Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old boys who were making stuff up on 4chan which was a place of great unseemliness, not that I would know; they knew they weren’t being serious – well, not serious-serious - they weren’t serious about anything. I mean – there was no vast conspiratorial cabal in charge of everything, but it was such fun to pretend there was, and hey you know, maybe, I’m not saying it is, but maybe it’s true, who knows, not me for sure, but saying all this stuff seems to annoy the very people we love to annoy, it’s the elaborate internet version of ringing an old fart’s doorbell and running down the road. But the thing is, when this laughing gas escaped from its 4chan/8chan messageboards of icky sickness (many rape jokes, apparently), what do you know, people on facebook started taking some of it literally. And then Fox News! Now it really got funny! We couldn’t believe it! Let’s make some other wild shit up!

And they found that they could not make up shit that was too wild for people to believe.

Because people believe anything! Anything!

Not quite core to the conspiracy, but widely believed, was that the cabal was heavily involved in large-scale child abuse, quite probably for satanic or other ritual purposes

Leading to the stroke of genius that goes by the name of Pizzagate. You like that one? What about this:

Marjorie Taylor Greene [Representative for the 14th district of Georgia] in 2018 wrote that Californian wildfires had been deliberately started by a “Jewish space laser”

Yeah, throw that one onto the pile along with 5G and anti-vaxxing. It’s all true you know. They never went to the moon! You know why? There isn’t a moon!




IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN

So this QAnon thing – it is the very definition of Anarchy. It’s a movement with no leaders, no fixed beliefs, no holy scriptures, it booms along and bits fall off it very frequently – like when a prediction that Trump will be reinstated doesn’t happen – yeah, didn’t happen, so what, we’re now waiting for the reappearance of John F Kennedy Jr – I know, the MSM say he died in 1999 but he didn’t and he’s back and he’s one of us – and anyway we’re all now busy doing research into the connection between Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan laboratory that deliberately started the plandemic – wait, maybe that was Hunter Biden… or Hillary Clinton – hold on, aren’t they the same person? My head hurts, I can’t keep all this straight. I need to lie down.

But no time to weaken, you have to be online 25 hours a day or you’re gonna miss the next livestreamed massacre courtesy one of your little QAnon pixies (3 QAnon-related mass shootings in 2019 including the Christchurch mosque attack). Because although the whole thing started as a lot of crazy humour, when the racists and nazis joined the party it wasn’t that funny anymore.

James Ball is a great guide through all this madness. Without overburdening us outsiders (who’ve never before heard of MyPillow or LARPing or Frazzledrip and only barely heard of gamergate and The Great Reset with too much detail -but there will still be too many obscure names and acronyms for some, it just cannot be avoided-) he pulls together and makes sense – in a way, in a way – of the means and methods of this amorphous nightmarish alternate-reality choose-your-own-plot do-your-own-research world we now inhabit.



He says stuff like

The idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost all of us believe to some extent – not least because it’s at least partly true

He says that the MSM response to this farrago of poisonous fantasy is debunking and fact checking and is a total non-starter because there is no debunking or fact-checking these people, they are immune, you can’t prove a negative and with QAnon types there is no proof you could give them that they would believe.

As an example, take the #SavetheChildren campaign, a QAnon offshoot.

The statistic bandied about by QAnon and QAnon-adjacent influencers is that “365,348 children went missing in 2020” as QAnon congresswoman Lauren Boebert once tweeted, citing the stat to the FBI. “You haven’t heard a word from the media about it.”

JB says – this number is accurate! Yes! But it actually refers to the number of missing person reports about children for the total year, not the number who are actually missing.

Considerably more than 99% of missing children in the US are found alive and even in the most high-risk category – abduction by strangers or by a family member with an outstanding felony warrant – 97% of children are recovered alive.

I think Lauren Boebert would probably wave away those stats as fake news. Even though they are from the same source that she uses.

JB says

So embedded are QAnon’s ideas in the conspiratorial corners of the internet that there are now hundreds of thousands or people who subscribe, at least in part, to QAnon without ever having heard of Q or QAnon itself.

He says

In the US, a poll taken by YouGov as early as May 2020 found that 44% of Republican voters believed Bill Gates was plotting to use Covid-19 as a pretext to plant tracking microchips in billions of people around the world.

He explains how the wild ‘n’ crazy turbulence of Trump AND Covid rebooted the whole mania, and he pulls in, of course, the QAnon low-point culmination on 6 January 2021. Actually to discuss this whole giant QAnon conspiracy thing you have to rant on about so many loony things you get to start sounding as mad as the people who believe it!



THREE THINGS (OF SO MANY) I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND

I didn’t get where the obsession with Hillary Clinton came from.

I don’t understand that if the deep state stole the election why they won’t steal the next one too, so what might be the point of Trump running in 2024? He will lose, the deep state will see to it.

I still didn’t understand quite how the conspiracy believing MSM hating red pill eaters think our lives and our countries work. Because if there is a giant elite running everything, then democracy is a sham, justice is a sham, all those fine words mean nothing. Doesn’t matter which party wins an election, the elite will be pulling all the strings. They will continue to inject us all with vaccines to turn us into zombies or radiate us with 5G to turn us into… zombies… or zap us with a space laser to turn us into… zombies. How come they haven’t done all this already? I don’t understand. Oh boy, actually I don’t understand any of this.

Recommended for masochists who enjoy feeling their brain melting.