Salon, Amanda Marcotte: Is QAnon the new Christian right? With evangelicals fading, a new insanity rises. Subtitle: “Right-wingers desperately need a myth that turns them into the good guys. With QAnon, they’ve outdone themselves”
Amanda Marcotte pulls no punches.
White evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.
Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.
Seriously? How in the 21st century, hundreds of years since the Enlightenment, hundreds of years of building a global civilization based on science and technology (which incidentally enables no-nothings like QAnon followers, and religious fundamentalists, to spread their conspiracies and theological fantasies), that has led to so many incredible discoveries about the age and extent of our universe, are so many people still so ignorant and uninformed and credulous? Well, I have no quick easy answer. I need to account for such a phenomenon, in the big scheme of things. Partly it’s my observation that ordinary people don’t need to understand reality in order to live their lives, raise their children, and provide the next generation; communities and tribes are built on shared theories about the world, no matter how outlandish. It seems to be only a tiny fraction of the entire population that is smart enough, or cares enough, to try to understand how the universe actually works. (This is perhaps a luxury of mature cultures.)
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Slate: House Republicans Get Cranked Up, subtitle, “QAnon is headed for Capitol Hill.”
After winning a runoff for the Republican nomination in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District Tuesday night, Marjorie Taylor Greene delivered a message for her soon-to-be colleague in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“She’s a hypocrite,” Greene said. “She’s anti-American. And we’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress!”
…
Where Greene has broken new ground, though, is in her support for QAnon, a vast and ever-morphing conspiracy that holds that Donald Trump is secretly combating a cabal of globalist and Democratic elites who run a pedophile ring and worship Satan. “I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out,” Greene—who, again, will almost certainly serve in the United States House of Representatives next year—said in 2017. “And I think we have the president to do it.”
My take: she’s insane. Or slightly better: she’s a Trump cultist. Or at best, severely uneducated about the real world works.
I’m always trying to understand these issues in the bigger picture. There have been crackpots throughout history. How is it crackpots are becoming significant political forces now? Because internet?
