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Picard: Well. . . I suppose that is the end of Q.
[with a flash, Q appears on the bridge with a trumpet, accompanied by a mariachi band]
Q: AU CONTRAIRE, MON CAPITAINE! HE’S BACK!
[Trumpet blows, the band starts playing]
One of my favorite topics of discussion in the Dissident Right, and a perennial pet peeve of our circles, is the QAnon phenomenon. I’ve written about it all the way back in 2018, others have written about it, Devon Stack of Black Pilled and now Morgoth of Morgoth’s Review have made videos about it. There are many Twitter threads trying to get to the bottom of what Q is, who is behind it, what its purpose is, and what its eventual fate will be. They’re all fascinating, because whodunits are always fascinating. Without hard evidence, however, we can only speculate. That’s a lot of fun, but here at Counter-Currents, we are all about serious business. And yet we cannot ignore Q as mere silliness. Therefore, I have resolved to blackbox the QAnon phenomenon, leaving aside its inner workings in order to observe its effects on the political scene and the Dissident Right specifically.
I won’t pretend to know who Q is. He could be some Midwestern kid in his mom’s basement hawking shirts, hats, and mugs; he could be one or several American (or other Five Eyes countries) federal agents wasting taxpayer dollars by gaming the political system; he could be an intrepid Macedonian content farmer hiding out in a converted industrial loft in Veles, making piles of cash off of ad space; or, as some have speculated, merely a rudimentary engagement-maximizing AI developed by Midwestern kids, federal agents, or Macedonian content farmers (or all of the above) for the purpose of selling hats, mugs, and shirts, gaming the political system, or making piles of cash off of ad space. But who Q is is less important than what Q does. And by that, I don’t mean the shadowy figure, figures, or AI posting the cryptic messages on imageboards. Rather, I mean the movement of QAnon true believers.
In my trawling of Twitter dot com (truly a goldmine for the enterprising people-watcher), I’ve noticed that QAnon people talk back to the blue checkmarks with a good dose of courage, even smugness. They’re dunking on what they perceive to be condemned men and women. Because a key point of the Q narrative is “the storm,” in which the white hats in the American government will purge the black hats and all the pedophile satanist child molester globalist elites who have hijacked (hijacked, I say!) America, Q-believers feel confident in mocking elite Leftists with blue checkmarks. The blue checkmarks themselves are stunned by the sheer suicidal bravery of someone daring to talk back. The response, if it ever comes, is usually some variation of “where do you get your balls?”
Now, here’s an aspect that Vox Day of all people has managed to get right. It doesn’t matter that a narrative is false — even blatantly false — if acting on it delivers success. His Arch-Enemy and King of the Gammas Jordan Peterson would call it “darwinistically true.” And indeed, if we define success as having the balls to openly antagonize Leftists and humiliate them in public, yeah, QAnon is a successful narrative. It also serves as a useful means for coordinating and rallying populists of a certain variety. One interesting aspect is that the QAnon narrative might have gotten out of the control of whoever started it. There are unconfirmed rumors that it was indeed started by some cynical kids with the intent of selling mugs and shirts, but has since been blown out of proportion and that parts of it are variously run by grifters, feds, and those pesky Macedonian content farmers. But it’s bigger than them now. It’s bigger than just America, too.
“It’s just dumb boomers LARPing!” you say. Well, that may be so. Except it’s not just boomers — young people are repeating the QAnon narrative, too. And as Morgoth pointed out in his video, the QAnon narrative has become the central folkish thrust of the Trump campaign, just as the immigration and race replacement narratives of 2016 were the animating power of that era’s meme magic, even though its memes are unbelievably cringe. However cringe and stupid we think this thing is, it has gotten a life of its own. It animates a large number of people who show up to Trump rallies, even though it is transparently false to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. What gives?
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We are the HBD crowd here, and we like to harp on about race differences in intelligence, but we tend to forget that there’s a whale of variation within races too. A large number of white people are of IQ 90 and lower. An alarming amount are in the midwit range. Most of them are apolitical and just want to grill, for chrissake. But even those who just want to grill can’t help but notice the politicization of everything. So they enter politics reluctantly, to defend themselves from politicization and depredations against their way of life, mostly to defend their creature comfort and peace of mind. Very few have a class consciousness — after all, when you just want to grill, the racial makeup of the country is of no importance, only that grills and meat remain legal. If you don’t really want to get involved in politics, you won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the concept of the political, collective action, or organization. Rather, your biases will lead you to seek out narratives in which good guys are already on the job, and they merely require your thoughts and prayers, or at most your vote. It’s the ultimate in slacktivism — just far enough from your comfort zone to make it feel like sacrifice and “doing something,” but close enough that you don’t cede core comforts.
Do understand that I’m not knocking these people. They were born with average or below-average IQ and a weaker will than others. This is something they have zero control over. Low IQ and low thumos aren’t crimes. These people very prudently do not want to be involved in politics — they’ve neither the ability nor the inclination. Indeed, they are forced into politics by the republican-democratic system and the concordant liberal culture of “the good citizen” who is engaged with grand ideas. Really, the best these people can muster is local politics, which is why they expect small institutions to scale up. To them, the American federal government is a massive homeowner’s association and the FBI is their local sheriff’s department writ large. Small minds (which are small through no fault of their own) cannot comprehend the nature of macroentities. If they knew what we know about globohomo’s various institutions and agendas, they would be so thoroughly demoralized that they’d either be too depressed to leave their homes or the human submission instinct would kick in and they’d immediately convert to globohomo.
As an aside, this is a good thing for accelerationists to consider. While a highly engaged Dissident Rightist might just hack the idea of powering through to the next Spenglerian civilizational cycle, some people just don’t have the capacity to think outside of the framework which they’ve been raised in. Asking them to abandon the framework of American liberalism is like asking a fish to ride a bicycle. Asking them to accept that the American liberal paradigm is against them, evil, and must be destroyed is like asking a pious Christian to take a dump on a crucifix. Something like Q is probably the best we can do to engage them and the democratic system dictates that these people have to be engaged, even if only as a votebank.
So, that’s it, right? All the snickering aside, Q is good and beautiful and it serves to moralize the normies when otherwise they’d be eaten alive by woke. So what if it’s stupid and false and everyone with two brain cells to rub together not only rejects it but is also irritated, and not only because of the low-IQ and repetitive nature of Q believers?
Remember when I said that Q memes are cringe? There’s a reason for that. It’s because everyone with two brain cells to rub together rejects and is irritated by the Q narrative, and the creation of dank memes requires two brain cells to rub together and that certain je-ne-sais-quoi that sets a memelord apart from a cringetard. Apparently, you can’t beat meme magic out of glorified normies.
I’ve suspected for a while that the Dissident Right consists mainly of the disaffected sons of the ruling and upper-middle class. The 2016 meme magic and subsequent emergence of /pol/ as an unofficial police, intelligence, and counterintelligence agency, embarrassingly better and more effective than its official counterparts, has convinced me that the Dissident Right is full of unemployed and underemployed bright men who’d have formed the political, security, financial, educational, cultural, and intelligence elite in times past. Since IQ, thumos, and other elite-characteristic traits tend to be heritable, I suspect that many of our elite enemies are harboring a Dissident Rightist fifth column in their basements and upstairs bedrooms.
To the federal fuckheads, NGO nincompoops, and Antifa aardvarks reading this: your son is probably a secret Nazi.
Turns out that alienating the cognitive and creative elite of the movement, the people who got into the Dissident Right precisely they do not believe shoddily-constructed narratives about the government, is a bad idea. What seems to be even worse is calling them shills, feds, brainwashed, or my personal favorite, insinuating that their lack of fervor for Q Jesus is due to depression, effectively trying to ascribe skepticism about a political position to mental illness — a method favored by the Soviets. It engenders a contempt for the Q believer in the Dissident Rightist and activates his old elite biases against the proletariat. What if my professors and mother were actually correct, and the Right really consists of genuinely stupid, uneducated people? I mean, who but a foolish ingrate would not only blindly put his faith in QAnon, but also call you a Federal Depressed Antifa shill for doubting the narrative? What if I’ve been blinded to the astounding stupidity of Right-wingers in the 2016 era by our perceived successes and camaraderie? More to the point, the content of the narrative itself disgusts someone who wants to fight for his people. Sit tight and do nothing while our beautiful military and white hats in government perform a little bit of magic and purge the pedophile satanic globalist elites. Really, this is just Alex Jones, hold the charisma, entertainment value, and personal integrity.
Nothing really gets done without the elite, disaffected or otherwise. 2016 was a struggle between the old elite and their underemployed progeny, and the young bloods won, for a given definition of the term “victory.” 2020 thus far has been the story of the Leftist elite running wild to little opposition, aside from quixotic Q people talking back to them (and losing their Twitter handles). Without memes produced by the dissident rightist cognitive elite, the footsoldiers of populism are memetically powerless, unable to invigilate themselves into the political discourse the way the 2016 era Dissident Right forced the issues of immigration and identity to the forefront.
One of the most important things I’ve written for Counter-Currents is my essay on multimodal ethics. I keep telling myself that I need to rewrite it for clarity and coherence, but for the time being, take it as is. Whatever political formula we employ in the future will have to solve for these two variables: the necessity of constructing a narrative for the lower classes so they remain happy and reliably vote for whomever serves white well-being best without alienating the movement elite. That the elite needs a different ethical and narrative system I believe is at this point self-evident. Ideally, the Dissident Right would be a formal initiatic society and higher degrees would come with ever-greater and more profound redpills. As it happens, it is an informal initiatic society and status is unregulated — higher degrees do not command as much clout as lower degrees can (indeed, the most redpilled are usually the most obscure), inverting the power relations.
In the meantime, all we can really do is observe the QAnon phenomenon from a distance. As we know from the Seventh Day Adventists and other Millennial Protestant sects, non-manifestation of the eschaton does not discourage the faithful — one cannot be reasoned out of a position they weren’t reasoned into. It may already be too late and Q-belief might already be a requirement for any foray into populist politics in America.
The best we can do is construct an alternative, less false narrative for the white normie — and hope he finds it more compelling.
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10 Comments
I agree with almost all of this article except the “midwit range” reference. Anybody who believes this bullshit is a functioning retard.
These people’s worldview will collapse the day after the election. That collapse will have real consequences.
“While a highly engaged Dissident Rightist might just hack the idea of powering through to the next Spenglerian civilizational cycle, some people just don’t have the capacity to think outside of the framework which they’ve been raised in. Asking them to abandon the framework of American liberalism is like asking a fish to ride a bicycle. Asking them to accept that the American liberal paradigm is against them, evil, and must be destroyed is like asking a pious Christian to take a dump on a crucifix. Something like Q is probably the best we can do to engage them and the democratic system dictates that these people have to be engaged, even if only as a votebank.”
This was something I was hammering at in my review of that book on Gertrude Stein and Bernard Fay, although I guess so vaguely as to constitute some kind of “esoteric writing” a la Strauss. Rather than promoting foreign hobbyhorses like Throne and Altar, Spenglerian Caesarism, Yavinesque monarchy, etc., how about just recover and promote the good ol’ American Tradition (tricorn hats and silk hose optional, of course).
Great essay. Yes, there are national reps from QAnon. When will we have a senator from counter currents, lol? Part of Q’s appeal is that it doesn’t cross any line that would really damn a movement or politician, eg racist or antizionist lines. It’s safe as it does not really challenge the prevailing orthodoxy and after all, what “they” want is for the masses to engage in the simple mud slinging exercise between the parties, ie hating Hillary Clinton or Donald trump, and Q is simply another level of that. If dissident right ideas became commonplace and no longer grounds for banishment, the charade could be dispensed with.
I have a friend who subscribes to some shamanistic beliefs and goes to seances and various holistic cures. He sometimes spends considerable money on these beliefs, so recently I decided they were not merely harmless delusions and I attempted to disabuse him with logic. He became very angry and started cursing at me in a way I have not seen from him. Sometimes certain people simply need irrational beliefs. They are spiritually sustained by them somehow. Maybe my addiction to dissident right websites is that for me, who am I to judge?
Pol WAS a strange mix of upper middle class( specially Engineering degrees students ) and lower middle class people that would have ended as police officers.
Qanon is Frame Game. Do you remember the old JF Gariepy Youtube videos where he had Frame Game on discussing just how insidious the Jewish movement is in our society? He also had his own channel. He had to disappear as Frame Game because people were getting close to discovering who he was. We only know he was a Jewish lawyer living in New York.
The simplest way to police the movement vanguard is to teach them not to be snobs. Snobbery is the always obvious and always repellent to its targets. I followed Q for a bit. I don’t any more. I don’t think Q is really what it says it is, and I don’t think that the outcome will be the victory that Q-folk predict.
Elites are going to arise on their own. There’s no reason to emphasize (or even ruminate too much on) ‘the elite’. It alienates ordinary people and that’s bad. For building and maintaining a mass movement, a revolutionary movement, ethos is more important than thumos which is not nearly as important as episteme.
White people have embraced an epistemological view of politics that is entirely destructive of solidarity due to the natural variation in the ability to understand ideas. The problem stems from one of the shibboleths of liberalism: Knowledge is power.
I’m always suspicious of any idea that basically everyone on all sizes of a political conflict believe. That’s the case with ‘knowledge is power’.
This simply isn’t true. Power is power. Power can take many forms. Sometimes having certain kinds of knowledge under certain circumstances can confer power, but most of the time knowledge does not translate into power. Knowledge is important, but if your goal is power, don’t confuse them.
At this particular time in history, solidarity is power. If you have the knowledge on how to craft a rhetoric or political organization that creates and/or amplifies solidarity, you’re on your way to victory.
It’s like the old saying “I’d never want to be part of a club that would accept me as a member.” Politics has always been to a great extent about aspiring to be part of a large social group. In our atomized age that’s probably more true than ever. People want to be part of a group that’s better than what they are, strong and physically fit, intelligent, cultured, popular. They don’t want to be part of a movement associated with three-hundred pound high school dropouts drinking their beer in momma’s basement.
This was hilariously cringe.
The smug snobbery reminds me of reddit, and to be frank the entire analysis is reddit tier and manages to miss almost all important touchpoints when analysing the Qanon phenomena.
The only part that is even close to the mark, is the snide comparison to Alex Jones.
Yes! Qanon is not that new, it’s the contribution of an older movement which arose out of pedogate, which is even older than that. To trace the historic roots of Q, leads you back to John Birch society, the Franklin scandal, Larouche movement, and the JFK and 911 truth movements. All these curents have been marginalised politically for decades, and now due to the vague nature of it’s leading figure have become a directed political force.
Given the percentage of Americans that believe the CIA shot JFK, that 911 was an inside job and that the intelligence services are criminal enterprises the movement represents a tremendous political force.
The new age, pseudoreligious nature of its narrative, the good vs evil grand conflict is fascinating for very understandable reasons, which have nothing to do with intelligence. They are captivating because the forces from subliminal mind rises when we experience reality breaking experiences. Whith the west going through one of it’s death and rebirth cycles this sort of spiritual narratives come to the forefornt of political struggles.
And given the OP’s obvious faustian outlook, one should ask not if he is smarter that those he here talks down to, but if he isn’t on the wrong side of history. Because that faustian bargain may come back to bite him.
What the Q cult lacks is intensity. It’s superficial, it energizes to nothing. It’s a lot of horsepower with very little torque – the midlife crisis-mobile of cults. Christians of old would sail halfway around the world to slay infidels. Today’s dissidents plot the downfall of the world’s most powerful empire.
Q is a ghost dance for people who don’t and can’t understand the nature of the struggle. And unlike Alex Jones, it’s not even fun.
But of course, you’ll get the last laugh when Trump A C T I V A T E S S E S S I O N S, and that mean ole eurotrash blueblood Jeelvy will get purged along with all of the other faustian satanists.