In many cases they’re already the same people
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There’s certainly overlap, and that overlap is where a big part of the pipeline concern comes in. There are a lot of devoted Q people whose entire involvement is irritating forum posts and dumb-ass bumper stickers. As the edifice gets shakier and they lose faith the nearby more radicalized members are right there to provide a face saving path forward. They can reassure the passive member that they weren’t completely misguided for the past X years, they were just missing the last pieces of the jigsaw. There are a lot of people who will do a lot of damage to avoid admitting they were that wrong for so long.
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Maybe the cure is to convince people Q is plant from the left who has been tricking them the whole time to keep them running in circles.
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Oh trust me, I do. All day, every day.
I guess part of my point is that a group like Atomwaffen is scary, but so is a whole horde of white people attempting to assassinate our order of succession. Is one group worse than the other? Maybe. Is there a substantive difference between them? Not really. Do they all need to be treated as if they pose a dire and immediate threat and should be scrubbed from the earth with haste? Abso-fucking-lutely.
I’m glad that organizations like SPLC exist to define those distinctions in the various forms of white supremacy, but at the end of the day, they’re all terrorists and should be treated as such.
Also: There is little doubt in my mind that a large number of them frequent both worlds and the line between them is virtually non-existent. To wit:
Woman Accused of Stealing Nancy Pelosi’s Laptop Appears in Video Making Nazi Salute - bellingcat
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Tomah-to, tomay-to. Cult belief system, Capgras Syndrome.
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I’d not heard of that. Thank you!
I hope you’re right.
I’m just concerned that if it’s not “the storm” it’s going to be some other equally sociopathic conspiracy. I don’t think that so many people really truly believe the actual facts (or even the fake offered “facts”) as much as they’re willing to suspend disbelief because it fulfills an inherent inner need for them.
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“Wait, March 4th is no good for me.”
“Okay, how about State of the Union address, whenever that is?”
“I guess.”
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“Trust the plan, Trump will bring the storm.” rhymes with “If we build a landing strip, John Frum will bring the cargo.”
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Can we get the Washington Department of Power and Water (DPW or the equivalent) to schedule some water main work, electric cable maintenance, or other activity for that day that forces the hotel to be shut down for 24 to 48 hours? Or some road work would also work.
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Who gets to do aerobics in front of the motorcade?
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This is a defining characteristic of all cults, particularly doomsday cults. It never matters that “the storm” (or the rapture, arrival, reckoning, etc) never comes.
Step one for understanding cults is to let go of the idea that any information matters. If the participants cared about evidence, they never would have made it to the point of joining. Once you’re in, keeping your identity whole overpowers any urge to question anything. It’s a story, not a model of reality, and you can always modify a story as needed to suit a desired belief.
Yup! This is called “God Of The Gaps”. There will always be things we don’t know, and there will always be people who can’t be comfortable with unknowns, so they point to those gaps and yell, “See! That must be [insert god]”
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This is super key right here. Nobody in QA-n-n was a super rational person before this. I guarantee they all also believe in one or more of UFOs, antivax, flat earth, alt med, Illuminati, etc. The problem is not Q, it is how to keep people out of all these irrational belief systems. There will always be something for these people to join, but those organizations are the symptom.
And absolutely it is about fulfilling inner needs. When you talk to these people and sincerely listen to them, you find that they are scared, lost, depressed, lonely, etc. They don’t have good tools or support for these problems, so they latch on to what is available (which sadly, is mostly Facebook).
I strongly recommend Oh No Ross And Carrie’s multipart podcast series on Flat Earth for understanding this. Flat Earth is the perfect test case, because there could not be a more ludicrous belief in the face of overwhelming evidence. That alone is proof that cults have nothing to do with information. Ross and Carrie get to know these people and hear their stories. As I said, they’re mostly just scared and lonely, like all of us. We need to give them better tools for dealing with that (and also kill Facebook because fuck).
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Not only this, but a lot of this is manufactured. A lot of people who fall into this, in reality, lead comfortable and otherwise reasonable lives. But… they turn on their TV to their preferred conservative outlet, and they’re spoon fed manufactured rage and victimhood day in and day out, until they feel like they’re the persecuted fringe (even when they’re not)[see every person who believes in the “war on Christmas” or that being white is currently a disadvantage in the USA]. Then you get a “fringe” that isn’t, has numbers that do not correspond to a small fringe, and is being purposefully manipulated.
The “conspiracy” movement is happening because some people profit from it, either financially, or in terms of political power. This isn’t some grassroots spontaneous made up of naturally occurring disaffected people. These people are being groomed for it, but think everyone else is the “sheeple”…
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Theater isn’t a crime.
They already were there in those groups. People can join multiple forums online.
Yes, very good point! Q-a-a-n is very much a movement of butthurt privilege-blind white people. That’s important to note. They’ve been radicalized by conservative media into something dangerous.
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If failed predictions would doom a cult, the Jehova’s Witlesses would not be here any more. They still hold a sort of record.
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