A Layperson’s Guide To Understanding QAnon;
Or Why Did Everyone Lose Their Minds?
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” — Friedrich Nietzche
Many people are confused by QAnon. This piece is simply here to give you a view into what you are seeing. Perhaps you have heard their slogan/rallying cry of “Where We Go One, We Go All” or seen it represented as WWG1WGA and are baffled by it. Perhaps you wonder, “What is Q?”. Perhaps you are confused by a seemingly normal family member, relation or friend who is consistently posting nutty articles and memes from news sources you’ve never heard of across social media.
When you finish this piece you will have answers to these questions which will not solve the QAnon conundrum, but which will give you a lens and perspective to understand and cope with these questions and much more.
Game Theory
As it turns out, there is a simple theory system which, once embraced, will snap all these questions and confusions into focus. NOTE: this is merely the system/method to understand QAnon. It is not what QAnon was built and based on.
The theory that will put most of QAnon into perspective is Game Theory: simple, basic , easily understood Game Theory.
Every game, from checkers to Monopoly to card games to console video games, have a similar central structure, or skeleton, which holds the Game together.
For almost all Games the skeleton consists of:
1 — Background
2 — Objective
3 — Strategy
4 — Rules
5 — Winning
If you don’t think so, go grab a game in your home. Basically every game has an instruction card inside with all these aspects written in detail.
Background
Background is the least essential part of games for most people and most games, but for some games, Background is a core component to drive people to play.
For example, anyone can simply play checkers or backgammon or bridge or euchre and not know the Background. But if you invest in an expensive checker set or backgammon board or buy a bridge game set (as opposed to just grabbing a deck or two of cards) there is a good chance that, as part of the investment, the people who sold you the game at a premium included a custom card or small leaflet telling you the history of the game. “Backgammon is an ancient game dating back millenia to 2,000 B.C.” or “The History of Bridge”.
The Background isn’t essential to Game play but it can pull you in deeper, emotionally and psychologically.
You can pop in a video game in your console and simply play; but, if it is the latest Mario or Zelda or Assassin’s Creed, knowing the legacy of the series can add a level of interest that is deeper than the average layplayer. Does that mean the layplayer can’t or won’t have as much fun playing the video game? No. Does that mean the Super Fan is a better player or will have more fun? No, again.
So, what is the Background of QAnon?
It’s pretty simple. & for most QAnon adherents the Background is what draws them in to begin with.
The QAnon Background
Q works for the United States government, a life long employee and patriot with high level security access. Due to Q’s career in government and access, s/he has constant contact with and within the Deep State Shadow Government which is, in fact, truly running the country behind the veil of the Main Stream Media (MSM) and puppet government.
Q must remain anonymous since being outed would lead to Q being put in danger, perhaps locked in a Secret Dark Site Deep State prison or even killed.
But Q has seen enough and knows enough and wants to expose the Deep State and SAVE AMERICA!
— — — — -
So that’s a pretty meaty Background there. If you believe the rhetoric and narrative that America is being destroyed by a Deep State Shadow Government, this probably sounds like a great game (!). Players have Confirmation Bias taken to an extreme level.
To start, the belief in the existence of Q retroactively proves that the Deep State exists. It is no longer on anyone to prove that the Deep State exists. Q is part of it and revealing the truth to those who believe.
All the paranoia and rhetoric is baked in there too. Q wants to help save us from the UN black helicopter satanist pedophiles with their phony vaccines which are actually poisonous mind-control systems and on and on and on….
In addition, what’s all this about saving America and making America great again? Sounds familiar. It’s like finding a community of like minded people in a world that you know is against you and out to get You and out to destroy YOU.
What a background, huh? Simply by thinking of playing the Game all of your conspiracy theories and victim paranoias are confirmed.
And the hook! Q is every underdog hero who beat insurmountable odds rolled into one. Q is Luke Skywalker. & the Deep State is The Death Star. Q is Robin Hood. Q is Mel Gibson in Bravehart. Q is Katniss Everdeen and Harry Potter and David beating Goliath. Plus, don’t you sometimes feel like Q since everyone else is brainwashed by the Fake News Media and the Swamp Government?
OK, the Background has reeled you in and now maybe you’d like to hear The Objective. The Objective is as simple as The Background and it both capitalizes on and leapfrogs off of it.
The QAnon Objective
Q needs YOUR help to expose the Deep State and save America from liberalism, foreigners, atheistic scientists and global puppet masters.
Q can and will feed you information called “breadcrumbs” via anonymous online posts on various message boards; but to protect Q’s identity and life, Q has to bury the “breadcrumbs” in disinformation which may sometimes be code and sometimes be gibberish.
Will YOU help Q to bring forth the “breadcrumbs” to all Patriotic Americans in an effort to reassemble the information back into The Truth which expose the Deep State, save America and thus Make America Great Again?
— — — — — — — — — — — — — —
What an Objective in QAnon! You were actually always doing this anyway but on your own and now there is Q and Q proves you were right all along. All this time you have simply been waiting for someone with the real information, and now you are connected with that person!
To go back to Game Theory, you may feel great when you finally beat a player you always lose to in chess. Or when you beat the latest Zelda video game. Or trounce everyone in poker or Monopoly. But do you ever save America playing and winning any other game? Even if you are a US sports team and you win a global championship, you don’t save America in the process.
So, you are pulled in by the Backstory and want to achieve the Objective.
But how?
Well, luckily there is a Strategy to explain this.
The QAnon Strategy
Helping Q isn’t easy and it takes time and diligence, but the rewards are incalculable.
To help Q, join message boards such as 4chan and connect via social media with accounts related to QAnon.
You don’t have to anonymize your posts but you are free to do so. (Remember, if they can get Q, they can get YOU! You don’t even have security clearance. You are a Rebel Hero and part of the Noble Patriotic Underground once you choose to start playing).
Be sure to read any and all posts by Q and attempt to decode the breadcrumbs.
All players MUST collaborate to work together to help Q and save America. Be inclusive of all other players’ thoughts and they in turn will be inclusive of yours. Remember: the main goal is not to be a solo hero who cracks the code but to work together so EVERYONE playing QAnon wins together.
Post and promote and share any and all thoughts.
But BEWARE! The Deep State will do anything in their power to stop people from helping Q and exposing them. Work with all QAnon players, but keep an eye out for Spies & Fake Players.
How To Detect A Spy or Fake Player
- They will attempt to attack the ideas, articles and memes you post.
- They will attempt to counter argue and/or change your mind or the minds of other players.
- They will post articles and videos from the FAKE NEWS and LAME STREAM MEDIA to rip your ideas apart with disinformation.
- They will almost never post articles or videos from Fox News, OAN, Brietbart or other trusted Patriotic News outlets.
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
So the Strategy is quite simple. Post, re-post, share, write or say anything that pops into your head and find connections between anything else other QAnon players are posting.
Anything from within the QAnon community is de facto revealed truth and anything from outsiders or The Media is de facto a lie.
You’ve seen this happen or it has happened to you. You have that relative or old friend posting erratic media articles from websites and news sources you never heard of and finally you read one of the posts and decide to reply with a comment politely saying “You may be wrong here” with a link from a major news source (e.g. — CBS, New York Times, etc.) and instead of a dialogue the response is an attack on the source you posted, or, worse, an ad hominem attack on you.
Congrats! You’ve been outed as a Spy/Fake!
In your mind, since you don’t play QAnon, the response makes no sense and you have no idea why the other person is digging in and doubling down on an idea that is clearly nonsensical, non-factual, refuted and/or propaganda.
In the QAnon player’s mind, this is the core strategy and you don’t believe in Q so you are of no value to them in the game. In fact, you’re an active threat.
Now, you may not accept this, but, then again, you’re not playing.
Ever play a card game and someone who isn’t playing walks into the room. And then that person walks around the room and sees everyone’s hand and proceeds to make the huge mistake of saying something out loud about someone’s specific hand and what they should do?
What happens?
No matter the comment, good or bad, strategic or not, ALL of the players get annoyed by this breach of etiquette. QAnon works exactly like a game. When you get involved from the outside and aren’t playing, all the people playing QAnon get furious.
So congrats! You replied to your QAnon friend/relative thinking you could help, but instead you cemented them deeper into the Game.
How do you avoid being that counterproductive person? Well, now is a good time to take a look at The Rules.
The QAnon Rules
Like most popular games with large passionate audiences, QAnon sticks with a small, simple to grasp, basic rule set. QAnon isn’t contract bridge. Heck, it isn’t even checkers. In fact, most of the rules are based on the premise of “There really aren’t any rules.”
But there are a few key easy to follow rules. And when you don’t play QANon and don’t realize that there are, in fact, rules, the entire game looks like a chaotic anarchic mess of insanity. When you understand the rules, everything makes more sense.
Here are the 3 Key Rules of QAnon, with examples of how they work, using actual QAnon examples.
— — — — — — — — — — —
QAnon Rule #1 — No Non-Players
Ignore, Dismiss, Denounce or Attack ANY information supplied by ANYONE who isn’t playing QAnon.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
This has already been alluded to. If you try to counter any QAnon player’s statements/posts/articles/memes, your information is rejected simply based on the fact that you, a non-player and non-believer, supplied it.
— — — — — — — — — — — — -
QAnon Rule #2 — No Factions
Any player can make any statement or theory and all player statements are equally valid as long as the core and central meaning is “The Deep State exists and we must help Q destroy it.”
— — — — — — — — — — — —
This one may come across as complicated so it will be easiest to illustrate by example.
If you live on Earth in 2020, you have heard of COVID-19 or coronavirus. This is a virus which has caused a global pandemic which has killed nearly 1 million people worldwide and which is still not under control as of Fall 2020.
Oh wait, sorry, that is what COVID-19 is to those of us not playing QAnon.
For QAnon players, COVID-19 is just another Deep State/Globalist Scheme manufactured to keep Americans enslaved to the Global Cabal, specifically MAGA Americans.
Now there have been several theories to explain/expose COVID-19 embraced and amplified by QAnon. Here is a short, non-complete list:
1 — Someone in China ate a bat and got COVID-19 and gave it to everyone.
2 — Bill Gates funded a secret lab in China or a secret volcano in Asia which is where COVID-19 came from. COVID-19 may have been unleashed on purpose but it may have been an accident.
3 — This whole COVD-19 thing is a HOAX and is just another attempt by The Deep State to remove Trump from office.
4 — something something George Soros something.
5 — COVID-19 is caused by new untested and unregulated technology such as 5G cell towers.
There is no reason to go too deep into any of these theories but it is a good idea to note how they range across a gamut of QAnon tropes and themes.
1 — Xenophobia: foreigners eat bats which is gross and that is what makes disease happen
2 — James Bond super villian fantasy: Bill Gates has fooled the Media into portraying him as a nice successful businessman but his real agenda is to take over the world from his secret lair in the South Pacific.
3 — Anything the Media says is fake so COVID-19 must be fake.
4 — Global elitists have taken over America to steal our ham sandwiches and Oreos and make our children become sexual deviants from watching Teletubbies.
5 — Technophobic gibberish. (Please note the dovetailing of QAnon and MAGA with more people being connected to technology via global satellite systems and devices made cheaply outside of the US. “Damn these global satellites and phones that are allowing me to spew this nonsense to an enormous audience I couldn’t reach previously without said phones and satellites!”
The key to Rule #2 is less obvious, however. Go online or to certain right wing media and QAnon people will be explaining their specific theory at length. There’s one catch though: you won’t find any video, or chats, or panels, or segments where the espousers of one theory are fighting against or arguing against people espousing another theory.
The people who think it’s the “bat eating” theory don’t waste their time and energy arguing against the 5G theory who in turn don’t waste their time arguing against the people espousing the Bill Gates or George Soros theories. All the players have the same end goal of helping Q to take down the Deep State.
Rule #2 basically says No Infighting. This is the reason you don’t see QAnon factions. There isn’t a Wisconsin branch of QAnon players who claim more legitimacy than a Texas branch of QAnon players.
— — — — — — — — — — — —
Rule #3 — Don’t Get Hung Up
If a fact or theory is proven wrong or turns out to be not true, simply ignore it and move on.
— — — — — — — — — — — -
As you may have seen or encountered, there are a ton of various breadcrumb facts circulating through QAnon. If you used to watch Glenn Beck’s show, QAnon charts make his chalkboard fact connecting maps look tiny.
Now with so many breadcrumbs circulating through so many players so rapidly, there has to be a system to filter some ideas out.
One breadcrumb became quite popular at one point. The breadcrumb was “JFK Jr. didn’t really die in a plane crash back in the 90s. His death was faked and he has been living in a secret location with an organization aligned with Q and on a Specific Date, JFK Jr. is going to reveal himself to the world an make an announcement which could possibly take down the Deep State entirely.”
There were many versions of this (e.g. — “Q is actually JFK Jr.!”) but all of the JFK Jr. QAnon theories agreed on one point: the date of the JFK Jr. re-emergence. The build up of excitement across QAnon players around this theory was large enough for MSM outlets to report on it.
And then the Great Day arrived.
And nothing happened.
Now, one would expect there to be some blowback here. Maybe some players would start mocking or insulting other players who pushed the theory the hardest. Or some players would say “This is such nonsense. I’m not doing QAnon anymore.”
Nope. Nothing of the sort. All QAnon players simply moved on as if nothing had happened. That specific breadcrumb was simply an accident. Or a piece of disinformation seeded by the Deep State itself to hurt Q and stop QAnon.
And this isn’t about the specific JFK Jr. breadcrumb. These breadcrumbs around Huge Revelations happen regularly but they never even cause the slightest pause in the QAnon gameplay. Everyone is focused on one single thing. A central part of every game. Winning.
Winning QAnon
Like any game, someone eventually wins.
QAnon’s winning moment is encapsulated in their mantra/mission statement:
Where We Go One, We Go All.
But what does that mean? For a long time, whenever I heard that or read that or saw it on the news, I would think “What are they talking about?”
Picture this, however.
Think of going on vacation or home for the holidays and someone puts out an enormous puzzle on a table in one of the rooms. One of those complicated puzzles with 1,000+ tiny pieces.
Over the course of the next week or weeks, people work on the puzzle. Maybe your father and sister obsess over it, but sometimes you sit down for 20 minutes and do some pieces. Maybe progress stalls for a day or so, but then people start doing more and more work on it. Some cousins or friends come to visit and they add some pieces too. No one gets upset at anyone contributing to completing the huge puzzle. It’s a communal project.
Eventually the final piece goes in, maybe weeks later. And no one is upset about someone else finishing the puzzle. The person who put the last piece in didn’t “win” the puzzle. Everybody won. Everybody wins. It was a massive group effort with some people doing much more work than others but in the final moment all the work was worth it to complete the puzzle.
Where One Person Helped, The Entire Group Benefited.
QAnon’s Winning works on the same model.
Some people spend lots of time playing. Others play when they have a little free spare time. But in the end, the Game is Won when all the breadcrumbs come together as a huge revealed Truth.
And Q takes down the Deep State.
And everyone who played QAnon Wins and vanquishes their very real enemies who are the liberal elite globalist scientist technologists (who also happen to be atheistic pedophile satanists) who run the Deep State.
Where They Go One, They Go All.
Postscript
I’ll reiterate — QAnon isn’t actually a Game but Game Theory which gives you a very easy view into how QAnon works. It’s more like a cult and the players take the game extremely seriously to the point of doing things in real life that affect everyone else. The point of this piece is not to delve deep into the details of QAnon but give a lens to impart perspective to deal with the growth of QAnon which could lead to it affecting your life.
As a final note, I suggest the book Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. In this novel a group of people start feeding random facts, quotes and data into a computer and then proceed to print out randomly generated writings. It starts as a joke with the group publishing and selling these computer generated texts as Occult Knowledge. But then they and their readers start to take the joke writings as deadly serious. One thing leads to another and the group can no longer tell if it is still all a joke or if they have uncovered a Deep Occult State secretly running the world.
QAnon players truly think Q is helping to track and shut down the Secret Deep State which is set on destroying the QAnon players and America. It may be a joke, or a game, but for the players it is 100% revealed truth and deadly serious.
