Originally published at: QAnon has some weird overlaps with MMA, WWE, and Wellness Influencer Culture | Boing Boing
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“There is only one.”
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To summarize “there’s a sucker born every minute”, but there are many different flavors of sucker.
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Idiots all.
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Grifters gotta grift.
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May 1st.
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Roger That!
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So you’re telling me that dumbasses are also stupid?
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I wish I could find it. There was a short piece on NPR this morning about the disinformation “wellness” bloggers and influencers, with specifics about how the anti-vax stance is monetized. Anyone else hear that?
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Barnum knew that this country was a grifter’s paradise. The whole “rugged individualist” attitude described in the first article* has created an annual bumper crop of marks going back hundreds of years.
[* an attitude which movement conservativism and “free”-market fundamentalism pandered to so long that it reached its logical conclusion: tens of millions happily voting a known con artist into the White House]
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Don’t forget the sovereign citizen movement, there’s a lot of overlap there. Look for example at the origin of the march 4th story.
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Hey Qanons, look no further…it is I, the one and ONLY real Q. 
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There are also some weird overlaps with other cultural phenomena… Circus and Carnival road shows and those equally interesting tent revivals that seem to pop up throughout the South in the good old Summertime. One set grifts your money by rigged games of chance and skill and lets you “see the elephant”. Most folks know it’s a grift and it’s a bit of harmless fun. A fool and his money are soon parted… not much to lose but an evening and a few bucks in exchange for the fun and a kewpie doll. The tent revivals are different in that they pass a collection plate, group sing some hymnals and get “revived” spiritually. Also, they just use grift tactics to “save your soul”. Also, mostly harmless… totally voluntary.
QAnon is similar but quite different in that it’s a continuous and ongoing siege of the mind. It may be a lark at first, then the weaker minded get caught up in the tentacles of the disinformation campaign and like any cult following once ensnared, it holds on tenaciously and sadly will most likely require Deprogramming with a capital D . It has seemingly become the drug of choice for the untold number of people not totally sentient and well enough to see it is really a very stupid and dangerously bad experiment being played out by a mass psyops operation gone really, really wrong, like a damn runaway train.
… Congress needs to act and begin an actual major inquiry into the nature of its origin. To not do so now, in a timely manner, is to possibly regenerate the horrors of some of the worst mass hysteria events like Jonestown and the Reverend Moon, and others like Waco, seen in the last century. This is a serious matter and though I do make fun of it too, I would be wrong to not see the implications of it continuing to its conclusion … the fix is in. People have already died directly. QAnon conspiracy thinking has most likely has been responsible for a percentage of the Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic deaths, too.
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Yes, not only interesting but it brought to my mind of an older couple down the street from me. All the boxes are checked. Anti vaxxers ( apparently since the 70s, from talking to them), redmeat Republican Party homeschooling evangelical Christians, big Trump loudmouths. Restricted diets based in wellness influencer thinking. Kambucha drinking adherents. Wingnuts…
… QAnon conspiracy thinking might be a real thing in their lives, too. Form follows function, as they say.
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“Weird” overlaps? Really.
Ask yourself, what do all these weird things have in common? C’mon. I’ll admit it might be a little hard if you find yourself in the middle of the Venn diagram, but try… That Venn diagram is Dumbfuckistan of course, nothing weird at all about it
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It’s not weird at all.
The McMahons having a long time association with Donald Trump going back to the 1980s. Two time Senate loser Linda McMahon was rewarded with a cabinet position in Trump’s administration after giving $7 million dollars in donations.
The UFC has also long has ties with the Trump Organization going back to the early 2000s and in recent years had basically become a Trump propaganda arm. The UFC CEO was a huge Trump donor.
And “wellness influencer” just seems like a shoe in for Trumpian bullshit.
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From the linked Pastel QAnon story:
it’s a shorter leap than one might assume from believing that Big Pharma is pushing dangerous vaccines onto an unsuspecting public to believing that Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and Bill Gates are part of a global network of Satanists who kidnap children and drink their blood.”
I don’t think it’s a surprise at all: both are crazy conspiracy theories. The more shocking thing is that it appears the former doesn’t seem to have fazed the author or seemed dangerous to them before QAnon existed. Somehow I suspect they harbour sympathies with the antivaxers.
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I wonder how much is a pipeline effect of close donors like that and how much is the known tendency for people prone to belief in one conspiracy to be more likely to believe in other conspiracies, even if they are contradictory. Joe Rogan both platforms far right figures, but also a rich web of conspiracy. The herbal supplement industry both funds major Republican figures, but also feeds a distrust of our shared reality. WWE overlaps with both,as well as personal ties to Republican politics.
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weird? as in unexpected? b/c this tracks perfectly IMO. WWE and “wellness influencer” are strictly cons just like QAnon. MMA I guess is a little different but tracks with both the other groups?
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