dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

" “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration … to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” — Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, “Dr. Strangelove”

In the 1964 black comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” the above words are spoken by a general who is about to start World War III. His theory about the contamination of “precious bodily fluids” is the tipoff for poor Group Captain Lionel Mandrake that the general has gone certifiably cuckoo.

Last week, Republican voters in Georgia’s 14th congressional district nominated Marjorie Taylor Greene for the seat being vacated by Rep. Tom Graves. Greene is (or claims to be) a QAnon believer.

You might think that once voters were alerted to this, they’d shrink from Greene as Mandrake did from Ripper, asking her to go nicely with the men in white coats who are here to help her. Her opponent told Politico, “She is not conservative — she’s crazy.” The voters were not convinced. Greene trounced Cowan by 14 points (as of this writing).

Georgia 14 is a comfortably Republican district. But Greene is not offering traditional Republican fare. She’s denounced a “Muslim invasion” of America, called George Soros a “Nazi,” and endorsed the bonkers QAnon conspiracy.

Q refers to an Energy Department classification level of top secret. The person styling himself Q in cryptic online messages is anonymous, thus QAnon. To describe what followers of Q believe is to enter a hall of mirrors.

Remember the fellow who, a month after the 2016 election, drove from North Carolina to D.C., barging into a pizza place and firing off a shotgun? Well, he was looking for the child sex slaves he’d been led to believe were chained in the back, at the behest of John Podesta and Hillary Clinton.

“Pizzagate” morphed into the QAnon conspiracy in which Q followers wait for signals from their leader that a vast conspiracy of Satanic child abusers, run by the “deep state,” George Soros, the Supreme Court and God knows who else is about to be unmasked. Did I mention that they think Beyonce is only pretending to be black? It’s a hydra-headed thing, this conspiracy, and contains multitudes. But the one common thread is this: The great deliverer will be Donald J. Trump."

More at Link:

https://www.oaoa.com/editorial/columns/opinion_columnist/charen-quazy-for-qanon/article_b94b80e0-e171-11ea-b5bc-5b640f7134a3.html

Anonymous ID: 3e22df Aug. 19, 2020, 3:31 a.m. No.10340090 🗄️.is 🔗kun >>0111

Essay: QAnon - the alternative religion that’s coming to your

church

19 August 2020

KATELYN BEATTY

"It’s a rough time to be a pastor. An election year, national racial unrest and a global pandemic each challenged the usual methods of ministry. Taken together, many church leaders are facing the traditional post-vacation ingathering season with a serious case of burnout.

But there’s another challenge that pastors I spoke with say is on the rise in their flocks. It is taking on the power of a new religion that’s dividing churches and hurting Christian witness.

Mark Fugitt, senior pastor of Round Grove Baptist Church in Miller, Missouri, recently sat down to count the conspiracy theories that people in his church are sharing on Facebook. The list was long. It included claims that 5G radio waves are used for mind control; that George Floyd’s murder is a hoax; that Bill Gates is related to the devil; that masks can kill you; that the germ theory isn’t real; and that there might be something to Pizzagate after all.

“You don’t just see it once,” said Fugitt. “If there’s ever anything posted, you’ll see it five to 10 times. It’s escalating for sure.”

"Conspiracy theories - grand narratives that seek to prove that powerful actors are secretly controlling events and institutions for evil purposes - are nothing new in the US. But since 2017, a sort of ur-conspiracy theory, QAnon, has coalesced in online forums and created millions of believers."

Conspiracy theories - grand narratives that seek to prove that powerful actors are secretly controlling events and institutions for evil purposes - are nothing new in the US. But since 2017, a sort of ur-conspiracy theory, QAnon, has coalesced in online forums and created millions of believers. “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion,” wrote Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic in June.

Named after “Q,” who posts anonymously on the online bulletin board 4chan, QAnon alleges that President Donald Trump and military officials are working to expose a “deep state” pedophile ring with links to Hollywood, the media and the Democratic Party. Since its first mention some three years ago, the theory has drawn adherents looking for a clear way to explain recent disorienting global events.

Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe. With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero", and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support.

One scholar found a 71 per cent increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651 per cent increase on Facebook since March.

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a non-denominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared Plandemic, a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a money-making scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realised many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise” - a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, US evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon."