Conspiracies

Tuesday

Luke Lyman

How Alex Jones won

One of my favorite Walt Whitman stanzas goes like this: I’m a pioneer! I’m an explorer! I’m a human, and I’m comin’! I’m animated! I’m alive! My heart’s big! It’s got hot blood goin’ through it fast! I like to fight! I like to eat! I like to have children! I’m here! I got a life force! This is a human! This is what we look like! This is what we act like! This is what everyone was like before us! This is what I am! Just kidding. That’s Alex Jones, the voice of our time. Nobody in media has won more in the past 20 years than Jones. He’s lost a lot along the way, of course, including the largest defamation suit in American history and access to every mainstream media platform. But those were only temporary slowdowns.

Jones

Sunday

Ben Sixsmith

What happened to QAnon?

"There’s a storm coming,” popular historian turned esoteric political commentator Neil Oliver posted on Twitter in May, “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But there’s a storm coming.” As Mr. Oliver is a Scotsman who calls himself “the Coast Guy,” some of his followers might have thought he was referring to the weather. Others more acquainted with the tropes of modern conspiratorial thought, though, will see the reference to a “storm” as a reference to a time of social and political crisis. It comes — whether Mr. Oliver knows it or not — from the fevered discourse of QAnon. QAnon! The term almost makes you feel nostalgic.

QAnon