Saturday, December 11, 2021

Q about Q

Items like "in Dallas, hundreds of QAnon followers have gathered for about a month near Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, believing he and his namesake son are going to show up — either having faked their deaths or after being resurrected." seem a little sideways. This smells like a smear--find some nuts at an event and imply that they represent the whole group. Or maybe it misrepresents what went on completely. I'm reluctant to assume the story tells me anything about Qanon.

Has anyone researched how extensive this sort of thing is in Qanon? I'm not eager to go diving in the swamp, and if someone who has can tell the rest of us I'd appreciate it. (For the instance mentioned, my inclination would read "a hundred" for "hundreds" and flesh out the group with more of the curious than true believers. But I've been wrong before.)

On the face of it this kind of belief seems more like Heaven's Gate than a run-of-the-mill conspiracy theory. You'd think it would be hard to sustain it in the face of mockery. But if people cluster only with their own, having little secret recognition signals....

People don't seem eager to check things out for themselves. If JFK faked his assassination, he'd be ... lets see ... 104 years old by now. OTOH, that's fairly sane compared to solipsism run wild.

If all news is driven by interested parties and untrustworthy, what's left? What friends tell you? At least they're trustworthy--for some domains of trust. "Influencer" is a scary word, isn't it? Not teacher, or persuader, or example ...

1 comment:

  1. My suspicions are yours. I know people who believe some crazy things, as that was my career. But shared crazy things are a different matter entirely, and it is hard to sustain unless you control a group's entire environment, as with Jonestown. It's fun to pretend there are lots of these folks, as you can congratulate yourself that "our people" don't believe anything like that.

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