After the QAnon Ban, Who's Next?
taibbi.substack.com
taibbi.substack.com
I almost didn't read the article either but it had surprising depth to it.
In this case, the two are linked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Ping_Pong
"The restaurant is the center of the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which has been discredited by a wide variety of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. One Pizzagate activist fired a gun in the restaurant in 2016, and another started a fire in it in 2019."
Q's first post wasn't until Oct 2017. Two things are being conflated here.
I don't know.
It's weird how this was a non-issue until around 2016, when all of a sudden it became an existential threat to free speech and civilization itself.
It's almost as if there's a tacit agenda behind the presentation of concern for free speech in the general case, with the goal of normalizing extremist right-wing speech in parallel with its increasing adoption and normalization within a specific mainstream American political party.
But out of all the dramatically more contentious issues in censorship, QAnon is a no-brainer compared to so many other more delicate topics.
Kind of bored of these QAnon hot takes. They're truly out there in their level of insanity and outrageous denial of consensus reality. There's so many others tiptoeing gray zones; those would be much more interesting to cover.
Here’s the problem: Free speech rights are intended to protect speech. They are not intended to protect propaganda. Nor would we want them to. Propaganda is relatively easy to identify and is not speech.
Take Trump, for example. He does not lie in an attempt to convince you of the truth of his perspective. He lies to show you who has power in the situation. He knows that you know that his excuses are shallow and dumb - that’s the whole point.
He is asserting that he can create his own reality and say whatever he wants and you cannot stop him. The majority of his supporters do the same thing. When they repeat his lies, they are not attempting to convince you of their truth. They are showing you their allegiance.
This is similar with QAnon and a myriad of other right wing groups. After repeating their lies over and over, their supporters begin to get confused about what is actually real. They originally bought in to the scheme to be part of the group, but the scheme took and and they lost their grasp on any truth. There is no truth once this takes over.
This is not speech. This is a caustic type of control that uses honest people to spread by confusing their sensibilities. They protect the exercise of these lies, in their quest for morality and justice, and allow its venom to spread. Soon, it kills both host and victim. Leaving all powerless to the purveyor of the propaganda.
This is easily identifiable. We must not protect this. It is not speech.
Getting pulled into a quasi-logical debate where this is confused with speech is exactly what the purveyors want. They want us to confuse this with speech so it can be protected while it erodes the minds of its consumers.
Although preceded by similar viral conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate, the theory proper began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by "Q", who was presumably a single American individual. It is now likely 'Q' has become a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon.
(...)
QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", the title of his 1964 essay on religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. QAnon's vocabulary echoes Christian tropes—"The Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgement Day) and "The Great Awakening"—evoking the reputed historical religious Great Awakenings of the early 18th century to the late 20th century. According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil." Some QAnon supporters say the forthcoming reckoning will be a "reverse rapture": not only the end of the world as we know it, but a new beginning, with salvation and utopia on earth for the survivors.
(...)
The Washington Post and The Forward magazine have called QAnon's targeting of Jewish figures like George Soros and the Rothschilds "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". A Jewish Telegraphic Agency article in August 2018 asserted: "some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories".
The Anti-Defamation League reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism.
The Czarist hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has intersected with the QAnon conspiracy theories, with Republican QAnon fan Mary Ann Mendoza retweeting a Twitter thread about the Rothschild family, Satanic High Priestesses, and American presidents saying that "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion Is Not A Fabrication. And, It Certainly Is Not Anti-Semitic To Point Out This Fact." Mendoza, who sits on the advisory board of Women for Trump and was scheduled to speak at the 2020 Republican convention until news came out of her Twitter activity, later denied knowing the content of the thread, although anti-Semitic references appeared in the first few tweets. Similarly, Trump has denied knowing anything about QAnon except that QAnon fans like him and "love our country."
By 2020, QAnon followers were advancing a theory that Hollywood elites were engaging in "adrenochrome harvesting," in which adrenaline is extracted from children's blood to be oxidized into the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. Adrenochrome harvesting is rooted in antisemitic myths of blood libel dating to the Middle Ages that Jews murder Christian children for their blood for use in religious rituals. QAnon believers have also promoted a centuries-old antisemitic trope about an international banking conspiracy orchestrated by the Rothschild family.
Genocide scholar Gregory Stanton has described QAnon as a "Nazi group rebranded", and its theories as a rebranded version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
They sound like glorified shitposters that escaped the confines of /pol/. Are they really causing that much of an issue to FB and other platforms?
FWIW I read the article, but it meanders a lot.
I guess FB tries not to land in the headlines about someone going postal after organising the attack in semi-public on their site.
(And, I suppose, it took enough susceptible people who believed this drivel...)
What's new is how QAnon packaged and rebranded these disparate bigotries into a single narrative with Donald Trump as the messiah and made it viral, likely on the back of the general alt-right and neo-reactionary surge of support within Trump's base. But it wouldn't have taken off at all if that wellspring of hate in America's core hadn't been there to tap, and there weren't already plenty of people who would have found the general premise of, say, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of child sex slaves, to be reasonable to begin with. You don't convince people to believe that sort of thing who aren't already halfway there.
Nor was that the idea of the "New World Order". Globalist elites? Sure. Secularism and leftism? Yes. Conspiracy? Absolutely. Pedophilia and satanism? No.
Maybe "many" is an overreach, but those beliefs were definitely present well before Pizzagate and Qanon.