WSJ profile of one of the Capitol attackersHe professes a series of beliefs about the powerful manipulating the world in ways visible only to those able to see through the deception. He knows he is one of them.
“There are so many people walking around half asleep,” he says. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
In Mr. Sweet’s world of false conspiracies, financier George Soros is both a Nazi and a Communist who pays leftist activists to burn and loot American cities. QAnon, a conspiracy-theory group that believes Mr. Trump is under assault by devil worshipers, speaks the truth. A Washington pizza parlor serves pies made of children’s blood to Satanists who know to order off-menu. The U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to seize control of the heroin trade. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Pelosi drink children’s blood in a quest for eternal youth.
“I’m not going to go open a court case saying [Ms. Clinton] eats children,” Mr. Sweet says. “But I can believe that she might eat children.”
This is like the Dunning–Kruger effect on steroids.