A somber four-year anniversary: Q-Anon in the rearview mirror

June 11, 2025.

On June 11, 2021, at 10 pm (yes, really), I finally walked away from a job that was killing me. I could not sleep. My gut persecuted me 24/7. Far too often I felt depressed, anxious. I gained weight if I looked at food. Even kale could make me gain weight. It wasn’t the food, it was my body’s reaction to the levels of stress our bodies are not built to withstand.

Gaslighting and verbal abuse were nonstop. At 6 am. 10 pm. In the middle of lunch. When I was on the road. As were the texts and phone calls and Team chats and — far too many of you know what I am talking about.

I’ll never forget, sitting in a meeting with a supplier that accounted for 80% of our Cost of Goods Sold. I was negotiating the price of a particular substrate with top-level sales reps. Boss called me on Teams video. I ignored; there were four men squeezed into my tiny office. He texted. I ignored; there were four men squeezed into my tiny office. He called my cell phone. I ignored; there were four men squeezed into my tiny office. Keep in mind, this meeting had been on the calendar for weeks and he knew its impact on our bottom line.

Text: If you don’t pick up, you’re fired. I picked up. Put me on speaker phone. And he proceeded to denigrate me in front of these four men who were deciding what the price of “our” substrate would be. I was humiliated. And I was the CFO — the only female CFO in the twenty-year history of this $40 million company.

Afterwards, our sales rep told me (in front of the other three men): Don’t worry. It didn’t make you look bad, only him. Still, no one should have to live that way.

So on 10 pm, June 11, 2021, when that most-toxic workplace was finally behind me, my mind and body crashed. It’s therefore appropriate that the pending anniversary has worried my mind and body a bit the last two weeks.

Not so much the memories of the toxic boss. But the political news that pounds in my ears, same as it did when I worked for that toxic boss.

He had not always been that bad. Bad, yes. But although his political viewpoint was strident when he hired me — he hated Barack Obama with a passion — he could formulate his thoughts and ideas somewhat coherently.

He’s the only libertarian I’ve known who understands the consequences of that political ideology and accepts those consequences. Streets and roads? Developer should be responsible to build. Electric, gas, utilities? Developer or business should bear the cost of connecting to the network. Pollution, oil spills, potholes? Should be settled by civil lawsuit or criminal if conscious offense. Abortion, gay rights? Government has no business meddling. Natural disasters? Up to the states or municipalities to raise the taxes to take care of citizens, or citizens to have proper insurance, or rainy day funds.

In other words, I could completely disagree with him, but at least his politics were logical, rational. In my view, impractical, because we humans are social and need community. And government is simply us. But I could follow his arguments. Our disagreements did not cause a rupture, either personally or regarding business.

In the run-up to the election in 2016, he was perplexed. He hated Hillary Clinton more than he hated Barack Obama. Yet he also thought Donald Trump was off his rocker. If Trump is elected, there will be nothing but chaos and disaster. He voted for the libertarian candidate.

I wish I could pinpoint the date. Sometime in 2017 or 2018, he changed. He’d always been an avid consumer of social media, but at some point he signed up for Parler, almost as soon as it debuted. Business meetings centered on the most recent conspiracy theories posted on that radically far-right site.

I also wish I could pinpoint the date that the irrational political babble became fully infused with 4chan and Q-Anon. By April 2019, he was full-on Q-conspiracy theorist. I cannot forget that date, because we celebrated a legal win with our attorneys at a fancy Vegas restaurant. I’d "lucked" into the seat across from him.

Almost as soon as I sat down, he started into his harangue about the latest Q-conspiracy. I asked him if we could please not talk politics for one night. His wife seconded my comment, as did a few others at table.

Instead of focusing on the success of the day’s events, he doubled down on the latest Q-conspiracy. I repeated my request. And that unleashed the loudest, most painful screaming match ever directed at me personally. Full of venom, personal attacks, more gaslighting, hate, and condescension. And not one person at the table defended me. They were all too scared of him.

I got up and left, crying as soon as I was outside. One person followed me, but for some reason kept defending him, “Oh, you know how he is.” That’s a defense?

As bad as that night was, it worsened quickly and drastically.

For me, 2020 was a year straight from the maws of hell. And not just because of Covid, although that didn’t help matters any. The closer the election got, the wilder and more out-of-control he became. Business meetings ostensibly to discuss SEO results, or acquisition of a new facility, or an accounting hire, turned into an absurdity that even Lewis Carroll couldn’t have imagined.

We were interviewing one specific woman for a senior accountant role. He monopolized the entire 45-minute Teams interview with his Q-rants. Which she agreed with! Life became impossible after he insisted I hire her, despite her lack of qualifications.

As bad as the runup to the election was, after Joe Biden won, the nightmare devolved into a full-fledged frenzy. I don’t think he slept much from November 4, 2020 to March 31, 2021. (I certainly could not sleep during those months.) His Q-rants, coupled with insomnia-induced obsessions, destroyed all semblance of normalcy in the business. We would be reviewing cost calculations for a specific product, when he would whip out his iPhone and start reading aloud from a Parler post he had bookmarked.

The reason I have bored you with this background is as follows:

Trump’s desire to declare martial law apparently dates back to November 2020 and was openly discussed on Parler.

By December 6, 2020, Parler members were allegedly (per that boss) wrapped up in an ongoing conspiracy to replace Trump’s existing military brass with hand-picked men. According to what he read aloud from Parler, Trump was moving these men into the White House, so they would be able to proceed the moment a triggering act occurred. And according to Parler people including my boss, January 6, 2021 was to be that triggering act. And my boss had planned to be there (he did not go at the last minute, because apparently a major vendor offered him a weekend in Miami).

When Vice President Mike Pence essentially foiled that plan, the notion of declaring martial law did not die with the casting of electoral college votes on January 6, 2021. Instead, they turned their attention first to inauguration day, then to the old traditional day in March which they insisted was the legal and constitutional date for a presidency to begin. Q-plans seemed never to have stopped pushing the idea that the military would support Trump once he declared martial law.

I feared that we would lose all such documentation once Amazon Web Services pulled the plug on Parler. A Twitter user with the handle “@donk_enby” was able to exploit a vulnerability in Parler’s setup. She scraped and archived approximately 413 million “items” (posts) and 57TB of data. Including J6 videos. Including all those plans for martial law.

My computer struggles to search 1TB of data on my external hard drive, so I know that I don’t possess the technology necessary to properly search her database. I also don’t have a Github subscription. If you do — apparently the Parler data is hosted here. Or here. Or here. See the problem? I have no idea if any of those three Github spaces truly hosts Parler posts.

ProPublica researched that Parler download for videos of J6 uploaded from the Capitol on that day. But I have not been able to find a comprehensive, easily accessible way to access all 413,000,000 posts up to and including January 6, 2021.

If anyone reading this is a tech whiz, and has a little time on your hands, and a love of country, consider finding the complete database and searching for martial law. Or plans to install Trump despite the failure of J6. And military personnel, congressional representatives, and senators, and their aides and staffs, who participated in that planning.

That would give us a running head start on whatever plans the current executive branch and their minions have in the works. They’re not particularly original, this current crew of Trump’s. They’d be building on what was conceived in 2020.

If you also know of a simpler way to access donk_enby’s archive, please yell!

Meanwhile, I am happy to be away from that place, even though current events remind me of the horror far too often.

We all deserve peace. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Without fear.

Comment worth keeping

Congratulations on what seems a truly hellish situation.

I had one toxic boss, but he was much more subtle than yours was. This man was, in many ways, extremely intelligent. He has received awards from the Association for Computing Machinery and other institutions for some very really contributions he's made in both hardware and software design. But there is something really 'off' about the guy; he really seemed to delight in wrecking people's lives. My experiences with him go back several decades, so the trauma has long-since worn off. In fact I got some benefit from the whole ordeal, as he became the model for the villain in my first novel, and lots of people loved him. That is, they loved the character I created who was inspired by him, because that character was so smart, devious and slimy — the kind of villain you love to hate. According to his wikipedia page that long-ago boss is still with us, but if he shuffles off this mortal coil before I do I'll name him publicly.

Alas, if only such people could be confined to works of fiction! As you note, they're all around us these days, in positions of great authority and power. Thanks for your work to call attention to them.

--John Sundman, writer and computer scientist, June 12, 2025.

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Image credits: Top photo--Shopify, public domain for platform users. Bottom photograph--Outside during the US Capitol during the January 6, 2021 attack on the building. Photograph by Tyler Merbler from USA. This image, originally posted to Flickr, was reviewed on 22 February 2021 by the administrator or reviewer Leoboudv, who confirmed that it was available on Flickr under the stated license on that date. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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