Online, there have been more than a few comments by Never-Trumpers and conservative “but he’s not really pro-life” Christians voicing their new-found admiration for Trump, who after he was shot rose up like a phoenix, blood streaming across his face, triumphantly shouting “Fight! Fight!” with his clenched fist raised in the air.
The assassination attempt yielded the Hero Shot par excellence and it appears that this is the moment his Q Anon devotees have been waiting for: tangible evidence that these long years of waiting and cryptic messages have not been a hoax. Now they “know” for sure that they have not been misled or manipulated, that it must all be true: the White Hats, the ‘Dumbs”, the SRA. All of it.
However factual the heinous activities of the Deep State might be, though – and there is certainly plenty of evidence – the whole concept of an anonymous commentator ‘dropping’ mysterious clues for Trumpian insiders is very troubling. For the idea of an ‘insider’ revealing ‘secret knowledge’ to adoring devotees is the very essence of Gnosticism. And if Trump has a cult-like following, then the name of that cult really is Gnosticism.
His Q-Anon cult thrives on the promise of secret knowledge: the messages, and Trump’s tweets and speeches are treated as codes and are said to full of gematria. Gematria is a cipher which assigns a numerical value to a word or letter of the alphabet. One very famous reference to this can be found in the Bible, where St. John tells us that the number of the Beast of the Apocalypse is six hundred and sixty-six. The importance of dates and numbers, which often are highly significant anyway, becomes elevated in a gematria system.
Gematria is thought to have been first developed by the ancient Greeks and has popped up throughout history in occult circles, with many variations. Magicians throughout the ages have referred to it and gematria is part of the system of Kabbalah. Gematria was once taught to members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley apparently used it to code his 1904 The Book of the Law.
Ciphers aside, Catholics are not immune from Trump Gnosticism. Already, some are claiming that Trump’s life was saved by the Virgin Mary, a theory suggested by the date of his assassination attempt: July 13. This is one of the “Fatima Days”: the 13th day of each of six consecutive months from May to October which mark the most famous apparitions made by the Mother of God to the children at Fatima.
Now, don’t misunderstand, I wholeheartedly believe that the apparitions and messages from Fatima are true. What I baulk at is attributing Trump’s “miraculous” escape to the intervention of Our Lady. For if one actor in the Deep State can play at the Psy-op game, then so can two.
Trump’s Q-Anon followers have been “trusting the plan” for years. They have an enormous amount of blind faith in Q’s claims that even as we speak, Trump’s secret militia is liberating children from the bowels of the earth. If a prediction fails spectacularly, as happened with the very first one in 2017 when it was foretold by Q that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, the faith of these hillbilly Gnostics is not shaken. A perceived failure simply becomes subject to a new level of revealed truth: Clinton was actually arrested but was subsequently replaced by a body-double.
And so was Biden … and Pope Francis … and on it goes. Throw in the theory that viruses are a product of the imagination and there you have Q Anon-sense.
From the very advent of Q, Trump himself played the game, telling reporters that this was the calm before the storm and with sage-like restraint explaining that all would soon be revealed. Perhaps it was more than coincidence that his recent legal battle was over his relationship with a woman known as “Stormy”.
In 2022, he began referencing Q-Anon in his tweets and on his social media platform, Truth Social. He likes to pepper his rally speeches with insider references, the kind of jokes his only his Q-Anon followers would appreciate.
In the wake of his assassination attempt, it has been fascinating to watch people falling onto one of two camps: the freedom-loving Trump supporters (roughly aligned with the Republican party) and the evil left-leaners (the Democrats.) Those undecideds in the middle grey area, who once constituted the majority, seem to have all but disappeared.
And maybe that was just the point of the whole exercise.
Ecclesiastical Freemasonry 