Psssst. There's a pedophile in your attic.

The FBI investigator had the job of conducting background checks which included for college students who applied for naval officer training.  I knew him from some lengthy interviews about students who were candidates for officers training.  We became friendly when we discovered we had both served in the military in Germany at the same time (as did Elvis Presley).  And he was a member of a travelers' organization I once belong to that published newsletters in which members reported on special finds of restaurants and other services that made life more pleasant for those whose jobs require travel.  Once we had lunch together at a small town cafe that specialized in lunches of fresh-made soups and very appealing sandwiches and salads, and he mused about some of the problems he looked for in doing background checks.  He spoke of the dangers of kooks and the difficulty of identifying them at times.  

He said he was often stunned at the delusions some people clung to and the alternate realities in which they lived.  Or the vicious malice some people held against others that they often hide.  I asked how he uncovered those mental states.  One way, he said, was if the person had children to observe them at play.  The children would often repeat things they heard at home or recreate behaviors the parents demonstrated.  One of the reasons the investigators spent so much time interviewing teachers of candidates was  that the teachers often picked up nuances in the things that their students wrote, or said, or acted out.  The investigators  were particularly focused on memes that their subjects may have displayed.

As a student and teacher of the literary role of folklore, which includes urban legends I was interested in how investigators regarded tales and habits of mind which are delusional, preposterous,  or hateful.  Some urban legends are funny or preposterous or ironic and are told largely for their entertainment.  Some are told with a deep belief that signals derangement in the believers.  And some are told to celebrate or malign an individual or a group.  A few urban legends convey matters of truth.  When an urban legend contains a set of beliefs around which a group of people organizes itself, it can signal  concerning social trends.  My investigator friend said any sign of an untruthful belief system in a candidate would be analyzed for an indication that the person was a kook.  When people cling to delusional tales, something is not right with them mentally, and when the tales contain false defamatory statements,  the derangement is severe.

An event of mass derangement has occurred recently.  It calls itself QAnon or The Storm.  Q is a troll that claims to have a high position in the White House, and people who who perpetuate his posts claim that there is a secret cabal just waiting to rise up under the command of Trump to bring a storm down on the liberals:

 Q insists that it’s actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller) because they’re obviously just evil, money-hungry globalists who’ll do anything for the highest bidder. (Oh, yeah, and they’re also apparently into raping and killing children, though the crowd is split over whether this is because they’re satanists or just part of some weird blackmail scheme involving the CIA.) Q also claims that Trump, the genius that he is, figured all of this out way back when he was just a measly presidential candidate, and has been pretending to love Putin and/or be involved with Russia ever since as a way to force a third party to investigate these horrors — without drawing the attention of those evil Dems-who-must-not-be-named, of course — because he’s just that selfless of a leader.

QAnons gather at a Trump rally

The mass insanity of this cult has all the amusing aspect of watching the inmates in a psycho ward, except the members are not locked up and are roaming around throughout the country pursuing  their delusions.  They are redolent of the case in Jordan, Minnesota, in the 1980s in which an entire community was swept up into accusations of organized and satanic pedophilia during which dozens of adults were accused and some were charged.  The first couple was acquitted and all charges were dropped against the others.  The state's attorney general and governor and the FBI in separate investigations declared they could find no evidence to support the allegations.  People complained that the exonerations left them not knowing who to accuse and avoid.

The anti-intellectual faction in the U.S. has further deteriorated into a state of mental malfunction and dysfunction that does not recognize facts and reason, but prefers to live in a state of malicious delusions.  The divide in the country is becoming more and more a division between those who hold to knowledge and reason and those who are dangerously insane.  At the root of this infirmity is debased and malevolent character, a notion that power is in the exercise of evil.  They are not people who can be engaged in intelligent communication.  The only hope is that they can be avoided, but they had the power to elect a president who has endorsed and served their delusions.  

These are the people who claimed that Hillary Clinton and friends ran a child sexual abuse enterprise out of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., which moved a deranged imbecile to shoot the place up.  

They see pedophiles in your attic and want to excoriate, probably shoot you, for keeping them them there.  To them, they are making America great.

T

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-storm-conspiracy-explained.html

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1985-02-15/news/8501090651_1_child-sex-abuse-sex-abuse-new-charges

http://rogerwilliamslawreview.org/files/2014/04/cheitpdf.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20100510160346/http://www.a-team.org:80/scott_county.html