Morrison’s craven cave to the QAnon cult -- can he squirm out of this one too?
Morrison and his mate Stewart, under the warm embrace of the QAnon guys trashing America’s Capitol building. This is a photo montage, not fake news.
Monday night’s 4 Corners program on ABC explained that two Australian devotees of the American cult called QAnon – Tim Stewart and his son Jesse – are promoting the cult’s terrible excuse for a belief system, including to PM Scott Morrison.
QAnon reckons that the world has been taken over by pedophiles who drink babies’ blood, and this includes the Queen, Hillary Clinton, Richie Benaud and billions more of us who don’t believe its grotesque fairy tales.
The ravings of the Australian QAnon cheerleaders — Stewart father and son — wouldn’t matter except for three scary facts:
(1) Prime Minister Morrison and his wife have been best mates with Tim Stewart and his wife Lynelle for decades; she was employed in the PM’s office until very recently,
(2) Tim and his fellow cult members convinced the PM to use a Parliamentary apology to all victims of child sexual abuse to promote the QAnon fantasy that these family tragedies are about “rituals” controlled by people with left-wing politics, and
(3) QAnon is NOT a “fringe” group, as Morrison claims, but a metastasising political cancer in the USA and beyond. It’s followers don’t share an ideology — more an incoherent belligerence. It was a major force behind the deadly January 6 attack on the US Capitol building.
A recent documentary by the US entertainment giant HBO, explains that ‘Q’ itself is a loser geek named Ron Watkins (possibly working with his father Jim) whose main contact with other people is with sex workers in the Philippines. The doco, called Q: Into The Storm, reveals that Watkins duo and their fellow grifters have no coherent ideas or plans. Like Trump, they throw out a stream of half-baked ideas which their fans can finish, allowing them to be thrilled that they agreed with Trump, or he with them, just as they can do with ‘Q’.
Despite all that, and the fact that the Watkins duo appear to have stopped being ‘Q’, the cult is dividing families in the US and in Australia, with its obey-or-die ethos, and its online pronouncements which its anonymous followers embellish with shit from innumerable cults dating from ancient times to today, from every corner of the earth. The American Watkins/’Q’ pretended to be someone with access to the inner sanctums of American power, and predicted a “great awakening” that would kill all the pedophiles and blood-drinkers who rigged the election to stop Donald Trump from saving us from Hillary Clinton and all the other people who don’t believe in the non-person called QAnon.
It is, in sum, a concoction of fairy tales which collect the blame for all the terrible things afflicting us today, from covid to poverty to global eco-catastrophe, and pin it on targets we can easily see and attack, be they individuals such as Bill Gates, or categories such as scientists, or uppity women.
QAnon is proof that the explosion of facts and provable explanations called the Enlightenment, launched in the 1700s, has still not given most of us the ability to stop bullshit from baffling brains.
All this was documented before the ABC reporters did their show on Monday, including in my article on this website in November 2019. What was new in Louise Milligan’s report is that the extended Stewart family face the cameras united in condemning Tim and Jesse as dangerous nutbars. Tim’s parents and sister Karen, who was repeatedly assaulted sexually by two lads who went to the same church in Maroubra as she did as a young teen, reveal text messages in which grandson calls grandma a motherfucker and threatens everyone in the family and beyond that those who challenge the cult to back off or they’ll all be “fucked”.
In response, Scott Morrison is doing what he always does; saying he doesn’t hold the hose, and that this is a plot by the commie bludgers of the ABC. He’ll disown his mate Tim, or being a weasel he might just say he isn’t his brother’s keeper.
It’s worth saying that the Morrisons themselves disavow QAnon; they go to a different church which was co-founded by a real pedophile, whose son is still being investigated for hiding that fact. The son, Brian Houston, is the top pastor of Hillsong, and is an even closer mate of Scott Morrison than Tim is, or was. 4 Corners didn’t think that was worth saying, nor did they challenge the whole premise of the PM’s defence – that QAnon is a puny piece of passing madness.
It isn’t puny or passing. A poll by America’s nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute indicates that between a third and a half of Republican voters “believe” the QAnon conspiracy, including the part about Democrats drinking the blood of children, and that the 2020 Presidential election was a massive fraud.
Cults and religious fairy tales offer people simple ways to cope with complex awfulness, and offer hope through easy fixes. They also often lead to mass murder, and much of QAnon’s rants about blood drinking echoes the worst libels perpetrated on Jews less than 80 years ago as the Nazis prepared to launch the Holocaust.
America’s overarching problem is that the majority are poor and getting poorer, their social systems – health, education, the media, common spaces – are increasingly owned and operated by unaccountable kleptocrats, which makes a big chunk of the population desperate enough to buy the hard-boiled garbage peddled by QAnon.
Australia, led by the cabal of fossil fools gathered around the vapid viper Morrison, keeps racing to keep up with the worst practices of America.