Marquette University Intimations Project

Anonymous

During the pandemic, my three most visited websites were Zoom, Twitter, and  Youtube. Coming in a close fourth is GreatAwakening.win. The QAnon message boards  are filled with stories of families cutting the “Patriots” out of their lives and explanations  for why the Clintons have not been publicly hanged yet. I followed them from 4chan to  Reddit and Twitter to their own posting board as they were pushed off of mainstream  platforms. Every time they would be publicly denounced by anyone, it just strengthened  their belief in the truth of their cause. If Hillary Clinton said they were crazy, it must  mean that they were on the right track. A lot of people dismiss the QAnon believers as  conspiracy theorists on the fringes of society, but I think that ignores the broader  implications of the popularity of these claims. Yes, a lot of these people live in an  alternate reality and are in a completely insulated echo chamber. But they have  correctly identified one thing: the world is noticeably shittier than it was twenty years  ago.  

Money buys less, the wealth divide is getting even worse, and your terrible boss  has more control over your life than ever. The politicians that are supposed to make  things better are busy Tweeting “Raytheon is epicly increasing diversity!” or “I am going  to bring my Barrett .50 cal into the Capitol Building!” depending on what side of the  culture war they fall onto. The market forces that were being taught as a science equal  to physics are now completely controlled by how funny the richest man alive is on  Saturday Night Live, which used to be alright but now has the two worst presidential  impersonations back to back. There are forever wars across an ocean that have been 

going on long enough for a man to serve, come home, have a son, and then deploy that  son to the same base he was stationed at. A global pandemic went from “two weeks  with a mask” to “an entire year living in fear of killing your grandma.” There was an  unemployment crisis so bad that the government sent money to people, something that  was previously completely unthinkable. New records for “deadliest mass shooting in  American history” are being set every year. Everyone copes in a different way; the  posters on Great Awakening just invented a story of a child-kidnapping Cabal run by the  most powerful people on Earth.  

These people were laughed at for years for believing Pizzagate. Then it turned  out that rich people have an island to have sex with children on. Bill Clinton, Prince  Andrew, and Bill Gates (and unfortunately for QAnon believers, Donald Trump) all have  undeniable ties to a man that trafficked young girls so frequently on his plane that locals  called it Lolita Express. The made up story of rich and powerful people kidnapping  children suddenly became a lot more real.  

All it took was for one part of the conspiracy to (partially) come true, and there  was no way to convince these Patriots that Q, the mysterious insider who knows that  arrests, hangings, and a revolution are coming, could do no wrong. There is something  appealing about believing in a QAnon-type prophecy. Maybe everything bad in the world  is only caused by a small group of individually evil people (and not the bone-crushing  demands of continued market expansion forever). If that was true, then things could be  solved in an afternoon.  

An alternative to QAnon’s blaming of the cabal is an opposing group that thinks  Trump is the only reason that (almost) everyone’s lives have gotten worse, and electing 

Joe Biden will reverse the endless march to the Mad Max world that seems more  inevitable every day. This view is almost as ahistorical as the Great Awakening’s. The  forever wars were not started by Trump. The Great Recession of 2008 and the complete  lack of meaningful financial reform following it were not because of Trump. The  inadequacy of the United States’ ability to respond to a reality-altering pandemic was  not caused by Donald Trump. He made things worse, but Donald Trump is not the  reason Americans live without universal healthcare or a lack of pretty much any social  safety net. That is because there is a ruling class that hates you. If you are not paying  $30,000 for a plate at a fundraising event or looking the other way while Jeffrey Epstein  walks out of a room with a big burlap sack that has a cash sign on it, you are just  another resource that has value to be extracted to these people. One side has correctly  identified the disdain the richest people in the world have for everyone else, but believe  them to secretly be lizards. The other side thinks the most powerful people in the world  care about them. I honestly can’t tell who is more delusional.  

QAnon believers (in general) are racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic,  and usually pretty despicable. They relish in ruining their lives by severing their family  ties. They are endangering lives by spreading misinformation about Covid and the  vaccine. But I still feel sympathy for them. It is hard to live in a world that is filled with  arbitrary suffering, especially when you are the generation that sees the global system  collapse. It’s easier to reduce contemporary problems to the nefarious plans of a  modern aristocracy than to critically analyze them as the failing (or success) of an  unsustainable system. Whether you blame global capitalism, Donald Trump, Joe Biden,  prayer being taken out of schools, immigrants, the Koch Brothers, or the Lizard People, there will always be the undeniable fact of the modern world getting worse until  something changes.  

I can guarantee that change is not Trump coming back into office, no matter how  many explanations of his inevitable return I read on GreatAwakening.win.