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By David Futrelle
If you’re still suffering whiplash from today’s news cycle — Rod Rosenstein has resigned! Oh wait no he hasn’t! — just think how much worse it must be for QAnon supporters, who take the already confusing real news out there and add five or six more layers of utter bullshit on top of that.
Given the rush of news in the last few days, I thought I’d take a little look at the QAnon hashtag on Twitter to see how the mega-MAGAs are taking not only the news on Rosenstein but also the ongoing Brett Kavanaugh shitshow.
The general consensus? Pretty much every new decelopment on both fronts, no matter how disastrous it might look for Trump and the GOP on the surface, is actually evidence that Trump is winning his game of 4-D political chess.
The Q Believers started their day today with some enthusiastic, if slightly premature, celebrations of Rod Rosenstein’s resignation-that-wasn’t.
https://twitter.com/sctallgirl2000/status/1044270712704421890
Dems: We have more Kavanaugh accusers!
Trump: Fine, I’ll raise you a Rosenstein resignation
Dems: (Full blown panic mode!!)#ItsHappening#Qanon#FISAGate#MondayMorning#MondayMotivation https://t.co/hOMFGOQ9EV
— EconPoliticist (@EconPoliticist) September 24, 2018
https://twitter.com/MegaGame1/status/1044252832684281862
https://twitter.com/T_SLiCK_1969/status/1044250203295899648
Apparently in the 4-D world of the QAnons, Animal Farm and The Matrix are the same thing.
Also, I’m not sure they’ve watched The Matrix all the way to the end because (SPOILER ALERT) Neo/Mr. Anderson defeats Agent Smith and flies into the sky like goddamn Superman.
This dude is evidently convinced that the bogus reports of Rosenstein’s resignation were all part of some brilliant disinformation strategy on QAnon’s part.
#QAnon Was that just a "Sky is falling" moment and was every news source reporting [RR] Quit/Fired Chicken Little? #RodRosenstein #MuellerInvestigation #RachelBrand #Kavanaugh #WWG1WGA pic.twitter.com/DJRX0AqT8F
— FormerlyKate (@PeaceLanese) September 24, 2018
This guy has a similar, er, analysis:
This whole kerfuffle this morning RE: Rosenstein might be an intentional narrative shift (#4DChess style) to get the hyper-focus off Kavanaugh.
Food for thought. #MAGA #Trump #AmericaFirst #QAnon #TheGreatAwakening
— OutlawJoseyWales⚒️ (@outlawjw) September 24, 2018
This dude thinks the Rosenstein whiplash today was some sort of plot by ‘blue checkmarked” Twitter users — and by this I assume he means that subset of verified Twitter users who work in the media — to give Trump-haters a little thrill before the inevitable confirmation of Kavanaugh.
https://twitter.com/StockMonsterUSA/status/1044269791383625729
Those Q Believers who weren’t celebrating something that didn’t happen were instead celebrating something that may never happen — the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh. And they’re taking all the accusations against him in stride.
https://twitter.com/TearsApache/status/1044248752477917184
When #Kavanaugh is confirmed, the hammer will drop!#Trump will #DeclassifyFISA and Comey, McCabe, Strzok and Rosenstein will be implicated. They will go to jail!
FBI Attorneys James Baker and Lisa Page have flipped already spilled the beans to a Grand Jury.#QAnon #MAGA pic.twitter.com/seTgSrwyXn
— Loki Sullivan ⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@LokiSullivan) September 24, 2018
This guy is less interested in dropping hammers than in dropping dominoes (which, incidentally, is not how the game of dominoes is played).
https://twitter.com/BestRDSP/status/1044282039397224449
This guy somehow manages to work dominoes, Chicken Little, and Kabuki Theater into a gloriously muddled QAnon trifecta.
https://twitter.com/TheRealMaddog58/status/1044262029652037632
Naturally, the Q Believers have some conspiracy theories about Kavanaugh accuser Christine Ford.
A thread..
1. Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey exposed for ties to Big Pharma abortion pill maker… effort to derail Kavanaugh is plot to protect abortion industry profits@prayingmedic @realDonaldTrump @Education4Libs @charliekirk11@DonaldJTrumpJr #qanon #QArmy #TheStorm pic.twitter.com/W0b67Tw23w
— Pristine Mind 💎 (@Pristinesara) September 24, 2018
This is classic. #Kavanaugh accuser claims she called her friend on her cell phone immediately after alleged attack in 1982. First handheld cell phones not available until 1984. Hmmm. #GreatAwakening #WWG1WGA @potus #QAnon pic.twitter.com/Q9c1jW5W3H
— President-Elect Dr. Average American (@JWhite041020) September 24, 2018
I hasten to add that this last one is utter bullshit. Ford hasn’t claimed to have called anyone immediately after the alleged assault, on a cell phone or a banana phone or on any other kind of phone. Indeed, the Washington Post (which has provided the most detailed account of her accusations) says that Ford told their reporters that “she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband.”
Apparently even Fox News is part of the Deep State conspiracy, for daring to post the results of a poll that shows support for Kavanaugh slipping — instead of promoting a completely unscientific poll posted in the #QAnon hashtag on Twitter that shows OVERWHELMING SUPPORT for the accused serial sexual assaulter. At least among the sort of people who respond to polls in the #QAnon hashtag on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/DickensJimbo/status/1044283916390207490
Q Believers, are you ok? You don’t sound ok,
Wait, why is the QAnon brain trust celebrating Rosenstein being maybe quit-fired? Normal (for certain relative levels of “normal”) conservatives would celebrate this, because then it would be easier to shut down Mueller. But don’t they think Mueller is secretly really investigating the Democrat pedophile ring and the Trump-Russia thing is just a cover?
I know, I shouldn’t be applying logic to this. It’s like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.
The whole Q-believer jargon avalanche gives me a headache. Though it’s also a useful reminder that it’s important to have friends/conversation partners from different groups. Otherwise you end up spewing specific in-group jargon 24/7 and can no longer talk to people outside of your in-group.
This is as bad as the jargon-heavy spews we see from incels and MGTOWs and other purveyors of dribble.
Given they take their red pill/blue pill terminology from a movie made by transwomen in which the red pill is a pretty obvious allegory for embracing your true inner (potentially trans) identity, I think that we already knew people in weird right wing twitter didn’t really get The Matrix.
To recap, MAGAs think a president who was born wealthy and got into an ivy league business school due to family connections and was given an enormous sum of money to start his own business by his father nominated a wealthy man who went to an elite prep school followed by an ivy league university to SCOTUS in order to fight the elites and drain the swamp of their corruption.
Never has anything made more complete and total sense.
Completely off topic, but the mammoth in this site’s banner is called Ed, right? Ed the Mammoth?
sarah_kay_gee: What it makes me think of is…
Personally, I’m a huge nerd. (Both in that I have an extremely high level of nerdery and that I am a big fat guy who is a nerd.) And in my official position as a huge nerd, I read at one point about how to run green dragons in D&D, and I swear this is leading somewhere. The thing is, green dragons are supposedly the ultimate plotters and schemers, who should react to just about everything the players do with “ALL ACCORDING TO PLAN”, like if Light Yagami was extremely large and scaly and green. The storyteller, however, is only very rarely an actual green dragon, and as a result might not be able to predict everything the players can do… so the advice is to run with the plan being extremely loose, and then after the fact, whatever the players DID was, as ever, all according to plan.
This second-rate Q Continuum reminds me of that. Possibly even intentionally – the Plan is perfect and will save everyone ever forever, so anything that happened must, in retrospect, have been part of the plan. Duke Mueller was meant to be supporting the Orange King through the work of the Knight of the Rose Stone, only it turns out the players killed the Knight of the Rose Stone in single combat? Hah, just as planned, the dragon needed the Knight at just that position when he was defeated! The Plan is perfect!
…It can make a good story, but in reality, it can also be THOROUGHLY ANNOYING.
Diptych: …aww, you found ’em? Hunt over, people, Diptych found Ed.
Silly question maybe, but do those red X thingies, that some of them have behind their names, mean anything? The german satire website Der Postillion recently ran an article that twitter is labeling verified nazi accounts that way now, but that cant be true (since, you know, its the Postillion and well… it’s twitter). I’m not actually on twitter, but i’m curious.
I think they just put them on themselves, to show they believe in Q.
Podkayne Lives
An X to indicate you believe in Q.
Makes perfect sense
Trust the plan.
I trust Kavanaugh’s toast.
katzentier: The red X means that they believe they have been “shadowbanned” – that Twitter has wholly reduced their visibility so that no one will see them, in order to damage conservative viewpoints.
You may well have seen a great many of them. This should tell you how accurate their position is.
Since it means they believe the conspiracy theories put up by the alt-right at the least evidence, and that they are eager to claim grievances that require redress, there is quite a high correlation with the white-supremacists and Nazis, but you’re quite right, Twitter would never take action against them.
@Alexisagirlsname:
Not only is the Matrix the brainchild of trans women, but George Orwell was a literal antifa–having fought against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War–and Kabuki was originated by women, later being mentrified* when the shogunate decided that it was immoral for women to appear on the stage.
*This wonderful term comes from thelilithnoir on Tumblr, in context of a discussion of Star Trek and Beatles fandom–both of which were founded by female early adopters (and initially scorned as ephemeral trash that overwrought hormone-addled girls liked): http://alarajrogers.tumblr.com/post/178424981179/shiralipkin-thelithnoir%23notes)
I do find those red X things useful. They’re an instant block without bothering to red the tweet.
(Note – this has backfired once – someone did it to take the piss out of the weenies.)
@sarah_kay_gee
At a guess, because “Rosenstein” is one of them-there Jew names, dontcha know.
@Shadowplay:
Which, ironically, sort of makes the red X into a self-fulfilling prophecy if enough people behave likewise …
Speaking as someone who worked in the cellular industry for about 10 years, even if she had claimed to make a call on a cell phone after the attack the date wouldn’t rule out her claim as false.
There were cell phones around before the first handheld in 1983. They were installed in vehicles and usually called car phones. They have been around since the 1940s.
These true believers can’t even get their own bullshit lies straight.
@Full Metal Ox
Surely the worst piece of “mentrification” (good word) is the whole “incel” thing. Created by a queer woman in the 90s for an intersectional supportive community for the perpetually single, mentrified to become the most violently toxic male space of all.
No, they used a capital letter for “Dominos”, so they’re clearly talking about the pizza chain. Pizzas, as you know, feature heavily in their iconography: I’ve seen QAnon referred to as “the Pizzagate Extended Universe”.
@katzentier:
It’s a pissy right-wing thing. They’re mad that so many verified (with a blue checkmark) Twitter accounts, with understandably large followings, happen to be those of journalists who report the news accurately, so to set themselves apart in their delusions of oppression, they put red Xs beside their own handles.
Of course, this is convenient (as noted above) for telling sensible readers whom to ignore as a conspiracy-theory crank spreading dumb rumors (and claiming to be reporting “real news”).
I wonder if they’re still using (((triple parentheses))) to denote
lizard peopleJews, too. Has anyone checked?Twitter’s moderation for rightwing weirdos is like the childhood of a Yorkshireman in the four Yorkshiremen sketch: so poor you have to pretend-ban yourself.
No matter how bad the news is it’s still miraculously good news. Weird how that works.
@Moggie
I remember “cheese pizza” meant child porn on 4chan,
I honestly wounder if thats where pizza gate came from,
a bunch of people from 4chan reading Hillery’s emails and deciding that since “cheese pizza” obviously means child porn then this “pizza place” Clinton and her friends keep going to must obviously be code for “pedophile brothel” and it just expands from there.
That meme about Comey colluding to help Hillary win…didn’t Comey basically reintroduce the email investigation right before the election, something that while, may not have had a totally causal effect on Hillary’s popularity declining, surely wouldn’t have helped it right before voters went to the polls?
These folks think that they have some complex conspiracy figured out when obvious truth is staring them in the faces. Then again, the tinfoil hat crowd always has seemed to have had a disdain for occam’s razor.
@TreePerson
That is exactly what it was.
@Liquidmidnight
Yeah, Comey ultimately did far more to get Trump elected than Russia ever did. Especially now that we’ve finally learned that, in fact, the Trump campaign was also under investigation, but Comey didn’t feel like that warranted mentioning.