Here are some things that I have almost no clue as to what they are and I will bet money (someone else’s, not mine) that you don’t either: QAnon, Proud Boys, and 4chan. But about once a week, the national media and geeks on social media need to remind you that they’re groups either related to vehement racism, dangerous conspiracy theories, or more racism.

It shook the media last week when Vice President Mike Pence was photographed in Florida greeting SWAT team members, one of whom was sporting “a QAnon conspiracy patch,” as the Washington Post put it.

Those ignorant of QAnon, which is nearly everyone, probably shrugged and proceeded to line their birdcage with Dana Milbank’s latest column. But as the Daily Beast explains it (because that’s where you go when you need an explanation about the latest imagined threat), QAnon is a dumb Internet story about how the “deep state” has attempted to assassinate President Trump, and Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama are on the cusp of being thrown in prison.

Normal person: "Wow, that’s a dumb story that no sane person could believe."

Correct. In fact, most of the people who pretend to take these stories seriously are joking. It’s an acquired sense of humor developed by people who enjoy online video games, but it’s not a vast conspiracy that threatens the republic.

The officer wearing the patch, identified as 31-year-old Sgt. Matt Patten, was reassigned Tuesday, effectively demoted to the Department of Law Enforcement, and disciplined in a public letter.

But the Daily Beast can now rest easy that Patten will no longer be able to openly spread his online joke about Clinton and Obama being headed to Guantanamo.

The left-leaning Daily Beast website covers every move of the otherwise obscure “Proud Boys,” right down to their masturbation habits. “New Proud Boy Rules: Less Fighting, Less Wanking,” a headline at the website said last week. Even the New York Times regularly reports on this small group, though to the paper’s credit, it relegates its coverage to the New York region section, given that no one outside of New York cares about a self-help gang of disaffected men.

But they’re racist!

The group actually calls themselves “anti-racial guilt,” but because the news media will dig in the cracks of any sofa to find a living racist, the rest of us are expected to care as we live our otherwise happy lives.

The New York Times published a piece in October explaining a ridiculous and admittedly funny video passed around by bored Internet trolls that portrays anti-Trump liberals as humorless cyborgs. The video inspired a mock campaign wherein a bunch of fake Twitter accounts were set up to make fun of liberals operating like a mob.

The Times reported in earnest that this campaign was “born in the fever swamps of 4chan and Reddit message boards…”

Reddit is a massive website where you can spend endless hours learning and talking about anything. It has one pro-Trump thread where people mock liberals, and the Times acts like it needs a medical quarantine.

No one knows what 4chan is, and the people who use it are anonymous. But in an actual news article, CNN quoted comments from the website to show that “white supremacists” approve of Trump.

Trump “never flatly denounced white supremacists” at a press conference in November, CNN said, so 4Chan users “were overjoyed, calling the press conference ‘glorious,’ and ‘beautiful’ … with one commenter writing: ‘I am honestly in awe of this man as a leader.’”

Weeks later, a CNN commentator was fired from the network after having used what was widely perceived to be an anti-Semitic trope during a speech before the United Nations.

Anyway, now you know more about QAnon, 4chan, and the Proud Boys than you ever wanted to. You also know more about how the media gin up fear and concern over things that barely exist.