What Happened to The World
How Qanon started
Disinformation has shattered the shared foundation of Truth that we depend on for a functioning society. People are now living in wholly separate realities, and navigating the divide is becoming increasingly difficult.
One of the main chisels in that crack was the phenomenon known as Qanon. Much has been said and written on the matter, a lot of which has done a good job explaining what it is, how it spread, and the damage it’s done.
In all that coverage, however, we never got the answer of how it actually started. The consensus seems to have settled on the idea that it was basically just a joke, which accidentally happened to get out of control, that probably came from a random guy in South Africa called Paul. But the case for that is pretty thin, and ignores a lot of evidence outlined below. Meanwhile, the story we’re about to tell has only been fleetingly considered, before being abruptly discarded, based on what could most charitably be described as a mistake.
Identifying the source of some anonymous posts on the internet is not easy, but nor is it necessarily impossible. We have a vast amount of information to work with, and now, after a four-year investigation, we can finally reveal the answer to how it began and who was behind it, right down to the specific people in the room when it was first conceived.
Like anything, it is the product of countless streams converging. The background detail and historical context for those streams can be found here. Today, we’re going to skip over most of that to cover it as quickly as possible.
Part 1: Puzzles
The initial idea for the LARP that would eventually go on to become Qanon began with a prolific Arizonian livestreamer named Manuel Chavez III, aka Manny, AKA Defango. This isn’t to say that what he imagined is what it actually ended up being, or that it was all perfectly planned and executed from the get-go. Just that when we trace the evolution of this thing back, that is where the seed originally came from.
Manny was a computer guy and a cook and an all-round cool dude about town. In the course of his internet wanderings he found a few puzzles on 4chan, like Tengri 137, and enjoyed the challenge of solving them.
The best puzzle going around was a thing called Cicada 3301, which left a complicated string of cryptographic clues across both the web and the real world, for reasons which are still not entirely clear.
So Manny had a crack at that one too, and upon completion, found himself being handed the “Spear of Destiny”, by a guy called Thomas Schoenberger.
Thomas was a lot of things, but ostensibly a composer, who liked to make his music more interesting by involving puzzles. He had a thing for prime numbers, for example, and would work them into his songs to generate more engagement.
When the original Cicada appeared to have gone quiet in 2016, Thomas and some associates basically tried to take it over (the edition Manny did wasn’t actually the original, it was their knock-off version.)
In 2015, Tom started an influence company called “ShadowBox”. Their promotional material describes themselves as:
“An elite online reputation management firm … We create shadow ‘bot’ campaigns… use targeted chaos to confuse your opponents… sow the seeds of doubt and present the counter-narrative that [your enemies] are, in fact, the villains… We do this through sophisticated use of internet technology, meme creation, and cyber-guerrilla tactics […] to sway public opinion in your favor.”
So, after “solving Cicada”, Chavez wound up working with these guys on making more puzzles, and other bits and pieces of digital shithousery.
Part 2: Trolls
Their first (and perhaps only) client was the deep-pocketed GOP donor and friend of Erik Prince named Ed Butowsky, who had pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Benghazi, and #pizzagate.
One of the people they were working with was a jovial-looking fellow named Robert David Steele. When the “Save the Children” movement took off in 2020, if you followed the sources for people’s posts, most of them would ultimately lead to videos of Steele in a made-up court called the “International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ)”, lying about “Adrenochrome”.
Steele would go on to be one of the primary Q promoters. In January 2017, he was laying the groundwork for many of the narratives we see appearing in Qanon, and even doing us the kindness of naming some of the key figures in the network, including two people we’ll come to soon: Steve Pieczenik, and Mike Flynn.
Before dying from COVID in 2021, Steele spent most of his time on video calls with other Q-promoters like Sean Stone and Sacha Stone. He publically called Qanon “the greatest information operation of all time”, and is about as close to the centre of this network as it is possible to get.
But, back to 2017. By August, Thomas, Steele, and Manny were all in regular email correspondence about various shenanigans:
In September 2017, Chavez went to a digital security conference called DEFCON, to hype up the hijacked Cicada. We have footage of him there on the ground:
Disinformation is arguably the most pressing of all the digital security issues. It had delivered a lot of wins for the right, but some were becoming concerned about the dangers of their team’s excessive credulity. So Manny thought, what if we set up a deliberately fake LARP, releasing bogus “insider info”, see who follows along, then turn around and call them out, to warn them to be more skeptical in future. What could possibly go wrong.
While at DEFCON, he booked a room and gave a presentation for this idea he had. To flesh it out, he drew on a story by Italian anarchist collective Luther Blissett, about a secretive government insider called Q, who manipulates the truth to sow seeds of doubt.
In the room were Flynn-ally Jack Posobiec, Trump’s Twitter-guru Justin McConney, and some other digital lieutenants from MAGA3X. And that’s where this thing was born. Jack and his boys were happy to try something with a bit of secret-agent puzzle-dust or whatever, so they offered a small crew of trolls, possibly including but not limited to James Brower, Doug Stewart, “Microchip”, etc, and badda bing badda boom, we’re on.
It didn’t last long with that exact crew in that exact form of course. Manny quickly realised that the MAGA guys were a fair bit more hardcore than him, so he bailed after a few days. Since then, he has tried to tell people it was just a prank, but sadly to no avail.
Now at this stage, hopefully you’re thinking “well what if he’s just making all this up, trying to insert himself into the story for notoriety”. Which is a great question, because absolutely maybe he is.
But in episode 32 of the Qanon Anonymous podcast, James Brower is telling the hosts his story about his role in how it started. And in the 56th minute, when he’s talking about who was in the Discord server, he says it was him, Micro, and Turdbo. It’s never mentioned again. But “Turdbo” is another of Manuel’s aliases. If he was just making this up, James would not have dropped that name.
Unless they’re both lying, of course. So, either they both teamed up this one time, to tell this one weird lie, at no apparent benefit to themselves. Or, they’re saying the same thing because this story, that perfectly lines up with everything else that we see, is simply what basically happened.
After about a month, it was banned from 4chan, so migrated to a similar site called 8chan, whereupon the owner Jim Watkins and his son Ron became involved. The exact ratio of control or level of communication between them and any of the original creators is unclear. There was certainly a noticeable change in the quality of the output when it moved to their board. But like seasons 5–7 of The West Wing, it’s still the same basic thing. The characters and direction and momentum it built in that first month were enough to sustain it to keep doing the same job — energising the MAGA movement, with a “military insider” dropping cryptic clues to a crazy conspiracy.
It’d still be good to connect them to the Q posts for ourselves today though. Which can be tricky, because one of Q’s hallmarks was only making ambiguous “predictions”, like “No Name will be back in the headlines”. The believers think that the drops are deliberately cryptic to maintain deniability and stop the ~Deep State~ from getting to them, while the debunkers can confidently claim that Q is just a charlatan. It’s a tidy little arrangement which worked perfectly well over almost all of the 5,000 drops.
But in drop 3110, they appear to overplay their hand. They call out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, invite him to “play a game”, and say the STRIKE will be FAST. The next day, Twitter is hit with a $250 million lawsuit. Whoever wrote that drop knew about the suit in advance.
The suit was brought by Steven Biss, on behalf of Mike Flynn’s “best friend in DC”, congressman Devin Nunes. Biss and his wife Tanya Cornwell were also working closely with Thomas, Steele and co. That’s how “Q” knew.
It’s a little vague, but not vague enough. They slipped up. It’s like when Howard calls Annie a “Wildcat” in Speed. It tells us that they had eyes on certain information. Which tells us it came from someone in this gang.
There’s plenty more evidence too. A key part of Qanon’s growth was not just the posts themselves, but the way they were covered by the world of conspiracy websites, like “Victurus Libertas”. And below, we find an email to Thomas’ friends who run said site, pitching an article where he claims to speak for Q.
We also find a couple of articles from August 2016, using an awfully familiar language and typo[g]raphic style, to talk about awfully familiar narratives, such as an “insider at the Pentagon”, using puzzles to reveal the truth about the Democrats, in what seems like to be a pretty obvious precursor to the Q thing:
“The next wiki leak will deal with Clinton Foundation. Quid Pro. Cicada 3301, which you hear about, is connected to wikileaks. There are former and current FBI agents who are leaking, not Russians. There are internal battles afoot, and the white hats are using a segment of Cicada 3301 called Pi Mobi to expose the false flags being committed in US and Europe. Watch UK and NYC, Berlin and Paris in coming days. Things about to get r[e]ally crazy”.
We also know that some of the key people responsible for taking Q to that wider audience were the Watkins, and a YouTuber called Tracy “Beanz” Diaz. And quelle surprise, in 2017, we find that Thomas was in chats with a woman called Courtney, who worked for Jim Watkins’ website The Goldwater, and Tracy herself (who Defango was also talking to on Twitter at the time). And right before Tracy turned on to Qanon, she was talking about Wikileaks, another puzzle called Vault7, and Cicada 3301.
Another friend of Thomas is a gentleman named Douglas Gabriel, who seems nice enough, until he starts talking about how Trump is the one to “take down the deep state”. Apparently he was a cryptologist with the NSA or something. He and his wife Tyla run a channel called “The Gospel of Sophia”, alongside websites like “Patriots for Truth”. And just three days after Q’s first appearance, on their show “American Intelligence Media”, they had a lot of detailed thoughts about what it all means. Almost as if his buddies who were running the thing gave him this stuff to post:
One of the Qanon movement’s earliest catchphrases was “#FollowTheWhiteRabbit”. Because that was the original intention — to lead people through this warren, like Alice, or Neo, to “awaken” in the alternative reality that had been created. In Q’s first month there were over 10,000 tweets per day featuring the hashtag. This is not the work of a random troll who accidentally “happened to hit the jackpot”.
And guess what Cicada 3301 was talking about in September 2017, immediately prior to the launch of Q? “Follow The White Rabbit”.
And if all that isn’t enough, we have a whole bunch of emails between them all discussing the “Q” project, and how best to manage it in varying degrees of deniability:
Part 4: Spies
We can also look at it stylistically. Q has sometimes been compared to a Tom Clancy novel — a high-stakes spy thriller. Which is notable, because one of Clancy’s writing partners was an insufferable boomer we heard Robert David Steele mentioning before, named Steve Pieczenik.
He used to work for the State Department, specialising in Psy-Ops around the world throughout the ’70s, and becoming a crusader for the “anti-communist” far-right. Conspiracy narratives, of course, are a major weapon in his arsenal. He’s been a frequent guest on Alex Jones’ Infowars over the years, masterfully exploiting the platform to propagate his narratives across the cultural landscape.
In 2015, he became one of the first people to begin talking earnestly about the presidential ambitions of Donald Trump:
“This is one of the most phenomenal revolutions America has ever seen,[…] Trump had been monitoring the MSM for some time.. when we put his name up for the next presidency, he took it […] we are so tired of the people who committed the crime of 9/11, that once Trump gets in, many of them will be arrested […] we have to look at this as very positive movement. The backlash is huge. They never expected us to come in and be able to pronounce the truth […] We want them to show how stupid they are.”
This is clearly the foundational narrative of Qanon. That is the earliest recorded mention of “a team of military insiders putting Trump’s name up”. Not to mention slightly more generalised tropes like “they never expected us”, and “many of them will be arrested”.
So we’ve got 3 options:
- Q came up with this narrative entirely independently,
- Q heard this narrative, on this episode or elsewhere, and ran with it, thereby becoming a “product” of Steve’s operation, or
- Pieczenik, who has openly promoted Q, brags about running Psychological Operations, and writes spy-thrillers professionally, was at some point part of the creative team behind Q.
There’s been a lot of confusing controversy over the idea that “Mike Flynn is Q”. The simple answer is that the guys who were Q — Jackie Posobiec and co — were Flynn’s guys. That’s why it’s so pro-Flynn. He’s not “writing” them per se, and it wasn’t even necessarily his idea in the beginning. But either way, they’re on the same team, and we’re faced with the same problem.
So here it’s probably worth doing a bit of background on Flynn himself. He was made Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency by President Obama in 2012. Shortly afterwards he started acting weird, getting aggressively Islamophobic, and suspiciously close to Russian figures, so was fired in 2014.
He quickly started a lobbying firm called the “Flynn Intel Group” with a businessman named Bijan Kian, selling political influence services to foreign interests in Turkey and Russia, to sway American opinion towards their favour.
According to court documents, Kian also also sent Schonberger to Turkey back in 2013 for some kind of special operation. But who knows what that was.
In 2016, Flynn joined the Trump Campaign. Helpfully, the week after their election victory, he can’t resist bragging about exactly how they accomplished it:
After his gross invasion of the personal space of the woman introducing him, he gets to the point:
“We have an army of Digital Soldiers. Because this was an insurgency folks. This was irregular warfare at its finest. We have what we call Citizen Journalists. […] The American people decided to take over the idea of information. And they did it through social media.”
“Psychological Operations” have been around for a while. They have a certain ~conspiratorial connotation~, but at the end of the day, they’re basically just guerrilla marketing. All advertising is effectively a “Psy-Op”. Ever since Thomas Barratt used a cute painting to make Pears Soap more appealing, and Edward Bernays put cigarettes in the hands of marching suffragettes to make them “torches of freedom”, brands and agencies have sought to shape our perceptions of their products and clients.
The internet, obviously, presents an unprecedented opportunity to manipulate perception. Pretty much anyone can say pretty much anything. Not just with individual posts, either. You can make whole websites, that look like legitimate news platforms, and use them to disseminate whatever messaging you want.
Steve Bannon is someone who understands how to leverage this landscape better than most. In 2013, he came across a company called Strategic Communications Laboratory. Founded by an ex-ad man named Nigel, SCL create influence operations for right-wing political candidates, by using vast volumes of psychometric data to clinically produce the most manipulative content. They are a Behaviour Change Agency. Buoyed by +$10 million of funding from the Mercers, Bannon set up a subsidiary of SCL called Cambridge Analytica.
Unsurprisingly, there is now an entire commercial industry serving this space. Psy-Group and WikiStrat are both companies founded by an ambitious young Israeli-Australian named Joel Zamel. They specialise in offering manipulation campaigns for governments and corporations and private individuals, through “online perception management”, opposition research, honey traps, and even clandestine on-the-ground activities.
In 2016, Joel signed a memorandum of understanding with Cambridge Analytica.
This is all right up Flynn’s alley of course, and at some point Kian introduced him to Zammel. According to the Daily Beast:
Zamel wanted Flynn to be a member of the firm’s advisory board. Zamel spoke with him about it on multiple occasions around the time Flynn was forming the Flynn Intel Group. “Flynn took a real shining to Joel.”
During the Republican primaries, Trump campaign official Rick Gates asked Psy-Group for a proposal for an influence operation. They responded with a quote for $3,125,000 plus media costs, and promised to make it virtually untraceable.
Three months later, Blackwater mercenary Erik Prince arranged a meeting between Zamel, Donald Trump Jr., and George Nader. Nader then paid Zamel $2 million.
And what do you know, all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people started believing that Donald Trump’s political enemies were engaged in everything from child sex trafficking to drinking the blood of babies tortured in tunnels deep underground.
So, how exactly did all that happen.
Part 5: Pizzagate
In July 2016, some posts began appearing on 4Chan, from someone claiming to be “an FBI agent with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case”. The actual story was pretty mild, so they tried to spice it up by talking about the “nightmarish truth”, and all their “disgusting delights”. Arms deals, human trafficking, even black magic! It was exciting stuff.
The character came to be called “FBIanon”, and all up there were seven “Ask Me Anything” threads, spread out over roughly four months, and about a thousand posts.
Beneath all the noise, the key point of the LARP was to “focus on the Clinton Foundation”. Which, interestingly, is the exact same message, in the exact same language, that Bannon was pushing in the book “Clinton Cash”.
But obviously anyone could have read his book and cribbed the idea, so let’s press on. Among the rest of the posts, we find a clear directive. They weren’t just idly telling the stories, they were urging the anons to spread the narratives, with very specific instructions:
“The task is this: unleash every meme, image, and horrible story about HRC that you can muster […] In order to be effective, you must proselytise… For example: Start a website aggregating the images/facts and then try to get it linked to Drudge. Shove the images down every news anchor/journalists throat. Push out to people who you normally would have nothing to do with… invade their circles … We should be spreading memes to subs on Reddit.… blitz Twitter, Tumblr, and all social media with memes on the Clinton Foundation tonight, the last night of the DNC […] We need TrumpGen with us, and the meme division blasting the Tumblr tags. Bring up the old methods that /b/ used to use during their raids […] We’re going to war tonight …Repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth. Repeat after me: ‘Hillary is evil and will destroy the planet.’…”
It’s an unusually high level of dedication and professional panache for someone who’s not being paid. This person knows what they’re doing, and they’re good at it.
Still, it’s possible that a passionate volunteer had the same skills and singular devotion to getting Trump in office as someone on the campaign.
But, in July, FBIanon also says:
“More leaks will come. The time is not right yet. Expect an October Surprise.”
Which sounds a lot more like a confident claim than a lucky guess. It gives us a strong indication that they did in fact have inside knowledge. Not of the FBI case, but of the shady back-channel to Wikileaks that Thomas Schoenberger and Roger Stone and boasted about:
Sure enough, on October 7, 2016, about 30 minutes after the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape came out, Wikileaks began releasing thousands of emails they’d been given by some Russians who had hacked the account of Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
Unfortunately for them though, there wasn’t anything particularly incriminating in there. The closest they got was an invitation to an event by acclaimed performance artist Maria Abramovic.
But if you change some of the words, and tell people it’s sinister, you can make something out of nothing. And on October 17, FBIanon says:
“When you are reading Podesta’s emails, remember that the Clintons deal in weapons, drugs, and people. Some terminology in use is far more nefarious than many of you suspect.”
This is the seed that would go on to spawn the notorious phenomenon of #Pizzagate. Diligently watered by InfoWars hosts like Owen Shroyer, it broke ground in November, when our buddy Jack Posobiec live-streamed a visit to a pro-Democratic Washington pizza-parlour called Comet Ping-Pong, to fuel the suspicion that there was a child-trafficking ring running in the basement. He wasn’t following the story, or “falling” for it, he was helping create it.
So that’s the simple, surface-level version of the story of how the whole Pizzagate/Qanon mess started. These puzzle-guys meet these digital soldier guys who worked for these military intelligence guys, and we get the shape of the thing.
But the full story has quite a lot more to it than that. To chart the next chapter we need to take a magical journey to, of all places, the mountains of Tibet.
Part 6: The Great Spiritual Awakening
High among the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas live a secret band of “Enlightened Mystics”, who have preserved the wisdom of the ancient religions throughout the millennia, and hold the key to understanding the Universe.
That is according to a woman by the name of Helena Blavatsky, at least. In 1875, she and a few of her friends at The Miracle Club in New York formalised these ideas into a quasi-religion called Theosophy, based on their claim to being in touch with these spiritually advanced Masters.
By the early 1900s, they had sold enough books and lecture tickets to establish 121 lodges across the world. The narratives found their way to the ears of a charismatic conman called Guy Ballard. As a boy he liked digging and gold, so wound up becoming a mining engineer. He discovered that in real life it’s pretty hard to actually find gold, but pretty easy to tell people that mines have gold in them, and then sell them fake stocks. He also dabbled in various cons like clairvoyance and hypnotism. His wife, Edna, was a concert harpist who worked in an occult bookstore.
They saw how you could make a buck out of this game, and began concocting a story of their own. For their protagonist, they plucked a relatively obscure character from Helena’s mythology — a mysterious 18th-century polymath called The Count of St Germain.
The Count was based on a real-life person who could apparently spin quite a yarn. Most likely born in the northern Italian village of San Germano in the late 1600s, he was a good enough conversationalist, musician, and all-round party-guest to convince people that he was an alchemist who had lived for hundreds of years. A comedian adopted his persona and exaggerated his stories, until he was said to have been everyone from Merlin, to Francis Bacon, to a high priest of Atlantis.
So, in 1930, Guy claimed to have met The Count while hiking on Mt Shasta in California. He and Edna were supposedly the sole “Accredited Messengers” of the “Ascended Master” St Germain, and formed their own Theosophical off-shoot cult, which they called “I AM”.
The idea of calling yourself a messenger for one of these Masters is of course endlessly adaptable, and has gone on to spawn many offshoots. An airman determinatively named Mark Prophet started one called the Summit Lighthouse, and his wife Elizabeth Clare Wolf, who had grown up with I AM books in the house, later started another called the Church Universal and Triumphant. In its wake followed the Open Mind Forum (from whence comes the NESARA story), the Dove of Oneness, and more recently, Love Has Won. All of them are all descended directly from the Ballards’ I AM Activity, based on the legendary Count of St Germain.
Ok but why are we talking about these goobers. Well, you’ll never guess who claims to be a direct descendent of St Germain, and was trying to develop a screenplay about his life and adventures, while also scoring the film, and casting himself as the lead… None other than our good friend, ol’ Tommy Showbags. The “Th Stg” in his emails actually stands for “Thomas St Germain”.
This is all I AM shit. For nearly a full century, these charlatans have been poisoning people’s brains with their ridiculous lies, claiming that they have secret-agents in the government, working to try and ~take down the deep-state Cabal, and help humanity ascend to a higher spiritual dimension~.
And in 2021, we hear I AM prayers coming directly from the mouth of General Mike Flynn:
Now we’re getting close to the story of exactly how this mess has come to so effectively penetrate the divine and sacred feminine circles of the New-Age, Holistic Wellness World. They seem nice, so what on Earth could make those kinds of people become such avid Trump supporters, as they suddenly did in such disturbing numbers in 2020?
The answer of course is they were hit with disinformation from this factory we’ve been outlining over the last 20 minutes. Specifically, however, it comes via a blonde woman and I AM disciple named Lisa Clapier.
She pops up in all sorts of interesting places. Like #Occupy LA in 2011, where she was acting as media liaison, and “red-pilling” otherwise progressive people by hosting screenings of one of her favourite films, “THRIVE”.
And guess who she reached out to in early 2027, about a collaboration? The one and only Count of St Germain, I mean our mate Thomas.
Lisa was also deeply involved with #Unity4J (an ostensibly bi-partisan operation for Julian Assange), and ran a Twitter account called “SnowWhite 7 I AM”, which was one of the primary promoters of Qanon:
Here she is basically admitting to it all. She might be exaggerating her role, or not, but it’s notable either way:
Part 7: “Plandemic”
But it doesn’t stop there. We have one more character to meet, an actor/model from the “New-Age” community in Ojai, California, named Mikki Willis. He and his wife Nadia started a production company called “Elevate”, ran a film-festival by the same name, appeared at events featuring Thrive-y “Free Energy” presentations like “Knowphest”, and worked with people who ran red-pilled spiritual events like “One Love” and “Bhakti Fest”. And at some point, he crossed paths with Clapier.
Mikki and Lisa were both at the Standing Rock #NODAPL protest. There is a lot to be said about that whole Thing. The short version is that the fossil-fuel interests who felt threatened by the protest hired a professional mercenary operation called TigerSwan, to “infiltrate” the camp and manipulate the movement in various ways from within. But perhaps that’s a story for another time.
Despite all the above, the “New-Age Conspiracist” movement wasn’t making massive headway prior to 2020. They were mostly clutching at straws, trying to make a fuss out of ~5G~ fear-mongering.
Then COVID hit, and the conspiratorial tales the machine had been peddling came the closest they ever had to reality. Governments were dramatically restricting the freedoms of their citizens, and pharmaceutical companies stood to profit. Meanwhile, the world was basically turned upside down. Jobs were lost, parties were called off, and people were locked inside for months on end, with nothing but time to scroll their screens, resenting the people responsible, and looking for answers to what the hell was going on.
In times of turmoil, people tend to take comfort in simple explanations. And the idea that this was all the result of the UN trying to take over the world is way easier to grasp than a yawning existential void. So the Disinformation Factory had a field-day.
Mikki moved quickly, and on May 4th 2020, just six weeks into the pandemic, released the now-infamous 26-minute movie “Plandemic”, featuring disgraced research scientist Judy Mikovits. It misrepresented a bunch of complicated things, and fabricated a bunch of others.
Which turned into the crisis that we see today. “Plandemic” proved to be the spark that hit the tinderbox that set the world on fire. Steve Bannon sent it rocketing around the internet with Breitbart, radicalising millions of people all over the world, with astonishing rapidity.
Because it typically led straight to two other films that came out around the same time: “Fall of Cabal” and “Out Of Shadows”, which in turn led straight to Qanon and its extended universe. They essentially reanimated the #pizzagate narratives to become the “Save the Children” movement, and the world hasn’t really been the same since. Electorally significant numbers of people remain dialed into these channels, being pumped with this propaganda every time they open their phone.
And that’s basically What Happened to The World. That’s how and why everything got so crazy.
Part 8: Onwards
We are living in a soup of psychological operations, which has everyone at each other’s throats. Most people genuinely believe they are on the right side, fighting for a noble cause. The Machine is very brightly coloured, and it’s very loud, and it has become far better at telling and distributing disinformation than we are at dealing with it. “Reality” itself has been shattered, possibly beyond repair. How we make it through remains to be seen.
When we’re not sure what’s what, perhaps the best we can hope for is to be honest, curious, and kind. And be ruthless with those who aren’t. If we can manage that, then we might have a chance.
