Paul is Dead: On Conspiracy Theories, Part 2
Paul is dead.
As in Paul McCartney.
As in the Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
He died in 1966 and was replaced by an exact replica to continue the Beatles’ dominance of rock and roll.
Of course he wasn’t dead. He didn’t die in 1966. He went on to record music, write songs, form his own band, play solo, perform at the Olympics and do car karaoke with James Corden.
But ask a wide swath of people in 1969 if Paul McCartney was actually dead and they would be absolutely certain he was.
Why were they so certain?
Clues. They were everywhere.
Let’s start with the odd-sounding “Revolution 9” on the Beatles’ White album. The man credited with jump-starting the “Paul is dead” theory told a Cincinnati radio station in 1969 that if you played the song backwards you could hear the phrase “Turn me on dead man.”
This, of course, had to be a reference to Paul McCartney, and the Beatles were trying to clue their most passionate fans into the sad news through cryptic clues. It’s obvious to anyone that the last people the Beatles would want to inform about this band-killing piece of news would be the group’s most ardent fans, but this calls for the suspension of common sense, so let’s just go with it.
I Want to Believe
There were many, many more clues:
- On the sleeve of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album cover, a mysterious hand is being held over Paul’s head. If you begin looking for reasons to think Paul is dead, all of a sudden the hand is there to symbolize an ancient death symbol of the Greeks or American Indians.
- At the foot of the Beatles on the same album cover appears to be a “grave” with a left-handed guitar on top. Do the flowers spell Paul? (They do not). It is a Lonely Hearts Club Band after all.
- On the back of the Sgt. Pepper album cover is a picture of the band. Three of the Beatles are facing frontward and Paul is facing backward. Song lyrics are superimposed over the photo and just above George Harrison’s thumb is the phrase “Wednesday morning at 5 o’clock, which became Paul’s supposed time of death.
- Paul is also pictured in another album art piece wearing a black armband with the letters O.P.D. Obviously that meant “Officially Pronounced Dead”. It actually meant Ontario Provincial Police and there are plenty of them out there just like that one.
- Want one more? At the end of Strawberry Fields Forever, John Lennon wails “I buried Paul” when actually he says “Cranberry sauce.”
More than once during this whole “Paul is dead” craze, McCartney issued public statements stating, of course, that he was in fact alive and not dead. This just fueled the conspiracy even more. Obviously, this man claiming to be Paul McCartney is an impostor.
It just kept building.
The license plate of the Volkswagen Beetle on the cover of Abbey Road says “28IF” which was taken to mean Paul would have been 28 IF he had survived.
So despite the shallow, shaky “clues” and the ridiculousness of it all, many people believed the theory fervently. And who knows, maybe many still do.
McCartney was asked about this many times. In 1993 during an interview, he was asked why so many people believed he was dead.
“People have taken too many drugs and started looking for answers in all the wrong places,” he said.
Fewer people believe Paul is dead today, but conspiracy theories are alive and well, and I’m not sure about the drugs, but a lot of people are looking for answers in all of the wrong places.
A Trumped Up Conspiracy
On January 6, 2021, at least a few hundred people stormed the Capitol building. Not all of them were conspiracy theorists, but many were and there were many more backing them who did not trespass themselves onto federal property.
The conspiracy theory was not that the election was stolen. The election may or may not have been stolen. I don’t think most of what is known points in that direction but no one was omni-present in every precinct. The conspiracy theory way too many hold is that 13 demonic families control the world and that “God and the good guys” co-opted a rich real estate mogul to become president and run the families and their minions out of town.
Please, do not be uninformed. Donald Trump did not stumble into the Presidency. He didn’t just win because he happened to be any other person than Hillary Clinton. His Presidency was meant to be. He was an instrument of God sent to save the world from the Luciferians and he was destined to succeed.
His “drain the swamp” mantra wasn’t about the lobbyist-controlled backroom deals in Washington. When Trump said drain the swamp, he meant it in a supernatural context.
The good news is he wanted all of us to know that, but he couldn’t tell us without, I suppose, tipping off the bad guys. So he planted someone by his side, someone whose identity would never be revealed but someone who would clue the Trump army into what was really happening so we could follow the supernatural victory, blow by blow.
All Eyes on Q
His (or her) name appeared on an Internet message board as simply “Q” for the first time in October of 2017 (scroll to Page 23) announcing that Hillary Clinton would be arrested for sex trafficking and was being extradited to the United States. His date and time for this event were very detailed.
“Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the U.S. to occur. U.S. (Marines) will conduct the operation while the National Guard is activated,” the drop stated.
Q went on to post more than 4,000 times and created a following of who knows how many, glued to the next drop. People devoted their lives to connecting the dots between drops. This map is a great insight into the mind of a follower.
Keep in mind that the first Q drop was spectacularly wrong. It was so wrong that it is hard to imagine how a single person would pay a moment’s attention to anything else posted by this person. Of course a garbled backwards song lyric helped launch the McCartney theory so I suppose anything is fair game.
When Q was super wrong, he simply indicated that either (A) It really did happen, it’s just being kept secret or (B) Sometimes you have to throw out a little misinformation to keep the bad guys off your trail.
Q suggested that he identified as the single letter on the message board because he had special “Q” clearance that allowed him to be privy to Top Secret information.
He probably should have known that what he suggested in his very first drop is not how this works. It’s not how any of this works. It is a terribly bad understanding of basic Constitutional law. But that didn’t stop a sizeable number of people buying into every drop. I believe in part this was because the hatred of Hillary Clinton was so strong in the country that they wanted to believe she would come to a bad ending. They also wanted someone to blame for all the bad stuff going on in the world. And Hillary Clinton made it very, very easy to be someone to be blamed.
Tip of the Iceberg
But this was just the beginning. It wasn’t just Hillary. It was basically every elected Democrat official, both federal and state. All of them, combined with most of Hollywood, were part of a Satanic pedophile ring that had resulted in the kidnap and exploitation (or murder) of thousands of children. Trump was tapped as President to end that.
This was a spinoff, or continuation of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
In fact, all those flubs, misstatements, bad grammar and even misspellings in his rapid-fire tweets? Well, that was all part of Trump’s “code” for the good guys to know he was actually in control.
I’m not making this up.
Many of the Q drops, like the first one, signaled imminent victory. Mass arrests coming soon. Some drops hinted that the arrests had actually already happened and many prominent Democrats were tried by secret tribunals at Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba and summarily executed on the spot. Some were replaced by look-alikes so, again, the bad guys would not be tipped off. Fortunately, the families of these executed Democrats were apparently talked into playing along.
Over, and over, and over again, the mysterious “Q” would promise victory on the horizon. He urged his followers to trust those men that Trump brought along with him in the early part of his administration, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
When Sessions declined to block the DOJ’s investigation of Trump-Russia collusion, Q told his followers to continue to trust Sessions and many surmised that the Trump-Russia probe was actually encouraged by Trump to distract the media while Trump and Sessions did the real work of bringing about the supernatural victory, right under the nose of everyone. Brilliance at work.
When Sessions left the AG position, followers were led to believe it was “all part of the plan” so that Sessions could do the real work he was brought in to do.
Others Q said to trust fell by the wayside. When they did, it became “all part of the plan.”
Covid? All part of the plan. Those pop-up Covid hospitals in New York City’s Central Park and other places? They were actually military operations designed to rescue the sex-trafficked children from the Satanic Democrat pedophiles, who had been keeping them in underground abandoned sewer pipes in New York City.
A Change of Plans
When none of this proved to have any substance, the narrative turned. Trump had most of what he needed to have in place, but he would actually need four more years to carry it all out. After all, the Satanists had been in control for a long time.
Remember, this isn’t something people were hoping would happen. People believed this was destined to happen.
The difference between something hoped and something believed to be destined is a very important distinction here.
So imagine this going on for three years, with drop after drop promising “The Storm Is Upon Us” while followers could actually see no visible sign.
Just trust, they were told. Trust, trust, trust.
For many of them, this made the election a matter of life and death. They called themselves Trump’s digital warriors, and they were many. Just how many is hard to say. Tens of thousands at least and maybe more. While not everyone bought in to every single conspiracy claim, polls indicate that a whole swath of people bought in to at least part of it.
So when polls indicated that Trump trailed weak Democratic opponent Joe Biden in the upcoming election, a lot of people decided they just couldn’t sit back and do nothing. They may have believed Trump’s draining of the swamp was destiny, but sometimes you just have to push destiny over the finish line.
Trump lost on election night, but that didn’t mean a lot to the Q followers because they were led to believe Mike Pence could overturn the results and reinstate Trump. Of course he couldn’t, at all, and any elementary knowledge of the Constitution would suffice. And, on top of it, what real patriot would support a Constitution that allowed a sitting vice president to overturn an election by what amounted to a simple decree?
But Trump stirred his followers and led them to believe Pence could – and maybe even would – come through.
So when Congress convened on January 6th to certify the election results, a small but very passionate group of people had already decided they couldn’t let that happen. They communicated with each other through some of the more obscure social media apps and came ready to, at the very least, create chaos.
They were looking for the slightest green light from the president. And although there is no way that Trump’s words on that day could legally be considered riot-inciting, his frothing followers only needed to hear “fight like hell” and “show strength”. That’s it. That’s all they needed.
And with that, they marched to the Capitol.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that not everyone present on January 6th were conspiracy theorists. Not everyone was intent on trying to stop the certification. Many were simply there because they didn’t like the direction of the country and I certainly understand. Lots of people were there for lots of different reasons. Only a few decided to push in to the Capitol.
Those few did, however, march to the Capitol with the intention of trying to stop the certification. A few put their hands on cops. A smaller number pummeled police with an American flag and pole. And a handful more walked on through after the barriers had been breached and sauntered into the U.S. Capitol Building.
It is also worth noting that almost none of the bystanders came to the aid of the police who were being beaten, nor did they converge on the man using the American flag to beat the police. All of a sudden “Back the Blue” and “I stand for the Flag” rang pretty hollow.
Some chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Based on their pre-riot rhetoric, those weren’t empty words.
I don’t consider myself a conspiracy theorist and it’s not because I don’t believe that some conspiracies exist. It is because conspiracy theorists never focus on their own shortcomings and ways to improve themselves. Everything is always someone else’s fault. I have my hands full with myself way too much to hop down a rabbit hole of conspiracy.
They hate the mainstream media for cherry picking tidbits that support one way of seeing things while ignoring alternative views. But that’s exactly what conspiracy theorists do.
The Point
Fortunately, the silly “Paul is Dead” theory harmed no one, as far as we know. Q, on the other hand, broke up families and friends.
Both were equally absurd.
My point? When you start with a thing to believe such as “Paul McCartney is actually dead” and then you look back at weird album covers and odd song lyrics with the theory already in mind, everything magically looks like a huge affirmation of the theory.
What we need to do instead is begin at home teaching our children critical thinking. It has never been more important since it is very difficult to wade through news today and find things trustworthy.
If we don’t do that now, what’s next? People will be storming the Capitol again and looking for people to hang, only the crowd will be much, much larger next time and selfies at Nancy Pelosi’s desk just won’t suffice.
Read Part 1 on conspiracy theories