I’ve never had much time for the American cult of Q Anon, in fact I probably saw its dangers earlier than most. Even though I’m a supporter of former President Trump, I’ve kept well away from the Q Anon cult because I can see how divorced it is from reality. Despite my opinion that Mr Trump was a half decent President of the United States and probably better for the West than either his predecessor or the current incumbent, the theology of the cult of Q appals me.

For those who do not know about the cult of Q Anon, their basic theology and I use that word deliberately because the cult of Q is now more akin to a new religious movement than a political one, tells that Trump was sent by god to hunt down ‘satanic paedophiles’ aligned with the Clintons. They believe that Trump will be miraculously be reinstalled in the White House by god. Q is a type of saviour cult which believes that all the problems of America will be solved when the supreme being reinstalls Trump as president. They also, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the individual, believe in nonsense about how the world is ruled by satanic reptilian overlords similar to the guff that the conspiracy grifter David Icke promotes.

The Q cult has a lot in common with Christian eschatology and this issue is explored quite well in an article from 2020 in Psychology Today magazine. You have the binary split between good and evil and heroes and their opposites along with a message that the world is going to end and judgement is coming for the wrongdoers. If you took the most extreme reading of the Biblical book of Revelations, which seems to me like a mushroom trip of allegory and extreme imagery, turned it into a political movement then it would look a lot like what the Q Anon movement has turned out to be. Q Anon also has features in it that remind me very much of a Live Action Role Playing game where those involved in the Q cult take an active part in promoting and discerning the Q message. This aspect of the Q cult, the active rather than passive involvement of the membership and the similarity with extreme Christian eschatology, is what makes the Q cult so powerful and very dangerous.

I believe that it could be as dangerous to America as the cult of the false Messiah Shabbati Zevi and his publicist Nathan of Gaza were to the Jews of the 17^th century. Zevi’s claim to be the Moshiach or Jewish Messiah got traction among Jews who were suffering greatly from oppression at the time and Zevi attracted a large following many of whom sold their property and abandoned everything because they thought that Zevi would bring them to the Promised Land. Zevi was not the Moshiach he was a self deluded coward who converted to Islam when ordered to do so on pain of death by the Turkish Sultan. The Zevi Heresy had massive implications that still reverberate today and were a big factor in the creation of the Reform Judaism movement that placed less emphasis on the concept of the Moshiach and of waiting and searching for him. It is quite possible that the Q cult or the eventual implosion of it could have similar implications for the United States.

There are many similar echoes of the Zevi Heresy that can be found in the Q Anon movement. There is a central ‘Messiah’ figure for the Q Anons in the form of Trump and as the Q Anon movement has grown and solidified we are seeing similar examples to that to that of the Zevi Heresy of followers selling all their property, withdrawing their savings and cashing in their pension funds in order to follow the Q cult.

The Q Anon cult as it stood was, as divorced from reality as it was, bad enough but as time has gone by the Q Cult has got worse. It’s not just a singular cult followed by secular rightists or extreme evangelicals any more, it is splitting into different and more extreme factions, some of whom have the sort of theology that would be expected from a person who is catastrophically mentally ill and a worrying likenesses to suicide cults like Heavens Gate.

An offshoot of the Q Anon cult has been preaching that on the anniversary of the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the late President will be resurrected in the city where he was murdered, Dallas. In addition to this extreme and lunatic claim, this breakaway Q Anon group is claiming that the President’s dead son, John F Kennedy Jr, who died in a plane crash off the East Coast of the USA over two decades ago will also return. The dead Kennedy’s along with Trump will then form a new Trinity modelled on the Christian Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Q Anon cultists gathering on a railway bridge near the site where President Kennedy was assassinated waiting for the Kennedy’s to be recincarnated.

This sort of belief would normally be confined to maybe one or two individuals with catastrophic mental illness but sadly this is not the case. In a situation that clearly echoes that of the Zevi Heresy, leaders of this breakaway Q cult are appearing to attract a large number of supporters something that should worry anyone concerned about the rise of extremist religious and quasi-religious movements.

Followers of the main figure in this sub-cult of the already extreme Q cult itself, a Hitler worshipper called Michael Brian Protzman, have take the Q cult to it’s next lunatic level by gathering his supporters in Dallas, near to Dealey Plaza where President John F Kennedy was assassinated. Of course neither the late President nor his equally dead son appeared but that doesn’t seem to have shattered the confidence of Protzman’s followers.

The left leaning news source, Vice, which although left leaning is pretty good on the subject of the Q Anon cult said:

On Tuesday morning, hundreds of QAnon followers gathered on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, believing they were about to see John F. Kennedy reappear. 

These people had travelled from all over the U.S.—California, Florida, New York, Montana, and at least a dozen other states. On Monday night there was an almost carnival-like atmosphere in downtown Dallas, as they gathered in anticipation of the predicted return of the assassinated president, something they believed would also somehow trigger the return of former president Donald Trump to the White House and his announcement as “king of kings.”

It’s clear to see from the behaviour of the Q Cultists that this is not a political movement using political means and having political aims, but a religious movement and a particularly irrational one at that. The more I read of the way the Q Cult is going the more I see in it a parody of Christianity especially as they are treating the triumvirate of Kennedy senior and Junior along with Mr Trump as some form of replacement Trinity.

Protzman appears to embody what the Q Cult or at least parts of it are turning into, which is a religious cult of personality. Whilst the Q cultists have at their centre the former President, people like Protzman are becoming personality cult figures themselves and it should raise alarm that even when Protzman’s claim that the Kennedy’s would come back to life, his followers still have confidence in him.

Protzman was once the boss of a now defunct demolition business but has morphed into being a Q Anon influencer and it’s plain to see that he has a lot of influence.

Vice added:

But unlike most influencers, Protzman has effectively built a cult within the QAnon movement, where his followers refer to him as a godlike figure, are willing to travel across the country to see JFK resurrected, and most of all, continue to praise Protzman even when the miracle fails to materialize.

His rise within the QAnon world has been rapid. Back in March, his Negative48 Telegram channel had around 1,700 members; today, it has over 105,000 members. But aside from the number of followers Protzman has, what makes him stand out from other QAnon influencers is the loyalty and worship he has engendered in those people.

Personality cults built around nutters are rarely good. In the past it has spawned everything from genocide at one end of the scale as we saw with both Stalin and Hitler, through to new religious movements such as the Mormons and those bits of Christianity or Christian adjacent sects such as the Jehovah s Witnesses.

What bothers me is that unlike when the Millerites, an end times church group from the mid 19^th century USA, had a failed prediction of the end of the world in 1844 an incident known as The Great Disappointment, Protzman’s followers are not that bothered or at least don’t seem to be about the failure of his predictions about the Kennedy’s. They are still following him even though he has patently failed. This should bother people as this is the same sort of pathological stubbornness and a failure to discern the truth from false prophecy that has been at the heart of suicide cults like Heavens Gate, the Order of the Solar Temple and to a lesser extent, Jonestown which was not primarily a mass suicide but instead was both a murder and suicide incident.

Protzman comes from a very morally dark place and it is both surprising and concerning that such a cult of the sort created by Protzman could arise in the modern USA. It’s the sort of thing that might have been expected to arise out of a Europe that is being increasingly stressed by political, economic and social problems or from the wilder shores of the Islamic world. Protzman is a bit of a Hitler worshipper and has been very active in promoting Hitlerite views and media.

The Vice article continued:

Protzman has used his newfound fame to spread deeply anti-Semitic content while pushing highly suspect financial investments to his followers, many of whom confessed within the channel that they are in vulnerable situations personally and are in need of help. 

As well as denying the Holocaust, Protzman’s channel has boosted the deeply antisemitic film Europa – the Last Battle, a 10-part film that claims Jews created Communism and deliberately started both world wars as part of a plot to found Israel by provoking the innocent Nazis, who were only defending themselves.

“If you haven’t watched the documentary Europa: The Last Battle 2017, here’s the link,” said the post, sent on Oct. 2. It has been viewed over 38,000 times. 

The article then went onto discuss other anti-Jewish films and conspiracy theories that Protzman has promoted including denying that there are any real Jews in existence (the Khazar convert conspiracy theory). Protzman also said that modern day Jews are basically the ‘criminals’ of the British and Roman Empires in a different form. All of this and all of his claims are of course complete and utter bollocks.

Protzman is obviously also making an awful lot of money out of his deluded and increasingly extreme followers. He’s been encouraging his followers to invest in foreign currencies like the Iraqi Dinar and the Vietnamese Dong on the grounds that a great financial reset is coming and when that happens these currencies will be revalued as being one to one with the US Dollar. The premise that this is made is that because the Iraqi Dinar is currently valued at about 1400 Dinars to the US Dollar when the ‘financial reset’ happens one US dollar invested in the Dinar would become 1400 US dollars. Of course this is another claim by Protzman that is completely ‘away with the fairies’. Protzman is making money off of his followers by claiming that the best way that they can buy this currency is via his own website and must, in order to do so, sign a non-disclosure agreement about the transactions. I don’t know about you but there are a whole load of scam related red flags flying for me about all this.

The more I look into the subject of the Q Anon cult and its offshoots using various sources including the statements of Q Anon followers themselves, the more I feel concerned and worried about where this will all end up. It is quite possible that sub-cults of Q Anon like that of Protzman’s may grow. They may not stop growing even if Protzman himself is arrested or convicted of financial crimes such is the faith that his followers put into him. It is also possible that even if charlatan lunatics like Protzman himself are taken down, others may step up to take their place spurred on by the ability to raise large amounts of cash from Q Anon types and gather around themselves adoring crowds willing to pay to listen to bullshit.

The founder of Scientology, the science fiction author L Ron Hubbard was once claimed to have said: “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.” Maybe those involved in the Q cult and especially its quasi-religious offshoots have realised the same thing. When you have people selling their property, investing in junk schemes, cashing in their pensions and withdrawing their life savings in order to follow a guru like Protzman, then you, or rather America, doesn’t have a legitimate political movement, but instead a new religious movement and a potentially massive problem coming up in America’s future.

Q Anon is now a big enough movement to have political influence but if Q Anon backfires and implodes, as I hope it will do, possibly due to some massive and yet unforeseen scandal or one or more of the Q nutcases going mad with a weapon, then it’s going to taint any politician who has had any association with it. The political Right is engaged in a large scale political battle with the Left in its various forms and this battle is being carried out on both economic and cultural fronts. Whilst some on the right might be tempted to flirt with Q Anon, because of its popularity or seeming popularity, it could be that this might not be the best idea. If Q Anon implodes in the way that it might then it will take down with it any political type who as given it support. As a conservative I don’t want to see the right take any unnecessary hits but this is what might happen if the Q cult is not treated with caution.

Q Anon is dangerous in all sorts of ways. It’s dangerous to America’s polity and it’s dangerous to those individuals who become too deeply involved in it.