
just he slips up. What does he say? He says,
I've spent the past three years teaching normies
how to do intelligence work. It was basically
what I was doing anonymously before. And then
he stops. He freezes. You can see the gears turn
in his head. He realizes he just said what I
was doing anonymously. He tries to backtrack.
He stammers and says, but never his cue. And
then what's his reaction? He laughs. He lets
out this nervous. almost smug little laugh. He
looks right at the camera and he smiles this
big awkward smile. It's a total you got me moment.
He all of it winks at the camera. It's chilling.
It's absolutely chilling. Because if that is
true and all the forensic and circumstantial
evidence says it is, it means this global movement,
this thing that incited riots and ruined lives
and broke families. Basically, a guy in the Philippines
trying to promote his message board. It strips
away all the mystique. It wasn't a military intelligence
operation. It wasn't a team of patriots. It was
a message board admin with a God complex. A bored,
cynical webmaster. And that leads us to the real
world. Because whether it was a game to Ron Watkins
or Paul Ferber, it was not a game to the people
reading it. No. And this is where we have to
talk about the violence. Because the rhetoric
of QAnon was war. It was never just a discussion.
It was explicitly the language of war. General
Michael Flynn, Trump's former national security
advisor, leaned into this hard after he was pardoned.
He called the followers digital soldiers. He
even led them in taking an oath. He made it official.
And when you tell people they are soldiers and
you tell them the enemy is literally killing
and eating children, violence isn't just possible.
It becomes logical. It becomes a moral imperative.
You have to think about it from their perspective.
If you truly believed 100 percent in your heart
of hearts that your neighbor was kidnapping and
eating babies, what would you do? You'd kick
down their door. You would feel obligated to.
You'd be a monster if you didn't. And we see
this play out time and time again. We've got
a list of incidents here in the notes, and it's
just heartbreaking. We mentioned the pizza guy,
Edgar Welch. Yeah. But there was also the Hoover
Dam incident. Right. Matthew Wright. Matthew
Wright. In 2018, he drove a homemade armored
truck onto the Michael Kelly and Pat Tillman
Memorial Bridge right by the Hoover Dam. He blocked
all traffic. He'd welded steel plates to a pickup.
He had an AR -15. He had a handgun. And he was
holding up signs. He was demanding the release
of the OIG report, the Department of Justice
Inspector General report, that QAnon followers
had been hyped up to believe would expose all
the deep state crimes. He was ready to have a
shootout with police over a government document
he heard about on an anonymous image board. He
truly believed he was starting the revolution.
He was eventually arrested after a 90 -minute
standoff. He wrote letters from jail, signed
Patriot. He threw his entire life away for a
lie. Then there's the murder of Frank Kelly.
This one is so bizarre because it involves the
actual mafia. Frank Kelly was the reputed boss
of the Gambino crime family, a real -life mob
boss. In 2019, a young man named Anthony Camillo
shot him dead in front of his house on Staten
Island. Was Camillo a rival gangster, part of
a mob hit? No. He was a construction worker who
had fallen deep down the Q rabbit hole. When
he showed up for his court appearance, he had
Q and WWG1WGA scribbled on his hand in pen for
the cameras to see. And what was his motive?
His defense attorney said Camilla believed Frank
Calley was a key member of the deep state and
that by killing him, he was helping Trump protect
the country. He thought he was a secret agent.
He thought he was going to be pardoned by Trump.
It shows the reach of this thing. It touches
every corner of society, from mommy bloggers
to the mob. But the story that haunts me the
most from the source material is Matthew Taylor
Coleman. This one is. This is the darkest it
gets. And I think it's important to share this
specific story to understand the total catastrophic
break from reality that can happen. Coleman was
a surf instructor in Santa Barbara, right? Yeah.
The sources say, by all accounts, a normal, loving
dad. Yes. Ran a surfing school with his wife.
Seemed perfectly normal. But he started spending
hours and hours deep diving into QAnon and some
adjacent, even stranger theories about reptilians
and secret bloodlines. And he became convinced
that his wife possessed serpent DNA. Yes. and
that she had passed this demonic DNA onto their
children. His two kids, a two -year -old and
a ten -month -old baby. In August of 2021, he
put them in his van. He told his wife he was
taking them camping. Instead, he drove them to
Mexico. He took them to a field, and he killed
them both with a spearfishing gun. It makes you
sick to even say it. When the FBI caught him
at the border, he didn't deny it. He confessed
immediately. He told him he had to do it. He
said he was saving the world from the monsters
they were going to become. He believed he was
the hero of the story. That is the ultimate tragedy
of this gamification. It's not a game. It completely
overrode the most basic biological instinct a
human has, the instinct to protect your own offspring.
The narrative became more real to him than his
own children. And all of that violence, all of
that radicalization, it all culminated on one.
day, January 6th, 2021. The Capitol attack. The
insurrection. We all saw the footage. And it
was impossible to miss the influence of QAnon.
We saw the Q flags everywhere. We saw the T -shirts.
We saw Jacob Chansley, the QAnon shaman, in his
fur and horns carrying a spear, standing at the
vice president's podium in the Senate, leading
a prayer. But we have to understand their mindset
that day. They weren't just rioting to riot.
They were there because they thought something
was supposed to happen. They were waiting. They
were waiting for the storm. They truly believed
that once they breached the building, that was
the signal. The trap would be sprung. What did
they think was going to happen? They thought
the military, which they believed was secretly
loyal to Trump, would emerge. They thought they
would conduct mass arrests of Mike Pence, Nancy
Pelosi, and all the other traitors. They thought
Trump would be declared president for life. They
thought it was the final victory. And then night
fell. Night fell. The police eventually cleared
the building. Congress reconvened, shaken but
determined. And they certified Joe Biden's victory.
The cognitive dissonance for those people must
have been off the charts. You can see it in the
chat logs from that night on platforms like Telegram
and Parler, which we have in the source material.
It's pure panic and confusion. Where is the military?
Why isn't Trump acting? Trust the plan. Did we
get played? You would think that would be the
end. The final undeniable public failure. The
prophecy failed. The leader left office. Game
over. But that's not how cult dynamics work.
When a doomsday prophecy fails, the believers
often become more devout, not less, in order
to rationalize the failure. They double down.
And the movement didn't die. No, it mutated.
It went underground for a bit and then it went
global. This is the international mutations section
of our notes. And I find this absolutely fascinating
as a study of culture. How does a conspiracy
theory that is so deeply rooted in American politics
resonate in Germany or Japan? It adapts. That's
the power of what you might call a big tent conspiracy.
Right. It's so vague and sprawling that it can
absorb local grievances and local histories.
Take Germany, for instance. The Reichsberger
movement. Exactly. Citizens of the Reich. These
are people who believe the modern German state,
the federal republic, is illegitimate. They think
it's just a corporation set up by the Allies
after World War II and that the German Empire
still secretly exists. So they merged their theory
with QAnon. They merged it seamlessly. They saw
the deep state as the same force occupying their
country. They believed that Donald Trump was
coming to liberate Germany too and restore the
Reich. And this wasn't just online LARPing. There
was a real coup plot. A very real, very serious
coup plot. In December 2022, German police conducted
one of the largest raids in their history. They
arrested dozens of people, including a man named
Prince Heinrich XIII, a minor aristocrat they
planned to install as the new leader. And what
was their plan? Their plan was to storm the Reichstag.
the Parliament building, arrest lawmakers, and
trigger a civil war. They had bought weapons,
they had former soldiers in their ranks, and
they were heavily influenced by QAnon ideology
about the storm. And then in Canada, we have
the Queen of Canada. Romana Didulo. This is a
spinoff that went totally rogue. She is a Filipino
-Canadian woman who rose to prominence on Telegram
after Q went silent. She just stepped into the
power vacuum. And what was her claim? She claimed
to be the secret queen of Canada. secretly appointed
by the same white hat military alliance that
appointed Trump. And people believed her. Thousands
of people. She amassed a cult -like following.
She would travel the country in an RV with her
followers. She started issuing decrees. Decrees
about what? She told her followers that because
she was queen, all debts were canceled electricity
and water were now free you didn't have to pay
your taxes or your mortgage so people just stopped
paying their bills they stopped paying their
bills they stopped paying their mortgages and
of course the power companies cut them off the
banks foreclosed on their homes they lost everything
and when they complained to her She told them
it was their fault for not having enough faith
in her decrees. She gaslit them completely. And
she got violent, too, didn't she? Her rhetoric
became incredibly violent. She encouraged her
followers to try and arrest police officers.
She called for shoot -to -kill orders against
nurses and doctors who were administering COVID
vaccines to children. It just shows that once
you remove the anchor of reality, there is no
bottom. The delusion can go anywhere. I want
to zoom out for a second and ask the big why.
Why this particular story? We've seen conspiracies
before. JFK, the moon landing, 9 -11. But this
one feels different. It feels almost religious.
That's because it is religious in its structure.
And to understand that, we also have to understand
that QAnon is not new. It is a remix, a rebranding
of a very old and a very dangerous hate story.
You're talking about the blood libel. The blood
libel. This is an anti -Semitic myth that dates
back to the Middle Ages. The lie was that Jewish
communities were kidnapping Christian children
and using their blood to bake matzah for Passover
or for other dark rituals. It's the exact same
plot as the adrenochrome story. It is identical.
You just find and replace the nouns. Replace
Jews with the globalist cabal, which for many
is just a modern code word for Jews anyway. Replace
ritual with adrenochrome harvesting. It's the
same monstrous lie, just updated for the Internet
age. And it also draws heavily from the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Absolutely. The Protocols
was a fabricated text from the early 1900s created
by the Russian secret police that claimed to
reveal a secret Jewish plot for world domination.
QAnon is just the digital interactive version
of these old poisonous hatreds. But it also syncs
up almost perfectly with a certain strain of
American Christianity. Specifically, American
evangelical Christianity. If you already view
the world through the lens of spiritual warfare,
of an active, ongoing battle between God and
Satan, angels and demons, then QAnon makes perfect
sense. It takes that spiritual battle and makes
it physical and political. Exactly. In this framework,
Donald Trump isn't just a political candidate
you like. He's a messianic figure. A King Cyrus,
an imperfect vessel chosen by God to fight evil.
And the Democrats aren't just the opposition
party. They are literally demonic entities, minions
of Satan. It raises the stakes to cosmic proportions.
It does. You can compromise with the political
opponent on a tax bill. You cannot compromise
with the demon who wants to eat children. It
demands total war. This also explains the isolation
we hear so much about. There's a subreddit called
RQAnonCasualties. I've read some of the posts
there, and they are absolutely heart -wrenching.
They are devastating. It's just post after post.
I lost my mom. I lost my husband. My sister won't
speak to me. Not to death, but to the rabbit
hole. The believers are encouraged to isolate
themselves. Yes, because if your family doesn't
believe, if they challenge you, it means they
are asleep. Or worse, they are part of the system,
part of the cover -up. The movement encourages
you to cut off anyone who challenges the truth.
It creates a sealed environment, a classic cult
dynamic. So let's bring this up to the present
day. It is February 2026. The original Q account
hasn't posted a real drop in years. The last
time Ron Watkins was in the news was for a failed
congressional run in Arizona. But when you look
at the political landscape, did Q lose or did
they actually win? That is the complex and disturbing
part of this story's aftermath. The brand queuing
on lost. It became toxic. You don't see the Q
shirts and the big flags at rallies as much anymore.
But the ideas. The ideas won. The ideas went
mainstream. How so? The core concepts have been
laundered and absorbed into regular political
discourse. The idea of the deep state, that unelected
bureaucrats are secretly controlling everything,
that is now standard rhetoric. And the moral
panics. The obsession with groomers in schools,
the constant panic about child trafficking being
an epidemic in every town that comes straight
from the Q playbook. It's Pizzagate 2 .0. And
of course, the election denialism. The belief
that the 2020 election was stolen was a core
QAnon tenet long before the election even happened.
By 2024, it was a central plank of the Republican
Party platform. The sources mention a PRRI poll
from 2024 that is just stunning. Yes, the Public
Religion Research Institute. It showed that nearly
one in five Americans, almost 20 percent of the
country. agreed with the core tenets of QAnon
that there is a storm coming to sweep away the
elites, that violence might be necessary to save
the country. That is tens of millions of people.
And with Trump's return to power in the 2024
election, the source material says the adherents
rejoiced. For them, it was the ultimate validation.
They finally got what they were waiting for.
In their minds, the Biden years from 2021 to
2025 were just the pause. It was a test of faith,
a necessary part of the movie they believed they
were watching. Trump's return proved that the
plan was real all along. So they don't need cryptic
clues on 8chan anymore. No. Why would you need
to decode crumbs when your hero is back in the
White House? The subtext became the text. The
fringe narrative became, for them, the political
reality. It really reframes. how we think about
truth and belief. We tend to think facts will
win out in the end. We think, well, the date
passed, nothing happened, so they'll stop believing.
But this whole saga shows that a compelling story,
even a horrifying one, is more powerful than
a mountain of facts. It offers something that
facts can't. It offers community. It offers a
sense of purpose, of significance. It tells you,
you are special. You're awake. You know the secret
truth that the sheep don't know. That is a powerful,
addictive drug. It is very hard to give that
up and go back to just being a regular person
in a messy, confusing world. So to wrap this
all up, we've gone from a single anonymous post
about Hillary Clinton to a global movement that
reshaped politics, incited real world violence
and broke countless families apart. It was collaborative
fiction that bled into reality. It's a warning.
It's a case study. It shows us that in the digital
age, our shared reality is much more fragile
than we thought. And that leads me to my final
thought for everyone listening. If QAdon proved
one thing, it's that a rigorous shared understanding
of the world can be dismantled by an anonymous
person just asking questions and dropping a few
digital crumbs. And it makes you wonder. Is the
next Q already posting? The next Q won't look
like Q. It won't have the same name. It won't
be on a message board. It might be a TikTok trend.
It might be a series of AI -generated influencers.
It might even be a podcast. Are we already consuming
the next set of crumbs and we just haven't realized
it's a game yet? That is the question we should
all be asking ourselves every single time we
open our phones. On that cheery note, thank you
for joining us on this deep dive. Stay curious,
stay critical, and check your sources.