Examining QAnon’s “official” Twitter account
Although the mystery of the forum poster known as Q has been all but solved – it’s the guys who run 8chan, of course it’s always been the guys who run 8chan – the movement they’ve inspired has kept gathering momentum, forming into its own snowball of idiocy with no input from above. Case in point: The X (formerly Twitter) account QTHESTORMM, which purports to be run by Q himself and claims the title “President of Magic.”
Although the page’s content is about as vacuous as you might expect, it serves as a remarkable microcosm of the Q movement as a whole. Every day, there’s a new doomsaying prediction and a new deadline set for some earth-shattering event. The fact that the last hundred deadlines haven’t been met is, of course, no obstacle to the account’s audience, who discuss the implications of each purported alien attack and missile launch in hushed tones.
Why, though, you might ask? Why would someone string along hundreds of thousands of MAGA cultists with false prediction after false prediction, relying on their blind devotion to keep them from realizing that none of this shit is actually happening? Sick amusement? Genuine belief? Accelerationism in service of sparking a civil war?
It’s to sell T-shirts, of course. It’s always to sell T-shirts. This current moment in American politics, with its absurd factionalism and unashamed grifts, is utterly exhausting, and I sincerely hope it’s going to die with Trump when his Big Mac-fueled heart inevitably gives out within the next few years. We shouldn’t have to treat “Aliens are controlling the shadow government” as a genuine position to be debated against.
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