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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
And how do you suggest we “rid” ourselves of the nut jobs?
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.
Conspiracy theories have existed long before the invention of the internet and social media sites. Lonesome losers move in and out of fringe political groups regardless of whether these groups are Left or Right. They rationalize their violent behavior as an effort to save the world based upon secret information that they alone have discovered.
The Son of Sam killer claimed he was getting commands to kill from his neighbor’s black Labrador retriever. The NYPD did not start impounding black labs in the City of New York to prevent a new Son of Sam from going on a killing spree. The killer changed his story when that narrative wasn’t getting him the attention that he thought he deserved.
The paradox of trying to shut down social media sites is that they are good source of info for law enforcement. There were warnings according to the FBI, and the NYPD terrorism task force from posts on social media that there would be an attempt for a violent entry into the Capitol building. That warning was ignored.
What I have written here should not be taken as I believe Q is not dangerous. Don’t put yourself in the position of defending Q. Would you invite the individual that dressed as an extra in a movie depicting Custer’s last stand into your home?
If I can sum up and save time, there are different responses:
Q is peculiar and horribly fascinating, but irrelevant.
Q is irrelevant, and you should be talking about Subject A.
Q is irrelevant, and the fact you are not talking about Subject A means you don’t care about Subject A as much as you should, which means you are either naive, misguided, wrong, or actively opposing the discussion of Subject A, and this will be brought up in the future.
Q is a problem, but not a big one.
Q is a problem that reveals bigger problems in society, and we should address them, but not at the expense of more pressing issues.
Q is a problem that reveals bigger problems in society, and we should address them, because the left is going to hang this around the neck of everyone on the right and it will be good to have answers and solutions.
I’m somewhere between the last two.
Are you saying that because Epstein ran a prostitution shuttle service, Pizzagate was real? Or because Pizzagate was crazy-talk, Epstein wasn’t running a prostitution shuttle service?
No, I’m saying that “that’s crazy” is not an argument. Crazy is subjective in the sanest of times, but we have seen crazy things turn out to be true.
Not so sure about that last one. The origins in 4chan are part of a larger story about the creator of 4chan / 8chan and his adversary, who may have posed as Q. There’s a fascinating Reply/All podcast about the Q backstory here.
I am there on the last one, and a bit beyond. Not only is the Left going to hang the Q around our necks, Q is a growing danger, as shown by the rioters who had Q t-shirts.
Q is going to keep on growing and they have two members of Congress already, Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) and Lauren Boebert (CO-3). They need to be stripped of committee assignments, and Ms. Boebert (CO-3) must be told that, “No, you can’t wear your gun to the office or on the floor of the House.” (If the Boston Globe is correct and Lauren Boebert communicated Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts to the rioters, she should be expelled from the House under the 14th Amendment due to being part of an Insurrection.)
So we have millions of people unemployed. Millions of small businesses lost forever. Millions of children being abused daily by teachers refusing to do their jobs. The global economy in free fall. All this as a direct result of government malfeasance.
We have A new president on the horizon that does not engender any confidence in improving any of these situations, and there’s a long list of other things I’m pretty sure he’s going to make worse.
So yes – this is the perfect moment to make sure we don’t have any nut jobs in our ranks because the left will hang it around the neck of the right.
What a profound and counterproductive waste of time. For one thing, if the left doesn’t have something real, they’ll make it up. I’ve been on this earth for 62 years and I’ve yet to meet a white supremacist. And still the left has managed to convince many that our country is lousy with them.
I’ve been writing about many issues, including free speech, for 30 years, in print and online, under my own name; if a mugshot appeared in the paper or magazines, I was not wearing the trademark rictus of blissful ignorance. Just because I post on Topic A instead of Topics B-Z does not mean I’m not concerned about B-Z, and if one wishes to suggest that I should get serious I have an uncivil suggestion that involves a full bladder and a rope.
Good point. I meant to stop centering every conversation around Trump so it comes down to an argument about Trump. If I had done that in my post, I would have written “why does Donald Trump attract these people? Has he encouraged them? Has his advisors flirted with them? Did Trumpism necessarily lead to Q’s rise?” and so on, after which people would have argued about Trump instead of Q.
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.
Gary, I’m not seeing support for Q here. We can denounce it all day here, but it won’t register outside of Ricochet (not sure we have a right to shut down their insane rants.)
The idea that we need to distance ourselves from an organization that we never embraced is a function of what others have to say about us, not what we say ourselves. Making that clear to the public requires a bullhorn, which I think was Trump.
Any suggestions o how to get the word out?
Bravo!
What is all this talk about “Q” that I am hearing? I think he passed away more than 20 years ago…
Oh wait…
So why are we talking about Q? What’s the point?
Perhaps it’s just another refrain of that old saw about the American people being deplorable, gullible fools.
I suspect that Q people are similar to white supremacists. Put them all together and you couldn’t fill a Scenicruiser, but no fringe group is too small to hang around the necks of the populists.
We’re talking about it because James wrote an interesting post about it.
And it’s worth talking about. My point in #1 was not to suggest that we shouldn’t talk about it, but rather that it seems easy enough for a conservative to avoid ever encountering it, and so I wonder how “real” it really is.
Similarly, my point in #109 is not to suggest that, since speech suppression is a greater threat than the misinformation of flake groups like Q, we shouldn’t talk about Q. That kind of argument has never made much sense to me: if you like caring for animals, care for animals; the fact that there are people who need help also doesn’t mean that caring for animals is somehow unworthy. We can fight many battles at once.
But the speech suppression comment was topical, because the ascendant rationalization and justification for speech suppression is that misinformation — the kind of nonsense Q spouts, for example — is such a threat to democracy that only its active suppression can protect us. We’re seeing that argument invoked literally by the hour, as thousands of voices are silenced by the tech giants.
So yes, scoff at Q and at all the other flaky and/or malicious bozos out there spouting nonsense and making our side look foolish. But be ready to defend their right to spout nonsense, however distasteful that may be, because the side with their hands on the controls thinks most of what we say is nonsense, and won’t stop at Parler, or Q, or your Facebook account.
Concentrate on the one in bold. Because regarding your last point, the left is going to hang anything around your neck that will have absolutely nothing to do with Q.
White Nancy Pelosi has already condemned Trump supporters for their whiteness.
Do you have the audacity to question some of the strange Election Week occurrences – then you’re obviously a conspiracy theorist or a blatant liar and will be censored or deplatformed on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
If you’re a member of Congress and have questions about the election – then you’re an insurrectionist, seditionist, traitor and should be booted from Congress. And clearly Trump supported election conspiracy theories (Jon Gabriel said so) and incited violence (Jon Gabriel said so), so he should be burned alive (Rob Long).
If you support free speech you actually support hate speech and need to doxxed. Don’t worry about any anti-trust laws…Parler must be killed.
Do you have legitimate objections to the draconian COVID lockdown based on actual science and what is known about how the immune system works and can actually be inhibited by constant mask wearing; do you support HCQ? Then expect to also be censored and deplatformed.
Support Trump or question the election results in any way and expect to booted from your flight.
Support Trump in any way and expect to booted from PayPal or any crowd-funding site.
Banks and credit card companies are now articulating their outrage about Donald Trump and his supporters. Should you be concerned?
Consider this a partial list. And has absolutely nothing to do with Q.
The left hates you. They want your money. They want you to shut up. They want your silent obedience. They don’t need to invoke Q to make your life miserable, they have a million other excuses. They don’t need to mention Q at all to turn this country into a hell-hole.
Kevin McCarthy can strip the two Q-Anon’s from Committee Assignments, and the NRCC can look for strong candidates to primary them, not unlike Steve King (IA-4) last Congress.
Q crazy is a few unimportant loons, but leftist crazy is the media, schools, universities, and all the institutions they control- which is about all of them.
As someone that hits in terms of the size and scope of the internet a very tiny amount of sites, I never heard of QAnon until the debate. Had to look it up. And 8 chan, etc. Same thing. I pretty much stay at what I think are fairly normal conservative and other interest sites, pintrest, food, religion, daily word game, etc.
I found twitter interesting through the election ordeal, and I still find it interesting to go though link to link, etc. I don’t think you could avoid finding what is Q comments and posters (both political and medical discussions) and developing a suspicion by the comment (and over time the name). If you did not cross check, look for differing ideas, ask yourself how plausible something is, persue other interests you could have been easily led astray. As with most things, a little bit of truth can become stretched easily, both sides. I’m kind of a news scoffer, and it has been transpiring into an overall scoffer, a cynic perhaps?
The pandemic is the most disturbing to me because we always have viruses around, and I don’t want to live like this. The political discourse and actions around it has damaged some of my extended family relationships. I’ve developed some contempt for retirees who demand lockdown (while bopping around in their masks) and describe loans to businesses as help while offering to sacrifice 1 to 2 percent of their SS to help out. Had a close friend and a somewhat close family member drop dead in the last few months, 68 the other 52. Not covid. (the 52 yr old is a medical worker who had the vaccine). No funerals to speak of. Later, they say.
As I noted way up above, I have no use for the Q-sters but they are irrelevant to my life and, apparently, most of us. I also mentioned that it’s likely the greatest danger they pose is to allow those on the left/Biden supporters to to use them as a cudgel to discredit the ideas of large numbers of the Republican Party. Quod erat demonstrandum.
The Left is going to use “Q-Anon” against us, just as many of us label Democrats as the “AOC/Squad” party. If you will go to left wing magazines and websites like The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Salon, Slate, Huffington Post, Vox or The Atlantic, you will see that “Q-Anon” gets mentioned as often by them as “The Squad” is mentioned in National Review, Ricochet, and The Dispatch. In particular, The Atlantic has done a number of long form stories on Q-Anon.
CNN and MSNBC have ended FNC’s 20 domination of the ratings. People are watching those channels and people are reading the above magazines.
It’s called preaching to the choir. While I do not doubt that those organs are focusing on Q, they would mostly certainly distort something else if there was no Q (“Collusion”). It’s the nature of the beast.
Sure. Proud Boys. Pepe. Trump. Immigration. Statues. Police. Guns. Religion.
Truthfully, I don’t give a damn about the dueling establishment publications. I also don’t grant that Q is equivalent to The Squad. AOC and her colleagues are real and represent a real and sizable segment of the Dem electorate. Q represents no one.
ehhh….No. How about persuading them they might be mistaken? As far as I know there is no official “QAnon” membership list or badge or even a secret handshake – it is entirely possible that some people may think that some of the QAnon talking points(full disclosure – I haven’t clue what QAnon is all about or what their talking points may be – and I don’t know the secret handshake, either…) and because of that some may be lumped into being a full fledged QAnonner(QAnonnist?). Dunno, but ti seems that the art of political persuasion is being discounted. And for what it is worth, I wouldn’t count the Boston Globe as a bastion of accuracy when it comes to providing information – that little tidbit about the Colorado rep seems to be isolated to the Globe and given the general propensity of the Press to make up stuff about people they disapprove of, not sure they deserve the benefit of the doubt on that little tidbit of dirt…
Yep, I laugh at Pizzagate because it’s obviously crazy. And people believe it. Even crazier.
In New York City, Q types were elevated train cars from the turn of the last century, rebuilt for the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. The Q types lasted another 30 years and were the last wooden railcars in passenger service in America when they finally were retired in 1969.
Is it threadjacking if I jump in and out with a note on James Bond’s Q, referenced above? Desmond Llewellyn, the actor who played Q, had worked with Sean Connery in British TV in the Fifties. On the set, he did what wise bit players do–defer to the star, don’t do anything to attract undue attention. After all, Sean’s a huge star now. The director took him aside. “No, don’t be deferential. You don’t like him. He takes all your wonderful gadgets and breaks them.” Llewellyn got the message and changed his tone, becoming the irritated, supercilious Q we all know. “Try to pay attention, double-O seven…”
It’s not thread jacking if your comment is more relevant than the subject matter, and James Bond trivia is way more relevant than Qanon.
Sorry to contradict you, Ed, but yes, it’s threadjacking.
However, if you claim, Gary, that you’re threadjacking as part of a Qanon-inspired conspiracy, then it stops being threadjacking. (I think there’s kind of a catch-22 there, but I’m not sure.)