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I don’t know, to me the Q thing feels like an Alex Jones thing. Very rich and powerful men fucking teenage concubines is something that has always happened and probably always will. But by extension that suddenly means we have to believe in the deep religious / spiritual / satanic / conspiratorial explanation offered by QAnon? To me it seems very similar to the Kennedy assassination; something bad happens, there must be an explanation. It can’t just be that a very rich man used his immense wealth and extensive connections built up over decades to get away with fucking poor teenage Eastern European models and kids from broken homes in East Palm Beach, likely with tacit approval of intelligence to get kompromat on some powerful people. It must be this satanist thing, with satanic imagery scrawled alongside other questionable scrawled upon the walls of a DC pizza restaurant, with eschatological implications, with Deep Lore tied to a bizarre hybrid of new-world and old religious institutions.
The biggest problem with conspiracy theorists is this gish gallop of theories. It’s in the suggestion that one conspiracy being proven means that they’re all true, or at least plausible, when this isn’t the mechanism by which any hypothesis of this kind could or should possibly be judged. Most individual conspiracies are highly flimsy, but their credibility with their supporters is built on their resting, one billion miles down, on the faintest grain of truth.
I’ve always struggled to understand this gap between plausibility and reality among conspiracists. Yes, some super rich people get away with fucking teenagers. No, that doesn’t mean Bush knew about 9/11 in advance. It certainly doesn’t mean that the federal governments had aliens on ice under Area 51. It doesn’t even mean most Epstein conspiracies are true (“anyone who flew on the plane was involved” lmao these people don’t understand how rich people culture even works etc etc). He probably did kill himself, many people would in his situation facing guaranteed jail for the rest of his life, likely in complete isolation.
It reminds me of kitchen-sink conspiracy settings like Assassin’s Creed or Funcom’s largely forgotten ‘Secret World’ MMO. Believing in everything doesn’t look smart, it just makes you look goofy. The harsh reality of the age old ‘elites are molesting kids’ isn’t that they aren’t (some are), but that the rate of sexual deviancy is in fact much higher among the plebs than the elites. But, of course, that’s much less interesting.
Q I think started life as a troll, but a lot of it seemed just to perfectly viral and too “addictive” to followers over too long of a period of time to have been simply a random troll. It was pretty sophisticated, having a lot of ARG elements (codes based on capitalization of certain words, date and time stamps having a meaning, phrases repeated, etc.) as well as the repeated phrase of “we go all” which interestingly enough stopped around Jan 6 2020. Some of the sex stuff and the child adenochrome stuff seemed pretty calculated to paint the elites in question as uniquely evil and depraved, and something that would absolutely make any believer willing to take some sort of action to stop the elites. Child sex slavery and child torture are obviously meant to be provocative, and the kind of accusation that denials don’t exactly make go away.
As to why conspiracy is attractive, I’ve often held it to be a form of political and social Gnosticism. Part of the attraction is that it provides a kind of Political and Social theodicy— things are not bad because of incompetence, or individual greed, or bad incentives producing bad policies that make people worse off. It’s deliberate, THEY (whoever they may be) are doing it all on purpose. And this not only gives the impression that the problems are being produced to harm us little people, and those doing it know what they’re doing. It also give the believer the feeling of being in the know, and thus part of a secret group that gets it. This in itself is empowering as it gives the believer the idea that since a lot f people get it, that there’s a resistance movement (or maybe they actually form one). They seem more common when things seem bad and are getting worse. There weren’t a lot of conspiracies in good times, or if there were, they weren’t taken seriously. In 1990, it was UFOs probing people, maybe the government was reading your emails, but nothing seemed serious. In 2020, the government pushed a “clot shot” to depopulate the planet, and stole an election and want to confine people to one section of their city. The difference is that 2020 was worse for the average citizen than 1990.
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Sure, you quickly get into the Foucault's Pendulum type stuff, and I'm not going to argue for every insane theory. It isn't even necessary to argue for Epstein conspiracy theories truth value. But we're talking about the book here.
When we're studying "Why did QAnon rise right now?" which was the premise of the book, why would we not include this very suspicious and very public thing that happened, widely cited by the primary sources as proof? It seems a very odd omission. The author seems to want to place blame purely on the believers, that they are 100% responsible for choosing to buy into Q, but at that scale we have to look at it in terms of societal causes, and ask how we can prevent it. And part of that should be, hey our institutions need to regain credibility.
As I pointed out, in some ways to the human mind a pedophile cabal is less horrifying. "Lmao you don't know rich people" is a funny gag sure, but which is worse: that the current rich people are pedos and we need to throw them out, or that rich people just don't care that he was a pedo, that they're indifferent to it? An organized moral universe is a comfort, even if it is a dark one.
Worse is the ultimate horror, the one they can’t confront, which is that in every American town, in working and middle class communities across the country and the world are people who have done worse than Epstein. Bur because they’re not rich, because they’re not ‘elites’, because those who turn a blind eye to their misdeeds are commoners rather than elites, the jealousy that drives most of the outrage at those on top can’t exist, and so they’re much less interesting.
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