Esquire: “We ordinarily don’t do traffic reports hereabouts, but this one from the New York Times is a whopper. The ship, which was heading from China to the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, ran aground amid poor visibility and high winds from a sandstorm that struck much of northern Egypt this week, according to George Safwat, a spokesman for the authority that oversees the canal. Unfortunately, it also seems to have lit up the Batshit Signal among the QAnon set.”

“According to some veteran spelunkers, the believers have concluded that the container ship has multiple connections to Hillary Rodham Clinton, one of which is the fact that it has ‘EVERGREEN’ painted on its side, and ‘Evergreen’ is allegedly HRC’s Secret Service handle. (There’s also something-something about the ship’s call sign that has a big old neon sign reading ‘RABBIT HOLE’ above it.) There’s a certain mutability about this craziness that sets it apart from similar insanities of the past. The McCarthy-McCarran period had defined limits. As soon as the foot soldiers took aim at the likes of Dwight Eisenhower’s alleged ties to the International Communist Menace, the limits were breached and the political power of the theory drained away. The really formidable conspiracy theories are the ones that are in constant motion in several different directions at once, the ones that can move from the expectation that the former president* actually would be inaugurated in March to the notion that a huge container ship has the mother of all fender-benders in order to offload children being trafficked at the behest of a former First Lady, United States senator, and Secretary of State, and not miss a beat while doing so. This doesn’t make the whole thing less frightening, let alone less of a threat. Some day in the distant future, someone will figure out what it was about the Clintons that touches off the fireworks in the brains of so many people.”