This weekend we reflect on Q Anon & the corporate state; Ong’s Hat: The Early Internet Conspiracy Game That Got Too Real. “On a sunny morning in early 2000, Joseph Matheny woke up to find conspiracy theorists camped out on his lawn again. He was making coffee when he noticed a face peering in a ground-floor window of the small, three-story building he rented in Santa Cruz. Past the peeper, there were three other men in their early 20s loitering awkwardly. Matheny sighed and stepped outside. He already knew what they wanted. They wanted to know the truth about Ong’s Hat. They wanted the secret to interdimensional travel.” https://gizmodo.com/ongs-hat-the-earl…
Chrissy Teigen is well-known for her Twitter presence and witty tweets but now the model has blocked over a million Twitter users, made her account private and deleted over 60,000 of her own tweets after conspiracy theories connected her to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein https://globalnews.ca/news/7188815/ch…
Online Conspiracy Groups Are a Lot Like Cults. Inside these closed online communities, outside voices are discredited and dissent is often met with hostility, doxing, and harassment. Sound familiar? https://www.wired.com/story/online-co…
What are the similarities between an Italian novel from the ’90s and the QAnon conspiracy theory that’s resulting in armed standoffs with police in the US? “Dispatches signed ‘Q’ allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book.” They also pointed to the fact that the Q from the QAnon community is described almost exactly like Luther Blissett used to be described, “an entity of about 10 people that have high security clearance.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/…
Is the QAnon Conspiracy the Work of Artist-Activist Pranksters? The Evidence for (And Against) a Dangerous Hypothesis. The history of “Luther Blissett,” the Italian media jamming movement, is suddenly relevant to the US political discussion. https://news.artnet.com/opinion/q-ano…
Some Q followers break away when they recognize the content of the theories is not self-consistent, or they see that some of the content is directly aimed at getting donations from a specific audience, such as evangelical or conservative Christians. This then “breaks the spell” the conspiracies had over them. Others start watching Q-debunking videos. Disillusionment can also come from the failure of the theories’ predictions. Q had predicted Republican success in the 2018 US midterm elections & claimed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was involved in secret work for Trump, with apparent tensions between them a cover. When Democrats made significant gains & Trump fired Sessions, there was disillusionment among many in the Q community. Further disillusionment came when the predicted Dec 5 mass arrest & imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay detention camp of enemies of Trump did not occur, nor did the dismissal of charges against former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. For some, these failures began the process of separation from the QAnon cult, while others urged direct action in the form of an insurrection against the government. Such a response to a failed prophecy is not unusual: apocalyptic cults such as Heaven’s Gate, the People’s Temple, the Manson Family, and Aum Shinrikyo resorted to mass suicide/murder when their expectations for revelations or the fulfillment of their prophecies did not come about. Psychologist Robert Lifton calls it “forcing the end”. This phenomenon is being seen among some QAnon believers. Travis View echoes the concern that disillusioned QAnon believers might take matters into their own hands as Pizzagate believer Edgar Maddison Welch did in 2016, Matthew Phillip Wright did at Hoover Dam in 2018 & Anthony Comello did in 2019 when he murdered Mafia boss Frank Cali. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon#A…