I was surprised to see this event. With the global reach of social media, I’d be interested to see reporting on the connections between the American anti-mask & anti-lockdown movement and how this attitude is proliferating in other countries.
I don’t think this particular article is stellar in the framing and details, so is there anyone in Europe and/or who has followed European Covid-19 public sentiment that could offer more information on this topic?
I have a lot of European coworkers and interact with them on a daily basis. Many of them are in Germany, and they all are aware of this.
The sentiment among the people I know is that the protesters are “fringe nutjobs.” One guy said they are very “American.”
So there’s one data point.
Part of it could be that American idiocy is spreading overseas:
" By October, Marc-André Argentino, a leading QAnon researcher who is a PhD candidate at Montreal’s Concordia University, had tracked QAnon to more than 70 countries and many types of users, including hardcore extremists and Instagram influencers new to the world of conspiracy theories.
“Some experts out there were thinking that if the president loses the election in November, this might go away,” Argentino said, “but in reality, because it is transnational, it has legs of its own.”
" QAnon adherents have marched with far-right groups in Germany and protested lockdown measures in Australia. In England, they warn of vast child-trafficking rings that do not exist. Canadian followers conjure “deep state” plots out of basic public health measures."
Qanon will be a dangerous driving force in global politics for years to come. I think we’re at the barest tip of the iceberg on the damage this “movement” is going to cause as it grows, adapts, and becomes the ultimate conspiracy theory.
This is going to be a toner war fought with information, misinformation, and memes.
In college, my little group had a common joke we’d toss around at each other.
“Meme based intellectual warfare”
If we only knew.
I first heard about this in The Jacobin, they were talking about how Biden didn’t have anyone countering the Q rhetoric in spanish and how that hurt the turnout in Texas & Florida.
This did surprise me, I just I was hoping that this would be confined to the english speaking world.
Who knew that Orson Scott Card would actually get something kind of right?
Yeah, their political analysis is…regularly not great. And by regularly not great, I mean ranging from regular bad faith and outright lying, all the way through to absolutely unhinged from anything resembling reality. I wouldn’t trust it.
And that’s before we even get to the real sketchy shit, like the fact that one of their “Writers”(and the attached twitter account), Carl Beijer, is literally a fictional person run by multiple white people using it to pretend to be black, publishing a millionaire praising white supremacist Tucker Carlson’s “Populism”, publishing a sympathetic interview with supposedly Ammon Bundy(Who later turned out to be a racist troll perpetrating a hoax, though to be fair, they were not the only ones caught out by this), publishing a glowing obituary of a prominent Nazbol who financed and organized groups responsible for(and whose purpose was) killings of innocent civilians in the Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea, and publishing the work of a blatant and well-known racist and antisemite. Just to name a few that come to mind.
Yeah. Jacobin has been so dire lately that while you can discuss them, please no one link to them from the forum.
Yeah, it’s always been a bunch of petit bourgeois cosplaying as working class whisperers and socialist revolutionaries, and always a bit out there and (Previously, obviously, not now) largely harmless, but at least it used to have some things of worth. But something about, well, basically 2016 primaries just broke something inside them, and they’ve rapidly been going further and further off the rails ever since.
I still don’t understand what the core alleged conspiracy in Q actually is. I get as far as Pizzagate (the rich and powerful are trafficking underage girls for sex) and then I sorta lose the thread after that.
Or is that part of the point? It’s a nebulous agglomeration of multiple disparate theories stuffed under the umbrella of “pedos are everywhere.”
There is an anonymous person named Q, hence QAnon, who is a magical government insider. They know everything that is really going on in the government and such. They are leaking it onto the Internet.
The core of the narrative that Q tells is that Democrats are running a huge secret pedophile trafficking ring and Trump is fighting them. Like, behind the scenes at the US government, this Trump Republican vs. Democrat pedo war is just raging in secret on a daily basis.
And then whatever else Q has to say about other things as well.
There’s a few very good Reply Alls about it.
The Reply All episode about who they think Q really is was excellent!
Based on the evidence presented, I agree with their conclusion.
We are rather off-topic for this thread, but at the end of the day it matters not what conspiracies QAnon is revealing, but rather for its adherents it is an ARG for them to occupy themselves with and feel smart and part of a special club. That does not mean it is not incredibly dangerous, it is, but it provides a framework for people to draw whatever conclusions they want about nefarious things they imagine are happening in this big complex world we live in.
That is old. It is waaaaay past that.
Q represents a broad anti-Illuminati organization that speaks in code. By interpreting national events, posts in certain chan boards, and Republican press releases, you can via numerology and nonsense (e.g., the Q Clock) learn how to help achieve The Great Awakening, which will happen as part of The Storm.
Basically, if you crack the code, you are one of the special people who will be on top in a new world order after the apocalypse of The Storm where all Democrats are arrested for treason and America becomes a glorious utopia for the true believers.
The above is not even close to how detailed and crazy it really is. But they are way past pizzagate. It’s becoming a proper Gnostic Cult, except that it has no leader and no specific gnosis.
Big oof there! I’ll have to double check anything that crosses my path from them!
I only mentioned them because I honestly have not heard from anyone else that qanon has left the english speaking internet and is now infecting everyone.
It’s okay! I’m just bit of a nerd about my job, so I keep tabs on this stuff, I don’t expect other people to as well. After all, what use would I be if everybody did?
And yeah, I’m with you on that - I’ve not had a lot of news about non-english versions of Qanon(outside of Japan, where a slightly startling number of fringe kooks have been picking it up). I don’t know why, if it’s because it’s reach is limited there, or if it’s just not being talked about in most places, but either way, it’s a pretty quiet subject.
I believe everything you’ve written about Jacobin, but is there a place that documents all of that?
I know a bunch of people who are constantly sharing Jacobin articles about all kinds of crazy stuff and it would be nice to show them proof of some of the flaws with that website and the people who write there.
I don’t have it to hand, since that’s stuff I’ve seen over time, but I recon I could scare something up.
Austrian ruling party ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei, Austrian people’s party, considered center-right) and chancellor Sebastian Kurz were for a while embroiled in a corruption inquiry. A large part of this is the appointment of party-loyalist Thomas Schmid to a high office in the government’s holding company. Kurz denied having influenced this decision under oath but text messages between the two have surfaced that seem to contradict it. There were also allegations that Kurz had bribed newsoutlets to propagandize against a political rival.
Last wednesday, authorities raided the party headquarters of the ÖVP as well as the offices of the chancellor. Yesterday evening, Kurz resigned from his office. However, this may be a tactic to save face for a possible future candidacy.