It’s an old evil that keeps reappearing over and over again: blood libel, anti-semitism, witch hunts (the real ones, not the fevered persecution fantasies of terrible people), the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, government sponsored genocide, the McMartin preschool moral panic, satanic ritual abuse, and now…QAnon. They’re all the same. Talia Levin chronicles them all, and adds another organization to the ranks: The Republican party.
For now, QAnon remains in a curious position with regard to the formal party apparatus of the GOP. While QAnon adherents have been warmly lauded by the president—“I’ve heard that these are people who love our country,” he said—other elected Republicans have proceeded with more caution. The past few years have proved that there is an enormous amount the Republican Party is willing to absorb; cryptic clocks, coded messages, and the sating of Democratic appetites on child-flesh seem as yet just out of the bounds of propriety.
Nonetheless, the increasing popularity of the theory among the Republican base—which has exploded following the mixed and often conspiratorial messages proffered by the party during the Covid-19 pandemic—has meant that QAnon is no longer relegated to the fringes. The researcher Alex Kaplan, at Media Matters for America, has kept track of no less than 81 candidates for Congress in the 2020 cycle who have “endorsed or given credence to the conspiracy theory or promoted QAnon content.” Twenty-four of those candidates have made it to the November ballot, by winning their primaries or fulfilling other requirements. (Kaplan has identified an additional 21 current or former candidates for state legislatures affiliated with QAnon.) A number seem poised to win their contests, ensuring a QAnon-believer presence amid the ranks of the political elite next year. One wonders how closely they will monitor their colleagues’ veins for signs that they are pulsing with adrenochrome, extracted from the pituitary glands of tortured children, and how such discoveries will affect bonhomie in the cloakroom.
The McMartin story is illustrative and familiar. I remember the insanity that gripped so many people over that one: there were secret tunnels under the preschool! Children were dragged down there and forced to participate in satanic and sexual rites! Babies were being horribly murdered as part of evil rituals! Of course, there were no tunnels — authorities actually dug up the grounds to search for them — and there was no evidence of tortured, abused children, or of any of the outlandish acts anyone was accused of. Yet lives were ruined and people were jailed and spent years in court, all over this unbelievable nonsense.
Now QAnon is up to the same tricks with claims of tunnels under pizza parlors and Democrats indulging in child trafficking so they can steal the blood of innocents. When will we learn that none of this is happening and these are lies peddled by fearmongers?
And I wonder how many people STILL believe that the lies about the McMartin school were true.
BTW: Fred Clark at Slacktivist has been on top of this:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2020/09/22/there-is-nothing-new-under-the-sun-2/
It is interesting how those same old, same old fears and beliefs inevitably come back over the centuries. And that, they always seem to work.
There’s an 1841 book called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” (mighty catchy title, BTW) that’s perfect for 2020. I’ll have to get it out.
In my quest to know what the fascists are up to without having to deal with their bullshit directly, I’ve been listening to a few podcasts that keep track of the Right and analyze their activity. One of these is QAnon Anonymous (QAA), which chronicles and decodes the QAnon “movement” and other complementary manifestations of the American Far Right.
One of the trends that QAAis following is how QAnon is starting to infect the Left, seeping into the “Wellness, ” alt-med, and anti-vaxx circles where the New Agers insect with the Far Right on the Venn Diagram of Crazy. I’ve heard self-professed “hippies” who claim they supported Bernie Sanders, environmentalism, or the Green Party only a few months earlier becoming avid Trump-supporting, authoritarian, anti-socialists after getting “red-pilled” when QAnon propaganda on social media sites they tend to trust.
Another avenue QAnon is using to spread is under the facade of being an anti-sex trafficking movement. QAnon influencers try to couch their rhetoric around efforts to “Save The Children” from sexual slavery, and their demonstrations are reported by the lazy local media as such without digging much deeper. It’s only when you start talking to the demonstrators and ask them what they believe do they start to get into “The Cabal,” “The Storm” and how HRC is draining the blood of raped children to get their adrenochrome.
Out of curiosity I looked up adrenochrome, a derivative of adrenaline which according to Qanon is supposed to be the elixir of eternal life One German chemical company will sell you 25 mg for about $200. Aside from extracting it from living babies being totally illegal and morally horrific, getting the chemical that way would seem to be far too difficult and expensive.
“Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”
Heh, speaking of extraordinary delusions, there are some brilliant, well-educated people who maintain that free markets are rational. What’s worse, they set policy for much of the world. My theory is that a lethal mix of unquestioned assumptions from religion and social Darwinism underlies much of such phenomena.
Cthulhu, their lies aren’t even very good.
I laugh whenever I see the word, adrenochrome.
.1. Want some adrenochrome?
You can buy it online.
One source is Santa Cruz Biotechnology
ORDERING INFORMATION
PRODUCT NAME CATALOG # UNIT PRICE QTY FAVORITES
Adrenochrome, 25 mg sc-206029 25 mg $55.00
0
ADD TO CART
Adrenochrome, 250 mg sc-206029A 250 mg $335.00
0
ADD TO CART
Description
Technical Information
Safety Information
SDS & Certificate of Analysis
Adrenochrome is an oxidation product of adrenaline (ephinephrine, norepinephrine). It inhibits COMT (Catechol-O-methyltransferase), promotes the synthesis of prostaglandins in brain tissue in vitro, promotes the secretion of nerve growth factor by L-M ce.
Yeah, I’m not surprised that certain inroads are being made to the Left. One ofthe things I’ve observed is that once a person gives in to any type of delusion, it is really easy to slip other types of delusions into their worldview. One form of delusion being used as a vector to introduce others, especially if they are closely aligned in some way.
People really have to remain vigilant and question the things they are told about the rest of the world, but that’s just way too hard for some people, so that once you get caught up in it, it really does become a kind of rabbit-hole.
@6 “adrenochrome.” Isn’t that a make of 35mm colour film .
.2. FWIW, adrenochrome has no known CNS drug effects.
There are a few old reports that it is psychoactive but these reports were never followed up on or repeated.
It’s not a scheduled drug by the DEA , which tells you a lot right there.
There is also no black market which tells you even more.
.3. I’ve got some adrenochrome at home in a drawer.
It’s an aged oxidation product of epinephrine.
My old bee kit anti-anaphylaxis epinephrine injector has turned color due to the epinephrine oxidizing to…adrenochrome.
It’s not a big deal and who cares.
There are, in fact, tunnels under the white house and the capitol. They even have a train under there,
to bring fresh corpses for Mitch and Jared to lay eggs in.Just an observation, but I occasionally run into people, of all kinds, who don’t have a consistent view of the world. It’s as though they gather together sound bites scavenged from thither and yon and paste them into a kind of random collage in order to decorate their interior head space.
@ 4
Ah, but that’s the “fake” adrenochrome that The Cabal puts out to draw attention away from the REAL substance! Why are you regurgitating the Lamestream Mockingbird Media’s lies? ARE YOU IN ON IT??? HOW MANY CHILDREN DO YOU HAVE CHAINED UP IN YOUR BASEMENT, YOU DEMON?????
;)
@ 8
I don’t know, my momma took it away.
Why would anyone want adrenochrome when there are heaps of perfectly good meth around?
[I think the whole adrenochrome thing is projection by a bunch of kidporn and meth obssessed 4channers]
Oh dear, Hunter S. Thompson may be partly to blame for the nonsense about adrenochrome;
Heightened levels of adrenochrome have been shown to induce schizophrenic behavior. What use of this chemical are they implying?
@garnetstar, # 2: You’d find the book “Satan’s Silence” interesting, also infuriating. It’s about the Fell’s Acre Day Care case, and how all the really fantastic claims of tunnels and Satanism were kept from the jury.
No.
There are a few old reports that this happened.
It was part of an old theory about the causes of schizophrenia.
These old reports have never been followed up on or repeated.
It’s basically a myth these days.
More current reports indicate that adrenochrome doesn’t get you high or have any notable CNS effects.
As I pointed out earlier, adrenochrome isn’t illegal and there isn’t any black market.
I’m sure you would get more of a buzz from a double espresso or a few beers.
@ Raven, # 18: Thanks for the update. They were teaching that as fact when I was in college.
The much larger danger is that victims of the type of abuse that I both experienced and witnessed when I was in the public school system (in the 1970s) will not come forward. MInd you, I can believe that many of these “QAnon” nutjobs were likely engaged in this type of abuse themselves; thus, their fascination with it.
Not since 2011 in Wichita.
I remember an incident during the horror show that was the McMartin case. I was at my parents’ home when a news program did a segment on the ongoing trial. One of the defendants (McMartin’s grandson, who was held in jail for five years without ever being convicted of anything) was shown on camera while a reporter did a voice-over. My father looked at the defendant and proclaimed to all of us, “You can tell he’s guilty just by looking at him.” He was supremely confident about his pronouncement, and supremely wrong. Too many people are too certain about things.
Speaking of pathogens…
OT -I am sorry to derail, but “The Atlantic” Sept 30 has an article that explains the paradoxical spread of Sars-cov-2 virus; very briefly the variable ‘k’ is much more important than ‘r’.
And now back to the thread…
anthonybarcellos@21, too true. Too many people certain about things.
And, again, an illustration from the horrible McMartin case: a surgeon testified about interviewing a child or children who said that a dead horse’s belly had been cut open (in downtown LA, BTW, I guess no one noticed the horse carcass), and that they, the children, had been put into the belly. By the McMartin daycare workers.
The surgeon said “I was convinced by the truth of the story by what the children described: the bulging of the guts when an incision is made, the smell. How could a child learn that, if it didn’t happen?” He clung to this idea even after it was pointed out to him that it did happen (bulging guts, smell, inside a dead horse, and all), but not in LA. In a scene from The Empire Strikes Back, which a child would remember.
Presumably that has nothing to do with that “parabiosis” thing
that billionaire Christian and Tolkien enthusiast Peter Thiel
is allegedly into, right? ;->
Billionaire Vampire Wants Your Blood
SourceFed
Aug 2, 2016
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/14/no-peter-thiel-is-not-harvesting-the-blood-of-the-young/
No, Peter Thiel is not harvesting the blood of the young
by Sarah Buhr
June 14, 2017
Thiel’s “Palantir” was in the paper today. I never realized before that
not only is the company name right out of Tolkien (which must have given
the late Christopher Tolkien the fantods), but the logo is —
a palantir!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/technology/palantir-stock-initial-public-offering.html
Palantir Shares Go Up in Wall Street Debut
By Cade Metz and Erin Griffith
Sept. 30, 2020
Anybody remember the 80’s sci-fi novel by “James Tiptree, Jr.” that
had as a plot element a phenomenally potent and phenomenally expensive
(and phenomenally illegal, but that never stopped an oligarch)
drug with the poetic name “Stars’ Tears”, that could only be produced
by torturing members of a beautiful alien race?
http://english.netmassimo.com/2013/06/03/brightness-falls-from-the-air-by-james-tiptree-jr/
Yeah, I remember it.
Her stories aren’t known for their happy endings.
Child trafficking is happening .it’s carried out by soulless sociopaths who’ll do anything to satisfy their greed and lust. A perfect description of today’s Republicans.
@26 Yep, and it makes, as always, a great excuse for a) hiding one’s own terrible secrets and fetishes, while hoping not to get caught, while b) using “think of the children”, to pass legislation based on inflated numbers, lies, and misdirection, so as to also “save souls”, by targeting the people that, if the cops and the courts where not always out to get them, don’t want child trafficking either, and would work “with” the authorities to stop it. Its like if they made selling Aspirin illegal, then spent all their time trying to arrest people selling willow bark tea, while claiming they where secretly either lacing it with cocaine, or working for the people who manufacture meth, and the only way to “stop” the bad drugs is to keep hassling the hippies selling tea, while failing to actually find any of the people making the meth (and partly due to the fact that they might even, as you imagine, know, or suspect, some people in their area of doing that stuff, but they literally can’t afford to stick their tea selling necks out, even to report a meth lab, lest they get arrested along with the meth sellers.
This is the level of stupidity involved, and so, so, so, much of it is driven by this delusional purity idea, in which the victims of their pursuit of their holy grail don’t count, and neither does their failure to find the damn cup, because its the holy pursuit of it that matters, and everyone else is a sinner anyway, so all equally guilty (unless they can pray to Jesus, while donating $1,000 every time the charity plate passes, because then.. well, you are absolved, and the fact that you secretly do all the things you are against is just “proof” that the crusade is necessary – after all, if you, who are so holy, can fall for such terrible sins, then imagine what the “lesser” people are getting up to, and not paying, err.. praying, hard enough to get saved from!!!)
I could have sworn I saw QAnon signs being held by Trumpists protesting the removal of Confederate monuments. Qanon is against child trafficking & rape, yet they march to defend the statues of people who fought for child trafficking & rape. I am disappoint.