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Anonymous ID: b10ffd March 27, 2022, 8:35 a.m. No.15956323   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>6325 >>6331 >>6345 >>6361 >>6465

>>15956304

 

''Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America Kindle Edition''

by Will Sommer (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Hardcover

—

A journalist who has followed the rise of QAnon explains what it is, how it has gained a mainstream following among Republican lawmakers and ordinary citizens, the threat it poses to democracy, and how we can reach those who have embraced the conspiracy and are disseminating its lies.

 

Over the last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic spread worldwide, so too did the pro-Trump cabal known as QAnon. What began as a fringe online conspiracy in the mid 2000s is now embraced by millions of Americans across the country

—and the globe

—including new members of Congress and the thousands of Trump followers, armed with guns and a variety of makeshift weapons, who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, searching for lawmakers including the Vice President, shouting “hang Mike Pence.”

 

Following internet clues from a mysterious figure named “Q”

—who has claimed to be a high-level government insider with a Q-level clearance

—QAnon adherents, fueled by paranoia and hatred of the left, believe that Donald Trump has been anointed by God to stop evil Democrats who sexually abuse, kill, and eat children; that Trump won the 2020 election that was stolen from him and will soon order mass executions of Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, the Obamas, George Soros, and many others. QAnon believers continue to spout lies and disinformation about politics and the pandemic; their beliefs have ruptured friendships and family bonds and caused untold damage.

 

While in office, Trump praised QAnon believers as “people who love our country,” invited them to the White House, and retweeted their crazed messages on a near-daily basis.Though he is gone, the threat of widespread violence from his acolytes

—“the Storm is coming”

—remains high. What can we do about Q's growing platform?

''Daily Yeast reporter Will Sommer has been reporting on the QAnon conspiracy for years and has been targeted by the group.'' In this timely and essential book, he explains the genesis of QAnon, his experience covering its members online and in the real world, Q’s lies and how they are spread, how Q has overshadowed politics, and what the nation must do to address this growing danger

—including how to help friends and family who have fallen under Q’s pernicious sway.

Anonymous ID: b10ffd March 27, 2022, 8:47 a.m. No.15956372   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>6385 >>6739 >>6813

>>15956348

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/hair-care-1.4174722/i-shave-my-face-every-few-days-scaachi-koul-on-the-bushy-brown-lady-experience-1.4175157

 

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scaachikoul/qanon-believers-turning-away-from-trump

 

She Left QAnon. Now She Doesn’t Know What To Believe.

buzzfeednews.com/article/scaachikoul/qanon-believers-turning-away-from-trump

Scaachi Koul Culture & Criticism

A millennial stay-at-home mom from South Carolina, a gay couple from Texas, and a social worker in New York believed in QAnon. Now that Biden is president, they’re not sure where to go from here.

 

Scaachi Koul BuzzFeed News Reporter

 

Posted on March 26, 2021, 10:20 am

When I first found 27-year-old Ashley Vanderbilt’s TikTok account, it only had a handful of followers. During the pandemic, Vanderbilt lost her job as an office manager in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which left her with plenty of time to browse QAnon conversations on Telegram and read conspiratorial QAnon posts on Facebook. By October, she was far down the rabbit hole thanks to a family friend, and she even eventually brought one of her cousins in with her. “I’d talk to a family member of mine, and he’d send me articles. I started believing those,” Vanderbilt told me in January. Indeed, before President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Vanderbilt’s TikTok was almost completely nonpolitical — her posts mostly featured her fiancé dancing while vacuuming, her 4-year-old daughter singing karaoke, and some axioms from her therapist. Engagement on her posts hovered around 20 to 40 likes, and not much more.

 

But the day before Biden would be sworn in as the 46th president, Vanderbilt posted something different. “I have two crazy theories,” she said in a video on Jan. 19. “My first one is tomorrow, everything goes down… I’m sure [Biden] will be arrested, along with thousands of Hollywood elites and politicians. We need to get our country back to the republic it used to be over a hundred years ago.”

Anonymous ID: b10ffd March 27, 2022, 8:48 a.m. No.15956385   🗄️.is đź”—kun   >>6395 >>6445 >>6466 >>6739

>>15956372

 

The next day, she posted again from her front porch. “Well, I was wrong. And it sucks. I have spent the better part of the day crying,” she said, puffy-eyed. “I think I need to spend some time on personal development and time in prayer… I can’t go through that heartbreak and disappointment again.” From there, sometimes multiple times a day, Vanderbilt began posting videos explaining how she got wrapped up in QAnon in the first place, and what she was doing to deprogram herself from beliefs that clearly didn’t end up being true. “I thought that before Kamala [Harris] would be taking her oath, getting sworn in, I thought the emergency broadcast system would go across our TV and everything would go black,” she told me over the phone at the end of January. “I thought everyone would be arrested and then Trump would be back. Everything would go into martial law.”

 

For most of the time that Trump was in office, Vanderbilt believed in many QAnon-sanctioned mass delusions, from Pizzagate (the belief that the vast majority of the Democratic Party is engaged in a pedophilia ring) to Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga being baby-eaters (“Lady Gaga was wearing a red dress, and [Q supporters online] were saying Nancy Pelosi wears red shoes a lot. Those people wearing red is supposed to symbolize the blood of those children,” Vanderbilt told me). She had been so sure that nearly everyone at the inauguration, from Lindsey Graham and George W. Bush to the Clintons and the Obamas, would be arrested. (Garth Brooks, she believed, would have been spared.) But once Biden was inaugurated without incident, it finally became clear to her that the tenets of QAnon that she had believed were all untrue.

 

Vanderbilt isn’t alone: The inauguration seemed to be an inflection point for a number of QAnon believers who thought Donald Trump would return to office on Jan. 20. In theory, the siege on the Capitol a few weeks prior was just the beginning of the Q storm, sure to end with martial law and a second Trump term — despite his election loss.

 

Even after realizing that Kamala Harris would not be arrested and Donald Trump would not be moving back into the White House, Vanderbilt still wasn’t even clear on what she had really believed. It was through her then-modest TikTok following that she started to understand what she was a part of. “Everybody on TikTok was telling me it was a cult, or how I’m feeling, getting out of it, is the same as someone who’s getting out of a cult,” she said. “I don’t even know where to start. Where do I start looking? For what? There’s just so much.” The inauguration hasn’t signaled an end to QAnon, just the beginning of a new chapter for its believers.

 

I spoke with four former and current QAnon believers over the last few months — after Biden’s inauguration, during Trump’s second impeachment trial, and again after March 4, a date Q supporters believed would signal Trump’s return to office. Vanderbilt was the most deprogrammed of all the people I interviewed. Kirk, 37, and Luke, 39, a gay couple based in Texas who asked to go by their first names, still believe in portions of the movement even though Q’s predictions did not come to pass. And Mark, 51, based in upstate New York, who asked for a pseudonym to protect his family’s privacy, is still trying to pull his wife out of QAnon, a community she remains firmly rooted in.

 

Q seems to have disappeared for now. Whoever they are, they’ve largely abandoned their base after riling them up for years — and have not posted new “Q drops” since 2020. But the people who believe in Q are wrestling with whether to keep on believing or to abandon a cause that, for some, became core to their identities. Some might be deprogramming themselves, while others are cherry-picking the parts of the movement they want to hold on to. But the people I spoke to say their feelings have changed drastically from when they were following the inauguration to when Biden’s stimulus checks were being sent out. Vanderbilt has been using the weeks after QAnon’s disintegration to read more, learn more, talk to more people, and question absolutely everything she’s ever known. “It’s kind of a little bit of a do-over,” she said after the inauguration. “I’m going to learn the world again.”

 

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