The Rise & Fall of the 4 am Club

"he will NOT be president!" - TikTok Psychics

I couldn’t sleep at all the night of the US presidential election. I lay in bed tossing and turning until, around 4 am, I got up to check my computer for an update on election results. The news confirmed what had already been taking shape before I’d tried to sleep. The results were in, and they weren’t the results I wanted.

The next day I succumbed to doom scrolling (as one does). My social feeds were full of shock and woe and disbelief, but something stood out among this. The algorithm showed me a young woman on TikTok, confidently proclaiming herself to be a psychic medium. She stared straight into the camera and in a firm voice declared that despite the election results already being confirmed, DT would NOT take office.

At first I thought, okay. Sure. One person saying something conspiratorial. Not a new thing on the internet. But then the algorithm continued to show me “psychic” after psychic. Each proclaiming that DT would not be the next president, KH would. They began to refer to themselves (and the followers they quickly amassed) as the 4 am Club. Because it wasn’t just me - many people, mostly women, all over the country, awoke at 4 am with a strange feeling that fateful night.

The weeks went on, the psychics multiplied and persisted. Some consulted tarot cards. Others used divining rods. Several cited astrology as their source of info. Many claimed to receive messages from spirit guides.

I was an outside observer, but with a vested interest. I’ve been a professional tarot reader for over a decade, and although I don’t identify as a psychic and I don’t read predictively, I’m used to co-existing with folks who do. It’s safe to say I’m skeptical of those who claim to be psychic, but I mostly have a live and let live philosophy. I’ve had plenty of tarot reader friends who identify as psychics and make predictions, all of whom do so within a specific set of ethics. I’m not necessarily opposed to that.

I’m a skeptic, but I want to believe. Who WOULDN’T want to believe that this shitshow isn’t real? Who wouldn’t want to believe we’d actually get our first Black female president instead of a racist rapist?

So for the first week or so after the election I thought, meh, this is mostly harmless. I’m sure some of them are charlatans, but many of them seem well-intentioned. Who could blame them for trying to cling to any amount of hope in these dark times? But as time went on, the whole phenomenon began to seem more and more sus.