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.

*ding* You've got mail!

There's a quote from Winston Churchill that goes, "You have enemies?  Good.  That means you've stood up for something, some time in your life."

By that standard, I'd have gotten some serious props from Mr. Churchill for yesterday's post, which generated quite the deluge of hate mail.  I don't know where my link got posted, nor by whom, but evidently it was in a place where there are a significant proportion of people who took umbrage at my identification of Donald Trump as a liar, a racist, and a misogynist.

The responses varied from the banal to the highly creative.  Several of them invited me to do things that even thirty years ago I didn't have the flexibility to accomplish.  But I thought it'd be fun to respond to a few of them, even though all I'll probably do is generate more hate mail.

Oh, well.  I'm all about throwing caution to the wind.

[image courtesy of photographer Jessica Flavin and the Wikimedia Commons]

Here's one that I thought was kind of interesting:

You really don't get it, do you?  From your picture you're as white as I am, and you're gonna stand there and tell me that you have no problem being overrun by people who have different customs and don't speak English?  Let's see how you feel when your kid's teacher requires them to learn Arabic.

Well, my kids are 26 and 29, so unless they decide to enroll in college, they're unlikely to face this particular issue.  But ignoring that for a moment -- I would have been elated if my kids had had the opportunity to learn Arabic in school.  They each took three years of French, but to say they weren't enthusiastic about it is something of an understatement.  I would welcome any opportunity my kids, or kids in general, had to learn about other cultures.  In fact, I think a lot of the hatred and ugliness we're seeing right now is largely generated by the fact that the people who are the most racist don't know even a single person who is of a different race.

Once you get to know someone, realize that they have the same dreams, needs, and desires as you do, it becomes a hell of a lot harder to hate them.

Then there was this one:

Fuck you, you left wing libtard.  We finally have a president who speaks his mind, and you can't handle it.  Well, sorry, jerkoff, but this is America, and we're taking it back whether you like it or not.

"Taking it back?"  From whom?  Or do you mean taking it back in time?  Because that's a hell of a lot more accurate.  To the 30s, when racism and sexism was institutionalized, when there were still lynchings of African Americans, when being Jewish or Italian or Hispanic or Chinese meant that you were automatically disqualified from most high-paying jobs, and when you didn't even mention it if you were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

I can only hope we aren't going back there, and as a nation that we've learned the lesson that you don't gain more rights for yourself by denying others theirs, but in the last few days I've begun to wonder.

I also got an email sending me a link to a news article about the Justice Department demanding names of 1.3 million people who visited an anti-Trump website.  It was accompanied by the following cheery message:

Watch your back.  We know who you are.  There's a list of treasonous assholes like yourself, and you better be careful, because this shit is not going to be tolerated any more.

I have two things to say about this one:

1. The "we know who you are" thing cuts both ways, to judge by the number of white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were at the Charlottesville protest, who were identified from photographs, and who are now losing their jobs, facing censure from families and friends, and having their websites shut down.  Apparently a good many of them are boo-hooing the backlash, but don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
2. For the record, I've never tried to hide.  Not my political beliefs, nor my religious ones, nor much of anything else.  So if you want to put my name on your list, knock yourself out.  Write it in capital letters and underline it three times.  Bring it on.

Last, we have this one:

You alt-left pussies make me want to puke.  I bet if you were in any real danger, you'd run home to mama.  You're pretty tough when you're sitting there on your computer, aren't you, big man?

To be honest, I don't think I'm all that tough.  I'm a wuss about pain, frankly.  But I am willing to take significant risks to stand up for what I believe in, to follow Roy T. Bennett's exhortation to "Stop doing what is easy.  Start doing what is right."

And it's interesting that I'm already a member of the "alt-left," a group that President Trump invented two days ago.  I suppose I should be honored, really.  I was expecting it to take at least a few weeks just to have my application processed.  I hope this means that my official alt-left badge, commemorative t-shirt, and decoder ring will be in my mailbox soon!

Anyhow, that's a sampler of what was in yesterday's mailbag.  For damn near all of them, I pretty much just read the first line or two and deleted them, because there's only so many times you can read "go fuck yourself."

So I guess I struck a nerve, which is to me a good thing.  At least it means people are reading what I write, and (on some level) thinking about what I'm saying.  And with this crowd, any inroads I can make in the "reconsider your beliefs" department is movement in the right direction.