They misspelled “disinformation”
Ha ha, I’m joking. QAnon sounds like the perfect bait to capture a subset of atheists — you know the ones, the same ones that got addicted to culty anti-feminism and regularly logged on to 4chan and regressive reddit message boards and spent a few years telling the world I was a tyrannical pussy-whipped cuck who was anti-free speech. You know the ones. They still pop up on YouTube and FaceBook in my comments.
I think the 4chan/8chan link is the real giveaway. The people there tend not to be your usual evangelical Christians and did preach a lot about anti-authoritarianism, but evolved into a significant groupthink mentality (amusing, since that’s what they accuse SJWs of) that has wider appeal, and has since absorbed evangelicals and New Agers without schism. 4chan/8chan has obviously had deep rifts — the founders are tearing at each other even now — but they spawned a remarkably stable loony cult.
It’s clear that QAnon is a creature of 8chan, birthed from the diseased mind of Jim Watkins, one of the founders of the chan group.
Unlike many cults—which rely on the charismatic appeal of the leader—QAnon works because of the leader’s anonymity. It allows followers to imagine Q as a perfect embodiment of their ideals, working deep inside the structures of government power.
In this framing, Q must conceal their identity and communicate through coded messages in order to continue operating in the upper echelons of the American government. If Q instead turned out to be a pig-farming smut peddler living in the Philippines…that might change things.
As it turns out, the founder of 8chan (since rebranded as 8kun)—where Q has posted those coded messages since abandoning 4chan in November of 2017—has been claiming to know the identity of Q for some time now. According to him, Q is in fact a pig farming smut peddler living in the Philippines—and also the current owner and operator of 8kun…
Ironically, QAnon, which got some life from its anti-pedophile #PizzaGate nonsense, is a product of a guy who distributes child- and Asian-fetish porn.
Since then Watkins has moved to the Philippines, got married, started a pig farm, founded a conspiratorial right-wing news outlet called The Goldwater (that also fetishized Asian women), hijacked the domain of 2channel, and took over 8chan—which has since been under scrutiny by the Philippines’ National Bureau of Investigation for allegedly enabling the distribution of child-abuse materials.
Why would a government informant working to expose a global pedophile ring choose to operate on a website that has itself been labeled as a pedophile ring?
It’s been enlightening to see godless 4chan evolve into godly, sanctimonious, delusional QAnon over time, and atheists should take it as a warning — you’re also susceptible to conspiracy-thinking.
I make a bold prediction: David Silverman is burrowing down into the muck, and when he finally openly adopts a religion, it will be Q.
Even more ironic, they tout Donald Trump, of all people, as their would-be champion. Same guy who used to walk into the dressing rooms of underage beauty contestants. Same guy who was besties with Jeffery Epstein. Same guy who wants to fuck his own daughter.
IMO, Qanon is a modern day cargo cult.
The cargo equivalent is not just owning the libs, but rounding the libs up, and sending them to concentration camps forever.
Back in 2016 BuzzFeed dropped a bomb with a credible (but unverified) report that Trump raped a 15 year old girl at an Epstein party. This is the first time I’d ever heard of Jeffery Epstein. Epstein is a man who was trafficking in under age prostitutes for decades and the only reason he isn’t in prison for it is because he’s dead. If there’s any presidential candidate associated with a long term pedophile ring it’s Donald Trump.
Not only has Trump done nothing to combat human trafficking, in his past he endorsed someone who was actually doing it. How the hell do then Qanon morons think this is their savior? Human trafficking is a real problem and the Qs are chasing ghosts instead of focusing on solving the problem.
There is a low but finite possibility that the massacres of Qanon may end up happening.
The first victims of German fascism were the opponents of the Nazis. Mostly commies and Social Democrats but also the occasional intelligensia and priest or other religious objectors.
The people who say, “It can’t happen here” have been wrong since end of 2016.
We already have children being kept in cages along out southern border. The ICE/Border Patrol is so callous and incompetent that the paperwork has been lost or never existed for most of those children.
It’s turning out that the US government has no idea who they are, where they came from, and who and where their parents are.
@4
Raven, I’m confused. Last I checked QAnon and LITERAL NAZIs are on the same side. Why would they be the ones massacred?
They wouldn’t.
The wording “massacres of Qanon” is supposed to mean the ones that they are desperately hoping will happen.
It is a cargo cult and their cargo is death.
Not the best wording but you know what I mean.
I think it possible that Trump’s “October surprise” may be the issuing of indictments for child sexual abuse against Biden, the Obamas, the Clintons, etc. Barr is obviously willing to do anything his master orders, so what’s to stop him?
Strange that I read into “massacres of QAnon” the purging of the SA (Sturmabteilung) in the Night of the Long Knives. Why wouldn’t the contemporary far right eat its own if a possible threat or no longer useful?
Who is ready for a good laugh?
Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
Why would anti pedo qanon choose trump as their savior? Because its about “ethics in gaming journalism”. By that I mean they dont actually care about saving children. Its a hate mob and the pretense of caring about a real subject is the excuse.
It makes perfect sense once you realize they don’t give a damn about people preying on children. They want to kill the people they hate, period, and accusing them of being cannibalistic Satanic child rapists is just their clumsy way of trying to make mass murder seem more palatable to the general public.
It’s blood libel.
I know people who are into this kind of garbage, or for whom this kind of “OMG pedos!” garbage seems to be tailor-made. They’re usually child abusers of the “I hit and terrorize my kids because I love them variety,” if not necessarily child rapists. So not only is it blood libel it is, to some degree, projection.
Honestly, as someone who was raped at age three by a good, Christian, pillar-of-the-community type, and who was beaten and terrorized by their good, Christian parents until their twenties, my reaction to these QAnon “believers” is… you know, I probably shouldn’t finish that thought. Let’s just say it involves work boots and leave it at that.
I think the word you want here is “Naturally” or “Unsurprisingly.”
To me, QAnon seems kind of like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the internet age.
@vucodlak — Does it involve leaving a “gift” in their work shoes? If so, I’d be happy to contribute…
WMDKitty, nope; it involves steel-capped boots and a change of momentum.
@John Morales — That’ll do, too.
I’ve always thought QAnon is a joke that got out of hand, a sort of explosive failure of Poe’s Law — which is compatible with the whole *chan connection. The fact that “Q” is anonymous would make it possible for either there to be more than one person making it all up (which would help explain why some of it is apparently self-contradictory) or for the person who started it to have backed out and been replaced with somebody far more cynical. The only thing about which we can be sure: in some way, Q must be making a fortune off of all of this.
The Vicar@17,
You evidently haven’t noticed that a common tactic of the far right is to post things which can be disavowed as “jokes” or “satire” if the reaction is unfavourable, or pushed further and further if it’s favourable, among their desired audience. The ambiguity over whether something is a “joke” can be maintained for long periods, There’s no reason at all to think that Qanon “got out of hand”, or that the person who started it has “backed out”; it’s been wildly successful, and as PZ says, there’s good reason to think that its originator is Jim Watkins, and that he’s still the person posting the messages.
Frustratingly, I doubt in our lifetime that the press, their complementary pundits cum opinion writers, contemporary philosophers, and historians of the recent past will ever acknowledge, in ruthless, honest, and irrepressible fashion, that these people were deserving marks of a confirmation bias-satisfying hoax. Even when the “mysteries” are solved (the grifter has a fellow traveler identity, what he was selling were emphatically and unequivocally lies subject to confirmation basis and which, once a political party moved to openly embrace and regurgitate and in some cases sanitize them or exploit the power to “investigate” critics of them had to be grandfathered into their larger grievance-based origin story), they will never be, at least for a while, honestly reckoned with as artifacts of outright state- and ruling party-propaganda.
There will only be astroturf, equivocating, and veiled or no apologia. Some say some said. Passive construction. Boy, it looks like everyone, undifferentiated, is equally to blame here! But, also, are we not bowing to the mob by agreeing on the facts too soon, instead of arbitrarily seeking out different interpretations for the sake of balance? These and other JAQ-off questions are all that’s in store for us. Just look at 2016 revisionism already, applying questionable “data” to a result in order to overcomplicate the cause. We all know the US is no representative democracy.
The legacy and/or quasi-respectable journo line will be, for the next third or half century:
No One Can Ever Really Know, followed by
The Culprits Calling This a Persecution Make Some Good and Salient Points, followed by
Okay, This Was Satire (that pwned the libs)/Some Kind of Clever Dick Kidding on the Square exercise followed by
This Is No Different From the Liberal Playbook/Both Sides, followed by
They Made Me Do It, followed by
lol Who Cares? Triggered much?, eventually landing upon
No Real Cletus of the Heartland Cares About Your Coastal Elitist Hair-Splitting [because we helped the saboteurs to teach them not to and deprive them of something other than journalistic malpractice, water-carrying, and anti-critical thinking civics] / Resisting Q is Bougie
There are no adults piloting this craft. There is a narrative of sorts to be told, but the form of narrative will invariably corrupt the truth when the genre of longform pop political analysis is suspense fiction and the mode contrarian. A true reckoning is a long way off when it’s easier just to practice Murc’s Law, where reactionary conservatives and bigots are allotted the full share of not just responsibility but full and total plausible deniability for their chaotic nihilism. Every extremist view, so long as it emanates from the right, will be given by Our Liberal Media disproportionate and uncommonly generous fair hearing and be marketed, as necessary, into galaxy brained “strategy” or good faith failure; hecklers are betraying America and… what’s this? Smoke and clouds are gathering ‘round a lib? Whatever will these neolib socialists get up to next? To the Baquetmobile, post-haste!
None of the “right wing” groups screaming about trafficking, and trafficking children, give a damn either. It was figured out pretty damn quick “after” a few recent federal level laws where passed that a) they where cobbling together statistics from abuse in foster homes with actual trafficking, to inflate their numbers, and b) pointed out that one of the people actually talking to congress about their own child being “found on a website”, that if the website hadn’t existed the cops would have never found her at all, and that the attacks on such sites had almost nothing to do with attacking “trafficking”, but attacking sex work in general. That’s what its all been about. Every sex worker there is has said that a) they hate the idea of kids being one the street, and trafficked, and b) they can’t report it, if they see it, lest their own lives get turned to shit by the authorities, but that c) if those authorities ever actually worked with them they could help end it. So.. what do the authorities do? Attack sex work in general, while inflating numbers, and lying about what, where, and what kinds, of problems exist, because they, really, don’t give a F about the kids, just the “sex”. Or, so it would seem, based on their attitude, what sort of laws they push, and their unwillingness to recognize when those laws actually make the situation “worse”.
Or, and hilariously – some clown at work, who is no doubt listening to qanon, actually had the gall to say a few days back that, “Trump has done a lot of stop trafficking!” Sigh…
There’s probably some very interesting work to be done on the 4chan phenomenon in general and Q in particular. The early internet was characterised by a belief in absolute equality, that if everyone’s voice was equally loud something something freedom and democracy. It has been said before that the actual result of such systems is that my ignorance is equivalent to your expertise.
I think there’s a more general analysis though, which is that what a lot of the freeze peach people are really concerned with is social cachet. In most communities every act of speech carries with it implicit weight due to the social position of the person speaking. What the anonymous message boards do is remove that element of speech, roughly equalising every poster so that any single message has no more significance, socially, than any other. Consider then, someone who in their daily lives has so little social significance that when they say something nobody listens or cares. Then they find a message board where every voice is equal and other posters will respond to them, even more so if they post provocatively. The final step is for them to graduate from these message boards back into the wider world where they find that even though they are one of the lords of 4chan, still nobody listens to them or cares what they say because they are still socially irrelevant. They have spent years inculcating the belief that their words deserve a response, and when they don’t get it, the feeling is one of literally being silenced. So they cry freeze peach.
There was a time when I would have considered the anonymity and equality of internet message boards to be a wonderful thing, allowing all the old tyrannies of class, race and gender to fall away leaving the words themselves shorn of anything but their content. It turns out, after this glorious experiment has been run, that when you remove social context and significance what remains and flourishes is whatever tickles the most reflexive, primal responses of the human mind. That, I think, is why Q persists so effectively. It is a mind virus, grown in a perfect environment, where its effect can’t be tempered by the usual forces that maintain social cohesion. Forced to compete viciously for attention, the memes have become weaponised.
Given Bill’s relationship with Epstein, this isn’t as far-fetched as it seems.
Making money off the gullible is perhaps the oldest business model in America, and the World Wide Web makes it more successful today than ever.
@KG, #18:
I dunno. Given the whole “Pied Piper Candidates” thing, I think there are a lot of people under the Democratic leadership who vastly underestimated how much the right wing has an irrational hatred of “the libs” and will go along with absolutely anything as long as it makes Democrats uncomfortable. I can easily imagine some former Clinton operative thinking it would be really clever to make up a bunch of amazingly blatant lies, hoping to catch some suckers and play it up into a national “look how stupid Republicans are” news story, discovering that whoops no this has now become A Thing and is causing serious harm, and backing away from it, and then somebody malicious realizing what an opportunity there was in taking up the identity of Q themselves.
But remember: the only strategy which Democrats are willing to follow is to try to peel off Republican voters. Because it’s just so likely that people who believe QAnon and will literally deny the evidence of their own eyes to keep going with it just to piss off Democrats can be convinced to vote for a Democrat. Moving left to attract actual sane people, well, there’s no money in it — at best, it goes in the platform, which the Democrats supporting Biden said outright in 2012 was a bunch of lies that only a naive fool would believe, and which therefore has even less credibility than it would anyway with a liar like Biden as the candidate.
@The Vicar
When I first started to combat the purity politics bullshit from the left it was largley triggered by the fact that you turn any and every thread regardless of topic into a bullshit rant about democrats. Just like your doing now.
For fucks sake this thread is about conspiracy theories and child trafficking.