June 28, 2022 - 3:30pm
It’d been 7 hours and 563 days since we last spoke.
But here he was again: Q. Just an alleged employee of the Trump-era Deep State, stood before a message board of cranks, white nationalists and sexless men, asking them to “play the game again”.
Q: anonymous leader of QAnon, the 2020 conspiracy theory that turned middle-aged middle-Americans into an army of Manchurian candidates, obsessed with how Trump would redeem a fallen US by purging it of bureaucrat-pederasts.
Q: also the guy who another army of podcasters and investigative journalists have since very convincingly outed as Ron Watkins, 35, whose father Jim Watkins owns the 8kun domain on which Q’s “drops” would be found.
After the investigative journalists, the criminals trials, and the multiple quite good documentaries, this was a story that seemed to have run its course. Q went dark immediately after January 6th. One of his last posts was of a massive American flag, fluttering on a hillside. The final one was a dead link to a deleted YouTube video. It was a fitting send-off.
Q is tiresome, and we are all tired.
But here we are again. “Shall we play a game once more?” said the first post, which was signed Q. Other messages followed: “Are you ready to serve your country again?”. And: “remember your oath.”
There followed a piece of doggerel about Roe v Wade. A decent enough trigger point to launch a new season. But the vibe has shifted. Remember Houseparty? Remember Pokemon Go? Remember QAnon? Even bored dads in Tallahassee change their pop cultural hobbies every 18 months.
Plus, like the present Swiss cheese retconning of the Star Wars Franchise, there is a point in any cultural product’s evolution where the narrative tropes that made it attractive become inflated to nothingness by everything that comes after.
In January 2021, Q got out at the right time, like Ricky Gervais and The Office. In the best telling, he was Salvador Allende, barricaded in his office with a Kalashnikov and one bullet as Pinochet’s goons marched up the corridor. He warned about the Deep State. Then it came for him.
Now, like the tedium of watching Trump pout and stalk in the margins of the internet as he awaits his own comeback chance, there is a sense that the sound is turned down on this channel. Q’s back? And? The US Navy has a transgender admiral; the “QAnon shaman” is not yet halfway through his 41 month prison term. The game has moved on.
By considerable coincidence, Ron Watkins happens to be running for Congress this autumn, in Arizona’s 2nd District. What would Ron be wanting with a massive publicity foghorn capable of geeing up the most rabid sections of the Republican base?
Ron still denies he is Q. His counter-argument was simply that, if he were actually in charge, he would have made that last Q drop more artistic.“If I were Q I wouldn’t have made that last post to be that last post. I would have done something more exciting.“
No doubt George Lucas once felt the same about Return of The Jedi.
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SubscribeI find liking Woolf (and women like Dorothy Parker) very easy. Sharp, witty, opinionated, different – women who lived in a time when they were supposed to be polite, compliant and almost voiceless.
Yes – ditto Patricia Highsmith or Leonora Carrington
“It would be easy to cancel Woolf today — parts of her, at least. Emre’s notes introduce critical debates about Woolf’s racism: the diaries are full of unacceptable remarks about Indian people.”
I hate it when people in the past fail to live up to modern ways.
A down vote? Come on, that is why classic literature is being removed from mainstream education.
Perhaps they didn’t get the irony. You were being ironic weren’t you?
It would indeed be easy to find reasons to cancel Woolf. Only last week I discovered the n-word in one of her early short stories…
Nothing new about the sneering metropolitan elite
The Bloomsbury lot had such a hard First World War doing ‘war work’ on a country estate.
What I recall about the private Virginia Woolf was her depression, her revulsion with her own body and her desire for her own space – A Room of One’s Own. It almost seems to me that she was a free spirited intellect, confined within a body she disliked and a life she felt trapped in. Or maybe I’ve been reading the wrong biography.
I am often guilty of generalising my faults as a means of excusing them. We don’t actually know how other people think, only how we think they think, which is really just us thinking. I know I can be very nasty. My problem is taking responsibility for that regardless of what other people do and to try somehow to be kinder.
Perhaps, because she was trying to consciously break free from the more submissive role she was brought up with. In trying to be more assertive, she became rude.
It reminds me of this: ‘Women can do the job as well as a man, but they cannot be a gentleman’ (or words to that effect)
Would anyone ever have paid any attention at all to Virginia Woolf, had she not been a woman?
Mrs Dalloway is actually a very good novel indeed.
Yes it is.
No, Jane Austen and the Brontes were of course also heavily over promoted because they were women…