The Storm Has Begun. It Doesn't Look Anything Like What QAnon Cultists Believe It Would
Only 120 years? Whatever happened to ambition?
For followers of the far right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon, the concept of “The Storm” occupies a place of central importance. According to Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, in an interview with Salon, “The Storm' is basically when tens of thousands of people, including Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and [John] Brennan, and maybe even Hollywood celebrities, and other high-level politicians and journalists even, are going to be arrested, and rounded up and possibly even sent to Guantanamo Bay. Or be subjected to basically military tribunals, where they will be tried for their heinous crimes. And that's sort of like the outline.”
For QAnon cultists, The Storm will be their moment of ultimate vindication. It’ll be that halcyon day when the truth of their seemingly insane, paranoid, impossibly lurid worldview will be established beyond any reasonable doubt. It will expose an evil cabal of sex trafficking Satanic cannibals whose members include Tom Hanks and redeem QAnon extremists in the eyes of their friends and family. This will lead to plenty of embarrassed calls where QAnon skeptics sheepishly concede to QAnon true believers that they foolishly doubted that Bill Gates was a child-eating devil worshipper but now that they saw him getting arrested on television, alongside literally hundreds, if not thousands of other famous, powerful and rich pedophile practitioners of black magic, ALL of them Democrats, they have no choice but to admit to themselves and the world that everything QAnon said was true, and everything everyone else said was nothing more than a filthy lie to cover up literarily the largest sex trafficking ring in the history of the world.
QAnon look forward to the Storm the way the devout look forward to that sunshine day when they will be reunited with their lord and savior in heaven. When The Storm hits the world will finally know what they already know to be true and the sins and wickedness of evildoers will be laid bare for all the world to see.
A version of the Storm happened recently and, needless to say, it didn’t look at all like what QAnon cultists hoped for or expected. Just as QAnon hoped and predicted, Donald Trump, `the leader of the free world, used his position as the most powerful man alive to signal that he thinks Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden should all be investigated, arrested and possibly imprisoned and executed due to their participation in what he has repeatedly and very publicly called the worst crime in American political history: spying on his campaign and instigating what he calls “The Russian Hoax.”
Whenever Trump confidently declares that he is the greatest president in history, particularly for African-Americans, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, it highlights just how little Trump knows about American history, which is not surprising, considering how little he reads. Trump’s knowledge of American presidential history goes all the way back to 2013 or 2014: it’s his presidency plus two or three years of Obama.
Trump angrily insisted that his Attorney General (and at this point it is very obvious that Barr works for Donald Trump and represents the interests of Donald Trump, not the United States) prosecute his political enemies, seething to Fox Business Network, “To be honest, Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country or he’s going to go down as a very sad situation. I said I’m not going to get involved, but I’m going to have to get involved.”
This SHOULD have been a huge deal. The President of the United States was saying that Barr’s reputation hung on whether or not he launched criminal probes against Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton, that, to put things in appropriately breathless, Trumpian terms, he would either be the “greatest attorney general in the history of the country” or “a very sad situation.”
In case there’s any doubt that Trump thinks Biden, Obama and Clinton are guilty of high crimes against the American government and the American people, on October 7th he tweeted, “Obama, Biden, Crooked Hillary and many others got caught in a Treasonous Act of Spying and Government Overthrow, a Criminal Act. How is Biden now allowed to run for President?
As QAnon has insisted all these years, the nebulous crimes that Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton are guilty of are no mere misdemeanors: they’re treason. You get EXECUTED for treason. You get stashed in a secret prison for treason. Treason is a big fucking deal.
Trump tried to signal the beginning of the Storm, an event that would, of course, kick off with the deeply satisfying image of a sobbing Obama being led out of his home in handcuffs, charged with treason and attempting to overthrow the United States government, with angry words in interviews and indignant tweets and putting screamingly public pressure on his Attorney General to do his bidding or suffer the consequences.
In QAnon’s alternate universe, a cool-headed and relentlessly strategic Trump gives the order and Obama and Biden and Crooked Hillary are all rounded up in raids and subjected to military tribunals. In reality, Trump asserts his desire for Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton to all be arrested and do hard time by re-tweeting a meme from Saturday Night Live, Trump’s favorite television program, of Chris Farley screaming at a badly photoshopped Attorney General Barr, “for the love of God ARREST SOMEBODY!”
That’s your Storm, QAnon true believers: an unhinged man-baby, sick with a disease he’s spent months downplaying and dismissing, blasted out of his mind on powerful drugs, rage re-tweeting a meme of a long-dead funnyman screaming at his own Attorney General to make with the investigations and arrests and indictments or pay the ultimate price: displeasing Donald Trump.
The giddy power fantasy of QAnon is that Trump is so powerful he can do anything, including bring down an evil cabal of Satanic pedophiles run by the world’s most richest and most powerful people. In reality, he’s so powerless that he can’t even get a famously loyal sycophant like Barr to do his evil bidding.
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