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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
OK, thanks. But it appears that “5 died” is finding it’s way into the narrative as if 5 died in the riot. This seems to be another example of shading details to achieve a particular purpose–especially if Babbitt’s shooting turns out to be unwarranted.
I think it’s also because no one wants to think that crap just happens. It’s more comforting somehow that someone (even a bad someone) is in charge. That goes for conspiracy theories of the right and left. It is the Deep State, the CIA, Russia, the Illuminati, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers…..someone must be pulling the levers behind the scenes. The alternative is too scary apparently.
No, vs feeling like you have to answer for any whack job someone tries to saddle you with, thereby validating and accepting their premise.
1) you don’t have to answer for anyone but you, 2) I suspect that these stones they’re trying to tie around your neck aren’t as heavy as they claim, and 3) while we’re busy dealing with these stones we aren’t dealing with the real and extensive problems with the left who claims the mainstream illegitimately.
@jameslileks How does Q compare to “The Great Reset” that you wrote about in the link?
For one thing, the “The Great Reset” is a World Economic Forum” (who sponsors Davos) approved and linked actual entity. I still hang in there with NR because in a somewhat fading sense they do cover at least a couple views on the topic of the day. I’d say that the “Reset” is real and Q is mostly a fake diversion created by the “Resetters” — and we are wasting our time looking at it.
BLM whose signs say “Silence is Violence” is supported by the Davos crowd actually DOES violence on a massive scale, as opposed to “the Trumpian right” that gets massive negative coverage for not even burning any precinct HQs down. If the shoe was on the other foot, would the Capitol protest not be rated as “mostly peaceful”?
Your column included the statement “The Great Reset means slapping the heart-attack paddles on the chest of every government group that flatlined with failure and pumping more juice into the withered muscles.”
Just preceding you said “But no one took to the think pages of the serious newspapers to ask whether the public-school/college model had shown itself inadequate on every level and should be replaced by something smaller, more atomized, nimbler, less laden by levels of bureaucracy that made the Ottoman Empire look like the post office in a North Dakota town, pop. 200.”
I’m thinking you and I agree that the centralized WEF / Davos / massive government / huge corporate bureaucracy / MSM supported global system needs to be vastly reformed to the point of somewhat “replaced”. As a “retired” (downsized) veteran of the IBM behemoth that once ruled the IT world, I’m pretty sure all massive centralized bureaucratic systems will “fail”, however mainly they spawn something “new” … as in the case of the IBM failure, it created Microsoft and Intel, and the rest is the tech world we live in. The centralized IBM government connected bureaucratic system was a “parent” to the failing 1970s to 1980s mainframe, single vendor computing environment that every big Fortune 500 company had.
Now it “decentralized” to a group of elite companies that we all know … Amazon, Google, etc, but really those elites meeting at WEF / Davos “forums” are mostly like the old IBM “divisions” — Davos is Armonk.
My conclusion is that we recognize the “Great Reset” — ( “Fascism Rebranded”) and start remodelling to a decentralized, “little towns in ND” architecture.
I don’t know anyone who didn’t think Pizzagate was nuts. However, I agree both sides have kooks. I used to think the Left had more than the right, but I’m sadder and wiser in 2021. Sanity is rare.
I don’t have any info on the suicides; these are just things I’ve heard or read in passing.
Perhaps so, but it was not so ridiculous on its face. Hence, widespread.
There was pretty definitely one suicide of an office on Saturday. As to whether that unfortunate is “counted” in the five, I don’t know.
No it doesn’t have to be some grand cabal, but someone authorized the weaponized spying on political opponents. That someone should be punished. The system that allowed it should be reviewed and improved to prevent it from happening again. It’s not good enough, to me, that sh*t happens.
There are always wack jobs. That’s human nature.
The political wack jobs on the Left are used in psychological warfare to move the Overton window to the Left. Compared to Ayanna Presley, Adam Schiff looks like a normie. That helps make the agenda seem less crazy, because normies are pushing it too. That, plus “they have real grievances which are driving them to extreme behavior; we deplore the behavior but demand that their grievances be addressed.”
But because of Left dominance in the the organs of culture and information, wack jobs on the right are used to prove the wackiness of the right. This is asymmetrical information warfare, and we’re losing.
Right you are Basil. The side that solemnly tells us that boys are girls if they say so, that they have abortion rights, that insist we call them by whatever made up pronoun they prefer – just shouldn’t be throwing stones. Oh wait, and they want to teach it to grade school kids as if those are generally accepted principles.
Look, the whole point of last week’s gathering in DC was an attempt by some Republicans to get an audit of the presidential election. Anybody who says that Trump lost in court is being disingenuous, almost all suits being tossed without examination of the records or voting machines on the basis of standing, or because the evidence demanded by the court would only come from an audit of the systems and processes. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that they need an examination. Democrats are absolutely terrified of audit, which is what Cruz was asking for. If they weren’t afraid, they’d insist on an audit just to prove that Biden is way more popular to Obama and Hilary.
The way to take everyone’s eye off the ball is to insist that all Trump supporters broke into the Capitol last week. While they’re at it, lets point to the most ridiculous fringe group on the right and proclaim that everyone to the right of Rachael Madoff is a Q adherent.
That’s a lot of conscious lying to do to avoid an audit of the vote. Keep your eye on the ball.
Well there goes my comment about the Overton Window. :)
Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have helped establish over time that the window will always tilt strongly right-ward. It’s part of the reason for the focus on white supremacists when there are bigots all across the spectrum.
James: Is your title some kind of play on words? Hoping for a withering of conspiracism? Or maybe a reference to the withered brains of QAnon acolytes?
Or did you mean “Whither Q?”
I posted some warning signs on how to spot conspiracy theorist wackos the other day. Many of them appear to be loners, are somewhat intelligent but also appear to have some OCD/Aspergers issues. As for Q, I’m not even sure where one finds the Q stuff. Is that a dark web thingy? Do I have to have a VPN link or a special browser?
All that said, I have a friend who knows this guy who has a buddy who is highly placed in the medical or health or something community who said that people must wear masks all the time even when they’re jogging or driving a convertible in 90 degree weather…because COVID floats everywhere in the air. Then I hear there are Democrat governors and mayors who believe that COVID is especially active after 10pm and puts on snappy clothes and hits the nightclub circuit.
Then, I’m pretty sure there are well-known sitting members of Congress and a sprinkling of “conservative” pundits who devoutly believe that Donald Trump is racist and constantly sends out secret dog whistles to his legions of white supremacist followers. One may have been a podcaster on this here website. But she’s gone now.
It is amazing what people believe.
Except that it was ridiculous on it’s face. The Dossier itself was always exactly what they were trying to claim (without any evidence) about President Trump: it was information from foreign agents (Russia to UK) meant to influence the election.It was inherently self contradictory from the beginning with never a hint of reasonable predicate.
Yes. Ricochet is too cynical to believe there are secret heroes that are going to save the day. But I might be projecting.
With the SPLC, you also have to follow the money. Ideally, to banks in the Cayman Islands or the equivalent.
It certainly was ridiculous. And contradictory, as you say. Just not as obviously so. That’s a statement on how bat-(excrement) the Pizzagate stuff was, not how credible the Russiagate stuff was.
Okay. I don’t know Q from a jar of Vicks, as my old dad would say. But I know speech suppression. Let me tell you what’s up-and-coming in the exciting world of speech suppression.
Misinformation. That’s the new mantra of the left, extraordinarily popular with smart young over-educated technocrats in Silicon Valley and other places where golden collar workers congregate. Misinformation is the great evil of the technocratic age — and the justification for the suppression of speech that doesn’t meet the subjectively objective standards of the ascendant left.
In a brilliant gut-punch of a piece he wrote back on October 27, a piece that remains the most moving thing I’ve read on Ricochet (members-only, so I won’t try to link it), James observed how a mask wearer’s hygienic virtue gave him an instant claim to the moral high ground. We’ve all seen it; we know it’s true.
In the rising technocracy, opposing “misinformation” grants that same moral authority. These arrogant too-bright-by-half children, ignorant of every aspect of history predating Google, confident that they can competently manage the complexity of human society and avoid the pitfalls of every single effort that preceded them simply because they don’t know that others have tried and failed — these eager innocent young control freaks celebrate “data” and “studies” and “evidence” and “truth” and will happily shut down every platform and voice that doesn’t meet their puritanical standards.
I’ve talked with these people. They’re often nice, always smart, deeply sincere, full of boundless energy and enthusiasm. It isn’t their fault that they’re incipient fascists: no one ever told them, before they handed them the keys to global communication, that complex systems defy even Ph.D.s in data analysis and computer science.
So Q is stupid and a source of chaos and confusion for a gullible subset of the population that might otherwise turn to InfoWars or NPR or some other source of dopey ideas. I can live with that. The fight before us isn’t to quash misinformation, but rather to preserve our ability to express unapproved ideas. It’s a serious fight.
I was engaged with one of these bright young fellows a few days ago on another platform. His name is Ian, and he’s got a Ph.D. in something to do with computational genetics, and manages the science for a Silicon Valley tech startup doing single-chip biological assay systems. He’s a bright, sometimes charming guy. Regarding the big tech shutdown of Parler, he had this to say:
“We are witnessing the halting of fascism enabling platforms. The fourth branch of government is speaking.”
He’s smart enough not to take that literally, but it doesn’t have to be literal to be true. That’s what we’re up against. Q is stupid and silly, but ultimately trivial.
Could not agree more. Exactly right, in my opinion.
we should immediately adopt that strategy. We DO NOT have wackadoodles. We have people with legitimate grievances …
wait
scratch that
We have people who FEEL they have real grievances that are being SYSTEMICALLY ignored and it has driven them to extreme behaviors. While we condemn the behavior but demand that the grievances are addressed.
The Illuminati? Nah, they’re governing the weather instead through chemtrails. They have their own agenda.
This is an extremely potent tactic in local politics. Don’t forget that much of the advice on how to respond to the election involves acting locally. Here’s how it can work: The public comment period at a city council, planning commission, or some other local body is jammed by crazies, each of whom takes xeir 3 minutes, and is hard to get off the mic. Since official business waits for after the public comments, when those wrap up at 2 am, the disciplined radicals with strong bladders vote in some aspect of their agenda. By then, most normies have gone home, and there are basically no local newspapers to cover the meeting anymore.
Aside from the peeing Russian hookers, the inherent self-contradiction (and therefore self-indictment) was there and obvious. That’s part of the reason this is such a great scandal to me: despite how obvious it was our institutions went along with it anyway and they seem poised to never getting to the bottom of just how and who started it.
Hubert Humphrey and AFL-CIO President George Meany did the nation a great service by expelling overt Stalinist’s from the Democratic Party and organized labor.
William F. Buckley, Jr. did the nation a great service by expelling the John Birch Society from the Conservative Movement.
It is now the task of the Democratic Party to purge Antifa from the Left, just as it is the task of Conservatives and Republicans to purge Q-Anon from our side.
There are many things that have happened over the last 5 years that I would have previously thought crazy and unbelievable. I am not so quick to dismiss conspiracy theories these days.
One thing I learned over the last four years is a term called steel manning. This is opposite of straw manning. It’s where you address the strongest most reasonable arguments instead of some mischaracterization or weak interpretation of the arguments. Conservatives have of course known this for a long time even if we didn’t know the term. It’s helped us strengthen our arguments.
Arguing about Q is a giant straw man. There is plenty that is real and shocking and scandalous. I know I want resolution on many of those things; I guess the elite just doesn’t want the same things I do. So now what?
There are two Q-Anon friendly members of Congress in the House: Marjorie Taylor Greene of GA-14 and Lauren Boebert of CO-3. They are in heavy Republican Districts.
Just like Steve King, they need to be primaried, and to lose their Committee Assignments.
According to the Boston Globe, Ms. Boebert allegedly was in communication with the Rioters who took over the Congress and communicated Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts to them. If so, she should be expelled from Congress.
We need to clean up our side of the asile, just as the Democrats need to deal with AOC and the so-called “Squad.”
Yeah Gary, you are just the authoritative arbiter we’ve been looking for.
Thank you. This is a hobby horse of mine — and one I almost mentioned in my first comment on this thread. I think it’s hugely important, a bellwether for a whole flock of improbable claims to which we are expected to confess our fealty.
Fun story about ole’ Hubert: he ensured that my grandfather was a lifelong Republican. Early in Hubert’s life, when he was just a low level government hack, Hubert was not above asking people for bribes. He tried to wheedle one out of my grandfather, and for that my grandfather bore him and his party both a lifelong enmity.