The Op-Ed Page

Found this on Wikipedia. It’s by someone named Eric Rolph, at English Wikipedia…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Hey, remember the other day when I posted Paul’s abortion post, I said I had another one from him that I hadn’t even looked at, but would post soon? After which I didn’t have time for several days to think about posting on the blog? Well, this is it, and Paul just texted me to tell me it had to do with “Pride Month,” which he said was ending today. Sorry, Paul. Here you go…

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Remember when a rainbow was just a rainbow – happy surprise after a downpour? I sometimes long for the simplicity of those pot-o-gold days.

But we live in a complicated and changing world. Which means we sometimes we have to share symbols that our tribe has felt we owned. Christians are struggling with the appropriation of the rainbow, which for us evoked the story of Noah’s Ark. Every child that has ever attended Sunday School has been taught this story, often with images of happy animals strolling symmetrically up the gangplank.

I wrote a column in April in response to one of those Christians, the Rev. Michael Goings. Rev. Goings, whom I’ve not met, is a fellow citizen columnist for the Florence Morning News. He wrote a piece in March (“The Sacred Sign of the Rainbow”) in which he objected to the “thievery” of the rainbow by the LGBTQ community. He castigated its use as a symbol of gay pride as a “blatant act of defiance and desecration” claiming that it is “almost unpardonable, abominable, and dishonoring to the Almighty.”

I can understand some mild annoyance at the muddling of the rainbow imagery for young Christian Sunday School students. Kids can ask the darnedest questions, and a Sunday School room can be a dicey place to answer. But for me, that annoyance is overwhelmed by the enormous pride that the LGBTQ community is now able to express through the rainbow flag. Over the past decade, the ubiquity if the flag has paralleled their acceptance into the fabric of American life.

For Rev. Goings and others, rainbow imagery that supports LGBTQ people induces fear, rage, or the sense that apocalypse is nigh. Many Christians cannot accept that gay people are worthy in the sight of God. Some, like Lauren Boebert, have seats in Congress. When the Air Force recently tweeted support of Pride Month with an image of an airman saluting against a rainbow background, Boebert responded, “We salute one flag and one flag only in the United States of America. It isn’t the ‘Pride’ flag.”

I think it’s fair to describe Boebert as a Christian nationalist. At a Christian conference in Woodland Park, Colorado in September of last year, Boebert said, “It’s time for us to position ourselves and rise up and take our place in Christ and influence this nation as we were called to do.” Later she spoke of the end times: “We know that we are in the last of the last days. This is a time to know that you were called to be part of these last days. You get to have a role in ushering in the second coming of Jesus.”

Of LGBTQ people, she said they are “spitting in God’s face.”

Goings and Boebert read the Bible one way, a literal interpretation to which they are entitled. They believe that God sent a great flood that wiped out all of humanity except for Noah’s clan. Once the waters receded, God sent a rainbow as a sign of a new covenant with His people.

I read the Bible as literature, much of which I believe is divinely inspired. But it is filtered through flawed, limited human authors. Some of the Bible is confusing and some of it is simply wrong. Of many examples, I will give one – Ephesians 6:5: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

So here is this layman’s take on the story of Noah and the rainbow. There was no great flood (almost every geologist backs me up on this point). This story falls in line with flood myths that had been written and told for centuries before the Noah story. It is a way of trying to understand how a divine being or beings interact with their creation.

Like many Bible stories, this one is full of contradictions. Noah’s family, the best God could find on Earth, immediately shows God just what He has wrought in his second attempt at civilization. In Genesis 9:17, the ark account ends with God saying to Noah about the rainbow, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.” Four verses later, Noah “became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.” It is reassuring that God would choose someone as imperfect as Noah as the father of his new creation. He’s barely off the ark when he is found by his sons completely blitzed and naked. It tells me that God has a keen understanding of human frailty, an unending tolerance for our mistakes, and a bodacious sense of humor.

If you believe that men who love men or women who love women are reprobates warped by their sin and a danger to society, you have a right to your opinion. From that position, you have a couple of options. One is to try to completely shield yourself from the corrupting influence of gay people. Don’t listen to any music or consume any news, TV, movies, or social media produced by them. Don’t buy any products designed or services offered by them. I wish you luck. Or, more profitably, get to know a gay couple. Actively recruit gay people to your church so you can see who they really are. See if your opinion doesn’t change.

In my reading of Noah’s story, the rainbow is a sign of God’s new approach to humanity. This is the God of Love. Yes, there is still the God of Wrath who makes his presence known through the Old Testament (see, for example, Psalm 137). But here is our first glimpse of the God of Love who will later be personified in the New Testament in his Son, Jesus. In that light, the rainbow makes perfect sense as a symbol for gay and queer people.

If you like, you can cling to the few verses about homosexuality being an “abomination.” But, remember, God had much more to say about adultery than homosexuality – including that adulterers be put to death. Consider the possibility that these warnings come from a different time and were written by men who had little understanding of psychology and human relations. If, like Rev. Goings and Rep. Boebert, you are so willing to denigrate homosexuals, why not adulterers, who receive much more Biblical condemnation?

I have a brand new decal on my car’s back glass with a version of the rainbow flag. It advertises a new LGBTQIA+ advocacy group in our region called Pee Dee Equality. I’m hoping it will flourish. Our corner of the state could use a place that advocates for the dignity of every person.

This column is based on one that appeared in the April 26th edition of The Florence Morning News.

The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Those of you who are avid readers of this column (yes, all three of you) may remember my writing a column with a similar headline about QAnon back in October. QAnon has pretty much run its course. MTG will be a little harder to get rid of, but please don’t worry about her.

For many, listening to Marjorie Taylor Greene is exasperating. She is often wrongheaded, facile, bombastic, and defensive. I don’t have enough space to recount all the ways Greene is unsuitable. They are well laid out on her Wikipedia page. Perhaps the most famous are her belief in QAnon and various other conspiracy theories, including that space lasers started California wildfires. She has been a vociferous champion of the lie that Trump won in 2020. Most disturbing was her statement opposing a peaceful transfer of power two days before the attack on the Capitol. She says on video “You can’t allow it to just transfer power ‘peacefully’ like Joe Biden wants, and allow him to become our president. Because he did not win this election. It’s being stolen and the evidence is there.”

She routinely calls journalists and opposing politicians “liars” and has mastered the simplistic, us-versus-them trash talk that has worked so well for Trump. In doing so, she has become the darling of the extreme right. In an inevitable response governed by Newton’s third law of social media, many Democrats are amplifying her as well, hoping to delude voters into thinking that she represents most Republicans.

In trying to understand Greene, I watched multiple interviews including one between her and CNN’s Jim Acosta in April 2022. It is an ambush sidewalk interview. Acosta questions Greene as she walks down a D.C. street about a tweet to Mark Meadows in the aftermath of January 6^th. In the tweet, she raises the idea of Trump declaring martial law to avoid leaving office.

She defends herself vigorously. Her willingness to push back against those she and her supporters see as enemies has earned her a loyal following. Going toe-to-toe with a “fake news” reporter, calling him a liar to his face, is the MTG brand. She has a feisty, take-no-prisoners attitude that has replaced well-chosen words and sober deliberation as the currency of our nation’s politics. She feels Acosta has misrepresented the text and at one point says, “Why don’t you be honest for once?” But she doesn’t finish strongly. After some back and forth, she refuses to answer any more questions and walks away saying, “We’re done, we’re done, stop harassing me… leave me alone.”

The exchange left me feeling sad for Greene. She seems like a lonely, angry person whose career will mirror Sarah Palin’s – each has opted for transient political notoriety at profound personal cost. Palin and her husband divorced in 2020 after 31 years of marriage. Greene and her husband divorced in 2022 after 27 years.

So I would urge you, if you disagree with Greene, to recognize that she is unlikely to change and that you already know enough about her to predict most of her policy positions. Recognize that she is a second-term House member, a position with very little power. Yes, she was helpful to Speaker McCarthy but only because the Republican margin in the House is so small. With a larger majority, she would have been irrelevant. Remember that she’s well-liked by voters in Georgia’s 14^th district. Her Democratic challenger in 2022 raised more than $15 million (a gigantic sum for a house race), much of it from out-of-state donors, and lost by more than 30 points. It was foolish for people outside the state of Georgia, most of whom knew nothing about her opponent, Marcus Flowers, to give him money. There was not a single clear-eyed person in the state of Georgia who felt that Flowers could win.

So I say to those donors, don’t waste your money until a credible candidate opposes Greene. And I say to all those of you outside of Georgia, don’t waste your mental energy on her. She has turned Teddy Roosevelt’s advice of “Speak softly and carry a big stick” on its head. She shouts “Liar!” at the president during his State of the Union, but she has no clout. Spend your precious mental resources elsewhere.

A version of this column appeared in the February 22nd edition of the Florence Morning News.

The Op-Ed Page

Bart Campolo

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

The first time I heard the term “secular humanism” many decades ago, it was in a negative context. I translated it as “angry atheist” and stored it in my mental junk drawer along with other assorted concepts I wasn’t sure merited further investigation.

Humanism reemerged as something to consider when I came across the story of Bart Campolo. Bart is the son of Tony Campolo, a progressive Baptist preacher and former spiritual advisor to Bill Clinton. Bart entered the family business as a spellbinding evangelist and founder of Mission Year, an urban ministry focused on improving the lives of young people. Through his twenties and thirties his faith eroded and he now rejects anything supernatural. In 2016, he started a podcast called Humanize Me. I’ve listened to dozens of episodes and, despite the trauma of his public deconversion, he remains a charismatic, insightful, and loving human being.

The trouble with humanism, Bart admits, is that it’s hard to gather a community around a belief system grounded in this world and not in the next. He has been able to generate a faithful online following but the idea of a humanist church has not been a galvanizing one. Bart attempted to start an in-person community in Cincinnati called Caravan, which, based on the website, appears defunct. But the four founding principles of Caravan are profound: building loving relationships, making things better for others, cultivating awe and wonder, and worldview humility.

Christians are familiar with the first three precepts but not the last. Most Christian churches, though not all, practice the opposite, what might be called worldview hubris. We are sure we have found the way to heaven and we’re doubly sure it’s the only way.

A couple thoughts about our certainty. First, the math of our proposition doesn’t seem compatible with a loving God. I suspect, when creating the universe, God knew that many of us would not be Christian (currently Christians make up about a third of the world’s population). Would God knowingly create a world in which so many of his children would miss the mark? Many Christians say they believe this, pointing to verses like John 14:6 in which Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” However, few are moved to invest time or money evangelizing the lost. According to the missionary organization The Traveling Team, for every $100,000 that Christians make, we give $1.70 to the unreached.

I respect those who believe Jesus is the only way. If you interpret the scriptures literally, you have a strong case. My view is that the Bible is authoritative but not inerrant. In John 14, Jesus also says “The Father is greater than me” (verse 28) and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (verse 11). The message I get from the whole of John 14 is that belief in the Father is the critical piece. If you define God as Love, as almost all religious people do, then loving God by loving others is our highest obligation. If love is at the center of Christianity rather than belief in Jesus, we no longer are forced to be exclusive.

Again, I realize this is not the standard interpretation of the Bible preached from most pulpits. Nor am I a theologian. However, decades of Bible study and worship have shown me the hazards of an exclusive Jesus.

First, it instills an oppositional mentality. It’s us (the saved) among them (the lost). It’s virtually impossible not to pity or fell superior to people whom you believe have made a choice that will haunt them for all eternity.

Second, it can make us solipsistic. Why waste time dealing with people who are different from us and are dammed to hell anyway? Most churches are demographically homogenous – far more so than our cities, towns, or workplaces. The temptation to retreat into the cocoon of one’s comfortable church circle is strong.

Third, it makes us afraid. We worry that there is something wrong with “those people” who either worship differently or don’t worship at all. We fear becoming close lest their foreign ways lead us astray.

Last, it makes us incurious. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and peoples of the world’s many other faiths (and no faith) have traditions that can add to our understanding of the world. Many years ago while visiting Tucson, Arizona, I came upon a group of Buddhist monks meticulously crafting a sand mandala. These flat, intricate sand sculptures take groups of monks days or sometimes weeks to construct. Once completed, they are carefully dismantled, symbolizing the impermanence of the material world. The monks’ egoless devotion to their task, which they complete in silence, and their willing acceptance of the mandala’s destruction has no parallel Christian ritual but has been a lifelong inspiration to me.

I had a Jewish patient who taught me a deeper understanding of the concept of shalom. I had a Muslim student who taught me the discipline of Ramadan. We Christians have our own array of deeply meaningful traditions, but we must allow the possibility that we don’t have a lock on the Truth.

The Caravan website reminds us how most of us come to our world view: “(M)ost of our ideas and convictions are inherited from other people and/or conditioned by circumstances beyond our control. In other words, we are well aware that if our lives or brains were different, then our worldview would be different too, and we’d be using different arguments to defend it.”

When we meet someone of a different faith, our choices include conversion, consternation, or curiosity. Choose wisely.

A version of this column appeared in the February 3^rd edition of the Florence Morning News.

The Op-Ed Page

The lady who squeezed the pomegranates.

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

I haven’t traveled widely, but the two times I have travelled internationally as an adult, I have been aware of what a privilege it is. Approximately 40% of Americans have never left the country, and 10% have never been outside their home state.

Looking back at America from across an ocean or a border grants an important, perhaps even essential, perspective. Sometimes the American way gains standing from a faraway vantage. In February 2020, just before COVID, I spent two weeks working in a hospital in Tanzania with a half-dozen students from USC School of Medicine. The hospital, one of the largest in Tanzania, was decades behind those in the U.S. The wards were open (approximately thirty to a room), and the ICU was miniscule and outdated. The radiology department had installed its first CT scanner just a couple years before. Of the deaths that occurred during our time there, several could have been prevented in the U.S. Returning to McLeod Hospital, the local Florence facility where I do part of my practice, I was grateful for the technology and expertise that I had heretofore taken for granted.

The cheese-maker.

My most recent trip, in November 2022, was to Sicily, the land of my ancestors. Returning home was a more ambivalent experience. Our small, expertly-led tour group spent 10 days travelling the length of the island and sampling its bounty. We met a family of fishers and ate tuna they had caught in their restaurant, we met a family of olive famers and watched as one poured freshly pressed oil into small bottles for us to take home, and we met a family that made sausage, pasta and cheese. We saw the patriarch make ricotta in the morning and then ate it for lunch. When I returned, my first meal in the U.S. was at Buc-ees. It was culinary whiplash.

Please don’t misunderstand. There is fast food in Sicily. I bet my brother, who travelled with me, that we would not see a McDonald’s in Sicily, and lost. There are families in America who produce food with the same sense of tradition and passion as those I saw in Italy. We have a farmers’ market in Marion where a woman, whose ancestors have been here since the town was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, sells glorious cookies and pound cakes from recipes honed through the generations. And it is of course true that many people in both countries would eat better if they could afford it.

That said, the food cultures of the two countries are different. It shows in our waistlines. Italy’s adult obesity rate is about 12%. America’s has topped 40%. Speed and work are valued in different ways by the two nations. Eating as part of multitasking is deeply ingrained here. We take out. We eat food in our cars or at our desks. Family members in the same house don’t always eat together.

In Sicily, food is more often an event. Some businesses still close in the middle of the day so that pranzo (lunch) can be savored and followed by a nap. Fresh ingredients are more available and sought after. In Sicily we shopped in two sprawling outdoor markets, one in Palermo and the second in Catania. Both brimmed with riotous displays of fruits, vegetables, meat and fish. In the Ballaro market in Palermo, I watched in awe as a woman at least in her 60s deftly and powerfully squeezed pomegranates with a manual press. With effortless squeeze after squeeze, rivers of juice flowed into the cups of her delighted customers (of which I was one). The juice of the grape is also coveted in Italy. We met a vintner whose vineyard is on the slopes of Mt. Etna. He described how just a few dozen kilometers of distance or altitude between vineyards can produce markedly different wines.

The culinary spirit I’m trying to describe was best exhibited as we dined at the restaurant Tritalo Mediterraneo in Palermo. We ate there twice, sitting outside, and laughed as we tried to communicate across the language barrier. On our second visit, we were welcomed like returning family. When I asked for the check, the owner instead brought out a bottle of Punagro (an orange liqueur) with four glasses and poured each of us a complimentary drink. That gift typified Sicilians approach to the table – as a place of refuge and rejuvenation, where time slows, and from which no sane person would hurry away.

It’s easy to believe that America has the best of everything. It is not wrong to think of our country as the shining city on a hill, as Reagan put it. But there are many different ways of living. The American way, sad to say, is not always the best. It was humbling, but necessary, for me to be reminded of that.

A version of this column appeared in the 1/11/23 issue of the Florence Morning News.

Paul, on the far right, with family members.

The Op-Ed Page

At first, Trump brought attention and renewed dignity to working people who felt exploited by business, media, and tech elites.

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Our long national nightmare is over. Donald Trump has overplayed his hand and (boy it sounds good to say this) is headed to the dustbin of history.

In 2016, Trump benefitted from the trifecta of a crowded Republican primary field, a weak challenger, and an angry electorate. I was in the audience when Trump came to the Florence Center in February of that year (not as a supporter but to see the show). I’ve been to many political rallies, including a national convention, and I’ve seen whipped-up crowds, but this was different. It was a quasi-religious fervor. The catharsis came when Trump shouted, “We’re going to build a wall” to ecstatic cheers. Then, gleefully, he asked “And who is going to pay for it!?” The crowd roared “Mexico!”

At the time, I discounted Trump. I was sure my fellow countrymen and women would see through what he was doing, playing to our fears, inflaming us with hyperbole, lies and innuendo. I was wrong. After he won, I thought back to two men sitting next to me at the rally. They had come straight from work and were still dressed in boots and Carhartt jeans. At one point, Trump said, “This country is going to hell.” The man sitting next to me said quietly to his friend, “In a hand basket.”

Whatever you think of Trump, he connected with those two construction workers in a way that no other politician in my lifetime has. Trump’s strength was that he brought attention and renewed dignity to working people who felt exploited by business, media, and tech elites. If you live where I do and have watched plant after plant close and your once thriving Main Street shrivel, it’s not hard to understand Trump’s appeal to folks Alan Jackson called “the little man.” No other candidate from either party could match Trump’s appeal to working-class voters, especially rural ones, whose jobs disappeared and wages were flat while economists told them how good it all was for the global economy. Trump acknowledged their loss and their pain and promised to advocate for them in Washington.

In 2016, most people who voted for Trump did not know what they were getting. They knew how they felt-angry, nostalgic, like the America they knew was slipping away. Not all their energy was generous – as demonstrated by the “Mexico” chant, but I will leave that for another column. For today, we can recognize that in 2020, the connection he forged with them in his first campaign outweighed the turbulence of his presidency, and they stuck with him the second time around.

Thankfully, for enough Americans, election denial is a bridge too far. Since the founding of the republic, we have demonstrated that we will accept colossal flaws in our candidates as long as they pledge to advance our policy positions. We will always argue about the size and role of government, the minimum wage, the regulation of guns, the best way to fund Social Security and Medicare, and the price of gas. But we know there needs to be an America in which we can argue. The tie that binds our fractious democracy together is our willingness to accept election results.

Trump strikes at the heart of this with his lies about election fraud. The midterms should have been a red tsunami. Joe Biden’s historically low approval ratings amidst the worst inflation in 40 years presaged disaster for the Democrats. Instead of reemploying his successful worker-centered strategy of 2016, Trump snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by harping incessantly about his loss in 2020.

The defeat of Blake Masters, a Trump-backed Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, will be remembered as the beginning of the end for Trump. Masters was poised to win a crucial Senate seat until he made election denial a pillar of his campaign. One of his television ads begins with a casually dressed Masters walking alone down a road in the Arizona desert. His first words are “I think Trump won in 2020.” A few seconds later, “The media – they’d tell any lie in order to hurt President Trump.”
That ad was a crucial test of how far Americans are willing to walk with Trump. An attack on the Capitol did not seem to be a deal-breaker for many Republicans. Would they overlook election denial as well? Fortunately not. Masters turned a winnable election into a five-point loss to the Democrat, former astronaut Mark Kelly.

Trump’s backing in a tight race is now the kiss of death – just ask Kari Lake (losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate), Mehmet Oz (losing Senate candidate in Pennsylvania), Adam Laxalt (losing Senate candidate in Nevada), Tudor Dixon (losing Michigan gubernatorial candidate), and most recently, Hershel Walker. Trump endorsed all of these candidates, and his super PAC spent heavily in their races.

Trump will not go quietly, but he will go. Ron DeSantis is the rising star in the Republican Party, as he should be after his blowout win over Charlie Crist. I’m no fan of DeSantis. I disagree with many of his policy positions and don’t like his governing style, exemplified by his duplicity in tricking almost fifty asylum seekers to board planes for Martha’s Vineyard to “own the libs.” But crucially, he won without resorting to election denialism. I am confident he will respect our electoral process and not defile it further if he loses. For that reason alone, Republicans should abandon Trump and embrace DeSantis. America will be more secure once Trump leaves the stage.

A version of this column appeared in the Nov. 30 edition of the Florence Morning News.

The Op-Ed Page

Yeah, THAT guy: The so-called “QAnon shaman.”

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

In the early fall of 2012, I was part of group organizing free community health screenings. Out of the blue, a physician who was a stranger to me called and asked if he could volunteer for our weekly outings. I was glad for the help, and over the next year or so, he and I supervised several screenings together.

After a screening in the months before the 2012 general election, he came into my office looking concerned. He asked if I had seen a YouTube video made by a man claiming to have had cocaine-fueled sex in a limousine with President Obama. He knew that I was planning on voting for Obama and asked plaintively, “What are we going to do? This is going to ruin his chances for re-election.”

When I watched the video (which is still online and currently has fewer than 7,000 views) I was unmoved. Despite my reassurances, my colleague was convinced that the video would derail Obama’s campaign. This was my first brush with the conspiracy mindset. Here was a man both intelligent enough to practice medicine and generous enough to give away his time who lacked a needed skepticism. I found out later that he was a loner who was estranged from his family. He died of a preventable cancer, perhaps another manifestation of his inability to properly weigh information.

I’ve also had a younger co-worker who was a true conspiracy theorist. He sported a bumper sticker that said “9/11 was an inside job” and published multiple books, the titles of which I will not list to spare him the embarrassment – he has taken another job and has grown out of his conspiracy phase. He was socially adept, polite but formal with me and an enjoyable conversationalist for the staff in his generation. He kept his banter light; I never once heard him voice any of the ideas about which he wrote so fluently.

Which brings me to QAnon, the absurd theory that (and this next phrase pains me to write) Hilary Clinton is the leader of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles that has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, including government, Hollywood, and the media. QAnon has gotten more press than it deserves, in part due to Jake Angeli, the “QAnon shaman,” who became the face of the January 6^th attack. He was one of the handful of rioters who penetrated the Senate chamber and left a note on Vice-President Pence’s desk that read “It’s only a matter of time, justice is coming.”

The most current polling on QAnon from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) produced this eye-popping New York Times headline: “41 million Americans are QAnon believers, survey finds.” I am going to venture that this is a vast overestimate of the true sway of QAnon. The PRRI polls of approximately 20,000 Americans showed that 16% “completely agree” or “mostly agree” with QAnon’s pedophilia claim (16% of the US adult population (258 million) equals 41 million).

However, looking at the numbers more closely, only 5% completely agree (about 13 million). Many fewer participate actively in QAnon activities and fewer still participated in the January 6^th attack. My guess is that if most of the 5% who “completely agree” were asked on penalty of perjury if they truly believe the conspiracy theory they would say “no.” And if the answer was “yes,” when asked to produce any credible evidence, they would fail.

QAnon’s success can be attributed to its being allowed to fester for several years without much public notice on a racist and misogynistic website called 8-chan. Now that January 6^th has subjected it to scrutiny, it will shrivel. All of Q’s major predictions have failed to come to pass and the shaman and his fellow rioters are in jail.

About the only people in power who are courting QAnon are folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene and, of course, Donald Trump, who recently introduced a Q-associated anthem as background music for one his rallies and posted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin. The fact that he must overtly court Q supporters can only be interpreted as a sign of Trump’s waning popularity.

The best approach to Q is not to engage. Don’t bicker with Q followers on social media and please don’t lose any sleep over the movement. Yes, a very few supporters have been violent. But most adherents are harmless. Based on my limited experience with conspiracy theorists, it is possible for them to harbor fantastic beliefs while being good at their jobs, funny, and kind.

It is undeniably taxing to engage a conspiracy theorist who is trying to prove he is right. I would recommend listening carefully and asking curious questions for as long as you can stand. You will probably walk away shaking your head. But what a conspiracy theorist most needs is to get out of his echo chamber. If you provide an alternative perspective offered in a respectful way that can be heard, you may help him back toward reality.

A version of this column appeared in the Oct. 5 edition of the Florence Morning News.