dChan
Anonymous ID: ea2e2a April 19, 2019, 4:04 p.m. No.6245166   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5215 >>5226 >>5246

QAnon Is Just the Standard Trump Train Now

 

By Brian Feldman

 

The release of the Mueller report this week marks the supposed end of one of the great conspiracy theories of our time: #QAnon. The idea behind QAnon, if you need a refresher, was that a high-level government employee with knowledge of Mueller’s investigation was posting on anonymous message boards like 8chan, alleging that the Mueller investigation into Trump’s campaign was actually a smoke screen. In fact, the story goes (I think — it gets muddy), Mueller and Trump were working together to expose corrupt elite Democrats who are part of a global pedophile ring, or something. It was Pizzagate on steroids, and it captured the imagination of a vocal minority of the MAGA crowd, all waiting and believing that Q was telling the truth.

 

Obviously, Q’s predictions were never going to be proven true. Q’s posts are often vague and noncommittal, allowing his or her followers to fill in the blanks with their own projections. A potent subgenre of Q-decoding videos cropped up on YouTube as “citizen journalists” sucked up the attention of presidential supporters desperately grasping at straws (crafty merchandisers also sucked up a fair amount of money too).

 

But as Mueller’s investigation dragged on and Trump cohorts began getting indicted, the Q conspiracy devolved into less of an elaborate scheme and more of a frame of mind. It turned from a double-crossing spy-movie plot into wishful thinking. The Mueller report used to be the endgame, now it is only the beginning. With some heavy massaging and redacting, Attorney General William Barr did his job and delivered a verdict of “no collusion,” validating the central Q belief that the charges were bogus, even if the actual theory of QAnon went belly-up. As it stands now, Q followers — the ones who used to believe in mantras like “Trust [Jeff] Sessions” — are now positioning the Mueller report as just the first step in a much longer process.

 

WE ARE THE NEWS

 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/what-the-end-of-the-mueller-report-means-for-qanon.html?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=s1&utm_campaign=nym&fbclid=IwAR1zafm765W-RQcQoV7-QrrQRXenn4IK02a9qd1mRDRzOK4TPIl_fwZHkVU

Anonymous ID: ea2e2a April 19, 2019, 4:08 p.m. No.6245209   🗄️.is 🔗kun

Who Was the Bearded Man at the Barr Press Conference?

At a Thursday morning press conference on the Mueller report’s impending release, Attorney General William Barr offered an effusive absolution of President Donald Trump. The entire exercise felt more like public relations than fair-minded legal analysis, and Barr’s conclusions will likely contribute to existing perceptions that the Department of Justice is essentially working for Trump. But Barr didn’t work alone, and as public scrutiny inevitably fixes on him in the aftermath of today’s events, he may share the hot seat with the two individuals who joined him for Thursday’s briefing. One, Rod Rosenstein, is somewhat familiar to the public as the department’s deputy attorney general. His bearded neighbor is not as well known. He’s Edward O’Callaghan, a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, who joined the Department of Justice earlier this month as a principal associate deputy attorney general.

 

O’Callaghan’s career reveals a firm commitment to the Republican Party. As Newsweek reported, O’Callaghan previously worked for the 2008 presidential campaign of the late Senator John McCain. In that capacity, he traveled to Alaska to intervene in a state investigation into Sarah Palin, then the state’s governor and McCain’s running mate. Palin faced an ethics probe into her suspicious termination of the state’s Department of Public Safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan; Monegan had reportedly refused to fire a state trooper who happened to be the ex-husband of Palin’s sister. According to Newsweek, O’Callaghan worked with Palin aide Meghan Stapleton to try to defuse the investigation.

 

“Stapleton and this guy did almost daily press conferences to discredit the investigation,” Hollis French, an Alaska legislator, told Newsweek. “She was the face Alaskans would recognize. Others would have no idea who this attorney was standing next to her.” Les Gara, a serving Democratic state legislator, told the magazine that O’Callaghan and Stapleton made the investigation “look like a Democratic attack against Palin.” Sounds familiar!

 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/bearded-man-barr-mueller-press-conference.html