A Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman’s Conspiracy Manifesto
How RFK Jr., Naomi Wolf, and an NYU Professor Ended Up on the Same Page as QAnon Cultist Jacob Chansley
The “QAnon shaman”—Jacob Chansley, the tattooed dude having an Excellent Adventure in Mike Pence’s Senate chair on January 6—put a photogenic face on the insurrection, and on Trump’s Idiocracy. Barechested, covered in neo-pagan tattoos, brandishing a spear, and sporting a fur headdress with horns, Chansley was catnip to media outlets. Was he a Burning Man bro gone MAGA? Adam Ant on ayahuasca? Or, as one YouTube wag put it, what you get “when you throw a Republican, a ton of shrooms and MDMA, a scratched DVD of Vikings Season 1, and a sweaty yoga mat into a boiling pot”?
All anyone knew at the time was that he was a devout believer in QAnon, the conspiracy cult that knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a devil-worshipping cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles is the real power—the Deep State—behind our sham democracy.
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Curious to know if Chansley really is emblematic of the bat**** style in American politics, as the historian Richard J. Hofstadter never called it,
I bought a copy of his book, One Mind at a Time: A Deep State of Illusion, self-published in 2020 under the name Jacob Angeli.
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Also no surprise: the weird syncretism of New Age spirituality and right-wing conspiracy theory, which scholars of American religion have dubbed “conspirituality.” This, after all, is a man who describes himself in his back-cover bio as a “shamanic practitioner, QAnon digital soldier,” New Age energy healer, and “God-loving, country-protecting patriot of the U.S.A.” “What we did on Jan. 6 in many ways was an evolution in consciousness,” he told the Washington Post, “because as we marched down the street… shouting ‘USA’ or shouting things like ‘freedom’… we were actually affecting the quantum realm.” Deepak Chopra, meet QAnon.
One Mind at a Time outlines a unified field theory of power, paranoia, and sinister myth. No surprise there, either: Frank P. Mintz, the historian who invented the term, defines conspiracism as the “belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history.” It’s the metanarrative suspicious minds use to make sense of the world. And a significant part of that sense-making consists of sleuthing out the connections between seemingly unrelated things.
Chansley connects the dots between the Freemasons, the Illuminati, Yale’s secretive Skull & Bones society, MK-Ultra (the CIA’s notorious experiment in Better Brainwashing Through LSD), Nikola Tesla, “reptilians from the Draco star system,” “the artificial monolith” found on Mars’s moon Phobos (on loan from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 ?), the horrors of fluoridation, the depravity of the Royal Family, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Dahmer, the performance artist Marina Abramović’s “’spirit cooking’ event based on Aleister Crowley Magic,” which Hillary Clinton attended, we’re told, and where “semen, breast milk, and blood” were on the menu. The scattered points coalesce, as they always do, into a constellation: “the deep state takeover of our nation through corrupt laws and the government’s misuse of force.”
What I wasn’t prepared for was just how closely One Mind at a Time harmonizes with the worldviews of public figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental activist-cum-anti-vaxxer; Naomi Wolf, the feminist pundit turned COVID Truther; and Mark Crispin Miller, the NYU professor of media studies who ran afoul of his colleagues for what they allege is his “espousal of ‘non-evidence based’ conspiracy theories, including [the belief] that cell phones cause cancer and the moon landing was fake” and, most controversially, his promotion of anti-mask, anti-vaccine misinformation in the middle of a pandemic.
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As for Miller, he’s a 9/11 Truther, a Sandy Hook skeptic (the school shootings were a “false flag” operation, he believes, staged to provide a pretext for a crackdown on Second Amendment rights), and a vociferous opponent of masking, lockdowns, and vaccines, which he, like Wolf and Kennedy, believes are prelude to “The Great Reset,” a eugenicist plot cooked up by George Soros, the Rockefellers, Ted Turner, and—because no conspiracy’s complete without him—Bill Gates to eradicate the mass of humanity so the one percent can have the planet all to themselves, maintaining a slave class that will serve their overlords in a neo-feudal society.
“Look for certain code words like ‘pasta’ or ‘pizza’ and if the pizza sign has, like, devil horns or something, that’s something to watch out for, okay?”
How did the scion of America’s most storied political dynasty; the author of a feminist classic that influenced generations (The Beauty Myth); and a progressive media critic end up on the same page as a QAnon cultist whose book reads like Don DeLillo on DMT?
What all four have in common is the knee-jerk suspicion that all government and establishment-media narratives, all expert opinions are “propaganda.” This wariness is coupled, paradoxically, with a willingness to believe any “counternarrative,” no matter how dubiously sourced or implausible. In raising doubts about public-health authorities like Fauci, the CDC, and the WHO, Kennedy, Wolf, and Miller seem to see themselves as standard-bearers of the 1960s activism whose bumper-sticker slogan was Question Authority. Conspiracism is a counterculture—a counterculture of counternarratives.
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