They claim to follow "Q", but they need to get a clue. -- Fighting Fit
[AN: Well, if I wasn't on their hit list before...]
"The point was never believing all the conspiracy theories at once. The point was never in making them all into one mega-conspiracy. The point was not even in gaining proof," said the lecturer. "The point was to sound like they knew more than everyone else, and therefore get angry about the imagined injustices they were allegedly suffering."
The large screen showed an angry Human holding a piece of cardboard that bore the words, Q sent me in three colours. Red, white, and blue.
"These were universally people from the 'middle class' of their era. They believed the narrative told to them as children, and they became angry that their story was not aligning with that narrative. Rather than being angry at the organisations that told them these lies, they imagined a foe that prevented their personal narrative from coming true."
Now the screen showed a very complicated graph of related conspiracies, in comparison with a simple, CORPORATIONS LIED TO YOU. The graph was captioned, What Q-Anon wants to believe whilst the other side was under the heading, The Truth.
"The point is to remain angry at a vast conspiracy of Others who are destroying life as they know it, life as they want it, and are otherwise making them uncomfortable. These are people who have been satisfied with isolation in echo chambers and are offended by anyone not like them. And when they band together..."
The image of angry people assaulting an important building. "They almost destroyed the polity they believed they were saving. A self-important loudmouth used their talking points in a position of power, and goaded them into a course of action that was purely destructive. They were then surprised that they were arrested and charged with treason when this gambit failed."
"Yet the damage was done. Those disaffected by the slow collapse of the extant system were active, even in nations unrelated to the polity that suffered the insurrection event." The previous picture of an angry sign-holder zoomed out to reveal that they were in a tropical locale with little in common with the colours that the protestor bore.
"People are more willing to believe in sinister Others than trusted organisations that were actually being -well- organic waste vents."
Headlines with passively-worded phrases filled the screen, associated with their active counterparts. They told the story of greed and corruption, destroying the structures that should have supported the majority.
It all gradually became overwhelmed with repeats of the phrase, nobody wants to work any more!
"Truly, evil bears the seeds of its own destruction. When corporations, not people, began running the government, the smokescreen failed, and the oligarch rulers fell to the very people they had encouraged in the first place."
The screen showed a few surviving pictures from that collapse. Burning buildings. Hanging bodies. Riots in the streets. People throwing priceless art around like garbage.
"With the lack of support, the conspiracies faded into obscurity, and those who once believed them had nothing else to blame but their own actions."
A series of book covers emerged onto the screen. The largest of them was titled, The Q Prophecies: An Analysis. "Of course, once the writings of the so-called leader of the movement were sufficiently analysed, it was revealed that this Q was nothing more than a puppet account designed to stir unrest within a certain demographic. A social wedge between those people and any learning that could shatter those illusions. A creation of faith and alleged moral superiority... but lacking none. Most of it was insider information to make it appear as if Q had their finger on the pulse of the world. And like all lies, it was peppered with elements of truth."
Links between the posts made by Q and corporate choices otherwise kept secret. Links between posts and plans that never went ahead. Mixed well with legitimate-sounding nonsense and buzzwords that meant nothing.
"Those who remain willfully ignorant of the truth will always prefer conspiracies over evidence. In these cases, it is rare that the truth will convince them."
[Photo by Aakash Dhage on Unsplash]
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