What happens to QAnon after the non-apocalypse?

Great Debates
61

Oh, I made the Thomas Jefferson vampire stuff up, but it’s a prime example of the defective thought patterns of conspiracy theorists.

I once tried to debunk something my CT friends kept prompting, a point that would’ve killed a lot of their “evidence”.

There is an anomaly to the way some news sites, usually small local outlets, set up their web pages. The date on the page doesn’t always update when the content changes, it reflects the date the page itself was created or the date of the last time the underlying template was updated.

This will cause a date-limited search for an event, such as the Sandy Hook school shooting, to show up on a page created before the event. The conspiracy theorists latch on to this like a dog with red meat.

The party line is that these websites prove that some TV station in North Dakota knew about the Sandy Hook shooting, in deep detail, before it happened.

So, in a burst of naivety, I thought I could prove to my friend that these stories that were his “smoking gun” evidence weren’t nefarious at all.

So I picked a couple of current events that I felt would be impossible for anyone to claim were conspiracies and pulled up the pre-dated news stories.

It didn’t work, it turns out there is nothing that my friend won’t think is a conspiracy. I’m sure, to this day, he thinks that Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s drug overdose was part of the grand conspiracy. He thinks the government conspired with Ariel Castro to hold 3 women captive as sex slaves.

All because these were the stories I picked to try and disprove his faulty logic.

BTW, the guy thought I was really good at finding conspiracies and should’ve spent more time working with him and his friends.

62

Well, I’m not sure. The fantastical element of it is one of the things that appeals to the sort of folks who fall for this.

You know those Nigerian scam emails? Have you ever actually read one? They’re RIDICULOUS. I read them and think “no human could possibly fall for this” and yet they do. But the fact they’re ridiculous is itself part of the strategy; it screens out people whose skepticism can regulate their greed, so that the people whose attention they get are the ones for whom greed can overwhelm all critical thought. (A truly successful scam will always hit up the mark multiple times, so that’s a key part of the business model.) The QAnon believer is, in a sense, naturally selected for extreme, unflinching dedication to the cause by virtue of the fact that it IS so preposterous and untethered from reality; it therefore appeals specifically to folks prone to falling for such things.

Of course, conspiracy theories that hew closer to the truth can be popular too. The 9/11 truther conspiracy is false, but it’s not as ridiculously batshit insane as QAnon. But it’s also true that people didn’t seem to be as emotionally invested in it.

63

Back in 1968 my history teacher read to us from a pamphlet he picked up giving the “details” of a Masonic-Illuminati conspiracy, spearheaded in part by George Washington, aka John James Audubon. We all had a good laugh. Vampire Thomas Jefferson isn’t so far away from that. You might have a good second career creating this stuff.

64

You are right and it’s really transparent. The registered owner of the 8kun and Qdrop websites is Q, who would’ve thunk it, right? Here’s the best reporting I’ve seen on Jim Watkins and Q.

This is not only a great piece, it contains a large number of links to other great pieces.

65

@RickJay: Agree completely. As to this specific tidbit:

The National Enquirer does NOT survive on the one copy per lifetime that sensible people flip through and not buy. They thrived in their time because of all the gullible people who bought and pored over every issue every week.

This is simply the same phenomenon and same target market updated for the internet era. Except now the entire audience can participate in reinforcement through TwitFace, etc.

66

I think that the absurdity plays in in another way as well - once the suckers have been led via a bunch of disjointed clues to their conclusion, it becomes something they figured out for themselves, and they feel smarter and get endorphin rushes from having figured out something other people couldn’t. If the lies were about things that were reasonable then lots of people would believe in them and they wouldn’t feel as special for having figured out the ‘truth’.

67

I always thought people bought the National Enquirer for entertainment, just the say I used to buy SF magazines. You mean that people actually believe that quackery?

68

The fact that nowadays Snopes is forever being called to debunk “news” articles originating from them and their ilk suggests a hefty fraction of the public does believe the stories.

The medium may change, but human nature, cussed though it be, is eternal.

69

Not just the enquirer, also, when it existed, the weekly world news, the paper that headlined batboy, aliens and elvis sightings. Yes, much of their audience was hipsters looking for an ironic laugh (myself included), but if you looked at their advertisers they were all psychics, and dubious dietary supplements, and beauty treatments. So clearly a significant portion of their audience were the truly gullible.

70

'Zactly. If you want to know who reads a particular magazine, look at the ads, not the articles. The advertisers are paying serious money to get their message in front of the right kind of eyeballs. Not just any old eyeballs.

71

Interesting NYT article about how one woman did a deep dive into QAnon, but came out.