Blackboxing Q

2,220 words

Picard: Well. . . I suppose that is the end of Q. ^[1]

[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 ^[2], 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?

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 ^[4]. 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 ^[5]. 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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