ON BECOMING LEADERS: WE ARE ALL Q
I’ll never forget the moment I learned George H.W. Bush became President: college dorm, sitting on my bunk, disoriented from a nightmare. The November sky was the same dull cadmium yellow of home, but not the skyline. No lone water tower presiding over fields, ranch houses and barns; just glass-walled office towers pinched into a concrete grid. I’d stared out confused, a half-awake remembering of where I was but not yet believing it.
“What?” Oh yeah, I forgot: roommates.
“Dude, you okay man?” What could I say? That I woke knowing Bush won before I’d heard it announced? At that age, I had zero political interest much less knowledge—I don’t think I even voted. So the feeling I had, and what I was about to say, surprised even me. It was as though I’d time-travelled twenty years into the future and was sent back with devastating news. I don’t remember the nightmare itself, but the memory of the words, delivered without context or preamble, oracle-like and consoling, is crystal clear: “This man will take us to war, and what’s coming will be horrible.” It straight-up freaked the roommates out—they’d looked at each other like I was nuts. A long uncomfortable pause followed, then one snorted and the other lol’d, relieved at what had to be a joke. I joined them of course. The urge to normalcy is a powerful drug.
Later, when the first Iraq war played nonstop on TV and everyone just accepted it, moving on with their lives, I wrote my “prophecy” off as the over-dramatic affect of teenage self-importance. The roaring nineties were a boom time—the music good, the beer better, spirits high. Gen X had yet to come to terms with the paucity of parental accountability that would shell-shock our future, and all the other bubbles of fake narratives and financial chicanery had yet to burst too: The towers had yet to fall, Mossad yet to prove responsible, and autism yet to skyrocket. Banks had yet to steal trillions over a mortgage scam of their own device, and the willing stooges of Congress yet to sign off on it. Migrants had yet to flood in, criminals yet to enjoy free rein, and the mentally ill from Antifa to the gender/race/species-dysmorphic yet to be exalted. Our arts, media, history and holidays—our every cultural touchstone—had yet to be remade into 24-7 communist propaganda, and patriots the world over had yet to see we were at war with a shadowy global overclass, powerful and ruthless beyond imagining. It would have to be seen to be believed. By the time we did, the suicide of despair was mowing us down like mortar fire.
And then a hero emerged. Down the escalator he came, to tell us we weren’t crazy, or forgotten, that our nightmare was about to end. But the elation of 2016 couldn’t help give way to strained hope, then doubt, as our dream of swift rescue faded. The untangling of decades of snares wouldn’t take months, but years. And so entered another hero, the prophet in our ear, to give us faith in a 40,000-ft view of a future only a handful were given to see. Right now it’s just a dull yellow dawning above an unfamiliar skyline, but someday we’ll look back on it as the dust from an old blast radius beneath a now thriving square, a cruel joke we’ll eat crow over for the childish innocence that allowed us to fall for it in the first place, a cautionary tale we’ll pass down to our children so that, so help us God, this nightmare will never happen again.
Q stands for many things: the Questioning of narratives, the Quandary of when and why, the Quelling of fears. Now, with this latest dragon felled and more to come, I see Q as our Quest. To finish the job not as children quaking at vague prophecies from dreams hardly understood, but as full-grown men come into our own, with the understanding and drive we’ll need to lead our peoples back to their rightful roles in truly representative republics.
Because we are all Q. We have been called to a time where it is our duty, and our blessing, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the great men that defeated the dragons of our past, passing their hard-won freedoms to us in sober trust. It is in their honor we fight on, and are sure to win.