Boebertbak
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see 3a atlantic and some new stuff
7 25 this is very long some rep? lots of qanon? no wiki?
SEE TWO
MERRI OK
see ALT FACT POST TRUTH
boosted by GOP pol?
OBVIOUSLY CONSPIRACY QANON
SEE TROLL CAUCUS // MTG
FACEBOOK SOCIAL MEDIA
PRO PUTIN ~ UKRAINE
GINNI?
TRUMP
8/20 tag qnon
bak primary 4/20 covid BS
SEE QANON 2? 5/20 ON PLANDEMIC/COVID GENESIS PT --> JNZ
boosted beto shooter bs
fox/ bad trinity role? // TP?
bak 1219
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an 12 23
the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.
According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.
"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.
"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.
Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.
Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."
The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/reality-might-no-longer-be-an-option-reporter-details-the-cognitive-dissonance-trump-defenders-grapple-with-in-support-of-the-president/
One of the most jarring aspects of watching Fox News or One America News Network is the mental gymnastics President Donald Trump’s supporters must perform in his defense. Being a Trump supporter often means defending the indefensible. Journalist Anne Applebaum describes those extremes in an article published in The Atlantic on September 25, stressing that their defenses of the president require a total defiance of logic and reason.
Applebaum cites Trump loyalist William B. Crews as one of the wildest examples. Crews, Applebaum notes, was an employee of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci. Crews, the Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markey recently reported, was angry because Fauci’s messages on the coronavirus pandemic sometimes conflicted with what Trump had to say — and Crews responded by attacking Fauci on the Red State website using the pen name “Streiff.”
As “Streiff,” Applebaum notes, Crews also defended Trump on everything from the Ukraine scandal to the George Floyd protests.
“Nothing that (Crews) wrote was clever or surprising,” Applebaum explains. “Day after day, he produced boringly predictable pablum — the sort of average-vile stuff pumped out on Fox or Breitbart News all the time. The only thing remarkable about this writing is that Crews was doing it while simultaneously being employed by a government body whose most important task is to fight exactly the kinds of conspiracy theories he was producing.”
Another example of a Trump supporter who has gone to insane lengths to defend the indefensible, according to Applebaum, is Michael Caputo,former Trump-appointed spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo, Applebaum observes, “was caught meddling with scientific reports on the pandemic put out by the CDC, which, like Fauci’s agency, is part of HHS. He then posted a Facebook video claiming that scientists at the CDC were plotting ‘sedition’ and worse.”
Applebaum quotes Caputo as saying, “You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going. There are hit squads being trained all over this country. If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
The “cases” of Crews and Caputo, Applebaum writes, indicate “that people whose jobs require them to provide ‘alternative facts’ on a regular basis might eventually break under the strain. Maybe there is a price to be paid, in loss of mental clarity, for supporting the fantasy world needed to sustain this president.”
Trumpworld, Applebaum warns, has become so unhinged that even supporters of the far-right QAnon cult are now welcome in the GOP.
“In order to make sense of the world they can see all around them, (QAnon) have created an elaborate and obviously false explanation — that an omniscient Trump is fighting a cabal of deep-state Satanists and pedophiles,” Applebaum observes. “No wonder Republicans, instead of shunning QAnon believers, are working to elect some of them to Congress in November. They genuinely serve a function, helping Trump supporters navigate the gap between the reality they live in and the fiction they see on Fox and Facebook.”
Applebaum wraps up her piece by warning that if Trump wins a second term in November, his administration could become even more divorced from reality.
“Voters can still choose to grapple with reality — to read real news, to seek accurate information, to use our daily experience as a guide before deciding what to believe —without fear,” Applebaum stresses. “But for people like ‘Streiff’ — people who actually work in this administration, and people who would choose to work in a second Trump Administration — reality might no longer be an option.”
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an 920 also joni ernst
Thom Tillis, R-N.C., on Thursday
that he believed the 200,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the U.S. had been inflated in order to “encourage people to use social distancing.”
“When the final accounting is done,” the actual COVID-19 death count will be lower, Tillis claimed.
The response echoes a false conspiracy theory pushed by adherents of the baseless QAnon movement: that public health officials are allegedly lying to the public about the true death count because of ulterior or possibly sinister motives. Only 6% of the reported deaths are attributable solely to COVID-19, conspiracy theorists claim.
Tillis also embraced an extreme anti-vaccine position and appeared to welcome herd immunity as part of a strategy to get 60% of the country immune. (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said last month that a herd immunity strategy would lead to an “enormous” death rate that would be “totally unacceptable.”) The Republican incumbent told the caller that she was “absolutely right” in saying “the CDC has made clear” that deaths related to COVID-19 cover “things like heart attacks, and slip-and-falls and things like that” when people “have COVID in their system.” The caller told Tillis she wanted “a more definitive, clear number.”...
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/johnny-enlow-marries-seven-mountains-dominionism-to-the-qanon-conspiracy-theory/
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-nominates-another-qanon-candidate-this-one-for-senate-seat/
GOP Nominates Another QAnon Candidate—This One for Senate Seat
By Jared Holt | September 16, 2020 11:04 am
(Screenshot / Twitter)
In a double-digit victory, Lauren Witzke won the Republican ?primary election ?for Delaware?’s U.S. Senate seat last night, defeating? opponent James DeMartino, ?who was backed by the state Republican Party. Witzke will be facing Democratic Sen. Chris Coons in the general election this November.
Media Matters includes Witzke in its running list of candidates who have supported the outlandish ?but dangerous QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that President Donald Trump is secretly battling a network of satanic pedophiles connected to prominent business, political, and entertainment influencers who are? allegedly trafficking children. Media Matters notes that Witzke has tweeted a QAnon slogan and has been photographed wearing a QAnon t-shirt. Earlier this year, Witzke attempted to distance herself from the ?QAnon ?movement.
Witzke’s campaign has been marked by its closeness to extremists. Witzke? is campaigning on a staunch anti-immigration platform, calling for a 10-year halt on immigration into the United States, and has associated with ?white nationalists. She was endorsed by Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, who has his own longtime ties to far-right nationalists. And although the Delaware Republican Party endorsed her primary opponent, she claimed on Twitter in February that members of the state’s GOP had “been really good” to her.
RWW revealed in May that Witzke’s then-campaign manager Michael Sisco displayed an affinity for far-right figures and anti-Semites, and had once proposed implementing royal rule in the United States as a means of driving Jews out of positions of power. Since our reporting, Sisco appears to have left Witzke’s campaign team.
Right Wing Watch first encountered Witzke at a 2019 event billed as the “Deplorables Tour” at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., where Witzke claimed that President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was in accordance with God’s will and that Trump had been anointed by the Lord.
“There has been an assignment to wipe out my generation, but I will not stand by and let this continue. … Our God is a God of order. God establishes the borders of nations. Our nation is built on biblical principles. And there is an agenda for decades to dismantle the unity of our people and to provoke chaos,” Witzke said at the event.
After her win, she thanked white nationalist and anti-Semitic podcaster Nick Fuentes, who congratulated her on the victory.
(Screenshot / Twitter)
She also shared congratulations on Twitter from far-right users, including Gateway Pundit contributor Cassandra Fairbanks, far-right columnist Michelle Malkin, white nationalist organization VDARE, and far-right Twitter account Columbia Bugle.
https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/gop-senate-hopeful-employs-monarchist-and-anti-semite-to-manage-campaign/
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GOP organizations in Texas, Oklahoma, and California are using a flyer with the QAnon slogan to promote pro-Trump events
09/02/20 12:56 PM EDT
q fox
The definitive guide to Fox News' treatment of the QAnon conspiracy theory
08/21/20 11:20 AM EDT
President Donald Trump praises QAnon conspiracy theorists for supporting him
President Donald Trump praises QAnon conspiracy theorists for supporting him
08/19/20 6:41 PM EDT
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https://boingboing.net/2020/09/16/a-major-qanon-hub-has-shut-dow.html
on September 10, 2020, the fact-checking site Logically.ai posted a lengthy and fascinating article into how they tracked down the identity of the man behind the so-called "QMap":
In the world of QAnon, the site qmap.pub is something of a sacred text. It's a site designed to collect Q's posts on other message boards and collate them in a searchable database; over the years, it has grown to include glossaries on themes, profiles on people named across the drops (handily sorted into 'Evil', 'Traitor/Pawn', and 'Patriot'), and even a prayer wall
Most followers of QAnon tend not to visit Q's posts on 8kun and the 'chan' boards where they are initially posted (the vernacular used on those sites is deliberately exclusionary and newcomers are often put off). This makes qmap.pub a crucial port of call for all QAnon information and a major node in how the movement disseminates its lore. The site has been hitting over 10 million monthly users since April of this year.
The man behind the QMap is not the fabled "Q" himself ("Q" is actually rumored to just be 8kun owner Jim Watkins, which would depressingly make a lot of sense). The QMap mastermind is allegedly a New Jersey-based IT specialist in his 40s who has worked for CitiGroup and others; confronted by Bloomberg News, the man insisted he had nothing to say about what he believed was a "patriotic movement to save the country."
As of Saturday, the QMap website was taken down. Hopefully, the same will soon be true of the entire false bullshit QAnon cult movement.
QAnon Key Figure Revealed as Financial Information Security Analyst from New Jersey [Logically.ai]
Who Is Jason Gelinas? QAnon Website Goes Offline After New Jersey Operator Identified [Christina Zhao / Newsweek]
#OPQANON / CONSPIRACY THEORIES / CONSPIRACY THEORISTS / DOXXING / MAGA MADNESS / QANON / THE TRUMP CULT / TRUMP CULTISTS
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/herd-developed-trumps-cult-would-rather-get-19-than-admit-they-were-wrong/
an 920
Herd developed’: Trump’s death cult would rather get COVID-19 than admit they were wrong
Amanda Marcotte / SalonSeptember 16, 2020
Trump was doing spectacularly bad science again, this time during a town hall in Philadelphia hosted by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Tuesday night. The event went about as well for the president as anyone who has been awake during the past four years could have predicted, which raises the important question: Wasn’t his new campaign manager supposed to be *competent*?
When asked about an audio clip captured by journalist Bob Woodward in which Trump talks about the coronavirus pandemic and how much he “wanted to always play it down,” Trump slid right into his don’t-believe-your-lying-ears mode, claiming that he, in fact, “up-played it.” Whatever that means. Then the “very stable genius” currently squatting in the Oval Office rolled out his brilliant plan to lick the coronavirus problem (as transcribed by the invaluable Aaron Rupar of Vox):
TRUMP: It is going away.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Without a vaccine?
TRUMP: Sure. Over a period of time.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And many deaths.
TRUMP: It’s gonna be herd developed.
He also used the phrase “herd mentality.”
Trump’s English comprehension is garbled by decades of being unable to listen to anyone speaking about any topic that doesn’t directly concern his greatness or his personal finances. But he appeared to be talking about the concept of “herd immunity,” which is generally understood to require 70 to 90% of the population to be immune to a given infectious agent. This “let everyone get it” plan has been a favorite of Trump’s from the beginningof the pandemic. Recently, he has hired a borderline quack named Dr. Scott Atlas — a radiologist with no expertise in virology or epidemiology — to keep telling him it’s a good idea. But even Atlas knows this is a crackpot plan, and has so far refused to admit to reporters that he’s the source of Trump’s incoherent muttering about “herd impunity” or “herd magnanimity” or “herd it on the grapevine.” (To be clear: Kidding! He hasn’t said any of those things. At least not yet.)
right now, somewhere around 2% of Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus — which is still a whopping 6.6 million people, more than any other nation on Earth — and of that group, just over 196,000 have died as of Wednesday afternoon. I leave it to readers — who, unlike Trump, didn’t pay someone to take their SATs for them — to figure out how many more people are likely to die if we go with Trump’s brilliant plan of infecting perhaps 35 times as many people with the virus as have now tested positive.
(Or, skip the algebra and read this article from the Washington Post, which estimates that Trump’s “good brain” plan would kill nearly 3 million people}:
Here I thought that Trump had crammed thousands of his followers, without masks, into an indoor rally in Henderson, Nevada, just because he’s a terminal narcissist who prioritizes his insatiable need for applause over the lives of the very swing-state voters he would need to win the election. But hey, it might also be that he’s using the bodies of his own supporters — who tend, on average, to be older and likelier to die of COVID-19 — for his grand experiment in “herd development.”
Move over, Burning Man: It’s time for a new desert festival! Donald Trump’s Coronafest 2020: The drugs aren’t as good, and you’re way likelier to end up dead.
The wild thing is how many people turned up for the dubious pleasures of risking their lives to hear Dr. Bleach-Injector’s whiny, singsong cadence for more than an hour. *Thousands* of people showed up at the Henderson rally, putting it all on the line to show the world that they’re willing to get sick or even die rather than admit it was a bad idea to elect a racist reality-TV host with the moral compass of a serial killer to the highest office in the land.
In the first year of Trump’s presidency, I wrote a piece warning about the powers of rationalization, and suggesting how far Trump supporters would likely go rather than admit they made a mistake in voting for the man in 2016.
“[T]he answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never,'” I wrote in June 2017.
I quote myself only to say that, holy yikes, did I understate the case. No matter how confident I was that Trump supporters would contort themselves into ridiculous pretzels or sign onto outrageous beliefs to justify their 2016 vote, even I had no idea how wacky things could get. Here we are, three years and change later, and this is the lengths Trump voters will go to avoid having to say, “Oops!"[twt/pix/vid?]
or check out this rally in the town of St. George, Utah,which happened a few weeks ago but has now gone viral, due to the I-can’t-believe-this-isn’t-satire aspect of it all. That report doesn’t come from a progressive media outlet of any kind, just the local news station. It features a bunch of angry white people comparing having to wear a face mask to George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis, or claiming that “most child molesters love” masks.
No doubt it’s tempting to dismiss these examples as nut-picking, no different than when right-wingers grab the occasional anarchist-flavored vandal at a Black Lives Matter protest and use him to demonize the whole movement. But the difference is these loons don’t actually sound much different than their beloved president.
Trump has also suggested that people only wear masks to spite him. He was clearly coached by his campaign staff to sound vaguely pro-mask during the Tuesday town hall, his true feelings came out when he kept repeating variations of “a lot of people think the masks are not good.” (When Trump says “some people” or “a lot of people” are saying something, he is just stating his own opinion and, like the incorrigible coward he is, refusing to own it.) And like that “child molester” lady, who is obviously a QAnon follower, Trump loves pushing Q-friendly conspiracy theories, even retweeting a QAnon adherent who recently accused former Vice President Joe Biden of being a pedophile.
Despite all this, Trump’s approval rating sits right around 42 to 44%, and is apparently immovable. The phrase “in for a penny, in for a pound” has never been more relevant. Apparently, anything is better than admitting that the liberals were right that voting for Trump was a bad idea — even getting COVID-19 is preferable to that. That’s why the conspiracy theories must get more baroque all the time, because trying to tell a story in which Trump voters are the good guys is harder than trying to explain to the cops why you have a freezer full of human body parts.
Hell, maybe it was a smart idea for the campaign to throw Trump on TV, thereby guaranteeing that liberals would mock him and the fools who vote for him without mercy. As the past four years have demonstrated, it just makes Trump’s supporters more defensive, and more determined than ever to stick it to the libs one more time. Because heaven forbid that Trump’s 2016 voters should demonstrate a conscience by acting like realgood guys would: Sucking it up, admitting they were wrong and making better choices this November.
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aha: reduction = retaliation = transaction
terministic screen/tunnel vision limits to small number of visible things right here and now self-ish vs larger complex system/ long term; also zero sum
long term means more entities, more events thus more complexity (tho a story can simplify/screen/ change emphasis, make a pattern thus meaning, which then acts as term screen filter to repell conflicting/anomalous/dissonance info )
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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/facebook-allowing-campaign-ditch-face-masks-en-masse-spread
no pix lnx
Facebook is allowing a campaign to ditch face masks en masse to spread
The posts are calling for people to burn and trash face masks on a specific day in September
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM KAYLA GOGARTY
PUBLISHED 09/10/20 10:18 AM EDT
A campaign urging people to burn and get rid of face masks en masse on September 15 has been spreading on Facebook and Instagram, despite multiple state laws and health experts’ guidance to wear them.
As the novel coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, both public officials and health experts have urged people to wear masks to decrease the spread of the coronavirus. Numerous states have also instituted mandates for people to wear masks when in public.
Nevertheless, since at least the beginning of September, posts have spread on Facebook and Instagram calling for a mass rejection of masks on September 15, getting at least tens of thousands of engagements combined. The posts have often used a handful of memes that encourage people to “throw that filthy thing away” or “burn your masks” on September 15 because “we the people have decided that the masks are no longer mandatory.” One such meme was shared by a congressional candidate who supports the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Instagram mask meme1
Facebook mask meme1
Facebook mask meme2
In particular, the campaign and these memes have spread throughout public Facebook groups that have tens of thousands of members combined.
Facebook mask meme groups1
Facebook mask meme groups2
Facebook mask meme groups3
There are also indications that the campaign has spread in private “reopen” Facebook groups and anti-mask groups as well.
Facebook mask meme private groups
Additionally, multiple Facebook events promoting the campaign have popped up and been shared on the platform.
Facebook mask campaign events
The campaign has also appeared on some other platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, with some content using the same Facebook memes and a YouTube video that pushes it even carrying revenue-generating ads.
Facebook has repeatedly served as a vector for coronavirus misinformation, particularly through the groups feature.
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greene ~ dem dropped out
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no lnx pix twet
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/qanon-believing-gop-candidate-threatens-offense-against-the-squad-with-ar-15/
qAnon-believing GOP candidate threatens ‘offense’ against ‘The Squad’ with AR-15
Written by Common Dreams September 13, 2020
The Democratic congressional candidate running in Georgia’s 14th district against Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right proponent of the QAnon conspiracy theory, raised alarm Thursday after Greene suggested Republicans “go on the offense” against progressives in Congress.
In an image posted to her official Facebook page, Greene was shown brandishing an AR-15—the same semi-automatic weapon Kyle Rittenhouse used late last month to shoot three protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two.
The post also included images of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—progressive members of what’s been called “The Squad.”
Greene suggested in her caption that progressives who back Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and far-reaching economic reforms to end sky-rocketing wealth inequality, are “‘Hate America’ leftists” who “want to take this country down.”
“We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” wrote Greene. “Americans must take our country back.”
The post appeared to be a “threatening message” to the congresswomen and the left, Washington Post reporter Rachael Bade tweeted.
“Anyone not realizing that Marjorie Greene really thinks it is justified and patriotic to talk about violently taking out Democrats isn’t actually listening to Marjorie Greene,”tweeted Kevin Van Ausdal, the Democrat running against Greene in November.
Earlier this week, Greene announced on Twitter that she is raffling off her AR-15 to a supporter.
Greene easily won the Republican primary in the district last month, and is widely expected to win the general election.
President Donald Trump called Greene a “future Republican star” last month after her victory, days before giving his tacit endorsement to the QAnon conspiracy theory for which Greene has also expressed support. In June, Politico uncovered footage of Greene espousing Islamophobic views, saying that Muslims such as Omar and Tlaib shouldn’t serve in the U.S. government, and expressing other racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.
In late 2017, Greene recorded a video in which she promoted the QAnon theory, which bizarrely holds—among other things—that Trump was hand-picked by military commanders to take down a global child sex-trafficking ring run by public figures including Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama.
“There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene said in the video.
Greene is one of 15 candidates for public office who have verified Twitter accounts and have promoted QAnon, which has been linked to several violent crimes and has been classified as a domestic terror threat by the FBI.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-new-extremist-racist-cult-is-eating-a-debilitated-gop-alive/
for a certain kind of Republican, it is hard to imagine anything worse than the party founded by Abraham Lincoln transmogrified into the party of Donald Trump. Some of those Republicans have openly abandoned the once Grand Old Party, while others quietly await a reform or restoration. Only a few have acknowledged so far that the authoritarian and racist trends in their party cannot be blamed on Trump alone and were visible well before he took over.
Yet as awful and dangerous as Trump undeniably is, there may be something worse ahead for Republicans. That thing is called QAnon, the online phenomenon that has declared war on an international conspiracy of elitist pedophiles and cannibals, which, of course, doesn’t exist.
The burgeoning movement, supposedly directed by a mysterious government official known as Q, already has established itself as an alternative source of authority within the Republican Party. Congressional candidates who support or endorse QAnon, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, are likely to be sent to Washington from solidly Republican districts where they won primaries. It is astonishing to realize thatnearly 80 QAnon supporters stood for election in this cycle, nearly all of them Republicans.
So what was once regarded as a quaint and kooky conspiracy theory has become a destructive cult, as anyone who has encountered one of its true believers can attest. The durability of their delusion was demonstrated when Pizzagate, the original QAnon conspiracy, was explosively disproved a couple of years ago by one of its most fervent adherents. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle, the poor dupe drove from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., determined to rescue children from the Democratic Party pedophiles. He shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant where they were supposedly held and found nothing except a one-way ticket to prison. His excuse, aside from terminal stupidity, was that he had meant well.
he was lucky nobody got killed.
Since that fiasco unfolded, however, QAnon has grown by the millions, not only in the United States but abroad. And as the cult has grown, it has revealed the truly sinister — and utterly unoriginal — ideology at its core.
“QAnon Is a Nazi cult, Rebranded,” writes Dr. Gregory Stanton, a genocide expert who has served in the State Department and taught at George Mason University.On the JustSecurity website, Stanton explains that QAnon propaganda is overflowing with its own versions of traditional anti-Semitic and conspiratorial themes — notably the blood libel that accused Jews of stealing and murdering Christian children to drain their blood for Passover matzoh, and the hoary claim that Jewish bankers are scheming to take over the world.
Promoted and amplified by the German Nazis and their allies, those absurd slanders motivated the slaughter of millions of men, women and children. Beyond the anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros and other Democrats, it is easy to find gross prejudice and racism on any QAnon message board. Stanton’s analysis is blunt: “The world has seen QAnon before. It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback.”
Like Donald Trump, who appears to be a fan of QAnon because it worships him, and like the Nazis before them, the followers of QAnon seem bent on revenge and retribution for mythical offenses. They babble endlessly about “The Storm” that is coming, by which they appear to mean a coup followed by a bloodbath. That, too, is reminiscent of Nazi style. Maybe they should just call themselves Storm Troopers.
Wherever the QAnon storm originated, it is now clearly a project of the Russian intelligence services, which direct their internet armies to spread and amplify the cult’s messages on Twitter and elsewhere. QAnon adherents are featured on Russia Today, the cable outlet controlled by the Kremlin. The movement’s fervent flag-waving echoes the super-patriotism of the Nazi-controlled Bund during the ’30s, when Germany sought to infiltrate the Republican Party.
While the FBI recently warned against the possibility of widespread violence provoked by QAnon, there has been a slew of murders and other mayhem attributed to the cult’s followers. Its most fanatical devotees are undoubtedly a potential source of trouble if and when their idol Trump loses to Joe Biden.
What may be most disturbing about QAnon — beyond its repulsive ideology, its rejection of rationality, its cult practices and its obvious foreign sponsorship — is that, so far, Republican leaders have failed to repel its ongoing takeover of their party. Indeed, too many have supported QAnon candidates like Greene, who recently brandished a gun to threaten Democratic members of Congress.
Those Republicans had better wake up — or QAnon’s extremist cult will consume their debilitated party.
To find out more about Joe Conasonand read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the
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Amanda B. Rekondwith:
. As the Queen in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” astutely observed, the trick in learning to believing impossible things is simply practice.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/expert-on-genocide-and-anti-semitism-lays-out-the-frightening-parallels-between-qanon-and-hitlers-nazis/
he QAnon conspiracy cult enjoyed a major victory when, on August 11, far-right extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene won a GOP congressional primary in Georgia — and given how overwhelmingly Republican her district is, Greene is likely to win the general election in November and be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021. QAnon, known for their outrageous conspiracy theories, believe that the U.S. government has been infiltrated by an international ring of pedophiles and Satanists and that President Donald Trump was put in power to battle them. And Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch and an expert on the history of anti-Semitism, believes that there are parallels between QAnon’s outrageous views and the views that Nazis promoted in Germany during the 1930s.
Describing QAnon’s views in an article published by Just Security on September 9, Stanton writes, “A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power. Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.”
According to Stanton, there are countless parallels between QAnon’s conspiracy theories and the anti-Semitism that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis promoted in Germany before and during World War II.
“The Nazis worshiped Adolf Hitler as the leader who would rescue the white race from this secret Jewish plot,” Stanton explains. “Nazi ‘stormtroopers’ — storm detachment, Sturmabteilung — helped bring Hitler to power. Nazi Germany went on to conquer Europe and murder 6 million Jews and millions of Roma, Slavs, LGBTQ and other people."
central to Nazi ideology, Stanton notes, was the anti-Semitic 1902 pamphlet, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Stanton stresses that QAnon’s ideology is a “rebranded version” of that pamphlet.
“QAnon purveys the fantasy that a secret Satan-worshiping cabal is taking over the world,” Stanton observes. “Its members kidnap white children, keep them in secret prisons run by pedophiles, slaughter and eat them to gain power from the essence in their blood. The cabal held the American presidency under the Clintons and (former President Barack) Obama, nearly took power again in 2016, and lurks in a ‘Deep State’ financed by Jews, including George Soros — and in Jews who control the media. They want to disarm citizens and defund the police. They promote abortion, transgender rights and homosexuality. They want open borders so brown illegal aliens can invade America and mongrelize the white race.”
Stanton continues, “QAnon true believers think Donald Trump will rescue America from this Satanic cabal. At the time of ‘The Storm,’ supporters of the cabal will be rounded up and executed. The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany, where over 200,000 German QAnon accounts infest the internet.”
Stanton goes on to write that QAnon’s critics “are perplexed at how any rational person could fall for such an irrational conspiracy theory.” But when people are suffering hardships, Stanton explains, they “respond to fear and terror” and “blame their misfortunes on scapegoats” — which is what happened in Germany during the 1930s.
“In the 1930s,” Stanton recalls, “millions of Europeans were unemployed. Violent battles between Nazis and communists raged in city streets. Democratic governments were powerless. Fascist dictators ruled Spain and Italy. Hitler took power in Germany and conquered Western Europe. Stalin’s communists conquered the East. The Hitler-Stalin Pact sealed totalitarian rule over most of Europe. It took World War II and the deaths of millions to defeat the Nazis’ genocidal tyranny, and another 50 years to free the gulags of the Soviet Union.”
Stanton adds that in 2020, it is obvious that QAnon’s influence is growing when a QAnon supporter like Greene is “likely” on her way to Congress and President Donald Trump praises her as a “future Republican star.”
“The world has seen QAnon before,” Stanton warns. “It was called Nazism. In QAnon, Nazism wants a comeback.”
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/08/27/qanon-conspiracy-naomi-seibt-climate-science-deniers
Back in December 2019, two conspiratorial worldviews collided as, for the first time, QAnon’s Q suggested his followers should question anew a topic that, by now, has been considered, and reconsidered, for decades: climate change.
“The Paris Agreement on Climate is Another Scam to Ripoff Taxpayers and Enrich the Politicians,” the Q-Drop (the term QAnon followers use to refer to messages they believe come from some sort of government insider who signs messages with the letter Q) claimed, labeling climate action a “con.”
In May, a second Q-Drop riffed on climate change, with a link to a snarky tweet about science and the Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg by a would-be House Republican who’d lost her primary race in March.
Both of those Q-Drops were picked up by a report commissioned by a coalition of environmental groups and conducted by the research firm Graphika, which found that a group of vocal climate science deniers began using QAnon hashtags in May — and they haven’t stopped since.
“The QAnon movement hasn’t traditionally covered climate change, but in May, when an influential QAnon account tweeted about climate denial, there was a notable and sustained increase of QAnon content shared within the climate denial group,” Michael Khoo, an advisor on disinformation for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, and Melissa Ryan, CEO of CARD Strategies and author of the Ctrl Alt-Right Delete weekly newsletters, wrote in an article published today on Medium.
[pix] Asked and Answered
The questions that Q advanced on climate change have been asked and answered — as essentially all of the burning questions on climate science still churning around in climate denial circles have been.
And today, as the impacts of a warming climate are accelerating, it is very clear that we collectively have little time to spare waiting until those who haven’t been keeping up with, or who refuse to acknowledge, the scientific consensus are convinced. The longer the world waits to slash greenhouse gas pollution, the less chance we collectively have to calm the worst impacts of a warming world, according to the world's top climate experts, and if we don't, climate change could make all of the calamities we’ve faced in 2020 soon pale in comparison.
Q, however, raised different concerns about climate action.
“Who audits where the money goes?” the December Q-Drop asked, linking to an article about the Green Climate Fund, which provides funding to help developing countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to help them meet their Paris Agreement goals.
Nevermind that if you want the audits of the Green Climate Fund alluded to in the Q-Drop, the answer is extraordinarily unmysterious and unglamorous: the audited financial statements are posted online and they’re done by accountants. Nevermind also that the Paris Agreement itself was never fundamentally about the movement of money, but instead involves countries promising to regulate pollution inside their borders — something we’re still continuing to fail to do, both in the United States and worldwide.
And nevermind that the U.S., whose politicians the Q-Drop implies are pocketing money somehow along the way, has nearly walked away from both the Paris Agreement and the Green Climate Fund. That's despite the glaring fact that the U.S. has been the world’s worst climate polluter since 1750, meaning that this country has played the single largest role in causing the very problem that the global climate pact attempts to (somewhat) address.
To turn Q’s question around, one very basic question Q has never answered is who exactly they are — and to what extent, if any, they’ve sought to monetize the power and influence they’ve been busy amassing. “At this point, who's behind it is speculation more than anything,” Ryan told DeSmog.
Another key part of the problem — as ever — is that climate science deniers publicly talk a lot more than others. Whereas in years past, mainstream media was faulted for giving climate science deniers a misleading amount of airtime, today, they’re using social media to achieve the same ends. Graphika’s research found that for every social media post by the vocal climate scientists and environmentalists they studied, the vocal climate science deniers they studied posted four times.
“On average, they observed that the Climate Denial group was about four times ‘louder’ (number of tweets relative to the group size) than the Climate Science group,” Khoo and Ryan, both advisors to a coalition of environmental groups that commissioned Graphika’s research, wrote.
Clutching at Q’s Coattails
Not only is QAnon taking up climate denial, but prominent climate deniers have been taking up QAnon.
“The other thing we see is that the right needs QAnon more and more to amplify their messaging,” said Ryan.
Take, for example,Naomi Seibt, a young German YouTuberwho has questioned climate science and who has worked with the Heartland Institute, a U.S. think tank and notorious promoter of climate science denial.
“So do you want a beautiful planet that you can stare at but that’s it? It’s just like looking at a TV screen,” the Express, a UK newspaper, quoted Seibt as saying in May. “As a climate realist, I don’t deny that we don’t have some negative impact on the planet. But I don’t think that it’s related to CO2 emissions.”
Seibt briefly rose to broader prominence following a Washington Post article about her in February — though she remains far less well-known than Greta Thunberg, the young environmental activist who the Heartland Institute has sought to compare with Seibt. “She reportedlychose not to renew her contractwith [the] Heartland [Institute] in April 2020 after facing potential fines from a regional broadcasting authority,” DeSmog’s profile on Seibt notes.
In addition to speaking about climate, Seibt has publicly spoken about her views on race and religion. “Seibt’s rise as the young face of climate skeptics has drawn scrutiny of her past remarks. On Friday, video circulated of Seibt’s remarks after a shooting at a German synagogue,” Bloomberg reported on February 28. “'The normal German consumer is at the bottom, so to speak. Then the Muslims come somewhere in between. And the Jew is at the top. That is the suppression characteristic,' she said in comments first reported by The Guardian.”
In July, the trial of that synagogue shooter, charged with murdering two people and the attempted murder of dozens more, began with the accused shooter stating that he felt he was “on the bottom rung of society” and that he was “superseded,” as he sought to justify horrific crimes.
As in Germany, white supremacists in the U.S. have increasingly engaged in racially motivated “mass shooter” armed attacks on unarmed people. And QAnon followers have also begun committing violent acts. “I think it's also important to remember that the FBI has declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat,” said Ryan, “and QAnon has inspired kidnappings, it has inspired at least one murder, it has inspired arson, there is a real danger from these folks who are drawn to this and become just embroiled in it.”
Naomi Seibt speaking at a Heartland Institute event. pix]
The teenage Seibt has previously denied allegations of anti-Semitism and her mother, an attorney whose clients have reportedly included politicians from the far-right German AfD party, previously told The Guardian that Naomi is not a supporter of the far-right. “'In fact, I was commenting that I think it’s wrong to comment on different races and to view them differently,' Seibt said,” in response to questions about her views on race, The Guardian reported. “'We should just all be regarded as the same.'”
More recently, in addition to talking about climate change and other topics, Seibt has begun posting about QAnon. “As of right now, I don’t consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement,” Seibt said in a YouTube video posted earlier this month and whose title refers to two QAnon themes, “but I am on the side, watching and evaluating for myself what I think is verifiable and what to me seems too far out there.”
“I do not consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement, nor will I ever attach a label to my activism,” Seibt said in response to a question from DeSmog about whether her position had since changed, adding that she also does not identify as a white nationalist, part of the far-right, or an anti-Semite. “But as long as the QAnon movement continues its peaceful protest against matters of injustice, I consider it a positive contribution to the global political discourse.”
“I do not view any ethnicity or religion as superior,” she said, adding that she identifies as a libertarian. “I promote a reduction of centralised state power so that individuals may act freely. The premise for that freedom, of course, is that the individual does no harm to his or her fellow citizens.”
Social Media Fail
Khoo and Ryan pointed to the ways that social media companies for years failed to conduct the most basic scrutiny of information that they publish online and allowed all sorts of demonstrably false information to be repeated in an endless rumor mill online.
“Facebook has policies that let Trump lie uninterrupted,” they wrote. “And when climate deniers get a simple fact-check on Facebook, members of Congress themselves have sent letters to company executives to complain.”
All of this can, of course, have significant policy consequences in the real world.
“The danger for environmental advocates and for the planet is that QAnon could be the energy that stops a big push for any meaningful climate action,” Khoo told DeSmog. “If a Green New Deal is the next thing, we could see QAnon followers serving as the foot soldiers in that war.”
There’s also the risk that fossil fuel companies and trade organizations might jump on the QAnon bandwagon, inspired by the conspiracy theory's popularity. Last week, President Trump praised the movement, claiming not to know much about it except that “they like me very much.”
“If QAnon becomes more mainstream,” Ryan said, “I could see a scenario where industry groups that are invested in climate denial and fossil fuels and such will be incentivized to embrace QAnon or rely on those tactics and networks.”
The other risk is that conspiracy theorizing, when mixed with social media, can not only bring in adherents, it can also raise money.
“The new addition to this history of climate capitalism is the capitalism behind the clicks, the monetizing of disinformation that happens on all the platforms,” Khoo and Ryan wrote. “Virality is central to the profit model, as are ads. Whether or not they’re true is secondary, from a business perspective.”
And the reality is that QAnon has been growing, with NBC News reporting earlier this month that Facebook discovered QAnon accounts and pages have attracted over 3 million member and follower accounts.
Last week, Facebook removed nearly 800 QAnon groups and took some steps to restrict QAnon hashtags and other social media. That follows moves by Twitter to take down roughly 7,000 Twitter accounts and designating QAnon as “coordinated harmful activity.”
Some see that as far too little, far too late. “They’ve had three years of almost unfettered access outside of certain platforms to develop and expand,” Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project, told MIT Technology Review in July.
As of press time, Facebook and Heartland have not responded to questions from DeSmog.
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yikes, q mainstream? misread CDC?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/medical-experts-slam-joni-ernst-for-echoing-qanon-conspiracy-theory-that-19-count-is-exaggerated-truly-unconscionable/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/heres-what-lies-behind-the-conspiracy-theory-thats-eating-america/
In the previous two installments of this series, I chronicled the attempts made by an old friend to convince me of an outlandish conspiracy theory being promoted by the group of rabid online Donald Trump supporters known as “QAnon.” According to my friend, initiates of the Illuminati had teamed up with subterranean demons to torture, rape and eat kidnapped children in underground military bases ruled by Trump’s mortal enemies. Not surprisingly, none of the so-called “evidence” provided by my friend proved any such thing. Onward from there we go …
Fun with Adrenochrome!
The second link my friend sent me, entitled “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” was posted by a QAnon advocate who calls himself Vinctum. On Twitter, Vinctum describes himself as a “Red Pilled Armenian bloke from the Netherlands that’s into Personal Growth, Spirituality, Psychology, and Conspiracy facts.” Though he joined Twitter as recently as January of 2020, he already has more than 3,000 followers. His YouTube channel has considerably more: 181,000 followers.
“ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep” is a nearly 15-minute video that contains almost no facts whatsoever. It’s as if someone read and reread John W. DeCamp’s 1992 true-crime book “The Franklin Cover-Up,” which revolves around reportage about an alleged pedophile ring operated by prominent Republicans like Nebraska businessman Lawrence E. King Jr. (a crime ring that reportedly overlapped with Iran-Contra money-laundering schemes operating out of the Reagan-Bush White House), and decided to toss these scandalous rumors into a giant blender mixed with 100% pure gonzo jabberwocky — but this time around, Democrats are now the evil, mustache-twirling villains at the center of the soap opera. As with so many of QAnon’s claims, elements of past conspiracy theories have been distorted and flipped, always in favor of Republicans. Any allegations that reflect badly on Republicans are conveniently left out of the retelling.
According to “ADRENOCHROME — Those Who Know Cannot Sleep,” Hollywood performers such as Patton Oswalt, Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks torture children on a regular basis in order to maintain healthy, moisturized skin. Of course, it’s just not possible to maintain a superior level of skin care without extracting Adrenochrome from naked, prepubescent bodies writhing in pain on a subterranean obsidian altar built at the feet of an enormous statue built in honor of Baphomet, the great goat-headed god. Vinctum draws passages from Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” to make his case, but can’t even quote Thompson correctly, and even misspells his last name. (Is proper spelling really so much to ask? After all, Thompson’s name is emblazoned on the front cover.) I doubt this poor fellow has ever read “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” from cover to cover, despite the fact that it’s a very short book and shouldn’t take this “bloke” more than a couple of hours to get through it. He doesn’t even seem to understand that the book is meant to be humorous.
In 2017, a year after Trump’s election, I published a novel entitled “Until the Last Dog Dies,” which was about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. After wading through hours of this humorless QAnon material, in which even the most innocuous Disney cartoons are flensed of fun and replaced with dark speculations about the demonic symbols hovering like unholy specters over Uncle Walt’s films, I’m beginning to think that my novel was far more prescient that I could have imagined. For example, did you know that Illuminati Satanists inserted the subliminal word “SEX” into the animated film version of “The Lion King” in order to pervert the minds of children around the world? After all, what could be more demonic than the word “SEX”? (Isn’t it odd that these Christians are so concerned about the word “SEX” allegedly appearing for less than half a second in a Disney film, but don’t care at all that their president cheated on his wife with a porn actress? I don’t care what Trump does in his private life, or who he does it with, but this dichotomy seems to be a prime example of what psychologists call “compartmentalization.”)
Vinctum’s only source to back up his peculiar claims that Adrenochrome is being extracted from living human beings is in fact Hunter S. Thompson, but he never bothers to explain how this scenario might work in the real world. What was the source of Thompson’s knowledge? Is Vinctum suggesting that Thompson was a member of the Satanic Illuminati, and that’s how he knew about Adrenochrome being harvested from humans? Vinctum never bothers to clarify. He just floats a spooky suggestion, and allows the viewers to use what little imagination they have to reach their own ill-informed conclusions.
Because I’ve always been something of a masochist (as my friend Damien once told me, back in high school, “You’re never bored when you’re a masochist”), I went to the trouble of following some of the links that Vinctum flashes on the screen while he’s droning on and on. From these links, I learned that Oswalt, the Emmy-winning comedian and actor (who, coincidentally, has been an outspoken critic of President Trump’s policies) is in fact a sadistic pedophile who spends his free time hunting down innocent children at Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C. In the weird, wild mythology of QAnon, Comet Ping Pong is the equivalent of Mordor, the home base of arch-villain Sauron in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
On the surface a modestly upscale pizza joint in a residential Washington neighborhood, Comet Ping Pong is in reality the ultimate abattoir of evil in which Hillary Clinton and former White House chief of staff John Podesta are alleged to have tortured uncountable children to satiate their heady lust for young, nubile flesh. What was the evidence for Oswalt being a pedophile, you ask? Other than some doctored photos placing him at Comet Ping Pong, nothing. Needless to say, even if Oswalt had visited Comet Ping Pong, there would still be no evidence that the man’s a pedophile. I’ve not seen a single shred of evidence that links Comet Ping Pong to any criminal activity whatsoever, much less an international sex ring. And you know what? No one else has either. If those who devoutly believe they’ve seen such evidence would only pause a moment, take a step back from their own biases, and try to peer through the layers and layers of obfuscation QAnon has placed in front of their eyes, perhaps they would be able to see reality as it actually exists rather than the cheap illusion QAnon wishes them to see.
* * *
Not only does QAnon remind me of Salem witch hunters and New Age UFO cultists, but this brand new religion also resembles L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology. At a backyard barbecue in Venice, California, 20 years ago, I met a fellow who had been a member of Scientology for 10 years until he finally woke up to the fact that he was being played for a fool and decided to turn the tables on them. This man spoke to me for a long time about what it was like living at the large Scientology compound in Riverside, east of Los Angeles. He did hard manual labor, like digging ditches in the desert soil, for 10 cents a day. If he came down with an illness, church officials made him work anyway.
Everyone at the compound had been so thoroughly brainwashed that if you ever questioned the word of L. Ron Hubbard, even for a second, your knee-jerk response was to turn that doubt back on yourself. For example, let’s say you suddenly found yourself entertaining a pernicious thought like, “Hey, is it possible that L. Ron Hubbard’s a liar?” Immediately, you would then think, “Wait a minute… what have I done wrong that I would even be thinking such a thing? Am I a liar? What have I lied about recently? Oh, yes, I did tell a white lie about something, didn’t I, just the other day? So that explains it! Now I understand why I’m doubting the great LRH. I’m so relieved! There’s nothing wrong with Ron. There’s just something wrong with me…”
QAnon’s followers rely on this same psychological safety mechanism on a daily basis. Since 2017, not one of QAnon’s major predictions have come true. For example, QAnon insisted that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election, would team up with Trump to expose the “deep state.” In the first week of November, 2017, QAnon announced that Trump would declare “a state of temporary military control” within “the next several days.” By 2020, Hillary Clinton and her Satanic minions were supposed to be in prison. Despite the fact that none of these events have occurred, QAnon never once lost any followers. Instead, these followers have grown even moreobsessive and loyal. QAnon’s acolytes said, “Wait a minute, QAnon’s not wrong. We simply misinterpreted his predictions. We’re the ones who are wrong! There’s something wrong with us. We need to continue studying the posts until we come up with the correctinterpretation….”
Like Hubbard, QAnon has based his/her/their entire cosmology on past sources without ever acknowledging them. After all, the Great Godhead doesn’t need “sources,” does He? In the late 1980s, a former Scientologist named Bent Corydon broke away from the Church of Scientology and wrote a scathing book about his experiences entitled “L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman?”, in which he revealed that Hubbard drew most of his ideas from philosopher Alfred Korzybski, author of “Science and Sanity,” and occultist Aleister Crowley, author of “The Book of Lies” and other tomes about ceremonial magic (or “magick,” Crowley’s preferred spelling). When Hubbard’s documented ties to occult organizations — e.g., Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis in Pasadena, California — became publicly known, Hubbard explained that he had been infiltrating the organization on the behalf of the United States military. Most of his followers believed him.
This same “the Great One can do no wrong” attitude is prevalent among QAnon’s followers. If a video was released tomorrow that depicted Donald Trump having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein’s underage sex-trafficking victims, Trump would calmly approach his podium and say, “I had to do that in order to fully infiltrate the sick perverts who are secretly in control of this country!” and almost every single one of QAnon’s followers would enthusiastically agree.
“Out of Shadows”
In the Christian world of QAnon, Democrats and Satanists are the same.
The hatred that Christians harbor against Satanists has always baffled me. After all, they share the same beliefs. Both groups ostensibly believe in the existence of the same mythological entities. A Christian and a Satanist would naturally have far more in common than a Christian and a Buddhist. A Buddhist doesn’t even believe in Satan. The respective belief systems of Christians and Satanists are branches of the same cosmology.
Perhaps this is why QAnon’s “Christian Patriot” followers appear to spend the majority of their day dwelling on Satanism, the main topic of a thinly disguised QAnon recruitment video entitled “Out of Shadows” which features conspiratorial ruminations by a former Hollywood stuntman named Mike Smith. The third link my friend sent me led to this video, a feature-length YouTube “documentary” that took the internet by storm in April. As of this week, this video had received more than 18 million views. It’s a peculiar film, as it does indeed contain some accurate and vital information.
Of course, the most effective forms of disinformation must include some accurate and vital information, otherwise the lies won’t be accepted so easily. The former Scientologist I met at that backyard barbecue told me that he wouldn’t have pursued Dianetics at all if not for the fact that his earliest encounters with Hubbard’s teachings led to many lifelong anxieties being cured. He felt he had taken away some useful teachings from Hubbard. It’s only after Scientology gets you hooked on the brain entrainment methods that do work, only after you’ve invested so much of your life into their coffers, that they start dumping the really insane nonsense on you.
“Out of Shadows” follows the same pattern. The “documentary” begins by sharing accurate but little known information about Hollywood’s intersection with the CIA. I applaud the filmmakers for bringing to light the fact that the entertainment most of us imbibe so unthinkingly often carries with it a hidden political agenda. This has been true of Hollywood films going at least as far back as World War II, and no doubt even earlier. I myself have written a book that touches on some of these same issues, though my approach to the material is radically different. My forthcoming book, “Hollywood Haunts the World,” is backed up with genuine evidence from the first page to the last.
About 20 minutes into its running time, after dealing with the potentially dangerous intersection between Hollywood and the U.S. intelligence community, “Out of Shadows” abandons any pretense of objectivity when it presents a montage of various news reporters repeating the same words (“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy” being the most memorable refrain), not bothering to mention the fact that this mimicry was the result of a pro-Trump campaign initiated by the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 2018.
This is from Timothy Burke’s March 31, 2018, Deadspin article, “How America’s Largest Local TV Owner Turned Its News Anchors Into Soldiers in Trump’s War on the Media“:
Earlier this month, CNN’s Brian Stelter broke the news thatSinclair Broadcast Group, owner or operator of nearly 200 television stations in the U.S., would be forcing its news anchors to record a promo about “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.” The script, which parrots Donald Trump’s oft-declarations of developments negative to his presidency as “fake news,” brought upheaval to newsrooms already dismayed with Sinclair’s consistent interference to bring right-wing propaganda to local television broadcasts.
Stelter’s CNN article, published a few weeks earlier, offers further context, observing that at the time, the FCC was reviewing Sinclair’s proposed acquisition of Tribune Media and that “Sinclair critics — Democratic lawmakers and some of the company’s Republican rivals — have alleged that the FCC has given Sinclair preferential treatment.” The scripted promos sent to all Sinclair stations, Stelter wrote, “show how the company wants to position itself in local markets from coast to coast”:
The instructions to local stations say that the promos “should play using news time, not commercial time …. Please produce the attached scripts exactly as they are written …. This copy has been thoroughly tested and speaks to our Journalistic Responsibility as advocates to seek the truth on behalf of the audience.”
The promos begin with one or two anchors introducing themselves and saying “I’m [we are] extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces. But I’m [we are] concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one sided news stories plaguing our country.”
Then the media bashing begins.
“The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media,” the script says. “More alarming, national media outlets are publishing these same fake stories without checking facts first. Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personalbias and agenda to control ‘exactly what people think.’ … This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
The fact that the filmmakers present this montage in “Out of Shadows” with no context whatsoever, then spend the rest of the “documentary” promulgating far-right conspiracy theories, is extremely disingenuous, to say the least. Ironically, the main message of “Out of Shadows” could be summarized as a call to question authority because what we see in the media is driven by a hidden agenda. Unbeknownst to most of the people who saw it, “Out of Shadows” is a perfect example of that very manipulation.
Among corporations and intelligence agencies — not to mention certain high-profile political figures — it’s standard operating procedure to accuse your opponents of offenses you yourself are committing. The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” take this tactic to heart. This is a consistent strategy used by the QAnon cultists, as when they fret about “black hats” locking helpless children in cages — despite the fact that the only government agents known to have committed such acts against children (i.e., immigrant children) are the Homeland Security agents carrying out the policies of Donald Trump, the very man QAnon claims is working hard behind the scenes to free abused children from subterranean cages. (In a world that still contained nuance and humor, I suppose one might call this “irony.” In our current situation, however, we’ll just have to call it a “fact” and leave it at that.)
After the montage, the filmmakers present genuine information about such insidious U.S. intelligence programs as MK-ULTRA and Operation Paperclip. Veteran conspiracy theorists will find no surprises here, but this might be educational for viewers who have never been exposed to this information. The filmmakers use the CIA’s longstanding involvement with mind control programs to segue awkwardly into a six-minute segment about the late Lt. Col. Michael Aquino, co-author of an infamous 1981 military paper about the future of psychological warfare operations entitled “From **PSYOP to MindWar**: The Psychology of Victory,” in which Aquino and his collaborators offer up such blatantly authoritarian statements as the following:
In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe — neither through the primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.
These media are, of course, the electronic media — television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasters make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Like the sword Excalibur, we have but to reach out and seize this tool; and it can transform the world for us if we have but the courage and the integrity to guide civilization with it. If we do not accept Excalibur, then we relinquish our ability to inspire foreign cultures with our morality. If they then devise moralities unsatisfactory to us, we have no choice but to fight them on a more brutish level.
MindWar must target all participants if it is to be effective. It must not only weaken the enemy; it must strengthen the United States. It strengthens the United States by denying enemy propaganda access to our people ….
In case it’s not obvious, that last sentence is a blatant violation of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. After all, is there an agreed upon definition of “enemy propaganda?” Who decides what “enemy propaganda” is and what isn’t?
Aquino’s story will be old news to viewers well-versed in these areas, but the vast majority of those who saw this video had probably never heard of him, nor had known that a High Priest of a Satanic church called the Temple of Set had served as a U.S. intelligence officer in Special Forces, Psychological Operations for many years. The filmmakers imply that Aquino’s existence is some deep, dark secret of the U.S. military, when in fact the lieutenant colonel flaunted his Satanic affiliations for decades. He even appeared on a 1988 episode of Oprah Winfrey’s show alongside his wife, Lilith.
Keep in mind that the documentary began with the intent to prove that Hollywood is a propaganda tool. So why spend so much time talking about an oddball military officer who published a disturbing paper nearly 40 years ago? Other than his brief appearance with Oprah, Aquino had no known connections to Hollywood.
From Aquino, we then segue back to more or less accurate information about MK-ULTRA, interspersed with wrongheaded analyses of supposed Satanic symbols embedded in pop culture that harken back to the height of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s.Perhaps you remember such delightfully stupid moments in American history as when Procter & Gamble was accused of slipping demonic symbols into their “man in the moon” logo (devil horns hidden atop Moon Man’s head, three sixes in the curlicues of Moon Man’s beard, and — choke! gasp! — 13 stars twinkling in the background), and when televangelists insisted that Mighty Mouse was imbibing the devil’s drug, cocaine, because he was seen sniffing an animated flower in a single frame of a Ralph Bakshi Saturday morning cartoon.
The filmmakers of “Out of Shadows” seem particularly bothered by innocuous music videos featuring the likes of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. In the case of the latter, the documentary suggests that only the complex machinations of dark and sinister forces could explain Perry’s rise to superstardom after abandoning her original Christian gospel orientation and reshaping herself into a double-platinum pop star. It doesn’t occur to the filmmakers for even a moment that Perry’s decision might have been influenced by the simple fact that the marketplace for a Christian gospel singer isn’t nearly as large as that of a scantily clad, quirky pop singer. (Apparently, this is one of those rare instances in which faith in the fairness of free-market economics has failed the conservative Christian community.)
Most of what these people perceive to be “Satanic symbols” are nothing of the kind. In “Hollywood Haunts the World,” I deal with the plethora of esoteric symbolism woven into numerous films, from Victor Sjöström’s “The Phantom Carriage” in 1921 all the way to Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” in 2020. Very few of these hermetic films could be described as “Satanic” in nature. In my first book, “Cryptoscatology,” when commenting on Alex Jones’ 2000 documentary, “Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove,” I wrote that Jones’ biggest weakness was the typical “Christian tendency to confuse paganism with Satanism.”
Indeed, Christians often confuse hermeticism with Satanism. They confuse esotericism with Satanism. They confuse Freemasonry with Satanism. They confuse spiritualism with Satanism. They confuse Mormonism with Satanism. They confuse homosexuality with Satanism. They confuse Dungeons & Dragons and Procter & Gamble and Mighty Mouse and comic books and pop music and cocaine with Satanism. When anything that is other or different or unfamiliar is confused with Satanism, you’re going to experience a great deal of bewilderment. And then you panic and begin making YouTube documentaries that end up containing about 15% truth and 85% disinformation. That vitally important 15% keeps a lot of eyes on the screen for the duration of the documentary. But that 85% is the real reason you made it, isn’t it?
While suffering through this 118-minute piece of QAnon propaganda disguised as anti-Hollywood/anti-government propaganda, I was struck by the fact that I could easily make the filmmakers’ case for them far better than they were doing themselves. If they really wanted to connect government conspiracies to Satanism, why not go beyond Aquino? Why not mention Louis Tackwood, for example?
What follows are relevant passages from Alex Constantine’s 1993 book, “Blood, Carnage, and the Agent Provocateur”:
In 1971, Lee Smith, an ex-convict from the California Men’s Colony, testified before Congress that he’d been paid to foment prison unrest. He’d been instructed by authorities to blame “Marxist revolutionary forces” for stirring up the violence. Afterward, conditions at the penal colony worsened ….
[Louis] Tackwood, who’d been recruited by [the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section] to provoke prison riots, blew the whistle in 1971, charging that the secret LAPD unit had been “set up on the same basis as the CIA” ….
Tackwood pulled LAPD skeletons out of the closet with the publication of “The Glass House Tapes” in 1973, including the disclosure that the department had about 125 provocateurs on the payroll. Some in the press, not many, asked questions. Liberal community groups in Los Angeles, discovering they’d been infiltrated, sued the LAPD. CCS [Criminal Conspiracy Section], the secret police unit, was disbanded, its spies and provocateurs reassigned. In its place evolved the OCID [Organized Crime Intelligence Division], which incidentally maintains no files on organized crime. The OCID does, however, keep extensive files on local politicians and private citizens ….
One of the most controversial aspects of “The Glass House Tapes” was Tackwood’s claim that the Los Angeles Police Department, in concert with various U.S. intelligence agencies, was using Satanic cults in California for the purposes of blackmailing and brainwashing high-profile initiates. I find it ironic that this scenario has now been embraced by the right wing, when back in the early 1970s the only people talking about this were far-left radicals like the members of the Citizens Research and Investigation Committee, with whom Tackwood collaborated on “The Glass House Tapes.” Subsequent nonfiction books like Walter Bowart’s 1978 “Operation Mind Control,” Maury Terry’s 1987 “The Ultimate Evil” and John W. DeCamp’s aforementioned 1992 “The Franklin Cover-Up” explore similar themes in far greater depth, so why are none of them mentioned in “Out of Shadows”?
The same is true of MK-ULTRA and Project Paperclip. Why don’t the filmmakers cite such well-researched books as Gordon Thomas’ “Journey Into Madness: Medical Torture and the Mind Controllers” or Christopher Simpson’s “Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effect on the Cold War“? If the main purpose of this documentary were to inform the public about these topics, books such as these would be mentioned. That’s the type of move that encourages the viewer to pursue further research once the documentary has been seen. As I’ve mentioned before, William Cooper did this on his “Hour of the Time” radio show almost every episode.
At one point in “Out of Shadows,” Mike Smith says:
Let’s take the word “Hollywood.” Where does that come from? Well, “Hollywood” comes from the holly tree. The ancient druids back in the day used to take the holly tree, make wands to weave spells, cast spells, or channel spells. And when they needed help, they would consult the Magis or the “mediums” of the day to help channel their spells to the population. Well, cut to today. What do we have in our houses? We have these black boxes. What are they called? TVs. But if you stop and you say the word “television,” [you get] “tell a vision.” You turn on that television, and what do you get? What’s the first thing that pops up? A list of “channels.” And when you turn on those “channels,” what’s on those “channels”? Programming! They’re programming you. They’ve been programming you your whole life. You don’t even know it!
Jordan Maxwell, who’s been delivering lectures about occult symbolism for decades, said these same exact words to me in Mesquite, Nevada, in the summer of 1999. I first heard Maxwell make this observation during a radio interview on KPFK in Los Angeles in 1993. And yet Smith doesn’t bother to cite Maxwell. Neither do the filmmakers credit him at the end.
In the 1970s, the muckraking journalist Mae Brussell (who’s often referred to as “the Queen of Conspiracies”) began dedicating many episodes of her underground radio show “Conspiracy: Dialogue” to what she called Operation Chaos, an alleged CIA plot to destabilize the anti-war movement of the 1960s by assassinating various influential rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.
Alex Constantine, a writer heavily influenced by Brussell, published a book in 2000 entitled “The Covert War Against Rock” that expands on Brussell’s theory at great length. By contrast, former CIA agent Kevin Shipp uses “Out of Shadows” as a platform to flip Brussell’s theory, conveniently leaving the CIA out of the equation and implying that such ’60s and ’70s rock icons as Morrison and Frank Zappa were not victims of COINTELPRO-style surveillance and harassment, but were instead the conspirators themselves. Here are Shipp’s own words:
It’s odd because, in Laurel Canyon, so many of the soon-to-be-stars there — their parents were either in the military industrial complex or intelligence or the Pentagon. In Frank Zappa’s case, his dad was working at Edgewood Arsenal where they were doing biochem studies, psychotropics, exposing U.S. troops to VX nerve gas and other things. The family kept gas masks in their house. He grew up with that in case there was an accident. And Edgewood Arsenal was doing very similar, related MK-Ultra projects on U.S. troops. The Gulf of Tonkin is another prime example. The commander of the Gulf fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin — his son was Jim Morrison. They claimed the USS Maddox was attacked by Vietnamese vessels. It was never attacked. As a matter of fact, they put ghost ships on the radar to make it look like they were Vietnamese ships. The Maddox was never attacked. It was an actual, literal “false flag” to enable the U.S. to declare war on Vietnam. So Jim Morrison’s dad was involved in the false flag of the Gulf of Tonkin.
After presenting information that seems to link MK-Ultra mind control experiments with the unlikely notion that the intelligence community was the main influencer behind the 1960s counterculture movement, we get Shipp’s implication that Morrison and Zappa were somehow brainwashed by their military parents to become rock stars and thereby create a generation of freako-pervo-weirdos. Shipp’s not the first person to suggest something like this. Perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, for example, was convinced that the Beatles were formed by British MI6 intelligence agents to influence American teenagers to experiment with psychedelic drugs. (In my experience, American teenagers don’t need British intelligence agents to indulge in illicit substances.)
If you think we’ve now reached the nadir of absurdity, you’re quite wrong. Numerous QAnon followers — far more than you could imagine — are convinced that Hillary Clinton was assassinated long ago and replaced with a clone, which is clearly a recapitulation of the conspiracy theory introduced to the world by Dr. Peter Beter on May 28, 1979. Beter insisted that President Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger, among several other key American politicians and military leaders, had been murdered by the Soviet Union and replaced with what he called “organic robotoids.:{” By carefully analyzing news footage, Beter claimed he could tell you the approximate time and place the real Carter was offed and switched with his robot clone. Beter’s special “audio letter” containing this startling announcement is }
In 1992, a right-wing group called “Police Against the New World Order” — a loose-knit conglomeration of active and retired police officers, National Guard members and military officers — published a saddle-stitched, 76-page booklet entitled “Operation Vampire Killer 2000,” whose main purpose was to warn fellow law enforcement officers (as well as private citizens) of ongoing attempts by “New World Order” globalists to “overthrow the Constitutional Republic of these United States of America” by fomenting various crises that would lead to the establishment of martial law. Here’s a direct quote from the booklet: “Aided by their controlled media, and NWO government-paid agitators/’leaders’ on both sides, the goal is to frighten Americans, of all colors, into accepting Martial Law.”
The group was led by a retired Phoenix police officer named Jack McLamb. Whether his views were right or wrong, sane or paranoid, it’s clear from reading his booklet that McLamb’s intent was to warn the citizens of the United States against encroaching fascism.
QAnon has borrowed much from “Operation Vampire Killer 2000” while also managing to stand the original message completely on its head. Instead of warning against martial law, QAnon is urging people to welcome it with open arms.
In May of 2019, Michael Swanson of WallStreetWindow.com (author of “The War State: The Cold War Origins of the Military-Industrial Complex and the Power Elite, 1945-1963“) interviewed journalist Pearse Redmond about the beginnings of the QAnon phenomena. Here’s Redmond:
[Early on] QAnon was advocating for a military takeover of the country, and martial law being enforced everywhere, and that this was actually a good thing. We shouldn’t really worry if Trump declares martial law and the military takes over policing, setting up camps to intern dissidents and whatnot. That was actually okay, and we should support Trump when he does that. So that was one of the early warning signs for me. Not to fully go the tinfoil hat conspiracy [route] that they’re preparing us for this, but just that [QAnon was] once again acclimating people to that [idea], making it seem that it wasn’t such a big deal, and at the same time sucking in a lot of conspiracy people who were warning about that very thing ten to fifteen years ago, particularly the more right-leaning [conspiracy theorists warning us against] FEMA camps [being set up] everywhere, and now they were [saying], “Oh no, the FEMA camps are good because we won’t be in them!It’ll just be the Democrats!” And that’s a very interesting technique — or experiment — to see if you could do that. QAnon was pushing this idea that [former national security adviser] John Bolton was a good guy, that he wasn’t a part of the Deep State or the Washington elite, that bombing and invading Iran was actually a good thing, and that we should all advocate for that. So, once again, [QAnon was] converting a lot of the alternative conspiracy people who have been — rightfully — questioning what’s going on in Iran and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and suddenly turning them around and getting them to advocate invading Iran and taking their oil and whatnot. So this is really, really strange and disturbing — the speed that these people all dropped [their former convictions and began advocating for] things they were previously against. Instantly, in the course of a few weeks, they had reversed course and basically just became Trump Republicans, advocating that anything Trump says is good.
Louis Tackwood, Alex Constantine, Walter Bowart, Maury Terry, John W. DeCamp, Gordon Thomas, Christopher Simpson, Jordan Maxwell, Mae Brussell, Lyndon LaRouche,Dr. Peter Beter, Jack McLamb. Work plundered from all the above researchers has been stitched together by QAnon into a weird, sprawling patchwork quilt of conspiracies. That the original researchers are never cited by QAnon suggests that the purpose of Q — and particularly of the “Out of Shadows” documentary — is not to inform. It’s to disinform.
That’s why there are only four specific sources cited throughout “Out of Shadows”: the aforementioned former Hollywood stunt man named Mike Smith, who admits that his supposed information was gleaned from too much time spent surfing the internet while convalescing from a work-related injury, which means that his experiences in the film industry are irrelevant in the context of this film; a still active stunt man named Brad Martin; a “former” CIA operative named Kevin Shipp; and a journalist named Liz Crokin.That’s it. Instead of interviewing a university professor like Christopher Simpson about Project Paperclip, they use accurate information only to drive home the real point: Believe in the theories of QAnon. And what’s the inevitable result of accepting QAnon’s theories into your heart?
Voting for Donald Trump.
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mojo
Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, posted a video on Independence Day in which he recites an oath for QAnon conspiracy theorists along with five others[vid]
flynn had been circling the QAnon world for months, but this takes his flirtation with the group a step further. As the QAnon conspiracy theory goes, powerful liberal politicos are running an underground child sex trafficking operation but will ultimately be exposed and charged for their crimes after “The Storm.” There is, of course, no evidence that such a scheme exists. The oath, which includes the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” refers to “an oath to become ‘digital soldiers’ to defend the Constitution,” explains the Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer. In the last month, following other cryptic messages of support for the QAnon conspiracy, Flynn added #TakeTheOath to his Twitter bio. As Sommer reports:
Flynn plays a large role in QAnon mythos, where his guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his discussions with Russian officials has been spun to make him a persecuted victim of the deep state—or even, in some cases, as the mysterious “Q” himself. Many QAnon fans have added three star-emojis to their Twitter handles, in a nod to Flynn’s status as a retired three-star general. Pictures of books supposedly signed by Flynn with the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all” are seen in the QAnon community as powerful “proof” that QAnon is real, although their authenticity hasn’t been proven.
Through it all, Flynn had publicly stayed silent on QAnon and his role in the conspiracy theory, while his son told QAnon believers to stop claiming his father was involved in their worldview.But sometime in the last month, Flynn edited his Twitter bio to add a QAnon hashtag: #TakeTheOath.
…Flynn himself actually coined the term “digital soldiers” years ago, in reference to United States cyberwar capabilities. But QAnon believers have recently become fixated on it, convincing themselves that Flynn was actually referring to them. The oath craze has gone so far that, on Saturday, QAnon believer and Republican Senate nominee Jo Rae Perkins posted a video of herself taking the oath to become a “digital soldier.”
Flynn’s message, though alarming, falls into a larger trend: QAnon online activity has been on the rise since the start of the pandemic. As my colleagues Ali Breland and Sinduja Rangarajan reported last month, Google Trends shows that QAnon search terms like“WWG1WGA” (where we go one, we go all) spiked in March as US businesses started to close.Wikipedia’s QAnon page saw a surge in pageviews in March and April. Mentions of QAnon on Twitter have also increased:
A Mother Jones analysis of nearly 500,000 tweets posted across one week in April found that the average number of tweets per day using the hashtag #QAnon increased by 160 percent as compared to the averages compiled over six months of 2019 by the Twitter user @conspirator0 (Twitter later limited searches of posts on its platform, making other comparisons difficult.) The highest daily number of QAnon tweets documented by the account in 2019 was 75,349. After the onset of the US’s coronavirus crisis, that figure nearly doubled, reaching a high of 147, 748 tweets on April 4, 2020.
Anecdotal examples bolster what the data shows. Internet communities that hadn’t previously done so are now associating with far-right conspiracies like QAnon, impending mass arrests of elites for running pedophile rings, and liberal megadonor George Soros’s supposed plots. Across Instagram, pseudoscience wellness influencers, lifestyle influencers, anti-vaxxers, at least one contributor to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goopsite, and other seemingly unrelated groups have all pivoted to spreading versions of these conspiracies that emerged on the far right.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/
see sep node long
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https://www.salon.com/2020/08/16/what-is-qanon-a-not-so-brief-introduction-to-the-conspiracy-theory-thats-eating-america/
pt 1
I've been involved in the wild world of conspiracy theories for 24 years now, ever since I published my first article in the pages of Paranoia Magazine in the spring of 1996 when I was 24 years old. What most impressed me about Paranoia was the anarchy of information available within its pages. It wasn't a right-wing conspiracy magazine. It wasn't a left-wing conspiracy magazine. It didn't even exist between these two poles. Its editorial mission (or non-mission) was beholden to values (or non-values) that lay far beyond these limiting parameters, a dedication to cataloging and analyzing the extremes of fringe beliefs from multiple points of view.
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As Marshall McLuhan once said,"A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding." The editors of Paranoia dedicated themselves to not having a point of view. It was the exact opposite of propaganda. By its very nature, propaganda excludes any information that contradicts or undermines the message the dedicated propagandist is intent on disseminating.
Conspiracy theories have always been used by what we now call "persuasion engineers" as tools of mass indoctrination. A good conspiracy theory that seems plausible and frightening enough can be worth more than a thousand well-reasoned stump speeches.
In my first book, "Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form,"I broke conspiracy theories down into five distinct categories: 1) Insanity, 2) Disinformation, 3) Misinformation, 4) Satire, and 5) Legitimate Research. Some theories manage to merge two or more categories into one. Only on very rare occasions do such theories manage to combine allfive categories. The most recent — and arguably most impactful — strain of this hybrid form of conspiracy-mongering first emerged in 2017, promulgated by an anonymous 4chan poster known only as "Q" — or "QAnon." You've been hearing a lot about this lately, most likely. At least one QAnon supporter is almost certain to be elected to Congress in November, and devotees of this particular conspiracy theory are eagerly supporting the re-election of Donald Trump.
The average person, who has not spent the past couple of decades studying the origins of conspiracy theories (a reasonable choice, I might add), would probably not recognize the origins of most of the quasi-surreal elements that make up the convoluted QAnon narrative.
Earlier this year, in March, I was talking to a friend about COVID-19 and the national lockdown. He's 10 years older than me and lives in a small town in the Midwest. I live in Long Beach, California. While chatting with him on the phone about all the unexpected difficulties that have arisen from teaching my English classes online, he suddenly volunteered the opinion that COVID-19 would be a positivedevelopment in 2020.
"Yeah?" I asked. "How so?"
He proceeded to tell me, with complete sincerity, thatafter Trump is re-elected in 2020, he will deliver "free energy" to the people of America. Not only that, he's also going to abolish the income tax. Right now, at this very moment, United States troops have been deployed underground where they're busy "cleaning out" covert subterranean tunnels, "saving hundreds of children from satanic slaves," and kicking out the "black hats." Without skipping a beat, my friend then insisted that news of this game-changing development would be "coming out" soon.
"It's a great thing," he told me in measured tones. "Trump will have to use the Emergency Broadcast System to give this news to the American people because the media keeps lying and social media like Twitter and YouTube are censoring and deleting videos that report reality the way it actually is."
Furthermore, my friend said in tones of absolute certainty, Trump supporters working behind the scenes (referred to by my friend as the "white hats") had recently wrested control of the entire Google corporation from devil worshippers,which is why you could now retrieve "accurate information" from that particular search engine.
"Uh … where are you getting all this?" I asked.
He seemed reluctant to tell me. At first he hemmed and hawed, then muttered, "Oh … just these message boards."
"Well … what message boards?" He wouldn't say. "Could you send me the links?" I asked.
"There are no links," he replied.
"No links? What is this, the dark web or something?"
He chuckled. "Kind of."
When I pushed further and asked for more details about this "accurate information," in a conspiratorial whisper he urged me to search the word "Adrenochrome" in Google.
* * *
I first read Hunter S. Thompson's classic nonfiction book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" when I was 18. I've taught the book in my English composition classes at Cal State Long Beach, off and on, since 2002. I'm well aware that Thompson's alter ego, Raoul Duke, encounters Adrenochrome when Dr. Gonzo (Duke's speed-fueled attorney) suggests that he ingest the drug because it "makes pure mescaline seem like ginger beer." He also warns Duke, "You'll go completely crazy if you take too much." Duke claims that the hallucinogenic effects of Adrenochrome work best when the substance is harvested from the adrenaline glands of living human bodies.
Even at the tender age of 18, I knew that this inspired idea was one of Thompson's many phantasmagorical asides in an otherwise journalistic narrative. Thompson was famous for these detours into Munchausen-level jabberwocky, like the time he claimed that Sen. Ed Muskie was taking "massive doses" of a psychedelic drug called Ibogaine during the 1972 presidential campaign, a hilarious (and entirely false) tale related in Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail."
On the commentary track that accompanies the 2003 Criterion DVD release of Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," Gilliam confirms that Adrenochrome is "a totally invented nonsense-drug that Hunter [made up]." Gilliam follows this with an eerily prescient statement that almost foreshadows the introduction of the drug into QAnon's ever-expanding mythology: "This scene had such an effect on so many people that afterwards I was hearing kids say, 'Oh, I've had Adrenochrome!' They were talking about where they get it. 'Oh, there's a guy who can get me Adrenochrome.' I just love how the Big Lie always works. It worked for Hitler, and it can work for people like us [i.e., artists and storytellers]."
It appears to be working for QAnon as well, since "totally invented nonsense" has a way of becoming facts in the minds of the gullible, the semi-informed, the frustrated and the insane.
So I did exactly as my friend suggested. I googled the word "Adrenochrome." Keep in mind that my friend insisted that Trump-supporting "white hats" had taken control of Google, so I would receive only accurate information from that search engine when inputting this particular word.
The first result that popped up was Emily Writes' March 17, 2020, article in Spinoff entitled "Down the Rabbit Hole With the COVID-19 Conspiracy Theorists," which begins as follows:
Today I fell down a rabbit hole of rabid Trump supporters who are convinced COVID-19 is both a hoax and also Trump's greatest moment as president. He has acted decisively apparently, while also knowing that COVID-19 is a Hollywood Liberal Elite cover-up ….Adrenochromeis a drug for the liberal elite of Hollywood made from actual human brain stem containing hormones from the adrenal gland. Hillary Clinton manufactures this drug by torturing children in a pizza shop …. Tom Hanks is addicted to Adrenochrome and he caught COVID-19 from the latest batch of tainted Adrenochrome that came through Celine Dion who is a high priestess from the Church of Satan. She is well-versed in poison as she's been lacing her children's clothing line with a chemical that makes our children "gender neutral." Tom Hanks signalled to the Hollywood Liberal Elite Cabal DeepState in his Golden Globes acceptance speech that there would be a shortage of Adrenochrome.Ellen has closed her studio audience because she's addicted as well.
After reading this article in its entirety, I emailed my friend and pointed out that when I put his advice to the test and Googled "Adrenochrome," the first article that popped up sardonically tore the entire conspiracy theory to shreds. How did this jibe with the notion that Trump-supporting "white hats" had total control over Google?
I received no direct answer to this question. I was told, instead, to search the name "Rachel Chandler." This would somehow answer all my questions. Bypassing those pesky "white hats" at Google, I decided to use a different search engine called Millionshort, and almost immediately found a March 22, 2019, Daily Dot article entitled "QAnon Is Attacking a Random Woman in a Disturbing and Dangerous Way," which detailed how QAnon posts had become strangely focused on a photographer and casting director named Rachel Chandler, who is part of the newspaper-owning Chandler family but has no visible political footprint and is not otherwise a public figure:
Q made a seemingly endless stream of posts referencing Chandler, insinuating that she took a 2017 picture of Bill Clinton and registered child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (whose light prison sentence handed down by current Trump cabinet official Alexander Acosta is currently under investigation) hanging out together in a pool.
Beyond that, QAnon accused Chandler of "procuring" "girls" for Epstein, having her photography studio funded by elite Satanists who used it for rituals, flaunting Epstein's "sex and torture room victims" with her pictures, having a link to a still-unexplained (yet supposedly horrific) event at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood ….
To be clear, Chandler has not been accused of any wrongdoing by any law enforcement agency …. There's no evidence she took the pool picture that QAnon claims proves she's linked to Epstein, and it doesn't even feature him — though it does feature George Nader, the convicted pedophile who's providing evidence in the Mueller investigation regarding President Donald Trump's link to meetings with Russian officials.
And yet Chandler's name has been dragged into the conspiracy so completely that the first page of a Google search shows nothing but QAnon-related content, while five of the top six videos that come up when searching her name are by QAnon acolytes.
None of the many videos and speculations posted by QAnon and his numerous supporters provide any definitive links between Chandler and Jeffrey Epstein, yet somehow this red herring has received intense focus from thousands of amateur detectives, most of whom no doubt have a sincere desire to get to "the truth."
One might argue, as does Emily Writes in her above-mentioned Spinoff article, that when "people feel like they have no control over their lives — like in the midst of a global pandemic — the comforting certainty of conspiracy theories seems increasingly attractive." One might also argue that racism, xenophobia and (perhaps most deadly of all) neophobia fuel the interest in such theories. But I think these explanations, while partially valid, ignore the heart-meat core of the real issue plaguing America at this moment.
The real problem is that genuine conspiracies are unfolding before our eyes every day, but when the mainstream media avoids reporting on such conspiracies — for a whole variety of reasons, the main one being that it's simply easier to get paid rewriting corporate press releases and slapping one's byline on the end product than by actually putting one's reputation on the line tackling a plethora of inconvenient truths — it becomes necessary for average people to fill in the gaps on their own. These people may be ignorant, but they're not stupid. They know instinctively that they're being victimized by blatant lies every day. So, with no training whatsoever, they perform "research" on their own by scouring through a multiplicity of such "reliable" online sources as 4chan, 8chan, 8kun and Reddit.
As award-winning science fiction writer Cory Doctorow wrote in May of this year:
[W]hy is it so easy to find people who want to believe in conspiracies[?] My answer: because so many of the things that have traumatized so many people ARE conspiracies.
The opioid epidemic was a conspiracy between rich families like the Sacklers and regulators who rotate in and out of industry. The 737 crisis was caused by Boeing's conspiracy to cut corners and aviation regulators' conspiracy to allow aerospace to regulate itself.
Senators conspire to liquidate their positions ahead of coronavirus lockdown, well-heeled multinationals conspire to get 94.5% of the "small business" PPP fund, Big Tech conspires to fix wages with illegal collusion while fast food franchises do the same with noncompetes.
In a world of constant real conspiracy scandals that destroy lives and the planet, conspiracy theories take on real explanatory power.
Everything Doctorow says here is true; however, we rarely apply such clinical observations to people we know personally. Often, we use such explanations to dismiss the cockeyed beliefs of peculiar strangers encountered online. Before March of this year, I had known my friend to be a rational person with a fair amount of real-world experience and common sense, not someone who would be swayed easily by illogical rhetoric or over-the-top nonsense. On the other hand, I hadn't been in close contact with him since the last presidential election and the birth of QAnon, who emerged from internet obscurity in November of 2017. This was, coincidentally, the same time period when Trump's approval ratings had reached a "near-record low." (The full effect of QAnon on Trump's approval ratings since November of 2017 has not been studied in any substantial way.)
After about four weeks had passed, I emailed my friend and asked him a few more questions about QAnon, trying to understand how anyone could believe so many unsubstantiated claims with so little skepticism. Surely, I thought, there must be something at least halfway reasonable to back up these outrageous statements. I needed to know the source so I could evaluate the claims myself. On May 3, I sent him the following email:
I'm trying to wrap my head around this whole QAnon thing, so maybe you can help me. I have a few questions.
Why would the United States military be "cleaning out" covert underground bases when they're the ones who *built *the bases in the first place? Who else but the U.S. military would be in charge of massive underground bases built on U.S. soil?
Why would Trump be interested in implementing free energy? Isn't he trying to revive the coal industry? It would seem to me that free energy would undermine all of his business interests.
According to most reliable sources, censorship on Google seems to be alive and well at the moment, which is nothing new. (In my experience, I've found thatmillionshort.com is a far better search engine tool.)
I'm not certain that "white hats" exist in our current political situation. Perhaps "black hats," "slightly-less-black hats," and "gray hats" would be more accurate terms?
Didn't the whole concept of "Adrenochrome" being harvested from live human beings originate with Hunter S. Thompson — as a satirical concept? I always thought that passage in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was intended as a joke. Is QAnon claiming that Hunter S. Thompson had "insider knowledge" when he wrote the book?
The next day, my friend responded to my questions with another question: "You're a researcher. Why are you playing D.U.M.B.?" That's it. Nothing else.
Since I had no idea why he had written the word "dumb" as an acronym, I replied, "I'm not playing 'D.U.M.B.' I honestly don't know the answers to those questions. I'm trying to understand the proposed scenario. If you have the answers, I'd love to hear them."
Later that day, he wrote me back and explained that "D.U.M.B." stood for "Deep Underground Military Bases." The explanation rendered the first message even more confusing than before. (How could I possibly be playing "Deep Underground Military Bases"? I resisted the urge to ask him to elucidate further, as I suspected the response would just add to my befuddlement.) He sent me several links as well, despite the fact that a month earlier he had insisted that there were no links he could possibly send me. He never bothered to explain how or why this situation had changed during the past four weeks.
Inevitably, the first link led me to QAnon's posts. Most of these posts were so cryptic, they didn't answer any of my questions.
Addressing my question about Trump delivering free energy to the American people, my friend responded, "President Trump's uncle John was asked by the F.B.I. to investigate Nikola Tesla's papers." This terse sentence was then followed by a link to an Aug. 2, 2017, post at Heavy.com entitled "John Trump, Donald's Uncle: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know." Right after the link, my friend wrote, "And you wonder where I come up with free energy for the nation in the future."
Nothing* *in the Heavy.com post suggested that Donald Trump was working on delivering free energy to the United States during his second term in office.
Attempting to address one of my other questions, he wrote, "If Google's censorship is on, then why, when you search 'Rachel Chandler,' you get all of this information about her?"
Of course this is a perfect example of "circular reasoning." Everything QAnon says about Rachel Chandler is true because, when you Google "Rachel Chandler," all of QAnon's posts pop up. Therefore, everything QAnon said about Rachel Chandler is true. (If A, then B. If B, then A. Or perhaps I should say, "If Q, then Q. If Q, then Q.")
To answer my other questions, he sent me links to three different YouTube videos, one of which dealt with the untold story of the Deep Underground Military Bases.
The first video (entitled "The Underground War, Happening Now") features a "Christian Patriot" named "Rick B2T" in conversation with an anonymous fellow calling himself "Gene." I subjected myself to 38 minutes and 16 seconds of unsubstantiated rumors about U.S. Christian soldiers battling demon-worshipping members of the Illuminati in deep underground bases.
:{This directed me to an even more convoluted YouTube video entitled "}
:{," in which I learned that Gene had decided to risk his life going public with these dangerous secrets because, one fateful day, God had contacted Gene and expressly told him, "This information }::{has}::{ to come out!" At this point, Gene teamed up with an anonymous former "Canadian military officer" to reveal the disturbing truths about these "Deep Underground Military Bases" where (and this is a direct quote) "animal and human sacrifices nourish the bowels of creatures — in other words, we're talking demonic, terrible }::{things}::{ that inhabited Earth long before Man arrived." }:
After this startling revelation, Gene elaborated on the scenario further: "The New World Order is in the final stages — that is, they were, until Trump came along — the final stages of their satanic plan to reduce the current world population by 80 to 90 percent[…]. If it weren't for Trump, most of us would not be listening to anything right now." [Gene chuckles darkly.] "Instead of the Word of Christ, you'd be listening to the angels."
As of May 28, only 10 days after being posted, this video had already received 33,105 views and only 34 dislikes. I've seen YouTube videos of random kids opening birthday presents get more dislikes than that. The Blessed to Teach YouTube channel has 92,600 subscribers.
If it's not clear to you yet, let me spell this out: Even as you're reading these words, there are thousands of "Christian Patriots" living in the United States who sincerely believe that Donald Trump saved them from being eaten by demons when he entered the White House. This is not hyperbole. This is a literal interpretation of what they believe.
This is the mentality you're dealing with. No amount of logic, common sense or reason can combat such convoluted delusions. These people are clearly the product of incessant brainwashing, and yet they think everyone else in the country is mind-controlled to such an extreme degree that people who do not support Trump are either A) soulless demon-worshippers or B) poor unfortunates incapable of understanding the obvious truths being unveiled by geniuses like "Rick B2T" and his pal "Gene." On Nov. 18, 1978, hundreds of "True Believers" in Guyana held similar beliefs, only seconds before they literally drank the Kool-Aid.
You might assume that most of Rick's viewers are hardcore evangelicals dwelling in a deep pit in the Ozarks. But my friend wasn't raised a hardcore Christian and had never expressed such views in my presence over the course of many, many years. Something happened to change him radically between the emergence of QAnon in 2017 and the advent of the national lockdown in 2020. Even a regular Joe can be swayed by nonsense with a fair amount of ease.
Nonsense has always been an essential part of the American landscape, from Salem witch hunts in the 1690s to New Age UFO cults in the 1990s, but QAnon takes this tradition of nonsense to a whole new level.
Next installment: The roots of QAnon: From 1940s science fiction to 19th-century anti-Masonic propaganda
ROBERT GUFFEY
Robert Guffey is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach. His books include the novel "Until the Last Dog Dies" and "Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security." Visit his website.
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MORE FROM ROBERT GUFFEY
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/the-deep-twisted-roots-of-qanon-delusions-of-demon-cannibal-conspiracies/
salon robt guffey pt 2:
those among you who are familiar with the strange realm of UFOlogy may know about William Cooper, one of the most outrageous figures to appear on the UFO lecture circuit in the 1980s and author of the 1991 underground bestseller “Behold a Pale Horse.” Nobody else at the time could beat the wildness of Cooper’s claims, which included the idea that the U.S. military, nefarious extraterrestrial forces and ancient secret societies like the Illuminati had banded together for the express purpose of destroying the United States and God-fearing people everywhere.
As crazy as Cooper could often appear, in almost every lecture I’ve ever seen he would often pause to say something along these lines: “Don’t believe me. Do your own research. Look at my sources and tell me I’m wrong!” He once dedicated an entire hour-long episode of his shortwave radio show, “Hour of the Time,” to reviewing the lengthy list of books he had read in order to produce his epic, 43-part series entitled “Mystery Babylon,” an in-depth analysis of how hermetic philosophies had impacted world history. You could disagree with Cooper’s eccentric conclusions, but you really had to respect someone with the temerity to broadcast an hour-long bibliography over the radio. Even more surprisingly, his listeners hung on every word.
If Cooper’s listeners decided to follow his advice to fact check his numerous claims, they would have to read such lengthy and difficult tomes as “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly P. Hall and “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” by Albert Pike — and that’s just scratching the surface.
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Furthermore, Cooper never shirked from sharing details of his personal background, the sometimes sensationalistic episodes of his military career in the Navy, his years spent fighting in Vietnam, or the ruins of his many marriages. He was a real person. He wasn’t “anonymous.” It was possible to verify the facts about Cooper’s military background, which were crucial to his claims of having had access to insider knowledge.
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, mainstream UFOlogists with academic backgrounds (researchers like Jacques Vallée and Stanton Friedman) believed that Cooper represented the bottom of the barrel of P.T. Barnum-style hucksterism in the fields of UFOlogy and conspiratology. Neither of them could possibly have predicted what was coming: a 21st century in which QAnon cultists — a word I do not use lightly or flippantly — believe that performing “research” means typing a few names into Google images, seeing QAnon’s own posts pop up, and concluding within seconds that QAnon’s theories have all been confirmed. Why bother reading Hall’s 578-page “Secret Teachings” when you can just glance at a subject header in Reddit and convince yourself you’ve solved the mysteries of the universe?
Compared to QAnon, William Cooper was Buckminster Fuller.
It wouldn’t take much research to figure out that many of QAnon’s claims can be traced back to the late 19th century, and some even earlier than that.This is one of the reasons it’s important to study conspiracy theories. If more people understood their origins, perhaps they would be a little more skeptical when they see these theories being strategically repackaged as political propaganda aimed at a new generation of easy marks.
The supposed links between devil worship among the “elites” and secret societies like the Illuminati can be traced back at least as far as the 1870s, when French journalist Léo Taxil published “Les mystères de la Franc-Maçonnerie,” a volume that purported to reveal the eyewitness accounts of a woman named Diana Vaughan. After converting to Catholicism, Vaughan confessed to having engaged in numerous satanic rituals with Freemasons. During one of these rituals, she saw a demon shape-shift into a crocodile and play the piano. The book was a huge success among Roman Catholics, many of whom were eager to lap up the most insane claims as long as they made the Masons look bad. Then, on April 25, 1897, the French newspaper Le Frondeur published Taxil’s confession that Vaughan was wholly fictitious. Taxil boasted that his book was “the most fantastic hoax of our times.”
But even after his confession, people continued to believe in his 12-year prank. Indeed, fundamentalists of all varieties insist on quoting Taxil to this day. Jack T. Chick, the wildly successful cartoonist who founded Chick Publications (a California-based Christian publishing company designated as an “active hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center) used Taxil as a source in his most popular anti-Masonic tract, “The Curse of Baphomet.”
Rick and Gene’s wild tales about “underground wars” between “white hats” and “black cats” — discussed in the first installment of this series — appear to have a more recent source: the Lovecraft-inflected 1940s horror stories of Richard Sharpe Shaver. In 1943, at the age of 36, Shaver became infamous among American science fiction fans for a series of allegedly true accounts he began publishing in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. Shaver claimed he had discovered a race of prehistoric extraterrestrials known as the Titans. Most of the Titans had abandoned Earth long ago, but a few remnants of their society had been left behind. There were two types of Titans still living on Earth, although they were hidden deep underground: the angelic Teros (“white hats” who sometimes intervened positively in human affairs) and the demonic Deros (“black hats,” whose entire existence revolved around kidnapping, torturing and eating human beings).
Unbeknownst to the fake-news-spewing mainstream media, the Deros often snatch humans from the surface world and drag them down into their underground caverns where they rape, torment and kill their captives in creatively sadistic ways. How did Shaver know about the Deros’ existence? Because, he claimed, he had been imprisoned in their subterranean realm for eight years. This is from Walter Kafton-Minkel’s 1989 book, “Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs from Inside the Earth”:
Shaver witnessed many of the horrible dero torture sessions, in which young women abducted from the surface were flogged, torn to pieces, roasted, or devoured by the evil dwarfs.
More than anything else, the dero are sexual perverts. Although they must reproduce somehow, they do not seem to engage in conventional sex; they … find their arousal in torture and dismemberment.
Sadomasochistic sex was one of the dero’s major pleasures. One of the weirder stories in [Shaver’s magazine] The Hidden World was illustrated with a crude drawing by Shaver of a dero pitching dagger-tipped darts into an unfortunate young woman who had been stripped naked and chained to the wall of a cave.
And here’s a brief passage from Fred Nadis’ 2013 book “The Man From Mars,” a biography of Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer:
[Shaver] recalled a woman with a spider’s body visiting him in his cell, offering both horror and ecstasy. He reported, “It mounted me and playfully bit me — its fangs shooting me full of poison — tobacco juice you know — with appropriate sexual sensations of impregnation. After a time my skin began to pop with little spiders and they swarmed out of me by the million.” [A helpful Tero named] Sue … had a blind daughter with whom he fell in love. He called her Nydia. They became lovers. Nydia helped teleport him to an underground cavern where he saw amazing machinery and a chamber where the thought records and history of the Elder Races were recorded.
Even after Shaver’s dramatic escape from their underground realm, the Deros continued to beam negative messages into his head. In fact, the Deros had been using their “amazing machinery” to invade the minds of humans for centuries, manipulating them to commit the darkest sins imaginable.
To the dismay of rationalist science fiction fans the world over, hordes of readers began writing letters to the magazine insisting that Shaver was correct — they, too, had encountered the subterranean Deros! Soon, Shaver’s followers became part of the ongoing saga, adding suggestive tidbits of intrigue that were then woven into the growing tapestry by Shaver and Ray Palmer.
Much the same is being done today by QAnon, whose posts often contain only a few words or a single image, but whose cryptic messages will spark endless internet speculation that adds to the unfolding drama, upon which QAnon will then build yet another layer. Not long ago, on May 29 of this year, QAnon posted a link to Mike Rothschild’s Daily Dot article entitled “Inside the First Church of QAnon, Where Jesus Helps Fight the Deep State,” in which Rothschild analyzes the cult-like aspects of QAnon:
Since its first 4chan posts in 2017, the QAnon conspiracy theory has become a movement encompassing everything from commerce to politics.
And increasingly, this includes religion, as QAnon believers infuse their complex mythos with elements of spiritual warfare and Biblical theology.
But some Christian QAnon followers are taking this merger even further, using the text of Q drops as scripture to form what seems like a hybrid Q/Christian denomination.
And it might be the future of QAnon.
Along with the link, QAnon posted the following message: “Fear. Panic. Loss of narrative control. You are the news now.”
You hear that? You are the news now. Participatory fiction. Choose your own adventure. A role-playing game for Christians. Virtual reality, but with no goggles necessary.
To Shaver’s credit, he never tried to base a church on his theories. What became known as “The Shaver Mystery” continued to be a popular, though highly controversial, topic in science-fiction fandom for about 10 years. Eventually, Shaver drifted into obscurity and began turning his attention to more artistic pursuits, producing one wonderfully bizarre painting after another, all of which fall into the category we would now deem “outsider art.” After his death, Shaver left behind scores of bizarre tales from which the real mind manipulators — not subterranean Deros, but human beings who work for political think tanks — can plunder nifty ideas and reboot them for our New Dark Age of Unenlightenment.
A strange fascination with subterranean beings kidnapping humans, dragging them underground and sexually assaulting them recurs throughout the QAnon theories that have spread across the internet since 2017. Similar obsessions also run throughout Cathy O’Brien’s infamous 1995 memoir, “Trance Formation of America,” which, like QAnon’s theories, is a fascinating mixture of truth and untruth, information and disinformation, reality and unreality. At one point in “Trance Formation,” O’Brien claims she was sexually assaulted by Hillary Clinton in a hotel room. She describes this encounter with such intense attention to detail that one can’t help but feel that the true goal of the book is something other than pamphleteering.
I sent a copy of this book to my friend Damien sometime around 2001. He was working as a fry cook in San Diego, and had no academic background whatsoever. His immediate reaction to the book was to say, “This is just pornography for right-wing Christians!” Since Damien had actually been paid to write pornography (for a company called Evil Angel Productions based in Van Nuys, California), I’ll take his word for it.His instinctive conclusion was that Christians felt safe reading O’Brien’s lurid tale because they could unconsciously get off on the pornographic details while feeling outraged at the same time. Who else but Christian conservatives could figure out how to merge sexual gratification with judgmental loathing?
QAnon’s obsession with penny-dreadful tales of Hollywood and Washington “elites” raping underage children becomes suspicious when seen in such numbers, in post after post after post, in video after video after video. QAnon followers just can’t stop themselves, it seems, from dwelling on this disturbing notion. Some of the Christians who make these videos will even illustrate their outrage with digitally blurred photographs that barely obscure the illegal images. One wonders if “outrage” accurately describes the emotion they’re experiencing while viewing — and reviewing and re-reviewing — these salacious images.
This reminds me of the numerous past occasions when the respectable “PBS NewsHour” featured roundtable discussions about the worst excesses of what its hosts and correspondents called “tabloid media.” The hosts would lead a high-toned conversation with academics and fellow journalists about how the nasty tabloids had been irresponsibly publishing graphic, bloody crime photographs just to raise sales. Of course, the producers of the “NewsHour” would invariably spotlight these same images throughout the segment, reframing them as educational illustrations of how low the depraved tabloids would go to sell newspapers. The truth, of course, is that PBS producers desperately wanted to draw in the same numbers as The Star and The National Enquirer, but the only way to approximate that was to air the same images while pretending to be disgusted by it all.
Who else but intellectual liberals could figure out how to merge capitalism with judgmental loathing?
In the end, one thing is clear when it comes to the creation of QAnon: Someone who was highly familiar with conspiracy-theory folklore figured out how to give these retro spook stories a facelift, specifically warping them to match the paradigm of Donald Trump’s America.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/alex-jones-and-deanna-lorraine-say-michelle-obama-is-a-man-and-bill-gates-is-an-alien/
trump cultist, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and failed congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine served as an in-studio guest host on Infowars last night, where she and extremist right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones alleged that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a man and that Bill Gates is an alien.
Lorraine and Jones repeatedly referred to Michelle Obama as “Big Mike” as they suggested that she is really a man or possibly pretending to be a man as part of a “psy op.”
“Do I think she has a swinging you know what?” Lorraine
. “Maybe. I think she might. I think she might, but it does look suspicious.”
“There’s videos of her where she looks like she’s got a flaccid eight-inch rubber snake in her pants,” Jones replied. “We’re talking like a foot-and-a-half long thing. She’s adjusting it. It’s flopping around. It’s halfway to the knee. And the word is, you know, she’s pitching, he’s catching.”
“She might have put a rubber snake on her pants and all these things to mess with us because they run psy ops,” Jones declared, and Lorraine agreed.
“Wouldn’t that be the biggest psy op ever perpetuated to have a woman as the first lady but who is actually a man who is a transgender?” she said. “Wouldn’t that be the biggest psy op and everyone just believes it? Because they do stuff like that all the time, so I wouldn’t put it past them.”
Later in the program, Lorraine insisted that “elites” like Bill Gates “seem like they have very manly looking wives,” which prompted Jones to asset that Gates may be a woman, or possibly an alien.
“These aliens, and I think that’s what they are—I don’t get into like flying saucers. As a human, my first thing is that’s not a human,” Jones said. “There’s something wrong with these people.”
“There’s something very, very wrong with these people,” Lorraine responded. “It’s from the inside out. I think when they trade, they make a deal with Satan that we’re going to do some satanic work here on Earth—they’re exchanging their soul for it.”
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/deanna-lorraine-dropped-from-alex-jones-show-technical-issue-or-conspiracy/
trump cultist, QAnon conspiracy theorist, and failed congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine has been tirelessly spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 virus and pandemic on Twitter and on her YouTube programs for months. In July, Lorraine was invited to appear on Australia’s “Today” program to share her views, but shortly after
began, her internet connection dropped out and the anchors ended the segment after they seemed to realize that giving Lorraine a platform from which to spread conspiracy theories might not have been a very good idea.
Lorraine has refused to accept that the technical glitch that ended her interview was legitimate and insists that it was a deliberate effort on the part of the program to cut her off so that she couldn’t share the “real facts about COVID.”
Yesterday, Lorraine
“The Alex Jones Show” to discuss her appearance on Australian television, and while she recounted how she was dropped from the program supposedly due to a poor internet connection, her internet connection cut out and she was dropped from Jones’ program.
[pix w/ mic and her bk talking back]
after Lorraine’s connection was dropped, Jones played the clip of her interview on “Today” and wondered, “was that her Skype breaking up like it just did, or were they cutting her off?”
“I know that the United Nations censors people,” he
. “I know the head of YouTube says, ‘If something disagrees with the United Nations, we shut it down.'”
Last week, Lorraine told her followers to stop listening to media outlets like CNN and to instead get their information from Jones and Infowars because it is “one of the only places where you can get actual news.” On the show yesterday, Jones returned the favor and announced that he was inviting Lorraine to appear in studio with him next week so that his audience “can hear what she has to say, because she’s smart as a whip.”
Tags: Alex Jones DeAnna LorraineCoronavirus
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/foxs-whitewash-trumps-qanon-endorsement-helps-explain-how-it-happened-first
Trump’s Wednesday endorsement of the deranged and dangerous QAnon movement as people who “love this country” thrilled its supporters while horrifying observers, who pointed out that his validation of an extremist ideology linked to violent acts would swell its ranks. But during his first interview following those remarks on Thursday night, the president faced no questions about his praise for unhinged pro-Trump conspiracy theorists who claim that he is on the verge of unraveling a global pedophile ring of Satan-worshipping Democrats and celebrities. As Fox News host Sean Hannity provided the president with his typical mix of sycophancy and softballs over the course of the half-hour phoner, Trump’s embrace of QAnon never came up.
Hannity’s decision to ignore the story put a capstone on Fox’s lackadaisical response to the president’s praise for advocates of a bizarre conspiracy theory that the FBI has termed a domestic terror threat. Fox News political analyst Karl Rove garnered press attention on Wednesday for calling QAnon supporters “nuts and kooks” and saying the president “ought to disavow them” on Special Report, and that program ran a segment on the “conspiracy theory” the following day. But none of the network’s highly rated prime-time hosts have mentioned Trump’s remarks at all, and by Thursday morning, Fox & Friends was decontextualizing part of the president’s comment as an anodyne reference to his administration “saving the world.”
Trump backing the QAnon movement seems like a natural fit -- the president is a notorious conspiracy theorist who finds it nearly impossible to disavow even his most reprehensible supporters. But his praise for the group can’t be separated from Fox’s unwillingness to try to establish guard rails for the Republican Party by denouncing it. Trump relies on Fox for news and information, and its coverage constantly shapes his worldview. If Fox’s hosts had condemned the QAnon movement in the years since it first emerged, it’s hard to imagine that the president would be praising it today -- or that it would have metastasized through the GOP to the extent that it has.
But Fox has largely kept discussions of the QAnon movement and its violent and unhinged ideology off its airwaves, even as its spread within the Republican Party has ensured that the network has repeatedly ended up promoting its supporters. I noted last week, after one of its adherents received the GOP congressional nod for a blood-red district, that QAnon has been referenced on only eight broadcasts on the network’s weekday evening programming over the previous two years -- almost all passing references that failed to describe the conspiracy theory’s dangers. The network’s on-air talent have alternately denied knowing anything about the movement and played footsie with it, engaging with its followers on social media, downplaying its extremism, and even praising aspects of it on Fox shows. Meanwhile, the network’s executives hired a prominent QAnon-supporting influencer to host a cooking show on Fox’s streaming service.
We know what it looks like when Fox tries to destroy the credibility of a movement with its audience, and that isn’t it. Fox hosts and personalities highlighted the Black Lives Matter movement during 288 weekday evening broadcasts over the same two-year span, building on racist and unhinged smears the network has deployed against its supporters since its founding.
In recent months, as the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor drove new attention to Black Lives Matter’s campaign against racial injustice and police brutality, Fox hosts redoubled their efforts to delegitimize it. Network star Tucker Carlson, perhaps the Fox host with the most influence on Trump right now, turned his program into a nightly assault on the group. He called it a “totalitarian political movement” and denounced Republican leaders who expressed support for it.
Trump got the message. He repeatedly lashed out at Black Lives Matter this summer, at times in direct response to segments he was watching about it on Fox. The president was particularly aggrieved by an anti-police chant that members of a Minnesota-based Black Lives Matter group used during a march in 2015 -- one that Fox has highlighted dozens of times in the years since.
If Fox had devoted even a fraction of the venomous demonization it launched at Black Lives Matter activists to QAnon conspiracy theorists, the network could have warned off its millions of viewers -- including the president -- from the movement. But Fox has not chosen that path, which would require trying to curb the excesses of the radicalized Republicans whose anti-Democratic fervor powers the network’s ratings.
Instead, Fox sold out its viewers to a cult. The longer the network held its fire, the more vulnerable its audience was to the movement’s entreaties, and the harder it became to pry Trump supporters away from its conspiracy theories. Now QAnon’s ranks have swelled, its supporters have effectively become a key GOP constituency, dozens are running for Congress, and at least one will likely be elected to the House in the fall. With the president himself signing on as a validator, it may be too late to keep QAnon away from the levers of power.
QAnon may garner criticism here and there from some at Fox who, like Rove, find the spectacle of the president cozying up to “kooks” too much to bear. But I doubt very much that the network as a whole will engage in the full-spectrum denunciation needed to curtail QAnon’s growth. Instead, the days to come will likely bring a range of responses from Fox personalities, from ignoring the movement, to downplaying its importance and extremism, to condemning its critics for attacking Trump supporters. The press will be hammered for covering the story. Some network figures will claim that the QAnon movement makes some good points, perhaps even outing themselves as full-fledged supporters. Others will rely on whataboutism, with the president’s defenders pushing back against reporting on QAnon by demanding to know why the media isn’t asking Democrats to condemn antifa or Black Lives Matter.
Fox is a Republican propaganda outlet that is deeply devoted to Trump. As long as that party and its leader are standing by the QAnon cult, the network won’t dare to stand up to it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-goes-all-in-on-ugly-white-grievance-politics/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/they-like-me-very-much-trump-gives-a-horrifying-answer-when-pressed-on-qanon/
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mis-spoke? made up extreme exec priv or somesuch? that chosen one was a goof/joke?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/former-dhs-staff-trump-claimed-magical-authorities-to-break-the-law/
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/qanon-functions-like-a-video-game-to-hook-converts-and-some-of-them-include-former-navy-seals-reports/
more than likely, a full-fledged supporter of the QAnon conspiracy cult will be sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021: Marjorie Taylor Greene, on August 11, won a GOP primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District — and given how overwhelmingly Republican that district is, she is going into the general election with a major advantage. QAnon is showing no signs of slowing down, and according to the Daily Beast’s Kelly Weill, the cult is attracting some well-trained military veterans.
QAnon believes that President Donald Trump was sent to the White House to combat an international pedophile ring that has infiltrated the United States’ federal government and practices Satanism. Cult members also believe that an anonymous figure named “Q” is giving them updates on Trump’s battle against the satanic pedophiles.
FBI agents have warned that QAnon followers are quite capable of violence. And Weill, in an article published in the Beast on August 18, warns that some well-trained military veterans are embracing the cult.
“In particular, some ex-(U.S. Navy) SEALs are promoting belief in QAnon or related theories that falsely accuse many of President Donald Trump’s opponents of being involved in satanic pedophilia and cannibalism,” Weill reports. And according to Marc-André Argentino of the Global Network on Extremism & Technology, the potential for QAnon-related violence should not be ignored.
argentino told the Beast, “The violence we’ve seen has been by people without acumen and physical training. Where it could get scary is with people who do have training.”
Weill cites Louis Garrick Fernbaugh, a former Navy SEAL, as an example of someone who has been promoting far-right conspiracy theories — and he is obsessed with billionaire George Soros and Antifa. Another former SEAL Weill discusses is Stephen Ralston: on Instagram, according to Weill, Ralston “frequently uses QAnon hashtags, promotes Q videos, and posts about his interest in killing pedophiles. Although opposition to pedophilia is an overwhelmingly popular sentiment across political parties, QAnon turns the concern into a bogus call to arms against Trump’s foes.”
According to Argentino, “QAnon is rooted in this war narrative, in the sense that they’re in aninformation war against the ‘Deep State.’ Information wars are typically combined with a more physical element…. (Veterans) may want to be called upon to free the children from the pedophiles.”
One of the things that QAnon is doing to attract converts, Kyle Daly reports in Axios, is “working like a video game.”
“Game designer Adrian Hon has argued that QAnon is a lot like an alternate-reality game, in which players follow a trail of clues online and off, to solve mysteries or just discover more clues to chase,” Daly explains. “But QAnon also echoes other game genres, mashing them together to become an all-encompassing, highly addictive experience. Intentionally or not, it has rolled up gameplay components from the past several decades of game design.”
QAnon, according to Daly, also has elements of an “adventure game.”
“Adventure games are built around puzzle solving, with players using exploration and trial and error to discover secrets and backstory and progress through the game,” Daly notes. “Many classics of the genre have the player unravel a sinister conspiracy. At the center of QAnon are cryptic messages posted online by ‘Q,’ who claims to be a Trump Administration official with high-level clearance. QAnon adherents pore over these posts, often written in phony spy jargon, to divine clues and secret messages and make fresh links in the grand conspiracy aligned against Trump.”
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https://www.axios.com/qanons-2020-resurgence-41759d2b-7d08-4d6e-bad0-d2a63b6285ad.html
aug 4
strange realities of 2020 have perfectly played to the kind of fear QAnon thrives on, driving record online interest in the conspiracy theory.
Why it matters: QAnon is not just one fringe conspiracy theory — it's a sprawling network of falsehoods that's seeping into the mainstream. Its growing influence is sowing fear and confusion around some of today's most important issues, such as election integrity and the coronavirus pandemic.
Catch up quick: QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory that alleges the "deep state" is engaged in a global fight to take down President Trump.
- QAnon rose out of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory and has grown into a decentralized network that analyzes cryptic prophecies dropped in remote online forums by "Q," who claims, without ever offering evidence, to be a Trump administration official with high-level clearance.
- Q maintains President Trump is secretly fighting a child-selling cabal in the U.S., though the conspiracy has spiraled to cover a vast array of claims, from JFK Jr. having faked his death to help Trump behind the scenes to the coronavirus being a hoax or a biological weapon engineered in either case by sinister elites.
By the numbers: Conspiracy theories tied to QAnon are growing more popular.
- There was more than 10 times as much Google search interest in QAnon in mid-July than in mid-January, according to Google Trends data.
- QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July, according to data tracked by the Atlantic Council and shared with Axios.
- There has been a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior, according to data from GroupSense provided to Axios.
Parts of the mainstream Republican party have latched on, helping drive its conspiracy theories mainstream.
- 11 QAnon supporters are now 2020 Republican Congressional nominees.
- President Trump himself has retweeted QAnon followers at least 90 times since the pandemic began, and others in Trump's inner circle have also shared Q content.
Between the lines: For all its twisty logic and branching details, Qanon is premised on a simple narrative of the good working to vanquish the evil, who are responsible for all the world's ills. There are very real concerns that may be driving more people to that narrative.
- 2020's battered economy has spurred wide-ranging anxiety and uncertainty.
- Child trafficking, central to QAnon, has seen greater visibility, with the Jeffrey Epstein saga working as "gasoline poured onto QAnon embers, springing the theory back to life at a moment when some believers were suffering doubts," said Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT's Center for Civic Media.
- Coronavirus has funneled what might otherwise be disparate conspiracy theories about cover-ups and global vaccine schemes into the grand unified theory offered by QAnon.
QAnon could pose real-world danger as it grows, scholars and analysts worry.
- Experts are particularly concerned it could undermine faith in democracy, with recent Q posts questioning vote-by-mail and election integrity.
- The web of misinformation expanding from within QAnon "definitely has real teeth," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen of cyber intelligence firm GroupSense.
What to watch: Tech giants are starting to crack down on QAnon, but policies around it are inconsistent and may in some cases be easily dodged.
- Twitter recently shut down 7,000 Q-related accounts. It expects broader policy changes to limit the reach of another 150,000 accounts, per NBC News.
- Facebook removed five pages, 20 accounts, and six groups associated with QAnon for violating its content manipulation policies in May.
- TikTok blocked several hashtags related to QAnon last month from its search results, although some of the videos that originally had the hashtags may still be available on the platform.
Yes, but: Studies have shown that users are more likely to seek out bad information when a Big Tech platform flags it as false.
- "There's sort of this censorship backfire that happens, and people start becoming outraged that [a video is] being taken down and then sharing it more and more and more," said Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.[// STREISAND EFFECT?!
Meanwhile: New platforms such as Parler and TheDonald.win are giving the conspiracy theory places to spread unchecked.
- On Parler, which has attracted conservatives, Webster-Jacobsen said there are 10,000 to 15,000 new posts every day with the hashtags #QAnon or #WWG1WGA — which stands for the Q catchphrase "where we go one, we go all."
The bottom line: Trust in U.S. institutions is dangerously low, which creates a ripe environment for big-tent conspiracies such as QAnon.
- "In some senses, the QAnon conspiracy is a deeply comfortable one: the idea that pedophile alien lizard people led by Hillary Clinton are running everything is more comfortable than the truth that no one has their hand firmly on the tiller,” Zuckerman say
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/some-republicans-finally-denounced-qanon-thats-great-but-its-too-little-too-late/
analysis
Some prominent Republicans and institutions are stepping up to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory after Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has voiced support for the outlandish conspiracy movement, won her primary runoff this week and became Georgia’s all-but-certain next member of Congress.
Condemnations of Greene and the conspiracy theories she believes are a refreshing change of pace in a Republican party that has allowed the QAnon movement to fester and grow in its ranks with tacit silence and winking online engagement. But the unfortunate truth is that any condemnation, no matter how powerful and from what perch, is likely to be ineffective in halting its spread or dissuading believers. QAnon has existed for nearly three years and has grown into an alternative universe to be reckoned with. As I wrote in July: “GOP leaders could have stopped it, and now it may be too late.”
Greene is among the dozens of Republican candidates seeking office this year who have embraced QAnon, a conspiracy theory that at its core alleges a network of demonic child sex abusers is leading the world and plotting its destruction. The FBI considers QAnon a potential source of domestic terrorism; followers of QAnon have been linked to criminal activity, including kidnapping and murder.
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois denounced QAnon after Greene’s victory, calling it “a fabrication.”
“Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller,” Kinzinger tweeted. “Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies."[twt rep k]
the editors of the National Review published a column yesterday urging Republicans to follow Kinzinger’s lead. They wrote:
House Republicans should go further and deny Greene committee assignments when she arrives in Congress in January. Stripping Iowa Republican Steve King of his committee seats in 2019 sent a message that there are boundaries of decency in the GOP that should not be crossed, and it signaled to GOP primary voters in Iowa that they should choose more wisely next time they had an opportunity. Thankfully, Iowans did just that in June.
Any such move would surely lead Greene to conclude there is a conspiracy against her, but some paranoids deserve enemies.
Managing editor of the Washington Examiner Jay Caruso admitted that his earlier doubt that QAnon believers could take power in Congress “was wrong and the GOP invited this mess.”
Politico reported that Republican Rep. Denver Riggleman of Virginia said the GOP would be in trouble if Greene was the face of its future. “QAnon is the mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories. It’s disgusting and you want to get rid of it as fast as possible,” he said.
But for every condemnation of QAnon, there were congratulations directed at its followers that seemed to ring louder.
President Donald Trump congratulated Greene on her primary runoff win, calling her a “future Republican Star.”
“Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!” Trump tweeted[djt twt]
the Chicago Tribune reports that Greene maintained support from many of her fellow Georgia Republicans, including Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins.“It’s clear that we need more outsiders with business sense in Washington,” Loeffler said. Rep. Matt Gaetz also offered his support to the QAnon candidate Thursday, tweeting, “Proud to be in your corner, Marjorie!”
House Republicans denounced Greene earlier this year after Politico surfaced a trove of videos in which Greene espoused racist and bigoted views. Republicans began to distance themselves from her candidacy and some endorsed her primary opponent, but nearly all remained mum on QAnon.
QAnon conspiracy theories have also taken rootwithin conservative evangelicalism, an essential part of the GOP base.
Tags: Marjorie Taylor Greene Election 2020 QAnon
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https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/fbi-calls-qanon-domestic-terror-threat-trump-has-amplified-qanon-supporters-twitter-more-20
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/california-republican-party-endorsing-least-four-qanon-supporting
7/29/20
California Republican Party is currently backing at least four congressional candidates who have expressed support for QAnon-- part of a larger movement by Republicans across the nation to support the violence-linked conspiracy theory.
QAnon is based on cryptic posts to online message boards from an anonymous user known as “Q" that have spread rampantly on social media and among fringe right-wing media. QAnon conspiracy theorists essentially believe that President Donald Trump is secretly working to take down the purported “deep state,” a supposed cabal of high-ranking officials who they claim are operating pedophile rings.
Media Matters has documented that in 2020, there have been at least 68 current or former congressional candidates who have embraced QAnon. There have also been at least 12 current or former state legislative candidates who have embraced the conspiracy theory.
The California Republican Party lists its endorsed candidates for this election cycle on its website, including Buzz Patterson (Congressional District 7), Nikka Piterman (Congressional District 13), Alison Hayden (Congressional District 15), and Erin Cruz (Congressional District 36).
All four of those Republicans have supported the QAnon conspiracy theory:
- In April, a Twitter user askedPatterson: “Do you support the Q movement?” He replied, “Yep!” (Patterson later bizarrely claimed “that he does not recall sending the tweet about the theory and does not ‘follow or endorse anything he/she/them say.’”)
- Piterman has tweeted the QAnon hashtag and slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” often abbreviated as “WWG1WGA,” though he misspelled the latter.
- Hayden has repeatedly tweeted QAnon hashtags and QAnon content.
- Cruzoffered support for the QAnon conspiracy theory in an interview with NBC News, including saying that “she believes some of what Q posts is valid information.”
The California GOP previously endorsed congressional candidate and QAnon supporter Mike Cargile, but quietly removed it shortly after Media Matters reported that he had used the n-word in an anti-Black Facebook rant.
The California GOP added its endorsements of Hayden and Cruz to its website in recent weeks even after news reports about their pro-QAnon views. (Google’s cache of the party’s endorsement page “as it appeared on 28 Jul 2020 03:48:35 GMT,” or 11:48 p.m. EDT on July 27, did not show endorsements for the two.)
Media Matters asked the CAGOP for comment, including confirmation that the party is endorsing the four candidates and whether it had a comment on QAnon and those candidates' support for the conspiracy theory. A spokesperson responded by sending a link to the party's endorsements page, which includes the four QAnon-supporting candidates.
The California Republican Party’s decision to endorse QAnon-supporting candidates is another instance of major Republican leaders and organizations lending credence to the conspiracy theory. Other examples include:
- President Donald Trump has frequently promoted QAnon Twitter accounts.
- Trump official Erin Perrine went on a QAnon program to recruit campaign volunteers. (The interview did not include a direct mention of QAnon.)
- Two Republican Party organizations in Florida and a GOP group in Georgia have used their Facebook pages to promote QAnon.
- Republicans are backing the Colorado congressional campaign of Lauren Boebert, who has expressed support for the conspiracy theory. (Boebert has attempted to distance herself from QAnon after criticism.)
- The Oregon Republican Party is supporting U.S. Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins, who is an avowed backer of QAnon.
Right-wing media have also been offering credence to QAnon in recent months.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/qanon-may-be-coming-congress-and-journalists-need-be-ready
parker m
“Gun-toting” restaurateur Lauren Boebert came out ahead of incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. She was described as a “guns rights activist” by Twitter, USA Today’s headline read, “5-term Rep. Tipton backed by Trump loses in Colorado primary, upset by businesswoman Lauren Boebert,” and The New York Times’ headline about her victory read “Lauren Boebert, Gun-Rights Activist, Upsets House G.O.P. Incumbent in Colorado.”
One aspect of Boebert’s history that initially received less prominent attention was her support of QAnon,a pro-Trump conspiracy theory baselessly alleging that Democratic officials are leaders of a worldwide pedophilia ring. The QAnon movement was name-checked in a leaked May 2019 FBI document highlighting the emergence of conspiracy theory-fueled domestic terrorism threats, and devotees have committed a number of murders, engaged in armed standoffs, and made politically motivated death threats. QAnon followers have vandalized churches, taken police on high-speed chases, and in one case, conspired with fellow followers to commit kidnapping.
“I hope that [QAnon] is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better,” Boebert told QAnon supporterAnn Vandersteel on Vandersteel’s SteelTruth show in May, adding that she was “very familiar” with QAnon. She also appeared on Patriots’ Soapbox, a popular QAnon YouTube channel. Additionally, Boebert appears to have a YouTube account that subscribes to multiple QAnon channels.
Since winning her primary, Boebert has tried to distance herself from the movement, telling Colorado Fox affiliate KDVR, “No. I’m not a follower. This is just a fake attack from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,” and adding, “QAnon is a lot of things to different people. I was very vague in what I said before. I’m not into conspiracies. I’m into freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I’m not a follower.”
While it’s good news that KDVR asked her directly about her connections to the movement, several experts on the subject worry about how the press will handle QAnon, generally.
In many ways, Boebert and other QAnon-following candidates have been normalized in the press. FiveThirtyEight published an article about the likelihood that Republican women will increase their representation in Congress with the November elections, and used a photo of Boebert. Her fringe beliefs are not mentioned anywhere in the article or accompanying tweet.
When The New York Times wrote about Boebert’s victory, it made a passing reference to her support of QAnon, saying in the lead that she’d “spoken approvingly of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon.” It wasn’t until the 11th paragraph that the movement got mentioned again, and even that was framed in the context of how “Democrats immediately went on the attack” for her support of QAnon.
Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan has reported extensively on the QAnon movement, and he has identified two concepts that journalists need to understand when reporting on this movement. The first has to do with QAnon-supporting candidates and the need to probe their actual beliefs. “Some of these candidates seem to see QAnon and its supporters as an explicit political constituency to appeal to for support, and are trying to use existing QAnon infrastructure to do so, such as using QAnon hashtags (particularly #WWG1WGA) and going on QAnon YouTube channels,” he says. “So they seem to be treating a far-right conspiracy theory group tied to violence and flagged by the FBI as some normal voting block when it's clearly not.”
The second issue is that reporters often seem unaware of, or aren’t reporting on, the actual number of QAnon-supporting candidates who are progressing in their races. Kaplan says, “I keep seeing just a few specific candidates mentioned over and over regarding those who made it out of primaries or to primary runoffs (Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jo Rae Perkins), when it's way more than that; it's at least 14 candidates that made it out of primaries to the ballot in November or to primary runoffs (and that's leaving out independent/write-in candidates).”
Boebert certainly seems to fall into Kaplan’s category of QAnon candidates who may not be true believers of the conspiracy theory, but have found it politically expedient to associate themselves with it during the primary. Unfortunately, Boebert is nowhere near the only Q-curious candidate running for office.Kaplan has counted a total of 63 current and former congressional candidates who’ve either endorsed or lent credence to the theory. More than a dozen of those candidates will appear on the ballot come November.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who came in first in her Georgia Republican primary, sending her on to an August 11 runoff, is an extremely vocal Q supporter who shared a campaign video in which she holds an assault weapon and demands that “antifa terrorists stay the hell out of northwest Georgia.”
“Q is a patriot. We know that for sure, but we do not know who Q is,” Greene says in a video. She later adds, “I think [Q] is something worth listening to and paying attention to.” The Cook Political Report lists Georgia’s 14th district as an R+27, meaning that if she wins in her August primary runoff, it’s extremely likely that she will be elected to Congress.
It’s worrisome that politicians who believe in outlandish conspiracy theories may soon be in positions of massive power without being given necessary scrutiny.
What will it mean to put someone in power who honestly believes that President Donald Trump was secretly working with special counsel Robert Mueller to uncover a “deep state” conspiracy and fight back against a global child-trafficking cabal being run by celebrities and leaders in the Democratic Party? This is a movement that believes that the current global pandemic is the result of a biological weapon released by shadowy global elites, that celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks are secretly under house arrest for child trafficking, and that John F. Kennedy Jr. is actually alive, 21 years after his death. The movement has been amplified repeatedly by Trump allies and even the president himself. Online, QAnon followers have picked up on Trump and allies’ promotion of Q-related posts, citing them as proof that QAnon is real.
The long-term effect of this movement remains unclear, but journalists need to be ready to confront this issue when they are faced with it.
Travis View, one of the hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, wonders what it will take for journalists to treat QAnon and its believers as a genuine threat to people’s safety.
“The question isn’t whether QAnon-connected murder, terrorism, and law enforcement scrutiny will cause the mainstream press to take QAnon as a serious extremist threat. We’re past that point,” he tells Media Matters. “The question is now how much QAnon-connected crime and death are required for the press to understand the dangers associated with QAnon.”
“Characterizing QAnon as merely a ‘pro-Trump conspiracy theory’ undersells it and misleads readers,” says View in a nod to how several news outlets have covered the movement. “I sense that most mainstream political reporters have a narrow grasp of extremism. They may understand the basic principles of white nationalism or salafi jihadism, but anything outside of that is invisible to them.”
For View, that means journalists have to make an effort to understand where candidates and their party backers stand on some of the more outlandish QAnon claims. View suggests asking Greene what she found “brilliant” about a cryptic Q post reading, “BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. A WEEK TO REMEMBER. DARK TO LIGHT. BLACKOUT NECESSARY. Q,” or why she showed interest in Rachel Chandler, a seemingly random woman QAnon followers have baselessly tried to connect to Jeffrey Epstein.
"Are the QAnon candidates at all concerned about the movement they’re associated with being called out as an extremist threat by the FBI?” asks View. “Even if these candidates no longer subscribe to QAnon beliefs, then there is journalistic value in discovering that as well.”
It’s easy to brush conspiracy theories off, but there could be long-term consequences to inaction in the fight against them. Yale philosophy professor and author of How Fascism Works Jason Stanley faults journalism’s normalcy bias for some of the surface-level failings on coverage of QAnon candidates.
“The U.S. media has a seemingly unyielding need to normalize the political process, especially when it comes to developments on the far right,” he tells Media Matters. “Pandering and minimizing extremist far-right conspiracy theories is presented as ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ -- sadly, this generosity is not extended to the left, where even mild forms of social-welfare democracy present in Canada and Europe are often presented as utopian fantasy. As Republican politicians become ever more extreme in their fantasies [such as] child sex rings run by the Democratic Party, we are yet again receiving lessons about how this false conception of journalistic objectivity leads to the destruction of our shared reality, rather than an improvement in our understanding of it.”
On Twitter, Stanley has expressed concern that the Trump administration and his supporters in Congress will try to “reverse engineer QAnon to make it seem plausible.” Trump’s ramblings about “Obamagate” would seem to be a part of this.
This wouldn’t be the first time Trump had taken a ludicrous claim and tried to reverse-engineer it into reality. After Trump baselessly accused President Barack Obama of illegally tapping his phone lines prior to the 2016 election, Trump used the power of his administration along with right-wing media to try to validate what he said. The administration’s decision to have John Durham conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the Mueller probe feeds into the QAnon “deep state” narrative.Should a large enough QAnon contingent come into power, it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to think that they would unleash a series of specious investigations and hold show trials to prosecute targets of the movement.
Some reporting on the QAnon movement has been great and should serve as examples to reporters who may not be familiar with it.
NBC News’ Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny stand out as examples of journalists who produce good, in-depth coverage of this conspiracy theory and corresponding movement. Similarly, the aforementioned QAnon Anonymous podcast as well as the work of Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch (and formerly of Media Matters) have been must-follows for anyone looking for a detailed breakdown of some of the movement’s biggest players and what they believe.
Will Sommer of The Daily Beast has provided excellent reporting related to the conspiracy theory, Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic published a remarkable long-form piece on the history of the movement, and The Guardian’s guk Julie Carrie Wong carried out an investigation about how Facebook has helped promote QAnon and other conspiracy theories.
Without a thorough understanding of internet culture and a familiarity with conspiracy theories, journalists may very well find themselves unprepared to cover Q-supporting politicians when they inevitably end up in the halls of Congress. Their ascension to those roles should in no way be an excuse to accept the conspiracy theory as anything less than a dangerous and deranged belief, but there’s reason to worry that will happen, as the eternal fight for balanced coverage in media often means accepting the far-right’s most outlandish beliefs as rational. Political journalists should spend time between now and November familiarizing themselves with this movement, because it’s not going away.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/fox-news-dangerous-dance-qanon
house Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) spent part of his Friday morning on Fox & Friends, reeling off attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and congressional Democrats. But thanks to the typically placid questioning from the program’s co-hosts, he escaped without having to comment publicly on the issue currently roiling his caucus -- McCarthy’s ongoing support for Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon conspiracy theorist who won the party’s nomination for a Georgia congressional seat on Tuesday.
Fox’s failure to press McCarthy about Greene reflects the network’s unwillingness to challenge QAnon, an all-encompassing extremist ideology which postulates that President Donald Trump is on the verge of uncovering a worldwide satanic pedophilia ring composed of Democratic leaders and celebrities. Fox and its cadre of right-wing stars could have tried to prevent QAnon’s rise -- and as an overwhelmingly powerful force in conservative politics, they may have been able to do it and have a responsibility to try. But instead, they have alternately ignored and flirted with QAnon, even as its supporters have multiplied and infested the Republican Party.
The group’s core tenets are dangerously unhinged, the coronavirus conspiracy theories pushed by itssupporters are a public health threat, its adherents have been linked to violent attacks, and a leaked FBI memo warns that its members may commit acts of terrorism. But its massive scope -- it boasts social media communities numbered in the millions and a global presence -- and its pro-Trump nature makes it a rising player on the right. At least 70 of this cycle’s Republican congressional candidates have endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content, and 19 of them have already secured places on the ballot this fall.
If QAnon’s ascent is not stopped, its supporters could duplicate the tea party movement’s path, moving from fringe outsiders to Republican Party power brokers. And Greene’s primary win seems to have spurred a gut check for some on the right, because McCarthy had refused to support her primary opponent, and her heavily Republican district means she is likely to win her seat. The editors of the generally pro-TrumpNational Review called McCarthy’s embrace of Greene a “travesty,” and at least some House Republicans seem to agree, albeit anonymously.
That apparently hasn’t swayed McCarthy -- even after Media Matters revealed that Greene was also a 9-11 truther, the conservative outlet The Dispatch reported that his office said the minority leader still “looks forward” to her victory. But Fox & Friends had the opportunity to get him to discuss his support for a QAnon candidate personally and on-camera, and the hosts passed.
That’s symptomatic of how the network has handled QAnon more broadly in the years since it first emerged from the right-wing message boards. When Fox supports or opposes a movement, it’s generally not hard to tell -- just contrast the seemingly endless fawning coverage the network gave right-wing protests against coronavirus stay-at-home orders with its unhinged attacks on activists protesting racism and police brutality this year.
But with QAnon, Fox has been almost entirely silent. The movement has been referenced on only eight broadcasts on the network’s weekday evening programming over the past two years, according to the Nexis database. In every single case, it was a fleeting mention in which the speaker did not describe the conspiracy theory (on multiple occasions, the mention occured in a clip from another network that the Fox host was criticizing).
Both the network’s stars and its executives clearly worry about becoming too closely associated with QAnon. Sean Hannity claimed in a recent interview that he has “no earthly idea what it's about at all,” while Jesse Watters issued a statement distancing himself from the movement last month after he drew controversy for using his weekend show to hype the “great stuff” the movement has uncovered.
But you also don’t see prime-time hosts like Tucker Carlson using their shows to actively try to convince their viewers not to become QAnon followers, or otherwise warning them about that dangerous extremist ideology. There are three reasons you probably won’t see that anytime soon.
First, the QAnon cult is now large enough that it overlaps with a solid swath of staunch Trumpists, which is also the network’s devoted viewership.At this point, Fox hosts would risk alienating their audience if they were to criticize QAnon. The movement is particularly enamored of Hannity’s program, which shares similar themes regarding Trump’s fight against the purported “deep state.” And as QAnon has increasingly merged with the president’s base, the network in turn has ended up repeatedly promoting its believers.
Second, Fox is a cog in the Republican Party’s propaganda apparatus, and while it has at times challenged the GOP establishment from the right, it has shown zero inclination to act as a guardrail against the party’s extremists. If Republican leaders like McCarthy are willing to accept someone like Greene serving in Congress, you aren’t going to see Hannity’s ilk side with anonymous GOP members of Congress criticizing that judgement.
If these arguments seem familiar, you might recall something similar happening during the 2016 election, as Trump came to subsume both Fox and the Republican Party.
And indeed, third, Trump himself is hanging over the entire debate. While he dodged a direct question about Greene’s QAnon support on Friday, he has endorsed her as a “future Republican star,” and one of his top campaign aides lashed out at Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) when the congressman criticized QAnon. Is it so hard to believe that the president, who made his political bones as a birther, claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) dad helped kill President John Kennedy, accused MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of murder, and is constantly portraying himself as the victim of a conspiracy by the media and “deep state” might be willing to embrace QAnon directly at some point? That certainly has to be a risk that would weigh on the minds of Fox’s personalities.
So instead, as QAnon believers continue to spread throughout the Republican Party, we are likely to see more criticism of the QAnon critics. Fox hosts will downplay the importance of the movement. They will say that the danger is being blown out of proportion by Democrats and the media and anti-Trump conservatives -- a hoax, if you will. They will claim, like Watters did, that QAnon’s supporters make some good points. They will argue that it’s all just an attack on Trump’s supporters. And have you seen how QAnon triggers the libs?
Once you’ve championed Trump, it's incoherent to try to establish a hard opposition to conspiracy theories, no matter how baroque. And so, with little to no pushback from Fox, QAnon will continue to spread through the network’s audience, and will gain a foothold in Congress for years to come.
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David Atkins / Washington Monthly August 16, 2020
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/why-the-gop-cant-control-qanon-the-party-was-already-becoming-a-conspiracy-cult/
at long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.
I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration withtop “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”
The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.” “Patriots Are in Control.” “Where We Go One We Go All.” It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to beessential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truth”: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access tofree energy, debt jubileesand world peace.
Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the pain”: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist” cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.
QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:
'Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)” is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.”
This is not a political movement. It is a novel form of online religion enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?
One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.
The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.
These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought. It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.
So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?
This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.
Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream” Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-evangelicalism-is-in-decline-and-qanon-could-take-its-place/
Remember the “Left Behind” series, about how the Rapture would whisk away all devout right-wing Christians before Jesus Christ unleashed the apocalypse on the unbelievers? Purity rings? Jesus Camp? Breathless stories about “girls gone mild,” giving up sex and tank tops for the Lord? A federal health official who believed that women who had premarital sex couldn’t feel love? Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson blaming 9/11 on the “pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way”?
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There can be no doubt that the heyday of Christian fundamentalism in America was the George W. Bush administration. Conservatives craved reassurance that they were defenders of “morality”, despite supporting an indefensible invasion of Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. These claims to moral superiority over liberals mainly came in the form of policing hymen status, harassing women at abortion clinics and claiming a right to Christian forgiveness (for yourself) whencaught with prostitutes or soliciting gay sex in public bathrooms.
White evangelicals still hold considerable political power, which is why Donald Trump occasionally tries to get photographed fondling a Bible in ways he vainly hopes are convincing. Abortion and LGBTQ rights are still under serious threat, as the Christian right has made major inroads into the federal judiciary.
Perversely, however, the cultural power of white evangelicals is clearly fading, both in terms of numbers and relevance, and that process started long before Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.’s namewas ever associated with a “pool boy.” Bibles have been largely replaced with Pepe the Frog memes. Public prayer has given way, among right-wingers, to chants of “Lock her up.” You hardly hear anyone on Fox News these days talking up premarital abstinence anymore. They’re too busy arguing that it’s no big deal that Trump has routinely cheated on his wives, or that it’s “pearl-clutching” to be angry that he has bragged about committing sexual assault.
white evangelicalism is in decline, but another movement is rising to take its place, a movement that scratches that same right-wing itch towards false piety and elaborate tribalist mythologies that are incomprehensible to outsiders: QAnon.
Yes, QAnon, the bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory that holds (more or less) that behind the scenes of observable reality lies a shadowy worldwide pedophile ring run by Democrats and prominent celebrities, and that Trump’s bizarre and self-serving authoritarian behavior is actually an elaborate ruse to hide his secret fight to destroy this elite child-abuse conspiracy.
QAnon has grown rapidly since it first emerged in 2017, morphing from an online conspiracy theory to anexplosive political and cultural phenomenon, one that can probably be considered a cult — although it lacks leaders in any conventional sense. While there hasn’t been systematic research into how many Americans are QAnoners, an NBC News study earlier this month discovered that QAnon accounts on Facebook have more than 3 million followers.
An estimated 20 QAnon adherents are running for congressional office this year. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene, just won a primary race for the Republican nomination in a Georgia district that is nearly certain to go red in November, in a landslide that suggests, at the very least, that her wacky beliefs didn’t scare off Republican voters. While some Republicans have publicly expressed reservations about Greene — who has apparently made racist comments and used sexist slurs — Donald Trump just called her a “future Republican Star”.
It’s a measure of our bizarre political climate that the Trump campaign sees QAnon as the future, but it’s hardly a surprise. Trump hasn’t been shy about courting QAnon followers, frequently retweeting its adherents (while later suggesting he doesn’t know much about it). But this public endorsement of a QAnon candidate brings the public embrace of the movement to the next level. Now Trump’s campaign is publicly attacking at least one Republican congressman who committed the sin of criticizing QAnon, with Trump’s deputy communications director arguing that the “real” conspiracy theory is the Russian collusion story. (That’s actually true, even if Team Trump has the story upside down.)
As ridiculous as all of this is — in the real world, Trump has wished accused child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell “well,” and has shown no particular interest in the issue — the rise of QAnon as a more secular replacement for evangelical Christianity makes a lot of sense.
By claiming to pursue a crusade against the sexual abuse of children, QAnon gives its adherents a feeling of self-righteousness, one that allows them to ignore the reality that they support a deeply immoral and sociopathic president who is bragging about his efforts to steal the November election, and whose malicious mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic has destroyed our economy and led to 166,000 deaths and millions of damaged lives. It lets them construct a story where they’re the good guys who oppose sexual exploitation, when in fact they are fiercely loyal to a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by two dozen women.
Evangelical Christianity played the same role for conservatives in the pre-Trump years, letting them feel holy and moral despite openly backing politicians who promoted immoral policies. But it came with a bunch of downsides, like being made to feel guilty for premarital sex, divorce or even (as Falwell Jr. found out) drinking and partying. With QAnon, you get to sleep in on Sunday and have all the sex you like, without giving up that pious assertion of moral superiority or the presumption of secret knowledge.
QAnon even swipes a central tactic from the Christian right: Focusing its concern on imaginary threats to children, while ignoring the very real threat to children (and everyone else) posed by their beliefs and actions.
With the Christian right, it’s all about melodramatic appeals that abortion supposedly “kills babies,” rhetoric that allows them to feel righteous while they undermine the services — social welfare, health care, housing and education — that allow parents to raise actual living children in safe, healthy environments.
QAnon claims to be fighting for children, but the child sex-trafficking victims they speak for are exclusively in their heads. In fact, QAnoners not only ignore the real cases of sex trafficking that exist, which have nothing to do with their conspiracy theory, but get in the way of activists who fight the real problemby clogging up phone lines, confusing their fundraising efforts, and interfering with social media campaigns.And they certainly don’t give a damn about the real-life children that Donald Trump separated from their parents and stuffed in cages along the border.
Embracing ridiculous beliefs, whether in the Rapture or in Pizzagate, seems to be a part of American right-wing DNA, perhaps because wild fantasies are the only way they can distract themselves from the real evil they do in the world.In light of that, the rise of QAnon makes sense. It’s the perfect mechanism, in Trump’s America, for conservatives to tell themselves a story about how they’renoble warriors for truth and justice in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re not. Hardly anyone likes to face the genuinely bad things they’ve done, and QAnon provides Trump-loving conservatives a fable to justify all their dreadful choices.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/conservative-writer-warns-the-gop-is-increasingly-embracing-the-utter-lunacy-of-qanon/
no lnx twt vid?
Conservative writer warns the GOP is increasingly embracing the ‘utter lunacy’ of QAnon
Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2020
On Tuesday, August 11, the QAnon conspiracy cult enjoyed a major victory when far-right QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene won a Republican primary in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District and was congratulated by President Donald Trump — who wasn’t the least bit troubled by her pro-QAnon views. And veteran conservative pundit/author Mona Charen, in an article published in The Bulwark on August 13, laments the willingness of prominent Republicans to endorse those who embrace the “utter lunacy” of QAnon.
The QAnon cult believes that Trump was elected president to combat an international pedophile/child sex ring that operates within the U.S. government and that an anonymous figure named “Q” is providing updates on Trump’s battle. Greene, in a 2017 video that has been posted on YouTube, expressed her solidarity with QAnon. And considering how deeply Republican her district is, Greene has a very good chance of defeating the Democratic candidate, tech worker Kevin Van Ausdale, in November and taking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2021.
Charen explains: “Pizzagate morphed into the QAnon conspiracy in which Q followers wait for signals from their leader that a vast conspiracy of Satanic child abusers, run by the ‘Deep State,’ George Soros, the Supreme Court, and God knows who else is about to be unmasked.Did I mention that they think Beyoncé is only pretending to be black? It’s a hydra-headed thing, this conspiracy, and contains multitudes. But the one common thread is this: the great deliverer will be Donald J. Trump.”
QAnon, Charen writes, is a “paranoid conspiracy (theory that) has gathered momentum at the Republican grassroots.”
Greene is not an anomaly: support for QAnon has been growing in the Republican Party.
“No fewer than 60 current or former congressional candidates have expressed interest in or support for the QAnon conspiracy,” Charen laments. “One of them, Jo Rae Perkins, got the Republican nomination for Senate in Oregon. And now, Marjorie Taylor Greene seems almost certain to be going to Congress.”
Charen notes that although some prominent Republicans condemned Greene — including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise — Trump and others have embraced her.
“Greene received backing from the House Freedom Fund, an arm of the House Freedom Caucus,” Charen observes. “Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and former Rep. Mark Meadows, now Trump’s chief of staff, also backed Greene.”
To make matters worse, Charen adds, Greene critics like Kinzinger are being slammed by Trump supporters for speaking out against her.
Voters in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, Charen points out, could have chosen her GOP primary rival, Dr. John Cowan — who she describes as a “gun-rights-supporting, anti-abortion Trump loyalist” — to run against Van Ausdale. Instead, they went with someone even further to the right: a QAnon extremist.
“It’s odd that Republicans, who pride themselves on their practical understanding of life — incentives matter, money doesn’t grow on trees, personal responsibility is essential to a well-ordered society — should display such a marked weakness for utter lunacy,” Charen laments. “I don’t offer an explanation, just a warning. This disordered thinking is no longer just a fringe phenomenon.”
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boebert colo
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/sean-hannity-praises-and-coming-qanon-friendly-congressional-candidate
fox News’ Sean Hannity hosted Republican congressional candidate Lauren Boebert on his TV show — providing a prime-time platform to a candidate who has supported the violence-linked QAnon conspiracy theory.
The QAnon movement was name-checked in a leaked May 2019 FBI document highlighting the emergence of conspiracy theory-fueled domestic terrorism threats, and devotees have committed a number of murders, engaged in armed standoffs, and made politically motivated death threats. QAnon followers have vandalized churches, taken police on high-speed chases, and in one case, conspired with fellow followers to commit kidnapping.
Boebert is one of dozens of current or former 2020 congressional candidates who have expressed support for the conspiracy theory. Many of them, like Boebert, will be on the ballot in November.
Boebert has explicitly praised QAnon, and furthermore appeared on another QAnon YouTube show. She's tried to back away from those statements after winning her primary election, and this week got a helping hand from Hannity. He introduced Boebert as an “up-and-coming Colorado congressional candidate” who was “taking on the Washington swamp.” Hannity portrayed Boebert as the victim of unfair media attacks.
Also: Boebert is touting the endorsement of white nationalist and COVID-19 conspiracy theorist Tom Tancredo.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-nation-goes-full-cuckoo-right-wing-conspiracy-theorists-get-even-more-unhinged-as-the-presidents-chances-fade/
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A pandemic is spiraling out of control and Donald Trump’s reaction is to roll his eyes and say, “It is what it is.” Unsurprisingly, polling data shows that his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is pulling ahead, not just in national polls, but in a number of battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida, none of which Trump can afford to lose. After all, the incumbent has nothing real to run on. The economy is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans are losing health insurance by the millions, and Republicans are responding by trying to shortchange unemployment benefits for the millions of people who’ve lost their jobs.
With nothing real to hang on to, it’s no surprise that conservatives — already prone to spreading misinformation — are increasingly addicted to conspiracy theories, wallowing in paranoid fantasies to justify the ludicrous notion that there’s any reason to keep on supporting Trump and the Republican Party.
Unfortunately, this turn towards even greater conspiratorial thinking on the right is also extremely dangerous. There’s already a strong link between right-wing paranoia and right-wing violence. Add the increasing likelihood of Trump’s defeat, the rising stress from the coronavirus, and a blitz of violent propaganda, and there’s a real chance that right-wing conspiracism will lead to even more domestic terrorism, hate crimes and neofascist goons in the streets.
Alex Jones of Infowars, who still has a sizable audience despite having been de-platformed by many major social media companies, shamelessly encouraged his audience last week to lash out with murderous violence against the left.
Jones claimed to have reports that “Maoists” (which is fringe-right code for anyone to the left of Republicans) are stockpiling “explosives and weapons and trucks loaded with ammonium nitrate and chlorine gas” in the cities in preparation to wage war against all true-believing Americans. So “the best thing to do in a defensive way,” Jones said, “is kill as many of them as quickly as possible.”
Jones of course insisted that he was only talking about “defensive” tactics and warned viewers about not “jumping first,” but that rhetoric is mostly a weak attempt at ass-covering to disguise an effort to incite terrorist violence from the right.
For one thing, Jones is just making up the threat that his audience is supposed to be “defending” themselves against. No leftists are not stockpiling weapons or bomb-making materials, and there is no progressive conspiracy to wage war on right-wingers. For another thing, Jones painted a clear picture of the kinds of people he imagines killing as quickly as possible, specifically naming “the establishment perverts and pedophiles” who he believes run society, as well as people who “show up in black uniforms and burn down your local courthouse.”
The former is a reference to Democratic politicians, whom far-right conspiracy theorists have been accusing, under the banner of “Pizzagate,” of running a secret pedophile ring for at least the last four years now. The latter is a reference to Black Lives Matter protesters and anti-fascist activists, the vast majority of whom are peaceful. The right has been demonizing the as violent because of some graffiti and sporadic episodes of vandalism.Neither group is involved in a plot to kill conservatives (or anyone else), but by claiming that they, Jones is setting up a narrative clearly meant to incite or justify violent attacks.
On the Christian right side of things, similar conspiracy theories about progressives are spreading. As Right Wing Watch has documented, popular Christian right activist Scott Lively has claimed that “Democrat-controlled population centers” will soon be burned to the ground, as part of an elaborate conspiracy by liberals to get out of paying pensions to police officers.
Unfortunately, there’s good reason to fear these wild and violent theories are gaining even more traction than usual on the already paranoid far right. On Tuesday, Axios reported a massive surge in online interest in QAnon, which is basically an umbrella movement that organizes all these various right-wing conspiracy theories into one narrative that has become so elaborate and consuming for its followers that it’s almost a religion at this point.
Online searches for QAnon have reportedly exploded tenfold. Similarly, “QAnon pages and groups on Facebook had nearly 10 times more likes at the end of last month than they did last July” and there has been “a 190% increase in the daily average number of tweets with popular QAnon hashtags since March as compared to the seven months prior.”
QAnon followers believe that a shadowy “elite” — which they conflate with Democrats — runs both the country from the shadows and, oh yeah, that they also have a massive pedophilia ring, and that Trump is secretly masterminding a plot to destroy this elite cabal. (In real life, Trump’s reaction to people who run pedophile rings is to say they like “beautiful women” on “the younger side” and also to say “I wish her well.”) It’s a testament to the kinds of pretzels people will tie themselves into in order to believe that there’s anything noble or moral about Donald Trump, or some valid reason to support him.
The rise in interest in QAnon isn’t surprising, as the White House is actively encouraging their voters to get involved with this unified-field conspiracy universe. As Media Matters has reported, Trump has retweeted QAnon Twitter accounts at least 185 times, and “members of Trump’s family, his personal attorney, current and former campaign staffers, and even some current and former Trump administration officials have also repeatedly amplified QAnon supporters and their content.”
Honestly, the supposedly mainstream conservative network Fox News is just as dangerous at this point. Most Fox News hosts are careful to avoid overtly endorsing QAnon, but network content in recent weeks has been perfectly situated to validate and amplify the paranoia about Democrats and progressives who are supposedly gearing up to wage war on conservatives.
Day in and day out, Fox News has broadcast scary images of protesters fighting with police, clouds of tear gas and people running through city streets in the middle of the night, all to make rural and suburban viewers, who are even more shut-in than usual, believe that American cities are war zones right now. Fox News is also blatantly lying to its viewers, blaming “radicals” and “antifa” for the scary images, and not telling viewers that in most cases what they’re seeing is cops provoking conflict, often by chasing down, beating and tear-gassing peaceful protesters.
As those of us who actually live in American cities can attest, they don’t look like war zones, but pretty much like the same places they were before the pandemic and the protests (with a lot less traffic). Even when it comes to the protests themselves, despite some looting and vandalism back in early June, the vast majority of protests have been entirely nonviolent, at least as long as law enforcement isn’t attacking protesters without cause.
In spreading this bald-faced propaganda, Fox News — which tries to position itself as the voice of the Trump-era mainstream right — is working in tandem with cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs conspiracy theorists like QAnon and Alex Jones. Fox News viewers see all these misleading images and hear all this talk about “antifa” and the “radical left,” and it feels like concrete evidence that the conspiracy theorists are right and that “progressives” or “radicals” are starting a civil war. This not only reinforces conspiratorial thinking, but encourages more conservatives to seek out these outrageous theories.
Taken together, the Trump White House, the online conspiracy fringe and Fox News are enveloping Republican voters in this paranoid fantasy that they’re under violent assault from the leftists — and that they need to “defend” themselves through pre-emptive action. There’s already been a rash of violence against protesters, who have been run over with cars or shot down in the streets. Rather than toning it down, Trump and his allies in both “mainstream” and fringe right-wing media have ramped up their rhetoric, painting a lurid and entirely false picture of the supposed threat. Either implicitly, as on Fox News, or explicitly, as with Alex Jones, conservatives are being encouraged to respond to this imaginary threat with violence.
There’s no reason to expect this situation to improve as the November election nears — or after that either, quite likely. Right-wingers are sore losers on a good day, but now they’ve whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy that is utterly detached from reality and could lead to tragic violence.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/angelo-carusone-speaks-bbc-news-about-impact-qanon-conspiracy-theory
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/fox-news-host-is-quickly-back-peddling-after-spreading-dangerous-qanon-nonsense-on-air/
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Igor Derysh / Salon July 27, 2020
Fox News host Jesse Watters has walked back comments he made praising the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory during a Saturday interview with Eric Trump.
Watters called QAnon a “fringe group” — which he does not “support or believe in” — in a statement to Mediaite one day after he praised it for uncovering “a lot of great stuff.”
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that started on the imageboard 4chan in which a would-be secret operative with classified information posts clues to followers about the “deep state” and a baseless plot by President Donald Trump to destroy a global sex trafficking ring allegedly involving high-profile Democrats and their celebrity supporters.
What began as a widely-mocked fringe group has now grown into a widely-mocked insurgency within the Republican Party. There are numerous QAnon supporters and boosters running in Republican races around the country. Oregon Republicans recently nominated a QAnon conspiracy theorist as their U.S. Senate candidate.
Twitter recently cracked down on a network of accounts linked to QAnon over their “potential to lead to offline harm.” Facebook is preparing similar steps, according to The New York Times. QAnon adherents have pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy, a baseless claim that high-profile Democrats were running a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria which was followed by a shooting, and more recently, a bizarre claim that the furniture outlet Wayfair was secretly trafficking missing children in ads for high-priced storage cabinets.
Watters took issue with the ban during his Saturday interview with Eric Trump.
“Twitter has basically cracked down and eliminated about 7,000 accounts and another 100,000 accounts are now in the cross-hairs.” he said. “Do you think this is an attempt to interfere in an election? Because, you know, Q can do some crazy stuff with the pizza stuff and the Wayfair stuff, but they also uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein and the deep state.”
Many of the QAnon “deep state” claims have been debunked and, as NBC News reporter Ben Collins noted, it has not “uncovered a lot of great stuff when it comes to Epstein.”
“The Epstein reporting was by actual reporters at newspapers, bastardized by Q to fit a narrative about Satanic child cannibalism,” Collins wrote on Twitter. “Deeply irresponsible garbage by Fox News.”
After questioning whether blocking accounts linked to the fringe group would qualify as “election interference,” Watters compared the group to the anti-fascist movement Antifa.
“I never saw Q as dangerous as Antifa. But Antifa gets to run wild on the internet, what do you think is going on there?” Watters asked.
Eric Trump, who has promoted the conspiracy theory on Instagram, did not engage with the QAnon comments but agreed with Watters’ assertion that cracking down on the baseless conspiracy theory was tantamount to election interference.
“They are literally putting their finger on the scales of a U.S. election,” Trump argued.
“You have some little dweeb in Silicon Valley, who’s 22 years old. He’s a tech savant,” he said. “He’s running Twitter or one of these companies, and he literally has his finger on the power of a presidential election.”
Journalists condemned Watters and Fox for praising the group on the air.
“I can’t begin to tell you how validating this segment will be for QAnon followers and how dangerous that is,” journalist Yashar Ali wrote. “QAnon followers are deeply detached from reality and they constantly look for validation of their beliefs. They look for what they see as codes from people they support. A top Fox News host endorsing QAnon while the president’s son nods along is all they need.”
Watters later issued a statement walking the comments back.
“While discussing the double standard of big tech censorship,” he said Sunday, “I mentioned the conspiracy group QAnon, which I don’t support or believe in. My comments should not be mistaken for giving credence to this fringe platform.”
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Goodbye QAnon: Twitter bans 7,000 conspiracy mongers and places limits on 150,000 others
Mark Sumner / Daily KosJuly 22, 2020
Twitter this morning is brought to you by every letter except “Q,” because after three years of rants about how the world is actually controlled by a high profile cabal of…
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russians wd be stupid not to use Qanon?
720 srch: russia putin GRU qanon disinformation active measures
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Putin's Goal Is to Bring Down American Democracy - The ...www.theatlantic.com › magazine › archive › 2020/06
The Russians were expecting the election of Hillary Clinton—and preparing to immediately declare it a fraud. The embassy in Washington had attempted to ...
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Jun 2, 2020 - By supporting theories aimed at destabilising the US during the Coronavirus pandemic, Kseniya Kirillova reports on how Putin has opened up ...
Russian troll accounts purged by Twitter pushed Qanon and ...www.nbcnews.com › tech › social-media › russian-troll...
Feb 2, 2019 - The accounts' tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Trump, almost 38000 times — the most of any hashtag.
Missing: GRU ?active ?measures
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-troll-accounts-purged-twitter-pushed-qanon-other-conspiracy-theories-n966091
no lnx pix
new batch of troll accounts identified by Twitter as having ties to Russia’s propaganda operation revealed an emphasis on promoting far-right conspiracy theories such as Qanon to Americans.
Twitter announced Thursday the removal of 418 accounts tied to the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, the disinformation group whose employees were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller last February for attempted election interference.
The accounts’ tweets featured the hashtag #MAGA, usually in support of President Donald Trump, almost 38,000 times — the most of any hashtag. #ReleaseTheMemo, a social media campaign pushed by allies of the president last year that aimed to discredit some members of the FBI, was tweeted 37,583 times.
In all, the 400-some accounts tweeted more than 900,000 tweets.
At the time, close allies of Trump brushed off suggestions that #ReleaseTheMemo, which trended on Twitter, was boosted by Russian influence. "Russian trolls have nothing to do with releasing the memo. That was a vote of the intelligence committee,” counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway said last February.
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Some now-purged users spammed Twitter with tweets repeating the hashtag “#ReleaseTheMemo.”
When removing the spam-style messages that included multiple hashtags, the second-most tweeted topic for the Russian troll accounts was #Qanon, a baseless conspiracy theory that claims Mueller and Trump are secretly working together to take down a global pedophile ring run by celebrities and Democratic politicians.
#GreatAwakening and #FollowTheWhiteRabbit, which are catchphrases for #Qanon followers, also featured prominently in the Russian trolls’ tweets.
Nina Jankowicz, a global fellow at the Kennan Institute focusing on Russia and technology, told NBC News that Qanon’s often outlandish narratives about a secret global cabal fueled by the United States fits well with Russian propaganda’s larger narrative.
“One of the Kremlin’s favorite tactics is to inspire confusion and doubt to sow distrust in government. Qanon certainly does that,” Jankowicz said.
“Amplifying the conspiracy theory also makes it look like it has more supporters, distracting from more substantive issues in the online discourse.”
[Related
TECH
What is Qanon? A guide to the conspiracy theory taking hold among Trump supporters]
Qanon, a more elaborate offshoot of the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory, came to prominence when several Trump supporters showed up at the president’s rally in Tampa, Florida, this past August carrying “Q” signs and wearing T-shirts supporting the conspiracy.
In the last year, believers in the conspiracy have also been in armed standoffs with the police in Arizona, and one blocked the Hoover Dam demanding the “Release of the OIG Report,” a Qanon-based conspiracy theory loosely derived from the success of #ReleaseTheMemo.
All of the 30 most-used hashtags pushed by the suspected Russian troll accounts focused on either support for Trump, conspiracy theories that targeted his political opponents or a separate — but sometimes overlapping — trolling campaign that meant to demean Muslims.
The hashtags #IslamIsTheProblem, #StopImportingIslam and #BanShariaLaw were each tweeted more than 15,000 times by the 481 Russian troll accounts.
The accounts attempted to emulate Americans on both sides of the political aisle.
One account identified by Twitter as a Russian troll account, @QuartneyChante, posed as an African-American woman. One of her tweets received more than 66,000 retweets.
“Dear White People. It’s a privilege to learn about racism instead of experiencing it your whole life,” the tweet read.
The account was even featured in several news articles, including a Mashable story dubbed "Dear white women: Here's how to step up for women of color.”
Jankowicz said the widespread dissemination of the tweets is a good reminder not to trust everything you read on social media.
“That account was created fairly recently and gained a lot of traction quickly, it seems,” Jankowicz said. “It’s pretty sad, but unless accounts use a plausible name and personal photo on Twitter, I’d advise users against interacting with them.”
Ben Collins
Ben Collins covers disinformation, extremism and the internet for NBC News.
Image: Joe Murphy
Joe Murphy
Joe Murphy is a data editor at NBC News Digital.
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aha: is Q an interdisc hub? // anti-mask? [vax, militia?] alt rt boogaloo?
aha: gop/rt busted so many times for dark $/corruption that it needs whatabout so soros = kochs and actblue = dark $/scam
plus they need to neutralize blm demand for justice, and it's a scam than racism not real
note chan origin then moves up escalator to dobbs
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6/20
https://www.mediamatters.org/fake-news/debunked-conspiracy-theory-about-black-lives-matter-actblue-and-democrats-can-be-traced
no lnx many pix
A false money laundering conspiracy theory regarding the Black Lives Matter movement's use of a payment processing company for donations has gained traction online among right-wing figures and can be traced back to far-right message boards.
The conspiracy theory alleges that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is some kind of a front to launder money to Democrats because the BLM website uses ActBlue to process its online fundraising payments. ActBlue is a payment processor used widely by progressive groups and organizations affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party has an equivalent processing company called WinRed. As the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics has noted, “many candidates use [ActBlue] to process donations but that money isn't pooled to be shared across candidates or groups,” and “a donation to BLM through ActBlue goes just to BLM, not any other group.” But the conspiracy theory still has earned well over a million shares and views on social media and has been amplified by a Fox Nation host.
A review by Media Matters found that before it gained traction, the conspiracy theory had been circulating for days on far-right message boards. The earliest mention our review found was at the beginning of June on Twitter, when an account that has pushed the slogan for the QAnon conspiracy theory repeatedly tweeted the claim on June 1 and June 2. The account claimed it had sent the conspiracy theory to the FBI and President Donald Trump, and it urged the Ohio Police Department to investigate the claim.
@OneVoiceUS
The conspiracy theory popped up days later on June 5 on TheDonald.win, a new forum for the subreddit “r/TheDonald,” which was known for violent rhetoric and was ultimately quarantined by Reddit. On TheDonald.win, a user wrote that “when you go to donate on the blacklivesmatter.com website,” you are redirected to ActBlue, which means entities “donating to Black Lives Matter are actually donating to ActBlue.” That means, the user wrote, that the donations may be “just going straight to fund the Democratic presidential campaign.”
The next day, another user on the forum wrote in a post that “BLM is a bait and switch fundraising scam” for the Democratic National Committee “by laundering money through Act Blue.” The user urged others to “tell everyone you know.” This post gained more traction on the forum than the first one, which it directly referenced in the comments. Similar language made its way to Facebook minutes later.
The Donald subreddit forum ActBlue1
Over the next few days, the conspiracy theory also began circulating on 4chan’s “/pol/” message board, a known hotspot for white nationalists, where users pointed to ActBlue to claim Black Lives Matter was “a fundraising apparatus” and a “slush fund” for Democrats. One 4chan user pushing the claim on June 8 used nearly the exact same language as the June 5 post from TheDonald.win.
4chan ActBlue claim
The conspiracy theory also continued to circulate on TheDonald.win on June 8 and reached the subreddit “r/conservative,” where a user called Black Lives Matter a “money laundering scheme” for Democrats via ActBlue. That post was later shared in a YouTube video.
The following day, on June 9, The Gateway Pundit, a far-right blog that has a history of publishing misinformation, posted that the BLM site “appears to be aninternational money laundering scheme used by the Democrats to raise money from an international audience,” claiming ActBlue appears to be “a funding arm of the DNC.” (The site’s owner Jim Hoft shared the post on Twitter, calling it an “exclusive.”) The post gave a “hat tip” to TheDonald.win for the claim. The post was picked up by multiple far-right figures, including by a QAnon-supporting former congressional candidate on Twitter, another QAnon Twitter account with a major following who keeps evading his Twitter ban, and by trollMilo Yiannopoulos on Telegram.
Gateway Pundit ActBlue claim
On June 10, right-wing pundit Candace Owens quote-tweeted an Instagram video pushing the conspiracy theory and accused Black Lives Matters of being a “shell company” for Democrats via ActBlue(Owens also posted the video on Instagram, where it received well over a million views). Minutes later, “Q,” the central entity of the QAnon conspiracy theory, posted a link to Owens’ tweet on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board. Owens’ post has been retweeted more than 64,000 times so far.
Candace Owens ActBlue claim
Following Owens’ post, the conspiracy theory began spreading to other conservative figures, such as Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch; a Florida Republican congressional candidate who has given credence toQAnon; Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier (who, like Owens, incorrectly called ActBlue a “Democrat super PAC”); Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and former editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s London bureau Raheem Kassam.
Additionally, two major conservative TikTok accounts, @therepublicanhypehouse and @conservativehypehouse, both posted videos pushing the conspiracy theory, getting more than 370,000 views combined (even though TikTok has an anti-misinformation policy).
The conspiracy theory also apparently reached Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, who has a history of pushing claims from message boards. She tweeted, “When you donate to BLM you’re donating to the Dems.”
Tomi Lahren ActBlue claim
These tweets and videos combined have gotten hundreds of thousands of shares and views and have amplified the conspiracy theory far beyond fringe message boards.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/god-sent-me-claims-%e2%80%8bqanon-promoting-congressional-candidate-angela-stanton-king/
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mma 720
OAN’s White House correspondent: QAnon is anonymous “for a very good reason” and “people need to respect that”
Trump official went on a QAnon show to recruit campaign volunteers
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/qanon-may-be-coming-congress-and-journalists-need-be-ready
7/10 parker m
“Gun-toting” restaurateur Lauren Boebert came out ahead of incumbent Rep. Scott Tipton in the Republican primary for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. She was described as a “guns rights activist” by Twitter, USA Today’s headline read, “5-term Rep. Tipton backed by Trump loses in Colorado primary, upset by businesswoman Lauren Boebert,” and The New York Times’ headline about her victory read “Lauren Boebert, Gun-Rights Activist, Upsets House G.O.P. Incumbent in Colorado.”
One aspect of Boebert’s history that initially received less prominent attention was her support of QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory baselessly alleging that Democratic officials are leaders of a worldwide pedophilia ring. The QAnon movement was name-checked in a leaked May 2019 FBI document highlighting the emergence of conspiracy theory-fueled domestic terrorism threats, and devotees have committed a number of murders, engaged in armed standoffs, and made politically motivated death threats. QAnon followers have vandalized churches, taken police on high-speech chases, and in one case, conspired with fellow followers to commit kidnapping.
“I hope that [QAnon] is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better,” Boebert told QAnon supporter Ann Vandersteel on Vandersteel’s SteelTruth show in May, adding that she was “very familiar” with QAnon. She also appeared on Patriots’ Soapbox, a popular QAnon YouTube channel. Additionally, Boebert appears to have a YouTube account that subscribes to multiple QAnon channels.
Since winning her primary, Boebert has tried to distance herself from the movement, telling Colorado Fox affiliate KDVR, “No. I’m not a follower. This is just a fake attack from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,” and adding, “QAnon is a lot of things to different people. I was very vague in what I said before. I’m not into conspiracies. I’m into freedom and the Constitution of the United States of America. I’m not a follower.”
While it’s good news that KDVR asked her directly about her connections to the movement, several experts on the subject worry about how the press will handle QAnon, generally.
In many ways, Boebert and other QAnon-following candidates have been normalized in the press. FiveThirtyEight published an article about the likelihood that Republican women will increase their representation in Congress with the November elections, and used a photo of Boebert. Her fringe beliefs are not mentioned anywhere in the article or accompanying tweet.
When The New York Times wrote about Boebert’s victory, it made a passing reference to her support of QAnon, saying in the lead that she’d “spoken approvingly of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon.” It wasn’t until the 11th paragraph that the movement got mentioned again, and even that was framed in the context of how “Democrats immediately went on the attack” for her support of QAnon.
Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan has reported extensively on the QAnon movement, and he has identifiedtwo concepts that journalists need to understand when reporting on this movement. The first has to do with QAnon-supporting candidates and the need to probe their actual beliefs. “Some of these candidates seem to see QAnon and its supporters as an explicit political constituency to appeal to for support, and are trying to use existing QAnon infrastructure to do so, such as using QAnon hashtags (particularly #WWG1WGA) and going on QAnon YouTube channels,” he says. “So they seem to be treating a far-right conspiracy theory group tied to violence and flagged by the FBI as some normal voting block when it's clearly not.”
The second issue is that reporters often seem unaware of, or aren’t reporting on, the actual number of QAnon-supporting candidates who are progressing in their races. Kaplan says, “I keep seeing just a few specific candidates mentioned over and over regarding those who made it out of primaries or to primary runoffs (Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jo Rae Perkins), when it's way more than that; it's at least 14 candidates that made it out of primaries to the ballot in November or to primary runoffs (and that's leaving out independent/write-in candidates).”
Boebert certainly seems to fall into Kaplan’s category of QAnon candidates who may not be true believers of the conspiracy theory, but have found it politically expedient to associate themselves with it during the primary. Unfortunately, Boebert is nowhere near the only Q-curious candidate running for office. Kaplan has counted a total of 63 current and former congressional candidates who’ve either endorsed or lent credence to the theory. More than a dozen of those candidates will appear on the ballot come November.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who came in first in her Georgia Republican primary, sending her on to an August 11 runoff, is an extremely vocal Q supporter who shared a campaign video in which she holds an assault weapon and demands that “antifa terrorists stay the hell out of northwest Georgia.”
“Q is a patriot. We know that for sure, but we do not know who Q is,” Greene says in a video. She later adds, “I think [Q] is something worth listening to and paying attention to.” The Cook Political Report lists Georgia’s 14th district as an R+27, meaning that if she wins in her August primary runoff, it’s extremely likely that she will be elected to Congress.
It’s worrisome that politicians who believe in outlandish conspiracy theories may soon be in positions of massive power without being given necessary scrutiny.
What will it mean to put someone in power who honestly believes that President Donald Trump was secretly working with special counsel Robert Mueller to uncover a “deep state” conspiracy and fight back against a global child-trafficking cabal being run by celebrities and leaders in the Democratic Party? This is a movement that believes that the current global pandemic is the result of a biological weapon released by shadowy global elites, that celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Tom Hanks are secretly under house arrest for child trafficking, and that John F. Kennedy Jr. is actually alive, 21 years after his death. The movement has been amplified repeatedly by Trump allies and even the president himself. Online, QAnon followers have picked up on Trump and allies’ promotion of Q-related posts, citing them as proof that QAnon is real.
The long-term effect of this movement remains unclear, but journalists need to be ready to confront this issue when they are faced with it.
Travis View, one of the hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, wonders what it will take for journalists to treat QAnon and its believers as a genuine threat to people’s safety.
“The question isn’t whether QAnon-connected murder, terrorism, and law enforcement scrutiny will cause the mainstream press to take QAnon as a serious extremist threat. We’re past that point,” he tells Media Matters. “The question is now how much QAnon-connected crime and death are required for the press to understand the dangers associated with QAnon.”
“Characterizing QAnon as merely a ‘pro-Trump conspiracy theory’ undersells it and misleads readers,” says View in a nod to how several news outlets have covered the movement. “I sense that most mainstream political reporters have a narrow grasp of extremism. They may understand the basic principles of white nationalism or salafi jihadism, but anything outside of that is invisible to them.”
For View, that means journalists have to make an effort to understand where candidates and their party backers stand on some of the more outlandish QAnon claims. View suggests asking Greene what she found “brilliant” about a cryptic Q post reading, “BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. A WEEK TO REMEMBER. DARK TO LIGHT. BLACKOUT NECESSARY. Q,” or why she showed interest in Rachel Chandler, a seemingly random woman QAnon followers have baselessly tried to connect to Jeffrey Epstein.
"Are the QAnon candidates at all concerned about the movement they’re associated with being called out as an extremist threat by the FBI?” asks View. “Even if these candidates no longer subscribe to QAnon beliefs, then there is journalistic value in discovering that as well.”
It’s easy to brush conspiracy theories off, but there could be long-term consequences to inaction in the fight against them. Yale philosophy professor and author of How Fascism Works Jason Stanley faults journalism’s normalcy bias for some of the surface-level failings on coverage of QAnon candidates.
“The U.S. media has a seemingly unyielding need to normalize the political process, especially when it comes to developments on the far right,” he tells Media Matters. “Pandering and minimizing extremist far-right conspiracy theories is presented as ‘balance’ and ‘objectivity’ -- sadly, this generosity is not extended to the left, where even mild forms of social-welfare democracy present in Canada and Europe are often presented as utopian fantasy. As Republican politicians become ever more extreme in their fantasies [such as] child sex rings run by the Democratic Party, we are yet again receiving lessons about how this false conception of journalistic objectivity leads to the destruction of our shared reality, rather than an improvement in our understanding of it.”
On Twitter, Stanley has expressed concern that the Trump administration and his supporters in Congress will try to “reverse engineer QAnon to make it seem plausible.” Trump’s ramblings about “Obamagate” would seem to be a part of this.
This wouldn’t be the first time Trump had taken a ludicrous claim and tried to reverse-engineer it into reality. After Trump baselessly accused President Barack Obama of illegally tapping his phone lines prior to the 2016 election, Trump used the power of his administration along with right-wing media to try to validate what he said. The administration’s decision to have John Durham conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the Mueller probefeeds into the QAnon “deep state” narrative. Should a large enough QAnon contingent come into power, it doesn’t seem to be a stretch to think that they would unleash a series of specious investigations and hold show trials to prosecute targets of the movement.
Some reporting on the QAnon movement has been great and should serve as examples to reporters who may not be familiar with it.
NBC News’ Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny stand out as examples of journalists who produce good, in-depth coverage of this conspiracy theory and corresponding movement. Similarly, the aforementioned QAnon Anonymous podcast as well as the work of Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch (and formerly of Media Matters) have been must-follows for anyone looking for a detailed breakdown of some of the movement’s biggest players and what they believe.
Will Sommer of The Daily Beast has provided excellent reporting related to the conspiracy theory, Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic published a remarkable long-form piece on the history of the movement, and The Guardian’s Julie Carrie Wong carried out an investigation about how Facebook has helped promote QAnon and other conspiracy theories.
Without a thorough understanding of internet culture and a familiarity with conspiracy theories, journalists may very well find themselves unprepared to cover Q-supporting politicians when they inevitably end up in the halls of Congress. Their ascension to those roles should in no way be an excuse to accept the conspiracy theory as anything less than a dangerous and deranged belief, but there’s reason to worry that will happen, as the eternal fight for balanced coverage in media often means accepting the far-right’s most outlandish beliefs as rational. Political journalists should spend time between now and November familiarizing themselves with this movement, because it’s not going away.
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https://www.insider.com/hilary-duff-responds-to-qanon-conspiracy-theories-about-child-trafficking-2020-5
HOME CULTURE
Hilary Duff appeared to respond to baseless QAnon conspiracy theories saying that she was involved in child trafficking
Rachel E. Greenspan
hilary duff qanon theorieshilary duff qanon theories
Hilary Duff. Aaron Poole/E! Entertainment/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images]
Hilary Duff has appeared to respond to baseless QAnon conspiracy theories falsely claiming she's involved in child trafficking.
"Everyone bored af right now I know..but this is actually disgusting..... whoever dreamed this one up and put this garbage into the universe should take a break from their damn phone. Maybe get a hobby," she said in a tweet.
QAnon theories attacking celebrities have only further amplified its reach, as people like Duff and Oprah Winfrey respond to the viral accusations, which have no basis in fact.
Hilary Duff has responded to outlandish conspiracy theories spread by the QAnon conspiracy theory movement that claimed she was involved in child trafficking.
In a May 23 tweet, the actress appeared to respond to the false claims, which began after a now-deleted tweet alleged a photo of her with her son, Luca, proved that she had been involved in the practice of selling children, according to The Daily Dot.
"Everyone bored af right now I know..but this is actually disgusting..... whoever dreamed this one up and put this garbage into the universe should take a break from their damn phone. Maybe get a hobby," she said in a tweet.
—Hilary Duff (@HilaryDuff) May 23, 2020
The photo that followers of QAnon — a movement centered on the conspiracy theory that there's a group of "elites" in the US who are out to get President Donald Trump and engage in pedophilia and child trafficking, among other things — used to attack Duff allegedly showed her son with "white markings all over his body." In the original Twitter thread, the user called this "a message to the devils of the elites that her son is for sale," The Daily Dot reported.
The QAnon movement's conspiracy theoriestargetting celebrities have only further amplified its reach,as figures like Duff respond to the viral accusations, which have no basis in fact. The theories about Duff participating in human trafficking are part of a larger trend among QAnon supporters, who continue to falsely allege that various famous people are involved in such crimes.
In March, Oprah Winfrey responded to a hoax claiming she had been arrested on human trafficking charges. Even the police department of Boca Raton, Florida, tweeted to clarify that it had not arrested Winfrey.
The QAnon movement has clearly made its way into the mainstream. Now, there's even a slew of lifestyle influencers on Instagram sharing this kind of misinformation, which stems from the fringes of the internet, with hundreds of thousands of followers. Plus, Trump continues to share theories on Twitter, like Obamagate, which is strongly linked to the QAnon community.
"When you've got the president of the United States promoting these themes and theories," Alexander Reid Ross, a researcher who tracks white nationalism and a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, told Insider in a previous interview. "You can say that they're fringe, in terms of the competent, rational mind, but you can't say that they're out of the mainstream," said Reid Ross.
Read more:
Lifestyle influencers are using COVID-19 to spread QAnon conspiracy theories: 'I truly believe I owe it to my audience to be more for them during this turning point in our culture'
Facebook banned a cluster of 'fringe conspiracy' QAnon pages for breaking its rules on manipulation
A QAnon conspiracy theory about Oprah Winfrey went so viral that it provoked her to respond, showing the scope of coronavirus misinformation
Celebrities, politicians, and influencers are largely accountable for the spread of false coronavirus information, according to a new study
NOW WATCH:
More: Digital Culture Hilary Duff QAnon Conspiracy Theories
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/qanon-conspiracy-theories-started-on-the-fringe-but-now-its-adherents-could-gain-real-power
Marc-André Argentino, Concordia University
Until recently, many people didn’t take conspiracy movements seriously, even though violent acts have been perpetrated by those on the fringe. People who believe in false conspiracy theories are often just considered silly or weird.
Below the surface, however, there are movements from these communities that have negatively affected our societies, and will continue to do so. The most prominent of these conspiracy communities is the QAnon movement.
QAnon adherents are not your caricature conspiracy theorists wearing tin foil hats and living in their parents’ basement. Some may soon be elected officials.
QAnon has an interesting place in the fringe. Though birthed from the same “chan culture” as other fringe internet conspiracy communities, QAnon is still in full evolution.
This October will mark three years since the inception of the QAnon movement after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories on the internet forum 4chan.
From online fringes to mainstream politics
What started as a conspiracy theory — about a deep state satanic cabal of global elites involved in pedophilia, sex trafficking and supposedly responsible for all the evil in the world — has moved from the world of online into mainstream popular culture.
In hisbook American Conspiracy Theories, political scientist Joseph Uscinski writes:
“ … conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with threats. Consequently, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness or disunity. But nothing fails like success, and ascending groups trigger dynamics that check and eventually reverse the advance of conspiracy theories.”
Though academic research would suggest that conspiracy theories are for “losers,” QAnon has thrived. After all, the community propagating the QAnon conspiracies was on the winning side of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Recent reports also suggest thepandemic has been beneficial to QAnon, a boon for the movement in terms of new members and an increase in social media content.
Increase in Q content on Facebook
I have been researching the QAnon movement since 2018. Based on my most recent social media analysis, QAnon has seen a 71 per cent increase in Twitter content and a 651 per cent increase on Facebook since March 2020.
Facebook has seen a veritable QAnon boom. Currently in my data set there are 179 QAnon groups with more than 1.4 million members, and 120 QAnon pages with a total of 911,000 page likes. The most interesting element of this Facebook boom is that most of the new pages are international, providing QAnon content in many different languages.
QAnon has used its increased visibility to spread medical disinformation, raising public health concerns. They have also been the source of wild sex trafficking claims, forcing some celebrities to respond to their allegations.
One of the more important signs of QAnon moving into the mainstream is the growing number of QAnon supporters running campaigns for the U.S. Congress.
Most Q candidates are Republicans
Researcher Alex Kaplan of the U.S. not-for-profit publication Media Matters has found 62 QAnon believers ran in congressional primaries in 27 different states. Almost all of them ran as Republicans, although a few were independents.
At least 12 of these candidates will be on the ballot in November — five in California, two in Illinois and one each in Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, Texas and Colorado, with two more candidates in runoff races in Georgia and Texas. Results from primaries showed nearly 600,000 people voted for candidates who support QAnon.
Marjorie Greene is the star QAnon candidate and is expected to win the runoff for a safe Republican seat in Georgia. Trump congratulated Greene after she came in first in the party’s primary and called her a “big winner.”
Five-term incumbent defeated
On June 30, five-term GOP incumbent Scott Tipton from Colorado was upset by Lauren Boebert, who stated in an interview with the conservative website Steel Truth that she was “very familiar” with QAnon.
“Everything I have heard of this movement is only motivating, and encouraging and bringing people together, stronger and if this is real than it can be really great for our country,” said Boebert, who is now on the ballot for November’s election.
When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee called upon the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) to disavow Boebert for her QAnon beliefs, the NRCC told the Huffington Post:
“We’ll get back to you when … the DCCC disavow(s) dangerous conspiracy theorists like Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff who have pushed without evidence their wild-eyed claims that the president of the United States of America is actually a secret Russian double agent under control of the Kremlin.”
Q supporter running for Senate
QAnon candidates are not limited to the House of Representatives. Oregon recently selected Jo Rae Perkins, a QAnon follower, as the GOP Senate candidate.
QAnon is no longer the simple fringe conspiracy movement it was at its inception three years ago. It now resembles a mainstream religious and political ideology. Some candidates perceive QAnon as an ideological platform they can campaign on, while others view QAnon adherents as an electoral base from which they can gain votes.
Trump has amplified tweets from supporters of the QAnon conspiracy movement at least 185 times, including more than 90 times since the start of the pandemic.
Trump associates such as his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, campaign manager Brad Pascale, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Donald Trump Jr. have all amplified QAnon content as well. Most recently, Eric Trump promoted QAnon on Instagram when plugging the president’s controversial rally that was held Tulsa, Okla.
Writer and conspiracy researcher Travis View notes: “QAnon conspiracy theories are promoted at the highest levels of power, when it wasn’t that long ago conspiracy theories were the pastime of the powerless.”
If QAnon believers make their way to the halls of Congress, those once considered powerless will have achieved real power. As journalists and researchers raise awareness about QAnon candidates, American voters will need to determine if they’re ready to to entrust the responsibility of their democratic institutions to QAnon adherents.
Marc-André Argentino, PhD candidate Individualized Program, 2020-2021 Public Scholar, Concordia University
This article is republished from The Conversation
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ref 1 https://religiondispatches.org/in-the-name-of-the-father-son-and-q-why-its-important-to-see-qanon-as-a-hyper-real-religion/
In a May 13th article published in The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance offers her readers a deep dive into the QAnon movement. The article argues that when surveying QAnon, we’re not only examining a conspiracy theory, we’re observing the birth of a new religion. LaFrance underscores this argument by highlighting the apocalypticism found in QAnon; its clear-cut dualism between the forces of good and evil; the study and analysis of Qdrops as sacred texts, and the divine mystery of Q.
Following the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown in 1978, historian Jonathan Z. Smith wrote an essay locating the study and definition of religion within an academic context, where he highlights that “almost no attempt was made to gain any interpretative framework” of what occurred at Jonestown by academics. Adrienne LaFrance’s article on QAnon makes clear that the movement and its believers demand to be taken seriously. Her piece acts as a springboard to ask the question: Can QAnon be considered a religion?
Though many enjoy mocking the QAnon conspiracy theories and those who profit from them, it’s important to note that the movement’s adherents firmly believe in the theories—even to the detriment of their families and communities.
Therefore, in an effort to avoid the mistakes of the past and to better understand the movement as it continues to grow and evolve, I suggest that we view QAnon as a “hyper-real religion.” Sociologist Adam Possamai, who coined the term, defines it as “a simulacrum of a religion created out of, or in symbiosis with, commodified popular culture which provides inspiration at a metaphorical level and/or is a source of beliefs for everyday life.”
Or, to put it more simply, a religion with a strong connection to pop culture. Based on Jean Baudrillard’s work on hyper-reality and simulations, hyper-real religion is based on the premise that pop culture shapes and creates our actual reality, with examples including, but not limited to: Heaven’s Gate, Church of All Worlds, Jediism, etc. As a movement in a constant state of mutation, QAnon clearly blurs the boundaries between popular culture and everyday life. MATRIX 4 IS ABOUT TRUMP PANDEMIC]
What this means is that technology and the marketplace of ideas have inverted the traditional relationship between the purveyors of religion and the consumers of religion. Thus, we see religious doctrinal authority (that is, those who can contribute to the religion’s teaching) being created by popular culture. TELEVANGELISM?
For example, the QAnon cosmology (how the world/universe appears; what it looks like; its characteristics, and types of creatures that populate it) and anthropology (ideas about human beings, their origin and destiny) are rooted in conspiracy theories, historical facts, and mythical history from film and popular culture.
As such, Terry Gilliam’ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is recommended by QAnon followers as evidence of the effects of Adrenochrome; The Matrix:{’s }
:{ is used to frame the choice to either be a part of the Great Awakening or to remain “asleep”; and the slogan “Where We Go One, We Go All” is from the film }:White Squall:{, whose }
:{’s comments section is filled with QAnon followers }::{(the top-rated comment, with over 5,000 up-votes, reads “Thumbs up if }::{Q sent you here}::{”}::{). Theprophetic figure of the movement, known only as ‘Q’ , also regularly references movies in their QDrops, as demonstrated from the screenshots below:}:
[very large doc/graf]
QAnon theology (conceptions of the sacred, gods, spirits, demons, the ancestors, culture heroes and/or other superhuman agents) is rooted in American evangelicalism and neo-charismatic movements developed in the 1970s and 1980s—specifically theology involving a worldwide cabal that controlled governments and aimed to control the freedoms of people through technology, medicine, and liberalism.
For example, QAnon reworked elements of the Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) panic (aka “satanic panic”) that originated in the U.S. in the 80s.SRA was the belief that a global network of elites was breeding and kidnapping children for the purposes of pornography, sex trafficking, and Satanic ritual sacrifice.
Furthermore, QAnon adopts the language of spiritual warfare found in many neo-charismatic movements. Based on some of the data analytics work I’ve done, Ephesians 6:11-18 is the most shared verse among QAnon adherents. Given the verse’s apparent condemnation of governments, the reaction of QAnon to the pandemic is rooted in the language of spiritual warfare, especially when addressing conspiracy theories surrounding 5G, ID2020, Bill Gates and vaccines, HR 6666, etc. Since the start of the pandemic, QAnon have spread a false racist theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and that white people were immune to COVID-19; they’ve promoted drinking bleach to cure the virus; that COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon and that the virus release was a joint venture between China and the Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election by destroying the economy. If that weren’t enough, they also played a key role in promoting the Plandemic video and the ObamaGate and #FilmYourHospital hashtag; and forced Oprah Winfrey and Hilary Duff to come out with statements declaring that they are not pedophiles.
When taking into account how much neo-charismatics, American evangelicalism, theological conspiracy theories, and spiritual warfare is influenced by the distrust of the everyday reality as being false (with their reality being ‘true’), one could make the argument that QAnon theology is not only influenced by pop culture, but is in fact, deeply rooted in the conception of the sacred within a hyper-real world.
Some might argue that a hyper-real religion isn’t a “real” religion because it’s invented, but scholars of religion don’t validate or discredit claims of what constitutes ‘true’ religion, because it’s true to the people we study. As a scholar of religion I study what people do when dealing with the sacred, rather than try to validate the religious message or experience. What people do when dealing with the sacred is routinized over time as believers construct their religion. All religions, hyper-real ones included, are socially constructed and are thus invented.QAnon is blatantly invented [META-FICTION?!]as it openly uses works of popular culture, media, entertainment, American evangelicalism and conspiracy theories at its basis, that have been organically developed across time and space by a community of believers. Belief in QAnon reflects a created hyper-real world based on such theories.
This is unsurprising, as Travis View stated on PBS’s The Open Mind “we’re living in an age where conspiracy theories are promoted at the highest levels of power, when it wasn’t that long ago conspiracy theories were the pastime of the powerless.” Similarly in 2018, Joseph Uscinski stated that QAnon is different from normal conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theories are for losers,” he told the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, “you don’t expect the winning party to use them.”
By framing QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it can offer insight into the confusion that people feel when discussing the movement, which is critical for observers, scholars, and decision-makers who need to take QAnon seriously. The past months have highlighted how QAnon is a public health threat, a threat to national security, and a threat to democratic institutions.
The essence of conspiracy beliefs like QAnon lies in the attempts to delineate and explain evil; it’s about theodicy, not secular evidence. QAnon offers comfort in an uncertain—and unprecedented—age as the movement crowdsources answers to the inexplicable. QAnon becomes the master narrative capable of simply explaining various complex events and providing solace for modern problems: a pandemic, economic uncertainty, political polarization, war, child abuse, etc.
The result is a worldview characterized by a sharp distinction between the realms of good and evil.[POLARIZATION/DEMON-IZATION] The movement accomplishes this by purporting to be empiricallyrelevant. That is, they claim that QDrops are testable by the accumulation of evidence about the observable world in fighting evil. Those who subscribe to QDrops are presented with elaborate productions of evidence in order to substantiate QAnon’s claims, including source citation and other academic techniques.
However, their quest for decoding QDrops masks a deeper concern: the more sweeping a conspiracy theory’s claims, the less relevant evidence becomes—notwithstanding the insistence that QAnon is empirically sound. At its heart, QAnon is non-falsifiable. No matter how much evidence journalists, academics, and civil society offer as a counter to the claims promoted by the movement, belief in QAnon as the source of truth is a matter of faith rather than proof.
Therefore, rather than ask questions like, How can people believe in QAnon when so many of its claims fly in the face of facts?, we should instead ask What are QAnonersdoingwith their belief system? QAnon believers have committed acts of violence in response to QAnon conspiracy theories. Elected officials or those campaigning for elected office have campaigned on QAnon. Those studying and combating the movement need to move beyond viewing it as a mere conspiracy theory; QAnon has grown beyond that. We are, as Adrienne LaFrance asserted, witnessing the birth of a religious movement. QAnon as a belief system only appears to be dependent on Donald Trump’s presidency and his ability to remain in power. Whether we will be speaking of future or former President Trump, the person known as Q will likely fuel the movement for a long time to come. Q will continue to claim special insights, knowledge, and frame things for their followers in terms of their enemies’ alleged ambitions. [AGENDA, HATE AMERICA, GLOBAL ELITE DOMINATION]
If Donald Trump wins in November, QAnon will be vindicated in their beliefs and say this is what God has mandated, reinforcing the belief that they are right. If Trump loses, it will be attributed to the Deep State Luciferian cabal and they will have a role to play in fighting against the fake government that’s replaced Donald Trump.
QAnon has become a hermeneutical lens through which to interpret the world. Already we’ve seen a formalized QAnon religion at Omega Kingdom Ministries (OKM). OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube. At OKM, QAnon is a hermeneutic by which the Bible is interpreted; and the Bible, in turn, serves as an interpretive lens for QAnon. Furthermore, QAnon is built into their evangelical Christian rituals. OKM may be a sign for what’s to come in terms of QAnon’s proximity to evangelical and neo-charismatic movements in the U.S.
In categorizing QAnon as a hyper-real religion rather than a decentralized grouping of conspiracy theorists, it provides an analytical framework to quantify and qualify QAnon-inspired acts of violence as ideologically motivated violent extremism. Furthermore, there’s an increasing overlap between QAnon and the far-right/Patriot movements on Telegram, a messaging app that has attracted extremists because due to its privacy protections. From the perspective of national security, we need to be prepared for more acts of violence by QAnon believers as it’s proven to be a catalyst for radicalization to violence, terrorism and murder.
By considering QAnon as a hyper-real religion, it becomes possible to frame how QAnon has foundresonance not only within the American electoral system, but with populists around the globe. This is especially important not only in the context of elections, but also when framing the global response to the pandemic and public health. Policy makers at all levels need to take the QAnon ideology seriously when planning strategies to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus.
QAnon may not be a recognized religion, a tax exempt 501c3 institution, or the kind of traditional brick-and-mortar religion most are familiar with. However, by framing QAnon as a religion—in particular, a hyper-real religion—we create a framework that helps us better study, report and understand QAnon. More importantly, it demonstrates that the movement needs to be taken seriously and has the socio-political and behavioral impacts that other religions have. In doing so, it provides a pathway to protecting our societies and institutions from the public health, democratic, and national security threat that QAnon potentially poses.
==
ref above nat sec
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/420379775-fbi-conspiracy-theories-domestic-extremism.pdf
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/420379775-fbi-conspiracy-theories-domestic-extremism.pdf p, dl 720
==
ref 2
https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199351800.001.0001/acprof-9780199351800-chapter-6
Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent
Print publication date: 2014
Print ISBN-13: 9780199351800
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2014
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199351800.001.0001
Conspiracy Theories Are for Losers
Joseph E. Uscinski
Joseph M. Parent
:{:{}:
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199351800.003.0006
This chapter argues that conspiracy theories are essentially alarm systems and coping mechanisms to help deal with foreign threat and domestic power centers. Thus, they tend to resonate when groups are suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity. But nothing fails like success, and ascending groups trigger dynamics that check and eventually reverse the advance of conspiracy theories. In short, because defeat and exclusion are their biggest inducements, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” though sooner or later everyone must play the loser. In short, successful conspiracy theories conform to a strategic logic based on threat perception.
}:
Keywords: conspiracy theories, foreign threat, domestic power, threat perception, strategic logic
---
ref plandemic
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/qanon-coronavirus-disinformation_n_5eea6123c5b6a475b84c90c2
no linx great graf
QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To Come
The far-right conspiracy movement has flourished amid the pandemic, rendering its disinformation campaign stronger than ever ahead of the presidential election.
By Jesselyn Cook, HuffPost US
Hours after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on March 11, Fox News primetime host Sean Hannity pondered the news on his radio show. It “may be true,” he mused to his audience of millions, that “coronavirus fearmongering by the deep state will go down in history as one of the biggest frauds to manipulate economies, suppress dissent and push mandated medicines.”
Once again, far-right conspiracy theories had broken loose from internet dens and shaped mainstream conservative media coverage. Hannity, a close confidant to President Donald Trump, was parroting a known promoter of QAnon, the online fringe movement that claims a “deep state” cabal of Satanist elites is running an international child sex trafficking ring, among an ever-expanding repertoire of other falsehoods.
The COVID-19 emergency has turbocharged QAnon’s ability to spread tactical disinformation and attract new followers. As the movement seizes on public anxiety surrounding the virus to lure more people into its conspiratorial web, new data compiled by HuffPost reveals shocking spikes in traffic for dozens of the most influential QAnon accounts across social media. Many have more than tripled in size amid the crisis.
With just months until the polls open in November’s presidential election,QAnon has gained a massive new audience for its unhinged propaganda.
“It’s very concerning,” said Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters who studies online extremism. “Whenever a conspiracy theory or falsehood is circulating on social media, you can usually track it to a QAnon figure playing a role in spreading it.”
QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To
ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES] [sign: Q sent me]
Skyrocketing Online Interest
QAnon’s ostensible leader is “Q,” an anonymous online poster who adherents believe is a top government insider leaking coded intel to the public. [flynn? 3 stars] Q posts cryptic messages to the forum 8kun, which replaced the now-shuttered website 8chan last fall. There’s no clear indication of how many subscribers QAnon has amassed since its origins in 2017, although researchers estimate that its base could comprise hundreds of thousands of people or more — including at least 57 current and former congressional candidates. Some QAnon followers have even been inspired to commit violent crimes.
Rather than getting their supposed intel directly from Q on 8kun, which can be difficult to navigate, many QAnon supporters rely on a network of so-called “decoders,” or proxy figures, [AMPLIFY] who decipher and extrapolate on Q’s posts on their various social media channels. Whenever QAnon content scores a prominent new endorser, a trending hashtag, an affirming feature on Fox News or a presidential retweet, for example, decoders’ Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook pages tend to light up with curious new followers seeking information about the movement.
That’s been happening a lot lately, particularly as people search for answers about a global health emergency that’s unprecedented in most living memories. QAnon has played a major role in amplifying COVID-19 conspiracy theories into virality [TIP POINT = UNSTOPPABLE?!— many stemming from the baseless claim that the virus is a state-engineered bioweapon — while attracting hordes of new adherents in the process.
HuffPost analyzed the growth of dozens of the largest QAnon decoder accounts on social media, using the analytics tools Social Blade and CrowdTangle. The data showed explosive spikes in followers and subscribers starting in mid-March, just as the outbreak reached official pandemic status and as much of the world awoke to its severity. Most accounts’ followings have grown at least threefold since March 11, with one QAnon-centric Facebook group’s membership skyrocketing by more than 5,000%.
This graph charts the growth of four of the largest QAnon
HUFFPOST/DATAWRAPPER]
This graph charts the growth of four of the largest QAnon "decoder" accounts on social media. Each started spiking in followers or subscribers in mid-March — a trend reflected across dozens of other decoder accounts HuffPost analyzed.
Google searches for “QAnon” also began to soar in mid-March, as Mother Jones reported, along with searches for “deep state”; “Fall of the Cabal,” a popular QAnon video explainer series; and “WWG1WGA,” the movement’s slogan, meaning “Where We Go One, We Go All.” The number of visits to qmap.pub, a website that catalogs Q’s posts, has likewise erupted during the pandemic. The page had more than 10.5 million hits in May, compared to 4.1 million in January, according to the analytics tool SimilarWeb.
This surge in traffic appears to represent a staggering wave of new interest in QAnon. Although it may seem like a bizarre, low-level threat given its #PizzaGate-style theories, QAnon has an outsize real-world impact. As it has bubbled up from the paranoiac cesspools, it has shown time and again its insidious ability to disseminate disinformation to the masses — including, recently, anti-vaccine propaganda, the promotion of bleach as a COVID-19 cure, and hoaxes targeting front-line health care workers.
Even before the virus took its toll,QAnon had staked its territory in the political realm. Time magazine listed Q among the most influential people on the internet in 2018. A 2019 Civiqs poll of 1,543 registered U.S. voters found that 17% considered QAnon’s theory “about a conspiracy among deep state elites” to be “mostly true.”
Last spring, following a deadly shooting and other violent incidents involving self-proclaimed QAnon believers, the FBI labeled the movement a potential domestic terrorism threat. Trump has retweeted QAnon-supporting accounts more than 130 times — including three times on Saturday alone. And now, anopen QAnon promoter is expected to make it to Congress.
A 265,000-follower QAnon decoder Instagram account suggests the COVID-19 pandemic is a
INSTAGRAM]
A 265,000-follower QAnon decoder Instagram account suggests the COVID-19 pandemic is a "great awakening" — a common QAnon reference to people "waking up" to the movement. [millenial END DAYS GHOST DANCE TRUMP DEATH CULT?]
The pandemic has provided the ideal conditions for QAnon to gain critical mass. Fear and desperation abound in times of crisis, and rapidly changing information — such as the shifting advice regarding face masks early on — can rattle people’s confidence in authoritative news sources, rendering them especially vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
“People are looking for explanations for what feels like randomness,” Kaplan said. Conspiracy theorists are ready and eager to meet that demand.
The coronavirus has even brought unlikely QAnon enthusiasts out of the woodwork to preach Q’s message to entirely new audiences.Over the past three and half months, a series of lifestyle influencers on Instagram have abruptly pivoted their content from fashion, yoga, filtered selfies and the like to far-right agitprop.
“With everything going on in the world, I’m ready to share some of the things that I have been following for a really long time that I think are going to be exposed to the masses very soon,” one influencer-turned-propagandist announced in March, before posting a series of QAnon-themed Story Highlights to “awaken” her more than 100,000 followers.
Since then, she has repeatedly used her platform to advance the notion that the pandemic is a false flag event orchestrated to distract from “deep state” depravity, to mandate vaccines and, more generally, to exert unbridled control over society.
QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To
SCOTT OLSON VIA GETTY IMAGES]
A Burgeoning Force For Disinformation
QAnon’s growth is self-perpetuating: As it gains more followers, its ability to sow confusion and hyperpartisan conspiracies gets stronger, helping it attract even more adherents.This cycle is also fueled by social media recommendation engines that drive QAnon content onto people’s screens.
One of the highest-profile examples of coronavirus disinformation is “Plandemic,” the professionally produced but falsehood-laden film featuring discredited former medical researcher Judy Mikovits. Pushing a series of debunked claims, including that wearing face masks “literally activates your own virus” (it doesn’t) and that vaccines are “a money-making enterprise that causes medical harm” (they’re not), “Plandemic” went viral almost overnight — and it happened in large part because of QAnon.
Disinformation researcher Erin Gallagher traced the film’s spread across Facebook and other video-hosting websites. She found that a handful of big QAnon Facebook groups were among “Plandemic’s” most effective promoters on the 2.6 billion-user platform.
These “super spreader” groups can behave like a virus in the way that they propagate false information,Gallagher told HuffPost. “A lot of people come into contact with content there, and are sharing it in and out of the group,” she said.
One QAnon group played a particularly large role in amplifying “Plandemic,” Gallagher’s research showed. That’s likely because the group has been rapidly expanding since mid-March, like so many other major QAnon social media pages. By the time the video was posted online in early May, the group had already swelled from around 3,300 members pre-pandemic to nearly 120,000. (It’s now closing in on 200,000.)
This graph charts the growth of a QAnon Facebook group that widely amplified the
CROWDTANGLE]
This graph charts the growth of a QAnon Facebook group that widely amplified the "Plandemic" film.
Social media algorithms have undoubtedly accelerated the growth of QAnon accounts on their respective platforms. Facebook and other websites are free to use in exchange for people’s attention, which is the commodity that is then sold to advertisers. So when algorithms detect that certain content has the potential to go viral — whether it relates to the Kardashians,baby animals or a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles — they’ll often promote it further to prolong user engagement and maximize ad revenue.
By following just a single QAnon account on Instagram, for example, users can wind up viewing dozens more — all served to them by an app that’s designed to keep them scrolling for as long as possible, even if it means distributing disinformation. Facebook, which owns Instagram, has run dozens of ads featuring the “WWG1WGA” slogan.
After HuffPost followed a single QAnon account, Instagram recommended dozens
SCREENSHOT/INSTAGRAM]
After HuffPost followed a single QAnon account, Instagram recommended dozens more.
In rewarding such content with algorithmic promotion, social media platforms not only legitimize it, but incentivize people to produce more of it.
“Recommendation and engagement algorithms are built to promote this kind of content,” said Gallagher, who was shocked to see Facebook recommend that she check out a QAnon page in April right after she joined a local quarantine-focused group. “They’re built for viral marketing campaigns.”
With Big Tech’s help, QAnon has propagated many of the biggest conspiracy theories that are now plaguing society, and as the movement grows its reach, it’s only becoming more adept at doing so.
QAnon’s Coronavirus-Fueled Boom Is A Warning Of What's To
MARIO TAMA VIA GETTY IMAGES]
Conservative Media Pickup [ESCALATOR/ECHO]
As QAnon has wormed its way to notoriety from the entrails of the internet, it has become an increasingly effective conspiracy-theory pipeline to much bigger figures in the right-wing ecosystem. Since elevating the claim about coronavirus fearmongering by the “deep state” all the way up to Hannity’s radio show in March, QAnon has helped blast out a litany of other terrifying falsehoods tied to COVID-19, including the widespread assertion that the vaccine, when it arrives, will be used for mind control.
The amplification and reach of these theories has impeded the work of public health officials tackling the worst pandemic in a century.
On March 23, Q posted a message to 8kun suggesting that the coronavirus was a bioweapon unleashed to hurt Trump’s re-election chances. Days later, the hashtag #FilmYourHospital started trending on Twitter. Launched by a QAnon supporter, it urged people to show up at health care facilities with cameras in an attempt to expose the media for supposedly exaggerating the extent of the crisis.(More than 125,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 so far.)Former congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero, a notorious QAnon promoter, tweeted the #FilmYourHospital challenge to her more than 300,000 followers.
In early April, another QAnon-backed conspiracy theory got a boost from Fox News. AfterQAnon supporters aggressively pushed the baseless claim that Microsoft founder Bill Gates — who is helping to fund COVID-19 vaccine development efforts — will somehow implant people with microchips for tracking and depopulation purposes, Fox’s Laura Ingraham quote-tweeted a post about Gates and vaccines, writing: “Digitally tracking Americans’ every move has been a dream of the globalists for years. This health crisis is the perfect vehicle for them to push this.”
Later that month, QAnon found an even greater megaphone in the president of the United States. Throughout the crisis, QAnon backers including Tesoriero have been calling on Trump to replace leading infectious-diseases specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci with Shiva Ayyadurai, a Senate GOP candidate and scientist who is staunchly opposed to vaccines, and who has promoted QAnon in the past. As the government had to enhance Fauci’s security detail in response to far-right harassment, an April 10 YouTube video of Ayyadurai accusing Fauci of being “embedded in the deep state” racked up millions of views.Two days later, the trending hashtag #FireFauci was retweeted by Trump himself.
One of the largest pro-QAnon accounts on Instagram baselessly suggests the killing of George Floyd was
INSTAGRAM]
One of the largest pro-QAnon accounts on Instagram baselessly suggests the killing of George Floyd was "staged."
Now, QAnon is wielding its bolstered momentum to propel fake news about the killing of George Floyd into the mainstream — exacerbating a national tragedy while displaying its own prowess as a purveyor of disinformation in the runup to the presidential election.
QAnon decoders have argued that Floyd’s death was a scam intended to provoke chaos and justify a sweeping government crackdown. A 22-minute YouTube video pushing that falsehood was widely shared in QAnon Facebook groups and reached at least 1.3 million people, The New York Times reported earlier this month. A short time later, a woman in California was filmed tearing down a public memorial for Black victims of police violence as she shouted that Floyd’s death was “staged by antifa and George Soros.”
More recently, QAnon adherents have accused the Black Lives Matter movement of being a front to launder money for Democrats — a debunked claim that was started by a QAnon Twitter account, according to a review by Media Matters. It garnered extraordinary online traction from a number of prominent right-wing pundits, including Fox News host Jesse Watters on Saturday evening.
“I wonder how much Black Lives Matter funneled to [Democratic presidential nominee Joe] Biden just in June alone,” Watters said on his show, “Watters’ World,” which has millions of viewers. Trump retweeted a clip of the segment soon after it aired.
Late Sunday night, Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren tweeted then deleted a picture of a flyer falsely attributed to Black Lives Matter that labeled white men, women and children “the enemy.” Snopes, which had already debunked the hoax as an “attempt to smear” the racial justice movement almost two weeks earlier, reported that the flyer appeared to originate from a QAnon Twitter account.
QAnon decoders and supporters were also involved early on in spreading the entirely unfounded rumor that Martin Gugino ? the 75-year-old protester who was violently pushed to the ground by police in Buffalo, New York, fracturing his skull — was an antifa activist who faked his injuries. Far-right media outlet One America News Network ran with the conspiracy theory, and within days of the incident, Trump caught wind.
“Buffalo protester shoved by Police could be an ANTIFA provocateur,” the president tweeted to his 82 million followers, as Gugino lay in a hospital bed with a brain injury.
“Could be a set up?”
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8chan Is Trying To Come Back As '8kun.' Its Founder Is Trying To Stop It.
8chan Is Trying To Come Back As '8kun.' Its Founder Is Trying To Stop It.
Suggest a correction
Jesselyn CookReporter, HuffPost
MORE:
Politics Coronavirus QAnon Social Media sean hannity conspiracy theory
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https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/here-are-qanon-supporters-running-congress-2020
no lnx pix vid twt
Multiple supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which got its start on far-right message boards, are running campaigns for Congress in 2020.
The conspiracy theory, which revolves around an anonymous account known as “Q,” started on far-right message board 4chan, later moving to fellow far-right message board 8chan, which has since relaunched as 8kun. (Beyond the QAnon conspiracy theory, 8chan/8kun has been linked to multiple instances of white supremacist terrorism, including the 2019 massacre in El Paso, TX.)
The “Q” account’s claim -- and the conspiracy theory's premise -- is that President Donald Trump was working with then-special counsel Robert Mueller to take down the president’s perceived enemies, the “deep state,” and pedophiles. Multiple adherents to the conspiracy theory have been tied to acts of violence, including multiple murders and attempted kidnappings, and an FBI field office released a memo in May that listed QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Currently, among these candidates who have endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content:
Ten have secured a spot on the ballot in November by competing in primary elections.
Of those 10 candidates, five are from California, and there is one each from Colorado, Oregon, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas.
Two, in Georgia and Texas, are heading to upcoming primary runoffs.
One in Florida is running as in independent.
One in New York is running as a Republican write-in.
Fifty-five are Republicans, 2 are Democrats, 1 is a Libertarian, and 2 are independents.
Below is the list of 2020 congressional candidates who have endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content, divided into sections for 1) candidates who have secured a spot on the ballot in November, are heading to primary runoffs, or are running as write-in or independent candidates; 2) candidates whose primaries are still upcoming; and 3) candidates who are no longer running or whose status is unknown.
Candidates who have made it to November, a primary runoff, or are a write-in or independent:
Lauren Boebert (Colorado)
Lauren Boebert is a Republican candidate running in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. She won the Republican primary on June 30 and thus will be on the ballot in November's general election. She appeared on the online show Steel Truth, hosted by QAnon supporter Ann Vandersteel, during which Vandersteel asked her if she knew about “the Q movement.” Boebert responded that she was “very familiar with it” and said that while she did not focus on it a lot, she hoped that QAnon “is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better.” She also said that everything she heard about QAnon “is only motivating and encouraging and bringing people together, stronger, and if this is real, then it can be really great for our country.” In May, Boebert also appeared on Patriots' Soapbox, a major QAnon YouTube channel, and she also appears to have a YouTube account that subscribes to multiple QAnon channels. Despite all of this, Boebert has since claimed, “I don’t follow QAnon."
Mike Cargile (California)
state gop pulled endorsement?
Mike Cargile is a Republican candidate running in California’s 35th Congressional District. Cargile was one of the only two candidates who ran in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3, which means under California election law, he will appear on the ballot in November's general election. Cargile’s Twitter profile includes the QAnon slogan “Where we go one, we go all,” often abbreviated as “WWG1WGA,” and “#OathKeeper,” likely a reference to a far-right armed militia group. He has also tweeted and retweeted the QAnon slogan, and responded “absolutely” to a user's tweet that “now's the time to get On Board” with "#QAnon."
Mike Cargile QAnon profile image
Erin Cruz (California)
Erin Cruz is a Republican candidate running in California’s 36th Congressional District. Cruz came in second in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3, which means under California election law, she will appear on the ballot in November's general election. According to NBC News, Cruz believes some of the “Q” posts are “valid information,” saying, “I think that the biggest thing with QAnon is there's information coming out. And sometimes it is in line with what's going on in government.” She also told NBC that she believes “there is someone out there putting information on the internet” as part of QAnon, adding that “a conspiracy theory only sounds crazy until it’s proven.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia)
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Republican candidate running in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Greene came in first in the primary on June 9 and will head to a runoff with the second-place finisher on August 11 (the runoff was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic). In 2018, she posted on Facebook about an “awesome post by Q.” She has posted the QAnon slogan on Facebook and on Twitter, the latter in response to a tweet defending the legitimacy of “Q” where she also wrote, “Trust the plan” (another catchphrase QAnon supporters use). She also has tweeted the QAnon-connected hashtag “#GreatAwakening” to far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. She has also appeared in a video where she discussed following QAnon, calling “Q” a “patriot” and “worth listening to.” According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greene “has posted a series of tweets defending QAnon, including one" -- now deleted -- "encouraging her followers to message her with questions so she can ‘walk you through the whole thing.’”
Alison Hayden (California)
Alison Hayden is a Republican candidate running in California’s 15th Congressional District. Hayden came in second in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3, which means under California election law, she will appear on the ballot in November's general election. On her campaign Twitter account, Hayden has repeatedly retweeted content explicitly promoting QAnon, along with repeatedly tweeting the QAnon-connected hashtag “#GreatAwakening.” On what Ballotpedia lists as her personal Twitter account (an account her campaign account has previously tagged), she has tweeted the QAnon slogan and “#GreatAwakening.”
Alison Hayden retweets
K.W. Miller (Florida)
K.W. Miller is an independent candidate running in Florida’s 18th Congressional District. Miller has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan “#WWG1WGA” and “#GreatAwakening” (along with a hashtag for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory). He has also posted the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan on Facebook and repeatedly posted “#GreatAwakening” on Instagram. He also put up a Facebook ad in January promoting a campaign event featuring QAnon supporters Ann Vandersteel and KrisAnne Hall as special guests.
K.W. Miller QAnon Twitter
Buzz Patterson (California)
Buzz Patterson is a Republican candidate running in California’s 7th Congressional District. Patterson came in second in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3, which means under California election law, he will appear on the ballot in November's general election. On April 7, Patterson tweeted “yep” in response to a user asking if he “support[s] the Q movement.”
Buzz Patterson QAnon Twitter
Jo Rae Perkins (Oregon)
Jo Rae Perkins is a Republican candidate running for the U.S. Senate in Oregon (she was previously running in Oregon’s 4th Congressional District before switching races) and a former chair of the Linn County Republican Party. She won the Republican primary on May 19 and thus will be on the ballot in November's general election. She has repeatedly tweeted in support of QAnon and posted the QAnon slogan on Twitter and both her personal and campaign Facebook pages. Perkins has also said she follows the “Q team.” Her activity has included pushing a “#QProof” (supposed evidence that “Q” posts are accurate), posting links on Facebook to multiple QAnon YouTube videos, and linking to a site that collects “Q” posts. She has also demanded that reporters ask Trump “the #Q,” referring to a belief among the conspiracy theory’s supporters that Trump would confirm “Q” as real if asked.
In a January 3 interview with Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt (formerly of Media Matters) that she livestreamed and which featured a “WWG1WGA” sticker in the background, Perkins expanded upon her belief in QAnon, saying there is a “very strong probability/possibility that Q is a real group of people, military intelligence, working with President Trump” and compared the “Q” posts to secret codes used during World War II. Later in the interview, she claimed that “Q is most likely military intelligence ... and they've been out there watching what's been going on with our country for decades and they are partnered with President Trump to stop the corruption and to save our republic” and compared believing in “Q” to believing in Jesus Christ. Perkins also said her QAnon support is part of her campaign strategy and claimed that “there's a lot more people that are running for political office that follow Q than are admitting to it.”
Video file
CitationFrom a January 3, 2020, livestream on Jo Rae Perkins' Facebook page
Nikka Piterman (California)
Nikka Piterman is a Republican candidate running in California’s 13th Congressional District. Piterman was one of the only two candidates who ran in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3, which means under California election law, he will appear on the ballot in November's general election. He has tweeted the QAnon hashtag and the QAnon slogan (misspelled).
Nikka Piterman QAnon Twitter
Angela Stanton-King (Georgia)
Angela Stanton-King is a Republican candidate running in Georgia’s 5th Congressional District. She won the primary on June 9 by default, running unopposed, and thus will be on the ballot in November's general election. On Instagram, Stanton-King has posted a QAnon video from a well-known promoter of the conspiracy theory. She has also repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan. She has since denied to The Associated Press that she supports the conspiracy theory, claiming she posted the video as part of “questioning the movement” and that she used QAnon hashtags in order to “extend her reach” on social media.
Angela Stanton-King Instagram QAnon
Johnny Teague (Texas)
Johnny Teague is a Republican candidate running in Texas’ 9th Congressional District. He won the Republican primary on March 3 and thus will be on the ballot in November’s general election. Teague on his campaign account has retweeted content explicitly promoting QAnon, including retweeting a video of QAnon supporters giving an oath supporting the conspiracy theory. He has also retweeted a false conspiracy theory pushed by some QAnon supporters that John F. Kennedy Jr. is secretly still alive despite dying in a plane crash, and he has tweeted a video from a QAnon account with a major following.
Johnny Teague QAnon Twitter1
Antoine Tucker (New York)
Antoine Tucker is a Republican candidate running as a write-in candidate in New York’s 14th Congressional District, according to Ballotpedia. He has posted on Facebook and Instagram (where he goes by “Tony Montaga” and “Montaga,” respectively) an image of a “Q,” writing alongside the QAnon slogan, “What makes humans different from other Animals? We laugh, cry & we ASK QUESTIONS” and “#conspiracyfactsnottheories.” And on both platforms he has written that “Q” and QAnon supporters “want to investigate, seek the truth and remove those that are elected and committing crimes out of DC.” Tucker has since explicitly confirmed his support for QAnon.
Antoine Tucker QAnon Facebook
Rob Weber (Ohio)
Rob Weber is a Republican candidate running in Ohio’s 9th Congressional District. He won the Republican primary on April 28 and thus will be on the ballot in November's general election. On May 3, Weber quote-tweeted a QAnon account’s tweet featuring the QAnon slogan and hashtag and a video of someone saying the slogan. Weber wrote above the tweet, “Congrats on being ‘17’d,’” referring to “Q,” the 17th letter of the alphabet, and to “Q” linking to that tweet the day before (being “Q’d” is a term used by QAnon supporters to refer to being linked to by “Q”).
Rob Weber QAnon tweet
Samuel Williams (Texas)
Samuel Williams is a Republican candidate running in Texas’ 16th Congressional District. Williams came in first in the primary on March 3 and will head to a runoff with the second-place finisher on July 14 (the runoff was originally scheduled on May 26 but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic). Williams has tweeted the QAnon hashtag and repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan. He has also run a Facebook ad promoting an appearance in January on Patriots' Soapbox, where he appealed for financial support for his campaign.
Samuel Williams Patriots Soapbox
Candidates whose primaries are still upcoming
Darren Aquino (Florida)
Darren Aquino is a Republican candidate running in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. He has tweeted the QAnon slogan.
Darren Aquino QAnon
Phil Arlinghaus (Tennessee)
Phil Arlinghaus is a Republican candidate running in Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan and has repeatedly posted it on Instagram, along with posting it on Facebook.
Phil Arlinghaus QAnon Twitter
Ron Curtis (Hawaii)
Ron Curtis is a Republican candidate running in Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District. He has written the QAnon slogan (misspelled) while quote-tweeting a likely fake account of Vincent Fusca, a man many QAnon supporters incorrectly believe is actually John F. Kennedy Jr. in disguise. Curtis has also repeatedly retweeted the QAnon slogan and has retweeted videos and a hashtag for QAnon supporters giving an oath supporting the conspiracy theory. And on Facebook, Curtis has posted a link to a tweet urging that “the QAnon movement must not become comatose.”
Ron Curtis QAnon Twitter
Vic DeGrammont (Florida)
Vic DeGrammont is a Republican candidate running in Florida’s 20th Congressional District. DeGrammont has the hashtag “#Q” in his Twitter profile, and he has also repeatedly tweeted “#Q” and used the QAnon slogan.
Vic DeGrammont Twitter profile
Thomas Gilmer (Connecticut)
Thomas Gilmer is a Republican candidate running in Connecticut’s 2nd Congressional District. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and on Instagram has repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan. On Facebook, he posted a link to a post on the new forum for the subreddit “r/The_Donald,” which featured a YouTube video from a QAnon account with a major following.
Thomas Gilmer QAnon Twitter
Sammy Gindi (New Jersey)
Sammy Gindi is a Republican candidate running as a write-in candidate in New Jersey’s 6th Congressional District. Gindi has tweeted the QAnon slogan and another QAnon hashtag, “#QSentMe.”
Sammy Gindi QAnon Twitter
Bob Lancia (Rhode Island)
Bob Lancia is a Republican candidate and a former member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives who is running in Rhode Island’s 2nd Congressional District. Lancia has retweeted content explicitly promoting QAnon.
Bob Lancia QAnon retweets
Tracy Lovvorn (Massachusetts)
Tracy Lovvorn is a Republican candidate running in Massachusetts’ 2nd Congressional District. Lovvorn has posted the QAnon slogan on her Twitter and Facebook campaign accounts, along with a photo of a bell with the slogan on it.
Tracy Lovvorn Twitter QAnon
Jessi Melton (Florida)
Jessi Melton is a Republican candidate running in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. On February 13, Melton made an appearance on the YouTube channel of InTheMatrixxx, a major QAnon account whose channel is devoted to the conspiracy theory. Melton promoted her appearance on her Twitter account by mentioning the “Q movement.” During her appearance, one of the hosts asked if “you know about QAnon yet,” to which Melton responded, “Yeah, a little bit about you guys. I mean, I know you’re kind of just similar to me. I mean, you call it like you see it. And a lot of that are supposed to be things we don’t speak of.” The hosts then discussed a “Q” post with her regarding Attorney General William Barr. Melton also lauded the channel as a “pro-republic show” that is getting “awareness out there,” and discussed having the hosts appear at one of her fundraisers. In June, Melton had one of the hosts at an event of hers and quote-tweeted his post showing a photo of them together, writing, “Thanks for coming my friend.”
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CitationFrom a February 13, 2020, livestream on the IntheMatrixxx YouTube channel
James Mitchell (Washington)
James Mitchell is a Democratic candidate running in Washington’s 8th Congressional District. Mitchell, who in March posted that he was going to “look further” into QAnon, has tweeted the QAnon hashtag and has repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. He has also promoted a false conspiracy theory pushed by QAnon supporters that children in New York City were being rescued via tunnels and saved from sex trafficking. He has also repeatedly pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and posted on YouTube a video airing anti-vaccine claims from a discredited conspiracy theorist.
James Mitchell QAnon
Billy Prempeh (New Jersey)
Billy Prempeh is a Republican candidate running in New Jersey’s 9th Congressional District. On his campaign Facebook page, Prempeh has posted a photo of himself next to a “Q” flag, writing out the QAnon slogan alongside it. He has also tweeted the QAnon slogan and mentioned in a YouTube interview that “Q” and “the Great Awakening” are “stuff that we've got going on right now.”
Billy Prempeh QAnon Facebook
David Schuster (Tennessee)
David Schuster is a Republican candidate running for the U.S. Senate in Tennessee. In a survey Schuster completed for Ballotpedia, he wrote the QAnon slogan, which he has also repeatedly tweeted. In 2017, Schuster posted a YouTube video on his Facebook account titled “Did President Trump Endorse Q Info on Secret Indictments of Pedophile Network,” urging people to “listen to this.” And on YouTube, Schuster in May posted a video where he said, “I do like Q. I do like to follow it.” He then said the QAnon slogan.
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CitationFrom a video David Schuster posted to YouTube in May 2020
Dan Severson (Florida)
Dan Severson is a Republican candidate and a former member of the Minnesota House of Representatives who is also running in Florida’s 19th Congressional District. Severson has tweeted the QAnon slogan.
Dan Severson QAnon Twitter
Reba Sherrill (Florida)
Reba Sherrill is a Republican candidate also running in Florida’s 21st Congressional District. In a YouTube video, a QAnon supporter interviewed Sherrill about attending a Florida QAnon “Great Awakening” rally, during which she said, “I've been following Q since the beginning.” She also tweeted “thanQ” in response to the person who uploaded the video.
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CitationFrom a video uploaded to YouTube on February 26, 2020
Danielle Stella (Minnesota)
Danielle Stella is a Republican candidate running in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District. Stella has repeatedly posted in support of QAnon, worn QAnon apparel, and shared QAnon videos. An apparent aide for Stella told Right Wing Watch that the candidate “stands 100% behind the principles of patriotism, unity/inclusiveness (WWG1WGA!) and love for country that Qanon promotes,” although a former campaign staffer dubiously told The Daily Beast that Stella's support for QAnon was “a ruse” to get support. Yet Stella is also a member of a small QAnon group on Telegram, where she has posted about being in a “#QArmy” and praised her “Qfamily.” Stella has also endorsed another baseless conspiracy theory originating from 4chan that accused her would-be opponent, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), of hiring a hitman to assassinate a woman. Stella was later banned from Twitter for suggesting that Omar be hung for treason.
Stella Telegram QAnon
Darlene Swaffar (Florida)
Darlene Swaffar is a Republican candidate also running in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. The candidate has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan, including in a bizarre claim about Trump’s tweets and the life of Benjamin Franklin being related to “Q” as “the 17th letter of the alphabet.” On her personal Facebook page -- whose intro section also includes the QAnon slogan -- Swaffar has posted multiple QAnon memes. In April 2019, Swaffar wrote on a Facebook page called “QAnon Great Awakening” that the page’s posts about QAnon “have inspired me to explore my run for Congress in 2020” and claimed she had “already met with the Republican party in South Florida and have received their endorsement, as well as endorsement from three other major organizations.”
Darlene Swaffar QAnon Facebook page
Nichole Williams (Tennessee)
Nichole Williams is a Republican candidate also running in Tennessee’s 1st Congressional District. The candidate has tweeted the QAnon hashtag and repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan along with the hashtag “#wearethenewsnow,” a phrase commonly used by QAnon supporters. On Facebook, the candidate has posted some of the same hashtags, along with the hashtag “#Q.”
Nichole Williams Facebook page2
Lauren Witzke (Delaware)
Lauren Witzke is a Republican candidate running for the U.S. Senate in Delaware. She has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan, including in response to another QAnon supporter who claimed that “nearly every patriot, Q follower, true news speaker and real investigative journalist is a believer in Jesus Christ” and said they were “encouraged by this great awakening.” Witzke has also worn a QAnon shirt.
Witzke QAnon shirt
Daniel Wood (Arizona)
Daniel Wood is a Republican candidate running in Arizona’s 3rd Congressional District. Wood has tweeted the QAnon slogan and the hashtag “#TheGreatAwakening.” He has also quote-tweeted a major QAnon account and the Twitter account for a QAnon YouTube channel.
Daniel Wood Twitter QAnon
Candidates no longer running (or whose status is unknown)
Mykel Barthelemy (Georgia, lost primary)
Mykel Barthelemy was a Republican candidate who ran in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District. She was defeated in the primary on June 9. She has tweeted the QAnon slogan. On her personal Facebook page, Barthelemy has posted multiple QAnon memes and a promotion for a Facebook group called “QAnon RedPillers.” In March, she appeared on Patriots' Soapbox, where she said, “After the last four years of watching everything that's been going on -- the attacks and the deep state and the swamp rising up and -- I always knew they were there, but hey, everything that they said that was conspiracy has been proven to be true.” In 2018, she also commented on a fact check from Lead Stories debunking a falsehood that the FBI inspector general reported that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex ring, writing, “So her noted crime against children is okay? THE FUDGE OUT OF HERE!”
Mykel Barthelemy Facebook QAnon3
Karen Bedonie (New Mexico, lost primary)
Karen Bedonie was a Republican candidate who ran in New Mexico’s 3rd Congressional District. She was defeated in the primary on June 2. She has tweeted the QAnon slogan and the QAnon hashtag alongside a photo of a “Q” flag (calling it “qute”).
Karen Bedonie QAnon Twitter
Dan Belcher (Oklahoma, dropped out of race)
Dan Belcher was a Republican candidate who ran in Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District and dropped out of the race in early February. Belcher has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and the QAnon slogan. At the end of his campaign launch video that he posted on social media, Belcher had the QAnon slogan under his campaign logo and even said the slogan out loud. His Twitter account has also posted graphics for his campaign featuring the slogan and a white rabbit, likely a reference to “follow the white rabbit,” another phrase used among QAnon supporters. His campaign Facebook page also posted “The Storm Is Upon Us,” a reference to a belief among QAnon supporters that Trump’s political enemies will be arrested and tried in military tribunals.
:{Video
CitationFrom a video uploaded to Dan Belcher's Facebook page in August 2019
Additionally, Belcher has run multiple Facebook ads featuring the QAnon slogan (including his announcement video where he says the slogan out loud), which have received thousands of impressions combined, according to Facebook’s ad library.
Dan Belcher QAnon Facebook ads1
Dion Bergeron (Indiana, lost primary)
Dion Bergeron was a Republican candidate who ran in Indiana’s 1st Congressional District. He was defeated in the primary on June 2. On March 15, Bergeron accepted an endorsement from a QAnon super PAC while tweeting the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan. On his campaign Facebook page, he wrote that his “license plate says THANQ on the Indiana 'In God We Trust' plate,” and there “are stickers that proclaim Where We Go One, We Go All” on the side windows of his car. He also called Jim Watkins, the owner of 8chan/8kun who helped create the super PAC and has previously signaled support for QAnon, a “patriot.”
Dion Bergeron QAnon Twitter
Michael Bluemling (Florida, dropped out of race)
Michael Bluemling was a Republican candidate who ran in Florida’s 21st Congressional District and dropped out of the race in April. Bluemling has tweeted the hashtag “#Q” and other hashtags associated with “TheStorm,” another reference to the QAnon conspiracy theory. He has also endorsed the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
Michael Bluemling Twitter QAnon
Jeremy Brown (Florida, dropped out of race)
Jeremy Brown was a Republican candidate who ran in Florida’s 14th Congressional District and dropped out of the race on March 5. Brown has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan and features the slogan in his Twitter profile. In November, he tweeted, “Since concluding my research into #QAnon & #TheGreatAwakening, last week I announced I too am a part of #WWG1WGA” (“#TheGreatAwakening” is a QAnon-connected hashtag). He has also tweeted an image of an apparent “Q” neon sign and wondered if “#TheGreatAwakening hit Tampa,” and he attended a January 11 rally in Tampa supporting QAnon.
Jeremy Brown tweet QAnon
Jamie Byers (California, lost primary)
Jamie Byers was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 4th Congressional District. He was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. He has tweeted the QAnon slogan at Trump.
Jamie Byers QAnon Twitter
Ignacio Cruz (California, lost primary)
Ignacio Cruz was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 19th Congressional District. He was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. Cruz has posted the QAnon slogan on his personal Facebook page (while sharing a “satirical” story about Rep. Ilhan Omar) and multiple times on his campaign Facebook page. He also ran a Facebook ad including the slogan. Cruz has also posted QAnon images.
Ignacio Cruz Facebook ad QAnon
Billy Earley (California, lost primary)
Billy Earley was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 44th Congressional District. He was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. Earley has tweeted the QAnon slogan and posted multiple QAnon videos on his Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Billy Earley QAnon video3 Twitter
Tim Fazenbaker (Maryland, lost primary)
Tim Fazenbaker was a Republican candidate who ran in Maryland’s 2nd Congressional District. He was defeated in the primary on June 2. He has tweeted the QAnon hashtag.
Tim Fazenbaker QAnon Twitter
Ari Friedman (Ohio)
Ari Friedman (also known as Harry Bacharach) has been a Democratic candidate running in Ohio’s 11th Congressional District, according to cleveland.com. The status of his campaign is unclear, as his Twitter account has been suspended and his campaign site is also down. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan (including tweeting a video of himself playing a pro-Trump song with the QAnon slogan). He has also pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, along with defending anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
:{Video
CitationFrom a video uploaded to the Twitter account of Ari Friedman on November 13, 2019
Rhonda Furin (California, lost primary)
Rhonda Furin was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 45th Congressional District. She was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. Furin has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan, along with posting it on her campaign and personal Facebook pages.
Rhonda Furin Twitter QAnon
Rich Helms (Texas, dropped out of race)
Rich Helms was a Republican candidate who ran in Texas’ 33rd Congressional District. He dropped out before the primary, according to Ballotpedia. Helms has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan, including one time directly in response to a tweet about a “Q” post, and he has also retweeted a post about his candidacy containing another slogan connected to QAnon, “#TheGreatAwakening.”
Rich Helms QAnon Twitter
Gary Heyer (Minnesota, dropped out of race)
Gary Heyer was an independent candidate who ran in Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District. He dropped out of the race before the filing deadline, according to Ballotpedia. Heyer, a delegate at the 2012 Republican National Convention, called himself an “Independent #QPlan Candidate” in his Twitter profile. In December, he tweeted a video of himself apparently outside of a church and next to a sign with “Q” on it, saying he was “inviting all of the churchgoers to partake in the great awakening.” He also added the QAnon slogan and tagged other QAnon accounts in that tweet.
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CitationFrom a video uploaded to Gary Heyer's Twitter account on December 22, 2019
Bobby Jeffries (Pennsylvania, dropped out of race)
Bobby Jeffries was a Republican candidate in Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District but dropped out on January 11, according to The York Dispatch. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan and tweeted in 2018, “#QAnon for the win!”
Bobby Jeffries QAnon tweet
Patrice Kimbler (California, lost primary)
Patrice Kimbler was a Republican candidate who also ran in California’s 36th Congressional District. She was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. She has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan, including quote-tweeting a major QAnon account.
Patrice Kimbler QAnon Twitter
Matthew Lusk (Florida, dropped out of race)
Matthew Lusk was a Republican candidate who ran in Florida’s 5th Congressional District and has since dropped out of the race, according to Ballotpedia. Lusk has tweeted multiple QAnon videos and had an “issue” page on his campaign site specifically called “Q” featuring the text “who is Q.” Lusk also appeared in a video on NBC News about his support for QAnon, which he demonstrated partly by including a “Q” on the back of his campaign signs.
Lusk has expanded upon his belief in QAnon in multiple interviews. He told the Florida Politics blog, “Q is one of my issues because it’s definitely a leak from high places.” In an interview with The Daily Beast, Lusk said that posts from “Q” are a “legitimate something” and that they are a “very articulate screening of past events, a very articulate screening of present conditions, and a somewhat prophetic divination of where the political and geopolitical ball will be bouncing next.” And in an interview with NBC News, Lusk said “Q” is “like an advanced news warning,” adding that “it might come out in the mainstream media a week or two weeks later. So I think there's a lot of inside sources, whoever this person is.”
Matthew Lusk QAnon campaign site
Andrew Meehan (Pennsylvania, lost primary)
Andrew Meehan was a Republican candidate who ran in Pennsylvania’s 1st Congressional District. He was defeated in the primary on June 2. On May 22, he tweeted the QAnon hashtag while quote-tweeting a post calling him a “QAnon supporter.” That tweet also featured a video of Meehan saying, “I definitely follow the Q movement,” as a man wearing a QAnon shirt stands behind him.
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Michael Moates (Texas, dropped out of race)
Michael Moates was a Libertarian candidate running in Texas’ 26th Congressional District but dropped out, according to a January 10 Daily Beast article. Moates, a conservative writer who has previously spread falsehoods, suggested support for QAnon in a series of since-deleted tweets in 2018, according to Right Wing Watch. Using the QAnon hashtag, Moates urged people to “keep an eye on” QAnon and wrote that his “goal in life is to ask POTUS about” it. Moates later that year was accused of sending inappropriate messages to several underage women. Moates has also since been suspended from Twitter, and he launched another account for his campaign, violating Twitter’s ban-evasion rules (his new account has since been suspended).
C. Wesley Morgan (Kentucky, lost primary)
C. Wesley Morgan was a Republican candidate and a former member of the Kentucky House of Representatives who ran for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. He was defeated in the primary on June 23. On both his Twitter and personal Facebook accounts, Morgan has posted in response to a QAnon account defending the conspiracy theory, “You are 100% correct in your assessment of Q. We know the truth and the truth will set us free,” and then added the QAnon slogan. He has repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan on both his personal and campaign Facebook pages, along with repeatedly posting videos from a QAnon YouTube channel.
Wesley Morgan QAnon Twitter post1
Mindy Robinson (Nevada, lost primary)
Mindy Robinson was a Republican candidate who ran in Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District. She was defeated in the primary on June 9. She has posted the QAnon slogan (misspelled) on Twitter and Facebook (she has since explicitly confirmed her QAnon support). Last June, she tweeted a video from a QAnon account pushing a false claim about author and advice columnist E. Jean Carroll after Carroll reported that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Her tweet was then shared by Donald Trump Jr. She also has pushed a conspiracy theory about Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg and was a major amplifier of a hashtag for the “Clinton body count” conspiracy theory after Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
Mindy Robinson QAnon Twitter
Kristen Alamo Rowin (Texas, lost primary)
Kristen Alamo Rowin was a Republican candidate who ran in Texas’ 17th Congressional District. She was defeated in the primary on March 3. On April 12, she tweeted the QAnon slogan and “#Q.”
Kristen Alamo Rowin QAnon Twitter
Christine Scott (Florida, dropped out of race)
Christine Scott was a Republican candidate who ran in Florida’s 22nd Congressional District. She was forced to drop out of the race due to being disqualified from the primary, according to Ballotpedia. The homepage of her campaign website featured the QAnon slogan.
Christine Scott website QAnon
DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero (California, lost primary)
DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 12th Congressional District. She was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. She has repeatedly tweeted about QAnon and the QAnon slogan, including tweeting about QAnon to a major QAnon account. In a since-deleted tweet, she also wrote that “Q is real.” In an interview discussing “Q” with The Daily Beast, Tesoriero said, “I wouldn’t say that I believed in him or the group or anything, but I do believe in some of the issues that he discusses.” She has also expressed support for the Pizzagate conspiracy theory but declined to confirm that support to The Daily Beast.
DeAnne Lorraine Tesoriero QAnon Twitter
Steve Von Loor (North Carolina, lost primary)
Steve Von Loor was a Republican candidate who ran in North Carolina’s 4th Congressional District. He was defeated in the primary on March 3. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon hashtag and QAnon slogan.
Steve Von Loor Twitter QAnon
Joe Walz (Texas, lost primary)
Joe Walz was a Republican candidate who ran in Texas’ 22nd Congressional District. He was defeated in the primary on March 3. He has repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan.
Joe Walz QAnon Twitter
Joanne Wright (California, lost primary)
Joanne Wright was a Republican candidate who ran in California’s 34th Congressional District; she was the only Republican running in the district. She was defeated in the nonpartisan blanket primary on March 3. On Wright’s personal Twitter account, her background photo is a picture of Trump pulling up a curtain to show a “Q.” She has also tweeted a QAnon video and repeatedly tweeted the QAnon slogan. Wright, who was endorsed by the California Republican Party, has also pushed conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus COVID-19 and the late Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/following-media-matters-reporting-cagop-removes-endorsement-qanon-candidate-who-used-n
The California Republican Party has dropped its endorsement of congressional candidate and writer Mike Cargile. Media Matters had recently reported that Cargile is a QAnon supporter who wrote an anti-Black rant on Facebook in which he used the n-word. He has also repeatedly shared bigoted memes on the platform.
Cargile is running for Congress in California’s 35th Congressional District against incumbent Democratic Rep. Norma Torres. The California Republican Party had backed his congressional campaign and stated on Facebook in January that it is “proud to endorse” him.
Media Matters previously documented that Cargile is a supporter of QAnon, a violence-linked conspiracy theory that is based on cryptic posts to online message boards from an anonymous user known as “Q" that have spread rampantly on social media and among fringe right-wing media. QAnon conspiracy theorists essentially believe that President Donald Trump is secretly working to take down the purported “deep state,” a supposed cabal of high-ranking officials who they claim are operating pedophile rings.
Cargile has also claimed that the coronavirus is a “scamdemic” and “NOTHING compared to the diseases and plagues headed this way via the rats and the homeless”; and has praised the lie-filled Plandemic video as “EXACTLY why I'm in this race!” ...
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rww
> Roger Stone: ‘I Certainly Hope Q is Real’
July 2, 2020 2:23 pm
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mma 620
Online trolls and far-right conspiracy theorists learned a valuable lesson this week: Do not upset Korean pop music superfans.
QAnon is an absolutely deranged conspiracy theory that’s caught on in right-wing media. At least 50 current or former congressional candidates have embraced the conspiracy theory, which centers around a secret plan involving President Donald Trump, a cabal of his “deep state” enemies, upcoming mass arrests, and a mysterious entity known as “Q” who shares insider information with people on internet message boards. The conspiracy theory has been linked to multiple crimes and threats of violence.
K-Pop fans decided to start tweeting popular QAnon hashtags with photos, GIFs, and videos of their favorite bands. Understandably, this was more than a little frustrating for the Q-obsessed conspiracy theorists. Hilariously, this resulted in even more conspiracy theories involving George Soros and antifa to explain the surge in K-pop tweets including the QAnon hashtags.
As Parker Molloy noted: "It’s important that all of us -- especially those working in the media -- understand how easy it is to manipulate social media for political gains. And while manipulation isn’t always necessarily used for evil -- few people will shed tears over conspiracy theorists being temporarily frustrated online -- you can't believe everything you see trending on Twitter."
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/qanon-loving-senate-candidate-wants-martial-law-declared-in-oregon-to-combat-antifa/
no lnx vid
qAnon-loving Senate candidate wants martial law declared in Oregon to combat ‘antifa’
Written by David Neiwert / Daily KosJune 7, 2020
The Oregon GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate, Jo Rae Perkins, decided to let her “Q light” shine on a Facebook livestream earlier this week—and it was a doozy.
Perkins, an unrepentant “QAnon” conspiracy cultist, told her audience that the state needs to be placed under martial law, with the National Guard being sent not just to Portland—where there have been violent protests over police brutality—but to rural places like Klamath Falls and Bend. Her reasoning:Busloads of nefarious antifa activists, financed by the evil George Soros, are fanning out to these towns to wreak destruction.
The only problem with Perkins’ scenario: They’re not. The only places “antifa” activists (as well as many others) have clashed with police—and the only protests in which damage has occurred—have been in Portland.
There have, however, been a string of far-right hoaxes that have found audiences with credulous residents and even law-enforcement officers in these rural areas—utterly spurious reports of buses loaded up with black-clad antifascists, coming to their towns to break windows and harass local businesses.In turn, large crowds of heavily armed men have turned out on the streets of those towns to fend off the invading antifa hordes.
Perkins happily promoted those hoaxes, as well as a panoply of associated conspiracy theories, including the notoriously false and anti-Semitic claim that financier George Soros is secretly funding “antifa.” She also offered a new twist, claiming that the antifa hordes are “the army that Obama put together a few years ago.”
At the zenith of the rant, she demanded that martial law be imposed via the National Guard: “This is insurrection. And the governors need to call in the National Guard,” she said. “We need martial law to squash this ASAP.”
She continued: “Let’s think about this. We’ve been under a soft martial law since March, the middle of March … You know that and I know that. And in some places, it is far beyond a soft martial law. It has gone into a hardcore martial law.”
The solution, she said, was to call in troops: “The National Guard needs to come in because there is not enough police officers to squash what is going on. We need the National Guard to do that.”
Perkins said she was “in pure shock” at reading reports that busfuls of antifa protesters were heading to these towns: “This is ridiculous. In Klamath Falls?” she said. “People are out to protect their businesses. Two or three buses full of antifa came down from Portland. Wow! Wow!”
She began praying aloud during the livestream: “But Lord, now we have this evil, this antifa, Father God. And we say no more. Lord God, I ask that you bring out your warring angels to protect the cities, to protect the innocent people, to protect the business owners, Lord God.”
Perkins repeatedly described “antifa” as “evil”: “These cannot be people,” she said. “All I can see, Lord, is just the demonic outcry, oh God, of people that just people that feel they can just … total disregard, total disregard for other people, for their property. All in the name of justice for George Floyd.”
In short order, this became an attack on George Soros:
Lord, these people have no sense of morality, of what is right and what is wrong, Lord God. Not the ones that are causing this mayhem. This antifa. Father God, shut down George Soros, Lord God. End his reign of terror, Lord God. We know that he is funding this. Lord, we say. ‘Strip that money, strip that money strip that money.’ If there is a way, Father God, that President Trump’s administration can block him from being able to spend any more money, Lord God, then allow that happen.
She later reiterated: “Then we have theantifa thugs. Many many people believe that they are being paid for by George Soros. And I have seen anything to dispel that rumor. I have never seen George Soros come out and say he has nothing to do with it.”
Perkins added that “the media are supporting antifa because they are all part of the same cabal,” which she went on to explain was “the Deep State.”
But it wasn’t just Soros to blame, according to Perkins. So was former President Barack Obama:
Clearly there’s crazy people out there. Clearly we need to get a grip. Clearly we need to be praying. Clearly we need some strong leadership in our states. That is clear. Oregon needs Governor Brown to call out the National Guard. The National Guard is here, they need to be deployed, they need to be activated. Ashland, Klamath Falls, Eugene, Salem, Portland. Where else are they gonna pop up? Bend? I will bet you guys that Bend is gonna happen next. It will be next, because Bend is a large town. Bend, and Pendleton. They are deploying all over the place.
This is the army—this is the army that Obama put together a few years ago. Wasn’t there an army that he put together a few years ago? I just read about it.
For the record: No buses bearing hordes of ravening antifascists appeared in Klamath Falls, or any other of the multiple locations where they were rumored to be about to descend—which in Oregon included such towns as Medford, Grants Pass, and Coquille. (In Curry County, the local sheriff shared the false rumor with his constituents on Facebook, then later deleted the post when it became apparent there was no there there.) There still are no reports, yet, of similar mythical buses headed for Bend or Pendleton, but given the ease with which they appear to spread on Facebook and among “QAnon” conspiracists, that likely is just a matter of time.
Perkins will face incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the November general election.
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QAnon app banned by Google relaunched using Amazon
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libertarian journalist explains the links between QAnon and fundamentalist Christianity
This week in Oregon, Republican primary voters picked a major extremist to run against incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the general election: Jo Rae Perkins, who is an avowed…
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How fundamentalist religion has made the policy response to COVID-19 so much worse
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after months of inaction, Google has finally removed QAnon apps that violated terms of service from its store
regon Republicans Nominate QAnon Believer for U.S. Senate
rww
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/libertarian-journalist-explains-the-links-between-qanon-and-fundamentalist-christianity/
this week in Oregon, Republican primary voters picked a major extremist to run against incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley in the general election: Jo Rae Perkins, who is an avowed believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory.Perkins won by almost 20%, which was certainly decisive — and given how much of a blue state Oregon is, pundits are predicting that Merkley will enjoy a landslide victory over Perkins in November.
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Despite the fact that this choice is likely to be a huge electoral blunder, we can’t totally disregard the QAnon believers. Those who embrace the QAnon cult are quite serious about it — as serious as evangelical Christian fundamentalists are about their faith, according to libertarian journalist Bonnie Kristian.
The QAnon theory claims that Donald Trump became president in order to combat a worldwide sex trafficking ring that includes Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats— and a mysterious figure named Q is giving them information and updates about their cause. During her victory speech, Perkins specifically mentioned Q and told supporters, “I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you, Anons. Thank you patriots.” And she referenced the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”
Kristian, in an op-ed for The Week, explains that while QAnon devotees are far from mainstream, they have a fundamentalist-like devotion to their cause. And she notes that QAnon’s “narrative centers on a cabal of powerful figures in government, business, academia and media who make time for child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination.” Q, she adds, is “the movement’s anonymous digital prophet.”
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Although QAnon isn’t known for being a religious movement per se, The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance has reported on QAnon-minded churches being developed. And Kristian predicts that QAnon will grow as a religious sect.
“The church of QAnon may be a portent of things to come,” Kristian writes. “Traditional religiosity is declining in America, but humanity will not cease to be religious. It will merely diversify its sources ofincreasingly customized religiosity. From lapsed evangelicals, as many QAnon adherents seem to be, to religiously unaffiliated ‘nones,’ people crave the community, meaning and purpose church provides — even if they abandon or reject its teachings.”
Kristian notes the similarities between QAnon’s views and the views of end-time Christian fundamentalists, who have an obsession with the apocalypse.
“QAnon builds on apocalyptic thinking common in parts of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in America,” Kristian explains. “Q drops frequently include Bible passages, and the style of study of scripture and Q texts employed — the careful search for hidden prophetic meaning and correspondence to history and current events — is very much a creature of the religious right.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basis-of-a-new-religious-movement/
no lnx twt pix
Followers of the QAnon movement believe in wild and dangerous conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump. Now a faction within the movement has been interpreting the Bible through QAnon conspiracies.
I have been studying the growth of the QAnon movement as part of my research into how extremist religious and political organizations create propaganda and recruit new members to ideological causes.
On Feb. 23, I logged onto Zoom to observe the first public service of what is essentially a QAnon church operating out of the Omega Kingdom Ministry (OKM). I’ve spent 12 weeks attending this two-hour Sunday morning service.
What I’ve witnessed is an existing model of neo-charismatic home churches — the neo-charismatic movement is an offshoot of evangelical Protestant Christianity and is made up of thousands of independent organizations — where QAnon conspiracy theories are reinterpreted through the Bible. In turn, QAnon conspiracy theories serve as a lens to interpret the Bible itself.
[Read more:
QAnon conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic are a public health threat]
Trump vs. the ‘deep state’
The QAnon movement began in 2017 after someone known only as Q posted a series of conspiracy theories about Trump on the internet forum 4chan. QAnon followers believe global elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state.”
OKM is part of a network of independent congregations (or ekklesia) called Home Congregations Worldwide (HCW). The organization’s spiritual adviser is Mark Taylor, a self-proclaimed “Trump Prophet” and QAnon influencer with a large social media following on Twitter and YouTube.
The website of Omega Kingdom Ministries mixes QAnon theories and biblical references.
The resource page of the HCW website only links to QAnon propaganda — including the documentary Fall Cabal by Dutch conspiracy theorist Janet Ossebaard, which is used to formally indoctrinate e-congregants into QAnon. This 10-part YouTube series was the core material for the weekly Bible study during QAnon church sessions I observed.
The Sunday service is led by Russ Wagner, leader of the Indiana-based OKM, and Kevin Bushey, a retired colonel running for election to the Maine House of Representatives.
Bible and QAnon narratives
The service begins with an opening prayer from Wagner that he says will protect the Zoom room from Satan. This is followed by an hour-long Bible study where Wagner might explain the Fall Cabalvideo that attendees had just watched or offer his observations on socio-political events from the previous week.
Everything is explained though the lens of the Bible and QAnon narratives. Bushey then does 45 minutes of decoding items that have appeared recently on the app called QMap that is used to share conspiracy theories. The last 15 minutes are dedicated to communion and prayer.
At a service held on April 26, Wagner and Bushey spoke about a QAnon theory, called Project Looking Glass, that theU.S. military has secretly developed a form of time-travel technology.Wagner suggested to e-congregants that time travel can be explained by certain passages in the Bible.
On May 3, the theme of the QAnon portion of the service was about COVID-19. Bushey spoke about a popular QAnon theory that the pandemic was planned. (There is no evidence of this.) And when an anti-vax conspiracy theory documentary called “Plandemic” went viral , the video was shared on the HCW websites as a way for e-congregants to consume the latest in a series of false theories about the coronavirus.
Leveraging authority
What is clear is that Wagner and Bushey are leveraging religious beliefs and their “authority” as a pastor and ex-military officer to indoctrinate attendees into the QAnon church. Their objective is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.
[Followers of the QAnon movement regularly show their support for Donald Trump at his political rallies, including this one held in Pennsylvania in 2018.
(Shutterstock)]
OKM’s ministry is rooted in Taylor’s prophecies. Wagner regularly mentions that if it wasn’t for Taylor, he would have never started this ministry.
On its website, OKM references the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence. Seven Mountains utilizes the language of Dominionism — a theology that believes countries, including the United States, should be governed by Christian biblical law. Its goal is to attain sociopolitical and economic transformation through the gospel of Jesus in what it calls the seven mountains or spheres of society: religion, family, education, government, media, entertainment and business. This blends QAnon’s apocalyptic desire to destroy society “controlled” by the deep state with the need for the Kingdom of God on Earth.
Wagner and Bushey have taught their congregation to stop listening to any media —even Fox News — because they’re are all “Luciferian.” What they provide instead is a road map to QAnon radicalization comprised of QAnon YouTube channels for the congregation’s daily media diet, the Qmap website that lists new QAnon conspiracy theories and Twitter influencers.
‘Deep state church’
They further insist that as Trump continues to “drain the swamp” in Washington, it’s “our” responsibility to drain the deep state church swamp. They believe the same deep state that controls the world has also infiltrated traditional churches. As Wagner stated in his April 12 service: “I am here to focus on the deep state church. This goes beyond our church and involves our culture and our politics. Kevin is here to talk about QAnon and the military operation to save the world.”
Like any church, they also run outreach ministries. OKM is currently raising funds for something called Reclamation Ranch, which Wagner describes as a safe place for children rescued after being held underground by the deep state. Children at risk is an ongoing theme in many QAnon conspiracy theories, including the famous fake “Pizzagate” theory.
As of May, OKM moved from Zoom to YouTube to accommodate the growth in attendees. At last count, approximately 300 accounts participated in the recent services.
While that’s not a lot of followers, we should be concerned about these latest developments. OKM provides formalized religious indoctrination into QAnon, a conspiracy movement that is both a public health threat by spreading false information about the coronavirus pandemic and a national security concern.The Conversation
Marc-André Argentino, PhD candidate Individualized Program, 2020-2021 Public Scholar, Concordia University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news
Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host.
Conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and QAnon supporters spread the false claim online
WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN
PUBLISHED04/08/20
A conspiracy theory about Microsoft founder Bill Gates and a potential vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been circulating for weeks on social media platforms, getting high engagement numbers, and has since been pushed by both Fox News host Laura Ingraham and a Newsmax correspondent.
As the coronavirus pandemic has spread throughout the United States, Gates, who runs an organization that focuses on public health worldwide and has warned of the threat of epidemics for years, has been leading efforts to and spoken out about finding a vaccine. That has included spending billions of dollars to find a cure via his foundation and doing interviews on shows including Fox News Sunday and The Daily Show about the need for a vaccine.
Gates on March 18 also participated in a Reddit “AMA” (“Ask me anything”) Q&A, where he encouraged a “national tracking system” for the coronavirus and “some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” Scientific American reported in December that Gates had been funding efforts to create an invisible ink that could go into people’s skin to see who has been vaccinated. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology bioengineer said the ink could provide data that is useful in fighting disease around the world, noting, “If we don’t have good data, it’s really difficult to eradicate disease” (though the outlet also quoted a bioengineering professor admitting it could raise privacy concerns).
During this time, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, white nationalists, and supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have spread a baseless conspiracy theory on multiple social media platforms, far-right sites, and message boards claiming that Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is some kind of nefarious attempt to control, follow, or even depopulate the world’s population via a “microchip” of some sort(the “depopulation” claim is based on a major misreading of Gates’ past remarks).
A review by Media Matters found that the conspiracy theory first seemed to gain traction aroundMarch 17, when a YouTube videoabout the virus mischaracterized Gates’ work to develop trackable vaccine data as “implanting everybody with a global ID” and compared it to tattoos on Holocaust victims. The video received more than 120,000 views. On that same day, conspiracy theory outlet Infowars published a piece and video of an Infowars host suggesting Gates was using the situation to “reduce the world’s population,” citing the invisible ink, and tied it to claiming the government would give out a “color-coded wristband that will be used for traveling Americans during an impending COVID-19 lockdown.” The Infowars article subsequently spread in Facebook groups and showed up as a meme on Instagram....[pix]
...Following Gates’ AMA and his “digital certificates” comment, the conspiracy theory spread on March 18, moving to message boards including 4chan’s “/pol/” and the conspiracy subreddit on Reddit, where a user called Gates’Reddit posts “pretext for introduction of certificate of movement” and a plan to be “fully enslaved by the Deep State.” On Telegram that evening, white nationalist Faith Goldy wrote that Gates’ posts were “underreported” and that a “microchip implant ID” would be harmful to “nationalists.”[fiath g twt?]
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The following day, as the conspiracy theory continued to circulate on 4chan, it was picked up by NewsPunch, a disinformation site formerly known as YourNewsWire, which accused Gates of pushing for technology that will be “adopted for its ‘convenience and safety’ and then overnight will become mandatory for you and your family – or else.” That piece, too, circulated on social media and as a meme, along with other memes accusing Gates of using a vaccine to work with “globalists” for a “new world order.”
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On March 21, another YouTube video was uploaded saying Gates wants to implant microchips in people and calling them a “mark of Satan” that could be used for “identifying us to the United Nations.” The video has received nearly 1.8 million views and at least 1.2 million Facebook engagements, according to the tracking tool BuzzSumo. That includes shares in QAnon Facebook groups and on a major anti-vaxx Facebook page.[pix w/ pyr eye]
throughout the rest of March, more videos popped up on YouTube (despite the platform’s pledge to crack down on coronavirus misinformation) accusing Gates of wanting “eugenics” and “population control” and claiming he is the antichrist and that he essentially supports genocide; they racked up another 1.6 million views combined. The videos included a clip from anti-Semitic conspiracy theory outlet TruNews and a video whose title called the virus a “hoax” (those videos received hundreds of thousands of Facebook engagements combined)....[rw talk?]
Videos on social media platform TikTok pushing the conspiracy theory in late March and early April also racked up many views (despite the platform’s anti-misinformation policy). One video that received more than 230,000 views included in the caption “#fvaccines” andaccused Gates of pushing for everyone on the planet to have a “digital ID … by combining mandatory vaccines with implantable microchips.” (Media Matters removes identifying information from videos created by or featuring minors to protect their identity.) Another video that received tens of thousands of views claimed Gates was “evil” and connected him to a plan to “get everybody microchipped” via vaccines.
...[pix]
The conspiracy theory continued to spread following news in early April of Gates’ spending for a coronavirus cure. Another major white nationalist Telegram account shared a post saying Gates wants the population “extinguished,” and multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram, including QAnon and anti-vaxx accounts, shared a meme urging people to take “no vaccine from some shady ass nerd that wants to depopulate the planet.” Ben Garrison, a far-right and pro-Trump cartoonist, drew a cartoon pushing the conspiracy theory that portrays Gates as a Nazi, which was also posted on the backup site of the pro-Trump subreddit “r/The_Donald.”[pix meme blk kid]
...By April 6, bigger QAnon accounts on social media had spread the conspiracy theory, such as Dylan Wheeler, who accused Gates of using “microchip[s]” in order to be “the face of the New World Order.”
That afternoon, Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted a thread accusing Gates of “control[ling] global health policy” and saying that his “plan” was to use “vaccines to track people.”
On the morning of April 7,Fox host Laura Ingraham, whilequote-tweeting an anti-vaxx musician's post about Gates’ AMA,said “globalists” see the pandemic as a “perfect vehicle” for their “dream” of “digitally tracking Americans’ every move.”
The spread of the conspiracy theory comes as multiple other conspiracy theories about the coronavirus have circulated on social media, including others about Gates and the virus.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/the-far-right-wants-to-make-its-shared-fantasy-of-violent-civil-war-a-reality/
david n kos
The Age of Conspiracy Theories in which we are now immured has produced a kind of bastard offspring: the Shared Violent Fantasy. Exhibit A is the “Boogaloo,” the far-right’s ironic name for the long-sought “second civil war” they believe is on the verge of erupting in the United States—and in which the ongoing novel-coronavirus pandemic has become a virtual petri dish for cultivating the fear of societal collapse essential to their worldview.
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Like many conspiracy theories, and all such fantasies, the “Boogaloo” has a powerful tendency to produce real-life violence from people who absorb the underlying paranoid values and believe in them fervently. A recent incident in Texas in which a self-proclaimed “Boogaloo Boi” set out to murder a police officer in order to help spark the civil war underscores the extent to which the believers are likely eventually to attempt manifesting their fantasies—which can entail violence not just against authorities, but sometimes even their unsuspecting neighbors.
Aaron Swenson is a 36-year-old Texarkana man who frequented “Boogaloo”-related Facebook pages with some frequency, sharing their frequently violent memes and indulging the usual violent rhetoric in the comments. Eventually, he reached a point where he decided to act on it.
The world of “Boogaloo” on social media—particularly on Facebook, where over 125 such pages reside—is riddled with references, both direct and obscure, to their eagerness to begin a civil war by shooting law-enforcement who attempt to enforce gun-control measures, or for that matter any other measures that attract the ire of the far right. Recently, these have come to include COVID-19 lockdown and social-distancing measures.
The universe it occupies resides in a bubble of conspiracy theories and “constitutionalist” fantasies, but with a distinctly alt-right edge. Irony abounds everywhere:adherents wearHawaiian shirts as a reference to “the boog,” or the “Big Igloo” (the “Boogaloo” flag features an igloo and a palm tree). Their memes reference “Pepe the frog,” white-nationalist OK signals, and the common shared belief that nefarious communists are plotting to confiscate their guns and enslave them in concentration camps. This fantasy is the justification for their announced intention to begin shooting their fellow citizens, especially those who work for the federal government or police.
On the night of April 11, Aaron Swenson began livestreaming from his pickup truck, telling his audience that he was out hunting a police officer—anyone would do, he wasn’t particular—to shoot and kill, all in order to start the “Boogaloo.” He told them he was seeking a lone cop to “ambush and execute.”
People began calling the Texarkana Police Department, which promptly found the page and figured out both where Swenson was located and what kind of vehicle he was driving. Upon locating him, he fled a squad of police cars at high speed, eventually grinding to a halt well after his tires were flattened by a spike strip. “He was wearing an armored plate carrier type vest when we arrested him, and officers found several loaded weapons inside his truck,” the police department’s Facebook post reported.
At his own Facebook account, Swenson liked more than a dozen pages that mention boogaloo in their names, as a report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on the “Boogaloo” phenomenon described. It also noted that “some users leaving comments on the profile on the night of the attempted attack endorsed the targeting of police officers, while others suggested calling 911 in response to the live broadcast.” The two videos were active on the Facebook page at the time of the report, having amassed over 1,500 and 3,400 views, respectively; however, they have since been removed by Facebook.
Swenson has been charged with making terrorist threats against an officer, evading with a vehicle and illegal possession of a weapon.
He is not the first such “Boogaloo” enthusiast intent on making the shared fantasy into a violent reality. In January, three would-be terrorists from the neo-Nazi organization The Base were arrested by the FBI, charged with plotting to wreak havoc with their weapons at a planned anti-gun-control march in Richmond, Virginia, around which “Boogaloo” rhetoric was already rife.
A few days later, three more “Boogaloo”-loving members of The Base were arrested in Georgia for plotting to assassinate a local antifascist couple, as well as overthrow the local county government.
At the Richmond rally, the “Boogaloo” was a major theme—flags, signs, and social-media posts from the event all referenced and celebrated it—that continued even afterward during the debate in Virginia over its gun-control laws.
And just as the white-nationalist, conspiracist and “accelerationist” right has sought multiple means to exploit the novel-coronavirus pandemic, the “Boogaloo” theme has become a louder topic of discussion on far-right telegram channels. The lockdown measures instituted by governors around the nation in response to the virus have particularly provided ample evidence for the conspiracists—in their minds, at least—of their long-running contention that “globalists” are seeking ways to enslave the world.
Signs referencing the “Boogaloo” have popped up at a number of the far-right-led protests against the lockdown measures. One marcher at the “ReOpen” rally in Topeka, Kansas, on April 23 carried a large black “Big Igloo” flag.
There has also been a certain amount of somewhat predictable crossover between the “Boogaloo” element and the far-right conspiracists of the Trump-loving QAnon world, some of whom have also been acting out violently during the pandemic—notably the locomotive engineer who attempted to ram the USNS Mercy with a train engine.
According to QAnon expert Travis View, the “Boogaloo” has become the preferred fallback position for people swept up in “The Storm” theories, believing that one day soon there will be mass arrests of leading liberal and media figures for their roles in a global child-trafficking ring, and increasingly disappointed at its failure to materialize.
“If that change doesn’t come, some of the followers have made reference to what they call Plan Z,” View says. “If the whole Q operation fails, then Plan Z is sort of equivalent to what the far-right extremists call the ‘Boogaloo.’ Which is civil war, basically.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has sharpened the interest in a civil war. The TTP report found that most of the 125 Facebook groups devoted to the “boogaloo”—some 60%—were created in the very recent past (within three months), just as the states began declaring lockdowns and social-distancing measures. Perhaps more worryingly, “they have attracted tens of thousands of members in the last 30 days.”
In several private boogaloo Facebook groups that TTP was able to access, members discussed tactical strategies, combat medicine, and various types of weapons, including how to develop explosives and the merits of using flame throwers. Some members appeared to take inspiration from President Donald Trump’s recent tweets calling on people to “liberate” states where governors have imposed stay-at-home orders.
Despite these findings, TTP notes, Facebook has been slow to remove these pages. One of the most prominent—Thicc Boog Line, which specializes in selling branded “Boogaloo”-themed gear and clothing—attracts thousands of readers. It has recently been pitching messages to its readers emphasizing the opportunity to wreak “boojahideen” havoc during the time of a pandemic.
These findings resonate with a similar report issued in February by the :(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{Network Contagion Research Institute, warning that “domestic militants” are organizing around memes to “incite violent insurrection and terror against government and law enforcement.”
The boogaloo, a joke for some, acts as aviolent meme that circulates instructions for a distributed, viral insurgency for others.The topic network for boogaloo describes a coherent, multi-component and detailed conspiracy to launch an inevitable, violent, sudden, and apocalyptic war across the homeland. The conspiracy, replete with suggestions to stockpile ammunition,may itself set the stage for massive real-world violence and sensitize enthusiasts to mobilize in mass for confrontations or charged political events.
Daniel E. Stevens, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, the umbrella organization under which TTP operates, told Christopher Mathias of HuffPost in a statement that “Facebook’s failure to stop their platform from being used as an organizing tool for extremists is completely unacceptable.”
“There is nothing subtle about how these extremist groups are using Facebook’s platform to advance their cause,” Stevens said. “Boogaloo proponents are not simply discussing ideas or political views; they are directly advocating for violent action and tactically planning how to defeat government entities.”
“Boogaloo” enthusiasts indeed have detailed plans for how to achieve their goals, both militarily and through propaganda, as the TTP report details. However, government and law enforcement are not the only targets that “Boogaloo” memes discuss. A subcurrent in a number of the violent fantasies that they express in their memes is the idea of committing home-invasion robberies targeting their relatively hapless and untrained neighbors as a means of thriving during the civil war—or a pandemic.
Another featured a photo of an angry Joaquin Phoenix in Jokerwith the script: “When you dispatch the normie with ease to raid their stash because they stocked up on TP and not ammunition”—with a subscript across the bottom reading: “You get what you fucking deserve.”One popular meme among Facebook “Boogaloo” followers was one that showed a SWAT-style armed raid team in military gear massing outside a door, with the script: “Me and my boys going for a grocery run at my asshole neighbor’s house.” Another features a grid of graphics demonstrating military hand signals during a raid, all of which are interpreted in the language of a home invasion: “Shoot that dog.” “Cover up the evidence.” “I found cocaine. It’s pretty good.” “Wrong house. Let’s boogie!”
These ideas are not particularly new among the more openly cynical participants in far-right conspiracism and survivalism. Indeed, they were openly elucidated back in 2014 by a “Patriot” movement survivalist named Tyler Smith, who was featured on an episode of National Geographic’s TV series Doomsday Preppersboasting about his plans to invade the homes of his neighbors—particularly those who might also be preppers, since they would make better targets.One of the more commonly shared of these memes actually makes fun of other “preppers,” particularly those who are suddenly new to the business amid the pandemic. It shows a “Virgin Prepper” who is “always scared, can’t sleep at night,” and “has no fun,” then contrasts him with an obviously fun-loving “Chad Raider” who “Takes your good shit and burns all the rest so no one else can have it,” and is seen holding up a bag marked “All Your Shit.” He’s also “not scared of death or coronavirus.”[vid]
“We’re not in it to stockpile,” he proclaimed in a segment that was used to promote the show. “We’re in it to take what you have, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us. We are your worst nightmare, and we are coming.”
He told the show’s producers that he only had a few months’ supplies for his family because he intended to aggressively assault his neighbors and steal their food and weapons caches.
“All your shiny ARs, your high-powered .308 rifles, your 50,000 rounds of ammo, are all going to be ours,” he said on the show.
Smith was arrested by the sheriff of Pierce County, Washington, where he resided at the time, shortly after his appearance on national TV, because he wielded multiple guns on camera in the segment, and he was already a felon (on a sexual-behavior-with-a-minor charge) forbidden from owning weapons. He spent a couple more years in prison for that, but was back on the streets by late 2016.
He was most recently spotted marching in Portland with Patriot Prayer—the far-right street-brawling group led by Joey Gibson of Vancouver, Washington—at one of its 2017 demonstrations. Gibson, as it happens, has been active in the anti-coronavirus-lockdown protests, traveling to Seattle and Olympia for protests.
Those protests, of course, featured plenty of “Patriots” wearing Hawaiian shirts underneath their body armor—a signal for what the “boojahideen” like to call “the Big Luau.” The chief organizer of the “Boogaloo” motif in Olympia was Matt Marshall, the leader of the III Percent of Washington, a “Patriot” militia group based in Eatonville, Washington, and a close ally of both Gibson and state Rep. Matt Shea, the far-right legislator whose plan for a post-breakdown society called for the execution of all non-believers.
These violent fantasies keep mounting in number and vehemence. The question increasingly is what spark will inspire them to attempt to make them manifest.
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https://www.pbs.org/video/the-cult-of-qanon-zvxtct/
THE OPEN MIND
The Cult of QAnon
04/20/2020 | 27m 32s |Video has closed captioning.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/the-church-of-qanon-will-conspiracy-theories-form-the-basis-of-a-new-religious-movement/
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