Same here. What scares me more than the GQP radio stations and TV networks is the influence of social media. The percentage of people using sites like Fbook on a daily basis and getting most of their “news” from that source seems to be increasing every year. Since they’re designed to show things similar to what users have seen before (or content from friends), they function like a petri dish in which the disease of disinformation quickly grows and spreads.
I used to use social media sites once a week to check on distant family and friends. The amount of conspiracy theory content coming my way from just two people out of fifty was enough to make me abandon it except on holidays and birthdays. I didn’t click on any of it, yet the amount of it continued to grow until the effort of scrolling past it to see anything else got on my nerves. Could it be that the algorithm has determined people likely to read or believe those stories are also more susceptible to other marketing, and that’s why it drowned out more sensible content posted by 48 other people?
It’s been a bit and I think this is what I really am on about. The poll purports to measure how many people believe QAnon type things but the question it asks really isn’t a question about whether you believe QAnon type things. Because in the minds of the people doing the polling and interpretting the polling, “QAnon-type things” is the stated public beliefs of QAnon supporters.
Believing that people with any kind of power often use that power to abuse vulnerable people, and that we systematically protect those powerful people and hide that abuse is not being a conspiracy theorist, it is being correct. That’s why QAnon uses that idea as a hook to draw people in and as a rationalization for their actions.
So I think the pollsters, and even this article on BB, are basically laundering QAnon’s reputation for them. QAnon beliefs are not beliefs that the government is run by pedophiles (even satanic ones). The basic belief of QAnon is:
America is in a civil war between a faction that wants to subjugate and enslave white people and a faction that wants keep America as it is
The one litmus test of which side someone is on is their allegiance to Trump
