Like any good role playing game, one of the foundations of the #QAnon conspiracy theory is maps. Q and the others pretending to be Q love making references to maps, tossing out cryptic phrases like “news unlocks map” and “learn to read the map.”

The crux of #QAnon is that a vast secret parallel history of the world has unfolded over the centuries, with powerful families and religious interests shaping events around them to maximize profit, quell dissent, and increase their power over the witless sheep under them. It involves everyone, has its hooks in everything, and is everywhere.

Of course, none of that is new to the world of conspiracy theories. Long before Q came along, hysteria over the Illuminati, Freemasons, Jews, lizard people, or Catholics controlling the world ran rampant.

The beauty of Q is that ALL of that is true, with eons of mental slavery being thrown off only now by Q followers and the actions of President Trump. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. As the site Deep State Mapping Project puts it ,

This is actually a multi-dimensional war between good and evil that spans the galaxy.  Our planet is breaking free from an ancient quarantine imposed on it by Archons, hostile to humanity.

With so many entities and government plots and people to keep track of, it’s only natural that a kind of uber chart would emerge trying to link it all together.  After all, charts are a favorite of the conspiracy community, and the more items connected in more arcane ways, the better.

And so, one “map” has emerged out of the mist trying to connect all of the dots – one “unlocked” by the “news” that Q drops. The first Q reference to “news unlocks map” seems to have come on November 24 (though with anonymous posting, it’s hard to know for sure), and the map emerged on the exact same day.

Put together by Dylan Louis Monroe (who appears to also run the site Deep State Mapping Project), it’s a massive tome full of small print, arrows, circles, and even multiple different keys to help decode it. I present to you:

A Cartography of the Globally Organized Corruption Networks

That clears it all up, right?

There’s two ways to approach something like this. The first is to dismiss it out of hand as a Gish Gallop, the logical fallacy where a believer attempts to overwhelm their opponent with a firehose of arguments, discarding each one as it’s debunked and adding a new one to replace it.

From that perspective, “the map” is a torrent of nonsense, full of unconnected concepts, some of which don’t even exist. When you start with the Biblical Flood and go all the way to “meme wars,” you’re basically arguing everything and nothing at the same time. How is one supposed to debunk that in any way that doesn’t involve just not bothering?

I get that. But what if we look at the map another way, which is to take its creation seriously, but not its content? Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this, and if we can’t argue with what they’re trying to say (and to be clear, we should not), then we can at least try to understand why they’re saying it.

https://twitter.com/olivejuicyfruit/status/980830739477467137

Things are hard for a lot of people right now, and the world continuously assaults us with events that are out of our control and don’t make a damn bit of sense.

What made sense about the Kennedy assassination? What made sense about the 9/11 attacks? What makes sense about the terrible war in Syria? Nothing much at all. So rather than simply throw our hands up, we try to force it to make sense. We connect it to other things.

John F. Kennedy wasn’t supposed to be assassinated by a shmoe in a book depository. So we do what “the map” does, make it part of something bigger. In this case, connecting it to former CIA head Allen Dulles, to CIA operation called Mockingbird, to
“media monopolies” all the way to today’s epidemic of fake news. Hell, even Kennedy’s son’s death is connected to it.

https://twitter.com/LizCrokin/status/983111257455669249

It makes us feel saner to see things as connected, rather than random occurrences that could happen to anyone.

Are they actually connected? I doubt it, at least not in any appreciable way. But if they’re not connected, then Kennedy died at random for nothing. If they are, then he died as part of a much grander struggle, one being fought right now over the future of the world.

Dylan Louis Monroe read the Q intel drops, and decided to try to make sense of it all. Who are we to say that wasn’t the right thing to do for him? Yes, the map is nonsensical. But it’s not much more nonsensical than some of what’s happening in the world today.

Of course, there might be another reason for the map’s existence, which is Monroe trying to monetize it, selling all manner of “map” shirts and swag on his Deep State Mapping Project site. So maybe his goal all along was to “unlock” the map, but cash in off it.

Even so, that puts him in the rarified air of conspiracy theory grifters who make millions selling books, website subscriptions, swag, quack cures, and the like. Are they trying to make sense of things, as well? Or are they canny businessmen, cashing in off the poor dopes who actually are?

Much of #QAnon is a batshit crazy conspiracy theory, deeply rooted in antisemitism, poor critical thinking skills, and an unreasonable hatred of Hillary Clinton.

But it’s caught on for a reason, and while it’s easy to dismiss that reason as “people are crazy,” it’s more compassionate to try to look into why people believe – while still acknowledging that it is indeed a batshit crazy conspiracy theory.