liquidlyrium:

icarus-suraki:

sunriseseance:

sunriseseance:

sunriseseance:

Ooooooh this is gonna be a lot so buckle up, but the short answer is: far right death cult that’s gaining a deeply, deeply concerning amount of traction right now.

TW for absolutely fucking everything.

Long answer is Qanon is a far right death cult that started on 4chan in 2016. It started with one jackass anon who called himself Q and made (completely false) predictions, claiming insider knowledge to help Trump and defame democrats. Followers decided that, due to the pseudonym chosen, he must be someone in the military with Q-level clearance. It’s basically confirmed at this point that Q is (and probably always was) an asshole named Jim Watkins. Jim is the founder of 8kun, which hosts child porn. Hold this in your mind for later.

Qanon centers on the belief that Trump is a) secretly really smart b) secretly a really good guy and c) secretly working behind the scenes to root out the Very Evil Bad Guy Deep State Democrats. At its core, the conspiracy is about worshipping the Asshole, waiting (for now), and interpretation. This allows them to dip into basically every conspiracy theory that has ever existed before. Evil deep state Jewish People? Absolutely. Lizard people (which is just evil deep state Jewish People with a weird new coat)? Yes. Hillary Clinton is the antichrist cause a fly landed on her? Absolutely. Vaccines are a way for uhhhhh Bill Gates to put microchips in your blood? Mhm. 5G caused Coronavirus? Yes. Donald Trump is the archangel Uriel? Jesus, yeah, some of them actually believe that.

Because Q is online, and disparate, and anonymous, and based so heavily on interpretation, people can bring whatever personal brand of crazy they want. It’s dangerous, it sucks you in, and it camouflages itself. Here’s why:

The big, center stage of Qanon the reason you, anon, me, and everyone else on Tumblr has to be just as careful as Aunt Karen, is that Q sucks you in by pretending to care about pedophilia and child trafficking.

Do you remember the Wayfair scandal that got a hundred thousand notes a while back? The one about the cabinets on Wayfair being priced high and having the same names as missing girls? Yeah, that was Qanon conspiracy.

Q gets its talons in good people, people like you and me, by pretending it’s about “saving the children.” It pretends that when it wants to kill individual democrats who oppose Trump, it’s because they’re secretly pedophiles. It positions itself as a moral authority against global elites who are trafficking and abusing innocent children and who can argue with that??

I mean, not me. Hollywood DOES have a pedophilia problem. It just isn’t Chrissy Tiegen, ya know? And I’m sure that there are pedophile democrats but look who they’ve put in the center of their conspiracy theory, a dude who is named in a rape case against a 13yo, a dude who was buds with Jeff Epstein.

Also, I think it’s important to note how wacky their idea of pedophilia is, and how nefarious it gets. Their idea of pedophilia isn’t molestation or anything like that. It’s buying a kid on Wayfair and then raping it in a ritual while you cut its face off and take its blood to harvest a magical chemical called Adrenochrome so you can stay young forever (yes, this is blood libel. Hello again, antisemitism!!) This means that they get desensitized to actual, average, everyday pedophilia. This also means that they sucker you into the rest of their far right death cult. Because if the left is doing this, then you have to be on the right, right?

So what is the right doing?

Well, they’re waiting for something they call the Great Awakening. They’re expecting, soon, televised trials and executions of all of these pedophiles (who are, again, just people who oppose Donald Trump). They are expecting a military takeover of America and the world. They are expecting everyone to be forced to watch this to reprogram their brains and get them used to the new world. They’ve been expecting this for a while (and, not to get too scary, but they’re getting impatient, and they’re getting scared what with the election).

I think Q spreads because it makes the world feel safer and more simple, and that appeals to everyone.

I guess, ultimately anon, Qanon is a right wing death cult that most people think they’re too smart and too good for, but I see Tumblr spread pieces of it ALL the time, and it scares the shit outta me. Good people, smart people get lost to this. Be careful out there, do your research, and always think about who stands to gain power from the things you spread.

(Also if you feel comfortable, it is more than okay to reblog this.)

What we’re seeing right now is a direct result of this. These people lived in an alternate, flattened reality where they were the main characters and nothing could go wrong for them. They firmly believed Trump would be perma-dictator and would save the world by killing non-existent pedos and creating an ethnostate. We are seeing the violence of fantasy land crashing into reality. We are seeing their white supremacist, fascism, and magical thinking turning into a desparate attempt to turn their fantasy into reality. Nobody paid attention to Q anon as it grew. Nobody paid attention to all of its malicious tendrils. I saw Q conspiracy bullshit being spread on Tumblr TODAY. Q scares the shit out of me, and this is why.

After what happened yesterday, they’re going back to unreality and conspiracy. They’re claiming that the deep state and antifa staged the violence and insurrection yesterday. Q people (and others) are claiming that every single anti-American act that took place yesterday was done by antifacists dressed up like fascists to Make Them Look Bad. The point of this is to keep living in this flattened world where they’re the good guys and we’re the bad guys and they’ve got good things coming. They want to keep being able to believe that they’re going to win. Yesterday was supposed to be the Great Awakening, and because they failed, it’s back to conspiracy. Keep your eyes on this. Don’t let them get away with this bullshit.

Please do keep your eyes on this. When QAnon started getting attention back in the spring of 2020, I had a giggle about it. I was rolling my eyes and laughing. I wish now I’d taken it more seriously then. But I’m glad I started paying attention, even if I was laughing. Nothing the conspiracy espouses is rational, logical, or factual, but it’s also not at all new and it’s as dangerous as it was when it first appeared.

If you want to go back a bit, all of QAnon’s stuff is basically rehashed from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s (sacrificing children), Milton William Cooper’s book Behold a Pale Horse (anti-Semitism, Deep State/Evil Government, secret cabals and banking dynasties, HIV/AIDS is man-made), and William Luther Pierce’s book The Turner Diaries (anti-Semitism again, Deep State/Evil Government, supporting assassinations and hate crimes), the American version of Evangelical Christianity (anti-Semitism again, except Israel is important because Israel is how you get The Rapture to happen), and probably a hundred other things.

Working in the library you get genuine questions about this–and lectures. I’ve come across dozens and dozens of other conspiracy theories that I haven’t yet seen in QAnon but I’ll bet it’s in there somewhere. Far be it from me to support censorship, but I wish I could put more context or explanations around these things instead of people just taking the ideas on whole.

So when you look at it, the “HIV/AIDS is man-made!” idea links up pretty well to the more recent “COVID-19 is man-made!” ideas. Likewise the “Great Awakening” concept maps almost perfectly onto American Evangelical Christians’ general interpretations about the biblical book of Revelations. 

Nothing QAnon says is entirely original. Whether the QAnons (I’ve heard there’s possibly two writers, one who started on one site and one who picked up on another site, and the writing styles are different enough to make it clear that it’s at least two different writers) know any of these sources specifically and are specifically taking pieces of them for their stories, I don’t know. But certainly all the ideas contained in the works and events referenced above are in the ether of the right wing. I mean, they were chanting quotes from The Turner Diaries at the insurrection about executing government officials. Whether they know the sources or not, these old ideas are being dredged up and put into the minds and mouths of right wingers. 

All the stuff that was dismissed as irrational nonsense and fringe ideas is now being paraded around as true. I’ll leave you with a quote from Alan Moore that sums up the mindset of the conspiracy-favoring right wingers:

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory is that conspiracy theorists actually believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy or the grey aliens or the 12 foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control. The truth is more frightening, nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.

I finally watched a video on my “to watch” list the other day. It’s quite long but it is ostensibly about flat Earth and flat Earth debunking, but I was unprepared for the hard turn about halfway through the video into the explanation and breakdown of the whole QAnon phenomenon and just how prescient it turned out to be.

This video was posted four months ago.

So when the above people say “flattened reality” they’re striking very close to the heart of the matter.