Making the Case for "BlueAnon"

An analysis of Biden dead-enders in the weeks leading up to his ejection from the 2024 American Presidential race.

One of the main components of ‘conspiratorial thinking’ insofar as it constitutes an irrational form of analyzing events is a paranoiac desire to contextualize any actor who benefits from a situation as consciously intending to produce it. ‘Cui bono?’ or ‘who benefits?’ is a question I see a lot of conspiracy theorists ask as a means to construct a ‘grand coalition’ of heterogeneous agents who are consciously intending to enact a common goal in virtue of these agents all benefiting from a given event. It is a means of ‘reading between the lines’ of what can be empirically observed as an attempt to grasp the inner machinations of a confusing world governed by immeasurably complex, byzantine institutions in such a way that renders a simplistic, easy to understand narrative which they believe will protect them against perceived threats. 

In this sense, conspiracism can be seen as categorically the result of both irrationality and feelings of powerlessness. It is the product of individuals whose social world is presented to them as opaque and impenetrable and yet is also their primary source of pain. They are lab mice stuck in a cruel behaviourist experiment that perpetually shocks them at random intervals, who have developed a conceptual schema to explain these random, disconnected events in a way that they believe may mitigate their suffering. In the case of QAnon and its adherents, this can be seen in how willing they are to connect the evil shadowy cabal supposedly fighting Donald Trump with perceived threats to their own personal ego aims. Liz Crokin, for instance, once claimed that a violent surfing accident she was involved in was caused by Hillary Clinton and her supporters using satanic rituals to hex her. The drive to ‘bake,’ or come up with grand conspiratorial connections as a means of explaining events, is then, broadly, ego preserving. It is an irrational method of ordering an equally irrational world in such a way that contextualizes the conspiracy theorist as an agent with power who has the ability to act against perceived threats in their world.

For most who are left of Donald Trump, this analysis of QAnon is perfectly acceptable. I have anecdotally come to realize this about the general public’s perception of QAnon from giving a streamlined version of this account to strangers, a conversation which is directly proportional in frequency to the number of times someone has asked me “what do you do for work?” Even fairly conspiratorially minded people are quite happy to disparage QAnon, a movement which has now been deemed ‘old news’ even by those who agree in substance with a majority of its claims. And yet while QAnon is dead, its ashes have been spread across the marketplace of ideas, and even those standing across the culture war divide have begun to think in startlingly ‘pilled’ terms. But why should we be surprised by this? Liberals and leftists live in the same ‘behaviourist experiment’ as QAnon adherents and are thus vulnerable to many of the same psychological techniques which satisfy the structurally produced neuroses present among those who were tricked by QAnon. Yet while this may not be particularly surprising, the rate at which QAnon-esque conspiracy theories have been deployed to satiate the neuroses of those on the liberal side of the culture divide is shocking. “Blueanon” is a term that I have generally been reticent to mobilize given that (1) it is most commonly used by right wing conspiracy theorists who are far more irrational than the phenomenon they are condemning and (2) out of fear that it may imply liberal conspiracy theories are equally irrational and violent as their right-wing equivalents. Yet while it seems clear that “BlueAnon” is in no way as dangerous as its Republican double, its similarities to the original have become too noticeable in recent months for me to not at the very least identify it as an object of concern. 

The most horrifying instance of “BlueAnon” I have observed has been from a collection of fairly influential ‘Biden dead-enders’ in the last few weeks of Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign, who responded to the influx of calls for Biden to step down by asserting that there was some broad conspiracy being put into action by the liberal media which was attempting to slander Biden as a means of helping Donald Trump’s presidential bid. Not only were these dead-enders conspiratorially minded, insofar as they explained the cause of events through reference to non-existent conspiracy theories, but they embraced a form of conspiratorial thought that bears a startling resemblance to that of QAnon. This group was unable to concieve of their own interests as diverging from that of Biden’s, even in an instance where a better Democratic Presidential candidate may have suited them. For this group, all threats against Biden’s interests were simultaneously threats against their own ego aims, and all of these percieved threats were a part of the same grand coalition working to ensure Donald Trump recieved another 4 years in the oval office. As I will elucidate in this newsletter, this general form of conspiratorial thought paired with identification towards a leader is startingly similar (in form at least) to what I have observed among QAnon adherents.

Making the Case for “BlueAnon”

It has been clear for more than a year that a majority of the American electorate (even a majority of registered democrats) believe that Joe Biden is too old to run for a second term. This is not an electoral newsletter (for a better account of how disastrous the Biden campaign was set to be, I recommend Ettingermentum.news), yet what is important to note here is that any rational agent who is concerned about a Trump presidency would want Biden gone from the dem ticket yesterday. This was the developing consensus among Democratic voters, donors, and politicians following Biden’s disastrous debate performance in late June. Members of his party began to publicly call for Biden to step aside following his refusal to budge privately, donors began to withdraw their money, and liberal journalistic institutions reported the growing discontent within the party. Nothing about this series of events requires the construction of a particularly grand ‘conspiracy theory.’ It is a collection of heterogeneous actors pursuing their own unique set of interests, which happen to align with putting increased pressure on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. Party elites wished to improve the standing of the Democratic party by replacing Biden with a more competent candidate, wealthy donors did not wish to invest their money into a race that they perceived to be already lost, and journalists wished to publish a story that generated the most clicks. 

One fairly large and zealous contingent of American Democrats did not perceive Biden’s final weeks in the 2024 presidential race in this way. According to them, the liberal media was supposedly responsible for ‘manufacturing’ a narrative surrounding Biden’s age and mental acuity because Trump becoming President would be better for business. As this theory developed, the individuals who subscribed to it became increasingly zealous in their attempts to expose this supposed conspiracy wherever it appeared. As all mainstream liberal American news organizations were in some way reporting on this story, or at the very least showing clips of Biden’s many verbal flubs, it required these individuals to expand their conspiracy to heights that one would not think possible given their previous longtime allegiance to these same institutions. One prominent Biden dead-ender made a post on X, which received 6 thousand likes, calling on their audience to “Cancel your New Yorker subscription. Cancel your Times subscription. Turn off Pod Save and cable news.” Many Biden dead-enders even went as far as imagaining that liberal news channels were manipulating audio of Biden speaking to make him sound senile. A user on X received twenty two thousand likes on a post which claimed that “Bidens mic was EQ’d to pick up as much low end and high end ambient noise as possible” in an ABC interview.

As calls for Biden to step down grew, so too did the scope of this conspiracy. While the theory was fundamentally undergirded by the idea that Biden was under attack by journalistic institutions who were chasing profits against the better interests of the nation, the narrative also now had to account for figures these individuals had previously worshiped, such as Barack Obama actively working towards ending Biden’s bid for reelection. Those who do not rely on conspiratorial thinking have a fairly easy way of explaining why prominent members of the Democratic party were publicly calling for Biden to step down. These individuals have an investment in the party succeeding and do not perceive Biden to be a viable candidate. Yet those who are drawn towards conspiratorial thinking wish to understand perceived threats to their ego aims in absolute terms. It cannot be that some actors are attacking Joe Biden, an individual these people identified as an absolute guarantor of their interests, for good and fair reasons. All threats must be unified, even in such a case where an argument must be made that Obama, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and a collection of Democratic Party Senators and House Representatives are all now in some form collaborating with Donald Trump. One prominent Biden dead-ender, who has 700 thousand followers on X, attempted to square this circle through the discovery of a talent agency that many people who were attacking Biden had connections with. On July 19, they said this on X, receiving nineteen thousand likes.

Something to keep in mind: Tom Strickland - the megadonor pulling dem donations from folks who back Biden - is a co-founder of the WME talent agency. Another co-founder is Ari Emanuel who repped Trump. They also do business with LIV golf tournament, Miss Universe, UFC/WWE (wrestling), Obama (Ari’s brother Rahm was his chief of staff), Elon Musk, and god knows how many media personalities are repped by WME. 

In other tweets, this user highlighted how “Pod Save America,” a prominent liberal podcast that had also called for Biden to stop running for reelection, was also represented by WME. This was supposedly their smoking gun, the nefarious actor who is underpinning the calls from within the Democratic party against Joe Biden, connected with the nefarious liberal media plot to get Trump elected for the sake of profit. When Democratic Party House Representative Zoe Lofgren publicly called for Biden to step aside, the previously mentioned user replied to their X post by saying 

Hey, @ZoeLofgren: did Strickland at WME threaten to withhold money from you if you didn’t come out publicly against Biden?

It is interesting to observe what happens to conspiratorially minded individuals when the grand irrational conspiracy theories they have constructed does not reflect the reality of a given situation (as tends to happen often). In this case, the theory that any attacks against Biden’s reelection campaign come from a conspiracy led by a nefarious Trump-aligned media is clashing with the fact that a supposed ‘good guy’ (a Democratic Party House Representative) has acted in a way that would logically connect them to this evil plot to do harm. It is interesting to see how, in this case, this individual has squared this circle in classic QAnon style by asserting that their intentions are still good and they are merely being manipualted to do evil from behind the scenes.

If one squints, this general mistrust of the media adheres to a standard left wing critique of journalist institutions being run as capitalist firms. Trump’s initial rise in 2015 was certainly aided by the fact that many news outlets boosted him because that got them the most views. Yet what makes this belief truly ‘conspiratorial’ is that it presupposes that concern surrounding Biden’s mental acuity began as a result of a grand conspiracy by shadowy institutions to manipulate the masses. In reality, Democratic voters have been concerned about Biden’s age for more than a year now, and his disastrous debate performance only made these concerns worse. The media was not publishing stories about his age to a reader base that was originally disinterested as some supposed grand plan to eventually produce a more profitable political situation by getting Trump re-elected. They were publishing stories about Biden’s age because their readership was already interested in them. The invention of some grand conspiracy in an instance where it is not required to explain events is, of course, the hallmark of irrational conspiratorial thinking. It is an attempt to remove any nuance to how the world works out of fear that doing so may lead one to miss some evil secret plan by nefarious forces attempting to do evil.

One point that Biden dead-enders repeated ad nauseam as evidence that narratives about his age were invented by the media was that this focus on him being the oldest Presidential candidate in American history was ‘unfair’ or ‘hypocritical.’ And to a certain extent these points were true. Yes, it was hypocritical of the media to focus on Biden’s age while not talking about Trump, a man who is only three years younger. Yes, there are far more ‘impactful’ issues that could be taking space on the front page of a newspaper than Biden’s mental acuity. But these biases in print are first and foremost a reflection of the opinions of a liberal reader base who has long been shaped to obsess over concerns like the mental acuity of their President, especially in a context where he is barely able to stumble through a minute long prepared speech without slurring his words. Americans conceive of the President as a colossus who is singularly responsible for protecting their empire against both foreign and domestic threats. Despite the American President holding far more direct influence than most heads of state in other republics, he almost appears like a figurehead in comparison to the imagined role he plays within governance in the American subconscious. It is no surprise that a liberal media that has been selling this image of the President has now encountered an active reader base whose primary concern is whether the senile 81-year-old will decide to run for a second term.

There is a reason why Biden dead-enders only began to sound like a dollar store version of Noam Chomsky as a result of a news cycle attacking Biden for his age and not, for instance, when the liberal media began carrying water for his support of the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This is because their conspiratorial mode of thinking involves anointing Joe Biden with the ability to protect their own percieved interests. As I stated before, conspiratorial thinking is first and foremost driven by one’s self preservation instinct. These Biden dead-enders perceived attacks against Biden as simultaneously attacks against themselves. In this sense, they partially share in a central psychological component of QAnon: identification towards a leader. QAnon adherents perceive Trump’s self interests as identical to their own and will pursue Trump’s ego aims as if they are merely aiding themselves. Yet seeing one’s interests in a certain political party succeeding over another does not necessarily imply the conspiratorial mode of thought that is the object of study in this newsletter. What connects these Biden dead-enders to QAnon adherents is the irrational identification of their self interests with a leader. For those within this online milieu, any threat to Biden was a threat to their own ego aims, even if this threat was attempting to replace Biden with a more viable presidential candidate, a decision which, as loyal Democrats, they should have actually embraced. This form of conspiratorial identification is unable to see the instances where one’s own ego aims diverge from that of the leader. It is thus the primary psychological mechanism which undergirds fascistic movements, as adherents become entirely unable to recognize instances where they are being manipulated by a demagogue whose interests have diverged from their own. As a prime example of this form of politician worship, one image macro shared by many Trump supporters displays an image of Donald Trump and reads, “In reality/they’re not after me/they’re after you/I’m just in the way.” This meme is, of course, nonsense, and Trump is an individual who has shown time and time again that he is only concerned about himself. This form of conspiratorial thinking does not allow threats to the leader to be heterogenous and disunified. These threats are not allowed to have nuance or be reasonable. They all must come from the same grand coalition that is not only after the leader but also the adherent. As an example of Biden dead-enders exhibiting this logic, one user on X received eight thousand likes by posting this on July 18:

I have never been more convinced that the “Biden should drop out” is a Russian propaganda op. The Internet Research Agency is up and running in full swing.

Ironically, if we were to actually think of Putin’s interests as concerns the 2024 American election, he would obviously wish for Biden to remain in the race. This was also the position of his American ally Trump, who has openly complained about not getting to run against Biden in November. Yet Biden dead-enders are unable to conceive of these sorts of nuances. The form of conspiratorial thinking that drove QAnon posits that any and all things which threaten one are unified. It thrives on a deep sense of dread concerning mysterious agents working in the shadows to ‘get one over’ on you. Identifying these agents and their machinations becomes its own way of providing one with some form of power to fight against them. Thus, if one has any hunch that a nefarious conspiracy may have caused a particular event, not considering this possibility would weaken oneself against these conspirators.

To conceive of Biden as an absolute guarantor of one’s ego aims, and thus any threats against him as threats against oneself, requires a psychological mechanism that Freud refers to as identification, which involves the internalization of the image of an individual into one’s own ego ideal. In the case of Biden dead-enders, it becomes clear that Biden can only represent some ‘ideal’ of what it means to be ‘presidential,’ even in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is incapable of doing so. Following a short, prepared presidential address on July 14 where Biden had multiple verbal flubs, one prominent Biden dead-ender on X received thirty thousand likes on a post which read

President Biden is the ONLY candidate running for office with the kind of compassion, character, and decency we have come to expect from American Presidents. His age is irrelevant. His stutter is irrelevant. His leadership and experience: RELEVANT. Excellent speech tonight, Mr. President.

Saying “battle box” when you mean “ballot box” becomes an ‘irrelevant stutter’ to the same group of liberals who subscribe to a ‘West Wing Sorkin’ style mythology that the President is a quick witted debater who has the intellectual capacity to outsmart his enemies and bring them to heel through reason alone. Such a mythology is, of course, nonsense and is a romanticization of a fact that humans have come to know all too well since the advent of the modern state: that when the statesman speaks his word is final. Many of those who hold an affectionate view towards ‘dictators’ wish to pretend that this fact concerning the state is not maintained through the use of sheer violence and that the American state functions through reasoned debate and collaboration, yet to conceive of Biden’s belligerent narcissism as representing this liberal democratic ideal betrays that for many it is merely a mask to hide their enamourment for power and the violence undergirding the statesman’s commands. On X, one Biden dead-ender received thirty five thousand likes on a post which read 

He outmaneuvered the GOP during the state of the union…twice.

He outmaneuvered Kevin McCarthy into preventing the government shutdown.

He outmaneuvered Mike Johnson into funding our allies.

He’s outmaneuvering the pundits right now.

When you underestimate Joe Biden, you play right into his hands.

Those who are this attached to Biden have become convinced he is the primary force within politics looking after their own interests. It is, therefore, unacceptable for them to believe he is an incompetent narcissist who is mainly being propelled forward by the momentum of both state and party bureaucracy.

Yet while it seems clear to me that many components of BlueAnon mirror its far-right sibling, it is admittedly a far weaker form of conspiratorial ideation. There have, so far, been no Biden dead-enders who have went on wild police chases because they believe everyone around them is secretly an agent of an evil conspiracy (as is the case with QAnon adherents like Alpalus Slyman). Their identification towards Biden is far weaker than that of many Trump supporters, and as soon as Biden was successfully pushed off the 2024 ticket, a vast majority of them immediately abandoned their support for him and moved on to posting about the new presumptive Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris. Many of the threats that Biden dead-enders incorrectly assumed Biden would protect them from were also far more ‘rational’ concerns than threats QAnon adherents obsess over. There is good reason to be worried about a second Trump term, for instance. Yet this does not necessarily mean that the comparison is not worth considering. 

What most interests me in this comparison is elucidating the degree to which psychological techniques utilized by QAnon have ‘infected’ public discourse more broadly. As the ‘temperature is turned up’ within American public discourse, most have come to an understanding that their rational ego aims are increasingly under threat by something, yet the irrational character of public discourse has prevented anyone from agreeing what this ‘something’ is outside of reference to cultural signifiers which accompany one of two sides of the culture war. While the similarity in structure between QAnon and some recent liberal conspiracy theories could be a product of this form of thinking growing independently of direct influence by QAnon, in some sort of conspiracy carcinization process, I am half convinced that many liberals have subconsciously copied QAnon even if they consciously hold negative opinions about it. It appears that QAnon has become a memetic cognitohazard even amongst many of its ideological opponents whose obsession with the theory for the sake of condemning it has led to them embracing its structure as a conceptual schema for interpreting events.

One reason I have this hunch is from observing the behaviour of certain liberal conspiracy theorists who have previously marketed themselves as ‘QAnon debunkers,’ specifically with reference to how similar their conspiracy theories are to QAnon in structure. The most absurd example I can find of this comes from a fairly prominent ‘anti-QAnon researcher’ who has embraced the sort of conspiratorial thinking surrounding Biden I have talked about in this newsletter. They wrote this, for example, about attacks against Biden by the media,

It is nothing short of a soft coup against the President. It’s being aided and abetted by a bunch of elite, nervous white men who get air time by going along with this psyop… It’s a psyop being promoted by the corporate media to attack the Democrat, because they profit from a “horse race.” Gullible and opportunistic white men have decided to pile on because they don’t think the outcome will affect them.

Yet this position is far from their most absurd ‘bake.’ They also subscribe to the theory that Donald Trump’s assassination attempt was faked and that the shooter was inspired by, or connected with, Michael Flynn, who had supposedly been planning an assassination attempt against Trump as a means of ending American democracy. They write,

What if this killer thought Trump’s murder would create “the best case scenario” and spark a violent revolution as laid out in detail by Flynn’s network for many months? How are al-Qaeda and ISIS, who rely on individuals and cells to be “inspired” by their propaganda and carry out terrorist acts for them autonomously any different than what Flynn’s network has been doing?

I have no idea if Thomas Crooks listened to Ivan Raiklin tell Alex Jones that “if you assassinate Trump… America will respond in kind” but if he did and wanted to go out a “hero,” how is he different from an ISIS suicide bomber, or the 9/11 terrorists, but inspired by American ISIS instead? How is Mike Flynn, who has been consistently driving this message, different from Osama bin Laden?

This person’s conspiracy theories reek of a bizarre inverted QAnon, even copying the theory’s form through the continual usage of rhetorical questions as a means to soften the fact that the connections they are drawing are completely absurd. While theories about Trump’s assassination attempt are fairly prominent among liberals, I find that they are usually shut down pretty quickly after someone is informed that Trump’s shooter was killed by police. Yet this person has such an irrational desire to connect any perceived threats in their world to a grand conspiracy that they are willing to suggest that the shooter was well aware of the fact he would be killed and sacrificed himself for the movement as a means of bolstering the American right. By comparing this supposed self sacrifice to suicide bombings committed by Muslim fundamentalists, they have also connected another web of nefarious actors to the grand conspiracy threatening their ego aims.

Another indication that QAnon has been almost directly absorbed by many across the culture war divide is liberal’s newfound obsession with “white hats,” or individuals who appear to be working with the enemy but are, in fact, working with ‘us.’ As a recent example of liberal usage of this trope, some Biden Dead-enders appear to believe that JD Vance is secretly plotting against Donald Trump. One X user received 6 thousand likes on a post which read,

Let’s just say @JDVance1 is going to be reading up on the 25th Amendment.

A vast majority of conspiracy theories are ‘negative’ in purpose, meaning they are concerned with a supposed conspiracy that threatens one’s self-interests. Yet QAnon, with its obsession with ‘white hats,’ has helped popularize the ‘positive’ conspiracy theory within political discourse, which posits that there is a secretive coalition of ‘good guys’ fighting for one’s interests. The ‘positive’ conspiracy theory is a particularly irrational expression of feelings of powerlessness, where neuroses derived from perceived threats one has no ability to defeat are satiated through the absurd assertion that there may be some secret shadowy organization that is actually looking out for one’s interests, even in a context where a right wing demagogue with the legal status of a king has assumed the most powerful political office on the planet. 

This concern is far more sympathetic than many of the underlying anxieties that drive QAnon adherents. I am also quite worried about how much death and suffering Donald Trump may be able to inflict with another four years in office. Yet to those who, for this very reason, come away from this newsletter with a sour taste in their mouth because I have invoked the term “BlueAnon” and dared to compare these people to fanatical adherents of a fascistic movement: I do not particularly care. I believe that this form of conspiratorial thought mobilized in direct support of a President who is currently overseeing the mass indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civilians does not deserve to be treated with kid gloves. Even speaking merely in utilitarian terms, this instance of irrational conspiratorial thinking mobilized tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of ‘digital soldiers’ towards a cause that, if succeeded, would have emboldened the fascist American right by weakening the Democratic Party’s chances of winning the 2024 American election. This is the problem with conspiratorial thought; it is irrational. It lacks a rational character that is able to understand the actual consequences of world events and their underlying causes, and it also, therefore, lacks a moral character that is able to understand politics without direct appeal to one’s own self-preservation instincts. This makes me a supposed ‘ally’ to these people in the international ‘culture war’ only in virtue of the fact that they are currently blind firing towards a perceived threat where I happen to not be directly in the way.