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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(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.
Everyone in America needs to read this FREE—I’ve gifted it below—report from the conservative WALL STREET JOURNAL about Trump and Epstein.
Apparently the president has now threatened to sue the WSJ over this 100% accurate report due to how damaging it is. wsj.com/politics/trump…
Holy actual literal shit OMG
By the way, the answer to the riddle in the note (in effect, “What do you get for men [Trump and Epstein] who have everything?”) is “You get them something one isn’t *allowed* to have.”
Trump then writes that he and Epstein have the thing they want in common—and it “never ages.”
Can I make the blindingly obvious observation that now that we know Trump and his crew doctored the Epstein video we can't possibly trust that anything else they release will be all they actually have?
Wouldn't you just assume documents are being *burned and shredded* right now?
Like aren't we actually past the point of no return here? The second we learned that they cut out 3 minutes from the Epstein video and tried to pass it off as a legitimate piece of evidence, wasn't that pretty much the end of any Epstein credibility for the whole administration?
You don't have to be a former federal investigator to know that every moment between the release of that fake video and the inevitable future decision by Trump to release "everything" was a moment that Trump goons at DOJ/FBI spent destroying evidence that didn't center Democrats
What would Trump do if this song went viral today?
WARNING: This song goes hard and makes no apologies.
LYRICS:
Gather round and I'll tell you of two Florida men
Who for twenty or so years were the best of friends
One of them ended up mysteriously dead
While the other one sleeps in a White House bed
I have no difficulty saying that Trump and Musk caused some of the 50+ flood deaths in Texas.
And here's why: these two men with no expertise in disaster preparedness were told not to cut the positions they cut, and were told people would die if they did.
And then people died.
Moreover, Democrats are never going to start winning elections again until they're willing to call a thing just what it is.
Texas Democrats should be clear and persistent in saying that public service cuts overseen by non-experts desperate for billionaire tax cuts killed people.
And if Republicans respond by saying that Democrats are politicizing these deaths, the Democrats should respond: THAT'S BECAUSE THE DEATHS ARE POLITICAL. POLITICIANS CAUSED THEM.
1/ If I had to rank by how annoying they are the false narratives I hear folks who don't study these men professionally advancing, the claim that the Feud is fake would easily rank #1.
There's *no evidence whatsoever* substantiating the claim that any part of the Feud is fake.
2/ #2 would be the claim that Trump isn't the most powerful man alive. I've spent more time and words arguing that Trump is beholden to foreign business associates than anyone anywhere—and even I understand that when you control Earth’s most powerful military, it means something.