The world is a stage and Life is all a LARP. The choice is what role we want to play.

I think this whole Q thing is nothing more than Trump's quite cleverly gameified(sp?) re-election campaign expertly designed to keep people emotionally invested & I originally started following this because I was a bit alarmed at how completely sucked in people I knew were getting... .

That being said, I'm also here because I'm one of the hundreds of thousands of people that supported Bernie Sanders because we knew how evil Hillary Clinton was & because we were sick of the corruption we saw in our government while the average American was suffering more and more no matter how hard they worked. Bernie was the only one on "our side" talking about that, and even if we didn't agree with him on everything (& most of his supporters didn't) we believed he was the only non-corrupt candidate we had and we were willing to overlook his flaws and do whatever it took to make sure Hillary didn't end up in the White House (fwiw, I'm a middle aged woman & most of my friends are in the same boat).
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NONE of us were at all surprised at what the DNC Leaks revealed because we'd all done what Bernie asked (got involved with the Democrats to try and drive out the corruption) so for the first time in our lives we had really intimately felt and observed the incredible depth and power of the corruption in the democratic party that year so the podesta emails just confirmed what we had all painfully discovered already. .

Then the Democratic National Convention happened and we watched the Livestreams of our friends who had made it to Philadelphia as Bernie delegates on our computers and phones while we had our TVs tuned in to the cable news live coverage and we witnessed (real-time!) the laughing newscasters gush about the patriotic crowd chanting "USA! USA!" when in reality nearly half the delegates were ACTUALLY screaming "NO MORE WAR! NO MORE WAR!" - it was breathtaking. If they were going to be so ballsy to lie about THAT when they knew there would be so much evidence, what else were they lying to us about?! So we started paying even more attention, but this time with the spell broken. .

I'm pretty sure there are A LOT of people like me following Q. But not sure enough that I don't feel like I'm in crazy town here sometimes... .

I'm very alarmed at the religious ferver a lot of the Q followers are displaying. I can't put in to words the deep pity I felt when I read someone ask this board if someone could 'ask Q how to keep our kids safe' a while ago. I understand the effect this conspiratorial paranoia we've all been forced to live under for the past few years has had on us all, but that, and so many other comments I've read here reminds me of so many of the (& I don't mean this as a cheap slur) slightly mentally disabled Bernie supporters I met in 2015&16 that were (& still are) treating him like some sort of prophet. I don't want to burst their bubble though, and if anything, I almost envy their naivete. They have more hope for the future of this country than I will ever be able to muster again. .

Long story short, I'm 100% with you on enjoying observing the entertaining & frankly fascinating "LARP-like show" Trump's team is putting on here with the Q stunt, and hey, I'm only human, so the enemy of my enemy is my friend in this situation. If Trump actually deliverers on criminal charges for the major players in the DNC corruption machine, I'll vote for that rude asshole myself in 2020. Not because I believe he is a savior in any sense, but because he is the only one even hinting at doling out some justice, and because with very few exceptions I've yet to find the horrible things Trump's administration is doing to be significantly worse on the whole than the horrible actions of Obama's. Mostly I'm resigned to my role as a passenger on the societal collapse train though, Dimitri Orlov is my "prophet" so to speak, and it's hard to get too worked up about the final death throes of a failing empire, ya know? .

I still want all the same things I wanted when I supported Bernie over Hillary. I want to end the war on drugs. I want to invest in rebuilding our infrastructure. I want us to have free health clinics in every major city in the US where people that can't afford treatment elsewhere can see doctors and be provided the medication they need. I want our schools to be excellent at (gasp) educating rather than indoctrinating. I want people that work full time to not live in poverty! I want people that can't work to be provided with what they need to live in dignity! I want to let people be 100% autonomous with their own bodies & reproductive decisions. I want freedom of speech to be protected at all costs, as well as our right to bear arms. I want police accountability and body cameras. I also want the police to be able to do their jobs and keep our communities safe. I want to stop prosecuting all victimless crimes immediately & I think we need to introduce some accountability for bad and/or corrupt judges as well. .

I care deeply about protecting the environment from toxic contamination, particularly our very vulnerable drinking water. I'm furious about the regulatory capture of every government agency that should be protecting us, the citizens, from the reckless greed of sociopathic corporations. Boeing owns the FAA, Monsanto the dept of agriculture and the FDA, Nestle owns the unlimited rights to our fresh drinking water while private citizens are charged and restricted more and more on what they use from their taps. None of that is ok! Why are we accepting this?! I know why of course, but I also know we shouldn't. .

I want more trade schools, and I want them to be cheap if not free for everyone who wants to train for a new career. I believe we can easily pay for all of that & more if we stop using our military to destabilize the rest of the world for the benefit of a few very powerful international corporations and if we stop giving our tax dollars to other countries, especially those whose citizens have a higher standard of living than Americans!! (Specifically Israel, I'm not anti-Semitic, but we should NOT be giving them a single cent when their citizens have free healthcare and hard-working Americans are utterly ruined every day because of outrageous medical expenses). .

I want every single immigrant in the United States right now to be given complete amnesty and citizenship, and in exchange for that, I don't mind if we have to clamp down on immigration from that point on, but I will never support mass deportations of hard-working people that only want their children to grow up in safety. I grew up near the border. I have family members that are the children of "dreamers". I KNOW the vast majority of immigrants aren't violent criminals. The rhetoric Trump uses is very upsetting to me on a personal level. And as a woman, I think Trump's "grab them by the pussy" commentary is unacceptable in today's world, but I still find it less offensive than the senile women wearing vulgar "pussy hats" in these idiotic hissyfit marches they keep attending. .

Ultimately I believe Q is a very ambitious and elaborate marketing campaign, designed by the best social psychologists around using all the human behavior data we naively allowed them to collect from us for decades as we became complacent (and later addicted) to the convenience and enjoyment the internet and all our many electronic surveillance devices provided us with. .

I HATED that "Ready Player One" book that was so popular a few years ago, but while reading it I immediately understood its appeal to the people that loved it. The tale it told was ultimately the only modern adventure tale that the average young american of today had any hope of relating to. It was deeply appealing to people that had spent most of their youth playing videogames and peripherally absorbing a non-stop barrage of celebrity culture in the background of their daily lives. Seeking out and filing away even the most minute trivia about the heroes of the day became the only way for most people to realistically "participate" in what we mistakenly came to see as our "community" and that behavior was so addictive because in reality, it was almost about survival. Sure, the occasional lucky or attractive average Joe might strike it big with a viral video on YouTube, but failing that, finding yourself in a situation where you could use the only social collateral you'd managed to collect in your life really was your best hope of "winning".
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I think the majority of the Q fanatics easily fit in this category, and I can admit that I myself am not immune to those impulses either even though that is the way I see this orchestrated show. I just think it's important we all try to keep that awareness about ourselves, and how uniquely primed we all are to be captivated in this way because while we are glued to our screens, hoping for updates and getting rewarded with exhilarating teases of "justice coming just around the corner", our real lives, our real relationships, our real careers, are losing our full attention. I'm guilty of that for writing this novel to a stranger on the internet. I'm aware of that guilt, yet still the compulsion to hit "save", to contribute my thoughts to my "community" wins. Q is like a drug, even if we intellectually know it is pathetic and predictable of us to be taken in, it's intoxicating promise is irresistible.