QAnon Conspriacy theory

Underway

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Colin P said:
The difference is that GOP voters know there is a divide between the Dem and the GOP voters and how they see America. The GOP voters worry how far the dems will go down the socialist path and want to rein them in. The Dem voters appear to believe that there is no other path to follow other than their own, any other opinions are invalid.

You could literally change the Dem and GOP words around in that paragraph and not be incorrect in the least (but you need to replace socialist with fascist/neoliberalism or equivalently loaded antonym).  I'm looking at you guns, god and gays conservatives and taking kids from parents apologists etc...
 

Fishbone Jones

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Underway said:
You could literally change the Dem and GOP words around in that paragraph and not be incorrect in the least (but you need to replace socialist with fascist/neoliberalism or equivalently loaded antonym). I'm looking at you guns, god and gays conservatives and taking kids from parents apologists etc...

Can you explain what you mean here? I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to convey.
 

Underway

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recceguy said:
Can you explain what you mean here? I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to convey.

G3 conservatives https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/God,_guns_and_gays.  A particular type of social conservative.

Taking kids from parents is a shorthand reference to people who refuse to listen to any arguments regarding the removal of refugee children from their parents.

My point is that there are people on both sides of the political spectrum that "believe there is no other path to follow other than their own, any other opinions are invalid." as stated by Colin P.
 

Colin Parkinson

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I agree it goes both ways, my experience is that the left has a larger number of people that cannot even imagine any other way being valid. Many of the right can imagine the path the left is on and are concerned how far down the left may go. they generally understand the Left path has some value as long as you don't go to far. Capitalism is about competing ideas and constant change. Socialism is actually about conformity and slow or no change. Radical Socialism must be authoritarian to function. Full out Capitalism starts to fail as eats it's young. A functioning society generally incorporates a dose of minor Socialism and controlled capitalism. The more aware on both sides of the political fence understand that society is going the wander between what they consider the "goalposts" of a society, the alarmbells go off when it veers to close to either posts. Sadly now there is a very vocal element of the left who considers the centreline the new right wing goalpost, so anything over that is a crisis in their eyes and also see the traditional left of centre goalpost as completely inadequate. They are being driven by the siren song of hardcore Socialism, imagining that if a little bit is good, a lot will be perfect. As long as they are in charge and on the top, they will explain away the failures. 
 

OceanBonfire

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QAnon is now infiltrating mainstream American life and politics

Since its origin three years ago, QAnon has festered in the darker corners of the internet. Now the group's followers, who call themselves "believers," have found a niche on social media and within the Republican Party.

QAnon began as a single conspiracy theory. But its followers now act more like a virtual cult, largely adoring and believing whatever disinformation the conspiracy community spins up.

Its main conspiracy theories claim dozens of politicians and A-list celebrities work in tandem with governments around the globe to engage in child sex abuse. Followers also believe there is a "deep state" effort to annihilate U.S. President Donald Trump.

But followers of the group have expanded from those beliefs and now allege baseless theories surrounding mass shootings and elections. Followers have falsely claimed that 5G cellular networks are spreading the coronavirus.

There's no evidence that any of what QAnon claims is factual. ​

Followers make unfounded claims and then amplify them with doctored or out-of-context evidence posted on social media to support the allegations.

The anarchical group's birth, and its continued seepage into mainstream American life, comes on the coattails of the Russian disinformation campaign that targeted U.S. elections in 2016. ​

While the Russian campaign had an apparent objective -- influence voters to elect Trump -- QAnon is decentralized, having no clear objective aside from its popular slogan, "Question everything."

Anyone can create a conspiracy, offer evidence to support it and tag it with QAnon hashtags to spread it. But no one is held responsible for the trail of chaos and disinformation it leaves behind.

...


https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/qanon-is-now-infiltrating-mainstream-american-life-and-politics-1.5009310
 

Retired AF Guy

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Looks like our recent intruder at Rideau Hall may have been a follower of QAnon.
Extracts from a today's Toronto Star;

In March, just as the COVID-19 lockdowns began, the Grindhouse Instagram account featured a post about “going down the rabbit hole” into QAnon conspiracy theories.

“Has anyone else been following ‘Q’ and the ‘White Rabbit’ down the rabbit hole and how this all relates the Corona virus (sic)/COVID-19 situation?” reads a March 27 post on Grindhouse Fine Foods’ Instagram account.

“Lots of coincidences in all these ‘Q’ posts if this turns out to be a ‘nothingburger’.”

Attached to the post were a series of hashtags, referencing debunked conspiracy theories.

Grindhouse Fine Meats is the business owned by Hurran
.
Complete article can be found here.
 

OceanBonfire

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Trump praises the group:

Trump praises QAnon conspiracists, appreciates support

President Donald Trump on Wednesday praised the supporters of QAnon, a convoluted, pro-Trump conspiracy theory, and suggested he appreciates their support of his candidacy.

Speaking during a press conference at the White House, Trump courted the support of those who put stock in the conspiracy theory, saying, “I heard that these are people that love our country.” It was his first public comment on the subject.

...


https://apnews.com/535e145ee67dd757660157be39d05d3f
 

OceanBonfire

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Russia is now boosting QAnon conspiracy theories:

Russian-backed organizations amplifying QAnon conspiracy theories, researchers say

Russian government-supported organizations are playing a small but increasing role amplifying conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns of interference in the November U.S. election.

Academics who study QAnon said there were no signs Russia had a hand in the early days of the movement, which launched in 2017 with anonymous web postings amplified by YouTube videos.

But as QAnon gained adherents and took on new topics - with President Donald Trump as the constant hero waging a misunderstood battle - social media accounts tied to a key Kremlin ally joined in.

...


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-qanon-russia/russian-backed-organizations-amplifying-qanon-conspiracy-theories-researchers-say-idUSKBN25K13T
 

Colin Parkinson

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According to Wiki, so far the only real success the group appears to have had is gunning down a mob boss, by a guy convinced that Trump had his back. On the bright side lunatics gunning for organized crime might put some fear into the mob guys for a change.
 

Colin Parkinson

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Conspiracy theories and SF

https://connectingvets.radio.com/articles/opinion/why-veterans-believe-in-qanon-conspiracies?fbclid=IwAR0t8tiXIAhzD3RR7Q4TUDbhPEsS80NCjtnQxtDRGtqH1XrCJGUcFZY2p_M
 

OceanBonfire

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QAnon, conspiracy theories, right wing/far-right, and anti-mask advocacy go hand in hand:

https://apnews.com/35a881fb3e95ff8421efe57d05a5c374

https://apnews.com/35a881fb3e95ff8421efe57d05a5c374

QAnon conspiracy theorists, far-right group join Vancouver anti-mask rally

https://globalnews.ca/news/7332529/vancouver-anti-mask-rally-qanon/
 

CBH99

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OceanBonfire said:
QAnon, conspiracy theories, right wing/far-right, and anti-mask advocacy go hand in hand:

Can't dock him Milpoints just because he posted an article RELATED TO THE THREAD  :-\  LOL

I got you Bonfire, evened it out the best I could    :cheers:
 

Bruce Monkhouse

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OceanBonfire said:
QAnon, conspiracy theories, right wing/far-right, and anti-mask advocacy go hand in hand:

Several hundred!!??  OMG, every right wing person in Canada was there...….what a crock.
 

QV

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CBH99 said:
Can't dock him Milpoints just because he posted an article RELATED TO THE THREAD  :-\  LOL

I got you Bonfire, evened it out the best I could    :cheers:

I docked because OceanBonfire stated "QAnon, conspiracy theories, right wing/far-right, and anti-mask advocacy go hand in hand". 

In other words, if you don't believe wearing a cloth mask or homemade bandana will protect you and others from a virus, you're a nut like these people. 

This is how we got to: "if you disagree with me, you must be a racist/misogynist/etc" in today's highly divisive environment.  This is just to shut down discussion.  That is why the neg MP.   





 

Colin Parkinson

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Keep in mind that we have a full generation of people becoming adults who grew up on a steady stream of Hollywood made movies that portrayed vast conspiracies, which requires the hero or little guy to fight back. So they have been conditioned to believe in conspiracies.

To be fair I believe there are multiple attempts to create conspiracies, but they all fall foul of human nature, greed, laziness, ego and pure stupidity.   
 

mariomike

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For anyone interested in what Trump had to say on the subject,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Responses_by_Donald_Trump
 

Retired AF Guy

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A recent Time article that looks at how QAnon conspiracy theories have affected US politics.

How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy

BY CHARLOTTE ALTER/KENOSHA, WIS.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021 6:26 AM EDT

Kelly Ferro is a busy mom on her way to the post office: leather mini-backpack, brunet topknot, turquoise pedicure with a matching ombré manicure. A hairdresser from Kenosha, Wis., Ferro didn’t vote in 2016 but has since become a strong supporter of Donald Trump. “Why does the news hate the President so much?” she says. “I went down the rabbit hole. I started doing a lot of research.”

When I ask what she means by research, something shifts. Her voice has the same honey tone as before, and her face is as friendly as ever. But there’s an uncanny flash as she says, “This is where I don’t know what I can say, because what’s integrated into our system, it stems deep. And it has to do with really corrupt, evil, dark things that have been hidden from the public. Child sex trafficking is one of them.”

Ferro may not have even realized it, but she was parroting elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a pro-Trump viral delusion that began in 2017 and has spread widely over recent months, migrating from far-right corners of the Internet to infect ordinary voters in the suburbs. Its followers believe President Trump is a hero safeguarding the world from a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities who run a global sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals.

None of this is even remotely true. But an alarming number of Americans have been exposed to these wild ideas. There are thousands of QAnon groups and pages on Facebook, with millions of members, according to an internal company document reviewed by NBC News. Dozens of QAnon-friendly candidates have run for Congress, and at least three have won GOP primaries. Trump has called its adherents “people that love our country.”

In more than seven dozen interviews conducted in Wisconsin in early September, from the suburbs around Milwaukee to the scarred streets of Kenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting, about 1 in 5 voters volunteered ideas that veered into the realm of conspiracy theory, ranging from QAnon to the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax. Two women in Ozaukee County calmly informed me that an evil cabal operates tunnels under the U.S. in order to rape and torture children and drink their blood. A Joe Biden supporter near a Kenosha church told me votes don’t matter, because “the elites” will decide the outcome of the election anyway. A woman on a Kenosha street corner explained that Democrats were planning to bring in U.N. troops before the election to prevent a Trump win.

It’s hard to know exactly why people believe what they believe. Some had clearly been exposed to QAnon conspiracy theorists online. Others seemed to be repeating false ideas espoused in Plandemic, a pair of conspiracy videos featuring a discredited former medical researcher that went viral, spreading the notion that COVID-19 is a hoax across social media. (COVID-19 is not a hoax.) When asked where they found their information, almost all these voters were cryptic: “Go online,” one woman said. “Dig deep,” added another. They seemed to share a collective disdain for the mainstream media–a skepticism that has only gotten stronger and deeper since 2016. The truth wasn’t reported, they said, and what was reported wasn’t true.

This matters not just because of what these voters believe but also because of what they don’t. The facts that should anchor a sense of shared reality are meaningless to them; the news developments that might ordinarily inform their vote fall on deaf ears. They will not be swayed by data on coronavirus deaths, they won’t be persuaded by job losses or stock market gains, and they won’t care if Trump called America’s fallen soldiers “losers” or “suckers,” as the Atlantic reported, because they won’t believe it. They are impervious to messaging, advertising or data. They aren’t just infected with conspiracy; they appear to be inoculated against reality.

Democracy relies on an informed and engaged public responding in rational ways to the real-life facts and challenges before us. But a growing number of Americans are untethered from that. “They’re not on the same epistemological grounding, they’re not living in the same worlds,” says Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse who studies online disinformation. “You cannot have a functioning democracy when people are not at the very least occupying the same solar system.”

American politics has always been prone to spasms of conspiracy. The historian Richard Hofstadter famously called it “an arena for angry minds.” In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Americans were convinced that the Masons were an antigovernment conspiracy; populists in the 1890s warned of the “secret cabals” controlling the price of gold; in the 20th century, McCarthyism and the John Birch Society fueled a wave of anti-Communist delusions that animated the right. More recently, Trump helped seed a racist lie that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

As a candidate in 2016, Trump seemed to promote a new wild conspiracy every week, from linking Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination to suggesting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered. In interviews at Trump rallies that year, I heard voters espouse all manner of delusions: that the government was run by drug cartels; that Obama was a foreign-born Muslim running for a third term; that Hillary Clinton had Vince Foster killed. But after four years of a Trump presidency, the paranoia is no longer relegated to the margins of society. According to the Pew Research Center, 25% of Americans say there is some truth to the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was intentionally planned. (Virologists, global health officials and U.S. intelligence and national-security officials have all dismissed the idea that the pandemic was human-engineered, although Trump Administration officials have said they have not ruled out the possibility that it was the result of an accident in a lab.) In a recent poll of nearly 1,400 people by left-leaning Civiqs/Daily Kos, more than half of Republican respondents believed some part of QAnon: 33% said they believed the conspiracy was “mostly true,” while 26% said “some parts” are true.

Over a week of interviews in early September, I heard baseless conspiracies from ordinary Americans in parking lots and boutiques and strip malls from Racine to Cedarburg to Wauwatosa, Wis. Shaletha Mayfield, a Biden supporter from Racine, says she thinks Trump created COVID-19 and will bring it back again in the fall. Courtney Bjorn, a Kenosha resident who voted for Clinton in 2016 and plans to vote for Biden, lowered her voice as she speculated about the forces behind the destruction in her city. “No rich people lost their buildings,” she says. “Who benefits when neighborhoods burn down?”

But by far the greatest delusions I heard came from voters on the right. More than a third of the Trump supporters I spoke with voiced some kind of conspiratorial thinking. “COVID could have been released by communist China to bring down our economy,” says John Poulos, loading groceries into his car outside Sendik’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. “COVID was manufactured,” says Maureen Bloedorn, walking into a Dollar Tree in Kenosha. She did not vote for Trump in 2016 but plans to support him in November, in part because “he sent Obama a bill for all of his vacations he took on the American dime.” This idea was popularized by a fake news story that originated on a satirical website and went viral.

On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.

Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

The rise in conspiratorial thinking is the product of several interrelated trends: declining trust in institutions; demise of local news; a social-media environment that makes rumor easy to spread and difficult to debunk; a President who latches onto anything and anyone he thinks will help his political fortunes. It’s also a part of our wiring. “The brain likes crazy,” says Nicco Mele, the former director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, who studies the spread of online disinformation and conspiracies. Because of this, experts say, algorithms on platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to serve up content that reinforces existing beliefs–learning what users search for and feeding them more and more extreme content in an attempt to keep them on their sites.

All this madness contributes to a political imbalance. On the right, conspiracy theories make Trump voters even more loyal to the President, whom many see as a warrior against enemies in the “deep state.” It also protects him against an October surprise, as no matter what news emerges about Trump, a growing group of U.S. voters simply won’t believe it. On the left, however, conspiracy theories often weaken voters’ allegiance to Biden by making them less likely to trust the voting process. If they believe their votes won’t matter because shadowy elites are pulling the country’s strings, why bother going through the trouble of casting a ballot?

Experts who follow disinformation say nothing will change until Facebook and YouTube shift their business model away from the algorithms that reward conspiracies. “We are not anywhere near peak crazy,” says Mele. Phillips, the professor from Syracuse, agrees that things will get weirder. “We’re in trouble,” she adds. “Words sort of fail to capture what a nightmare scenario this is.”

But to voters like Kelly Ferro, the mass delusion seems more like a mass awakening. Trump “is revealing these things,” she says serenely, gesturing with her turquoise-tipped fingernails. Americans’ “eyes are being opened to the darkness that was once hidden.”

After yoga in the morning, Ferro says, she often spends hours watching videos, immersing herself in a world she believes is bringing her ever closer to the truth. “You can’t stop, because it’s so addicting to have this knowledge of what kind of world we’re living in,” she says. “We’re living in an alternate reality.”

With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah

This appears in the September 21, 2021 issue of TIME.

Link

Reminds me of the 80s when the "Satanist" scare was the big boogeyman of the day.
 

Brad Sallows

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Feh, who needs QAnon when they've got Roman Polanski and Jeffrey Epstein and all the people who hang around in circles where access to underage women is one of the perqs.
 
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