This is the second part of a series exploring the rise and fall of Donald Trump. If you haven’t already read Part I (you can here), you’ll want to do that before going ahead.

That piece laid out an argument for Donald Trump’s longstanding deep state ties, particularly his (at least partial) connection to a lesser-known faction of the US deep state that has a more mercantilist economic and ethno-nationalist position. This piece will explore the Russiagate and Q phenomena and how we understand those from the larger frame of reference offered in the first installment.

To begin we need to look into the relationship between the US deep state(s) and the Russian deep state and then fit Trump within that much larger geopolitical context.

First, an important data point along the trajectory: Trump’s decades-long connection to the Russian mafia. Way before supposed hooker pee tapes and the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump was acting as a conduit for Russian mafia money laundering. Whether Trump consciously knew that or turned a blind eye or was genuinely in the dark is hard to say but either way the evidence is clear that through his real estate ventures Trump was deeply intertwined with numerous Russian mafia contacts and was being used (knowing or unknowingly) as a means to “clean” Russian mob money.

In order to understand how that situation came to pass we need to set some historical context. In the waning days of the Soviet Union, criminal organizations began to position themselves into the gaps caused by the failure of the communist system. Organized crime elements controlled the black and “grey” markets that were increasingly necessary to daily survival in the collapsing Soviet empire.

Then with the fall of The Soviet Union and the rise of Yeltsin and the Russian oligarchs, the Russian mob really took off. It was largely filled with and controlled by ex-KGB and other Soviet-era intelligence and security personnel.

Western banks and liberal economists (esp. from Harvard) were deeply entangled with this 1990s-era oligarchic Russian deep state. Through those connections they perpetrated what is now known as the Rape of Russia—basically the large-scale illegal selling off of Soviet-era assets. At that point the IMF, World Bank and others brought in massive neoliberal reforms in a classic case of “shock doctrine.” Ezekiel73’s piece on the connection of disaster capitalism to MK-Ultra is directly relevant here.

As per that historical connection between MK-Ultra and disaster capitalism, along with the financial shock doctrine came a corresponding social engineering, psychological trauma/shock doctrine meant to bring the Russian populace to their knees. Just as after the end of the Second World War where the Allied powers (principally US and UK) made deals with many elements of the former Nazi elite in order to co-opt them, the US and Western European powers, sought to make deals with numerous elements of the “enemy class” of the ex-Soviet state. I’ve covered the implications of the Nazification of the democratic Allied powers. Much the same could be said of the post '90s Russian example.

If WWI and WWII were designed to destroy the German state as a threat to the Anglo-American order, then the Cold War was meant to do the same to the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact. Meanwhile elements of fascism were brought directly into the Anglo-American capitalist order (as detailed previously), creating a kind of stateless global mafia/organized crime outfit known as the Fascist International.

In short, the German framework and the “Rape of Germany” early in the 20th century became the template for the Rape of Russia. This included mass distortion of the economic sphere—particularly through financial markets—leading to hyperinflation both in the case of Weimar Germany in the 1920s and Russia in the early 1990s.

Just as the Fascist International went global through the total annihilation of the German (and Italian) fascist states, the destruction of The Soviet sphere lead to the globalization of Russian organized crime. A kind of post Cold War “Soviet" or "Communist Criminal International” if you like.

Technocracy recall is the grotesque hybrid fusion (“chimera”) of capitalism, communism, and fascism. Now we've got all three players on the board.

Right as The Soviet Union was collapsing, then US President George HW Bush was busying proclaiming a “new world order” (novus ordo seclorum); he was also reneging on a promise he had made to not extend NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries.

Russia suffered immensely during that time. Birthrates plummeted, life expectancy dropped, substance abuse, addiction, and suicide rates sky-rocketed and the country became overrun with organized crime, lawlessness, violence, and kleptocractic, oligarchic rule. (Again see the example of Germany post both World Wars for the historical template).

Vladimir Putin rose to power on the promise of bringing order and stability back to Russia by any means necessary. Putin’s means were (and still are) of course ruthless; he was former KGB after all. Putin eventually gained the upper hand against the Russian oligarchs and, like any skilled Mafia don, forced allegiance and payment to this subordinates and for those who wouldn’t play ball, there was jail, exile, or death (or all three).

The Russian mob consequently became largely co-opted, functioning as a sort of wing of the Russian state, just as many elements of US organized crime are deeply tied to elements of the US deep state (see the assassination of JFK). Putin, in other words, by no means destroyed the Russian oligarchic structure. Rather he simply bent that system to his will and placed his friends/cronies in the privileged power positions atop this cutthroat game.

Putin strategically needed to first “control his own base of operations” domestically before he was then able to start his project of reasserting Russian power and influence regionally and globally. His brutal campaign in Chechnya (started under Yeltsin) and the terror it spawned fits precisely into that category. Later there was Russian aggression into former Soviet republics like Georgia—itself spurred on by US neoconservatives. Later still there was the incursions and retaking of Abkhazia and The Crimea.

Putin and his allies had made a deep study of the “color revolutions” and their instigation and “guiding” by Western intelligence agencies under the cover of democracy NGOs, aid agencies, etc. We’ll come back to that point in a second because it’s immensely important but for the moment it’s enough to say that the Russian deep state figured out how to use those very same color revolutions tactics against the West itself, particularly within the US.

As Putin sought to reassert Russian influence regionally, it continued to bump against NATO attempts at encirclement—including of course the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

On the European front, The Ukraine became the central flashpoint between the pro-Western neoliberal deep state side and the pro-Kremlin Russian deep state oligarchic side. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was a lobbyist for Putin’s puppet in The Ukraine Viktor Vanukovych—whose job it was to prevent The Ukraine moving into the NATO, IMF, World Bank, EU orbit. On the Western neoliberal side there was of course The Orange Revolution and subsequent involvement in Ukrainian politics that takes us to the whole Rudy Giuliani, Hunter & Joe Biden, and Trump’s infamous “shakedown” phone call with the newly elected president of The Ukraine.

Worth recalling through all this that the Western “pro-democracy” faction in The Ukraine has deep ties to the (you guessed it!) history of fascism in The Ukraine, going all the way back to Hitler himself. Which as we’ve covered multiple times is pretty par for the course—the alliance of the West with “former” Nazis/fascists in order to fight the Russians.

To be clear then, neither side in that fight consists of the “good guys." All that detail however is necessary background to understanding what did and didn’t go down with Russiagate.

But back to the Russian mob for one more moment…

One of the key sources of the “laundering” of Russian mob money and the capital flight that took place (with a “wink-wink” from Western financial elites) was of course real estate, inexorably leading back to Trump.

Starting in the late 80s Trump was deeply cash strapped—as I covered in the last piece—due to his failure in the Atlantic City Casino business (a business of course tied to the US mafia). Trump was not able to secure funding from most Western bank sources and Russian oligarchic (read: state mafia) sources helped to buoy Trump and his businesses at their lowest ebb, particularly through the Trump name licensing agreements set up globally during the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

Fast forward to the 2016 election…near the end of the campaign elements within the more globalist/left-wing US deep state faction become concerned about Trump’s ties via Russian organized crime to The Kremlin.

Putin and The Kremlin were deeply anti-Hillary Clinton and decided to run a series of psychological operations—through their various deep state intermediaries—in the United States. It wasn’t really a pro-Trump psychological operation as it was an anti-Clinton one. As noted before, The Kremlin used the very tactics that the CIA/MI-6 and other Western intelligence agencies had used in Russia’s backyard (“color revolutions template”).

Trump and his team did make some contacts with various associates of The Kremlin by one or two (or more) degrees of separation during the campaign. The FBI and the CIA also set some people up to make Trump look deeply implicated in something his campaign honestly probably wasn’t super duper involved in—e.g. Michael Flynn for example definitely appears to have been setup by US intelligence operatives.

It’s important to remember that for the vast majority of his campaign Trump and his team didn’t actually think he was going to win. Trump was running ultimately to boost his global brand, including but not limited to Russian and ex-Soviet Central Asian contacts.

What we saw in Trump campaign’s behavior is the same thing we saw with influence peddling via The Clinton Foundation from the Clinton camp. 

The infamous Steele dossier with the charges of “hooker tapes” and blackmail against Trump was set up by a Clinton political group. The DNC hack, supposedly by Russian mob/intelligence assets also turned out to be a very questionable one. Meanwhile rather than elaborate over the top conspiracy theories of sexual blackmail and Trump being some Manchurian (Siberian?) Candidate, the real evidence was in plain sight: Trump’s deep ties to the Russian mob.

But notice how that story never really got to the forefront. Why? My speculation is that because any pulling on the strings of Trump’s Russian mob ties would implicate any number of other US deep state players: politicians, financial & banking conglomerates, real estate tycoons, media organizations, academic institutions, you name it. Again see the Rape of Russia.

It would also potentially reveal the deep ties on all sides of the deep states (plural) to the organized crime and shadowy intelligence-world nexus (Russian or otherwise), perfectly symbolized by Jeffrey Epstein’s personal connections to both the Clintons and to Trump.

The Mueller Report—which no one remembers at this point and basically no one actually read—was primarily focused on the Kremlin’s psychological operation into the American political system in the 2016 election, which involved a lot more than the supposed DNC Hack and Hillary’s emails. There were assets sent into the NRA to change opinion there to a more pro-Russian stance for example.

The Mueller Report’s findings on Trump–detailed in the much smaller Part II of the report–actually had to do with procedural issues (like potential obstruction of justice or perjury). Of course as we’ve been saying Trump’s crimes were all financial and in plain sight and those were totally ignored—because those crimes are endemic to the elite class.

Basically The Watergate playbook was dusted off and used against Trump. It even involved a faked break-in to the the DNC (again!). As I argued in my last piece, The Watergate playbook is an insider setup by deep intelligence operatives to create a phony operation, one bound to be caught. Setup the target—first Nixon and in this case Trump—whose already guilty on another front, forcing him to commit various procedural crimes in an attempt to cover a crime he didn’t actually commit in the first place in order to cover up the real crimes he actually did commit.

The great irony of course is that the real actual crimes both Nixon and Trump did commit of course were not ones that were ever going to be actually investigated and charged because those crimes are the bread and butter of the deep state.

In other words, Trump’s criminality was all over the place but actually had really nothing to do with the Kremlin—hell even during the presidential campaign the actual felony crime Trump did commit was bribery to silence women (like Stormy Daniels) to stop stories of extramarital affairs. Nothing Russia-related there.

In other other words, the problem was not Trump’s connection to organized crime, financial corruption, and covert intelligence connections. The problem was that—from the point of view of globalist factions within the FBI and CIA—he wasn’t linked up to their approved mafia and deep state covert actors. The problem was Trump was linked up with “the other side's" deep state-organized crime faction.

Again comparing the post-Soviet Russian example to the post-WWII German example is very instructive. As WWII was coming to an end, the Allied Powers—particularly the military intelligence agencies—made deals with much of the remaining Nazi elite to get them onside in the next war against the Soviets (who were actually still technically allies against the Nazis at the moment). The Allied (and Soviet) twin invasions destroyed the German state and the German people. The Allies and the Soviets both made various deals with aspects of the Nazi regime to recruit them to their side for the next war (Cold War).

Each of the two superpowers then created a puppet German state (West and East Germany). The Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet system crumbled. This opening allowed the Western powers to push quickly for a re-integration of Germany along the West German (pro-Western) lines.

So not only did the West get the alliance with the postwar Fascist International it eventually got Germany under its sphere/orbit. Of course Germany also bent the EU to its will which may have actually been the hidden fascist plan all along (but that’s an entirely different story for another day).

Just as in Germany, with the destruction of the Soviet state, the Russian people suffered the greatest. Officially The Soviet leadership were off the scene, just as with the de-Nazification of Germany. Unofficially of course many kept their positions and traded themselves into to being deep state/organized crime elements at the behest of the Kremlin. Again just like the Nazi example.

With Putin however the Russian state did not accede to the West. The West made plenty of connections with the Russian deep state but Putin very intentionally pushed back against the neoliberalization and EU/IMF/World Bank/Washington consensus model. There was no equivalent for the West of the West German state becoming the eventually de facto unifier in the Russian example. Sure NATO very quickly moved into Central Europe. Under (Bill) Clinton there were the campaigns in the Balkans to break Russian influence/power there. Plus the entry into NATO of Baltic countries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. 

That Western alliance pushed for deep color revolutions and meddling in The Ukraine and Belarus—as did the Kremlin on the pro-Russian side to maintain those countries within its orbit.

While many in the (Western) press refer to this as a “New Cold War” the original Cold War took place at the gates of Berlin now the borderland is Kiev. That information alone tells you who won and how serious this supposed war really is (and isn't).

Nevertheless the plan for first alchemically melting down the Soviet apparatus and then rebuilding the Russian state to be servile to the Anglo-American neoliberal capitalist order failed. Russia hardly represents an existential threat to the West but it’s not outright controlled by it either.

Putin and the Kremlin’s own version of a color revolution to sow discord in the United States makes perfect sense strategically in light of that history. They were just using the CIA’s own playbook against them. The technical military term is asymmetric warfare.

Which means the public media version of Russiagate was a limited hangout. The real story of Russiagate was actually twofold:

  1. The ongoing “lukewarm war” between the Russian deep state and the US/EU/NATO deep state. Remember the two enemies of the Soviets were the fascists and the capitalists/democracies. When Putin & company say they’re fighting the same enemies they've always been fighting, he ain’t wrong. Contrary to those elements of the paleo-conservative or new anti-globalist/alt-right in Europe and North America, this doesn’t make Putin any kind of a hero (or even anti-hero). Again it’s just one mafia faction against another, not good versus evil. It does however help to understand why Putin’s Kremlin has acted the way it has.
  2. Trump’s deep financial ties to elements of the Russian mob which never became the focus of the story, instead the sideshow carnival element psyop did. The second piece—the Trump related one—only makes sense in light of the first piece. The first piece was never covered in the Western press, hence the limited nature of the hangout.

Which brings us back to Trump’s long-standing flirtation with ethno-nationalism and economic autarky as detailed in the previous piece. Putin has combined those two elements during his decades long authoritarian rule. Putin’s Kremlin has run a long-standing psyop to form ties with authoritarian and anti-globalist hard-right forces in Europe (as well as around the globe). As we’ve covered elsewhere on the site one of the craziest 180 degree political turns globally has been the flipping of anti-globalization primarily to the (new) right and away from the 1990s era-anti globalization movement associated with the left (e.g. Naomi Klein’s No Logo).

So not only does Trump have deep financial implications with elements of the Kremlin-backed/controlled Russian mob, he also (weirdly) has a natural overlap with Putin’s strategic objectives and governing philosophy. I don’t think this meant Trump was ever beholden to Putin but Trump did (and does) have a longstanding nationalistic (economic and right-wing populist) streak. That very weirdly, as we’ve been saying, lines him up with elements of the more mercantilist, lesser known hard-right faction of the US deep state. What’s utterly bizarre however is that group’s major enemy was of course socialism/communism (see: Joseph McCarthy). It’s pretty insane that Putin managed that fliparoo.

The major fear of the anti-Trump US deep state was his anti-globalist elements, which Putin and The Kremlin symbolize. Though once more, being anti-globalization doesn’t automatically mean one’s alternative is any better (Putin’s Russia certainly is not). The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Same with Trump. Remember also that Trump’s anti-globalist streaks are far less than his otherwise very “mainstream” conservative deep state tendencies towards plutocratic rule. Trump’s heterodoxies against the globalist US deep state faction were more in response to things like the coronavirus epidemic, his blocking of wars against Iran & North Korea, and his trade war with China. Those aren’t nothing but they aren’t everything either.

And here finally then we come to the Question of Q(Anon).

I’ve largely wanted to stay away from the Q (non?)debate for a few reasons.

One: It’s totally polarized and there’s no debate there. It’s pretty much entirely ideology on all sides.
Two: I don’t think Q was as important (pro or con) as many others seem to think it was.
Three: There’s not sufficient contextual understanding to be able to come at the topic intelligently. It’s taken an essay and a half just to get to that point.

Given everything that’s been shared here how might we begin to understand the Q Phenomenon? (Because whatever else it is, it’s a phenomenon).

I see Q as a very intelligent psychological operation but not in the way most would imagine it to be. (For a counter view to what I propose check out Ezekiel73's pieces on Q, especially his most recent one. For the record, Q is one of the few things we vociferously disagree about.)

I highly recommend you listen to this series on Alex Jones on the podcast Behind the Bastards. Jones (whose a Q critic, it should be noted) was originally a more anti-deep state figure. He was a 9/11 Truther, he was against the war in Iraq, and railed against George W. Bush. He was even in Waking Life. During the early 2000s Jones had a kinda/sorta following among some on the left. But most of those were anti-Bush folk not necessarily anti-US deep state as such.

Once Obama came into power however Jones then went about systemically critiquing him and thereby gained more following on the right. Again easy to be anti-the system when your preferred party is out of power. This brought a more specifically patriot, William Cooper-esque, anti-NWO, militia quality to Jones (which was always there to some degree but became heightened during the Obama years).

Now as 2016 election rolls around you have this group of folks—particularly younger ones—nurtured for almost a decade on attacks on PC culture, socialistic government overreach, and the rest. You have intersections here with the Men’s Rights Movement as well as the Alt-Right both of which I’ve covered previously.

So you have this group that’s very activated and motivated. If however Trump is elected, then in theory based on previous history Jones should then go in hard on Trump. If he’s against whoever is in power at the time (deep state) then it would be Trump’s turn.

So there’s a problem here: how to square the circle (Masonic pun very much intended) of retaining those followers and keeping the view of being an “outsider” to the system while being the biggest insider of all?

Answer: Formulate a narrative based on aspects of the Ron Paul-Patriot-ethno-nationalist lesser known deep state group, mixed with elements of conspiracy theory (particularly William Cooper), add in a healthy dose of old school Puritan Christian theology of America as a “city on a hill”, but make it linguistically native to the internet et voila you have yourself a very contagious meme.

That memetic narrative is deeply mythic in nature—by which I mean it connects to a mythic core in human meaning making. George Lucas famously was said to have read Joseph Campbell’s Hero of A Thousand Faces when creating Star Wars. I often wonder if whoever is behind Q similarly studied that text and updated it for the internet age.

As I’ve covered previously on the site we live in apocalyptic times and we need to look to apocalyptic spiritual movements often to gain a glimpse behind the veil. Though on the other hand those groups often themselves can easily become lost in their own visions. I would put Q into that category for sure.

I see Q then as a mouthpiece (propaganda wing if you prefer) of the ethno-nationalist, lesser known deep state faction ("a comms channel").
Whether Q was the official or unofficial/self-proclaimed mouthpiece of that faction I don’t really know. 

Q presented “himself” as an intelligence insider. Perhaps that was the case. Or perhaps the person(s) behind Q was more in media/communications with connections to some deep state actors who were feeding him/them information. I tend towards the latter position but that is just a hunch.

Whoever was behind it, they created one very intricate limited hangout. I’m referring there to the Q drops themselves. In other words, there were (and are) Q drops that did call upcoming events. How that information was known and by whom there’s a lot of argument about but if there were some deep state players involved (which I think is very plausible) then that would explain those aspects.

As to the wider “Q Twitterverse” and people claiming to have insider information, there was a lot of disinformation going on there, online bots, as well as just people totally wrong. I’m also open to the argument that Q may well have included elements of an ARG (alternative reality game). It’s complex and multilayered.

The hangout in Q was the hangout around the nature of deep state politics. Q pointed out MK-Ultra and brought people’s attention to a number of very real, actual, historical conspiracies (a number of which we’ve covered on the site). Q pointed towards the JFK’s assassination as a coup d’état against the “above ground” US state by the intelligence, organized crime, financial elite, military-industrial complex, aka the “underground state” or “deep state”. In this Q was actually correct.

Now where Q starts to go off the rails in my view is the idea that there was some insider “white hat” operation of true patriots going to overthrow this cabal (“mass arrests!”) and restore the US constitutional republic. In other words, the limited in the limited hangout is how the information of deep state activities was almost always skewed to the more left-wing globalist US deep state faction (as if that faction was THE DEEP STATE as such rather than simply a tentacle of the larger conspiratorial squid). Occasionally some conservative front men for the Wall St/military industrial complex portion would come in for an attack or two by Q but principally the target was the globalist deep state wing, particularly in the CIA/FBI/Hollywood/Silicon Valley/mainstream media. Which again is no doubt a wing or faction of the deep state that most definitely exists. Limited hangouts only work if there’s at least some partial truth to the operation.

Call me old fashioned but I felt a lot safer when my right-wing militia anti-NWO conspiracists believed the Black Hawks were coming for them any minute and were paranoid of imperial military power. How (some of) that group got flipped via Q into publicly advocating for a military junta/suspension of civil rights/martial law is, in my estimation, an all-time great psyop. Almost as great as Vladimir Putin getting certain right-wingers in Europe, Canada, The US and elsewhere to look to Russia as the great model against the evils of globalism.

Just as Putin is the head of his own deep state (just a different adversarial deep state vis a vis the globalist types), Trump is profoundly deep state as these two pieces have labored to show.

Strangely I’m actually with Q that Trump was the public face/front man for a deeper faction but that faction could never have been a truly anti-deep state faction as such because Trump was as deep state as they come. Sure he had some contacts with the lesser known anti-globalist ethno-nationalist economically mercantilist faction but those connections didn’t stop Trump from doing plenty of the bidding of the Wall Street/Big Military “mainstream” conservative deep state, as I detailed in the previous piece in this series. And even when Trump did play footsie with the ethno-nationalist, economic mercantilist faction it was still, after all, a deep state faction itself.

How much time did Q spend revealing Trump’s connections to the Russian mob?

The ultimate tell around Q was the phrase: "Trust the plan." This was a classic tactic allowing people to feel that they were part of some great (mythic) movement, that there would be outside (or "insider") rescuers who would care for them and bring true justice. In this way Q very expertly co-created (e)soldiers in an ongoing information war, whose battlefield is largely online. But like many soldiers drafted from the masses throughout history, I believe they were used as cannon fodder and pawns in a higher-dimensional game of geopolitical chess.

Trust the plan kept such folks emotional activated. That activation was called into political mobilization in response to charges of electoral theft leading to the Capitol Hill destruction. That Capitol Hill protest was infiltrated and used as a cover to militarize Washington, D.C. and create a "US Green Zone" (as John Robb calls it). As further pushes towards technocracy occur in the coming years, the political class will be that much more physically separated from the populace.

The Capitol Hill riots are already being used as a cover to push for a domestic anti-terrorism/Patriot Bill/911-type Commission which will further the pursuits of the national surveillance state. If Q was a controlled opposition campaign–and I'm not particularly convinced it was to be honest–but if it was that would have been the purpose of the entire operation. If that were the case it was ultra-successful (emphasis on if). I've argued in this piece that I think it much more likely that Q was a part of a larger intra-deep state factional war, fought out on the terms of the digital mental battlespace. But whether controlled opposition or not, I think it ended up in the same place--becoming a justification for a deeper technocratic tyrannical rule. The Capitol Hill riots really sealed that fate.

I've written previously about how I believe much of the UFO Disclosure narrative is similarly constructed on the premise that an outsider group (with some connections to white hat military-intelligence insiders) will rescue the masses and bring a kind of "counter-coup" against mainstream corrupt politics. In that case it is in the form of Space Brothers (and a supposed alien-human grand alliance). This template I believe was key–consciously or unconsciously–in the Q formulation.

At the end of the day, I hold that all this in-fighting was between different deep state factions, each of which involved in heavy psychological operations and social engineering. I think Q was the communication strategy/information wing of that more mercantilist, ethno-nationalist faction (again whether officially inside or outside the government apparatus). Q understood that the current form of warfare is primarily psychological and informational—as I covered in my piece on Col. Join Boyd and OODA Loop theory.

Trump, probably more instinctively than cognitively, understood this dynamic and used his background in “mental magic”/Prosperity Gospel/New Thought as well as his connections to tabloid media/pro-wrestling/reality television and conspiracy world (“Birtherism”) to understood narrative construction and framing in this postmodern age. Which is why Trump was very successful at controlling media narratives during his presidency.

Which brings us to the question of the 2020 election–what to make of that gong show?

Prior to the election Q had begun to speak of a potential coming electoral fraud, particularly through mail-in ballots. That argument was later floated by Trump himself (prior to the election, as well as afterward) and also by his Attorney General William Barr.

Q followers consequently believed there was some insider plan to thwart this coming electoral fraud. Then the election happened. There was the Capitol Hill protests, and then a transition to Biden in power. Q mostly went silent. After some initial railing, even Trump went mostly silent.

Then Q wrote that it had to be that way in order to show the depths of the corruption.

Perhaps? Or perhaps that's an ex-post facto justification or attempt to deflect the inevitable work of grief/mourning for those on the Q side. Trump didn't drain the swamp. Trump was never a guy who was going to drain the swamp--given, as we've discussed, that was he as swampy a creature as there is. As I've written before, this path is a very grief-soaked one.

We saw the first stage of Kubler Ross' stages of grief with bizzaro stories that there's still some secret plan and the seeming loss was actually a gambit in a larger nth dimensional geopolitical chess game. We've seen anger (stage 2) with the Capitol Hill protests. We've seen bargaining (stage 3) with mainstream Republicans trying both to somehow claim connection to Trump's legacy but also distance themselves from the Capitol Hill riots.

I expect we'll start to see some instances here and there of stage 4 (depression) as the realization sinks in. But for the rest they'll dig in deeper somewhere between stages 1-3, cycling between compromise, denial, and anger.

It's also possible that the faction Q represents (again officially or otherwise) was already sensing Trump was going to lose and was poisoning the well beforehand with pre-charges of electoral fraud–looking to create a ready made response that didn't require admitting defeat. As I covered in my last piece, Trump's worldview (inherited from his father) is entirely built around a world of "winners vs. losers". Trump cannot abide being a loser or admitting defeat. As a result, he sowed the view that the election would have to be rigged in the case he lost.

Another option–not mutually exclusive–is that the various other deep state factions got together and basically threatened the ethno-nationalist faction that Trump was (partially) connected with. And that group basically hung Trump out to dry at that point. I tend towards this view but admittedly it's quite speculative. This article could be seen as potential evidence of this possibility. Also the multiple strange references to Continuity of Government (COG) would be another possible clue as to deeper machinations.

With Trump now at least temporarily sidelined (in the formal political sense) the question becomes what next?

Well there's no crystal ball here to predict of course but based on this framework it would appear that the more globalist-left wing faction is going to take the reins for a bit and push their more explicitly scientism-oriented form of technocracy. This deep state faction still functions through largely traditional media channels for its propaganda which is why it's been caught off guard numerous times recently with videos of Marina Abhramovic being taken down from connection to Bill Gates or the World Economic Forum's insanely tone deaf articles around The Great Reset.

The gap then between the official public story line and the reality will continue to grow, bringing more and more folks into a space of questioning the failure of the accepted narrative ("Epstein is just like a Christmas ornament–he didn't hang himself") . This step is generally speaking a good initial one but as this series has tried to show there is plenty of disinformation and social engineering prevalent in the so-called conspiracy/alternative space itself, which can simply be deeper and subtler layers of control–just as the Red Pill became its own form of a psyop.