James Gill: Are Democrats Satan-worshipping pedophiles? Many Louisianans think so.
Polls are widely, and justifiably, pooh-poohed these days, but we can probably trust one that finds Louisiana is fertile ground for QAnon conspiracy theories.
According to the Pew Research Center, the three states with the highest concentration of QAnon adherents, at 12% to 14%, are Louisiana, Georgia and Mississippi. Nationwide, one in 10 Americans favor QAnon, another poll by a group called HOPE not Hate found.
That means there are many millions of people walking the streets of this country who believe that Satan-worshipping pedophile Democrats secretly rule the world, injecting themselves with adrenochrome, an elixir extracted from the children they abduct. Wayfair had been forced to issue statements denying that traffickers conceal children in the cabinets it manufactures.
Georgia has just gone one better than Louisiana by electing dedicated QAnonist Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress. Another congresswoman-elect, gun-toting Lauren Boebert of Colorado, has somewhat backed off her earlier endorsement of QAnon.
With Clay Higgins about to begin his third term in Congress, Louisiana is no slouch when it comes to political paranoia, however. Higgins has voiced support for two gangs of deluded right-wingers — the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers.
Boebert won election after denouncing the incumbent in the primary as insufficiently devoted to President Donald Trump. Greene, meanwhile, believes Trump is uniquely qualified to rid the world of the cabal that runs our lives from the shadows. The QAnon faithful believe that, when Trump delivers mankind from bondage, cabal members will be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay and hanged.
Greene, whose many racist slurs include denouncing the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros as a Nazi bent on world domination, may be a repugnant spokeswoman for a deranged movement, but she is Trump’s cup of tea. He has called her a “future Republican star,” and lauded QAnon as “people that love our country.” The FBI takes a different view, having dubbed QAnon a “domestic terrorist threat.”
President-elect Joe Biden is naturally at a odds with Trump over QAnon, having whimsically suggested last week that its adherents have a screw loose. He said they should take advantage of the mental health benefits provided by the Affordable Care Act, which Trump was hoping the U.S. Supreme Court would throw out.
Some fans must wonder why Trump doesn’t just make it happen, for QAnon has taken on the trappings of a religion and he is widely credited with divine powers. When Trump was sick with the coronavirus, Brendan Dilley, a radio talk show host who doubles as a “Make-America-Great-Again life coach,” predicted he would soon recover on account of his “god-tier genetics.” From whom gods inherit their genes must remain imponderable.
It would be folly to write off QAnon believers as no-account suckers, however. There are so many of them that they must run the IQ gamut. What they believe may seem incompatible with sweet reason and scientific principle, but the same applies to the tenets of any faith. Another Pew survey found that 80% of Americans believe in miracles, so whatever objections may be raised to QAnon, its adherents cannot be accused of unusual credulity.
Their emergence is alarming because their high priests do not preach peace and reconciliation. QAnon believers take their cues from a mysterious online source, purportedly a high-ranking government official with all the inside dope on the domestic threats to the American way of life. QAnon’s version of Armageddon is the Storm, when Trump will vanquish the evildoers and — you’ve guessed it — make America great again.
Until that wonderful day arrives, militias inspired by QAnon and similar paranoid movements are evidently prepared to stage violent resistance to the government they believe is oppressing them. Six militiamen right now await trial on charges of plotting to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Trump’s “Liberate Michigan” tweets in response to Whitmer’s coronavirus lockdown order was a clear incitement to thuggery, and very much in character. He is too busy fabricating tales of election fraud to contradict goofy conspiracy theories.
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.
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