Politics
QAnon Collapses As GOP Coddles Conspiracy & Delusion
It turns out Q is a socially awkward web hoster intent on toying with American democracy.
As it turns out, Q is not a deep cover intelligence operative on the frontlines of Donald Trump’s secret war against hordes of Satanist-Democrat pedophile vampires. Go figure.
Rather, he seems to have been revealed to be a socially awkward web hoster intent on toying with American democracy from his laptop. If Q’s goal was to stir up American extremism and blight our politics with endless disinformation, ignorance, and hatred, he has succeeded fantastically.
Of course, he could never have gone so far without the tacit encouragement of Donald Trump and the GOP, who have not only tolerated raving QAnon supporters within their midst, but embraced and further amplified their collective insanity.
Ron Watkins’ first foray into the ugly netherworld of online misinformation and hate was 8chan, the now notorious internet sanctuary of neo-Nazis, disturbed sociopathic loners, and conspiracy theorists. It’s a place where mass shooters across the world could show off their rambling manifestos and leave behind footage of their killing sprees, all to the endless joy, admiration, and frequent copycatting of their online cheerleaders.
8chan happily incubated America’s darkest impulses. Thus QAnon was born.
The message board, renamed 8kun in 2019, is a cesspool where alienated and anonymous people compete to outdo one another in every kind of human depravity, always uncensored and open for business for the most disturbed and mentally vulnerable.
The QAnon conspiracy theory exists at the intersection of America’s toxic conservative politics and the new information age we all inhabit. Fringe views have found a willing platform, both online in the form of message boards like 8chan, and in the Republican Party, which increasingly caters to its most extreme and noxious elements.
QAnon has emerged as the grotesque face of America’s political disfigurement in recent years. It represents the tendency toward ignorance amid the right-wing’s resentment of science, evidence-based thinking, and ultimately reality itself.
It comes from America’s long, sordid history of religious extremism that’s been bubbling on the right for decades, even as those same latent ideas have metastasized into something far larger and darker when fed the jet-fuel of a new and overheated information environment online that we are just barely beginning to understand.
Conspiracy is a way for low-information people to synthesize an increasingly complicated world, to make sense of a changing society and a challenging economy, and draw meaning into their lives. Conspiratorial misinformation has always been a potent political weapon, wielded by unscrupulous politicians and manipulative agitators, but it’s never had the kind of reach the internet has provided for it in recent years.
Naturally, Ron Watkins denies he is Q. In a recent HBO documentary on the subject, he seems to give himself away, however, with a slip of the tongue. His motives seem clear. Like Donald Trump, Watkins is a narcissist who clearly enjoys preying on the misery and stupidity of others.
The truly scary component of the QAnon saga is less about one person’s deranged games, and more about the millions of Americans who are seemingly unable to distinguish between outright fiction and reality.
The larger questions of conservative America’s turn toward racism, extremism, and dark fantasy, alongside a swiftly changing complimentary online ecosystem that rewards the loudest, ugliest, and most extreme content have only grown since Donald Trump’s campaign to subvert the election and his disgraced departure from office.
Our society has been cracked in half by these lies, and QAnon seems to distill all that’s wrong with America’s culture and politics into a single catchphrase. Unfortunately, unwinding the trends that led to millions of Americans believing in the existence of a satanic cabal of child pedophiles, and a major political party integrating that delusion into its politics, may take far longer than simply diagnosing the problem.
Certainly, the continued insistence on fantastical dishonesty and conspiracy-mongering within even the mainstream of the GOP, and the ever-enlarging spiderweb of ever more bizarre and extreme media purveyors offering such content suggests QAnon may be the terrifying beginning rather than the endpoint of the spectacle of unhinged conspiracy asserting itself into American politics.
Even now, after Q’s identity has seemingly been revealed to be an antisocial web hoster, QAnon’s many nodes continue to mutate like a gangrenous growth, unstoppable by reason or the force of reality.
It’s clear that many Americans seem totally unable to resist the temptation to ascribe the difficulties, frustrations, and anxieties of their lives to shadowy forces just beyond their reach, while neo-fascist politicians seem unable to resist the temptation to use that ignorance to gin up fear, anger, and support for themselves.
All of which leads to a dangerous and highly combustible concoction of quasi-religious delusion careening directly into the heart of American politics. As that ignorance is supercharged by the internet and abused by political manipulators, it bodes badly for the rest of us consigned to the fact-based world we call reality.