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Wither Q?
Q is a cult, and its prophet and instrument of salvation is Donald Trump. As of last Sunday the faithful were still insisting that the Plan would be fulfilled. What’s the Plan? Why, it’s a brilliant, complex, breathtaking long-game effort to take down the hydra-headed pedophiliac crime syndicate that controlled The Swamp. While things may have seemed dark on Sunday, the faithful were assured that everything was still working. The president was not in Washington, but in Texas; the White House videos had been filmed in front of a green screen to distract the enemies. Trump was actually directing the military from a secret base.
Later in the afternoon, some people on Twitter started a story about DC’s air traffic shut down completely, with massive numbers of troop-carrying planes on the runway. Debunkers posted shots of air traffic from flight-tracker apps; people whose accounts had lots of numbers in there names and eagles in their bios noted that jets had flown over their house very low and loud, so yes, it’s happening.
Except it didn’t, and it won’t. Donald Trump will leave office without making the Q prophecies come true. You have to wonder what that means for the cult. There’s a precedent, after all. Some recalculate the date of the Rapture; some turn on the person who was supposed to lead them to heaven; some fall away, disheartened, and pull a caul over the episode in their life and move on, abashed.
In a way, it already happened. After the election, Q had to revise its predictions to accommodate events, and for some the Stolen Election was proof of the existence of powerful contrary forces. But moving on past the inauguration means losing faith in Trump as the powerful force that will sweep away iniquity. Obviously, he wasn’t, and didn’t. The Deep State wasn’t supposed to win. Pelosi was supposed to be in Gitmo wearing Clockwork-Orange eyelid-spreaders watching film of all the things her minions did to children in the catacombs under a pizzeria.
The left is not burdened with Q-type nonsense. The Putin-Puppet stuff came close. Fitzmas was another. But compared to Q, those are garden-variety political-scandal narratives with an institutional conclusion. I wonder if the left can move past these things easier because they have deeper narratives that offer solace. They can always fall back on the comforting certainties of American sinfulness, the knowledge they are virtuously embroiled in a long twilight struggle against the idea of American exceptionalism. The country is fatally corrupted by racism, sexism, and capitalism, with slavery the Original Sin that taints every atom of ink in its founding documents – but that somehow this uniquely immoral construct can be redeemed by a devotion to a slow-grinding, never-ending rearrangement of its fundamentals, punctuated by violence to encourage the stragglers.
Marxism is Q without the “best by” date printed on the label.
Published in General
My history professor clearly broke the law, then.
Reliable? Why should we trust Facebook the censor? Also, “membership” in a Facebook group is not the same as actual or meaningful membership in a group. Right now I think I’m in about 20 FB groups most of which I’ve never looked at after I “joined”.
Except for Lola.
Nah, in order to be up on all this you’d likely need to get out far, far less.
It also sounds like Britain is about to have a publicly funded propaganda crackdown, and some of Auntie’s minions are angling for their next grift.
I’m impressed by the level of comments and conversation in this thread. And as always, @jameslileks‘ prose is a joy to read (especially as I can hear the wonderful tones of his voice-over as I do so.)
However, I am at a loss to see how this post matches the sentiments James expressed near the end of last Friday’s flagship Ricochet Podcast #526 (here). There he makes a sound case that the best way for going forward is to stop talking about Donald Trump. His presidency is ending, and continuing to focus on it is exactly what the Democrats want to do going forward. Yet here we are, responding to a Ricochet post with the opening sentence of, “Q is a cult, and its prophet and instrument of salvation is Donald Trump.” (Italics added for emphasis.)
Like many of the others posting here, I know little about “Q” or “QAnon”. I’ve neither watched nor read any of their content, a practice I intend to continue. That major media outlets such as Forbes, NBC News, WSJ and social media behemoths like Facebook are expressing alarm at such fringe groups doesn’t really impress me that much. Each of theses mainstream media outlets has an ideological agenda that shapes how they present news, including focusing on the radical fringe elements of their political opposition, and not presenting information that reflects negatively upon their end of the spectrum.
Your mileage may vary on how credible you think the threats are, but the FBI reports of Q types planning further disruptions this weekend and on into next Wednesday’s inauguration does make discussion of the group not simply one to talk about what happened last Wednesday, but what might happen in the upcoming days (and where you’d think after the blow-back in the past five days, including and especially the social media bans attempted by the big tech companies, the only faction that would think doubling down on the Jan. 6 actions at the Capitol were a good strategic idea would be the “Q Anon for Biden/Harris” wing of the group).
If you’ve been a regular reader here on Ricochet, you have at least seen parts of it all. The insistences that Trump would be vindicated on X date, that “indictments are just around the corner from Sessions / Barr / Durham”, the way someone would be a hero in the Trump administration one day, than roundly condemned as a traitor / villain / swamp creature / looney the next – the higher the expectations that said person would unmask the “real” culprits of Russia-Gate, the lower their fall when they failed to do so. And pretty well anyone posting about how Trump was getting ready to unveil something / indict someone / etc. That Pence would certainly undo the election on 1/6 or else show he was a traitor like all the rest. And on and on and on.
These were all the less disrespectable parts of Q that surfaced, and indeed continue to surface here – the parts of the scummy iceberg that showed above water. Declan Leary reported that Q stuff was everywhere in the rally last week.
Darn right.
Right? I don’t think that some people on our side realize the situation we and the country are in. I get the sense that some itching to return to normalcy think that not much bad happened the last five years except for Bad Orange Man. As I’ve been saying, though, any analysis that does not account for five years (and more) of around the clock propaganda, censorship, Resistance, BAMN, CHAZ/CHOP, election irregularities, covid authoritarianism, antifa violence, BLM violence, cancel culture, and big tech censorship is actually dangerous. We should not normalize the perpetrators of these terribles nor should we normalize the obsurest of obscure fringe groups that someone might make a case should be on our side.
Would this be a reasonable comparison for what could happen? Been there.
I think I’ve found your problem.
Actually, as they metastasize like a cancer, they tend to grow more and more complicated. They have to become more complicated in order to comport with observed reality – like the concept of heavenly spheres just as Galileo was looking at Jupiter, and as Copernicus was working out the math.
For someone to continue to adhere to a conspiracy, the conspiracy network must grow and grow and grow, to the point where everyone is somehow in on it, as a stooge, a tool, or one of them.
In the QAnon alternate universe, this is why everyone is a traitor to Trump the moment they fall from his graces – he found out, don’t you see? They were plotting and he got to them first!
I did not realize the degree to which “Q-thought” had infiltrated Ricochet.
Of course there are kooks. Let’s not make them to be more than they are, though, especially when “normal” is bad enough.
Even if you do take this to be on our side, let’s please refrain from the both sides crap. The other side was and is much worse. Cancel culture, big tech censorship (and perhaps collusion), and actual Dem corruption is real and close to an existential problem we should be facing with all hands on deck. But no, Qanon is apparently a major scourge that must be talked about.
You laugh at Pizzagate because it’s obviously crazy. Right. So is Sex Island.
My brief investigation in to Q seems to indicate the following.
It started as a joke on 4 Chan. It got out of control and the original founders, confessed hoping that everyone would get the joke and move on. But they didnt.
At some point it was co opted by at least Russian Intelligence. You can go on Q and say all sorts of nasty things, but if you say the ‘Russians did blah’ you are quickly excommunicated from the cult.
Some believe that democrats are now behind it as well, or that other groups have coopted it. Basically to encourage people to do stupid things, like attack the capitol. Certainly the person who got shot, was probably sucked into it, and was believing she was liberating the government from bad actors and saving the Presidency.
I should probably do a larger post/video on the subject and talk about my favorite version. Agent Garbo.
I do have an article published on how the UK/French conned the USA during the leadup to the Suez Crisis.
There has been plenty of Trump fanaticism on Ricochet. But I doubt the connection to QAnon.
Yep, and then it goes back to my earlier post about the unfair double-standard between angry protests on the left and angry protests on the right — violent expression on the right is framed by the media as the dark night of fascism descending on America, while violent expression on the left is framed by the same people as justifiable anger at an unjust system, where any and all violence has to be looked at through ‘root causes’ .
So the protestors could torch the for-hire limousine owned by a Muslim immigrant during the 2016 inauguration and get zero outrage from the big media outlets. Let the same thing happen again eight days from now and it would be an allegory for the Nazi white supremacist future all Trump voters want for America. Nothing fair about it, but it’s the reality of the current media situation.
Probably not consciously. Most people here (though not all people here – I speak from experience moderating) were not directly trying to post Q stuff, or citing the various forums where this stuff originated. That’s not how stuff like this works – few go all the way down rabbit hole, it’s not necessary that many do.
But we all have friends or relatives or co-workers who do dive in a little deeper, and they have friends who go deeper still, and rumors, “screen grabs” (often of suspect origin, usually with a tag “I captured this and it was taken down – share it everywhere before our tech overlords suppress it!”), memes, rants, posts, and more get shared from out of the dark well to others. Many of them are ignored, but you only need a few to be re-shared. “OH! Wow, my friend sent me this, and I know he’s not one of those types, so I can trust it,” and you have unwittingly been a bit drawn in. Not far. But the volume of rabid stuff churned out is high, and bit by bit it nibbles away at people’s minds, and their minds start to draw connections between the strange stuff passed on to them and what they see in the news. “Hmmm… Maybe this person was a traitor…”
Again, you might not have any connection to Q. You do not need to have any connection to it. But you’ve seen its stuff.
Is this the same FBI that lies to the FISA court in order to spy on political opponents? Is this the same FBI that declared antifa to be an ideology and not an organization?
Oh this wasn’t Q stuff. This was disinformation to keep us whacko birds in line. Now we can all forget about how the Russia Collusion Hoax started. We can forget about Joe Biden and corruption too. That’s all Q nonsense.
One side hand wrings about their kooks with great shame and starts throwing allies under the bus. The other side leverages their kooks to push the ball in their direction.
Can you remember the good ol days when presidents like Reagan promoted what was good in America, and gave the bad guys the evil eye, and he did it respectfully, while yielding real results? Or how about the first George HW Bush, who upon losing re-election, left a heartfelt good luck note for Clinton in the Absolute desk? It wasn’t that long ago, yet it’s like a lifetime. What happened?
The basic principles and values that our country has always lived by, even during tumultuous times like the 60’s have been the bulwark because the foundation was there. If you look up the speech that MLK gave in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the crowd was massive – all colors, ages, clergy, and you could hear a pin drop. His message was powerful, but positive, not destructive. Our language, and censorship, and this brave new world of Big Tech being judge and jury has changed it all.
Tearing down statues doesn’t erase history. We need history. Conspiracy group thought on both sides is so dangerous, as we’ve seen throughout history.
Skip – do you think there’s nothing more to see on Russia Collusion Hoax? Or do you still think that Trump actually was a Putin puppet?
Marxism and Critical Race Theory are vastly more conspiratorial than ever was Q. And the entirety of the Left now buys in to those. Whites are evil. Western Culture is entirely a profoundly evil conspiracy of privilege for some. These are holy to the Left. What is the 1619 Project but CRT imposed on history? Who pays attention to Q? No one that I know (maybe that’s because, like Pauline Kael, I don’t get around much in the fever swamps). As Raymond Aron titled his 1955 book, Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals. They’re completely addicted and now run the show.
I live in Georgia, which has just elected an anti-Semitic Marxist race-baiter, er, Critical Race Theorist who masquerades as a pastor, educated at the post-Christian Union Theological Seminary, falling in line with Farrakhan and Jeremiah G-D America Wright, spiritual mentor of Barack Obama. From MLK, Jr to Raphael Warnock, the sublime to the ridiculous. We’ve got problems, right here in
You want conspiracy theories? How about this one: The coordinated attack on the “right-wing” media (eg, anyone right of Howard Dean) came immediately on the heels of a speech given by Obama calling for restrictions on the right wing media. Did anyone notice that, or am I the only one? Seems to me like Obama is the orchestrator of the Left, and is running the attack, calling the shots, while Biden makes asinine comments about buying more votes from minorities by giving minority small business owners money to the exclusion of small business owners generally. Healing? Comity? Kooks to the Right of us; kooks to the Left of us? This is all silly distraction.
Was there election fraud or not? If there was, was it massive or trivial? Note how such voices as NR have completely dropped any mention of election fraud, as if it did not exist. So we are supposed to move forward with healing? Anyone who lives in America and doesn’t acknowledge election fraud is like Robert Caro who wrote a massive biography of Robert Moses, (who dealt with the Mob in NYC every day), and never once mentioned the Mob. Again, see James Jacob’s book, Mobsters, Unions, and Feds. Can one say “Whitewash?”
Get serious, James. There are problems, and you are simply distracting from them and ignoring and trivializing them.
Example of the moment: Free Speech? James puts on his Alfred E. Newman grin and says: What, me worry? I think Rob already got the memo about bashing the Right. James seems to be coming along. Perhaps he can avoid the re-education camps. But still, like Jack Ma, he also might have to “embrace supervision.”
That was Q stuff. Explicitly so.
But as David March suggests above, who was creating it?
And as Lileks and others have wondered, why do so many on our side continue to soak it up?
Don’t worry, it hasn’t really. Skip is conflating some things and mischaracterizing others.
When have I ever said I thought Trump was a Putin puppet? Go on – I’ll wait for you to find it.
This is just “No enemies to the Right!”
It does us no good to just whinge about what the Left is doing if we’ve got lunatics on our own side.