Great piece on the mind-boggling weirdness that’s QAnon

I am quoted extensively in this excellent bit of investigative college journalism about the utterly bizarre roots of the great American derangement of QAnon. 

The Saint Peter’s University newspaper ran this article examining a part of the modern conspiracy culture whose beliefs appear to be stranger and stranger the more one looks at it in light of all the media coverage it received in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

 

From its unknown origins in the bowels of the 4chan message board in what might or might not have been a prank, this movement resembles both a role playing game from hell and a cult at the same time. It’s a sort of do it yourself, crowdsourced conspiracy where thousands of people have coalesced around a movement with no known leader—aside from whomever it is that has been posting unintelligible gibberish about “storms” and “great awakenings” on the Internet—and also a kind of a cult with no charismatic leader.

 

No matter how one looks at the ongoing saga of QAnon, I think any clear headed person will only see madness.

An Anti-conspiracy Conspiracy? Unlikely.

So I finally got through perusing parts of - probably just a small part of - all the information cropping up in the media about the Qanon conspiracy theory. After several days of this enterprise, I just got tired of the whole thing and more than a bit irritated by the amount of stupid that exists in the world. However, I was also fascinated by the larger social phenomenon of it all, the confirmation of a number of venerable media theories that have been arguing for decades that people are quite active and facile when it comes to protecting their own belief systems, in interpreting and twisting information in the world all around them in such a way as to confirm their own preconceived notions and biases...

...You see as an eggheaded academic who tries to corrupt and brainwash America's youth by teaching them how to debunk conspiracy theories about the New World Order, to embrace the status quo and to appreciate the subversive, Satanic fun of the "Lucifer" TV series, I need to frame everything in terms of high-flown theories...

But anyway, the Qanon conspiracy theory! For those who have not kept up with this, it basically started with a series of postings on the 4chan and 8chan social media sites by someone (or maybe some parties) calling himself "Q" and claiming to be a high-level government operative with inside information that can best be described as depressingly bonkers. And I mean so bonkers that if the producers of The X-Files would ever craft an episode around it, they would make it one of their comical self-parody episodes. But the main points of the theory claim that Donald Trump had been "installed" in the presidency by a secret cabal of military brass to work together with Robert Mueller to expose and smash a world-wide Satanic pedophile ring run by Hilary Clinton, the Democratic party, and numerous A-list Hollywood celebrities. So, yup, Mueller's Russia investigation is just a ruse, a smoke-screen for the real work of taking down the global Satanic child-sex trafficking ring.

And because high-ranking government whistle-blowers would try and blow their whistles by going to disreputable online forums instead of respected media outlets...

Oh, yeah, the so-called "respectable mainstream media" are all infiltrated by sex-trafficking Satanists too. Sorry, forgot about that!

So anyway, there's no point in beating a dead horse here and repeating what so much of the news stories about Qanon have already talked about, namely how absurd all of this is and how there is no evidence to prove any of this silliness. Yes, it's all completely unbelievable and it's all stupid. And no, there is no credible evidence to prove any of these claims. Furthermore, it stretches the imagination beyond all breaking points to suggest that such a far-reaching conspiracy that would include thousands of people from the mass media, law enforcement, and politics could ever pull off a plot like this...

So let's just repeat after me, kids: 9/11 was not an inside job, JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, we landed on the Moon, mass shootings in Colorado, Sandy Hook, and Florida were not false flag operations and there are no such things as "crisis actors." Thousands of people can NOT work together on such ridiculously convoluted plots without slipping up, spilling the beans, or turning on one another. Yes, if you disagree with me, you fail the class!

What is more interesting here, however, is how the Qanon phenomenon gives evidence to how fragmented our society has become to the point of the disappearance of a consensus reality for such a large sectors of the American population. People - again, as decades worth of research on how individuals process information and how personal beliefs and desires intersect with external sources of information coming from mass media sources has demonstrated - will selectively expose themselves to information that confirms their inherent biases. We believe what we want to believe and we will aggressively ignore or reinterpret information that contradicts our beliefs. Cognitive Dissonance is the phenomenon that explains how unpleasant and how downright painful it is to be proven wrong, to hear points of view that disagree with us, and have our beliefs challenged. It so unpleasant that people will go to extraordinary lengths to escape such feelings. The easiest way to escape dissonance today is by way of the conspiracy theory. Scientific studies have disproven the vaccine-autism link you've come to believe? Well, the scientists that authored those studies are in on the conspiracy!

The Qanon phenomenon can best be viewed, I believe, through this framework of a toxic cultural fragmentation and dissonance. Some have come to despise those whose political positions they disagree with to such a pathological extreme that they are willing to embrace the head-spinning absurdity of the Qanon claims.

This article, as a matter of fact, posits that maybe the Qanon conspiracy theory was actually a creation of some leftist pranksters to make ultra-conservatives look bad. At some point, perhaps the pranksters will show themselves in public and yell "Psych! Fooled you!"  Now such an anti-conspiracy conspiracy is quite unlikely, I think. However, if someone tried to pull such a grand-scale joke, it would, no doubt, work quite easily.

Now let me predict that the political opposite of such a prank would work as well. There are demented crackpots on the left as well, and not just on the right. The repellent, violent morons of the "Antifa" movement would be just as ready to swallow a conspiracy that would blame some grand, world-scale act of evil on a vast coalition of the military/industrial complex, corporations, George W. Bush, all in league with Big Oil, FOX news, Dick Cheney, and Rush Limbaugh.

Today, unfortunately, stupid has no exclusive party affiliation. And conspiracy theories are its favorite refuge.