The Letter of Q

Introduction

When I was 12 years old Animal Planet created a TV show called “Finding Bigfoot.” The series followed a team of “bigfoot field researchers” as they travelled across America in search of a species of giant bipedal apes that apparently roam the nation’s forests undetected by science or well functioning cameras. My siblings and I shared a good laugh when we first came across a preview for it. The sight of a grown man yelling into the woods and hoping that a mythical creature would yell back was really quite funny.

I watched the first episode expecting absurdity and was not disappointed. Not only did the strange men who hosted the show claim that there were thousands of bigfoots in the United States, but dozens of people across the rural Georgia town they visited claimed to have actually seen one. Of course, when it came to providing evidence for the creature’s existence, no one seemed to have much. At the end of the episode the team ventured into the woods to try to “find bigfoot”and unsurprisingly failed to deliver on the show’s title. They yelled, banged on trees, listened for responses and reacted hysterically to every ambiguous sound they heard, but in the end they left the viewer with little evidence of bigfoot. I walked away from the first episode wondering who could possibly be foolish enough to buy the absurd, baseless premise of the show.

For some reason I continued to watch, and as the season progressed something strange happened. After a couple episodes I found myself actually entertaining the possibility that these creatures might exist. After a few more episodes I began to think there was a decent chance that something was indeed out there. And by the end of the season I was 100% convinced in the existence of a bigfoot species, so much so that I would spend hours looking out of the car window trying to spot one on trips out of the city. I would even yell out a few calls when I went on hikes with my family.

Looking back, it is hard to say what exactly pushed me over the edge. Perhaps it was the sheer amount of people featured on the show who shared detailed stories about their close encounters with bigfoots. Surely all them couldn’t be crazy liars, I reasoned. The hosts of the show also provided some decent explanations as to how the bigfoot species could manage to avoid discovery by science: they are intelligent, they inhabit the most remote regions of the country and they have no desire to be found. It made a lot of sense the more I thought about it.

Though I think the ultimate factor driving my belief in bigfoot was simply the fact that I wanted them to be real. It was fun to believe. It was exciting to think that I knew about the existence of a creature whose very presence on earth was denied by almost everyone around me. When I was mocked by friends or family for my belief it did not deter me at all, in fact it actually strengthened my conviction. The amount of joy that I could get from potentially being proved right only increased with the number of people that doubted me.

I was certainly not alone. The show became a massive success, running for a total of nine seasons. After a few years off air it was rebooted in the form of a two hour special. It continues to be aired frequently on Animal Planet to this day. Ultimately, the fact that “Finding Bigfoot” consistently failed to find any good evidence of bigfoot did not stop viewers from coming back week after week.

I share all of this to offer an insight into how sane, smart individuals can come to believe crazy, stupid things. It’s not hard to convince people of something that they want to believe. A captivating lie can be far more powerful than a boring truth.

Into the Abyss

A few years after I surrendered my belief in bigfoot, I found myself trying to sell people on a different type of mythical monster, though this is the story of how I ultimately created a real one.

It all began with a lazily written paragraph of pure nonsense. I truly was not expecting much when I clicked “post.” In my mind it was hardly any different from the multitude of trollish YouTube comments and Twitter replies that I was writing almost every day at the time. I would have scoffed at the notion that what I had just written could have any sort of real world impact. I presumed most people - assuming any one would actually care enough to engage with my post - would detect my bullshit, others would find it funny and go along with it and, yes, perhaps a few people would actually believe it. I’m not sure which of these reactions I was seeking. Looking back, I think I was just craving any form of reaction I could get.

It was 2017 and I was a freshman in college. The first year one spends away from home is often very turbulent and mine was no exception. I spent my 19th year of life caught up in the struggle of figuring out who I was and what I believed in. Donald Trump had been elected president the previous fall, and I was still trying to wrap my head around what it all meant.

I grew up in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, DC in a wealthy neighborhood populated primarily by college educated liberals. Taking after my politically minded parents who had CNN or MSNBC on the TV at all times, I became quite the combative liberal voice amongst my peers, arguing against the few Trump supporters I could find at my high school for much of the 2016 election season.

But something changed in me the night Trump won. In the wake of the election I recognized that the relentless mocking and unified disproval of Trump on behalf of the American establishment had meant nothing. I pondered the possibility that the smug attitude directed towards the rural, working class of America by coastal elitists like myself had actually been counter-productive. My bubble had been popped by a giant middle finger from middle America, and I was forced to come to grips with the fact that there was a massive part of the country inhabiting a totally different reality than mine.

Something else happened shortly after the election that wound up having a lasting impact on my life. I was walking home from school one afternoon and noticed a swarm of police cars blocking off a busy intersection ahead of me. I crept closer and mounted the front steps of someone’s walkway to get a better view of what was going on. I saw a shaggy man walk out into the street and surrender to the police. I remember thinking that he looked out of place, like someone who couldn’t be from my neighborhood.

I later learned that the man had travelled from North Carolina to Comet Pizza in search of a child sex-slave operation that he believed to be located in the restaurant’s non-existent basement. He had come armed with an AR-15 and fired several shots inside. The incident garnered national attention and became known as “Pizzagate.” It was the first time I heard about conspiracy theories of that nature and also the first time I heard of the website “4chan,” an online message board where everything goes.

One might think that a delusional gunman coming so close to home would have scared me away from the platform that radicalized him, but it was quite the opposite. I was overwhelmingly curious to explore this new world of people who believed that the planet was controlled by a group of elite pedophiles that ate babies to remain youthful. It was disturbing, disheartening and potentially damaging, but I couldn’t look away. I spent much of the summer before college scrolling through 4chan, gradually building up the confidence to post. I never really came to believe in any of the conspiracies, nor did my opinion of Trump change all that much, but I did gain a sense of empathy for this group of lonely men who seemed to cope with the sting of the real world by escaping into these online fantasies.

When I got to college in the fall of 2017 I quickly became one of those lonely men. I isolated myself from my fellow classmates, who I found to be quite condescending, especially when it came to politics. They were overwhelming children of the wealthy who looked down upon Trump supporters and spoke with enough arrogance to suggest that one would have to be an uncultured moron to disagree with them. I was too shy to engage with them face to face so I took my anger online and started waging wars against smug liberals in various comment sections. The purpose was not to push Trump’s agenda so much as it was to challenge the remarks of democrats who fancied themselves as being morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Though I ended up playing devil’s advocate so often that the line between my true beliefs and what I was writing online began to blur.

The best part of the internet is the same thing that makes it toxic: the fear of judgment that governs every face to face interaction is gone. You can be whoever you want to be, and you can say whatever you want to say without fear of consequence. I’ve heard some people argue that to gage the true character of someone you must watch how they behave when they think no one else is watching. I don’t believe this is true, or at least I hope it’s not. People are meant to exist around others. I reckon most of us would reach dark, delusional and dangerous depths if we were left alone for too long. This is all to say that the internet brings out the worst in many people, myself included.

After fighting battles in comment sections and message boards for a while, I noticed that commenters had a tendency to use their background to gain authority in an argument. I recognized that one’s true identity is irrelevant online, so I began to claim certain identities to troll other users and enhance my arguments. I also created multiple accounts on each platform so that I could shape debates to my liking. Sometimes I would even make a comment from one account and then switch to another account to add support. Other times I would use a second account to argue against myself. It’s easy to dictate the outcome of a debate when you control both sides. One might consider this a slimy technique, but as I saw it there was no point in trying to “play fair” in a place as nihilistic as the internet.

As I spent more time on 4chan during that depressing fall of my freshman year, I began to feel as though I could relate to this community of users who seemed to spend much of their days sharing disturbing memes and entertaining absurd conspiracy theories. They were people who felt overlooked by those around them, demonized by the media and rejected by society as a whole. Much like myself at the time, they seemed to have few friends and no good relationships with women in the real world.

These types of people are often labelled “incels,” short for involuntarily celibate. The word is often used to describe lonely, misogynistic men, and I must confess that I find it a bit problematic. While many men on 4chan do undoubtedly write horrible things about women, calling them “incels” is merely a way of putting down a group of people who are already in a very low place. I reckon it would be more productive to examine the circumstances that lead certain men to adopt such dark viewpoints, as opposed to insulting them for being losers that no women want to have sex with.

When you feel rejected, it is easy to be resentful. When you have nothing, it is comforting to believe that those who have everything are evil people that cheated to get it. The lack of sympathy and outright disdain directed towards disillusioned men, or “incels,” likely only contributes to their state of resentment and delusion. I probably would have been more stable - and perhaps this whole disaster would have been avoided - had a real person reached out to me during that lonely fall of 2017.

Anonymous Fame

It was a rainy day in late October when I thoughtlessly created a new account on 4chan. I had seen other accounts titled “FBI-Anon” and “CIA-Anon” (Anon short for anonymous) created by people who claimed to be high ranking government officials with dark secrets of the “deep state,” so I decided to make my own account in which I would pretend to be someone in the US government with a very high level security clearance. Using somewhat cryptic, military-like language, I made my first post in which I claimed to have top secret information about the imminent arrest of HRC, or Hillary Rodham Clinton.

My post didn’t garner much attention in the first couple hours, aside from a few users clowning me and a few others questioning my identity, but then something crazy happened. My post was picked up by a few YouTubers with strong followings who specialized in conspiracy theories. They spread the word and just like that my account started blowing up. From then on nothing was the same.

The initial rush of engagement with my post was quite exciting, but I certainly didn’t expect it to last. I had made a prediction about the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton without the slightest bit of reason to believe that it would actually occur. I figured that when 24 hours passed and nothing happened people would recognize that I was a fraud and my brief moment in the spotlight of the internet underworld would come to an end. I was mistaken. Much like “Finding Bigfoot,” my appeal could not be undermined by false predictions or a lack of evidence. The lie I had created was captivating enough on it’s own. All I had to do was continue to feed the lie so that it could grow to new heights.

Motivated by the rush of engagement, I concocted a narrative that went far beyond just Hillary Clinton. I suggested in a series of cryptic messages that a major reckoning was on the horizon. This reckoning, which I referred to as “the great awakening” and later became known as “the storm,” involved a group of secret government operatives working alongside the US military and President Trump to take down a network of elite pedophiles who had been controlling the world for years.

The month of November was an absolute blur. I was gaining more and more traction with each post, and I quickly became addicted to the attention. I continued to relentlessly pump out half-baked bullshit, and much to my surprise my words began to take on a life of their own. Various online groups sprung up to decipher hidden meanings within my posts, most of which I did not create intentionally. Still, it was truly an incredible feeling to have so many people hanging on my every word. I felt like an oracle offering prophecies to a group of devoted followers.

I never stopped to reflect on the implications of what I was doing, which is of course something I’ve come regret with hindsight, but it must be noted that my posts were still relegated to a small segment of the internet underbelly at that point. A month in, I still believed that my narrative existed in an online fantasy dimension that was totally separate from reality.

My journey as God of the internet underworld ended about as quickly and randomly as it began. Just over a month in, a user on a rival website called “8chan” claimed my online persona, insisting that my account on 4chan had been “infiltrated,” and just like that it was all over for me. I tried to keep posting, but it quickly became clear that there was nothing I could write that would change people’s minds. In their eyes my account was compromised, so nothing I posted from the account could be trusted. But while my time as the dark web’s Wizard of Oz had come to an end, the journey of the online character I created had only begun.

Victor Frankentstein

For the next three years I could only watch as someone else used my online persona to create a global movement that became far bigger and far more damaging than anything I could have ever imagined. Things took a weird turn almost as soon as I lost control of the “official” account. The conspiracy theory quickly transformed from a relatively small online group into a massive real life cult. The new puppet master encouraged followers to prove their allegiance to the movement by reciting a pledge and posting it on social media. The whole thing was still fairly amusing to me when I first saw recordings of people saying “where we go one, we go all.” There was even something sort of endearing about it. Disillusioned, lonely people suddenly had a cause and a sense of belonging.

Things became a bit more real in the summer of 2018 when people starting attending Trump rallies with signs and merchandise referencing the movement. At that point the mainstream media started covering it, and from there it all became very contentious.

The Covid 19 pandemic took the conspiracy theory to an entirely different level in the spring of 2020. All of the sudden millions of people found themselves at home with little to do. Many of them were in especially dark places, having been laid off from work and isolated from friends. The situation provided the perfect conditions for the conspiracy theory to grow.

By the summer it had become clear that things had gone way too far. What started as a bit of harmless fun on an online message board had morphed into a very real problem that was consuming the lives of millions of people. I began to hear stories about followers that had become estranged from their families due to their devotion to the movement. I thought long and hard about coming forward with my identify and trying to put an end to the movement.

Bob Heironimus

While campfire stories about scary forrest-dwelling monsters surely go back centuries, bigfoot hysteria truly originated in 1967 with the now famous Patterson-Gimlin Film, a 20 second long video showing a dark bipedal figure walking steadily out of sight and turning once to look at the camera. Most believe that the film depicts a man in a suit, however to bigfoot believers the Patterson Gimlin film is regarded as the ultimate form of evidence for the creature’s existence.

30 years after the film was originally released, a man named Bob Heironimus came forward as the person who was actually wearing the gorilla suit in the video. He can even replicate the famous walk perfectly all these years later. Despite this revelation, the film is still held in extremely high regard by the bigfoot community, which is likely bigger than it’s ever been.

Bob Heironimus’s fate weighed heavily on my mind as I considered sharing my story with the public. The more I watched the conspiracy theory grow alongside the backlash, the more I came to realize that there was nothing I could say that would make any difference. People’s entire meaning of life had become intertwined with the character I created, and I knew from experience that when one confronts a fact that threatens their identity they are far more likely to deny the fact than alter a core pillar of their identity.

The Tipping Point

By the fall of 2020 I was back home in DC doing my senior year of college virtually. On a nice Saturday afternoon a few weeks after the election I decided to go for a run through the monuments. Much to my surprise, when I reached the Lincoln memorial I encountered crowds of Trump supporters, some of whom brandished merchandise that referenced the conspiracy theory. I remember thinking that they looked out of place, like they couldn’t have been from DC. I later learned that the event was called “The Million MAGA March,” and that people had come from all over the country to protest the results of the election.

I found myself deep in reflection as I ran through the crowds of protesters that day. I thought back to that odd moment at Comet Pizza four years earlier when I encountered a single man from out of town who had fallen victim to the allure of an online conspiracy theory. Back then it seemed unbelievable that even one man would travel to DC for such an outrageous lie. Now, just four years later, I was faced with the stark reality of thousands of people marching through the city in pursuit of a fraudulent cause that I helped create.

The January 6th insurrection proved to be a culmination of the hysteria that mthe conspiracy theory had been brewing for years. I sat in front of the TV and watched people storm the capitol, risking their lives and the lives of those defending the building, all for the sake of a stupid lie. People died for nothing real.

The Aftermath

In the wake of all that’s happened, I’ve become deeply disheartened and pessimistic. I’ve found myself wondering what other major human developments, ideologies and religions have grown from a small, random thing being taken out of context, internalized by a group of disillusioned followers and greedy opportunists, and spread around the world. I’ve lost my faith in Christ. Becoming somewhat of a messiah figure myself was a bit like discovering how magic tricks work. Having watched a stupid joke I made on a remote corner of the internet morph into a global religion in the span of three years, I can only imagine the degree to which people could distort the meaning of something over the course of centuries.

The sad thing about the January 6th insurrection, and perhaps the thing that people seem to misunderstand, is that the rioters who stormed the capitol were behaving rationally based on what they believed to be true. Is it entirely surprisingly that people who think an elite group of pedophiles rigged the election to instal Joe Biden as president would take such drastic action? It’s easy to vilify those who engage in this type of behavior, but it is important to recognize that these are not people who possess vastly different values than the rest of us; they are people who occupy a totally different reality.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the truth no longer exists. Perhaps it never really did, but there where at least times throughout history when the vast majority of people in a given community shared a common trust in certain sources of information and authority. The Internet has created a global “community,” bringing us together while simultaneously pulling us apart. We now occupy a fragmented reality in which an overarching narrative that holds us together no longer exists.

There is your truth or my truth, but who’s to say what the truth is? You have your sources and I have mine. There will be no “great awakening" in which the population suddenly realizes the “true reality.” Instead, there will be billions of independent discoveries, as we grow ever closer to a destination in which everyone has their own, completely separate reality. At that point I fear the fight will be over.

- Q