Not surprising in a world with no consensus reality

So I've been away from the blog for a while, as the holidays and numerous writing projects have been taking up my time, but found myself shaking my head in dismay at a month's worth of insanity every time I glanced at trending stories in news apps or turned on the TV. Even though I study the social phenomenon of conspiracy theories, the events of the past month leave me stunned. Although I guess they shouldn't. The logical end result of the conspiratorial mentality, as we have seen so plainly on January 6, is anarchy violence, and destruction. 

This shameful end of the road to the QAnon conspiracy and its adherents should, again, not be a surprise. In 2019 an unpublished FBI memo warned that QAnon and similar conspiratorial subcultures should be viewed as a potential terrorist threat as we would approach to 2020 elections and its aftermath.  And now the memo was proven right.

But even before January 6, the depth of the depravity to which conspiracy fantasies could be goaded into has been obvious. What could be more repugnant than the harassment of the families of Sandy Hook victims by conspiracy theorists? Or anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists taunting and mocking the parents of children who had needlessly died of the measles because they haven't been given life-saving vaccines? Does it surprise anyone that people who could sink as low as the harassment of the Sandy Hook families would be capable of rioting in the Capitol building?

And the worst part of this conspiratorial madness is the fact that the disaffected, a disillusioned collection of unfortunate souls out there, people somehow so disconnected from a consensus reality as to actually entertain the irrational tenets of QAnon, have been goaded on in their beliefs. They have been pushed and egged on, their gullibility, anger, fear, and disillusionment with the world exploited by opportunistic con artists. Their fears have been fed by people like Alex Jones and his imitators all across the Internet - from the State of the Nation to the Millennium Report, Before It's News and Zero Hedge - egging on the unstable toward the inevitable violence.

And the most frustrating and shameful of this exploitation of a disaffected subculture of America was Donald Trump's own tacit endorsement of the QAnon movement from its very inception in 2017. Turning a blind eye to the sort of extremism growing on the fringes of the conservative right by the President of the United States is outrageous. His claims that he knew nothing of QAnon's off-the-wall Satanic child-trafficking conspiracy theory is completely unbelievable. 

People as angry and volatile as the ones who stormed the Capitol are still out there and all over the country. Dealing with this madness, the ultimate madness of a world where there is no consensus reality, is perhaps the biggest existential challenge this culture has to deal with in a long time...perhaps a threat it has never faced before in its history.