Steve Henn on OPERATION MINDFUCK

Poet Steve Henn (author of AND GOD SAID LET THERE BE EVOLUTION) just published a laudatory review of my latest book, OPERATION MINDFUCK: QANON & THE CULT OF DONALD TRUMP. Here's an excerpt:

Operation Mindfuck: QAnon & the Cult of Donald Trump by Robert Guffey tackles the conspiracy theories Q draws from, the history of the Q phenomenon, and the eventual attempts by mobs at least partially influenced by Q, and certainly influenced by Donald Trump, to overturn the 2020 Presidential election. The book is well-researched, with a full Bibliography of notes that reference and identify each quote from each source that Guffey cites. Guffey, additionally, has a long background studying conspiracy theories and their origins.

Not with innuendo, but with clear reference to documented text and speech, Guffey tells us the origin of various elements of the Q conspiracy, which is a pastiche that draws in so many people in part, Guffey says, because it has so many different sides and supposed connections to current events that a Q enthusiast can pick and choose whatever elements of Q they are most attracted to. Guffey points, for example, to the Satanic panic of the 1980s as a touchstone of the hysteria over supposed Satan worshipping elites in entertainment and politics. But he goes as far back as the 19th century, noting a satire of the Freemasons that later was perverted into political propaganda by the original Nazis, and that has hung around on the fringes where “the real story of what’s happening in the world” has maintained a presence ever since.

In other words, Guffey is not a lightweight. He knows how to write a real book.

I am avoiding cherry-picking a lot of specifics from Guffey’s book, in part because part of the pleasure of reading it comes from learning the various threads of conspiracy and their connection to the current political situation that he lays out in cogent and, mostly, un-hyperbolic prose, but also in part because I don’t want any readers who may be followers of Q to get bogged down in protesting this or that detail. Guffey’s “big picture” is much, much more cogent and plausible than Q’s....

Read the entire review HERE.