QAnon followers are barking up the wrong tree. They seem to think Donald Trump is the messiah and he’s communicating to them in code, using the number 17. This makes sense to them, because Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Those 17 flags behind him when he addressed the media were a dead giveaway, right?

Hogwash.

It turns out that Q is a false prophet, and Trump is the antichrist.

Here’s how I know: QAnon placed a phone call to the universe and dialed up a wrong number. The real number they should have been calling was 42. You may laugh, but read on. You won’t be laughing when you’re done.

In 1979, author Douglas Adams declared that 42 was “the answer to the ultimate question of the life, the universe, and everything.” It turns out he was right. All we have to do is look at the clues.

First, it’s clear that Trump fits nowhere in this equation, because he was the 45th president, appearing three spots too late to fill the role. The most obvious thing to do, therefore, is to ask ourselves who the 42nd president was. The answer happens to be Bill Clinton, and this should come as no surprise, when you think about it.

To say Clinton was an effective president would be an understatement. During his time in office, the United States saw the biggest economic expansion in its history. Clinton converted the largest budget deficit to date into its largest surplus, and helped the nation achieve its lowest poverty level, lowest crime rate, lowest unemployment rate, and lowest government spending in decades.

He was America’s chosen savior, very much living up to the prophetic nature of the number 42.

But there’s more. Far more.

During Clinton’s time in office, he was bestowed with a peculiar nickname: Author Toni Morrison declared him to be “our first black president.” Most people took this to mean that Clinton’s policies had been favorable to Black Americans, but Morrison went much further. She declared that Clinton, his “white skin notwithstanding” was “blacker than any actual Black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

On close inspection, it’s clear that Morrison was speaking prophetically. She wasn’t just talking about her own lifetime, but “our children’s,” indicating that Clinton was blacker than any potential president, including Barack Obama — whose rise she must have foreseen as well. Obama, of course, was the child of Black father and a white mother, which means that Clinton himself must have been fully Black.

How is this possible? What did Toni Morrison know that she didn’t explicitly say? The key lies, once again, in the number 42, which also happens to be the number worn by one Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier. In doing so, he became baseball’s savior, integrating the sport known as the “national pastime.”

Robinson had been destined to do so from the beginning: He was born on January 31, 1919, and 1+31+1+9-1-9=42. Further, he was born in a Georgia city called Cairo, which shares its name with the capital of Egypt and the largest city in all of Africa. The number 42 was particularly important to the ancient Egyptians because it was associated with the pharaoh, the divinely anointed ruler... or messiah. It was the number of Osiris, the nation’s first king, whose body was divided into 42 pieces and scattered across the land’s 42 nomes or territories.

After he died, he was resurrected and became a ghost, continuing to rule in the afterlife as a god.

Robinson’s place in all this becomes even clearer when one considers the nature of Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Beloved, for which she is best known. The book is about a ghost and contains an epigraph quoting Romans 9:25, which reads in part: “I will call them my people, which were not my people.”

This is exactly what Morrison said about Clinton: She called him Black, even though he was not Black — at least on the outside. Morrison had apparently foreseen Clinton’s election when writing Beloved, and knew that Clinton was Black on the inside. The astonishing conclusion is right in front of our faces: The ghost of Jackie Robinson had taken over Bill Clinton’s body and was acting as the true president of the United States for eight years.

Want more proof? Robinson was known, during his playing days, as “Jackie the Robber,” foreshadowing his takeover of Clinton’s body. And he would be portrayed in the film titled simply 42 by Chadwick Boseman, who himself later portrayed a messianic figure known as Black Panther in the film of that title. Like Robinson, the movie blazed its own trail, becoming the highest-grossing film to feature a predominantly Black cast and the first superhero movie to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Consider further: Boseman’s character in that movie wore a full-body suit to make him look different on the outside than on the inside, just as Bill Clinton, the “first Black president,” looked white on the outside. Another clue may be found in the fact that a panther is a kind of cat. Cats have nine lives. So, it is immediately apparent that Robinson, whom Boseman previously played, had claimed one of his subsequent lives by infiltrating the “full-body suit” of Bill Clinton.

He was, in a very real sense, a hitchhiker, as foretold in the title of Douglas Adams’s book.

Literature, as it often does, holds the key.

If you want to go further down the proverbial rabbit hole, you need look no further than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which contains several references to the number 42. The author, Lewis Carroll, was a mathematician. He knew his numbers. With this in mind, I’ll direct you to his most notable allusion to the sacred 42, which occurs when Alice attempts to perform multiplication problems in Chapter 2.

Alice declares, nonsensically, that “four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is — oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at this rate.” Yet on closer inspection, it turns out not to be nonsense at all, but rather a progression: Base 18 is used to obtain the first answer, base 21 to obtain the second, and the number 3 is added to the base in each successive problem. The progression stops working, however, at base 42 (naturally), where four times thirteen does not equal twenty, as expected.

This explains Alice’s dismay that she should “never get to twenty.” This foreshadows the dismay of many voters who felt like they should never get to the year 2020 after Trump’s election as president, in which he beat another Clinton (Hillary). In that case, too, the math didn’t work as it should have: Hillary Clinton actually received more votes, but she still lost the election to Trump, who portrayed himself as the anti-Clinton in order to sully the holy name’s place in history.

Balance was restored when Joe Biden was inaugurated on 1-20-21. Add those numbers together, and you get, that’s right, 42, making Biden the sacred pharaonic messianic successor to Bill Clinton and Jackie Robinson.

What more evidence do you need? It’s clear from all this that the ghost of Jackie Robinson became a hitchhiker in Bill Clinton’s body at some point around the time he was elected, so he could save the United States, just as he had saved the game of baseball. Toni Morrison, as a prophet, recognized this, as Lewis Carroll had a century earlier.

What about QAnon and its fixation on 17? As any Star Trek fan knows, Q is a practical joker, which explains why none of his “predictions” ever come true. Toni Morrison, Douglas Adams, and Lewis Carroll are much more trustworthy messengers.

The key to it all isn’t 17, but 42.

Of course it is. It’s the answer to the ultimate question of the life, the universe, and everything.

Disclaimer!

Now comes the disclaimer: Much of the evidence you see above is true. Toni Morrison did write a book about a ghost, and she did call Bill Clinton “our first black president.” Jackie Robinson did wear the number 42, and Douglas Adams did proclaim it to be the ultimate answer in his book. The passage from Alice in Wonderland is real, too. But the conclusion I reached is utter rubbish.

Adams himself has admitted that he chose the number 42 at random, as “a joke,” because it was “a mundane number” that “made no sense whatsoever.” Kind of like the conspiracy theory I presented above, which I thought up after waking up this morning and presented here for the same reason.

And to make a point.

Jackie Robinson hitchhiking in Bill Clinton’s body? Get real. No one in their right mind would believe such idiocy. Yet it’s no more idiotic than QAnon suggesting that Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of devil-worshipping pedophiles plotting to take over the world. Or Trump’s assertion that Obama was born in Kenya. Or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that a “Jewish space laser” caused the California wildfires in 2018. Or Orson Welles’ 1939 broadcast of War of the Worlds, which panicked large numbers of people who believed aliens really were invading Earth.*

Absurdity alone should be enough to discredit a conspiracy theory, but sadly, it’s not. Enough people put more stock in the messenger than the content of the message, that absurdity can become reality in their own minds. If someone credible says so — like a radio announcer (in the War of the Worlds broadcast) or a trusted friend online — we’re inclined to believe it. And if a lot of other people are repeating it, we can believe it so strongly it becomes integral to our belief system, to our very identity.

And that’s a huge problem.

Because Wonderland is fiction, and the rabbit hole is a dead end.

* I apologize if you found any part of this piece offensive: It’s satire, and that kind of goes with the territory when you’re making fun of something that truly is offensive, like the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Stephen H. Provost is a former journalist and author of three books about the Trump presidency, available at www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RC7L8X1. (He also writes fantasy novels, which explains his vivid imagination.)