This will get dangerous for regular people, unless it is stopped soon, it will get dangerous. The far right of the far right is getting far out of hand. The FBI certainly understands the threat, and appears to be acting on it.
According to an internal memo circulated in May of this year, conspiracy-driven domestic extremists pose an increasing danger to … well, you and me. The memo specifically calls out the Qanon group.
As Yahoo News reports, the threat “very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.”
Unless you have researched conspiracy theories for novels, spending far too many hours on conspiracy-based websites, as I have, it would be difficult to appreciate the craziness infused into a good Qanon theory.
For those of you trapped in adulthood and real lives, Qanon is quite literally an “anonymous person,” purportedly deeply embedded in the White House, who posts cryptic messages on 4Chan (or one of those) and the posts get picked up on several other prominent conspiracy boards. Calling them “cryptic” is charitable. Whoever created Qanon makes Nostradamus look like a power point presentation.
As anyone who has read my novels knows, no one loves a good conspiracy theory more than me. Indeed, people do conspire, that’s why it is a crime in the first place. And, often, the ones most determined to get away with some master plot will sneer that accusations are a “conspiracy theory,” as if the label alone proves its falsehood. I have always believed that being a true skeptic begins with being open to the possibility that real conspiracies do exist.
However, this isn’t about that.
This isn’t even a good conspiracy theory. Unless you believe that Robert Mueller was working for Trump all along, and that his real mission was to flush out a global Ponzi-Scheme run by Obama and the Clinton, and that such a theory could be encrypted into internet posts, well, it is not for you.
Or me.
It should not be for anyone, as the FBI duly notes. After all, we have already seen from Pizzagate, people do, in fact, get killed when things like this spiral out of control. The FBI also noted that we have an election coming up, imagine what can happen if it appears that Trump is about to lose? What kind of “conspiracy” can Trump drum up? How realistic can Trump make it look?
I will give you a hint. On the day that this memo was released, Trump himself had Qanon conspiracy-touting folks over to the White House, posed as real journalists.
Make no mistake, we have the single ugliest election season any of us have seen, coming, one perhaps unsurpassed since 1860. These people alone make the situation dangerous. As always, Trump can, and does, simply add fuel to a population dying to explode.
I suspect the FBI knows that, too.
****
My novels are here, for those interested in far more likely conspiracies …. involving aliens.
I can’t help but believe this QAnon individual is a liberal troll sitting under a PT Barnam poster laughing his FN azz off at the rubes as he makes them jump through hoops.
Maybe it’s me…….
The thought occurred to me, too, but I would think that a liberal troll would have bailed long ago, right when he realized too many people were taking him seriously. Right now it’s just a rather disturbed individual, who either believes this stuff or is doing it for sport from a non-political point.
Or maybe he is a true believer. These Trump folks are out of touch with reality.
So much truth here. For the record, I tend to be skeptical of conspiracy theories because I think most are attempts to make sense of a chaotic world full of random actions. A lot of people feel more comfortable with the idea that there’s an actual narrative and some logic behind things such as the Kennedy assassination (and for the record, I believe none of the overblown conspiracy theories surrounding that, not even the involvement of Ted Cruz’s father!). This makes great novels but I thin in real life the is seldom true.
The #1 conspiracy theory on the left that I’ve been trying to debunk for 15 years is the one about the 2004 election here in Idiohio. The theory is that John Kerry DID win the election here (those infallible exit polls!) which would have made him president, except that the vote totals were being shipped to a secret war room in Chattanooga where Karl Rove was changing them to give Bush just enough votes to win. (It was very close).
There’s a flaw in this theory you could drive a Mack truck through. A very small number of Ohio’s 88 counties were using electronic machines until 2006 so there was no way physically to do this. Did the Republicans engage in chicanery? Yes, they did — the same chicanery they used in 2016, which was not again changing vote totals on touchscreen machines (although in that case there were some in use) but by keeping “undesirables” (i.e. people who tend to vote for Democrats) from being able to get tp the polls.
The reason I’m so militant about this one isn’t because I think conspiracy theorists on the left will start shooting anyone but rather because the excitement about potential hacking (which would make a great novel!) takes our eye off the ball and what is really going on. On the right though — good lord, I saw the interview with those “We’re not racists and you hurt our feefees by saying we are” Trump supporters who were convinced that little Ilhan Omar had somehow entered the country illegally and become a citizen in order to force Sharia law (which I’m sure they couldn’t define if their lives depended on it) on the whole country. I wonder where they got this idea? Trump is a clear danger to the whole country.
There’s a great bit of verse from second wave punk rock band Bad Religion’s song “Stranger Than Fiction” that speaks to your first paragraph, Anastasia: “Life is the crummiest book I ever read,/There isn’t a hook,/Just a lot of cheap shots,/Pictures to shock,/And characters an amateur would never dream up.” I see all that as ANOTHER reason people go for conspiracy theories.
Personally, on this stuff, I’m less Tom Clancy and more John LeCarre. The reasons this all happened were mundane and banal and the outcome will likely land EVERYBODY involved (and I include Putin on that list…a man with his kind of economy and widespread eco-tastrophe is in anything but a strong position) nowhere they wanted to be.
We are on the same wavelength. I love reading conspiracy theories that are well-crafted and have enough truth to them that one wonders. Actually, that for me is the hook, the wonder, “could someone do that?”
I don’t know.
Sometimes I think we’re all far too naïve about what does actually happen in rarified air. Look at the facts coming out regarding Epstein. I am not trying to prove any sort of conspiracy to you, I am only giving you the basis as to why sometimes I feel like we’re all too naïve. I just wonder, and that, to me, is the fun.
The key to me is the ability to say “I don’t know” to both the actual theory (which I don’t know) and perhaps the truth, which I also don’t know. It is the “I know what happened!” that I think is dangerous.
I suspect that, thanks to Trump and inevitable American decline that he helped accelerate, these domestic terrorists will be THE next major threat going into next decade. Ireland had the IRA. Spain had the Basques. This is looking like our version of both of those. Worse yet, I’m pretty sure that this will be true regardless of who wins next year.
Careful, but you’re spewing some nonsense when you bring up the IRA and ETA (the Basque group you failed to identify, instead smearing an entire ethnic group). Both the IRA and ETA had LEGITIMATE POLITICAL objectives, that had absolutely nothing to do with idiotic conspiracy theories like Pizzagate or the New World Order. Note that I’m not saying how the IRA or ETA went about their objectives was right, but fighting against political repression is just a tad different than shooting up a pizza place because you fall for someone’s false claims that it’s a front for a child sex-slave ring.
The IRA began because (minority) English Protestants controlled the vast majority of Irish property, denying the (majority) Irish Catholics any real voice in their own affairs. Even after the issue became limited to just Northern Ireland, it was still largely a case of political repression. While Catholics formed a minority of Northern Ireland’s population, they had limited political representation, either in the local legislature or in Westminster (the House of Commons had a tradition of refusing to seat elected MPs from parties that were considered “troublesome”–even as those parties would rarely allow their members to take their seats; even so, neither the Labour nor the Conservative Party was willing to hear Irish Catholic complaints about the Protestant majority) and when London simply doubled down against recognizing any Catholic complaints (most NI Catholics didn’t want to leave the UK but they felt ignored by London so they looked to Dublin as the only real alternative; Dublin, of course, wasn’t too interested in adding the territory because then the NI Protestants would be the minority), the Catholics felt they had no real alternative. (It’s worth noting that, in the post-Brexit Northern Ireland, the “troubles” could easily return since Ireland still has no desire to control Northern Ireland and the anti-EU Brits haven’t quite figured out how to deal with the border issue.)
As for ETA, if only that fascist Franco hadn’t decided to impose his iron will over the Basque Country and remove the limited amount of autonomy that the area had had for centuries (under both the Spanish monarchy and the succeeding republic), then the Basques wouldn’t have felt a reason to rebel. It should be noted, that after Franco’s death, the political climate became more favorable to the Basque nationalists who decided that a restoration of their autonomy (which included schools that were allowed to teach IN Basque rather than only Spanish) was far more favorable–and reasonable–than independence.
The history lesson is appreciated, Joseph. Nevertheless, I maintain that the cause of why such folk do what they do stops being legit when they decide indiscriminate massacres of civilians (whose only crime is being there) is the solution to their problem. In that much, both IRA and ETA were EXACTLY like our own domestic terrorists both in deluded thinking and violence.
If anything, the ultimate results you pointed up illustrates the futility of those tactics. The only real change they ever made was killing a lot of people who would otherwise be alive. The real solution required something else entirely.