The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

Daniel Morrison
29 min readSep 11, 2020

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The human brain is a fascinating machine. Sitting atop the pinnacle of 14 billion years of cosmic evolution, from quarks to consciousness. Brought together by the fundamental laws of the universe, through stars and supernovae.

4 billion years ago, some atoms became arranged in a pattern that looked like a code we now call DNA. They were instructions, for how to make a copy. Over time, bigger and bigger bodies began emerging to be able to do that. Each new generation had slight variations, which would either help or hinder the chances of making the copy. The ones that survive, do, and the ones that die, don’t.

Ultimately it’s all about energy — you have to get enough to survive long enough to replicate. And life has evolved all sorts of things to do that. Ways to catch each other, or avoid being caught. Physical things, like shells and wings, or conceptual things, like reproduction strategies.

All animals have brains, but 5 million years ago, something interesting started happening between the ears of a primate. It began to imagine. It could have ideas, communicate, and create things. It could wonder, and ask questions, and if it found answers, it could get more energy or live longer, and the chances of replicating improved. So it produced pleasurable sensations to incentivise the feeling of understanding. The “thinking brain” emerged in multiple species of hominid. But 200,000 years ago, one came along we have come to call Homo Sapiens.

For 190,000 years, our ancestors roamed the earth, hunting and foraging in small communities. 10,000 years ago, agriculture led to people putting down roots, which led to population growth. Cities led to surpluses and specialisation of labour. Money was invented for trade, and writing helped keep track of it all. Energy and Ideas and could be transmitted across Space and Time.

For 9,500 years, human society was largely local, and based on the energy you could make with your hands or a horse. 500 years ago, people began to study how and why things happened, and set sail over the horizon. Vast reservoirs of energy were found, unleashing unprecedented amounts of power.

200 years ago, people noticed that certain combinations of materials produced a flow of electrons, which allowed for the creation of energy, and for communication at a distance. The world was electrified.

Exploring the ways of the universe

50 years ago, we figured out how to control that flow of electrons with incredible precision, and information was digitalised. And at the tip of this 14 billion year story, the 4 billion year story of life and the 200,000 year story of humans, 20 years ago the internet comes along, and 5 years ago we get ubiquitous smart phones. All of a sudden anyone can say anything to anyone, anytime, anywhere, true or not. Straight from the palm of one hand to another.

If you have someone’s attention, you can influence them into giving you their energy. And so a whole new industry emerged — advertising and marketing. The digital communication network, combined with a deepening understanding of psychology, presented the opportunity to apply specialised manipulation techniques with clinical precision.

Throughout all this, the brain has remained basically the same organ we walked the earth with for 100,000 years. It developed impulses and instincts, to help us comfortably survive. We are so dazzled by the miraculous spectacle of consciousness that we think of the brain like a divine oracle, and it’s easy to forget it’s a fallible tool. Just as our eyes can deceive us, our brain can too. For example, it seeks information to confirm its biases, and rejects information that doesn’t.

Into this world walks a man called Alex Jones, with some stories called “Conspiracies”. Before we begin, we should clarify something. People have absolutely conspired to influence the world, countless times throughout history, and still to this day. It’s how things work. Some plots we know, some we don’t. When we say “conspiracies” here, we are talking about something fictional. A fantasy. The Lord of the Rings is a cool story, but if someone starts talking about how Sauron is actually trying to take over the world, we need to be able to understand the difference between that and reality. Because these stories play on the psychology of the brain. They are like a kind of virus, and can have a profoundly powerful effect on how it functions.

To fully understand this story, we have to go back 200 years, when an explosion of energy had transformed society in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

A few made a fortune. Vast empires of steel and oil, rubber and rail. They capitalised on the industries, and used the capital to capitalise further. Their power was basically absolute.

In the second half of the 1800s, people began to think that it might be a good idea to consider some central organisation, recognise human rights, and to implement some common infrastructure projects.

People organising

The capitalists considered all that a threat. As it stood, they could essentially do whatever they wanted, exploit people and the environment however they pleased. Anything less would be intolerable. So they fought this idea of collectivism as savagely as they could. They called any government program “communism”, and framed it as tyrannical control.

It is against this backdrop that 70 years ago, we come to a guy called Joe McCarthy. He had a weird temper that didn’t make many friends in Washington. In 1949 he made a fool of himself defending Nazi war criminals charged with massacring American soldiers in France, and was voted the worst person in the US Senate. In 1950, he comes out swinging. He held up a piece of paper with 57 names of people in the State Department he said were agents of the enemy. The enemy at the time, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They operated a centralised economy, and were called Communists.

It was a complete fabrication. Whether is was brazen dishonesty, political opportunism, or sheer insanity, it poisoned the conversation from that point on. Hearings were held, and a ‘red terror’ gripped the country. A later report said the result was to “confuse and divide the American people … to a degree far beyond the hopes of the Communists themselves”.

“These hearings are a part of our national past that we can neither afford to forget, nor permit to re-occur”

The case was thrown out, the furore died down, and the poison was largely contained. The government successfully implemented several large scale public infrastructure projects. The capitalists grew uncomfortable. And in 1958, a retired candy salesman called Robert W. Welch Jr. founded a group of twelve men called the John Birch Society. (John Birch was killed before it started and would almost certainly hate what it is, so we’ll just call it JBS). He picked up the anti-communist spear, and tipped it with a powerful poison: A “Conspiracy Narrative”.

The man who sold the world

Conspiracies have been around about as long as humans have had an imagination. The particular story he told was 200 years old. So, let’s go on a journey to see where it came from.

On 1 May 1776, in what’s now Germany but was then Bavaria, a small group of thinkers founded a group dedicated to the ideals of the enlightenment, and gave it the wonderful name “Illuminati”. Yes, they were a real group. They wanted to think about things and hoped to help each other figure stuff out. They questioned the traditional powers of the monarchy or theocracy. They opposed superstition, obscurantism, religious influence over public life, and abuses of state power.

How dare they

The church/state outlawed them after about 10 years. A few years after that, the French People overthrew the aristocracy in their famous Revolution. In chaotic times of radical upheaval, people seek comfort in a simple explanation. Two books were written: “Proofs of a Conspiracy”, and “Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism”. They claimed that all the bad stuff happening in the world was because of the dastardly Illuminati, that evil Bavarian secret society. As well as the Freemasons, a similar group who were basically glorified architects. This is half of the genetic foundation of the Virus we see today. It caused a minor stir at the time, spawned a few other publications, and even made its way across the Atlantic. Then it lay largely dormant for 150 years.

To the east, around the same sort of time, Russia was experiencing tensions of its own. Following the Partitions of Poland, many Jewish people came to settle in the western part of the country. They stayed in their communities and were called insular, or they integrated and were called invaders. They were different, and it was hard. In the mid 1800s, a guy called Jacob Brafman had a falling out with tax agents in his community. For revenge, he painted a picture of a secret cabal of Rabbis pulling the strings of the larger Russian state. He produced a prolific volume of literature. Again, he would have been able to draw on existing anti-semitic narratives rather than create them himself, but this was the first time it appears in recorded history. It’s where the idea of the “deep state” comes from. He found an eager audience, and a profitable market of people rushing to skewer the Jewish community and justify their racism.

In 1902, these ideas were crystallised in a book called the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. It was a fictional transcript of the minutes of a meeting between these sinister Jewish elders, explicitly laying out their elaborate plot for world domination: control the media, tax people, etc. It plagiarised large portions of a book called “Dialogue in Hell”, published in 1864 by a French writer trying to satirise Napoleon’s plans for world domination. This is the other half of the genetic foundation of the virus we see today.

Automobile tycoon Henry Ford, however, took it for real. Again, it could have been brazen dishonesty, but the brain has a way of playing tricks. Lying feels uncomfortable. So often if we tell what we know is a lie, our brains just make us believe it instead, to avoid the discomfort. And we look for information to confirm our narratives. These two things explain a lot of this story. In Henry’s case, this book suited him, so his brain most likely made him believe it and ran with it. He printed half a million copies, and spread it as far as he could. Including into the hands of Adolf Hitler, who used it on his way to the holocaust. That’s Henry getting a medal in the photo above, with Hitler smiling on the left.

But Hitler wasn’t the only fascist who found it. In 1920, it also made its way into the mind of a young woman called Nesta Webster. She believed that she was the reincarnated spirit of a young socialite from the time of the French Revolution who’s letters she’d read. She wrote two books, that fused the Zionist narrative with the Illuminati narrative, and claimed that Collectivists were at the centre of it. This is where the “Communist Conspiracy Narrative Virus ” is born. She is the patient zero in our modern story.

Nesta and her work

So, back to the American conservative capitalists and their crusade against collectivism. In 1933, a small group of extremely wealthy individuals actually tried to overthrow the government and install a fascist military dictatorship. They claimed to have a standing army of 500,000 retired veterans. They approached a highly decorated retired general named Smedley Butler to lead it. He played along until he knew as much as he could, then went straight to congress and told them everything. The committee concluded he was absolutely telling the truth. No further action seemed to be taken.

In the 1950s, after the Democrats had been in power for 20 years and McCarthyism had blown up, “collectivism” was making more and more sense. So this is where Robert Welch and his capitalist buddies in the JBS introduce their powerful poison: Nesta Webster’s “Communist Conspiracy Narrative Virus”.

Their central claim was that America was under attack from a secret cabal of evil communists. Any public project, or regulation on business, or international cooperation, was a part of their sinister plan for world domination. They didn’t want their own government telling them what to do, let alone any other government. So they hated the idea of the UN.

Mass medicine played into the plot line perfectly, which is where the ‘water fluoridation’ story comes from, and of course they re-introduced the ‘anti-vax’ narrative, paving the way for Mike Wakefield. They didn’t talk about Global Warming at the time, but they created the philosophical foundation for the hoax. Almost all of what we consider to be conspiracy theories today (apart from the real plots), are a variation of this Virus.

Conservatives were also fighting Civil Rights, like racial and sexual equality. Rich Old White Men enjoyed their position of absolute power, and understandably weren’t too keen on any concessions. A lot rides on racism. To justify taking a people or a continent, you have to tell yourself that the people you’re doing it to are inferior. That is the lie upon which a lot of western civilisation is built. And since Civil Rights were usually legislated in terms of whether or not the government could tell you not to bully women or black people, it was the same enemy the capitalists were fighting. So social justice became a part of the communist conspiracy narrative too.

The virus was now pretty potent. And the mainstream conservatives didn’t need to use it to themselves to benefit from the work of the JBS, who aggressively distributed it as far as possible. Members were told “Join your local P.T.A., get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over.” They sponsored a Speaker’s Bureau, published a magazine called American Opinion, and prolifically distributed literature.

It may not have seemed like it at the time, but the envelopes above contain the most sophisticated weapon the world had ever seen — one which attacked the the mind itself, the place where thoughts happen. By the 1960’s, they had infected over 100,000 people with the idea that international cooperation, public projects, and regulation on business, were all part of an evil communist plot. Those people then spread it themselves, and so on.

Most conservative capitalists however, like Ayn Rand, William Buckley and Barry Goldwater, who all wanted the same thing as the JBS, saw them as a harmfully dangerous distraction. And in elections, the JBS candidates never really made it past the primaries.

But just because they didn’t win office, doesn’t mean the Virus went away. They infected people and policy through think tanks and lobbying firms. And groups like the Council for National Policy let it mingle with the mainstream. It broke out of the capitalist conservative political sphere, and took hold in the mind of the public.

By the 1980s, the world of conspiracies was well established. A whole industry had been created, with a deep body of literature, and a lucrative public speaking circuit. Garry Allen, Eustace Mullins, David Icke, Bill Cooper, Mark Dice, Jerome Corsi, and many others, made careers out of telling these stories. And while the JBS wasn’t a dominant feature in mainstream politics, they were very much still active. They would go to people’s homes for dinner, to network and talk about their fantasies.

“Conspiracists”

One of these dinners was in the home of a young boy called Alex Jones. And thus the Virus found its super-spreader. The only thing Alex loved as much as conspiracies was attention, which was a dangerous combination. He got a job at a public access television network straight out of school, and then moved to a radio station. His schtick was simple — talk loud and fast about the secret cabal plotting to establish a New World Order. Everything was part of that narrative, and nothing was as it seemed.

His energy was infectious. And the stories were compelling. The world was changing fast, the chaos created confusion, and people sought simple explanations. In an increasingly secular society, Jones was there with an answer the churches could no longer provide. His audience grew. And he used them to sell products. Dietary supplements, mostly.

People said Jones “seemed to launch into public events as if flung from another universe.” And he was. The fantasy universe of Nesta Webster and the JBS. His perspective had been poisoned. It was like someone came and started screaming about Hogwarts as if it was real, and that politicians were in league with Voldemort. And if anyone doubted it, they were Death Eaters too.

But while Welch and his victims were off in Conspiracy Land, the conservative capitalists back in the real world were hard at work too. A handsome young actor called Ronald from California slapped a respectable, family friendly face on ‘Small Government’.

Privatisation was pitched as the American Spirit. Public projects were pinko. The capitalists could profit from the conspiracies without actually using them, which sounds about right. And while the religious community might not have seemed like a natural fit for the cold hearted conservatives, Jerry Falwell and The Family managed to swoop in with some smooth manoeuvring to weaponise them. Pat Buchanan carried the fire brand populism throughout the 90s. The Murdoch and Mercer families used their media empires. And then there were the billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Their father, Fred, was an oil baron from Texas, and a seemingly psychotic parent who deeply damaged his 4 children. He made a fortune with his business Koch Industries, refining fuel for Hitler and Stalin. This wasn’t really unusual for the time — much of the Nazi war machine was built and funded by American companies like the aforementioned Ford Motors, or Harriman Brothers. George HW Bush’s father, Prescott, was famously involved too. Fred was a founding member of the JBS. Charles and David followed him into the family business.

Joseph, Fred, Charles, David, and Fred again.

They cared about one thing, which was making as much money as possible, and that meant exploiting people and the environment however they pleased. They didn’t even want to fix a lethally leaking pipe, let alone reckon with the implications of Climate Change on their industry. So they use their vast resources to fight government regulation however they could. Including, most notably, funding think tanks to publish papers to create the idea that Global Warming was a hoax. Which readers may recognise as another manifestation of the Conspiracy Virus. The same intent, and the same genetic architecture.

The Koch Brothers. One of them is dead now.

The “Global Warming Hoax strain” of the conspiracy virus infected people like Michael Crichton and Bjorn Lomborg, either through a sincere belief, or just straight up cash. Either way, they both published writing that gave ammunition to any pundit, politician, or member of the public, who wanted to fight any government environmental regulation. Now, anything green was simply “communist”.

By 2008, they had a pretty good lock on things. The Overton window was about where they wanted. And then Barak Obama won the presidential election. A charismatic ‘progressive’ who had the audacity to float the idea of maybe not letting health companies rip people off quite so much. This presented a crisis for the conservative capitalists, as it appeared to threaten their absolute power. So they mobilised a rabid political response which came to be known as the Tea Party.

The tone of politics noticeably changed. It had always been bloody, but now it became virulently vitriolic. The Conspiracy Virus took hold, and instead of hiding on the sidelines being cloaked in subtle nuance, it came right out to spit in the crowd.

Characters like Glen Beck got prime time spots on Fox News, using the narrative to infect millions of people with anti-collectivist propaganda. The billionaires were happy.

Glenn Beck’s circus

The stage was set for the next critical infection event: A Conspiracy Narrativist in the White House. In 2015, it started to look that might actually be possible. For that to make sense, we have to meet a guy called Roger Stone, and his long-time client, Donald Trump.

Old mates

At the 1970 Connecticut state convention of Young Republicans, Stone met a guy called Paul Manafort. They recognised a political ruthlessness in each other which would go on to form the basis of a life long partnership. In 1980, they founded Black Manafort and Stone. Together, they basically invented the “industrial lobbying complex”. They would use a big bag of dirty tricks to get candidates elected, and then charge a long list of clients for access to the politician afterwards. Shamelessly.

The idea of industrial scale influence isn’t that old. In 1890, Pears Soap put their brand next to a pretty picture, and became the first to associate a product with a feeling to increase sales. In 1912, Edward Bernays invented life-based campaigns, and our lives have been a soup of advertising ever since. A man called Ivy Lee seems to have been the first to apply that to politicians, and he helped Hitler with his image in America in the 30’s. Manafort would advise his own horrific dictators and war lords, and lobby for them in Washington. He has hundreds of thousands of deaths on his hands.

Manafort personally extended wars for profit

While Paul was off enabling genocide overseas, Roger was busy back home perverting the course of domestic democracy with dick moves. He used a new style of smearing, developed by a guy called Arthur Finkelstein.

In the early 1980s, Trump was in trouble for discriminating against African American tenants in his properties, and facing competition in his Atlantic city casino from Native Americans. Long-time family associate Roy Cohn advised him to meet with the Manafort and Stone, who in turn advised him to basically be an arsehole, which was, sadly, effective.

Trump was a lot of things, and they were all on Stone’s list of things he looked for in his ideal presidential candidate. So slowly, over the years, he began to explore the possibilities of a path to the election. A lot would need to align for it to work. And in the wake of the rise of the Tea Party, things began to fall into place. One thing he would need, was a disinformation cannon. And in 2015, he met Alex Jones.

For Jones, Trump was a natural fit. An outsider and a narcissist, who was well and truly infected with the Conspiracy Virus. A gossip who loved attention. Jones was a kindred spirit, and was delighted to have him on his show. An actual presidential candidate, taking him ‘seriously’, after all these years. It must have been quite a thrill.

But this was no play date. Stone was there on business, and that was to use Jones and his audience and the power of conspiracies to spread lies and disinformation to get Trump elected.

He resurrected an old classic called the Blood Libel. For a thousand years, it’s been used to persecute the Jewish People, by perpetuating the idea that they torture children. So he just used that, but put the Clinton Campaign at the centre. Ridiculous you say, and quite right. But with Jone’s audience under the spell of the conspiracy virus, anything is possible.

Blood Libel, ancient and modern.

A visible personality like Jones can only take you so far though. You also need some secret ones. Imaginary characters who can say anything. And on an anonymous message board in a dark corner of the web called 4Chan, that’s exactly what you can create.

In July 2016, while the FBI were conducting their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, someone claiming to be be “a person with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton caseappears, who will come to be known as FBIanon. They subtly yet systematically created the idea that there was far more going on with the Democratic candidate — up to and including occult rituals abusing trafficked children.

Clinton’s campaign manager was a guy called John Podesta, a long time democratic operative. His emails got hacked by Russia and given to Stone and Wikileaks. There was nothing in there (except for an invitation to an event by acclaimed performance artist Maria Abramovic). But if you say that some words mean something else, and then amplify that message with more fake accounts, you can make something out of nothing.

These things all combined to createPizzagate”. This was of course just one piece of the puzzle in the campaign. Steve Bannon had brought Breitbart, and Cambridge Analytica fresh from the battlefield of Brexit. Bot networks, foreign and domestic. Russian interference. The Seth Rich Assassination Story. Kushner and Parscarle brought their strategies, Murdoch brought his empire and its cast of characters, along with Sinclair and OAN. Lewindowski and Scavino played their parts. Manafort managed most of it. And of course they had the entire republican political apparatus and its decades of groundwork in conditioning the conversation with anti-progressive sentiment to draw on. And a content delivery algorithm specifically designed to keep people on a particular platform which then tended to radicalise people. Plus a candidate as unpopular as Clinton was to begin with, running a campaign as badly as they were. All this meant that when the FBI reopened the emails investigation a few days before the election, they had enough to get them over the line.

Trump had no idea about politics, but Bannon and Miller and others behind them knew exactly what they were doing — Smashing collectivism. Public programs, responsible regulation, and international co-operation went right out the window. Slashing regulations, privatising industries, and aggressive nationalism were in. They savagely attacked the media, and destabilised the very idea of truth itself. All to preserve the power of rich white men. It had always been the goal, Trump just tore the mask off. It was a Faustian bargain, not just with their own soul, but the soul of the world itself.

His malevolent incompetence, and lack of interest in doing anything other than listen to people tell him how good he is, became harder and harder to deny. Investigations into blatant corruption began to close in, and the team needed something desperate to build and maintain support. It was time to go back to fantasy land.

In actual reality, Donald Trump is a dodgy real estate developer who openly brags about barging in on naked young girls in the Miss Teen USA pageant, committing sexual assault, has sexualised his own daughter since she was an infant, and said he’d like to date her.

But in an alternate reality (and this is an administration that used the term ‘alternative facts’ with a straight face), he is on a righteous crusade to bring down the deep state cabal of democrat pedophiles who are trafficking and torturing children.

Psy Group is a company who pitched the Trump team on a similar sounding project during the 2016 convention. They quoted $3,125,000 plus media costs, and promised to make it virtually untraceable. This isn’t to say they did it. The point is that this industry exists.

Slide from their proposal

Pulling something like this off requires a lot of work. Stories had to be published about how many pedophiles Trump had prosecuted. He had to read a speech or two, sign a bit of legislation. Video compilations and other content had to be created. And like in 2016, they had an anonymous message board at their disposal. Which can be used to create any narrative you want. Because after all,

The day after Manafort was indicted, in October 2017, another character appeared on 4chan. They claimed to be working inside military intelligence, on a secret mission to take down the deep state cabal, and Donald Trump was actually a messianic hero. They posted cryptic questions, and the audience filled in the gaps and helped create the story. They were called “Q”.

From the outside, it looked like a joke. It was on a joke site, with a long proud history of jokes. The premise sounds pretty funny, and they got a lot of predictions wrong.

But beneath the surface seems to be a sophisticated ARG, specifically designed to draw people in and hook them on a certain Narrative. It is arguably a version of an elaborate trick known as the “Nostradamus Hustle”.

Puzzles are fun, people like games, and they also like having their biases confirmed. This did all that, but perhaps most importantly, it provided a sense of community. Q talked to them, and they talked to each other. They were all on on a righteous crusade to save the world together. That is a compelling plot line. High quality video content appears, and it continues to pick up steam.

None of it came true. But imagine if it did. What a rush. So people want to believe it, because it’s an enjoyable story, and so their brain lets them. The best way to understand it is to hear how it works on a personal level. Listen to this woman decoding things she believes prove the veracity of “Q”:

As one analyst describes: “This is someone walking you through how minor coincidences provide her with Narrative Validation- thus enabling her to psychologically exist within the fantasy world of her Inner Narrative. Note the genuine psychological relief and earnest optimism for the future that she is experiencing as a result of having her Inner Narrative validated. Also know that she is clearly not alone and having this specific reaction, as numerous other individuals in the replies are clearly experiencing the same euphoria. When the QAnon delusion is eventually taken from her she will experience a tremendous sense of disorientation, rage, fear, and hopelessness. She will be exceedingly vulnerable at that point to becoming highly radicalized, and she will not be alone”

By now the Virus has gone ballistic. Millions of people are infected. And the conspiracy story was just the tip of the spear, which is now being used as a pipeline to pump them pro-Trump propaganda.

Here we need to note that Alex Jones isn’t the only conspiracy merchant / disinformation agent in the game. An internet millionaire called Mike Adams has been doing the same kind of thing for the same time, running a suite of sites anchored around “Natural News”. Like Jones, it seems like it was all an elaborate scheme to sell supplements. Using advanced SEO techniques to get millions of monthly views, he targeted people interested in organic foods and chakra therapies, and used the “conspiracy virus” to incubate the conservative narrative in disguise. Government programs and international cooperation were still the bad guys, but in this variation they used Big Pharma and Vaccinations to execute their control. The shame here is that there is a lot to like about natural remedies, and a lot to dislike about pharmaceutical companies. He just put a whole bunch of bullshit on top. Which you could say about Jones too.

When an International Health Organisation suggests that governments tell their citizens to stay inside or wear a mask, devastating people’s livelihoods, because of something invisible which doesn’t even seem that deadly, it can feel a lot like government over reach. And in times of chaos and confusion, people look for a simple answer. This was the perfect opportunity for the Conspiracy Virus to strike, and drive the capitalist conservative spear deeper than ever before.

Three films were produced, and collectively clocked up over 100 million views. “Plandemic” was heavily and almost exclusively promoted by Breitbart, and called the virus a conspiracy. “Out of Shadows” had a hollywood stuntman and used studio-quality production values to introduce people to the Pizzagate conspiracy. And “Fall of the Cabal” was a 10-part home made hodge-podge of it all. All while people are stuck at home in the midst of a confusing crisis, with nothing but time on their hands and questions on their mind.

By this stage, the Q world — where Trump is on a secret crusade to take down the evil democratic child sex trafficking ring — had been growing roots for over 2 years. It was a thoroughly established universe, with endless hours of organically created content for people to fall right into. But, the central story still seemed like a stretch. It needed a revamp. And so we began to see the “Save the Childrencampaign.

Same old Story

Of course child sex trafficking is a real thing, and it’s horrific. It’s not ‘2,000 children per day’, that represents the total number of reports, most of whom are promptly found. One child missing is too many, and they deserve a focused fight for them. This campaign is deliberately obscuring that, by flooding the internet with hashtags and using the Conspiracy Virus to paint progressive democrats as pedophiles.

This would turn out to be one of the biggest infection events of all, bringing millions of people who otherwise wouldn’t have been within an ideological mile of Trump, right to his wagon. And now they’re there, they are being fed clinically created content, with a very specific, conservative capitalist agenda, undermining the case for progressive government. Many of them have guns. Do not mistake Q’s craziness for ideological incoherence:

The content of “Q-drops” moves quickly from the message board to the broader internet, like youtube and facebook and twitter, and that is what the vast majority of people interact with it. Which makes sense when you learn that this is the front page of “8kun”, where Q (having left 4Chan) currently lives:

8Kun

This is the place where the mass shooters are radicalised, post their manifestos, and livestream their massacres. It is currently owned and and operated by an American expat in Manilla called Jim Watkins, who appears to be connected to Q posts. There is complex network supporting it. It doesn’t make money.

The Trump administration is so entwined with Russian policy objectives that it should come as no surprise to know that all of this is being explicitly amplified by Russia as well. This article is long enough already without going to far down that rabbit hole, but it would be remiss to ignore it.

Russian Media sowing divisive naratives

And that just about brings us to where we are now. A world ravaged by Conservative Capitalism, and its weaponisation of the Communist Conspiracy Narrative Virus.

We have a tremendous challenge ahead. To excise this disease from our community. It is going to require compassion, clarity, cleverness, and persistence. To re-design our systems, and build better infrastructure. To make decisions in the collective interest. We can put this in the past, and choose our story for the future.

We have the chance to turn the pages over. We can write what we want to write. We’ve gotta make ends meet, before we get much older. We’re all someone’s daughter. We’re all someone’s son. How long can we look at each other down the barrel of a gun? You’re the voice, try and understand it. Make a noise, and make it clear. Wah oh, oh whoa, oh whoa ah wow. Wah oh, oh whoa, oh whoa ah wow. We’re not gonna sit in silence. We’re not gonna live with fear. Wah oh, o whoa, oh whoa ah whoa. Wah oh, o whoa, oh whoa ah whoa.

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