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Comment by aleister_777 | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the media is talking about this more than anyone else at this point. There have literally been over 2000 articles written to debunk this. The content has been banned from reddit, twitter and other platforms.

Why is everyone so vigilant to call it "dangerous"? Why not flat earth and chem trails? Why all the attention for this one thing?

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Because there is at least one Republican politician who will win a House seat in November and is a firm believer.

Who?

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/901985118/from-fringe-to-cong...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/us/politics/marjorie-tayl...

Marjorie Taylor Greene

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/511633-trump-cal...

Yes, she only one the Republican primary, but it is very likely she will win the general election.

Wow, never expected a serious candidate to be posting videos that start with "have you been following 4chan?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rtYok4fdbQ

Her previous claims about 9/11 and the Pentagon are also interesting: https://www.mediamatters.org/congress/qanon-candidate-marjor...

She denounced her previous claims on Aug 13th, 2020.

154 people died in that portion of the 9/11 attacks, including many children, as can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIWT4f_3gDk&feature=emb_titl...

The ~4 minute video is well worth your time.

I would encourage you to ask yourself what government position/s she is qualified for, given her recent beliefs about the deaths of those people.

And five more who have expressed varying degrees of support or credence:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/12/politics/qanon-congressional-...

There's been a similar amount of shutdown on 5G tower conspiracies after they resulted in vandalization, arson and even a shooting. 17 towers were attacked in New Zeland alone[1] for example, and plenty elsewhere.[2] As a result 5G groups have been banned on Facebook and the like. Things like this that has real impact is for better or worse pretty quickly suppressed on most platforms. If flat earthers started setting tankers on fire or something they'd probably get the same treatment.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/17-cell-towers-have-been-van...

[2]https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/3/21276912/5g-conspiracy-the...

Does anyone know which vendors' equipment was on the attacked towers?

New Zealand banned Huawei so probably not them although, as recently as Nov 2019, the second-largest NZ operator Spark was intending to use a mix of Nokia, Samsung, Cisco, Ericsson and Huawei equipment.

https://www.mobileworldlive.com/asia/asia-news/new-zealands-...

I believe they reached a scale of followers that none of these others have

Let me tell you why this is dangerous. QAnon evolved from an earlier movement, the spiritual warfare cult. My Father's family was all very deeply entrenched in this movement and while QAnon may be a new movement the spiritual warfare cult has been around a long time and rears its ugly head in many ways. While I was growing up the spiritual warfare cult was being expressed as the satanic daycare abuse scandals and the satanic abuse panics for the mid-80's and 90's. After my mother ran away with me from my father for being a physically abusive dick his entire side of the family came together to attempt to regain custody from my mother by saying that she was a satan worshiper. The case dragged on through the courts for years, I was sent to a church shrink that basically brainwashed me into saying whatever they wanted me to in front of a camera and my grandparents and father ultimately won the custody battle. It took years for me to realize what had happened to me. Needless to say, it ruined my life, my mothers life, my brother's, and my step father's. I have extreme trust issues with romantic partner's to this day.

I first heard about QAnon when I heard about the Cosmos Pizzeria accusations of hosting a basement full of children that were being "sacrificed to satan" and then canabalistically eaten by democrat elites in DC. Don't think that's harmless well what about the guy that shot up the place in an attempt to free those children from the nonexistent basement. Seems pretty dangerous to me.

That's a heartbreaking story.

You clearly don't have a believer in your family.

Because Twitter still hasn't and there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who follow the accounts that propagate this.

That appears to be changing: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-bans-7-000-qa...

I think you might because of socio-economic context under-estimate the scale and danger of this. There are government officials, members of the military including special forces, and more, that openly signal their belief in the QAnon conspiracy. Besides, the QAnon conspiracy taunts its followers towards dangerous political behaviours.

This was a pretty good take on why QAnon is such a big issue: https://youtu.be/6k-w-2KIV7Q?t=4728

"q anon is a conspiracy theory incubator it's not like the other conspiracy theories out there it's not like pizzagate alone it's not like the epstein stuff alone it's an incubator for all these conspiracies so they all feed off of each other so even if you try to knock down one there's others to hold it up if you look at the vast amount of anti-vaxxers who just recently got into q anon around march and april of this year it's like a whole separate movement that was gigantic and huge and dangerous in its own right

basically combined with q anon to form something even more dangerous and you're going to see it with more of these separate conspiracy theory movements down the line and that's really what makes q anon so honestly horrific i mean you have conspiracy theorists who don't even they're not even on the same page percentage of q9 people believe uh uh rapper kennedy jfk is still alive or whatever and then another percentage thinks that's bullshit but it doesn't matter because they all come together for the prime reason that hell this is all stuff that's going to help trump and we believe in the main thing that all these different forces are coming together to stop trump but he's going to take them all down the"

Also a longer interview https://youtu.be/lf3xlx9K0DI

Update: Trump was directly asked if he supports QAnon conspiracies, and he refused to answer[1].

That's why it's dangerous. It has penetrated to the mainstream of the party in control of 2 out of 3 branches of US govt, as well as the entire military.

1. https://www.axios.com/trump-qanon-refuses-to-answer-question...

I feel like this is all meta-commentary: the more we talk about QAnon (or the other things you list), EVEN TO DEBUNK IT WITH FACTS, the more people believe it. That's too surprising to ignore but too meta to discuss directly. So people write articles about QAnon and leave it their readers to wonder (and read more articles and get them more ad revenue).

The scale of QAnon is much bigger than the others. There's a QAnon candidate in Georgia who's won her primary for a senate seat. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/us/politics/marjorie-tayl...

HoR seat but yes

I see multiple posts a day related to QAnon conspiracy theories on FB. Much of it is just stupid, but it also includes anti-mask and anti-vax, which I think is very obviously more harmful right now than almost any other political topic.

I see nothing about flat earth or chem trails.

Next year, there will be almost a dozen Republicans elected that publicly endorse QAnon conspiracies.

It's more dangerous than chemtrails or flat Earth because it paints a lot of real people as dangerous enemies of the US.

Because flat earth and chem trails don’t encourage policy changes or have representation from (potential) elected officials

From what I understand, the QAnon Conspiracy theory is dangerous partially due to the volume of believers in political offices or coming into political offices. It is not unlike how scientology can often be more dangerous than other cults because scientology consistently targets culturally significant people to join the cult.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#Incidents

It is spawning a fair bit of violence.

I read through that whole list, and the only thing that involved any actual violence was a mafia killing, which it wasn't clear actually had anything to do with Q.

I don't know anything about this Q stuff (I don't even know what they believe), and I'm certainly not endorsing it, but your link does not support your claim.

The pizzagate shooting can be viewed as an early qanon consequence. Aspects of qanon are basically riffs on pizzagate, and the two factions have essentially merged.

QAnon believers are winning republican primaries and are likely to win a few house seats. I think the idea of a Flat Earth Caucus in the House of Representatives would also be troubling to people.

Media are endlessly debunking QAnon and PizzaGate, yet no media is investigating things like Epstein network (Mr Clinton traveled like 30 times in the famous island - he must really liked the beach).

Interesting point. What if Jeffrey Epstein was the original "Q"?

I'm pretty sure I've heard plenty about the Epstein network from the mainstream media over the past couple of years. Are you really sure there's no media investigating it?

I literally heard about Clinton palling around with Epstein from the mainstream media. The media has never been shy about reporting anti-Clinton stories.

The media barely looks into the Epstein story details and actively omits large chunks of evidence, such as his and Maxwell's ties to Les Wexner or their ties to domestic/foreign intelligence. As Alexa Acosta said: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” There's so much evidence that he was linked to the CIA/Mossad and Epstein was even known to brag about it.

We now know that Harvey Weinstein, who is just a media exec, was able to kill stories for years about him sexual abusing actresses. Is is crazy to think that a intelligence agencies could kill stories about one of their honeypots?

> Is is crazy to think that a intelligence agencies could kill stories about one of their honeypots?

No, though it's misguided to presume that this factually occurred merely because one is capable of imagining such a scenario.

Yeah, investigate all those pictures of Trump partying with Epstein and Maxwell.

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