Chapotraphouse

don't work yourself into a shoot

I remember visiting r/CBTS_stream within a few days of its creation, the moment Qanon went beyond 4chan where it was just one more user doing that kind of posting. Even with less than 100 people in the subreddit, I immediately knew it was something different and dangerous because those people were desperate. Their voice chatrooms were the most depressing place I've been online- boomers chainsmoking and falling asleep on mic while trying to impress each other by finding a new clue. Their posts instantly fused Trump with Evangelical prayer threads with all of the existing Obama-era conspiracies in a way that made every contribution equally valid and every contributor a genius. People assumed that Q was at least a CIA agent, if not Trump himself getting on reddit to talk to his secret friends in code. Whenever I ran a user analyser on the subscribers, unless they had a new account it always had the saddest results in terms of subscriptions and posts. Qanon and Pizzagate are psychosexual things. They're paedophiles who want to feel strong and smart and morally righteous by stopping the paedophiles they support.

Russiagate is less psychosexual, but there's still a deep need driving it. Liberals can't imagine being anything other than institutionalists and can't accept that those institutions don't serve them. They spent the entire first Trump term begging for anyone in the system to and say "mr president, your russia sir.". The only thing that could explain the state of the US was that we secretly became a bunch of Asians overnight. The only thing that could explain any dissenting voice online was that they personally were being stalked by every bad guy in a James Bond film.

Both of those are hardcore Millerite movements. They gave an outsized sense of importance to the users who had nothing else to believe in, purely a skinner box that you press to remove cognitive dissonance. They insisted that all of the contradictions would be erased overnight and that some form of utopia would come after the promised one delivered us. We'd finally drain the swamp, we'd finally return to a good president leading a noble empire. It all hinged on hypothetical documents that only existed if the core conspiracy did.

With Epstein everything is already there and no one email is going to crack the case. The only time things actually shift is when another group of documents is released, and the only way they shift is that another group of people I already think should be guillotined for other reasons is implicated further. I don't expect the republicans to save the day any more than I do the democrats any more than I do the institutions. If it comes out today that he's still alive, I don't expect that to change anything about the case for the same reason Maxwell being alive hasn't. If every single name in the files is given a death penalty it won't change anything because it's just one more reason to hate the same class and they'll all be replaced tomorrow. The built-in scepticism toward anyone doing anything about it is where it's different for me. At least on Hexbear I haven't seen anyone under the illusion that the dam is about to break or that we can make that happen through pure willpower. It's much closer to True Crime Slop, just an empty Two Minutes' Hate, than it is Qanon.

That's not how schizophrenia is precipitated. Schizophrenic delusions are highly personal, e.g. "I literally am Jeffrey Epstein" or "CIA agents are stalking my home because I know too much about Epstein". They differ fundamentally from "ordinary" conspiracy theories.

I'm using the word clinically, not as an ableist pejorative. I have loved ones with the illness.