On social media during lockdown I was amazed to discover how many “Friends” who I thought were smart, sentient, reasoning individuals were actually QAnon conspiracy theorists. The art work I have been creating would ignite their remaining brain waves, turning them in to vicious trolls.
My Facebook accounts have been hacked and shut down so I haven’t been following the insanity online as much this past month. The promise of a vaccine leaves me feeling like I might soon wake from a year long coma. People seem to have too much time on their hands and with no creative outlet they turn into mindless zombies who prefer conspiracy theories to science.
Q is a fictional mysterious figure whose cryptic, evidence-free posts are accepted by many as gospel. They promote the idea that there is a satanic cabal of pedophiles that runs rampant in government and Hollywood. The former president, was supposed to expose and defeat that cabal. Instead he lost the election and has been reduced to crashing wedding parties at Mar-a-Lago to spread his lies.
After the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the social media platforms that had long allowed the falsehoods to spread like wildfire — namely Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — got more aggressive in cracking down on accounts promoting QAnon. Hollywood. QAnon has continued to survive in the darker corners of the Internet. In these fringes white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups continue to flourish.
QAnon podcasts are available through Apple and Google. There is big money to be made from the mindless. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently defended QAnon adherents. QAnon has even gained a foothold in the halls of Congress, where two Republican members have openly supported some of the movement’s baseless ideas. The zombies are roaming the halls of the capitol long after the insurrection.