This is a document of a meeting I had with cult leader Negative 48 (Michael Protzman) in Dallas, Texas in June 2022. Michael died in a motorcycle accident in July 2023 after which his group of followers dissolved into other groups or back towards a life they had left behind.
If you go to the top of the Dealey Plaza pyramid- Main St. being the bottom of the pyramid and the point of the pyramid where Houston and Elm meet up at Interstate 35- and you look to the north east then you’ll see it.
‘Houston we have a problem, nightmare on elm street.”
I sat with Negative 48 ( -48, Michael Protzman ) in a McDonald’s in downtown Dallas. It was over one hundred degrees that day, early June Texas heatwave. I had come to Dallas because he had called his followers to meet him here since the apocalypse was upon the world and Dallas, specifically at Dealey Plaza, would be the place that it would begin, the Second Coming. I had been following Negative 48 and his group on Telegram for sometime, a sort of break-off group of QAnon and conspiracy devotees who took the most cult like tendencies of various movements and created their own belief system. While deeply tied to QAnon, it is distinct in many ways, partly by its adherence to a known leader, that leader is Michael ( Negative 48, -48) and it reliance on his own bastardized use of Gematria, the ancient Hebrew tradition of Numerology. Michael uses this interpretation to speak in sequences of numbers, riddles, secrets and turns of phrase, weaving popular culture, religion and end times prophecy into a never-quite-decipherable language that spins endlessly from his mouth.
I arrived at Dealey Plaza early in the day. There are two large X’s on the street, each marking the exact location where a bullet struck JFK in 1963 as he rode In his car with his wife. Around noon I saw some followers begin to arrive, it was not hard to make them out, all in MAGA gear, wearing huge grins. It was a reunion for many, the group comes from around the country, and this was the first time some of them had seen each other since November ’21 when they met here the first time to wait for the second coming that failed to materialize. A woman wearing a t-shirt with a picture of JFK and Princess Diana on it beneath the boldly printed words ’The Return’ walked up to me and asked, “What are you here for?”
“This.” I told her, looking out towards the cult that was gathering on the lawn between Houston and Elm Streets
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{Negative Forty Eight speaking to me in McDonalds the afternoon of June Eleventh:: He says- ( “Houston we have a problem, nightmare on elm street three twenty one, three twenty one is at the beginning of all dark, at the beginning of all light, march twenty first three twenty one, pretty soon its going to be twelve twenty one, Trump signed executive order one three eight eighteen on twelve twenty one seventeen, Juniors birthdate is on nine twenty one. These are clearly things that happen for a reason. The people in power thing that they’re in charge. ) He stops speaking at looks at me. We are sitting along a long bar against the window of the McDonalds on little stools so that as we lean in to each other to be heard over the voices in the restaurant our knees are touching and our faces are inches apart. I mostly look out the window, but as the conversation keeps going I look into his face more and more, he is never not meeting my eyes.}
_
She told me her name: “Misty” and I told her my name and we shook hands, she was a white woman, probably in her 60’s, she pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. We sat on a concrete ledge in the the shade. “My god it’s hot she said.”
“Yeah, this is brutal. I’m from Tulsa and I always think Dallas is sorta similar in temperature to us, but every time I come here in the summer I realize how much hotter it gets.”
“I’m from Phoenix,” She tells me.
“Oh you’re used to it then.”
“No,” she says, “The humidity here.”
We continue small talk for a while, touching on the weather, Texas, Oklahoma, Phoenix ( “I have a sister there.” I tell her)
She asks me if I’m here because I’m a believer.
I tell her I travel around and take photos all around the country.
“Photos of what?”
I tell her I look for photos that show the cracks in our society as America is collapsing.
“Well, I guess you found it here, didn’t you?” She says to me as we look back towards the growing number of cult members on the lawn, probably one hundred people now. “Have you met Michael? ( -48, Negative Forty Eight)” She asks.
“No.”
“Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
We walk over the crowd of people that has gathered and Misty greets friends, they give weary looks to me with my camera around my neck. She asks a woman, “Is Michael here yet?” The woman says no and Misty introduces us. She is immediately paranoid and begins to prod me, to find my reason for being here.
“How did you know to come here?” She asks me, looking deeply into my eyes.
“I saw people on Telegram talking about it, thought I’d come down.” I say.
“No, no one on Telegram said anything about Dallas, what telegram channel are you on?”
“I”m on the Negative 48 Channel.”
“How long have you been on there?”
“I don’t know, maybe six months or a year?”
“It was private until last week ( The channel has not been private in any of the time I have been on it. )”
“Oh, well..”
“Let me see your phone, show me the channel you’re on”
I pull out my phone and open up telegram and how her. She sees the channel and is in disbelief, she scrolls through the last several posts.
“Thats the channel,” she says, “How did you get on there.” (Question not to me, but to the universe.)
She hands my phone back and walks away. The rest of the day every interaction I had with any of the followers would be a full on paranoiac examination of what I knew and how I knew it. I would be quizzed about Negative 48, JFK, Trump, The Media. Nothing I could say would satisfy anyone, truly. I talked with one woman about January 6th and told her I had been there. She didn’t believe me, “How many people were there?” She asked, “Oh, I’m bad with those kind of numbers I said, maybe like twenty thousand or something, thats how it looked anyway.” She laughed like I was a fool. “God,” She said, “I knew you weren’t there, there were well over a million people there (an obvious untruth, but in this reality truth is not the arbiter of fact, only signs are important, nothing you see if actually what it is.) The minds of Negative 48’s (Michael Protzman) followers have become so steeped in conspiracy that nothing can exist outside of that sphere, everything is a sign, a signal a test and they are operating on a level in which they have to be fully engaged at all times in order to navigate this treacherous path Michael has created. At its peak that day there were probably a little of one hundred people gathered to take part in the cult gathering, but there are nearly 70,000 followers to the Telegram channel run by -48 ( Negative 48, Michael), but there seemed to be a truly hardcore group of less than thirty on the ground that day. That group making up a sort of command and security structure and the most ardent of followers, some of whom would openly seek praise or attention with Michael’s sphere of influence.
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{Continued conversation with Negative Forty Eight in McDonalds the afternoon of June Eleventh:: He says- ( “You remember the Michael Jackson movie called ’This is It”? Its one thirteen, our election was on eleven three, Junior’s (JFK Jr.) plane crashed seven sixteen ninety nine, seventy one is eight, six is fourteen, fourteen and ninety nine is one thirteen, George Bush died on eleven thirteen. The problem is that one thirteen equals ‘Not True’. The best is yet to come two twenty eight, Michael Jackson moonwalk two twenty eight. When Michael Jackson walked off the stage after he called Tommy Mottola the Devil he said, “The best is yet to come. (228)” because he knew, because Donald Trump and him were really close friends. Matter of fact, if you go look at his house where he’s got a big circle in his garden and he’s on the swing, his feet are hanging off, thats the Q. Its in your face one sixty five. Michael Jackson one twenty four, ‘In the beginning’ one twenty four. Funny how Trump’s favorite bible verse ‘Eye for an eye’ one twenty four, fireworks one twenty four.) He paused and looked at me, letting the gravity of his words take hold.
_
When I first began following the group on Telegram there seemed to be an idea that Negative 48 was a sort of prophet, that things were being spoken to him and he could then speak them to his followers, but in the past months he has taken on a more Messianic image in the minds of his followers. Some refer to him as the Archangel Michael, some refer to him as a Messiah, some say the Second Coming, which I’ve never heard him quite acknowledge, but he never really disavows the titles either.
June 11, 2022 was meant to be a big day, not just for this group, but for all of us, the entire world. The Storm had been approaching for sometime and there would be no ignoring on June eleventh twenty twenty two. What would take place that day would be ‘The Event’ followed by Ten Days of Darkness after which the second coming would occur, which would happen at Dealey Plaza when the still living JFK would appear and usher in the return of Jesus Christ and we would no longer be able to ignore it as Jesus appeared to the world that he had actually been here all along, we had been seeing him for years, only most of the world ignored what was right in front of our faces. Donald Trump was, in fact, Jesus and only a very small number of people, mostly those who are followers of Negative 48, would be able to finally say, “We told you so.”
Michael and I talked one on one for about two hours, a never ending monologue of numbers, predictions and intrigues. I had not expected to be in conversation this long and had really only set out to have him explain his ideas of the apocalypse to me, but every time I steered the conversation in that direction he would lead us back the other way. After a while I could tell he didn’t want to go down that route and I guessed it was because it would lead to a provable outcome. If the apocalypse is supposed to happen this day or that day and it doesn’t come then thats just one more thing a cult leader has to deal with. When he had first arrived at Dealey Plaza that day his followers had gathered around him and closed a tight circle around Michael. He started off with the obvious news that this day was not the beginning of the second coming as he had said it was. There was an audible and tortured moan from a few of the devotees, but he continued. “This is difficult work,” he said, about predicting the end. “And sometimes mistakes are made, but don’t worry, it’s coming soon.” Two women began to weep at this news. A few people were angry and some even left.
I wondered if this was a way of weeding out the less devoted. If you make a promise that Jesus will return on a certain date and then walk that promise back only the most hardcore will remain with you. And if you do it over and over again like Michael has then the hardcore group gets more narrow and more devoted and more willing to follow any path the leader lays before them. I didn’t learn any new information from Michael at the McDonalds. If you’ve joined one of his livestreams on telegram then you heard all the same information that I heard in our one on one conversation. But I did get a glimpse into the phycological tactics used on his followers. “You were chosen to be here.” He told me, “you are full of wonder, I can see it in you, thats why I’m talking to you, because you’re open.” He said this as some of his followers who had become curious started to hover over our conversation. I think he said it for them more than for me.
After our two hours together, I told him I needed to go, that I had to drive back to Tulsa and I thanked him for his time. Two of his followers, a husband and wife that looked mid 50’s came up to me, they were angry. “You sure spent a long time with him.” She told me, “No one ever gets that much time alone with him.” And the husband said, “Are you gonna write one of those articles that gets everything wrong and talks shit.” They were mad and their faces were very close to mine. Michael stepped up and got between us, “He’s ok, he told them, he gets it.”
As I was saying goodbye to Misty and another woman who had been kind to me that day Michael said to me, hey take my picture before you leave. He sat on a stool in the McDonalds, smiled, looked into the lens and said. “You have no idea whats coming.” I pressed the shutter.