My friend Mark Dery, one of the finest cultural critics alive, read a copy of the QAnon Shaman's self-published polemical new age fascist screed, One Mind at a Time: A Deep State of Illusion. Mark survived to write about it, and how closely the QAnon Shaman's paranoid worldview aligns with today's Republican standard-bearers, on Lit Hub:
There are many quotable quotes in Mark's review. Here are a few:
- Barechested, covered in neo-pagan tattoos, brandishing a spear, and sporting a fur headdress with horns, Chansley was catnip to media outlets. Was he a Burning Man bro gone MAGA? Adam Ant on ayahuasca?
- I wasn't surprised by the misspellings and grammar glitches. Chansley is a college dropout, smarter than his persona suggests and a better writer than some of the undergrads I've taught but hobbled by the spotty literacy of the autodidact. (Hitler's minister of propaganda is "Joseph Gerbils"; the civil-rights icon known for his "I Have a Dream" speech is "Martian Luther King Jr.")
- Chansley's use of the word "research" is instructive. Every QAnon cultist is a self-styled "researcher," convinced that his or her Google erudition is a license to question authority.
- Trump's insistence that we're entitled not just to our own opinions, but to our own facts, is now an article of faith on the Right.
- Where you and I see a stylized arrowhead in the logo of the Arrowhead Towne Center mall in Glendale, Arizona, Chansley sees "pedofile code," as the orthographically challenged sign he waved at a 2020 Trump event proclaimed. "This symbol says that Arrowhead mall is a safe haven for certain people with certain tastes—in particular, boy love," he tells a TV crew, adding, with flawless comic timing, "That's not just me talkin' out my rear end, here.
