Led by Trump and his base, QAnon conspiracy theorists are targeting Georgia in their effort to overturn the 2020 election. We are heading into Cloud CuckooLand in American politics.
This story by Drew Harrell explains why Georgia election official was so angry. Read it to the end. It appeared in the Washington Post:
In her legal quest to reverse the reality of last month’s election, President Trump’s recently disavowed attorney Sidney Powell has gained a strange new ally: the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the QAnon conspiracy theory’s Internet home. Powell on Tuesday filed an affidavit from Ron Watkins, the son of 8kun’s owner Jim Watkins, in a Georgia lawsuit alleging that Dominion Voting Systems machines used in the election had been corrupted as part of a sprawling voter-fraud conspiracy. Powell has claimed that a diabolical scheme backed by global communists had invisibly shifted votes with help from a mysterious computer algorithm pioneered by the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez — a wild story debunked by fact-checkers as a “fantasy parade” and devoid of proof. No real evidence was included in Watkins’s affidavit, either. But Watkins, who said in the affidavit that he lives in Japan, nevertheless speculated that — based on his recent reading of the Dominion software’s online user guide — it may be “within the realm of possibility” for a biased poll worker to fraudulently switch votes.
Watkins’s affidavit marks one of the first official connections between a notable player in the QAnon conspiracy universe and Trump’s muddled multistate legal campaign, which some of the president’s allies have labeled, in the words of Chris Christie, a “national embarrassment.” Many similar Trump-QAnon overtures have already played out on TV and social media since the election nearly one month ago. Watkins made similar allegations in an unchallenged segment on the far-right One America News network, which Trump retweeted to his 88 million followers last month.
Powell and her client Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, are effectively celebrities to QAnon loyalists, who posit online that both will soon help “release the Kraken” and expose a bombshell that could salvage a Trump second term, vanquish his enemies and unveil the hidden machinations of a communist conspiracy. Since claiming to have resigned last month from 8kun, Watkins has devoted much of his online activity to claims about unfounded suspicions regarding Dominion, an 18-year-old voting-technology company whose computer programs, ballot printers and other products are used by elections officials in 28 states. Trump and his supporters have loudly attacked the Denver-based company as having contributed in some unproved way to steal the vote.
In a lengthy rebuttal last week, Dominion said that Powell’s claims were nonsensical: Manual recounts, machine tests and independent audits had reaffirmed that the voting systems had given accurate, undistorted results. Her “wild and reckless allegations,” the company added, were “not only demonstrably false” but had “led to stalking, harassment, and death threats to Dominion employees.”
In his affidavit, Watkins called himself an information security expert with nine years of experience as a “network and information defense analyst” and security engineer. But he did not mention that his experience had come largely through 8kun, the site once called 8chan that was knocked offline for nearly three months last year.
The message board is infamous for its anonymous threads of racist bile and extremist threats, and the site was used by gunmen to announce and celebrate three fatal attacks last year — at an El Paso Walmart, a San Diego-area synagogue and a New Zealand mosque.
Major web-services providers that form the Internet’s backbone have refused to work with the site, with one executive telling The Washington Post last year that Watkins’s site had facilitated “mass shootings and extreme hate speech with intolerable consequences.”
Ron Watkins holds an exalted role in QAnon’s online sphere of influence: He and his father are among the few people who can verify posts from Q, the conspiracy theory’s unnamed prophet (and a self-proclaimed government agent with top-secret clearance) who claims to post solely on 8kun. (The strange arrangement has fueled unproved theories that the Watkinses have helped write Q’s posts, or are Q themselves, which both men deny.)
Q has posted more than 4,000 times since 2017, but only three times since the election, sparking a mix of anxiety and faith-based recommitment among QAnon believers.
Attorney General William P. Barr said on Tuesday that investigators with the FBI and Justice Department hadn’t “seen anything to substantiate” the claims of mass voter fraud.
But Watkins and his supporters have continued to hunt for clues to support the unproven claims of a secret Dominion scheme.
Shortly after midnight Tuesday, Watkins posted what he called “a smoking-gun video” of a Dominion worker manipulating Georgia voting data by “plugging an elections USB drive into an external laptop … then suspiciously walking away.”
The undated video — which was recorded at a distance and includes a man and woman offering ongoing commentary of the “nerd boy” as he works inside an election office — shows nothing even remotely conclusive of voter fraud: The man uses a computer and a thumb drive, all of it very obviously caught on camera.
But Watkins’s messages nevertheless kicked QAnon-echoing accounts and online Trump supporters into conspiracy-theory overdrive. Many began sharing the name of a Georgia man they believed had been captured on the video, after they’d zoomed in on the man’s identification badge. A number of accounts on Twitter, 8kun and other pro-Trump websites shared links to the man’s possible LinkedIn profile, phone numbers, home address and personal details, including a photo of him as a groomsman in a friend’s wedding in 2018.
A Dominion representative said the company wouldn’t comment on alleged employee matters or safety issues, but that it was working to report all threats to law enforcement.
Watkins did not respond to questions, and a woman he had thanked on Twitter for sharing the original video said she had “no comment about anything.”
The man’s name and identifying information is still bouncing around the Web, with some people calling for his imprisonment, torture or execution. For several hours on Tuesday, just typing in the first two letters of his name into Twitter would automatically complete the rest of his name. One tweet includes his name and said he is “guilty of treason” and added, alongside an animated image of a hanging noose: “May God have mercy on your soul.”
Gabriel Sterling, a top official with the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, addressed the threat in a fiery news conference Tuesday afternoon and called out Trump and Republican senators for not condemning the violent language. Sterling said the man caught on camera had been transferring a report to a county computer so he could read it.
“It’s all gone too far. All of it,” he said. “This 20-year-old contractor for a voting system company [was] just trying to do this job,” he added. “His family is getting harassed now. There’s a noose out there with his name on it. And it’s not right. … This kid took a job. He just took a job, and it’s just wrong.”
While this story defies logic, it should ring alarm bells for sane people on the left. I hope the Biden administration orders the FBI to investigate these groups to better understand how they operate and to assess the threat they pose. it is easy to write them off as lunatics. However, organized lunatics with weapons are a much bigger concern. The Trump administration created a mass distrust in government, and it has provided rich soil for growing conspiracy theories.
The story and others like it should not only “ring alarm bells for sane people on the left” but also for all sane people right, left, middle. The QAnon leader and followers are nothing more that domestic terrorists and should be treated as such.
Anyone who believe the junk put out by QAnon should seek psychiatric help and soon.
They are insane.
Diane
This blog post is completely misleading. Trump and his supporters do not support or negate Qanon. They simply exist.
Likely the left believes the false narrative in this blog because the left is leading and supporting violent marxist groups like BLM and Antifa.
I think both BLM and Antifa need to be denounced by Biden/Harris. They have not.
The dishonest press gives them a pass.
With that said, I do think the Democrats should be very frightened by the pot they are stirring and violence they are encouraging.
The Democrats are seeming to embrace the idea of a civil war. Not the Republicans.
The Democrats started the first civil war and the Republicans finished it. Did you pay attention in history class
BLM has already turned on Joe & BLM is an organization funded by outsiders. They are a marxist group. So is antifa
If you like living in Russia or China under their government rule, you will enjoy being bullied by BLM and Antifa similar to what happened in the chop/chaz zone then keep supporting Biden.
If not, you will be miserable.
Most people, particularly women on the left have no idea how to survive in 0 below weather or how to make a fire when there is only wet wood. Most on the left do not even know how to hold a weapon properly. They can only imitate what they see in movies. Holding a weapon that way is guaranteed to kill the weapon holder or at the very least injure themselves.
Most people on the right do know how to survive. They find winter camping and survivalist camps to be a fun vacation.
What will you guys do when the the electricity and water supply is taken out by BLM and Antifa?
The right will survive.
The left will cry. They will be pleading with the survivalist types to help them. Crying like blubbering babies.
So be careful what you wish for. I don’t advocate a civil war but I see quite a few here appear to be salivating over one. They don’t look like tough types, either, and certainly the skinny, no muscle tone Millennials are not tough enough to survive summer camp without a visit from mom.
The post you refer to is completely accurate.
Trump is being represented by a lawyer, Sidney Powell, who is working with QAnon.
QAnon is completely insane.
Why should Biden and Harris (or anyone else) denounce BLM? Black lives do matter. Don’t you agree?
How did you feel when you saw the video of the cop with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, squeezing the life out of him? Did you think that was okay? I didn’t.
In an earlier comment, you claimed that the white supremacist who murdered a young woman in the Charlottesville event was justified because he was “backing up his car” and she got in his way. I showed you video of him roaring into a street full of pedestrians, who were tossed in the air like mannequins.
You never admitted that you were wrong.
I told you that the driver of the car admitted his guilt and was sentence to prison.
Yet you still think he was innocent of any wrongdoing.
If he could apologize and admit his guilt, why can’t you?
As for Antifa, as you know, they are anti-fascists. We fought the Second World War to prevent fascists from taking over the world. All good Americans are anti-fascist. Are you anti-fascist? I am. I don’t want to see an American Hitler. Do you?
Police and jails must be defunded and disbanded. We must allow so called criminals to be integrated into society, the same way Blacks are integrated into White areas. We must stop the School to Prison Pipeline now! 😐🔔
“Sara” sounds like one of the male fans of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh and INCEL sites.
“They don’t look like tough types, either, and certainly the skinny, no muscle tone.”
Hiding behind a female name to promote violence and hate, as “Sara” does, is repellent.
moeone2015, seems like we have one of the persons you cite in your last sentence right here responding to your comment. To wit, I can’t find any references in Marx’s writings about how American police are killing Black citizens nor any BLM protesters citing those mythical words. Perhaps they are Chico Marxists?
Wrong! They are Groucho Marxists! A distinction without a difference!
Heavily armed lunatics.
McCarthyism + Alex Jones + QAnon + any right wing crazy nut + Trumpism = a witches brew that could reduce a blue whale carcass to cartilage and bones in 10 seconds.
These maniacs are a threat to the republic and our democracy with their nutty accusations and threats of violence. Speaking of which: Trump campaign lawyer Joe diGenova said former top US cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot” and “drawn and quartered.” Of course now diGenova is claiming that he was being sarcastic or just joking. So typical of these cowardly howling gargoyles. DiGenova’s comments come after Rudy Giuliani said in a recent interview with Fox News that someone should “cut the head off” the Democratic Party while making a throat-slashing gesture.
Newsmax and One America are news outlets that spew out disinformation and conspiracy theories. The mass paranoia spreads to ultra conservatives and militia groups. Along with thirty or forty years of neoliberal governance that undermined the working class, it is a toxic brew that may foment violence.
We need unions to restore pensions and benefits for working people and give them associations that they belong to and that fight for them.
The vicious comments by Joe DiGenova will inspire violence. It’s no joke. The FBI should protect Krebs. DiGenova should be disbarred.
DiGenova should be disbarred. Yes, but in my opinion, there are many others who ave been generating the lawsuits about election fraud when there is none, and with such sloppy work in spreading these that they have misspellings, including multiple spellings for the names of witnesses. And that is just for starters.
This is a recent and interesting report on an effort to discern what QAnon means to a larger public, and whether it is believed, and by which political parties the respondents were most aligned with.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/16/5-facts-about-the-qanon-conspiracy-theories/
Thanks for this shocking information. More Democrats than Republicans have heard about QAnon. Sadly, more Republicans are living accepting some of the outrageous QAnon claims. They believe disinformation as fact.
Years ago, when I was a baby editor, just out of school, I took a job at McDougal, Littell. My first assignment was to revise the table of contents (TOCs) for a new edition of our grammar and composition program. That program had failed to make a substantial dint in the market. I revised the TOCs to include a Writing Process strand and a strand on Critical Thinking. The revised program became the best-selling grammar and composition textbook program in the country. And after this hit the market so successfully, every educational publisher in the country added a Critical Thinking strand to just about every textbook program.
But these Critical Thinking strands were TERIBLE. For example, almost all of them contained a lesson on distinguishing fact from opinion. However, almost all of them left out a CRUCIAL piece of teaching. It is simply not the case that matters of opinion (e.g, We should or should not build a border wall) are not conclusively arguable. Statements of fact are either true or false. Statements of opinion are either WARRANTED BY FACTS or NOT WARRANTED BY FACTS. And it’s that last bit of instruction that is almost always left out of those Critical Thinking lessons in print and online textbooks. Bizarrely, one can look in vain at the Critical Thinking strands in thousands of these textbook programs, in print and online, for lessons on warranted versus unwarranted opinion. And so we end up with graduates of K-12 schooling who say things like, “Everyone’s entitled to their [sic] opinion” or “Well, that’s just your opinion,” who simultaneously hold these opposing views, both of which are false.
The phrase “Critical Thinking” wasn’t well chosen. It came about on analogy to the previously existing phrase “Creative Thinking.” But there is actually a technical term for the study of what can and cannot be known and how. It’s called Epistemology. We need Epistemology strands in our textbooks, print and online, that address in detail this issue of what makes an opinion warranted or not, with case studies. And, of course, we need to be teaching about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and assessing evidence and biased sources and so on. But teaching kids about warranted versus unwarranted opinion is key. In particular, we need to be teaching about how emotion and individual self interest can lead people to accept dramatically unwarranted opinions. People want to believe that if they send the televangelist a contribution or pay the psychic hotline, they will become richer and their spouses and kids will love them. They want to believe that they are poor not because they have a corrupt government and aren’t marketable because undocumented workers are taking their jobs. They want to justify their fear of the Other by believing that undocumented workers are rapists and murderers. But the question always is this: Is the opinion warranted? By what facts? And are those from reliable sources and true?
The Writing Process stuff was in the air at the time. Many of my colleagues at McDougal were interested in it, other Writing Process texts had already been published, notably by Allyn and Bacon, and a number of education professors were pushing it in scholarly essays and articles. The Critical Thinking stuff had precedents, of course, but not as many. I was particularly interested in this because at the time, as a young man, I was fascinated by symbolic logic and studying it on my own. So, I think I made a pretty major, but unknown, contribution there by popularizing it via this very popular textbook series. But I came to regret it because the Critical Thinking strand explosion that occurred after this text hit the market was so lame. For example, all the textbooks contained lessons on “Making Inferences” without the slightest understanding, on the part of the authors of these, that there are many completely different kinds of inferences and many completely different ways of arriving at inferences that are supportable. And in the absence of that understanding, one couldn’t create lessons that actually taught the knowledge necessary to make inferences of different types well.