Q up for the Storm, the Breadcrumbs, the Awakening...

[Stavros]

If it were not for the fact that QAnon appears to be in alliance with the Republican Party and that-

"Media Matters, a not-for-profit progressive research center which monitors misinformation, has counted 67 current or former right (https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/here-are-qanon-supporters-running-congress-2020)wing congressional candidates (https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/here-are-qanon-supporters-running-congress-2020) who have embraced QAnon, a conspiracy theory based in antisemitic tropes which has incited supporters to violence and is popular among Trump supporters."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/24/wave-rightwing-republicans-run-office-trump-blessing-extremist

The list is here-
https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/here-are-qanon-supporters-running-congress-2020

"Believers also say Angela Merkel is Hitler’s granddaughter and Kim Jong-Un was installed by the CIA to keep the world in a permanent state of near-apocalyptic nuclear doom..."
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/what-qanon-conspiracy-theory-involving-donald-trump-explained-twitter-shuts-down-7000-accounts-related-group-2921226

We might just dismiss it as another wacko conspiracy theory junket -which on one level it is, but what happens when the believers leave the church and join the party?

And it is breathtaking gall for the President to day he does't know much about them when he has held their sign aloft, and re-tweeted their stuff 185 times. So many breadcrumbs, so much to lose sleep over before the 'Great Awakening'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

https://www.advocate.com/politics/2018/8/03/what-qanon-and-how-does-it-affect-lgbtq-people

[broncofan]

It is a horrifying menace and the synthesis of every crazy idea I've seen online for the last several years. I don't know what to say except that the Republican party is totally complicit in allowing the most delusional conspiracy theorists into the mainstream of their party. The ideas circulate on networks of white supremacists and neo-nazis who all day dream about committing attacks on minorities when they're not concocting some sinister fiction about Hillary Clinton or the deep state.

To actually know all of the details of these ideas is to delve into a complete fantasy land...one almost feels irresponsible to summarize it as hateful garbage because combatting the malicious ideas might mean learning about their origins. It's exhausting, ignorant, amoral horseshit.

[Stavros]

Two responses to your rational post -

1) Sidney Blumenthal takes apart the Republican Party with surgical malice, to show how it has ceased to be the Party of Lincoln, Hoover and Eisenhower. My only criticism is that he doesn't define what it means to be a Conservative in the context of American poitics, which I think has become a confused concept with more contradictions than it can sustain.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/23/how-donald-trump-canceled-republican-party-sidney-blumenthal-lincoln

2) As I have pointed out before, because you do not have a conventional party system with membership rolls, fees, a party organization and rules, anyone can stand for either the Democrats or the Republicans, so members of Congress can say whateever they like about QAnon and the canndidates chosen to stand for their party, they cannot expel them or force them to stand down -their criticism -is there anger?- is therefore impotent. After all, what is to stop Alex Jones or David Duke from seeking the Republican Party nomination for the President in 2024?

They probably won't get elected, but the process of erosion began some time ago, and the key thing as with so much in contemporary politics, is that enough people simply don't care to enable those who do to enter the system, even when what they cae about is based on hysterical garbage, like the pretender to the throne here who calls himself King John III. The irony is that I once met a man who said his name is Napoleon, only it is, as he is related to the offspring of the famous Emperor. And unlike the wannabe Napoleons who litter the middle pages of trashy newsapapers, he was a gentle, intelligent and a nice man. Not the sort to enter politics. And that is part of the broader problem -the best stay away, the worst push themselves forward

[broncofan]

Two responses to your rational post -

2) As I have pointed out before, because you do not have a conventional party system with membership rolls, fees, a party organization and rules, anyone can stand for either the Democrats or the Republicans, so members of Congress can say whateever they like about QAnon and the canndidates chosen to stand for their party, they cannot expel them or force them to stand down
I agree with you that some ability to discipline members and standards for admission to the party might prevent the total erosion of principles we see in the GOP. I also think that this control can sometimes only create the illusion of accountability because parties still have mixed incentives. What I mean is that parties may want to remove cranks from their ranks but they still want their votes and expulsions can create division. You can end up with a race to the bottom with no party having huge incentive to discipline or expel members. I still think you're right but nothing is perfect.

We've all talked before about the effects of social media and the internet on the dissemination of falsehoods. There's been some conversation about various sites that radicalize people into dangerous ideologies. I do think the changes in media beyond Fox News have had a significant effect on the slide of the Republican party into fantasy land. Fox News used to lead the right-wing agenda and make executive decisions about what was an acceptable departure from reality. Now they're on their heels having to decide whether it's fair comment to call Hillary Clinton a cannibal or whether they have some role as a gatekeeper for the discourse. A serious conversation about our ability as a society to have some set of shared truths needs to take place.

[Stavros]

"The Trump campaign is hosting events across the country this weekend to capitalize on whatever momentum the Republican National Convention created and mobilize the party’s base of voters to turn out in November. HuffPost found that official campaign events in Georgia and Nevada will be hosted by people who promote QAnon, the hateful conspiracy theory that the FBI recently flagged as a domestic terror threat. "

"A Black Voices for Trump event (https://events.donaldjtrump.com/events/black-voices-for-trump-anniversary-of-the-march-on-washington-mableton-ga-28-august?utm_content=main_menu&utm_medium=web&utm_source=djt_web) in Mableton, Georgia, on Friday evening features Angela Stanton-King, who is the Republican nominee in the November election to fill the House seat of recently deceased civil rights icon John Lewis. “THE STORM IS HERE ����,” Stanton-King tweeted (https://twitter.com/theangiestanton/status/1291514733007450112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5 Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1291514733007450112%7Ctwgr% 5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.embedly.com%2Fwidgets%2F media.html%3Ftype%3Dtext2Fhtmlkey%3D3ce26dc7e3454d b5820ba084d28b4935schema%3Dtwitterurl%3Dhttps3A%2F %2Ftwitter.com%2Ftheangiestanton%2Fstatus%2F129151 4733007450112image%3D) earlier this month, using a QAnon reference to the moment Trump will supposedly arrest and execute his enemies.
Like most QAnon adherents, Stanton-King appears to be convinced that most world events are in some way linked to sex trafficking, a problem that QAnon believers vastly overstate using bogus statistics (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wayfair-and-human-trafficking-statistics/id1380008439?i=1000487756926). “TRUTH BOMB ��,” she tweeted (https://twitter.com/theangiestanton/status/1283724914466398208?s=20) in July. “This isn’t about COVID 19 or BLACK LIVES MATTER. This is a major cover up for PEDOPHILIA and HUMAN TRAFFICKING.”
Stanton-King, who received a pardon from Trump earlier this year for her role in a car theft ring years ago, has also used Twitter to sow doubt about the risks of COVID-19, which has killed more than 180,000 Americans. In May, she praised Trump for promoting hydroxychloroquine (https://twitter.com/theangiestanton/status/1262713642052714496?s=20) as a miracle cure for the virus, despite a lack of medical evidence and the risk of severe side effects. In July, she predicted COVID-19 will disappear altogether after the election (https://twitter.com/theangiestanton/status/1280442681794183168?s=20), implying that the virus is a hoax to defeat Trump. Stanton-King is speaking at Friday’s event alongside Dr. Robin Armstrong, a physician who said he has provided hydroxychloroquine to nursing home patients (https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/trump-allies-put-unproven-coronavirus-drug-to-work-in-texas). "

More here-
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-campaign-events-qanon-coronavirus-risk_n_5f495872c5b697186e35df2a?ri18n=true

[broncofan]

It's interesting to read about conspiracy theorists who "overstate" the prevalence of pedophilia and sex trafficking given how awful both problems are and the fact that they need to be combated by human rights organizations. Yet these people are absolutely obsessed with imaginary trafficking rings in pizza parlors and among "liberal elites" and will ignore abuse that is well documented.

These ideas are really old wine in new bottles. Their theories are a hodgepodge of great replacement theory, of medieval antisemitic conspiracy theories repackaged to omit explicit reference to Jews but using some surrogate, and just good old-fashioned scientific ignorance with heavy doses of anti-Black and xenophobic rhetoric mixed in.

This thread speaks to the ideological radicalization of Republicans in this country. I'm not sure if it's a detour to talk about the ways in which actual vigilante violence is being encouraged by Trump. I am very much against looting and vandalism but still think random gun-owners shouldn't hold themselves up as guardians of cities they don't live in or have communal investment in and accelerate street violence. It is clear that Trump has shifted from using Covid as a cultural fault line to using the issue of police brutality and the response to it as a way of galvanizing support in white America. That this comes off of a backdrop of medieval conspiracism, racism, and xenophobic ideas makes the situation even more volatile.

I have been afraid about the political consequences of Trump winning. I'm finding myself and those around me increasingly afraid of street level violence between factions of Trump supporters and their opponents, both being used as pawns to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is not fit to govern.

[Stavros]

[QUOTE=broncofan;1940515
This thread speaks to the ideological radicalization of Republicans in this country. I'm not sure if it's a detour to talk about the ways in which actual vigilante violence is being encouraged by Trump. I am very much against looting and vandalism but still think random gun-owners shouldn't hold themselves up as guardians of cities they don't live in or have communal investment in and accelerate street violence. It is clear that Trump has shifted from using Covid as a cultural fault line to using the issue of police brutality and the response to it as a way of galvanizing support in white America. That this comes off of a backdrop of medieval conspiracism, racism, and xenophobic ideas makes the situation even more volatile.
[/QUOTE]

It seems to me that the problem lies in the possibility that encouraging armed militias, even if only 'notionally' or by implication, or through re-tweets (the President has re-tweteed QAnon tweets over 130 times), emboldens them, to the extent that nobody controls them, so that they become a 'third force' between the Federal Government and State Goverment law enforcement.

Having tweeted 'Liberate Michigan' and other states, the President may have given licence to actual violence, as has happened either with the individual in Kenosha, or the more organized sects such as the Kenosha Guard Militia who issued a 'call to arms', with other groups such as the 'Boogaloo Bois' in Oregon, Patriot Prayer, Patriot Wave and so on also provoking and taking part in violence.

If it gets out of control, then at some point they have to be dealt with, but with a President who seems to prefer 'direct action' and to treat Democrat Mayors and Governors with contempt, could this President side with armed militias against specific law and order jurisdictions, as in Portland and Kenosha? More to the point, is there nobody in his administration who can warn him of the dangers of supporting armed groups that declare they are 'anti-Government'?

Some are here-
Kenosha Guard Militia-
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/28/facebook-militia-posts-kenosha-protests

Patriot Prayer-
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/what-is-patriot-prayer-far-right-group-confrontations-portland.html

Boogaloo Bois
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/05/27/the-boogaloo-movement-is-not-what-you-think/

[Stavros]

Should law enforcement in Kenosha be re-identified as the Republican Guard?

"That followed a bout of unrest straight after the police shooting, where some businesses and public property were badly damaged and many stores are now boarded up, then a spiral into chaos last Tuesday night when armed, white agitators turned up on the streets, were given water and encouragement by police in an armed vehicle despite being out after curfew, and then ended up confronting protesters." (my emphasis in bold).
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/31/jacob-blake-trump-visit-kenosha

[Stavros]

Here is a curious situation: Lara Trump has been on the campaign trail in Florida with QAnon candidate Laura Loomer, while QAnon candidate Marjorie Greene's campaign has received financial support from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other prominent Repubican party donors, while it is claimed-

"More than a third of Republicans believe the QAnon (http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/qanon) conspiracy that Donald Trump (http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/DonaldTrump) is waging a secret war against a shadowy cabal of paedophile cannibals is "mostly true", according to a new poll released on Wednesday."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/qanon-conspiracy-mostly-true-republicans-trump-daily-kos-civiqs-poll-a9702261.html

Lara and Loomer-
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/lara-trump-campaigns-bigoted-conspiracy-155424480.html

Marjorie and Meadows-
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-marjorie-green-qanon-republican-donors-mark-meadows-house-a9688626.html

Here is the curiosity: why has QAnon's Crusader-in-Chief not announced his intention to abolish child marriage in the USA? I assume his old buddy Epstein might have made a case for middle aged men marrying little girls, but do most Americans support it?

Maybe the President should make this a campaign commitment? And if not, why not?

Some stats here-
https://www.unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-shocking-statistics/

https://www.moms.com/child-marriages-in-the-us/

[Stavros]

So “crazy uncle” don’t know who or what QAnon is, yet has retweeted their garbage over 150 times, and at least two of them are candidates for his own party. Marjorie Taylor Green in Georgia, and in the same state, Angela Stanton King

“In an interview with the Guardian, Republican Congressional candidate Angela Stanton King said that she believed the QAnon conspiracy theory (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/15/angela-stanton-king-qanon-conspiracy-theory) that the online retailer Wayfair is secretly trafficking children online as part of a deep-state“
https://jezebel.com/trump-supporting-republican-congressional-candidate-bel-1845388362

So cute!

[Stavros]

Has QAnon found a home in the White House?

"Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller, on behalf of the president’s re-election campaign, has claimed without evidence that Democratic candidate Joe Biden would “incentivise” child trafficking under his administration, if elected.

The claim mirrors conspiracies promoted by the online-driven QAnon delusion that Democratic lawmakers and celebrities are engaged in a child-trafficking operation, a belief that has gripped millions of Americans and elements of the Republican party.

Mr Miller, an architect of the administration’s hardline anti-immigration policies, claimed on a call with reporters on Wednesday that the former vice president would “incentivise child smuggling and child trafficking on an epic global scale.” "
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election-2020/stephen-miller-qanon-conspiracy-joe-biden-us-election-2020-b1402665.html

[filghy2]

I've made this point before, but this illustrates the cluelessness of the Trump campaign. When they should be going all out to appeal to undecided votes, they are instead making wild claims that are likely to appeal only to people who are already Trump fans. The same goes for the weird obsession with Hunter Biden. Are these people living in such a delusional bubble that they believe lots of undecided voters are conspiracy theory nutters?

[Stavros]

I've made this point before, but this illustrates the cluelessness of the Trump campaign. When they should be going all out to appeal to undecided votes, they are instead making wild claims that are likely to appeal only to people who are already Trump fans. The same goes for the weird obsession with Hunter Biden. Are these people living in such a delusional bubble that they believe lots of undecided voters are conspiracy theory nutters?

Consider how Rudolph Giuliani has become one of the 'conspiracy theory nutters' -yesterday I watched him ranting on Fox News about Hunter Biden, then frothing at the mouth when the woman interviewing him compared him to Christopher Steele whom Giuliani branded 'a criminal', demanding an apology ("I've been a member of the Bar for 50 years..."..) .the same man I once saw on UK TV over 30 years ago talking in rational terms about his campaign against the Mafia and organized crime.
How did he go from being a sane and reliable opponent of organized crime in New York to becoming one of its beneficiaries in Russia and the Ukraine?

There has always been a degree of conspiracy theory in the US. Some may recall Lyndon Larouche from the 1980s, and Tony Tanner in his survey of post-war American literature (City of Words, 1971) attibutes it in part to the layers of local, state and Federal government that people feel remove them from the heart of decision making, so that the higher up you go, the more secretive people become, fed these days by social media making claims that need not be true, merely seed the suspicion that 'they' ae not telling you everything, and that bad things are happening at the top of American government. It is in fact a form of libertarian ideology opposed to government, and uses conspiracy theory to grow its base- but one has to ask if people truy believe the claims made about child trafficking. The scary thought being that they do.

That Giuliani has become so potent a promoter of conspircy theories is a indication of the decline of the Republican Party as a rational party into a screaming banshee, walking barefoot on the hot coals it laid down in the 1990s.

[broncofan]

I've made this point before, but this illustrates the cluelessness of the Trump campaign. When they should be going all out to appeal to undecided votes, they are instead making wild claims that are likely to appeal only to people who are already Trump fans. The same goes for the weird obsession with Hunter Biden. Are these people living in such a delusional bubble that they believe lots of undecided voters are conspiracy theory nutters?
This strategy worked against Hillary because of how pervasive the hatred was of her aided by the leaked emails and the last minute announcement by Comey, but Trump keeps going back to the same playbook. To hear his campaign speeches is to hear the same loop of demagoguery: conspiracy theories, racism, red scare tactics, inciting anger against the media.

The q conspiracy theories are loathsome but as you say probably play only with their hardcore base. I'm going to say this in the U.S. election thread too but one thing they are doing better is suppressing the vote.

[filghy2]

There has always been a degree of conspiracy theory in the US. Some may recall Lyndon Larouche from the 1980s, and Tony Tanner in his survey of post-war American literature (City of Words, 1971) attibutes it in part to the layers of local, state and Federal government that people feel remove them from the heart of decision making, so that the higher up you go, the more secretive people become, fed these days by social media making claims that need not be true, merely seed the suspicion that 'they' ae not telling you everything, and that bad things are happening at the top of American government. It is in fact a form of libertarian ideology opposed to government, and uses conspiracy theory to grow its base- but one has to ask if people truy believe the claims made about child trafficking. The scary thought being that they do. .

There is also this much-cited essay from the 1960s. https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/ McCarthyism was the most prominent example at that time, but as he notes, there was also a history of anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic conspiracy theorising. Still, the idea of Communists penetrating the US government seems more plausible than the idea of it being taken over by a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles.

Remoteness of government is as much an issue in Australia, but I can't conceive of either of the major parties being willing to tolerate (let alone embrace) this kind of weirdness. While it's shocking that some Republicans promote these views, it's equally shocking that supposedly mainstream Republicans turn a blind eye to it and continue to support the party with barely a murmur of protest.

[Stavros]

Filghy2 thanks so much for the link to the Hofstadter article, not only brilliant in itself, but proof that the 'paranoid style' is not new and repeats itself, swapping one demon of the past for its present form. It is noticeable how, though they have pilloried the Affordable Care Act, the Republicans have tended now to concentrate not on policy issues such as education, transport, foreign policy, or the wheel of fate known as 'the Debt' which Paul Ryan hung around Obama's neck, but cultural issues.

The so-called 'cancel culture' which is promoted by Junior have become emblems of what his kind feel they have either lost, or are losing to minorities, enabled by a crushing self-guilt among White people constantly apologizing for slavery, capitalism, and so forth, but a movement which has, perhaps more so than McCarthy and the 19th century zealots, held up the truth for ridicule. WHen someone can say in pubic that deaths fro Covid have been reduced to 'almost nothing' on a day 1,000 were recorded, suggests contempt that in itself robs his argument of a shred of value. That he might run for the Presidency exhibits the vanity of this family, as if it were a genetically code fault, though he may need to shave off the beard to be a serious contender, for the beard is a mask that seeks to conceal a deep internal anxiety about sexuality and identity.

One could refer to many theories which are based on the belief that the truth is concealed, and that identifyng it, and acting on it, is a form of liberation. Class consciousness in Marx is concealed from the worker by the daily grind of labour, he has no time to think outside his immediate situation, or he would realize the extent of his exploitation, and organizee to fight against it. Crucially, the oppressed worker does not realize he has been robbed of his humanity, so that liberation through revolution does not just change the economic system, it transform the person from being a 'cog in a machine' to re-developing as a human.

Similarly, in Freud's model, the bourgeois patient has developed a means of coping with trauma by displacing or transferring it onto something less obvious, the trauma itself, usually of a sexual nature, concealing the truth through a nervous habit that itself causes stress and acnxiety. Reveal the truth hidden under the cover of this habit, and that it need not be destructive, and the patient is relieved.

Pastors will extol the truth of the sacrifice Jesus made -for you- when all around you life seems so pointless, so complex, so weighed down by problems -all you need is to tear away the painted veil, and you will be set free. Thus in the Salafi version of Islam, centuries of malpractice and invented ideas have distorted the truth of what Muhammad revealed, while deviations from the 'straight path' can be corrected if the believer re-engages with the original message.

Out of this comes the 'orginalism' that has distorted the purpose of the Constitution, but at least can be debated rationally, whereas this stuff is just batty-

"The research for Hope Not Hate also found that 17% of people questioned said they believed Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan” by the UN or “new world order”.
"While 6% of those polled claimed to support QAnon, larger percentages supported broader, linked conspiracies. A quarter (25%) agreed that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”. This rose to 35% amongpeople aged 18-24. A similar proportion (26%) agreed that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media and other powerful positions” are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/22/one-in-four-britons-believe-in-qanon-linked-theories-survey

I suspect that chronic failures of government -not its successes- have led to the proliferation of belief in these views, the bitter irony in the UK being that any conspiracy theory about the EU controlling our affairs, has not been relieved through us 'taking back control' as we never had it at all.

And the more the right fail, the more they blame everyone else, with the blame game probably entering a new phase of hysteria on November 4th...

Junior's Eyes used to be a rock and roll band, now he looms over the parapet -Dad, is it time to run?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/01/liberal-privilege-review-donald-trump-jr-maga-republican-party

[Stavros]

So weird they made a film about them, and then discovered the men who are resposible for Q are...a bit weird....

Storm comes on the 21st..

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/mar/18/q-into-the-storm-hbo-qanon-series