Are you looking for the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories? That is not how they work in my book but if you want to persist, I would rather go illuminati than scientology. Scientology is too monolithic, too organized, too structured, too rational (yeah, I know how this sounds); QAnon has (or seems to me to have) no structure and no ideology at all, it can still go in any direction and indeed does so every day.
Which is OK with me, as long as this direction is down.
I would rather say it’s a meta-conspiracy theory: a conspiracy theory about a shadowy organization with nefarious intent promulgating a conspiracy theory.
I’m not pushing any theory at all. I’m very far from a CTer, although I do acknowledge that there is such a thing as routine corruption in this world.
But it has concerned me for 10-20 years now that despite all the evidence of serious crimes associated with Scientology, they aren’t investigated, raided, prosecuted, etc. They just keep serenely sliding along, apparently (pace @Cervaise) raking in the adherents and the loot.
Which at least suggests they have enough friends in high places that uprooting that criminal empire is just not going to get approved. Which if true could lead to all sorts of bad places. The organization has outlived its founder. That’s always a sign of reproductive vigor; unlike lesser cults they could become a semi-permanent fixture on a scale of lifetimes.
Just to be clear, they are not “raking in” adherents, in the sense of enjoying net positive membership. They obviously don’t make reliable details public, but while they routinely claim hundreds of thousands of believers and healthy, swelling rolls, the best outside estimates of their population, using inference from what data are available, strongly suggest that their real membership count is mid five figures, and falling.
Went and dug up a cite for the membership figure.
I’d heard 50k as a ceiling; these guys pin it at around 20k. Either way, it’s dwindling.
Re investigations into their misconduct, it’s true that this has been on and off over the years, for very suspicious reasons. But it’s back on again, in a pretty significant way. Article:
Excellent news. And thank you for all the sleuthing and refs. Fascinating reading. They’re not a topic I follow with any real interest; they’re just part of the background noise of evil in the world.
This sentence has been bugging me as a non sequitur since this morning and so I did some more research.
It turns out I’ve misunderstood the Latin term pace and your sentence makes complete sense as a response to my earlier mis-use of the term.
So thanks for teaching me even more than you knew. And so discreetly and politely to boot. I wonder how many other 'Doper’s I’ve unwittingly confused or pissed off through my misuse? 
Heh. Honestly, I had no idea what you intended there, so I just pulled out the phrase for response. Now I’m curious about what you thought “pace” meant.
I had understood it to mean something like “reference”, or “see also”. Rather than the correct “contrary to the statement of”.
So I’ve been using it to give a respectful nod to or credit some tidbit from a prior poster when I actually was saying (at least to those who understood correctly) that I was disagreeing with them. :smack:
Ah. I have a “cf.” here, I believe you dropped it.
Thank you. I’ll gladly pay you on Tuesday for a cf. today. 
I suspect a large portion of them will just revise the theory to make Trump an agent of the Deep State, and it won’t be that hard.
Being an intensely curious person, I joined a couple of QANON Facebook groups just because they were there. A lot of them were strongly focused on specific parts of the conspiracy.
In one group, the leadership was mostly focused on all the child sex slaves being held in the basement of the Getty museum. But long before the 2020, election, a year at least, this group turned on Trump.
They thought he was a false prophet, an undercover agent on the side of evil. I guess the owners of the group had a partial, brief, flash of clarity and some point, but a flash that only illuminated a small part of their crazy and that part was Trump.
But it was pretty funny and that’s why I stuck around. QANONers would join and post some pro-Trump crap, only to be soundly “educated” by a crazy person that hated Trump.
Thanks for taking one for the team and reporting back to us.
What do those anti-Trump QAnnoners think of Biden? Is he a pedophile too or has the enemy of my enemy is my friend logic redeemed him?
You know, I don’t recall hearing anyone in that QANON group mention Biden. It was disappeared by Facebook during one of the early QANON purges, this summer I think.
This group was mostly obsessed with the child sex slaves being held in the basement of the Getty Museum schtick, I strongly suspect that the guy that started it believed that CT long before QANON, and QANON both reinforced his beliefs and widened his audience.
Even though they didn’t mention Biden, I suspect they think he’s just another child molesting pedophile that butchers children in order to extract a substance that keeps them young forever. Seriously, it’s called adenochrome. Which is a real substance that isn’t harvested from children and doesn’t impart eternal life - or at least, that’s what they want you to think.
Of course, if Joe Biden is taking a mysterious chemical to keep him young, it obviously isn’t working.
Or that’s just what they want you to think. Joe Biden is really young for his age, which well over two hundred. He’s really Thomas Jefferson, he faked his death in 1823 and went into hiding, preying on young children like a vampire until he found the opportunity to be President again…
Any chance it had to do with the photos with him an Epstein? Because, among that set that I saw, any photo with Epstein and a famous person meant that famous person was part of the pedophile ring. (Also often photos of people with people who had been in photos with Epstein. And people with the last name Chandler, which they thought meant “child handler.”)
From wikipedia
Several small-scale studies (involving 15 or fewer test subjects) conducted in the 1950s and 1960s reported that adrenochrome triggered psychotic reactions such as thought disorder and derealization. Researchers Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond claimed that adrenochrome is a neurotoxic, psychotomimetic substance and may play a role in schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.
I think that this explain s a lot about QAnnon. 
Proof that the real power behind QAnon has a sense of humor?
They’re filling the rubes with virtual adenochrome by telling them tales of the real adenochrome which in turn eats their brains. Very clever.
Isn’t it pretty well established that “Q” is a father-and-son team of American expats in the Philippines, named Jim and Ron Watkins? I’ve seen an article by Frederick Brennan, the guy that founded 8chan, which is where Qanon began. He later sold it to the Watkins’, and that’s where Q left his messages. When 8chan’s server stopped hosting the board, Jim Watkins started a replacement, 8kun, and, lo and behold, Q started posting there. Brennan said he thinks the “Satanic pedophile child slave” stuff started as trolling on 4chan, then was coopted by Q on 8chan and 8kun.
Boy you must really be anhedonic to put up with this crap, even as a research project. BTW, what happened to that Washington Pizzeria?
What this whole QAnon thing shows us is that the people running this hoax are really…inept.
It’s really not hard to come up with lies that would be far more effective, and believable, than QAnon. And yet even something this ludicrous has gained traction with millions of people.
Like atomic power, there’s an immense amount of energy and potential in the gullible crowd just waiting to be harnessed by someone who’s competent and shrewd.