Welcome to the QAnon Ranch
January 4, 2021
by Mark Koprowski
There was once a time when James Gilliland’s “As You Wish Radio Show” was a relatively benign, apolitical program, dealing mainly with New Age spirituality, ascension, healing, alternative medicine, the paranormal, free energy, and of course extraterrestrial contact. Every week, I would listen to the podcast with interest and curiosity. I bought all of James’ books and enjoyed his biographical documentary film, “Contact Has Begun.” I was on his mailing list. I even visited the ECETI Ranch at Mt Adams, Washington, in the summer of 2015, coming all the way from Japan, where I experienced unforgettable first-hand contact, and met James in person, who I found to be surprisingly approachable, soft-spoken and affable. As I had expected, he was a lovely and kind soul. I considered him a mentor, authority and luminary of the contact/disclosure community. (And despite some questionable photography, the ECETI Ranch is the real deal. Gilliland has often stated that the ranch is where skeptics go to die, and he’s totally right on that point.)
James Gilliland is an author, conference speaker, weekly radio show host, and spiritual influencer, with a YouTube channel reaching 41,000 subscribers. He’s been on the scene for decades. Yet, with the unexpected and sensational rise of Donald Trump, and particularly following the birth of QAnon, Gilliland seems to have fallen deeper down the rabbit hole, opting to expand his repertoire of topics to embrace right-wing conspiracies, à la David Icke and Alex Jones, taking up the fight against the New World Order and the globalist agenda. His base intentions appear to be sincere — reveal the hidden truth/Red Pill reality (or what Gilliland “thinks” is the truth). Nothing is as it seems, dark forces lurk around every corner, and most folks are mindless “sheep.” As a matter of course, “official” explanations and authorities are never to be trusted nor is the establishment in general: Big Media, Big Tech, Big Pharma, government institutions (aka Deep State), the medical and scientific community, and our electoral system. Favored targets include Black Lives Matter, Antifa, George Soros, China, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, and “radical” democrats, all assumed to be malevolent actors, pushing America, wittingly or not, toward its downfall or enslavement.
Gilliland’s conservative ideas in themselves are not as concerning as the dangerous and conspiratorial claims that he regularly promotes and injects into the public sphere. These ideas tend to be heavily biased, stemming from mainly right-wing propaganda sources. Every weekly radio show begins with a numbing blizzard of misinformation, serving to confirm a conspiratorial bias or nefarious suspicion. It’s hard to keep up. Yet, his claims are rarely presented in a careful and responsible light. Any tantalizing information or speculation, so long as it didn’t originate from the “lame stream news,” is assigned value and therefore worth parroting. Yet, no basic scrutiny or cursory fact-checking is attempted to assess accuracy. If it’s claimed that Joe Biden wore an earpiece during the first debate, well, he did. If Fauci and Gates were once roommates in college, they were. If Chief Justice John Roberts was on Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile island, he was. If masks are useless and even harmful, well, they totally are. And if Covid-19 is just the flu, it is.
Guests tend to come pre-packaged with a similar conspiratorial outlook, guaranteeing no opportunity for argument or contrary points of view. Perhaps most disturbing is that Gilliland has leveraged his alleged contact with higher-dimensional beings as a means to lend supernatural credence to his extreme views.
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Although Gilliland has claimed to be neither a Democrat or Republican — implying political impartiality — he refers to Hillary Clinton as “Killary,” declares that Adam Schiff “is the personification of evil,” and warns that “We have to get rid of the deep state… Biden IS the Deep State,” and that the Left plans to incite anarchy, take down America, leading to socialism, tyranny and genocide. Considering his image as a spiritual teacher exhorting us to stand in “love, light, and bliss,” these darkly extreme and paranoid projections represent a disturbing disconnect.
In a recent broadcast, Gilliland advises, without irony, “There is so much disinformation and misinformation out there, you might as well unplug your TV and throw it out in the snow basically… forget about the mainstream news, the “fake-checkers”… [he recommends some FOX News political commentators]… You know, it’s better to just stick with Sidney Powell and Lin Wood and General Flynn… they seem to be right on top of things.”
Rising stars in the QAnon community, Powell, Wood and Flynn are MAGA fanatics imploring Trump to pull out all the stops to overturn the election results. Former-convicted felon General Flynn suggests imposing martial law to re-run the elections in States where Trump lost. Release-the-Kraken-attorney Powell thinks local voting machines should be seized and has accused political foes of being Chinese spies. Moreover, taking a frightening page out of the McCarthy playbook, she is publicly soliciting names of people that may have “Communist China” connections. Lin Wood has stated that “Biden is evil” and advocates military arrests for treason. He brands journalists and politicians as “communists,” and demands that Chief Justice Roberts resign, publicly alluding that he’s corrupt and has a pedophilic relationship with his adopted children. And recently, he claimed that Jeffrey Epstein is alive. The divisive rhetoric is clear: if you support Trump, well, you’re a patriot; and if you don’t, well, you’re a traitor… or a Commie… or a pedophile… take your pick. So, think of this provocative trio as you will, but this is the cast of characters James Gilliland is urging his audience to get behind.
There is also an undeniable streak of patriotic fervor and American exceptionalism in Gilliland’s world view. In his 2021 annual New Year message, Gilliland writes, “[America] is more aligned with Universal Law than any other country.” And in a recent radio broadcast, he asserts, “America is the last vestige of freedom.” Any listener from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland, or other democratic nation might bristle at this notion.
It’s not my intention to defame or “cancel” Mr. Gilliland or dismiss his numerous positive contributions. There are many like him who understandably feel oppressed or disillusioned with the current establishment, its inability to deal with global problems or threats, like the pandemic, and the enactment of policies that reflect an uncomfortable shift in the cultural landscape. As they struggle for answers, some find comfort, power, meaning, and a sense of community within the rising “conspirituality” movement. QAnon’s emergence in 2017 has exploded this trend on an epic and frightening scale. This is not to say that real conspiracy theories do not exist; some are indeed valid and are worth investigating. Yet, incoherent theories, designed to propagate a political agenda, “confirm” a biased narrative, or muddy the waters tend to reinforce an irrational and untenable distrust in government institutions and media. More pertinent, it threatens to damage the spiritual/contact/disclosure field, which already suffers from a serious credibility issue and risks pushing it further into the conspiratorial fringe. Consequently, real progress and valid discoveries may be potentially undermined, confirming what many people have long suspected — that all of this, including the ET reality, is nonsense.
I don’t think Gilliland is out to deliberately deceive people per se. He’s not a grifter or a fraud. His integrity here is not in question. (I cannot say the same about a number of other cosmic cons in this field). Gilliland never seems to solicit donations. He genuinely appears to believe (or prefers to believe) the things he says, and that’s a huge problem. Gilliland suffers from a pathological unwillingness to verify the accuracy of information he routinely circulates. And some of these claims can pose a real threat to public health or safety. Sadly, it reveals in him a bewildering and tragic lack of media literacy and rudimentary skepticism.
Moving forward, we need to resist adopting outlandish theories and claims without careful analysis, apply tools of logic and reason, question and examine dubious sources, and challenge those that publicly spread misinformation. Above all, perhaps it’s time we stop over-dosing on the Red Pills.
