QAnon and the Panicking of a Nation
On All Hallows' Eve 1938, Orson Welles panicked a nation with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, depicting an outer space alien invasion of the United States. It was brilliant. But it also brought to light how masses of gullible people could easily fall for a totally made-up tale well told. Subsequent research revealed that some 1.7 million listeners took the broadcast as a real news bulletin (the U.S. population then was 130 million).
Something in the human psyche makes people want to make sense out of the incomprehensible, bring order out of chaos, seek facile explanations to confront fear. And the more disordered the era, the more some folks lower their threshold of credulity. "War of the Worlds" happened during the Great Depression, a period when all manner of demagogues, religious fanatics, occultists, political extremists and charlatans pandered to people's insecurities with fantastical answers to complex questions.
We are witnessing this same phenomenon today.
Americans have marvelous imaginations. When the ideal conditions prevail, this country can be a veritable petri dish of conspiracy theories. How 'bout those Salem witches? JFK was the victim of a plot involving shadowy right wing enemies/Castro/Moscow/Mafia - fill in your favorite evildoers. Elvis is still alive. Water fluoridation was a communist plot to undermine American public health. And then there are the UFO's and aliens being covered up by the Pentagon. Area 51 anyone? Watch out for those UN black helicopters! Obama was born in Kenya. Such fevered mental conjurings (with the exception of commie witch hunting McCarthyism) have been consigned to the ever present lunatic fringe. Until now.
Maybe there's something to that fluoridation deal because a mass psychosis has seized a growing segment of our population. Of course, Birther-in-Chief Donald Trump has had a hand in it. In fact, he is a veritable Niagara of falsehoods and misinformation. The Washington Post's Factchecker has been tracking Trump's lies since his inauguration. They run an average of over 7.5 a day, or a total well north of 4,000 since he took office. In June and July, however, our increasingly manic president has upped that rate to 16 a day.
For some reason, the far right traditionally has been an incubation hatchery for conspiracy theories. Which makes it the natural ally of a congenitally mendacious demagogue like Trump. Out of the radical right's fetid idea swamp now springs something called QAnon. "Q" reportedly stands for the government's highly sensitive Q security clearance for nuclear weapons programs; the Oz-like wizard pulling QAnon's levers allegedly is, or was, a "high level" government official who knows all the inner workings of the evil Deep State. "Anon" is the anonymity behind which this Hobbit character hides. He is all-knowing, dropping turds of false wisdom on his gullible mob with the aim of stampeding them to vanquish the enemies of their brilliant hero, Donald Trump.
I held a Q clearance working for Uncle Sam. Upon separation, the security folks told me one never actually loses one's Q clearance. Should we ever reach Defcon Level II or I, people like us could be called back to active duty. I don't know if this is actually true. But here's what I can say: QAnon is as phony as the bilge s/he spews. Pure. Unadulterated. Garbage. In their case Q stands for quackery.
Now here's where it gets really interesting. Deriding QAnon as a "deranged conspiracy cult," the Washington Post reports that “'Q' feeds disciples, or 'bakers,' scraps of intelligence, or 'bread crumbs,' that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the 'storm' — the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to 'the calm before the storm' — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs." You see, Trump, a super-genius, 12-dimensional chess player is actually secretly collaborating with Bob Mueller to expose such evil Democrat malefactors as the Clintons, George Soros and Barack Obama for plotting a coup against Trump while trafficking children on the side. Oh! btw, did you know that J.P. Morgan sank the Titanic to profit from the insurance? And... and the Illuminati and conniving wealthy Jews such as the Rothschilds lead a vile satanic cult which is at war with Trumpland. Somewhere there are cannibals in this mix. Why stop at child sex traffickers after all?
Get the picture? Neither do I, except that "deranged conspiracy cult" is a euphemism for this crowd - who have been showing up at Trump's rabid rallies sporting "Q" signs and T-shirts warning of the coming "Storm" and "Great Awakening." Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Trump slyly fans the flames in which these folks thrive, for example, referring elliptically in his recent Tampa speech to the "storm."
There are real life consequences to this tin foil mob's growing influence on the right. In 2016, in response to the ongoing claims in social media of a child sex-trafficking ring in pizza restaurants organized by Hillary Clinton, John Podesta and other senior Democratic officials, a man shot up a D.C. pizza joint using an assault rifle. Whipped into a frenzy by Trump at the Tampa rally, supporters, many QAnon fans, launched into a paroxysm of obscene gestures and profanity directed at CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, shouting "traitor" and "liar." Worried news media leaders are fearful that continued Trump charges of "fake news" and "enemies of the people" will lead to physical violence against journalists.
In their upcoming book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, James Wetherall and Cailin O'Connor posit that "social factors contribute to the persistence and spread of false beliefs, even when there is strong evidence available that those beliefs lead to poor outcomes... These same social factors can be manipulated by industrial and political agents." Pundits point to societal changes centering on globalization, immigration, "creative destruction" in the economy, a yawning wealth and income gap and atomized information media as catalysts behind the political troubles besetting this nation. Add to that a toxic political agent like Donald Trump and you have a witch's brew for popular discontent and social strife.
When those Martian hordes invaded earth in 1938, Americans' heightened credulity was starkly exposed. While the QAnon mothership has arrived at our doorstep, we may not quite be panicked as a nation yet. But a critical mass of true believers in insane theories is building, abetted by a sociopath in the White House. And this cannot bode well for our future.