Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the man the media has dubbed the QAnon Shaman, had been released from federal custody six weeks before when we met for lunch at a place called Picazzo’s, winner of the Phoenix New Times Best Gluten-Free Restaurant award in 2015. Despite a protracted hunger strike and 317 days isolated in a cell, Jacob’s prison sentence of forty-one months for obstruction of an official proceeding on January 6, 2021, had been shortened owing to good behavior, and he was let out about a year early on supervised release.
It took some doing to get him to sit for an interview, as Jacob is wary of what he calls Operation Mockingbird, an alleged CIA-sponsored effort begun in the Fifties to use mass media to influence public opinion. Jacob believes that people like me are the tools of the Mockingbird operation, of the deep state, international bankers, pharmaceutical cartels, and corporate monarchies that control the world. People like me believe in medicines that are addictive drugs, in food that is poison, in environmentalism that is ecocide, in education that is ignorance, in money that is debt, in objective science that is not objective. “People are brainwashed by the elites and their propaganda networks,” he said. “Mass hypnosis, bro.”
He had agreed to meet with me on a number of conditions, including:
2. That I call attention to the existence of a clean, free, wireless, and renewable energy source powered by the earth’s magnetic field that was discovered by Nikola Tesla but suppressed by the government because such a technology would make the existing energy grid obsolete, and thus threaten the rule of the globalists and their corporate monopolies.
Jacob believes he has been sent to earth to combat wicked forces such as Warner Bros. and MGM. He believes in the clear and present danger of a global ring of slave-trading, adrenochrome-swigging Clintonistas. He would also like to lift the ban on psilocybin mushrooms. And he’s been doing the work for a long time—for “millennia,” he told me. “I have reincarnated on this planet numerous times throughout the ages.”
Jacob is as apt to paraphrase Shirley MacLaine as WikiLeaks Vault 7 or Alex Jones, which is why I had reached out to him. He is Exhibit A of the widely reported observation that MAGA, QAnon, and the broader conspiratorial mishmash draw substantial support from the consciousness-raising, om-chanting, sound-healing, joint-toking, crystal- and chart-reading crowd, the long-haired hippies who half a century ago were lumped together with the fellow travelers of the left, but have been reincarnated two generations later as pivotal elements of the Trump coalition. Jacob and his cosmic vibrations epitomize that political reversal. Perhaps, I thought, there was something in his belief system that could explain how the self-evident truths that guided the foundation of American democracy had lost their way in the wilderness.
I figured the tattoos would be a good place to start. As he was perusing Picazzo’s menu, I mentioned the marks on the backs of his hands. They were planets, pyramids, and runes, he said—the alphabets native to early Germanic and Norse peoples. The massive dark blots on his shoulder took six and a half hours. “My reality—what I thought was reality—was ripping at the seams right in front of my closed eyelids,” he said, recalling the ordeal. “I was seeing the quantum particles.”
He was also tripping on mushrooms. (...)
His biological father spent most of Jacob’s youth in jail and played no role as a parent. His stepfather, whom he calls his dad, committed suicide.
Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “when one has not had a good father, one must create one.” Carl Jung ratified the idea of the fantasy father in 1919, when he labeled the concept an “archetype,” by which he meant a mental compendium of mythic, legendary, and fairy-tale fathers all wrapped up into one enormous daddy issue.
Jacob, who was born in 1987, came of age in the wake of Robert Bly’s Iron John, a book published in 1990 about modern man’s alienation from heroic male archetypes that spent sixty-two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was a seminal work of the mythopoetic men’s movement. Like Jacob, Bly served in the Navy. Like Jacob, Bly’s father was an alcoholic. Like Jacob, Bly was interested in Old Norse mythology—in particular, the epic tales of the principal Norse god Odin, who, in order to gain mystical knowledge, subjected himself to nine days and nights of torture. He lanced himself with a spear and hung upside down from Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree that connects the nine realms of the universe, a tattoo of which lies over Jacob’s heart.
In the era of Iron John, “manosphere” membership required bongos, sweat lodges, hugging, weeping, and throwing spears at boars. Today, it’s about getting buff, buying liver-enzyme pills online, and keeping a paleo diet. (...)
I nodded, and we sat in silence for a while. A waiter appeared, smiling in a vague, embarrassed sort of way. He seemed to have recognized Jacob and was ready to stand at attention.
But The Shaman’s thoughts had roamed far from the realm of gluten-free food. “The most evil things happen when a person believes that they are anonymous, when they’ve covered their face,” he mused after some time. “Whether it be with war paint, or whether it be with a mask.” Which struck me as odd, because at the Capitol on January 6, Jacob had painted his face. He had covered his head with a coyote-tail headdress and topped it off with buffalo horns. Holding his staff and megaphone, he sat his ass down in the presiding officer’s chair.
Now he looked me square in the eye.
“You’re paying, right?”
For the record, The Shaman ordered his pizza topped with artichoke hearts, basil, chicken, and mushrooms.
In court, Jacob’s lawyer told the judge that his client would not kill an insect, that he was picked on as a child and bullied as a teenager. After high school, he joined the Navy and found himself aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, a floating apocalypse-in-waiting, bristling with surface-to-air missiles, Super Hornet fighter jets, Prowler radar jammers, and Seahawk helicopters. It was the same ship aboard which John Frankenheimer filmed scenes for Seven Days in May, the 1964 black-and-white classic in which Kirk Douglas plays Colonel “Jiggs” Casey, who uncovers a plot against the United States government masterminded by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was the first movie of its kind, ushering in what became a standard in Hollywood thrillers after the Kennedy assassination: the deep state conspiracy.
About six months into his assignment, the ship psychologist diagnosed him with schizotypal personality disorder, an incurable condition characterized by social isolation, limited reactions to social cues, and sometimes a penchant to dress unusually. He received what the military calls a “general discharge, under honorable conditions,” in 2007, and returned to his mother’s house in Phoenix.
The living room here has an ornamental equine vibe—lit by a horse lamp, wall adorned with images of horses—except for the bookshelf, where what might have been a cowboy hat has been replaced by a Trump hat. Martha Chansley doesn’t subscribe to cable television. She believes that the buffalo is a “mystic” animal. When a reporter and camera crew from FOX 10 Phoenix descended on her house after her son had been taken into custody, she noted another mystical bond, this one with Donald Trump: “We are a part of him, and he is a part of us.”
“My mom was always kinda into woo-woo,” Jacob admitted.
After being discharged from the Navy, he remembered how he had once happened upon a CD in his mother’s car. The plastic case showed a bald and bearded hippie who had been dismissed from his psychology assistant professorship at Harvard because of his research on psychedelic drug therapies.
“I was like—oh, okay, that’s interesting.”
What The Shaman had stumbled across was a set of lectures given by Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert. Four years after his dismissal from Harvard, Alpert had traveled to India and changed his name to Baba Ram Dass. Four years after that, he published a book called Be Here Now, which sold two million copies and became a counterculture bible for Steve Jobs, Wayne Dyer, and George Harrison.
“I was awestruck,” Jacob said.
by Frederick Kaufman, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Pep Montserrat
