The connection between Robert F Kennedy Junior and David Icke, who thinks he is God? And Satan-worshippers siphoning off the blood of children? No link at all except in the loopiest of conspiracy theories, and the fact that Donald Trump has now openly acknowledged an overarching beaut.
Protests against restrictions to combat the pandemic have brought out a range of activists, some slightly less fanatic than others. The resentment and anger would be better masked. Don’t wear a mask if you can’t bear it but stop ranting, eh?
Reasonable people can be swayed by fears of vaccination for their children but the anti-vaxxer movement says mandatory quarantine is just exploitation of fear, and will lead to mass vaccination against the coronavirus. Which Bill Gates allegedly helped spread to develop money-making worldwide surveillance.
Icke says the coronavirus is linked to 5G technology. Robert F Kennedy, son of the assassinated Bobby, was eloquent last month in an online rally on a supposed Gates plan for injectable chips and ‘subdermal biometric tattoos’ to track human movements.
Creating bogey-figures is an ancient form of manipulation. In Britain as in the US, conservative politics has lost its way. The enemy Trump conjures up for racist white Americans is no more real than the bureaucrats, the elite portrayed as the enemy by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, inside their privileged bubble, to ‘get Brexit done.’
Having gutted the party that produced David Cameron and George Osborne, architect of austerity, Johnson and company are floundering. Having mishandled both lockdown and its relaxation by bumbling between ‘the science’ and ‘the economy’, they are in no position to pivot towards scarifiers about vaccination.
In Germany the far right turns out in sympathy with anti-maskers claiming the virus is bogus – as they do in modest numbers in the Republic and tiny groups here. German mainstream politics holds its nerve. The American Republican party fell in behind a man who bellows their worst dog whistles and is now too close to the election for anything but panic. Their presidential candidate, after all, the incumbent, has openly hailed QAnon ‘people that love our country’ - in a White House news conference on August 19.
Presumably this is because the anonymous leader ‘Q’, a senior US Army figure, is exposing online the ‘deep state plot’ against him. And he thinks there are votes in it.
A lengthy New York Times article last month says QAnon followers have been charged with murder, domestic terrorism and planned kidnapping. Yet Trump, after a couple of years of hints and coded nods, has now acknowledged their central belief.
Was it ‘a bad thing or a good thing’, he asked a journalistic challenger, that he was said to be saving the world from a paedophile cult? ‘I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.’
The grey old NYTimes sighed that if only QAnon was that ‘benign or grounded in reality...Backing the president’s enemies, the theory falsely claims, are prominent Democrats who extract hormones from children’s blood.’
None of this is funny. Around 60 present or former congressional candidates are QAnon supporters, three of them, all female, in the running in Georgia, Colorado and Oregon for this autumn’s election. The Georgian, Marjorie Taylor Greene, says this is ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles out.’ She has called the election of Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar an ‘Islamic invasion’, George Soros a ‘Nazi.’ Trump salutes her as a ‘future Republican star.’
The best hope that all of this including Trump will shrivel like a punctured balloon or an old flag is its sheer excess, its OTT-ness. Non-conspiracists are lucky in the egos involved; Gemma O’Doherty and John Waters in Dublin, and older brother of Jeremy Corbyn, Piers, complaining after that Trafalgar Square rally about ‘the arrest of me’. It may not be funny now, yet, but it should be.
