https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-does-the-qanon-conspiracy-thrive-despite-all-its-unfulfilled-prophecies/ar-AALC5Y8?ocid=msedgntp

Why Does the QAnon Conspiracy Thrive Despite All its Unfulfilled Prophecies?

32 mins ago

To any reasonable person, the failure of a long-foretold event to materialize should erode the belief that it will happen. A perfect example is the long-foretold and never arriving “storm” of mass arrests promised by the mysterious “military intelligence” team at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy. How could anyone think something promised for years, and put off countless times, is actually going to happen this time?

Belief doesn’t need to be reasonable—particularly when it revolves around the punishment of the people you’ve been told are responsible for all of the world’s ills. And this stubborn lack of logic isn’t limited to people who think the deep state is trafficking children or that Joe Biden is actually a fake president. We all have an innate need to believe in good things that are extremely unlikely to take place. It’s the essence of hope. And a life without hope is . . . hopeless.

Even when Q believers are presented with crushing proof that they’ve been fooled, they still believe—often taking the proof that they’re wrong as proof that they’re actually right. To do otherwise would be to give in to hopelessness.

By the time of the COVID-19 lockdown, Q had been exposed countless times as a fraud and a troll with no connection to military intelligence whose “predictions” were the same kind of rapid-fire guessing that a strip-mall psychic uses, while the movement’s members were running into the law for their increasingly violent and untethered behavior. But to the faithful, these were all temporary setbacks, perpetrated by a bought-and-paid-for media. Everyone just needed to “trust the plan” and believe.

To understand why QAnon followers believe and hang on to that belief requires understanding why people believe in conspiracy theories in the first place. To begin, Q is almost never anyone’s first conspiracy theory, but the next step on a ladder that includes any number of plots and schemes. So when people find Q, which already incorporates so many other conspiracy theories, it easily fits into their world view. And it doesn’t mean they’re crazy or stupid.

Human brains need to recognize dangerous situations, and we are hardwired to seek patterns, to find order in chaos, and to exert control where none can be found. Conspiracy theories, at their most basic level, assert that we are in danger from hidden forces. This helps give difficult questions and random events satisfying answers—and puts us at the center of those events. And we all do it.

If you’re hearing danger in a strange noise late at night, or looking at a world event and thinking that there must be more to it than what we’re being told, you’re just doing what your brain has evolved to do as a way to make sense of the senseless.

Our lives are often full of failure—personal, professional, and collective. We don’t want to believe these failures are due to honest mistakes by others or random chance. And most of all, we don’t want to believe that they’re our own fault. To believe otherwise is to believe that either we screwed up, or that we have no control over what happens to us. And that’s just too horrible to accept.

pt1

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/why-does-the-qanon-conspiracy-thrive-despite-all-its-unfulfilled-prophecies/ar-AALC5Y8?ocid=msedgntp

Such beliefs don’t begin with the Internet, nor are they more prevalent in the Internet age. Decades of polling consistently show that over half of Americans believe in some conspiracy theory, and that about as many people in 1963 believed that multiple assassins killed JFK as they did in 2013, according to Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Use Them.

Notions that someone is trying to get something over on us go viral for a good reason: many times, someone is trying to get something over on us. Conspiracy theories can be held by people who work normal jobs, have loving families, and don’t spend every hour of every day soaking in violent ideation. They can take the form merely of irritating our friends with yet another ramble about whatever hidden chicanery we’ve chosen to believe in—our phone breaking suspiciously just as the service contract expires so that we have to buy a new one, and so on. They can even be fun to speculate about—like the viral conspiracy theory about Chuck E. Cheese “recycling” unused pizza slices to make misshapen new pizzas.

Further complicating matters is that some conspiracies are real. Julius Caesar was murdered by Roman politicians conspiring together. And 150 years later, a conspiracy of killers succeeded in assassinating President Abraham Lincoln, with plans to kill both the Vice President and Secretary of War. A conspiracy of German officers tried to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944. And the U.S. Public Health Service engaged in a grossly unethical four-decade conspiracy to withhold syphilis treatment from Black sharecroppers in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, find believers because they fit in with our need to find hidden danger and revelations about how the world “really” works. As we’ve seen, this is not necessarily a bad thing. But for many Q believers, that nebulous feeling that they’re all out to get me becomes They’re all out to get me, and I’m gonna get them first. This is the danger of Q—not that people believe it, but that believing it means that those who don’t are the enemy.

For the QAnon adherent, Q is not a conspiracy theory—and many believers bristle at the term, calling themselves “conspiracy researchers” instead. It’s a way of clearly seeing the world and of organizing the players into columns of good guys and bad guys. And it provides its believers something nobody usually expects out of cultish conspiracy movements—hope. Q believers speak excitedly of the promise of a new future that Q would deliver—something ex-believer Jitarth Jadeja explained to me.

“I wanted to believe that the good guys were fighting the good fight, and in a better future,” he told me over Zoom. “Q makes you feel important and gives you meaning and self-esteem. You are saving the world when you’re in Q, [it’s] the highest way you can view yourself.”

Undoubtedly, at least some Q believers are in the grip of delusion, to the point of being unable to stand trial for crimes they’ve committed. Others vaguely believe some of its tenets without specifically calling themselves Q believers. And some are just in it for the trolling—or because they really hate Jews and Democrats, or worship Donald Trump. But those extremes are out of the ordinary. Many are just people who passionately believe in a thing that isn’t real because it tells them what they want to hear.

This is ultimately what brings people to Q, and what keeps them there. The promise of bad people being punished is one element of it, but the feeling of being part of something important and powerful is vastly underestimated. Q believers see themselves as soldiers fighting for the ultimate cause—and are surrounded by people who validate them, rather than insult or belittle them, or try to fact-check them out of what they think is real. Yes, Q will sometimes admit to making errors in drops. And Q posts their drops on 8chan, a place full of racists and anti-Semites saying racist and anti-Semitic things.

But that can be explained away, or written off as just another attack by the enemy.

What’s real, what’s tangible to Q believers is how it makes them feel. What questions it answers. What holes it fills that other aspects of their life don’t. For many believers, who truly see themselves as non-violent patriots, it’s that simple —good feelings shared with a community about something awesome that will happen to people who are keeping them down.

But for a few, it metastasizes. Sometimes it’s due to mental illness. Other times, it’s need and anger curdling into violent resentment. No matter the cause, the end is the same: from the Capitol attack to countless tiny familial tragedies, the results are violence, pain, and shattered lives. And onlookers struggling to understand what about this was so alluring in the first place.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/lawyers-for-the-south-african-brothers-who-vanished-with-3-6-billion-of-bitcoin-in-possibly-the-largest-ever-crypto-heist-have-been-terminated-from-the-case/ar-AALADG1?ocid=msedgntp

Lawyers for the South African brothers who vanished with $3.6 billion of bitcoin in possibly the largest-ever crypto heist have been terminated from the case

egraffeo@businessinsider.com (Emily Graffeo) 19 hrs ago

The lawyers for the two brothers involved in what could be the world's largest crypto heist have been removed from the case.

The South-Africa based lawyers told Bloomberg their mandate to assist the brothers has been terminated.

The Cajee brothers and the estimated $3.6 billion in bitcoin are still nowhere to be found.

The lawyers for the two brothers who have been accused of vanishing with an estimated $3.6 billion in bitcoin told Bloomberg on Monday their mandate to assist the brothers has been terminated.

"Our mandate to assist the Cajee Brothers has been terminated," John Oosthuizen, a South Africa-based attorney, said in an email to Bloomberg, when asked for comment on the brother's whereabouts. "I look forward to reading your reporting on the Africrypt saga further."

The statement from Oosthuizen came just two days after he publicly defended Ameer Cajee and his younger brother, Raees Cajee. The brothers have not been seen since they told clients that their cryptocurrency investment app Africypt had been hacked in April.

The brothers, speaking through Oosthuizen, denied any involvement in the crypto heist.

"There is no foundation to the accusation and there's no merit to those accusations," Oosthuizen told the BBC. "They maintain that it was a hack, and they were fleeced of these assets."

When 20 year-told Ameer Cajee learned of the hack, he told clients not to report the incident to authorities as this would impede attempts to recover the funds. Neither Ameer nor Raees contacted the police after the alleged hack.

Oosthuizen defended the brothers' decision to not talk to the police, saying that at just 20 and 18 years old, they "had very little life experience."

But several suspicious customers, however, did report the hack. They contacted Hanekom Attorneys, according to Independent Online, who then tried to track the brothers down. When unsuccessful, Hawks, a police unit in South Africa that targets crime and corruption, was looped in.

"We were immediately suspicious as the announcement implored investors not to take legal action," Hanekom Attorneys told Bloomberg over email. "Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack."

The news of the lawyers being terminated from the case also comes as local news site MoneyWeb reported that this incident wasn't the first time a company the Cajee brothers ran had been hacked.

Before founding Africrypt in July 2019, the Cajee brothers ran a different investment platform. In a letter to clients on in May 2019, the brothers said their platform was hacked and emptied of all bitcoin. They blamed a breach of their biggest trading partner, Binance, for the hack.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/right-wing-death-squad-active-duty-marine-plotted-to-bomb-dnc-murder-black-people-feds-say/ar-AALANYM?ocid=msedgntp

‘Right-Wing Death Squad’: Active-Duty Marine Plotted to Bomb DNC, Murder Black People, Feds Say

An active-duty U.S. Marine came under federal investigation for allegedly plotting with at least two others to assassinate minorities, drug users, and employees of the Democratic National Committee with explosives, rocket launchers, and automatic rifles.

That’s according to a newly unsealed FBI search warrant affidavit obtained by The Daily Beast, which indicates USMC Private First Class Travis Owens and his partners in the unrealized murder plot were influenced by Timothy McVeigh, the former U.S. Army soldier behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead and injured nearly 700. The document also states that one of the suspects had links to the Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi group linked to at least five murders. A handful of active service members and veterans have been identified as being members of Atomwaffen, which calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government.

The investigation began in late August 2019, when a tipster contacted the FBI about disturbingly violent conversations they had observed in a private Facebook Messenger chat group named “Right Wing Death Squad.” According to the FBI, three men were behind the troubling chats: James Wisdom of Arkansas; food service worker Jason D’Juan Garfield—also of Arkansas—who went by the noms de guerre “Moon Man” and “Jugger Bugger;” and Owens, a Marine Corps E-1 from Arkansas stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

“Rhetoric in the private chat messages was consistent with racially motivated extremism ideology, to include aspirational violence against religious and racial minorities,” states the affidavit, which was signed by Special Agent Ryan Crump of the FBI Little Rock Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The only one of the three who has been charged to date is Garfield, who in May 2021 was sentenced to 78 months in prison for illegal gun possession. Charges against Wisdom and Owens have not been filed, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast, and neither has a lawyer listed in court records. Assistant U.S. Attorney Aaron Jennen, the prosecutor handling the case, declined to comment.

Owens, however, was kicked out of the Marine Corps in April 2020, “after news of the NCIS/FBI investigation came to light,” USMC spokesman Capt. Andrew Wood told The Daily Beast.

“Participation in supremacist or extremist organizations or activities is a violation of Department of Defense and Marine Corps orders and will lead to mandatory processing for separation following the first substantiated incident,” Wood said in an email. “The Marine Corps is clear on its stance as it relates to racial hatred or extremism: There is no place for either in the Marine Corps. Our strength is derived from the individual excellence of every Marine regardless of background. Bigotry and racial extremism run contrary to our core values.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/court-hearing-delayed-for-expelled-oregon-lawmaker-accused-of-letting-protesters-into-state-capitol/ar-AALAKjt?ocid=msedgntp

Court hearing delayed for expelled Oregon lawmaker accused of letting protesters into state Capitol

Anderson man who tried to stop Biden is 8th South Carolinian arrested in…

1 killed in 3-vehicle crash at Highway 83 and North Gate

The first court appearance for former Oregon state Rep. Mike Nearman (R), who was expelled from the legislature after being accused of letting rioters into the state Capitol in December, has been delayed for three weeks.

The Oregonian, citing court records, reported Tuesday that the delay to July 19 was made at the request of Nearman's attorney, who said the former lawmaker "will be in better position to know what will happen."

In January, security footage obtained by The Oregonian showed Nearman pushing open a door, allowing protesters to enter the building during a legislative session. Some of the protesters became violent, including spraying an officer with an unknown substance.

Nearman was charged with two misdemeanors in May over his alleged actions including first-degree official misconduct and second-degree criminal trespass. Earlier this month Nearman was expelled from the Oregon House of Representatives in a nearly unanimous vote, with Nearman being the only one to vote "no."

The Oregonian noted that Nearman is the first sitting lawmaker to be expelled from the state legislature in Oregon's history.

"The facts are clear that Mr. Nearman unapologetically coordinated and planned a breach of the Oregon state Capitol," Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek (D) said after the vote. "His actions were blatant and deliberate, and he has shown no remorse for jeopardizing the safety of every person in the Capitol that day. Given the extraordinary circumstances, this was the only reasonable path forward."