Tag: QAnon

QAnon has receded from social media — but it’s just hiding

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On the face of it, you might think that the QAnon conspiracy has largely disappeared from big social media sites. But that’s not quite the case. 

True, you’re much less likely to find popular QAnon catchphrases like “great awakening,” “the storm” or “trust the plan” on Facebook these days. Facebook and Twitter have removed tens of thousands of accounts dedicated to the baseless conspiracy theory, which depicts former President Donald Trump as a hero fighting a secret battle against a sect of devil-worshipping pedophiles who dominate Hollywood, big business, the media and government.

Gone are the huge “Stop the Steal” groups that spread falsehoods about the 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Trump is gone as well, banned from Twitter permanently and suspended from posting on Facebook until 2023. Continue reading.

Southern Baptist leader calls out QAnon: ‘Armed insurrection does not fit with God’s word’

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Southern Baptist Convention President Ed Litton sought to distance churches from the delusional QAnon conspiracy theory during a Saturday appearance on MSNBC.

In May, Axios reported on QAnon infecting churches in America.

“That stunning window into the country’s congregations followed a major poll, out last week: 15% of Americans, the poll found, agree with the QAnon contention that ‘the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.’ The online poll was taken by Ipsos in March for the Public Religion Research Institute and Interfaith Youth Core,” Axios reported. “The poll found that Hispanic Protestants (26%) and white evangelical Protestants (25%) were more likely to agree with the QAnon philosophies than other groups.” Continue reading.

Trump’s announcement of rallies with Bill O’Reilly sets off furious backlash among QAnon supporters: report

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According to a report from Newsweek, Donald Trump’s announcement that he will be touring with former Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly in December was greeted with dismay and incredulity by QAnon followers who believed he would already have been reinstalled as president in August.

The tour, which will include stops in Sunrise, Florida, then Orlando before moving on to Houston and ending in Dallas on December 19, carries a ticket price of $100, with Trump announcing, “My tour with Bill O’Reilly is getting a lot of attention, and I’m looking forward to it. Maybe tickets would make a great Father’s Day gift? In any event, I’ll see you then, and much sooner.”

That announcement set off a flurry of comments on Telegram — a popular forum for QAnon adherents — who reacted with confusion and anger. Continue reading.

QAnon’s demise is ‘well underway’ as adherents cut and run from the cult: columnist

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On Friday, writing for the Chicago Tribune, columnist Virginia Heffernan argued that the QAnon conspiracy — which holds that former President Donald Trump is fighting to take down a cabal of flesh-eating pedophile Satanists who rule the United States — is rapidly falling apart and will soon fade into the history books.

“QAnon, who made a messiah out of former President Donald Trump, was always bound to lose steam. It will follow the arc of furious, loopy-loo American conspiracy theories that have existed since before the Civil War. Cults like QAnon burn bright, and they fade fast,” wrote Heffernan. “QAnon’s demise, in fact, is well underway. Its leader, Q, a figure from the internet’s dark side, is now widely suspected to be the creation of Jim and Ron Watkins. The Watkins men are a seedy father-son duo in Asia who serve up pornography and hate speech online.”

As evidence of the decline, Heffernan noted: the mysterious anonymous poster “Q” whose cryptic messages drove the theory has vanished from the internet; many believers have now disavowed the movement; and the fallout from the January 6 Capitol riot has led many more to blame the movement for their violence. Continue reading.

There are already 19 QAnon candidates

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For the time being, congresswomen Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have effectively cornered the market of QAnon conspiracy loons in this year’s congressional class. But their monopoly on the “we believe there’s a secret cabal of satanist, child eating elites running this country” strain of Republicanism may be nearing an end, as a new and expanded crop of QAnon adherents ready themselves for a congressional run in next year’s midterm elections.

According to a new analysis from Media Matters for America, there are a whopping 17 new QAnon supporters running for Congress next year — the vast majority of them Republicans from Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and Nevada — alongside Greene and Boebert, who will both be up for re-election

Like QAnon itself, with its sprawling mythology and amorphic ability to incorporate any number of contradictory iterations and sub-genres, the roster of would-be QAnon representatives is as varied as you might expect from a group of people inclined to believe in a worldview predicated on baby cannibalization and devil worship. Some, like Arizona GOP candidate Josh Barnett, have attempted to explain away past social media posts that featured QAnon slogans and narratives by claiming he was just “retweeting the article.” Continue reading.

QAnon leader tells followers she can time travel — and ‘retribution is coming’ for Democrats: report

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A QAnon adherent who claims she can time travel is whipping up her thousands of followers to carry out a plot to oust elected officials in the U.S. and replace them with QAnon followers, VICE News reports.

After months of building a network of groups in all 50 states, Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman promised her followers that “retribution is coming for what she says was the stolen 2020 election. She also claims Donald Trump will be reinstated into office. 

While growing her subscriber base on Twitch, Maras-Lindeman, who streams under the name Tore Says, has raked in tens of thousands of dollars, even convincing her subscriber base to donate over $80,000, so she could buy a new Tesla. Continue reading.

QAnon Crowd Convinced UFOs Are a Diversion From Voter Fraud

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“They want you talking about aliens because they don’t want you talking about Maricopa,” Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson tweeted.

It’s never been a better time to believe in UFOs. Barack Obama talked last week about inexplicable footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote about his trip to Area 51 in a recent op-ed. In June, American intelligence agencies are set to release an unclassified report on what the government knows about UFOs.

For “ufologists,” long mocked as tinfoil hat-wearers obsessed with little green men, some measure of vindication may finally be at hand. But for many UFO enthusiasts on the right, this new round of UFO disclosures is nothing to cheer about. Instead, they’re claiming the new videos of possible UFO sightings are meant to distract people from Donald Trump’s baseless voter fraud allegations and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.

“There’s no doubt that this mainstream UFO disclosure push is offering a convenient distraction for the Deep State to turn our attention away from important issues like the Scamdemic and the election fraud getting exposed,” Jordan Sather, a UFO and QAnon conspiracy theorist, complained on social media network Telegram on May 19. Continue reading.

GOP Governor Candidate Scott Jensen to Speak at Anti-Vax Convention

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Jensen to share the stage and legitimize views of America’s leading anti-vaxxer, the doctor behind the ‘Plandemic’ documentary, a QAnon enthusiast, and more

Saint Paul, MINNESOTA — This weekend, Scott Jensen will share the virtual stage with a group of notorious anti-vaxxers at the conspiracy-drenched Truth Over Fear Summit, a three-day online gathering aiming to “share invaluable and eye-opening insights into the truth behind the headlines, Covid-19, the rushed vaccine, and the Great Reset.” 

The Anti-Vaccine Conference

Also speaking at the event is a rogues gallery of conspiracy theorists who, like Jensen himself, have done tremendous harm throughout this pandemic by peddling junk science to the American people, including:

Continue reading “GOP Governor Candidate Scott Jensen to Speak at Anti-Vax Convention”

QAnon hasn’t gone away – it’s alive and kicking in states across the country

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By this point, almost everyone has heard of QAnon, the conspiracy spawned by an anonymous online poster of enigmatic prophecies. Starting with an initial promise in 2017 that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be imminently arrested, a broad group of interpreters divined a conspiracy that saw President Donald Trump’s Democratic opponents as a global cabal of Satanic pedophiles.

Perhaps the greatest success of the conspiracy is its ability to create a shared alternate reality, a reality that can dismiss everything from a decisive election to a deadly pandemic. The QAnon universe lives on – now largely through involvement in local, not national, Republican politics. 

Moving on from contesting the election, the movement’s new focus is vaccines. The influence of QAnon on pandemic denialism is significant, though the spread of Q in local politics is a source of conflict in many states. Continue reading.

‘Beware of false prophets’: Here’s why QAnon is thriving as a ‘false religion’ among evangelicals

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A certain type of evangelical Christian is more susceptible to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which mimics revivalist sermons.

Those immersed in televangelist or charismatic Christian culture are easily led astray by the false prophecy that places Donald Trump against a satanic global conspiracy, and conservative Matt Lewis examined those links in a new column for The Daily Beast.

“Even those of us who believe in miracles would concede that charlatans exist and often prey on vulnerable people,” Lewis wrote. “Someone who is desperate for physical healing or money to pay the mortgage might be easily exploited. As politics play a more central role in our lives, our vulnerabilities have shifted. Many Americans were so utterly desperate for Trump to be re-elected that they were willing to believe anything. And so they did.” Continue reading.