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Life Arts    H2'ed 7/1/21

QAnon's Alive and Bela Lugosi's Dead: An Interview with Robert Guffey

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John Hawkins
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Guffey:

You mention the Proud Boys. They were founded by the guy who started up Vice magazine. And he was a stand-up comedian. According to Patton Oswalt, a lot of these weird neo-fascist movements were started by failed comedians. And you wonder about the people behind Q. There's a definite sense of humor behind it all, but not in the people consuming it. They seem to have no sense of humor. I have a friend who spent a lot of time in Russia and he was adamant that he thought the whole QAnon thing was a Russian disinformation campaign. Who knows?

Hawkins:

The Russians?

Guffey:

But the way I perceive it, the elements of the mythos are still uniquely American. I imagine a team of 33 year old hipsters, a team of culture vultures whose job it was to consume all of this conspiratorial information and then flip it so that it would all come out at the end of the day as one punchline: "Vote for Donald Trump."

Hawkins:

It's bonkers nihilism, empty f*cking symbolism.

Guffey:

It's like you pull layers of an onion apart, apart, apart and then at the center -- nothing.

Hawkins:

And all that remains are your tears to show for it.

Guffey:

In "Donald Trump's Operation Mindfuck," I analyze this pattern of how clearly Team Trump would take something that was previously an anti-fascist conspiracy theory, or some sort of guerrilla warfare created by the left back in the '60s, and they figured out how to flip it. For example, William S. Burroughs coined the phrase "fake news" in a book called The Revised Boyscout Manual, just recently published for the first time in book form.

Hawkins:

Let's talk January 6 for a moment: The Insurrection. At the end of Part 3 of your Evergreen piece, you seem to suggest that what unfolded was more than meets the eyes. For instance, all I saw was a so-called barmy army of emotionally unstable misfits who represented anything but a national fervor or zeitgeist.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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