“Actually, fighting the Cabal was about healing your inner child all along”

I’ve been trawling through the archives of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, which documents all kinds of conspiracy-theory wildness, including deep dives into weird little tangents. If you want a backstory on the Queen of Canada, or all the different candidates for the Secretly Still Alive JFK Junior, this is the place to go.

And there’s a moment from Episode 219: Attending the Conscious Life Expo, which was so striking, I wanted to get it down.

So one of the enduring tenets of QAnon is that we have to Save The Children. Not any real children who are being abused or endangered by real threats, though! We’re talking about the children that the Secret Cabal of Globalist Liberal Cannibals are constantly murdering, in order to get high off a substance in their ground-up bones.

The children being imprisoned in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, on the grounds that Hillary Clinton’s pizza orders must be a code for something nefarious (and ignoring the inconvenient detail that Comet Ping Pong does not have a basement). Or the children imprisoned in secret tunnels under Central Park, called “mole children” because they’ve never seen sunlight. Although maybe Trump sent that National Guard in to free those, so we don’t have to worry about them anymore? I don’t remember all the lore, here.

Well, almost an hour into this episode, our hosts play some recordings from a presenter named Sean Stone, and around 59:39 he sets up this great spiritual evil:

“Something is feeding on that purity, on that energy, on the children. It’s been feeding on us, our entire existence, we just were unconscious of it. It’s been feeding on humanity for all of its existence, not just our own — all of humanity, since the beginning. That’s what this Great Awakening is actually about. […] Because you can’t ultimately become the hero until you face the real villain. I’m not saying the villain is one person, or one group, or — it’s an energy body.”

Commentary from the hosts:

“I mean, that’s much easier to talk about than trying to point out, you know, all of the well-known specific instances of Hillary Clinton eating the face off of a child! When you can ascribe this evil to some kind of mist…it’s Sauron, the Eye of Sauron, just forming in the ills of Mordor…It’s much easier to just keep talking about that! Because you don’t ever have to bring up any specific examples, and you don’t really have to relate it to anything going on in somebody’s real life!”

Skipping forward, here’s how the hosts introduce the next bit:

“In perhaps the greatest twist in his analysis, Sean Stone explains that we are the cabal, in a way, and the children we must save are actually inside us. And some of the terminology he used would be at home in a modern therapy office.”

And here’s Sean again:

“Once that trauma set in…that first violation of us as children…saying, You’re not a sovereign. You don’t have any rights. You belong to the parent. Or the state. We own you. That becomes your whole worldview.

So this whole work that we’re doing, Save The Children, Protect The Children, yes — at one level, there are millions of kids that need to be protected and saved.

But it’s actually our own work, on our inner child, that needs to be done! Because you can save a child, but if you don’t have the self-love, you can’t give it to the child. You can’t give it to your partner. You can’t give it to anyone, until you love yourself. This is the real work of the Great Awakening.”

I just. Look at that. How incredible is that?

From “the Democrats are smuggling abused children in Wayfair cabinets, elect Trump and he’ll save them” to “okay, sure, maybe on one level the Democrats are technically smuggling abused children, I’m not saying that was a lie or anything! Just, maybe the really important thing is that you should learn to love yourself?”

And it’s such a stark highlighting of how QAnon is, and always was, about making its supporters feel better rather than making any meaningful change in the world. It’s about feeling the smug superiority that you’re in on the secret of this horrible child-murdering conspiracy, when other people don’t know (the fools!) or don’t care (the sociopaths!).

Helping real children sounds like a lot of thankless work, you know? All the effort of researching and caring about the facts, so you know where the effort is really needed. All the potential disappointment if you can’t get more than slow, incremental change — or if you don’t see the underlying societal problems changing at all. Sounds upsetting. Can’t have that.

So now, as the grift of “Trump will rescue the mole children in a giant cinematic movie scene, any day now, just you wait!” is finally wearing thin, they’ve gotta pivot. And they’re on the verge of pivoting to something with evergreen appeal: “what if Your Feelings are really the most important thing in the world, and always were?”

(To be clear — legit activist groups care about the feelings of their members! Individuals can and do step back from real work, when they need a mental health break! But people with a genuine cause don’t say “you know what, let’s have this whole group take a step back from the famine/climate change/malaria/child education/anti-war activism, and re-focus the movement on us.”)