Donald Trump has had a busy week attending rallies where many of his avid supporters are either wearing Q tee shirts or holding up giant Q letters, and that has been getting lots of attention. QAnon is conspiracy theory so strange that even Rush Limbaugh doesn’t want to talk about it, and Fox News hosts quickly pivot and deflect when the topic is raised. QAnon is a mythical being with a stratospheric security clearance who releases clues onto the 4Chan and 8Chan forums, depicting a hidden world in which Donald Trump and the military are doing battle with a sinister global cabal. Former GOP strategist Rick Wilson hilariously weighs in. Daily Beast:
Some people need a single, grand unifying theory of why the world refuses to line up with their expectations. When difficult realities confront people without the intellectual horsepower to understand and accept the truth, some turn to conspiracy theories to paper over the holes in their worldview. No matter how absurd, baroque, and improbable, conspiracies grow on their own like mental kudzu where inconsistencies aren’t signs of illogical conclusions, but of another, deeper layer of some hidden truth, some skein of powerful forces holding the world in its grip. […]
Conspiracies—this one in particular—give their devotees a sense of coherence that is lacking in everything Trump does. QAnon presents Trump as the character he plays on TV; bold, commanding, strategic, and brilliant…as opposed to the real Donald Trump, who displays the dignity, intelligence, and honesty of a strip-club tout with tertiary syphilis.
In Q’s world, Donald Trump is courageously leading an effort to round up and punish—I’m not exaggerating—tens of thousands of child predators who occupy the highest reaches of government.  Q and Don, side by side, doling out the secret knowledge to the new elite. Instead of getting a clearance, all you need to do is check out 4chan, Reddit, or YouTube. […]
Why has Q eaten the Trump-right’s minds? Why does it work on them when it’s so obviously, evidently a gigantic pyramid of digital horseshit?
It works because stupid people are stupid and because Donald Trump’s Administration loves what QAnon does to stoke the fires of paranoia, resentment, and division. QAnon works for Trump because people who are not knowledgeable about the world, politics, government, the intelligence community and reality more broadly are desperately looking for confirmation that they’re on the winning team. Q tells them that they’re on the right side of history and that for once in their dreary little lives they and only they possess the secret, hermetic knowledge from inside the esoteric cult.
It gets better. Q’s followers believe that he is real and they await the day they hear that pronouncement from Trump’s own lips.
QAnon believers have become convinced that Trump is willing to confirm that Q is real, if only a reporter would ask him. In July, they started to deluge White House reporters, including many for conservative outlets, with requests that someone ask about QAnon. When Daily Caller reporter Saagar Enjeti tweeted that he wouldn’t ask about QAnon at a press conference, he was quickly besieged with even more criticism from QAnon believers.
Still, it’s difficult to satisfy QAnon believers. Someone finally mentioned QAnon in the briefing room on Wednesday when Newsmax reporter John Gizzi asked White House Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about Trump’s reaction to QAnon. But after Sanders essentially brushed the question off, QAnon supporters decided that Trump himself, not a White House staffer, had to face the question for the truth to be revealed.
QAnon is a digital wizard of Oz, projecting him (her?) self to be someone of immense power, when in reality he’s probably a basement blogger with a dreary life of his own who’s found the right scam to manipulate the masses of asses that comprise the Trump base. Or maybe QAnon is Steve Bannon having the last laugh, ya spose? Or maybe Mike Pence gone rogue? Vladimir Putin playing both ends against the middle? Say, I think I’ll start UAnon, and stir up the pot myself. Remember, only The Shadow knows…
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