This is like QAnon on bath salts
It’s a startling thing to realize that QAnon is the passe deranged rightwing extremist cult and that there’s a new one ready to take the country by storm (pun intended). An artist based in Berlin, Germany has founded something called the “Sabmyk Network,” which is, you guessed it, the shiny new extremist conspiracy toy.
Newsweek reports that Sabmyk, which has largely incubated on the messaging app Telegram, “actively targets the group’s followers as conspiracists wrestle to define QAnon’s future. It hopes to attract devotees of the conspiracy through social media accounts, many of which borrow from the QAnon terminology.”
In other words, Sabmyk is trying to take over QAnon’s niche in the wake of some of its followers losing faith in Q because Trump never usurped the presidency after losing the 2020 presidential election.
Newsweek explains that Sabmyk “promotes a messianic belief that the eponymous savior will wield a sword once owned by the ‘Orion Kings of Atlantis’ and lead an ‘awakening’ against an unspecified cabal of celebrities, scientists, bankers and company owners that it says are manipulating the general public.” Put another way, it’s QAnon meets a bath salt-fueled Dungeons and Dragons session.
The fact completely unhinged conspiracies of this approximate nature repeatedly gain traction is unsettling. It’s unfathomable for me to think of just how little one needs to use one’s brain to come to the conclusion that these conspiracies are real. But more than that, if QAnon highlighted this social illness, Sabmyk’s rise should be a field of red flags, sirens, distress flares, and a giant SOS written in coconuts. We, as a society, need to do something about this.
All it takes is one false messiah to engender another political and/or social climate that favors the election of another amateur dictator. We need to work on how to avoid that while we have a good, sane, and competent president now, otherwise in 3-and-a-bit years’ time, we might be having to listen to the My Pillow Guy give his inaugural address in which he extols the curative powers of Tide pods and explains how if we don’t all donate to the Pillow PAC, a shadowy liberal cabal led by JonBenet Ramsey will come to take fizz out of Bud Light.
Democracy thrives in snarkiness