They’re so close to right

My QAnon relative keeps saying, follow the money. Yet he won’t follow the money to Trump or Clarence Thomas or whoever paid off that other dickbag Justice’s loans. This is (part of) why I hate Joe Manchin: I followed the money to his coal plant and watched him put his personal financial interests over the future habitability of the planet. I recognize that there is corruption of the elite class, but it’s certainly not limited to Democrats like he thinks. And when I follow the money at the big picture, I see it flowing away from people, to corporations, where it’s concentrated in the hands of mega wealthy executives.

This is what makes discussion of this stuff so infuriating: he’s so close to reality, and yet so, so far. As Doctorow points out:

Likewise, we all want to “save the children.” It’s just that some of us want to save the children from real threats who never seem to face justice – youth pastors, Catholic priests, rich people with private islands, border agencies practicing “family separation” – while swivel-eyed loons want to save kids from imaginary threats (adrenochrome-guzzling Satanists).

Conspiracy can often reflect a kernal of truth: but the truth is that we’re not holding people in positions of power accountable for sexual abuse, not that being gay makes someone a groomer. That children in school are going hungry at lunch, not that Joe Biden is slurping baby blood. That we’re separating children from their parents in immigration and failing to reunite them, not that Hillary is running a sex trafficking ring from a pizza parlor basement. The conspiracies are a distraction from doing things that would require challenging our existing power structures, weaponizing outrage against imaginary foes while predators walk free.

The swivel-eyed loons have a point, but they’re missing the bigger picture.