Panic World - How QAnon changed American politics forever (with Travis View)

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

With Donald Trump being brought back into the White House, we might only be seeing the beginning of another decade of QAnon. How did we get here? Our story today starts in 2016, when Wikileaks released tens of thousands of private emails from John Podesta. By the 2020 election, thanks to “Q” and the QAnon movement, conspiracy theories were front and center. While many originated from right-leaning people and platforms, by the 2024 election both sides now have their own conspiracies to make themselves feel better, or demonize the other team—and there’s so many they’ve become ambient noise. Travis View joins us to talk about the proliferation of conspiracy theories and how they've impacted the way we think and approach politics. Our guest Travis View is the host of QAA (QAnon Anonymous). Check out the podcast wherever you listen, and follow him on the site formerly known as Twitter @travis_view or Bluesky @travisview.bsky.social. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey there, guys. If you want to keep vibing, want to keep rocking with this episode after you finished, you should head on over to Panicworld's Patreon, which is patreon.com slash panic world. And you can get an extra long version of this episode ad free. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, that's right. If you love the apocalyptic tone of what you're about to hear and you want to keep living in that world, you can do that over at patreon.com slash panic world. My first question for you is, do you have a favorite conspiracy theory of this election cycle? Is there one that's really tickled you? I remember last and last year in 2016, there were theories that their, like, Dominion was holding fraudulent election data in servers in Germany, and this required a raid on the facility. There were conspiracy theories that Italy was. using some sort of satellite system to change votes. That's, I mean, that's really the kind of stuff I'm looking forward to. And I have a feeling we're going to see that kind of thing in the coming months when people

start getting really deranged. Yeah, we haven't had any like the fun, wacky stuff yet. It's still kind of like serious and a little sad and boring. It's not like, we haven't gotten like laser-based theories yet or sound wave or anything like Yeah, yeah. You know, like a lot of, there's a, there's a lot of research that suggests that people become more conspiratorial when they feel as if they are losing power. So whoever loses this election is, is probably going to come up with some really, really wild conspiracy theories about what's going on behind the scenes in the coming months. Well, let me hit you with a theory. In 2020, conspiracy theories were front and center. there were still a lot of journalism institutions that one existed and two had the resources to try to debunk them. But now it feels like with everything in this election, it's all just sort of ambiently present.

You know, this sort of white noise like what we saw with Springfield, Ohio and cats and dogs and immigrants. It's just sort of out there and we just accept it. And it does sort of feel like everything has its own version of Q&ON in a way. There is sort of an overarching conspiratorial lore to all of it. Does this sound right to you? One of the talents of Trump and law of his allies is the ability to, you know, flood the zone with shit, as, as Bannon likes to say. Eventually, it gets to a point where, like, Trump promotes some sort of wild conspiracy theory,

or there's some sort of, like, even some sort of a conspiracy theory that's very popular on the right, becomes like a man bites dog story. Where it's like, well, yeah, of course, that's just the, way they are. It's just the political air we breathe now. It's just part of the general information ecosystem that we just have to wade through. That is a perfect way to put it. And that's what we're going to be talking about today in today's episode of Panic World. My name is Ryan Broderick. Trump has been the GOP nominee in three elections now. And as of last night, he is looking like he's going to be the next president of the United States again.

Trump entered our political lives, a lot has changed. America has become more paranoid, more siloed, more fragmented, and no single election could have ever fixed that. And there's no greater manifestation of Trump-era insanity than QAnon, the internet native cult that has acted as the engine of Trumpism since 2016. Understanding how it started and what its followers believe is more important than ever. So today we have with us Travis Vue. An expert in all things QAnon and the host of the podcast QAA or QAnonanon Anonymous. on whether the venue lets you put it on their signs. We wanted to look back at how different American politics has become in the last 10 years

because it's starting to feel like everything is Q&N now. Yeah, man. I came into this stuff. I think I really believed Loose Change, the 9-11 documentary when I was a teenager. Like I was like, they got it. They figured this shit out, man. And then I was always just very fascinated with like the weirder corners of the internet, you know, like blogs written about like energy vampies.

and Therians and Flat Earthers and Hollow Earth is my favorite actually. I think it's much funnier. I was just always really, really excited when I found like some absolute sickos blog and I could just read it all day. And so when QAnon started to turn on and we'll get to, you know, our story in just a second about how this all happened. I was very excited that they were pulling in stuff from everywhere. It was like they were playing all the hits.

When Adrenochrome showed up, I was like, oh, you guys are just, you're cooking right now. This is you are spirit cooking, if you will. But our story today starts in 2016, like most moments of political instability in the last 15 years or so. And it actually started on my birthday, October 27th, when WikiLeaks releases tens of thousands of emails from John Podesta's private Gmail, who was Obama's counselor to the president, Hillary Clinton's campaign share. It had been hacked earlier that year. And I wanted you real quick, Travis, to sort of explain what did, do you remember like, what 4chan noticed right away about a sort of word repeating over and over in these emails? Yeah, there were food terms.

What was really interesting about that particular story is that, you know, it was like these emails were released through WikiLeaks, the DNC, pedestrian emails, and they were like, they were hacked by these Russian agents who then sent it to WikiLeaks, who then basically released it through October as part of a, part of a larger campaign designed to promote Trump as a candidate. But the thing about the emails is that like it contains some things that you might be like interesting. For example, there was some, the general wider DNC emails were talked about how they were kind of like wary and hostile towards the campaign of Bernie Sanders, for example.

You know, that's certainly interesting. But, you know, there wasn't, you know, a level of like, in a scandal. that I think that a lot of like maybe 4chan types were hoping for. Yeah, I think you're right. There was not a smoking gun in there that they thought. Yeah, they assumed like, I was like, this is going to be, this is going to show the like actual total depravity of the. It's like, this is not just going to like end them politically. This is going to like, send them all the jail.

All to jail. Yes. So they decided that like food terms like pasta or pizza. cheese pizza or in one instance, walnut sauce, were separately codes that people were using to communicate how

to, like, traffic and abuse children. All these problems, which were largely, you know, quarantine to the poll board, which is 4chan's politics board, which, fun fact, was created after Ron Paul lost in 2008, because discourse about

Ron Paul was so fucking annoying that the moderators were like, we're going to put you all in a special section. So all of that discourse was over there. But it hadn't politically radicalized in a coherent direction until around 2014, 2015, when you get stuff like Gamergate. And it wasn't that like Fortune was like a safe space for like leftist theory before that, but it was not a raving insane asylum of fascism. It was different.

It was a different place. but they get this leak. And I also think you're right about the Russian agent connection where like it was an open vector for that exact kind of conversation. A lot of the weird things about our online political, you know, information ecosystem emerged from that. The Seth Rich conspiracy theory. This is where this is the false claim that a tragically murdered DNC staffer

was actually the person who attempted to, take these emails and release them to the public. It was absolutely not true. But, yeah, it's really interesting how, like, this moment where there's this Russian hack and leak, which leads to these 4chan poll people doing baking and finding connections that are just, that are just non-existent and then also leads in order to cover up the fact that it was actually Russian agents who hacked the DNC. Oh, I'm so glad.

I'm so glad you mentioned that because that's the next part of our story here. So about three days after the WikiLeaks release of Podessa's emails, it's bouncing around 4chan. It starts to build critical mass and a website called Your Newswire.com, which was run by a collaborator of the British conspiracy theorist and lizard people expert, David Ick, claims that an FBI insider has told them all about a Democratic-run pedophile ring. This is where Mike Sternovich, the right-wing influencer, gets involved. And this is when you start to see the beginning of this internet-wide push, this sort of like vast decentralized network of influencers and conspiracy theorists and anonymous users. And this leads to PizzaGate, which is sort of like the in-between for Gamergate and Q&ON.

This is like the Neanderthal of horrible online men, if you will. And like when you look back on this time period, is there a moment in 2016 where you think like we could have fixed this problem because of the way the platforms were lining up or the way these networks were connecting, like, could we have stopped? No, I mean, the appeal of it, like, for the people who have participated in it, was this idea is that, like, no, it's like we are like a non's working together to uncover the news that the mainstream media is covering up.

There's this really exciting kind of, like, populist message. And, you know, there's this year part of this community that's sort of revealing things about the world. like what we call baking, which is like basically interpreting like these online materials in ways that make these conspiracies connections. By doing this activity, you aren't just a crank at home making things up. You are, you know, you're contributing to like a great awakening. And that's a very intoxicating narrative.

That's exactly right. And to be clear, like what we're talking about at this point in our timeline, Q&ON has not happened yet. And so this is where you get the FBI insider idea starts to evolve into an FBI Anon, which will be using this term throughout the episode, and just to be clear, Anon means anonymous. It's what 4chan users call each other. It does not have a good mouth feel when you say it out loud. And this idea of this hidden information that was coming out of the White House, I feel like was very integral because of the anonymous nature of something like 4chan or later

8chan. Everyone is anonymous. You can just sort of cosplay. You can just sort of larp whatever you want. And if it fits the narrative, I think, you know, it can get a lot of traction. Does that sound kind of like a correct way of thinking about it here? There was another one called Meganon. There was one called high level, high level insider H-S-I-H-S-I-N-on. And the thing is, people just sort of like came on the foreshan, and then they pretended to have connections. And they said that they were going to release secret information about what was really going on behind the scenes. And they were, you know, sometimes it's referred to as like, you know,

larping. They were like, they are pretending to have, um, to be someone that they're not. And like, sometimes like the other anon, the other anons on these image boards, they would play along or they would call them out in their bullshit or whatever. They'd interact with them in some way.

But some people who are very, um, invested in these ideas, you know, took what these, uh, insider anons were saying as like lore as like, you know, they tried to like take what they're saying and then research it further to try and validate it. I think you're, use of lore is correct because like when I when this was first happening I was working in a newsroom and I was like one of the few people who like understood what these websites were so like my days for a long

time were being like okay like this is what happens when a 4chan thread 404s it'll time out this is what this is what staging is no fortune gold isn't real like all of these sort of like basic mechanical things that have to explain to older editors and like the thing that I was always struck by in these conversations was trying to make the argument to a lot of serious journalists that I was working for at the time being like, this is sort of just creepy pasta. And I remember downplaying the importance of this stuff at the time because it just seemed so monumentally stupid and so clearly a bit that everyone was doing. And I just couldn't imagine we'd be talking about it 10 years later. Like it actually breaks my brain to think about. Like when pizza get happened, when a guy brings

a gun into a DC pizza shop because he thinks there's a sex ring happening in the basement or whatever, it seemed like a one-off. But we know this was the start of a very specific kind of thinking that was taking over the world. And we're going to get to that right after the break. So at first, the conspiracy theories, I mean, they were fun for certain kinds of people, like, you know, guys who works at your local vape store or whatever. And it felt more like a prank than anything. It didn't really feel like a political op. You know, they did all these things, like they started a false rumor. Uh, this is like, this when Steve Jobs still alive, that he had had a heart attack and it spread online momentarily

to the point that it caused Apple stock to dip and before people realized it was a hoax. And oh, that was quite a victory, making up bullshit that has an outside impact. I think that's a really important piece to this, which is like they had been doing what they called ops or operations for a long time. You know, you like, do you know about the Hitler did nothing wrong, Mountain Dew label thing? Yes. Yes, of course. Yeah.

For people who don't, like, they hack, they sort of flooded an online poll to, like, create the new logo for Mountain Dew and they got it in the Mountain Dew find to say Hitler did nothing wrong. Yeah, another suggestion on the Mountain Dew poll was they suggested the flavor called, I think it was called Gush and Granny. That was the funny one. Yes, they did. Yeah. And so all of this kind of comes together, October 2017, almost a year after the Podesta emails release. This is when we get the first Q post and it's on, you know, Fort Chan's political board. and it's titled, Hillary will be arrested in two days.

By the way, she wasn't. It ends with saying, Open your eyes. Many in our government worship Satan. And this was sort of the moment where the FBI insider stuff, the FBI, all the different anons, the Pizza Gate stuff,

all of it kind of comes together. And so Q responded to this post by saying, HRC extradition already in motion, effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross-border run. And then it says, Goes on to say, expect massive riots organized and defiance and others fleeing the U.S. to occur. And then it said, proof check, locate a National Guard member and ask if activated for duty 1030 across most major cities.

I'm sorry. The idea of Hillary Clinton running across the border is like so funny to imagine. I know. God, that rules. Like, she's still on TV. Like, where it's all fine now. I mean, there is an inherent silliness to some of this stuff. But do you think, do you think this, this Q user, whoever they were, and we can talk about theories about that later, do you think that they were doing something particularly innovative compared to all the other users that were trying this sort of game at this time period?

Yeah, actually. You know, I think that what they, what the innovation was more gamification to being an insider anon. And like, for example, FBI Anon, their format. was sort of like a Q&A. They said, like, ask me anything, and he would pretend to know, whatever, have all these answers. What Q did very frequently, especially in the early days, there were these leading questions designed and sort of like very cryptic phrases that were designed for more engagement. And we can see this actually in the second Q drop, and which was done the same day. And it says things like, where is Huma?

follow Huma. Humah Aberdeen, by the way. Yeah, exactly. You say, oh, the Anon says, oh, Humah, Abidin, why should I follow Humah? Oh, no. It's getting me right now. I'm doing it. And then it goes on to say, why does Podus surround himself with generals?

What is military intelligence? Why go around the three-letter? And they ask these, like, these questions. And there's sort of an interactivity to this. And like, sometimes they would like, you know, the Q would like use these phrases that seem like nonsense. But the Anans, they convinced themselves it had to have some sort of very significant meaning. And they make them feel like they can go out and find the answers themselves. And it gets them to invest a lot of time.

And so as a consequence, people get like sucked into this narrative. So I wanted to come back to this idea you mentioned about the gamification, which, so in 2022, Adrian Hahn, long time Garbage Day reader, actually, wrote a, wire piece, connecting Q&ON to earlier ARGs. And this is a really good chunk that we pulled out here. So Q&ON's millions of followers often seem to begin their journey with the same refrain. I've done my research. In early 2001, Ain't It Cool News posted a tip from their reader.

Type Janine Sala's name into Google.com and see what pops up. The Google results began with Janine Sala's homepage, but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites and lifestyle magazines like the Sentient Property Crime Bureau and the Metropolitan Living Homes that profiled AI-powered houses. Others were hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, there were over 20 sites and phone numbers to investigate. By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from the single Ain't It Cool News article suggesting readers do their research. It later emerged.

They were all part of the first ever ARG. nicknamed the Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg's movie. The way I've described it, the beast sounds like enormous fun, but that's the exact same psychology behind QAnon, which is you type in one thing, and then all of a sudden you find what they call crumbs, right? So that's the term, the crumbs and bakers, I guess. Yeah. It's like, this is another always the funny, the weirdest sort of a ways in which QAnon people use terminology. They have this idea that like, like Q, Q doesn't tell you, what to believe. People always insist me. There's not a cult because it's not telling me what to

believe. It's like the Q just sort of releases what they call these small little bits of information they call crumbs and then they or directions and the idea is that the other people called what they called bakers, which would bake the crumbs into something more coherent, which is not, it was a confused metaphor. You do not bake crumbs in order to like make bread. So yeah, so there's this idea of that by by taking the little bits of information or the sort of like I said the leading questions you could you could sort of like find you could figure out um you know the most secret explosive esoteric truths about the power structures that control the world I don't think it is like totally that different from playing like an RPG or something like a text like you're using the internet

And you're using the news as a text-based video game, more or less. But the ending is almost always usually anti-Semitic. In 2017, it's another sort of big moment on our timeline here. This is when QAnon moves from 4chan to 8chan. And I feel like the reason this moment in particular is very interesting is because once it leaves its home base on 4chan, it really... it will have 8chan as sort of like a is a distribution network, but I do think it sort of sets in motion a moment where it starts to spread across the entire internet. And that's when you get 8chan mods like Paul Ferber,

aka Baruch the Scribe, um, who start popping up. Can you, can you give us a little quick rundown on Paul Ferber for those not in the know? So Paul Ferber was really involved from the early day, even when it was on 4chan. Um,

so yeah, Paul Ferber is, uh, has a, South African man who ran the, I believe it was the calm before the story. White South Africans have never done anything bad on the internet ever. Yeah, yeah. And he was, yeah, he was, he was, he was involved in its very, very, very, very early days. And this is actually the same month where best as we can tell, the first real actual celebrity famous person name drops it, which is when,

Roseanne Barr tweets about Q&on on November 17th, 2017. About two or three months later, Sean Hannity mentions it in January 2018, but Roseanne Barr seems to be kind of like the moment because now it's, now we're like in full spread mode. Yeah, it should be mentioned that someone else who was, we have documented very interested in Q&N in the very early days was Marjorie Taylor Green. Oh, whatever happened to her. Right.

Yeah, well, yeah, she went on. She's big now. But she took the Facebook live to talk about the cue drops and some of the wild early theories of Q&N. For example, the claim that Robert Mueller, you know, the special counsel investigated Trump was actually what they call a white hat, this idea that Robert Mueller was actually, they claimed he was investigating Trump, but actually he was a good guy in the Q&N universe and he was going to eventually nail Clinton. This was an early theory that kind of dissipated. when it became clear that that was not the case. No, no, I don't remember that happening, actually. By 2018, like in my own career, I'm having to cover anything about QAnon that pops up.

So, like, this is, like, when you have the moral panic of Amazon recommending Q&ON related merchandise being created by drop shippers and, like, the sense that, like, it was taking over the country, which, you know, we can, we should talk more about later on, you know, exactly how, how, how. and how far this stuff spread. The last, I think, really important date pre-pandemic would be August 10th, 2019. Now, do you know what that date is? Please, jog my memory. So there's this guy, Jeffrey Epstein, the banker, the Manhattan banker. This is when he died. Yeah.

Yes. And I was hoping you could walk us through how this impacted QAnonon. a conspiracy theory based almost entirely around hidden child sex trafficking networks because I feel like that would be big for them. I mean, after he died, a lot of Q1LN followers, they claimed that he had actually, like, faked his death. And then that he was like living at some sort of an undisclosed location. Guys, just take the win.

You got this one. You don't need to make it crazier. I mean, it was, it was, it was, yeah, there was this, there was this one QAnon promoter. I haven't heard from him. in a while, named Chief Police. And after this event happened, he tweeted, Epstein and prosecutors have reached a plea agreement,

part of which was fake death, new identity, and taken to undisclosed location to fully cooperate with investigators, cabal quaking in their boots. Right. Like, no matter what happens, that's not actually what's going to happen. That's just a prelude to some other bigger thing.

Well, it's very evangelical. It's a doomsday. Yeah. The thing that's about to happen will always be about to happen to a sense. But on January 6, 2021, I would say the closest thing to it about to happen almost happened. There's a tendency in especially the mainstream media to try and sidestep addressing the insane bullshit that Trump supporters believe because it's honestly, it takes a long time to write it out or explain it in a news package. You sound ridiculous when you try.

And so I think up until January 6th, like most of the. major mainstream outlets were like, look, if we're going to deal with Q&N, we're going to pull like some internet guy that looks like Shelter from the Big Bang theory on to the TV for a second to be like, the anonymous hacker 4chan is convincing people that everyone's a pedophile. But with the with the insurrection, it was such a high profile thing that you couldn't look away. You couldn't be, you couldn't sort of wave it away because they, you know, this is where you have the Q&on shaman guy. This is where you have.

It's there. Yeah, you know, it's like one of the one of the things my my my background like I said, I was very interested in the subject matter Not don't really have a background As as a journalist before I started getting into this But one of the things I learned is that like a lot of people in the press they were like understandably Didn't want to give it oxygen. They thought you know what I think probably the probably the best course of action is to just ignore it Like when I started getting really interested in Q and on it was like it was July 2018, there had already been an extremist incident connected with Q&ON. It was the previous month

in June of 2018. There was a man who had an armed standoff in an armored vehicle on the Hoover Dam Bridge. Oh, right. I forgot about the Hoover Dam guy. And this was, I was like, it's, it's crazy when you think about how early this was. This was like, like less than a year before the, before the Q drops started posting. He had a sign like pleading with people to release the Inspector General report. And this was based upon the belief that Inspector General Horowitz of the DOJ had some sort of secret report about the malfeasance of the deep state that was being suppressed or something. And so if it was revealed, then it would change everything.

And so, yeah, you're right. It's sometimes very goofy. Sometimes it's just like really kind of like harmless boomers in Q shirts. And so there's this there is this tension. I don't want to say, here's this crazy movement and it's gaining steam and it's going to take over. It's so scary. It's already motivated extremist action. Why isn't more people doing about this?

Because I'm just fucking Alex Jones trying like rile people up and trying to get people scared. I won't do that. But I want to I want but it's at the same time it is a kind of right wing extremist movement. And so I need to like, you know, treat it kind of seriously. So it's like, yeah, there's a, it's very, very difficult to know exactly how to approach it, the tone to take. Well, I will say the Hoover damn guy was correct because Q did change everything. We had individuals believing all kinds of cookie things, you know, in their own little world. And over the Trump administration, those, you know, fairly harmless weirdos started to interact with hard.

court neo-Nazis and militia members. And so what we saw in January 6th was the full articulation of this idea, the woo-woo new age people and the son-er-ran tattoo people. And it has changed the world. It has changed the way we in America think about ourselves and the way we view our fellow citizens. In a sense, we're all sort of paranoid of each other now. And we're going to talk about that after the break. So Joe Biden, he wins. You agree, right? You think Joe Biden won't? I would say that, yeah, I think he is legitimately elected. Okay. Hot take, but fair enough. I think I agree with you. In 2020, MPR wrote about the let's go Brandon meme. So they write in late

2021, the phrase, let's go Brandon based on a famously misheard crowd chant in an Ascar race. God, I love American culture so much. Quickly spread among conservative groups as a direct expletive toward Biden. Then sometime last year, fringe Donald Trump supporters who called for the former Republican president

to run again in 2024, created a series of dark maga memes. They usually depict an authoritarian dictator-like version of Trump in which he sometimes has blue laser eyes. accompanying captions typically call for Trump to take revenge on his political enemies. Those memes almost immediately spawned Dark Brandon, featuring a sinister Joe Biden in this context.

They often show images of the president shooting red lasers from his eyes or wearing military gear, which is to say that even like Biden is kind of like leaning into the visual language of something like Q&ON now post-COVID, which I find extremely fascinating. I think most like Trump supporters, they were just happy with the idea that like Hillary Clinton was sad because she lost. But like, she went on followers. They wanted more. They wanted her to live in a constant state of pants shitting terror because she was going. Pants suit shitting terror.

That she was going to be black bagged and then sent to Gitmo and then hanged. And then so this is and so I don't know, this this this idea that like, you know, this. political leader is not, you know, some sort of like restrained Western sort of like elected office holder, but rather a dark avenger who is fixating on making your enemies suffer. I don't know. It's a little bit more invigorating. What is really fascinating about this time period, this sort of like post-COVID post-insurrection moment, Biden's in the White House, is that you start to see the conspiratorial influence

of Q and on an effect on the other side of the aisle. This is where you get the, do you know the term blue and I, you know, blue and on? You've heard the term blue and on. Yeah. Yeah. So now when we go into this, we're not going to be saying that these two are equal and opposing forces by no means. But as anyone who's just heard the first part of this show can attest to you, when you

start to talk about the origins of QAnon, the influence of Russia on the 2016 election, the, I mean, the behavior of Trump's own campaign, it is all very conspiratorial because it was. Like it literally was. So I do think because the internet is this soup of different influences and aesthetics, it's constantly remixing itself. It was quite easy in 2021, 2022 for a bunch of Democrats that were using Twitter too much to kind of start talking like QAnon people. It doesn't seem that crazy to me. I mean, yeah, yeah. Like you mentioned, like on my, like on my own podcast, I generally shy away from using a term,

uh, uh, blue and on. It is a really useful shorthand because I like it's very, it's catchy. It's catchy. It's good. It's, that's the thing. It sounds good. It's also useful when I'm talking about, uh, for example, right now, there's a small community of people who are very insistent that, uh, that Trump, uh, stage his assassination.

Hold on. Hold on. I watched a video today of what an AR-15 round would do near a human ear. And I don't know, man. I'm just saying you got to do your research. You got to follow the red crens here. Yeah. Some people, they're very supportive of, you know, Democrats.

But they believe that, like, Trump, like, use a blood pack or something. Sometimes they accuse the, uh, the Associated Press photographer who took that very famous photo of Trump immediately afterwards of being in on it. Trust the plan. trust the plan. Exactly. I can see why you would refer to that as Bluenot. But the thing about QAnon is that like it's an extremist movement. Here's a tip for listeners that are sort of just learning about these worlds today.

If you take right-wing conspiracy theories and you dig deep enough, almost all of them, I would say 90% of them are just a remix on the protocols of the elders of Zion. They're all just very old anti-Semitic shit and has been bumping around for like hundreds of years. If you go on the left and you really want to find some cool left-as-conspiracy theories, you can. the CIA admitted to almost all of them. Every couple years are like, oh yeah, we did that shit. So, I mean, they're not comparable in any way. And plus on the internet, and this was a thing that we sort of touched on in the first part of this episode.

One of the criticisms I always had with like when CNN or even NBC or places would get into this territory and they'd start covering this stuff is that you can throw a dart in any direction on the internet and you can find the craziest person who believes. and probably masturbates to the most insane thing you've ever heard of. And that's just how the internet has been since the 90s. Like that's just what it is, man. You know, like it's when it starts to network and mobilize and spread. That's when you sort of have to start taking it seriously, I think. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I was always, I was grateful for the fact that, um, it didn't seem like, um, Q encouraged, uh,

people generally to take, uh, like outside action besides vote. There was like, I remember during, right, during the uh yeah but uh but qanon says vote go to the polls i know it's like it's like wait minute if there's there's gonna be revelations that change everything why i have to be so fixated

you gotta vote for you got to vote for there was this worry that like because uh cue was so trusted by this community that was there's the concern at least for me that cue would uh ask people to do something that would um that would like you know harm the qon followers or other people they They seem to find ways to do that on their own, just because they believed it so, so fervently, rather than being the, uh, sort of the, the, the pawns of a sort of a command control system on the Q post. Do you think, do you think that the fact that never went that direction is because the mantle of Q kept being passed around? So like by this point, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. By this point, James and Ron Watkins, the father and son duo who were longtime owners of the 8-chan domain. It seems like they were the one piloting Q at this point, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That seems to be the case. But after the insurrection, after COVID, in October 2022, once again, a big month for bad internet stuff is when Elon Musk takes over Twitter. He starts the process of renaming it X. Do you think Elon Musk knows what Q&N is? Like, do you believe he believes in it or cares about it? I mean, literally this week, he's sharing. videos with Q&ON iconography in them that seem to have been surfaced in a hardcore neo-Nazi telegram group.

But I'm also just like not convinced that like people at his level of the class hierarchy know anything. And also I sort of think he's like Trump where he'll say or do anything to be popular online because he has like a deep endless void inside of him. I don't believe like he really believes it. What do you think? So it's funny. I remember the Washington Post actually emailed him a question about Q&ON and his in his his response was merely LOL.

So so that that indicates to me that at least like like he knows what Q&O is. But also like he knows, you know, it's something that, you know, again, almost like Trump. something that's funny and perhaps something to, you know, nod and wink at. I think that's, I think that's right. And I think the, the gamification that QAnon introduced to a certain kind of political poster, both on the right and those on the left that are aware of it, I think was really amplified after Elon Musk bought Twitter and started to gut it. Because that's when you start to see, I think,

QAnon and both Blue Anon become a lot more hard to separate from normal internet discourse. This is when, you know, you have all kinds of theories about Biden being drugged for the debate, which I couldn't even tell you which side believe that. I think they both did in certain degrees. This is when you start getting like the conspiracy theories about Trump not actually being shot. This is when a schism happens around Biden and Kamala Harris, like this summer, where you have infighting with the Democrats and they're both using conspiracy theories against each other. It's just fascinating to me that after the insurrection, a bunch of major platforms clearly give up on news content. They give up on moderation.

They start, you know, adding more AI content. They sort of say, like, enough. We don't want any part of this. Then you have Elon Musk buying Twitter, and it starts to fall apart. And then a lot of the stuff that QAnon supporters were doing in the end of the last decade just becomes a normal way of communicating for a lot of people. I mean, this is like the Amber Hurd Johnny Depp stuff. This is the Gabby Petito disappearance. This is like TikTok conspiracy theories.

Like it all just sort of starts to feel like we're all bakers of a specific subculture that we're in. The other thing is that like Q kind of made this almost multi-level marketing kind of like system of being an online pun. in which. Oh, say more. Wait, that's a really good way to put it. Say more about that. That's really good. So Q would like produce like this information and then or like these very cryptic information.

It was like hard to decipher. And so there are other there are the people. One of the most notable ones is I guess one called praying medic who's also by the name of David Hayes. What he would do is like he would tell you what it means, right? He would say it's like there's all the strange stuff. Here's what it really means. And here's how to decipher it. That really works very well.

You can sort of like build a large audience by saying like, you know, all of these, I don't know, these news events and these documents and these, I don't know, even like weird, subtle things that like powerful people are saying, well, it all has a hidden meaning. And, you know, the MSM won't tell you what it is, but I do, because I understand it. I understand it on the level they don't. So listen to me. And then you would offer these elaborate explanations. And then there's this, there's a system where, and then you. Then you sort of like connect with other people who buy into your narrative to promote you and you promote, promote them. And maybe they aren't as popular as you, but they sort of offer a sort of a relevant sort of like interpretation of what you're saying to create the sort of like closed network of sort of like understanding current events.

So yeah, that's like just a sort of like a common thing now where you sort of like, you know, be the seer online. I think that's exactly right. I've almost wondered over the years if if QAnon is not actually a symptom of America's politics and actually a symptom of the way the internet has changed media consumption, in the same way that, you know, any person on Reddit you come across has a fan theory about their favorite TV show or pop star or whatever it is, there's just a contingent in our country who watch a lot of cable news and the same thing happened to them.

Like there's an entire subreddit of people. people who believe that Taylor Swift is secretly a lesbian are gaylers. They have all kinds of fan theories that they can see through the lines and be like, these words mean this and that's what these are the secret messages. And that is just the way the internet has shaped those people who listen to Taylor Swift. And the same thing just happened to the people who watch too much Fox News or MSNBC or CNN. It is politically powerful because it involves current events and political power. but it is it is not actually maybe connected to politics in any way.

It is simply just a symptom of 24-hour cable news. I've always wondered that. Yeah, yeah. I was always interested in sort of like a connection to this kind of phenomenon. The Sherlock fandom of the BBC. There was a, I think I know where you're going with this. Yeah, there was a community. People believe that the series was heading towards essentially a gay romance.

John Locke. Yeah, it was the name of the gay romance. The John Locke conspiracy theory. And there was a community of people who believe that there were secret clues in the show that indicated that there was some sort of more than friendly connection between Sherlock and Watson. They spent lots of, lots of time decoding clues. There was someone referenced the number 57. And there's a sonnet by Shakespeare, a sonnet 57, which happens to reference his,

affection for a young man. So, oh, this is a secret clue. I have a friend who, like, had a degree in Sherlock Holmes fanfic from the first Sherlock Holmes stories. And there is an entire society of people who have been writing gay fanfic about Sherlock Holmes and Watson for almost 300 years now. What is the status of QAnon right now in 2024? So Q um, stopped posting in, um, in 2020 and then, then returned in 2022 to make a few. posts. Q implied that they were returning for good. They were like,

do you want to play again? But the problem is that these posts were kind of like poorly received by the Q&on Baker community, the kind of like network of people who, who interpret the Q posts. They weren't very impressed. And so QQQ kind of like went away. But the Q&N community still is very active.

Q&N helped forge this sort of like conspiracist network of people who are on Rumble and telegram and, you know, now even Twitter. I heard a great argument many years. years ago that the rise of fascism in Europe in the turn of the last century was directly related to the affordability of the printing press that all of a sudden every single wacko across Europe could print whatever they wanted and you saw an immediate explosion in both occultism and fascism and when I think about the 21st century version of both occultism and fascism I think of QAnon

this idea that at every sort of big communications revolution you get these sort of movements They just tend to happen because it is a natural outgrowth of the way we consume media, the way we communicate, the way politics bounces off of, you know, a Democrat, you know, how citizens vote and mobilize and think. Like, I don't think that it is necessarily surprising that this stuff is happening. I'm always curious, like, well, you know, how long is this going to go? I mean, there's like, and I think the answer is like, you look at things, something like, I'm familiar with like, yeah, Nasara Gassara.

No. This is new to me. By the way, congrats. Grant, can we put a little clap and sound effect here? You are the first guest in our episodes to mention an internet thing that I don't know. You win. You just won Panic War. Congratulations. It's never happened before.

Sure. Tell me all about this. This is actually one of the very first internet cults. Wait, this isn't the gadget from Rescue Rangers cult in Russia, right? No, no, no. There was a belief that there was this entity online who organized using Yahoo groups. Oh, this, oh, my God, you are hitting like every pleasure center of my brain right now. Okay.

Packed like late 90s, 2000s, early 2000s. There was this entity named Dove of Oneness. Her real name was Shannie Goodwin. There was a woman who lived in Pacific Northwest. But she claimed that there was a secret law pass called Nasara, that and that, what would happen was that when the secret law was revealed, it would make everyone rich. However, there was a battle going on behind the seas between these entities called the White Knights and the Black Knights.

And this is why it wasn't revealed yet. And to this day, like a dove of oneness, Shannie Goodwin, she isn't active anymore. But there are still people who are waiting for this Nassara law to be revealed. and make everyone rich, essentially. That's wild. When these communities form and they're passionate and they have sunk a lot of time and money, they've made sacrifices. Sometimes they've separated from their family.

Sometimes they've lost jobs over these crazy QAnon beliefs. And so when you have that, invest in that much time and make that many sacrifices and you forge this kind of community, there's just no incentive to leave it even after decades. that's so interesting that's like wow i've i had never heard of this nisara gasara thing that's wild especially on especially when it's happening on something like a yahoo group which doesn't you know doesn't have the same network effect as something like let's say facebook or instagram or whatever that's it's just it's so interesting that like it's such a fundamental byproduct of the way we use technology is that these things just happen and i do have to

wonder if this this current election cycle you know the reason it it feels so intangible to us is partly, I think, due to the internet, which is that it is no longer centralized the way it had been for a decade. And part of the reason it doesn't feel centralized anymore is because of groups like Q&N that were taking advantage of it, spreading literally like a virus inside of centralized platforms. And a lot of those companies are like, fuck us. I don't want to deal with you freaks anymore. Like, we're going to just turn this shit off and you can all use AI generated content now. I do think that's part of it. It allowed a lot of Americans to start to abstractify

politics in the same way and create their lore and sort of treat it like a fandom I really do think in many ways that this election is happening very much in the shadow of QAnon but now instead of it being like this thing where like this evil right wing cult is taking over American politics it's that we all just sort of sound like Qaeda. It seems inseparable to me

like a fish in water. The one thing about QAnon is I want to talk about like the ways in which people come more conspiratorial when they lose power. Kewan is kind of the exception that proves the rule. But only because this is a conspiracist movement that emerged after their guy won. Their guy got in office. You got what you want. It's to excuse his inability to do what they want. Exactly.

That's what it is. Exactly. But they, yes, they wasn't, yeah, he wasn't arrest. He wasn't locking her up. You know, he wasn't like draining the swamp. Even progress on the wall wasn't quite as fast as they wanted. And so they wanted, they wanted, so they came up to the, it couldn't, it couldn't be that like this, this guy's bullshitting us. It couldn't be that I was duped.

No, because that cognitive dissidence is too painful. Exactly. And so instead, they reasoned that actually that Trump is going to do all the things that you're going to, are going to do, but he has to do it in secret because there's a secret battle. And eventually he's going to reveal everything. but yeah, there was this how to resolve the sort of a gap between how much they wanted Trump to do and how much they was actually doing is by turning to these kinds of conspiracy theories. And now that it looks like Trump is the projected winner and the next president of the United States again, it's reasonable to assume that Q and on activity will ramp up because Trump will never. never be able to deliver what he's promised them. And I think that's the most important takeaway from today's episode, which is that QAnon is an excuse. Q&N is a way to rationalize

Trump for first and foremost. And it will continue to evolve. Much of what we've talked about today will obviously remain true for how Q&N followers communicate and what they believe. But it is a it is a living entity. It is a living ideology. And it is a, is changing all the time. Woo, I feel a lot better about the future of America. But Travis, I want to thank you for coming on this show. It was fantastic. If you want to follow you, is there a good place they can do that?

I am unfortunately still on the platform formerly known as Twitter. It's Travis View. But I am also on Blue Sky, which I enjoy. I think there's a good community there. I'm digging it too. It's nice. Thank you again. This was fantastic.

Pleasure. If you like this conversation and you want to keep vibe and you want to keep rocking with it, you can go over to our Patreon, patreon.com slash Panic World, where we have an ad-free, extra long episode with Travis talking more about the history of online conspiracy theories in America. And we also play a little game, which actually in retrospect, didn't, wasn't very fun, actually, because I think we're both in a very dark place. But Travis was great. Panic World is a garbage day production.

You can subscribe to the news. newsletter at Garbage Day. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving, hosted by me, Ryan Broderick, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis, video editing by Kat Rasek, and our incredibly deranged logo was drawn by Gabby Cash. If you want to give us $5 a month, you can do that at patreon.com slash panic world, and in return, we'll give you more content to consume. If you want to buy an ad on the show or sponsor it in any way, you can contact the fine folks at Multitude at multitude.commodation slash ads. And if you want to get involved in the other way, you know, any other crazy scheme you want to rope us into, you can contact our fixer and bag man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at PanicworldPod at gmail.com.

Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass. While you still can.