Review: The Storm is Upon Us by Mike Rothschild

On Wednesday, anti-virus software entrepreneur John McAfee hung himself in a Barcelona prison, while awaiting extradition to the US on charges of tax avoidance. McAfee had long insisted there was a conspiracy against him and all of humanity, and in the minutes before he died, he played his final card — uploading the letter Q to his Instagram.

It was more evidence that the Qanon conspiracy rumbles on, even after Trump has left office, Biden has taken power, and every prophecy made by this 21st-century Nostradamus has proven false.

Since the anonymous internet account known as ‘Q’ first posted on 4chan, in October 2017, the Qanon conspiracy has spread around the world, proving particularly virulent in evangelical churches, wellness communities, empty-nest baby-boomers and, above all, the Republican Party.

53% of Republicans still believe Trump won the 2020 election and is the rightful president. That’s not entirely new in American politics — similar conspiracy theories emerged after previous elections. What’s new is the extremism and violence that Q has helped to inject into American politics. 15% of Americans and a quarter of Republicans believe the state is controlled by Satan-worshipping paedophiles, 20% of Americans believe ‘there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites’, and 15% think violence is necessary to save the country.

That is frightening. In January, the leading democracy and most powerful military in the world came close to an attempted coup. Senior Republicans like General Mike Flynn and Roger Stone called for martial law, and a crowd of rioters, spurred on by the president himself, stormed the Capitol building chanting ‘hang Pence!’ Five people died in that day of infamy for the republic, and two DC police committed suicide in the weeks after it, yet the only consequence is Trump has been banned from Twitter and Facebook.

This being America, the rise of fascism is accompanied by a whole industry of Q merch — gurus, books, podcasts, t-shirts, documentaries, bumper stickers, survival gear and health supplements. There’s also a booming industry of ‘conspiracy-theorist-theorists’, who explain the madness to the ‘normies’. Thus, we have Qanon Anonymous, an excellent long-running podcast; the Conspirituality podcast, also excellent; HBO’s documentary Into the Storm; and now the first mainstream book on the Q conspiracy, Mike Rothschild’s The Storm is Upon Us.

Rothschild (no relation to the all-powerful cabal) does a great job at tracking the metastasis of Q over the last three and a half years. It began, as mentioned, with an anonymous posting on the image board 4chan in October 2017. The poster talked about the ‘calm before the storm’, a reference to a weird cryptic remark Trump had made in a room full of generals. The poster later explained they were a group of 10 deep state insiders, seven of them high-ranking military, who were locked in a behind the scenes war for the soul of the United States.

The bad guys, or ‘black hats’, were the Deep State, the Democratic party, Hollywood celebs, the FBI, the fake news media and, at a deeper circle of evil, a cabal of Satanist paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton. The initial thread claimed that Clinton had, in fact, already been arrested and indicted, and was wearing a concealed ankle monitor, and that Trump and Q were about to launch ‘the storm’ — democracy would be suspended, martial law declared, the crooks and paedos would be rounded up and punished, and a new age of love would dawn.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this anonymous posting on 4chan. The message board was full of these sorts of ‘anon’ posters, claiming to be an FBI insider or a White House insider, for lolz. Nor was the conspiracy that Q peddled that unusual — it was very similar to Pizzagate, a conspiracy that spread during the 2016 election, which also claimed the Democratic Party and Hollywood were rife with Satanic paedos. Nor was Q unusual in its prophecy of a coming apocalypse — rapture-ideologies have popped up more and more since the millennium, from ISIS to fraud schemes like NESARA.

So why did Q go viral? It combined various elements cleverly, including aspects of a Tom Clancy-esque techno-thriller and a live-action role-playing game. The game meant you, the lonely desk-jockey, were part of an elite insider group, privy to secret knowledge of a coming apocalypse. It gave you not just a front-row seat, but a participatory role — first, decipher Q’s cryptic ‘Q drops’ (this is known as baking the crumbs, in Q-land). Second, join the digital jihad by spreading the Q gospel, making memes, retweeting Q accounts, buying merch and shit-posting the evil Satanist paedos and their fake-news lackies.

Q gave the dispossessed a sense of being special, the promise of a sudden cosmic fix of everything that is broken, and the prospect of the violent humiliation of all those rich smug corrupt liberals. Resentment is a helluva drug.

You can see why there’s an overlap with evangelical Christianity — Q offers a similar kind of appeal. When I was briefly a charismatic Christian, we were told we were superhero warriors in a cosmic battle against the Enemy. Never mind ‘going down the rabbit hole’ — a better metaphor for Q would be ‘going through the wardrobe’. We are princes and princesses of Narnia, fighting side by side with Aslan, and Hillary is the White Witch, luring children with Turkish Delight.

Of course, Q also took off because the president of the United States of America promoted it, constantly retweeting Q accounts, just as he promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy in his campaign against Hillary Clinton. As I’ve written before, Trump and his advisors (particularly Roger Stone and Mike Flynn) decided in 2015 to make a Faustian pact with America’s conspiratorial underbelly, to demonise Trump’s enemies and win power by any means. Nothing gives credibility to conspiracies than hearing them come out of the White House.

Roger Stone and Alex Jones celebrating Trump’s election in 2016

Q also spread because, like any good virus, it was adept at mutating. It began on 4chan, but that limited its reach to millennial male libertarians. So in 2018, two Q supporters — South African web designer Paul Furber and an American called Coleman Rogers — helped to shift the conspiracy onto 8chan, reddit, Facebook and Twitter, thereby spreading the virus to way more hosts (especially lonely baby-boomers who don’t have great online critical skills).

Rothschild shows that there is some evidence one of these two was the original Q — a livestream of Coleman Rogers shows him logging onto the Q account on 8chan, then switching off his livestream when he realized his mistake.

After that, it seems likely that the owner and controller of 8chan — Jim Watkins, an American ex-military porn baron and pig farmer living in the Philippines, with a hankering for far-right politics — decided to hijack the Q account for himself and his son Ron Watkins. The recent HBO documentary Into the Storm, and an excellent Reply All episode on Q both concluded that the Q account was hijacked by the Watkins family. Rothschild seems to agree.

We can certainly infer that Q has zero insider knowledge, based on the fact that its countless predictions of mass arrests and martial law all turned out to be false. Q is clueless.

But that really doesn’t matter. As a conspiracy / game / cult it gathered a momentum all of its own. Its followers helped to grow the Q universe, weaving in everything from the Federal Reserve to JFK Junior to adrenochrome (a drug the evil elite supposedly harvest from children) to chem trails to the faked moon landing. Someone even put it all together into a map.

Above all, the storm was coming. Definitely coming. Any day now.

Last year, the pandemic amped up people’s fear, economic insecurity, paranoia and isolation, and online conspiracies spread like never before. The New Age, wellness and alternative medicine communities proved particularly fertile for ‘conspirituality’, and Qanon mutated again, attracting yoga mums, martial artists and white shamans with its message of coming rapture.

Finally, the Q conspiracy built to a crescendo during the 2020 presidential campaign. The storm was definitely coming. And then it came, on January 6 2021, when hundreds of protestors in Washington DC, egged on by the president, stormed the Capitol building to try and overthrow the election and dispense summary justice to the Satanic politicians.

What’s happened since? A handful of the Capitol protestors have gone on trial, like the feckless ‘Q shaman’ in the Jamiroquoi hat, but my general sense is the US has not dealt with the virus. General Flynn is still speaking at Q and anti-lockdown rallies, calling for a Burma-style military coup. Roger Stone is still out there, claiming the Capitol storming was a deep state conspiracy. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson says the FBI was behind it. An immune response hasn’t kicked in yet. America is unwell.

The FBI, meanwhile, who seem to be incredibly slow on the uptake to confront this terrorist threat, released a report this week saying that more Q-related violence is probable, as Q followers ‘likely will begin to believe they can no longer “trust the plan” referenced in QAnon posts and that they have an obligation to change from serving as “digital soldiers” toward engaging in real-world violence’.

I feel Rothschild could have pointed the finger of blame more squarely at Trump, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone and Fox News for promoting extremism, political violence, fascism and domestic terrorism. This month’s FBI report said the Q movement is likely to lead to further violence due to the ‘frequency and content of pro-QAnon statements by public individuals who feature prominently in core QAnon narratives’ — in other words, Donald Trump, Mike Flynn and Roger Stone. So why the hell have these promoters of domestic terrorism not faced any consequences, other than getting banned from Twitter?

Rothschild’s book is an excellent first draft of history, but it leaves some unanswered mysteries. How did Q take over people so quickly, so they transformed in days from knowing nothing about it, to talking about nothing else? I’d love to read more interviews with believers.

Why has conspiracy culture taken off and gone so mainstream now? This is a bigger story, which Rothschild doesn’t cover, about the decline of US power since 9/11, the failure of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the 2008 financial crisis, the slow decline of the white population’s majority, the climate crisis and natural disasters, the radicalization of the left, and the rise of China.

Finally, Rothschild doesn’t really grapple with what western democracies can do to protect themselves against this virus, especially when its so easy for foreign enemies like Russia and China to help them spread. He does offer some basic advice for families who have lost loved ones to Q. And he suggests social media platforms are right to ban the conspiracy and close accounts of its supports.

This approach (which I broadly support) is not without its risks. We’ve seen this year how some ‘conspiracy theories’, like the lab leak hypothesis, turn out to be more plausible than initially thought, despite social media banning them. Still, there is a difference in probability between ‘the virus came out of the Wuhan Institute for Virology’ and ‘the world is controlled by an evil cabal of Satanic paedos’.

The best antidote to conspiracy theories is economic growth, high employment, political stability and optimism about the future. That doesn’t seem to be on the menu for the foreseeable future, so I suspect we’re going to see lots of weird prophecies, Messiahs, raptures and doomsday cults in the next two decades. What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?