You would be challenged to find a more stark portrayal of the choice voters face in this presidential election than this montage of comments by former Vice President Joe Biden and acting president Yeah-that-guy:
Throw in a reference to fluoridation and the Donald Trump clips could be from his audition tape for a remake of Dr. Strangelove.
Last month, the Texas Republican party adopted as its campaign slogan, “We Are the Storm,” the New York Times reports. It is a phrase used by adherents of QAnon conspiracists who believe there is a secret “cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile Democrats who seek to dominate America and the world.” The FBI has identified QAnon as a domestic terror threat. Georgia GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene is an adherent, along with several other Republican politicians.
Allen West, the former Florida congressman, now runs the Texas GOP. He denies the QAnon connection, reports the Texas Tribune, which fleshes out the storm metaphor:
The concept of “the storm” is a significant part of QAnon vernacular, said Mark Fenster, a law professor at the University of Florida who studies conspiracy theories.
“The storm has been one of the metaphors that Q and his followers have used to describe the coming upheaval in which Donald Trump reveals himself to have been working heroically behind the scenes to expose and punish those who have been engaged in this horrible satanic child sex cult,” Fenster said. “Storms are longstanding metaphors going back to biblical [times]of how it is you cleanse what has otherwise been a sinful humanity.”
Since conspiracists need no proof behind their theories, let me float a no-proof one of my own.
QAnon feels like a digital prank that took on a life of its own. Along with Russian and other foreign disinformation sites were fake news sites appeared in 2016 a) to make money and b) to prove just how gullible people can be.
One such digital satirist-entrepreneur lamented he might have helped Trump win the White House. Paul Horner, 38, died in September 2017 of an “accidental overdose.” Or was it? That’s how these things work.
Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins of NBC News found that three such persons took the original Q posts from 4chan to YouTube and Reddit and turned them into cash flow. From there the conspiracy spread widely and attracted audience on the erroneous belief that if everyone is talking about it there must be something to it:
Part of the Qanon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on the message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts alongside Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.
There are now dozens of commentators who dissect “Q” posts — on message boards, in YouTube videos and on their personal pages — but the theory was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the “Q” posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon’s spread and the originators’ financial gain.
Since then, they wrote in 2018,, “Qanon followers have allegedly been involved in a foiled presidential assassination plot, a devastating California wildfire, and an armed standoff with local law enforcement officers in Arizona.”
Yes, anxiety or loss of control in test subjects “triggers respondents to see nonexistent patterns and evoke conspiratorial explanations.” With white people a shrinking demographic, the economy in ruins, 175,000 dead and no end in sight, you could say people feel the world is out of control. Having a sense that you posses secret knowledge that can “out” the malefactors behind it all has real attraction.
Not to mention we have a “batshit crazy person” in the White House who feels the same pressures and is unwilling to distance himself from QAnon. “They like me very much,” Trump said about QAnon, which, Colbert I. King observes at the Washington Post, “is the standard by which Trump measures all of his relationships, both official and personal.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow closed her Friday show by interviewing CNN’s Brian Stelter, author of “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” due out next week and excerpted Thursday at Vanity Fair.
A Fox staffer told Stelter on the record saying the Fox’s allegiance to Trump “is putting our democracy at risk.” Stelter writes:
“Hannity would tell you, off-off-off the record, that Trump is a batshit crazy person,” one of his associates said. Another friend concurred: “Hannity has said to me more than once, ‘he’s crazy.’”
The relationship between the channel and Trump manifests as a propaganda feedback loop in which what what Fox hosts say on TV comes out of the president’s hours later. Then Trump calls Sean Hannity and repeats it back on TV.
Life imitates art. “I say it here. It comes out there,” newsman Albert Brooks says in 1987’s Broadcast News.
And Fox News viewers, QAnon cultists among them, will believe it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-party-of-trump-is-already-a-convention-of-ghoulish-clowns/2020/08/21/89248e90-e3ea-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html
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