OPERATION MINDFUCK

Who is Q, and how did QAnon’s bizarre brand of “hermetically sealed, self-imposed ignorance” seize the minds of so many Americans?

“A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches,” writes Guffey in this tour of the wacky world of QAnon, a mélange of conspiracy theories neatly packaged for right-wingers, fundamentalists, and lonely hearts who lack a credulity gene. “If you can convince thousands of full-grown adults to accept an oafish boor like Donald J. Trump as God’s ‘Anointed One,’ you can get these rubes to accept almost anything or anyone,” writes the author. As with all successful conspiracy theories, Guffey notes, its proponents are masters at explaining away any contradictions. At the same time, QAnon has enough silliness to it that one suspects that it’s an elaborate satire, although true believers don’t take it as such. Indeed, the author posits that Trump may be a victim of his own press, believing, per one of the dumber QAnon tropes, that he alone is capable of preventing his followers “from being eaten by demons.” Guffey’s dive is mostly at the shallow end of the pool; readers interested in the red meat of QAnon will want to read Mike Rothschild’s The Storm Is Upon Us or Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko’s Pastels and Pedophiles instead. Still, Guffey does a reasonably good job of teasing out the history of some of QAnon’s wilder threads, many of which owe to 19th-century antisemitism and fears of a new world order foisted upon innocents by the evil Illuminati. In that, QAnon has much in common with Scientology and other shopping-mall religions but with modern twists—sex dungeons disguised as pizza parlors, demons disguised as Democrats, and such.

It has its moments, but this belongs at the bottom of the stack of recent books on the madcap world of QAnon.