Social Qanon Megathread V1

[Headkicktoleg]

Dumb mom duped by fake news on the internet

 

[HomeCheese]

Baby boomers are the worst people on the planet.

Watch it young fella. [shakes fist]

 

[gaffbyknees2]

She was stunned by Biden's inauguration. How this South Carolina mom escaped QAnon

Ashley Vanderbilt says her four-year-old daughter Emmerson knew "something was wrong with her mom."
"I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she recalls.
After November's election she spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon. By inauguration day, she was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter.
Many QAnon believers have clear political motives, but Vanderbilt says she is a passive participant in politics.
"I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it. I grew up being told we were Republicans, so I've always been that straight red ticket," she explained in an interview with CNN near her home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last Saturday.
She doesn't watch the news. "What have we heard the last four or five years? Don't watch the news. 'Fake news.' 'Fake news.'"
Vanderbilt worked in the office of a construction company. But, like millions of Americans in 2020, she says she lost her job at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. Feeling depressed and with more time on her hands, she began spending a lot of time online.
The 27-year-old mom is an avid user of the video app TikTok. It's there, she says, that she was first introduced to QAnon.
She mostly followed entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election neared she began interacting with pro-Trump and anti-Biden TikTok videos. Soon, she says, TikTok's "For You" page, an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like, was showing her video after video of conspiracy theories.
A spokesperson for TikTok told CNN the company is "committed to countering misinformation and advancing media literacy in our community. Content and accounts promoting QAnon aren't allowed on our platform and are removed as identified."
Clearly the company's safeguards failed Vanderbilt.
What began on TikTok, continued on Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram, where by January Vanderbilt says she was spending hours every night learning more about the supposed cabal of pedophiles in the Democratic Party that had stolen the election.
But all was not lost.
She believed that even though Biden was declared the winner of the election, his inauguration would be thwarted.
First, Trump would declare martial law, then the Democrats (and some Republicans) and the Hollywood celebrities in Washington, DC for the inauguration would be rounded up and arrested. Trump had "opened back up Guantanamo Bay" (it never closed) and "increased the capacity to 200,000."
That was the conspiracy theory being pushed by QAnon followers on the eve of the inauguration, and it is what Vanderbilt believed.
But on the morning of January 20th, 2021, Trump flew out of Washington to his new home in Florida and Biden became the 46th President of the United States.
"I was devastated," Vanderbilt recalls. "Instantly, I went into panic mode."
She called her mom who was at work. "I just told her it's like we're all going to die. We're going to be owned by China. And I was like, I might have to pull my daughter out of school because they're going to take her."
Her mom tried to calm her down. "Obviously God's will was to have President Biden come in for this country, so it's going to be fine," Vanderbilt says her mom told her. "This happens all the time. It's an election. Parties switch, no big deal."
After their call she said her mom texted her a warning to not take her daughter out of school.
A key tenet of QAnon is that there is a master plan at work and Trump is in charge. "The plan" said he would round-up the so-called deep state and bring them to justice. "The plan" said he would win the 2020 election in a landslide. When this didn't happen, QAnon supporters began spinning absurd predictions that Trump would somehow halt Biden's inauguration in the days or hours leading up to it.
None of that happened. But like in many cults, the lore and predictions in QAnon are ever-changing. Each time a prophecy fails to come to fruition, a new theory crops up to fill the void.
And so some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration. President Joe Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen.
That was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that she had bought into a lie with an almost religious fervor. Over the past two weeks she has been posting on TikTok, the platform that dragged her into the conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hope that it might help or inspire others to see the light.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God for helping her out of QAnon. While she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said that Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, "Am I putting even Trump above God?"
Vanderbilt reflects that she could perhaps have been pulled out of QAnon before inauguration day if Trump himself condemned it. Instead, he flirted with it and tacitly embraced it by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, she had a revelation of her own.
She was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and a few members of the Republican Party, are not. She has admitted she was wrong and has condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
On the national stage, Vanderbilt hopes her story will help others.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/tech/qanon-mom-former-believer/index.html



******************

First of all, my heart goes out to this woman. She's obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed, but she seems like a person trying to live a solid life.

I wonder, though, how many millions of people are there like her in the country right now? Maybe they are not full on QAnon, but they believe some kind of combination of conspiracy theories involving (take your pick): pedophilia, global elites, liberalism, vaccines, technology, the US deep state, shootings as hoaxes, the "Great Reset," etc., and pretty soon this all merges into one vague "conspiracy gestalt."

I think I am going to coin that term "conspiracy gestalt."

In my estimation, it probably describes at least 30-40% of the political views in this country... and it is cross-generational, nothing that is going to die off with the boomers.

Final point, I had trouble responding to the thread asking: which side is morally superior, because I don't trust my ability to decode the deep motivations of people I don't know. I will assert one comparison though: while Democrats and Republicans doubtlessly both have many stupid voters, on the Republican side the dumbest also see to be the most politically engaged.

This is one of the several basic differences in the parties right now. And it is probably the most important.

Why don't she work out and pass on good healthy habits to her daughter instead of worrying about bullshit.

 

[tonni]

Well that, and baby boomers discovering Facebook.

The internet peaked in 2007.

 

[Satsui Ryu]

How do you think Qanaon came to be? I would be genuinely curious in let's say, you, a liberals point of view.

A lot of the underlying facets are not really new so there is some base level of acceptance. Qanon just took it to fantastical levels. And with social media being a thing it allows people to be exposed to enough people who believe the craziest stuff giving it what appears to be legitimacy.

I don't think Qanon as a whole is widely believed, but there are facets have pretty widespread acceptance.

 

[ShadowRun]

Next how a lesbian sister was brain washed into Antifa and I’m got out of it .. national news ! Many hours and resources dedicated to looking like a political party is some how all Involved and falls for bs. Then after that how a grandma Democrat got scammed by a phishing email 8 hour town hall on Fox News stay tuned!

 

[TryggeTryggvar]

Next how a lesbian sister was brain washed into Antifa and I’m got out of it .. national news ! Many hours and resources dedicated to looking like a political party is some how all Involved and falls for bs. Then after that how a grandma Democrat got scammed by a phishing email 8 hour town hall on Fox News stay tuned!

America should be used as a study case as to why so many people believe the weirdest things there. Out of all the western countries im sure its the one with the most lunatics running around. Left or right doesnt seem to matter both sides have the weirdest ideas.

Still love you my american sherbros

Edit: Australia might give americans a run for their money about being weirdest. I mean shrimp on the barbie? Cmon man

 

[luckyshot]

i listened to a podcast by people who practice ken wilbur's "integral spirituality". they were trying to get to the bottom of how it is that a surprising number of their own people had gone down the trump cult route.

this group is typically quite educated and often also affluent and the "integral" approach is a very solid innovatoin of spirituality that incorporates multifaceted dimensions of the human being.

one of the postulations about how this could happen in their group was that in an attempt to get people to not live in their heads and be more in touch with body and heart (something i think is profoundly valuable) they may have placed too much emphasis on feeling your way through life and that made people vulnerable to things that are not true, but can feel true.

q anon is just a bad mythology but it plays upon archetypal themes that are pretty embedded in human consciousness and that are fed to us in revised and updated form in movies and books (think the battle between good and evil). a false narrative that deals with these themes can feel true because of the truth of the themes even though the details of the story are completely fabricated (think garden of eden).

when a false narrative impregnated with archetypal and mythological themes is presented as fact it can feel true to many people because there is truth in it even though the narrative is completely fabricated.

it was very interesting listening to them come to terms with it happening in their camp when presumably that is a system that would be the less vulnerable to magical thinking.

the podcast also dealt with the fact that human kinds ability to know, to know when you actually know, and to digest the kind of scientific information available to us is very limited. on top of that our institutions really do lie to us.

they basically said that we are just not yet able to navigate all of this very well and can and will err all over the place as we move forward.

it also made me think of the new age movement and also today's evangelical christian movement which i think (and i now a lot of people from those groups) are completely out of touch with reality and whose teachers are often the most obvious of con men and women and who have encouraged people to trust their intuition and spirit guides or angels or jesus in ways that are profoundly dangerous and anit reason.


the challenge of today is to keep and preserve the deep body of wisdom and path of spiritual growth contained in the great non dual traditions while embracing fully the newer development of scientific thinking, reason and logic and incorporate all of that into a cohesive whole that neglects neither nor handicaps either one.

personally i think in this age of lying and manipulation practiced by all of our institutions and the corruption of them and the economic disparity and injustice this produces, (the primary cause of the hunger for ct theories and gullibility) and faced with humanities limited ability to know on just about every level, a deep admittance of our limitations and acceptance of them and embracing of them and the precarious place that places us in on this planet could go a long way towards stemming the fear that leads to cult like fanaticism.

Interesting points.

 

[luckyshot]

Next how a lesbian sister was brain washed into Antifa and I’m got out of it .. national news ! Many hours and resources dedicated to looking like a political party is some how all Involved and falls for bs. Then after that how a grandma Democrat got scammed by a phishing email 8 hour town hall on Fox News stay tuned!

Yeah, it's not like one of our two major political parties is currently having a civil war over how to deal with conspiracy nutbags or anything...

Nothing to see here!

 

[ThinkGreen]

Sounds like my mother in-law, except she’s still a Trump believer.

 

[luckyshot]

dubs

 

[ShadowRun]

Yeah, it's not like one of our two major political parties is currently having a civil war over how to deal with conspiracy nutbags or anything...

Nothing to see here!

Yea at least the right stand up to the loons while the left is silent ....

There are 72 genders ! Inject your kids with hormones , you racist, not woke enough !

 

[luckyshot]

Yea at least the right stand up to the loons while the left is silent ....

There are 72 genders ! Inject your kids with hormones , you racist, not woke enough !

Bu... bu... bu.... WHAT ABOUT!???!

Republicans privately gave conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene a standing ovation in a caucus meeting, according to reports

https://www.businessinsider.com/rep...reene-private-standing-ovation-reports-2021-2

Call me when the DNC gives AOC a standing ovation after she harasses some school shooting survivors, says the election was fake and QAnon is real, and says we should shoot Mitch McConnell in the head.

I don't know who you are trying to fool with this "both sides" bullshit at this point, but by all means keep doing it. You already managed to flip Georgia and Arizona blue...

 

[LangfordBarrow]

Yeah I mean it's not like ABC buried the Epstein story after the British crown literally called and threatened them...

 

[LangfordBarrow]

It is not a conspiracy to believe the election was rigged.

Many outsiders believe it was. Trump still does

You calling the former President a liar?

 

[bobgeese]

You don't know about that? From the mouth of an ABC anchor on hidden cam.

 

[terrapin]

You don't know about that? From the mouth of an ABC anchor on hidden cam.

this is mostly true fyi. and the left seems to be the least likely to be willing to admit that the msm does lie. its because the right lies about how much msm lies and so the left wants to pretend it doesn't happen.

@LangfordBarrow

 

[ShinkanPo]

She was stunned by Biden's inauguration. How this South Carolina mom escaped QAnon

Ashley Vanderbilt says her four-year-old daughter Emmerson knew "something was wrong with her mom."
"I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she recalls.
After November's election she spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon. By inauguration day, she was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter.
Many QAnon believers have clear political motives, but Vanderbilt says she is a passive participant in politics.
"I've always been someone that you just tell me what to do and I do it. I grew up being told we were Republicans, so I've always been that straight red ticket," she explained in an interview with CNN near her home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last Saturday.
She doesn't watch the news. "What have we heard the last four or five years? Don't watch the news. 'Fake news.' 'Fake news.'"
Vanderbilt worked in the office of a construction company. But, like millions of Americans in 2020, she says she lost her job at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. Feeling depressed and with more time on her hands, she began spending a lot of time online.
The 27-year-old mom is an avid user of the video app TikTok. It's there, she says, that she was first introduced to QAnon.
She mostly followed entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election neared she began interacting with pro-Trump and anti-Biden TikTok videos. Soon, she says, TikTok's "For You" page, an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like, was showing her video after video of conspiracy theories.
A spokesperson for TikTok told CNN the company is "committed to countering misinformation and advancing media literacy in our community. Content and accounts promoting QAnon aren't allowed on our platform and are removed as identified."
Clearly the company's safeguards failed Vanderbilt.
What began on TikTok, continued on Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram, where by January Vanderbilt says she was spending hours every night learning more about the supposed cabal of pedophiles in the Democratic Party that had stolen the election.
But all was not lost.
She believed that even though Biden was declared the winner of the election, his inauguration would be thwarted.
First, Trump would declare martial law, then the Democrats (and some Republicans) and the Hollywood celebrities in Washington, DC for the inauguration would be rounded up and arrested. Trump had "opened back up Guantanamo Bay" (it never closed) and "increased the capacity to 200,000."
That was the conspiracy theory being pushed by QAnon followers on the eve of the inauguration, and it is what Vanderbilt believed.
But on the morning of January 20th, 2021, Trump flew out of Washington to his new home in Florida and Biden became the 46th President of the United States.
"I was devastated," Vanderbilt recalls. "Instantly, I went into panic mode."
She called her mom who was at work. "I just told her it's like we're all going to die. We're going to be owned by China. And I was like, I might have to pull my daughter out of school because they're going to take her."
Her mom tried to calm her down. "Obviously God's will was to have President Biden come in for this country, so it's going to be fine," Vanderbilt says her mom told her. "This happens all the time. It's an election. Parties switch, no big deal."
After their call she said her mom texted her a warning to not take her daughter out of school.
A key tenet of QAnon is that there is a master plan at work and Trump is in charge. "The plan" said he would round-up the so-called deep state and bring them to justice. "The plan" said he would win the 2020 election in a landslide. When this didn't happen, QAnon supporters began spinning absurd predictions that Trump would somehow halt Biden's inauguration in the days or hours leading up to it.
None of that happened. But like in many cults, the lore and predictions in QAnon are ever-changing. Each time a prophecy fails to come to fruition, a new theory crops up to fill the void.
And so some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration. President Joe Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen.
That was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that she had bought into a lie with an almost religious fervor. Over the past two weeks she has been posting on TikTok, the platform that dragged her into the conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hope that it might help or inspire others to see the light.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God for helping her out of QAnon. While she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said that Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, "Am I putting even Trump above God?"
Vanderbilt reflects that she could perhaps have been pulled out of QAnon before inauguration day if Trump himself condemned it. Instead, he flirted with it and tacitly embraced it by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, she had a revelation of her own.
She was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and a few members of the Republican Party, are not. She has admitted she was wrong and has condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
On the national stage, Vanderbilt hopes her story will help others.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/tech/qanon-mom-former-believer/index.html



******************

First of all, my heart goes out to this woman. She's obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed, but she seems like a person trying to live a solid life.

I wonder, though, how many millions of people are there like her in the country right now? Maybe they are not full on QAnon, but they believe some kind of combination of conspiracy theories involving (take your pick): pedophilia, global elites, liberalism, vaccines, technology, the US deep state, shootings as hoaxes, the "Great Reset," etc., and pretty soon this all merges into one vague "conspiracy gestalt."

I think I am going to coin that term "conspiracy gestalt."

In my estimation, it probably describes at least 30-40% of the political views in this country... and it is cross-generational, nothing that is going to die off with the boomers.

Final point, I had trouble responding to the thread asking: which side is morally superior, because I don't trust my ability to decode the deep motivations of people I don't know. I will assert one comparison though: while Democrats and Republicans doubtlessly both have many stupid voters, on the Republican side the dumbest also see to be the most politically engaged.

This is one of the several basic differences in the parties right now. And it is probably the most important.

She should have just screamed at the sky atleast she did not raided a capitol.

 

[ShinkanPo]

i listened to a podcast by people who practice ken wilbur's "integral spirituality". they were trying to get to the bottom of how it is that a surprising number of their own people had gone down the trump cult route.

this group is typically quite educated and often also affluent and the "integral" approach is a very solid innovatoin of spirituality that incorporates multifaceted dimensions of the human being.

one of the postulations about how this could happen in their group was that in an attempt to get people to not live in their heads and be more in touch with body and heart (something i think is profoundly valuable) they may have placed too much emphasis on feeling your way through life and that made people vulnerable to things that are not true, but can feel true.

q anon is just a bad mythology but it plays upon archetypal themes that are pretty embedded in human consciousness and that are fed to us in revised and updated form in movies and books (think the battle between good and evil). a false narrative that deals with these themes can feel true because of the truth of the themes even though the details of the story are completely fabricated (think garden of eden).

when a false narrative impregnated with archetypal and mythological themes is presented as fact it can feel true to many people because there is truth in it even though the narrative is completely fabricated.

it was very interesting listening to them come to terms with it happening in their camp when presumably that is a system that would be the less vulnerable to magical thinking.

the podcast also dealt with the fact that human kinds ability to know, to know when you actually know, and to digest the kind of scientific information available to us is very limited. on top of that our institutions really do lie to us.

they basically said that we are just not yet able to navigate all of this very well and can and will err all over the place as we move forward.

it also made me think of the new age movement and also today's evangelical christian movement which i think (and i now a lot of people from those groups) are completely out of touch with reality and whose teachers are often the most obvious of con men and women and who have encouraged people to trust their intuition and spirit guides or angels or jesus in ways that are profoundly dangerous and anit reason.


the challenge of today is to keep and preserve the deep body of wisdom and path of spiritual growth contained in the great non dual traditions while embracing fully the newer development of scientific thinking, reason and logic and incorporate all of that into a cohesive whole that neglects neither nor handicaps either one.

personally i think in this age of lying and manipulation practiced by all of our institutions and the corruption of them and the economic disparity and injustice this produces, (the primary cause of the hunger for ct theories and gullibility) and faced with humanities limited ability to know on just about every level, a deep admittance of our limitations and acceptance of them and embracing of them and the precarious place that places us in on this planet could go a long way towards stemming the fear that leads to cult like fanaticism.

There was a topic in a 1997 Discovery Chanel show that talks about upcoming technologies and future internet fad back then the social media is prety much the Bulettin boards/ web forums and the mIRC and one of the guest says there are studies that more and more dis-information is being pumped on the Web and that we are already in an accelarating darkages.

Damn they really called it.

They were taking about this in 1997!

 

[Whippy McGee]

It so pathetic to watch places like CNN focus on the fringe: QANON, Greene, Jan. 6.... like they even matter in the big picture and the little dupes follow right along. QANON and Greene have zero power... they are tiny blips, but focus on that while The U.S. Government transfers trillions to the Oligarchs that pay CNN's, WaPo's, etc.. salaries.

Look a squirrel!!!!