The American Roots of QAnon, Part Two

The following is the second half of the speech I gave at Purdue University in early April on the uniquely American properties of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Because it wasn’t recorded, I decided to post it online, broken up into two parts because it’s really long. Part one can be found here. My books The Storm is Upon Us and the forthcoming Jewish Space Lasers are also available. Enjoy!

Another one of Q’s foundational theories had been floating around since the early 90’s – and it wasn’t the Clinton Body Count. It was the three-decade old prophesy scam built around a great financial awakening, known as NESARA.

First emerging out of the wreckage of another scam called Omega Trust, NESARA was like a lot other conspiracy theories in that it had its roots in something real, only to become completely engulfed in fraud and false hope. In this case, it was an economic proposal called the “National Economic Security and Recovery Act,” proposed by an amateur economist as a massive overhaul to the US financial system that would do away with the Federal Reserve, loan interest, consumer debt, and the current income tax. Its originator printed a thousand copies of his proposal and sent them to Congress, where he assumed it would be put to a vote at once. It was not, and it eventually found its way online.

That’s where it caught the eye of a victim of the Omega Trust scam, Yelm, Washington resident Shaini Goodwin. She saw it as a way to merge some of the conspiracy she’d fallen for with the more New Age-y aspects of NESARA, and went to work building a cult around herself.

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