Conspiracy of the day
Out of context: Reply #965
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- Bennn0
Translated from french]
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It is impossible to fully explain what happened on Wednesday on the United States Capitol without going through the QAnon conspiracy.Certainly, the people who assaulted the building with the aim of stopping the confirmation of the election of Joe Biden as American president do not all necessarily belong to the movement. Outgoing President Donald Trump certainly encouraged his supporters to "walk on Capitol Hill" in a speech where he said he was never going to concede victory and that he intended to keep fighting. QAnon is not the only element in play. The presence of people carrying a secessionist flag or a neo-Nazi t-shirt is not trivial.
However, for those like me who have watched this move for just over three years now, there is a feeling that this is the inevitable culmination of the QAnon galley. From a logical continuation. Sooner or later, we would come to this.
It's easy to stop at the QAnon show and laugh at it without really trying to really understand it and grasp the risk it entails. Seen from the outside, the movement is a circus.
Some supporters believe that John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the assassinated president of the same name, is still alive and working secretly for Trump. Others believe North Korea is in fact controlled by the CIA, thanks to Trump's interventions. QAnon's basic belief - that an American secret agent borrowing the moniker “Q” would post cryptic messages on an obscure forum once dedicated to Japanese pornography and cartoons to impart information of capital importance - is of a ridiculous absurdity for anyone with the slightest knowledge of web culture.
Since the November 3 election, QAnon fanatics have claimed that US Special Forces raided Germany to obtain machines that were supposedly used to rig the vote in favor of Joe Biden.
This week, the story had changed: Computers in Germany had simply served as a transit point between vote-counting machines in some key states and those seeking to alter the outcome of the ballot. It was, of course, the British secret services, which had obtained this data using Italian military satellites.
And so on.
QAnon is a bottomless pit. The movement is constantly changing and it is next to impossible to be aware of everything that its supporters, who now number in the millions, are saying. In return, it is not necessary to follow the latest developments of this sordid soap live to understand that what happened Wednesday is part of QAnon. His supporters are not subtle and they do not hide. You just have to listen to them to know exactly what they want.
If QAnon had a constitution, the first article would be that Donald Trump must rule in the United States - and elsewhere - and forcefully put everything in its place. It has to go through a purge of unwanted elements - politicians, officials, journalists; to hell with democracy, the rule of law, political standards or any form of compassion for all those who are not sympathetic to his power. What QAnon wants is a violent coup. That's all. The rest is frills.
This is not my opinion or an extrapolation on my part. This central foundation of the movement is at the very heart of QAnon's holy literature. Q's very first post, published on October 28, 2017, promised that former Donald Trump opponent Hillary Clinton would be arrested shortly. His second post - where he says Trump had already started cleaning up - couldn't be more explicit: "Whoever controls the presidency controls this beautiful country," he wrote. The US Constitution would tell us otherwise, but hey. QAnon has been an explicitly authoritarian and implicitly fascist movement since its founding.
As the QAnon mythology developed, with its forks into satanic cannibalism and horoscopic interpretations of misspellings in Trump's Tweets, this central point has never been lost sight of. Worse, he was exacerbated by the election result, proof, according to his followers, that the "deep state" must be even more fiercely opposed.
One of QAnon's countless pitfalls is viewing the movement as a web beast, a sordid pastime for the lost souls of social media. It may once have been the case. It is no longer. Wednesday's assault bears the indelible imprint of this movement.
Among the very first to enter the Capitol were people wearing "Q" t-shirts. The woman shot yesterday while participating in the storming of the building had clearly displayed her membership of the movement on Twitter. One of the most prominent figures of yesterday's events, a shirtless, make-up man wearing a helmet with Viking horns was actually Jake Angeli, aka "Q Shaman", a well-known QAnon preacher.
While some Republican politicians and supporters may well condemn these agitators and call them baselessly anti-Trump activists in disguise, the party itself is plagued by this conspiracy. Openly QAnon Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Green now sits in the House of Representatives. The party's body in Texas borrowed a slogan in August - "we are the storm", we are the storm - straight out of "Q" messages. Since the election, we can no longer count the politicians of this party who have brandished "evidence" of electoral fraud from the bottom of the web where QAnon faithful are rampant.
Inspired by social networks, the ideas of this movement travel. It is no longer necessary to be part of QAnon to propagate messages that come from it. The president himself, in an appeal to Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State for Georgia, where he asked the latter to "find" him votes to overturn the outcome of the election, repeated conspiracies "circulating in the Internet "and which were created from scratch by followers. Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood was posting stories associated with QAnon on his Twitter account until the social network suspended him late Wednesday night.
He is far from the only one. QAnon is now a main vector of political disinformation of all kinds. His ideas are circulating on pro-Trump media airwaves and in politicians' social media accounts.
The prophet at the center of the movement, "Q", has not posted a post since December 8. But Ron Watkins, former administrator of the forum where these messages were broadcast and son of its owner, Jim Watkins, has now established himself as a central figure in the movement. Some observers believe Mr. Watkins and his father have been controlling "Q" 's account for some time, which they deny. Regardless, Ron Watkins has indeed taken his place. He is cited as a "computer expert" by pro-Trump media outlets and posts messages on Twitter that curiously resemble "Q" statements.
In a tweet published a few hours before the assault, Mr. Watkins promised to unveil "a bomb" that would shock the planet. It was actually an article by Neon Revolt, a popular influencer in the QAnon sphere, who claimed, among other things, that Vice President Mike Pence was part of a plot to coup against the President. Trump.
The article concluded: “I call for the immediate arrest for treason of Michael Richard Pence, 48th Vice President of the United States. Patriots, you are all in Washington DC today for a reason. that it matters. "
Hours later, as Q Shaman stood behind the Senate podium leading an enraged crowd, New York Post reporter Steven Nelson took a snapshot of the scene.
- https://www.vice.com…Bluejam
- ^ One of QAnon’s Biggest Influencers Is a Failed Hollywood ScreenwriterBluejam
- lol you were ahead of the game on this Bennn...I wonder how many of the people who attacked the Capitol were QAnon.yuekit
- Recently I try to explain this Q thing to some of my friends in Asia who aren't that familiar with USA politics. They were like "wait what???" hahayuekit