I wonder about the folks who actively support Q and spread Q ‘theories’ - like Kennedy coming back to life, Jewish space lasers, etc. Anybody know one of these people? Are they cynically stirring the pot to keep the tRump rabble engaged? Do they actually believe the stuff? All the Repubs I know just shake their heads in disbelief at Q, but someone supports and spreads this stuff. What goes on in their heads?
Yes.
They are mentally ill.
My 19 year old son used to be a trumpy republican. He’s now an ‘anarcho-Capitalist’, whatever the frick that is. Anyway, even at the very height of his trumpiness he at least did not buy the Q crap.
Yeah. My wife’s cousin. He’s very impressionable and is also a drug addict. He’s a good kid too and it’s sad that he got caught up in all of that craziness.
I do. That is, I suspect he’s into Q. He’d never admit it, though, because he doesn’t trust anyone not in his in-group.
QAnon supporters don’t openly admit their allegiance for the same lack of trust that leads them to believe in Q in the first place. Anyone not with Q is their out-group and untrustworthy. Another conspiracy-theorizing friend is likely to “go Q, as” she’s switching in-groups. It used to be that conservatives were the out-group. She was liberal, but she was Marianne Williamson liberal, and she believes in Big Pharma conspiracy theories and is strongly anti-vaxx. That led to her anger with Anthony Faucci and government “forcing us” to get vaxxed, which led her to quit MSNBC and watch anti-vaxx Fox news. She’s one step from drinking the Q-Aid.
Conservatives are, I think, more prone to conspiracy thinking because they tend to be more fearful, and anxiety and the sense you’re not completely in control of your own life feed conspiracy theories, from what I’ve read. But I suspect there are a great many conservatives who are passive, not active Q supporter.: they won’t rule out Q theories and may buy into them, but they don’t know anything about or support QAnon, itself.
Yep. Maganut. He only listens to Alex Jones. He actually believed the Michelle Obama has a penis idea.
QAnon must be a really fringy part of the right, buecause when it became a ‘thing’ in the news I had never heard of it. I asked around other people on the right, and none of them had heard of it either. I still don’t know a single person on the right who understands what it is or where it comes from. Some of them suspect it is a democratic info-op, a fake group used to smear Republicans. I don’t think so, but whoever runs it or belongs to it is a very tiny splinter on the right. I thought maybe it was a 4-chan kind of thing that got out of control, perhaps.
I mean, I’d heard of Promise Keepers and other fringe Republican groups, but QAnon came out of nowhere. I still don’t understand what they are supposed to be about, other than accusing some Democrats of being pedophiles or something. But then, there are a lot of little cubbyholes on the internet for crazy people to gather.
Yes, I have a coworker who’s a True Q Believer. Based on how he talks about it, he doesn’t seem to be aware that it’s a fringe belief. He’ll bring up Q conspiracies as if it’s only common sense and we all already believe it.
I know the wife of someone who buys into at least some of the Qanon stuff. Our interactions are purely professional so I don’t know if she shares his views (though we do require vaccination to come on our premies, but we don’t demand proof, so she either is vaccinated or lies to us).
She is a pain in the butt to work with for reasons entirely unrelated to political views. Put simply, she’s not that bright, she expects me to do all the work she doesn’t understand on her behalf, and she’s uncooperative - it doesn’t seem to occur to her that maybe working together in a spirit of partnership would produce better results than “nope, I’m not contractually obligated to cooperate, so I won’t.”
Coincidentally, I’ve just caught up with a TV documentary on this:
I found it interesting, not so much for showing the delusions - and sometimes sad back-stories - of otherwise pleasant and seemingly normal people, and the extremes they can lead some to, but also how people like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn are trying to ride the wave politically - with what degree of genuine belief I found hard to tell.
There was a worrying segment about how there are followers here in the UK. We’ve already seen the sense of marginalisation/precariousness having its political effects in regular politics, but I hadn’t realised how what had seemed to be noisy but insignificant anti-vaxx protests were adopting much of the Q-style rhetoric and delusions. And it has its would-be political opportunists, but mostly still in the no-hope fantasy category
Its amazing to me that anyone who pays attention to American politics doesn’t understand or know what Qanon is. Yes it’s real. No it’s not a Democratic (Big D) plot to undermine Republican support. It dates back to at the very least Pizzagate in the public conscience.
Personally I don’t know anyone who is a Qanon supporter as a fact but having grown up in rural Michigan I have family members I haven’t spoken to in decades and would be hesitant to look at their Facebook feeds.
I don’t know anyone personally, but there is a house I drive by now and again with a large sign that proclaims “Q SOON”, or something like that.
I’ve often wanted to stop and ask questions, but I’m too afraid.
My wife and I watched that as well. I found it sobering and worrying that such a powerful, successful country can have such obvious conspiracy theories edging into the mainstream.
That said, Piers Corbyn has just been arrested for encouraging his followers to burn down their MP’s constituency offices if their MP voted to support the latest anti-COVID measures. We’re certainly not without our own crackpot fringe here in the UK.
Is Q really pro Trump though? I mean, I know they are now bc it’s adventitious, but I don’t see Q going anywhere after Trump gets his second term or is no longer a viable candidate.
Well, belief in conspiracy theories arise form the same well of belief as religion. Just like any new religion, when the “prophet” dies, they find someone new to take their place.
9/11 Truthers cast George W Bush as The Big Bad in most of their fantasies about what “really happened” on 9/11, but didn’t even hesitate to start hating on Obama as soon as Bush was out of office. Trump support will be similar. “Oh, I guess Trump was (in on it/not as capable as we’d thought/stopped by The Deep State), but >insert Candidate Name< is the Real Deal™!”
The one safe bet is that they won’t give up their beliefs willingly.
That TV documentary suggested that Flynn is in the running to be the Anointed One - if Stone has his way.
At the moment, that is.
(I knew Piers Corbyn was strange, in that “all out of step but me” self-righteousness he evidently shares with his brother - but has he learnt nothing from past attacks on MPs, or does he really not care? Winnie Mandela, he ain’t)
Conspiracy theorists never see inconvenient evidence as a problem. As the Atlantic pointed out, Tthe conspiracist in chief (TSG) got a lot of his start in politics with the birther conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.
Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times , Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.
Q-anon conspiracies are geared to support what Trump spewed and vice-versa, Trump and Q supported each other, or I should say: they mostly believe in each other.
Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.
“I feel God led me to Q. I really feel like God pushed me in this direction.”
Harger wanted me to know that he’d voted for Obama the first time around. He grew up in a family of Democrats. His dad was a union guy. But that was before Trump appeared and convinced Harger that he shouldn’t trust the institutions he always thought he could. Shock nodded alongside him. “The reason I feel like I can trust Trump more is, he’s not part of the establishment,” she said. At one point, Harger told me I should look into what happened to John F. Kennedy Jr.—who died in 1999, when his airplane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard—suggesting that Hillary Clinton had had him assassinated. (Alternatively, a contingent of QAnon believers say that JFK Jr. faked his death and that he’s a behind-the-scenes Trump supporter, and possibly even Q himself. Some anticipate his dramatic public return so that he can serve as Trump’s running mate in 2020.) When I asked Harger whether there’s any evidence to support the assassination claim, he flipped my question around: “Is there any evidence not to?”
Nope. Never met one. I certainly never sought one out.
I think that is basically correct. Yesterday, I heard an interview with a guy who studied flat-earthers: How to convince a science denier to reconsider their beliefs | CBC Radio.
Basically, their belief was part of their self-identity and, while he didn’t say it in so many words, it was very similar to a religion.
Yep. It was just last month that hundreds of Qfanatics spent several weeks at Dealy Plaza waiting for the second coming of JFK Jr. This is not the behavior of well-balanced people.