Leave the Gun, Take the Adrenochrome

One of the weirder recent local stories here in the NY Metro Area is the murder of the capo di tutti capi of the Gambino crime family by a sfacim on March 13th. While the conventional wisdom concerning the crime is that the killer murdered the don because the don warned him to stay away from his niece, the killer had a couple of QAnon conspiracy theory related terms inked on his palm.

QAnon is the 'one conspiracy theory to rule them all, one conspiracy theory to find them, one conspiracy theory to bring them all and in the darkness bind them in MAGAland, where the edgelords lie'. It's the unified field theory of conspiracies, with a basic premise that the Democratic Party and Hollywood elites are committing ritual child abuse and cannibalism on a global scale. It's Pizzagate on a combination of steroids and meth, the ancient blood libel trotted out for a 21st Century audience, with a lot of accumulated baggage, such as Ickean lizard people, Flat Earth lunacy, and a ton of Satanic Panic and eschatological evangelical fantasies. A lot of it is rooted, though believers may not realize it, in pop culture, with one central tenet of the conspiracy theory, the consumption of adrenochrome as a drug by the elite 'cabal', coming from Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and depicted in the movie based on the book:





Adrenochrome-as-drug is also alluded to in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, with 'drencrom' being an additive to the moloko-plus favored by the book's villainous main character. For the record, I'm not a fan of Kubrick's film adaptation, which traded in the gritty, grotty milieu of the book for an all-too-clean aesthetic which I feel glorifies the 'ultraviolence' the book portrays:





Adrenochrome being oxidized epinephrine, the easiest way to obtain adrenochrome is to let an epi-pen go bad. According to the conspiracy theory, though, regular adrenochrome doesn't cut it for cannibals such as Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks- the good stuff has to be sourced from victims subjected to torture and murder. This is a major plot point in the first episode of the BBC police procedural Lewis:





The Sisters of Mercy weren't particular about sourcing their adrenochrome:





At any rate, the world is a weird place when a mob boss gets gunned down by a guy who believes in a hoax perpetrated by a 4chan/8chan shitposter. The idea of the Mafia sending a couple of bone-breakers to send a message to a couple of online grifters is surreal, the very sort of grotesque lunacy which seems to be a hallmark of this particular era.

Post title based on my favorite line from The Godfather.