The QAnon Conspiracy Phenomenon

[AnonyJoolz]

It seems everyday there's a new dumb as fuck conspiracy circulating round the internet. Who comes up with the dumb names? QAnon?

Social Media should be removing ALL content with conspiracy crap as should Youtube.

Freedom of Speech / Protest law or laws should be changed so you can only talk / protest about valid stuff, not bullshit (calling a virus a hoax) and hate filled crap.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53959552

fucking stupid that thousands of dumb ass people can protest without any social distancing or masks and think everything is fine.

if monty python was god, i'd hope a big foot would come down and squish them all out of existance. These people aren't required for humanity to progress to level 2, they can be deleted.

may them all get the virus.

Just tell us how you really feel?

 

[Rushfan62]

Well. I agree with the sentiment, but, so many questions....

 

[ralfy]

It's possible that what really takes place is less spectacular but also more damaging that what is imagined. That is likely given a global economy where a few have more wealth than most, and where political power ultimately rests on financial assets.

 

[Sabresonic]

It seems everyday there's a new dumb as fuck conspiracy circulating round the internet. Who comes up with the dumb names? QAnon?

Social Media should be removing ALL content with conspiracy crap as should Youtube.

Freedom of Speech / Protest law or laws should be changed so you can only talk / protest about valid stuff, not bullshit (calling a virus a hoax) and hate filled crap.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53959552

fucking stupid that thousands of dumb ass people can protest without any social distancing or masks and think everything is fine.

if monty python was god, i'd hope a big foot would come down and squish them all out of existance. These people aren't required for humanity to progress to level 2, they can be deleted.

may them all get the virus.

I think Youtube should remove all UFO/Ghosts fakes as well.

 

[Rushfan62]

But leave the real ones alone?

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

But leave the real ones alone?

That would certainly make discussions here far more straightforward!

 

[Mythopoeika]

I think Youtube should remove all UFO/Ghosts fakes as well.

Youtube knows which ones are fake?

 

[Sabresonic]

Not saying if Pizzagate is true or not but how is James Alefantis 1 of the 50 most powerful men in Washington with owning 2 Pizza places ?

 

[uair01]

www.the-sun.com › news › osa...
Osama bin Laden's niece says only Trump can prevent another 9/11 ...

 

[kamalktk]

QAnon Website Shuts Down After N.J. Man Identified as Operator


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...uts-down-after-n-j-man-identified-as-operator

A popular website for posts about the conspiracy group QAnon abruptly shut down after a fact-checking group identified the developer as a New Jersey man.

 

[Lord Lucan]

This happened this week here in Australia:

Twitter permanently suspends QAnon account belonging to friend of Australian PM for 'harmful activity'
BurnedSpy34 and two other accounts associated with prime minister Scott Morrison’s friend have been removed by the social media giant in its crackdown on conspiracy content

Twitter says it permanently suspended a QAnon account belonging to a family friend of the prime minister, Scott Morrison, for “engaging in coordinated harmful activity”.

Twitter is in the middle of a broader crackdown on QAnon content and is attempting to reduce the amplification of accounts spreading “clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm on our service”.


BurnedSpy34, a prominent and prolific member of the Australian QAnon scene, was recently permanently suspended.


The man behind the account, Tim Stewart, regularly tweeted content associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory to his tens of thousands of followers, including bizarre and unfounded claims about Alexander Downer and Julie Bishop, among others.

“The account you mentioned below has been permanently suspended for engaging in coordinated harmful activity,” a Twitter spokeswoman said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...friend-of-scott-morrison-for-harmful-activity

 

[Yithian]

There was a big QAnon flap yesterday when somebody found that the past three years of Tweets from Tom Hanks's account appeared to have been deleted.

It was, many claimed, because Ghislaine Maxwell was soon to finger him as a serial abuser, but it wouldn't make any difference, and neither would his having fled overseas to Australia or having earlier acquired Greek citizenship (where paedophilia is probably celebrated), because the FBI have all his data already.

And then the Tweets came back because it was a techinical glitch...

...or was it?

 

[Ogdred Weary]

It is all Pink Floyd's fault:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/pink-floyd/for-qanon-origins-look-to-the-pink-floyd-internet/

 

[sherbetbizarre]

How QAnon took hold in the UK
Propelled by a sludge of conspiracy theories related to Covid-19, QAnon is gaining a substantial UK following

A study by anti-extremism think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has found that Britain is the second country in the world for output of Q-related tweets: 309,652 tweets between November 2019 and June 2020. Granted, a distant second: the US was far ahead with over nine million posts; but the UK’s share of the Q pie had been growing from 2.1 per cent in 2019 to June 2020’s 2.8 per cent. And that is only Twitter, and that was only June.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/qanon-uk

 

[uair01]

NEW: A potential key to identifying "Q"—the purported persona at the center of the growing QAnon movement—has been hiding in plain sight for years on a Filipino pig farm, experts tell @ABC News. https://t.co/rFtj3fSg2H

 

[ralfy]

More like a combination of different theories, e.g., the illuminati, the military industrial complex, false flag operations, etc.

 

[uair01]

From an economics blog:

QAnon is quite the cocktail, with its anonymous founder (can’t attack the credibility of an anonymous poster with no accessible history!), highly detailed yet easy to wield lore transmitted through word of mouth on semi-private Facebook groups or in person, no easy experiments which raise internal contradictions (the downfall of flatearthers), and the highly emotionally potent mix of corruption and child abuse.

Are there really any competing groups which offer anything remotely as attractive, all encompassing, and seemingly (to insiders) unassailable?

Will be interesting to see if it loses strength over time. I suspect there will be enough events which can be interpreted as confirming key points over the next 10 years for it to keep growing. Its rate of conversion is also pretty incredible, compared to previous cults/religions.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/09/from-my-email-on-qanon.html

 

[uair01]

From a comment to the link above. Food for thought:

Fred Clark is the one in 2008 that came up with this useful framework when looking at something like QAnon, though his example involves the Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition.

Opposition to the burning of kittens is not what sets the members of the AKBC apart from everyone else. What sets them apart is their strange belief that they are a special, beleaguered minority. What sets them apart is their refusal and/or inability to recognize that opposition to the burning of kittens is a unanimous, universally shared opinion. Apart from the AKBC, most people don’t feel a need to imagine or to pretend that there exists somewhere a vast Pro-Kitten-Burning Coalition that they must denounce as a demonstration of their moral superiority. www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2014/12/21/the-anti-kitten-burning-coalition-again/

And in terms of QAnon, this is a particularly relevant observation.

But here was the weird part: Most of the commenters and letter-writers didn’t seem to notice that they were expressing a unanimous and noncontroversial sentiment. Their comments and letters were contentious and sort of aggressively defensive. Or maybe defensively aggressive. They were angry, and that anger didn’t seem to be directed only at the kitten-burners, but also at some larger group of others whom they imagined must condone this sort of thing.

If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you’d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marg...om-my-email-on-qanon.html?commentID=160153203

An evangelical has done an explication of one of the more influential series in the tribulation vein of American literature, providing insight into the sort of field onto which QAnon's seeds were sown. www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/11/05/left-behind-index-the-whole-thing/

 

[uair01]

And on the same blog we have the idea that QAnon is based on the novel: Q.

It’s based on....wait for it ....Q

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)

Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird “origin myths” are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon’s psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP’s set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia…

The 4chan originator left the actual name of the book in as a meta reference. They didn’t even change the character’s name.

The authors are called Wu Ming, aka....anonymous. The entire thing is a self referential joke.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marg...does-qanon-stand-for.html?commentID=160152882

 

[uair01]

I'm nearing the end of the comments. They're good. Another one:

The guy that ran the Qanon website worked as a senior vice president in technology at Citigroup in New Jersey. It doesn't get more coastal elite than that.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/17/citigroup-employee-who-ran-popular-qanon-site-put-on-leave/

https://marginalrevolution.com/marg...does-qanon-stand-for.html?commentID=160152837

 

[uair01]

And two interesting links:

I wouldn't assume any benign artistic motives on the part of the trolls.

Here's an interview with Wu Ming about their take. Note they clearly recognize it's their novel, but disavow any connection to the Q-tards.

https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Co...magicians-astrologists-and-gurus-4144259.html

Here's an article that delves into the possible reasons:

https://qz.com/1349858/what-does-qanon-have-to-do-with-leftist-italian-authors-wu-ming/

There's a conspiracy theory that it's definitely a leftist prank, but there's no proof whatsoever it's a partisan conspiracy.

A much more likely take IMO is that the entire thing is malevolent trolling in a chaotic evil sense, of someone clearly familiar enough with anarchist European literature to use it effectively

 

[ralfy]

The point about the operator being a former official of a multinational bank is notable. That reminds me of the "Shadowgate" issue, not to mention Wikileaks and others.

 

[uair01]

This is fun. Choose what is Pynchon and what is QAnon:

https://medium.com/slackjaw/qanon-or-pynchon-conspiracy-292d3f5ab849

It was too easy for me. I know my Pynchon too well ...

 

[ChasFink]

It was, many claimed, because Ghislaine Maxwell was soon to finger him as a serial abuser...

It's been almost two weeks and no one took this bait? For shame!

 

[kamalktk]

It's been almost two weeks and no one took this bait? For shame!

 

[uair01]

This is beatiful! (My favorite economics blog is full of pleasant surprises.)
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/blockchain-meets-it-qanon.html

From a QAnon + Blockchain statement - pure poetry

When Jesus spit biblical rhymes on the mount, he too talked about the marshmallow test in the form of two gates that one could go through in life. One gate was narrow and lead to a difficult path; the other gate was wide and lead to an easy path. Most people, according to Jesus, took the easy path which lead to their ruin (Matthew 7:13–14). There can be no question that taking back your sovereignty is the hard path, but you must remember the alternative is destruction. Those who procure Zcash shall be part of the kingdom of God in the post-fiat world. More importantly, those who remain shitcoin pagans or bitcoin Jews will risk burning in the eternal flames of the surveillance state.
https://medium.com/@sixtenhodler/intolerant-zeal-5b5b1dd6ec0e

In other news, the Devil's Facebook’s Libra is hiring economists (I have done some consulting work for a competitor).

 

[Vardoger]

Not saying if Pizzagate is true or not but how is James Alefantis 1 of the 50 most powerful men in Washington with owning 2 Pizza places ?

Serving children on Pizzas to politicians does that to a man.

 

[EnolaGaia]

This CNN special report describes the proliferation of QAnon outside the USA and gives examples of surges in QAnon interest as the pandemic stressed populations in certain nations.

'It's like a parasite'
How a dangerous virtual cult is going global

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/07/tech/qanon-europe-cult-intl/index.html

 

[Vardoger]

Is Kayleigh McKenany sending secret messages to the QAnon conspiracy theorists? Someone has noticed the clock behind her when she is interviewed on TV has been standing on 10:10 for a week. Something was going to happen on Oct. 10 according to QAnon fans.. They were probably thinking of arrests of pedophile Democrats. But nothing special happened besides Trump's fan meeting on WH lawn.

GOP senator noticed something weird on Fox News — is Kayleigh McEnany sending secret messages to QAnon? - RawStory

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1315089079487336448

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1314670143776137221

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1315111658990297091

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1313566937469849603

 

[uair01]

This CNN special report describes the proliferation of QAnon outside the USA and gives examples of surges in QAnon interest as the pandemic stressed populations in certain nations.


https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/07/tech/qanon-europe-cult-intl/index.html

There is a book on "mind parasites" that might be good and interesting. I would be tempted to buy it, if only the author was not so extremely self satisfied on Twitter (even more than Nassim Taleb if that's possible )

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show...d?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=g7471ZRKBi&rank=2