Although the bizarre conspiracy theory group called QAnon has only two members elected to Congress, it has two members in Congress. That was not a typo. The KKK–so far as we know–does not have any members in Congress. Nor do the Proud Boys. But QAnon seems to have a strange power over the Republican party, so much so that most of its members voted to overturn a fair and free and amply verified presidential election.
One of the two major parties has succumbed to a cult with a mad ideology.
The Washington Post describes the curious hold that QAnon has over the Republican party in this article.
The siege on the U.S. Capitol played out as a QAnon fantasy made real: The faithful rose up in their thousands, summoned to Washington by their leader, President Trump. They seized the people’s house as politicians cowered under desks. Hordes wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the “Q” symbol and toting Trump flags closed in to deliver justice, armed with zip-tie handcuffs and rope and guns.
The “#Storm” envisioned on far-right message boards had arrived. And two women who had died in the rampage — both QAnon devotees — had become what some were calling the first martyrs of the cause.
The siege ended with police retaking the Capitol and Trump being rebuked and losing his Twitter account. But the failed insurrection marked a grim milestone in how the paranoid conspiracy theory QAnon has radicalized Americans, reshaped the Republican Party and gained a forceful grip on right-wing belief.
Born in the Internet’s fever swamps, QAnon played an unmistakable role in energizing rioters during the real-world attack on Jan. 6. A man in a “Q” T-shirt led the breach of the Senate, while a shirtless, fur-clad believer known as the “Q Shaman” posed for photographers in the Senate chamber. Twitter later purged more than 70,000 accounts associated with the conspiracy theory, in an acknowledgment of the online potency of QAnon.
The baseless conspiracy theory, which imagines Trump in a battle with a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex, helped drive the day’s events and facilitate organized attacks. A pro-Trump mob overwhelmed Capitol Police officers, injuring dozens, and one officer later died as a result. One woman was fatally shot by police inside the Capitol. Three others in the crowd died of medical emergencies.
QAnon devotees joined with extremist group members and white supremacists at the Capitol assault after finding one another on Internet sanctuaries: the conservative forums of TheDonald.win and Parler; the anonymous extremist channels of 8kun and Telegram; and the social media giants of Facebook and Twitter, which have scrambled in recent months to prevent devotees from organizing on their sites.
This is way off topic but I just saw this and it deeply upset me, and I could not help but wonder how many cases like this are happening and not being caught in districts that have been doing remote schooling since March.
https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/it-was-torture-police-describe-abuse-boy-endured-before-being-rescued-by-orlando-server.amp?__twitter_impression=true
We need schools open.
It’s horrific but why is it caused by schools being closed? Was his school closed? It looks like that county had a (state required) face to face option:
https://www.ocps.net/students_and_parents/school_reopening_plan
Sorry, I’m not suggesting this incident was related to school closures. I’m just imagining what have been happening since March in areas that have closed schools.
I agree with you that schools should be open but in the case of Florida “open schools” wouldn’t necessarily mean this boy would be attending anyway. They have a huge online school cohort and completely unregulated homeschooling. He could have easily not been attending a school with or without covid.
A big part of ed reform is pushing “options” that don’t include attending a school at all.
Researchers have linked homeschooling with greater incidence of abuse.
The research predates Covid.
The GOP has been heading over the cliff for decades and it has most definitely metastasized into a far right wing death cult. When a conman demagogue and buddy of Alex Jones is at the head of your party, it is safe to say that the GOP is in bed with racists and conspiracy nutters. Though for the moment Alex Jones is in conflict with Q-Anon for his own personal sick reasons, not out of any principles, since he has none.
A huge percentage of voters for the republican party do not have much in the way of actual beliefs…….except one: everything there is about democrats is bad.
When Trump was accused of being in Russia’s pocket, some people showed up at his rallies wearing T-shirts that said, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” The Republican Party has abandoned its principles. They didn’t even bother to present a platform in the last election.
YES
I think they’d have to admit they promoted lies about the election for months and since none of them are willing to do that their supporters will continue to believe the election was stolen.
They could fix this. They just don’t want to fix it.
A huge group of people would have to apologize and admit they lied- most of the Right wing news sites, the majority of GOP House members, 20 or so Senators, many governors, state party chairs, county party chairs, conservative lobbying groups, and on and on. They’ll never do it. It would be like some kind of mass confession.
They’ve never apologized for misleading people on Covid, so now we’re talking about two huge lies just over the past year.
Chiara OAN is STILL pushing the stolen election thing. If you didn’t know the history or the facts, and listened to one of their broadcasts, . . . what they are saying and how they present it . . . it would be easy to believe. CBK
Most Republicans believe Trump won. The good news is that Republicans are a shrinking party.
Seems there is a conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory.
It was just reported that a woman that took Nancy Pelosi’s computer from her office intended to give it to Russia. It makes it hard to call the barbarian horde at the Capitol “patriots.”
Barbaric they appear, but Conan the Barbarian doesn’t call them patriots. He feels sorry for them. So do I. The working class has no right to take up arms, but every reason to feel forlorn. Sing it: “…Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down…”
Pretty much. As the COVID deaths started to mount last summer, and Trump began threatening social justice protesters in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I came to the conclusion that the Republican Party is now a racist thrill-kill cult.
There will be a major change in our government when the old generation eventually gets voted out! What that change will be is any bodies guess.
Bill With so many kids being home-schooled, it’s not too far fetched to think we are setting up the next generation, mixed as it is in both good and bad ways, for another set of untenable divisions. CBK
The Republican Party has morphed into the Plutocratic Populism Party. They have catered to the wealthy, but knowing dollars don’t vote, they have had to appeal to groups like racists, anti-immigrants, anti-abortion, ie. evangelicals, anti-government for their voting blocs, and in doing so, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, the monster the Republicans created has gotten loose and is ravaging the country.
SO TRUE! The wealthy (corporate America) have been able to buy politics, but their few numbers can’t buy the votes needed to sustain their wealth and power. They created a monster with lies and deception and now they can’t control its worst parts….hatred, envy and greed.
Evangelicals
Linda “It’s evangelicals.” It’s politically right-wing evangelicals . . . and politically right-wing Catholics, and politically right-wing, etc., etc., etc., who have hate in their hearts and who are as distorted about their religious teachings as the GOP base is about their conservative-republican roots.
They are the ones in those titled groupings who are marks for the power of propagandists who have little or no interest in living a religious life but who are users of those who CLAIM to do so; and who are too stupid to realize that they are being used.
But forgive me . . . I forgot, your method is oversimplify and broad-brush aka “smear,” and to ignore what you don’t like to hear, true or not. What was I thinking. CBK
I agree, CBK. It’s rightwing Evangelicals, rightwing Catholics, rightwing Jews, etc.
Substitute Orthodox and that works too.
The nation is too far down the narrative’s road of evangelicals and Christian nationalists for understanding to be changed to allow greater religious group inclusion. And, resistance to Quardicos Driskell’s truth is too great. Amazingly, not even the make-up of the conservative faction of SCOTUS alters the perception.
If time could be turned back, the Economist’s “Christian conservatives” to describe one of the 3 groups that make up Trump/GOP world, would come closer to accuracy.
A the end of Oct., Vanity Fair tried to expand on the narrative but it gained no traction. An article in a separate publication explained what the magazine hoped to accomplish, “The Problem of MAGA …Reaches Vanity Fair”. The outcome of Vanity Fair’s report was probably limited to ad hominem attacks against the article’s author.
You wonder if there will ever be accountability for any of the lies.
The Ohio public health director was chased out of office by rabid Trump supporters because she predicted there would be 150k covid cases in the state. They picketed her home and threatened her. She quit to protect her family.
We hit 150k in September. As of today there were/ are 875k covid infections in the state.
Is anyone going to apologize/admit they were wrong?
NO…because they still believe it’s a hoax perpetuated by those evil, socialist democrats! Even on their death beds, a lot of these people won’t acknowledge that they are dying from Covid.
This is beautifully addressed in the program I just posted on :”America Reckoning/PBS.
Again I would highly encourage everyone to view what I consider GREAT journalism.
And then there is this:
Former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is going all in on the QAnon conspiracy theory, promoting an online store to sell QAnon hats and T-shirts, the proceeds of which will benefit his partnership with a prominent QAnon booster.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/07/to-celebrate-the-fourth-michael-flynn-posts-a-pledge-to-conspiracy-group-qanon/
The Republican Party has ceased to exist in any form that is worthy of admiration.
The Trump party should disappear. Or the GOP will.
Diane From one of the notes in this thread about home-schooling: “*A big part of ed reform is pushing ‘options’ that don’t include attending a school at all.”
It seems to me that over the last several decades education in this country (not to except other countries) has suffered from several “layered” problems that have their long and shorter term effects and that easily are a calamity in-the-making for the next generations.
At the deeper philosophical level are the effects of scientific positivism on our thinking which feed into the high-stake testing situation in several ways as well as the centuries-old dissing of the arts and humanities and the over-emphasis on STEM-kinds of programming, supported later by the computer boom. That Wall Street takes advantage of the resulting losses to the fabric of culture is not the same problem but of course important. . . . and itself is informed by the same off base philosophical issues, related in the sense that the distortions of philosophical meaning prepare the ground for a raft of felt and manufactured justifications for reformers.
As a result of those deeper effects coupled with ills of capitalism, however, what we would refer to as a HUMAN education remains mostly “hidden” and thought of as somehow less important to one’s formal education. And with the formalization of STEM emphasis, the hiddenness of human things, like character, social, and moral development, is further pushed aside, even though (and we have also forgotten this) a human education aimed at human maturity is still a good part of what children MUST learn to be able to carry the mantle of responsibility that is needed to live in a republican-democratic political culture, even as capitalist . .. and now, with the forces of propaganda that we are experiencing today, ever-so-more.
In that already deeply-distorted environment, however, the push for home schooling is one of the upper layers, so to speak, of the calamity in the making. Even if home schooled children can test well at intervals, the situation runs the high risk of being an unnoticed cover for a great loss to educating to live in a democratic order . . . such an education, hidden or not, is still afforded to those who are REGULARLY involved with other children in a public and other-than-parents teacher-guided situation.
Home schooling for religious ideological reasons, distorted or not, is just another way to hasten that calamity . . . by retribalizing consciousness towards anti-democratic political grounds, not necessarily, but much more likely. On that score, Jefferson knew what many of us all, including many religious people, seem to forget . . . that democracy is not anti-religion, but rather is the political ground for freedom of religion.
BTW, what kind of human education do the Facebook people have . . . the ones who are watching the algorithms? CBK