I want to answer a question that I’m asked over and over again: are there any conspiracy theories that turned out to be true?
That is, are there any popularly held beliefs that a group of powerful people secretly worked together to do something harmful, that were later proven with compelling evidence to be real?
It’s a given in the conspiracy theory community that history, particularly recent history, is full of conspiracy theories that were proven right or came true.
To state the obvious, pipe bomb maker Cesar Sayoc and Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers were violent, paranoid, hate-filled dwellers in the pervasive discourse of such people: conspiracy theories.
The targets of their ire were different. Sayoc was a hardcore Trump acolyte who felt that oppositional Democrats were the scourge of America, while Bowers appears to have disdained Trump for not doing enough to cleanse America’s REAL scourge – the Jews.
But both wanted their foes disposed of in the same way – a violent purging that spared no one they felt was not sufficiently on their side.
It’s a race war fought on obscure message boards and Fox News alike, pumping out anti-Semitic and violent conspiracy theories to broken minds who have no ability to discern fact from fiction.
These are self-proclaimed patriots who see themselves as the vanguard of a new digital war, where hearts and minds are won with memes, anonymous legions of soldiers fight by “digging” into people’s pasts, and anyone not sufficiently with them must be destroyed.
But when their memes and social media bitching didn’t get the job done, Sayoc and Bowers resorted to what paranoid killers have always resorted to when words aren’t cleansing the filth fast enough – bombs and bullets.
Their actions aren’t random. Their motives aren’t mysterious.
And they aren’t alone.
The mysterious closure of an observatory in New Mexico – by the FBI, no less. Anecdotal stories of massive military exercises featuring tanks, attack helicopters, and artillery in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, rural Michigan, Cape Cod, and elsewhere. A series of gas line explosions and fires in Massachusetts, blowing up dozens of houses – and bearing the hallmarks of a Russian cyberattack.
It could be the first stirrings of “The Storm,” the great unsealing of indictments against Democrats and pedophiles that mysterious Trump insider Q has been hinting at for a year.
But what if the exercises and explosions are actually the first strands in a spider’s web being woven by President Trump and his cronies to stay in power and crack down on non-believers?
I’ve been writing about online conspiracy theory QAnon for a while, and figured it was just too weird, esoteric, and creepy to make mainstream news.
I mean, fascist fantasies about a massive purge of Democratic baby-eaters, with a cadre of self-proclaimed “autists” deciphering rhetorical clues to the events to come left by a secret insider?
So imagine my surprise when a large and vocal group of Q believers swamped a Trump rally in Tampa on July 31st.
Suddenly, QAnon was everywhere – from the New York Times to the BBC and back.
It introduced Q to millions of people and brought mainstream recognition to a movement that had primarily been a secret club with very specific codes and keys to get in.
The coverage also brought up a very real backlash asking an important question: why are we talking about this crap?
Last week, I wrote about the political implications of SCOTUS Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement, and essentially, how liberal apathy put us in the position of Donald Trump being able to jam Supreme Court Justices through a collaborationist Senate.
At the time, it seemed clear that was due to a combination of his age (he’s 81) and Trump convincing Kennedy he’d be able to get a nomination confirmed before the November midterm and the possible loss of the Senate to Democrats.
But what a difference a few days makes.
Mike Rothschild 
You must be logged in to post a comment.