pink pill rt wmn

woman key logistical support KKK? alt rt?

MERRI OK

qanon pedophile CONSPIRACY gateway drug to woman MEBBE pink pill

SEE COMING FOR YOUR KIDS, GROOMER CS ACTUAL PEDO [GOP]

SEE HYPE FEAR

many related kid media links INDOCTRINATE

see moral panic M4L?

---

---

AN 12 25

A Fox News host is urging viewers to defend America’s “western Christian culture” and to think “communism” whenever they hear about feminism or secularism.

Rachel Campos-Duffy, a “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host, told viewers on Monday, “I think it’s really up to us to reclaim our culture.”

“We can sit and complain about it, but when we give in to those atheist groups that keep suing, we should come right back — this is our culture,” she said. “I’m not going to let, you know, pro-Palestinian or whatever they’re putting forward — these are all fronts for, you know, whenever you see any of these groups, just think feminism, secularism, just think communism. This is what they’re really about.”

“It’s always been about communism,” Campos-Duffy insisted.

“Making the state the center, removing the power of religion and family from our culture. It’s up to us to make sure that our culture remains what it is, which is a Western Christian culture with a beautiful history that we have in this country, and that we have to defend these things every single day, especially with our children.”

Campos-Duffy has a history of targeting feminism.

“Feminists like Hillary Clinton have robbed women of so much over the years, of minimizing the importance of what our purpose as mothers and as wives, and, I think, and really demeaning it and saying that it’s not the most important,” she said in September.

“Always remember that feminism has never been about women. It’s always been about ABORTION and COMMUNISM,” she wrote in 2023.

---

---

AN THE CONV 725

The Justice Department asked a federal court on July 18, 2025, to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case. The direction from President Donald Trump came after weeks of frustration among some far-right groups over his administration’s refusal to release the complete and unredacted “Epstein files.”

Epstein, a wealthy financier with high-profile connections, was arrested in 2019 on sex trafficking charges and later died by suicide in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial.

In early 2025, a federal court unsealed portions of the court documents. While names of some of the alleged clients and victims were released, many were redacted or withheld.

Epstein’s arrest and death became a central focus for QAnon followers, who saw them as proof of a hidden global elite engaged in child trafficking and protected by powerful institutions. The release – or withholding – of the Epstein files is often cited within QAnon movement circles as evidence of a broader cover-up by the so-called “deep state.”

Some followers of the MAGA – Make America Great Again – movement and the Republican Party believe in the false claim that the United States is secretly controlled by a cabal of elites who are pedophiles, sex traffickers and satanists.

Over time, what started as a baseless conspiracy on obscure platforms has migrated into the mainstream. It has influenced rhetoric and policy debates, and even reshaped the American political landscape. The foundational belief of many of the QAnon followers is that Trump is a heroic figure fighting the elite pedophile ring.

Trump’s attempts at downplaying or obstructing the very disclosures they believe would validate their worldview has led to confusion. To some, the delay in the release of the files feels like a betrayal, or even the possibility of his wrongdoing. Others are trying to reinterpret Trump’s actions through increasingly baseless conspiracy logic.

Trump has publicly dismissed demands for the full release of the Epstein Files as a “hoax.” He has also made false claims. On July 15, 2025, Trump said: “And I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama.”

As a scholar who studies extremism, I know that the movement views Trump as a mythological figure and it interprets Trump’s actions to fit this overarching narrative – an elasticity which makes the movement both durable and dangerous.

From Pizzagate to QAnon

The QAnon movement began with the Pizzagate conspiracy theory in 2016, which falsely claimed that high-ranking Democrats were operating a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. The baseless theory gained enough online momentum that a man armed with an assault rifle stormed the restaurant, seeking to “free the children.”

In 2017, an anonymous figure called “Q” began posting cryptic messages on message boards like 4chan and 8kun. The baseless accusations of a global network of elites involved in controlling global institutions, including governments, businesses, and the media, as well as operating a child trafficking and ritual abuse, were central to the QAnon movement’s narrative.

The movement has recruited followers through language like “Save the Children,” to mobilize around issues of child trafficking.

Many QAnon adherents, particularly women, were drawn to the movement through such appeals to child protection. According to psychologists Sophia Moskalenko and Mia Bloom, this type of appeal taps into powerful emotional instincts, making conspiracy theories like QAnon more persuasive and harder to dislodge, even in the face of contradictory evidence.

REF BELOW

QAnon movement’s rise

QAnon followers perceived Trump as a messianic figure working to expose this cabal in a climactic reckoning known as “The Storm” – a moment when mass arrests would finally bring justice.

They claimed that this moment would eventually bring about a “Great Awakening,” a reference to the religious revivalist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this context the phrase described the supposed political and spiritual enlightenment that would follow “The Storm” – a moment of mass realization when people would “wake up” to the truth about the “deep state.”

In 2019, the FBI identified QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat, and major social media platforms began banning related content, but by then, QAnon had bled into mainstream conservative politics. Q-endorsing candidates, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, ran for and won elected office a year later.

Trump and QAnon

During Trump’s first administration – from 2017 to 2021 – the QAnon movement flourished. The posts from Q claimed to reveal insider knowledge of a secret war being waged by the president, often in coordination with the military, against the powerful elite.

Trump never explicitly endorsed the movement, but he did little to distance himself from it.

His administration also included figures, like former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who openly interacted with Q content online.

Trump’s rhetoric, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election, gave new life to QAnon narratives. When he questioned the integrity of the electoral process, QAnon followers interpreted it as confirmation of the deep state’s meddling.

However, after Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, QAnon followers revised their original prophecy to maintain belief in “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening.” Some claimed the defeat was part of a larger secret plan, with Biden’s presidency serving as a cover for exposing the deep state. Some believed Trump remained the true president behind the scenes, while others reframed the awakening as a spiritual rather than political event.

Indeed, by 2020, several congressional candidates openly embraced or showed sympathy for the QAnon movement. SEE REF

At various campaign rallies in 2022 and after Trump used the movement’s symbolism. On Truth Social, his social media platform, he retweeted Q-affiliated accounts, and praised QAnon supporters as “people who love our country.” That same year he reposted an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin overlaid with the words “The Storm is Coming.”

After the 2020 elections

Trump’s departure from the White House in January 2021 created an existential crisis for the QAnon movement. Predictions that he would declare martial law or arrest Joe Biden and other Democrats on Inauguration Day failed to materialize. Q’s posts also stopped, leaving many followers adrift.

Some abandoned the theory. Others rationalized the failed predictions or embraced new conspiracy narratives, such as the belief that Trump was still secretly in charge or that the military would soon act to reinstate him.

Some QAnon communities merged with or were absorbed into broader anti-vaccine, anti-globalist, and Christian nationalist movements.

How big is the movement?

Estimating the number of QAnon believers is difficult because many individuals do not openly identify with the movement, and those who do often hold a range of loosely connected or partial beliefs rather than adhering to a consistent or uniform ideology. Not everyone who shares a Q meme or echoes a Q talking point identifies as being part of the movement.

That said, surveys by groups like the 2024 Public Religion Research Institute and the Associated Press have found that 15–20% of Americans believe in some of QAnon’s core claims, such as the existence of a secret group of Satan-worshipping elites controlling the government.

Among Republican voters, the number is often higher.

This does not mean all these people are hardcore QAnon adherents, but it does show how far the narrative, or parts of it, has seeped into mainstream thinking.

Epstein as evidence of ‘the cabal’

The Trump administration’s failure to disclose the information in Epstein files has fueled internal confusion, disillusionment and even radicalization within the movement.

For some QAnon believers, this failure was a turning point: if Trump – once seen as the hero in the conspiracy narrative – would not or could not reveal the truth, then the “deep state” must be more entrenched than imagined.

At the same time, frustrations have grown within MAGA and the QAnon movement’s spaces. Some see it as a failure to fulfill one of his most important promises: exposing elite pedophiles. Others believe the delay is strategic, another example of “the plan” requiring more patience.

The QAnon movement continues to evolve, even as its central figure hedges and hesitates, showing how potent myths can be in times of uncertainty. In my view, understanding why this belief continues to gain traction is essential for understanding the current state of American democracy.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, *University of Dayton

REF

By Marquise Francis, Yahoo News | January 19, 2020

On the eve of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the combative Georgia Republican known for her association with the fantastical, cultlike QAnon conspiracy theory, was back on Twitter after a 12-hour suspension, and back to making waves and rocking the precarious boat that Republicans find themselves in, having lost the White House and both chambers of Congress.

“I’ve said this all along, it’s people over politicians, not the other way around,” Greene tweeted late Monday night, just hours after her Twitter account was reinstated after it was suspended for violating the social media giant’s policies. “It’s the people of this country that matter. That’s why I’m asking everyone to join me as a Citizen Cosponsor to #ImpeachBiden.”

A rising star among the far-right wing of the party because of her brash, outspoken pro-gun, anti-abortion, stridently conservative views, Greene has most recently found herself at odds with Republican officials, who are alarmed by her record of conspiracy-mongering, bigoted rhetoric and last-stand efforts to undo the election results in her own state.

On Tuesday, Media Matters for America uncovered Facebook posts by Greene from 2018 in which she accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton of encouraging school shootings to push for gun control, calling the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in which 17 people were killed and 17 others injured, a staged “false flag” operation.

“I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control,” Greene wrote.

GOP colleagues have gone out of their way to denounce what one called her “cuckoo” ways.

“She’ll keep making fools out of herself, her constituents, and the Republican Party,” Republican Sen. Ben Sasse from Nebraska wrote in a recent op-ed for the Atlantic, describing Greene as “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“If the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies,” he added.

Last summer Republican officials panicked after videos uploaded to Greene’s Facebook account emerged that showed the then candidate making a series of racist, anti-Semitic and Islamophobic comments. As thousands of Americans across the country were in the streets marching daily on behalf of racial justice in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Greene was spewing hate. GOP officials attempted to distance themselves from her campaign.

“The comments made by Ms. Greene are disgusting and don’t reflect the values of equality and decency that make our country great,” Republican House Minority Whip Steve Scalise said, throwing his support to Greene’s primary opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan.

Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Politico, through his spokesman, that the comments were “appalling” and he had “no tolerance for them.” But McCarthy stayed neutral in the race, choosing to let the primary play out. Greene and Cowan ended up in a runoff, which Greene won.

Some Republican lawmakers then were worried that not enough pushback by national GOP leaders on Greene’s actions would create a firestorm that would not be so easily put out in the months to come.

“This is the kind of race and kind of situation where you need those groups,” said Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., who also supported Greene’s primary opponent. (Her Democratic opponent, who faced long odds in the overwhelmingly Republican district, withdrew before the Nov. 3 general election.) “So often, they only get involved when they have someone that they are trying to get in. But I think it’s just as important they get involved when there’s someone they’re trying to get out.”

Today they’re seeing their fears play out.

Greene, who became the first open supporter of QAnon elected to Congress in November, now uses her growing social media following and access to conservative media organizations like Newsmax and OANN to spread lies and push political propaganda. She plans to file an article of impeachment for Biden on his first full day in office because of “abuse of power,” citing Biden’s alleged family business connections with China and Ukraine, but she has not offered evidence of wrongdoing.

Greene has been somewhat of a loose cannon in recent weeks on Twitter, spreading lies about election integrity in her state and pushing for “all Americans” to “mobilize and make your voices heard in opposition to these attacks on our liberties” in a now deleted tweet archived by ProPublica.

She’s even come down on fellow Republican officials.

“Morons like you are responsible for losing GA’s 2 Republican Senate seats,” Greene tweeted in response to Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling’s assertion that she, former Rep. Doug Collins and President Trump were responsible for the substantial drop-off in Republican voter turnout in the Georgia Senate runoff elections. “You ran a Nov 3rd election that was stolen bc you idiots at the SOS mailed out millions of absentee ballots to any one and everyone while GA was an open state.”

On Sunday, Twitter suspended Greene’s account for 12 hours “for multiple violations of our civic integrity policy,” according to a Twitter spokesperson, which included lying about the elections’ validity.

But Greene’s status among hard-core conservative voters in the party seems secure for the time being. She has gained popularity as a vocal supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election, and has risen to borderline conservative stardom by openly supporting QAnon, a baseless theory that Trump is fighting a cabal of “deep state” saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex. The FBI has deemed the conspiracy theory a domestic terrorism threat.

In recent months she’s tried to distance herself from QAnon, but in an earlier video posted to YouTube, which she has since made private, Greene expressed her admiration for the theory. “Q is a patriot,” she said. “He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”

Yahoo News reached out to Greene for comment, but she has not responded to the request.

Following the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter increased its efforts to purge misinformation and incitements to violence from its site. Last week it deleted more than 70,000 accounts that were used to share QAnon conspiracy theories.

But critics want more accountability.

A MoveOn petition to “Remove Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene” from Congress had garnered more than 40,000 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon.

Boebert is a freshman Republican lawmaker from Colorado who holds many of the same views as Greene, and has also dabbled in QAnon conspiracies. Rep. Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, said Monday that he and Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., had both seen Boebert giving a tour of the Capitol to a “large” group ahead of the riot. Boebert denies this.

The petition accuses Greene and Boebert of “dereliction of duty” and “collusion” in the Capitol riot and occupation, which is under investigation by the House.

Some progressive activists are calling for Greene to be held accountable for spreading lies about election fraud.

“Leave aside the results of this latest big lie, that the president and his enablers won an election, leading to an assault of our Capitol. … It’s extremely troubling and dangerous for the underpinnings of our democracy, [which] relies on the way we elect our leaders, and a peaceful transfer of power,” Robert Brandon, president and CEO of Fair Elections Center, a national, nonpartisan voting rights organization, told Yahoo News. “Certainly if there are folks who contributed to that, they should be held accountable.”

In a year that saw record voter turnout, Brandon warns about a rollback in voting rights in the coming months as a result.

“Voter fraud has been talked about for 20 years, but normally as a way to disenfranchise voters,” he added. “We just saw a loosening up of voting options, whether it be mail-in voting or early voting in this year’s elections, and I think we will have an attack on that, starting in states like Georgia.”

University of New Haven associate professor of national security and political science Matthew Schmidt believes Greene’s rhetoric heightens the danger from right-wing extremists.

“The No. 1 national security threat has been domestic extremist groups,” Schmidt told Yahoo News. “It’s not ISIS, it’s not al-Qaida, it’s not Russia, it’s not China. It’s white supremacists and whoever else is attaching themselves onto QAnon. Reps like Marjorie Greene incite these groups. When she repeats these conspiracy theories that have no basis, she gives them validity because she’s an elected official. It’s incredibly dangerous … and has a long-term effect because this information is used to pass down to other generations that people with differing views are wrong and this is how you can act in response.”

Schmidt added that Congress ultimately has the power to hold Greene and others accountable for things they do and say, but acknowledged that it’s a slippery slope to push to limit any form of free speech.

“[The issue] is that this is the intersection of free speech and culpability of a criminal process,” Schmidt said. “Right now you don’t see enough evidence that she has incited a specific act, but … Congress has the capability to set its own rules and its ethics violations. There could be a way Congress could censor its members … using rules violations.”

But Republicans now have to ask themselves: Have they created a monster they can’t control? Greene has already announced her intention to file an article of impeachment against Biden on his first day in office, a stunt certain to get more attention than votes, but which can only enhance the impression of congressional Republicans as being more interested in showboating than in governing — and complicating McCarthy’s hopes of winning a majority in 2022 and becoming speaker of the House.

Republican leaders have faced this situation before — just last year, in fact, when, after years of tolerating the barely concealed racism and bigotry of Rep. Steve King of Iowa, they decided he went too far in an interview in which he questioned what was offensive about the phrase and concept of “white supremacist.”

---

REF 2

Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon

Authors: Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2021. 256 pages.

Reviewer: Matthew N. Hannah ǀ March 2022

QAnon has generated significant scholarly attention in recent years, especially in the wake of the January 6^th Capitol riot, and scholars have only just begun to analyze the incredibly complex movement. Pastels and Pedophiles thus provides a good resource for general readers interested in QAnon. The book does particularly important work contextualizing QAnon within a longer history of anti-Semitic conspiratorial thinking, detailing linkages between key aspects of QAnon beliefs and anti-Semitic thinking, comparing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with fake news or blood libel with adrenochrome harvesting. Such historical comparisons are interesting for thinking through some of the underlying ideological dynamics within QAnon. The book also offers a very useful summary of the international spread of QAnon, which will be an important resource for scholars and other readers.

In addition, and I think this is the book’s particular strength, the authors provide some very good analysis detailing how gender plays a central role in the conspiracy. Despite widespread stereotyping of QAnon as made up of older, conservative, white men, the events of January 6th revealed a stark truth: the role of women in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Of the five people who died that day, as rioters stormed the Capitol Building, two were women in their thirties who joined the mob because of their beliefs in the online conspiracy theory, which had quickly spread from the dark corners of 4chan in 2017 to mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko tackle the particular gender dynamics at work in QAnon, offering an important look inside the social and psychological incentives for female adherents to join the movement.

The book describes key influencers in the movement, showcasing women who not only participated in QAnon but actively developed the theory. Bloom and Moskalenko describe how QAnon subverted social-media pages dedicated to the Save the Children non-profit, espousing theories about pedophilia and child trafficking by powerful elites. This emphasis on gender is useful for advancing a more substantial view of QAnon being comprised of various demographics rather than the stereotype that it is predominately the domain of incels and boomers. In particular, the authors provide some nicely detailed lists of women influencers who became involved in QAnon: “Yoga-centered Instagram accounts went from posting inspirational messages adorned with serene images of light and love to being littered with posts about child exploitation, sex crimes, the devil, and an imminent war between good and evil” (74).

:{:{Unfortunately, the book is also marred by imprecision in the discussion of women within the movement. While I applaud the authors’ focus on such an important topic, I would have appreciated a bit more nuance in some of their analyses. On the one hand, they do good work in raising the important issue of gender in conspiracy theories. They point out that women in such extremist movements have been typically imagined as “lacking agency” (54) and that women have responsibility for such ideologies (55). But then there are also some strange aspects when they rely on unsubstantiated and openly ideological arguments, such as when they assert, without any citation, that “[m]any women who supported Bernie over Hillary ended up in QAnon” or when they claim that “women, whom we ordinarily assume are left wing, have also ended up supporting QAnon” (72).}:

I don’t agree that women are necessarily left wing nor have I seen evidence that “many women” who supported Bernie over Hillary turned to QAnon. Perhaps the authors have data for these claims, but they don’t provide it, and so these claims feel reflective of just the authors’ own prejudices and preferences. They try to imagine why women might join QAnon, often reducing such motivations to concerns over children. Certainly, this is one motivating factor, but there are many reasons why women might join QAnon, including anger over perceived political corruption, religious fundamentalism, or far-right indoctrination. In my research, QAnon is made up of a wide range of individuals attracted to the theory because they felt that mainstream political actors were inherently corrupt. This makes attempting to pin down any one QAnon ideology very difficult.}:

:{The book includes somewhat sloppy comparisons between QAnon and extremism. While I’m not suggesting that QAnon is not extremist, I think we should be more precise than simply stating, as Bloom and Moskalenko do, that QAnon relies on internet echo chambers the same way “jihadi groups operate,” which seems unhelpful and imprecise (68). In another section, Bloom and Moskalenko compare QAnon to ISIS in recruiting women (58). Such comparisons are inexact and seem more designed for “normie” fear mongering than actual analysis. This is especially prominent in their discussion of women in extremist movements, in which they superficially compare such disparate political and terrorist groups as Baader-Meinhof, the Basque separatist party Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the Irish Republican Army, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Boko Haram, the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party), and Ku Klux Klan (52-55).

Such a catalogue is meant to suggest, I suppose, that women are involved in extremism everywhere despite claims that such movements are predominately male, but the complete lack of historical specificity or nuance in comparing these very different sociohistorical movements as “extremist” seems ahistorical and unhelpful, especially given that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, not a political liberation front despite their presence in the Capitol protests.}:

This reductive tendency is also evident in the authors’ over-reliance on somewhat simplified psychological accounts of anon motivations. Unlike most people who experience upheaval in their lives, they argue, who “pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and move on” after personal or professional distress, QAnon adherents are drawn to conspiracies:

In this situation, personal distress is compounded by an unraveling of social norms that tether us to reality. As a result, ideas of right and wrong, of life’s goals and meaning are all upended. This vulnerable state is what psychologists call ‘unfreezing’ . . . To an unfrozen individual, a group’s ideology is less important than the newfound community. Gratitude for support from a radical group mixes with resentment against those who caused the unfreezing, and, with time, the individual can embrace both the group’s radical ideology and its radical agenda. (82)

Later in the book, the authors gesture toward some psychological solutions to QAnon, pointing out that many anons struggle with mental illness and isolation. They acknowledge the utter inability of American healthcare to treat mental health at scale, and argue that the American Psychological Association “must direct resources toward studying beliefs in conspiracy theories” (138). I appreciate their effort to tackle a highly complex problem even if some of their ideas seem vague and unclear. Cognitive therapy, a QAnon’s Anonymous, volunteering, and mindfulness seem to me to be somewhat simplistic responses to the immensity of this problem, but I do think these are a starting point, and I appreciate the effort to schematize an organized response, even if I don’t agree about the tactics themselves.

I also found the recurrent notion that QAnon believers are somehow recruited by some nebulous administrative entity, as might happen with a terrorist network for example, to be misleading. While it would be comforting to imagine a centralized—or even decentralized—control mechanism that is actively recruiting disaffected individuals into an organized movement, the truth is far more complex as well as interesting. And frightening. True, there are recruitment mechanisms for “red-pilling” new recruits, as Bloom and Moskalenko point out, but this is largely self-generated by members themselves because they believe they are exposing truths the American people need to hear. Because the book approaches QAnon with a tone of combined disgust and bemusement, consistently reducing QAnon to a terrorist network or describing the conspiracy with terms such as “loony,” I don’t feel the book lives up to its subtitle, which promises to take us “inside the mind of QAnon.” Instead, readers are offered a somewhat disorganized description of QAnon in general terms, without much in-depth analysis.

The authors spend significant space dismissing QAnon as nothing more than a collective lie. Again, this seems to miss much of the point of QAnon. Relying on an extended series of hypothetical scenarios meant to showcase how collective anger can be prompted through self-deception about facts, seems to mischaracterize QAnon’s actual dynamics. “The fiction allows a current of shared emotion to flood the minutiae of facts,” they assert, “[s]hared emotions create a community, washing away the moral injury” (85). QAnon may be a form of collective fiction and performative rage, certainly, but the movement is far more complex than a collective emotional deception. Moral injury is the raison d’ être of QAnon, not a symptom. Research into the minutiae of facts is the key, not something to be washed away by floods of emotion. Characterizing QAnon as collective outrage isn’t necessarily inaccurate, but does diminish the complex dynamics by which anons research and study and investigate the alleged global cabal, which subsequently fuels the outrage, which fuels more research effort.

On the whole, this book represents a good contribution to extant writing on QAnon despite the issues I describe above. Because so much of the existing writing on QAnon is journalistic, we need more scholarly and theoretical engagement with the conspiracy, especially since we will likely see a resurgence of Q conspiracies in the lead up to the 2024 elections. While I have some hesitancy about the framing and description of the conspiracy here and there, and quibble with some of the assumptions and comparisons made by the authors, I did find the book to be a useful addition to writing on QAnon, providing an accessible introduction to the conspiracy for lay readers while offering some useful insights for scholars. I think the focus on women within the movement is an important and necessary insight, especially as we ramp up for the 2024 elections, and I value the discussion of how QAnon has influenced the COVID-19 response. Because this book appeared at the moment it did, the authors offer a unique perspective, able to read the collapse of QAnon back through the conspiracy’s rise, which is useful for helping contextualize our current moment. For example, Bloom and Moskalenko detail how Nazi and racist groups on Gab and Telegram used Q’s silence and failure to predict Trump’s defeat as an opportunity to recruit from QAnon’s online followers into more radical and organized movements like the Proud Boys (116).

I am also intrigued by the authors’ attempt to schematize an “anti-conspiracy” framework for intervening in future QAnons, which is something about which I’ve spent some time thinking. How do we intervene in a decentralized, non-hierarchical, anonymized, and largely self-generated network of individuals unknown to one another who practice a fairly robust form of information literacy? It’s hard to debunk a conspiracy predicated on extensive research into people, institutions, and events, cobbled together from the incredibly vast information resources of the internet. Advancing what they describe as “Counter-Q” measures, Bloom and Moskalenko argue we should follow a “four-prong” approach: 1) building immunity to disinformation through a pedagogy of critical thinking, 2) limiting exposure by de-platforming or limiting accounts that share disinformation, 3) offer treatment to individuals trying to extricate themselves, and 4) adjust expectations of family and friends of Q believers (121-22). While I have reservations about the practicable efficacy of aspects of this “Counter-Q” approach—I don’t think de-platforming works and have questions about centralizing information control and the efficacy of literacy efforts—I applaud the effort to schematize and theorize possible responses to future conspiracies, because they will certainly arise given that the infrastructural realities persist. This book thus raises worthwhile questions about the psychological components of QAnon and proves to be suggestive about the information ecosystem in which we find ourselves.

*Matthew N. Hannah is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Studies at Purdue University.

---

child mutilation // baby killer --> dr killed

aha/hmmn 8 23 expansion:  trump says i am your retribution [// the storm qanon] demonization of enemy evil commie enemy, they must be taken from power and punished

see treason traitor execution

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/extreme-accountability-stew-peters-delivers-a-bloodthirsty-rant-at-the-latest-reawaken-america-event/

no vid  rww 8 23

stew Peters is a far-right virulently anti-LGBTQ bigot who regularly uses his nightly “The Stew Peters Show” program, speeches, and social media accounts to promote white nationalists and antisemites and to spread wild conspiracy theories, bigotry, and calls for violence.

:{:{}:

}:

Lately, those calls for violence have become increasingly explicit, as just last week Peters used his program to urge Americans to begin exploring “extra-legal options” to remove “enemy combatants” like Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs from office.

Over the weekend, Peters joined members of former President Donald Trump’s family and inner circle and a cavalcade of far-right conspiracy theorists for a ReAwaken America event in Las Vegas, where he delivered a bloodthirsty rant that was alarming even by Peters’ already unhinged standards.

Speaking on the same stage as the likes of Donald Trump Jr., Lara Trump, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Michael Flynn, Peters repeatedly called for his perceived political enemies to be executed.

Peters vowed to arrest former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and prosecute him for the COVID-19 pandemic, after which Peters said Fauci “will hang from a length of thick rope until he is dead.”

Hunter Biden, Peters then pledged, will be tried fortreason and “when he is convicted of those crimes, he will get the punishment that traitors like Julius and Ethel Rosenberg received before him: Death!”

Peters proceeded to declare that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is “atreasonous traitor, and in the world that we are going to build, traitors will hang.”

On top of that, Peters warned that any medical professional who provides treatment to transgender youth will be charged with “child mutilation.”

“Child mutilation will be a capital offense,” Peters proclaimed. “And those who commit it will receive the death penalty without exception.”

“We are going to see extreme accountability,” Peters asserted. “Maximum accountability. We are going to have permanent accountability, with extreme prejudice!”

Every one of Peters’ violent threats was met by wild cheers from the audience[vid]

despite Peters well-documented history of using extremely bigoted and increasingly dangerous rhetoric, he nevertheless regularly manages to get Republican leaders, elected officials, and candidates for office to appear on his program.

The ReAwaken America touris the brainchild of right-wing conspiracy theorist Clay Clark, who has openly bragged that the participation by Michael Flynn and members of the Trump family in these events is “legitimizing what we are doing in the minds of many people” and allowing him to get various conspiracy theorists and self-proclaimed “prophets” directly into “Trump’s inner circle.”

---

---

https://www.alternet.org/far-right-womens-cult-like/

as  far-right extremists continue to coalesce around Donald Trump and his third run for president, women, some of whom were once derided as "mommy bloggers," are taking an increasingly larger role as the faces of the movement.

According to a report from theGuardian, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to "martyr" Ashli Babbitt, who lost her life in the Jan. 6 riot, increasing numbers of women are recruiting or being used as recruiting tools to draw in other women that one researcher claims are susceptible to finding cults appealing.

As the Guardian's MacKenzie Ryan wrote, “alt-right” women have "shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics," as they defend the rioters who stormed the Capitol or ostensibly use the protection of children to push a far-right agenda like the controversial Moms for Liberty."

According to Dr. Sandra Jeppesen of Lakehead University, "[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” adding, "I think women definitely want power. I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”

Case in point, the rapid ascension of lawmaker Taylor Greene, with the Guardian reporting, "In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump. The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol,Jeppesen explained."

The protection of children is a central selling point to recruiting more adherents with Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University, explaining, "Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?”

The Guardian report states, "The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the 'mommy blogger aesthetic' on Instagram, known for sharing photos of 'lovely, enviable lives', become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories."

Ulthiin suggested, "women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles, stating, "It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult." [link]

---

rww 6 23

...

• Moms for Liberty’s efforts are part of a much broader project by its right-wing and anti-public-education allies to inflame conservative anger about school policies as a way to drive up voter turnout and help elect conservatives to office at all levels of government. Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida GOP, told the Washington Post in 2021 (when he was vice chair), “I have been trying for a dozen years to get20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.’”

Tags: Bridget Ziegler Donald Trump Ron DeSantis Tiffany Justice Tina Descovich Authoritarianism banned books Censorship Election 2024 Moms for Liberty Republican Party

---

10 22

"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver focused his main story Sunday on "problems" that Republicans create so that they have something to solve.

Republicans are desperately trying to take over the House, Senate and a slew of offices that allow them to control elections in an effort to usher in restrictive election laws to put in more Republicans and eliminate any policy delivered by a Democrat for the past century.

Republicans pledged for almost ten years that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced, only to be outed for being unable to come up with the replacement. They have placed judges in top posts to eliminate the personal freedoms and medical privacy of women. They invented an idea that Kindergarteners are being taught they are evil for slavery and were convinced that any mention of LGBTQ should be banned from schools in Florida and other states that have followed.

Oliver focused on another top issue for the GOP: transgender sports. While there are many, many issues facing Americans, indeed the world, Republicans are concerned that one or two transgender people could bring down sports.

He began with South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who ran a campaign ad claiming that she personally saved girls' sports in the state. There was one trans student about ten years ago in South Dakota, but Noem zeroed in on the possibility that one person ten years ago could one day be millions of trans students in the sparsely populated state.

Oliver pointed out that there were more girls playing sports in the Noem ad than there were trans kids in all of South Dakota sports. So, while Republicans like Noem complain about failures around inflation, healthcare and other problems they blame on Democrats, their solutions are focused on transgender sports.

Noem isn't the only one. A whopping 18 U.S. states have spent the past few years passing legislation to regulate who can urinate in a stall next to each other. While most people simply enter a bathroom, do their business and get out, in the mind of Republicans, restrooms are nefarious places where liberals are ushering in a plot to bring down society. They have yet to find any evidence of it, but they can't stop their minds from turning to anarchy as a result of a kid using the restroom.

The positive piece of Oliver's report is that he first reported on transgender rights nearly a decade ago and things have gotten a lot better. The crisis for the right-wing is that the American public has decided that they are accepting of same-sex marriage, eliminating a key issue that they have desperately clung to for years. Trans rights have now taken over that same desperate attempt to create a villain, make people afraid of him and then pass laws to protect children from him.

See Oliver's full segment in the video below:

---

---

omfg

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-accuses-childrens-national-hospital-castrating-young-people-minors-no

no lnx

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): We brought you this saga of Libs of TikTok -- one of the most informative accounts on Twitter. And because it is so informative, it keeps getting banned. Libs of TikTok just proved that physicians are, in fact, castrating young people, minors for no legitimate purpose whatsoever. Libs of TikTok reported -- recorded this call with Children's National Hospital, for example, in Washington, D.C.

[...]

Yeah, castrating kids. They admitted it, flat out. Now Children's Hospital is denying it, pretending it's not true.

Today, Vice.com, which rides to the rescue of anyone in power who's been embarrassed -- whether it's the CIA or the State Department or the Biden administration or Google or in this case, the medical establishment -- went after Libs of TikTok, one person. Vice, like a billion dollars in venture funding, they're claiming that Libs of TikTok is, quote, "helping the Kremlin" -- Kremlin -- "boost anti-LGBT disinformation." And then the Washington Post, owned by the richest man in the world, accused Libs of TikTok of lying. And then NPR, which is funded by your tax dollars and spends all of its time attacking you and your family for whom they have pure contempt, is pushing to ban Libs of TikTok. And then shortly after that, not surprisingly, Twitter obeyed and suspended Libs of TikTok, alleging hateful conduct.

THE LATEST

Fox’s Jeanine Pirro warns of violent “retaliation” from Republicans in reaction to Joe Biden’s speech

09/01/22 5:42 PM EDT

Donald Trump may have confessed to a crime on Truth Social. Legal experts are discussing the ramifications of his self-incriminating post.

09/01/22 4:36 PM EDT

Apple should follow Google’s lead and refuse to carry the Truth Social app on its store

09/01/22 3:29 PM EDT

The right will accuse DOJ of partisanship whether or not it indicts Trump

09/01/22 1:03 PM EDT

Tucker Carlson accuses Children's National Hospital of “castrating young people, minors for no legitimate purpose whatsoever”

Related

Tucker Carlson says children’s hospitals all over the country “are performing horrifying experiments on children”

08/31/22 9:29 PM EDT

Tucker Carlson suggests Mississippi water crisis was intentionally caused by the mayor of Jackson as part of a plot to radicalize the city

08/31/22 9:00 PM EDT

Jeanine Pirro says the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago was “a blatantly political move” meant to influence the midterm election

08/31/22

---

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-suggests-government-wants-put-chemicals-milk-turn-kids-trans

---

---

antidote to pink pill? bad faith coward ducks hearing

girl blood of pal

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/andy-biggs/

Andy Biggs (R-AZ), the former chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, announced he is boycotting Wednesday’s House hearing on gun violence, claiming it exploits children.

The hearing, which is currently being held, is focused on the victims and survivors of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, in which 29 people in total, including 19 elementary school children, were killed.

“I will not be physically attending the first panel of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s hearing on gun violence today,” said Congressman Biggs, who sits on that committee. “I object strongly to the Democrats’ exploitation of children who have been victimized so recently in Uvalde.”

In a statement, Rep. Biggs accused House Democrats of exploiting “children who have been victimized so recently in Uvalde.”

USA Today reports the child who is testifying is “Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old who smeared herself with her slain friend’s blood to play dead during the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.”

Her father, Miguel, told USA TODAY this week that Miah is sharing her survival story to “make safer schools.”

Biggs claims he has “no objection to holding a congressional hearing that considers crime, violence, and guns in America,” but the “child who is being brought to testify before the Committee this morning was recently victimized and traumatized. The Chair of this committee is re-victimizing and re-traumatizing this child for political purposes,” Biggs says.

No one is being forced to appear before the House Committee, those testifying are appearing of their own free will.

In 2019 Biggs called a Democratic-sponsored gun control bill “unconstitutional.” Earlier this year Biggs bragged he was leading the effort to “curb” the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) “assault on Second Amendment rights.”

Last year at the far right Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Biggs declared his opposition to the Biden administration’s nominee to head the ATF: “The first thing you’ve got to do is stop the guy that’s going to enforce the laws.”

---

---

no lnx

Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game that will rip America apart

Thom Hartmann April 28, 2022

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has declared war on Disney, while his colleague in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott, is on a jihad against the parents of trans children.

This is how fascism progresses through its later stages toward tyranny.

Democracies typically don’t turn into fascist oligarchies by being invaded or losing wars. It usually happens from within, and is driven by an alliance between demagogic politicians, corrupt religious leaders, bigoted street brawlers, and some of the wealthiest people in society.

First, fascists identify groups of people they believe are both vulnerable and sufficiently powerless that they won’t be able to fight back. Typically, these are racial, religious, political or gender/sexuality minorities.

:{:{}:

}:

Enormous efforts go into demonizing the people the fascists have identified; members of the group who’ve committed crimes are heavily publicized, while “think tanks” and fascist allies in the media identify malicious “reasons” for those folks’ “deviance.”

:{:{}:

}:

Efforts by members of the demonized groups to achieve parity or equality in society are characterized as a “theft” of privilege and assets from the majority, legitimizing both verbal, legal, and physical attacks on members of the group.

For example, the billionaire Murdoch family’s top-rated morning show, Fox & Friends, recently wandered into a discussion about white people being “marginalized” by the possibility of our public schools teaching the actual racial history of America.

“[T]hey are not only trying to raise up minorities and make sure the playing field is even,” Brian Kilmeade said, “they’re trying to take down the white culture!”

Kilmeade, in full “White people are the victims!” mode, went on:

“Why are we being marginalized on a daily basis…? And it’s not even subtle! It’s actually out there! It is written in black-and-white!”

It’s played out this way in every democratic country that has fallen to tyranny from within. It’s how it happened in the 1930s in Italy, Germany, Japan and Spain, and today in Hungary, Poland, Egypt, Russia, The Philippines, and Turkey, among others.

More recently, Swanson Food Heir Tucker Carlson went on a rant about the Great Replacement Theory.

After identifying targeted minorities — for today’s GOP that includes Black people, trans kids (and their parents), pregnant women, and Democrats — and encouraging legal and physical violence against them, fascists move to the second major step: seizing enough economic and political power that they can reshape society itself.

This requires bringing in morbidly rich people and enlisting the aid of big business.

So, first, they go after the biggest businesses. One of the biggest businesses in Florida is Disney, so Ron DeSantis tried to get them on his bigoted side. They didn’t go along with it, so now, in typical strongman fashion, DeSantis feels he has to destroy them to save face.

As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1933 election. It brought Hitler to power.

Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was that Jews, gays, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” and were trying to “strip” good white Christian Germans of their “rights” and twist society to conform with their “perverted” ideas and lifestyles.

Hitler blamed the 1933 economic crisis on German minorities, Jews and gays, and accused Germany’s second largest political party of complicity with them; the German people went along with him. Once the Nazis took power, they changed election laws in such a way that they would never again lose.

Republicans and rightwing billionaires, of course, are doing much the same thing right now in America. One wonders if they’ll have the retrospective angst that haunted Thyssen until the day he died. He wrote about it in I Paid Hitler:

“I am not a politician, but an industrialist, and an industrialist is always inclined to consider politics a kind of second string to his bow — the preparation for his own particular activity. In a well-ordered country, where the administration is sound, where taxes are reasonable, and the police well organised, he can afford to abstain from politics and to devote himself entirely to business.

:{:{}:

}:

“But in a crisis-ridden state, as Germany was from 1918 to 1933, an industrialist is drawn, willy-nilly, into the vortex of politics. After 1930 the aspirations of German industry may be summed up in one phrase: ‘a sound economy in a strong state.’ This was, I remember, the slogan of a meeting of the Ruhr industrialists in 1931. …“I, too, approved this slogan, 'To surmount the crisis it was necessary to reinforce the authority of the state.’ … I believed that by backing Hitler and his party I could contribute to the reinstatement of real government and of orderly conditions, which would enable all branches of activity — and especially business — to function normally once again.”

Unlike Thyssen, who volunteered to support Hitler’s rise to power with massive financial and business backing, Disney is pushing back against DeSantis’ efforts to remake society in an American neofascist mode.

Unless they soon cave in, Disney’s executives probably won’t one day write in their memoirs, as Thyssen did in his:

“But it is no use crying over spilled milk. The strong state of which I then dreamed had nothing in common with the totalitarian state or, rather, caricature of a state, erected by Hitler and his minions.

“Not for an instant did I imagine that it was possible, one hundred and fifty years after the French Revolution and the proclamation of the Rights of Man, to substitute arbitrary action for law in a great modern country, to strangle the most elementary rights of the citizen, to establish an Asiatic tyranny in the heart of Europe, and to foster anachronistic aspirations of conquest and world dominion.”

:{:{}:

}:

This is not America’s first brush with oligarchic fascism, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy. President Franklin Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace struggled with it in the 1930s with Charles Lindberg’s infamous Nazi-aligned America First movement.

In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”

Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan.

“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”

As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:

“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

:{:{}:

}:

But Disney refused to use their media platform to advance the fascists’ agenda. It has only, however, slowed them down a bit.

Ultimately, as fascists gain more power and grow bolder, nothing is off the table. This is the threshold we’re approaching today, where they don’t just trash minorities and march through the streets displaying weapons and huge flags, but began asserting justification for violence and even murder.

Alleging crimes against the majority’s children is a fascist favorite, as Hitler charged with his repeated attacks on Jewish teachers, leading 15% of the nation’s teachers and professors (including a guy named Albert Einstein) to flee the country when he began his attacks on education in 1933.

Fascist politicians start alleging the most vile of crimes by the groups they hope to destroy: words like “grooming” roll off their lips with a smarmy ease.

Soon vigilante groups set out to destroy those accused, sometimes politically, sometimes physically.

German Nazis were particularly fond of accusing people they intended to destroy or kill of sexual “crimes.” As Thyssen wrote:

“General von Fritsch’s affair is also a good sample of the peculiar methods used by the Hitler regime. Fritsch was to be ‘liquidated.’ To achieve this, it is said, the head of the Gestapo personally reproached him with practising homosexuality.

“Fritsch, who denied this from the very start, was ordered to call at the chancellery of the Reich, where he was to be unmasked in the presence of the Supreme Leader. … It seems certain that General von Fritsch has subsequently committed suicide. I can at least say that whatever the actual circumstances of his death may have been, he was anxious to die.”

While history usually sides with the victims of fascists, as we’re seeing today with the people Putin is starving to death in Mariupol, that’s small comfort as they confront terror and death.

DeSantis, Abbott and the other Republican neofascists are playing a dangerous game, using Disney as a proxy for the racial and gender minorities they want as whipping boys. It’s a high-stakes political game that has torn societies apart and destroyed millions of lives in the past.

Standing against them are their victims and the Democratic Party, albeit hobbled in their efforts by the perfidy of Manchin and Sinema. This autumn’s elections may well be the last chance for people of good will who believe in American values and eschew fascism to rise in opposition.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, regularly double-check your own registration to make it through a voter purge if you live in a Republican-controlled state, and volunteer to help out inside the Democratic Party or through any of the great groups fighting for a more just America.

Time is short, as Fritz Thyssen and Vice President Wallace would tell you were they alive today.

---

---

aha its rubber glue inverse defense/deflect from border baby jails, the original sin of trump admin?

note ali alex xian nat'l all suddenly? 4/22 they are coming to tear your kids away, cut off genitals?! // //rev ken copeland OK

4 22 rww

Christian Nationalists Gather in Oklahoma to Spread the Big Lie

By Kyle Mantyla | April 22, 2022 

Televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel held a special broadcast of its weekly “Flashpoint” program Thursday night on the campus of Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, where the Christian nationalist host and speakers railed against the outcome of the 2020 presidential election and spread the Big Lie that it had been stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Host Gene Bailey opened by acknowledging the various elected officials who were in attendance, such as Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor, multiple state senators and representatives, as well as various members of law enforcement and local elected leaders. Following the introductions, Bailey led the audience in praying that these leaders “cannot escape” God: “No matter what they do, they’re gonna run right into you.”

Bailey then began the program by declaring that “there’s one thing that I know for sure, and this is the raw truth: The raw truth was on Nov. 3, 2020, President Donald J. Trump won the election.”

“We’re still waiting on the election to be corrected, and we’re not going anywhere,” Bailey. “That election was rigged. It was stolen. But I got news for you, and I got news for you watching on television: There’s thousands of people in this room that say, ‘We’re taking our nation back!'”

“There is an agenda that’s not Democrat versus Republican,” Bailey proclaimed. “The agenda that’s in our nation right now is good versus evil—and I’m not calling any party evil although you can figure out probably where I’m coming from. … If you’re not willing to give up your nation to a woke agenda that’s not left, it’s liberal—it’s so far liberal, it’s out to destroy the very fabric of this nation, rip your children away from your families. … They want to educate your children. They want to take your kids from you. They don’t want you to do anything that resembles Christianity or stand up for what’s right or stand up for what’s truth.”

After leading the audience in a round of cheers and applause for Trump, Bailey was joined on stage by self-proclaimed “prophet” Hank Kunneman, who declared that President Joe Biden belongs in prison for treason.

“The thiefis being found,” Kunneman said. “They’re being exposed by the hand of God.”

“There is a payback coming,” he bellowed. “They’re talking about Biden’s poll numbers, what they really need to be talking about is cell numbers—not phone, prison cell numbers. These guys have committed a crime! They have committed treason against the United States of America and its Constitution. They did not care about you, your pocketbook, or your children, and they want everything inside of their demonic agendato bring you down and this nation. But I’m here to tell you that they are standing against something greater than all of us: It is Almighty God who loves the United States of America, and he loves his church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.”

---

rww 4 22

Ali Alexander, an organizer with the so-called Stop the Steal campaign, told radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Wednesday that “there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny.” The two agreed that now is not the time but began to discuss what would constitute “legitimate tyranny.”

Alexander and Jones are people of interest to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Alexander organized the rallies and strategy of the Stop the Steal campaign, which perpetuated the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump and worked desperately to keep him in power, while Jones and his InfoWars’ crew spoke at the rallies and advertised the campaign on their networks.

In December, Alexander sat for eight hours of testimony in front of the House select committee and threw fellow rally organizers, Amy and Kylie Kremer and Katrina Pierson, under the bus;Jones says he pled the Fifth when he met with the committee. Last Friday, Alexander told the New York Times through a lawyer that he would cooperate with the Department of Justice in its investigation of the attack. But by Tuesday, Alexander joined Jones on “InfoWars” to suggest he would never do so.

On the Wednesday edition of “InfoWars,” Alexander repeated part of his conspiracy theory that he shared with Jones the day prior: that the Jan. 6 investigations were part of a “deep state” plot to get rid of elections, the Republican Party, and Christians, with the goal to usher in a “stateless New World Order.” A civil war orchestrated by the deep state would be central to this effort, according to Alexander. In response to Jones asking how to avoid such a civil war, Alexander suggested viewers pray, before discussing “legitimate violence.”

“The second byproduct of prayer is that it makes us sane,” Alexander said. “So when we’re getting this deluge of persecution, we’re not saying, in our gut primal level, ‘We need to go bomb something, we need to go shoot something’; it’s ‘I will not give them an inch or become the monster they want us to become.’”

“Now, folks, I’m going to say something really crazy,” Alexander continued. “I’m not going to deny that the people have the right of revolution. I’m not going to deny 1776. I’m not going to deny there is a time for legitimate violence when there is legitimate tyranny. And by the way, the Declaration of Independence even outlines—”

“Says it’s your right and duty,” Jones interrupted. “But they are just losing right now, we’re winning politically. We don’t want to do it yet, but you’re not denying we have the right.” 

“Right,” Alexander replied. “I’m not denying the—I’m saying it’s not the time now, that’s for sure.” 

“But it’s definitely a card we have in our hand we’re allowed to play,” Jones said.

“Right! Right,” Alexander said. 

“When all else is lost you gotta do it,” Jones said.

“If they start ripping your children from your home and doing reassignment surgeries—” Alexander began.

“Everyone knows when the time is,” Jones interrupted. “The point is,anybody trying to lure you into plots to kidnap governors, anybody who wants you tooffensively attack, that’s not what we do.” 

“Frankly, a discerning mind and a mind in prayer, frankly, would not punch cops at the Capitol, would not  kidnap governors,” Alexander said.

“You know it makes us look bad!” Jones said

“And it won’t be successful,” Alexander said. 

“Not only do I not want to randomly punch cops, it’s dumb!” Jones exclaimed.

“It’s very dumb,” Alexander agreed. “It’s dumb, and it displeases God I think. But you know, these cops need to stop complying with COVID orders and lockdowns and stealing.”

“Yeah, no, they’re putting themselves in that position,” Jones said.

Alexander regularlyuses violent rhetoric and has called for civil war and rebellion. On the eve of the insurrection, Alexander led a Stop the Steal crowd in chants of “Victory or death!” and declared “1776 is always an option.”

As Luke O’Brien reported in HuffPost, Alexander considers violence a “natural right”:

On Twitter, Alexander had called violence a “natural right.” He was a prominent influencer on the platform, with almost 200,000 followers. “I am a sincere advocate for violence and war, when justified,” he tweeted in 2019. “I recognize no law above what is natural and good.” A militant Christianity has permeated his extremism; he has spoken often about being an agent of God.

Tags: Alex Jones Ali Alexander Capitol Insurrection conspiracy theories Jan. 6 violent rhetoric InfoWars

---

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/candace-owens/candace-owens-there-are-freaks-predators-and-pedophiles-are-all-hiding-under-lbgt

---

---

// raw milk gubmint fight?

maga q vaxxers self ID as good marks for grift, so they are targets for extraction?  will pay for simple immediate  solution?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/these-anti-vaxxers-and-wellness-influencers-have-been-applauding-putins-ukraine-invasion-report/

no lnx

These anti-vaxxers and ‘wellness influencers’ have been applauding Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion: report

Alex Henderson March 25, 2022

Support for Russian President Vladimir Putin is by no means universal on the America right. Many conservatives, from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to media Never Trumpers like The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and the Washington Post’s Max Boot, have been blistering critics of Putin — especially during the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Yet in the MAGA cult, Putin has had his share of apologists — from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to “War Room” host Steve Bannon to former President Donald Trump. And Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler, in an article published on March 24, focuses on a bizarre trend: far-right anti-vaxxers and online “wellness influencers” who have become cheerleaders for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Butler previously reported on pro-Putin anti-vaxxers in a March 2 article, and since then, the Mother Jones journalist stresses,the “overlap” between pro-Putin propagandists and anti-vaxxers “has only grown.”

“(On March 19), the Toronto Star reported a startling correlation between vaccination status and beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Butler explains. “More than 80% of vaccinated Canadians said they believed their country should help defend Ukraine, compared to less than a quarter of unvaccinated people. This dynamic is especially pronounced in extremist spaces. Some of the anti-mandate trucker convoy chats on Telegram now seem dominated by Putin cheerleading.”

Some online “wellness influencers,” according to Butler, have been claiming that President Joe Biden is “trying to pull a fast one on them by painting Russia as the aggressor” in Ukraine.

“Should social media platforms flag influencers’ content as disinformation,” Butler observes, “it only serves to reinforce their belief that they are being punished for their righteous truth-telling. Some influencers have monetized their self-proclaimed martyrdom by sharing disinformation about Ukraine and hawking their own wellness items.”

twt

Instagram, according to Butler, is one of the social media platforms where pro-Putin anti-vaxxers and “wellness influencers” have been plentiful.

“Beyond the oils and the tinctures, influencers are selling something much more valuable: a sense of fierce and uncompromising maternal identity,” Butler observes. “The account bios frequently mention natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting — and their posts and stories tie events in Ukraine back to defending their families from what they see as government overreach.”

Anti-vaxxers who are sympathetic to Putin, Butler writes, are also more likely to be influenced by the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon.

“Factions of anti-vaccine groups increasingly embraced COVID denialism and dabbled in QAnon,” Butler notes. “The Russians’ initial plan of dividing Americans had worked better than they could have possibly expected — so that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, anti-vaccine activists were primed to believe that Putin was the good guy.”

---

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-chyron-liberals-are-sexually-grooming-elementary-students

3 22

---

pink pill hype fear conspiracy qanon

https://www.mediamatters.org/laura-ingraham/fox-news-chyron-liberals-are-sexually-grooming-elementary-students

3 22

fox News propagandist Laura Ingraham has been called a “monster” by her own brother, who is gay.

“Our father was a Nazi sympathizer, racist, anti-Semite and homophobe,” Curtis Ingraham wrote, as NBC News reported in 2018. “Like father like daughter?”

Last year the highest-ranking Republican elected official in North Carolina came under fire for declaring LGBTQ people are “filth.” Not only was it vile and anti-American, but it was also done by dredging up an old trope, a disgusting lie, suggesting that gay people are pedophiles.

Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, a Christian nationalist, said: “there’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”

Last week the taxpayer-paid press secretary to Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis went all-in on the pedophilia lie, defending the anti-LGBTQ legislation her boss is expected to soon sign.

“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Christina Pushaw announced.“If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of four eight-year-old children. Silence is complicity. This is how it works, Democrats, and I didn’t make the rules.”

The anti-LGBTQ and anti-left lies are back, being promulgated now by some of the most powerful propagandists in the country. Things are getting dangerously worse for LGBTQ people across America.

Freedom for All Americans, a “bipartisan campaign to secure full nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people nationwide,” lists dozens of anti-LGBTQ bills currently in state legislatures across the country. Their passage becomes increasingly assured when propagandists like Laura Ingraham promote vile, hateful tropes about LGBTQ people, even when they mask them by extending it to “liberals.”

Wednesday night Ingraham once again proved her brother right.

“LIBERALS ARE SEXUALLY GROOMING ELEMENTARY STUDENTS” read the chyron on an “Ingraham Angle” segment.

Watch:

Ingraham began by airing clips of two people who viewers likely were expected to believe are school teachers, even though they apparently aren’t. One is just someone on a streaming service who never says she’s a teacher. The other says she’s “in pre-school,” so not a public elementary school teacher.

Those facts don’t matter to propagandists, like Ingraham, who ran those clips then immediately says:

“When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?” Ingraham asks (video below), as Media Matters reports. “As a mom, I think it’s appalling, it’s frightening, it’s disgusting, it’s despicable. Florida just passed a bill to keep this type ofsexual brainwashing out of schools. Democrats, though, claim the bill is bigoted, branding it as the ‘Don’t Say Gay Bill.’ Well, nice try. The real controversy, though, isn’t this bill. It’s that schools are peddling gender ideology when our international rankings in math, science, and reading are down across the board.”

As she introduces her guest, the chyron changes to read: “DEMS HAPPY TO RUN ON PRO-GROOMING PLATFORM.”

No facts, nothing to back up those claims, just outrageous, dangerous defamation.

---

---

interesting evil perversion so to spk on a YA? novel coming out coming of age bk not on any curric but avail in some schools fuelling CRT school bd BS

they call it child porn when it clearly ain't; eternal bad faith question

---

can't make it up, you da thunk the wd have learned from prev ridicule?  BigBird sacred? vaxx

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/ted-cruz-2655516694/

---

aha hmmn bookers just poach other shows?

...

Moms for Liberty regularly boosts the Heritage Foundation

Moms for Liberty also appears to be affiliated with -- or at least a frequent promoter of -- the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Koch-funded think tank with a history of attempting to influence public education.

According to a recent report by the UnKoch My Campus campaign on “ultra right think tanks and critical race theory,” the Heritage Foundation and other groups have “used their influence to generate and spread talking points, briefed state and federal legislators on model policy, and attempted to generate grassroots mobilization against local school districts.”

The “resources for parents” page on Moms for Liberty’s website is almost exclusively composed of links to the Heritage Foundation.The page first directs parents to a “Heritage Action for America” guide to filing an open records request. Next, the page directs parents to the Leadership Institute -- an organization run by Morton Blackwell, who received the Heritage Foundation’s “Titan of Conservatism Award.” The Heritage Foundation’s website is listed as the next resource. After that, the Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution is listed.

The Heritage Foundation has spent much of 2021 using scare tactics to boost opposition to CRT, publishing commentary, reports, and even a legislation tracker on the issue.

---

aha 2020 election? preceded by what seemed nonsense non-issues dr suess and potatohead = moral panic = indoctrination of kids

---

palin hockey mom and grizzly lipstick?

---

va gov CRT BS an extension of below? // mask vaxx?

---

---

a niche for anyone who has procreated?

https://www.mediamatters.org/critical-race-theory/professional-conservatives-find-path-victory-ginned-outrage-over-critical-race

Born in a constellation of right-wing think tanks, the outrage against “critical race theory” spent over a year in the metastasizing embrace of right-wing media, churning up hatred against discussions of race in schools.

As this deceptive marketing reached a fever pitch, there was an explosion in Facebook groups being formed or shifting their focus to opposing critical race theory in schools. These groups were a nexus for supporters to organize in-person disruptions at school board meetings.

This astroturfed frenzy against supposed CRT in schools led to threats and harassment against school board members nationwide, and, in Virginia, helped propel Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s mansion.

Assigning national importance to a statewide election can be reckless; anti-CRT outrage did not prevail everywhere in the 2021 election. But for the effort and money that conservative activists and media put into defining the Virginia gubernatorial race with critical race theory, it is clear that these charlatans will attempt to export the Virginia playbook nationally in 2022 and beyond[twt.]

as Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who helped launch the campaign, has explained, the goal is to “put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category” so that people “read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’” Other right-wing institutions and groups, like the Heritage Foundation, joined in the fray with events, activist toolkits, model legislation, and pushes for bans made in concert with lawmakers.

From there, advocacy groups use this think tank framework to generate local outrage against critical race theory.[IT'S A FRANCHISE MODEL?! MLM?] According to an NBC News analysis, there are now “at least 165 local and national groups that aim to disrupt lessons on race and gender,” and several of the most prominent ones are headed by Republican activists and strategists. These groups cram local controversies into the CRT framework established by Rufo and others, disrupt school board meetings, and place spokespeople in media appearances -- sometimes professional spokespeople, who are instead described as local parents.

The noise and attention from these professionally operated, think tank-inspired groups then generates coverage from an obsequious and obsessive right-wing media, champing at the bit for any angle that will hurt Democrats and help Republicans. Empowered by the outrage suddenly all over TV -- to the tune of hundreds of Fox mentions per month, plus loads more from OAN and Newsmax -- GOP politicians find incentive to take legislative action to drastically limit the teaching of civil rights, sometimes even banning books altogether. [AND WORDS]

This feedback loop is a concerted strategy whose first trial run was the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. It is not a grassroots movement, it is not a natural response to alleged left-wing excesses, and it is not about what is best for children. It is a top-down attempt by professional political operatives to morph political landscapes to suit their racially regressive needs. And, at least in Virginia, it seems to have worked. [twt.]

as Rufo promised, the professional outrage against critical race theory has only just begun. As the next election looms, critical race theory (or similardog whistles like “parents’ rights”) will suddenly get thousands of TV mentions again, and professional GOP operatives will again call themselves mere concerned parents. Think tankers may even publicly discuss their exact plans again, because they know it won’t cause any harm; enough of the mainstream media will still cover these anti-CRT outrages as grassroots “education” issues, instead of what they are: a think tank astroturf project.

---

---

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/qanon/

no lnx

'Lost sheep': Conspiracy theory expert says QAnon believers are being swallowed by 'mass radicalization'

Jacob Chansley, dubbed 'The QAnon Shaman'/Channel 4 News screenshot]

Chauncey DeVegaand Salon November 03, 2021

America's mainstream news media has a short attention span [cits have /voters have of golden retriever], which has certainly played to the advantage of the long-running Republican-fascist assault on democracy (and on reality). Of late, the media has grown bored with QAnon, the antisemitic and racist conspiracy cult which claims to believes that a secret cabal of pedophile Democrats and other members of the "deep state" run the world — and gain superpowers from kidnapping and killing children and then ingesting their vital essence. In this demented worldview, only Donald Trump and other "patriots" can save America and the world.

It appears that QAnon followers played a significant role in the attack on the Capitol and coup attempt on Jan. 6. No leaders of that coup plot have been apprehended or punished, and most of the foot soldiers have received relatively lenient punishment to this point. President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland appear reluctant to apply the full power of the law to punish Donald Trump, along with his allies, operatives and followers.

QAnon followers are also attempting to undermine American democracy and civil society by infiltrating such "vulnerable" sites as local school boards, library committees and other ground-level institutions of local and state government. Their purported goal may be to ban the teaching of "critical race theory" (which is not taught in public schools), but the real goal is larger: to enforce punishment of "unpatriotic" thoughtcrimes, and to mainstream right-wing conspiracy theories and other lies about American history.

QAnon followers are also seeking to become election officials, where they are planning to use the fervor around Trump's Big Lie and other conspiracy theories to rig election results, overthrow multiracial democracy and replace it with one-party Republican rule.

In an article posted last June, the National Education Association explored the QAnon-fueled "radicalization" of school boards in communities all over America:

In a small town in Washington State, the newly elected mayor calls QAnon, "a truth movement," and recently fired the town's skeptical city manager. In coastal San Luis Obispo, California, a school board trustee's Facebook posts include a QAnon video, misinformation about COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, and promotion of the ex-gay, conversion movement. She won, says the town's mayor, who is calling for her resignation, because "people had no idea this was going on," and didn't have the "bandwidth to research the school board election," reports the local newspaper, the Tribune.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a newly elected county sheriff is now explaining why he posed for photos last year with a supporter in a "We are Q" t-shirt.

Across the county, conspiracy theorists and proponents of fake news are winning local elections. And their new positions give them a powerful voice in everything from local law enforcement to libraries, trash pickup to textbook purchases.

QAnon followers are also gaining influence and power within white Christian evangelical churches and other faith communities. This is integral to the worsening radicalization of white Christianity and the threat of a right-wing "holy war" against Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black and brown people and anyone else who believes in the separation of church and state, or who holds values and beliefs deemed "un-American" or "anti-Christian."

Public opinion polls and other research show that a large percentage of Republicans and Trump followers say they believe in at least portions of the outlandish QAnon fantasy and — not coincidentally — are also willing to support right-wing political violence to protect their "traditional way of life" and "save the country." This includes removing President Joe Biden from office by violent means if deemed necessary.

Matthew Rozsa of Salon summarized these findings this week:

New public opinion research from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, part of its 12th annual American Values Survey, has returned alarming findings.

Close to one-third of Republicans in the survey, or 30%, agreed with the statement that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country." That was more than the combined total of Democrats and independents who say the same thing (at 11% and 17%, respectively).

PRRI CEO and founder Robert Jones said the large proportion of Republicans who appear ready to endorse political violence is "a direct result of former President Trump calling into question the election." Jones noted that according to the same survey, more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, as opposed to only 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats.

The study also found that 39% of those who believed that Trump had won the 2020 election endorsed potential violence, compared to only 10% of those who rejected election misinformation. There were also signs of a split based on media consumption, with 40% of Republicans who trust far-right news sources agreeing that violence could be necessary, compared to 32% of those who trust Fox News and 22% among those who trust mainstream outlets. In addition, respondents who said violence may be necessary are more likely to report feeling like strangers in their country, to say American culture has mostly worsened since the 1950s and to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history.

:{:{}:

}:

Sophia Moskalenko is a social psychologist and expert on conspiracy theories, radicalization and extremism. She is currently a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) and is the author of several books, including "Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us" and "The Marvel of Martyrdom: The Power of Self-Sacrifice in the Selfish World." Her new book, with co-author Mia Bloom, is "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon."

In this conversation Moskalenko discusses the dangers QAnon poses to American democracy and national security. She explains that QAnon is a community where overwhelmingly white and often socially alienated followers find fellowship and meaning as they are radicalized into extremism and other potentially dangerous antisocial behavior. In her view, QAnon functions as a space that nurtures and satisfies white fantasies of right-wing masculinity, femininity, violence and heroism about "protecting" children and reasserting "traditional values".

Toward the end of this conversation, Moskalenko explains what she would tell Joe Biden and other senior members of the administration about the threats posed by right-wing terrorism, as well as about the ways hostile foreign powers are using disinformation and other forms of propaganda to weaken American democracy and society.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You are an expert on terrorism and other forms of political extremism. You are also an expert on propaganda and disinformation. How are you feeling right now, given America's democracy crisis?

I've been feeling a little bit like Cassandra, the woman in Troy who was yelling as loud as he could about the city falling to ruin, and everybody was laughing at her. Then of course her warnings came true. It doesn't feel good. There was so much attention being paid to Islamic terrorism after 9/11. Unfortunately, there was not enough attention being paid to the trends right here in the United States domestically. This was all very alarming for somebody such as me who is an expert on terrorism and radicalization. These trends pointed to how right-wing groups were attracting more people and carrying out more and more lethal attacks.

There were people in positions of power and influence here in the United States who were beginning to pander increasingly to these groups. And of course, Trump's presidency was a type of pinnacle for that behavior. Those appeals to right-wing extremist groups are now crystallized in congressional representatives who are outspoken supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

There was also Trump's line after the riots in Charlottesville about "good people on both sides," which implies that maybe Nazis aren't so bad. This problem has been developing for a long time.

When you looked at the events of Jan. 6, what did you see? What jumped out at you?

I'm a psychologist, so I focused on the emotions that I observed in the faces, the screams and the actions of the Trump followers who were there that day at the Capitol.

It was just striking to me how angry and violent and ready to inflict serious damage a lot of those people were. On Jan. 6, I saw a huge crowd of people who look just like my neighbors but who were acting in a very threatening and menacing way. It was disturbing. I also, of course, saw many QAnon symbols and antisemitic symbols and other references to hate groups.

I was also struck by the composition of the people at the Capitol on Jan. 6. They were very diverse in terms of age and gender. From the Arab Spring to images from the Ukrainian revolution or Georgian revolution, we mostly see men carrying out these mass radical actions. But on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, we saw a lot of women. There were many young people and also people in their 60s and 70s. That is very unusual, in many ways, as far as radical movements go.

There were various right-wing extremist groups and other forces involved in the events of Jan. 6. What role did QAnon conspiracy believers play?

We know that between 10% and 20% of people present at the Jan. 6 insurrection were members of right-wing militia groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. A sizable proportion of those groups also consisted of active-duty military or veterans. Those militia groups also include active or retired police.

As for QAnon members, after Jan. 6 when the prophecy about Trump's return was unfulfilled, a number of QAnon followers became disenchanted. They went back online looking for answers, like they did before they found QAnon. Now they are looking for something else.

There was a concerted effort by the right-wing extremist groups to bring them in, because they were like lost sheep. The way these groups and individuals talk about the QAnon types is very dismissive. They call them idiots. They call the QAnon prophecy nonsense. But they felt this was an opportunity to recruit a bunch of disenchanted QAnoners into their ranks.

We know that both QAnon and the right-wingers I am discussing here are very antisemitic and racist. Whatever they may say about it, we know from the data we have collected from their own materials that they express clearly antisemitic and racist attitudes. In that aspect there is an overlap, at least psychologically, between QAnon and these right-wing extremists.

"I am Q." We see that language everywhere among the QAnon believers. What is the meaning?

"Q" is a mysterious person, or likely several people. This person or persons has "Q-level" government clearance, which indicates they are supposedly quite high in America's intelligence hierarchy. So while a given person may claim to be "Q," another way of thinking about the meaning of "Q" is that it is an expression of a larger identity.We are in the era of identity politics. Wearing some clothing that announces that one believes in QAnon is a way of projecting that membership and identity.

Wearing that symbol is also a way to connect to other QAnon followers. Because again, especially at these mass rallies or events, people come there for many different reasons, including a shared emotional experience, whether it's rage or hope or even fear. That is the attraction of being together with all these other people who are experiencing the same emotions – even if they are negative emotions. It's a way of establishing your tribe. In a rapidly changing world where we often do not know who our neighbors are, it can be very isolating and very unsettling to not have a tribe.

Carrying something like a big letter "Q" on your chest or over your head is likely an attempt to feel connected with other people who believe similar things.

One key aspect of QAnon is how it is a space forwhite male fantasies of power, home and family, and about using violence to "protect" children, women, faith and community. QAnon is also a space for fantasies about a particular type of white womanhood and femininity.

:{:{}:

}:

Much of QAnon behavior and beliefs arerooted in entertainment. In fact, they borrowed many of their tropes from traditional folklore, like vampires and witches, and also from Hollywood movies. Experimental research has shown that people are compelled to conspiracy theories because they are a lot better at eliciting strong emotions. Some people seek out conspiracy theories because they offer a chance to feel fear, like a horror movie, or anger, such as in a revenge movie.

At the same time, QAnon fills a void that was created when single-earner households where the dad goes to work and the mom stays home in her white little apron were increasingly not viable for most Americans. Such an idea, that a lot of white middle-class men and women grew up with, is no longer available to them. What is left behind are feelings of disillusionment, anger, grievance.

Of course, many of these grievances are then redirected by these QAnon or right-wing narratives more broadly towardsimmigrants who are supposedly taking the good jobs or taking money out of the economy that would have been enough to make the American dream possible for "real" Americans. Channeling that anger into a hatred toward minorities or immigrants is one way to make sense of their new reality.

QAnon is also a fantasy of action and about the ability of individuals to have agency in their own lives— albeit in delusional, dangerous and unhealthy ways. For example, this deranged belief that children are being held hostage by evil forces who drink their blood is likely to encourage people to get their weapons and go save them. How do these QAnon fantasies play out on the individual level?

QAnon really grew in power and popularity when the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter protests were also becoming more prominent. For a lot of women, it was an uncomfortable political conversation that they did not feel ready to have. This idea about saving children then became a safe political alternative for white suburban women to discuss. In their minds, who wouldn't want to save the children?

These QAnon "save the children" ads often portray white children who are being held roughly or muzzled by dark hands. It's a man of color holding this child. This is in contrast to the real Save the Children charity's posters, which overwhelmingly depict children from African and Asian countries who are smiling and laughing in the pictures. By comparison, the QAnon pictures show horrified, abused and generally unkempt kids who elicit sympathy and distress by their appearance alone.

These QAnon "save the children" ads are just a kind of placeholder, I believe, to project their racial discomfort and political beliefs with people who feel the same way — and to do without really calling things by their actual name.

How do you assess the Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement's use of stochastic terrorism? Are we at a tipping point where that stochastic terrorism could become direct encouragements to violence against "the enemy"?

I believe that we are past the tipping point. Hate speech has been increasing for a number of years. I published a book in 2018 where I traced trends for hate speech online, including on Facebook and Twitter. There was a very sizable increase since before the 2016 election, with hate speech becoming more and more prevalent.

For example, the rise of Nazism involved the use of dehumanizing language and other propaganda comparing Jewish people and others to vermin and cockroaches. Jews were depicted as being less than human, which makes it easier to call on people to exterminate them.

:{:{}:

}:

The language used by the Nazis might sound familiar in the present because it's also what we hear from places like OAN or Fox News about immigrants, especially in the context of COVID. As seen with the increasing number of attacks against the Asian and Asian American communities, we can see how such hate speech has an impact.

The question is now whether we will see more mass events such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, which require coordination, movement across the country, money and other resources. I am really hoping that the authorities who are tasked with preventing another such event are doing their jobs.

Donald Trump and his spokespeople and other agents have created a martyrs out of his follower who was killed by law enforcement in the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Trumpists and right-wing propaganda media are now referring to members of Trump's attack force as "political prisoners," who are by implication innocent and heroic.How do you explain to the public the importance of this narrative and the political work it is doing?

This is a classic move. We saw it in Nazi Germany. We also saw it in the Soviet Union. Mythologized martyrdoms manufactured sometimes literally out of nothing. In Nazi Germany before World War II, they created a fake martyr out of a man named Horst Wessel. He became a huge martyr, and it was completely fabricated.

Martyrdoms in general are a hugely potent mass radicalization weapon. A martyr always inspires followers who will make self-sacrifices of their own. And it always challenges opponents to prove that their values are not morally bankrupt and that they too can pay the cost in blood to support the cause they believe in. There is always conflict in the wake of a martyrdom, including a fake martyrdom.

What Donald Trump and his spokespeople are doing is capitalizing on the potential of right-wing martyrdom. Whether or not this is going to catch on like Horst Wessel's did depends on how ready the public is to carry the banner of fake martyrdom. Because any martyrdom is always a symphony between the individual and the public, even a true martyr will not inspire followers if they are not ready to make sacrifices in the name of the cause.

A fake martyr, on the other hand, can appeal to millions, as in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Union, if they are ready to jump on the bandwagon and express their rage in the name of the martyr.

What are you most concerned about in this crisis and going forward?

I am most concerned about mass radicalization and the related hatred and intolerance.

What advice would you give President Biden and other senior leadership?

Try not to pay attention to red herrings. Things like QAnon are a red herring. Try to not lose the forest for the trees. We have a massive right-wing radicalization problem in the United States where the followers are mobilized and armed and actively training. They have military or police training. They are also actively recruiting from those ranks. The resources should be going to confront that problem.

Do not discount the influence of malicious foreign actors, such as Russia and China. They are a lot more experienced with the weaponization of information and concocting propaganda narratives that are going to spread like wildfire and sow discord and mobilize people. The United States needs to catch up with their capabilities in that regard, and to protect ourselves in a way that we are not doing right now.

We need to do better with the social media giants about holding them accountable for what is taking place on their platforms.That means we need to demand that they become a lot more transparent, such as by sharing how they use algorithms and who they allow to dominate the discourse. At the moment, it's a complete black box. We need to hold those huge business entities responsible. They're like a type of public square — they need to be regulated.