QAnon (2 Viewers)

[Dragon]

This organisation and its reach is seriously scary. When the head of the New York Police Department's second-largest police union openly shows his support of this "organisation" then something is seriously wrong!

The head of the New York Police Department's second-largest police union gave a television interview Friday afternoon while sitting in front of a mug emblazoned with QAnon imagery and slogans.

The mug behind Mullins featured the word "QANON" and the hashtag #WWG1WGA, which stands for "where we go one, we go all," a popular slogan among QAnon supporters. At the center of the mug was a large letter Q, which refers to a supposed government insider who, according to QAnon supporters, posts cryptic clues on the Internet about the "deep state."


More than a year ago, the FBI reportedly assessed that QAnon was a dangerous movement that was likely to inspire its most extreme members to commit violent acts of domestic terrorism.

In recent weeks, QAnon supporters have been posting videos of themselves reciting an oath and repeating the "where we go one, we go all" catchphrase that is seen on the mug. They say they are preparing "digital soldiers" for an apocalyptic reckoning, when thousands of "deep state" pedophiles will be arrested and prosecuted at military courts at Guantanamo Bay.

https://us.cnn.com/2020/07/17/us/head-nypd-union-qanon-mug/index.html

 

[bird]

I can always enjoy movies/shows starring actors whose personal belief structures fall under the category of azzhat depending what the movie/show is.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

Caviezal is an idiot. A dangerous idiot.

i also didn't realize i secreted adrenaline or that it came out of me.. jesus anyone who listens to these clowns need to do humaity a favor and jump off the nearest bridge..

 

[Optimus Prime]

Very interesting article
=================

Jane – not her real name – is nervous about speaking to me. She has asked that I don’t identify her or the small, south-coast Devon town in which she lives. “I’m feeling disloyal, because I’m talking about people I’ve known for 30 to 40 years,” she says.

Jane isn’t trying to blow the whistle on government corruption or organised crime: she wants to tell me about her old meditation group. The group had met happily for decades, she says, aligned around a shared interest in topics including “environmental issues, spiritual issues and alternative health”. It included several people whom Jane considered close friends, and she thought they were all on the same page. Then Covid came.


Jane spent most of the first Covid lockdowns in London. During that time, she caught Covid and was hospitalised, and it was then that she realised something significant had changed: a friend from the group got in touch while she was on the ward. “I had somebody I considered a real best friend of mine on the phone telling me, no, I ‘didn’t have Covid’,” she says. “She was absolutely adamant. And I said: ‘Well, why do you think I went into hospital?’”

The friend conceded that Jane was ill, but insisted it must be something other than Covid-19, because Covid wasn’t real. Jane’s hospital stay was thankfully short, but by the time she was sufficiently recovered and restrictions had lifted enough to allow her to rejoin her meditation group, things were very different.

“They have been moving generally to far-right views, bordering on racism, and really pro-Russian views, with the Ukraine war,” she says. “It started very much with health, with ‘Covid doesn’t exist’, anti-lockdown, anti-masks, and it became anti-everything: the BBC lie, don’t listen to them; follow what you see on the internet.”

Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot. Jane finally gave up.

This apparent radicalisation of a nice, middle-class, hippy-ish group feels as if it should be a one-off, but the reality is very different. The “wellness-to-woo pipeline” – or even “wellness-to-fascism pipeline” – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories.

It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. One of the leaders of the German branch of the QAnon movement – a conspiracy founded on the belief that Donald Trump was doing battle with a cabal of Satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton and George Soros, among others – was at first best known as the author of vegan cookbooks.

In 2021, Attila Hildmann helped lead a protest that turned violent, with protesters storming the steps of Germany’s parliament. Such was his radicalism in QAnon and online far-right circles that he was under investigation in connection with multiple alleged offences, but he fled Germany for Turkey before he could be arrested.

Similarly, Jacob Chansley, AKA the “QAnon shaman” – one of the most visible faces of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, thanks to his face paint and horned headgear – is a practitioner of “shamanic arts” who eats natural and organic food, and has more than once been described as an “ecofascist”.

Thanks to wellness, QAnon is the conspiracy that can draw in the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett and her Andrew Tate-watching teenage son. The QAnon conspiracy is one of the most dangerous in the world, directly linked to attempted insurrections in the US and Germany, and mass shootings in multiple countries – and wellness is helping to fuel it.

Something about the strange mixture of mistrust of the mainstream, the intimate nature of the relationship between a therapist, spiritual adviser, or even personal trainer, and their client, combined with the conspiratorial world in which we now live, is giving rise to a new kind of radicalisation. How did we end up here?

There are many people interested in spiritualism, alternative medicine, meditation, or personal training, whose views fall well within the mainstream – and more who, if they have niche views, choose not to share them with their clients. But even a cursory online request about this issue led to me being deluged with responses. Despite most experiences being far less intense than Jane’s, no one wanted to put their name to their story – something about the closeness of wellness interactions makes people loth to commit a “betrayal”, it seems.

One person recounted how her pole-dancing instructor would – while up the pole, hanging on with her legs – explain how the CIA was covering up evidence of aliens, and offer tips on avoiding alien abduction.

“A physiotherapist would tell me, while working on my back with me lying face down, about her weekly ‘meetings’ in London about ‘current affairs’,” another said. “There was a whiff about it, but it was ignorable. Then, the last time I saw her, she muttered darkly about the Rothschilds [a common target of antisemitic conspiracy theories] ‘and people like that’. I didn’t go back.”

Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.…..

Other respondents’ stories covered everything from yoga to reiki, weightlifters to alternative dog trainers. The theories they shared ranged from extreme versions of wellness-related conspiracies – about the risks of 5G and wifi, or Microsoft founder Bill Gates plotting with vaccines – to 15-minute cities, paedophile rings and bankers’ conspiracies.

Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk.

This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the “secrets” of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to.

What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But, as Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, observes, the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place.……..

‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline

One minute you’re doing the downward dog, the next you’re listening to conspiracy theories about Covid or the new world order. How did the desire to look after yourself become so toxic?

www.theguardian.com

 

[Taurus]

Very interesting article
=================

Jane – not her real name – is nervous about speaking to me. She has asked that I don’t identify her or the small, south-coast Devon town in which she lives. “I’m feeling disloyal, because I’m talking about people I’ve known for 30 to 40 years,” she says.

Jane isn’t trying to blow the whistle on government corruption or organised crime: she wants to tell me about her old meditation group. The group had met happily for decades, she says, aligned around a shared interest in topics including “environmental issues, spiritual issues and alternative health”. It included several people whom Jane considered close friends, and she thought they were all on the same page. Then Covid came.


Jane spent most of the first Covid lockdowns in London. During that time, she caught Covid and was hospitalised, and it was then that she realised something significant had changed: a friend from the group got in touch while she was on the ward. “I had somebody I considered a real best friend of mine on the phone telling me, no, I ‘didn’t have Covid’,” she says. “She was absolutely adamant. And I said: ‘Well, why do you think I went into hospital?’”

The friend conceded that Jane was ill, but insisted it must be something other than Covid-19, because Covid wasn’t real. Jane’s hospital stay was thankfully short, but by the time she was sufficiently recovered and restrictions had lifted enough to allow her to rejoin her meditation group, things were very different.

“They have been moving generally to far-right views, bordering on racism, and really pro-Russian views, with the Ukraine war,” she says. “It started very much with health, with ‘Covid doesn’t exist’, anti-lockdown, anti-masks, and it became anti-everything: the BBC lie, don’t listen to them; follow what you see on the internet.”

Things came to a head when one day, before a meditation session – an activity designed to relax the mind and spirit, pushing away all worldly concerns – the group played a conspiratorial video arguing that 15-minute cities and low-traffic zones were part of a global plot. Jane finally gave up.

This apparent radicalisation of a nice, middle-class, hippy-ish group feels as if it should be a one-off, but the reality is very different. The “wellness-to-woo pipeline” – or even “wellness-to-fascism pipeline” – has become a cause of concern to people who study conspiracy theories.

It doesn’t stop with a few videos shared among friends, either. One of the leaders of the German branch of the QAnon movement – a conspiracy founded on the belief that Donald Trump was doing battle with a cabal of Satanic paedophiles led by Hillary Clinton and George Soros, among others – was at first best known as the author of vegan cookbooks.

In 2021, Attila Hildmann helped lead a protest that turned violent, with protesters storming the steps of Germany’s parliament. Such was his radicalism in QAnon and online far-right circles that he was under investigation in connection with multiple alleged offences, but he fled Germany for Turkey before he could be arrested.

Similarly, Jacob Chansley, AKA the “QAnon shaman” – one of the most visible faces of the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, thanks to his face paint and horned headgear – is a practitioner of “shamanic arts” who eats natural and organic food, and has more than once been described as an “ecofascist”.

Thanks to wellness, QAnon is the conspiracy that can draw in the mum who shops at Holland & Barrett and her Andrew Tate-watching teenage son. The QAnon conspiracy is one of the most dangerous in the world, directly linked to attempted insurrections in the US and Germany, and mass shootings in multiple countries – and wellness is helping to fuel it.

Something about the strange mixture of mistrust of the mainstream, the intimate nature of the relationship between a therapist, spiritual adviser, or even personal trainer, and their client, combined with the conspiratorial world in which we now live, is giving rise to a new kind of radicalisation. How did we end up here?

There are many people interested in spiritualism, alternative medicine, meditation, or personal training, whose views fall well within the mainstream – and more who, if they have niche views, choose not to share them with their clients. But even a cursory online request about this issue led to me being deluged with responses. Despite most experiences being far less intense than Jane’s, no one wanted to put their name to their story – something about the closeness of wellness interactions makes people loth to commit a “betrayal”, it seems.

One person recounted how her pole-dancing instructor would – while up the pole, hanging on with her legs – explain how the CIA was covering up evidence of aliens, and offer tips on avoiding alien abduction.

“A physiotherapist would tell me, while working on my back with me lying face down, about her weekly ‘meetings’ in London about ‘current affairs’,” another said. “There was a whiff about it, but it was ignorable. Then, the last time I saw her, she muttered darkly about the Rothschilds [a common target of antisemitic conspiracy theories] ‘and people like that’. I didn’t go back.”

Some people’s problems escalated when their personal trainer learned about their work. “I had three successive personal trainers who were anti-vax. One Belgian, two Swiss,” I was told by a British man who has spent most of the past decade working in Europe for the World Economic Forum, which organises the annual summit at Davos for politicians and the world’s elite.…..

Other respondents’ stories covered everything from yoga to reiki, weightlifters to alternative dog trainers. The theories they shared ranged from extreme versions of wellness-related conspiracies – about the risks of 5G and wifi, or Microsoft founder Bill Gates plotting with vaccines – to 15-minute cities, paedophile rings and bankers’ conspiracies.

Is there a reason why people under the wellness and fitness umbrella might be prone to being induced into conspiracy? It is not that difficult to imagine why young men hitting the gym might be susceptible to QAnon and its ilk.

This group spends a lot of time online, there is a supposed crisis of masculinity manifesting in the “incel” (involuntary celibacy) movement and similar, and numerous rightwing influencers have been targeting this group. Add in a masculine gym culture and a community already keen to look for the “secrets” of getting healthy, and there is a lot for a conspiracy theory to hook itself on to.

What is more interesting, surely, is how women old enough to be these men’s mothers find themselves sucked in by the same rhetoric. These are often people with more life experience, who have completed their education and been working – often for decades – and have apparently functional adult lives. But, as Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, observes, the answer may lie in looking at why women turn to wellness and alternative medicine in the first place.……..

‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline

One minute you’re doing the downward dog, the next you’re listening to conspiracy theories about Covid or the new world order. How did the desire to look after yourself become so toxic?

www.theguardian.com

It's the same effect. Being special because you know something the sheeple don't.

Yoga, meditation, lizard people...it's the same thing serotonin-wise.

 

[bird]

Imo, the vast majority of humans need mental healthcare.

 

[MT15]

One of the folks who funded the QAnon movie:

 

[CoolBrees]

I will continue to say it until it no longer is true-

All of their accusations are admissions.

 

[Optimus Prime]

posted this on EE too
==============


Sad watching this guy's mother so deep in the rabbit hole. He actually handled it pretty well all things considered

and the wellness connection is there as well

It has to be heartbreaking when someone close to you is going through this

 

[Optimus Prime]

Posted on EE also

About how JFK assassination became ground zero in modern conspiracy theories

Also how how conspiracy theories switched from left wing to right
==============

…….In the 21st century, though, everything began to flip. The internet hastened the rise of a new breed of conspiracist – and of conspiracist enterprise. Chatrooms and social media helped people spread and monetise their content, while rejection by the mainstream media became a badge of honour.

There were fresh conspiracies to examine, from 9/11, to renewed claims that the moon landings were faked, to endless speculation about the “murder” of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Alex Jones’s website Infowars alleged on the day of the 9/11 attacks that they were a government-instigated “false flag” operation, just as Jones would claim were many other atrocities, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, in which 26 people, 20 of them children, were killed. That last lie led to some of the victims’ parents successfully suing him for $1.5bn in 2022.

By this time, most left-leaning conspiracists and X-Files fans had got off the bus. Like many 21st-century conspiracists, Jones also embraced homophobia, xenophobia, white supremacism and racism – such as the “Obama wasn’t born in the US” conspiracy theory.

Conspiracism had become predominantly a rightwing concern. In the Kennedy era, the left was suspicious of an “invisible government” secretly tipping the scales against them; now, the right denounces the “deep state” for doing the same to them.

Then came the Covid pandemic, which brought together what the author Naomi Klein calls “the far out and the far right”. Anti‑vaccination movements bled into other conspiracies: lockdown mandates, 5G signals, vaguely antisemitic “globalists” and “elites”, all of whom were supposedly part of the “great reset”.

It has been a parallel story with QAnon. Despite its far‑fetched theories and string of failed predictions, QAnon, which originated on online message boards, has prevailed by absorbing other conspiracy theories, including the second coming of JFK Jr.

Covid prompted what the journalist Anna Merlan describes as “conspiracy singularity”. “All of a sudden, these conspiracy movements that seemed pretty disparate had a common cause,” she says.

“A lot of people saw an opportunity to make money and to get attention by rowing in the same direction. That’s proved remarkably durable; they have been able to jump to new topics as a group much more frequently.”

Whereas, in the past, conspiracy communities might have been discrete, in the internet era “they’re all in the bathtub together floating around”, says Merlan. “You’re much more likely to grab someone else’s cool toy as it floats by and give it a try.”

“The idea that conspiracy theories can be read as a challenge to power is no longer salient,” Birchall adds. “They might still gesture to genuine grievances or injustices, but they are ultimately emptied out of any critical force today. They have become a weapon within proxy wars – culture wars – often repeated by those in power.”

Rather than holding politicians to account, conspiracism has become a political tool. Witness “the big lie” – Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Even though Trump’s allegations of voter fraud and foul play have been proved baseless, 63% of Republicans polled in March still believed in the big lie. Other election losers have attempted a similar ploy, from Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to the Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake…….

‘It splintered our sense of reality’: how JFK’s assassination spawned 60 years of conspiracy theories

The murder of the US president left millions convinced their government lied and covered up. Decades on, it continues to twist the truth about everything from Covid to G5 to Trump’s defeat at the polls

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

It's the same effect. Being special because you know something the sheeple don't.

Yoga, meditation, lizard people...it's the same thing serotonin-wise.

Posted in EE conspiracy thread also

Another article on this
=================

In the terrifying early days of the pandemic, a concerning development emerged in the wellness space. Chiropractors, health coaches, ayurvedic healers and other mind-body professionals took to the internet in earnest to circulate QAnon content, stories about Hillary Clinton guzzling blood, and screeds against social distancing.

It was a puzzling shift for a motley group better known for sharing recipes and stretching tips. Over far-reaching newsletters and palette-perfected Instagram posts, wellness gurus were now peddling plotlines of hidden agendas, secret cabals and the Great Awakening……

She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.

Klein allows that some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.

But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.

I spoke with Klein over Zoom about the allure of the mirror world, why wellness culture came to mingle with the far-right, and how we might tunnel back out of the rabbit hole. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.……

We are in this moment where some of these distorted projections are also showing up in wellness culture. You’ve noted that there are a number of people who are in the business of bodies who appear to have been especially seduced by the mirror world. Chiropractors, juice enthusiasts, yogis – they’ve portaged their interests in health towards rabid, far-right belief systems.

First of all, we have to be clear that it’s not everyone – but fitness really was kind of on the front line. I was in New Jersey for the first few months of the pandemic and the two groups that were organizing most in those early days were the very religious, and the very fit.

Some of the first protests against lockdowns were outside of gyms. And I was trying to understand what was going on with that. Why were these super buff folks having these protests, doing push-ups outside of their gyms?

And I came to the conclusion that there was something similar to the way in which some ultra-religious people were reacting, where they were insisting no matter what this was, they had to go pray. They had to be in these collective spaces, because that was their force field. Prayer was their protection against death or what happens after death.

I vividly remember watching the news one night, and there was a story about a megachurch that had broken lockdown. Journalists were interviewing people as they were streaming out of the megachurch. And they said: “Aren’t you afraid of Covid? You’ve just been in a room with thousands of unmasked people singing.” And the answer from one worshipper was: “No way! I’m bathed in the blood of the Lord.”

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.……

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ness-culture-far-right?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

[Optimus Prime]

Is Q not a thing anymore?

When I see footage of Trump rallies I still see people wearing the gear but haven't heard anything from them in ages

 

[superchuck500]

Is Q not a thing anymore?

When I see footage of Trump rallies I still see people wearing the gear but haven't heard anything from them in ages

Well yeah it was basically exposed as to the actual Q thing.

But I think the conspiratorial ideas and beliefs still carry on, just not as organized by a single driver.

 

[samiam5211]

I think Qanon has been fully integrated in to MAGA now.

 

[Saint by the Bay]

I think Qanon has been fully integrated in to MAGA now.

Exactly. When conspiracy theories are the guiding principle of a major political party there's no value in fringe groups anymore.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

I think Qanon has been fully integrated in to MAGA now.

you can't really have one without the other....

 

[SaintForLife]

BlueAnon is alive and going strong with Democrats and many here.

 

[bird]

BlueAnon is alive and going strong with Democrats and many here.

Iirc, it was Eric who said that they (the Trump organization) we’re getting a lot of money from Russia.

One suggests reading Kleptocracy: How Dirty Money Is Conquering The World by Tom Burgis. Trump figures in it prominently. He laundered money for Russians.

 

[SaintForLife]

Iirc, it was Eric who said that they (the Trump organization) we’re getting a lot of money from Russia.

One suggests reading Kleptocracy: How Dirty Money Is Conquering The World by Tom Burgis. Trump figures in it prominently. He laundered money for Russians.

Exhibit #1