Thread by @egavactip

I made a post a few minutes ago about the ability of QAnon adherents to believe the most outrageous things. It amazes me but does not *surprise* me, because I've encountered this before.

I want to tell you that story.

Back in the early 1990s, a sovereign citizen from Colorado named Roy Schwasinger and a motley crew of accomplices embarked upon a multi-million scam across many states and two provinces of Canada.

Although I'm simplifying a bit, Roy claimed that since 1933, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, there was no such thing as money (a belief at the core of the sovereign citizen movement), and thus almost every action of the U.S. government since 1933 was illegal.

Enterprising patriots had uncovered this unlawfulness and launched a class action lawsuit against the federal government (he pointed to an actual lawsuit--though one that had been dismissed by the courts). This suit, he and his accomplices would tell audiences, went all the way

up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the people, against the government, with a judgment of some $600 trillion dollars. Even now, Delta Force commandos were retrieving gold that had been illegally moved out of the U.S. by the government.

If you were a party to this suit, you could expect a handsome reward. Never went to college? Expect a million bucks. Denied a loan? A million bucks. Foreclosed upon? A million bucks. All told, the average man, woman or child could expect to get back about $21 million from

the government. Now how could you be a part of this chocolatey goodness? Well, Congress had appointed Roy's organization, called "We the People," to be the ones to process all the claims. And for a mere $300 filing fee, you could join the class action lawsuit--and get your

$21 million dollars when everything was adjudicated. And, in seminar after seminar, in $300 increments, Roy and his accomplices got money in buckets from the eager believers--regardless of how completely outlandish the claims were. And let me just say that the outlandishness

did not stop there. Roy, a former meatpacker from Nebraska, told audiences that he had actually done special ops for the government for years, that he had a license to kill from the government, and that the U.S. Navy had actually secretly executed some 170 judges and

attorneys in 1993. None of this seemed too crazy for his audiences to believe. I've seen a We the People seminar on videotape, and these guys were not slick-talking hucksters who could effortlessly spin an elaborate yarn. The ones I saw--I did not see Roy but some of his

accomplices--presented themselves as simple, ordinary, even homespun. They seemed much like their audiences, who felt a connection, who--and this is important--*wanted* to believe. In the late 1990s I worked with a Colorado DOJ investigator who had the case and I heard his

presentation on We the People a number of times--and each time marveled at what people would believe. Schwasinger himself got 9 years in prison for the scam, and 15 years in a related case, and several of his accomplices were also convicted, though not all.

In the late 1990s, when the bizarre NESARA conspiracy theory emerged, my radar warnings went off, because it was such a similar type of theory that I felt sure there was going to be another big scam behind it. But NESARA went a different way, and had a much longer life--it is

still around today. But there is a connection, in that NESARA eventually incorporated a highly distored version of the Roy Schwasinger/We the People story into its own lore, which is widely distributed today.

Read, for example, this version of the We the People story and

compare it to my description above: sites.google.com/view/nesara-la…. Roy and his crazy theories live on, though Roy himself is dead.

And NESARA itself, I should note, has in recent years been incorporated into QAnon lore, which means that Roy Schwasinger has, too. In essence, that

scammer from 30 years ago still lives on in people's heads today.

So, no, I am not *surprised* at the crazy things QAnoners believe, because I've encountered that level of suspension of disbelief before.

But I do still marvel at the ability of the human brain to accept the

craziest, most ridiculous and outlandish assertions and claims out there, claims that one would think would not stand up to a moment of scrutiny or critical thinking. And indeed they would not--but they always manage to reach those credulous people who simply *want* to believe.