THE STORM! (Or: How do we get out of this mess?)

This is a long essay which uses a number of small examples to illustrate a very large problem.

Trump can cure cancer! Popular right-wing conspiracy freak Mark Taylor has assured his audience that President Trump will, in his second term, release the long-suppressed cures for cancer and Alzheimer's. For many years (says Taylor), these cures have been suppressed by the evil medical profession, which (as everyone knows) is controlled by those hideous, money-grubbing and endlessly scheming J....er, globalists.

You'd think that Trump would reveal the cure for cancer during his first term, and perhaps during his first week. Any president who can cure cancer would be a shoo-in for reelection. Any president who can cure cancer should be able to end Obamacare without opposition.

Taylor also says that "Satan's frequency" blinds Americans to Trump's many virtues: "This bombardment of frequencies that we have going on right now, it’s been proven scientifically that it will literally change your DNA, and that’s what’s happening to a lot of Christians." Curiously, Taylor neglects to cite the journal that published this landmark study of the effects of Satan's frequency on genetics.

Jedi. Alex Jones has decried the new Star Wars movie as state-sponsored propaganda. I cannot fairly evaluate this argument as I have not seen the film and would prefer to avoid spoilers. However, I worked on the outskirts of Hollywood for quite a few years and never once met, or heard about, a screenwriter who complained that the State changed his or her scripts. Screenwriters complain about everything else, but not that.

Since the GOP runs "the State" right now, Jones must think that the Republican party likes to fiddle with Star Wars movies. That's the problem with being a right-wing conspiracy theorist in age of Trump: You cannot scream about the menace of "THEM" when your team becomes "THEM."

Hillary. The continuing smears of Hillary Clinton have had an impact. Her approval ratings mirror Trump's. A large portion of our population continues to view this retired political figure as a major menace. Hillary-hate has replaced the orgasm as America's favorite form of emotional release.

"Gloom and misery everywhere." The newest, grandest conspiracy theory to enter the market -- by way of 4chan, natch -- is called The Storm. (The link goes a great piece published by New York Magazine.) Even though I do not yet fully comprehend this matrix of weird accusations, my "Spidey sense" tells me that this one is going to be bigger than Pizzagate.

Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

Now pay attention, 007:

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane. However, thanks to some rather forced coincidences — like Q kind of, sort of guessing that Trump would tweet the word “small” on Small Business Saturday, and this one time the internet decided that Q was “totally on Air Force One” because he posted a blurry picture of some islands while Trump was on his trip to Asia — and a whole heck of a lot of wishful thinking, people believed he was the real deal.

Within the conspiracy community, there is a myth (which I first heard in the late 1980s) that "Q clearance" is the highest level of clearance within the United States government. (A novel by Peter Benchley seems to have initiated this meme.) In fact, the term is used only within the Department of Energy to denote those granted access to nuclear secrets. Rick Perry, God help us, has Q clearance.

According to Q, Trump was never really involved with Russia, and isn’t actually under investigation by Mueller & Co. On the contrary, Q insists that it’s actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller) because they’re obviously just evil, money-hungry globalists who’ll do anything for the highest bidder. (Oh, yeah, and they’re also apparently into raping and killing children, though the crowd is split over whether this is because they’re satanists or just part of some weird blackmail scheme involving the CIA.) Q also claims that Trump, the genius that he is, figured all of this out way back when he was just a measly presidential candidate, and has been pretending to love Putin and/or be involved with Russia ever since as a way to force a third party to investigate these horrors — without drawing the attention of those evil Dems-who-must-not-be-named, of course — because he’s just that selfless of a leader.

In this fantasy world, all of the far right’s wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or just about to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama; and that the Las Vegas massacre was most definitely an inside job connected to the Saudi-Clinton cabal.

They believe all of this will be coming to a head any day now. That “The Storm” — of arrests, political turmoil, and Republican vindication — is coming. Though there have been some, uh, miscalculations as for exactly when.

From time to time, this humble blog has received comments from crazed conspira-trolls confidently predicting that Hillary, Obama, Soros and their partners in evil will soon be rounded up and led off in cuffs. Now I know the origin point of these forecasts.

Have we met Q before? "Q" -- whoever he is -- has fastened upon a familiar ploy. Do you remember TBR News and "The Voice of the White House"? If the name doesn't ring a bell, allow me to ring it.

During the Dubya administration, this alleged "insider" manifested himself within the cyber-pages of a website called TBR News. Many visited that place without understanding that "TBR" stood for The Barnes Review, a pseudo-scholarly organization devoted to the promotion of Holocaust revisionism. The Barnes Review was the creation of a notorious neofascist named Willis Carto, who, in turn, was an associate of Francis Yockey, a mastermind of the post-war fascist underground.

(William Turner's Power on the Right describes a speech given by Carto in a hall bedecked with swastikas. Carto's Noontide Press catalogue offered Hitler: The Unknown Artist and other examples of Adolf Adoration.)

The editor of TBRNews called himself Walter Storch, who also writes under the name Gregory Douglas, and whose real name may be Peter Stahl. Another dubious writer calling himself Henry Makow is also associated with "Douglas." (There is talk of a family relationship. Hell, Makow may be Douglas.) I've read that these deceivers may have links to the rarified field of art forgery. In sum and in short: These people live in a world best described as "The Blacklist with brown shirts."

I tried my best to comprehend this goose-stepping masquerade ball in this long, weird post published in 2009. If you're fascinated (as I am) by All Things Strange, hit that last link. You may also want to read an excellent investigative piece published in 2006 by Kos.

Bottom line: The Storch/Douglas/Makow "team" -- if we can call it a team -- is devoted to the creation of elaborate fakes, deriving either from bogus documents or from ersatz "revelations" offered by nameless insiders. This blitzkrieg of bogusness has a fourfold purpose: 1. To foster paranoia. 2. To spread anti-Semitism. 3. To cast a favorable light on Nazi Germany. 4. To make Americans lose faith in democracy.

Back in the Dubya era, liberal websites often got suckered in by the Voice, which seduced lefties by telling them what they wanted to hear about Bushian malevolence. Since TBR News usually kept the anti-Semitism sotto voce, many lefties went along with the simplistic presumption that anyone who hated Bush just had to be cool. Until very recently, most progressives refused to understand that the ultra-rightists despise the Bush family as much as they despise the Clintons.

Why am I rehashing this history? Frankly, my Spidey sense is telling me that Q and the Voice of the White House could be one and the same. Of course, my Spidey sense is far from infallible. Even if it is wrong in this instance, I suggest that Q is best understood as a very gifted student of the Makow/Douglas/Stahl/Storch school of manipulation.

Pizzagate on steroids. Let's return to this important New York Magazine expose of a phenomenon which -- like early-stage Trumpism itself -- has managed to infect much of our culture while attracting little mainstream attention:

Over the last month and a half, the Storm has spread from the depths of 4chan and 8chan to Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter, where it’s found hundreds of thousands of devout followers. Some of the most popular explainer videos boast nearly 200,000 views, and the QAnon hashtag has gotten so popular, it’s honestly difficult to track. (I signed up for one of those freebie “Track Your Hashtag Now!” services and #QAnon hit the 2,000-post limit within four hours.) Some poor soul even took the time to write a 117-page book charting Q’s rise to power, which I’m guessing has been seen at least as many times as this very aggressive Imgur guide, which was at 137,000 views as of Sunday night.

It is claimed that Roger Stone has slyly pushed Q-friendly material. I don't know if that claim is true. If it is, color me unsurprised.

Bottom line: How do we get out of this mess? The above-linked NY Mag story caused one reader to offer this comment:

This type of thinking is ABSOLUTELY treatable with medication. Not kidding.

I doubt this. I believe that "conspiracism" -- like alcoholism -- should be considered a form of addiction, and I'm not sure that addiction can be cured by psycho-pharmacology.

For the sake of argument, let's stipulate that this assertion is true. Do we want to live in a country in which those who make dubious and dangerous claims are forcibly medicated? Who will decide which Americans receive drugs? Who watches the watchmen?

That, in a nutshell, is the conundrum we face in the era of Trump. I used to have faith that unregulated free speech was a self-healing organism. I used to believe that free speech was like Wolverine's skin: The bad guys could bruise it, batter it, stab it and shoot it -- but after a period of pain, everything would return to normal.

I've lost that faith. The bullets have hit vital organs and the holes don't seem to be closing up.

Conspiracy madness is destroying this country. Neo-Nazis are using (or abusing) free speech to eradicate democracy. In the end, they hope to institute a totalitarian state in which free speech will be no more.

Infuriatingly, the only way to combat their abuse of free speech is to restrict free speech. But that option is unthinkable. Any state which has the power to hide or prevent the lies told by Q or "Gregory Douglas" or the Pizzagators will also have the power to restrict what I have to say and what you have to say.

Perhaps the best film about Nazism is Kevin Brownlow's 1965 masterpiece It Happened Here. Toward the end of that movie, one character offers this horrifying paradox: "The appalling thing about fascism is that you've got to use fascist methods to get rid of it."

When I first saw the film at a revival theater in early 1980s, that line made me angry -- and I was not the only one who felt disturbed. A few in the audience applauded; some hissed.

How do I feel now? I don't know. I just don't know.