QAnon is an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). It was set up that way and is managed that way. QAnoners are playing an ARG and refuse to stop for the very reason transreality gaming can be hazardous: you can forget what's game and what's reality. QAnoners are lost in a dangerous game.
The reason this matters is that Trump and his agents aim to expand the gamification of reality beyond the confines of QAnon's ARG mythology. Now they're turning the finding of evidence of "election fraud" into a transreality game with its own mythology. All of this is dangerous.
When we think of the far right as a space of "fake news" rather than the gamification of reality, we falsely accept the notion that Trumpists are interested in news. They're not. They're interested in tailored escapism, and in redefining reality as a mythology they can live with.
When you misdefine someone as simply an indiscriminate "news consumer" rather than deeming them a LARPer—Live-Action Roleplayer—you erroneously analyze their characteristics and erroneously model their behavior.
Trump himself is an ARG—and people enjoy the game too much to stop.
Trump and his agents are deliberately creating a new intelligence theater, in which intelligence agents must "enter the game"—yes, a bit akin to entering a Matrix—to combat the seditious ends Trump, Flynn and others intend to direct their ARG to. It's all weird digital-age stuff.
By this same logic, QAnoners cannot be reached by *real* news presented to them in *conventional* terms.
Instead, intelligence agents will end up infiltrating the Trumpist QAnon ARG with the "real" using scenarios in which the "real" *momentarily* seems to be part of the "game."
This is why I described the Trump era as the First Reality War, and urged folks in intel to treat reality as an active combat theater. Government will need many more digital-age cultural theorists than it anticipated. Not cyber folks—I mean world-builders and their interlocutors.
The good news: the generation coming up gets transmedia, transreality, XR, ARGs, pervasive gaming, immersive theater, reality mining, gamification, collaborative OSINT and the like far more than their elders. Which is key, as much of the Trumpist threat will come in such spheres.
For instance, "Communism" exists in Trumpist mythology the same way Shinra did in Final Fantasy VII: as an in-game construction defined by narrative utility and seamless integration with a UX. Trumpists have no idea how the term connects to anything actually happening in America.
So Trumpists can't be deprogrammed from their sense of what Communism—or for that matter socialism—means in meat space, as their (false) consciousness of these terms is the product of an in-game "economy." You either change their game or get them to stop playing. Both are *hard*.
But put aside intelligence and counterintelligence.
What this means for the average American is that you may have members of your family or certain acquaintances who you can no longer speak to because *even when they are talking to your face* they are playing a transreality ARG.
My advice to those with Trumpists or QAnoners they still want to interact with: you have to find ways to get them to *put the ARG aside* momentarily. Which is hard, because Trump and his team are daily expanding the size of the ARG to try to make it *roughly the size of reality*.
The best many of us can do right now is to try to draw these LARPers into non-game spaces in which they have non-game interactions with non-game participants—and to try to make such spaces and interactions of such high entertainment value that the game begins to seem unnecessary.
But you don't address the situation by trying to introduce "real news" (qua news) directly into the situation, as you are dealing with someone whose interest is in entertainment rather than news—and whose fundamental complaint is with reality itself, not with information streams.
I teach digital-age cultural theory, XR literacy, mass communications, post-postmodernism, digital journalism and transmedia worldbuilding at the university level—while my recent books are classified as being on the subject of intelligence and espionage—so these are my interests.
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The manifesto of the Minnesota shooter has been translated—and it's all about his hatred of Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, illegal immigrants, Somalis... none of this had to do with him being trans and major media *knows* it.
So why won't it say so?
1/ The manifesto uses the most vile slurs imaginable to describe Jews and Blacks, groups MAGA is hostile to.
The manifesto uses the most vile rhetoric imaginable to speak of illegal immigrants, another group Maga is hostile to.
And it uses 4chan-speak. 4chan is a MAGA hotbed.
2/ Everyone in America knows at this point that MAGA is a fascist movement and that the first group it wants to start treating like the Nazis did Jews are transgender persons. So the second the possibility the shooter was trans arose, all of us should have apprehended the danger.
1/ I recognize that I often say this when I am speaking of extremely deep-dive curatorial research into Trump and two discrete topics—Jeffrey Epstein and January 6—but it is true: what is in this book will shock you even if you believe you cannot be shocked on these topics.
2/ I want to issue a warning to those with sensitivities surrounding the subject of sex crimes and pedophilia. It is almost certain that this epic work will be triggering for you so, do read with caution or decide whether it even makes sense for you to read this at all.
(🧵) Trump and his team are lying to MAGAs about what is going to happen with unhoused persons in DC—a thread.
1/ In case you doubted it, Karoline Leavitt confirmed today that the Trump administration knows nothing about unhoused persons or homelessness.
They don’t know how shelters work. They don’t understand mental health/addiction services intake.
They’re just going to jail everyone.
2/ She promised America unhoused persons would be given a choice: shelter, mental health/addiction services, or jail (apparently on a bogus charge that would lead to a long, unjustified pretrial incarceration at massive expense to taxpayers).
I studied Criminal Law at Harvard Law School under Alan Dershowitz and went on to be a criminal defense attorney.
The post below is one of the most ignorant posts I’ve ever seen about Criminal Justice and I only just now learned this man is faculty at Harvard Law.
How? No idea.
Crime is a key driver of public policy—almost always to the detriment of society—a fact that explains why everything tied to it is supposed to be described and defined in exact (and exacting) terms: e.g. statutes, crime data, Constitutional amendments as interpreted by precedent.
As it happens, I also have a background in Sociology—and even in the allegedly softer of the social sciences (including those, like Sociology, often affiliated with the study of Criminal Justice and the Law) the phrase “pervasive social disorder” would be considered preposterous.
This is the serial child rapist the Dear Leader is about to pardon to save himself.
Any MAGA providing rhetorical cover for Donald Trump as he seeks to cover up years of pimping teens—teens he'd fed booze and drugs—at the Plaza Hotel in the 1990s is as good as a pedo themselves.
Trump had his own teen rape victim procurer. He even turned his sex trafficking ring at the Plaza into a business that thereafter was accused of human rights violations by its workers—who deemed themselves slaves. What Epstein did in FL Trump not only allowed but mirrored in NYC.
All this is based on existing reporting. I've compiled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reliable major-media sources on these matters into PROOF OF DEVILRY, which will be published shortly as the seventh book in the NYT-bestselling Proof Series.
(1) Trump and Epstein became friends in 1987, not 1990. The New York Times inexplicably cuts 3 years off their 17-plus-year friendship.
(2) Their friendship did *not* end because Epstein was a creep. It ended over a Florida real estate deal. nytimes.com/2025/07/19/us/…
To the credit of the NYT, it does eventually clarify Point #2 in the report.
I do wish it spent more time on the fact that an anonymous person dimed out Epstein after Trump got angry at Epstein over the real estate deal in 2004—and that Trump has a history of diming people out.
That question alone could change everything.
If in fact Trump extended his long history of being a disgusting snitch only when it personally benefits him by reporting Epstein to the police in 2004—or having an agent do it—it would confirm he knew exactly what Epstein was up to.