>https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1295667270719602688
Covid cure found, and it's not HCQ
https://twitter.com/DemConvention/status/1295558907293769728
cringe with your coffee?
What if Sally Yates is Q?
Mostly sarcastic, but have you ever heard the name Quillian before?
>cringe
>enjoy
>https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/08/18/why-john-brennan-peter-strzok-and-doj-needed-julian-assange-arrested-and-why-uk-officials-obliged-2/
Why John Brennan, Peter Strzok and DOJ Needed Julian Assange Arrested â And Why UK Officials ObligedâŚ
According to reports in November of 2019, U.S Attorney John Durham and U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr were spending time on a narrowed focus looking carefully at CIA activity in the 2016 presidential election. One recent quote from a media-voice increasingly sympathetic to a political deep-state notes:
âOne British official with knowledge of Barrâs wish list presented to London commented that âit is like nothing we have come across before, they are basically asking, in quite robust terms, for help in doing a hatchet job on their own intelligence servicesââ. (Link)
It is interesting that quote came from a British intelligence official, as there appears to be evidence of an extensive CIA operation that likely involved U.K. intelligence services. In addition, and as a direct outcome, there is an aspect to the CIA operation that overlaps with both a U.S. and U.K. need to keep Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under tight control. In this outline we will explain where corrupt U.S. and U.K. interests merge.
To understand the risk that Julian Assange represented to CIA interests, it is important to understand just how extensive the operations of the CIA were in 2016. It is within this network of foreign and domestic operations where FBI Agent Peter Strzok is clearly working as a bridge between the CIA and FBI operations.
By now people are familiar with the construct of CIA operations involving Joseph Mifsud, the Maltese professor now generally admitted/identified as a western intelligence operative who was tasked by the CIA (John Brennan) to run an operation against Trump campaign official George Papadopoulos in both Italy (Rome) and London. {Go Deep}
In a similar fashion the CIA tasked U.S. intelligence asset Stefan Halper to target another Trump campaign official, Carter Page. Under the auspices of being a Cambridge Professor Stefan Halper also targeted General Michael Flynn. Additionally, using assistance from a female FBI agent under the false name Azra Turk, Halper also targeted Papadopoulos.
Recap: âŚMifsud tasked against Papadopoulos (CIA). âŚHalper tasked against Flynn (CIA), Page (CIA), and Papadopoulos (CIA). âŚAzra Turk, pretending to be Halper asst, tasked against Papadopoulos (FBI). âŚVeselnitskaya tasked against Donald Trump Jr (CIA, Fusion-GPS). âŚButina tasked against Trump, and Donald Trump Jr (FBI).
>https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-is-tracking-the-mysterious-evolving-anomaly-in-earth-s-magnetic-field
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/10/14/earths-magnetic-field-could-flip-within-a-human-lifetime/
>https://twitter.com/dailymail/status/1295676830549147648
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638047/COVID-19-cases-U-S-nursing-homes-jumped-nearly-80-earlier-summer.html
COVID-19 cases in nursing homes soared by 80% as infections surged earlier this summer in Southern states and the Midwest
COVID-19 cases in U.S. nursing homes jumped nearly 80 per cent earlier this summer, driven by rampant spread across the South and much of the West.
Residents of long-term care facilities account for less than one per cent of the U.S. population, but more than 40 per cent of COVID-19 deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
'The case numbers suggest the problem is far from solved,' said Tamara Konetzka, a research professor at the University of Chicago, who specializes in long-term care. She was not involved with the study.
The situation is a politically sensitive issue for President Donald Trump, who is scrambling to hold on to support from older voters as polls show disapproval of his administration's response to the pandemic.
The White House announced in late July the release of $5 billion for nursing homes, while launching a program to equip each of some 15,000 facilities with a fast-test machine to screen residents and staff for the coronavirus.
Monday's study from the American Health Care Association found there were 9,715 coronavirus cases in nursing homes the week starting July 26 - a 77 per cent increase from a low point the week of June 21.
The group is the industry's main trade association.
Weekly deaths, rose to 1,706 the week of July 26, an increase of nearly 25 per cent from a low point the week starting July 5.
Nursing homes in Sunbelt states had more time to prepare than facilities in the Northeast that were hit in late winter and early spring, with grim results.
But Konetzka and other researchers have been warning that once a community anywhere experiences an outbreak, it's only a matter of time before the coronavirus enters its nursing homes.
>https://twitter.com/imamofpeace/status/1295679869854998529
https://libyareview.com/?p=5779
30% Salary Raise for Mercenary Fighters in Libya, Qatar-Turkey Agree
Turkish Defence Minister, Hulusi Akar, and his Qatari counterpart Khaled Al-Attiyah, arrived on Monday in the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
The Prime Minister of the Government of National Accord (GNA), Fayez Al-Sarraj, received the Defence Ministers, and their accompanying delegations with his Deputy, Ahmed Maiteeq, and Undersecretary of the Defence Ministry, Salah Al-Deen Al-Namroush.
The meeting between Al-Sarraj and the Defence Ministers touched on the areas of military and security cooperation, and programs for building the security and defence capabilities of the GNA.
But behind the scenes, Libya Review sources revealed the GNAâs request to strengthen the military support provided by Turkey and Qatar to its security forces.
The sources confirmed that the talks that took place between Al-Sarraj, Akar, and Al-Attiyah resulted in a tripartite agreement to increase military support for the Tripoli-based government. It is believed that at the request of Al-Namroush, it was agreed to pay a 30% increase in the salaries of Syrian fighters sent by Turkey. This comes amid recent unrest on social media, concerning lack of payment by Ankara to these fighters.
Observers said that the reason for Al-Namroushâs request was to control the anger of the Syrian mercenaries, before the matter turns into a widespread rebellion and they refuse to fight.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638547/Rose-McGowan-accuses-Alexander-Payne-grooming-her.html
'I now know I was groomed': Rose McGowan accuses Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne of raping her when she was 15 in a second 'bomb of truth' Instagram post - one day after saying he 'was well endowed'
Rose McGowan last night accused Oscar-winning director Alexander Payne of 'grooming' her and having sex with her when she was 15.
The actress, now 46, said that 'for years I had thought a man I had sexual relations with was a a sexual experience I had⌠I now know I was groomed.'
Payne has yet to comment on the allegations.
McGowan - a pioneer of the #MeToo movement who was one of the first women to come forward against Harvey Weinstein - said the alleged ordeal led her to quit acting before she returned to Hollywood after being 'discovered' at age 21.
Earlier on Monday she had named Payne as the man who allegedly 'sat me down and played a soft-core porn movie' when she was 15 before he 'left me on a street corner' - an incident she first described in 2018 without identifying Payne.
'If you are out there trying to have sex with an underage minor, you are committing a crime, even if the minor doesn't know it,' she said last night in a second 'bomb of truth' post on Instagram.
'I was attracted to him, so I thought it was on me, but that's not correct. I was not an adult.'
>https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/democratic-national-convention-michelle-obama-claims-donald-trump-is-the-wrong-president-for-us-p5srj6b8h
I'd try to rip the video but what a waste of time
https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/lawsuit-jeffrey-epstein-raped-a-13-year-old-girl-in-1978-3-years-after-working-at-the-dalton-school/
This appears to be the oldest known allegation of sexual abuse against Epstein. The 1978 claim is three years after Epstein taught teens at the Dalton School, an elite institution that was helmed by Attorney General William Barrâs father Donald Barr.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12431571/flu-pneumonia-coronavirus-deaths-lowest-lockdown/
DEATHS DWINDLE Flu and pneumonia is now killing six times as many people as coronavirus as deaths at lowest since lockdown
FLU has killed more people in the UK than coronavirus for eight weeks in a row, new figures show.
Almost seven times as many people are now dying of influenza or pneumonia than Covid-19, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics.
In the eight weeks up to August 7, the latest date for which figures are available, 3,144 people died of coronavirus - but 7,639 died of flu or pneumonia.
Eight weeks ago, a total of 1,002 died of influenza up to June 19 - compared with 783 Covid-19 deaths.
The gap has widened each week since and the latest figures show flu killed 1,013 people in the week up to August 7 - almost seven times as many as the 152 who lost their lives to coronavirus.
It comes as the number of coronavirus deaths in England and Wales dropped to its lowest level since lockdown began.
Of the deaths registered in the week up to August 7, 152 mentioned ânovel coronavirus (COVID-19)â on their death certificate.
This is the lowest number of deaths involving Covid-19 in the last 20 weeks and a 21.2% decrease compared with the previous week.
>https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12431571/flu-pneumonia-coronavirus-deaths-lowest-lockdown/
'BELOW AVERAGE'
The latest figures make up the eigth week in a row that deaths have been below what we'd expect.
Flu deaths were also well below the five-year average - highlighting the steady drop in coronavirus fatalities.
The reason for the drop in flu deaths isn't yet known, although it's believed it could be the result of increased hand-washing and mask wearing.
The number of all fatalities registered in England and Wales was 1.7% below the five-year average (157 deaths fewer) in the week up to August 7.
According to the ONS, six regions in England saw figures below the five-year marker.
They were south-east England (0.2% below), the West Midlands (0.6% below), south-west England (4.4% below), Eastern England (4.5% below), London (4.5% below) and Yorkshire & the Humber (5.4% below).
In Wales, the number of deaths registered in the week to August 7 was 1.4% below the five-year average.
The number of deaths in care homes and hospitals also remained below the five-year average in the week up to August 7, although the number of deaths in private homes continued to be higher than the five-year average (702 more deaths).
>https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12431571/flu-pneumonia-coronavirus-deaths-lowest-lockdown/
TOTAL TALLY
Figures published on Tuesday by the ONS show that 51,935 deaths involving Covid-19 had occurred in England and Wales up to August 7, which were registered by August 15.
The National Records for Scotland recorded 4,213 deaths involving Covid-19 had been registered in Scotland up to August 9 while 859 deaths had occurred in Northern Ireland up to August 7 according to the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency.
Together, these figures mean that so far 57,007 deaths have been registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate, including suspected cases.
This total is far higher than the official figure reported each day by Public Health England (PHE) due to a difference in how the stats are recorded.
Yesterday, PHE confirmed a further three coronavirus fatalities in the UK, bringing the government's official tally to 41,369.
It comes after the government ordered an urgent review into how the stats were counted, resulting in only deaths which occurred within 28 days of a positive test result being logged.
<according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics
>https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending31july2020
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional: week ending 31 July 2020
>https://twitter.com/mailonline/status/1295678692543410176
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638929/15-horses-mutilated-France-police-hunt-mystery-attackers.html
https://streamable.com/edw0oa
>https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/qanon-gop/
Inside QAnon, the Conspiracy Cult thatâs Devouring America
Late last June, a visitor scrolling through the Wayfair website noticed something curious. Several ordinary-looking cabinets featured there were listed at rather lofty prices tags. Further examination revealed that the cabinetsâand other seemingly price-inflated productsâbore the names of girls such as Samiyah and Yaritza. In an ordinary world, such a discovery would not be remarkable: Ikea and other furniture retailers routinely name their products after women, the price for a professional steel cabinet can be surprisingly steep, and it turned out that a computer glitch had caused an incorrect price to be assigned to a Wayfair pillow.
But this is no ordinary time and that was no ordinary visitor. She was Amazing Polly, an influencer with QAnonâthe cultish conspiracy movement obsessed with global elites and pedophilia that has boomed in the past two years. âMy spidey senses are tingling,â Polly posted on Twitter. âWhatâs with these âstorage cabinets?ââ The post seemed to languish before resurfacing as a bizarre question in an obscure Reddit chat room devoted to conspiracy theories: Was Wayfair trafficking children in overpriced cabinets? Seven days later, the multi-billion-dollar retail giant found itself at the center of a global conspiracy theory that claimed the company was running a massive child-sex-trafficking ring.
With the aid of thousands of self-styled âinvestigators,â speculation spread so hysterically on social media that scores of national news reporters investigated, and a national human-trafficking hotline long operated by âSave the Childrenâ was flooded with hundreds of calls, diverting resources from callers actually in need. Wayfair issued a statement denying it was a front for a human-trafficking ring, but believers dug in their heels, turning on Wayfairâs founder and his wife, embroidering new and ever more fantastic charges. Meanwhile, social-media influencers posted memes that matched the names of Wayfair products with those of girls listed in old missing-persons reports. Three days after the initial Reddit post, the Wayfair conspiracy theory had been mentioned on Twitter over 1.2 million times from 564,000 user accounts. One of the girls who was allegedly trafficked inside a Wayfair cabinet, Samiyah Mumin, posted a video on Facebook in which she slammed conspiracy theorists for taking attention away from a real problem: âYâall know how many people is actually missing?â
>https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/qanon-gop/
QAnon has become the most potent force in American politics that most Americans have never heard of
It was the latest example of a modern phenomenon: politics and pedophilia and anonymous internet warriors descending suddenly on unsuspecting people and companies. Until recently, few knew much about QAnon. The right-wing conspiracy movement emerged in 2017 as a result of cryptic clues posted on the internet that portray a world in which Donald Trump works secretly to vanquish a coven of global elites, including top Democrats and Hollywood celebrities, who torture children, traffic them for sex, and even eat them. Flagged as a violent threat by the FBI, banned from Twitter and TikTok, and avidly courted by the Trump campaign, QAnon has become the most potent force in American politics that most Americans have never heard of. In a few short years, QAnon-associated accounts have metastasized on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at an unprecedented rate. The pandemic has further fueled its growth, uniting the QAnon conspiracists with anti-vaxxers and Covid-deniers with the 9/11 deniers and Sandy Hook skeptics that were already part of Qâs growing coalition, which apparently includes everyone from Roseanne to porn queen Jenna Jameson to former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. (The general, a QAnon icon, recently released a video of him and his family earnestly reciting the QAnon pledge.)
On Facebook, there are thousands of groups and pages devoted to QAnon, with millions of members and followers, according to an internal Facebook report leaked to Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News. A popular Redditt group now offers support to the estranged families and friends of QAnon converts; the group, called âThe Qult Headquartersâ and dedicated to debunking the conspiracy theory and deprogramming its devotees, has more than 24 thousand members. Once a strictly American phenomenon, QAnon has gone global. There is evidence of QAnon presence in 71 countries, and on every continent save for Antarctica, says Concordia University researcher Marc-AndrĂŠ Argentino. One user posing as âQâ in a French community group said in a post: âIf the French people rise up, the American army will come and help you. Qâ
The groups followers also include some mentally unbalanced people, who have latched onto the QAnon ideology with a fervor that has broken into real life in dangerous ways. Defense lawyers for the man charged in the murder of the underboss of the Gambino crime family in New York City, say their client is obsessed with conspiracy theories and believed the mobster was a member of the âdeep state.â (The same man had previously attempted to make citizenâs arrests of Schiff and Congresswoman Maxine Waters.) The landscaper arrested for igniting the 2018 wildfire that burned nearly 20,000 acres of Orange County and destroyed a dozen homes had posted dozens of conspiracy videos on his Facebook page, including some about a satanist cult that ruled the world and a mysterious U.S. intelligence insider who is working with Donald Trump to thwart it. A QAnon believer and self-identified member of the alt-right Proud Boys in Seattle killed his brother in January by stabbing him in the head with a four-foot-long sword, later claiming he thought his brother was a lizard. In June of last year, an armed man inspired by a Q post barricaded himself in an armed vehicle and blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam bridge for hours. He was demanding the Justice Department release a (nonexistent) secret report on Hillary Clintonâs use of a private email server that Q had claimed was being stashed at the dam.
Despite its outlandish allegations, the group has also become an increasingly influential player in GOP politics. Fourteen QAnon supporters are running for Congress in 2020; two, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a GOP candidate and avid conspiracy theorist with a history of making racist comments, seem poised to win. Despite early objections from a few party members, she has encountered little opposition from party leaders or the president. In fact Trump, who frequently retweets out QAnon conspiracy accounts, warmly congratulated the candidate on her victory. At this stage in its growth, QAnon âis driving conversation on the online right,â says Kevin Roose, the tech columnist for the New York Times. âMany of the stories that end up trending on Twitter or Facebook are there because QAnon found them and pushed them. It is a lot bigger and more influential than people realize.â
The basic premise of QAnon is this: âQâ is a top government insider close to the president who has proof that global elites secretly enslave and torture children and extract from their blood what they believe is a life-extending chemical named Adrenochrome. Qâs targets range from Democratic politicians like the Clintons, Adam Schiff, and the Obamas to globalist moguls like Bill Clinton and George Soros to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. Trump and his military allies are working secretly to unmask all these evildoers and make sure that they are carted off to GuantĂĄnamo and hanged for their crimes. The enemies of QAnon are, in nearly every case, enemies of Trump, which experts say is no coincidence. âAt the end of the day, this conspiracy theory is targeting the Democratic establishment,â says Cristina LĂłpez G., who studies QAnon for the liberal research group Media Matters for America. âTo believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press,â wrote journalist Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic. âOne of Qâs favorite rallying cries is âYou are the news now.â Another is âEnjoy the show,â a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When the world as we know it comes to an end, everyoneâs a spectator.â
The steady drip of accusations spurred an army of âdigital soldiersâ who wanted to be part of the Great Awakening, which they envisioned as the triumphant unmasking of the global cabal that has been suppressing American liberties since the assassination of JFK. (That event ushered in a new age of conspiratorial distrust of the government and the elite establishment that has grown ever since. Ironically, many Q supporters believe that JFK Jr. is alive and faked his death in a plane crash to bring the evil globalists to justice.)
Followers employ numerology and Illuminati symbols to decode the cryptic messages Q leaves on anonymous message boards; they believe that the malefactors advertise their misdeeds openly using codes and symbols, and that Trump secretly signals âproofâ of the storyâs legitimacy, like when a supporter asked Trump to use the phrase âtip top,â which Trump later used at the 2018 White House Easter Egg Roll (standing beside a white Easter Bunny, no less).
Alison Hayden, a QAnon believer running for California representative Eric Swalwellâs seat in Congress, told me she is optimistic QAnon will bring âcures for cancerâ and halt âtechnologies of light and sound manipulation that make us crazy and angry.â For a political outsider and conspiracist, Haydenâs bona fides are fairly âestablishment.â She was educated at UC Berkeley and the London School of Economics before working in global finance at Citibank and Charles Schwab & Co. and becoming a district-level Republican delegate.
Although QAnon is a national phenomenon, Californiaâthe birthplace of fantastical movements from Scientology to Satanic Panicâhas proved to be an especially fertile breeding ground for the group. So itâs no surprise that of the 14 QAnon-identified congressional candidates on the November ballot, five are from California, a state that also figures prominently in QAnon lore. Hollywood is the stage for many of Qâs wildest allegations. No major group since the Church of Scientology has turned the American hunger for celebrity to greater advantage. But while Scientology opened celebrity centers to recruit stars like John Travolta and Tom Cruise, and used them as pitchmen for its much-maligned and equally bizarre belief system, QAnon does the opposite: it positions stars as deranged villains on whom believers can vent their personal hatreds. If Scientology is the cult of celebrity, QAnon is the cult of anti-celebrity. Says Will Sommer, a staff writer for the Daily Beast who has covered QAnon since it emerged from a trollish corner of the internet in 2017, âQ takes the classic idea of Hollywood as this decadent and depraved sort of Babylon and pushes it to the most baroque, exaggerated extreme.â Every celebrity who has died tragically, from chef Anthony Bourdain to Soundgarden lead singer Chris Cornell, was murdered, they aver, to prevent them from blowing the lid off the demonic cabal.
ââââ
QAnon is the big-budget sequel to Pizzagate, the viral phenomenon rooted in a sinister reading of emails hacked from the personal account of Hillary Clintonâs campaign manager, John Podesta. When the FBI declared QAnon a domestic terrorism threat last year, the intelligence bulletin warned of members âclaiming to act as âresearchersâ or âinvestigatorsâ [who] single out people, businesses, or groups which they falsely accuse of being involved in the imagined scheme.â Thatâs what happened in 2016 after a self-declared FBI insider on 4chan declared that the phrase âcheese pizzaâ in the Clinton emails was a secret code for child pornography. Alex Jones hyped up that claim on Infowars, and helped spawn thousands of Pizzagate-supporting sites on the Internet, who identified the basement of a suburban D.C, pizza parlor as a primary hub of child-trafficking activity. In response, an enraged North Carolina warehouse worker named Edgar Maddison Welch drove 300 miles to the Washington pizzeria Comet Ping Pong and fired a military-style assault rifle inside, believing he was saving victims of child trafficking. As it turned out, there was no basement at the restaurant. âThe intel on this wasnât a hundred percent,â Welch later told the New York Times from jail.
QAnon co-opted the characters and storylines of Pizzagate the way a major Hollywood studio might co-opt a hit indie film, says Travis View, host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous. And though the Pizzagate conspiracy wilted for a time, the trollish âchan cultureâ of anonymous internet forums from which it emerged reinforced its generative premise: judgment is near for devil-worshipping elites who defile children. With QAnon, the stakes are raised and the saga gets an improbable hero: Donald Trump.
It all started rather innocuously. During a White House dinner for military commanders on October 5, 2017, Trump made a mysterious comment that got conspiracy theorists talking. Gesturing to his guests, Trump said: âYou guys know what this represents? Maybe itâs the calm before the storm.â He didnât elaborate, but online his vague statement triggered a storm of online speculation. Then, on October 28, someone appeared on the anonymous image board 4chan claiming to be a Trump-supporting military or intelligence insider with âQâ-level clearanceâa rare government security designation that allows access to top secret documents. âHRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run,â begins the series of messages, which predicted the imminent arrest of Hillary Clinton. The prediction was wrong, of course. (They always are; it only encourages supporters to go back and reinterpret them.) But the notion that a super-secret government agent was feeding intelligence directly to the American public took off in the MAGA-sphere.
The design of image boards like 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun, which conceals the real names of users, greatly enhanced the mystique of the poster, now widely known as Q.
There is no way for social-media users to know who Q is. Whoever is posting as Q uses a password-protected account that produces a unique ID, visible to other users. This is how forum-goers can verify that the account posting âQ dropsâ is the same over time. Q was initially believed to be one person, but it is now accepted that multiple people, in cooperation, are posting using the pseudonym, says Harvard researcher Brian Friedberg. (In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator named Tracy Diaz banded together with two moderators from the 4chan website, Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, to push QAnon onto mainstream platforms, according to Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News. Rogers and his wife, Christina Urso, later launched the Patriotsâ Soapbox, a round-the-clock live-streamed YouTube channel devoted to QAnon coverage which they use to call for donations that are accepted through PayPal, cryptocurrencies or mail. Recent guests on the show include GOP Congressional candidate and QAnon supporter Lauren Boebert, and Erin Perrine, director of press communications for Trumpâs reelection campaign.)
Whoever it may be, Q today is the Dungeon Master of the internetâs eeriest role-playing game. âWith QAnon, you have this person putting out these clues in an ongoing way, so thereâs something to follow along with,â says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami and co-author of American Conspiracy Theories. âThereâs an online sense of group belonging, with a chant and an oath. They feel like part of current eventsâwhatâs going on right now and in the future.â Tech researchers and journalists have likened QAnon to a massive multiplayer online game. âQAnon is popular partly because the act of âresearchingâ through obscure forums and videos and blog posts, though more time-consuming than watching TV, is actually more enjoyable because itâs an active process,â Adrian Hon, chief executive of the gaming company Six to Start and a designer of alternate reality games, said in a Twitter post.
When the pandemic brought radical changes to Alison Haydenâs daily life, the 60-year-old special-education teacher turned increasingly to QAnon to make sense of it all. âJust kind of popped up on YouTubeâ was how she described joining the Great Awakening. Today she is one of an estimated 14 candidates for U.S. Congress who identify with the movement that believes JFK Jr. is still alive, Hillary Clinton is on trial, and Justin Trudeau is going to be executed. (This conspiracy theory, which the FBI has deemed a violent inspiration to domestic extremists, has support from all 14 candidates, according to Media Matters.)
âItâs digital soldiers amalgamating informationâyou wouldnât otherwise know about various topics that are swirling the internet with a conservative viewpoint that supports the president,â Hayden says. Asked for examples, she refers to claims that Senator Kamala Harris uses a body double, the coronavirus outbreak was a âplanned event,â and the Chinese armed Black Lives Matter activists with AK-47s.
How anyone takes any of this seriously is a testament to the success of what former Harvard researcher Benjamin T. Decker, chief executive of a company that investigates online disinformation, calls âconspiracy entrepreneursââhucksters like Tracy Diaz and Coleman Rogers who make money pushing Q-content on Q-related podcasts, chat rooms, and YouTube channels. âItâs as much about the economy of the conspiracy as the conspiracy itself,â Decker says.
Where would QAnon be today had Roseanne Barr not given it a platform in 2018? Barr blew up ABCâs hit reboot of her show when she amplified QAnon in tweets glorifying Trump for supposedly having âbroken up trafficking rings in high places everywhere.â Actor James Woods has retweeted baseless conspiracy theories linking Los Angeles congressman Adam Schiff to child-sex trafficking. Porn star Jenna Jameson, another QAnon believer, claimed that The Hunt, a satire about rich liberals who abduct right-wing deplorables and pick them off for sport, was real. In a social-media post, Jameson claimed she overheard a hunt for children being discussed at the Hotel du Cap in Cannes. âYet you collaborated to defame the only man who is fighting against them,â one guy wrote back. To which Jameson replied, âIâm not Stormy, you imbecile.â
Keeping up with QAnon where Hollywood is concerned is an exercise in contradiction. Followers âtend to have a disdain for Hollywood, so much so that they think Hollywood is running satanic pedophile rings,â Uscinski says. âIâve seen strains of this theory suggesting they turn child actors into shoes.â Yet quotes and ideas borrowed from Hollywood movies have become the basis of many QAnonâs most popular slogans and storylines, he points out.
The idea for âadrenochrome,â the supposed life-extending elixir that QAnon followers believe is extracted from the blood of children by the global elite, can be traced to the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when Johnny Depp, as Hunter S. Thompson, hallucinates after supposedly ingesting the compound. (In real life, adrenochrome is a synthetic compound used to stanch bleeding.) Two of the most popular QAnon rallying cries, âThe calm before the stormâ and âWhere we go one, we go all,â can be heard in the trailer for director Ridley Scottâs forgettable 1996 sailing drama, White Squall. (The top comment on a YouTube post for the trailerââThumbs up if Q sent you hereââhas been liked 5,700 times.) The premise of The Matrixâthat reality as we know it is a vast, artificially controlled simulationâresonates well with Qâs worldview, says Marc-AndrĂŠ Argentino, a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University who is writing a book about QAnon. âThe Matrixâs blue-pill/red-pill scene is used to frame the choice to either be a part of the Great Awakening or to remain âasleep,ââ Argentino writes in Religion Dispatches. (As top QAnon influencer Joe M. put it, âEverything is staged and you are watching a movie.â)
âSomeone do a movie on these pathetic NUTCASES I beg you,â model Chrissy Teigen tweeted from deep inside an online âswarmâ of QAnon followers in July. QAnon scours the social-media feeds of Hollywood stars like Teigen, Tom Hanks, and Oprah Winfrey, looking for clues that they are linked to the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. âFinding me talking about toddlers and tiaras in 2013 and thinking youâre some sort of fucking operative,â Teigen wrote to one. At the peak of the barrage, the mother of two blocked more than a million user accounts and deleted 60,000 of her old tweets. Within days, Twitter permanently suspended 7,000 QAnon accounts on the platform, restricted 150,000 more, and banned Q-related terms from appearing in trending topics.
After Hanks contracted the coronavirus, a QAnon influencer and convicted bank robber named Tommy Gelati, who once co-hosted a Barstool Sports podcast with actor Michael Rapaport, began speculating that Hanksâs haircut proved that he was secretly hosting Saturday Night Live from prison. After a producer randomly appeared in a window on the set of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, QAnon influencers speculated that he was a police officer and that DeGeneres was under house arrest.
âJust got a phone call that my name is trending. And being trolled for some awful FAKE thing,â Oprah Winfrey tweeted on March 17, after a conspiracy theory embraced by the QAnon community claimed she was arrested in a global sex-trafficking ring. âItâs NOT TRUE. Havenât been raided, or arrested. Just sanitizing and self-distancing with the rest of the world.â A Facebook post from June shared more than 32,000 times reads, âItâs crazy many ppl donât know Oprahm on house arrest for Sex trafficking kids, as well as Ellen, Tom Hanks, Clintonâs.â
Also widely circulated is the âarrest/execution list,â which name-checks the entire cast of Friends as âarrested & waiting tribunal,â except for Courtney Cox, who is âarrested & under house arrest.â When celebrities posted videos of themselves from lockdown looking less than put together, QAnon gurus speculated about an âadrenochrome shortageâ that was sapping their youthful energy. When Hanks contracted COVID-19, his name went on a list of presumed members of the sex-trafficking cabal, as did Lady Gagaâs, for advocating social distancing.
There is a limit to how much harm a QAnon Twitter swarm can inflict on an A-list celebrity. But the situation was much more dangerous for a not-at-all-famous 33-year-old Los Angeles woman who was randomly and viciously targeted by QAnon last year. Her ordeal began when Q posted an old photo to 8chan showing her on a plane with Bill Clinton. âEpsteinâs plane,â Q wrote with no proof. âWho is she? Follow friends. Friends lead to others. Open source.â Soon after, thousands of tweets popped up across the Internet, mentioning her name, address and phone number. With that, she was pursued around the clock like the final woman alive to confront the killer in a slasher film. Once someone is cast as a recurring character in the pro-Trump fan fiction of QAnon, the doxxing and threats may subside, but they never end. After the woman left Los Angeles and cut off all her social media, she still pops up regularly on QAnon lists of child abductors.
According to police, belief in QAnon has inspired at least ten violent incidents, including two murders, a kidnapping, vandalism of a church, and an armed standoff near the Hoover Dam. Lawyers for the man charged in the 2019 killing of a Gambino crime family underboss say their client, Anthony Comello, is obsessed with conspiracy theories and believed the victim, Francesco âFranky Boyâ Cali, was a member of the âdeep state.â (Comello previously attempted to make a citizenâs arrest of Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters.) At the Hoover Dam, a man using an armored car to block traffic held up a sign that read, âRelease the OIG report,â referring to a âsecretâ Justice Department brief QAnon had led him to believe was stashed at the dam. (No such report existed.)
In an age where the president of the United States is a âbirtherâ and has tweeted conspiracy theories or fringe content more than 145 times while in office, it is unsurprising that QAnon has a friend in the West Wing. Trumpâs embrace of QAnon has grown tighter as his poll numbers have dropped. On the July 4th holiday, before Trump spoke to the nation from the White House lawn, he retweeted accounts linked to QAnon 14 times in one day. In August, the Washington Post noted an apparent convergence between Trumpâs inner circle and an ever-widening cohort of QAnon believers. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro delighted Q followers in June when he wore a Q flag pin during an interview on Fox News. (âWow!!!!!â rejoiced one follower on Twitter. â@PeterNavarro45 is wearing a flag pin with Q on it. I have one too.â) Trumpâs first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, recorded a video of himself on July 4th in which he holds up his right hand and recites an oath associated with QAnon, including âWhere we go one, we go all.â During an interview on Fox News with Trumpâs middle son, Eric, when host Jesse Watters praised QAnon for having âuncovered a lot of great stuff,â Trump replied, âYeah.â Meanwhile, recent ads from the Trump reelection campaign in Nevada and Arizona feature shots of Trump followers sporting QAnon gear, and the director of press communications for Trumpâs reelection campaign, Erin Perrine, appeared as a guest on Patriotsâ Soapbox 24/7, a YouTube call-in show devoted to coverage of QAnon.
This election season saw dozens of QAnon-identified candidates running for Congress around the country, all under the GOP banner. California is no newcomer to Q politics. Former San Juan Capistrano city councilwoman Pam Patterson made news with a farewell speech in 2018 in which she prayed for God to âbless Q.â When Mike Madrid was political director for the California Republican Party in the late 1990s, Pete Wilson was governor, and the main conspiracy theory was that Mexicans were trying to reconquer the southwestern United States. Los Angeles and San Francisco were the cities where the conservative movement was its weakest, and where the conspiracy freaks felt most at home. âIt was a handful of fringe activists,â recalls Madrid, a longtime Republican who co-founded the Never Trump Lincoln Project. âNow theyâre the nomineesâtheyâre the candidates!â
On July 4, President Trump retweeted accounts linked to QAnon theory 14 times.
The Q-friendly congressional candidates running in California are either true believers or cynical self-promoters. In the first category is Hayden, who lives in the Bay Area city of Hayward. When a prominent QAnon influencer tweeted about a pro-choice New Zealand abortion law, claiming it legalizes âluciferian child sacrificeâ and vouchsafed a supply of human fetal parts to the deep state, Hayden retweeted it. When someone posting as âQ Seekerâ said on Twitter that his wife was leaving him over his belief in Q, Hayden advised him to keep the faith: âWhen it all comes out, your standing FIRM will establish your leadership in your family.â
Mike Cargile and Wendy Cruz, the Q-friendly congressional candidates in Southern California, are in the second categoryâmarketing professionals who have paid lip service to QAnon in an attempt to boost their electability. âWeâre likely to see it emerge as kind of a new Tea Party, a force within the conservative movement pushing politicians, even those who donât believe in the secret signals of Q, to find it politically valuable to get on QAnonâs side,â says Roose.
According to a report by NBC News correspondents Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, Cruz said that QAnon supporters have âlegitimate concerns,â without elaborating what those were, adding that they deserve to be respected as a voting bloc. Cruz, who lives in Palm Springs, has a campaign banner hanging at the local Republican Party headquarters in La Quinta. Cargileâs Twitter bio includes #WWG1WGA, the hashtag for âWhere we go one, we go all.â As Los Angeles reported in July, the California GOP quietly removed its endorsement of Cargile from its website after Media Matters revealed that his Facebook and Twitter pages were littered with the N-word and diatribes directed at Blacks, immigrants, Muslims, and the LGBTQ community. The Pomona resident also called the coronavirus a âscamdemic,â and stated that it is ânothing compared to the diseases and plagues headed this way via the rats and the homeless.â
Cargileâs opponent, Congresswoman Norma Torres, says supporters of the GOP challenger have made death threats against her online. âTheyâre people with extreme anti-government, anti-immigrant views,â says Torres, who emigrated to the U.S. from Guatemala as a child. Torres says she is troubled by the cloak of anonymity that shields QAnon followers. Not long after Ed Mullins, head of the second-largest NYPD union, gave an interview on Fox News with a QAnon mug in the background, Torres said, âWhatâs scary is, where do these people work? Could they be our classroom teachers, our police officers, our crime investigators?â
One former Republican official said the rise of QAnon seemed more pronounced because, in terms of registrations and influence, the party itself is in steep decline. âIf QAnon is growing in influence, itâs because the party is shrinking and there are fewer rational voices to drown it out,â the ex-official said. (California GOP chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson declined an interview request after learning that this story was about QAnon.)
Madrid calls QAnon âa parasite feeding off the decaying host of the Republican Party.â He adds that QAnon is an âamorphous glueâ that cements what he describes as the âholy trinity of the MAGA coalition: white nationalists, gun fanatics, and conspiracy theorists.â The QAnon supporters running for Congress in California arenât going to get elected. But Margorie Taylor Greene in Georgia and Lauren Boebert in Colorado, both identified with QAnon, won primaries in âsafeâ Republican districts, meaning the general election will be a cakewalk for them. (Boebert defeated a five-term congressman in Coloradoâs Republican primary in June. In May, she told an interviewer âEverything Iâve heard of QâI hope this is real. Because it only means America is getting stronger and better and people are returning to conservative values.â She has since denied she believes in QAnon.) Taylor Greene, a businesswoman and QAnon diehard, won the Republican nomination for Georgiaâs 14th Congressional District earlier this month, despite hours of uncovered videos where she demeans Blacks, Muslims and Jews, and promotes a slew of conspiracy theories. Trump praised Taylor Greene after her victory was official, tweeting that she is a âfuture Republican Starâ who was âstrong on everything and never gives up â a real WINNER!â
Two Republican congressmen, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Denver Riggleman of Virginia, came forward on Sunday to disavow the movement and call on their colleagues to do the same. Critics say it is too little, too late.
âThereâs going to be a QAnon caucus in the Republican Congress in 2020,â Madrid says. âCount on it.â
>standing beside a white Easter Bunny, no less
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