QAnon types trying to save face by going "conspiracy theorists were proven right again" when. No, bc "Epstein was close with Trump" was not only never a conspiracy theory, it was never their conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy theory was that Trump was a crusader sent by God to dismantle a Satanic cult led by the Democrats and Marina Abramović. You were dismissing every photo of Trump and Epstein together and taking your guns to threaten a random pizza place in DC you thought had cult tunnels underneath it. Potentially I feel their hybrid of 80s Satanic panic, blood libel, & cultic worship of the musclebound savior of children Donald Trump was not proven right. In fact it might have been one of the most wrong things anyone has ever believed
Every time a new Epstein drop occurs you get a lot of people saying QAnon was "right", but merely wrong about who was doing it (look up "Qanon right" on Bluesky to see many bloots to that effect) and...no they weren't, on any topic but the vague theory of there being powerful people who are pedophiles. What they thought the abuse *was* is entirely fantasy with no connection to actual events: for one, they assumed it was Satanic in nature, but also the "abuse" they imagined was stuff like "a cult is sacrificing kids in secret tunnels to harvest their adrenochrome" (a real but medically useless chemical whose mythic qualities were invented by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas; surprisingly, it's not extracted from the glands of frightened children, and you can buy bottles of it for less than $100 online).
It was as much a panic about cannibalism as it was about child abuse, and when they discussed child abuse, they believed it was ritualistic in nature. Because...it's just reheated 80s Satanic Panic and reheated blood libel and implicated left-wing figures near-exclusively in a very specific way. The conspiracy being a Satanic cannibal ring featuring every famous liberal wasn't incidental, it was the core of the belief. They were wrong about who was doing it and wrong about what they were doing, and they supported the culprits of a real child exploitation ring that coincidentally existed at the same time and that some of them have retroactively pointed to - after years of open support! - as what they were really fighting the whole time
Like. They thought the big smoking gun being held in the files was a video of Hillary Clinton eating a child and wearing her face. They kind of laundered it over time as they latched onto Epstein and made him core to the mythology, but that was the inciting belief.
If you plopped down the evidence we have now in front of your average QAnon believer back then and told them "this is what you're seeking", they wouldn't believe you. It doesn't match what they thought, so it must be a lie. Or there's more out there beyond it. We can tell this because we did do that. For ten years. And they did exactly that
Not to derail...but Bluesky calls its posts "bloots"? Seriously?
No, they call them "skeets". Short for "sky tweets".
