It always seemed to me that QAnon was some sort of online LARP on 4chan that got out of control and metastasized. It’s left a trail of broken families and swept into the mainstream with branding and everything. After the predictions of Trump’s return to power after Jan 6th it seems to have fizzled out. Did QAnon stop posting? Did their adherents just glom onto the next crazy theory? How many followers now disavow the theories of QAnon?
It looks unrelated at first glance, but this basically sums up 2010-2023 in a nutshell for the crazies.
They’re still active as fuck on telegram.
They became the Government and are using their power to mass fire everyone to get rid of the Deep State.
Why do you think MAGA is so willing and ready to fire huge swaths of the US Government?
They went on about the “deep state” because their goal was to create a deep state.
You mean “”“The Deep State”“” right? …right?
Yeah, the non-existent Deep State. These fuckers are firing important people looking for ghosts and goblins.
They did their jobs. They divided regular people and got kleptocrats to go full mask off. They’re laughing at us, probably.
Q went away except for a few random posts around December or January 2020-2021 (can’t recall). A documentary series on HBO seemed to point to Ron Watkins as likely Q. He ran for some office and did very poorly. Q wasn’t needed anymore, but the destruction to families remained in its wake.
QAA podcast continues to study bizarre right-wing conspiratorial thinking (it’s quite entertaining and usually pretty funny when not saddening). There was a book published recently about specific case studies of people whose lives were destroyed by the movement and where they are now, The Quiet Damage, by Jesselyn Cook. There are other books on the subject, including Trust the Plan, by Will Sommer.
Our society will continue experiencing real-world harm because of the radicalization of Q supporters for years, I’m sure.
QAA has become one of my primary information sources. They’re at least good at making all this entertaining
Yes, one of the few places that I get updates on current events that make me laugh. Probably the funniest show I listen to, at this point.
I think it’s a question of time before sb makes an AI that can write exactly the conspiracies necessary to heard people in a way to achieve a concrete, pre-specified goal.
A corrupted Mrs Davies?
It kind of merged into a couple things, from what I’ve seen: “wellness” (you know the kind, antivaxx mommy blog crap, Joe Rogan raw meat diets, supplements), “preppers” (people ready for a race war and living off the grid a la The Turner Diaries), and the “tradwife/MIGTOW” stuff. There’s the splinter adherents from various right-wing influencer podcasts thinking JFK or whoever is going to reemerge at Dealy Plaza, but those invariably fizzle out. The integration into broader movements is where it’s thriving. You get lured in with yoga, then next thing you know you’re canning beans because you won’t be the one eating bugs because that’s what the democrats want.
Yoga and canning beans are both great hobbies. You pick weird things to use as examples of the worst way getting sucked into QAnon could go.
You’d be so surprised! The hobbies are inherently good. But people — specifically, influencers — use them as gateways to the broader movements (so-called wellness and prepping as described above).
Edit: Here is one such piece on the co-opting of yoga.
It’s truly fascinating to watch these people who have been captured by the more intelligent get (to use an overused analogy) herded between ‘fields’ like sheep.
Hello there.
How long until you head back to the Continuum?
General Kenobi
They are still there. I used to be on Gab, Voat, and others where a lot of them congregated. Half of them are fucking US senators now… I did my best to debunk as much shit as I could, or bring some voices of reason to the table when possible. iirc a lot of them are on 8chan and some other chan-fragments that spun off.
The BBC has a good podcast about it.
QAnon appeared to me to be a LARP that wanted to convince people that pedos are the Democrats running local pizza shops, rather than the anti-trans people demanding to inspect your child’s genitals to play sports. When their base became more concerned about gematria than the beauty pageant king hanging out in the dressing room with underage girls, then they effectively won.
It’s my theory that QAnon was being controlled by Republican election strategists. Steve Bannon has bragged about this.
It was no coincidence that Pizzagate started immediately after the news broke that Trump used to go into teenage dressing rooms.
I don’t doubt the a MAGA crowd leant into the Q conspiracy and were happy to co-opt it’s adherents into it’s electoral base. However is there any evidence that links its genesis to the like of Banon? Most of what I heard (from across the pond, indirectly) was more traditional wedge issues like anti-DEI and anti-trans rhetoric.
A good long form video on Flat Earth and Qanon by Dan Olsen. In case someone is new and curious about what Qanon is.
