Encounter at Far Point
Editor's Note: I chose the title for this post based on the fact that while I've heard of the internet conspiracy theory known as "Q," this is my first contact with it in real life. Robin will get it.
I had to go over to the old neighborhood a few weeks back to pick up this special prescription cat food for Bob, our ancient crypt keeper ghost cat, and I decided to take a weird route home that involved following the Kennedy Expressway out to O'Hare. Along the way while in the middle of the permanent traffic jam, I saw this guy -- I can't imagine it's not a guy, or that he's any older than, say, 30 -- next to a collection of banners he'd attached to the Sayre Street bridge advertising "Q." He saw me take this picture, so he waved and raised a camera to take a picture of me back. Now I'm probably on some web site listed as one of the awakened.
"Say, Clint," you might be asking. "What is 'Q'?" And the first thing I'll say is that this had better be the only place on the internet you ever ask that unless you want a horde of basement-dwelling teenagers holding digital pitchforks to drag you forcefully into the dark, dank underbelly of the web where everyone looks like a poorly-drawn frog and chants something like "One of us! One of us!"
Here's the deal. Q is short for "Q-Anon," which is actually supposed to be a person who first popped up on an internet sewer called 4-chan. (And if you ever want to lose all hope for humanity, spend an hour poking around 4-chan.) Sometime around the 2016 election, this Q-Anon popped up and started pretending to have special knowledge obtained from his supposed high level security clearance of an intricate and ornate conspiracy waged by evil Left Wing types that penetrated far into the bowels of the Deep State government. Also, these are the guys that said Hillary Clinton was running a child porn ring out of the basement of a pizza joint in New York City. The basic theory in recent times is that Robert Mueller is a plant working in secret with Donald Trump to untangle this Left Wing Deep State conspiracy, that there are secret indictments waiting for hundreds of Democrats, and that at some point soon the righteous will rise up and line all the Democrats against the wall, and a new glorious day will dawn when all the disaffected and abused will finally be able to climb from their basements and set their computers up in the light of day. Or something dumb like that. It's a conspiracy theory, and it's nuts.
But there is this core of sad and gullible people who have really gotten into the "Q" theory, and they've infected a bunch of folks who might otherwise seem normal. A not insignificant portion of the Fox News viewership is into it. A lot of the old white people who go to Trump rallies buy it. Your crazy uncle is probably a Q. The woman in this video is a Q.
I hate conspiracy theories. I think there is no quicker way to unravel a society than to feed a bunch of conspiracy theories to its most gullible members. These gullible types then feel like they have some sort of special knowledge, that they're somehow more in-tune with the world and smarter than everyone else -- one of the great ironies of conspiracy theory -- and they become willing to subvert every essential thing that keeps society in place in order to defend against the conspiracy.
Meanwhile, a lot of people on my side of the political fence talk about Russia and it's attempts to "hack" our elections, and some people believe that the Russians have actually physically changed the votes in our voter machines. And, yes, on some level that's taken on the degree of absurdity of the typical conspiracy theory. But I don't think Russia is some technological superpower able to penetrate deep through all our digital infrastructure and control everything. I think that, in general, Russia is a yahoo country full of rednecks, but that they were lucky enough to recognize a certain kinship with their redneck American cousins. They saw where we were most gullible (mostly in things related to white nationalism) and fed us a bunch of conspiracy theories like Pizzagate that inspired us to hack ourselves. They didn't have to hack our votes. They just hacked our brains ... or lack thereof.
Encounter at Far Point
Editor's Note: I chose the title for this post based on the fact that while I've heard of the internet conspiracy theory known as "Q," this is my first contact with it in real life. Robin will get it.
I had to go over to the old neighborhood a few weeks back to pick up this special prescription cat food for Bob, our ancient crypt keeper ghost cat, and I decided to take a weird route home that involved following the Kennedy Expressway out to O'Hare. Along the way while in the middle of the permanent traffic jam, I saw this guy -- I can't imagine it's not a guy, or that he's any older than, say, 30 -- next to a collection of banners he'd attached to the Sayre Street bridge advertising "Q." He saw me take this picture, so he waved and raised a camera to take a picture of me back. Now I'm probably on some web site listed as one of the awakened.
"Say, Clint," you might be asking. "What is 'Q'?" And the first thing I'll say is that this had better be the only place on the internet you ever ask that unless you want a horde of basement-dwelling teenagers holding digital pitchforks to drag you forcefully into the dark, dank underbelly of the web where everyone looks like a poorly-drawn frog and chants something like "One of us! One of us!"
Here's the deal. Q is short for "Q-Anon," which is actually supposed to be a person who first popped up on an internet sewer called 4-chan. (And if you ever want to lose all hope for humanity, spend an hour poking around 4-chan.) Sometime around the 2016 election, this Q-Anon popped up and started pretending to have special knowledge obtained from his supposed high level security clearance of an intricate and ornate conspiracy waged by evil Left Wing types that penetrated far into the bowels of the Deep State government. Also, these are the guys that said Hillary Clinton was running a child porn ring out of the basement of a pizza joint in New York City. The basic theory in recent times is that Robert Mueller is a plant working in secret with Donald Trump to untangle this Left Wing Deep State conspiracy, that there are secret indictments waiting for hundreds of Democrats, and that at some point soon the righteous will rise up and line all the Democrats against the wall, and a new glorious day will dawn when all the disaffected and abused will finally be able to climb from their basements and set their computers up in the light of day. Or something dumb like that. It's a conspiracy theory, and it's nuts.
But there is this core of sad and gullible people who have really gotten into the "Q" theory, and they've infected a bunch of folks who might otherwise seem normal. A not insignificant portion of the Fox News viewership is into it. A lot of the old white people who go to Trump rallies buy it. Your crazy uncle is probably a Q. The woman in this video is a Q.
I hate conspiracy theories. I think there is no quicker way to unravel a society than to feed a bunch of conspiracy theories to its most gullible members. These gullible types then feel like they have some sort of special knowledge, that they're somehow more in-tune with the world and smarter than everyone else -- one of the great ironies of conspiracy theory -- and they become willing to subvert every essential thing that keeps society in place in order to defend against the conspiracy.
Meanwhile, a lot of people on my side of the political fence talk about Russia and it's attempts to "hack" our elections, and some people believe that the Russians have actually physically changed the votes in our voter machines. And, yes, on some level that's taken on the degree of absurdity of the typical conspiracy theory. But I don't think Russia is some technological superpower able to penetrate deep through all our digital infrastructure and control everything. I think that, in general, Russia is a yahoo country full of rednecks, but that they were lucky enough to recognize a certain kinship with their redneck American cousins. They saw where we were most gullible (mostly in things related to white nationalism) and fed us a bunch of conspiracy theories like Pizzagate that inspired us to hack ourselves. They didn't have to hack our votes. They just hacked our brains ... or lack thereof.