A while back we were sharing a beer at our favorite dive with a friend of ours who’s a well-regarded local heavy metal and punk music drummer, and during a discussion of the day’s news she told us that we needed to get on the internet and find out what “Q” was saying about it. Only then, she assured us, would we truly understand what was really going on.
Our friend is a sweet enough gal, but she drinks her beer through a straw, and believes that Hillary Clinton died on Sept. 11 in 2016 and has been replaced by a body double, and that the Illuminati have shape-shifting reptilian aliens who secretly cause everything from the stock market indices to the baseball scores to your own personal and financial problems, so we were skeptical of the claim. We love a good conspiracy the way other fiction lovers enjoy a good murder mystery or cloak-and-dagger novel, though, so we looked up the “QAnon” theory, found it’s plot entertainingly complex but a bit fanciful, and then gave it little thought.
We were reminded of the of the amusing anecdote, however, by President Donald Trump’s latest campaign rally in Tampa, Fla., on Tuesday. There was the usual schtick about all the enemies of the people that Trump has lately been vanquishing, and more than the usual booing of the “fake news” media, but we couldn’t help noticing all the white t-shirts with emblazoned with a “Q” rather than “Make America Great Again,” and all the waved signs proclaiming that “We Are Q”.
Which obliges a weary news watcher to familiarize himself with this whole “Q” and “QAnon” craziness, and what it means amidst of the rest of the craziness you find daily even in the most respectable news outlets.
To put it as succinctly as possible, “Q” is the “internet handle” of someone one or another out there who often posts on a couple of internet message boards largely devoted to conspiracy theories, and purports to be a high-level federal official with the ultra-top “Q level” security clearance, and “QAnon” is “Q” and all the anonymous internet “Anons” who are believe his claims and are thus deciphering his cryptic messages to discern what’s really going on. What’s really going on turns out to be pretty much every crazy-ass conspiracy you’ve ever heard, from the Masons to the Rothschilds and certain other Jews and some shape-shifting reptilians and annoyingly liberal Hollywood hot shots and other child-molesting Satanic sorts. According to this unified field conspiracy theory, these evil forces have been running America and the world for decades. The good news in the theory, and what accounts for all those “Q’ t-shirts and signs at the Trump rally, is that the military recruited Trump to run for president, and they are now setting things right.
According to the theory even that special counsel probe into the “Russia thing” is a ruse, and that the special counsel is using the cover to investigate the child-molesting Satanic cults that have wrought such hell on America for so many decades, will ultimately lock up such enemies of the people as President Barack Obama and vanquished Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, with Trump’s grateful voters chanting gleefully as the cell doors clank. A long ago “Q” posting was interpreted by the “QAnons” to mean that Clinton and several of her subordinates would be locked up a short time later, and that a general crackdown on Satanic pedophilia would shortly follow, but the faithful still believe in final delightfully vengeful denouement when that smug movie star Tom Hanks and everyone they dislike is rightfully behind bars.
Trump’s more mainstream defenders will rightly note that he can’t be held accountable for the t-shirts some people wear and the signs they wave at his rallies, but they can’t say he’s done anything to discourage such crazy-ass conspiracy-theorizing. Trump has congratulated radio host Alex “THEY’RE TURNING THE FRIGGIN’ FROGS GAY!” Jones on his “excellent reputation,” recommended The National Enquirer’s dubious scoop that Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’ dad was in on the Kennedy assassination for a Pulitzer Prize, use the same language of “globalists” and “elites” and daily insists that everything you’re seeing and hearing about that “Russia thing” is “fake news” about a nefarious conspiracy against him. For now, at least, the “Q” t-shirts and signs will be more welcome at the Trump rallies than the crew from the Cable News Network or the New York Times.
We have our own conspiracy theory that Trump’s campaign coordinated with the Russian government’s now undeniable attempts to influence the election on his behalf, and has since obstructed the Department of Justice’s efforts to investigate the matter, but we base that on Donald Trump Jr.’s own “tweeted” e-mail chains and sworn Congressional testimony by various campaign officials and the indictments and guilty pleas that have already resulted from “Russia thing” investigation and everything else that’s been verified. Even with all that to back us up, we’ll still only say that it looks pretty darned suspicious, and we’ll hope that the Trump’s more mainstream and fringier fans will be just as agnostic, and that the special counsel is allowed to conclude his investigation no matter what it concludes.
It would be fun to eventually find out who “Q” really is, especially if he turned out to be some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed, which is a sly allusion to another one of Trump’s conspiracy theories.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 