Conspiracy Cults Are a Business, Not a Resistance

During my 20 years in conspiracy circles—14 of them in the JQ movement—I’ve met or talked to virtually every leader or influencer in it. It became clear to me that some of them are true believers, while others are opportunists and, in worse cases, bad actors. I’ve also noticed many of these movements become cult-like, with cult leaders who promise everything but provide nothing tangible. But what I want to focus on here isn’t the people, but rather the relationship between them and the people who follow them.

A cult leader needs an audience that never checks his claims or challenges his authority. The member needs somebody who can give him comfort, meaning, and certainty in our harsh and uncertain world. Each one hands the other exactly what he needs, and that’s why neither of them can afford to let it end.

That is the foundation of the relationship, not truth.

We’ll start with the leaders.

Notice how they never correct themselves. Not about a prediction, not about a source, not about somebody they destroyed who turned out to be innocent. Think about what that implies: they’re selling their audience that they’re infallible. But you and I both know that no human is perfect, so how is it possible that the men at the top are never wrong?

Because they have to pretend to be right no matter what.

It’s all an act, and the business can’t survive without it. The second one of them admits he got something wrong, he’s told his audience that checking is allowed.

How many conspiracy cult leaders claimed the world would end in 2012? How about humanity will be depopulated by 90%? Whatever happened to the FEMA camp coffins? Weren’t we supposed to “Eat the bugs and live in the pod”? There was a man who said billions would die from the COVID jabs by 2025—why haven’t they?

None of it happened because none of it was true.

Did one of these people who sold these narratives ever come back and say, “I got that wrong”? Or did they move straight to the next one while everybody forgot the last one?

The newest cult formed is the Charlie Kirk conspiracy cult led by Candace Owens. She’s the perfect example of a cult leader who keeps getting it wrong and never loses a follower for it. Wrong about Brigitte Macron, which got her sued. Wrong about the Egyptian planes, which the flight logs disproved. And she’s gone from the bullet that killed Charlie not being a .30-06 to an exploding mic, and then back.

Has she retracted any of it?

A record nobody checks isn’t a record; it’s content. As long as these cult leaders keep pumping out new content, there will always be an audience to consume it.

Now look at how they make money: super chats, merch, memberships, meme coins, sponsorships—some of them going as far as casinos and shady supplement companies. Every single one of those depends on the audience staying angry, scared, and tuned in.

So if the truth ever hurt their income, which one do you think they’d pick?

Now let’s look at the members of their communities: they need answers, and they need certainty.

Human societies are messy and don’t always provide them cleanly. And it’s true that our institutions have lied, our governments have lied, and our leaders have lied. Conspiracies do happen. But the leaders of these cult movements make the world look as terrifying as possible, and then—what do you know—they just happen to be the ones with all the answers to make things better.

Once a follower believes this person is trustworthy and is being persecuted by the system because he has the truth, everything the cult leader needs has already been handed over. The member won’t check because checking puts the certainty at risk. He’ll accept that the leader is never wrong, because only somebody who’s never wrong can give him certainty. And he’ll defend him against outsiders, because an attack on the man is an attack on the ground he’s standing on.

Nobody has to coordinate any of this; both sides just do what the position requires. Both sides get what they need. The leader gets money and status. The member gets the feeling of being informed, the feeling of being in a resistance, and a room full of people who agree with him.

What he doesn’t get is a single thing that was advertised.

Ask any of the cult leaders running on a fringe what their plan is—you’ll get something vague that isn’t a plan. Ask how many people have to be “woken up” before anything improves—nobody can give you a number. That’s not a bug: a business doesn’t want its customers to graduate.

And what have they ever achieved? Another useless collab, another seminar, another “debate,” another “discovery” of a conspiracy that they never proved to anyone?

The worst kind of cults are these political movements based on conspiracy theories because they require political action in the world. They are the type that can inspire violence, riots, and assassinations, because people think they need to get in the streets and fight the government or take out certain figures. No one’s rioting about flat earth.

But these movements don’t capture the hearts and minds of the people, and there’s always a faction inside them reading the Turner Diaries and thinking we need a race war. I’ve seen these groups come and go because they’re not based in any practical solutions; it’s always unpragmatic and delusional idealism.

To illustrate how much of a failure these groups are: Imagine a toy factory that’s been running for 60 years and has never produced a single functional toy. Would anybody keep funding it? Yet these fringe movements still exist, and they’re still funded by the small base of people who fall into this kind of thinking.

Not only is this kind of thinking inapplicable to the United States to begin with, but look at who gets picked to carry it: drunks, drug addicts, gamblers, pornographers, scammers, criminals, and all-around degenerates getting boosted and treated like authorities. Our enemies figured out they can bypass the MSM entirely with social media and make these e-celebs to poison the minds of our citizens.

Take the clearest example. Scott Ritter served prison time for unlawful contact with a minor—a 2011 Pennsylvania conviction, a public record, and nobody disputes it. He’s been platformed nonstop ever since, including on Russian state media, and presented to audiences as a credible authority on war and intelligence.

It’s not an accident. A man with something behind him is easier to steer than a man without.

You don’t have to be a convicted hebephile to be a useful idiot for our enemies. I know how because I was used in the same way. There was a reason I ended up on Russia Today, on the front page of the Tehran Times, and on Press TV. My rants and my song didn’t go viral because of the MSM. They went viral because Russia, China, Qatar, and Iran love amplifying any American who helps us turn on each other.

I was a useful idiot, and I didn’t know it. A lot of the people getting boosted right now are in exactly that spot, knowingly or not. How many of them do you think will ever realize it? And if they do, how many would admit it?

Now look at what’s actually being sold: that these people are the resistance against a monolith that controls everything.

These are people whose main activity is drama with each other—feuds, callouts, response videos, and content. Does that look like a resistance or a business?

Does any government on earth really take them seriously? Are commentators with microphones the resistance to the best-armed militaries in history? Is a man streaming while he plays video games a threat to brute force? If anything, they will use them as boogeymen to advance their own agenda.

These fringe movements believe only extreme radical change can fix anything—a race war or accelerationist terrorism. And they push ideologies that are antithetical to America in every way, yet they claim to be pro-America.

A lot of them, especially in the JQ movement, are living in 1933. They talk like we’re in an interwar European capital where a few hundred men could take a government building and own a country by morning. They don’t account for Continuity of Government protocols, or a command post in the air that keeps running if Washington stops existing, or a succession list that goes through the whole cabinet, or surveillance infrastructure that didn’t exist in any form a century ago.

There’s no Capture the Flag. There’s no marching up to the White House and winning. The state isn’t a king you can depose; it’s a bureaucracy with backups. So the uniforms and the marching aren’t a strategy. It’s historical cosplay.

The more sophisticated grifters won’t sell this kind of LARP; they focus more on promoting the same failing ideas but without the uniforms. Despite their better optics, they’re still selling a fantasy that will never happen.

This is precisely how the model works, because a product that can’t be delivered never has to be. What actually moves things is boring—institutions, elections, budgets, laws, and courts—and it takes becoming a serious person, which is exactly what the fantasy saves everybody from having to do.

Ultimately, the e-celeb and the fan parasitize each other. None of them actually care about each other, only that the other delivers on the deal. If the e-celeb dies, the fan goes to the next one. If the fan dies, the e-celeb doesn’t even know his name.

It’s an online ecosystem of people feeding off each other for entertainment, comfort, and a sense of belonging—and only one side of it is getting paid.

---