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primary 4/20 covid BS

SEE QANON 3 5/20 ON PLANDEMIC/COVID GENESIS PT --> JNZ

boosted beto shooter bs

bak 1219

tags: ali alex, boebert, bongino, cleta, corsi, nunes, don jr, engelbrecht true the vote, flynn fitton, ginni, gohmert, influencer, jan 6, jesse watters, jordan? kash, kirk? kraken sidney, mtg meadows? navarro OANN, newsmax, overstock, rumble, satan, telegram, trump, twitter, violkence; 8chan, ashli, any biggs, cernovich, ...globalist, hollywood celebs, lin wood esq, oprah, ted nugent, poso, raiklin RFK, russia troll, sheriff sovereign, stew peters, tim pool, wacko, wendy rogers, adrenochrome, blood libel, joe kent, lara logan, scott presler, rosaeanne barr, witze

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https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland

includes qanon

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

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?]

...

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.”

[pix]

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.

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.

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:#ffffff;"):}::{Network Contagion Research Institute,:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: 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.

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.

QAnon Anonymous host Travis View discusses QAnon conspiracy theorists, what motivates them, and their political goals.

Aired: 04/20/20

rww 420

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/right-wing-round-up-the-cult-of-qanon-2/

the

Open Mind: The Cult of QAnon.
David Corn @ Mother Jones: Here We Go: Trump Has Started Accusing the Dems of Stealing the 2020 Election.
Cristina Cabrera @ Talking Points Memo: ‘More Important Things Than Living’: TX Lt. Gov. Sticks To Morbid Pitch For Saving Economy.
Timothy Johnson @ Media Matters: Infowars is planning another rally against public health orders in Texas.
Hemant Mehta @ Friendly Atheist: Pastor: In a Financial Crisis, Give to Church. That 10% “Doesn’t Belong to You.”
Tony Marrero @ Tampa Bay Times: Preaching conspiracies: Coronavirus puts Tampa pastor’s beliefs into mainstream spotlight.

Tags: Dan Patrick Owen Shroyer Robert Henderson Rodney Howard-Browne Coronavirus Round-Up

aha note escalator, and recycling mutation/hybridization of older conspir BS

he's the next soros re covid?

Bill Gates coronavirus conspiracy theory spread on social media and then to a Fox News host.

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/bill-gates-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-spread-social-media-and-then-fox-news

mma many link, pix, graf/ twt

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

PUBLISHED 04/08/20 12:13 PM EDT

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 around March 17, when a YouTube video about 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.

Infowars Bill Gates

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.”

Faith Goldy Bill Gates

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.”

Bill Gates Instagram3

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.

Bill Gates Facebook1

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).

Bill Gates YouTube5

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” and accused 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.

Video file

CitationFrom a video uploaded to TikTok on April 1, 2020

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.”

Bill Gates Facebook Instagram meme

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.”

On the morning of April 7, Fox host Laura Ingraham, while quote-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.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/how-qanon-conspiracists-and-coronavirus-truthers-make-a-dangerous-combination/

no lnx

How QAnon conspiracists and coronavirus truthers make a dangerous combination

Written by Marc-André Argentino, The Conversation April 9, 2020

by Marc-André Argentino, Concordia University

First there was the pandemic, then came the “infodemic” — a term the head of the World Health Organization defines as the spread of false information about COVID-19.

The most dangerous conspiracy theories about the coronavirus are now part of the QAnon phenomenon. For months now, actors in QAnon have downplayed the severity of the crisis, amplified medical disinformation and have been originators of hoaxes.

The QAnon movement started in 2017 after someone using an anonymous account known only as Q posted wild conspiracy theories about U.S. President Donald Trump on the internet forum 4chan.

QAnon conspiracy theorists believe a deep state cabal of global elites is responsible for all the evil in the world. They also believe those same elites are seeking to bring down Trump, whom they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the deep state. QAnon has now brought the same conspiracy mentality to the coronavirus crisis.

As a researcher of online movements like QAnon, I use a combination of data science and digital ethnography to research how extremist movements use technology to create propaganda, recruit members to ideological causes, inspire acts of violence or impact democratic institutions.

Bottom-up approach

A central component of QAnon is the crowdsourcing of narratives.This bottom-up approach provides a fluid and ever changing ideology. My analysis of Twitter shows from January to March, there was a 21 per cent increase (a total of 7,683,414 posts) in hashtags used by the QAnon community. This means the misinformation they spread has the capacity to reach a wider audience.

For instance, QAnon community influencers on Twitter promoted Miracle Mineral Supplement as a way of preventing COVID-19. The toxic product was sold by theTexas-based Genesis II Church of Health and Healing for US$45. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had previously issued a warning about the dangerous and potentially life threatening side effects of the supplement.

In January, QAnon was amplifying narratives on 8kun (the internet forum formally known as 8chan), Facebook and Telegram (an encrypted instant messaging plaform) about a false theory that Asians were more susceptible to the coronavirus and that white people were immune to COVID-19. Not only are there racist undertones associated with this disinformation, it minimizes the threat posed by the virus.

Downplayed threat

From February until the second week of March, QAnon followed the lead of Trump in downplaying the threat of the virus and calling it a hoax. They believed the virus was adeep state plot to damage the president’s chance at re-election. The QAnon community said those warning about the pandemic threat were trying to detract from U.S. domestic politics, stop Trump rallies and remove all the economic gains they contended had occurred during the Trump presidency.

After the WHO upgraded COVID-19 to pandemic status and the U.S. announced it was closing its borders to most people from Europe for 30 days, QAnon changed the narrative again. Suddenly, QAnon thought the pandemic was something to celebrate because it was a cover for the Trump administration’s secret plan to arrest deep state agents.

Evangelicals within the the QAnon movement viewed the pandemic as the promised coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth. David Hayes, who is better known as the Praying Medic and an influencer in the QAnon community with 300,000 YouTube subscribers, said in a March 14 livestream that there was no reason to be concerned about COVID-19. Hayes reassured his viewers that they may not be affected by the disease because this was “spiritual warfare” — only those who have not been chosen by God will be affected by the disease.

The person known as Q, who spawned the QAnon movement, didn’t post anything online about COVID-19 until March 23. Up until then, all of the medical disinformation, hoaxes and downplaying of the pandemic had been sourced from QAnon influencers and community.

Public health threat

In his first post on the topic of COVID-19, Q pushed a conspiracy theory with racial undertones about COVID-19 being 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.

The QAnon conspiracies have created an environment of complacency among its followers who aren’t taking the risks posed by the virus seriously.

Florida pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, who has given credence to QAnon in the past and has preached that the coronavirus was planned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was arrested after holding Sunday services and disregarding federal, state and county orders to limit gatherings to less than 10 people. His conspiratorial beliefs led to his negligent actions, which put hundreds of people from his congregation at risk.

In another instance, right-wing media figures were spreading an “empty hospital” conspiracy, downplaying the pandemic and its death toll.

A QAnon account originally launched the #FilmYourHospital hashtag. This was amplified by QAnon influencers such as former California congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero and QAnon influencer Liz Crokin. This hoax was then picked up by mainstream right-wing media figures promoting COVID trutherism to a wider audience.

The FBI once called conspiracy theories spread by QAnon and others a “potential domestic terrorism threat.” It’s time to call the infodemic a public health threat.

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.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/are-trump-and-his-allies-setting-up-dr-fauci-as-their-elite-scapegoat/

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Are Trump and his allies setting up Dr. Fauci as their ‘elite’ scapegoat?

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon April 6, 2020

This has gotten buried under the pile of horrific news about both the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s multiple failures to handle the crisis, but there was a moment during Trump’s daily propaganda dump on Sunday that was even more disturbing than usual. It came while Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was speaking, which usually means a respite from Trump’s firehose of misinformation and self-aggrandizement and an opportunity to get real information from an actual expert who is not a sociopath.

A reporter started to ask Fauci about the use of hydroxychloroquine, the now-legendary anti-malarial drug, to treat COVID-19. Fauci was almost certainly about to say, as he does every time he’s out of reach of Trump, that there’s no real evidence that the drug works, much less that it’s the “game-changer” that Trump desperately wants it to be.

But Fauci wasn’t able to answer the question, becauseTrump stopped him. “You don’t have to ask the question,” the president said, stepping in front of the podium, waving his hand in the air and using his girth as a physical barricade between Fauci and the reporter.

Earlier in the press conference, Trump had offered yet another glowing recommendation of hydroxychloroquine, which has no substantive evidence to recommend it. He literally cited “rumor” as a reason to give it a spin and said, “What do you have to lose?”

People actually have a lot to lose, as the drug has been known to damage the nervous system, cause psychological trauma and lead to heart attacks.

During this exchange, there was a hint of one reason Trump is championing this drug as a of miracle cure, despite the lack of evidence: He’s starting to workshop the excuses he will use and the scapegoats he will sacrifice in order to escape the blame — which he richly deserves — for how badly this crisis spun out of control. And the person most in danger of becoming the primary scapegoat for Trump and his minions is Fauci himself.

“If it does work, it would be a shame we did not do it early,” Trump said about hydroxychloroquine during the press conference Sunday.

At that point, it became clear to me what Trump hopes to get out of this endless hype about an unproven and dangerous drug: A QAnon-style conspiracy theory he can roll out, after the worst of the crisis has passed, about his heroic efforts to save everyone with a miracle drug, which were thwarted by shady “deep state” forces who denied the public this lifesaving drug as part of a plot to make him look bad.

Unfortunately for Fauci, he’s the most obvious candidate to become the villain in this conspiracy theory, in much the same way former FBI director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller were framed as part of a sinister anti-Trump conspiracy during the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been leading the pack in the effort to cast Fauci as the villain in the right-wing conspiracy theories that will pour from the spigots as soon as the spread of the coronavirus and the associated death rate start to ebb.

Dr. Fauci is prescribing “national suicide,” Carlson claimed on his show last week, declaring that the economic collapse caused by social distancing protocols is “a far bigger disaster than the virus itself, by any measure” and declaring that our “response to coronavirus could turn this into a far poorer nation.”

There are plenty of people who must share the blame for this national disaster. Trump, for one, is to blame because he twiddled his thumbs and denied the virus was serious until it had exploded across the country. If he’d actually taken this seriously and contained the disease, it’s likely none of this would be necessary. Carlson, of course, isn’t blaming Republicans, who seem determined to stop the kind of New Deal-level federal investment in our workers that is needed not just to keep people from falling into dire poverty, but to get the economy back on the road to recovery.

But instead Carlson is blaming Fauci, saying that the doctor “has bulletproof job security,” with the clear implication that he doesn’t care about people who are losing their jobs.

To make matters worse, there are reports that Fauci is conflicting with White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, a major booster of hydroxychloroquine. This isn’t surprising, since Trump’s right-wing economics advisers are eager to grasp at any thin straw to suggest that the economy can be “reopened” without causing mass loss of life from COVID-19. It just happens that this fantasy is not scientifically feasible.

It’s easy to see where all this is going. If the social distancing works to contain the virus, conservative pundits will point to the lower-than-feared death toll as evidence that the virus was never that serious — but not, of course, that the severe restrictions on daily life actually worked. They’ll claim that quarantine measures were never necessary, and suggest that hydroxychloroquine was a real solution that was available the whole time but got left on the table thanks of the “deep state” conspiracyagainst Trump. (Rather than because there’s no evidence this often-dangerous drug is actually a cure for COVID-19.) And Fauci will be held up as the straw-man villain in this conspiracy because he supported social distancing and was skeptical of Dr. Trump’s miracle drug.

Will this conspiracy theory work? In the sense of shoring up Trump’s support with his loyal base, there’s no doubt about it. There’s been a run on hydroxychloroquine from Trump supporters, who trust their president’s ill-founded rumor-mongering over any and all medical evidence. These are folks who feel justified in voting for a racist reality TV star and will cling to whatever nonsense Trump and Fox News dish up as a rationalization.

It’s unclear, however, how much traction this nonsense will have outside of that Trumpian bubble. There is definitely room for concern, since conspiracy theories about “secret” cures that regular doctors are holding back for mysterious reasons never seem to go out of style. But as Rutgers professor David Greenberg argued in Politico this weekend, “Politicians may be able in the short term to cover up their failed programs or weak leadership with clever messaging and images,” but in the end, with the economy down the toilet, the public is more likely to blame Trump than whatever scapegoat he and his propaganda team at Fox News serve up.

Still, this “deep state” theory seems close to inevitable, and the attacks on Fauci have already started. Trump’s opponents need to anticipate the twists and turns ahead and have a strategy to counter them. In an election that’s already being compromised by the pandemic itself, the prospect of widespread voter suppression and Trump’s apparently immovable popularity with his base, every weird Trumpian dirty trick could turn the tide.

https://act.pfaw.org/go/82278?t=5&akid=14579%2E2556770%2ED9q91f

mypillow

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/22/inside-fringe-internet-coronavirus-bubble-142960

for nearly two months, President Donald Trump downplayed the looming coronavirus threat before finally acknowledging the crisis at hand. But by the time the president shifted hisstance, many of his supporters on the fringes of the internet had already adopted—and amplified—his initial skepticism, framing the pandemic as just another flu bug or a liberal media hoax.

Now that the virus has circled the globe, killing thousands of people and crashing the stock market, what are these people, who live off a steady diet of perceived grievances and conspiracy theories, thinking? Are they, like Sean Hannity and other prominent Fox News hosts, no longer dismissing the novel virus as an overblown, politicized event, or are they steadfast in their denial—and even coming up with more fanciful theories as time goes on?

Given the dire situation, it seems worth knowing if the severity of the pandemic finally has penetrated the bubble of the most extreme coronavirus scoffers; if these people and their followers are ignoring safety measures because they believe the pandemic is a false flag to take away their guns or a Deep State plot to take down Trump, then they risk contributing to the disease’s spread. So, this past week, I created a faux Twitter account and set about building my own information bubble. My objective: Inhabit the world of far-right figures and conspiracy fanatics, survey the landscape and see where it leads me. I wanted to not just look into, but live in, the information universe seemingly giving comfort to people who want to believe this is all just an overreaction.

Initially, my guiding principle for choosing which accounts to follow was they had to have expressed skepticism about the seriousness of the virus and the need for an all-out response. I started by following a few highly trafficked personalities that I was already familiar with, such as pro-Trump acolytes Bill Mitchell and Sidney Powell, as well as Jordan Sather, a “professional shit stirrer” (as Rolling Stone put it) in the bizarre QAnon conspiracy movement, which holds that Trump is doing battle with nefarious Deep State forces.

Every time I punched in a new name, Twitter helpfully recommended like-minded souls to follow. I was served up names both less familiar (like a former CIA officer on a “mission to expose the Deep State/Shadow Government”) and very familiar (hello, LauraIngraham and Sebastian Gorka). Some of them occupied very different parts of the info-verse from each other, but they seemed united in the urge to defend the president and his handling of the crisis. I stopped adding to my bubble when it hit close to 70 accounts.

Over the week, I could see a clear line emerging between people who live within the conservative landscape broadly speaking—like Ingraham and Mike Huckabee, who can’t resist trolling liberals, but really aren’t questioning the risks of COVID at this point—and the people who’ve left the mainstream world behind for good. The former are looking for ways to pick holes in mainstream-media consensus and criticisms of the president, but they’re still reality-based. With the others, though, it’s impossible to imagine what combination of circumstances might pull them back to reality.

After spending long stretches in this fevered silo, I’m sorry to report that even a devastating pandemic can’t dent the human appetite for conspiracy ideation.Given the anxious, uncertain times we find ourselves in today, perhaps this is not surprising. Scholars say that people who feel a lack of control in their lives sometimes turn to conspiracies to help make sense of random, unfathomable events. “When disasters and tragedies take place, conspiracy theories may be more appealing—or less terrifying—than the reality of what has taken place,” Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan explained in an email.

That said, I was surprised to learn that some of the most notorious conspiracy promoters, likeInfowars’ Alex Jones, did not deny the severity and spread of coronavirus. (He is banned from Twitter, but people I followed managed to lead me to his website, where I could watch his streaming broadcast.) To be clear, Jones, who is notorious for erroneously suggesting that numerous mass shootings were staged, has not changed his ways; he is still spewing ridiculous conspiracies about the pandemic’s origins and impact.

Jones’ acknowledgement that the virus is more serious than an ordinary flu bug stands in contrast to some other far-right figures and QAnon promoters in my bubble who furiously argued otherwise—even after Trump’s own reality check. This divergence highlighted something else that struck me: just how many conspiracy narratives are being floated in response to the pandemic, as if they’re being tested to see which ones stick.

***

It was on Tuesday, March 17, hours after a White House press conference about the virus, that I launched my faux Twitter account. One of the first retweets that flashed across my laptop screen was from a libertarian activist (@erasethestate),who misleadinglycompared flu and coronavirus statistics, something Trump had previously done numerous times. But this was also the same day that the president shed his cavalier approach to the pandemic. Would coronavirus minimizers like @erasethestate take their cue from Trump and abandon that disingenuous tack?

Hardly. Bill Mitchell, a vocal Trump supporter with 547,000 followers, showed up often in my feed to bemoan thecoronavirus “fearporn.” He was emblematic of many in the far-right sphere of my bubble who faulted the media for “hyping” the pandemic. Mitchell, like @erasethestate, also frequently conflated the high number of flu deaths and hospitalizations with those for coronavirus—failing to mention that the latter is believed by medical authorities to be more contagious and lethal. It will be interesting to see when or if Mitchell ever revisits his obstinate stance, illustrated vividly in this tweet:

I don't care if I'm the last pundit on Earth saying the wild over-reaction to #COVID19 is bullsh*t, it's bullsh*t.

100%, pure grade A, solid gold bullsh*t.

History will agree with me.

2,356

9:34 AM - Mar 18, 2020

not everyone in my feed was as adamant as Mitchell. For example, Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor Twitter suggested to me, wanted to have it both ways on her podcast. “I don’t know if it’s just me,” she started out saying in a recent episode. “I almost feel like there’s this strange overreaction.” Then in the next breath, she noted, “Italy is really suffering,” before equivocating again: “We are overreacting, maybe for good reason, but there’s also this issue where it has been politicized.”

Carter’s fuzziness made it hard to understand where she stood. But to some extent, it’s understandable if some of her listeners and followers feel confused about what to think. If you’re obsessively following the outbreak news, watching the panic among real-world doctors, the anxiety of people watching their jobs and 401(k)s vanish, senior citizens and even 30-somethings struggling for life on ventilators, it can be infuriating to read tweet after tweet intimating that this isn’t a big deal at all. But if you haven’t been hit by the disease yet and don’t want to stay inside for the sake of people you’ve never met, there’s a measure of relief in occupying a world in which the situation is under control and the response has gone too far.

While both MAGA types and QAnon enthusiasts in my bubble were suspicious about the pandemic and its root cause, they expressed different reasons. Mitchell intimated that the virus’ spread was a form of bioterrorism by China. Some in the QAnon crowd, seeing the rush to develop a vaccine to fight the virus, fingered profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies as the culprits. While he loathes Big Pharma, Jordan Sather blamed other black hats closer to home after seeing this tweet from Trump:

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

The world is at war with a hidden enemy. WE WILL WIN!

564K

12:31 PM - Mar 17, 2020]

most people likely understood that Trump was referring to a microscopic pathogen as the “hidden enemy.” But Sather the real meaning on his YouTube show. “What could he mean?” Sather asked with a grin, as he stroked his chin. “I think you know exactly what he means. He’s talking about the Deep State cabal infecting our planet right now—quite obviously.” The QAnon movement—which spun off the deranged Pizzagate episode during the 2016 election—is obsessed with rooting out supposed Deep State actors and A-list pedophiles, who according to QAnon belief, control Hollywood and the real levers of government power.

When I was in my bubble, an anonymous, QAnon adherent alleged on Facebook that Oprah Winfrey was arrested for running a child sex ring. It was preposterous and easily debunked, but the rumor circulated so widely on the internet that Winfrey felt compelled to respond on Twitter. Even crazier, according to several news reports, the Facebook post alleged that other celebrities, such as Tom Hanks, had also been arrested, but that a covert intelligence operation triggered the coronavirus epidemic to distract the world from bringing them and a Satanic cabal to justice.

Toward the end of my time in the bubble, a retweet flashed across my laptop screen that contained a screen grab of something Alex Jones had said on his Infowars show. Jones helms a lucrative multi-media empire that has trafficked in outlandish conspiracies for two decades; he has been successfully sued by parents of Sandy Hook shooting victims for suggesting that the tragic event didn’t actually happen. After one of my followers tweeted a blurb from his show, I clicked on Jones’ livestream just as he was beginning of one of his trademark stream-of-consciousness monologues.

“The world is going into martial law,” he says in his raspy voice, playing off the travel restrictions that have been enacted to quell the pandemic. “Criminals, armed robbers, rapists, they are all being let out of jail by the tens of thousands.” Every word of this is false, of course, as is what he says a few minutes later: “If your neighbors sees you cough, you’re being taken away for six weeks. … This is how the West dies. This is how America dies, this is how it all unfolds.”

No wonder Jones isn’t denying the severity of the coronavirus; he’s using it to frighten his listeners witless—to his own advantage.

Wearing a blazer and sitting behind his faux TV studio in Austin, Texas, Jones broke off from his rants every 10 minutes or so to hawk his line of dietary supplements and other products. He sells everything from toothpaste and coffee (called “Wake Up America”) to sleeping aids (“Knock-out”). I tried to listen to two of his shows on consecutive days, but I couldn’t get very far in, especially after I heard him plug his supplements as a life and death necessity for people to survive the pandemic. “Folks, they want to train you to sit there and die in your house,” he said. “Get the boost you and your family need. A lot of stuff is selling out, a lot of stuff coming in. We have the supplements now. You better get your orders in. Do not wait.”

Agitated by his shamelessness, I slammed my laptop shut and reflected on the upside-down world I had created for myself on Twitter and YouTube. I felt unsettled by the realization that not even a monumental humanitarian crisis can keep some charlatans from exploiting people’s fears for profit.

If you want to hear that the virus is no big deal, maybe even fake, you don’t have to build your own bubble. Here’s your shortcut: At the moderate end, among the media-skeptic pro-Trump crowd, the virus is real and it’s scary, but so are liberal overreach, open borders, government spending, breathless public-health fearmongering and criticism of Trump. At the extreme end, let’s call it Full QAnon, the outbreak is engineered by Chinese scientists, Big Pharma or criminal celebrities, and may or may not be real.

This weekend, I peeked back at my Twitter bubble one last time to see if events on the ground had changed any of the hardened minds I’d been following for days. But everyone seemed ensconced in their altered or alternate realities. There was not a dent in the cocoon—for now

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-conspiracy-theory-post-about-coronavirus-spreading-social-media

no lnx many

QAnon conspiracy theory post about the coronavirus is spreading on social media

The QAnon conspiracy theory, already labeled a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI, is now also a threat to public health

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/24/20 1:41 PM EDT

A conspiratorial post about the novel coronavirus by “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, is spreading throughout social media, harming efforts to convey that the virus is a legitimate danger to public health.

The QAnon conspiracy theory revolves around an anonymous account known as “Q,” and is premised around the claim that President Donald Trump was working with then-special counsel Robert Mueller to take down the president’s perceived enemies, the “deep state,” and pedophile rings. Multiple adherents to the conspiracy theory have been tied to acts of violence, including murders and an attempted kidnapping, and an FBI field office released a memo in May 2019 that listed QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The conspiracy theory started on far-right message board site 4chan and later moved to fellow far-right message board site 8chan, which has since relaunched as 8kun. The owner of 8chan/8kun, Jim Watkins, has shown support for QAnon and helped establish aQAnon super PAC. (Beyond the QAnon conspiracy theory, 8chan/8kun has been linked to multiple instances of white supremacist terrorism, including the August 2019 massacre in El Paso, Texas.)

On the evening of March 23, “Q” posted on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board about the coronavirus. The post used race-baiting language, referring to the illness as the “China virus,” and implied that the virus was a bioweapon created in order to harm Trump’s reelection chances. (This false conspiracy theory has spread elsewhere on social media.)

Q post coronavirus pix]

Since then, the post has spread throughout Facebook groups and Twitter among QAnon supporters, where it has received thousands of engagements combined, being cited for proof that “the virus is a Cabal weapon” and a “false flag” that “democrats look suspiciously responsible for.”The “Q” post was also able to spread thanks to QAnon apps that are offered on the Google Play Store (which Google profits from).

Q post coronavirus Twitter2

Q post coronavirus Facebook1

Q post coronavirus Twitter3

The “Q” post’s spread comes as supporters of the conspiracy theory have been using social media platforms to spread falsehoods about the virus being some kind of false flag by the “deep state” for population control or a “military operation” to target supposed elites. They have also promoted dangerous false cures for the disease such as drinking bleach.

Pro-Trump OAN pushes wild conspiracy theory that novel coronavirus was created in a North Carolina lab

Pro-Trump cable news network OAN aired a special "investigative" look into the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. The network’s chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, suggested that the novel coronavirus responsible for the current pandemic may have originated in a North Carolina laboratory.

As support, Rion cited Greg Rubini, whom she described in the special as “a citizen investigator and monitored source amongst a certain set in the D.C. intelligence community.” There is no evidence that Rubini is a “monitored source” for anyone but Rion. He has pushed QAnon conspiracy theories about the “deep state” on Twitter. Rubini also preposterously suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci funded the creation of the novel coronavirus and that Trump's political opponents spread it around the world, from China to Italy to back to the United States. This is obviously a totally bananas conspiracy theory -- but it's one the network fell for.

This would be bad enough, but the Trump White House has credentialed the networked as well. And on Wednesday, Trump called on Rion during a White House briefing, where she asked if the phrase "Chinese food" was racist, and accused the rest of the media of “siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels.”

Shortly after making a mockery of a public briefing in the middle of a pandemic that could kill millions, Rion said that China was making an "odd" accusation that the novel coronavirus was created in the United States -- the same conspiracy theory that Rion herself had endorsed just days earlier.

This isn't going to end, either: On Saturday, Trump again called on OAN and used its question to attack The Washington Post.

Featured Media

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-coronavirus-is-conspiracy-theory-gold-for-trump-supporting-qanon

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The coronavirus is conspiracy theory gold for Trump-supporting QAnon

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / The Washington Monthly March 18, 2020

By now, most of us have heard about QAnon, the group of conspiracy theorists that formed soon after Donald Trump was elected. For a refresher course, here’s how they were described by Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, who has written about the group extensively for the Washington Post.

“QAnon is based upon the idea that there is a worldwide cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who rule the world, essentially, and they control everything,” View told Salon. “They control politicians, and they control the media. They control Hollywood, and they cover up their existence, essentially. And they would have continued ruling the world, were it not for the election of President Donald Trump.”

“Now, Donald Trump in this conspiracy theory knows all about this evil cabal’s wrongdoing. But one of the reasons that Donald Trump was elected was to put an end to them, basically. And now we would be ignorant of this behind-the-scenes battle of Donald Trump and the U.S. military — that everyone backs him and the evil cabal — were it not for ‘Q.’ And what ‘Q’ is — is basically a poster on 4chan, who later moved to 8chan, who reveals details about this secret behind-the-scenes battle, and also secrets about what the cabal is doing and also the mass sort of upcoming arrest events through these posts.”

“Q” doesn’t directly tell his followers what’s going on. Instead, he provides hints around which they develop their conspiracy theories. But when it comes to coronavirus, “Q” has apparently been silent, which has left his followers scrambling. As a result, several theories about the virus have emerged.

Because these folks have believed in a cabal that controls everything for so long, it is inevitable that they would spread things like this—even though it directly contradicts all of their other conspiracy theories.

Of course, QAnoners buy into the whole idea that coronavirus is a hoax.

After all the left’s hoaxes failed, they have launched the most epic Trojan horse fake news HOAX in the history of America. It’s even worse than war of the worlds. These crazy people are running around like chickens with their heads cut off screaming that the sky is falling and bringing the economy to its knees over nothing but a flu! A FLU! And Americans have actually fallen for it!!

We should not be scared by the left. We should not be scared by all of the left’s hoaxes. We should be ON GUARD and watching our backs at all time because the vast majority of Americans are lost sheep lemmings who believe everything the media tells them! Even after every single fraudulent hoax has been exposed as a LIE!!

I hope you’re not one of the lost lemmings who have been brainwashed and bamboozled by the left. If you are, turn back and reject their lies. Turn to the book of Truth and don’t take your eyes off of it.? Ever.

Here’s a meme that captures a couple of their themes.

There is one theory, however, that is rising to the top of this heap of nonsense. In order to understand this one, it is important to know that for months now, they have been predicting that “the storm” is coming.

“‘The Storm’ is basically when tens of thousands of people, including Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and [John] Brennan, and maybe even Hollywood celebrities, and other high-level politicians and journalists even, are going to be arrested, and rounded up and possibly even sent to Guantanamo Bay…Or be subjected to basically military tribunals, where they will be tried for their heinous crimes.”

According to the QAnon crowd, “social distancing” is just a cover for the coming storm.

This means mass arrests and we know this is going to happen worldwide, so they needed a cover to restrict travel and get people prepared to have an interruption in supplies while a financial reset and the arrests occur. President Trump is trying to tell Americans to be prepared under the guise of a pandemic.

The stock market needs to adjust down in order to do a complete reset and move us to a gold backed currency and get rid of the Fed. The stock market has been falsely inflated for awhile. The CV is the perfect “crisis” to make a lot of it work. Travel will likely shut down for a brief period and maybe all schools and universities will be shut down so kids are home safe with their parents when the arrests occur. We could even have a period of Marital Law to suppress opportunities for looting and riots…

Having the CV crisis allows POTUS to shut down our borders so Homeland Security and our military can focus on keeping peace. Also, POTUS said everything with the CV will be over in April. He said it because he knows it is fake and they plan to take action in March and by April, the American public will be informed of what has occurred and why.

When Tom Hanks announced that he had contracted the virus, it was proof to the QAnoners that the storm was underway. The story simply gets more bizarre from there.

The fact that folks like this are among Trump’s most avid followers tells you all you need to know about the man who currently occupies the White House. It will be a great day when he leaves the premises and we can go back to either ignoring or laughing at these idiots.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/pro-trump-media-claim-cdc-overhyping-coronavirus-because-nancy-messonnier

Dr. Nancy Messonnier is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Her impressive bio lists a number of top positions that she has held in the CDC, and it also notes that she has received multiple awards.

In recent days, Messonnier has taken a leading role in warning the public about the threat that the novel coronavirus strain known as COVID-19 poses to the United States. The Wall Street Journal noted that Messonnier said it was just a question of when coronavirus will circulate in the U.S. The Daily Beast quoted her as saying, “We expect to see more cases of person-to-person spread among close contacts. ... The goal here is to slow entry of this virus into the United States.” CNBC quoted her calling for schools to divide students into smaller groups or to close entirely and conduct courses online. Many other outlets have quoted her as well.

But right-wing media have begun to coalesce around a conspiracy theory that Messonnier’s warning should be disregarded because she is the sister of former Trump appointee Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein was a frequent target of pro-Trump propagandists for appointing Robert Mueller as a special counsel in the Russia investigation.

From a QAnon Twitter account to Rush Limbaugh's show

The conspiracy theory about Messonnier and Rosenstein goes back at least to a QAnon Twitter account noting their connection in early January.

It really started to pick up speed this week.

On February 25, Rush Limbaugh ranted about Messonnier, suggesting an anti-Trump conspiracy after he learned she’s related to Rosenstein. It was also picked up by a poster on white nationalist message board 8kun. Soon thereafter, it jumped to 4chan's “/pol/,” a slightly less extreme white nationalist message board. The Conservative Treehouse, a right-wing blog featured on Lou Dobbs' Fox Business show before, also posted about the conspiracy theory.

Others followed suit:

On the morning of the February 26, Joe Hoft (the brother of Jim Hoft, proprietor of the Gateway Pundit) posted about it. Hoft wrote that Messonnier’s remarks while President Donald Trump was in India were “a startling rebuke” and that it was “eerily similar to past Presidential trips when former and corrupt DAG Rod Rosenstein and the corrupt and criminal Mueller gang would drop shocking news as the President was overseas.”

Later on the 26th, Rush Limbaugh returned to the conspiracy theory, with the transcript of his show hyperlinking to Hoft’s post. After suggesting that Messonnier was not to be trusted, Limbaugh quickly changed the subject to suggest that the virus may just disappear once the weather warms up. Scientists have cast doubt on that theory as well.

Meanwhile, Trump is reportedly furious at Messonnier:

new 220

https://apnews.com/e230131513bf3df60c76bb1151bc6b7c

MILWAUKEE (AP) — President Donald Trump was more than halfway through his speech at a rally in Milwaukee when one of his hand gestures caught the eye of a supporter standing in the packed arena.

The 51-year-old woman believed the president had traced the shape of the letter “Q” with his fingers as a covert signal to followers of QAnon, a right-wing, pro-Trump conspiracy theory. She turned to the couple on her right and excitedly asked, “Did you see the ‘Q’?”

“He just did it?” asked Diane Jacobson, 63, of Racine, Wisconsin.

“Was that a ‘Q’?” added Jacobson’s husband, Randy, 64.

“I think it was,” replied their new friend, Chrisy. The Geneva, Illinois, resident declined to give her last name in part because she said she wanted to avoid negative “attention.”

NY Post columnist and CNN contributor posts climate-denial tweet from QAnon conspiracy theorist

WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 09/19/19 2:25 PM EDT

Salena Zito, a columnist at the New York Post as well as a CNN contributor, reposted a climate-denial Twitter thread from a writer who is involved in a notorious far-right conspiracy theory.

Zito began as a local Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist and since the 2016 election has further built her career upon the rise of Donald Trump. (At the same time, she has faced allegations of plagiarism.)

On September 19, Zito retweeted Martin Geddes, whose Twitter profile identifies his affiliation with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

The “interesting thread” goes on to declare: “There are many crimes & crises that are going to bury the progressive left over the next few years, but the one that will be their epitaph is Global Warming (aka ‘Climate Change’).”

Geddes describes himself as a “digital soldier,” and his profile includes a link to a piece he wrote that he describes as a “QAnon article that Medium censored.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory is based around an anonymous user on the far-right internet forum 8chan who signs cryptic posts as “Q.” The user claims to be a high-level member of the federal government, and dedicated believers look in these posts for clues about an alleged master plan by President Donald Trump to take down his “deep state” opponents and pedophilia rings supposedly linked to celebrities and politicians.

As for Geddes’ accusation that global warming is “a political construct,” backed up by “people with PhDs (whose entire livelihood depends on agreeing with this)” -- wouldn’t it make more sense to think that the fossil fuel companies would pay more money for a science-on-demand racket, rather than university administrations?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/wacky-qanon-conspiracy-theorists-have-become-a-major-headache-for-trumps-reelection-campaign-report/

no lnx

Wacky QAnon conspiracy theorists have become a major headache for Trump’s reelection campaign: report

Written by Alex Henderson September 12, 2019

Not all of the right-wing Republicans who want to see President Donald Trump reelected in 2020 are believers in the goofy QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that Trump is secretly fighting an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers — and that an anonymous figure known as Q is secretly sending updates on the battle. Many conservatives and Trump supporters believe that the QAnon cult is completely nuts. But QAnon theorists won’t go away, and in a report for the Daily Beast, journalists Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng describe the ways in which they have become a headache for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Sommer and Suebsaeng report that QAnon theorists are feeling increasingly energized: in addition to making their presence felt at Trump rallies, they have been holding rallies of their own — for example, a QAnon rally was held across the street from the White House on Wednesday, and about 100 people showed up.

At a recent Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, according to Sommer and Suebsaeng, QAnon supporters were so visible that cable news couldn’t ignore them. QAnon supporter John Welch told the Beast, “By the time the rally was over, they didn’t have any choice but to put us on (television).”

The problem that QAnon poses for the Trump campaign is that when they are able to attract media attention at Trump events, it sends out a message that parts of his base are divorced from reality — and gives Democrats a possible weapon to use against Trump.

Sommer and Suebsaeng report that “to Team Trump…. QAnon diehards who adore Trump and garner media coverage and camera shots at his 2020 rallies have been a long-time nuisance.” And one senior Trump campaign official, interviewed anonymously, told the Beast that the campaign has a formula for dealing with QAnon: “ignore them” and don’t “make a big deal out of” them — and at the same time, try to avoid “pissing off the crazy” people.

On one hand, Sommer and Suebsaeng report, Trump’s team don’t want to anger QAnon supporters — who view Trump as an heroic figure who will topple an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers. But on the other hand, their visibility at Trump events is bad publicity for the campaign.

“The presence of Q believers at rallies,” according to Sommer and Suebsaeng, “also means Trump could accidentally endorse the theory, at least in the eyes of its believers. Nearly every Trump appearance produces footage that QAnon believers scrutinize in hopes of seeing Trump’s hand movements form what they believe to be a Q.”

mma

:{QAnon rally promoter plans to livestream event on Periscope, which prohibits violence-encouraging content:(style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:#ffffff;;fill:#ffffff;"):}:

09/05/19 3:19 PM EDT

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/what-is-qanon-inside-the-conspiracy-theory-that-just-wont-die/

no lnx

What is QAnon? Inside the conspiracy theory that just won’t die

Written by Matthew Rozsa / Salon August 19, 2019

If you follow the squeaks and squawks of far-right conspiracy theorists, you have almost certainly encountered QAnon believers — individuals who follow the oft-debunked predictions of an anonymous man who calls himself “Q” and claims to know the sinister truth about how the world works.

To better understand the QAnon conspiracy theory, Salon spoke with Travis View, the host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, who has written about the group extensively for the Washington Post.

What does QAnon believe?

What is “The Storm?”

As Vox’s Jane Coaston wrote in March, followers of QAnon believe that there is an imminent event known as “‘The Storm,’ during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.” In November 2017, Coaston pointed out that QAnon had predicted that John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, would be arrested and that the military would take control, followed by riots being orchestrated to prevent more senior officials from also being arrested.

“‘The Storm’ is basically when tens of thousands of people, including Hillary Clinton and James Comey, and [John] Brennan, and maybe even Hollywood celebrities, and other high-level politicians and journalists even, are going to be arrested, and rounded up and possibly even sent to Guantanamo Bay,” View told Salon. “Or be subjected to basically military tribunals, where they will be tried for their heinous crimes. And that’s sort of like the outline.”

Who is ‘Q?’

As View put it, “We have some indication of who ‘Q’ might have been, but there isn’t really any sort of solid evidence right now connecting someone to ‘Q.'” At the very least, it does not seem likely that any old person could pretend to be ‘Q.’

“On 4chan and 8chan, these are image boards,” View said. “There aren’t really like webs or forums. And how image boards work is that you can’t create an account. You can’t register an account that’s yours. But what you can do is — you can create what they call a trip code. And this is sort of like a string of characters that’s connected to a particular password that only you know . . . For someone to post as ‘Q,’ they would first need to know ‘Q’s’ trip code or password. And so that’s basically it: There’s a method for identifying yourself basically on these image boards.”

“Now, in ‘Q’s’ case is kind of complicated, because the trip code has changed a few times, because the trip code was leaked or hacked for whatever reason. But, yeah, that’s basically how image boards work. You can sort of identify yourself as sort of someone who posts two or more times with this trip code.”

Is there any truth to what QAnon believes?

“The interesting thing about QAnon is that there’s always at least this tiny hint of truth to it,” View said. “I’ve talked about sometimes they’re sort of right, maybe in a very broad general sense, but their specific particular claims are always insane and far, far detached from reality. In the case of secret pedophile rings, I mean, you don’t have to look very far to see that kind of thing actually happens. I’m talking about the massive sort of scandal in the Catholic Church. For example, there’s a case in Philadelphia, which is horrendous, of many young people who were molested by people in the Catholic Church. And it was sort of covered up, and has gone on and served several cities all over the world. Very, very tragic.”

“And, of course, there’s the case of Jeffrey Epstein, who was a billionaire who may have molested dozens of girls, and then basically got a sweetheart deal from the government and is a free man now. So there’s that reason — is that they often have a sense that, ‘Well, if this kind of thing is going on and is being covered up, then perhaps the cover-up is bigger than anyone thinks.'”

This point cannot be discounted: From Hollywood to the corridors of power, there are indeed secret pedophile rings that exist. That does not mean, however, that any crackpot who claims to have discovered one should be automatically taken seriously.

Why do people believe this nonsense?

To answer that question, let us turn to “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” the classic American political essay by historian Richard Hofstadter. Originally published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964, Hofstadter dissected what causes people to subscribe to conspiracy theories. His argument was based not on a psychological diagnosis but rather on a particular style that tends to appeal to people regardless of whether it has any objective merit:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse…

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/michael-flynn-and-george-papadopoulos-slated-to-speak-at-event-hosted-by-qanon-conspiracy-theorist/

no lnx

Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos slated to speak at event hosted by QAnon conspiracy theorist

Written by Alex Henderson August 14, 2019

Many right-wing activists avoid discussing the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that: (1) Democrats are involved in an international ring of pedophiles and child sex traffickers, (2) President Donald Trump was put in the White House to secretly combat the ring, and (3) important updates are being sent via an anonymous figure named Q. But others are happy to promote it, including Yippy, Inc. CEO Rich Granville. And Trump allies Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, Mother Jones is reporting, are scheduled to speak at a conference Granville is organizing.

The one-day event, scheduled for September 14 in Atlanta, is billed as the Digital Soldiers Conference and claims it is designed to promote a “digital civil war” against “censorship and oppression.” Granville, who has posted many references to QAnon on Twitter, is not the only QAnon supporter who will be speaking at the event: Florida-based online broadcaster Bill Mitchell, another scheduled speaker, has often promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory on his show.

The letter “Q” is one of the ways in which QAnon supporters identify themselves, and the website for the Digital Soldiers Conference depicts an American flag with stars in a “Q” shape. But Granville told Mother Jones that the flag depicted on the site isn’t a QAnon reference but rather, a reference to the fact that Flynn (who briefly served as national security adviser in the Trump Administration in 2017) is a three-star general: three of the stars are depicted in gold rather than white.

Gen. Flynn set to speak at Digital Soldiers Conference in Atlanta@DigiSoldiers @GenFlynn #DIGITALSOLDIERShttps://t.co/j96rWMMayC #realDonaldTrump via @freedomoutpost

— Rich Granville CEO of Yippy.com (@GranvilleReal) August 13, 2019

Nonetheless, Granville acknowledged to Mother Jones that he is a QAnon supporter. And Mother Jones described Granville’s Twitter account as “littered with references to QAnon.”

According to the Digital Soldiers Conference site, most of the proceeds from the event will go to Flynn’s defense fund. Flynn, like Papadopoulos (a foreign policy adviser on Trump’s 2016 campaign), faced federal charges as a result of lying to the FBI in connection with the U.S. Justice Department’s Russia investigation. Both of them agreed to fully cooperate with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, but while Papadopoulos has already served a brief prison sentence, Flynn has yet to be sentenced.

Trump campaign ad featured QAnon signs despite FBI warning that conspiracy could ‘motivate’ extremists

The FBI in a recent document listed “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory as a “domestic terror threat.” Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have already been linked to multiple threats, attempted acts of violence, and even murders.

On Twitter, President Donald Trump has amplified supporters of the conspiracy theory more than 20 times. Trump has also met with multiple supporters of the conspiracy theory at the White House, and a supporter of the conspiracy theory is co-chair of a coalition group for his reelection campaign.

https://www.mediamatters.org/twitter/fbi-calls-qanon-domestic-terror-threat-trump-has-amplified-qanon-supporters-twitter-more-20

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no lnx many

The FBI calls QAnon a domestic terror threat. Trump has amplified QAnon supporters on Twitter more than 20 times.

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 08/01/19 4:18 PM EDT

The FBI in a recent document listed “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory as a “domestic terror threat.” Supporters of the QAnon conspiracy theory have already been linked to multiple threats, attempted acts of violence, and even murders. On Twitter, President Donald Trump has amplified supporters of the conspiracy theory more than 20 times. Trump has also met with multiple supporters of the conspiracy theory at the White House, and a supporter of the conspiracy theory is co-chair of a coalition group for his reelection campaign.

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

FBI cites QAnon as a domestic terror threat

FBI lists QAnon conspiracy theory as a domestic terrorism threat. In May, the FBI released a memo which “for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat,” according to Yahoo News. The memo “specifically mentions QAnon.” From the August 1 article:

The FBI for the first time has identified fringe conspiracy theories as a domestic terrorist threat, according to a previously unpublicized document obtained by Yahoo News.

...

The FBI intelligence bulletin from the bureau’s Phoenix field office, dated May 30, 2019, describes “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists,” as a growing threat, and notes that it is the first such report to do so. It lists a number of arrests, including some that haven’t been publicized, related to violent incidents motivated by fringe beliefs.

The document specifically mentions QAnon, a shadowy network that believes in a deep state conspiracy against President Trump, and Pizzagate, the theory that a pedophile ring including Clinton associates was being run out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant (which didn’t actually have a basement).

…

President Trump is mentioned by name briefly in the latest FBI document, which notes that the origins of QAnon is the conspiratorial belief that “Q,” allegedly a government official, “posts classified information online to reveal a covert effort, led by President Trump, to dismantle a conspiracy involving ‘deep state’ actors and global elites allegedly engaged in an international child sex trafficking ring.” [Yahoo News, 8/1/19]

The conspiracy theory has been growing online since October 2017. As reported by Media Matters in August 2018, “the unhinged conspiracy theory known as ‘QAnon,’ or ‘The Storm,’ has been gaining traction online among President Donald Trump’s supporters since October 2017,” but “it finally jumped to the mainstream in the form of shirts and signs that were prominently visible at a Trump campaign rally in Tampa, FL”:

While the theory has its murky origins on 4chan and 8chan -- message boards best known for serving as the source of hoaxes and organized harassment campaigns -- many prominent right-wing figures, websites, and social media accounts have helped amplify QAnon. [Media Matters, 8/2/18]

QAnon supporters have been linked to multiple acts and threats of violence. Supporters of the conspiracy theory have been linked to multiple violent incidents and threats of violence, including a man accused of murdering his brother with a sword, a man who reportedly threatened to kill YouTube employees, a man accused of murdering an alleged crime boss, an armed man who blocked the Hoover Dam with an armored vehicle, and a man who threatened to assassinate Trump. Supporters of the conspiracy theory have even terrorized a charter school and forced it to cancel its annual fundraiser. [The Daily Beast, 8/11/18, 9/27/18, 1/9/19; BuzzFeed, 6/17/18; The New York Times, 7/21/19; The Daily Dot, 5/10/19]

Trump has amplified QAnon-supporting Twitter accounts more than 20 times

On Twitter, Trump has repeatedly retweeted, quote tweeted, tagged, and shared content from QAnon supporters. Since 2017, Trump has repeatedly amplified Twitter accounts supporting the conspiracy theory.

From November 25, 2017:

Travis View

@travis_view

Question: When will Trump retweet a Q-Anon account and promote a Q-Anon website?

Answer: Trick question. He already has.

On Nov. 25, 2017 Trump quote tweeted @MAGAPILL, which included a link to their website. The site has been promoting Q-Anon since before Trump's quote tweet.

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Mar 17, 2019

Replying to @atrupar

The account Trump retweeted (@Lrihendry) to indicate he hates John McCain is a bigoted pizzagate conspiracy theorist who suggested Obama is a pedophile

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

Trump retweeted a Qanon account (@vmbb12) whose avatar is Q with a MAGA hat. I’d tell you more about this account but it has me blocked, even though we’ve never interacted.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

171

4:02 PM - Mar 17, 2019 · Minnesota, USA

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96 people are talking about this

From March 20:

From a QAnon conspiracy theorist to actor James Woods to comedian Larry the Cable Guy to the leader of the free world.Thus travels information in the age of Twitter and President Trump, who took a late-night swing at a familiar punching bag — the Transportation Security Administration — via a nearly two-year-old video spread by a character on the far fringes of the Internet.

…

The video was reshared on Monday by a Twitter account called Deep State Exposed, which is operated by Jeremy Stone, a follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Stone’s twitter bio includes the phrase “WWG1WGA,” shorthand for “Where We Go One We Go All,” a rallying cry for the bizarre theory that ties together the Pizzagate conspiracy and a supposed “deep state” plot to control American politics. Stone soon added a follow-up tweet to the viral video claiming that “TSA goes out of their way to hire high school dropouts with an inclination for sexual perversion. It’s mind control!!!” [The Washington Post, 3/20/19]

On May 1, Trump retweeted six accounts that had pushed the conspiracy theory:

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

Multiple accounts that Trump retweeted this morning appear to have pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

5:15 AM - May 1, 2019

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From May 4:

Josh Russell

@josh_emerson

Big day for the murderous death cult known as Qanon.

This is one of the biggest Q accounts.

Twitter could have done something about this, Reddit did.

But they refuse too and they won't, until a few more people get killed by these nutcases.

View image on Twitter

5:47 AM - May 4, 2019

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From May 12:

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

Crowley in March called the New Zealand shootings a false flag and pushed the conspiracy theory that John Podesta was involved with the attacks.https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/uploader/image/2019/03/18/Lisa_Mei_Crowley_Podesta.png …https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1127706781952512000?s=19 …

Travis View

@travis_view

Today Trump retweeted an old tweet from Lisa Mei Crowley, a QAnon pusher who has screenshots of Q drops in her Twitter header image.

This is the sixth or so time that Trump has retweeted a QAnon account. I stopped keeping track tbh.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

4:54 PM - May 12, 2019

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On June 9, Trump retweeted Bill Mitchell, a conservative radio host who has boosted the conspiracy theory:

[Media Matters, 7/9/19]

From July 4:

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

May 1, 2019

Multiple accounts that Trump retweeted this morning appear to have pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

It appears that Trump tonight retweeted another QAnon believer.

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

Jul 4, 2019

Replying to @AlKapDC

It appears that Trump tonight retweeted another QAnon believer.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

An account Trump quote tweeted last night had pushed QAnon, Pizzagate, & a debunked hoax known as "Frazzledrip" about Hillary Clinton & Huma Abedin mutilating a child. Trump since then has also retweeted two other QAnon accounts.

On July 12, Trump again retweeted Mitchell:

From July 14:

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

Jul 12, 2019

Replying to @AlKapDC

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

At least two of the accounts Trump retweeted this morning appear to be QAnon accounts.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

7:36 AM - Jul 14, 2019

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See Alex Kaplan's other Tweets

In a July 30 tweet, Trump tagged a QAnon supporter with the QAnon slogan in its profile. He also retweeted another QAnon account.

Replying to @AlKapDC

This afternoon, Trump tagged in a tweet a QAnon account.https://twitter.com/jdawsey1/status/1156246319868129280 …

Josh Dawsey

@jdawsey1

The account potus just tagged for voter ID https://twitter.com/voteridplease/status/1112189035554983936 …

Alex Kaplan

@AlKapDC

Trump also quote tweeted and retweeted another QAnon account this afternoon.

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

10:51 AM - Jul 30, 2019

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[Right Wing Watch, 7/30/19]

Trump has met with multiple QAnon supporters at the White House and even has a QAnon supporter as a campaign surrogate

Trump has hosted multiple QAnon supporters. InAugust 2018, Trump met with radio host and QAnon supporter Michael Lebron in the Oval Office. This July, Trump’s White House social media summit hosted Mitchell, singer Joy Villa, who wore “Q” earrings at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, and Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit, which has criticized media outlets that tried to “mischaracterize and discredit” the conspiracy theory. Another booster of the conspiracy theory, cartoonist Ben Garrison, was originally invited to the summit, but his invitation was later rescinded. [CNN, 8/25/18; Media Matters, 7/9/19]

A QAnon supporter is co-chair of a Trump campaign coalition group. Actor and QAnon supporter Stacey Dash is a co-chair of Women for Trump, a coalition group for Trump’s reelection campaign. [women.donaldjtrump.com, accessed 7/23/19; Twitter, 1/28/19, 7/23/19]

Alleged QAnon-inspired murderer was obsessed with Fox News

killed mafia deep state; want to arrest schiff and _)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/qanon-conspiracists-appear-at-trump-rally-only-hours-after-fbi-warning-on-far-right-conspiracy-group/

no lnx ah

Far-right proponents of the bizarre QAnon conspiracy theory — which claims that an alliance of Hollywood actors and Washington, D.C. politicians, among others, have been engaging in an international child sex ring —are not only unhinged; they are also potentially dangerous, according to the FBI. And this week, the Washington Post reports, some QAnon proponents turned up at a rally for President Donald Trump on the same day the FBI issued a bulletin warning that the group could be dangerous.

According to the bulletin, proponents of QAnon as well as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory have the potential for violence. In 2016, Pizzagate proponents claimed that Democrats were using a Washington, D.C. pizzeria for child sex abuse.

The bulletin reads, “The FBI assesses theseconspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts.And it goes on to say thatreports “of a sudden rise in threats and unfounded accusations against a given individual or business may indicate impending conspiracy theory-driven crime or violence.”

On Thursday at a Trump rally in Cincinnati, according to the Post, a supporter named Brandon Straka used a QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” And other QAnon proponents were seen at the rally as well.

In the cultish QAnon community, Trump is held in high regard: QAnon theorists believe his presidency is meant to help carry out a worldwide battle against a child sex ring — and Q is an anonymous figure who sends sporadic messages on the battle.

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-approved-conspiracy-kook-says-military-sprays-chemicals-in-the-sky-to-sow-societal-chaos/

Lionel Lebron, a YouTube conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo with President Trump in the Oval Office last year, claims that the federal government and military are manipulating the climate over the United States to sow chaos and disorder in society.

Dan Wigington of Geoengineering Watch joined Lebron on his YouTube podcast to discuss the government’s alleged routine of spraying chemicals into the sky in order to influence the climate in ways that shape world events and sow chaos into the American population. The duo specified that they wouldn’t call the chemicals sprayed in air “chemtrails” because the word “chemtrail” is too often associated with conspiracy theories. Rather, the duo opted to say that their theories are about “geoengineering.”

“Semantics are important and I don’t want to be an anti-semantic,” Lebron joked.

The science community has debated the ethics of using chemical agents to curb the effects of climate change, but the ideas are often considered to be far-fetched and too risky to attempt on a large scale. However, Lebron and Wigington pile conspiracy theories onto that scientific debate—theories about military forces using geoengineering to “topple nations” in “weather warfare,” and to destabilize society.

Wigington said that government agencies use chemicals sprayed in the sky to keep portions of the United States cooler than the rest of the planet so that it “confuses and divides the population as to the true state of the climate while the planet descends into total meltdown.”

“Not only is climate modification used for weather warfare, to topple nations without those nations ever knowing they were at war—nations in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere that are forced to allow U.S. occupation. It’s used as a weapon of war, but also it’s used to confuse, divide, and thus pacify populations,” Wigington said.

Lebron agreed.

“Just like free radicals are so dangerous because they’re always trying to cleave and grab something, the worst thing that the military industrial complex, cabal, whoever you want to call these people—the asset-stripping jackals—the worst thing they could have happen is stability, calmness, power, strength, a sense of solemnity, purpose, cooperation. They don’t want that,” Lebron said. “Anything that makes them skeptical, that makes them run to the streets, run to the religions, run to their science—just run.”

Wigington went on to claim that weather forecasters are able to read scripts predicting the path of hurricanes because the government is using microwave beams and Raytheon military products to steer the aquatic cyclones.

Lebron is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who posed for a photo in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last year. The Daily Beast reported that Lebron claimed to have taken the picture with Trump after he received a “special guided tour of the White House,” and that an Oval Office photo op with the president is something that would typically require a senior administration official’s blessing. Earlier this week, Lebron filmed an interview with actress Roseanne Barr, who is a QAnon believer.

rww

MARCH 25, 2019 4:26 PM

Fox News White House Correspondent Inflames QAnon

MARCH 19, 2019 1:27 PM

Man Accused of Murdering a Mob Boss Was Interested in QAnon

3/19 mich

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/video-show-alarming-number-of-trump-fans-supporting-qanon-liberal-child-sex-trafficking-conspiracy/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trump-loving-conspiracy-nuts-once-again-blow-a-prediction-about-the-mass-arrest-of-the-presidents-foes/

Another week, another missed prediction of the mass arrest of President Donald Trump’s political enemies.

The *Daily Beast* reports that followers of the “QAnon” conspiracy theory had predicted that Trump would round up prominent Democrats for their supposed participation in a global pedophile ring on March 19th.

March 19th has come and gone, however, and the mass arrests never occurred.

As the report notes,this isn’t the first time that QAnon followers have made a false prediction about these arrests, which they refer to as “The Storm” that will sweep away all opposition to the president.

The first failed prediction came in 2017, when followers believed that longtime Clinton loyalists John Podesta and Huma Abedin would be arrested for their role in running a child human trafficking syndicate. Since then, QAnon followers have also predicted that Trump would bring the hammer down on his enemies during the funeral of former President George H.W. Bush — a prediction that also failed spectacularly.

None of this has phased QAnon’s core base, however.

“Unlike earlier failed predictions, which saw some followers leave the movement or express discouragement, this latest failure appears to have already vanished down the movement’s memory hole,” reports the Daily Beast. “QAnon’s failures are so numerous they’ve become an ambient white noise that true believers can tune out.”

https://www.alternet.org/qanon-conspiracy-believers-complain-being-isolated-loved-ones-during-holidays

Believers in the rightwing conspiracy Qanon, an elaborate fantasy in which President Donald Trump and Robert Mueller are secretly working togetherto battle a cabal of prominent people who are child molesters,complained of being lonely and isolated from loved ones in a new Daily Beast report.

Qanon believers "lamented that their belief in the bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory had isolated them from friends or family," and that the loneliness was "keenly felt over the holidays."

It's part of a trend that has followed the year-old conspiracy theory, which has reportedly broken up families.

The story was sourced to four conspiracists, "two diehards and two who are beginning to experience doubts."

One of the believers, a man, said that he has now joined a support group for Qanon believers who are increasingly estranged from family and friends.

“You hear about a lot of people, their spouses rolling their eyes and not seeing,” he said. “I’m trying to wake up my wife and head off potential disaster in the future and she just rolls her eyes. She thinks I’m nuts.”

Another woman lamented that no one she knows in person wants to hear about her conspiracy theories.

"I stopped trying to tell them. I stopped. Nobody wants to hear it," she said. "They say you’re a conspiracy nut and you’re looking at wacky stuff on the internet.”

One of the Qanon believers lost a friend of 60 years to her beliefs.

"She humiliated me on my Facebook page," she said. "There are other incidences as well. I keep it to myself that I follow QAnon. Some of my other friends follow as well.”

An expert who studies the Qanon phenomenon told the Beast that he's seen a lot of chatter about lost relationships within the conspiracy community but that the believers still think they will be vindicated.

"They often comfort themselves by imagining that there will be a moment of vindication sometime in the near future which will prove their beliefs right," he said. "They imagine that after this happens, not only will their relationships be restored, but people will turn them as leaders who understand what's going on better than the rest of us.”

Read the full story here.

ref DB no linx

Kimberly’s boyfriend was tired of hearing the QAnon videos she watched around their small apartment. To keep the peace, she started keeping the videos to herself. “I live in headphones now,” she told The Daily Beast.

“My boyfriend is... I don’t know how to describe it,” she said. “We have very different views. He does not think this QAnon thing is anything except nonsense. I drastically disagree.”

Over Thanksgiving, she joined a chorus of QAnon believers lamenting that their belief in the bizarre right-wing conspiracy theory had isolated them from friends or family, a loss keenly felt over the holidays. QAnon is “something I've been researching on my own, by myself pretty nonstop, 24/7 since probably July-ish,” Kimberly said. “And then it’s grown more and more and more and more and more and more intense for me.”

The QAnon theory falsely claims that President Donald Trump’s prominent opponents are part of an international criminal ring involved in the trafficking, abuse, and sometimes eating, of children. Believers think this because “Q,” an anonymous message board user who claims to be a high-level military insider, has been telling them so since October 2017. Over its year-plus lifespan, the theory has attracted untold legions of fans. It has also attracted comparisons to cults for behavior by adherents, some of whom claim to have become estranged from families and friends over their Q belief.

AND YOU THOUGHT PIZZAGATE WAS NUTS

QAnon: The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained

Will Sommer]

The Daily Beast spoke to four Q believers—two die-hards and two who are beginning to experience doubts—who claim to have been isolated from loved ones, as well as a former Q believer who now thinks the isolation helps reinforce QAnon support. The Daily Beast is withholding their last names at their requests.

In October, Matthew suggested “a support group” for members whose significant others did not believe in Q.

Matthew, a Washington man, was already in a QAnon club; he made the suggestion in a QAnon Facebook group with nearly 25,000 members. But what he suggested, a specialized group to deal with family alienation, resonated with the community.

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“You hear about a lot of people, their spouses rolling their eyes and not seeing,” Matthew told The Daily Beast. “I’m trying to wake up my wife and head off potential disaster in the future and she just rolls her eyes. She thinks I’m nuts.”

Earlier this month, Megan posted about the lack of Q believers in her small Pennsylvania town. “There is no one in my life that I can physically touch that knows what's really going on,” she wrote.

The rift is most evident this time of year. “When I get together with family for the holidays,” Megan doesn’t feel comfortable discussing conspiracy theories, or even politics, with members of her family, she told The Daily Beast. “I stopped trying to tell them. I stopped. Nobody wants to hear it. They say you’re a conspiracy nut and you’re looking at wacky stuff on the internet.”

Megan and Matthew now voice various degrees of skepticism about QAnon. Both were involved in earlier conspiracy communities, and view Q as one of many conspiracies in that broader matrix of fringe beliefs. A number of recent QAnon prophecies, including predictions about mass arrests of Trump foes on December 5 and the dismissal of charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn this week, have flopped.

“When I get together with family for the holidays. I stopped trying to tell them. I stopped. Nobody wants to hear it. They say you’re a conspiracy nut and you’re looking at wacky stuff on the internet.”

— Megan

Those failures, plus doubts about the moderator of a large Facebook group have caused both to back away from the conspiracy while still supporting some of its claims. But Kimberly and Marjorie (among a growing community of Canadian QAnon believers) said they were all-in on the conspiracy.

“My friends have told me they are tired of seeing my political postings,” Marjorie told The Daily Beast. She’s lost several friends over political posts about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, including a post about Trudeau being bricked into a wall, she said. She believes Trudeau is linked to the New World Order, a conspiracy theory promoted by some QAnon believers, and said she hopes Trump will save Canada from Trudeau.

In once instance, “after having a friendship with her for 60 years, she humiliated me on my Facebook page. There are other incidences as well. I keep it to myself that I follow QAnon. Some of my other friends follow as well.”

Kimberly said her Q belief had changed her, and that some former friends didn’t understand.

“I haven’t always been with these feelings I have now. I haven’t always felt the way I feel now,” she said. “I’ve done a complete 180. There are people in my family that don’t understand as well. I’ve lost some friends, people I’ve known since high school that I’m Facebook friends with, for an example. They just blocked me, or decided I’m not their friend, or unfriended me. Who the heck came up with that definition of friend anyway? That’s OK. It is what it is.”

Travis View is a researcher monitoring the QAnon conspiracy. Over the course of the movement, he’s seen believers discuss a growing estrangement from loved ones.

“People in the QAnon community often talk about alienation from family and friends,” View said. “Though they typically talk about how Q frayed their relationships on private Facebook groups. But they think these issues are temporary and primarily the fault of others. They often comfort themselves by imagining that there will be a moment of vindication sometime in the near future which will prove their beliefs right. They imagine that after this happens, not only will their relationships be restored, but people will turn them as leaders who understand what's going on better than the rest of us.”

But the alienation isn’t just a personal loss. It can also drive people further down the path of conspiracy.

Serena is a former QAnon believer. “I followed Q’s drops [forum posts]. I watched all the videos,” she told The Daily Beast. “I’m semi-retired, so that’s all I did all day. I was so excited. It was really a thrilling, exciting time.”

The spell broke in early 2018. She’d grown up in a military family. Her dad had been CIA, and though he was long dead by the time Q started posting, Serena still remembered how the intelligence community operated. The things Q, an alleged military insider, posted just didn’t sound right, she said.

“Q dropped Bible verses in their entirety. I mean like pages of Bible verses,” she said of her disillusionment. “I was immediately crestfallen. It just broke my heart. I immediately knew there is no way that military men are sitting around working on national security trying to rally the patriots that they would risk that leaked channel by putting Bible verses on there... I knew when I saw those Bible verses that it was a marketing scheme targeting conservative Christians for donations, merchandise sales, and profit with a political agenda of some kind.”

“I followed Q’s drops [forum posts]. I watched all the videos. I’m semi-retired, so that’s all I did all day. I was so excited. It was really a thrilling, exciting time.”

— Serena

She left the movement and started watching a YouTuber who debunks Q claims.

“That kind of saved me. I also studied cults in the aftermath. I believe these people are brainwashed,” she told The Daily Beast. “There are several things they [Q] do. One is isolate their followers and turn their followers against all other sources.”

Cult expert Rachel Bernstein previously told Wired that online conspiracy movements can radicalize people by creating a tight-knit community, insulated from the rest of the world and its facts.

“When people get involved in a movement, collectively, what they’re saying is they want to be connected to each other,” Bernstein told Wired. “They want to have exclusive access to secret information other people don’t have, information they believe the powers that be are keeping from the masses, because it makes them feel protected and empowered. They’re a step ahead of those in society who remain willfully blind. This creates feeling similar to a drug—it’s its own high.”

As real-life friends slip away, some Q fans have taken solace in the online QAnon community.

“It gives me hope,” Marjorie said of the Facebook fanbase. “As far as I am concerned, real friends respect your opinions, not call you down.”

QAnon’s main slogan, “where we go one, we go all” is a statement of group identity.When she’s looking for more like-minded people, Kimberly searches a hashtag related to that slogan. “That tells me somebody’s paying attention. So I know maybe that person has some interesting things to share, so I might [look at] their profile. Whatever they’re doing, if I like what it is, I’ll comment on it.”

“People want to belong. We want to belong somewhere, to some group. You did it back in high school: the cheerleaders, the jocks, the stoners, the dweebs, the book club, the chess club, everybody wants to belong.”

— Matthew

The online circles aren’t a replacement for family, View said. But they can simulate support for people who need it.

“There's a sense of fellowship in the QAnon community,” he said. “They imagine that they're all members of a small group of people who know about a coming glorious age in America. This fellowship isn't the same actual familial relationships, but it's a workable substitute when relationships with family becomes frayed. So this creates a vicious cycle: they fall down the rabbit hole of QAnon, which hurts their real life relationships, and causes them to fall down the rabbit hole even further.”

Matthew said he’s not in lockstep with other members of the QAnon community (he believes a number of other conspiracy theories less common in the group), but participates in Q groups nonetheless.

“People want to belong,” he said of online QAnon groups. “We want to belong somewhere, to some group. You did it back in high school: the cheerleaders, the jocks, the stoners, the dweebs, the book club, the chess club, everybody wants to belong.”

But QAnon isn’t the chess club. At its most radical core, QAnon is a call for drastic political purges. Adherents believe tens of thousands of Trump opponents will be arrested and possibly detained in Guantanamo Bay or executed. Some Q believers call for the military to implement martial law and crack down on Trump’s rivals. It’s a fantasy about a political Armageddon, after which the country will be cleansed and Trump can rule unimpeded.

PEPE SILVIA

QAnoners: Trump’s Text Alert Test a Step Toward Martial Law

Will Sommer

Q’s failed predictions might be enough to dissuade some followers. But true conspiracy believers sometimes become more committed after a prediction falls flat. The 1956 book “When Prophecy Fails” is a study of an American doomsday cult whose followers became more outspoken in their beliefs after the cult’s central prediction of world-ending flood proved false. The study’s authors found that, throughout history, prophesy movements can actually become more intense after failure, as long as they have a robust community that reinforces belief among members.

These movements can also become volatile after several successive failed prophecies. Psychologist and author Robert Lifton uses the term “forcing the end” to describe efforts to push a prophecy into reality. In his book Destroying the World to Save It, Lifton describes a series of cults that initially believed Armageddon would happen naturally, without human intervention. But when significant dates came and went without revelation, and the groups perceived themselves to be under attack, members took drastic actions: mass suicides in the cases of the Heaven’s Gate and Peoples Temple cults, and mass murder in the case of the Manson family and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult.

QAnon is less structured than these cults. Some followers like Matthew say they oppose martial law. But others have authored posts that appear to suggest ideas of “forcing the end.” After the December 5 prediction of mass arrests failed, View flagged a post by a QAnon follower who advocated “storm[ing] the white house” if the mass arrests don’t happen by mid January. “If you love our way of life, we may have to fight for it! WWG1WGA”

View image on Twitter

Travis View

@travis_view

Someone's not "trusting the plan" on this QAnon Facebook group.

"Ok patriots... if nothing happens (I'll give it until lets January 17th), then we must storm the white house and take our country back!"

That's a Wednesday. Which seems like a bad time to schedule an insurrection.

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12:58 PM - Dec 14, 2018

114 people are talking about this

Leaving the QAnon movement isn’t easy, Serena, the Q renunciant, said.

“There’s different stages when you get out,” she said. “When I first got out I said ‘oh my goodness, I need to warn everybody. I need to warn them.’ But then I was attacked and threatened so harshly,” she said. “And then I was just so sad, like in a mourning stage, and then I had to laugh because it became so ridiculous. It was the only way I could cope.”

Megan, who has distanced herself from large parts of the theory after becoming convinced that Q is Trump insider Roger Stone, said the conspiracy videos can wear her down.

“Sometimes I watch it so much, I have to give it a break,” she said. “I say ‘I need a day away from this crap because it’s starting to depress me too much.’”

Matthew said he never made the support group he suggested in October.

“Recently a couple of us started questioning what’s really going on here,” he said. “This ‘where we go one, we go all’ is, I believe, brainwashing. Where are we going to go?”

Kimberly and Marjorie, meanwhile, said they’re sticking with the conspiracy theory and its leader.

“No,” Kimberly said when asked if anything would convince her Q was fake, “nothing.”

“No,” Marjorie answered the same question. “I just hope that justice will be served.”

great graphic dl

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/07/someone-is-getting-rich.html

Qanon is an unbelievably stupid conspiracy theory whose underlying bullshittery is mathematically provable, and whose primary proponents are pallsy with the President, and whose adherents include mass-murdererswhose crimes are linked to their belief in the Qanon conspiracy.

Early on, person(s) behind Qanon made a bunch of very specific predictions that failed to come true, causing many to leave the cult. But Qanon learned from their mistake and has started to make much hazier, astrology-style pronouncements that leave sufficient leeway to allow virtually any event to be interpreted as proof of the prophetic insights of Qanon.

An exception was a set of very detailed predictions for December 5, 2018, or #D5, which -- unsurprisingly -- also failed to come true.

With the latest disappointment, many members of the Qanon cult are waking up to the fact that they got hoodwinked. Anthropologist Jennifer Raft, who writes about conspiracies, has addressed a set of remarks to these departing members, helping to ground them in what has happened to them while they were in the thrall of the cult.

The short version: you got scammed, people gained both money and attention by scamming you, smart people are actually easy to scam because they form really good rationalizations and overestimate their own intelligence, and chances are, you helped scam other people.

Not everyone will get out. Look at the Q Anon movement today. It’s still full of people—although less than there were at the beginning of the week—claiming that whatever hit the headlines proved his prophecies to be true, and demanding that everyone Trust the Plan and WWG1WGA, forever and ever, amen. It’s a lesson in how the brain works. It doesn’t matter how much evidence there is proving that Q is making it up as he goes along; for some people, the pain of admitting it was a hoax is greater than the pain of believing in that hoax. The costs of believing are less than the costs of reconsidering, so they won’t reconsider. When you see the die-hard Qists trying to keep the movement running, what separates you from them? How were you able to pull your head out of the rabbit hole, and why haven’t they? Again, I can’t answer that question, and again, the answer’s going to be different for everyone. And again, this is still something that’s important to think about.

This isn’t the last scam. The hardest point is last. Earlier I said that even, maybe especially, smart people fall for dumb conspiracy theories. And that’s true. But it’s also true that people who fall for conspiracy theories like Q will keep falling for conspiracy theories. There are lots of explanations for why that’s so, some of which are probably right. But even if we don’t fully understand why it’s true, we all know that it’s true. And that means that you, dear ex-Qist, are very likely to fall for some new conspiracy theory before long. That’s one reason why it’s worth thinking about how you got out of this one, and why the dead-enders didn’t. The “mental hygiene,” or good habits of skepticism and reasoning, that it takes to question Q Anon are also good defenses against getting tricked again. But not perfect defenses, not by a long shot. So maybe the best takeaway here is simply to remember, and really believe, that you can be fooled and that you have been fooled in the past. (And yes, that applies to everyone. I’m a conspiracy theory skeptic, and I try to remind myself all the time that I can be fooled and that I have been fooled in the past.)

Your Q Anon Exit Briefing [Jennifer A. Raff/Violent Metaphors]

(via Naked Capitalism)

Pence tweets — then deletes — photo of 'courageous' cop wearing far right QAnon conspiracy theory logo

guy got demotion/transfer?

rww

UPDATE (11/13/18): Since the publication of this article, the American Priority conference event page has been modified. The QAnon “expert” panel mentioned in this article has been delisted and some listed speakers who frequently spread the conspiracy theory are no longer listed as conference speakers. Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth no longer appears in the lineup; American Priority conference’s Alex Phillips tells Right Wing Watch that Hegseth withdrew due to an unexpected family obligation.

Heritage Foundation Distinguished Visiting Fellow Stephen Moore and Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth are scheduled to appear at a conference in Washington, D.C., next month where a panel of believers in the “QAnon” conspiracy theory plan to present. Moore served as an economic adviser to President Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The conference was announced earlier this year as an alternative to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which Ali Alexander (also known as “Ali Akbar”), one of the original American Priority conference organizers, said neglected the Trump base, despite a CPAC speaker roster that has included administration officials (including the president himself).

Fox News and Heritage Foundation have not answered Right Wing Watch’s requests for comment.

The current agenda page for the American Priority Conference lists as one of its “conference topics” the “QAnon” conspiracy theory, which surmises that President Donald Trump has ordered someone (or a group of people) with top-level federal security clearance to gradually reveal a secret collaboration between Trump and Special Counsel Robert Mueller to take down a satanic pedophile ring said to span the globe, and allegedly involves top Democratic leaders. Believers of the conspiracy theory, which revolves around an anonymous figure known only as “Q,” who shares via cryptic riddles posted to an image board notorious for child pornography, believe that Trump will eventually subject such top Democrats as Hillary Clinton to military tribunals.

The American Priority event promises “an open panel discussion from Q Experts.” The website does not contain any additional information about the planned panel. Speakers listed on the conference lineup include YouTube personality Jordan Sather, a prominent producer of QAnon content on YouTube.

Sather, who was on Comedy Central as a QAnon conspiracy theorist, uploads content perpetuating the conspiracy theory almost every single day online, where he has nearly 160,000 subscribers on YouTube. Just this morning, Sather posted an image to Twitter suggesting that news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had been hospitalized with fractured ribs was part of the QAnon conspiracy theory.[grafic]

Dustin Nemos, another QAnon content producer, is also slated to speak at the conference. Another speaker is Kari Baxter Donovan, who once promoted an apparently Q-themed article at Populist Media, which appears to have been deleted, tweeting its link with the tagline, “Q is for everyone” and the hashtag “#QAnon” hashtag, which she has also used to promote content as recently as November 3.

Another speaker slated for the conference is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted about QAnon on Facebook as recently as November 5. DeAnna Lorraine, who is also appearing at the conference, has tweeted about QAnon, too.

The event also features breakout sessions with other pro-Trump conspiracy theorists including Matt Couch, who’s responsible for spreading lies about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, and Laura Loomer.

The conference is also scheduled to feature presenters known to have had friendly interactions with figures within the white supremacist “alt-right” movement, including,, and Milo Yiannopoulous.

Deputy Director of the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA Chris Chmielenski is also slated to speak at the American Priority conference.

Right now, the conference shows only two full sponsors: An entity called American Grassroots Council, Inc., which appears to have only a shell website, and Americans For The Trump Agenda, a project of the United States Public Policy Council, Inc., a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose principal officer is listed as Emy Delgaudio, an Amway distributor. (Amway is the pyramid-style company founded by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.)

This article has been updated for clarity, with a link added to comments by a conference organizer, Ali Alexander, regarding the need for a conference alternative to CPAC. Alex Phillips, who told Right Wing Watch that he is now the “sole owner and organizer” of the American Priority conference, said that Alexander left the project in August.

Tags: Pete Hegseth Stephen Moore conspiracy theories The Storm Fox News Channel Heritage Foundation

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/qanon-conspiracy-theory-devastated-midterms-jeff-sessions

no lnx many

NEWS & POLITICS

QAnon's true believers are devastated as the conspiracy theory goes down in flames — and it won't end well

The Republican midterm loss and the firing of Jeff Sessions blew up the narrative of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Now its believers are at each others' throats.

By Matthew Chapman / AlterNet November 14, 2018, 3:55 PM GMT

The "QAnon" community is falling apart.

Perhaps no conspiracy theory has thrived more readily in the dark corners of the internet since it was first born last October on the infamous troll message board 4chan following President Donald Trump's vague remarks last year at a military dinner that it was the "calm before the storm." An anonymous user claiming to be a high-level government informant and calling himself "Q" after the highest level of security clearance at the Energy Department, began leaving cryptic messages he called "crumbs" which were supposed to be hints as to a wide-scale government operation known as "The Storm" to take down government corruption and the new world order, with Trump at the center. While the messages often had very specific dates, many aspects of them were purposefully vague, allowing believers in "QAnon" to use their imagination and fill in gaps.

In time, a gigantic overarching narrative emerged in which Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller were all working together and planning mass arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to liberal financier George Soros to members of Congress, for their role in a massive, world-spanning criminal child sex ring enterprise that has included every former U.S. president — and that people should prepare martial law and orchestrated mass riots to protect those marked for arrest. Q's believers have claimed that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is a CIA plant, that former Democratic staffer Seth Rich was assassinated by MS-13 on the orders of party leadership, and that Republicans intentionally lost the special election for Jeff Sessions' Senate seat in Alabama to build evidence of voter fraud. At its height, QAnon broke into popular culture, with disgraced TV star Roseanne Barr promoting it on Twitter.

But now, the ongoing failure of Q's predictions to come true has started to fragment the community, and two major events in particular smashed the credibility of the movement for many believers.

The first event was the result of the midterm elections, where Democrats decisively won control of the House. Q had previously assured supporters that, contrary to the polls, there was a "red wave" coming:

Will Sommer

@willsommer

Nov 6, 2018

Replying to @willsommer

You might think it'd be good for QAnon believers to start wondering if it's all fake! But instead, they're mostly just convinced "Q" needs to cut to the chase and institute a military dictatorship.

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Will Sommer

@willsommer

Here are some QAnon believers getting disillusioned by losing the House. Turns out if you convince your fans that Democrats are Satanic pedophiles, they'll be upset when they take over part of the government! (h/t @travis_view) pic.twitter.com/39uGO1tMA5

1,232

10:30 PM - Nov 6, 2018

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The second event was Trump's decision to fire Sessions, who in the QAnon narrative Trump was only pretending to hate, and was the mastermind behind all of the impending mass arrests that were supposed to be right around the corner.This was a particular blow, as many supporters were already trying to rationalize losing the House with the fact that, any minute now, Trump was going to declassify huge swathes of intelligence that would result in House Democrats going to jail and a series of special elections that would give it back to Republicans:

View image on Twitter

MAGASutt ??????????

@DrMichaelSutter

And I leave this with you my people...

DECLAS DECLAS DECLAS

FISA brings down the HOUSE#Qanon

...

The end result, according to conspiracy theory debunker Mike Rothschild, is that tons of QAnon believers now realize they have been grifted, while the rest, who have been gathered on thesocial network Voatafter the community was banned from Reddit in September, are at each others' throats and frantically spinning ever crazier ideas to explain away why nothing Q has said has come true:

View image on Twitter

Mike Rothschild

@rothschildmd

All is not well in #QAnon-land: a believer posted a rant on Voat, decrying the lack of action and blown predictions.

Rather than turning into a struggle session, other believers chimed in with their own frustrations, accepting that little is going to happen in the end.

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10:09 AM - Nov 14, 2018

198 people are talking about this

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Mike Rothschild

@rothschildmd

Nov 14, 2018

Replying to @rothschildmd

The hottest thread on #QAnon Voat is another argument over who's a shill, who's a real patriot, and whether the lack of results on the part of Q is actually part of the plan, or proof the whole thing is a sham.

View image on Twitter

Mike Rothschild

@rothschildmd

While some #QAnon believers are melting away, others are taking to Voat to announce their intention to arm themselves and form citizen militias.

Yes, it's likely all anonymous nonsense. But it only takes one disaffected believer to cause considerable damage. Be aware. pic.twitter.com/kq63GpKl2n

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12:25 PM - Nov 14, 2018

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Mike Rothschild

@rothschildmd

Nov 14, 2018

Replying to @rothschildmd

Meanwhile, as the #QAnon fora continue their shill hunt, the rest of Voat hums on as usual, providing a place for literally the worst people to extrude whatever is on their mind.

View image on Twitter

Mike Rothschild

@rothschildmd

How are the most prominent #QAnon acolytes taking the blows of Q's fizzled 11/11 prediction and the midterms?

Liz Crokin is accusing Jerry Brown of starting fires with lasers, and Chrissy Tiegen of being a man; while Jordan Sather is yammering about UFOs and misusing "its."

pic.twitter.com/XnJ5umhnVg

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2:05 PM - Nov 14, 2018

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The notion that some of the remaining QAnon believers might form "citizen militias" is particularly troubling, as far-right conspiracy theories have led to violence - most famously, a man nearly shot up the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington D.C. last year, acting on a hoax that Hillary Clinton and her inner circle were running a sex trafficking ring out of its basement.

Whatever happens, the QAnon conspiracy theory was never fated to end well for its believers. And the whole saga is a cautionary tale about being careful what one believes on the Internet.

omg bump to 2nd:

Trump met in the Oval Office with a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist who frequently appears on Infowars and Russia state media. The Qanon conspiracy theory, also known as "The Storm," essentially states that there are global pedophile rings tied to top celebrities and anti-Trump politicians. So far, no one knows how the conspiracy theorist was able to get an exclusive with Trump in the Oval Office.

A QAnon supporter also appeared as a guest on Fox & Friends. to complain about Facebook censoring him. Aside from pushing QAnon, the guest also previously posted on Facebook alleging that the Parkland mass shooting was fake.

Trump tweeted about the segment.

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-in-oval-office-meets-promoter-of-qanon-conspiracy-theory-that-says-democrats-run-pedophile-cult

A NEW LOW

Trump Meets QAnon Kook Who Believes Democrats Run Pedophile Cult

Lionel Lebron said he got a personal invite to the White House—and took advantage to post photos and Q clues on social media.

ASAWIN SUEBSAENG

WILL SOMMER

08.24.18 6:08 PM ET

On Thursday, President Donald Trump posed for an Oval Office photo with one of the leading promoters of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which claims that top Democrats are part of a global pedophile cult.

YouTube conspiracy theorist Lionel Lebron was in the White House for an event on Thursday, according to a video Lebron posted online. During the visit, Lebron and his wife posed for a smiling picture with Trump in the Oval Office.

Lebron is one of the internet’s leading promoters of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory based on a series of anonymous clues posted to internet forums. QAnon believers have interpreted the clues, which they claim without evidence are coming from a highly placed source in the Trump administration, to mean that Trump and the military are engaged in a high-stakes shadow war against a supposed globalist pedophile cult. The conspiracy theory has caught on with Trump supporters, who have held up QAnon-related signs and wear QAnon shirts to the president’s rallies.

Lebron claimed to have received a “special guided tour of the White House” before posing for pictures with Trump. In a video posted Friday, Lebron said he didn’t use the brief encounter with the president to ask Trump about QAnon or its slogan, “Where we go one, we go all.”

“I think we all know he knows about it,” Lebron said in the video, sipping from a coffee mug he claimed to have received as a gift at the White House.

Lebron didn’t respond to a request for comment as of press time. Neither did White House spokespeople.

All four White House officials the Beast did speak with about how Trump, the leader of the free world, ended up in a smiling photo op at the Resolute Desk with a prominent QAnon conspiracy theorist, pleaded ignorance about when this occurred, and why. Two of these West Wing officials audibly could not contain their laughter.

RELATED IN POLITICS

Trump’s Allies Struggle to Stop QAnon

QAnon Leaders Crack Down on Mentions of Cohen

]QAnon Is Even Blowing Conservative Media’s Minds]

“This president is a president for all Americans,” one joked, including conspiracy theorists.

It is highly unlikely that Lebron and his spouse were simply able to casually stumble into this meeting while on a White House tour, for instance. Those familiar with how this Oval Office operates say that typically the only way that an Oval photo op between President Trump and strangers would even happen is if a senior official vouched for the guests and waved them in.

Lebron, for his part, tweeted a picture of himself in the White House with QAnon-related hashtags. His visit to the White House comes as other prominent Trump supporters in the media try to push back on QAnon’s spread, fearing that it makes Trump voters look ridiculous.

also ref

https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2018/08/24/Fox---Friends-hosts-a-QAnon-conspiracy-theorist-who-has-claimed-the-Parkland-mass-shooting/221102

no linx vid

fox & Friends hosts a QAnon conspiracy theorist who has claimed the Parkland mass shooting was fake

Blog ››› August 24, 2018 4:50 PM EDT ››› ALEX KAPLAN

Fox & Friends provided a platform to a man who has repeatedly pushed the QAnon conspiracy theory, including sharing a post that claimed the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, was “fake” and that student survivors of the shooting are “actors.”

During the August 24 edition of Fox & Friends, the show hosted Jason Fyk, who was identified as an entrepreneur, along with Fyk’s attorney to discuss Fyk’s lawsuit against Facebook for “unlawfully silencing people … for its own financial gain.” During the interview, co-host Steve Doocy praised Fyk for using Facebook to build a business and pursuing “the American dream,” whileFyk compared himself to YouTube personalities Diamond and Silk, citing the duo’s false Facebook censorship claims.

The show -- which President Donald Trump consistently watches -- did not disclose that Fyk has appeared multiple times on Infowars, the far-right conspiracy theory outlet that has been banned from multiple tech platforms for violating their hate speech and harassment policies. On his own Facebook profile, Fyk has also repeatedly promoted posts from “Q,” the supposed figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory who claims that Trump has a master plan to dismantle child trafficking rings supposedly linked to powerful politicians and celebrities and defeat his perceived enemies and the “deep state.” (Three conspiracy theorists reportedly spread the conspiracy theory for financial gain.) In March, Fyk posted an image of a “Q” post calling the Parkland mass shooting “FAKE” and a “distraction” that was “organized & designed to DISTRACT” and that it featured “ACTORS [who] are ACTING.”

Fyk also discussed QAnon in January while appearing on Infowars (which fully embraced the conspiracy theory early on), with an Infowars host saying to Fyk, “What do you think of these latest QAnon posts hot off the press? ‘Chuck Schumer will live in fear from today forward.’ This is turning out to be a really good day.” Fyk responded that it was “definitely a win for the right.”

Trump himself may have also tweeted in response to Fyk's appearance when he claimed social media platforms were "silencing millions of people."

Matthew Gertz

@MattGertz

Aug 24, 2018

Replying to @MattGertz

President watches television, complains that Reality Winner is going to jail but Hillary Clinton isn't.

Left, Fox & Friends, 6:12 am

Right, Trump, 7:10 am pic.twitter.com/44XxktlGid

View image on TwitterView image on Twitter

Matthew Gertz

@MattGertz

Fox caption: "Are social media giants silencing people?"

Trump: "Social Media Giants are silencing millions of people."

Left, Fox & Friends, 6:27 am

Right, Trump, 7:34 am pic.twitter.com/W7Y56Ma6kZ

5:06 AM - Aug 24, 2018

Short Link

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Network/Outlet

Fox News Channel, Infowars

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FOX & Friends

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Alt-right and pro-Trump trolls

comentary on

https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-trumps-most-rabid-fans-need-madness-qanon-conspiracy-theory

joshua h

If you want to really understand QAnon, the ludicrous mish-mash of conspiracy theories premised on the idea that Donald Trump has been working in cahoots with Robert Mueller and senior military officials -- and also maybe JFK, Jr., who faked his death in a 1999 plane crash to thwart the Derp State -- to investigate and ultimately punish Hillary Clinton and, presumably, most other Democrats for running a massive pedophile ring, you should read Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality.

Mooney, writing in *Mother Jones*in 2011, summarized how "an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience [have] further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions...

This tendency toward so-called “motivated reasoning” helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal… The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience: Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion… [It is often] a means to a predetermined end—winning our “case”—and is shot through with biases.

If you're a normal person who's followed Trump's sleazy career, you've probably been shocked but not surprised by his conduct in office. Trump turned his father's modest slum empire into an international brand through relentless self-promotion and an unending supply of bullshit. He never passed up an opportunity to cut corners, recruiting undocumented workers to build his buildings with cut-rate Chinese steel. He pocketed big profits from projects that turned to shit by stiffing investors and contractors. He ran blatant scams like Trump University and sold cheesy crap made in overseas sweatshops.

In other words, he's always been a hypocritical, narcissistic grifter of the worst kind, and his America-First schtick on the campaign trail probably seemed like a ridiculous joke to you until the moment those early returns from the Midwest started coming in on Election Night.

But think for a moment how the past 19 months have played out for Trump's core supporters -- angry, disaffected white guys who are freaked out by the country's shifting demographics and blame those people for the fact that their incomes have been stagnant or declining for a generation or two and their kids are hooked on opioids.

Put yourself in their shoes (I know it's unpleasant). You'd pinned all your hopes on this guy. He was going to drain the swamp and revitalize coal mining and bring his brilliant negotiating skills to bear on all the foreigners who are screwing us. He was going to be a true "jobs president." He was going to stick it to the libs, people of color, immigrants -- everyone you hate.

But since his first day in office, he's run an embattled regime that's been mired in scandals and under the clouds of multiple investigations. He's delivered on the bigotry, but in a way that was a bit too obvious and made people call you out as a racist wingnut just for supporting him. And on the policy front, he's really only delivered a big tax cut for himself, his noxious spawn and other rich people just like them. The economy's strong, but you haven't seen it -- inflation has outpaced income growth over the past year. He's embraced a former geopolitical rival that you probably spent most of your adult life fearing and despising, and while you may think his tweets are awesome, on some level you also know they're kind of embarrassing.

In The Republican Brain, Mooney talks about a couple of studies that, while not definitive, suggest that conservatives tend to be more sensitive to cognitive dissonance than liberals. Holding two contradictory thoughts in their heads causes them pain and anxiety.

When you factor in how his base has been conditioned for so many years to believe that reality is often obscured by the corrupt Lügenpresse,it's easy to see how this crackpotty QAnon stuff has taken hold. Of course he must be some kind of super-spy who will lock up your enemies in Gitmo any day now. It's a necessary delusion for staving off the psychic agony that would come from acknowledging that you hung all your hopes and dreams on an erratic, wannabe-elitist doofus who sees the presidency as another opportunity to advance his brand and turn a shady profit.

Anyway, let us in the reality-based community review some of this week's less prominent dumpster fires...

*****

Embracing the reality of Trumpism means acknowledging the myriad ways in which he's broadened and deepened the swamp. Consider just a week of headlines about how his regime has made life easier for the plutocracy by giving them opportunities to fuck over working America -- in some cases, disproportionately targeting Trump's own credulous base.

"The Trump administration is planning to suspend routine examinations of lenders for violations of the Military Lending Act, which was devised to protect military service members and their families from financial fraud, predatory loans and credit card gouging," reported *The New York Times* this week.According to the exit polls, military veterans voted for Trump by a 2-1 ratio.

(Back in April, The Timesalso reported that Mulvaney had "advise[d] bankers on ways to curtail" his own agency's abilities to oversee their industry.)

A tangentially related story that did get prominent coverage this week was ProPublica's report about how three of Trump's "cronies" from Mar-a-Lago who have never "served in the U.S. military or government" are "exerting sweeping influence" on the regime's policies for veterans.

*****

In the latest of her many rollbacks of Obama-era rules designed to protect students from for-profit college scams -- like Trump's own defunct university -- Education SecretaryBetsy DeVos announced plans to kill the "gainful employment rule," which "sought to punish for-profit college programs that left graduates with heavy debt compared to their incomes."

According to Collin Binkley at *The New Republic*,it was "the second planned rollback of a major Obama-era rule in a matter of weeks. On July 25, DeVos proposed changes to the so-called borrower defense rule to toughen the process by which defrauded students can get their loans erased."

******

Here's a story that illustrates how the regime's priorities are playing out in the real world.

According to *Capital& Main*,the regime's "immigration crackdown appears to be crowding out other law enforcement priorities, according to a new analysis of Justice Department data."

A study released Monday by Syracuse University researchers showed that federal immigration prosecutions in June comprised 94 percent of all cases in the five U.S. Attorney districts along the southwest border. The spike in immigration prosecutions comes only a few months after Justice Department data showed that the Trump administration has overseen a 20-year low in white-collar criminal prosecutions.

So they're punishing brown people who are just trying to earn a living, and letting the criminals in tailored suits run amok. And the sad truth is that many working-class Trump supporters would probably approve.

*****

Reuters:

The Trump administration moved on Wednesday toshrink a government agency tasked with identifying looming financial risks, notifying around 40 staff membersthey would be laid off, according to a person familiar with the change.

The Office of Financial Research "provides a critical function by gathering data on areas such as banking, lending and trading from the country's complex web of federal and state regulators to provide a bird's-eye view of system-wide risks," and is "one of several financial regulators being overhauled under President Donald Trump, including the Financial Stability OversightCouncil, also housed within the Treasury, and theConsumer Financial Protection Bureau."

*****

And then there's this fresh Hell…

Holy moley! Treasury & the IRS just exempted *bankers* from the definition of "financial services" in the proposed pass-thru regs! I can lend via a passthrough & claim a 20% deduction (so the top rate on interest income goes from 37% to 29.6%)? #PickedTheWrongProfession

— Daniel Hemel (@DanielJHemel) August 8, 2018

*****

In other news, we've noted before that we kind of miss Scott Pruitt because his unique blend of cheap sanctimony and unbridled corruption brought a lot of media attention to how the EPA has gone rogue under Trump. But apparently even after resigning in disgrace,Pruitt's a gift that keeps on giving.

"A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration endangered public health by keeping the widely used pesticidechlorpyrifos on the market despite extensive scientific evidence that even tiny levels of exposure can harm babies' brains," reported the Associated Press this week. The court ruled that Pruitt had "violated federal law by ignoring the conclusions of agency scientists that chlorpyrifos is harmful."

*****

In related news, Lisa Friedman reported for *The New York Times* that "top officials at the Environmental Protection Agency pushed through a measure to review applications for usingasbestosin consumer products, and did so over the objections of E.P.A.’s in-house scientists and lawyers."

In this next graph, we see how The Timesin-house style requires characterizing obviously bullshit claims -- claims hotly refuted by the agency's own scientists, according to the story -- as just one side of a "spirited debate":

"The E.P.A. says it is toughening oversight. However, the way its new rule is written has spawned a spirited debate over whether it will actually make it easier for asbestos to come back into more widespread use."

*****

Meanwhile, in other rogue agency news, this week Gus Bova reported for *The Daily Beast* that back in July, "ICE crashed a van full of separated mothers" into a pickup truck in Texas, and "even though police said the van was too damaged to continue driving and the women reported injuries, ICE repeatedly denied the crash ever took place."

Keep in mind that it's all about law and order, folks.

*****

As you probably know, the myth of widespread in-person voter fraud is just a thin premise Republicans embrace in order to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Back in 2016, researchers atUC San Diego found that strict voter ID laws "cause a reduction in Democratic turnout by 8.8 percentage points, compared to a reduction of 3.6 percentage points for Republicans." That 5.2 percentage point margin wins them elections without having to come up with a popular agenda.

Here's a new twist on that old story. "A new study estimates that approximately 78,000 transgender people in eight crucial states will be eligible to vote in the upcoming 2018 elections, but will be unable to do so, due to those states’ excessively strict voter ID laws," according to DC's *Metro Weekly*.

*****

We try to leave you each week with some positive news, if only to keep you from ruining your liver by drinking too much.

The courts still appear to be functioning, according to this report from The Washington Post:

A federal judge in Washington halted a deportation in progress Thursday and threatened to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt after learning that the Trump administration started to remove a woman and her daughter while a court hearing appealing their deportations was underway.

The judge actually ordered a plane carrying the two deportees to turn around before they disembarked in El Salvador, where their lawyers say they have a credible fear being murdered. The judge also halted all other removals in cases with petitions pending before the courts.

And finally, at The Intercept,Ryan Grim reported that back "in April,Michigan officials who oversee elections kicked Democrat Matt Morgan off the congressional ballot, leaving the Republican incumbent, Rep. Jack Bergman, to run unopposed in the general election. That was the plan, at least, until primary day on Tuesday, when more than 30,000 Democratic voters cast write-in ballots in Michigan’s 1st Congressional District. That’s nearly eight times as many votes as Morgan needed to be resurrected and placed on the November ballot."

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/we-have-cia-thank-qanon-conspiracy-theory

As the editor of the JFK Facts blog, I try not to spend a lot of time on stupid conspiracy theories, but given widespread ignorance and confusion on the subject, unpleasant journalist duty often calls.

Who killed JFK? The Federal Reserve? Nah. The Secret Service man? A hoax. Ted Cruz’s father? Pure B.S. George H.W. Bush? Heavy breathing is not the same as credible evidence. On a recent Black Vault podcast, the most common JFK question I heard was, “Was Kennedy assassinated because of his interest in UFOs?” Um, no, he was not.

Which brings me to QAnon, the imaginative conspiracy theorist now dominating the internet, attracting followers of President Trump, and obsessing the Washington Post, which has published a dozen articles about QAnon in the span of four days. Like many conspiracy theories, the QAnon fever dream can be traced back to the assassination of JFK. The QAnon conspiracy theory is a psychedelic mushroom planted in the fertile manure of the Warren Commission. This mind-altering proposition grows in the gloom of anonymous chat groups. It is then stimulated by the bright lights of social media. And finally it is harvested and ingested by Trump cultists eager to prolong the alt-reality buzz that commenced on January 20, 2017.

But it all began on November 22, 1963.

Who Is QAnon?

For the uninitiated, “Q” is the moniker of a person or group of persons who post to 4Chan, a popular image website favored by the anonymous. Q’s “theory” (and I use the term generously) is that President Trump was persuaded by the military to smash a network of “deep state” pedophiles that has ruled America for decades. The president (it is said) is working with John F. Kennedy Jr. (who did not die in a plane crash). They will soon smash the perfidious plotters, QAnon predicts, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be sent to Guantanamo.

You may think this is nutty stuff. Buzzfeed News speculates that QAnon is actually a leftist goof on right-wing suckers. But read the respectful coverage of the pro-Trump Washington Times, where QAnon is described as a “mysterious figure” who has been “posting provocative questions about the government since October.” This stuff is taken seriously.

The historical foundation of this mash-up of the preposterous, the ludicrous and the vile is, you guessed it, the assassination of JFK.

From a December 2017 QAnon post about Trump’s alleged enemies:

As a backup, they defined ‘conspiracy’ as crazy/mentally unstable and label anything ‘true’ as such.
This works given most of what they engage in is pure evil and simply unbelievable (hard to swallow).
The ‘fix’ has always been in – no matter which party won the election (-JFK (killed)/Reagan(shot)).

Why do people believe this nonsense?

One reason is that a few kernels of it are not nonsense. The CIA, in this April 1967 memo, launched a worldwide campaign to demonize critics of the Warren Commission as “conspiracy theorists.” Skepticism about official theory of JFK’s assassination, wrote one agency official with the approval of CIA director Richard Helms, “is of concern to the U.S. government including our organization.”

The agency distributed talking points for “friendly elite contacts,” including the bald-faced lie that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was “an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.” In fact, CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton had monitored Oswald’s movements, politics, personal life and foreign contacts for four years before he allegedly killed JFK.

If that fact became known, the CIA would have a world of hurt on its hands. So the agency said in its memo that the members of the Warren Commission were eminent men and “efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society.”

The Commission’s critics, said the CIA, “are enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or another.” In other words, the CIA did define belief in “conspiracy” as a symptom of the mentally unstable and patriotically unreliable.

In fact, the doubts were fact-based. Skepticism about the Warren Commission’s conclusions percolated among the Washington insiders (including Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy) and among foreign leaders (including Fidel Castro and Charles DeGaulle). All of them concluded privately that JFK had been killed by his enemies, not by a lone gunman.

Of course, there are other factors contributing to the vogue of QAnon that have nothing to do with JFK.

The echo chamber effects of social media encourage the credulous. So does a president enamored with “alternative facts” (aka bullshit). The exhaustion of the Americaneconomic system, which no longer provides the majority with affordable education or upward mobility, leaves young people grasping for explanation of their plight.

But the U.S. government’s implausible account of JFK’s assassination—and the CIA’s self-serving defense—can always be cited by those who say “The government is lying.” So if you want to trace the roots of QAnon in American society, look to the Warren Commission and Langley. Please leave us JFK researchers out of it.

The Origins of JFK Theories

...

ref

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/5/q-qanon-followers-gain-prominence-donald-trump-ral/

Dave Boyer - The Washington Times - Sunday, August 5, 2018

Gary Brown of central Ohio is a follower of “Q,” the mysterious internet figure suddenly gaining prominence at President Trump’s campaign rallies.

Mr. Brown, a real estate agent and retired firefighter, began paying attention to the cryptic and frequently pro-Trump comments posted by the anonymous Q on message boards last year. He concluded that Q is better informed than the mainstream media about Washington and other topics.

“I don’t know for a fact who Q is,” Mr. Brown said. “I havestrong thoughts that it certainly could be someone in the administration. All I know is, when I read what is posted on the ‘Q board,’ it seems to be more relevant and more true than what I’m reading in the papers.”

On message boards such as QAnon.pub and 8ch.net, a person or group of people identified only as Q has been posting provocative questions about the government since October.

In a typical post, Q wrote last week about election security, “How do you safeguard the integrity of our elections from domestic & foreign criminal actors? How do you utilize the Russia narrative to knock out decades old election corruption? Why are D’s opposed to cleaning up voter rolls? Why are D’s opposed to imposing VOTER ID LAWS to further safeguard our elections?”

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/qanon-about-much-more-trump-it-reveals-deep-pathologies-republican-party

The political movement swirling around President Donald Trump -- formerly known as the Republican Party -- displays certain unique features but is really just the latest noxious excrescence of the American right. Like so many of its predecessors, the Trump movement is built on fear. And like every movement motivated by paranoia, its followers are mentally vulnerable to the most idiotic conspiracy theories.

Not surprisingly, since everything about Trump is always the "biggest" and the "best," his fans are flocking to a truly enormous and enormously deluded conspiracy known as QAnon, or simply, "Q."

Insofar as any sane reporter can determine, Q is an entity that delivers anonymous messages via internet chat boards (the same virtual locations that generally attract obsessive right-wing types who carry out harassment campaigns from their mothers' basements). Supposedly sent by some person or persons in the upper reaches of the federal government with ultra-secret security clearances, the Q "drops" assure us that Trump is actually dismantling the "deep state" and elite international pedophilia cults, both controlled by various liberal politicians and celebrities. Already, Q has reported the arrest of Hillary Clinton (which never happened).

According to Q, all of this exciting activity is being carried out under deep cover, with the assistance of none other than Robert Mueller himself. You see, the special counsel is secretly working to assist Trump, not to investigate him. The verbal assaults and tweets against him emanating from the White House, not to mention Fox News, represent a "false flag" deception. So does everything else that doesn't fit into the conspiracy.

Among the charms of Q is that any believer can invent his or her own version of this mysterious presence, because there are no facts to fetter the paranoid imagination. Inquire who is delivering those tantalizing internet hints, as a CNN reporter asked Q kooks at a Trump rally last week, and everyone offers a different answer: It's one person, or 10 people, or more; it's a committee of military flag officers; it's Trump himself; it's John F. Kennedy Jr., who didn't really die in an airplane crash off Martha's Vineyard in 1999 after all. (Not kidding!)

If you're not a believer, you will have difficulty understanding how anyone can believe such a patently ridiculous confabulation. Yet among the Trump faithful there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps soon millions, fervently joining the Q queue. They are eagerly awaiting "the Storm," their term for the moment of reckoning when Trump and Mueller will seize all those liberal pedophiles and march them off to Gitmo.

Among them is Roseanne Barr, who has promoted Q on her Twitter feed for months. But nearly every right-wing media personality, from Sean Hannity to Alex Jones, is stoking the crazy -- as are the Russians and their bots, of course, along with "alt-right" internet trolls like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich. In other words, Q fans include all the usual suspects.

Now, manipulative charlatans on the right have been training stupid people to believe stupid things for decades, dating back to The John Birch Society and its insistence that former President Eisenhower, among others, was a conscious instrument of the "Communist conspiracy." Those claims offended principled conservatives, who kicked the Birchers out of their movement.

But in more recent years, the inclination to promote outrageous calumnies has penetrated the upper reaches of the Republican Party and its allies on the religious right and in right-wing media. Republican leaders who are appalled by these tactics are almost always too cowardly to disavow them.

So in the early '90s, furious over losing the White House to Bill and Hillary Clinton after three terms of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Republicans promoted vile accusations to demonize the Democrats. Major GOP figures, including House committee chairs and especially House Speaker Newt Gingrich, slyly endorsed charges they knew to be utterly false. So did Rush Limbaugh, followed later by his many imitators on Fox. And so did Rev. Jerry Falwell, a minister of the Gospel who routinely violated the Eighth Commandment for profit.

The Clintons were slimed for years with concocted stories of cocaine trafficking and murder. Now they are said to operate an international child sex trafficking ring, along with former President Barack Obama (who is really a Communist Muslim born in Kenya) and George Soros (a Jew who is really a Nazi). But those sick fantasies have already gone stale.

The freshest theory, brought to us by BuzzFeed News, is also the most refreshing: Q is merely a hoax, concocted by leftists to make the right look extra dumb. For anyone with a functioning brain, a spirit of decency and a sense of humor, that's the only conspiracy with any traction.

To find out more about Joe Conason

lengthy *BuzzFeed* piece on the origin of QAnon has come to the conclusion that the entire group may have been started as an elaborate prank on the alt-right by leftists and anarchists.

Members of QAnon claim that President Donald Trump was recruited by rogue members of the U.S. military who "begged him to run for president" to overthrow a deep state involved in a global conspiracy that operates a pedophile ring.

4chan trolls are now claiming that QAnon was always meant as a prank on "older conservatives. "

"[L]ook how many normies and boomers got sucked into our lulz chaos," one member writes.

Further supporting the theory QAnon is a prank are statements by the author of a 1999 novel called Q that bears a striking similarity to the conspiracy theory.

"We can't say for sure that it's an homage," they told BuzzFeed. "But one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, 'fan fiction' inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else."

But the authors are concerned that the spread of QAnon represents a danger. The appearance of a seemingly armed man outside lawyer Michael Avenatti's office shared in photos by QAnon members serves as evidence of QAnon's possible danger.

ggl tom hanks top 5 vids?!

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/meet-qanon-deranged-conspiracy-theory-thats-surging-among-trump-supporters

sometimes “deplorable” just isn’t deplorable enough. That’s the case with a core set of Donald Trump supporters who have come together around a new conspiracy theory that’s … not Pizzagate. Because it’s worse. And, as the Washington Post reports, thisnew conspiracy is already spilling from under the rocks of alt-Reich websites, into living, screaming Trump rallies.

Believers in “QAnon,” as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. “We are Q,” it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a “Q” pattern: “Where we go one we go all.”

Who or what is QAnon? It’s the handle for a racist troll who pretends to be “a government agent with top security clearance” working with Donald Trump to take out the “Deep State.” Starting with connections to the original Pizzagate, QAnon has built up followers through mystery appearances in the Trump-loving depths of Reddit. Most of those posts come in the form of “breadcrumbs,” brief, haiku-like statements that can be interpreted as anything from a stock market prediction to an example of an AI attempting to learn human language through random word combinations. In a real sense, it’s wrong to even think of the QAnon story as something coming from the QAnon troll. It’s a collaborative effort; a group of like-minded racist conspiracy nuts riffing on blobs of half-assed beat poetry.

The supposed meaning of the posts are actually generated by thousands of Q followers who sift through this mess and convert the obscure “crumbs” into an elaborate story. There are entire 24/7 streaming channels and multiple Youtube videos dedicated to nothing but attempts to fit together the crumbs into a single narrative. And the story generated by this collaboration between incoherent source and conspiracy-monger fans isn’t just convoluted, self-contradictory, and utterly inane, it’s also deeply racist, anti-Semitic, and woven through with equal parts pedophilia and Christian end-times eschatology. In short, it’s a massively expanded version of Pizzagate in which Hillary Clinton, the Illuminati, and the Rothchilds—who may or may not be interchangeable—are waging holy war against Donald Trump and his supporters … while running child sex rings and satanic murder cults on the side.

If that sounds ridiculous … it is. Unfortunately, the people behind it are not joking.

The full spray of QAnon information includes: How violent criminal John McCain must wear an ankle bracelet and be tracked at all times, the harem of child sex slaves owned by Tom Hanks, and how Trump actually installed Robert Mueller as part of an ongoing plan to capture the Muslim terrorist Barack Obama. At the climax of the consensus narrative, Trump supporters will have to unite for a mighty Good vs Evil fight in which Hillary will team up with George Soros in an attempt to overthrow the government, only to be cast down by Trump, who will then usher in a new age of Christian righteousness. One led by Donald Trump and, you guessed it, Vladimir Putin.Because in QAnon, Putin is one of the few who can see through the Jewish plot to turn the world to Satan. And yes, in QAnon, Jews are satanists. Not surprisingly, many QAnon followers also consider themselves evangelicals.

It’s the kind of conspiracy theory in which anything can be made to fit and any gesture or word has hidden meaning. Before every Trump rally, QAnon boards light up with speculation over which parts of the theory Trump will “confirm” this time. And after every rally, the boards fire up again with conviction that Trump has done exactly that—given them a phrase or a hand-sign that they’re on the right track. One of the QAnon posts mentioned the phrase “tip top.” Weeks later, another told believers to “follow the white rabbit.” So when Donald Trump said “tip top” while at the White House Easter egg roll … hey, who could miss a message that clear? Even when things don’t fit, they’re made to fit, as when promised revelations that failed to appearin the Inspector General report were turned into evidence of more tampering by insidious Deep State Jew Rod Rosenstein.

QAnon is loony and ridiculous, but not at all funny. it’s also a growing force within the ranks of Trump.

Considering that Pizzagate already inspired one Trump supporter to appear in a DC pizza place carrying an AR-15 (and become frustrated by his inability to find a basement, much less the child-sex ring dungeons he had been expecting) there are ample reasons to be concerned about a greatly expanded Pizzagate now with a extra large side of anti-Semitic claims and calls for widespread conflict. QAnon has already become a much bigger factor in Trumpdom than the original Pizzagate. It’s not just websites and handmade signs. Hundreds of QAnon followers marched in DC in January. There’s a QAnon industry turning out T-shirts and trinkets. Rightwing celebrities like Barr and Schilling have helped bring the conspiracy theory to a larger audience, and also helped ease it into larger Trump-centric sites like Breitbart.Where did Rosanne Barr get the outrageous, racist statements she made in many of her Twitter posts? She was quoting QAnon sites. And, as the Daily Best reports, Curt Schilling is also on board.

Not for the first time, events under Donald Trump make it clear that English just isn’t sufficient. Because it would take way too many adjectives to describe just how deplorable his followers really are.

ref

https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-is-qanon-the-craziest-theory-of-the-trump-era-explained

no lnx twit

THE DAILY BEAST

AND YOU THOUGHT PIZZAGATE WAS NUTS

What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained

From celebrities to the grassroots, the right is obsessed with the idea there is a secret conspiracy where Hillary is headed for Gitmo. Here’s everything you need to know.

Will Sommer

07.06.18 10:03 PM ET

Plotters in the deep state tried to shoot down Air Force One and foil President Trump’s North Korea summit. A cabal of global elites, including top figures in Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the intelligence agencies, are responsible for nearly all the evil in the world. And now Trump is going to fix it all with thousands of sealed indictments, sending the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama straight to Guantanamo Bay.

Or at least that’s how the world is going for the believers of QAnon, the complex pro-Trump conspiracy theory that’s starting to having unpredictable effects in real life. The real news can be bad for Trump, but in QAnon-world, the president and his supporters really are getting sick of winning.

Who Is “Q”?

QAnon springs from a series of cryptic clues that started to be posted online in October 2017. Starting on 4Chan before migrating to the even more fringe 8Chan, the anonymous person behind the clues goes by “Q,” a reference to a high-level government security clearance. The “Anon” in “QAnon” refers to both Q himself, and to Q’s nameless supporters, the “anons.”

Q is supposed to be revealing this top-secret information via the clues, which QAnon fans have dubbed “breadcrumbs.” They’re written in a short bursts, in a reference-heavy style that’s part poem, part ransom note. Here’s one example from June:

Think SC vote to confirm (coming).

No Name action.

Every dog has its day.

Enjoy the show.

“No Name” is Q’s nickname for John McCain, and “SC” is obviously the Supreme Court. As for “every dog has its day” — that’s the kind of cryptic Q remark that has spawned a cottage industry of PDFs and 24/7 livestreams analyzing the crumbs.

Since Q could be anyone with internet access and a working knowledge of conspiracy theories, there’s no reason to think that Q is a member of the Trump administration rather than, say, a troll or YouTube huckster. But incredibly, lots of people believe it.

In April, hundreds of QAnon believers staged a march in downtown Washington, D.C. with a vague demand for “transparency” from the Justice Department. “Q” shirts have become frequent sites at Trump rallies, with one QAnon believer scoring VIP access. In June, an armed man in an homemade armored truck shut down a highway near the Hoover Dam and held up signs referencing QAnon. And celebrities like comedian Roseanne Barr and former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling have signed on.

Curt Schilling

@gehrig38

28 Jun

The Curt Schilling Show - Breitbart http://bit.ly/2I1wd3T via @BreitbartNews talk with a lawyer whose firm has cases in front of the Supreme Court and hear about latest ruling on 1st amendment as well as NOAA abandoning climate change hoax. On iTunes later today

Curt Schilling

@gehrig38

Also we open up a discussion about “Q” andwhy the anger and vitriol by liberals at the mere mention if it really is the fake conspiracy they claim?

9:49 AM - Jun 28, 2018

45 people are talking about this

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QAnon is unusual, according to University of Miami professor Joseph Uscinski, because it offers Republicans an alternate view of the world when they already control nearly the entire government. Usually, “conspiracy theories are for losers,” Uscinski said,

“Normally you don’t expect the winning party to use them, except when they’re in trouble,” Uscinski said.

The Origin Story

Since Q’s “breadcrumbs” are so vague, it’s impossible to nail down exactly what the storyline is supposed to be. But the general story, outlined in a pro-QAnon video endorsed by Schilling, is that every president before Trump was a “criminal president” in league with all the nefarious groups of conspiracy theories past: the global banking elite, death squads operating on orders from Hillary Clinton, deep-state intelligence operatives, and Pizzagate-style pedophile rings. In an effort to break this cabal’s grip, according to Q, the military convinced Trump to run for president.

Now Trump and his allies in the military are poised to arrest all these wrongdoers, shipping many of them off to Guantanamo Bay. That coming purge has been dubbed “The Storm” by QAnon fans, who claim Trump referenced it when he referenced “the calm before the storm” in October.

While the Storm is at the center of the QAnon narrative, it’s also flexible enough to fold in just anything that makes the news. Q is fond of hinting that each mass shooting is a false-flag attack organized by the cabal, and he used a blurry webcam picture of a flash of light near the Puget Sound to claim that the deep state had tried to shoot down Trump’s plane. [previOus missle conspir "streAK OF LIGHT"] 911?

QAnon fans are obsessed with finding proof that whoever is behind Q is actually connected to the Trump administration. During one Trump trip to Asia, Q posted some pictures of islands, which supporters seized on as proof that Q was on Air Force One. Q is also fond of predicting Trump tweets that, in retrospect, don’t exactly require top-secret clearance — that Trump will tweet “Saturday” on Small Business Saturday, or “Juneteenth” on June 19th.

Fans also point to Trump using phrases “predicted” by Q as proof of the story’s legitimacy. After one supporter requested that Trump used the phrase “tip top” in the State of the Union Address, While Trump never said “tip top” in that speech, QAnon supporters felt vindicated three months later when Trump said it instead at the White House Easter Egg Roll. QAnon supporters have even claimed Trump uses his hands to make a “Q” sign as a signal to them.

QAnon supporters love to speculate about Q’s identity, predicting that it’s either a highly placed White House staffer or even Trump himself. Other, more mundane theories about Q’s identity abound, but there’s not much compelling evidence pointing in any direction.

Even when Q’s predictions disappoint, the QAnon community keeps going. Q hyped up the release of the Justice Department’s inspector general report on the FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation, for example, promising that it would contain the promised “Storm” of revelations about top Democrats and the deep state. When the report fizzled, however, Q promised that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a frequent target of QAnon jabs, had tampered with the report. Trump had the real report, Q claimed, and that report’s release would solve everything.

Decoding It All

While QAnon has been the breakout conspiracy theory of the Trump era, not everyone on the right is on board. The farcical nature of QAnon’s clues has tended to alienate many younger, more internet-savvy people on the right, including members of the alt-right. QAnon also alienated a swathe of the right-wing conspiracy theory internet after Q denounced other internet personalities who had been speculating about the clues, accusing them of trying to profit off the movement. But QAnon has been a hit with older Trump supporters, leading to tech-illiterate baby boomers looking to spread the QAnon gospel asking for help in internet forums on “how to meme.”

Nine months after it started, QAnon world has accumulated an internal language of its own. The moderators of the QAnon forums and the interpreters of the clues call themselves “bakers,” a reference to the “breadcrumbs.” QAnon followers are fixated on which public officials are “white hats” or “black hats,” meaning whether they’re really working for Trump or are agents of the cabal. They urge one another to “follow the white rabbit,” which made Trump delivering his “tip top” speech next to the Easter Bunny all the more portentous.

QAnon believers even have a slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” which they often abbreviate to “WWG1WGA.” It’s become a rallying cry for QAnon fans that Q has attributed to President John F. Kennedy, although it actually appears to come from the 1996 action movie White Squall.

Roseanne Barr

@therealroseanne

we r the army of truth-wwg1wga

12:03 AM - Jun 20, 2018

2,475

847 people are talking about this

That community of people deciphering the clues seems to be as important to QAnon believers as Q’s message itself. On QAnon forums, believers talk about the idea that the cabal they believe is responsible for most of the trouble in the United States will soon be swept away has given them hope. Despite obviously being fake, then, it doesn’t look like QAnon is going to go away anytime soon.

Will Sommer

William.Sommer@thedailybeast.com

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.

8. Pizzagate, et al.

That just covers views held by a majority of Republicans. It doesn’t even get to the wild conspiracy theories swirling in the fringes of Trump’s base. Allow us to present QAnon, a conspiracy theory even weirder than Pizza-gate. According to the Daily Beast, adherents of “QAnon” are convinced an anonymous administration official code-name “Q” has been posting mysterious clues about elite conspiracies involving John McCain, the Supreme Court and Hillary Clinton. Q reportedly leaves “breadcrumbs” in online forums like 8Chan.

Like Pizza-gate, an online conspiracy theory is start to bleed into real life. The Daily Beast reports that QAnon true believers have started staging protests demanding that transparency about “Q” from the Justice Department. The Beast notes that there’s no evidence that Q is anything more than an Internet huckster playing a prank on gullible conservatives, but in the Trump era, who knows?