Since 4chan in 2017 the QAnon conspiracy has been going strong,
Though the theory of a cabal of cannibal pedophiles could be wrong.
But now the facts emerging from the Epstein files
Have us starting to question our wits and wiles,
And beginning to wonder if the QAnon believers were right all along.
“People who question whether the Earth is round — a fact understood by the ancient Greeks and taught to American children in elementary school — might have been political pariahs a decade ago. Now, they’re running local Republican parties in Georgia and Minnesota and seeking public office in Alabama.”
“Some 22% of Americans believe that a ‘storm’ is coming, 18% think violence might be necessary to save the country and 16% hold that the government, media and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.” A new study finds the QAnon conspiracy movement continues to thrive and has even strengthened more than a year after Donald Trump left the White House, The Guardian reports.
— Amount QAnon darling Ron Watkins has raised for his run for Congress in Arizona. Watkins filed his first campaign finance report just before the deadline passed at midnight on Monday, revealing that in the three months to the end of December, he raised just $30,588.22 in small donations from supporters.
Ad for ‘America First Rally’ with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz
The Daily Beast: “At the height of the controversy surrounding Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the revelations that he’s under investigation for sex trafficking, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bet big on a nationwide joint fundraising tour with her embattled colleague. But new campaign filings show that not only did the gamble not pay off, but that the much-maligned Republicans actually spent four times as much as they raised.
“Greene, the House GOP’s top fundraiser, is now faced with a decision: She can continue to join forces with her beleaguered ally at the expense of her campaign war chest, or she can cut bait and let Gaetz fend for himself.
“Since Gaetz and Greene kicked off their joint fundraising committee with a May 7 event at The Villages in central Florida, their campaigns and joint fundraising committee have posted a combined loss of $342,000. And according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, that joint fundraising effort, ‘Put America First,’ reported only $59,345.54 in contributions.”
Left: Lahmeyer, center, with Q conspiracists disgraced Gen. Mike Flynn, left, and pillow grifter Mike Lyndell; right: Lahmeyer’s daughter in red shoes
Things have been spinning out of control since the first week in July for Pastor Jackson Lahmeyer, a 29-year-old Qanon-courting candidate from Tulsa who’s running to oust Oklahoma’s apostate Republican senator, James Lankford.
After aggressively courting leading Trump/Q propagandists – he’s been photographed with disgraced Gen. Mike Flynn and pillow-grifter Mike Lyndell – Lahmeyer suddenly found himself the target of Q conspiracist madness that has put his once-promising campaign in jeopardy.
It all started when Lahmayer posted a photo of his very young daughter posing in front of a huge campaign photo of himself, proudly showing off her red shoes. What Lahmeyer (and 99.999999 percent of the world) did not know then is that, according to Q fabulism, children who wear red shoes are part of sex trafficking rings.
Since then, Lahmeyer has been on the defensive, fruitlessly attempting to reason with the same hardcore Q cultists whose votes he’d hoped to win. On July 7, he issued this meekly defiant plea for sanity, via Twitter:
The fact is that QAnon is far from gone,
And don’t let its believers put you on.
Their sly denials
And wiley smiles,
Are code that Q’s conspirators doth carry on.
QAnon supporter: “I just listened to it again and I have to agree it doesn’t really sound like him. Whoever it was was very good at imitating him though.”
— Newsweek: “With Trump contradicting QAnon theories that the vaccine is dangerous and the coronavirus is a hoax, many of its supporters came up with ways to cope with the latest cognitive dissonance, including suggesting it was not actually Trump speaking to Fox.”
Image: Yahoo.com
Vox has an interesting piece on the future of QAnon as described by journalists and researchers who have covered and studied the group. While the entire article makes fascinating reading, here is a crystallization of the experts’ thinking:
QAnon should be thought of as a religion, not a political movement.
Its religiosity enables it to survive, despite its prophesies failing to materialize.
To the QAnon devout, Q’s true identity does not matter.
The recent purging of QAnon believers from mainstream social media has reinforced their self-perception as persecuted renegades.
Democratic lawmakers should be careful about framing the GOP as the “QAnon party” because it could drive the GOP deeper into the fringes.
Violent extremists are actively working to radicalize QAnon believers for their own purposes.
Even in the absence of Trump and regular messages from Q, the tagalong theories — 5G, vaccines and alternative medicine — represent significant risks to the public.
Donald Trump, totally unsurprisingly, said, “I love the inflation.”
That puts him in a tiny minority of the general population.
Yes, he’s one of the billionaire elite,
Who don’t worry about having enough to eat,
And to whom “affordability” is just another liberal ideation.
An Associated Press-NORC survey found that 44% of American Jews hold a favorable opinion of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, compared with 39% who view him unfavorably. By contrast, just 32% of respondents said they have a favorable opinion of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while 59% said they have a negative view.
“Their New Deal is socialism for the super-rich (and their own enrichment) even if it means increasing poverty, inequality, and illness at home and around the world. They also want to rewrite history to ignore and outright deny our past flaws while banning books that say otherwise from our libraries. And they select even our military leaders based on their version of political correctness over ability.”
— Former President Bill Clinton, quoted by Deadline, in his July 4th message.
“I think it’s embarrassing, still, even more so. I mean, sure, like, take care of yourself, get healthy, but who gets to take four months off of work because they’re sad?”
— Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) called Rep. Tom Kean Jr’s (R-NJ) explanation on Tuesday for his prolonged absence from Congress “embarrassing” in an interview with TMZ, Mediaite reports.
A Reuters analysis of Trump’s public comments from June 23 through July 6 (13 days) — when a string of left-wing Democratic candidates won their party’s primaries in New York — found he invoked communism 81 times.
“An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad,” the New York Times reports. “Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.”
A new Cato Institute poll found that only 53% of Americans could correctly identify the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the historical event marked by July 4. And 46% said they did not know what the day commemorated, including 61% of Gen Z respondents.
“President Donald Trump said he had earned at least $26 million in income from an array of new real estate ventures abroad, illustrating how his fortune has grown as his family embraces foreign deal-making in his second term,” Bloomberg reports.
Quinnipiac Poll: “Sixty-one percent of Americans think the United States today is not living up to the ideal stated in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, while 35 percent think the United States today is living up to that ideal.”