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crickets

(25,896 posts)
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 04:02 PM Jun 2020

What is QAnon? The Prophecies of Q

The Prophecies of Q JUN 2020

The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. [snip]

While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back. [snip]

All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it. [snip]

...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. [snip]

In its broadest contours, the QAnon belief system looks something like this: Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them. (“These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED,” Q wrote in one post.) The eventual destruction of the global cabal is imminent, Q prophesies, but can be accomplished only with the support of patriots who search for meaning in Q’s clues. To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press. One of Q’s favorite rallying cries is “You are the news now.” Another is “Enjoy the show,” a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When the world as we know it comes to an end, everyone’s a spectator. [more]


There's no way to encapsulate this article in four paragraphs or so. It is very long, convoluted, disturbing, and a compelling, necessary read. If you have trouble getting past the monthly article limit, clear cookies and try again or bookmark for July 1. Getting through it in one sitting is unlikely, so download or park it in a tab somewhere to dip in and out as you can. It's worth the effort.


Further reading:

Down the rabbit hole: how QAnon conspiracies thrive on Facebook JUN 25 2020

A Guardian investigation has documented:

More than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups, and Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each dedicated to QAnon. The largest of these have more than 150,000 followers or members. In total, the documented pages, groups and accounts count more than 3m aggregate followers and members, though there is likely significant overlap among these groups and accounts. These groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief system, researchers say.

“Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.”

Moreover, Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have been exposed to them.



How QAnon conspiracy theory became an ‘acceptable’ option in marketplace of ideas — and more lessons on fake news MAY 05 2020

In many ways, QAnon is a quintessential conspiracy theory: It offers its adherents simple explanations in place of complexity, a coherent entity on which to place blame for the transgressions of modern life, and a sense of control and populist purpose.

But in other ways, it seems to have tapped into deeper veins of moral gratification: an apocalyptic vision of a renewed America that resonates deeply with evangelical Christian beliefs about the End Times. (Indeed, at least one church has been founded on QAnon belief principles.)

Whether they see QAnon as prophecy, self-described “research” or an “open source intelligence operation,” its followers have grown so numerous and pushed its rhetoric so persistently on so many fronts online, that its most anodyne permutations — vague references to a coming reckoning for immoral Washington elites — are disturbingly present in mainstream discourse.


Yikes.
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cayugafalls

(5,629 posts)
1. QAnon is a significant part of the brainwashing of the far right christo-fascist movement.
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 04:13 PM
Jun 2020

They are a clear and present danger to the safety and security of the United States of America.

Q, Boogaloo, KKK, 4Chan, Quiverful, 3 percenters, Oath Keepers, etc...are all interconnected.

soothsayer

(38,601 posts)
2. They don't mind trump putting kids in cages?
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 04:14 PM
Jun 2020

Or raping kids with Epstein?

Snip from above

In its broadest contours, the QAnon belief system looks something like this: Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them.

crickets

(25,896 posts)
6. And for that, I salute you.
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 04:38 PM
Jun 2020

I don't think you get thanked enough for the Top 10, so - thank you! And I see more links to add to the rabbit hole collection, oh my.

Quixote1818

(28,903 posts)
4. These are Qanon fruitcakes who think some anonymous naked creeper behind a computer screen,
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 04:23 PM
Jun 2020

making shit up, is the all enlightened one who they put total blind trust in and everyone else who is a doctor and politician is smuggling and raping kids, having satanic sex parties and drinking blood with the grey aliens and lizard people. .

crickets

(25,896 posts)
11. I heard about that earlier today.
Thu Jun 25, 2020, 05:24 PM
Jun 2020

Thanks for the twitter link, highplainsdem. Wow. I am amazed at the number of people posting videos or clear pictures of their faces.

Thank goodness for Wonkette.

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