THE CONSPIRASPHERE
This month brings a return, a resurrection, an exhumation, and a reprise. NOEL ROONEY reports on two-way traffic at the rabbit hole...
Q BACK
After a month’s absence from the ether, Q is back and Q is busy. Recent posts consist of the usual smorgasbord of quasiconstitutional posturing, numerological riffs (on B2 bombers, for instance: the Anon seemed to take particular pleasure in that one), pro-life propaganda, cryptic allusions to various public figures, and calls to arms for the followers. The new accusations against shamed tycoon Jeffrey Epstein figure prominently; it’s a nice opportunity for alt-righters to drag out pictures of all the famous people who ever flew on a plane (not a B2) with him, and for Q to egg them on with a few well-chosen crumbs.
One news item that Q signally has not commented on is the story – which featured in quite a number of broadsheets, as well as Rolling Stone magazine – that QAnon folks believed JFK Jr was about to stage a remarkable comeback, on 4 July. Could this silence on Q’s part be down to the fact that the story is really a puff piece, elevated to news by a media machine that was actually rather missing Q and wanted to keep the flames fanned until the elusive posts came back on stream? Last year a QAnon adherent asked Q about precisely this old chestnut and was told, fairly categorically, that JFK Jr was, in fact, dead, therefore not lurking in some kind of Arthurian cold storage waiting for a significant date on which to jump up and leer through a split panel door, bellowing “Here’s Johnny!” or whatever the patrician Bostonian equivalent may be. But, truth be damned, you can’t keep a good story down.
The Kennedy puffery wasn’t the only ghost of times past to make a media reprise. News reports claimed that a number of graves in the Vatican’s Teutonic Cemetery were to be opened in another attempt to solve the mystery around the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, in 1983. Orlandi, and another girl named Mirella Gregori, both 15 at the time, disappeared within a few months of each other and have never been found. It’s in the capricious nature of the media hive mind that only Orlandi’s story has remained in public view, periodically resurfacing with new rumours and theories.
The Conspirasphere’s archives contain a trove of theories on the subject: was Orlandi done in by a rogue Swiss Guard after a spat with the family? Was she killed to cover up the sexual misconduct of a high-ranking Vatican cleric? Did the Mafia kidnap her in an attempt to pressure the Italian authorities? Is she still alive and living as a Cosa Nostra concubine somewhere in Sicily? And of course, there is the (in)famous Mehmet Ali Agca, the deeply eccentric Turkish assassin who tried to off Pope JohnPaul II, who claimed she had been taken by the Grey Wolves (a deep state paramilitary group, or a bunch of deluded Turkish nationalists, depending on your point of view) as a bargaining chip in negotiations for his release; although he later claimed that Our Lady of Fatima was his actual liberator, after JPII had the bullets that struck him built into her crown. When the tombs were opened it turned out they contain no human remains – not even those of the German princesses meant to be buried there; a further mystery?
The 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing has generated a huge amount of laudatory and nostalgic press activity.
It is also curiously noteworthy, for those of us who track the trajectory of the Conspirasphere, that a large proportion of the articles give space (ouch), and often a good deal of it, to the theory – by now something of an industry, and rite of passage for entry into the rabbit hole – that the landings were faked. Further proof, if any were needed, that conspiracy theory is firmly embedded in contemporary mainstream thought, almost to the point where “fair and balanced reporting” requires trotting out a conspiracy angle before a story is considered complete.