QAnon Was a Theory on a Message Board. Now It’s Headed to Congress
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
I'm not very familiar with the details, but things like these do raise eyebrows and in other cases result in much more skepticism - see the doubtful light in which Epsteins death is still viewed.
Not true, that was fabricated by people but is commonly believed among many folks because it aligns with their "side".
The idea that Donald J. Trump is a white knight in the fight against child exploitation must be doubly hurtful to his victims.
Re-watch some classic '80s movies. Notice how the way men and women relate is kind of stalkery by todays standards, even if you're not woke.
Consider: Trump was a coked-up party boy rich kid revered by the coked-up party boy rich kids in Manhattan during the '80s. Do you think they were checking drivers licenses as they were banging hookers and strippers? Even if he didn't actually seek it out (a charitable assumption), it's very likely he's had sex with underage women.
Never mind the rape allegations, never mind the comments, the behaviour, the obvious personality / mental defects. Nope he's our ally in protecting underage women. Madness.
Litmus test: your 22 year old intelligent attractive daughter wants to be a staffer in a presidential campaign. You say avoid Bill Clinton, but hey Trump's a really good guy. Feel free to go on an overnight with him.
He called Ted Cruz’s wife “ugly” and Cruz is still supporting him.
The world is full of open secrets that can't be proved in court. It's a long way from "person X shows telltale signs of being corrupt in the way that many people in his role have repeatedly been shown to be corrupt" (my position) to some wild conspiracy theory involving basic misunderstandings of medicine, chemistry, biology, people, politics, history, espionage ...
How do you hold these 2 conflicting things in your head: 1) It was okay for the entire establishment (including elected officials) and media to spread (and claim as fact) conspiracy theories about the President being involved with Russians with zero evidence of such, and 2) It's not okay for random people to organize and share memes about an alleged gov't conspiracy?
Russiagate conspiracy
Ukraine hoax
Jussie Smollett hoax
Bubba Wallace hoax
Covington Catholic Highschool hoax
Kavanaugh hoax
Doesn't report majority of the facts of Epstein case fairly
Riots are called "peaceful protests"
Antifa is called a "myth"
Looking at the Wikileaks emails is called "illegal" by media
Now they wonder why Qanon is catching up?
EDIT: I am saying this as someone who thinks Qanon is bs. But the same people who spread misinformation for years now questioning the spread of a conspiracy theory is quite hypocritical. Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
IMHO both sides are guilty of this. Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump were all constantly hit by any allegation anyone could find to throw at them, and many of them were and are over-inflated or outright bullshit.
The campaign is the same. Trump spends more time shitting on other people and trolling on Twitter than talking about what he believes or wants to do, and Biden is basically running as "a dude who is not Donald Trump." Neither candidate is particularly exciting. I'll be once again voting for the least horrible of the two.
Nobody discusses the issues, and nobody ever tries to problem solve.
Personally I think it's a form of bikeshedding. People would rather sling mud than talk issues and problem solve because all the issues we face are really hard and there are huge vested interests who like the status quo and don't want anything "fixed."
Edit: feel like people are knee jerking to this. I am not necessarily claiming there isn't corruption, just that there is not enough focus on actual ideas and too much focus on personalities.
When McClain was running for President and one of his supporters started the “birther” bullshit, McCain shut them down. People insist on claiming that what the crazies (the subset not saying all Republicans are crazy) are doing in the modern Republican Party is normal politics. Neither Bush, McCain, Romney or any of the serious Republican candidates for President in 2016 were anywhere near this unhinged.
Edit:
I still don’t understand how it is controversial to say that neither traditional Democrat or Republicans are anything like this. Which side takes this as a negative?
It’s a bit like my southerner friends with Battle Flag bumperstickers calling themselves members of the party of Lincoln.
We do in fact live in a democracy. It's a dysfunctional one, but it is one. The people get what the people elect.
P.S. In many ways primaries are more critical than main elections. This is particularly true in states that lean strongly toward one party or the other. In that case the primary is the election.
In last iteration, it’s not clear that there is an agenda on the right other than staying in power and tweaking the left. The left does appear to have a strategy and if we believe what the right says, they would agree there is.
Health care is a really hard problem with huge vested interests and what we got is not some weird outlier from those points. But one party did something and another just said NO.
Maybe a good place to start would be some kind of annotation / wiki overlay for the text of the bills that the legislature publishes.
No hoax there, just misunderstandings (and probably somebody's old, unnoticed attempt at harassing some other driver or driver's team). See https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nascar/news/bubba-wallace-no... for an outline of what happened: there was genuinely a noose tied on the pull rope of exactly one out of 1,684 garage stalls, but it had been there since at least October 2019. That it was Bubba Wallace's team that noticed it was coincidence, but it seemed targeted to him at the time because of the unlikeliness of it.
Did Bubba Wallace ever say "Hey folks, it looks like it was all a big misunderstanding. My thanks to the fellow NASCAR drivers who supported me before we realized this". No; he doubled down.
A "noose" big enough for a cat, maybe. Certainly not a human being.
At least you acknowledge that Wallace was never the target. But I repeat, sometimes a knot is just a knot.
> A "noose" big enough for a cat, maybe. Certainly not a human being.
A small noose is still obviously either a threat or a sick joke in very bad humor.
A real "threat or a sick joke" would surely have used a human-sized noose hung somewhere else, as opposed to a hand-sized knot quite appropriate for its role as a pull handle for a garage door.