The Conspiracy Theory That Says Trump Is a Genius

New York Times Opinion ^ | April 6, 2018 | Michelle Goldberg

[edzo4]

Last week Roseanne Barr — who, with the hit reboot of her show, has become one of the most prominent Donald Trump supporters in the country — tweeted that the president has freed hundreds of children a month from sexual bondage. “He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere,” she wrote. (The tweet has since been deleted.)

Barr’s tweet, puzzling to the casual observer, was a reference to QAnon, an expansive, complicated pro-Trump conspiracy theory. The theory is fascinating as an artifact of our current political derangement, but more than that, it’s profoundly revealing about the lengths to which some Trump supporters will go to convince themselves that his presidency is going well.

As Paris Martineau explained in New York Magazine, QAnon was born last October, when someone claiming to have “Q” level security clearance started a cryptic thread on 4chan, the online message board and troll playground. It was titled, “The Calm Before the Storm,” a phrase Trump had recently used. Q posted hints, some in the form of questions, ostensibly meant to help clued-in Trump supporters understand what was really going on in Washington beneath the facade of chaos and incompetence. (“What is military intelligence? Why go around the 3 letter agencies?”)

[NetAddicted]

I’m seeing lots of projection nowadays.