I live in the Netherlands and the amount of deluded conspiracy theorists has been increasing steadily for several years now. Unfortunately things have really accelerated since COVID-19, people think the virus is fake, they think Bill Gates created the virus to put mind control chips into your brain, they think masks are a form of mind control somehow, these are just a couple of examples.
I always enjoyed reading about Q on r/cth because it's just so ridiculous, I had a good time laughing at those silly Americans, that is, until it came to my own country. Q anon finding it's way to the Netherlands is weird because it is a conspiracy theory about American politics, it has nothing to do with our politics (which also suck, just not as much as US politics). But as with most bad things nowadays the culprit is the profiteering of Facebook and Google, their algorithms work here in the same way they do in the US and have led a huge amount of dutch people into a long and harmful rabbit hole.
The realest consequence is probably the direct action that these groups (most of them formed on facebook) are now doing, they are genuinly harassing politicians on the streets of our capital city. Our Prime Minister almost always cycles to his work or to meetings, no motor parades with cops and secret service agents, just him on his bike. That is now almost certainly a thing of the past because the Qanon groups here keep shouting death threats and such to every politician they see.
The mere numbers of people still surprise me to this day, our most famous Qanon conspiracy theorist is probably Lange Frans, white rapper turned Qanon admirer. His podcast consistantly get close to half a million views in a country of 17 million people, which is like almost 10 million people watching one of these videos in the US.
Sorry for the long rant but just the fact that all of these people are also going to vote next year and the absolute state of the left in the Netherlands is plain sad.
Conspiracy theories have been a staple of US culture for a long time. It didn't begin with Q Anon. A case can be made for the 90s being the real decade of this stuff developing. "Black helicopters" was a big one, along with the usual UFO stuff and then the early Clinton conspiracies. Coast To Coast radio was a big deal in the 90s, along with Bill Cooper and it was around this time Alex Jones was laying down the foundations for what would become a media empire for him.
There was a time when you had harmless conspiracies like UFOs and some of the stuff on Coast To Coast, but it's really a rabbit hole that leads to a pipeline and goes to far right stuff. I had friends in high school who got into conspiracy theories, beginning with the old Alex Jones stuff from the 2000s and gradually got into more of the hardcore anti-semetic shit from David Icke and that led them to Holocaust denial eventually. I myself got into the conspiracy stuff in my late teens and I consider myself to be lucky to get out of it.
Q Anon is pretty crazy though and I think it's an evolution of all the anti-government conspiracies we had during the Obama era. The conspiracy crowd latched onto Trump pretty early on, and if we are being 100% accurate here, they loved Trump way back in 2012 when he pushed for Obama to reveal his birth certificate. With their guy winning and things not improving for them and the government continuing to become an authoritarian fascist dictatorship, they had to invent this "deep state" thing to keep it going. Once Trump is gone, the "deep state" will return to being "the government" in their terminology. We'll be seeing Q Anon evolve into something even scarier.
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This is not true. The government has went after the far right too. Conspiracy stuff started getting popular in the 90s when the government was targeting far right groups.
Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other incidents during the 90s are largely what inspired the anti-government sentiment towards the government and agencies of FBI, BLM and ATF.
Those are fine incidents of the government absolutely fucking things up. The FBI was waging a war against the far right militias in the 90s and they lost that war when the OKC bombing happened. Ever since then, the FBI has treated the far right cautiously and almost like they are scared of them, cause they really are. The OKC bombing was the biggest terrorist attack prior to 9/11 and had it not been for 9/11, people would've still been talking about it going into the 2000s.
Conspiracy stuff wasn't always a left or right thing. There was a weird time in the 2000s when Alex Jones was considered an ally to the left. Hard to believe now, but he was in the 9/11 truther movement and Jones spent the entire 2000s and up through Obama's presidency talking about the government becoming more and more authoritarian. When Obama passed the NDDA, the ONLY people talking about it were conspiracy theorists and Libertarians associated with them.
This site is obsessed with trying to radicalize liberals and wasting their time arguing that we should go talk to these smug assholes who hate us for being poor. But honestly, we should be trying to talk to conspiracy theorists instead. Many of them come so close to realizing that our system is fucked up and they'll come so close to realizing it's capitalism. These are the people I think we could convince and push towards leftism, long before any liberals will who are just going to side with the government no matter what.
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