BTW, why QAnon and not, say, XAnon? Because it looks mysterious enough – and cute enough – even when mirrored or reversed? Nona Q, Susie Q‘s lost sibling – or grandma.
Karen Bennhold reports from Berlin for The New York Times:
His [Trump’s] face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions…
“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.
That’s news to me. How come? What happened? Trump? Der große Erlöser? Huh? D’oh!
OK. Perhaps this is the clue:
The QAnon phenomenon has added a new kind of fuel to that fire.
As I’ve said before, QAnon was entertaining when it started. But read it daily and you’ll get bored pretty soon. Or hooked, like so many other readers have gotten hooked, within and without the US:
In Germany alone, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000, Mr. Dittrich said. The largest German-language QAnon channel on YouTube, Qlobal-Change, has over 17 million views and has quadrupled its following on Telegram to over 124,000 since the coronavirus lockdown in March…
It must have a tremendous integrative power, that Q project, the ability to twist together strains of various conspiracy theories into a grand narrative and general worldview. Could it be a Russian project, by any chance? Yes, as Russian propagandists are their best at post-truth. Whoever started it, it may be on the verge of a global breakthrough.
And then – what then? Can you picture QAnon’s apotheosis? Can anyone? Does Q have an idea?