Review of "Operation Mindfuck QANON AND THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP" by Robert Guffey

Much more detail about the nature of the Qanon conspiracy theories than I was prepared for...I knew this stuff was pretty batshit crazy, but I was still unprepared for how stupid it all is. And at some level I can't help thinking that the people pushing it out know that it's stupid, and are laughing at their followers; for example, the references to Deep Underground Military Bases, for which the followers unreflectingly use the acronym D.U.M.B. 

Some of this was compellingly awful, and other parts were mind-numbingly boringly awful...not the author's fault, it's just that there's only so much of this you can take. 

Sometimes his political instincts are spot on - he manages to despise the right-wing nutjobs who perpetrate this stuff without embracing their opponents, the mainstream Democrats who really don't give a shit about the damage that they've done with their policies and their wars. 

At other times he - no doubt exasperated by the depth of the bullshit he's had to wade through - descends into sarcasm that isn't interesting or edifying to read. That's a shame, a better editor would have cut a lot of that out.

He's quite well informed on the historical background to conspiracy theories, but I found that there are things that I wish he'd known about - for example, he cites Will Eisner's "The Plot: The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" for an explanation of the historical background to this foundational conspiracy theory, rather than Norman Cohn's "Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion". 

Probably not the definitive source on Qanon, but a good one to read. I was reading this as the news came through about Trump's indictment, and it made me glad that there was a prospect, however small, that the bastards responsible for all this might go to jail.