My latest for @dailydot, on how Devolution has become the hot new take on "Trump is actually still the president." It's needlessly convoluted, revolves around classified plans and orders, and you can buy t-shirts.
Spread out over 8 Substack posts and counting, Devolution claims the US is under the control of a secret military government while we wait for the audits to expose China and antifa teaming up to steal the election. And t-shirts.
The creator of Devolution is "Patel Patriot," an anonymous Trump die hard who has picked up 35k Telegram followers in weeks, and is making the rounds of Q influencer media to tell his incomprehensible story.
Devolution itself is nonsense. But any figure who can invent a story, fill it with irrelevant details, and make themselves into a sought after figure in conspiracy media out of nowhere bears watching.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Very early QAnon promoter reaction on Telegram to the Jan. 6 hearings: everything is fake, nothing you saw happened, it's all a hilarious lie.
All fake, all a big joke. Ha ha ha.
Most major Q promoters are simply ignoring the January 6 hearings. The ones that aren't are mocking them as a transparent fake pushing a Soros op using antifa plants and FBI informants.
This isn't a huge surprise, honestly. But that won't stop the conspiracy theories, and I'm sure McAfee has already been added to someone's Clinton Body Count list.
Good work from @page88 on the demise of QAnon as we know it. As the mythology of Q has enmeshed itself in GOP orthodoxy, the term "QAnon" itself has been dropped by believers. They now think it was invented by the media to make truth-seekers look crazy (it wasn't.)
QAnon as we know it ended with Biden's inauguration - no prophesized mass arrest of the deep state will be carried out by its biggest puppet. But its tenets wait to be rolled into a new conspiracy movement, and the whole thing will start all over again.
QAnon believers - who are now simply mainline consumers of right wing media - now wait not for "the storm" but for "the return." They wait for Trump to come back to office and make everything okay again. A lot of people who don't identify as Q believers think it's inevitable.
I'm absolutely fascinated by the mechanics of "Trump will be reinstated in August." How does any of this work? Who makes the final call? Does Pence get reinstated too? Is Biden supposed to just pack and go? What does SCOTUS do? Why didn't past presidents get "reinstated?"
Often in prophetic conspiracy theories, the details of whatever is supposed to happen shift constantly and aren't regarded as important by believers. That's because they aren't real, and therefore, they don't matter.
I understand that the threat of a coup or takeover isn't funny, and at least some Trump acolytes are taking it seriously. But it's also important to mock things that deserve mockery, even as we monitor them.
Russia's links to QAnon (whatever that even is anymore) are still nebulous, with no compelling evidence of anything beyond early social media boosting. Americans have always excelled at being sucked in by scams and conspiracy theories, so no links are really necessary.
People get unreasonably mad at me when I point that out, and if it were different, I'd gladly say so. But that's how it is. We tend to be our own worst enemy.