The Deprogramming Dilemma - 14
Q-uestions for Congress (the FBI, CIA, DHS &
NSA) – Part 1
By D-Jay
What is the world to make of QAnon?
And what are we to do about it?
After seeing the myriad of Q shirts, flags and
symbols on prominent display in the 1/6 Trump terrorist attack on the Capitol,
you might have thought this most insane of movements couldn’t be much worse
than that.
You would be wrong.
Not only is the Q cult tearing apart our country,
we now know that it is also taking a wreaking ball to families, friendships and
local communities – to say nothing of the lives and psyches of the people
caught up in it.
If you haven’t seen it yet, please do take a look
at this Pulitzer-worthy article by Greg
Jaffe and Jose A. Del Real in a recent edition of the Washington Post. Titled, Life amid the ruins of QAnon: ‘I
wanted my family back,’ with the subhead, An epidemic of conspiracy
theories, fanned by social media and self-serving politicians, is tearing
families apart, the lengthy essay offers an excellent overview on the human
damage being done by the movement.
A few choice excerpts:
She bought ammunition, camping gear, a
water purifier and boxes of canned food. Then, Tyler’s mother started wearing a
holstered pistol around the house, convinced that 10 days of unrest and mass
power outages were coming. Tyler, 24,
had been living with his mother an hour north of Minneapolis since he graduated
college in 2019. The paranoia and fear that had engulfed his home had become unbearable
in the months since Trump began to falsely claim that the 2020 election had
been stolen from him.
Family members spoke of their loved ones as
if they were cult members or drug addicts, sucked in by social media companies
and self-serving politicians who warped their views of reality. They begged and
bargained with parents and partners to put down their phones for just a few
days in the hope that the spell might be interrupted and they might return to
their old selves.
The anguish was playing out behind closed
doors in therapists’ offices, where overwhelmed family members were seeking
advice. And it was painfully clear on QAnonCasualties, the Reddit group where
Tyler had turned for support. The group
offered a rough barometer of the growing turmoil. Since last summer it had
grown from about 10,000 members to more than 130,000 in the days after Joe
Biden’s inauguration.
Lots more to be found in the piece, but you get
the idea.
Like families, reports are also coming in of once
peaceful local communities also being torn apart by the crazed fantasy
cult. A piece in Bloomberg CityLab by Laura
Bliss about the problems being faced by Sequim (pronounced “Skwim”), a town of
7,200 in Washington State’s bucolic Olympic Peninsula, nicely illustrates the
disturbing nationwide trend.
According to Ms. Bliss, the town, “had been
battling over the construction of an opioid treatment clinic. On Jan. 11, the
mayor — whose sympathies are known to lie with the clinic’s opposition — called
a motion at a city council meeting to remove the longtime city manager, who’d
played a role in approving the facility.”
A strictly local issue, right?
Not so fast.
She continues (shortened slightly):
But this wasn’t the usual small-town
infighting over local development. Mayor William Armacost had raised eyebrows
months earlier for sharing far-right memes and links promoting the QAnon
conspiracy theory on Facebook; in August, he’d defended QAnon on a local radio
show. So when the mayor, presiding over the Zoom meeting with a “Blue Lives
Matter” Punisher skull pinned to his lapel, tallied the 4-2 vote in favor of
ousting city manager Charlie Bush, some Sequimites saw something more sinister.
“So much of what is happening here is
anti-democratic at its core,” said Brian Grad, a liberal activist and former
Navy careerist who retired to Sequim. To Grad, the presence of a QAnon-boosting
mayor, making decisions on behalf of the city, is a troubling sign that the
intense partisanship and conspiratorial rhetoric that suffused national
politics during the Trump administration — particularly in its tumultuous final
months — have migrated to the local stage.
Beyond its status as a microcosm of the national
scene, the Sequim story should be studied for its playbook-like qualities,
experts who track far-right movements say. Lindsay Schubiner, a program
director at Western States Center, a social justice organization that tracks
far-right and white supremacist organizations, warns, “What we’re seeing in
Sequim, with a defense of QAnon and an attempt to remove the city manager and
undermine the local municipal institution, is so much in line with messaging
and strategies that we’re seeing from the far-right nationally. These are
troubling cases of people representing dangerous far-right movements,
essentially taking over local governments.”
We’re in trouble, folks.
How did such a load of sheer idiocy and insanity
gain so much power – and the ability to do so much damage at so many levels –
so quickly?
This is something new.
Something very, very dangerous.
But what exactly is it?
Who made it?
And why?
These are critical questions that need to be
fully answered and answered soon.
We’ll delve into them further in Part 2 of this
article…coming soon!
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Contributing factors to our democratic decline:
From the Right
Truth
Decay – Destruction of the Ability to Distinguish Fantasy from Reality
Ever
Worsening Demonization of the Media
Manufactured
Distrust of Science and Expertise
The
Iron Bubble of Disinformation
The
Dark Money Conspiracy
Information
Warfare Aimed at Us
Domestic
Terrorism
Emergence
of a Full-blown Cult of Personality
Ongoing
Voter Suppression and Gerrymandering
Election
Security
Continued
Weaponization of Social Media
Toxic
Right-wing Pseudo-Christianity
Racism
Sexism
and a Pseudo-Macho Mentality
Putinism
and the International Neo-Fascist Movement
Lack
of Education in Civics and Critical Thinking Skills
Destruction
of Crucial Democratic Norms
The
Collapse of Good Manners and Propriety
Radicalization
Sedition
From the Left (and Sometimes the Center)
OTT
PC (Over-The-Top Political Correctness)
Inept
Messaging
Lack
of Media Investment
Arrogance
Surrender
of Rural America Without a Fight
Failure
to Call Out and Counteract Toxic Right-Wing Christianity
Failure
to Call Out Right-Wing Racism, Sexism and Fascism for what it is, and
Counteract it in Time
Framing
Too Many Issues as Being Rooted in Race Rather than Economics and Class
Failure
to Recognize Just How Bad Things Can Really Get
Forever
Bringing Beanbags to a Knife Fight
Failure
to Protect Critical Norms
