Underground network of what now?
People who love feet is it?
The what conspiracy theory?
QAnon is a virtual cult that celebrates President Trump and casts Democratic politicians and other elites as evil child abusers. Aspects of the cult are downright delusional. Last year an FBI office warned that Q adherents are a domestic terrorism threat.
Plus it’s been gaining in popularity. Thousands of closed Facebook groups, with millions of members.
Numerous Republican congressional candidates “have embraced” QAnon, as CNN’s Veronica Stracqualursi reported earlier this week.
At the top of the list is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is all but certain to win her House race in Georgia this fall. Trump praised Greene for winning her primary. As Stracqualursi wrote, candidates like Greene are “espousing and promoting QAnon theories and phrases as they seek political office on a major party ticket.”
It’s a cult and a story.
There are storytelling components to this virtual cult, as Adrienne LaFrance explained so thoroughly in this article for The Atlantic.
“QAnon is emblematic of modern America’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories, and its enthusiasm for them,” she wrote. “But it is also already much more than a loose collection of conspiracy-minded chat-room inhabitants. It is a movement united in mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values. And we are likely closer to the beginning of its story than the end. The group harnesses paranoia to fervent hope and a deep sense of belonging. The way it breathes life into an ancient preoccupation with end-times is also radically new. To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion.”
It sounds a little bit like the trans madness – not the content, but the mass rejection of reason, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values.
Am I alone in thinking that a stupid question? Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask if the theory has any truth to it rather than ask if Trump believes that he is doing what the nutters claim he’s doing?
Mind you, whichever way the question is framed it allows Trump to fuel the conspiracy theory. He was never going to be honest and deny it, so to those who want to believe it, his not answering would be as good as a confirmation and gives them the chance to spread the idea further by saying that of course he wouldn’t admit to running such a secret mission and give the game away. To those people, the classic I can neither confirm nor deny will always be seen as confirmation.
That ‘fervent’ should be ‘ferment’, shouldn’t it?
Just read an interesting book by Anne Applebaum, who is not one of your usual Left writers, “Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends.
From the Publisher
Anne Applebaum traces a familiar history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics become polarized, which side do you back? If you are a journalist, an intellectual, a civic leader, how do you deal with the re-emergence of authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country? When your leaders appropriate history, or pedal conspiracies, or eviscerate the media and the judiciary, do you go along with it? Twilight of Democracy is a new kind of political writing, an essay that mixes the personal and the political and brings a fresh understanding to the dynamics of public life in Europe and America, both now and in the past.
Highly recommended by me.
Sigh. I’ve got a friend who has fallen down this particular rabbit-hole. One of their buffers against arguments is to insist that anyone who disagrees with them ‘hasn’t done the research’. Meaning you have to be willing to read endless volumes of vague blatherings that would make Nostradamus blush. As far as I can tell, “Q” simply is cold-reading the GOP, and that’s not really all that hard to do. And of course, none of the stuff ‘proving’ the central claim has actually come up–naturally, they made hay out of Epstein’s arrest and suicide. The claim is that Epstein was going to be the linchpin that exposed Bill Clinton*, thereby immediately proving that all Democrats had to be in on the kiddie sex ring. (Though one wonders, if Trump was really the guy they claim he is, why would he leave something like that to chance, and not have issued orders through the system that Epstein be placed under 24-hour video surveillance as well as standard suicide-watch protocol….)
*: To be blunt–it would not shock me in the least to discover that Bill Clinton had had sex with minors, either on Epstein’s plane, or in some other context. My opinion of his personal character is quite low. That still doesn’t implicate anyone other than, at most, some of his closest advisors, who would’ve had to participate in the cover-up.
AoS, I think it should be ‘foment’.
That’ll be the one, tigger.