QAnon will survive, even with Trump's defeat. John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty
In his classic 1954 study of the adaptability of belief, When Prophecy Fails, Leon Festinger infiltrated a suburban UFO cult led by a housewife, Dorothy Martin, who’d been receiving messages from the ether via automatic writing.
On December 17, Martin apparently had a phone call from one ‘Captain Video’, from outer space, telling her that a saucer was to land in her backyard to pick her up, at four that afternoon, just before the end of the world. When the ship didn’t come, Martin and her rapidly-assembled coterie fell into despair. But then they discussed the matter further, and realised that the true meaning of the message had been that salvation would come later that day.
So it went on. On December 21, while yet again waiting for the spaceship that would save them when the earth was destroyed at precisely 12pm, it was suggested that perhaps the lounge clock they were timing the planet’s destruction by was wrong. Thus, the room of true believers waited for a second, slower clock to chime midnight, fingers presumably in ears. When, still, nothing happened, it was agreed amongst them that God in his infinite mercy had decided to save everyone. This time.
In terms of their own timeline QAnon is now perhaps at its first midnight clock. That makes this week both a fecund and an unnerving time for believers. Unnerving, because there is as yet no word from the high priest. “Q”, the anonymous figure who speaks the revelations that hold QAnon together — supposedly someone inside the Trump White House with high, ‘Q-level’ security clearance — has remained silent since polling day. His movement is a lifeboat drifting.
The last post in Q’s preferred receptacle — a messageboard on extreme speech site 8kun — was on November 3. It was a photo of a swimming pool-sized US flag on a hill, entitled “largest_flying_flag_in_america.jpg”; a quote from the Gettysburg Address: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”; and the words: “Together we win”.
But the prophecy failed. Winning was not what happened. Ostensibly, Trump has now lost. So, what hope is there for those who believe he is the last line of defence against a Deep State paedophile conspiracy? Will he still be held up as the Lion of Judah when he’s reduced to hosting chat and light entertainment on Trump TV in 2021?
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SubscribeQAnon look like the kind of fringe nutters that left wing journalists are keen to cite as providing clear evidence that, at heart, the right is nothing but a gathering of sad desperate losers unable to deal with the complexities and freedoms of a 21st century liberal culture. In short, an easy target.
On the other side of the political divide we have much more powerful forces in the shape of BLM/Antifa and “woke” in general. I doubt if Gavin Haynes intended this but his penultimate paragraph fits them perfectly:
“One of Festinger’s key criteria in his study was that, if the believer’s views are to adapt, they “must have social support”. The individual on their own, Festinger theorised, would be too weak to push back against irrefutable evidence. But if multiple people could talk their way round to a new consensual reality, reinforce it to each other, then all would be good again.”
We are being talked round into “a new consensual reality”. Just consider those desperate intersectional diagnoses of Western society’s ills ““ all white people are racist. Even if that racism is hidden in their deep unconscious it must be there because a whole raft of theory says it is. Likewise, denunciations of sexism, homophobia, transphobia etc etc. The cathartic enjoyment of moral indignation depends on widespread acceptance of the cult of black suffering, women’s suffering, gay’s suffering, [victim group of your choice] suffering.
“In short, an easy target.” – because it is true.
Both sides have too many idiots.
Indeed, but you have to go a long way “right” to find nutters.
Whereas on the “left”, not so far.
You don’t have to go a long way to find nutters on the right, they’re right here in the comments. UnHinged is a magnet for them, as Ess Are says.
UnHinged…LOL
Sadly only 1 Uptick
I find the comments here a lot more illuminating and polite than the ones I see in more mainstream publications such as the Guardian.
But your idea of a right wing nutter is anyone who disagrees with you.
You have devalued the currency.
Not really, no. My examples of right wing nutters are people who think there is a plandemic, or that it’s organised by Bill Gates and Big Farmers, that vitamin D is the answer, or that the FPR for PCR testing for SARS-nCOV2 is over 1%, or that Biden would not have won were it not for widespread fraud.
There are certainly right wing people who don’t believe these sort of things, so woudn’t deserve the “right wing nutter” label. Unfortunately there are also plenty of people commenting here who do.
Vitamin D may not be the answer, but here is someone from Oxford Uni suggesting it might be part of it.
https://theconversation.com…
Not a right wing nut job so far as I can tell.
Woah, back up there. Are you saying, anyone who thinks the false positive rate on PCR tests is higher than 1% is a right-wing nutter? I’m not sure I understand – are you saying this claim is false? If you are, on what basis?
Leaving out the fact that PCR tests were never designed to be diagnostic – the inventor was very clear on that. They detect genetic molecules within a sample, they don’t indicate a current infection or whether you’re infectious. They also do not detect SARS-CoV-2 for 2 reasons (1) the sample goes through centrifugal rotations in order to magnify molecules & as the common cold is a coronavirus, if the sample is rotated too much the test detects those molecules (2) the SARS-CoV-2 virus has never been isolated because a virus needs a host to survive, which is why it’s notoriously difficult to make virus vaccines.
Anyway, the PCR false positive rate varies depending on multiple factors & it can be a lot higher than 1% As a general rule, you need to know what the true negative & true positive rates are (not easy) & also the probability of the person having the virus at the time of testing. The UK govt is currently mass testing hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom don’t have any symptoms & are unlikely to have the virus.
Rather than use a 0% probability, assume a healthcare worker is being tested. This Cambridge University study puts probability for HCWs at 3%
https://www.cam.ac.uk/resea…
As true neg (sensitivity) & true pos (specitivity) we’ll use the lowest sensitivity (70%) & the highest specitivity (95%) within the ranges shown in this BMJ article:
https://www.bmj.com/content…
Testing with these parameters, a positive test result will only be 30% accurate. So, for every 100 positives, only 30 of them will be accurate & the other 70 will be false positives. This gives a false positive rate of 3% Now, imagine scaling this up to mass testing hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom have no symptoms – you’ll get thousands of false positives. You can do the calculations yourself here:
https://calculator.testingw…
Maybe take the tin foil hat off, ya right-wing nutter 😉
Not on its own, probably, but it’s part of a cluster of beliefs that tend to belong to right wing nutters.
This is false. The article Yes, PCR tests can detect “the COVID virus” by Ian M Mackkay (a virologist who uses PCR) goes into detail, but briefly, the primers used were chosen and validated to look for sequences unique to SARS-CoV-2, not other viruses. The virus has been isolated and sequenced.
This is incorrect. The FPR is 1 – specificity and does not depend on the prevelance/prior probability. In your example, you have calculated p(not disease|positive test) assuming an FPR of 5%. The FPR is p(positive test|not disease). As you correctly say, to get from the FPR to that posterior probability, we do need the prevelance and Bayes theorem, which is what the BMJ site is doing.
The FPR can be bounded by looking at results from the summer when prevelance was low. ONS’s page Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot: England, 17 July 2020 says “For example, in our most recent six weeks of data, 50 of the 112,776 total samples tested positive. Even if all these positives were false, specificity would still be 99.96%” (and so the FPR 100% – 99.96% = 0.04%).
A constant FPR can’t explain why the proportion of positive tests has been increasing since August, either (see Coronavirus (COVID-19) testing statistics (UK): data tables).
Why do these things make someone Right Wing?
Thanks for illustrating my point so well.
There’s no particular reason why those beliefs should be linked to being right wing (with the exception of the Biden one, I suppose, where there’d be a clear motivation to claim that), but it happens they’re linked to the QAnon cult, which supports Trump. It’s certainly strange how that sort of science denialism and woo-woo, which was once the preserve of the loony hippy left, is now linked to a right-wing movement.
QAnon cult? Ah, but of course! It doesn’t really exist though does it? You made it up. It is the latest bugaboo.
Anyway, enough. I’ll leave you to hunt down QAnon operatives. They are everywhere and they are right wing!
Wotever…at least QAnon don’t go round looting and burning small business that are often owned by blacks/hispanics, they don’t throw faeces at the police, and they don’t march around the suburbs chanting and shining powerful lights into the bedroom windows of sleeping citizens.
They dont cause three billion dollars of damage and kill 32 people either.
Yea, well, looting and burning are just stuff and property crimes, and remember Orwell and Solzhenitsyn,they tell the reality that ‘Thought Crime’ is 1000X worse than property crime, and Q is pure Thought Crime. The great Frederik Pohl in his wonderful future dystopia told us policy was ‘Better a hundred innocents are killed than one ‘Consie’ escapes. See you are comparing thought crime with regular crime, which is like comparing dollars and pennies. Qites must be removed and canceled! (insert raised fist emoji here)
Truly, one needn’t be involved with Q to come to the realization that America is run by a discredited evil elite propped up by an even more discredited media.
Political violence exploded this summer, and it was all for the benefit of the Democratic Party. Arson, looting, and destruction of public property went unpunished by Leftist officials in progressive bastions. The McCloskys, Kyle Rittenhouse, and the late Jake Gardner found that the price to standing up to the mob is very steep indeed, as the justice system seeks to grind them to dust. Democracy has given way to anarcho-tyranny.
Conspiracy theories take root when people lose faith in institutions. If one were so inclined, one can spin a new conspiracy theory just by piecing together facts from the last half year. And it would probably be more reasonable to believe than those who claim the election results are legitimate.
Exactly. I haven’t been to the QAnon site or whatever it is they have. But there is, quite plainly, a Deep State/Swamp in the US that is determined to crush working class people who don’t like endless and largely pointless wars. Thus, due to the Deep State, Big Tech and the media, working class people who don’t like pointless wars may have lost the election.
it was ever thus and Trump may just have been a minor respite from decades – or even centuries – of rule by the wicked.
I commend you both for being anti-war and pro-labour, since those are two positions us left-wing types have held for a long time. And if next time you could bring yourself to vote in a presidential candidate who isn’t a chauvinistic bully, I’ll find it a lot easier to be sympathetic to your position. Why, if you could find literally anyone other than famous asshole and egomaniac Donald Trump to project those lofty ideals onto, I might even switch sides! God knows I am not particularly fond of neoliberal talk-liberal-while-acting-conservative hypocrisy myself.
Though it might also help if this hypothetical paragon didn’t go out of his way to alienate every country that isn’t a dictatorship, of course. I feel like not making everyone hate you should be part of one’s effort to avoid wars. And if he actually did something to help the working class, instead of giving tax cuts to the uber-wealthy and promising that that would magically make jobs lost to automation come back. That’d be nice too.
Over at the Guardian, whenever actual electors reject (again) one of their insane ideas the commentators there thrash about blaming everything but the actual idea itself. Could it be that the Americans were right to elect Trump, then to ditch him as the lesser of two evils each time? That they accurately weighed up their options, even if both choices were distinctly unappealing, erratic and potentially dangerous? I personally have great faith in the American people.
Trump got 8M more votes than 2016; we have to wait until final analysis of the vote but as far as we can tell less than 1M people changed their votes – and kicked Trump out.
So very few Americans decided to change their mind, the overwhelming majority of 2016 voters (and 8M new ones ) stood by him. When they said “we didn’t vote for Trump we voted against Clinton” they were lying.
” I personally have great faith in the American people.”
Let me quote H.L. Mencken, the greatest observer of the American people:
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – 2016 election for you
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
Your last para is a dreadful indictement of American voters!
Not mine, H.L. Mencken’s.
Mencken was a staunch conservative, but against fundamentalism of all stripes.
Mencken was also not a fan of Democracy
It was 100% the postal vote harvesting. People sent out to get the people to stupid or lazy to vote in person to sign a form requesting a mail in ballot. Then they show up and talk them through the process and get it in the mail. Legal, but vote harvesting. The Democrats have many million voters who hardly know who the President is who voted because special interests did all the work for them, and told them who to vote for.
Also the latest word is Q was assassinated by a Deep State Ninja hired by the Gates/Dorsey foundation and the last posts were fake. Another hero bites the dust. I will light a candle for him/her.
“People sent out to get the people to stupid…”
as opposed to people too stupid to know the difference between “set out’ and “sent out” or “to” and “too.”
“Sent out” makes perfectly good sense in that context, as in “they were sent out by Democratic Party operatives to harvest the vote”, doesn’t it? I grant you that “to” versus “too” was misused, but that may have been just a result of carelessness rather than ignorance. His serious point is not answered by your nit-picking.
your delusions are now corrupting your understanding of language
As is your poor grammar and punctuation.
I would argue that we have actually been graced “by a downright moron” here in 2020, instead. Joe Biden has been in our Senate for 47 years; what did he actually do, other than serve as a coat holder to President Obama?
the Moron has been shown the door.
A review of Biden’s record ” which spans 36 years as a U.S. senator and eight as vice president ” is, in part, a reminder of how much the Democratic Party itself and the U.S. political system have changed over the last half a century.
Joe Biden
306 Electoral Votes
78,686,795 votes
50.9%
Donald Trump
232 Electoral Votes [2016″306]
73,102,757 votes [2016″62,985,106 votes-45.9%]
47.3%
Republican Congressional candidates outperformed Trump”Republicans voted for Republican Representatives and Senators and Democrat Biden.
Biden 50.9 percent of popular vote, topping Reagan’s 50.7 percent in 1980 “¦Is highest percentage for challenger since FDR in 1932
More people vote for Clinton/Biden than Trump. You seem to have a difficult time accepting this basic fact.
So maybe the majority of people do want “The Deep state”?
I think the difficulty here is yours, in as much that you actually BELIEVE that what has just occurred in the US was somehow a free, fair and democratic election.
In this context it doesn’t matter about names or who really won, it is about a process that has been openly corrupted.
If the election is as corrupted as you it should be quite easy to prove. As of this morning Trump’s lawyers have provided no evidence (!!!) of “open corruption”. Pennsylvania aside all the court cases in MI, AZ, GE and WI have been thrown out for lack of the evidence.
Evidence is sought when a situation arises that warrants investigation, it doesn’t just appear from nowhere.
There have been enough flags in the run up and throughout the US election that would warrant an investigation into allegations of vote fraud, where evidence, if it exists, will be found. If there was no vote fraud, there will be no evidence.
I realise that it is popular for people like you to present “evidence”, then investigate and subsequently discover that you are indeed correct, but that is, generally speaking, not quite how it is done.
And I think you will find that all the court cases are just getting off the ground, rather than your erroneous assertion that they have all been “thrown out”.
Again, as of last night: Trump’s lawyers have provided no evidence and all their court cases in MI, WI, AZ, GE have bee thrown out!
Haha…ok, if that’s how it is in your world…however, out here in the real world…it’s just a bit different
Tell me the court case and the case number. Give me the case number and I can read it. Easy, show me!
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
DONALD J. TRUMP FOR
PRESIDENT, INC., MATTHEW
SEELY, ALEXANDRA SEELY,
PHILIP O’HALLORAN, ERIC
OSTERGREN, MARIAN
SHERIDAN, MERCEDES WIRSING,
and CAMERON TARSA,
Plaintiffs,
v.
JOCELYN BENSON, in her official
capacity as Michigan Secretary of
State, MICHIGAN BOARD OF
STATE CANVASSERS, WAYNE
COUNTY, MICHIGAN, and
WAYNE COUNTY BOARD OF
COUNTY CANVASSERS,
Defendants.
No. ______________________
____________________________________/
Mark F. (Thor) Hearne, II (P40231)
Stephen S. Davis (pro hac forthcoming)
TRUE NORTH LAW, LLC
112 S. Hanley Road, Suite 200
St. Louis, MO 63105
(314) 296-4000
thor@truenorthlawgroup.com
_________________________________
Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr. already granted the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s request and temporarily ordered all counties segregate mail-in ballots that arrived after 8 p.m. on Election Day from others, but the lawsuit is still pending petition in the highest court.
…
The attorneys’ hope is that by filing as “friends of the Court” and demonstrating a “strong interest” in the ramifications of the Supreme Court’s potential decision that SCOTUS may be more willing to take up the case. -The Federalist
Yes, read my comments again.
I specifically said “Pennsylvania aside…”
Michigan…? Or did you miss that court filing…?
They only need to show in one state that the Dominion voting machines operated incorrectly, the other 29 states that used the same machines would then become suspect.
They may have operated incorrectly, they may not have.
Your “copy & paste” came out of DJT’s website.
6 hours ago.
Read my “F” comments again: as of last night all the cases have been thrown out including previous cases in Michigan.
“They may have operated incorrectly, they may not have.” I can say that about EVERYTHING in life. Trump’s team has (as of today) provided NO EVIDENCE.
A state court judge in Michigan took up one of the ballot processing accusations quickly last week. She determined that the sworn statement from the supposed witness was hearsay and therefore couldn’t be taken seriously in court.
“We’ve got an affidavit that is not firsthand knowledge!” Judge Cynthia Stephens exclaimed at a hearing before dismissing a Republican poll challenger’s accusation about a conversation that another election worker allegedly had overheard.
The Trump campaign has appealed Stephens’ decision. But the Michigan appellate court said the campaign hadn’t sent the proper documents. Republican lawyers said Monday that they were preparing for new challenges, though local media had already debunked claims of foul play in the election. In other states, Republicans gave up on some claims of the mishandling of ballots.
….and Georgia have just stated they will be having a recount…all starting to fall to pieces, because once they start looking…and Michigan is looking like it may have to recount too…and then all those 30 states that use the Dominion vote machines…and then and then and then…
Yes, Georgia will do a recount and by Nov 20 Trump will still claim that he lost Georgia ( a republican state) to democratic theft.
When so many millions vote, it would be surprising if the process was completely free of irregularities. Nothing so far to confirm which side any of those might have benefited. To allege otherwise is just posturing.
I don’t think it is just irregularities.
OK, so you come home to find that your house has been burgled.
You call the police and say “i’ve been burgled”.
The police say “where’s the evidence”
You say “well, come round and investigate”
The police come to your house, investigate the reported burglary and find evidence of burglary.
In the case of the US election, the response to “i’ve been burgled” is “there is no evidence, therefore we will not investigate”
Your analogy is absurd.
You THINK it is absurd
No Jeremy. If the deep state is as corrupt as it appears then it will be extremely difficult to prove. What do you think your chances would have been of proving that elections to the politburo in Stalin’s Russia were corrupt?
You don’t have to believe in an international paedophile conspiracy to be suspicious of the election process and the result.
Your comparison between USA and Stalin’s Russia is utterly despicable.
Stalin killed MILLIONS of people!
Let us be perfectly clear here, all cases were only rejected by “Democrat” state courts, however, the Supreme court is still amassing and evaluating the evidence.
In the US, are the courts biased according to the party the governor represents?
In the US, are the courts biased according to the party represented by the state governor?
looks like it will have to go to the Supreme Court then
Georgia is now recounting and auditing the vote.
Time will tell
Oh, come off it, Jeremy! There are a ton of affidavits to voter fraud at this point. The attachment gives several all relating to the Michigan county in which Detroit can be found.
https://greatlakesjc.org/wp…
If the workers were assigning so many (imaginary?) people imaginary birthdates of January 1, 1900, it is not surprising Michigan has more centenarian voters than any other jurisdiction on the planet. The Pennsylvania law clearly stated that no mail-in ballots would be accepted after voting day, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled the legislature to accept them for three days later. In Michigan, the state law also said no mail-in ballots would be accepted after voting day, but a sworn affidavit stated that ballots received later were being marked as received on election day and counted as legitimate votes. I am not sure a court ruling is the best test about whether fraud is going on. If the affiant says ballots were received later and the person he accuses says that’s not true, does that mean, in your mind, that there is no evidence?
The election isn’t over yet
The assumption of corruption seems rather convenient as it seems to be an assumption that is largely held by the right.
Lol…another “reader” who doesn’t seem to read past the headlines of the MSM…
We just came off of four years of “Not MY President”, and “Russian Collusion!”, from OUR Left, so excuse me if I snicker at your post.
And maybe there is no such thing as the “Deep State”? Is the whole notion any more plausuble than the Illuminati? People seem to need to blame an organised conspiracy for the fact that things haven’t gone their way, whether it is 9′ tall shape-shifting lizards, The Deep State, The Freemasons (probably due to be resurrected as a sinister conspiracy as they’ve had too long a quiet time), The Illuminati, The World Economic Forum with their Davos meetings – the UN with their Black Helicopters etc etc.
The “Deep State” is quite a bit more credible than the Illuminati as a powerful source of mischief, I’d say. The Illuminati (who were real) were a ragtag group of conspirators in the 18th century, easily crushed by the Bavarian government when the German state found out about them. The Deep State, OTOH, is the permanent American bureaucracy, numbering in the millions of people and equipped with great power. There are legitimate questions about how they operate, which politicians they favor (if any), how united a front they have, etc. But they are definitely real, in the present, and can enact laws and policies rather than just theorize about them, unlike the Illuminati.
Hey, getting free stuff, paid for by the rich 1%ers that you hate, is a powerful drug.
Watch this next week. Trump will be doing another 4 years.
Another four years of ‘The Apprentice’?
“Conspiracy theories take root when people lose faith in institutions.”
Yes, but why such outlandish and fact-free conspiracy theories?
The assassination of JFK left a lot of unanswered questions, as did the September 11 2001 attacks. It seems reasonable to investigate further, not simply accept the official narratives.
QOnan believers think there’s an international paedophile ring harvesting adrenochrome from kidnapped children in order to retain or regain their youth. Is there any evidence for any of that?
But that’s not Q. Q is a set of conspiracy theories about child trafficking, satanism, possibly cannibalism, by specific high ranking people like Hillary Clinton and other high ranking democrats, amongst others. It also ties in elements of anti-semitic stuff.
America may well be run by a discredited elite, but if it is then Donald Trump is in their number, not some sort of saviour for the downtrodden. QAnon is pure partisan fantasy.
We do not need theories; take a look at the WEF website, listen to Soros and Schwab and see how many they have supporting them, including a member of the royal family who seems oblivious to the fact that they are looking to end the sovereign state. How stupid can you get?
The real cult is secular leftism. It works by destroying the self-confidence of the individual then suggesting a simple route to purity and moral superiority while destroying any notion that the individual is free to act according to his own conscience.
QAnon is at heart a deep suspicion of the faceless State – the enemy of individual sovereignty. The rejection of governmental power was the motivation for the founding of the American Republic and remains the binding force that holds the true American psyche together.
So give me Q over woke any day.
Yes, the child eating global cabal
They way the theory manifests itself is in vivid dramatisation – the worst things the human mind can conjure. To my mind it is an expression of the American psyche – the desire for freedom and self-determination at all costs.
That’s how the imagination works – it conjures the threat and gives it form in an in image which is metaphorical.
“To my mind it is an expression of the American psyche…” You mean like the armed nutter who turned up at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria to save all the children being raped and exsanguinated in the basement?!
A deep suspicion of the faceless State – so instead QOnanists place their faith in a faceless Q, who holds a position – with ‘Q security clearance’ – at the very heart of the faceless state?
No. They like the idea of someone inside the machine subverting it.
They like the idea to be sure, but is there any reason to believe Q is someone at the heart of the deep state with Q-level security clearance, and not just someone with an over-active imagination?
Q might be laughing on the other side of his faceless.
In media-speak “conspiracy theory” stands to Covid as “racism” to Diversity. Media / officialdom *are* ‘conspiracies’ against the inherited loyalties of ordinary Europeans.
Unanimity of opinion on what Larry Fink CEO BlackRock Inc & Agenda Contributor to Wold Economic Forum has spoken of as “The intersect between Covid, Climate and Racial Justice: the three great issues of our time.” cannot be understood other than as a coalition of interests – ‘conspiracy’ will do just as well.
“Conspiracy theory” serves to discredit opinion outside the approved ‘narrative’. Just as “racist” demonises Britons who dare to resist ethnic minority status in their native homeland.
For all I know the likes of David Icke and Alex Jones could be double agents complicit in what they oppose, peppering verifiable truth with claims that can be subjected to ridicule. It’s hard to know for sure. They might just be doing it to garner attention in the service of highlighting the truth. Either way much of what they say is either observably true or at least consistent with the facts.
Every media outlet follows a comparable model on the “three great issues of our time”: the middle ground fallacy where the truth is supposed to lie between opposing viewpoints.
The middle ground between Afua / Ash / Kehinde (critical race theory) and James / Toby / Rod (racial equality) is guaranteed minority status for natives and the denial of any platform to “racist” dissenters. James, Toby etc already being “racist” by default in virtue of “whiteness”.
Similarly re Covid it’s Chris / Patrick / Boris (Lockdown) v Carl / John / Toby (effects of virus don’t warrant such measures). Mention of globalist agenda can thus be framed as “cranks” or “conspiracy theorists”.
‘Lockdown Sceptics’ / “conspiracy theory” stands to Covid as ‘Free Speech Union’ / “racism” to Diversity: the only people imprisoned for incorrect speech, “far right” natives, being the one group whose speech Free Speech Union can’t defend.
On the convergence of opinion or “conspiracy” between government and commerce no one’s put the point more pithily than the mighty GK Chesterton:
“Bolshevism and Big Business are very much alike; they are both built on the truth that everything is easy and simple if once you eliminate liberty. And the real irreconcilable enemy of both is what may be called Small Business.”
Yes the WEF and political clowns have conspired to achieve the goals you outline, now watch them c**k it up and destroy many lives in the process. If it was really as simple as the conspirators hope perhaps someone would have hit on the solution to social, cultural and economic ills by now! Give these idiots another decade and voters will be begging President Xi to rule the West/Aus/NZ with Putin as Minister for the Interior!
Yes the WEF and others have conspired to achieve the goals you
outline, now watch them make a mess of it and destroy many lives in the
process. If it was really as simple as the conspirators believe
someone the solution to social, cultural and economic
ills would be known by now. Give these hopeless conspirators
another 12 years and voters will be begging
President Xi to rule the West/Aus/NZ with Putin as Minister for the
Interior.
‘Dare to resist ethnic minority status in their native homeland’? It’ll take a while. 80.5% described themselves as White British with 4.4% White Other as the largest minority in England and Wales at the last census. Admittedly, the percentage of White British declined from 87.4% in 2001. But at that rate it will take around another 50 to 60 years before people calling themselves White British will be in the minority. By then I suspect the ethnic categories will be largely meaningless. I’m sad I won’t be around to see it.
50 to 60 years is no time, really.
Half that would be closer to the mark.
Not that long at all. 2066 is Oxford demographer David Coleman’s prediction. But Gavin Boby, using 2019 demographic data from Department of Education reckons it will come a lot sooner and gives 2035 as the critical date, as that’s when indigenous schoolchildren will be a minority in British schools; native births a minority of births before 2030. Muslims will be a majority by 2050. Note that these figures are based on fertility rates: even without further influx ethnic dissolution of natives is mathematically guaranteed.
What’s happening here already meets UN definition of genocide. If an African or Asian people were being displaced at a comparable rate in their own lands by Europeans, to say nothing of the crime and violence visited on natives, not least jihadi rap3 gangs, the same types accusing people of “racism” would be defending their right to “self-determination”; in all likelihood we’d be sending troops in to protect them under auspices of UN Also worth bearing in mind that Europeans are a global ethnic minority. There are more Africans, Indians, Chinese than Europeans individually let alone combined. Diversity is a Bigger Lie than Covid.
The displacement, crime and violence visited on ‘indigenous’ Europeans is nothing to that visited on various African and Asian peoples by the British Empire, European nations or their US successor. Are ‘native, white’ Europeans being rounded up into concentration camps, carpet bombed, or invaded by actual armies composed of real soldiers?
Great anatomy of a conspiracy – the more you falsify it the stronger the believers cling on. I support the notion that some of these theories take a grain of truth and use illogical deduction to flesh out the theory, and Qanon seems no different: Did left wing politicians, compliant police and civil servants cover up gangs raping underage girls in British cities? Yes. Did US leftwing politicians allow MS13 and Barrio18 gang members into US where their use of rape as punishment carried on as it does in El Salvador, Honduras etc? Yes. Does this mean satanic left wing pedos trade children via pizza parlours? No. However it is reasonable to conclude that the majority of politicians, in this case left wing ones, are happy to allow the most egregious crimes against the person if it furthers their cause. Same can be said with SARS-CoV2 bed wetters, Anti- Vaxxers, Anit- Zionists etc etc. The US constitution was intented to check, balance and separate the powers of these loons as well as normal politicians with their more mundane foibles. Looks like the mechanism is in need of repair.
No need to read Q anon for examples of absurdity, The UK media carried reports today that the Head of the English Football association has been hounded out of his job for referring to some players as “coloured” rather than “black” and for referring to homosexuality as “a lifestyle.
When I was young no one called coloured people “black” as the word had negative connotations. Homosexuality is obviously a “lifestyle” as no gay gene has ever been found………It’s all w0ke madness.
How much of QAnon is just a big joke?
The media blowing this all out of proportion and taking it all-so-seriously just makes them seem even more out of touch and one sided.
I wish it was a big joke. Sadly there are too many idiots out there.
Didn’t Q get his start on Star Trek?
I was never a Star Trek fan so I don’t know.
Imagine believing in Russia gate .
From what I’ve read, it started as a joke and then caught on. Now it’s basically the old blood libel adapted for an Internet age, and there are plenty of people who take it seriously. A good article on the history is the Atlantic’s “The Prophecies of Q” from June this year.
It’s just digital age National Enquirer, isn’t it?
The thing about Qanon is nobody really has any idea how much of the following is genuine diehard conspiracy theorists, or just some right wingers with an incredibly cynical view of government, who find entertainment, maybe some actual belief, but probably mostly joy in knowing it’s another conduit through which to troll the left.
The fact that the term Qanon has now been heard coming from the lips of clueless left wing journalists who think they’ve somehow uncovered some new angle to take a pejorative shot at Trump, just makes this all much more fun to watch, as they “self own” on live TV.
But maybe the best part is that for three years, Maddow was given a mainstream platform on which to soil her drawers on a nightly basis while she attempted to stitch together some massive patchwork of conspiracies to prove that Trump did indeed enjoy to be peed on”and when it all came crashing down around her with a dud Mueller Report, she actually cried like a child on live TV.
Conspiracies for me, but not for thee.
Ridiculous and McCarthyite as I found the Russiagate nonsense, it did have a sort of semblance of a basis in facts, however few and tangential. Trump did call for Russia to hack more stuff, did and does rent out Trump properties to wealthy Russians, and was definitely ‘soft’ on Russia compared to Clinton, who wanted a direct military confrontation with Russia in Syria with her ‘no-fly’ (= US flies and kills at will) zones.
Are there any facts at all to back up this idea of a liberal global elite paedophile ring rejuvenating themselves with adrenochrome harvested from thousands of kidnapped children? Or even any evidence that Trump has been secretly working to defeat the deep state? (If he has, he doesn’t seem to have been very successful – look at how ‘the deep state is stealing the election’! Too much time blustering, tweeting and playing golf; not enough time being Our Saviour.)
I am now terrified that so many UnHerd readers are QAnon members. I knew UnHerd was gradually circling the drain of credibility but how quickly its end has come. The loonier elements of Spectator readers have migrated here. As their God would say: Sad. Or SAD!!!
I’m alarmed by the increasing numbers of writers and commenters on many websites who enthusiastically peddle stuff like 5G COVID vaccines using implantable biochips to alter our DNA. If they get their way, we’ll soon be back in the dark ages, with polio, measles, mumps, rubella, TB and so on running rampant, while climate change – another ‘hoax’ – goes unchecked.
It is because you have only thought about things superficially. If you start from the Christian perspective that you must love your neighbour as yourself, you must ask yourself, ‘is my neighbour a complete nutter?’ if your answer to this question is yes, then it is for you to find some way of living in a world full of nutters and still finding some means to love them. Alternatively you could decide that it is statistically unlikely that many of your fellow men are mad, and give the same respectful interest to the theories they hold to be true as you would the ideas of any other group of people whose thinking is unfamiliar to you.
The Bill Gates conspiracy theory derives from the fact that this man’s Microsoft empire transformed the world at the same time as there was a huge push to reduce investment in the physical economy and production of real things and turn the economies of the developed west over to financial services, the interests of big money and globalism. Gates wealth came from changing people’s livelihoods,making them dependent on his computer software, something which initially, needed updating every verse end, so that he was effectively a rent seeker. Such was his power that we could not now run even a small town council on a paper based system, let alone an empire. This man created something from which we have all benefitted, but his money was made by licensing it and requiring us to buy new versions every so often. Human beings rightly balk at the idea that this same model will be used to bring in the bucks by injecting some ‘beneficial’ substance into their veins. Will they will be tagged as having been injected, to show they are fit to socialise until the vaccine wears out, at which point will they be able to earn their living or meet other people, socially, until they have got the updated version of the vaccine? These are not the irrational illogical fears of nutters, they are reasonable worries based on experience. If you wish to help people put aside these fears you should counter them with reasonable arguments of your own, not dismiss them as insanity.
“Human beings rightly balk at the idea that this same model will be used to bring in the bucks by injecting some ‘beneficial’ substance into their veins. Will they will be tagged as having been injected, to show they are fit to socialise until the vaccine wears out, at which point will they be able to earn their living or meet other people, socially, until they have got the updated version of the vaccine? These are not the irrational illogical fears of nutters, they are reasonable worries based on experience.“
Sure they do… and they would rightly balk at being eaten slowly by a race of invading alien cockroaches from the planet Xandorf too… but that’s not going to happen either, is it? You had it right in the first instance… that’s an irrational illogical fear of a nutter. Get real.
You proved her point very well.
And what if I don’t start from a Christian perspective, and just think QOnanists are nutters?
“Several banks, like Bank of England have already prepared RFID microchip to be implanted under your skin.” The ‘bribe’: Universal Basic Income. That was Professor Richard Werner two years ago in a presentation on money creation. It’s on YouTube. Also worth watching is his dialogue with an FCA bloke who’s bound to agree with him on money creation. He doesn’t mention the chip in that discussion. But I’m not aware of anyone refuting it. Already many retailers are using virus as pretext for insisting on cashless payments It’s also argued that the reason Sweden avoided ‘lockdown’ is that they’re already the most cashless society. Even IKEA in this country are no longer accepting cash.
You lost me at YouTube.
There are, allegedly, a few grains of Truth on YT ;-}
P.S.
1) Could we agree that institutionalism is historically a rotten thing in need of constant reform and renewal?
2) Anyone seen “Eyes Wide Shut”? “Enemy of the State”? “I Robot” Any more suggestions?
3) Anyone agree that what we see in Sci-Fi / intrigue / Matrix etc movies spookily seems to end up being possible?
4) Could we make a (cheerful) parallel between Nostradamus and Q?
Look out for the new website: UnHinged.
Unherd articles continue to be thoughtful critiques of the status quo.
What in particular is it about Unherd that has you terrified? I don’t agree with everything people post here, but I would rather that than read articles where comments are narrowly moderated to fit a narrative.
The articles in Unherd make sense but many of the comments, on the other hand, are becoming incomprehensible. Especially the comments on this article. I’m wondering if Trump supporters are losing it, big time!
Amazingly half of America believe in the Russia gate conspiracy and that Trump is actually a Nazi. They believe the police hunt black people for fun and the world is going to boil in ten years. Or is it 11, cant remember.
Correct. Before something is “destructible” it must exist/be real. “Distraction” is “destructible” though, by simply not participating in it. The author’s continuing association w/ Vice, post-Gavin McInnes indicates what?
QAnon have traction because, in a weird way, they’re right. Christianity, particularly Catholicism, holds to the notion of natural law, the idea that people know what’s right and wrong. It’s more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea. They’re just experts at rationalizing their way around things they don’t want to do, or at justifying things they shouldn’t do, but want to.
So the supposed nutters of QAnon rail about a worldwide cabal of powerful paedophiles and are universally snorted at by the “educated” people, but then Jeffrey Epstein ends up dead. And this takes place in a context where the age of consent — for both heterosexual and homosexual relations — is being constantly driven downward by powerful political forces under the banner of “human rights”. The definition of marriage is extended to the breaking point, abortion is a moral imperative, indeed, almost a sacrament, and yes, whether one cares to admit it or not, extremely powerful, non-constitutional forces have conspired extra-legally to bring down a sitting US president.
Does all this amount to a worldwide, secret cabal of conspirators with a satanic agenda? No, but people’s instincts are good. The natural law ingrained within everyone is not at ease. They know something is badly wrong, and they give it form with QAnon, but in reality, it’s just the same old wickedness that’s been around since Eden. The only difference nowadays is that the wicked try to sell it under the flag of personal liberty, but in their hearts, people aren’t buying it. They know when they’re getting hosed, it’s just that they can’t always express it.
8kun …an “extreme speech site”……..Really Gavin?
It is the refusal of the establishment to do an audit of the votes in the battleground states that is very worrying. A “hanging chad” audit of Florida went on for over 40 days in the 2000 Bush vs Gore election. In 2020, the establishment wanted a concession from Trump 2 days after the election this year and the Never-Trumpers published the names and addresses of Trump’s legal team so the Antifa goons could target them which they have dutifully and violently done. Why the rush? Why no desire for transparency?
I don’t know, maybe military contractors, but it is fishy.
Sadly, not much in this article about what drives people to such bizarre ideas as QOnan. Just loss of faith in institutions. I’ve had very little faith in our ‘democratic institutions’ for decades, but I don’t feel the need to believe satanic paedophiles are harvesting adrenochrome from kidnapped children to keep Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi so youthful (doesn’t seem to work well, does it).
Nor is there much regarding what to do about QOnan and similar outlandish ideas. Some want to ban them from Facebook and so on, which only confirms their belief that the deep state is persecuting and censoring them, much as banning mention of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ only generated free publicity for it and the band.
I’m glad Biden won, but I do wish he’d stop touching women in that creepy way. Hopefully his minders can cure that trait.
Cure it? They do their best to ignore it.
Maybe Q can qure that trait.
Probably true that some of this sad scene will rumble on even though Q has gone quiet. Certainly there will be those who want to feed the frenzy. If you’ve already bought into far fetched conspiracy, even the massive reality checks looming now can be swerved, but it will consume a lot of energy people could find better ways to use in their own interest. Sone of the faithful will disinvest, others will pursue offshoots they can continue to link with their concerns, others will go back to playing out fantasy games in the original Q spirit.
For an alternative assessment of Q, I’d recommend Martin Geddes’ ’10 Essays on Q’ here:
wwwDOTonqDOTmartingeddesDOTcom
Q doesn’t exist. I don’t mean he doesn’t exist in the White House. Obviously not. They would have found him a long time ago. I mean that there isn’t a group of guys, or a guy, in a barn in Wisconsin writing this cryptic nonsense. They would have found them too.
I look forward to Q running for president in 2024, broadcasting Q-tips to the eagerly waiting world via Qwitter.
Vote red? Vote blue? Vote Q!
The only people playing 4D chess are those running Q.
Who needs conspiracy theories? Look at the WEF website.
In a post on a related article today, I pointed out that a large section, perhaps a majority, of Q-Anon’s grassroots support seems to come from working class women with children, usually single mothers. Both the Q-Anon elected representatives cited in above are female.
We can see Q-Anon both as a product of feminism (the instability and anxiety caused by family breakdown, lone parenthood, transient relationships) and as a form or subspecies of feminism. Many of Q-Anon’s targets and tropes are the same as those of radical feminists: men as predators and potential child abusers; protecting ‘women’s spaces’ (but not ‘men’s spaces’); [non-white] immigration and multiculturalism as a threat to ‘gender equality’.
We should remember here that there are close historical links between feminism and the far right: Marie Stopes supported eugenics (social and racial), Millicent Fawcett wrote approvingly of concentration camps in the Boer War, Christabel Pankhurst became an avowed Fascist. Q-Anon, at least in the UK, slots neatly into that tradition.
Also, Q-Anon’s fixations call to mind the ‘satanic abuse’ hysterias of the 1980s, in which right-wing Evangelical Christians and left-wing feminists worked together to create a climate of fear.
– Yes, the suffragettes of the early twentieth century were largely supporters of Oswald Mosley’s brown shirts in the 1930s.
“Former Suffragettes Flocked to British Fascism”
“former” individual members of the suffrage movement not the suffrage movement and there is no reliable quantification of how many.
Mosley wrote his 40,000-word manifesto in 1932, 1918, Parliament passed an act granting the vote to women over the age of 30 who were householders, the wives of householders, occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5, and graduates of British universities. About 8.4 million women gained the vote In November 1918.
I think America is in danger, of becoming Alice’s Wonderland. What’s become of the world’s leading nation.?
I could laugh, but this is not funny, mass hysteria?
have no fear…the Tea Bag Party came and went with negligible consequence as will QAnon, at least in the States, your local participants are a peculiar variant with their fixation on G5 cell towers.
Q is likely a Laughing Leftist making up fairy tales (not about the election- Trump won this thing) to mock us (PAST tense for me) that even bother to read them.
Fancy slogans and cliches. And an accuracy rate that would have any sports bookie fired.
Oh I have heard that JFK Jr would replace Pence on the ticket after resurrecting on 7/4/19 and then 7/4/20. BHO and HRC were both killed by military tribunals and their clones are running around. (Just as evil as the real ones.)
Silly sci-fi stories that would make Marshall Applewhite blush.
National Popcorn Day (with a side of pizza) 2018.
Q is everything it’s followers accuse the Lefties of being.
Crazy clues that, luckily, neither Rush nor Sean,etc resort to and they have the ball$ to attach their names to their commentaries.
I had the t-shirt and the bumpersticker and soon realized it was all BS.
HOPE PORN!
Christ warned about false prophets and Q is either that or satire.
Trust the scam!
Enjoy the Shoe!
Where we Fool one We Fool All!
Q is a reincarnation of the legendary comedian Charlie Callas.
At the risk of expecting the usual hordes of disingenuous nonsense replies, QAnon is nonsense. Pushing the idea that Trump was coming to save the US from “coastal elites” when he is the very embodiment of a coastal elite is case in point.
he says the election is over and that trump has lost. where did he get this information?
The FBI monitors QAnon as a potential source of terrorism because just a single actor with a rifle or bomb can do great damage; some of the men in the Michigan governor kidnapping plot are believed to have subscribed to this theory. But no criteria for predicting how long such groups will last or how dangerous they might become have ever been developed to the best of my knowledge. Most conspiracy theories remain harmless even if they endure, e.g. the notion that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which Oliver Stone made a movie of. And we never hear about the ones that disband upon the retirement, defrocking or death of their originators. Jim Jones’s People’s Temple cult led to the killing of a Congressman and the murder-suicide of 900 in Guyana in 1978 despite its much smaller following and relative obscurity.
Therefore, I think we’ve overblown the QAnon phenomenon. Its mystique derives entirely from Donald Trump, and if it survives, a feat it could attempt to achieve through claims that Trump’s job eliminating the pedophiles is finished in time to pivot to a next imagined threat, it won’t be able to hold as much influence away from the White House. The violent people who’ve associated with QAnon will remain a concern to law enforcement even if they discard the theory in favor of some other narrative. The rest, the millions of fans on Facebook, are there for electronic media kicks or excuse for antics on the streets. Mail-in ballots shifting toward Biden after Election Day hardly surprised the NY Times discussing the possibility months ago; see
“Republicans Fear Trump’s Criticism of Mail-In Ballots Will Hurt Them”
Trip Gabriel
NY Times, June 2, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/202…
Movement conservatives nonplussed at being upstaged by the Trump presidency may reassert themselves in an effort to bring the right back to core issues. Their mill should enjoy plenty of grist with our Supreme Court’s new ideological composition.
Just a quick comment”¦ At 1:48 in the Giuliani video, you can clearly see black stains on his fingers and palms of his right hand.
so many 5G cell towers; so little time.
The John Birch Society begat the Koch Brothers whose father”Fred Koch”was a co-founder of the Birch Society.
The Koch Brothers begat the Tea Bag Party vaporware.
The Tea Bag Party vaporware begat QAnon vaporware.
A pretty good rule of thumb, which I try and apply to any situation that I believe merits it, is to ask myself who actually gains and ultimately wins from a situation and who loses and why, regardless of what my own inevitable in-built bias might initially tell me.
Trump is certainly enough of an expedient opportunist and narcissist to be seduced by such a ridiculous conspiracy that places him at its centre of it as some sort of flawed Messiah come to deliver America and the ‘free world’ from an evil, paedophilic, cannibalistic cabal without troubling himself too much with the details and, undoubtedly, there are likely to be a relatively small number of his more hardcore, fundamentalist supporters for whom this madness with its thinly veiled borrowed antisemitic tropes all makes ‘perfect’ sense, but it begs the ultimate question how does and did this utter nonsense play with the MSM and, far more importantly, seep into the thinking of the electorate at large?
Dear Gavin
Emergency Laws to Stamp Out Free Speech 🤠| Carl Vernon
YOU TUBE watch?v=uVhZxH2SCXE
A tyrannical idea from Labour that needs stopping.
I didn’t like this. The big scandal is Democratic Party voting fraud in this election. Instead of writing about that Gavin wrote about QAnon, seemingly with the intent of smearing all people upset with the voting fraud with a QAnon brush. There may be a good time for him to devote a column to QAnon. Maybe it is a threat to whatever, but this is not it.
Because there is no fraud. This is a conspiracy that Trump has been peddling for years. His own team of investigators scrutinised his baseless fraud claims about previous elections and found them to be worthless. Every single conspiracy that has been peddled by Trump and his cult supporters has been proven as laughable nonsense. You really do look like an idiot for parroting them.
Trump’s own officials say 2020 was America’s most secure election in history
Homeland Security put out a statement with state and local officials that countered the president’s fraud claims.
Disappointing, please change your name to Herd. If you were following closely you would sense that the tide has already turned against Biden especially since the election has not been declared officially. He has the inertia of the media who have dug themselves a very deep hole that many of them won’t be able to climb out of. But as I’m sure you know that’s altogether different from showing that you won the election after the fraud has been considered.
Trump can already show he won even without the benefit of righting all of the fraud. Of course whether there will be a peaceful transition to the next term remains to be seen …