By David Futrelle
By now you may be familiar with the broad outlines of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which might be described, in essence, as Pizzagate on steroids.
As True Q Believers see the world, the heroic Donald Trump, with the help of numerous “patriots” inside the government and out, is fighting a grand battle against the vast Illuminati pedophile baby-eating cabal that secretly controls the government (and the world). And, yes, Q Believers have actually convinced themselves that the top cabal figures (including Hillary Clinton) are literal “pedovores” who drink the blood and eat the flesh of babies.
But as horrific as it all sounds, Q Believers think that Trump is actually winning his battle against the baby eaters, armed with literally tens of thousands of sealed indictments that will be used to arrest the key cabal members — in government, business, and Hollywood — when the time is right. Q Believers need only keep their eyes on the prize. “Trust the plan,” Q has assured them numerous times in his (their?) cryptic messages on 8chan.
While the basic thesis of QAnon Theory is already plenty weird, the details are even stranger — and they get stranger still by the day. QAnon is a giant dirty snowball of a theory, growing ever larger as it careens down the mountainside, picking up new sub-theories with every new rotation. The mysterious Q drops new “crumbs” virtually every day, and each one is pored over and taken apart by a small army of self-designated Q interpreters, who use the new clues to spin out new theories and add new enemies to Q’s ever-growing enemies list.
I spent several hours today going through just some of the topics posted over the past 24 hours in the GreatAwakening subreddit — Reddit’s main forum for Q Believers, with nearly 60,000 subscribers. Here are a few of the not-actually-true things I, er, “learned” in the process.
Financier, convicted sex offender, and former Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein has nuclear missile silos hidden beneath tennis courts on his private island
Q Believers have spent a great deal of time examining aerial photos of Epstein’s island hideaway, which they have taken to calling “pedophile island” because of all the reputed underage sex parties that have been rumored to have taken place there. (Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008, so that’s not an altogether fanciful scenario,)
Anyhoo, they’ve been suspicious about his tennis courts for a while and now they think they’ve found proof that they were built to hide missile silos. Or maybe the tennis courts don’t exist at all, and the photos available through Google maps have been doctored!
“I did a lot of map comparisons of E Island a few months ago,” WOWs_JohnPRyan writes.
I also noticed the “tennis court” cover by G maps. I initially thought that section was actually a sacrificial area or a burn area … the thought of missile launchers never came to mind, but I can see how it fits now.
Wait, so Google is in on the coverup? 0oDassiveMicko0 points the accusing finger of blame at Google/Alphabet Inc’s … former Executive Chairman, for some reason.
So, Google maps have superimposed a fake tennis court over what looks like a missile silo, where Apple maps shows what´s really there? Is that right? If so, Alphabet (Google parent company) and Eric Schmidt are 100% complicit. He is a Jew, too. If this is true, this is highly significant!
To someone called tlbt, the nukes help to explain why so many people (allegedly) go along with the vast (alleged) Illuminati pedophile conspiracy.
This post is about protecting/forcing the practice with the threat of thermonuclear hellfire. Like, holy shit, imagine thinking you’re part of the elite, finally get invited to a private island to connect with other power players, then get shown missiles that will destroy everything you love. Then you’re forced to participate in a sinister ritual (which is documented, blackmail) before you can go back up the elevator and back to what you thought was normal life. Sounds like a way of controlling powerful people to me.
Now some GreatAwakening commenters have convinced themselves there are similarly hidden nuclear missile silos in Vatican City. Yep, that’s right: the Pope is packing some nuclear heat!
Red shoes symbolize blood spilled in ritual sacrifices, and have to be earned
A GreatAwakening commenter called akilyoung explains:
I theorize that the red shoes worn by certain people are earned, not worn ‘just because’.
IMO..they represent blood on the feet. To be initiated into this death cult, you must kill virgins in a Babylonian style death ritual.
Akilyoung ties this theory in with discussions elsewhere in r/GreatAwakening of a pool owned by alleged Illuminati pedovore Gloria Vanderbilt (Anderson Cooper’s mom):
The pool with nooses? The virgins are strung up, and the initiate cuts them (wont get into details) and bleeds them out. The initiate is walking around in their blood doing his evil work, and ends up with red feet.
Thus they wear red shoes to symbolize their deeds, and SYMBOLISM WILL BE THEIR DOWNFALL.
Weird. I think I owned some red sneakers once. I just bought them from a shoestore. No virgin murder necessary.
Anderson Cooper is a “satanic pedophile” who orders kids to rape from a catalog
Reddit’s Q Believers have been examining a picture of CNN’s Anderson Cooper sitting in his office looking at what appears to be printouts of news stories from the web; behind him lurks a life-sized standee of Honey Boo-Boo. Some Q Believers have managed to convince themselves that Cooper is looking through a child sex slave catalog trying to decide on a child to rape.
QAnonMaga reports that
Q pointed out the papers on the table they are from a catalog where you order kids to have sex with the writing was enhanced and enlarged photos of a boy and girl and Cyrillic language he was so arrogant he let the photographer take a picture of illegal stuff.
Huh. Here is the highest-resolution of the picture I could find online, posted on a site devoted to Q “research.” Here’s an enlarged version of the papers that Cooper is reading.
I see what looks like a picture of an adult couple. I can’t read any of the words; I don’t see any distinctly Cyrillic letters.
Here’s what Q thinks he saw in that same picture:
Hey, who are you going to believe? Q or your lying eyes?
I’m going to stick with my lying eyes. I guess when you’re putting forth the dumbest conspiracy theory in history, you need to be a little, er, creative in your interpretations.
Ok. I’ve saved the most horrifying new Q discovery til last. Brace yourself.
Recent XBox Live outages are evidence of cabal members trying to clean up evidence of their nefarious plots that they shared with each other in … Xbox Chat?
“So Q drops that he knows they were communicating with Xbox chat,” writes HouseSlytherin.
Which probably means Q has the chat logs. They double down and try and erase all that information on the server? Doesn’t that make them guilty of another crime? Assuming they were government employees at the time, they are deleting public record.
So Microsoft is part of the cabal too? OH NOES.
“Upsetting that now even gaming isn’t safe,” writes a female gamer calling herself Vexxlyn.
Gaming has always been a comfort thing for me ever since I was a little girl with my first game boy, knowing microsoft was betraying me kind of hurts.
Now obviously I’m skeptical of virtually all QAnon claims. But I don’t have a hard time believing that if there were a vast Q conspiracy Microsoft would be in it up to the neck. Clearly the company that brought us both Clippy and Windows 7 is capable of ANYTHING.
The whole red shoes thing is really messing up my head now… Anyone else remember “Red Shoe Diaries”? :O And to think that episodes of that were a big part of my sexual awakening… *shakes head*
And now back to lurking… 😛
I only put on my red shoes to dance the blues.
I have three pairs of red shoes, one pair of salmon shoes, one pair of dusty pink boots, two pairs of pink sneakers (one solid pink, one pink and purple) and a pair of rose gold shoes. Guess that says something truly terrible about me.
That I like wearing colourful shoes.
This Q thing is a work of genius. He/she/they just drop little nuggets of nonsense and everyone else does the hard work of making it into a conspiracy. I almost admire it
Rei Malebario: Seems to me that it means you have exquisite taste in wedding shoes.
All this disinformation Q Anon and Pizzagate is doing a good bloody job of discrediting actual investigations into real Paedophile rings and child predators by making the whole thing sound ridiculous. Jeffrey Epstein is a bad one. He has been vocally SUPPORTED by Trump for liking his women ‘on the young side’. He’s been linked to Prince Andrew even. But now, talking rubbish about missile silos has detracted from anything he might have done for real and made it into a joke. There is no secret that the likes of a Jimmy Savile, Bill Cosby, Stuart Hall, Max Clifford and Rolf Harris did terrible things from sexual coercion to child abuse, and covered up for others who were just as deeply entrenched in the toxic masculine culture which allowed it. It’s really frustrating that now everything is a “conspiracy theory” and hoaxes like Pizzagate are detracting from the real purportrators.
I’ve been a lifelong resident of Kansas, so the Oz stories were always a big tourist thing around here, yet it often seems I’m the only one I know who actually read them. I’ve also read some fascinating theories about the political subtext of several of the books, including the then-contemporary fights over the Silver (like her shoes) and Gold (like the road) Standards, and how the Wizard was designed to look greatly like perennial Presidential runner-up, blowhard, and Bill-O’Reilly-100-years-early Willing Jennings Bryan. There was also the way that one of the sequel books seemed to be sending up the feminist suffrage movement of the time, but on deeper inspection was actually mocking the people mocking them (which would make more sense given that both Frank Baum’s wife and mother were active in the cause).
Best Qanon joke I’ve seen (RT’d by David):
friend: you heard about these Qanon conspiracies?
me: it’s pronouned ‘keen-wah’
Though, as ridiculous and mockery-worthy as Qanon is, it’s probably going to get someone killed eventually.
@Phil Adley
Sure…
Already happened last December.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html
So I saw that awful Slender Man movie came out and I watched RedLetterMedia’s review on it, and they mentioned a doc on the real case of those two girls from Waukesha who stabbed their friend to appease the Slender Man, who they believed (and I think still believe) was real. The doc was released by HBO and was titled Beware the Slenderman. The first part of the documentary touched on the way in which folk legends are transmitted through history (the example they used was the Pied Piper of Hamelin) and how outlets like Creepypasta can transmit those stories much faster than the oral traditions of old. But as I was watching the way that a lot of young web users seem to have taken to this story, which was the brain child of one guy, Eric Knudsen, on SomethingAwful.com for a Photoshop contest. With the help of viral media, there’s hundreds of fan drawings of this character on DeviantArt and fan films on YouTube… certainly by kids who either know the character isn’t real or believe it in kind of a kayfabe way (like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny).
(As an aside, kayfabe is a term in pro wrestling for the fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. In wrestling, kayfabe is never broken.)
I have a feeling a lot of QAnon, like Pizzagate and the “Deep State” conspiracy, is very craven actors seizing on kayfabe for their own ends. Morgan Geyser, one of the Slender Man assailants, was later diagnosed schizophrenic. Alex Jones is most certainly not.
Chimeric Mind,
I’ve read the books! They were my favorites as a kid and I’ve read them many times as an adult too.
I love the movie, but am always kind of mad at how the adaptation treats Glinda. She was kind of similar to Galadriel. Immortal, elegant, stately, imposing but on the side of good. Why the movie decided to turn her into a pink tulle clad who speaks like a kindergarten teacher, I don’t know. It’s like they didn’t want to make the female characters seem strong. Dorothy was always cheerful and bold in the books, not whiny, mopey and fearful like in the movie. They definitely disregarded how feminist the books were.
The other interesting thing about the books to me was how much fun Baum poked at the military. Not the privates who do the fighting so much. But the brass. It’s especially evident in Tik-Tok in Oz.
I’d recommend them to all Mammotheers. There are nit-picky continuity issues that a lot of fantasy fans would be insufferable about had they been written today. I can also think of two instances that are a bit racist. But overall, they’re clever and funny with a lot of subtext, very pro-feminist and pro-socialist, and a nice change if you ever get sick of the dark and gritty trend in fantasy. I think they’re a must if you like fantasy or have a child who does and I really don’t understand why most people haven’t read them. I seem to remember that at one point (the fifties, maybe?) there was a movement to get them removed from school libraries because they were so pro-socialism. So maybe that has something to do with it.
I always preferred Queen Zixi of Ix to The Wizard of Oz. But Maybe I should be revisiting Oz. I’ve been on a sort of nostalgia reading kick lately. I started with Eight Cousins which I got about halfway through, than stopped. It’s basically a wish fulfillment fantasy for tween girls where nothing interesting happens. Now I’m reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm which is surprisingly funny.
As for the Q Anon stuff. it would have made a great ARG (kind of makes me think of This Is My Milwaukee), but as something that’s likely going to have real world consequences, it’s kind of frightening.
Damn, this must be why I can’t ever find any decent red shoes. I’ve completed ancient Hittite blood rituals, but not Babylonian. I’m an idiot.
…But I was just looking at buying a pair of red shoes online. Guess I have to find a virgin to sacrifice?
But seriously – where are they getting all these people to murder?
I own /three/ pairs of red shoes. Who knows how many times I had to sacrifice virgins for that level of redness! (I must be doing it in my sleep, because I can’t remember a thing… Does sleep sacrifice count extra?)
I’m curious how they’ll reconcile everything when Orange Yeller’s out of office and all of these people are still walking around free. “Something something Deep State” most likely.
@Katamount
A popular ad-hominem on 4chan is to accuse someone of not really believing in what they’re talking about, or saying or doing something “ironically,” or being a “shill.” Basically, a lot of us are used to people arguing in bad faith.
@[email protected]
That’s one of the more irksome things about anonymity and the internet: you really have no idea what people actually believe with sincerity and what they’re just saying for attention. And really, I don’t think it does anybody a service to just assume everybody has ulterior motives. That’s part of what’s fuelling the cynicism.
But if there’s money being made, it’s a good indicator of motive.
Hippodameia said
All I could come up with is giving them scented markers for some reason.
Also, AFAIK, languages that use Cyrillic alphabets never have double letters in words (maybe Valya can tell me if I’m wrong.) When I took Russian in the USAF, I marveled at how easy spelling is once you learn the alphabet; it really is hard to misspell words in Russian! Now that I think about it, mispronunciation isn’t much of an issue, either, what you see is what you get.
Hambeast and Hippodameia:
Green shoes means you cut their grass. Purple means you brought them wine. Pink just means you have good taste in shoes. 🙂
So I’m gonna be controversial and say that one reason these conspiracy theories are so catchy is because they still hold to one kernel of truth, which is that the world is steeped in cheap, ubiquitous, seductive evil, in the form of oppressive power structures. Even utter hypocritical bastards like the 8chan crowd can understand, on some gut level, how much everything is fucked up.
Conspiracy theories explain very conveniently why everything is fucked up, and also allow people to deny that they’re part of the problem. IMO they serve to uphold patriarchy, capitalism, etc. by blame-shifting and projection instead of denialism.
The 8channer who believes in PizzaGate/QAnon/etc doesn’t stop to think about what they are doing on a site that hosts child abuse pictures.
The TERF who accuses trans women of systematic abuse, does not stop to question their own part in the systematic abuse of women.
Etc.
This TBH is why I have a weird soft spot for Christian eschatology, even though I am definitely not Christian (and despise most Christian institutions). It comes *so close* to that central truth, which is that not only is the world full of evil, but that becoming involved in evil is very easy and often convenient. But IMO it only comes so close so that it can better neutralize people’s introspection.
I loved, loved, loved Ozma of Oz. To this day I regret that lunchpail trees aren’t a real thing.
ChimericMind, weirwoodtreehugger @:
I love the Oz books! Especially the way they explore etiquette in a society where a number of prominent citizens are inorganic – the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, etc, get invited to banquets and have a place set for them, but don’t actually take any food or drink. They do raise their glass in toasts. Also, it’s fortunate that there are enough of them to converse quietly during the night so they don’t get bored while their meat-people friends are asleep.
Tor.com has reviewed a number of the individual books.
DanHoan @:
I’ve heard that the beginning of the (temporary) end for the 1980s Satanic Panic was when someone did the math and realized the number of children allegedly kidnapped by Satanists was roughly equal to the number of US soldiers killed in Vietnam – and tried asking people “who here has lost a family member in ‘Nam, or knows a family who has… ok, now who here has had a child mysteriously vanish, or knows a family who has?” The second question got far, far fewer raised hands.
Meanwhile, on a whim I tried looking up a news-of-the-weird today and realized it’s been ten years since Lord James of Blackheath claimed to have been approached by a mysterious organization who seemed to want to buy the British government? Which sounds less unlikely now than it did at the time. Sounds like he’s been in the news again more recently for claiming he arranged passage to Australia for a bunch of kids with dubious exit visa and therefore now thinks he might have abetted human trafficking. Trouble is, any site which covers him tends to be a conspiracy-fanatic site, and even they seem unsure whether his Lordship is actually revealing state secrets, in the early stages of dementia, or some combination thereof.