The grand unified conspiracy

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia suggested a topic for me to consider -- "QAnon."  I had heard the name before, associated with some sort of conspiracy theory, but didn't know much about it.  But when my friend said, "QAnon is the Grand Unified Theory to which Pizzagate is only the Special Theory of Relativity," I thought I should look into it.

And down the Rabbit Hole I went.

The best exposition I found of QAnon, known to true believers as "The Storm," was over at Medium, in an article written by political writer Will Sommer, called "Meet 'The Storm,' the Conspiracy Theory Taking Over the Pro-Trump Internet."  And the main gist of it, so far as I can understand it, is that none of the chaotic lunacy that has characterized the Trump presidency thus far is accidental; it's all being orchestrated by Trump himself as part of a Grand Plan.

In other words, it only looks like the Keystone Kops because you aren't seeing the Big Picture.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing apparently started with a guy calling himself "Q" or "QAnonymous" posting over at the site 4Chan, saying that "the Storm is coming," meaning that Trump is finally going to triumph over the globalists, lowering the boom and at the same time essentially declaring himself dictator-for-life.  QAnonymous likes to give his followers little snippets of mysterious "information" that don't tell you anything much -- or, even better, leave the interpretation up to the wild imaginations of 4Chan aficionados.  Here are a few examples:

• HRC detained, not arrested (yet).
• Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
• This had nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
• Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obamama [sic] etc have more power than Trump?
• Fantasy.
• Whoever controls the office of the Presidecy [sic] controls this great land.
• Why did Soros donate all his money recently?
• Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
• Mockingbird 10.30.17
• God bless fellow Patriots.

Over a few weeks, the conspiracy had managed to wind in the Seth Rich murder, the Clinton Foundation, the Central American/Los Angeles street gang MS-13, Darrel Issa's retirement, Elon Musk and Space-X, and a power outage during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.  Nothing is too minor or peripheral not to be linked in, and because QAnonymous frequently speaks in code, it's left up to his devotees to figure out what the hell he means.  When he posted the cryptic message, "PHIL_B_O_Extracted," the conclusion was that Obama had gone to the Philippines and was arrested, which made perfect sense except that he hadn't and he wasn't.

But the main upshot of it all is that Trump is way smarter and more cunning than he seems, and all of the tweets and scandals and revolving-door policy with regards to his cabinet are simply pieces he's moving around on a chessboard. To accomplish what, you might ask?  Well, here are a few of the goals, according to QAnon:

• Arresting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and sending them off to Guantanamo.  This is what the Mueller investigation is actually doing -- the focus on Trump is a clever smokescreen.
• The whole Russia collusion thing is a smokescreen, too.  In fact, Trump engineered the whole thing and is pretending to like Putin to draw out the treasonous Democrats.
• Ferreting out the perpetrators of Pizzagate, and making sure they end up behind bars.
• Sweeping pro-globalization spokespeople away, both in the United States and beyond.
• Ending any participation in treaties that don't put America first.

So the bottom line is that Trump is winning, which of course thrilled the alt-right no end, so they jumped on this bandwagon with little prompting and even less evidence.  As for Trump, he's winning at everything.  QAnonymous is said to be one of the top advisers to the president (whether a publicly-acknowledged one remains to be seen); Paris Martineau over at New York magazine said that some of them even claim he's been photographed sitting next to Trump on Air Force One.

QAnonymous hasn't always gotten it right, though.  He predicted a major conflagration in November, wherein Trump would show his hand and blow away the naysayers, and no such thing happened.  But like the people who forecast the End Times, the failure of his prediction doesn't seem to have diminished his standing.  Like with the End Times loons, the attitude by his followers seems to be, "Well, if he was wrong this time, it just makes it more likely he'll be right next time!"

The whole thing has become wildly popular, and not, I'm afraid, because of people sending the links to each other with the message, "Look at the shit someone dreamed up now!"  From 4Chan it's spilled over into Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, with the hits spiking so fast on each new post that it almost defies belief.  (Martineau signed up to track the hashtag #QAnon on Twitter, and it maxed out at the 2,000 post limit in only four hours.)

The whole thing is a little disturbing from several different perspectives.  For one thing, we have the usual problem with conspiracy theories, which is that it highlights the penchant people have for believing something with next to no hard evidence.  A second, however, is that this one smacks of desperation; there's a real sense that the QAnon True Believers simply cannot fathom that Trump is a clueless, narcissistic buffoon whose approach to policy resembles the strategy a six-year-old would use in Bumper Cars at the carnival.

The third, however, is that unlike other conspiracies -- for example, the idea that NASA is covering up evidence that the Earth is flat -- this one strikes me as potentially dangerous.  These people are deadly serious, and if something gets in the way of what they think is supposed to happen -- if the Mueller investigation results in a Trump indictment, if the current administration's anti-globalism agenda isn't enacted, if the #BlueWave hopefuls are right about a Democratic sweep this November -- I don't think they're going to take it lying down.  I can only hope that the real QAnon diehards are few enough in number that they won't represent a threat on any kind of national scale, but as we've seen over and over, all it takes is one or two heavily-armed nuts with an ax to grind to create some pretty significant havoc.

I hope I'm wrong.  And I hope that in the end, QAnon fades like many other wacky claims have.  But given its sudden surge in notoriety, I think we might have a bit of a wait before that happens.

Flat like a pizza

There's a saying in Senegal: "There are thirty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."  I found an especially good example of that yesterday over at Inverse, where I found out that there is a feud brewing between the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists and the Flat Earthers.

If you're not familiar with "Pizzagate," it's the idea that Hillary Clinton, George Soros, et al. have been using pizza restaurants as fronts for a nationwide child trafficking operation, and also that you can turn anything, however ridiculous, into a scandal if you simply add the suffix "-gate.".  The whole thing got started with some (allegedly) coded emails between Clinton and staffers over getting pizza for lunch, and blew up from there.  It's resulted in harassment and death threats for the owners of the pizza restaurants involved, and has refused to go away despite repeated thorough debunkings.

Well, there's nothing like believing in one ridiculous idea to make you think that everyone else's ridiculous ideas are completely laughable.  David Seaman, who is a prominent Pizzagate "truther" (as of the writing of this post, his latest tweet says, "Friends: if something happens to me, I want big fucking protests in front of COMET PIZZA in DC every day.  Sickos"), made the tactical error of calling out the Flat Earthers, via yet another tweet, this one saying, "I have it, on authority, Flat Earth is PAID DISINFORMATION to distract from Pizzagate & other Wikileaks reveals to come."

Here's a direct quote from an informational video Seaman made about the topic:

So Flat Earth theory is some kind of weird disinformation campaign, some sort of psyop to make people not believe. The fact that it shows up so closely whenever Pedodate and Pizzagate are mentioned, the fact that that’s when it pops up, I think it’s designed to muddy the waters … whoever’s pushing it continually, it does appear to be a disinformation campaign.

So basically, people are getting checks (from Soros himself, presumably, since he's someone who would have the necessary discretionary income) to convince everyone that the Earth isn't an oblate spheroid, because that would cause us all to be in such disarray that we'd ignore the idea that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring in the back of a dozen or so pizza restaurants.

Sure.  Makes total sense to me.

Well, far be it from the Flat Earthers to take that lying down.  One of them, Maggie Sargent, took to Twitter in high dudgeon a couple of days ago, and had hot words for Seaman:

All the Flat Earth people are saying is to question everything we have been told.  NASA is run by the federal government and if the federal government can traffic children and cover it up perhaps they made up the entire idea that the earth is round and it's all supposed to take us away from God.  I don't know what to believe either way but you shouldn't be rude to the flat-earth people.  There is a perfectly logical thought process between pizzagate and Flat Earth.  Not everybody thinks like you do.  We're all just trying to figure it out here so you should always be gracious to everyone who questions the government.

Yes!  Right!  What?

Of course, we probably shouldn't expect too much of Sargent, because one of her recent tweets was:

What if the Earth is a dimension?  Not flat, not round.  But like a video game.  This stuff is coming into my Consciousness for some reason.

What the hell does that even mean?  "The Earth is a dimension?"  Like, for example, width?

So the feud continues, with each side arguing that their lunacy is the right lunacy, and everyone else's is actual lunacy.  And the rest of us are just sitting here like this:

So that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm just waiting for the crystal energies, HAARP, and Illuminati people to get involved, and it'll be all-out war, until finally they just self-annihilate in a massive explosion of daftness.  I've already got my popcorn popped.

Deflating "Pizzagate"

A question I get asked a lot is why, here in Skeptophilia, I take time away from serious matters to look at the lunatic fringe, as I did yesterday with my piece on the reappearance of Mothman.  Let the weirdos be weird, seems to be the gist.  You're not going to convince them, you're not going to expunge all weirdos from the world, so it really is kind of pointless.  One friend said it was a little like masturbation; it makes you feel good for a little while, but in the end it doesn't really accomplish anything.

Well, I obviously disagree, because I keep at it on a daily basis.  (Writing Skeptophilia, I mean, not masturbating.)  And I do think there's a point to highlighting the activities of the loonies -- two, in fact.  First, there is the unfortunate tendency that once you've accepted one crazy idea, you're more likely to fall for others, because you've abandoned evidence and logic as the sine qua non of understanding.  Second, there's the even more unfortunate tendency that given enough encouragement, the wingnuts sometimes act on their beliefs.

This all comes up because of a Skeptophilia frequent flier, namely Alex Jones, who in the last few weeks has been ranting about something called "Pizzagate."  Which brings something else up, namely the fact that the media's tendency to turn anything into a scandal by adding "-gate" to the end of it really grinds my gears.  This annoys me almost as much as Alex Jones does himself, which is saying something, because if I had to choose between a root canal and listening to an entire episode of InfoWars, I'd choose the root canal because at least then I'd get some good drugs to help me through the experience.

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, "Pizzagate" is the insane idea that Hillary and Bill Clinton and various other influential people in the Democratic Party are using the Washington D. C. pizza joint "Comet Ping Pong" as a front for pedophilia and satanic rituals.  At first, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, tried to go online and defend himself from the allegations, but I'm sure you can predict how successful that was.  The message "Don't let up.  #PIZZAGATE Everywhere!" was posted on Twitter and got thousands of likes and reposts.  "It was like trying to shoot a swarm of bees with a gun," said Bryce Reh, Comet's general manager, who was nearly pushed into quitting his job because of harassment and death threats.

Then Alex Jones got involved.  He posted a "special message" on his website about how serious Pizzagate was, and the horrible the things they were covering up.  "InfoWars and the Pizzagate investigators are just trying to uncover the truth," he said.

Jones, of course, gets not thousands but millions of views, so suddenly the whole thing exploded.  And a couple of days ago, a guy showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, saying he was there to "do some investigating of Pizzagate" for himself.  He fired off at least one, possibly more, shots, but thankfully no one was injured.

The attacker, Edgar Maddison Welch, said that he heard about the pedophilia ring from Alex Jones and decided he needed to do something about it.

Poor James Alefantis, of course, is just trying to keep a business he's sunk ten years of his life into building from tanking.  "I really hope that all of these people fanning the flames of this conspiracy would take a moment to contemplate what has gone on here today and maybe to stop," he said.  I hope so too, but from experience, I can tell you that once conspiracy theorists latch on to an idea, they never give up.

So a lot of wacky beliefs are harmless, but they establish a pattern.  You stop asking questions, you start trusting purveyors of bullshit like Alex Jones, and all of a sudden you move from "odd but not a problem" to "possible incitement to do some serious damage."  And that's why I spend so much time railing against the woo-woos -- even those who, on the surface, seem pretty innocuous.

I'll keep after the big stuff, too.  As you know if you have read this blog for any length of time, I'm not one to suffer in silence.  But the small stuff and the low-hanging fruit deserves some attention too, from time to time.  As the adage goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  And that applies whether you're headed to someplace nice, or CloudCuckooLand.