I am writing this partly as a tool for any who would like to discuss with and maybe turn any of their Republican friends or relatives away from Consperacy Theories and especially the QAnon sites. One on one conversations may have a little affect, but there will need to be more effort put into miniimizing the CT movements.
Back when I was a child (oh so long ago) we had a game that we played sometimes that involved passing a message from person to person to see how the message would come out by the time it reached the last person. We called it “pass it on” (some may have called it “telephone”) or something similar, and it went a little bit like this and the rules could change depending on whos started the game and what they wanted to accomplish. Sometimes we just wanted to see how the message came out by just trying to whisper it down the line. And sometimes we changed the rules to have each person add just a little bit extra to what they passed to the next person. But the end result was often that the message was quite different at the end than what it was from the originator. That is the concept of Qanon. And the more “bats**t crazy the things added, the better the message spreads and the more followers the site develops.
So what is the purpose of QAnon? Money, Money, Money!!! thefederalist.com/… I don’t follow QAnon and little was really reported about the site except for the fact that it was growing in popularity and that it advanced some really crazy theories. But, the thing about crazy theories is they grow a life of their own AND THEY BUILD ON THEMSELVES. What may start from a “little thread of truth” can develope into the most outrageous falsehoods. But the problem is that there is always somebody or somebodies who will “believe anything”. And those somebodies will spread anything and even add their own “facts” to make themselves relevant.
Who is Q? Many QAnon followers think the Q is some deep underground government official who is a secrete ally of Trump and is feeding him information about the “deep state” within our government. Some investigators think they may have found out who Q really is: abcnews.go.com/… And they may be right that they have found the originators of the QAnon consperacy theory site. I won’t question their investigative powers and conclusions, nor will I say that anybody who has admitted to being Q is not Q.
But there is another reality of who is Q. There are many who advance these QAnon theories on their social media sites (of which there are far too many to mention), but FB, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik-Tok are some of the most popular. I don’t know for fact, but I suspect that there is not really a person who is Q in reality. There probably was an originator/originators of the site who advanced the notion of Q, and it probably helped to make the site more popular and draw more followers.
But just like the games we so innocently played as kids, the followers and those who post the CT of the site (and often add their spin to the CT) have inadvertly become Q. They don’t realize it, they may have never visited the QAnon site, they may never have read any post that was identified by the poster as coming from the QAnon site, but if they post something that somebody else has posted that originated from the QAnon site, they are spreading QAnon CT information.
So let’s advance this theory further. If there is not actually a single person or persons who are Q, then who is Q? Q is the person who publiches the CT information. So Q could be your next door neighbor, your CT posting sister/brother/mother/father. Q is the person who advances any of the CT postings thought up by some other person and posted to the QAnon site, or even to their own social media sites. And quite often, the poster may add more bats**t CT to the original post they saw, making the original post become more bizzar.
We have noted the money producing ability of the QAnon site, but there are others that are making profit from it also. We see many articles of wearing apparrel, some sponsered fron the QAnon site, but other commercial outlets are using it also. Here is just one, but I am sure there are others: www.redbubble.com/… And we will probably see many other items, such as jewelry, shoes, bumper stickers, etc.. And many of the wearers may not ever have visited a QAnon site or posted a QAnon post, or beileve a QAnon theory. They are just wearing a fashion. And we have seen that Marjorie Taylor Greene (and many other politicians) are raising money over the controversaries of their QAnon and other CT posts.
So how do we combat Q or QAnon? I doubt that there is a single way for the average person to wage a very successful campaign against Q, QAnon, or any CT. We, as individuals, can possibly have a small affect on individual relationships, but that is inadequate for solving the real problem. Possibly some group efforts may be able to have more affect, but even that may fail (even if there was to be some groups that were willing to take up the projects). MSM could help if they were willing, but some MSM outlets are only spreading it instead of trying to stop the spread. And government regulation would come up against the 1st Amendment right of free speach. And since CT in many different forms have been around for ages, it is hard to combat. Sometimes, it just fades away as fads change, but the internet now helps to spread CT where it wasn’t available in earlier times. But we all must do our part to try to keep it from spreading. And knowing how it spreads is the first step to working to minimize the spread. I am open to any ideas of how to combat CT and Q.. I don’t know how many sites are considered official QAnon sites, but Bloomberg has an article claiming a QAnon site has shut down:www.msn.com/… I would doubt that this shuts down the QAnon movement.