Qanon

Wednesday

Bill Zeiser

The MAGA infiltrator is sad, not brave

Last weekend brought some minor internet drama courtesy of Amanda Moore, a progressive activist who outed herself as having spent the past year “infiltrating” right-wing groups. On Twitter, she posted pictures that she'd taken with various luminaries of Trumpworld such as General Michael Flynn, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. She also claimed to have been given a counterfeit vaccination card from a member of a QAnon conspiracy group and to have worn a wire the whole time, recording the details of her meetings and chance encounters held under false pretenses. “We were literally at the same events,” she crowed at a photojournalist who sent a somewhat vulgar tweet mocking her.

maga exposure therapy amanda moore

Tuesday

Peter Wood

Capitol Hill conspiracies

Following the Capitol Hill riot of January 6, a fair number of elected leaders — mostly Democrats — and law enforcement officials expressed their belief that an armed insurrection was in the works. Hostile forces were said to ready to attack Washington intent on overthrowing the government. To forestall this, fences topped with razor wire were installed and members of the National Guard were kept on active duty. March 4 was rumored to be the date set for this uprising. No army of insurrectionists appeared on March 4 or any other date. Nor as far as anyone can tell was there ever a prospect for such an attack. On March 1, the razor wire was removed from one of the tall fences, but reinstalled on a shorter fence across the street, closer to the Capitol.

conspiracies

Friday

Grace Curley

When they smear you as a conspiracy theorist, you’re onto something

Here’s how to tell when Republican politicians or journalists or activists are making headway: left-liberal media networks start accusing them of being — wait for it — conspiracy theorists. In recent days, for instance, NBC’s Ben Collins and Joy Reid claimed that the grassroots parent uprising over critical race theory in schools was being driven by QAnon. Or remember last February when Sen. Tom Cotton raised questions about the origins of the coronavirus? The New York Times headline read, ‘Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins’. In May, when Sen.

conspiracy

Thursday

Jacob Heilbrunn

What does the future hold for Donald Trump?

Don't call it a comeback! Whether it’s by popular acclamation or by a coup, as former national security adviser Michael Flynn suggested at a recent QAnon meeting, Donald Trump is apparently reckoning that he’ll be back in the White House by August. At least that’s the theory percolating among the Trump diehards ensconced at Mar-a-Lago. But then, nolens volens, came a contrary verdict from Lara Trump on Fox and Friends this morning: 'There are no plans for Donald Trump to be in the White House in August.' What a pity. It would be splendid to have Trump back in Washington even if only for the month of August. But keen-eyed observers will note that Lara confined her restriction to August. July remains open. So does September.

trump

Thursday

Jay Elwes

A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame

From our UK edition

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a group of turquoise canisters with what appeared to be tail fins attached. He picked up one of the objects and filmed it. Later he uploaded his video to YouTube. What were those strange turquoise cans? The answer was provided not by a UN investigator, war correspondent or military expert, but by a bored business administrator at his desk in Leicester. He had never been to Syria, spoke no Arabic and by his own admission knew nothing about weaponry. But Eliot Higgins had become fascinated by the war in Syria, and was following the social media feeds of people in the thick of it. He saw the YouTube clip and noticed the serial number ‘A-IX-2’.

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

How cults crumble

From our UK edition

There’s something creepy about the way we call Donald Trump fans a cult, then watch them hungrily, hoping they’ll do something colourful, though not actually threatening — like self-immolate, perhaps. Lockdown is boring and we’ve watched everything on Netflix. So, MSNBC and chill. But not all MAGA fans are cultish, and not all political cults are on the right. 2020 acted like a cult accelerator, and now there are half-brainwashed people everywhere, on every part of the political spectrum, in your family, among your friends. How can you tell? It’s all in the eyes. It’s famously hard to define a cult.

Sunday

Cockburn

How will the Trump presidency end?

Donald Trump will not go quietly into the good night. In fact, he seems determined to leave the office with as little dignity as possible. This is adding a great deal of uncertainty to the transfer of power. It’s entirely plausible that America will wake up on Inauguration Day with Trump still contesting his ouster. What happens then? At that point, anything is possible! Cockburn has concocted a list of potential January 20 endgame scenarios, ranked from least to most likely:1. The normal endingPresident Trump mounts some flimsy legal challenges, makes a bunch of angry tweets, but ultimately backs down and leaves office normally. He soon goes back to claiming the election was stolen, but is quickly banned from Twitter.

end

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The truth about Adrenochrome

From our UK edition

QAnon, the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theory, teaches that President Donald Trump is in secret warfare with a worldwide network of paedophiles. As an explanatory model it reminds me of the voices that Gilbert Pinfold hears in Evelyn Waugh’s novel bravely describing his own delusions brought on by too much chloral and crème de menthe. In the QAnon dark world, kidnapped children are, I think, made use of to produce a psychotropic drug and elixir of immortality called adrenochrome. They are no doubt tortured and killed in the process. QAnon did not invent adrenochrome. Aldous Huxley mentions it in The Doors of Perception (1954), which largely explores his experience of mescaline.

Wednesday

Caroline McCarthy

Liberals don’t need their own QAnon

A general rule of thumb: when something seems too good to be true, it typically is. That often doesn’t stop people from really, really wanting it to be true.Last week, a ‘blue check’ Twitter account in the name of a man called Jon Cooper tweeted that a news source called ‘Jewish News USA’ was reporting that President Trump’s family and close advisers were pushing him to resign. The conspicuously false tweet has since been deleted. Cooper, whose Twitter bio all but implies that he’s a Joe Biden staffer (he isn’t), has a history of interspersing his Twitter account with ‘breaking news’ stories that have no basis in reality. As liberal commentator Yashar Ali warned his followers, ‘Jon just tweets bullshit.

qanon

Thursday

Ben Sixsmith

Cuckoo Q: are the QAnon crowd as crazy as they seem?

‘Have you guys been following 4Chan?’ asks Marjorie Taylor Greene in a 2017 video. A mysterious ‘patriot’ named ‘Q’, Greene explains, is prophesying the downfall of satanic ‘swamp creatures’ in Washington, DC, Hollywood and other liberal fiefdoms. Is Greene a kind of female Alex Jones? No: she is now a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia and, in all likelihood, headed for the House of Representatives. Only weeks ago, an investigation by Facebook discovered thousands of groups and pages, boasting millions of members and followers, dedicated to QAnon conspiracy theories. In July, Twitter banned more than 7,000 accounts associated with the movement.

qanon