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The kind of people who get into QAnon probably aren’t going to be big on structures and habit. They’re never going to be boring; as Phoebe Courtney, half of the husband-and-wife gadfly team behind the INDEPENDENT AMERICAN newspaper, put it in reference to the John Birch Society of the 1960s, they’re not the sort to become “docile precinct workers.†But if they had the tools and training to actually dig in useful places, they might turn up some interesting things. It’s often noted that the Right has a surfeit of pundits; what we lack are diggers, the dedicated researchers who do the boring work of poring through documents to find news. But maybe we’ve had them all along — they’re just naive and untrained. What if we trained them, empowered them, and turned them loose? People turn to conspiracy theories to explain a world they can’t understand. Giving them the tools to explore the real world could keep them more grounded — and turn up some interesting things for the rest of us.
So if we provide conspiracy crackpots with sufficient access to facts, they won’t select and distort those facts to confirm their conspiracy theories: they will sober up and discover “interesting things” for the rest of us!
I tend to agree that crackpots will likely find another thing to be crackpot about, but the basic idea that more ordinary people should be taught how to engage effectively in democracy via tools such as the FOIA is correct. Just because someone is a crackpot does not mean that they should not be taught the means to be effective political actors. They are entitled to know that information and giving it to them is the right thing to do. Crackpots or not, they are still full citizens and their elected officials are there to serve them, not to rule them.
It’s possible, though by no means proven, that intelligence agencies and private networks adjacent to these agencies are involved in sex trafficking to fund “off the books” operations. Accusations that intel agencies are involved in the drug trade have been flying around for decades. If they are involved in one criminal venture it would make sense that they are involved in another. Also, there is clearly alot of money in sex trafficking (as with the drug trade), and obviously that money goes somewhere. Its not possible to perfectly hide a multi-billion dollar industry. Its possible that this was the story behind Jeffrey Epstein–a fake billionaire who was really a frontman for the illicit sex trafficking trade, possibly connected in one or more intelligence agencies. Further, as with the Catholic Church, Penn State football, and Jimmy Saville, organizations are often unwilling to go after pedophiles in their midst. So there may be a handful of DC bigwigs who are pedophiles (see Dennis Hastert).
The rest of Q stuff beyond the above is looney-tunes.
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Expect conservative media to turn on Trump. FOX, talk radio, Breitbart, OAN, etc. Anything that is being subsidized by big money will soon be singing a new tune. Not one friendly to the Democrats, certainly, but one that makes Trump the scapegoat (not that he doesn’t deserve a big chunk of the blame). Evangelical pulpits that previously compared him to King David, suggesting he was God’s annointed, will spring forth with the new revelation that in fact, he was sent forth by the Devil, to test good Christians and lead them astray, and that wily Devil nearly succeeded. His prior liberal views, and his New York roots, will be emphasized–like George W. Bush before him, he will be branded a “liberal”. Who knows, we might see the GOP return to its prior Russia-hostile posture (back when the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney would accuse Barack Obama of being soft on Moscow), and may double down on this, treating Trump as a Manchurian candidate. We might even see the accusation that Hillary Clinton deliberately threw the election, knowing just what a Pyrrhic victory
I have a relative who is a QAnon/MAGA supporter. They called me up last night over the doofus at the state Department who was pranking people by changing the end date of Trump’s presidency on the website, saying it was a coup, that things were going to go down, and to stock up on food, get cash out, and so on, because the power grid was going to be taken down last night at 7:30. The reason they were calling is that they had “gotten some good intel.” WTF? Why do I feel like that’s some guy who knows someone who once worked as the janitor at the CIA before being fired for stealing other people’s lunches? This person also has a nice, long career that they’re putting in jeopardy because of some weird, non-reciprocated political crush on Trump, the same guy who won’t even go march at the head of his angry mob? I felt a familial obligation to talk them down, to say that they shouldn’t post on social media because it’s being “watched” and that they should only communicate in person. Why? Because I’m hoping that they’ll manage to make it past inauguration day without completely screwing up their life with this garbage.
Two big differences between 1946 Czechoslovakia and 2021 United States: 1) the Constitution; 2) a very well armed, and increasingly so, population between the coasts. Witness the widespread flouting of the law restricting “assault weapons” in even NY and Connecticut. Here in Phoenix I daresay exactly nobody would ever cooperate with a Biden buy-back of their AR/AK’s.
Obese reprogrammable meat bags who couldn’t run 5 miles to save their lives…
A fight between them and the US government would last three weeks, the ones who wouldn’t be droned in the first week, would have a swat team serving a no knock warrant at three in the morning the second week and the few survivors would lose access to all banking services in the third week. Good luck surviving in the USA with no credit or debit card, every camera in the country looking for you and all your physical assets impounded.
Watch how fast all the idiots who were involved in the beer hall putsch are being identified and arrested. They didn’t have the common sense to hide their faces, these are cosplayers, not revolutionaries. They swallowed the FOX/OAN/News Max bullsh*t, and now their lives are going to be ruined, in the best of scenario they are going to lose their jobs, their income and their families, in the worst cases they are going to spend a decade or more in the big house (I wonder how many of them will survive that experience).
They can’t cancel half the country! Oh, they can cancel the big fish, the ones with large followings, but not the real workers. Try vetting Facebook accounts to avoid hiring a wrong thinking electrician and your not going to fill that opening. Same with the people fulfilling orders at the Amazon warehouse or stocking shelves in all the Walmarts in the rural areas. Even Facebook can’t ban all the wrong thinking people without committing corporate suicide. If they ban my wrong thinking in-laws, my wife leaves too, Facebook only has power because of all the networks of real people, you can’t lose just half of them.
Almost twenty years ago now, a friend of a friend told me about something he’d discovered while he was in the Army. He did his service in peacetime and he went in with some office skills, so he spent most of his time in uniform working as a secretary to various officers. One day he discovered, in a rarely used filing cabinet at the back of the office, a document older than he was. He knew they weren’t supposed to keep anything that long, so he told his captain and was given a shredder, a set of guidelines, and three days to weed those files. Over the course of those three days, he got to see some documents he didn’t actually have clearance for, and some of them talked openly about how to reduce political participation by ordinary citizens so that government would have more freedom of action. The strategy proposed at the time was to step up the quality (in the sense of enjoyability) and availability of entertainment, so that ordinary people would be distracted by pleasure and, in his words, “forget that they were ever free.”
That doesn’t work so well in an environment of economic shrinkage and so a new method is being tried: a “death of a thousand cuts” that doesn’t actually outlaw political participation, but does make it more financially risky, such as big fines for mistakes in the collecting of signatures, so that you need a lawyer to go over everything. In Naomi Wolf’s book Give Me Liberty she discusses this, and there’s a very informative 6-minute snippet of her talking about it on YouTube from 2010, entitled “Naomi Wolf: When Protest is Effective and When it is Not.”
The Federal response to the year’s riots will be the next step in that process. Having whipped up passions among first the left and then the right to the point of mob action, they expect to have popular support for even more restrictions on public participation.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Donald Trump and Eric Metaxas (among others) were very well paid to say the inflammatory things they said, just as I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the news services were paid to pick up the video of George Floyd’s death, which might otherwise have been just another local news story.
The Powers That Be don’t care about trans rights or religious liberty or any of that, but they do want us to be so preoccupied with them that we have no attention left for thing things they do care about, such as foreign policy and the continued removal of restrictions on banking and finance. They want to be free to use the government’s power for their own ends while we argue about pronouns.
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I think the great Nathanael West forecast this all the way back in 1939. The movie premiere riot at the climax of The Day of the Locust, a distinctly American apocalypse, brightly burning by the dawn’s early light:
‘Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the paper and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, war. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed.’
You can’t read ‘slack minds and bodies’ and not think of the MAGA crowd. But at least West’s damned had Greta Garbo’s face in some magnificent movie palace to console them. Our damned only have Trump. The most damned of them all.
If were into tin-foil hat thinking, I’d posit a theory that the Elite created Qanon in order to distract the Trump base from real world problems and issues, the addressing of which might discomfit the Owning Class, and instead addict them to crazypants notions (“John Roberts eats babies for breakfast!”) that would embarrass a two bit pulp fiction scifi writer. And that of course serves to discredit the whole shebang by provoking violent behavior (we Americans will tolerate a lot– we do not tolerate public disorder) and render even the non-violent MAGA people utterly ridiculous.
Not to be too conspiratorial, but it really does feel like an intelligence operation that got out of hand. We all knew about Epstein for years, his conviction and light sentence, the flight logs, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, and then the arrest and sudden demise. I’d love some answers about how the hell he was allowed to operate in the open for so long, but I’ll never get them because everyone else who cares about this is obsessed with pizza restaurants and baby-eating reptilians.
It’s reminiscent of how the Air Force covered up secret aircraft development by making anyone who asked questions look like crazy black helicopter little green martian people.
The vast majority of people have never heard of QAnon. Hillary voters are more likely to have heard about QAnon than Trump voters.
I’m not surprised that more Hilary voters have heard of QAnon. When one of the most prominent politicians in your party gets accused of being part of of a pedophile ring whose members drink the blood of children, that’s a story that will get around. And when QAnon believers show up at Trump rallies wearing clothing bearing the Q identifier, Democrats will take notice. I also doubt that the mainstream right wing media that Trump voters consume are likely to cover QAnon. After all, at the family Thanksgiving dinner table, who wants to talk about the crazy relative who thinks it’s okay to marry your sister.
You might want to read about the Ghost Dance Movement among the native Americans in the late 1800’s. It’s considered a classic example of how cultures under stress can become deeply irrational and believe outright weird beliefs.
Basically the movement encouraged adherents to believe that through the dance they could overcome the US military forces, including becoming bullet proof. It didn’t work out and contributed to the wounded knee massacre.
I’d argue that the crazy beliefs we’re seeing on both the left and the right are examples of such thinking due to ongoing civilizational stress.
The only real difference between the Proud Boys et al and antifa is that antifa is smarter. Both have uniforms (camo vs black), carry weapons, attack the police, and want to overthrow the system while claiming to be defending democracy. But the antifa gang is smart enough to wear masks, attack people taking photos of them, and the plan their riots on secure messaging apps, making them much harder to ID and arrest.
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For the GOP to remain a viable conservative opposition party it must rid itself of Trump, and his impeachment and conviction would seem to accomplish just that, as it would bar him from running for office in the future. Seems like exactly what the GOP needs to do. From the point of view of GOP long term interests, what is the argument against impeachment?
The problem is that most of the GOP can’t think past the next election cycle’s primary, which is always about a year away. They’re all terrified of being primaried from the right by a Trumpist, and thus not only losing their own nomination but then seeing the seat possibly flip to the Democrats, especially in the suburbs.