March 4, 2021 - 7:00am

May I be the first to wish A Merry March 4th to you and your kin.

What is ‘March 4th’? Well, think of it as the Cinco de Mayo of the clinically certifiable.

In 1933, in his famous first hundred days, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the 14th Amendment to reduce the period that an outgoing President would spend as a lame duck. Prior to that, rather than late-January, incoming presidents would be inaugurated on 4 March.

Hence why many of Q’s bitter-enders have seized upon the date as the next Big One, where Trump loyalists inside the government will rise up, and overthrow the Bidenista regime.

According to the lore, this will make Trump the ‘19th president’ — because of another constitutional tweak, after Ulysses S Grant’s term, that changed the definition of citizenship from ‘sovereign citizen’ to ‘federal citizen’. Everyone since having thus been illegitimate.

“Military intervention is the only way at this point… my heart is ready for that,” said one of the guests on Juan O Savin’s Bitchute podcast, We Keep The Faith.

“The entities in the military that are making these decisions are somewhat past the groupthink,” Savin himself ruminated. “It’s a very mechanical and analytical process — if they believed a foreign entity was in charge, they would have to act.”

Savin was recording from his hotel room. He was ‘on his way to DC’, presumably tailed by the biggest squadron of G Men since Capone forgot to keep his lunch receipts for the IRS.

But considered in the round, Savin seems like a minority interest. Increasingly, Q’s online haunts are functioning more as an umbrella structure for a range of conspiracists who are interested in US politics. There’s much less emphasis on the godly “Q” himself, and his decoding “drops” (messages posted to the fringe forum 8kun).

This could be because the shadowy ‘Trump White House insider’ who went by the handle of Q seems to have run out of road, in the most intriguing way.

To date, the last Q drop was 8 December. It was a montage of patriots and big flags and street fighting, set to cross-dressing hair metal gods Twisted Sister’s 1984 classic ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’.

If this is how the world ends, not with a whimper but with bangs, then it is a sad place for the faithful to find themselves. No wonder spirits are increasingly testy. It seems that even amongst the lizard-adjacent, the idea of giving the media another hostage to fortune suddenly seems like a bad idea. Some suggest the 4 March date is a psyop, propagated by the media to discredit them.

They might even be right on that one. At the moment, there’s something of a feedback loop going on between a press corps intent on covering the spice of Q, and the fact that Q is presently flatlining. In some sense, it’s the same problem that organisations like Hope Not Hate have faced for years: the supply issue when it comes to actual living Nazis, versus the public demand for Nazi-type figures to boo.

The 6 January Shaman may have lodged in the media’s minds, but intriguingly, USA TODAY’s own analysis of court documents found that only 13 of the 266 arrested so far in connection with the Capitol attack could be positively linked to QAnon theories.

So it’s particularly interesting that a Q-adjacent ‘sovereign citizens’ clickbait blog called Information Liberation recently ran a piece with the headline: “Q-Anon’ Bears Striking Resemblance to Bolshevik Psy-Op From 1920s Known As ‘Operation Trust’”.

“Operation Trust was a Bolshevik counterintelligence operation run from 1921 to 1926 … Aimed at neutralizing opposition by creating the false impression that a powerful group of military leaders had organized to stop the communists’ takeover.”
- Chris Menahan, Information Liberation

As anyone digging deeper into a rabbit hole will intuitively understand, the only way to truly disavow Q, is to go one deeper…


Gavin Haynes is a journalist and former editor-at-large at Vice.

@gavhaynes