The Emperor himself. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
“I’m a 35 year old teacher,” a user complained in the Reddit forum r/Qult_Headquarters. “My mom has fallen to the QAnon cult because of this 15-year-old named Reed Cooper. He is popular in the Trump community and holds live streams… Why would such an adorable kid do such a thing?”
Reed Cooper, a smug blond boy in a Sunday school tie and blazer combo who festoons all his social media with American flags, is already a visual argument for the return of corporal punishment. But this reverse-Pied Piper is also the emissary of a more disturbing trend. Boomer radicalisation.
American Millennials always used to moan about their parents being “radicalised” by Fox News. While part of this was younger people complaining that their parents didn’t have the views of a Williamsburg dillettante, there was also a whisp of truth to it. A mono-diet of Hannity, the narrow wedge of talking points the station offers, can become velcro to which every other thought then sticks. The sadness was that the complaint was as much about parents subsiding into increasingly narrow and lonely lives — in which the fritzing hearth of TV is left to fill gaps in the home left by bereavement, retirement or illness.
But for some of that generation, the same comforting spool of “everyone’s talking about” content is now to be found in the infinite-scroll of social media. Mainly, on Facebook.
It’s long been obvious that Facebook is greying. Take the figures for UK users: in the period 2017-2018, Facebook shed some 400,000 18-24 year olds. For 25-44, the figures were flat, meaning that the only age groups still growing were 45-plus, with the over 65 cohort growing the most — up by 300,000 users. There are now more 65-plus users of Facebook than there are aged between 13 and 17.
In December 2018, Newsweek concluded that, for the first time in nearly a decade, less than half of all teenagers in the United States were visiting Facebook at least once in a month. The impact of that swing was becoming a vicious cycle: “this silver surge… had the knock-on effect of pushing younger people away from Facebook.”
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SubscribeI have never had a FB page (b/c of my job I was barred by US regulators) so I have no direct experience with it. I am a recently retired Yank with an Ivy League graduate degree and a successful career in economic and market forecasting. What little I knew of Q anon (some are saying there are disproportionate numbers of pedophiles among the ruling elite) led me to dismiss it as a crazy joke until……..it became clear from recently published documents that some guy named Epstein, with no visibility on where his Billionaire status came from, had actually travelled regularly to a private island with some guy named Clinton, some old world prince with no life, and many many other members of the ruling class. I’m sure they were just discussing how to make the world a better place before enjoying some relaxing downtime with the other guests that happed to also be there…….kind of hard not to connect those dots unless you are a FB “factchecker”.
And shortly thereafter it turns out that some other pile of confirmed documents makes a strong circumstantial case that the new US president is a paid for agent of the CCP……But wait, all this info came from fake news sites according to FB so I’ll just keep assuming its all part of some vast right wing conspiracy – you know, those people who suffer from self sufficiency, make personal sacrifices for child-rearing and other family obligations, delay gratification, worry about punctuality, and all those other markers of white supremacy (at least according to those who take my tax money under threat of prison and use it to open museums accusing me of being racist by actually doing all those horrible things – search “Smithsonian White Culture poster” if this is unfamiliar). But when I point out to people that Obama killed many times more innocent brown people via drones than all the cops in the US during his administration I get accused of all kinds of things but facts are, in fact, facts even if the corporate media oligopoly refuses to disseminate those actual, documented, FACTS.
Especially for those across the pond, I urge you to realize that at least 74 million Americans voted for Trump – many of us (I live in a close state so could not do my normal protest vote this time) did so with great reluctance, but felt it was our only hope to avoid getting steamrolled by the radicals. With Orange Man Bad leaving the scene, the split between the radicals and the rest of us will become more clear every day and we outnumber them significantly. The crazier they go the more they will pay the price at the ballot box (assuming that gets fixed). The real political fissure will be between the empiricists who are part of the unelected permanent government (10 million US gov’t employees and millions more at state and local governments!?!?) and dream of ruling the world while they get extraordinarily wealthy (aka neocons) and those of us who still hold out hope the US constitution will actually be enforced against this horrible killing machine known as the Government of the United States and the “crony crapitalist” system they have created over the past 20 years or so (e.g. sell favors in the tax and regulatory codes to reward their political campaign donators) – that system has certainly contributed to the hollowing out of the middle class here (and its even worse in Europe of course but since I pay for a meaningful chunk of Europe’s defense they can afford to ossify their economies I guess).
We are not as loud nor as destructive as either the radicals or the Neo-cons (we must spy on you despite the constitution and keep droning thousands in the ME in order to keep you safe b/c you have no idea of the imminent threats we are working so hard to overcome) – sound familiar to those of you wondering why lockdowns persist when the data is increasingly clear that lockdowns do little or nothing to stop the spread?
And if the US ballot malarky is not fixed, then I will have lived through the destruction of the greatest experiment in human freedom ever devised – and the bulk of the 7.5 billion souls on the planet will be the victims.
PS – On a happier note, I’m new to your site after getting a recommendation from a friend – Unherd today is what reading monthly commentary magazines used to be – a thought provoking delight. Keep up the great work.