Q-uestions for Congress (the FBI, CIA, DHS & NSA) – Part 1

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