MORMON HISTORY MOMENT (because it’s my account and you can’t stop me):

After Joseph Smith died, Brigham Young *did* claim control of the main body of the church & eventually moved it west.

But there were other claimants, including Smith’s first wife, Emma. Let’s talk about her!
Emma Smith started a Mormon offshoot church (which still exists to this day!) based, essentially, on her profound, BURNING need *not to admit* — not to the public, not to her son, and maybe not even to herself — that her late husband had had dozens of wives.
This is what I meant in the OP (or the thing I quoted in the OP) when I said the claim you make when starting a new religion, or a new conspiracy theory, or a new political movement, doesn’t have to be true.

It only has to meet your emotional needs, & maybe feel truthy as well.
The offshoot church — previously called the Reformed Latter-Day Saints and now called, unless I misremember, the Community of Christ — is a pretty chill, liberal version of Mormonism.

It has a splendid temple in Independence, MO that’s well worth a visit if you’re in town.
I don’t really know what I think about the founding lie (because it IS a lie) that gave birth to the RLDS.

I can see why Emma would want to build a world where the most painful fact of her life Just Wasn’t True(tm). I can’t say I blame her for doing it, either.
History is weird and people are complicated and life is very hard and very painful.

And maybe that should make me feel more sympathetic to the MAGA mob. Maybe. But… it’s hard to do that when the wellspring of *their* reality inversion field is a desire for Trump to be dictator.

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More from @QOrigins

10 Nov
This is why it's futile for Democrats to retreat from the issue of race. They HAVE to fight for a multiracial democracy and call the opposition what it is.
In this respect, the Democrats could stand to take a leaf from Abe Lincoln's book -- or from his campaign song, "Lincoln and Liberty."

"We'll finish the temple of freedom
And make it capacious within
That all who seek shelter may find it
Whatever the hue of their skin."
I like the next verse too:

"Success to the old-fashioned doctrine
That men are created all free
And down with the power of the despot
Wherever his stronghold may be."

Those two verses are the *exact opposite* of what the Republican Party stands for in 2021. And we know it.
Read 4 tweets
9 Nov
This is 100% the deal with the “decertify” crowd.

They don’t care that there’s no such thing as “decertifying” an election. They don’t care that Biden won in a free and fair election.

Their emotional identity is so bound up in Trumpism they can’t tolerate his being out of power
Doesn’t matter that installing Trump as an unelected dictator — which is hat they’re really talking about, what they’re really advocating for — is *profoundly* un-American, finding no precedent in our national history or American values.

Hell, they can’t acknowledge THAT either!
Because their identity is ALSO bound up in the idea that they “love the constitution.”

When their actions —such as, again, advocating for an unelected dictator to be installed over the United St in defiance of the constitutional procedures for *how we elect presidents*— ahem.
Read 6 tweets
9 Nov
“Khazarian” is, for reasons too stupid to burden you with, a code for “Jews.”

But *otherwise* this is dead on target w/how QAnon people talk about Australia: they’ve constructed a fantasy alternate reality in which a foreign land labors beneath the yoke of a COVID dictatorship.
It will be REALLY interesting to see if a Scandinavian version of this catches on.
It’s also worth noting that, in the conservative imagination, both Australia and Scandinavia are *white*, which might make them especially attractive locations for imaginary COVID dictatorships—the imaginary *resisters*, like the Q people, will be overwhelmingly white.
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
A lot of conservatives seem to think that "woke people" view whites as intrinsically evil by dint of their race.

This is a lie!

White privilege is exactly the kind of social arrangement set up by conquerors *everywhere* throughout world history.

We reject it *bc it's unjust.*
So it's not that white people are somehow uniquely evil. That would be a ridiculous assertion to make.

They're doing what people *do* with power -- they've created institutions and practices that bestow privileges upon them, making it less likely they'll LOSE their power...
and more likely that they, and their descendants, will *keep* that position of social power -- which, after all, makes their lives easier in various ways, small and large, visible and invisible.

And everyone likes having an easier life!

There's nothing unique about that.
Read 4 tweets
4 Nov
Yep. I would also add that they were good recordkeepers — I would bet you $10 that they kept a Word file or .txt or something with the text of their drops, bc you can see them stitching text together in various places (for instance, drop 6 is a pastiche of drops 4 & 5).
You can also see this with the lost drops; content from them is recycled into later canonical drops.

This raises a question: why didn’t Q care that not all of their content was captured in the images that were circulating on 4chan, which *supposedly* represented all Q’s posts?
If you believe in Q as a prophetic figure, that really IS a problem — everything they posted is vitally important, but IIRC many of the early graphics started with what’s now canonical drop 14. And Q didn’t object to this at all!

Q didn’t say “look harder, I first posted 10/28.”
Read 9 tweets
3 Nov
May I humbly suggest that elected Democrats stop calling their opposition “Republicans” and start calling them “the party of January 6th?”

Never, *ever* miss a chance to call them what they are. Label them with that shit. *Define* them with that shit. Put them on the back foot!
“But Origins,” you say, “that’s clunky and unnatural.”

So what? So were Newt Gingrich’s appellations for Democrats. But they worked. They changed political culture in this country and tarnished the Democratic Party’s brand.
Moreover, it’s not all that clunky! Here, try this on for size:

“My opponent, from the Party of January 6th…”

Or

“The Party of January 6th can’t be trusted with power—not at any level. And do you know why? Because they’ll use it to make sure the NEXT coup succeeds.”
Read 4 tweets

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