When I was 16, in 1966, my high school in south Arkansas began to integrate. We had been told in 1954 to integrate "with all deliberate speed." We made no steps to comply until the federal government informed our school system it would withhold funds if we did not move ahead. /1

When the school began to integrate in 1966, with a small hand-picked group of Black students entering the formerly "white" high school, some group plastered the campus with flyers. These might have been KKK flyers, or from some other source. No attribution was attached. /2

The flyers contained an astonishing stew of rancid propaganda, outright lies, lurid, touched-up photos of very black men dancing with very blond women: This is now going to happen to all of us whites if we do not resist, the flyers informed us. /3

Conspiracy theories were everywhere in the flyers: Commies are behind this integration nonsense, Jews are funding it, outside agitators from the North are acting behind the scenes to bring down glorious Southern Christian civilization. /4

The threats and malefactors were everywhere, hiding behind every bush. Anyone with even a soupçon of sense could read these flyers and see that none of this could possibly be real, that people with critical-thinking skills could not believe these conspiracy fables. /5

But people throughout the South in that period willingly swallowed every one of them, every toxic fable that could be produced to justify oburate resistance to a process white Southerners, many of us, chose to see as an intrusion on our sacred right of self-determination. /6

My point: QAnon and the will to believe toxic nonsense is absolutely not new in American culture. A straight line can be drawn from the astonishing spate of lies told as schools integrated in the South in the 1960s and Marjorie Taylor Greene. /7

QAnon's roots lie in resistance to racial justice. The will to believe anything at all to oppose that social goal was what all the conspiracy theories during the period of integration was all about. That same will to believe anything all exists among Q followers now. /8

This is not about really believing the nonsense. It's about spinning fables to justify a predetermined intent to resist what I do not intend to accept, my perceived loss of control and status as a white American. This is deeply rooted in US history. /9