Somehow I had already forgotten that, IN MID-FEBRUARY OF THIS YEAR,
the VERY conservative American Enterprise Institute found 29% of white evangelicals said it was "completely" or "mostly" accurate that Trump was fighting a cabal of pedophile Dems. 🙃🙃
The article is worth a read, BTW, because it has really interesting breakdowns on prevalence of QAnon belief by race and religion.
Oh! I should add -- this survey may actually UNDER-report the prevalence of that belief, since at least one other reputable survey found approximately 50% of Republicans believing that top Democrats are involved in child-sex-trafficking rings.
So: 🙃🙃🙃
What the hell, one more for the road:
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As you can see on the FULL graph (click in to expand, naturally), there was a tiny bit of Q-related content leaking onto the wider Internet almost from the start.
Reddit content was at first largely confined to r/conspiracy, and there were a few YouTubers covering Q early on.
So at the VERY beginning -- the period I'm mostly concerned with -- Q was largely a 4chan phenomenon. The data makes it *look* like YouTube, rather than Reddit, was the key driver of QAnon reaching a wider audience.
This is possible, but we don't have info on *views.*
Now... y'all know what a funnel is, right? Just in case you don't, here you go: it's a device that starts off broad at the top and narrows down to a tiiiiny little nozzle.
Radicalization is a funnel -- many are called, as it were, but few are chosen.
So is Anon.
Anyone who's curious enough to Google QAnon or watch one of their recruitment videos or what-have-you has entered the sales funnel.
But wait, why summarize? I can let Gander take it from here:
And more conventional right-wingers do share ideological sympathies with their fellows in other countries.
I wouldn't say they COOPERATE much, because right-wingers who participate in electoral politics are going to be pretty well focused *on those electoral politics.*
UPDATE: Oh boy. Seth's thread was an EDUCATION for me and, I think, will be one for you too.
Only gonna make one point because it's midnight, but... re: 👇, I absorbed a secularized version of this and STILL had a lotta cognitive dissonance abt America's past.
I can't IMAGINE how hard it would have been to stop doing... ::gestures:: all the whataboutism and deflection and "well, was it really so bad"-ness...
if I had believed that all of the atrocities were ordained by God to give America to white people, which was Seth's background.
I know most folks don't click links, so let me give you a brief summary. First, we've all had this EXPERIENCE, right? A Q person dances around questions endlessly, refuses to state their beliefs, and says "do your own research."
So Gander asks: what's the FUNCTION of that reply?
Well, almost certainly the Q believer has a *bunch* of Q-related beliefs that you'd reject out of hand. They want to pill you, and they know the interaction just... WILL NOT GO in that direction if they come right out and say what they believe.
I've long talked about how Q's North Korea storyline is the weirdest thing about him. Most of Q's conspiracy theories are generic, but "The CIA runs North Korea?"
That's OUT there.
Today I learned about a far-right podcaster who did an episode in April 2017 claiming thaaat:
Does that mean *for sure* that Q stole his claim from this guy? No.
Am I gonna spend a bunch of time researching it? No; I have other stuff to do and, at a cursory glance, there's very little meat on these bones. Not much to analyze.
But here's what I do have.
Really the most notable thing about his video is that, though the title currently says "(satire)," no one in the comments took it as satirical. Reception to his claim was, overall, warm but mixed.
On Twitter, incidentally, he WAS aware that Q was promoting his ideas: