Thread by @AlexandraErin

It's funny, QAnon people telling me that I've been brainwashed by TV news propaganda.

I don't watch TV news.

I do watch Q information channels online. I read the tags. I see the same things they do, more regularly than I read the news even.

Reading it with knowledge of how con artists work, how cults work, how vague and portentous sounding "prophecy" works, how the human brain works in terms of finding patterns and filling in gaps...

Q is such obvious garbage. It's not even good garbage.

You basically have to be rabid in your soul to fall for Q. And some of the people in the QAnon cult were like that already, violent people looking for something to be angry about. And some weren't, but the specter of children in danger and elites flouting the law made them so.

Q promises targets for hatred, for the purest, hottest, whitest hatred you can ever imagine. Targets WORTHY of your darkest dreams of torture and dismemberment. Public executions preceded by public humiliation. Worst punishment you can imagine, Q'll find someone who deserves it.

But Q also promises victims whose innocence is worthy of that bloody vengeance, victims whose lost innocence and lives you can mourn, future potential victims who might still be saved... literally *ideal* victims, children the Q followers will never meet or interact with or see.

Q invites cult members to engage the darkest parts of their id twice over, first in imagining the filthy horrors the elite cadre of Literally Satanic Literal Baby-Eating Monster Pedophiles are inflicting on the idealized children they imagine, and then in imagining punishments.

The promise of Q is that you can log into an anonymous internet account and shout filthy invective at a woman who is beautiful and rich and famous married to a husband who is all those things and they have a storybook life... and you can harass her about it and be the good guy.

Q is a religion that expiates your sins not by telling you that you are forgiven or you can be better, but by telling you "There are worse people out there than you. There are worse monsters in the night than trolls. So go forth and troll for great justice. Justice is coming."

People keep chiming in to mention stuff the Trump regime is doing and that the Q cult ignores or cheers on... I get it, but I don't think you understand how far divorced this is from anything having to do with actual politics, or Trump's normal base, rabid though they are.

Trump is a savior to them. Anything he does is good, morally good. Separating children at the border? That's just more proof. Why would he do it if the children weren't in danger? So the children must be trafficked. To them, it proves everything they believe about specific people

Any actual news of child trafficking rings being broken -- often on efforts that far predate the Trump regime, that he had nothing to do with -- and they go, "Oh yeah? If [this Hollywood actor] isn't a pedophile, how do you explain all the child trafficking busts?"

To the Q crowd, impeachment and everything around it is about one thing and one thing only: the elite scrambling to remove the superheroic messiah figure (Trump) who is the only one who can take them down. Everything else is details. Noise.

And some of you are probably thinking "that sounds like Trump's normal base to me."

Sure. When you try to put things into words, they can wind up sounding similar. "Composed primarily of water" and "has bones in it" accurately describes both myself and the Atlantic Ocean.