Oudheid en Middeleeuwen 1501-1600 1601-1700 1701-1800 1801-1900 1901-2000 2001-nu Filosofisch Sociaal en Cultureel Politiek en Economisch Technisch Stalinisme Maoïsme Neoliberalisme Socialisme Neomarxisme en Kritische theorie Algemeen Complottheorieën Irrationaliteit Irrationaliteit (Bijgeloof en religie) Leugens, desinformatie, propaganda KlokkenluidersMike Rothschild is een Amerikaans onderzoeksjournalist die geïnteresseerd is in samenhangen tussen Intenet en politiek.
Waar het boek een overzicht geeft van de feiten en ontwikkelingen van QAnon (in de VS, want het buitenland komt nauwelijks aan bod) is het een goed boek zoals je van een onderzoeksjournalist mag verwachten.
Waar het boek met verklaringen komt voor het fenomeen dat mensen in dingen geloven en blijven geloven tegen alle feiten in - dat gebeurt in hoofdstuk 6 - is het een slecht boek. Rothschild komt met nietzeggende biologische verklaringen - zoiets als "we zijn van nature allemaal uit op zekerheid" - en nergens in het boek is een kritische analyse te vinden van maatschappelijke oorzaken van en achtergronden bij het ontstaan van complottheorieën en de opkomst van mensen die er in geloven. Denk aan het idee "vrijheid van meningsuiting", aan armoede, aan slecht onderwijs, aan religie en bijgeloof, aan leugenachtige media, aan een verziekt politiek systeem, en noem maar op.
Mike ROTHSCHILDBij de mensen die het US Capitol gebouw bestormden zaten veel aanhangers van QAnon.
"Before the insurrection at the Capitol made QAnon an international news curiosity, the movement had already saturated Republican politics." [mijn nadruk] (7)
"Clearly, the danger posed by QAnon is real. But why do people believe it? Are QAnon followers true believers who really think they have been tipped off by military intelligence about a secret war? Are they dupes of Russian intelligence? Cynical trolls who enjoy riling people up? Marks in a giant grift that’s drained them dry? Should we mock them or pity them? Scorn them or help them? And is there any way to get believers to leave behind their fantasies and rejoin the rest of us? This book is my attempt to answer these questions. Because the people who keep asking me how to save their loved ones deserve an answer."(11)
"Even with Q’s explosion into the mainstream, many gaps still remain. We’re still trying to put all the pieces together of how it jumped so quickly from typical conspiracy circles to Bernie Sanders-voting yoga moms, why so many people believe a story that proves itself false over and over, how to help QAnon believers walk away from the movement, and what exactly President Trump and his staff know about it."(14)
"What has grown to be called “QAnon” is a complex web of mythology, conspiracy theories, personal interpretations, and assumptions featuring a vast range of characters, events, symbols, shibboleths, and jargon. It can be understood as a conspiracy theory, for sure, but it also touches on aspects of cultic movements, new religions, Internet scams, and political doctrine. It’s impossible to fully explicate every aspect of QAnon because it is so diffuse and has so many different plot strands and meanings. But the most important thing to know is that all of it started with an anonymous poster on 4chan." [mijn nadruk] (17)
"If QAnon is a mass movement — and it is — then the Q drops are its doctrine. And the drops meet all three of Hoffer’s criteria: they are unintelligible, they are vague, and they are unverifiable. Often all at once." [mijn nadruk] (21)
[Wat voor iedereen een reden zou moeten zijn om al dat geklets links - no pun intended - te laten liggen. Het probleem is dat mensen dat niet doen en dat ze zo gemakkelijk geloven in dat geklets, zelfs al zeggen alle redelijk onderbouwde feiten het tegendeel, nee zelfs al is zonneklaar dat dat geklets op allerlei manieren door de mand valt omdat er beweringen gedaan worden die overduidelijk niet waar blijken te zijn.]
"The vast majority of drops are full of conspiracies, riddles, rhetorical questions, and uncut delusion."(23)
"Q followers read the drops like holy texts — and a structure reminiscent of early Christianity has formed around Q’s gospel. A set of gurus or “decoders” have become microcelebrities in the Q world. They operate by reposting drops on Twitter or reading and interpreting them on YouTube videos or on blogs. They tease out the meaning, make the connections the dreaded “they” don’t want you to know about, provide context with the day’s news, and loop new drops back to old ones."(25)
"But the real “digital soldiers” didn’t care about base things like money. They wanted to get into the fight and take down the bad guys. And Q makes it remarkably easy to do nothing while believing you’re doing a lot."(27)
"Q lets people feel like they’re part of something bigger than their small lives. It gives believers a higher and noble purpose. It offers explanations for terrible things. After all, it’s easier to believe that a dark cabal is orchestrating negative events than it is to believe that powerful people, including our leaders, are simply greedy or incompetent. In a digital world where we are increasingly physically isolated and alone, particularly in the time of COVID-19, this combination of a participatory game played alongside a digital community against an easy scapegoat is hugely compelling."(28)
[Het maakt niet uit dat die verklaringen pertinent onjuist blijken te zijn, als ze maar zekerheid bieden. ]
"If Q, the decoders, and the flock are fighting on the side of good, then who are they fighting? We know the good guys — who are the baddies?
To put it simply — Democrats, Hollywood elite, business tycoons, wealthy liberals, the medical establishment, celebrities, and the mass media are the bad guys. They’re controlled by Barack Obama, who is secretly a Muslim sleeper agent; Hillary Clinton, a blood-drinking ghoul who murders everyone in her way; and Washington power broker, John Podesta, and they’re funded by George Soros and the Rothschild banking family (no relation to the author).
They employ scores of traitors and pawns, all of whom infest the government, intelligence community, and Justice Department. This is the so-called “deep state”—anti-Trump career intelligence personnel, the heads of worldwide banks, Hollywood stars and sports heroes, “activist judges,” almost anyone who stands against Trump and freedom. They are the enemies of democracy who own the major media companies and distribute daily talking points to be doled out on CNN and MSNBC. They “expend ammo” on false-flag terrorist attacks, or on complex hoaxes like COVID-19. They infuse Hollywood movies, music, and TV with Satanic symbols meant to weaken our resolve and stop us from asking questions. They force vaccines, cheap sugary food, and antibiotics on us to ensure we never break the chains of our mental and physical slavery. They’ve attempted to assassinate Donald Trump dozens of times, tried to scuttle his achievements as president, and done everything they could to undermine the public’s faith in Trump’s righteous justice. And most of us have no idea they exist, nor do we care about finding out. That’s the greatest trick the enemies of QAnon ever pulled.
But Q knows who they are. And Q will stop them — with the help of God, a few chosen leaders, and countless patriots around the world fighting in the trenches of a digital war that most of us have no idea is taking place."(29-30)
"And they discard anything that doesn’t confirm the conspiracy theory. This is the devotion you find only at the most observant levels of religion, or the most obsessive reaches of fandom." [mijn nadruk] (31)
[Dat is het probleem, ja.]
"All of this is to say: disconfirmation only makes believers believe more and harder. And Q being unmasked as a fake would be the ultimate disconfirmation — a vessel for skeptics to mock believers, and for believers to loudly and proudly declare that it doesn’t matter to them."(32)
"To really understand QAnon, one must delve into a bizarre, hopelessly complex world of conspiracy theories, decades-old Internet chuff, cryptography, cultic thought, centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes, wellness and medical pseudoscience, and moral panic over child trafficking and white slavery."(32)
" ... by the time QAnon emerged, 4chan had become a haven for right-wing trolling and Trump worship."(39)
"But beyond the figures who made names for themselves through Q, the movement was also starting to make its way into the fringes of the mainstream right-wing media infotainment machine. It was crawling out of the swamp. The right-wing author and birtherism promoter Jerome Corsi had already jumped in with Q, heading to r/CBTS_stream to decode posts. And later that month, Q took its boldest step into the right-wing ecosystem yet: early 4chan acolytes Paul Furber and Coleman Rogers made an appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars." [mijn nadruk] ()
"In the firmament of conspiracy theorists, there was no brighter star in 2017 than Alex Jones. The Austin-based provocateur had spent two decades turning himself into a mainstream figurehead, taking fringe ideas into the public consciousness and making millions of dollars in the process. He very quickly went all in on Q." [mijn nadruk] (64)
[Waaraan je kunt zien dat er flink geld verdient wordt aan al die samenzweringsverhalen.]
"Another major name in Q land emerged around this time. On December 28, 2017, a self-published author and “divine healer” who went by the name Praying Medic (real name: David Hayes) uploaded the first of countless YouTube videos he would make analyzing Q’s drops. Hayes had started his YouTube career making videos that linked Christianity to self-healing. They usually got about a thousand views. But his first Q video jumped up to fifteen thousand views. Within a few months, Hayes was one of the most prominent and prolific Q bakers on the Internet, amassing a YouTube following of over a quarter of a million subscribers, routinely getting hundreds of thousands of views, and spawning a legion of imitators and collaborators. Among the most popular early Q adopters were prolific YouTube channel X22 Report, gossip columnist turned “trafficking expert” Liz Crokin, news blogger Dustin Nemos, and “Neon Revolt”; a failed screenwriter turned conspiracy theorist who grew into one of the biggest names in the Q ecosystem."(67)
"A few weeks later, another new character would enter the Q story—one so integral to the QAnon phenomenon that major media outlets would eventually speculate that he actually was Q. That person was Jim Watkins, a middle-aged businessman and former US Army helicopter repairman who had launched a successful Japanese pornography website called Asian Bikini Bar, which he parlayed into a variety of tech companies and business ventures. By 2017, when Q launched on 4chan, Watkins had taken control of the hugely successful Japanese imageboard 2chan — the same board that had inspired the creation of 4chan. He was also now the owner and operator of 8chan, the imageboard to which Q had recently migrated."(68)
"Jim Watkins had already tried and failed to launch a right-wing conspiracy video channel called “The Goldwater,” and he was still interested in putting his stamp on the conservative infotainment complex — a lucrative sphere of media where the more outlandish a lie was, the more likely a small sect of people would believe it." [mijn nadruk] (70)
"It was after one these many hackings and fake posts from fake Q’s that the real Q announced, “Board compromised,” and left the CBTS board, first for several other 8chan boards, then for the Q Research board, newly created by Ron Watkins just for Q to post drops on. Before that, Q had simply been another chan user – now they were the center of their own board, a place where no dissent or contradictory information was allowed." [mijn nadruk] (71)
"As of the first week of January 2018, Q would only ever post on 8chan or its successor 8kun. Their identity would only be confirmable by tripcodes that Ron Watkins could access — which Ron formalized in August of that year by adding “secure” tripcodes to 8chan, where the password was known only to the owner of the server. That person was Jim Watkins. Naturally, Q immediately began using secure tripcodes, locking anyone else out of posting as Q. Whatever happened after that, Q and 8chan, and therefore Q and Jim Watkins, would forever be linked."(72)
"Around this time, the mainstream media started to pick up on story as well. In November 2017, a Newsweek story by Jason Le Miere reported on the orthopedic walking boots conspiracy theory."(74)
"Despite the handful of early media hits, for much of 2018 the QAnon conspiracy theory bubbled quietly, out of the glare of media scrutiny. Q’s only real brush with the mainstream news cycle in this period was its embrace by Roseanne Barr. (...) It wasn’t just some crank anon making claims about massive pedophilia rings; it was a legitimate TV star."(74-75)
"Matthew Wright’s blockade of the Hoover Dam was the first public violent act connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory. It wouldn’t be the last.(...) Q didn’t end with Matthew Wright’s failed siege. Q believers writing in posts that were archived before 8chan went down didn’t believe Wright’s blockade was real — just another deep-state fake job to stop the truth from coming out. Q had already said that “attacks would intensify” as the cabal’s media lackeys fought Q."(81)
"After Tampa, Q began to become inseparable from the mainstream Republican Party. They danced around it at first — then – press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn’t change the subject fast enough when a reporter asked her about Q shortly after the Tampa rally.35 But they didn’t turn away from it, either. They didn’t denounce it. (...) Just in 2018, Q believers shared Q YouTube videos over 1.4 million times, and drove hundreds of thousands of shares to Fox News, Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, various Q-drop aggregators, and The Goldwater, Jim Watkins’s now revived right-wing blog." [mijn nadruk] (85)
"As 2018 ended, Q was a little over a year old, and despite none of Q’s predictions coming true in a concrete way, the movement had taken the Republican Party and the mass media by storm. Q believers thought they were truly on the verge of something incredible that would change the world — and Q fed them everything they needed to keep believing that was true, even when world events proved otherwise." [mijn nadruk] (87)
"To understand the Q movement’s explosive early growth, we have to explore another critical element of QAnon: it is far from original. In fact, very little of Q’s mythology originates with Q. A rich tapestry of conspiracy theories, ancient hatreds, currency scams, moral panics, and social media rumors were stitched together to make QAnon, but few of these ideas are entirely new, nor is their original provenance difficult to trace. After all, what’s the secret and all-powerful “deep state” if not a different term for the New World Order that was so feared in the 1990s, which in turn was a new formulation for the fear of the Catholic Church or the Freemasons that drove conspiracy theories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Even some of Q’s catchphrases are stolen from past fringe movements. Before Q co-opted the concept of the “Great Awakening,” it denoted several brief but intense periods of end-times fervor that laid the groundwork for much of the religious revivals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The elemental parts of Q didn’t start with meme culture or chan boards or Trump or social media. They didn’t start with the Internet, the CIA, the Russians, or the Illuminati. They’re baked into the way humans demand explanations for things that seem to defy reason. And they start with the one group that humanity has always managed to pin the blame on: Jews." [mijn nadruk] (88)
"... the fact is that QAnon is a deeply anti-Semitic movement."(89)
"n the Q pantheon, almost nobody spends more money to hurt more people than two bad actors: the Hungarian liberal philanthropist George Soros and the Rothschild banking family."(89)
"In fact, 8chan has been rated as one of the most anti-Semitic places on the Internet by the Anti-Defamation League, full of targeted harassment against Jewish journalists, praise of anti-Semitic mass shooters, and an endless supply of anti-Jewish memes and “jokes.”"(91)
"Belief in QAnon requires no monetary investment — if it did, it would be straightforward fraud. But fraud does play a major role in the lineage of QAnon. What we know as some of Q’s most important parts — secret intel from a guru, a massive event just around the corner, a secret battle between forces of light and darkness — are all the core of several lucrative scams that preceded Q, scams that many Q believers have also fallen for." [mijn nadruk] (99)
Allerlei voorbeelden van fraude worden uitgewerkt.
"Like Omega and NESARA before it, and Q after, the dinar depended on a magical event that would change everything for those who believed: “the RV,” or the revalue. And like QAnon, that event was steeped in jargon, secret knowledge, and the feeling that “they” didn’t want you to know about any of it."(113)
[Het is werkelijk schokkend hoe goedgelovig mensen zijn, vooral ook als hun hebzucht een loopje met ze neemt.]
"But by early 2019, Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts, including an account whose avatar was a flaming Q wearing a MAGA hat. It was clear that the movement was getting in front of him more and more—to the point that by the 2020 election, Trump had retweeted hundreds of QAnon-promoting accounts, and was regularly sharing the memes created by members of the movement. And it wasn’t just Donald Trump’s Twitter that was becoming more receptive to Q and the ideas they were promoting. In the months after the Tampa rally, QAnon saw an explosion in growth across all platforms, with countless new members being pulled into Q’s ever-expanding story of a secret and silent war between good and evil." [mijn nadruk] (118)
"The Vox writer Jane Coaston described the movement as “[not] built on facts, but on almost religious fervor,” taking on a messianic and unshakable faith in Trump, Q, and the righteousness of the plan."(119)
"It was clear by now that after a year and a half of growing adherence and huge Q attendance at Trump rallies, Q was here to stay. And if it wasn’t clear from the hordes of Q believers showing up and representing at MAGA rallies, it would be clear another way: the top of the Amazon bestseller charts."(120)
" ... within less than a year of Q’s first drops, there were thousands of Q branded items for sale on Amazon. The e-commerce giant offered everything from “coffee mugs, bumper stickers, mobile phone cases and grips, pet collars, books and rap songs,” according to one NBC News story, with much of the gear eligible for free shipping. Amazon made no effort at all to police this material until after the Capitol riot, pulling much — though not all — of it down. Nor did crafts giant Etsy, which had a huge array of homemade Q swag to offer, because none of it violated their anti-harassment policies. There were Q Patreon pages and GoFundMe campaigns. Q T-shirts were on Teespring, and there were Q apps on the Google Play Store." [mijn nadruk] (121)
[Typisch.]
"But the universe would have other plans for the Q movement. While Trump would stumble through the events to come, Q would only grow bigger, more violent, and into ever more of a conspiracy theory of everything—all thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic."(142)
"To any reasonable person, the failure of a long-foretold event erodes the belief that it will happen. But belief isn’t reasonable. And this stubborn lack of logic isn’t limited to people who think the deep state is trying to murder their children. We all have an innate need to believe in good things that are extremely unlikely to take place. It’s the essence of hope."(143)
[Daar gaan we weer: "wij" en biologische en evolutionaire verklaringen: 'mensen geloven en hopen van nature'. Nee, hoor.]
"This is not a sign of lunacy, it’s the way belief works. These things give people hope. And a life without hope is . . . hopeless.
Even when 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 and are over the target. To do otherwise would be to give in to hopelessness."(143)
[Het is duidelijk dat Rothschild uit een samenleving komt - de VS - waar religie en geloof in god een enorme rol spelen. Dit is echt een bijzonder oppervlakkige stellingname. Jammer. De woorden 'hoop' en 'hopeloosheid / wanhoop' en 'geloof' zijn natuurlijk al zo vaag als wat. Wat is de relatie met erbij willen horen, zekerheid, de zin van het leven, en zo meer? En hoop is niet iets algemeens, hoop is altijd ergens op gericht. Zo ook hopeloosheid / wanhoop. Er zijn vormen van wanhoop waarmee uitstekend te leven valt: je wilt bijvoorbeeld graag dat X de 5000m schaatsen wint, maar X laat het totaal afweten en je weet dat het nooit meer gaat gebeuren. De grenzen aan fandom. Maar ook wanhoop bij ziekte of bij economische tegenspoed hoeft nog niet te betekenen dat iemand meteen een eind aan zijn of haar leven maakt. Ook geloof is niet één ding, is ergens op gericht, op een god, een mens, ]
[En het is wel degelijk een teken van waanzin wanneer je in dingen blijft geloven tegen alle feiten in, alleen maar omdat je zo graag wilt dat iets het geval is, alleen maar omdat je zekerheden wilt. Als je een fantasie serieuzer neemt dan de werkelijkheid, als je bepaalde vormen van geloof in iets niet laat corrigeren door de werkelijkheid om je heen dan heb je wel degelijk een probleem.]
"To understand why QAnon followers believe in spite of everything requires understanding why people believe in conspiracy theories in the first place.
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. A person doesn’t get cancer because of some randomly misfiring cells — they got it because of chemtrails or 5G Internet or microchips poisoning them."(145)
[Dit is een heel problematische opvatting. Geen neurologische onderbouwing te vinden. En in feite zegt de auteur opnieuw dat het geloof in samenzweringstheorieën aangeboren is. Dan zou er niets aan te doen zijn. Maar het laatste voorbeeld laat zien dat de kernkwestie is dat mensen niet geleerd hebben om onzekerheid te aanvaarden en wel geleerd hebben om zekerheid te halen uit het het geloof in zaken die niet bestaan. Dat laatste zou omgebogen moeten worden naar het eerste.]
"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."(146)
[Weer dat generaliserende "we" en "ons". Waarom is het zo moeilijk om te accepteren dat we zelf fouten maken of dat anderen fouten maken? Dat is niet van nature zo, dat is iets sociaals. Dat is lastig in een samenleving vol met competitie waarin we allemaal volmaakt moeten zijn, winnaars moeten zijn. Ook dat is een ideologie die in de VS volop te vinden is.]
"“Conspiracy theories resonate with some of our brain’s built-in biases and shortcuts, and tap into some of our deepest desires, fears, and assumptions about the world and the people in it,” writes author and psychologist Rob Brotherton in the introduction to his ground-breaking book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. “We are all natural-born conspiracy theorists.” (...) Life is full of scams, rip-offs, fraud, small-time crooks, cheapskates, and shady types trying to make a buck at our expense. To assume that there are many forces out there trying to screw us or hurt us is not delusional. In fact, it might just mean your brain is working the way it should be." [mijn nadruk] (146)
[Rothschild zit dus inderdaad op die lijn van de evolutionaire psychologie. Een fout standpunt, helaas, dat niet helpt. En het gaat zoals gewoonlijk ook weer samen met een negatief mens- en maatschappijbeeld: mensen zijn er op uit om elkaar onderuit te halen en zo verder.]
"Conspiracies, of course, are real. Nobody disputes that. To use the example of someone else’s misdeeds giving us cancer, there have been plenty of instances when someone’s else’s misdeeds did give people cancer — but those misdeeds didn’t involve chemtrails or 5G Internet poisoning, because those aren’t real things. Toxic dumping, hiding carcinogens in food, polluting water, and the like actually give people cancer, and are carried out by major companies all the time. These are real things."(149)
[Ja, maar dat zijn geen samenzweringen met het doel mensen kanker te bezorgen, maar een kapitalistisch economisch systeem waarin bedrijven alleen gaan voor de winst met alle gevolgen van dien. De voorbeelden die hierna volgen zijn wel samenzweringen met een duidelijk doel.]
[Het idee in QAnon, dat ze bezig zijn met het 'redden van de wereld' is ook zo typisch VS. Alsof we naar superman-films zitten te kijken waarin de wereld simpel is ingedeeld in slechterikken en goeierikken, waarbij die laatste de wereld moeten redden van wat de slechterikken van plan zijn. En het is versmolten met religie:]
"The religious dimension of this embrasure of Trump is also important to understand. “They believe they’re doing God’s work,” Dunning told me, echoing the messianic ideation so rampant in Q."(160)
"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 them.(...) 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." [mijn nadruk] (170)
"Long before Q-pilled insurrectionists sacked the US Capitol, Q believers were committing violent crimes, kidnapping children, and even killing people. The Capitol attack was far from the first sign of Q’s potential for chaos. It was everything that came before.
While Q believers deny it, there is a basic element of violence at the core of the QAnon mythology. How could any movement based around a “secret war” between good and evil that ends with military tribunals and summary executions be considered anything other than violent? In fact, the language used to describe the stakes of QAnon is strikingly similar to that used by terrorists."(172)
"QAnon has become both organized and violent much more quickly than any form of Islamic extremism."(174)
"Beyond the Hoover Dam standoff, the Cali and Wolfe killings, and the Capitol attack later, the blotter of alleged crimes that are seemingly Q-driven reads like the work of a movement infested with unstable and reactive personalities."(191)
[Waaruit dus blijkt dat dit gedrag wel degelijk een teken van waanzin is en verre van normaal.]
"While Q believers find it easy to write off any violent episodes they encounter in the media as the product of the “fake news” media, there are countless unknown incidents that the media hasn’t covered — tiny family tragedies that pit loved ones against each other."(194)
"When COVID-19 transformed the world in March 2020, Q suddenly became much less focused on indictments and much more wrapped up in the zeitgeist of the pandemic. Diagnoses were climbing by the day, major bastions of the social and entertainment landscape began to shut down, and Americans rushed to load up on supplies in depleted stores. It was a massive transformation that left tens of millions of people isolated, stuck indoors, and unemployed, with nothing to do, nobody to talk to, and nowhere to go."(199)
"QAnon believers played a major role in creating and spreading conspiracy theories about the pandemic."(202)
"The supposed potential of HCQ to end the pandemic and humiliate the anti-Trump “experts” on the left would become one of the biggest conservative talking points of the pandemic, and Q was right there pushing it all the way to the top."(208)
"Among the new consumers of conspiracy theories about bioweapons and child trafficking and cabalistic plots were countless terrified and isolated mothers. These theories were especially appealing to Instagram lifestyle influencers, a domain of attractive young mothers who build online brands by showing off their photogenic lives. Both high-profile influencers and their followers felt the same way — that something terrible was happening, and that raising awareness was the only way to stop it.
Just as QAnon is almost never someone’s first conspiracy theory, many of the converts to “QA-Mom” found Q through other conspiracy theories in the social media influencer sphere." [mijn nadruk] (210)
"Instead of pumping out the grotesque memes and incomprehensible charts usually found in Q discourse, they [de influencers - GdG] produced candy-coated paranoia and beautifully written-out memes about what horrors “they” were doing to us. And they were landing with a brand-new audience that wasn’t primed for how to interpret these conspiracies or what to do with this “knowledge.” Many of these lifestyle influencers, and the audiences embracing them, didn’t mention Q or even appear to know what it was. But it didn’t matter — they believed what Q had been pushing for two years."(211)
"Led by a phalanx of influencers armed with candy-colored proclamations about child prostitution rings and the power of personal research, this legion of concerned moms wasn’t alone. And they weren’t going to stay silent." [mijn nadruk] (215)
"#SaveTheChildren exploded on Facebook especially, where hundreds of anti-trafficking, anti-vaccine, and anti-cabal groups saw their membership increase by thousands of percent. It provided an instant and obvious jolt to QAnon, with the hashtag used over eight hundred thousand times just in the first week of August, according to a report by the Associated Press.18 Many of the people coming to Q from anti-trafficking posts through #SaveTheChildren had no idea what Q was or what it meant. Some weren’t even Trump supporters. But fueled by pandemic fears and a genuine desire to “do something,” they radicalized themselves quickly and efficiently.
So in the blazing hot months of late summer 2020, with the pandemic showing no signs of abating, the loose coalition of anti-vaxxers, anti-traffickers, anti-5G activists, COVID conspiracy theorists, anti-globalists, wellness advocates, terrified mothers, and crusaders for trafficked children hit the streets and began to march. They organized in cities all over America and around the world, often with little cohesion in their messaging, but with awareness and outrage in their hearts. And with QAnon slogans on their signs."(217)
"The QAnon movement was growing exponentially, while Q’s role directing that movement was shrinking. Even as #SaveTheChildren was drawing in millions of new members through Facebook and Instagram, the Q poster made no real effort to consolidate this growth, or even acknowledge it. By that fall, the number of Republicans who believed the conspiracies spun by QAnon were at least somewhat real had exploded to over 80 percent, even as Q was leaving the trappings of QAnon behind altogether and becoming a true conspiracy theory of everything. (...) So QAnon was growing up and sustaining itself without the “leader” at the head of the movement. And it wasn’t just growing in the United States." [mijn nadruk] (221)
[Van dat laatste worden wat voorbeelden en getallen gegeven, maar de QAnon beweging in het buitenland wordt verder niet uitgewerkt. Wat jammer is, omdat het misschien meer inzicht zou kunnen geven in motieven, en zo verder om je met QAnon te willen verbinden.]
"As the Internet moved from experimental to omnipresent, conspiracy theories were suddenly much easier to find and spread. Fringe beliefs were a natural fit for early bulletin board systems and Usenet newsgroups, as Internet pioneers shared everything from clues in the popular early alternate reality game Ong’s Hat* to much darker stuff (...) There were anons even back then, such as MI5Victim, a UK information technology worker who was so relentless in spamming Usenet groups and message boards with lurid tales of being persecuted and threatened by British intelligence that he was banned from almost every major early Internet communication service." [mijn nadruk] (228)
"Conspiracy theories already moved much faster online than in the real world, but social media allowed them to be created out of nothing. (...) QAnon was a perfect fit for social media. It was active rather than passive; it was driven by decoding clues and solving puzzles; it was visually interesting; it was open to any number of interpretations; and it was spinning a web of lies that its believers were perfectly happy to fall into. QAnon certainly wasn’t the first conspiracy theory to harness the power of the Internet for easy communication and propagation. But it was the first to exist almost entirely online, with no scientific knowledge or military expertise needed to understand it — just a hatred for the people Q hated, and the need for an online community that gave you praise and good feelings." [mijn nadruk] (229)
"Q was clearly breaking out on Twitter, and Twitter wasn’t taking any notice. It was a major mistake that would have profound implications for Q and for US politics."(232)
"Q’s mythology of an all-powerful deep state at war with a cadre of woke patriots was hopelessly insular and extremely difficult to describe in words without seeming like a crank. But attention-grabbing memes depicting Democratic luminaries in prison with the text of a Q drop or Oprah Winfrey exclaiming “you get to go to JAIL!” could be interpreted by anyone. This is how Q presented itself to people finding it for the first time: not as red-string-on-corkboard conspiracy madness, but the vague dread that “they” were doing terrible things and didn’t want you asking about it."(238)
"As the relationship between Q and Trump became more obvious in public, Trump would routinely share Q memes and slogans, often acting like he had no idea what they were about."(239)
"Memes were a critical tool for harassment, and they could easily be spread by bot networks and burner accounts. And anyone who ran afoul of Q or its believers could expect to find themselves on the wrong end of a firehose of social media–driven harassment and graphic memes. It’s happened to me, and to a lot of other people as well."(240)
"... when you’re putting the words “juvenile” and “sex” in the same sentence, there are people who are going to notice and think it’s their job to stop whatever is happening."(242)
"But the slowness of Facebook and Twitter to act on this ghoulish, violent harassment and overwhelming flood tide of fake news wasn’t new. The campaign against SB 145 was simply one example of what had proven by then to be a glacially slow reaction by the tech giants to QAnon activity — which would eventually have horrific consequences long before the attack on the Capitol finally forced them to do something about it."(246)
"Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube finally took serious steps against Q and its gurus around that same time. In July, Twitter banned about one hundred thousand Q accounts, blocked the use of Q-related URLs, and de-boosted Q in search results. Facebook took similar steps a month later, scourging many of the groups that had grown so much because of the pandemic. Over the next few months, everyone from TikTok to Etsy took steps to definitively curb Q’s growth on their various platforms. But numerous major accounts, video channels, merchandisers, and influencers remained — and the most influential personality of all, Donald Trump, continued to tweet conspiracy theories and Q memes with no meaningful pushback."(253)
"Finally, January 6, 2021, came, and with it, the nightmare that disinformation specialists and extremism researchers had feared. Social media played a huge part in coordinating the attack, and ginning up the anger and conspiracy theories that led to it.41 Conspiracy theories about Biden stealing the election and how the results could be overturned exploded in the two months between the election and the attack, turning Trump-world figures into media stars—with Trump amplifying all of it on Twitter.(...) Facebook and Twitter responded by cracking down hard on QAnon. Facebook, which had resisted wider bans on Q groups due to fears that conservatives would see them as overly limiting free speech, as revealed by the Washington Post in March 2021, closed tens of thousands of groups and pages. And Twitter executives realized their limited ban of QAnon that summer “wasn’t sufficient,” according to a CBS News story that same month, and banned over seventy thousand users, including major influencers. "(254-255)
"It was time for blood to be spilled. It was time for action. The Capitol attack was the final act of QAnon’s complete enmeshment in conservative orthodoxy, a takeover by radical nihilists, clout-chasing grifters, and conspiracy-theorist bomb throwers that the mainstream Republican establishment didn’t denounce until they were already assimilated deep in its fabric. By the time Joe Biden took the oath of office, QAnon was just as much a part of GOP orthodoxy as Benghazi and Hillary’s emails — or the Clinton “Body Count list” and Barack Obama’s supposedly fake birth certificate. The Republican Party was the party of Q. 4chan culture had long ago embraced Trump’s nihilistic approach to governing by trolling. But it took longer for the rest of the Republican Party to join in."(258-259)
"Regardless, that October [2020], Trump praised QAnon again, telling NBC host Savannah Guthrie that he knew nothing about it, but “what I do hear about it is they are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that.”
Trump’s conspiracy theories were now indistinguishable from QAnon’s. The president kept tweeting about fraud and rigging, and shared an absolutely unhinged conspiracy theory being promoted by Q followers that as vice president, Biden had helped organize the mass killing of the Navy SEAL team that had killed Osama Bin Laden — just one of the 315 separate times Trump would retweet or boost content from a QAnon believer before his eventual banning from Twitter.
With the election approaching, Q and Trump had told a compelling story to millions of pandemic-weary, conspiracy-believing, Biden-hating Trump voters: Trump was a hero saving the world from pedophiles through his army of Q believers, Biden was a barely functional puppet of the deep state and Chinese money, COVID-19 was being exploited (or had even been created) to hurt Trump, and “China Joe” would never and could never be president. Above all, Trump had no chance of losing as long the election was conducted fairly and legally. If Biden won, it meant the election was stolen and illegal. Millions of Trump voters heard the message as clear as a bell." [mijn nadruk] (273)
"One of the most frustrating aspects of telling the story of QAnon is that Q isn’t just one thing. It touches numerous different areas of culture, politics, sociology, and technology.(...) What do the experts in those fields think of Q?"(288)
Men is het niet eens over of het een sekte is of bijvoorbeeld een New Age religie.
[Who cares? Wat maakt het uit of je die etiketten 'sekte' of 'religie' wel of niet kunt plakken op al die mensen die zich thuisvoelen in QAnon?]
"The anti-progressive, anti-science, pro-Trump mores of evangelical churches fit perfectly within Q — and their members have radicalized at a brisk pace. An American Enterprise Institute survey from early 2021 reported that 27 percent of white evangelicals — a number far higher than any other religious cohort surveyed — believe that QAnon is either completely or mostly accurate." [mijn nadruk] (301)
[Typisch.]
"If it’s still not clear what QAnon really is, could that be by design? Could a foreign power or domestic conspiracy have created or hi-jacked QAnon, and used it to drive believers toward extreme ideologies as a way of harming the great democracies of the world in a psychological operation?"(305)
"Other experts in the cybersecurity realm have said essentially the same thing — that Russian trolls and domestic political operatives will amplify what’s already out there, but that only Americans can create conspiracy theories that will sucker in Americans. And no American has suckered as many of his countrymen and women than Donald Trump."()
"It’s clear that Q was growing on its own, not because Russia was pumping it up, but because nobody was stopping it."(312)
"A theory of this sort is unnecessary to explain Q’s success. Q has no coherent plan, no grand design, and no apparent operational structure."(313)
[Nou, blijkbaar hebben die 'great democracies' zelf die onzin voortgebracht. Niet zo 'great', hè. Dat heb je ervan als je kritiekloze opvattingen propageert over vrijheid van meningsuiting, en zo verder.]
Alles wijst erop dat miljoenen mensen alleen al in de VS iets hebben met QAnon denkbeelden.
"It’s worth showing in detail why Q, no matter who makes the posts, is not who they claim to be, has no secret knowledge or clairvoyance, and is wrong about almost everything all the time."(319)
"And as we’ll see below, they are full of false and vague claims, failed predictions, and assertions that are so bizarre and counter to publicly known information that they specifically defy evidence and proof."(322)
"At this point, it should be clear: Q had no special access and made predictions that didn’t come true, and the only “proof” of any such access or clairvoyance can be found in their own constant claims of it."(339)
"What we do about those people, how we help them, and indeed, if they can be helped at all, is the biggest question of all when it comes to Q. It’s the last question we’re asking, and it’s the one that’s probably the hardest to answer."(341)
"Fortunately, in the course of researching and writing this book, I’ve spoken to a number of people who are qualified to give such advice — and I’ve been exposed to the work of even more people who know what they’re talking about. None of them have all the answers or a bulletproof formula to rescue your loved from QAnon, of course. Nobody has that, and anyone who says they do is someone to avoid at all costs. But they do have experience, and what they have to say is meaningful."(345)
"There is a wealth of resources to help people understand coercive movements, and how to recognize them when you see them. These span books, videos, full-length docuseries, and websites that treat cults as social movements to be understood, not salacious groups of nutcases to be mocked. There are too many to name, but reading a few of the most important books can at least begin the process for you."(349)
"Overwhelmingly, experts advise that if at all possible, you should keep some line of communication open to the QAnon believer in your life, one that doesn’t involve trying to litigate the conspiracy or rehash the battles you’ve had before. This doesn’t mean you have to let them bombard you with QAnon videos and interpretations of drops, and if they try, you’re well within your rights to cease communicating temporarily. But it does mean letting them know you care about them — even if they seem to have given up on caring about you. (...) But in all cases, the communication has to be gentle and nonconfrontational; otherwise it will likely do more harm than good and leave you open to attacks."(350)
[Dat is nogal in tegenspraak met het eerder gegeven punt dat het van twee kanten moet komen. Nog afgezien van het feit dat 'communicatie' hoe dan ook al onmogelijk is. Ik vind dit soort adviezen echt een zwaktebod.]
"Don’t mock or belittle — Think about every time someone called you stupid for having an opinion they disagreed with. Did it make you give up that opinion, or believe it even more fervently? This same approach applies to conspiracy theories and coercive movements."(358)
[Lief, hoor. Maar dat werkt evenmin. Waarom zou je mensen niet op allerlei manieren laten voelen dat ze het bij het verkeerde eind hebben?]
"Don’t attempt to debate or debunk — I don’t debate conspiracy theory believers because as a skeptic and researcher, I’m beholden to the truth, while the conspiracy believer can use anything they want to in their argument. This should be your approach with QAnon. Attempting to debunk or fact-check QAnon to get someone out of QAnon will only send you down an endless path ..."(359)
[Nou, er blijft zo langzamerhand niets meer over, is het wel?]
[Rothschild heeft het hier dus alleen over hulp aan individuele personen. We lezen niets over maatschappelijke oorzaken die aangepakt zouden moeten worden.]
Het is niet met zekerheid te zeggen wie Q was. Het is ook niet echt belangrijk.