My friend’s posts on FB have ALWAYS been about hating all things Trump and anything associated with him.
Now all she posts is "OMG! Save the children from the pedos! Joe B is a total pedo. See the pics (or him with children at political events.).
I feel compelled to share this because my friend has always stuck me as as a level headed smart person. The fact that she could be manipulated like that scares the crap out of me.
This is frightening and telling and I hope this sort of thing is extremely unusual and improbable.
I fear, however, a second Trump term and that the inmates will soon be running the asylum. As a Canuck I feel really, really sorry for moderate, reasonable, thinking Americans who are immersed in this and watching it inexorably watching it happen.
Qanon bullshit isn’t really believed by the intelligent people spouting out its nonsense. It’s more to see what kind of reaction they can get from the left press and about how many rubes they can convince that its possibly true. It sows discontent which is what it was designed to do, very likely an idea started or encouraged by Russian propagandist.
Sorry to hear about your friend.
I know some stupid people. I don’t push them out of my life because they are otherwise nice people and after falling for some stupid meme over time they will realize they are wrong and then just drop it, even if for no reason than the lack of popularity for their misbegotten notion. There isn’t likely to be an apology or any reflection, they are just shallow people. They can stretch my tolerance for such things but I think we have to accept that some people will retain a childlike lack of awareness throughout their lives. As long as they don’t take actual offensive actions in some way I would let it pass.
But now this brings up something new. I understand the old pattern, dipshit at work says one of these stupid things, dumb friend hears it and repeats it like a parrot. This new social media thing is something different. The ability to spread such nonsense is highly enhanced by technology, that stupid friend isn’t just making themselves look stupid now, they’re actively spreading disinformation and recruiting other idiots to join the malevolent cause. And they can live in an echo chamber where they never hear anything else, don’t realize how they look in the eyes of those outside their little cabal, and eventually don’t care because they have their own world to live in.
We should be very afraid.
Yeah, this is frightening. The morons are the majority in this world, they’ve always been dependent on the competent minority that holds everything together and gets everything done. Connecting the idiots through social media has created a self-destruct button. Th
I agree. I think we’ll see the shit really hit the fan after his second term when he decides he’s allowed to have a third, and fourth and…
Sounds like she is mostly concerned with belonging to a tribe.
No, it’s not.
I know that because it recently happened to my mother.
Rated: 
Yeah, social media has become a pretty effective method for dispersing this kind of bullshit. It used to be that this kind of stuff would be isolated to people that signed up for newsletters or who frequented local radio or cable TV call-in shows. People give it more credence if they see it on a computer and figure that it must be true, not fully understanding that there’s no fact-checking involved.
I see it on the Facebook pages of some of my family members and it saddens and angers me…
Qanon is not just for stupid people.
My friend that I’m talking about is spreading Qanon bull shit with out realizing she’s doing it. She thinks she’s just speaking out against pedos. She doesn’t realize the connections Qanon is making between pedos and Democrats. Qanon saves THAT rhetoric for the MAGAs.
Qanon ain’t no amateur show. These guys are using military grade Psy-Ops tatics to cause division in this country.
Modify that a little bit and it could be a marketing slogan for them:
Qanon: It’s not just for stupid people!
It started as a massive trolling exercise on 4Chan. More people jumped on the trolling bandwagon, and it spread. Now, it’s hard to determine who is trolling and those that have been trolled.
4chan turned the OK sign into a White Nationalist symbol.
I thought Trump somehow accidentally super-glued his thumb and forefinger together.
I regularly see glurgy crap about people being poor but honest, or that the old ways were somehow better (yeah if you were male and white) or some kind kind of dressed up homily that turns out to be right wing glurge.
One that comes up regular is stuff along the lines of ALL LIVES MATTER, or somehow having opinions shoved down the throat - those so-called opinions are always extreme interpretations of a left leaning pressure group.
On the face of it and without any thought, they seem reasonable, but they are always just an introduction to being groomed by right wing racists - pointing it out to the poster always results in some denial or defensive posture.
People are always cycical about opposing points of view but incredibly naiive about anything that leans towards their own thoughtless bias.
You would be wrong about that;
Although, we really don’t know how “intelligent” that guy was. He is a surfing instructor, not a high-tech engineer or doctor or lawyer, etc. So that really tells us very little about how bright the guy is.
He came to believe that his children had “serpent DNA” that they got from their mother, and that they would grow up to be monsters. He said he hated to do it, but he had to kill them to save the world.
Totally heroic. That’s some serious brain damage going on there.
ETA: On the face of it, one might expect he’s got a strong insanity defense there. If so, that could get him out of jail and into a securely locked looney ward for the foreseeable future.
I’m pretty sure it’s not doctors and high-tech engineers that is behind Qanon. He can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m guessing by “intelligent” Si_Amigo meant us regular educated folks.
And there are lots of intelligent people who believe the Qanon line. It’s not that they are stupid, it’s that they’ve been misinformed (lied to). Fox and the internet is their appeal to authority.
And that’s the scary and dangerous part.
ETA: Parkland Survivor Says QAnon Convinced His Dad That Shooting Was Hoax
(Fact checked)
Yeah. I think the microcosms for these QAnon types are:
Those, to me, are the nightmare scenarios, and there is very little to ensure they don’t come to pass.
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of politicians who push QANON crap to voters. But then referring to them as “intelligent” is a bit of an oxymoron. The type of intelligence they possess is more of a ability to manipulate people that lack their own reasoning ability and are looking for leaders to simplify things to a level that they can relate. They pass off this bullshit abilty as leadership, but it is the leadership of a con artist. Not true leadership that is helpful to society, but leading a patsy to be taken for their own benifit in order to obtain power.