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This week:

—Mr. Peanut’s mystery death sets QAnon world alight

—Jack Burkman tricks his fans into looking at gay porn

QAnon Mr. Peanut: Planters killed off fancy peanut Mr. Peanut last week, ahead of a Super Bowl ad campaign.

While the announcement was met by most of the world with confusion or bemusement, believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory suggested something darker: that Mr. Peanut’s death was a signal from the pedophile-cannibal “deep state.” Just what that signal was, though, is a subject of hot debate.

To catch up: All is not well in QAnon-world, where QAnon promoters are telling their fans to drink bleach to ward off the new coronavirus. Two people are on trial for QAnon-related murders, including the alleged killer of a Gambino crime boss.

Much of the speculation relied on the idea that Mr. Peanut’s demise signaled that Kobe Bryant would die in a helicopter crash, or that the “peanut” thing meant that former President Jimmy Carter would soon be arrested by Donald Trump .

“Why did Planters leak their superbowl commercial early a few days ago and announce they were killing off Mr. Peanut?” asked major QAnon promoter Jordan Sather. “Was that a message?”

“There are too many Kobe/Peanut/Death connections to shrug this off,” noted QAnon figure “Carrie4Truth,” whose police officer husband once made headlines after guarding Vice President Mike Pence while wearing a QAnon patch.

All of this would be pointless internet nonsense, if the president wasn’t inviting representatives of this same lunatic conspiracy theory to the White House and retweeting them dozens of times.

Conservative activist tricks fans into looking at lewd pics: Hapless conservative operative Jack Burkman headed to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, promising to release compromising pictures of Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) outside the Senate chamber during the impeachment trial.

The Schiff pictures, which Burkman promised would be incredibly incriminating, would only be available for five minutes.

Trump fans flooded into Burkman’s Twitter account, bringing him more than 7,000 followers on Wednesday. Instead, he tricked them into looking at gay porn.

Burkman and his running buddy, 22-year-old blunderkind Jacob Wohl, have seen better days. Wohl is facing two felony charges in California, and recording bizarre fan videos for $20 on Cameo. The duo torched the last remnants of their reputations last autumn in a series of bizarre weekly sex hoax press conferences, which turned out to rely on duping unwitting accusers into thinking they were filming a Spike TV show.

All those antics have alienated just about every prominent ally Burkman and Wohl have on the right. But their promise to release incriminating pictures of Schiff revved up the grassroots conspiracy-theory base, which has developed a sort of wacko West Coast Pizzagate theory that Schiff was involved in some dirty deeds at the Standard Hotel in Los Angeles. Adherents to this idea include Robert Hyde, the Trump donor who was recently implicated in text messages about surveilling Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch.

Burkman’s scheme started last winter, when The Daily Beast and at least one other outlet received a mystery “dossier” on Schiff that had supposedly been discovered in a bathroom at the Trump hotel—or, as the bogus tipster who sent it in later colorfully described it to me, “next to the shitter.” The whole scheme stank of a Wohl / Burkman operation, and included an obviously photoshopped picture of Schiff with Ed Buck, the Democratic donor facing charges over the overdose deaths of two young men in his home.

After the first attempt to get any takers willing to launder his bogus photo, Burkman then tried to pressure RedState—the conservative blog that published nude photos of former Rep. Katie Hill (D-CA)—into publishing the pictures by tweeting that the blog had them. RedState brushed off the speculation, saying it didn’t actually have any pictures.

After having failed to launder the photos through any more respectable outlet, Burkman decided to release them himself Wednesday. When the pictures came out, though, they turned out to just be three blurry pornographic pictures—too lewd to describe here—featuring a completely unrecognizable middle-age white man engaged in various gay sex acts.

The images could also be easily found on a reverse Google Image search as generic porn pictures, meaning that Burkman had just pulled them from the internet. Burkman’s newfound fans fumed, complaining that he tricked him into looking at blurry porn. Many of them claimed that Burkman was himself a “deep state” asset intent on muddying the waters on Schiff’s behalf.

So, another loss for Burkman and Wohl. But the question remains: Why are they so committed to lighting their reputations on fire, in such obviously fake ways? Send me an email if you have any ideas.