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''TOGTFO''

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What The Past Three Months Have Been Like For QAnon Believers

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

Scaachi Koul

Culture & Criticism

Life

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 at 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.”

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.

>>17553042

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.”

January

When Vanderbilt and I spoke for the first time, she wasn’t even yet able to think about a Biden presidency; she was still processing how little she understood about her own political ideology. “My dad always said our family is Republican,” she said. “We’re a Republican family and that was it.” The first time she voted was in 2016, for Trump; when we spoke, she still believed that the Dominion voting machines used in the 2020 election were owned by Nancy Pelosi’s husband. (I told her that wasn’t true and she immediately took me at my word.)

Vanderbilt told me she never read any news sites, never fact-checked anything she read on Facebook, and that her only news sources were a QAnon Telegram chat and Jarrin Jackson’s Facebook page. (Jackson is a right-wing Christian, sympathetic to QAnon beliefs, with more than 50,000 followers.) “He goes live every night, and I watched him every night like it was church,” she said, adding that she followed Jackson to a Telegram chat with more than 10,000 people. “A couple days before inauguration, I was getting ready to watch Jarrin live and I had this idea in my head that I’m treating Jarrin’s [Facebook] Live as if it’s church. I go to church every Sunday. It was a weird feeling. Am I putting Jarrin above God?”

In fact, Vanderbilt was so protective of Jackson that it wasn’t until our final call that she would let me use his name in this piece. She just wanted to make sure his privacy was protected, even after she recognized some of his content to be untrue — it’s tough to go against your preacher. “It’s just this feeling that I’m putting more faith into these [Facebook] Lives than into the prayers that I’m sending out every night,” she said. “That would be my biggest regret. I’m always worried I’m not good enough. I just feel like I’m inadequate and I’m terrified to not go to heaven. It’s shaping how I’m looking politically.”

>>17553067

>they, too, will adopt the pointed finger.

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>>they, too, will adopt the pointed finger.

>>17553014

She Went Undercover in MAGA for a Year—What She Found Was ‘Alarming’

thedailybeast.com/she-went-undercover-in-the-maga-movement-for-a-year-what-she-found-was-alarming

January 5, 2022

Extremism

FEVER DREAMS

“I went to at least a dozen superspreader events and people died at almost all of them.”

When Amanda Moore lost her job, she decided to go undercover in MAGA land, attending QAnon events and CPAC, hanging with neo-Nazis and “blood-and-soil fascists,” and palling around with Proud Boys at Harry's Bar in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. But what her new compatriots didn’t know was that she was often recording them, and the result is a chilling portrait “of what the right looks like from the inside.”

Moore joined Fever Dreams co-hosts Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer to talk about the one-year anniversary of the Capitol attack and what she saw during her stint masquerading as a fellow traveler. Or perhaps not exactly masquerading, because wearing a mask at Stop the Steal rallies became quite dangerous for Moore. Eventually she had to ditch the face covering for her own protection as “the acceptance and escalation of violence between November [2020] and December” became more aggressive and raw—culminating in the storming of the Capitol, which “people [still] talk about it as though it was something that the right did, that the right should be proud of.”

Moore’s main takeaway after her time undercover was that “there’s a rise of right-wing populism among the under-30 crowd that's incredibly alarming to me… I really worry about it.

“I really just can never stress enough, like the rise of like the younger populist fascists. And like I said, everybody, under 35, I met who was at the Capitol says, ‘We did it. That was us.’ And they accept it and they’re like, ‘It would’ve been cooler if we had gotten further.’ And, like, ‘The Founding Fathers would be proud of us.’”

Moore also discussed the increasingly popular far-right playbook for harassing hyperlocal and moderate GOP officials and their children—people who are ostensibly part of the same party—to pressure them out of positions overseeing elections or on school boards, in order to install more radical acolytes. “Pressley Stutts took over the very local Greenville, South Carolina, GOP—I mean, he bullied this woman… who was in charge into quitting. And now—I mean, he was at an event I was at, and there was a COVID outbreak, and now he’s dead. But I mean, before he died, he was able to accomplish this.”

“I don’t know what a superspreader is in technicality,” Moore added, “But if it means everybody there got COVID, I went to at least a dozen superspreader events and people died at almost all of them.

“And these are people who, like, were preaching to the very last breath—like, don’t get the vaccine.”

Elsewhere on the podcast, Sommer and Suebsaeng discuss the results of a Texas election audit that “Republican officials were trying to bury”—namely because “they found basically nothing wrong with the results”—and dissect an increasingly bitter feud between an alleged failed treasure hunter named Jovan Pulitzer and a rival of his called “the Professor.” The two fellows have been scrapping over the failed Arizona audit, and they started doxxing each other, and making “penis-heavy” prank calls. If you’re wondering why any of this silliness matters, well, Pulitzer’s theories were in the coup PowerPoints that reached then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. As Suebsaeng notes, “his ideas made it to the West Wing.”

Sommer also recounts his firsthand experience of being at the Capitol during the riot a year ago. He highlights “the sense of chaos, the sense that really anything could happen… this sense that, once they breached the building, it was this idea that politicians were going to start getting killed, that kind of stuff. It was this sense of anarchy. For me personally it felt very surreal. I had been following someone like the Q Shaman for months, I was very aware of him and his antics out in Arizona. And it was like, Oh, there's the Q Shaman—he runs the Senate now, I guess.”

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QAnon Attracts Jewish Believers Despite Anti-Semitic Leanings

atlantajewishtimes.com/qanon-attracts-jewish-believers-despite-anti-semitic-leanings

By Jan Jaben-EilonFebruary 3, 2021

home page

NewsPolitics

Once a fringe phenomenon, QAnon is now considered a domestic terror threat by the FBI.

David Reinert holds up a large "Q" sign while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump at his rally on August 2, 2018 at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Rick Loomis / Getty Images

Members of the Jewish community – even in Atlanta – are not immune to the conspiracy theories spread by QAnon, a social media phenomenon full of anti-Semitic ideas, according to several researchers on the subject consulted for this story.

“There were Jews wearing kippot in the riots in the U.S. Capitol,” which also included Q flags and shirts, noted Arieh Kovler, a British-born corporate communications specialist who has long studied extremism on the internet and now lives in Jerusalem.

Some Jews, he said, entered the QAnon world through support for former President Donald Trump. “The Jewish believers are usually strong Trump supporters who slipped into Q,” he told the AJT in a Zoom call. Other Jews, including several in Atlanta, say they are unfamiliar with QAnon, but they espouse several of the QAnon beliefs, including that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, according to those interviewed for this article.

It’s obviously impossible to gauge exactly how many Jews buy into the QAnon beliefs. Kovler says they sometimes use fake names. “They don’t necessarily advertise they’re Jewish.”

That wouldn’t be surprising because QAnon is a “very anti-Semitic movement. Its text of drops [messages] are full of anti-Semitic tropes that have been around for millennial,” said Mike Rothschild, a Los Angeles area-based researcher who is writing a book about QAnon. He said that there have been several references to the Rothschild family [no relation to him] and a seeming obsession with Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor George Soros.

Originally German, the Rothschilds established a banking empire and have long been philanthropists who have, among other areas, supported Israel. The family name is used to allege worldwide control of finance by Jews. Multi-billionaire Soros supports progressive ideas around the world and is a widely used trope to represent Jewish influence. Both names have been disparaged by Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Kovler refers to as a “conspiracist for rent.”

QAnon was initially considered a fringe phenomenon. Now, however, especially since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warns that QAnon poses a domestic terror threat. “Q” has claimed to be a top intelligence officer with knowledge of Trump’s war against a global cabal of pedophiles, sex traffickers and wide-ranging conspiracies, including that the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the United States was a hoax and that the Mossad killed President John F. Kennedy.

So, how are Jews attracted to QAnon? According to Marilyn Mayo, senior research fellow with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, there are two main ways Jews – especially women – are pulled into the QAnon community.

One is through the anti-vaxxer movement which is “prevalent in the Orthodox community,” Mayo said. Acknowledging that this group includes some of her closest friends, Mayo describes them as vegan or extremely health conscious. “The pandemic makes people more prone to conspiracy theories. When there are worldwide crises, people want to know why this is happening. They are looking for answers.”

The second way Jews are enticed by QAnon is through the belief that children are being kidnapped. “The hashtag Save the Children used by QAnon folks brought many Jews [and non-Jews] to the conspiracy community,” notes Mayo.

That belief harkens back to the Pizzagate conspiracy that started in 2016 and falsely blamed Hillary Clinton with operating a sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant. An armed North Carolina man who believed the alleged plot actually drove to the restaurant and was arrested. QAnon burst onto the internet social media scene less than a year later.

Mayo points out that conspiracy believers showed up again at the pizza restaurant the night before President Joe Biden’s inauguration – an inauguration QAnon supporters believed would never happen. QAnon supporters of Trump, who they consider their “savior,” believed he would retain the presidency, according to the AJT sources.

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