Dates Can Mean Anything: the Slippery Anti-Logic of QAnon
As readers of this here blog are well aware, I am obsessed with QAnon, the controversial, possibly untrue conspiracy theory that posits that Donald Trump is fighting a heroic, secret battle against an evil cabal of cannibalistic Satan worshipers made up of top Democrats and celebrities like Tom Hanks that rules the world but will be taken down en masse and either executed or imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in a historic cleansing known as “The Storm.”
I’ve spent countless hours venturing down various QAnon rabbit holes over the past four years on Facebook and social media.
During one such journey I checked out the preeminent Twitter account for the QAnon theory that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death in order to fight the Satanic cannibalistic cabal of Deep State pedophile murderers and would publicly re-emerge and take Mike Pence’s place on the 2020 Republican ticket.
Sure enough, the pinned tweet for this account teased the exact date when JFK Jr. would emerge from decades of hiding and join Trump’s crusade against an almost unfathomable evil.
Needless to say, this day came and went without JFK Jr. coming out of hiding and proudly declaring himself part of Team Trump, just as pretty much nothing that QAnon prophesied actually happened.
A follower of the JFK-is-alive account understandably replied to this pinned tweet by saying that they believed in QAnon, they believed that JFK Jr. was alive and part of Trump’s furtive campaign against cannibalistic kiddie-fuckers and believed in the Twitter account but that it did not reflect well upon the feed’s credibility that its pinned tweet promised something that obviously did not happen.
This true believer politely suggested that the feed dedicated to promoting the laughable fiction that JFK Jr. is alive and would reveal himself on a specific date should perhaps choose a pinned tweet that hadn’t been proven wrong.
In response the proprietor of the JFK Jr-as-MAGA-secret weapon Twitter feed asserted that dates could mean different things.
The implication was that when this Twitter feed asserted that JFK Jr. would come back on a specific date and then he did not, in fact, come back on the prophesied day, that did not in any way invalidate the account or its claims; it just meant that the tweet about the day JFK Jr. wasn’t supposed to be taken literally.
In the weird, wild world of QAnon dates can mean different things and numbers can mean different things and words in particular can mean different things. Alternately, dates, numbers and words can mean nothing at all or they can be deliberately false because purposeful misinformation has somewhat confusingly always been at the core of QAnon mythology.
That might be utter bullshit but if you’re a QAnon cultist looking for reasons to keep believing it’s utterly satisfying and validating.
Conclusive evidence that JFK Jr. and Donald Trump once took a photograph together. What more proof do you sheeple require?
After all, if the day that JFK Jr. was definitely going to announce his big comeback doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means, then NO all-important day of reckoning has to mean anything either.
By that logic, January 6th and January 20th don’t have to be important either, or rather their importance might come from being days of fake importance, of historic, purposeful misdirection.
There’s literally no end to the number of ways you can read the tea leaves. It’s not a matter of QAnon letting you down constantly with a never-ending string of bold predictions that never come true; you’re letting down Q and your fellow patriots by misreading the prognostications and being too short-sighted.
Who’s to say that the Storm won’t arrive until Donald Trump Jr. and Michael Flynn Jr. are President and Vice President in 2037 (2020 + 17, the number of Q in the alphabet), with JFK III as Secretary of State?
The warped genius of QAnon is that because of the ingenious way it has been constructed, the game never has to end and the players never have to admit defeat and disillusionment, or that it was ever even a game rather than a matter of life and death importance.
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