Q isn’t an organic phenomenon. It is a purposely designed tool, and it is far too effective to imagine it won’t be used by the right, and people who simply wish to destabilize opinion, in every country possible.
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Yesterday I was searching some anime opening videos… Surprose! Found a QAnon linked URL on a video of Azumanga Daioh’s Soramimi Cake. Where they edited also a scene of a whiteboard putting Don’t take coronavirus vaccine.
What can I say?
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I feel like Qanon has it’s seeds in 9/11 truthers. Just not wide spread enough to call the truthers mass hysteria. If on the other hand you mean the response as in DHS/TSA etc… well I agree the response garbage it’s not really mass hysteria or delusion IMO.
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I was mainly talking about the military and security theatre response. And I don’t know how you couldn’t label that mass hysteria. The entire country wrapped itself in a flag and went on to kill a few hundred thousand brown people that had nothing to do with the attack. With bi-partisan and popular support.
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Pizzagate is another direct progenitor of it, along with the Satanic Panics of the 80s.
And its original story claims there’s somebody called Q because he’s got a Q-level security clearance that gives him access into the Evil Workings of the Deep State. But a Q clearance is a Nuclear Weapons design clearance; it might let somebody know how our our latest bombs work, but it wouldn’t give them need to know or even the correct access levels to NSA, or CIA, or FBI, or State Dept stuff, or to anything the National Security Council does except maybe some nuclear war planning, and certainly wouldn’t give them access into Hollywood’s top-secret child-blood-sacrifice contracts with the Masonic Illuminati or the Queen of England or Epstein’s love affairs with Donald Trump.
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And all the Clinton, Whitewater, Vince Foster stuff, too
Thanks, that is a bit more than I expected. However, there’s a lot of caveats here, not just that 450.000 followers out of roughly 500-700 million Europeans (depending of whether one talks about the continent or the EU) is not exactly a lot, especially when you take into account that a “follower” is just somebody who clicked on “subscribe”, and in many cases, a bot or someone who has multiple accounts to to make the alt-right more prominent than they actually are.
What you will also find in the articles you quoted:
the gunman made no direct references to Qanon
The theory remains on the fringes of European discourse
At the end of the day, that’s what QAnon is: an online community.
Even in German media who are watching the alt-right closely, Qanon influence of Europe is not a major topic, and it’s also not a frequent topic on the known alt right sites (Tichy, Epoch-Times etc.).
Also, Qanon builds on ideas that were already part of the Alt-Right storybook in Europe and elsewhere, so anyone who parrots these can be sure to at least briefly get the attention of some of the nutcases here (e.g. the infamous dope fiend Xavier Naidoo), especially when they sit at home and have nothing better to do. However, that does not mean people over here believe in the Qanon conspiracy explicitly. FWIW I have literally never encountered an example where one of the German weirdos who defend Trump bring up the Qanon conspiracy theory in an online (or offline) discussion, and I’ve seen my fair share of that.
I’m all for watching QAnon more closely, but at the moment the European Alt-Right is not made more dangerous by believing in QAnon than it already is: they clearly didn’t need Qanon for their previous acts of terrorism.
Can you elaborate on that, what do you think Qanon is, and who designed it for what purpose?
To counter that, targeting Qanon is the wrong vector. One must change the capitalist system that allows this to flourish.
This is a good place to start if you haven’t seen it:
One can’t look at just Qanon, because it is just a chapter in a story that started back with Whitewater, Vince Foster, etc., etc. I wish that Frontline went back a little farther to Rush Limbaugh, honestly, he should get some credit for this.
You’re correct, completely, in that the “true believers” who are posting to social media aren’t very intimidating in numbers, but they aren’t the goal.
For every one of the die-hards, there will be a thousand people who say “all that worshiping Satan stuff is silly, BUT…”, or “I don’t believe all the child abuse is real, BUT…” and go on embrace a segment of the beliefs. They are the real target for this effort. You have people who might only latch onto anti-vaxxer material, or the 5g hysteria, or the human trafficking. The recent Boing Boing article about the “artist” cited 9/11 Truther material as the gateway drug.
You are correct when you say the German shooter didn’t cite Q directly. He did, though, cite specific Q beliefs, folded in with what was probably his own pre-existing, racist, far-right material. Conversely, those who go delving into the more unaligned, benign aspects of Q will be wooed by the far-right material. Conspiracy theory is just the bait.
The point isn’t to make everyone believe everything. The goal is bringing all the conspiracy theory under one big tent, weaponizing it, and giving them all a common far-Right alignment. They all come to you, so you control the narrative.
QAnon as a title is a label for the underlying effort. I expect it to shift to another persona soon, it has become too obvious. If you are judging the overall effect of this, you won’t find it by looking for the term QAnon. You’ll find it by watching the overall shift of conspiracy theory, world-wide, toward the far-right.
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Hadn‘t seen it, but it contained no information I wasn’t already aware of.
All conspiracy theories fuel each other, once you‘re in, you start believing other stuff, too. That‘s not specific to QAnon, but a well researched fact about conspiracy theories. It‘s obvious, too, once you let go of critical thinking, the gates are open.
As far as I understand your reply, you haven‘t answered that question.
What is the tool, who are the actors, what are the goals you referred to, who that effort targeted at? I‘m sure that can be summed up in 1-2 sentences. I‘d really like to understand that.
The US responded by attacking the Country/Government that harbored/aided the organization that planned and executed the event. I mean yes sucks the civilian population gets caught up in war but that’s how war has always been. So no I wouldn’t call it hysteria or delusion more so than any other act of war.
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