LIVING IS EASY WITH EYES CLOSED

Donald Trump drives good people crazy.  This is known.  Apparently he also drives bad people crazy.  How else can we account for Roseanne Barr’s bizarre Friday tweet?  If you haven’t seen it, brace yourself.  She wrote:

“President Trump has freed so many children held in bondage to pimps all over this world.  Hundreds each month.  He has broken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere.  notice that.  I disagree on some things, but give him the benefit of the doubt-4 now.”

WTF? 

In an effort to decipher Roseanne’s message, your humble reporter has boldly ascended the mountains of madness.   Apparently there’s this thing called 4Chan, and another thing called 8Chan.  Maybe there’ll be a 16chan soon.  These “chan” things are internet sites comparable to the wild west of the 19th century, where there’s no law west of the virtual Pecos, and pretty much anything goes.  They are where Trump fans gather to fantasize about their glorious leader when they need something stronger than Fox News.  Donald Trump’s grip on reality is tenuous anyway, and apparently he’s taking his more gullible fans down the rabbit hole with him.

Someone known as QAnon is one of these fantasists, and he (and his followers) make shit up.  The most likely scenario is that he’s a troll, writing fan fiction for unstable people like Roseanne Barr.  Fanfic, as it’s called, is a literary genre in which obsessed fans of certain books or films (e.g. Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Star Trek or Star Wars) take those fictional worlds and make up their own stories about the characters.

QAnon writes fanfic set in a fake news universe in which Donald Trump is a conquering hero rather than a bumbling idiot.  QAnon calls his universe THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM, or THE STORM for short.  In QAnon’s bizarro world, Robert Mueller is actually investigating Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  It was Clinton and Obama, you see, who were really working for Vladimir Putin.  And Donald Trump, who in real life famously barged into the dressing room of teenage beauty contestants and fantasized aloud about having sex with his daughter, is a hero who brings child molesters to justice. 

In THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM, up is down, black is white, and we have always been at war with Oceania.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

A storm is gathering all right, but it’s not the one that Trump fantasists are hoping for.  Robert Mueller is coming for Donald Trump.  So is Stormy Daniels.  So, indirectly, are Emma Gonzalez and her classmates at Stoneman Douglas. 

When a bunch of high school students, a porn star, and a straitlaced former Marine have you backed into a corner, you might as well retreat into a fantasy world, whether it’s the one constructed by Fox News, or one built by QAnon and his friends.  But it’s scary to think about how these people will react when Trump’s day of reckoning comes.    

Thus it is that Trump and his fans are dead to the irony of his Friday proclamation naming April as National Sexual Assault and Prevention Month. 

Perhaps he’ll name May as National Collusion Awareness and Prevention Month.  June could be National Fuck the NRA Month.  And with any luck, November will be National Republicans Are Screwed Month.  Let’s make it happen!