Time is rapidly running out for Q and QAnon and Trump

I am curious as to what is going to happen to the QAnon movement now. As readers know, these are people who think that there is someone at the top levels of government with high-level security clearance (possibly Donald Trump himself) who uses the pseudonym Q to drop hints as to what is going on behind the scenes. As a result, QAnon followers believe that the top echelons of the Democratic party consist of pedophiles, sex-traffickers, and even those who eat children and that Trump has a plan to flush out and arrest them in a spectacular denouement. They have been eagerly waiting for this moment. And waiting. And waiting. But like Godot (or perhaps more appropriately, Guffman), Q has so far not revealed themselves and the prediction have so far failed to materialize.
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The “surreal goddamn nightmare” lives of QAnon followers’ loved ones

One sure-fire way to see if something is a cult is what happens within their families and friends. If they are so devoted to a group that they cut themselves off from everyone who does not share their beliefs, then they very likely belong to a cult. The responses to a survey of people who used to have relationships with those they knew who became QAnon devotees shows all the signs that it is a cult. One of them said that the best way to sum up the situation is as a “surreal goddamn nightmare.”
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A victory for a Republican QAnon devotee

While on the Democratic side we have seen a steady increase in the numbers and popularity of candidates with progressive views, it is the opposite on the Republican side, with candidates with extreme right wing views doing well. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Georgia where a follower of the conspiracy cult QAnon who has in addition made racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic comments, has won the Republican nomination for a congressional seat. Given that district’s strong Republican leanings, she will very likely win the November election and be in Congress starting next year. (Watch out, Louie Gohmert! You are in danger of losing your title for being the stupidest member of Congress.)
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The weird QAnon cult

I have long been fascinated by the sociology of cults, the psychology of cult members, and the conspiratorial thinking that afflicts them. I think my interest is because I was a religious believer well into adulthood and now I find myself wondering how I could have believed for so long in things that I now feel are patently nonsense. One factor is that I was born into a religious family and when growing up one tends to unthinkingly absorb the influences of one’s immediate surroundings. Though I grew up in a liberal Christian tradition that did not require me to believe in the more outlandish things that fundamentalist, evangelical, and biblical literalist Christians do, even the most stripped down versions of Christianity require believing in some pretty wild things. So to some extent, I shared similarities with cult members.
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The tightly knit but strangely solitary world of QAnon cult members

Sometime ago, I wrote about the mercurial rise within about a year of the QAnon phenomenon, one of the more bizarre political developments of the internet age, that says that Donald Trump is a genius who is cleverly drawing his enemies out into the open before he and his allies in the military suddenly swoop and arrest all of them. The evildoers include “the global banking elite, death squads operating on orders from Hillary Clinton, deep-state intelligence operatives, and Pizzagate-style pedophile rings.”
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The billionaires, tech bros, and intellectual enablers of Epstein

One of the popular conspiracies of the right such as by QAnon is that the world is run by a secretive cabal of elites, a subset of whom traffic in girls and young women. What the Epstein files reveal is that while not on such a grand scale, there does seem to have been a cabal consisting of billionaires, tech bros, and intellectuals, almost all of whom are men, who used their dominance in the public sphere to propagate eugenics and master-race science. I want to highlight a link that commenter Dunc provided to an article by Virginia Heffernan titled “The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science”. The article is well worth reading in full and names names.

Heffernan used to have John Brockman, literary agent to many major writers, as her own agent and for a while he included her in the mailing list for a group known as Edge that comprised these people and this gave her an insight into this group. She describes what she discovered.

It’s alarming to see your name in the Epstein files, but I was braced to see mine. Years ago, I was part of a salon for intellectuals and pseudointellectuals called Edge founded by John Brockman. His mass emails evidently copied in Epstein and a dozen such email blasts made their way to the latest dump of hazmat. 

Brockman, my former agent for tech writing, told me Edge was an intellectual salon. Edge.org is indeed intriguingly sprawling, jammed with scholarly idols whose bios have “Booker” and “Nobel” in them. Members of Edge participated in conferences and symposia, and promoted each other’s work. Who was I to say no? Among Edge’s prodigious ranks were Ian McEwan, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman.

But if I’d read the member list more closely, I might have hesitated. Edge was overwhelmingly male, for one. It was said to be an intellectual salon, but in the club photos were tech bro billionaires, including Edge members Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Larry Page. And too many members were men now largely renowned for misconduct, professional or personal: Marc D Hauser, Jonah Lehrer, Lawrence Krauss, and Marvin Minsky. 

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about meeting these people. Brockman kept me at a distance. As the latest Epstein files reveal, the token female members of Edge were actively excluded from schmoozing and conferences, especially the glittering events known as the Billionaires’ Dinners. 

Good policy. Otherwise, we might have struck up conversations with the anxious-looking teenage girls kept out of the photos. We might have overheard the Edge men praising race science, rape culture and genetic engineering. We might even have asked where the money came from. Then we would have come face to face with the illiterate child rapist and passionate eugenicist who bankrolled the whole thing. Jeffrey Epstein.

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False stories in the aftermath of tragedy

Whenever there is a natural disaster that takes many lives, there is a tendency for people to seize upon conspiratorial thinking as to the cause or on stories of miraculous survival or rescue.

In the case of the recent flash floods in Texas that has resulted in over 100 deaths and over a 150 people still missing, we see the conspiratorial minded come out in full force. I am not talking about the more serious discussions as to whether the cuts by Trump in funding the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) resulted in less efficient weather forecasting and early warnings (and he is proposing further $2.2 billion in cuts to NOAA), but about stories that the floods were the result of the government efforts to manipulate the weather.

Some people, emerging from the same vectors associated with the longstanding QAnon conspiracy theory, which essentially holds that a shadowy “deep state” is acting against President Donald Trump, spread on X that the devastating weather was being controlled by the government.

“I NEED SOMEONE TO LOOK INTO WHO WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS,” posted Pete Chambers, a former special forces commander and frequent fixture on the far right who once organized an armed convoy to the Texas border, along with documents he claimed to show government weather operations. “WHEN WAS THE LAST CLOUD SEEDING?”
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Would-be ‘Pizzagate’ avenger shot dead by police

One of the more bizarre episodes of the lunatic QAnon conspiracies was the widely circulated ‘Pizzagate’ story of how the basement of a Washington DC pizzeria known as Comet Ping Pong was the location where prominent Democratic politicians indulged in sex with minors, and where their orders for pizza were in code where the toppings represented the kind of victim they sought.

One man Edgar Maddison Welch believed the story and felt that it was his duty to stop this crime and so in 2016 he heavily armed himself with an AR-15 and other guns and drove about 350 miles from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina to stop it. Along the way, he made a recording to his family explaining what he planned to do and telling them that he would likely end up dead. Fortunately, things did not end badly, at least on that day. Arriving at the pizzeria, he searched the place after the terrified customers had fled and found that there was no basement and no nefarious activities going on and decided that he had been misled about the whole thing and surrendered himself. (You can read the more lurid details in my post from back in 2016.)

But last weekend, Welch was killed by police at a traffic stop in North Carolina.
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The psychology of conspiracy theory believers

Conspiracy theories, by which I mean beliefs that lack any solid evidentiary foundation but are believed by a surprisingly large number of people who sustain them by postulating elaborate explanations that involve powerful people and organizations colluding to hide what they believe is ‘the truth’, have been around for a long time. The internet has enabled much greater awareness of such beliefs, in addition to allowing them to flourish.

Naturally, this has provoked curiosity about the phenomenon, such as what makes a particular theory catch hold of the imagination of some people, what kinds of people are drawn to them, what kind of dangers they pose, and how they might best be combated.

Not all conspiracy theories are pernicious and need to be countered. Some are mostly harmless and can be ignored. The belief that the moon landing was faked, for example, does not do much harm. Neither does the belief that the Earth is flat. The belief that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job also seems largely innocuous. This is because the people who are thought to. be engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth are not clearly identifiable or are so big (‘the government’ or ‘the deep state’) that particular individuals and communities are not placed at risk.
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