Curious about QAnon
When you are lucky enough to be able to write and public books, the way I have been, you can’t help but daydream about all the books you’d love to write but will never be able to. I would, for example, love to write the text for an elaborate coffee-table book devoted to Pen & Pixel, the mad geniuses behind No Limit and various other independent rap labels’ surreally excessive and extravagant covers, which lean so hard into the gauche, gaudy hyper-capitalism of Master P and his worldview that they become an accidental satire on Hip Hop materialism.
I would also love to write a Jon Ronson-like book about QAnon. QAnon is of course the conspiracy theory, started by “Q”, ostensibly a high-level government operative that posits that Donald Trump is covertly working behind the scenes to bring down a massive international child sex trafficking ring prominently involving Democratic ex-presidents, Hillary Clinton and various Hollywood celebrities, including Tom Hanks.
That’s right. According to QAnon, Tom Hanks is part of a massive child sex ring. Disappointing, isn’t it? Likable guy. Impeccable reputation. Widely considered a national treasure yet the dude is up to his neck in Caligula-like sexual depravity, if QAnon is to be believed.
For much of its curious existence a core component of QAnon held that Robert Mueller was only pretending to investigate Donald Trump on charges that he colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election when in reality the two men were secretly in cahoots and that the end of the investigation, it would be Crooked Hillary who would be led away in handcuffs, not Mueller’s secret ally.
You’ve really done it now, deep state: you’ve made Sheriff Trump’s horse mad!
When the Mueller investigation wrapped up with a whole slew of damning allegations against Trump and the bumbling incompetents in his administration rather Mueller exposing a Satanic sex cult with tentacles that reach into the highest corridors of power the faithful of QAnon were disappointed.
They were similarly disappointed when John F. Kennedy Jr. did not use this Independence Day to come forward and reveal that he faked his own death and has been working with Trump to bring down the deep state trying to sabotage his presidency as well as the aforementioned globalist child sex ring, as QAnon predicted he would.
Some QAnon obsessives undoubtedly left the flock after some of the key tenets of QAnon proved predictably false. But a whole lot of people kept the faith in the face of seemingly clear-cut evidence that the conspiracy theory they have chosen to believe in is not only false, but so preposterous and extreme that there’s no way it could possibly be real.
That’s because there is at once so much to QAnon, and at the same time so very little, that huge components of it can be completely, incontrovertibly disproven and cultists can still hold onto the idea that while, sure, the Mueller and JFK Junior stuff didn’t quite play out the way they had anticipated, the thrust of it could still be true and valid.
QAnon takes the quasi-religious, cult aspect of Trump super-fandom to incoherent, vulgar and lurid extremes, presenting Trump not just as an extremely stable genius and the greatest, most popular President ever but as a real-life superhero, a man of action working around the clock to save both innocent children from being raped and eaten and democracy from being corrupted by Obama and Crooked Hillary’s evil minions.
QAnon holds that the most arrogant president in American history is actually drastically under-selling his true achievements, that he’s not just crushing it as the Commander-in-Chief: he’s also single-handedly keeping thousands or tens of thousands of children from being eaten by Satanists from Hollywood and saving our nation from a never-ending coup attempt by swamp creatures and deep state traitors.
I’m fascinated by QAnon because it seems so thoroughly divorced from any recognizable reality. Like all conspiracy theories, it tells us a story about how the world actually works that is appealing to some because it makes theorists feel like they possess secret knowledge, that they’ve been Redpilled while the rest of humanity remains asleep, sheep oblivious to the way the world really works.
With QAnon it transcends political beliefs and politics as a whole and becomes a form of magical thinking, of mass self-delusion, of shared insanity. I would love to explore the lives of people who, as a core belief, think that Donald Trump is trying to save the world from an evil cabal of baby-eating Satanist Democrats, and a few scattered Independent and Green Party members.
I don’t think I would be able to write a book about people I was not able to empathize with on some level. It’s hard to find common ground with people who see Trump as a Christ-like savior of our nation, and not its downfall, but QAnon’s poignant, desperate need to believe in something is relatable, that need to feel a sense of community and purpose.
Besides, we aren’t exactly hurting for well-intentioned but misguided attempts to humanize and understand poor Trump voters, to treat them as misunderstood exemplars of scruffy American decency and not ignorant, racist fucks motivated less by overlooked economic issues than anger towards brown people and the LGTBQ community.
So perhaps it is for the best that I’ll never write a book about the true believers of QAnon but if someone else does I will read the fuck out of it.
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