The "Alt National Park Service" Sounds an Awful Lot Like QAnon
We're all looking for hope in the face of fascism. For some, that's the perfect springboard to online clout.
On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, I had my first ever anxiety attack.
I didn’t know what was happening at first, but as the results rolled in and the outlook got worse, my heartrate kept climbing. My thoughts kept racing, and they kept getting darker. I started imagining that I was falling into a deep pit, and that I’d stay there forever. Soon, any rationality was gone. The panic was all there was.
Six months since election night, and the panic is quieter. But don’t worry, I’m as angry as ever.
So trust me when I say that I understand the rage we’re all feeling as Americans. I feel it too, and I’ll admit that I love some good rage-bait every now and then. Despite knowing better, I have the completely normal habit of diving deep into comment sections and online threads, looking for the hottest takes, the dumbest takes, the most bigoted and ignorant takes I can find, and I know that I do this because it makes me mad. Anger is addicting, especially if it feels like righteous anger.
Which is why I understand the appeal of the “resistance” social media accounts that have surged in popularity in the wake of Trump’s reelection. These accounts share news and headlines about the new administration, stoking the flames of social media and, ideally, keeping their followers engaged and fired up. At their best, these accounts can help motivate viewers to move from their screens to the streets, engaging with their communities and helping their neighbors however they can.
But something about these accounts makes me itch. Who is behind these often anonymous accounts? Why should I trust them? And why can’t I shake the feeling that I’ve seen all of this before?
What is the Alt National Park Service?
During the first Trump administration, a series of accounts emerged on Twitter and other platforms which claimed to be run by rogue elements of various national agencies, who were working from within to disrupt and resist Trump’s goals. These accounts presented themselves as the “Alt” versions of various agencies, from the Alt Fish and Wildlife Service to the Alt Centers for Disease Control.
Throughout that first term, the wider ecosystem of #altgov helped spread information about Trump’s abhorrent immigration policies, galvanized their followers, and generally seemed like well-meaning posters. With Trump’s reelection, these accounts have largely shifted to Bluesky, where the undisputed heavyweight of the group is the Alt National Park Service, or AltNPS.
For the most part, AltNPS isn’t much to write home about. Most of their posts consist of news headlines reposted without attribution, usually about twenty minutes after the real article goes live.
That’s nothing unusual for an anonymous #resistance account like this. But then I saw this post:
And then it got weirder:
During the fever dream of the early pandemic, we all got obsessed with one thing or another. Some of us took up knitting. Some learned to bake the perfect sourdough. And for some of us, for better or worse, we couldn’t stop thinking about a quirky little movement called "QAnon."
Q and You
At its core, “QAnon” is a far-right conspiracy theory based on the claims of an anonymous message board poster who claimed to be a high-level government operative with "Q" level clearance, giving the conspiracy its name. This person posted “clues” which validated adherents' existing belief that Donald Trump is an agent of justice fighting a shadow war against the Deep State, a powerful cabal that controls world affairs (and which conveniently includes anyone the movement hates).
But importantly, QAnon is not “a” conspiracy theory. It’s every conspiracy theory. In the world of online conspiracism, QAnon is the biggest tent imaginable, and the movement includes everyone from Christian nationalists to sovereign citizen ideologues to Boogaloo boys to simple, shameless grifters. The topic is so broad, and its beliefs so malleable, that it can fit many different types of fringe belief beneath its wings.
You can imagine where the crossovers happen: a belief in a world-spanning cabal is a standard feature of age-old antisemitic conspiracies; the government being an evil oppressor rings true to militia sympathizers; a single man appointed by God to rid the world of corruption and evil is a familiar story to Pentecostal and other charismatic Christian communities. And in between all of them is a small army of hucksters and frauds, eager to squeeze a payday out of the chaos.
QAnon partly fascinates me because it takes confirmation bias, a common feature of all conspiracy thought, to a ludicrous extreme. With a more specific conspiracy like “hollow moon” or “Bush did 9/11,” you might seek out evidence that supports that one claim. Belief in that claim might lead you down a rabbit hole into other conspiracy beliefs, and you may have had some fringe beliefs that caused you to believe in that conspiracy in the first place, but there was an odd sense of focus to these established conspiracy theories. They felt more contained, and many of these theories didn’t try to address anything broader than their immediate subject.
By contrast, QAnon is about everything. It’s about the Illuminati, and Democrats, and Jeffrey Epstein, and Satanism, and pedophilia, and antisemitic conspiracies, and vaccines, and COVID, and Trump, and BLM, and militias, and everything. Q’s tendrils reach into every right-wing belief system, and it’s uniquely able to offer an all-encompassing explanation that connects all of those beliefs, and which can connect people from all those disparate ideologies. It all shakes out as an odd combination of both extremely vague and hyper-specific.
I want to be clear that, despite all that I’m about to show you, the AltNPS account is not QAnon. AltNPS isn’t fomenting a movement of people who openly call for the mass execution of their political opponents. It’s not wantonly accusing random public figures of being Satanists or pedophiles. Nothing the AltNPS account is doing is as pernicious, as fascistic, or as violent as QAnon was, even on its worst days.
But the effect that QAnon had on people’s brains? That’s what AltNPS reminds me of.
The Numbers
While some of its posts are simple rage-bait or reposted news headlines, AltNPS has a habit of posting what I’m going to call “Numbers” posts:
These posts, which are cross-posted across multiple platforms, follow a simple formula of spelled-out, seemingly random numbers. The account has never provided an explanation for these posts or made any explicit claim as to what these numbers mean. In fact, they seem more than happy to let their followers answer that question for them:
This is the post that gives the game away. This is not the work of a government insider communicating with clandestine field agents via cryptic codes. This is the user behind a social media account realizing in real time that they’ve stumbled upon a gold mine for engagement. And engagement is exactly what they got, with followers reacting to these posts in several ways.
The first is the funniest: users repeating the same joke until you feel like you’re losing your mind.
The second is more somber, where followers earnestly hope that one day, they’ll learn the truth of what’s really going on.
These are the responses that make me the saddest, because I can feel how strongly these people need this to be real. They need there to be someone in a position to do something. America’s institutions, while hobbled, need to be fighting the good fight against an authoritarian government. The rise of American fascism needs to be a fever dream that one day we’ll wake up from, and get to listen to the tale of how the America we once knew never actually left us, because the heroes were in control all along.
And I understand wanting that to be true. I wish it was true, too. But our institutions are not coming to save us. As I write this, Trump is openly defying the Supreme Court and throwing the country into its third or fourth constitutional crisis in as many months. He is not an inconvenience that can be shrugged off through the sheer might of the park rangers.
I have to believe that the nation will recover from the damage of this administration. For the sake of my own sanity, I have to believe that. But the America that survives round two of Trump's cruelty and narcissism will not be the same country it started as. And the survival of this country isn't up to our institutions. It's up to us.
And despite everything, so far, I like what I see. Tens of thousands rallying in dozens of cities across the country. Protest and boycotts proving once again that bullying works. A wave of campaign announcements from inspired young Democrats for political offices of all types. Existing senators finally starting to understand that the harder they fight, the louder we cheer.
If we’re going to be saved by anything, we’ll be saved by regular people taking action. Not by imaginary spies sending codes over Facebook, and not by the magical thinking and post-hoc justification that we see in the comments of the AltNPS posts.
Hope and Human Connection
Interestingly, when it comes to the “Numbers” posts, the tone of the replies seems to be highly platform-dependent. On Bluesky, it’s full of fired-up Blue Wave liberals all but saluting the account and swearing oaths of fealty, which we’ll get to. But on Facebook, a strange ecosystem has emerged, one much sadder than the bluster of Bluesky.
Under the early Numbers posts on Facebook, commenters encouraged each other to, as the account really, REALLY loves saying, “not talk about Fight Club.” At first, they admonished anyone who asked what the numbers meant, but soon started doing the same for anyone who mentioned the numbers at all, even if they were praising the account and playing along with the LARP. Eventually, the AltNPS account itself encouraged their followers to simply talk about boring, trivial nonsense in the comments, in an effort to distract the algorithm from the clandestine nature of the posts while still providing engagement. Flood the zone with enough stories about your dogs and grandkids, and maybe Zuckerberg won’t notice the numbers station operating right under his nose.
But after enough of these posts, the tone began to change. The winking, in-on-the-joke vibe fell away, and all that remained was an earnest yearning for connection. With no pretense of being in on a greater political movement, commenters simply talked about their children and grandchildren, asked for gardening tips, and hoped that as they tossed their message in a bottle out into the void, that someone would find it and answer.
I’ll never look down on anyone for seeking human connection. For a lot of us, that connection is what makes life worth living, and losing that sense of human interaction can be devastating, especially for the elderly. And considering that most of the people I see in these comments sections appear middle-aged and older (and that Facebook is consistently hemorrhaging younger users), I’m not surprised that these spaces are full of older folks reaching out to each other for friendship and conversation. If anything, I think it’s sweet. And congrats to this person’s grandson, hell yeah big guy:
It’s interesting that on Facebook, that desire for human conversation is so strong that it overpowers the pretend spy games and conspiracism. Of course, because this is still Facebook, these earnest expressions of loneliness are met with spam, scams, and replies from relentless bots.
This is all to say that people follow this account for different reasons, most of which are unobjectionable and sometimes even healthy. But my problem isn't with people reaching out for human connection and hope during trying times; what worries me is how AltNPS manipulates their hope, and the dark places that can lead.
But for that, stay tuned for Part 2 of this column. Thanks for reading.
¿Will there be more poop chronicle updates?
Great piece, def has these rusty cogs turning. As someone who refuses to add on any social media past Facebook, interesting to hear how different the effects are on bluesky