Did you know that the word “gullible” does not appear in any dictionary? It’s true. Look it up. I’ll wait.
For those of you who did not fall for the best joke I knew in seventh grade, I’ve got another one for you: Did you know that Tom Hanks, Hillary and Bill Clinton, George Soros, Adam Schiff, Chrissy Teigen, and many other rich and famous liberals and Hollywood types are members of a cult that sexually abuses children and then sacrifices and eats them?
Except, it’s not a joke. It’s a bizarre fantasy that is believed by the tens of thousands of Americans who buy into the QAnon conspiracy. They look for cryptic clues on the internet that suggest “a storm” is coming in which all the pedophilic evil-doers will be arrested and executed. They share the clues in chat rooms and discuss what they might mean. And I repeat: They really think liberal leaders kill and eat babies. QAnon is considered a violent threat by the FBI and has been banned from most social media platforms. And yet, it persists, having become an especially potent force in the Republican party.
There have always been cults, mostly religious-based to some degree, most often designed to channel the twisted beliefs of some charismatic leader: Jim Jones, Charles Manson, David Koresh, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, et. al. But those cults were small in comparison to QAnon. And instead of a charismatic leader, this cult is fronted by an unidentified individual called “Q,” a “top government insider close to the [former] president” who has proof that global elites extract from their child victims’ blood a life-extending chemical named Adrenochrome. Q gets on the internet to post cryptic clues and set dates for when “the storm” might be coming. When one of Q’s predictions doesn’t pan out — which is always — he tells his adherents to “trust the plan.” You see, even the wrong predictions are part of the plan. It’s like a pyramid scheme of stupid: “Where we go one we go all.”
In an effort to educate myself, I started watching Into the Storm, the six-part HBO series that looks into the phenomenon that is QAnon. After 45 minutes of watching various deluded idiots proclaim unutterably insane things as fact and brag about getting a wink or a thumbs-up from Trump at a rally for flashing their “Q” gear, I grew weary and started fast-forwarding. I watched the part where an adherent “investigates” a Washington, D.C., parlor called Comet Ping Pong, the one where Hillary Clinton’s sex ring supposedly tortured babies in the basement. “Cheese Pizza,” you see, is code for “child pornography.” I’m not making this up.
The investigator concluded “something suspicious” was going on behind a door employees kept going through, and posted his report online, neglecting to mention that the pizza joint didn’t have a basement. I still don’t know if he tried the cheese pizza. His “report” was convincing enough to compel a QAnon true believer to drive 300 miles to Comet Ping Pong and open fire with an assault rifle a few weeks later.
I decided then that there was no way I was going to spend six hours of my life learning more about these fools. So I read reviews, and what I learned was that after six episodes, Into the Storm reveals that Q is most likely an American shyster named James Arthur Watkins, who owned the controversial anonymous message board 8chan, and his son, Ronald Watkins, who runs its successor, 8kun. Watkins’ umbrella company, N.T. Technology, also hosted Japanese child pornography sites, according to a 2020 story by Mother Jones. So, yeah, he seems nice.
I still don’t quite know how we got here, how a cult as obviously deranged as this one could suck in so many adherents. Unless it’s just that ideas, even (or especially) stupid ones, can spread virally now. Charles Darwin wrote about “natural selection” and survival of the fittest in his theory of evolution. We may be seeing an accelerated version of that phenomenon, with folks buying into ludicrous online cults and absurd anti-vaccination fears and science-denying foolishness at unprecedented rates.
The outcome is yet to be decided, but as a sage named P.T. Barnum once said about Americans: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Or maybe every second, these days.
You could look it up.
