If I had a leaky pipe in my house, like most people I’d call a plumber. For mechanical trouble there are mechanics, and electricians are there for electrical problems beyond changing a fuse. On occasions when one’s own body presents a problem there are medical professionals to cure the malady just as psychologists and psychiatric professionals are available for mental health issues. Even the religiously inclined make the hospital their first port of call for a broken limb leaving churches and priests until after treatment has been sought. One might be forgiven for thinking this is a fairly universal approach to life where such services exist.
However, a growing disregard for experts and knowledge festers as more and more people reach for opinions that are easily formed and require as little effort to hold. When aboard a plane, I want a licensed pilot not someone with opinions on flying. With access to a world of knowledge in almost every pocket today, it is comically tragic that anti-knowledge, pornography, shopping and selfies take up so much bandwidth. In some ways it is probably the most graphic, unflatteringly true portrait of our world.
“Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one.”
Dirty Harry (The Dead Pool)
Perhaps there have always been high numbers of credulous people and village idiots walking among us but with internet they have multiplied like Gremlins and now transmit their fibre optic lunacy at a rate well in excess of Covid-19. Following the well beaten track of their forbears, who by geographical accident worshipped at the church that claimed them, they fix limpet-like onto whatever purpose they stumble. No less lamentable for its predictability, the confections of grievance and half baked half truths are reversed engineered to fit into a world view that positions the believer as informed, rebel freedom fighter and member of a resistance to something or other. The sad truth about many subscribers is just how unoriginal they are.
Apart from symptoms such as death, the Covid-19 pandemic has it seems, a personally tailored surprise in store for each and every person to contract it. There are symptoms which appear even among those who have not been infected or indeed know anybody who has. These symptoms or rather side effects, manifest as an exponential growth of opinion. Unsurprisingly the industrious end of the opinion market set to work immediately squaring the shape of the virus into a government control narrative that dovetailed with their pre-existing deep state narratives. Throw into the mix anxieties about mind control, 5G, Area 51 and a colourful array of gibberish and you have to wonder how some people make it through the day burdened as they are. With the conviction of zealot converts their earnest bleating is more in keeping with head trauma than compelling argument and makes a sad spectacle of otherwise functional adults.
“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.”
Mark Twain
Perhaps struggling for attention in careers that have long flat-lined, a subset of celebrities have emerged from the mists of their own irrelevance to re-launch themselves as epidemiologists. They assert that a pop career that petered out in the last millennium has equipped them to make pronouncements on vaccines and masks. A simple rule of thumb is to ignore them for the static noise they are and reserve a little pity for their washed up, has-been souls.
Any group of people who share similar opinions widely enough become a demographic of sorts and invariably attract the attention of marketers and political parties seeking votes. With such a broad spectrum of bizarre claims and contentions about how the world is and should be, it is difficult to shoehorn them all into a firm ideology either right or left. Populism on the other hand is a comfy fit like leggings and sweat pants. Within the confines of one’s own home they are the go-to apparel that any size body can slip into with ease. Outside in the cruel light of day however they hide nothing and stains aside, they amplify every contour.
Titles such as incels, (involuntary celibates) who hate women because none will date them, are bedfellows (curiously) with gun nuts; home schoolers; flat earthers; climate-change deniers; birthers; anti-maskers; anti vaxxers; white supremacists; sects of various persuasions; those who claim the world is controlled by a network of paedophiles run from a pizza parlour by Hillary Clinton, and an ever growing network of other made up, self justifying twaddle. The overlaps of this Venn diagram require a Spirograph and crystal meth to illustrate with any precision. The ‘narcissism of small differences’ dictates there will be territorial and doctrinal purity disputes among adherents leading almost inevitably to internecine conflict and the manufacture of further grievance. With a weird sense of victimhood as the only common underpinning, an umbrella group was needed and no sooner was that recognised did one appear.
Q isn’t much of a letter when not paired with U in English. It does have its use in abbreviation as in: Q Here, LGBTQ+, Q&A, Q tips to clean one’s ears, Q the inventor in James Bond movies and who knows, possibly some other meanings besides.
QAnon possibly pronounced /kwanon/ or perhaps /Kanon/ or maybe even/K’anon/ is the mother ship of victimhood. It is a loose coalition of angry (largely) white people who love freedom, just not yours if it conflicts with theirs. QAnon represents a broad coalition of weirdologies but appears to have coalesced on a couple of manifesto points for their members and supporters to rally behind. As much as the aim is to close ranks behind a common cause, it mercifully spares thinking people the trouble of digging any deeper.
Easy to spell
According to Wikipedia – which is as close as I want to get to this toxic mishmash of lost souls:
“QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping paedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling them, leading to a “day of reckoning” involving the mass arrest of journalists and politicians”.
Pause and read again to clear up any lingering doubts.
Malleable and easily mobilised once the correct vocabulary is employed, they are the bedrock upon which Trumpistan is built and increasingly this lesson is being applied in Europe and across the world.
They think they're Jedi
Whether formally in the ranks of QAnon or not, such people believe themselves far more tech savvy than is the case; members roll in the faecal matter of internet as some proxy religion and claim revelation through the Rosetta stone of Star Wars. They set out as Jedi knights only to end up in the employ of Vader. Reliably misreading correlation as causation, they nibble at byte size chunks of whatever they find digestible, but like the junk food it is, it ulcerates never nourishes. Informed largely by anecdote tacked onto atom-sized grains of truth, they will tut and harrumph anyone who disagrees before dismissing them as sheeple. Call them out or ask for objective proof and like the snowflakes they are, they will block, unfriend and cancel like a spoilt child stomping off in a tantrum, impervious to reason.
We are increasingly subject to the moronic mental contortions of those who’d use their own kids as lab rats and claim the world is ruled by a cabal of like minded deep state actors. Often casual to high fibre anti-Semites, they think the government is interested in the minutiae of their porn fuelled, gun-toting, pseudo-intellectual existence. They post almost every grumbling brain fart on Facebook through to 4chan, subscribe to nut sites like infowars and QAnon and believe Natural News is actually natural and news. Once those and a few other boxes are ticked they relax with a spot of prepping for a finale imagined from Terminator as they whimper about infringements of privacy they gave up cheaply years ago.
Grin and bear it with a mask
