Qrazy

The QAnon phenomenon

made it to my radar back in May when Clyde Lewis of Ground Zero devoted a program to the subject:

5/30/18: Q – THE CREATION OF A TECHNOCULT

MONOLOGUE WRITTEN BY CLYDE LEWIS

“After our show with Jason Goodman and Quinn Michaels, we stirred a lot of controversy by implying that perhaps the whole QAnon conspiracy insider phenomenon is an exercise in both human and assisted A.I. disinformation.” (https://www.groundzeromedia.org/5-30-18-q-the-creation-of-a-technocult/)

Last week there were so many Qrazies attending a Trump rally (imagine that…) the so called “Main Street Media” was forced to acknowledge the “movement.” This brings to mind a part of one of the all-time great songs of the sixties, Alice’s Restaurant, by Arlo Guthrie:

“And friends, somewhere in Washington enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I’m singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do and that’s walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in say “Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant.”. And walk out. You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both faggots and they won’t take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement.”
https://genius.com/Arlo-guthrie-alices-restaurant-lyrics

The first of August brought a segment on the MSNBC program, All In, hosted by Chris Hayes.

What is QAnon?
Followers of the conspiracy theory movement flashed signs in the crowd at Donald Trump’s rally Tuesday night.
All In with Chris Hayes – 8:52 PM 8/01/2018(http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/what-is-qanon-1290356291810)

I mention this because Patricia has not been the same since the Trump Crime Family illegally won the election. She usually does not want to spend him time on anything to do with the Trumpster, but she does like Chris Hayes, whom she calls, “The nerdy guy.”
Because of “the nerdy guy’s” facial expressions during the segment I thought she would get a kick out of watching, so I asked her to sit and watch. Fortunately, it did make her laugh…

The next day Chris Matthews did a segment on his Hardball show.

Qanon, an internet conspiracy theory group, showing up at..

Over the past few months, a fringe group of conspiracy theorists has gained a lot of attention. On, Monday supporters of Qanon made up a significant segment of the crowd at Trump’s rally in Tampa.
Hardball with Chris Matthews – 7:38 PM 8/02/2018
(http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/qanon-an-internet-conspiracy-theory-group-showing-up-trump-rallies-1291248707777)

CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 show got in on the act: (https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/08/03/qanon-trump-rally-supporters-tuchman-dnt-ac-vpx.cnn)

The best thing I have yet seen on the subject comes from an interview by Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt with Oxford Scholar Dr. Joseph P. Farrell, the author of the popular Giza Death Star Book Series, who defines below the QAnon phenomenon as, “A Hegelian antithesis to the mainstream media synthesis.”
(https://gizadeathstar.com/)

PART 1: Q Anon – Deep State Wizard of OZ? DARK JOURNALIST AND DR. JOSEPH FARRELL – January 8th, 2018

Deep State Trial Balloon/Marketing Op Aimed at Alternative Media?

In this fascinating episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar Dr. Joseph P. Farrell the author of the popular Giza Death Star Book Series. Farrell delves deeply into the online group posts of Q Anon and its rapid spread through the Alternative Media under the guise of an anonymous insider. Farrell Poses the question: Is the Q Anon material just the latest wave of sophisticated disinformation that Catherine Austin Fitts calls “Hope Porn”?

Disinformation Campaign?
Farrell sees a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at the independent research community to create an Imitation Wikileaks style vehicle that will act as an All-knowing Oracle Insider for a variety of important Geopolitical situations. It is apparently designed to propagate the promise of Cabal Arrests and Elites being tried at Gitmo as a kind of Soma to pacify the growing online audience that are raising questions about the actions of the Deep State on a global scale! Don’t miss this exciting, informative and alarming Dark Journalist episode!

Exciting, riveting, informative and loaded with amazing facts. Don’t miss this incredible Dark Journalist Episode!

https://www.darkjournalist.com/s-farrell20.php

If this is not enough to quench your thirst for Qrazy knowledge, here are additional articles:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory-reddit

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/08/01/we-are-q-a-deranged-conspiracy-cult-leaps-from-the-internet-to-the-crowd-at-trumps-maga-tour/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.608b3935ef4e

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/02/634749387/what-is-qanon-the-conspiracy-theory-tiptoeing-into-trump-world

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/03/qanon-conspiracy-theory-trump-rallies

The first song is dedicated to Patricia:

Are We Just “Pawns in the Chess Game?”

A protest against the election of Trump outside the US embassy, London, November 2016

Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

This is taken from the transcript of the Chris Hayes show on MSNBC. The headline:

Sen. Feinstein: This ‘isn’t Nazi Germany’

Every single Senate Democrat has now signed on to a bill introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein to bar the Trump administration from splitting up families at the border.Jun.18.2018

https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/sen-feinstein-this-isn-t-nazi-germany-1258688067865

HAYES: So then tell me this, what is the endgame here from your
perspective? It seems to me that the White House quite explicitly is
essentially using these children as hostages to try to get Democrats to
give in to a variety of demands they have on restricting legal immigration
as part of a legislative package. Is that something you`re willing to
entertain?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I think that`s exactly right. Of course, we`re willing
to entertain a legislative package if it makes sense but don`t hold
children hostage. I mean, you don`t have to take 2,500 children from their
parents to get support for something. I mean, that`s bizarre and it`s hard
for me to believe that even President Trump would want to do that. It`s
just bizarre.

HAYES: Well, he pretty clearly does want to do it, at least as advisors
do. I mean you have John Kelly talking about how it`s a deterrent. You
have Stephen Miller giving on-the-record quotes about how it`s a deterrent.
Jeff Sessions saying the Romans 13 commands us to obey the laws of man in a
godly fashion. I mean, there does seem to be a part of this administration
that knows what they`re doing.

FEINSTEIN: Well, this is the United States of – I mean, United States of
America, isn`t Nazi Germany and there`s a difference. And we don`t take
children from their parents until now. And yes, I think it`s such a sad
day. People are so upset. I just read a wonderful letter to the editor by
Laura Bush. I can`t believe that this is happening in the United States
and the President insists so we, of course, will do everything we can to
pass a bill which would prohibit this.
http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/all-in/2018-06-18

With all due respect to the Senator from California, if the POTUS walks like a Nazi, talks like a Nazi, acts like a Nazi, and howls like a Nazi, we have become Nazi’s. The RepublicaNazi Trump administration is redolent with the acrid smell of Nazism.

Consider the article, It Can Happen Here, by Cass R. Sunstein in the June 28, 2018 issue of the New York Review of Books,.

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45
by Milton Mayer, with a new afterword by Richard J. Evans
University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $20.00 (paper)

Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century
by Konrad H. Jarausch
Princeton University Press, 446 pp., $35.00

‘National Socialist,’ circa 1935; photograph by August Sander from his People of the Twentieth Century. A new collection of his portraits, August Sander: Persecuted/Persecutors, will be published by Steidl this fall.

Liberal democracy has enjoyed much better days. Vladimir Putin has entrenched authoritarian rule and is firmly in charge of a resurgent Russia. In global influence, China may have surpassed the United States, and Chinese president Xi Jinping is now empowered to remain in office indefinitely. In light of recent turns toward authoritarianism in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and the Philippines, there is widespread talk of a “democratic recession.” In the United States, President Donald Trump may not be sufficiently committed to constitutional principles of democratic government.

In such a time, we might be tempted to try to learn something from earlier turns toward authoritarianism, particularly the triumphant rise of the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s. The problem is that Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events, a nation gone mad. That makes it easy to take comfort in the thought that it can’t happen again.

But some depictions of Hitler’s rise are more intimate and personal. They focus less on well-known leaders, significant events, state propaganda, murders, and war, and more on the details of individual lives. They help explain how people can not only participate in dreadful things but also stand by quietly and live fairly ordinary days in the midst of them. They offer lessons for people who now live with genuine horrors, and also for those to whom horrors may never come but who live in nations where democratic practices and norms are under severe pressure.

Milton Mayer’s 1955 classic They Thought They Were Free, recently republished with an afterword by the Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, was one of the first accounts of ordinary life under Nazism. Dotted with humor and written with an improbably light touch, it provides a jarring contrast with Sebastian Haffner’s devastating, unfinished 1939 memoir, Defying Hitler, which gives a moment-by-moment, you-are-there feeling to Hitler’s rise. (The manuscript was discovered by Haffner’s son after the author’s death and published in 2000 in Germany, where it became an immediate sensation.)* A much broader perspective comes from Konrad Jarausch’s Broken Lives, an effort to reconstruct the experience of Germans across the entire twentieth century. What distinguishes the three books is their sense of intimacy. They do not focus on historic figures making transformative decisions. They explore how ordinary people attempted to navigate their lives under terrible conditions.

Haffner’s real name was Raimund Pretzel. (He used a pseudonym so as not to endanger his family while in exile in England.) He was a journalist, not a historian or political theorist, but he interrupts his riveting narrative to tackle a broad question: “What is history, and where does it take place?” He objects that most works of history give “the impression that no more than a few dozen people are involved, who happen to be ‘at the helm of the ship of state’ and whose deeds and decisions form what is called history.” In his view, that’s wrong. What matters are “we anonymous others” who are not just “pawns in the chess game,” because the “most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” Haffner insists on the importance of investigating “some very peculiar, very revealing, mental processes and experiences,” involving “the private lives, emotions and thoughts of individual Germans.”

The conclusion of the review:

“If the president of the United States is constantly lying, complaining that the independent press is responsible for fake news, calling for the withdrawal of licenses from television networks, publicly demanding jail sentences for political opponents, undermining the authority of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, magnifying social divisions, delegitimizing critics as “crooked” or “failing,” and even refusing, in violation of the law, to protect young children against the risks associated with lead paint—well, it’s not fascism, but the United States has not seen anything like it before.

With our system of checks and balances, full-blown authoritarianism is unlikely to happen here, but it would be foolish to ignore the risks that Trump and his administration pose to established norms and institutions, which help preserve both order and liberty. Those risks will grow if opposition to violations of long-standing norms is limited to Democrats, and if Republicans laugh, applaud, agree with, or make excuses for Trump—if they howl with the wolf.”

In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.”

The full review can be found at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/hitlers-rise-it-can-happen-here/