"Q-uiet Riot" (worthy read)

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text: Greg Olear
@gregolear
"The greatest weapon against a lunatic fringe, aside from lengthy jail terms, is the example of a smooth, truly functioning government."
—@seanbeaudoin at PREVAIL's "Sunday Pages"

Sunday Pages: "Q-uiet Riot"
An essay by Sean Beaudoin
gregolear.substack.com
5:11 AM · Jan 17, 2021

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/sunday-pages-q-uiet-riot

QAnon will remain active even after its messianic warrior and scourge of Deep-State Satanists, Donald J. Trump, leaves office. I am as guilty as anyone for dismissing the cult as a laughable band of rubes when they first wormed into the collective consciousness during Pizzagate, in which sometimes-employed Q devotee Edgar Welch, who believed like his fellow acolytes that Donald Trump tweeted to him in a secret code only he and other Qs could decipher, drove from North Carolina to Washington to rescue children hidden in the basement of a D.C. pizza joint—mainly because he’d been told it was the nexus of a pedophile ring run by, among other Democrats and global elites, Hillary Clinton. He showed up with an automatic weapon to find that not only was Comet Ping Pong just a restaurant, it didn’t even have a basement. And so it seemed the movement would fade away in shame and embarrassment, but somehow Q only gained momentum, believers, and additional layers of conspiratorial spinoff. Donald Trump did not create QAnon, but he certainly legitimized it. In an interview during the campaign, and in possibly the most pristine example of his ability to spew obvious bullshit with zero compunction or even forethought, he claimed to never have heard of QAnon despite regularly retweeting their posts, and refused to condemn them because, “I know they’re against pedophiles, and are fighting very hard, what’s wrong with that?” Clearly a question he neglected to ask of Jeffrey Epstein while jetting around on the Lolita Express.

As Trump continued to seduce, cultivate, and pander to the most lunatic wing of the Republican Party, QAnon found a welcome home among their least intellectually capable members, and so the cult soaked in and festered, with Trump’s gleeful approval. He handed the movement both a foundation and a vocabulary, with his endless claims of rigged voting machines and stolen elections, doomed lawsuits and Raffensperger harangues, virus-denial and violent prognostication. Not to mention unleashing his crack legal team, Lin Wood (true psychopath), Sidney Powell (soon to be replacing Kathy Bates in Misery II: The Curse of Hugo Chavez), and Rudy Giuliani (the fraud of dementia/the dementia of fraud), who crashed courtroom after courtroom with such an outrageous sheaf of mendacity and fabrication that anything even relatively plausible began to resemble George Washington’s cherry tree (which, it turns out, didn’t actually happen either.) It is possibly worth noting that the Kraken boasted a division-leading record of 1-60 in its spate of fatuous lawsuits.

It turns out that a reflexive, pathological liar is precisely the idol to worship, far better than one who promises rain during a drought or listens to healing prayers for grandma, because blanket irrationality excuses all possible utterances and behaviors without the need for thought or analysis. The footage of hysterical Q acolytes chasing Lindsey Graham through the airport was momentarily hate-cathartic, but in the end harrowing, because it spoke to QAnon’s complete lack of a gravitational center, the willingness to lash out at anything and everything, an amoeba of delusional hatred spread in every possible direction. After his speech on the morning of Jan. 6th, Donald Trump might not have marched Q-pied down to the Capitol steps like the Piper he promised his followers to be—just another lie in a raging sea of them—but this does not absolve him of fomenting an insurrectionist riot. Osama Bin Laden didn’t fly any planes either.

As it stands now, the Republican party no longer exists as a functioning entity. There is no actual conservatism, no agenda, no ideas, no diversity of thought. Its one and only tenet is power for power’s sake, and an insistence on the de-legitimacy of anyone else who might ever hold it. The vast majority of Republican lawmakers are deeply unserious people wholly lacking the capacity to govern, which is one reason why there are 20,000 troops in D.C. for Inauguration Day, more than we have in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. Apologists over at FOX and across the internet immediately claimed the insurrectionist mob were Antifa infiltrators, but, as is obvious to everyone but aggrieved pork chop Lou Dobbs and Mario Bartiromo’s collagen, it was almost entirely angry white men in Camp Auschwitz hoodies. Angry white men in 6MWE shirts. Angry white men in Q sweaters and Q leather and Q hats and Q flags and Q ink. Not to mention a horned Q-shaman posing with his bros like an album cover for Rasputin & the Dipshit Trio, featuring the hit single “My Penis Tattoo Is bigger Than Your Penis Tattoo.”

*snip*