Friday, February 05, 2021

CLEEK'S LAW EXPLAINS QANON'S POST-TRUMP SURVIVAL

An NPR story suggests that the survival of QAnon now that Donald Trump is out of office is puzzling.
Inauguration Day should have punctured the conspiracy theory at the heart of QAnon.

Adherents of the discredited extremist ideology falsely believe that former President Trump is a savior who will stay in power as he wages a war against a cabal of satanic pedophiles...

Yet even with their hero out of office, QAnon's fiercest followers will find a way to adapt to the new reality by clinging onto more lies that suit their movement, says Travis View, who hosts QAnon Anonymous, a podcast that tracks and debunks online conspiracy theories.

"This is not something that is just going to go away," View tells Audie Cornish on All Things Considered.

In fact, the QAnon community has survived multiple unrealized predictions preached on Internet message boards since 2017....

"The belief systems and the conspiracy theories that sustain the movement don't come from Trump or Q or any specific leader — it's sort of crowdsourced and self-generated," View says. "It really is about the community and the feeling that they have some sort of inside information about what's going to happen, so there's really no head of the snake. There's not one thing you can take out that will make the entire movement fizzle."
QAnon isn't just sustained by the person its followers worship. It's sustained by hatred for its enemies.

Here's Marjorie Taylor Greene on Twitter a few days ago:



A decade ago, we learned Cleek's Law:
Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.
QAnon warps that for a conspiratorial age: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what we think liberals want today.

They always thought we wanted to take their guns and subject them to an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-God, anti-heterosexuality totalitarian dictatorship. That's what they believed before QAnon. Now they think we want to rape and mutilate children for the adrenochrome, and so we can wear their faces as masks. Someone in the Q-sphere, I assume, will tell them we want even worse things.

They'll keep believing. Maybe they'll decide that the hero who'll rescue them from us isn't Trump, but Mike Lindell, or Greene herself. But as long as they hate us, QAnon will never completely die.

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