and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder
– Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Cut it open
right down the middle,
skull to ass
turns out
QAnon is powered
by three overlapping elements:
sex trafficking panic,
apocalyptic far-right militarism,
tech monopoly. Three.
None of these
exclusively twenty-first–century
phenomena. Sex trafficking panics
periodically seize the United States.
Since the 1890s,
they’ve ebbed and flowed
with racist and anti-immigrant ideologies.
Moral panics
furnish a culturally acceptable means
to cloak raw nativist
and xenophobic uprisings
in the guise
of defending innocence.
The panicky produced frightening
blood libels about imperiled women
and endangered children, mostly white ones.
Especially the white ones.
Far-right militarism
has recurring cycles of prominence.
However far outside
the spotlight far-right groups might be
during the fallow times,
they endure and adapt.
The fear – or desire –
they are living
through the end
of the American republic
mostly as it appears
to white people
supplies a powerful theme
of grassroots organizing
on the right.
So wrong.
Today’s version
of this apocalyptic dogma
connects disparate extremist groups,
militias like the Oath Keepers
see themselves as the last defense,
fire-starter groups
like the Boogaloo Boys
want to bring on the storm themselves.
Cosplay with live ammo.
Tech monopoly
seems like a new phenomenon,
but as with sex trafficking panics
and far-right extremism,
it, too, echoes earlier shifts –
when new industries
concentrated wealth and power
in the hands of the few.
And touched off fears
of what future
tech-driven social transformations
would bring.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/02/03/on-hustles/