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QAnon Was a Theory on a Message Board. Now It’s Headed to Congress

26 points by chanfest22 6y ago

blisseyGo 6y ago
The same people who publicly supported the: 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.
- komradeKow 6y ago
  You are getting downvoted big time by the woke libs on this board. Very few, if any, however will respond. And their silence will be deafening
- JabavuAdams 6y ago
  The claims of QAnon are a bit more ... ah ... extreme. Believing it requires ignorance of so many different areas that it's not in the same league.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    See, for example, the whole "Pizzagate" thing, with the claims that a child trafficking ring was being run out of the basement of one particular pizza place in D.C.... a pizza place that has been proven to have never had a basement in the first place.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- api 6y ago
  I don't agree with all of what you're insinuating, but overall I think you're onto something. Even if some of these allegations have legs, it's sad that our politics mostly revolves around an endless search for the next something-"gate" instead of really discussing the issues. It's a form of deep anti-intellectualism. 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.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    This is in no way a “both sides” argument. None of the other Presidents actually encouraged the wild conspiracy theories. 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?
    - hindsightbias 6y ago
      Where did all those traditional Republicans go? It’s a bit like my southerner friends with Battle Flag bumperstickers calling themselves members of the party of Lincoln.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  > Bubba Wallace hoax 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-noose-hoax-nascar-facts/97l45h1k337m1ugxiat5k4wzu 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.
  - TMWNN 6y ago
    >No hoax there, just misunderstandings (and probably somebody's old, unnoticed attempt at harassing some other driver or driver's team). 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.
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      See his statement to that effect: https://twitter.com/BubbaWallace/status/1275844030144950272 https://twitter.com/BubbaWallace/status/1275844030144950272
      - TMWNN 6y ago
        I hadn't seen this. I was referring to his interview with Don Lemon before the tweet, in which he indeed doubled down on the noose angle. https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/6/24/bubba-wallace-don-lemon-whatever-fbi-says-noose-was-hung https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/6/24/bubba-wallace-don-le... He put the tweet out after being rightly mocked for not admitting that sometimes a knot is just a knot.
        crooked-v 6y ago
        It was very much not 'just a knot': it was very clearly a noose, and as I already mentioned, it was confirmed at the time that only that single garage stall out of all of them at every NASCAR track had the pull rope tied in that way. It turned out that it hadn't been put there to target Bubba Wallace, but it was still even at best a sick joke in bad humor put there by some previous inhabitant of that garage stall.
- dang 6y ago
  It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Can you please not? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of what politics/ideology you favor, because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to be for. Thus we have to moderate against it,
- aww_dang 6y ago
  It is curious how the media has reached this point of cognitive dissonance. Each side has their own set of "facts". Synthesis isn't especially enlightening either. I don't think you are alone in observing the absurdity of it all.
JabavuAdams 6y ago
As I grow older I keep thinking I won't be surprised/amused/alarmed by further examples of broken human thinking but nope. It just keeps coming. 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.
- dannyw 6y ago
  This is quite an unsubstantiated area to go off on and on the same path as conspiracies like QAon.
  - JabavuAdams 6y ago
    Not at all. It just requires some life experience with humans as opposed to being book smart. 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 ...
- scarface74 6y ago
  I don’t see the problem. According to the apologists, “both sides” have Presidents/Presidential candidates that are publicly recorded joking about forcibly “grabbing women by the pussy”. He called Ted Cruz’s wife “ugly” and Cruz is still supporting him.
Kednicma 6y ago
To get to facts: One of Q's tenets is that Pizzagate [0] was in the right direction. I humbly but firmly suggest that it was in the wrong direction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
- crooked-v 6y ago
  See also the recent usage of "#savethechildren" to promote nonsense like Pizzagate, while drowning out the efforts of actual child aid organizations.
- happytoexplain 6y ago
  This post pretty well sums up every opinion I've ever heard about Qanon that didn't come from somebody ranting irrationally about identity politics. This kind of thing is the universal endpoint for people who have a psychological need to be a part of a "side" in a sociopolitical "us vs them", but can not cope with the cognitive dissonance that such a binary demands by nature.
- s9w 6y ago
  That article neither contains the words "bullet" nor "camera" - so without reading (and without having a strong opinion on the thing in itself) it's evident that it's a typical Wikipedia article: Missing the most important facts and only having the goal of telling you what to think.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    And what is the significance of those words supposed to be?
    - s9w 6y ago
      I think a traffic camera which would usually overlook the place was turned off or faced away shortly before this happened so there's no video of it. And the only bullet fired conveniently hit and destroyed the harddrive of some computer. 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.
gfosco 6y ago
QAnon is so mild, it's bonkers the coverage it's getting. The whole thing revolves around the idea of "the patriots are in control, trust the plan, justice is coming, enjoy the show"... It's like a sedative, and harmless in my opinion. Whoever is LARPing as Q hasn't even posted in August, but the media is amping up coverage and increasing search interest (why?). 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?
- igetspam 6y ago
  Thy believe Gates is behind COVID because he wants to inject us all with AI. This is not harmless. This is an attempt to dissuade people from vaccination. People will die. Stupid people, sure but those stupid people will still infect others. Many still have kids who don't know their parents are lunatics. (I have family who subscribe to this garbage. It's insane.)
  - gfosco 6y ago
    Thanks for this elitist mind-reading and fear-mongering.

26 points by chanfest22 6y ago

The same people who publicly supported the: 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.

komradeKow 6y ago
You are getting downvoted big time by the woke libs on this board. Very few, if any, however will respond. And their silence will be deafening
JabavuAdams 6y ago
The claims of QAnon are a bit more ... ah ... extreme. Believing it requires ignorance of so many different areas that it's not in the same league.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  See, for example, the whole "Pizzagate" thing, with the claims that a child trafficking ring was being run out of the basement of one particular pizza place in D.C.... a pizza place that has been proven to have never had a basement in the first place.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
api 6y ago
I don't agree with all of what you're insinuating, but overall I think you're onto something. Even if some of these allegations have legs, it's sad that our politics mostly revolves around an endless search for the next something-"gate" instead of really discussing the issues. It's a form of deep anti-intellectualism. 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.
- scarface74 6y ago
  This is in no way a “both sides” argument. None of the other Presidents actually encouraged the wild conspiracy theories. 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?
  - hindsightbias 6y ago
    Where did all those traditional Republicans go? It’s a bit like my southerner friends with Battle Flag bumperstickers calling themselves members of the party of Lincoln.
crooked-v 6y ago
> Bubba Wallace hoax 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-noose-hoax-nascar-facts/97l45h1k337m1ugxiat5k4wzu 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.
- TMWNN 6y ago
  >No hoax there, just misunderstandings (and probably somebody's old, unnoticed attempt at harassing some other driver or driver's team). 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.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    See his statement to that effect: https://twitter.com/BubbaWallace/status/1275844030144950272 https://twitter.com/BubbaWallace/status/1275844030144950272
    - TMWNN 6y ago
      I hadn't seen this. I was referring to his interview with Don Lemon before the tweet, in which he indeed doubled down on the noose angle. https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/6/24/bubba-wallace-don-lemon-whatever-fbi-says-noose-was-hung https://www.advocate.com/news/2020/6/24/bubba-wallace-don-le... He put the tweet out after being rightly mocked for not admitting that sometimes a knot is just a knot.
      - crooked-v 6y ago
        It was very much not 'just a knot': it was very clearly a noose, and as I already mentioned, it was confirmed at the time that only that single garage stall out of all of them at every NASCAR track had the pull rope tied in that way. It turned out that it hadn't been put there to target Bubba Wallace, but it was still even at best a sick joke in bad humor put there by some previous inhabitant of that garage stall.
dang 6y ago
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. Can you please not? It's against the rules (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), regardless of what politics/ideology you favor, because it destroys the curiosity this site is supposed to be for. Thus we have to moderate against it,
aww_dang 6y ago
It is curious how the media has reached this point of cognitive dissonance. Each side has their own set of "facts". Synthesis isn't especially enlightening either. I don't think you are alone in observing the absurdity of it all.

JabavuAdams 6y ago

As I grow older I keep thinking I won't be surprised/amused/alarmed by further examples of broken human thinking but nope. It just keeps coming. 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.

dannyw 6y ago
This is quite an unsubstantiated area to go off on and on the same path as conspiracies like QAon.
- JabavuAdams 6y ago
  Not at all. It just requires some life experience with humans as opposed to being book smart. 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 ...
scarface74 6y ago
I don’t see the problem. According to the apologists, “both sides” have Presidents/Presidential candidates that are publicly recorded joking about forcibly “grabbing women by the pussy”. He called Ted Cruz’s wife “ugly” and Cruz is still supporting him.

Kednicma 6y ago

To get to facts: One of Q's tenets is that Pizzagate [0] was in the right direction. I humbly but firmly suggest that it was in the wrong direction. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory

crooked-v 6y ago
See also the recent usage of "#savethechildren" to promote nonsense like Pizzagate, while drowning out the efforts of actual child aid organizations.
happytoexplain 6y ago
This post pretty well sums up every opinion I've ever heard about Qanon that didn't come from somebody ranting irrationally about identity politics. This kind of thing is the universal endpoint for people who have a psychological need to be a part of a "side" in a sociopolitical "us vs them", but can not cope with the cognitive dissonance that such a binary demands by nature.
s9w 6y ago
That article neither contains the words "bullet" nor "camera" - so without reading (and without having a strong opinion on the thing in itself) it's evident that it's a typical Wikipedia article: Missing the most important facts and only having the goal of telling you what to think.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  And what is the significance of those words supposed to be?
  - s9w 6y ago
    I think a traffic camera which would usually overlook the place was turned off or faced away shortly before this happened so there's no video of it. And the only bullet fired conveniently hit and destroyed the harddrive of some computer. 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.

gfosco 6y ago

QAnon is so mild, it's bonkers the coverage it's getting. The whole thing revolves around the idea of "the patriots are in control, trust the plan, justice is coming, enjoy the show"... It's like a sedative, and harmless in my opinion. Whoever is LARPing as Q hasn't even posted in August, but the media is amping up coverage and increasing search interest (why?). 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?

igetspam 6y ago
Thy believe Gates is behind COVID because he wants to inject us all with AI. This is not harmless. This is an attempt to dissuade people from vaccination. People will die. Stupid people, sure but those stupid people will still infect others. Many still have kids who don't know their parents are lunatics. (I have family who subscribe to this garbage. It's insane.)
- gfosco 6y ago
  Thanks for this elitist mind-reading and fear-mongering.