There is an element of totally crazy conspiracy people, known as the QAnon believers, which advocate a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against President Donald Trump and his supporters.
QAnon has accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high ranking public officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. They claimed that Hillary Clinton was part of the child sex trafficking ring, and that Barack Obama and George Soros were connected to a great conspiracy against Donald Trump, who is portrayed as being totally innocent of any charges against him.
The FBI has said that QAnon is a likely domestic terrorist group, and Twitter has banned it from its platforms.
QAnon has promoted antisemitism, racism, nativism, and arguments that only Donald Trump can save the nation, making him out to be a demigod.
And now, we will have at least one, possibly more, members of the 117th Congress in 2021, who espouse these theories, but are being elected to the House of Representatives in 2020, and will have a platform to espouse their crazy, hateful rhetoric.
One such person is the future new Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was repudiated by Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, until she won the nomination this past week, and has now been embraced by both McCarthy and by President Donald Trump.
Greene spews racist, nativist, islamophobic, and antisemitic utterances, and refers to “Satan worshipping pedophiles'”, who are out to bring Donald Trump down, and also brandishes a rifle, and promotes all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories in a reckless manner.
She makes crazies like Louie Gohmert of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Devin Nunes of California appear, by comparison to her, to be “moderates”!
QAnon has spread like wildfire on Facebook groups, and is seen by some as a religious cult, with no interest in fact checking or any sense of accuracy. Greene will become a total nightmare for a party which already is too much oriented toward extremist right wing fringe elements.
The Republicans have been there before, with the John Birch Society in the 1950’s. The Birchers believed in all kinds of conspiracies, but especially they took McCarthy’s fantasy of Communists infiltrating the U.S. government and dialed it up to 11. They even accused Eisenhower of being a Communist, or Communist agent. They were finally pretty much purged out of the GOP in the 1960’s. They had become too embarrassing, and finally even Republicans started speaking out against them. That could happen again, and maybe the QAnon folks will be disavowed.
But things are a bit different now I think. Now news isn’t delivered through newspapers and a few broadcast networks so much as it is delivered through thousands of different channels, including the sketchier ends of the Internet. People can plug themselves into their favorite extreme point of view, go down the rabbit hole, and never come up. It’s made it easier to recruit people into these wacko beliefs, and harder to extract them out of that worldview once they’re in it.
I can’t decide which is scarier – her or the fact that there are people out there who vote for nuts like her.
Urgent we get behind Greene’s Democratic rival, Kevin Van Ausdal!
There becomes a national interest in resisting Greene’s horrible views and that is at the ballot box. Unfortunately, Kevin has had very little support in the North Georgia area and could really use our help.
Donate. Postcards. Phone bank. Resist Greene! Kevin’s campaign website below. Link to add your voice and donation!
http://www.kevinvanausdal.com
The main problem with QAnon’s conspiracy theory that some so-called “Deep State” is out to “get” President Trump and disrupt if not destroy him, his agenda, and his supporters is that it does not realize the following:
1. That the only reason Trump is in the White House was and is because that Deep State put him there, figuring that It could get more mileage out of him as opposed to merely a continuation with Clinton of what it got with Obamaism.
2. That Trump can stay in the White House as long as he continues to read his scripts, play his role, and follow the instructions of his handlers, choreographers, and directors.
3. That it’s claim that that Deep State wants to get rid of Trump collapses in the face of the fact that, during his reign, the Deep State has never had it so good ~ better even than under Obama, better even than under Cheney/Bush the Lesser, and Clinton. And better, even, than during the 16 years prior to Clinton, when the Deep State was open and overt in its command and control of the White House and Congress, and doing pretty well for itself, as well.
4. The most important thing QAnon and a lot of other people are totally confused about is exactly what this so-called “Deep State” actually, really is. According to Wikipedia:
“The deep state is a conspiracy theory which suggests that collusion and cronyism exist within the US political system and constitute a hidden government within the legitimately elected government. Author Mike Lofgren believes that there is “a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process”, or consider the deep state to encompass corruption prevalent among career politicians and civil servants.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States
Another way of stating that is that the Deep State is: the military-industrial complex, petro-financial web, techno-infotainment matrix, Guns n Drugs cartels, surveillance-secrecy-security-safety panopticon commanding, controlling, directing, choreographing, and scripting the 24-hour news and views cycle reality tv show that America in 2020 is, and has been, for quite some time.
And the glue that holds the whole thing together? America’s $ 1 = 1 Vote system of government and governance.
QAnon and any other believers in a Deep State plot to dump Trump need to ask themselves the following question: Given how and how much certain individuals, organizations, and institutions [government, corporate, civil, and cultural] have benefited and greatly increased either their Wealth or their Power and probably both during The Age of Trump, why in the world would the Deep State want to get rid of him? He’s the best thing to happen to and for the Deep State since at least the 2008 financial ¢risi$, if not 9/11.
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If not Memphis and Dallas. If not Pearl Harbor, the Lusitania, and the Maine. Among other notable turning and tipping points in American history.
You know something, Rational Lefty? i wonder if the best way to expose QAnon for what it actually is is to give it a chance to shout out its message out in Congress for more than just an isolated corner of Georgia to hear.
What finally got rid of McCarthy was exposing him to the American Public on live, black-and-white tv and over the radio.
And, where’s the so-called “Tea Party,” these days. Too much public exposure, perhaps?
My guess is that if Greene gets elected, she will be well broken-
in as to whatever role Da Boyz on The Hill might have in mind for her.
FR: “The Republicans have been there before, with the John Birch Society in the 1950’s. The Birchers believed in all kinds of conspiracies, but especially they took McCarthy’s fantasy … even Republicans started speaking out against them. That could happen again, and maybe the QAnon folks will be disavowed.”
It will be very interesting to see what happens should one or two of them get on the national stage, indeed. See my comment to Rational Lefty.
The most important thing that McCarthy, the Birchers, and the rest of the post-WWII American Far Right accomplished was to scare the hell out of enough of the American people enough to get them to give full support to “The Cold War,” and confronting, combating, defeating, and destroying global, monolithic, One World Communism hq’ed in Moscow; the folks who, just a couple of years ago, were with the Good Guys in “The Good War.”
And that Republican “purge” the Ult-Rightists in the 60s made way for the next step, a whole new product, launching it with Goldwater in 1964. And 56 years later, how far has the American Right progressed in amassing Power, as compared to the American Left?
So a case could be made, i suppose, for claiming that Joe McCarthy and The John Birch Society were Pathfinders for what has ended up ending us up with Trump. You continued:
“But things are a bit different now I think. Now news isn’t delivered through newspapers and a few broadcast networks so much as it is delivered through thousands of different channels, including the sketchier ends of the Internet. People can plug themselves into their favorite extreme point of view, go down the rabbit hole, and never come up. It’s made it easier to recruit people into these wacko beliefs, and harder to extract them out of that worldview once they’re in it.”
Very good points. i’m old enough to remember watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings on our family’s black-and-white tv, one of the very first in the neighborhood; there were only three channels, and all three of them were carrying the Hearings.
And yes, the Internet provides ready access to the “rabbit hole” by providing the Echo Chamber/News and Views Silos that show the way. That’s where the Information War is taking place, and will be either lost or won.
But that War obviously didn’t start when the Internet came to life. That’s what McCarthy, and the Birchers, and Goldwater, and all their Progeny were waging; and, given the present state of affairs of the relative Power of America’s “Right” versus America’s “Left,” i’d say they laid a pretty good foundation, wouldn’t You?
Why the GOP Can’t Control QAnon: The Party Was Already Becoming a Conspiracy Cult
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/15/why-the-gop-cant-control-qanon-the-party-was-already-becoming-a-conspiracy-cult/
At long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.
I (as others have) use the word “cult†here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q†who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration with top “Q†level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops†from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars†and “clocks.â€
The key catchphrases of the movement are typical of cultic in-groups with political overtones. “Trust the Plan.†“Patriots Are in Control.†“Where We Go One We Go All.†It provides a built-in community of fellow believers, and a chiliastic all-encompassing spiritual battle against both human and supernatural enemies. As with an adventist cult, Q followers are supposed to be essential team members laying the groundwork for the exposure of the “truthâ€: a giant global ring of child-eating Satanist pedophiles restricting access to free energy, debt jubilees and world peace. Central to all of this is the figure of Donald Trump, who will supposedly one day bring “the painâ€: the mass arrest and summary execution of all the cult’s enemies, ranging from standard right-wing targets like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. (The fact that President Trump, leader of the Executive Branch of the United States, has supposedly allowed this ring to exist unhampered for nearly four years while an anonymous 8chan user spreads the gospel is dismissed as a minor inconvenience.) All of it is overlaid on existing white supremacist and anti-semitic themes, as the enemy is supposed to be a “globalist†cabal using minorities to overwhelm majority-white Christian nations.
QAnon followers are also suffering the same sorts of social isolation and estrangement from family and friends that is typical of new cult members. QAnon leaders, for their part, offer a substitute family for them in replacement. As QAnon influencer Martin Geddes once tweeted before his account was suspended:
[“Part of the struggle of being “awake(ish)†is that many of your normal sources of support become flimsy or even can attack. Your preacher, teacher, therapist, mother, lover etc can be under the spell of false narratives or devious doctrines. Requires building a whole new network.â€]
This is not a political movement. It is a novel form of online religion enabled by social media algorithms. And it is deeply dangerous, not just because of its capacity for catapulting all sorts of misinformation but also because of its natural tendency toward political violence. After all, if you believed that such things were true and such people existed, what would you do to stop them?
One would think that the Republican Party would see the danger of this phenomenon and try to nip it in the bud, as surely as any political entity would try to quell a cult growing like a cancer within it. But it hasn’t. House GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has come under fire for not doing enough to stop QAnon within Republican circles and hewing too close to Trump, but he is unlikely to be seriously threatened for leadership. Trump himself refuses to try to squelch the conspiracy group, seeing any supporter as a good supporter.
The problem is that Republican Party has been relying on only slightly milder forms of conspiratorial politics for years now. It’s staggering to ponder the implications of modern Republican ideology all at once, but consider a few examples. To be a modern Republican you have to believe that thousands of climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to falsify data for grant money, while oil executives are victims trying to expose the truth. You have to believe that hundreds of thousands or even millions of people are engaged in coordinated voter impersonation fraud, abetted by hundreds of local elections officials in both blue and red areas, and no one has ever leaked it or been caught. You have to believe in a massively coordinated effort to take away guns not to protect children from being shot in schools and movie theaters, but to leave white people defenseless in a race war or implement a Stalinist state tyranny. You have to believe that social services are a racket to keep racial minorities voting for Democrats, rather than an attempt to mitigate the inequities of brutal capital markets in a society riddled with horrific structural racism. And so on.
These (among others) are truly bizarre beliefs, but they are preached from the Fox News pulpit 24-hours-a-day on America’s most-watched cable news network. They have become part of our daily political existence, such that we barely stop to remark anymore on just how outlandish and nonsensical they are when given a moment’s thought. It’s a deeply conspiratorial worldview that depends on its adherents remaining ensconced in a bubble of alternative misinformation.
So it’s not a huge logical leap from these conspiracy theories into even more fantastical QAnon territory. It’s not a big step, for instance, from ridiculously claiming that climate scientists are all lying for grant money–which lacks real credibility as a motive–to speculating that they’re lying for deeper, more nefarious ends. In some ways the Republican tropes actually gain more credibility the more villainous the opponents’ motives are claimed to be. If you’re going to claim that Democrats want to offer universal childcare as an evil scheme to gain power to do vague unspecified things, why not go all the way to claiming that they want to keep patriots subdued so they can harvest babies for adrenochrome? If you’re going to vilify your enemies with absurd claims and keep your followers in a tightly controlled information bubble, why stop at a partially enraptured cable news/AM radio audience? Why not go all the way?
This is why the GOP can’t control QAnon. Once the Republican Party handed over control of its messaging to cable news and radio hosts, and once it began to depend on an alternative universe of conspiracy theories promulgated on social media to prop itself up, it was only a matter of time before these things started to take on a life of their own.
Now we are all paying the price as this toxic cult threatens to infuse American politics with even more extremism, misinformation and violence. But it was the “mainstream†Republican Party and its allies that laid all the groundwork for it.
We need to kick all these loony ReThuglicans out of office!
The rest of us second that, Pragmatic.
This song perfectly expresses how I feel about all the stress going on due to Trump and his ReThuglican cronies.
Leia – The rest of us feel the same way.