Thank you, baker
I keep getting this newsletter thing in my junk email folder. Today I decided to see what it is. It is a music magazine. Music and culture, it looks like.
And they have a piece on Q. Hit piece. Also something about Lin Wood.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/qanon-civil-war-lin-wood-mike-flynn-rittenhouse-conspiracy-theories-trump/?utm_source=PMNTNL&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=211129#a-primer-on-the-frightening-zeal-of-lin-wood
Dispatches From Q-Land is a monthly Paste series delving into the seamy underbelly of the QAnon conspiracy theory on right-wing social media platforms such as Parler, Gab and Telegram. It’s a disturbing task, but only by paying attention to these dangerous extremists can we understand the nature of their ever-evolving delusion at any given moment, and hope to understand what they might do next.
This Thanksgiving weekend, as the rest of America was sitting down to turkey dinners, almost the entire QAnon sphere of influencers, grifters and lunatics were simultaneously sharpening their knives … to deploy on each other. As if determined to spite the season of goodwill as thoroughly and ironically as possible, what started out as a simple Tucker Carlson interview has snowballed into a full-fledged civil war that is dividing the Q-sphere into warring camps, leaving the average Anon (a believer in the broad and ever-evolving suite of QAnon conspiracy theories) completely unsure of what they’re supposed to believe, or who they’re supposed to support. It’s the kind of drastic schism that has been waiting to happen for a long time, and it’s honestly amazing that it didn’t happen sooner—this is a community that is absolutely built to go to war with itself at the drop of a hat.
That’s the thing about Anons—they exist in a state that is always on edge, and always ready to go on the attack. The online life of your average Anon prepares them to always be ready to change their beliefs at a moment’s notice, at least when it comes to attacking someone they’ve previously supported. On any given day, their activities involve espousing 110% rabid, fervent devotion to the constellation of various political figures and influencers who exist vaguely in the orbit of Donald Trump … until the day they’re inevitably called upon to suddenly start demonizing and destroying those same people because they’ve now fallen out of favor. Usually, though, it’s just a single name caught up in a public stoning. This new conflict is much broader and more devastating, which is all deeply confusing for Anons.
At its heart, this new QAnon civil war really comes down to the following dichotomy: It’s the profiteers vs. the evangelical true believer loonies. The battle lines don’t completely match up along those lines, but they’re quite close. This fight is essentially seeing the most diehard, zealous and genuinely deluded Q personalities turning against the ones who are primarily using the QAnon rhetoric for political or economic purposes, without actually believing in it.
And it all started with FOX pundit Tucker Carlson, AR-15 wielder Kyle Rittenhouse and disgraced attorney Lin Wood.
QAnon Grifters vs. True Believers
The fracas all began with FOX pundit/inveterate provocateur and asshole Tucker Carlson’s interview with acquitted gunman Kyle Rittenhouse. During said interview, Rittenhouse at one point turned his attention toward ardent Donald Trump defender/QAnon figurehead/embattled lawyer Lin Wood, who was one of the first attorneys to represent him following the incident in Kenosha, Wisconsin in which Rittenhouse fatally shot two men and wounded a third. Rittenhouse told Carlson that he and his mother Wendy Rittenhouse fired Wood in December of 2020 after deciding that Kyle was “being used for a cause,” and after Rittenhouse had sat in jail for 87 days following his arrest, despite the millions of dollars raised for his bail and defense.
Rittenhouse went on to say the following about Wood: “He was going on with all this QAnon and election fraud stuff, and just stuff we don’t agree with. He’s insane. He thinks he’s God and he just says all these weird things.”
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