Wasted days and wasted lives
“This is a foreign language unto itself,” tweeted author Tom Zoellner. He responds to an “I quit” rant by a follower of QAnon. Except QAnon is just an add-on here. The woman is not leaving the QAnon cult. She is just so pissed at “Q” that she’s decided to go culting by herself. Q, it seems, is an ancient alien affiliated with alien “orbs.”
So, the New Age is not as old-hat as I believed. It may have largely dropped out of sight where I live (once nicknamed “the Sedona of the South”), but has not died out. The rant below is confirmation. I don’t speak the language, but some of it is familiar.
She’s taking down “the ET transmissions” in retaliation for Q’s failure to acknowledge her six years of “disclosure” and for failing to stop the “pandemic of child trafficking.”
“During the sinking of Atlantis, the Archons took over,” she says, “and that’s how long it’s taken you to get back here and do anything at all.”
Atlantis, Archons, alchemy, aliens, angels. “A” is almost as big a deal as “Q” is down this rabbit hole. QAnon is just another ingedient to spice up the alphabet gumbo. This is where East meets West and Right meets Left. Delusion is ecumenical that way.
“Let the record reflect: the American people are a bunch of suckers,” author Ben Fountain wrote in the Guardian in 2016 as the Trump train left the station. I titled my unpublished faux New Age business magazine Mantra-preneur accordingly. From Barnum Was Right! productions.
As disturbing (and persistent) as the Pizzagates and Frazzledrips and deadly Covid misinformation threads are is how deeply sad it is that people lose themselves in the culture of conspiracy. Upon first glance, the New Age stuff from the 1990s appeared quirky and amusing. Harmless even. Another spin of the moral panic wheel, except more benign. Spirituality, human potential, etc. But underneath lies the anxiety of the disempowered, even if objectively they are not:
Posessing secret “truths” gives conspiracy theorists a false sense of power in a world beyond their control. When life feels as if you have awakened locked in the trunk of a car careening down a rutted mountain road, you want to believe – you need to believe – that someone, anyone, is sitting behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is better than no one at all.
Decades of conservative talk radio attacks on the press (and science) have slowly dissolved objective reality and destroyed the truth function of facts. But when unreality takes a firm hold, it also erases the boundaries between left and right. What’s left is a human wasteland.