By David Futrelle
If I were a conspiracy theorist, it would be easy, oh so easy, to make the case that Donald Trump is preparing to launch a massive crackdown on civil liberties in order to protect himself and fellow Republicans from massive losses in the midterms next month.
All the “proof” I would need to make such a case is out there, hiding in plain sight, in the words of Trump himself, as well as those of his most fervent followers.
Yesterday, as anti-Kavanaugh protests swelled and angry rape survivors confronted GOP senators face to face, Trump tweeted out his endorsement of an age-old anti-Semitic accusation, claiming (without the slightest shred of evidence) that “the very rude elevator screamers are paid professionals” carrying suspiciously un-handmade signs “paid for by Soros and others.”
Other GOP bigwigs, including Senators Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn have made similar claims. And Trump’s own lawyer — the increasingly erratic Rudy Giuliani — has even suggested that Soros’ assets be frozen in retribution for his alleged support of the protesters.
Trump has long dreamed of criminalizing dissent — recently declaring that he thinks “it’s embarrassing for the country to allow protesters” — and since his election the GOP has been doing their best to oblige him, And so Trump’s reference to Soros-paid protesters in his tweet yesterday can’t be dismissed as Trumpian grumbling; it’s an attempt to portray those who disagree with him and his fellow Republicans as traitors working for some sinister “international” cabal.
Trump has not himself publicly endorsed martial law, of course, but his most fervent supporters haven’t been quite so circumspect.
Believers in the rabidly pro-Trump conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon — based on the fiction that Trump is a bold freedom-fighter working diligently behind the scenes to defeat a traitorous “Deep State” — think that Trump has been signalling for some time that he’s about to launch a massive crackdown on his domestic foes.
But Q Believers aren’t just posting “proof” of this Trump plan; they are indicating — to the world, and to Trump himself — that they would enthusiastically support what would basically amount to a Trumpian military coup.
Many Q Believers thought that Trump’s text alert test run last Wednesday — Trump sent out an innocuous text message to millions of Americans to test new Presidential Alert system designed to warn Americans of natural and other disasters — was part of the run-up to a real declaration of martial law. As The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer writes,
Believers in QAnon … think the text could mark the start of “The Storm,” a fantastical MAGA dream in which Trump’s political enemies will be arrested and tried at military tribunals.
“That is how we will receive orders if all else fails,” wrote one QAnon believer on the 8Chan internet forum. “We are the next generation Minutemen! Standing by Sir!”
“SO HAPPY!” wrote another. “THANK YOU 45!”
More than a few Q Believers seem to be taking this “Minuteman” talk literally, with some hoping that they — like the Minutemen of old — will get an opportunity to murder leftist “traitors” in a sort of Trump-endorsed purge.
https://twitter.com/MrPuma2072/status/1047536309454221324
Never thought I’d be 😊 to hear about boots on the ground in 🇺🇸 #justiceiscoming
Martial Law, already enacted into readiness mode, may go full power for the purpose of keeping the peace while #massarrests occur
The #wirelessemergencyalert system will be handy then 👏😎#QAnon pic.twitter.com/zpaVnJqF8z
— 〽️💎⚡️✨💛 #fulldisclosure (@sheshifts001) October 5, 2018
Q Believers are even more excited by the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, suggesting that his presence on the supreme court will make it easier for Trump to get authorization for the military tribunals that are a central part of QAnon’s fantasy of retribution against the evil libs. This was a major Q talking point in the last several weeks:
It started… IT'S HERE!!!
The emergency text on 10/3
Kavanaugh will be in by 10/8
They will declassify FISA 10/25ish
Its the fall if the fall…
Arrests, Military tribunal -is gizmo ready?
The Red October will win! 11/6#POTUS45 #QAnon#Q#QArmy#FISA#DECLSS#RedWave https://t.co/HuKiCjpTsq— WQ2 (@WQ262402470) October 4, 2018
https://twitter.com/druderadio/status/1046022966956503041
One Q Believer explained the logic in a blog post several days before the final confirmation vote today:
Why are the dems so afraid of Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court? abortion? partly, but the real reason, courtesy of #Qanon: the deep state hacks are terrified of facing military tribunals; Kavanaugh will be the court tie breaker allowing the tribunals to go forward. …
they are terrified because they know its game over; they know President Trump will immediately declass FISA, the indictments will begin to be unsealed, and the arrests will begin these monsters will not be able stall the criminal judicial system and bribe and buy their way out of criminal convictions; they will face justice via the military courts and quick sentencing…some will get life in prison, and some will get a swift execution for their treason.
(Thanks to intrepid Q-monitor Mike Rothschild (no, really) for highlighting this post on his blog.)
On Twitter today, Q Believers are giddy over Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Q primed the pump with a “Q Drop” promising “pain” to the alleged Deep Staters, (CW: Rape joke.)
#QAnon wants to know if you're ready to see arrests and pain. He's like Michael Buffer with a too-tight MAGA hat cutting off the blood to his brain. pic.twitter.com/rCwrYZ2ILu
— Mike Rothschild (no relation) (@rothschildmd) October 5, 2018
Q Believers’ bloodthirsty glee over this allegedly impending “PAIN” is palpable.
Kavanaugh ready. Now BRING THE PAIN #maga #QAnon #TheStorm #Kavanaugh #KavanaughConfirmation pic.twitter.com/MwZNQ1adlg
— Juanma (@jmalmodovar) October 6, 2018
Anti trump pro demonrats called to demonstrate again #KavanaughConfirmation open societys are paid again by soros, to bash #Kavanaugh . but the Darkness will make a end for his own side, light will win again. Fuck all DemonRats thats a threat to the Soveraign planet mother earth!
— Q-NLD-0002 (@QDutchpatriots) October 6, 2018
https://twitter.com/Skinner147/status/1048706556416733184
One Q Believer even managed to work in a reference to the artist Banksy.
As alarming as this all is, it’s worth remembering that QAnon and his or her supporters have been wrong in virtually every specific prediction; hell, while correctly predicting that Kavanaugh would be confirmed (not exactly a difficult thing to predict), QAnon was off on the vote total, an inconvenient fact that Q Believers are now trying hard to explain away.
But Trump — an authoritarian to his core — has been obsessed with “retribution” his entire life, and the midterms represent a massive challenge to his continued power. Making things even more dangerous, Trump is well aware that many if not most of his fans would support some sort of crackdown on liberals and the left — none more enthusiastically than the QAnon contingent.
I would love to be able to dismiss all this as conspiracist nonsense. But with an impulsive, conspiracy-minded authoritarian in the White House — and energetically supported by a veritable army of wannabe Minutemen online — I can’t.
We need to put as much energy as we can into the midterms — they’re ours to win. But we also need to be prepared in case Trump decides to interfere in them, or worse — as so many of his fans not-so-secretly desire. These are dark days for American democracy. I can only hope the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the Trump Train.
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It’s not the Trump Train. It’s the Putin Train.
When you throw out phrases like “Red October,” you ain’t an American anymore. You’re Russian.
It’s worth pointing out that Trump supporters are around 30 percent of 30 percent. As the non silent minority they shouldn’t welcome martial law, civil war and what have you
Then again what they want is to be feudal lords, when they’ll probably be the piss boy like in Mel Brooks history of the world
Yep. The notion of Trump declaring martial law and staging a military coup is actually not that unbelievable. I don’t think it’ll happen this month. But it’s pretty likely that the SCOTUS would rule that a president can’t be indicted. Or Mueller just won’t try because that’s justice department policy anyway. Trump’s only way to escape legal consequences is to just never leave office. Does anyone really think he’ll agree to leave peacefully? What I don’t get is why these people are so eager to have this happen.
They think they have all the guns, all the bullets, and all the brains. They have no idea that there are pro-NRA Democrats, armed Democrats, and Democrats with brains.
They have pumped themselves up to believe that they are Rambo, and we are Charlie Tuna. And they think when the Civil War starts, they won’t run away the moment their buddy falls beside them. Some probably won’t.
I mean, it is nonsense. But there’s the danger that QAnon or their adjacents will use this nonsense as an excuse for violence.
Not-terribly-relevant question: why the “no really” after you mention the Mike Rothschild? My mind went, “Oh, because Rothschild was the name of a wealthy family who became the target of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories in the early 20th century,” but I don’t know if this is common knowledge. It was something that came up during my Masters research (Ezra Pound in his fascist phase suspected the Rothschilds of all kinds of things) so I’m curious. But maybe there’s some other reason for the “no really” that I’m missing. 🙂
It’s interesting that on the one hand, they claim that black men and immigrants are dangerous thugs and all in gangs, but on the other hand, they also put out memes about how their side has all the guns and our side is too wimpy. Do they not think all those supposedly dangerous black/Muslim/Latino dudes will side with us in the civil war?
It is around these parts. Thanks to the obsession our late, great troll NWOslave had with the Rothschilds.
Oh for the love of god… Thanks to these people, if our international allies felt it best to just ‘euthanize’ this country and put it out of its misery I’d almost be okay with that. 🙁
@epitome of incomprehensiblility
It is on 4chan and it’s ilk.
@jsrtheta
I’m not so sure of that, since to most people in the US’ cultural sphere this would call to mind the Tom Clancy novel / movie, or its eponymous unbeatable nuclear submarine, rather than the actual October Revolution.
Wait, so the Presidential text alert is going to go out only to his MAGA supporters so they can stay safe in their homes while the other 65 million of us are rounded up? How is that going to work, exactly?
Trump looks like he’s here to stay, unfortunately. Scandal won’t work. Moral outrage won’t work. We just had a story break that the president committed hundreds of dollars of tax fraud, and it fell completely flat. I don’t think Mueller is going to save our democracy either.
But maybe cholesterol will. (And cirrhosis of the liver, in the case of the newest SCOTUS installment.)
I mean, I guess if you want to discourage undocumented immigrants and refugees from coming into your country, transforming it into the exact same kind of kleptocratic dictatorship that those immigrants are desperate to escape from sounds like an effective strategy…
Not a good strategy, mind you. But effective.
I am a liberal with a gun. 2 actually. And not afraid to use either. Bring it on.
Not that I’m pro gun, but you can’t put that genie back in the bottle apparently.
I wish we had guns that would only work for one user. Install a chip or something.
In other news, I just saw an NRCC ad going after a Democratic House candidate for being funded by George Soros and being a member of the “global left.” Wow.
I think I’m going to write to the channel that aired it (local CBS affiliate) to express my disgust with them airing anti-Semitic propaganda. TV stations have to run candidate ads. But they don’t have to run 3rd party ads.
There are guns that are fingerprint-locked. The trigger won’t work unless the registered user is the one pulling it.
To the surprise of no one, the NRA hates these things. Apparently the right to have a gun means the right to shoot any gun you find on the street.
Not that I thought the NRA was reasonable before that, but it was when they came out against those that it became clear that there’s absolutely no way anyone in favor of gun rights who aligns with the NRA can claim the “responsible gun ownership” argument is anything but disingenuous.
I mean, seriously. This is the perfect gun to absolve the NRA from all the kids accidentally shooting themselves. Everyone can have a gun! Hurray! And there’s no way accidents will happen! And if criminals steal them, they won’t be able to use them! Responsible gun owners will be fine!
And yet, they hate the very idea of it.
Gun rights people are weird. (I mean, seriously. Register the guns. When you buy a gun, you shoot one bullet, it goes into a register. Crime happens, they recognize the bullet, they come and find the gun. If it was stolen from you, you’re fine. If it wasn’t… well, you may have some explainin’ to do.)
Question: would the actual-factual US military be alongside Trump on this particular “military coup”? Because all the indicators I’ve seen along the way are very much along the lines of “hell no”.
While some few of the senior generals might be all for implementing Gilead (under Pence), or Armageddon (if they can hammer popular culture into the correct configurations to match their “prophecies”), I get the strong impression the majority of the US military is very much of the opinion Trump is completely disconnected from his rocker, several Freddoes short of a playlunch, and definitely has a few ‘roos loose in the top paddock. Therefore any order of his which is unsupported by decent intelligence should be promptly lost in the bureaucratic shuffle while they find out who is on President-minding duty today, and get them to give him a different set of keys to rattle and see whether his mind changes in twenty minutes.
Okay. I emailed WCCO. Any other Minnesotan Mammotheers should do the same. The ad is against Dan Feehan.
The button on their site for management goes to [email protected] and [email protected] and the subject line that populated automatically was Contact Us: WCCO Management.
Most would not go along. Some would, certainly – mostly midranked officers who have peaked (There’s a reason most military coups have been carried out by colonels, not generals) but they’d be commanders without a command.
Also often forgotten – the Secret Service. The chances of them supporting any attempt by any president to “overstay their welcome” illegally is approximately zero. And they are in the same room with him all the time.
And people wondered why people wanted Repubes out of power forever.
They get right back to the typical basics with this crap. War hungry simpletons been itching so much and so long for a war, they can bust an epic 1 gallon nut just thinking about it.
Ou of curiosity, I know there’s been talk of passing a law to make sure the president can’t blow up the world for the hell of it (i.e., use a nuke) without somebody else being there to approve his pushing the button. Assuming even Trump didn’t have the chutzpah (if only because someone told him that was some sorta Jew word and he didn’t want to get Jew-cooties) to veto that, if the Dems don’t a veto-proof majority in the Senate, how many seats would have to flip in Congress for that to pass?
And yes, the Secret Service. I’d love to know the general blood pressure level among those on White House duty, since I assume Trump treats them like valets in a way that really, really pisses them off. Especially if they’ve been on that detail since the Obama years, as I imagine the Obamas treated them pretty decently.
@Rabid Rabbit
I believe that the republicans removed the filibuster so that they could try to cram through the ACA repeal and the tax cuts, so a simple majority should do it.
Wow. How disingenuous. So much selective editing! lol
This comment will “probably” be deleted for exposing their lies; so I’m likely wasting my time here… But for those who see this before they delete it. They edited a lot, but the most important thing they cut out was 3/4ths of the bottom image.
It will make sense why they don’t want you to see the whole thing, it destroys their narrative completely. They REALLY don’t want you looking into this movement, btw. They are afraid of it, because they know what it REALLY is. Here is the full “drop:” https://qmap.pub/read/2351
Watch the video linked in it. All of it. It explains a lot.
@weirwood.
It’s the eternal contradiction of fascism. Your enemy is paradoxically stronger and weaker than you. See Umberto Eco’s Ur-fascism.
Azu, I used a screenshot of your tweet because it was a response to another tweet and if I’d embedded your tweet the tweet you were responding to would have also been included and since that tweet wasn’t relevant to the point I was making that would have been confusing. I linked directly to the original tweet; all anyone needs to do is to click on the image.
I encourage everyone to go click on it; you’ll see that the portion of the image that doesn’t show up in the twitter thumbnail is just, well, more QAnon bullshit. But hey decide for yourself!
I didn’t watch the full video, I’ll admit. It was just excerpts from a Trump speech. I have heard rather a lot of those already.
Also, Azu, I didn’t delete your tweet. All tweets from first-time commenters go to moderation, so as to discourage spammers and drive-by postings by abusive trolls. I let it through as soon as I saw it. I would have gotten to it sooner but it’s saturday night and I was watching a movie.
@Rabid Rabbit
I dunno… probably wouldn’t want anything like that on a gun I’d be wanting to use in a hurry. Fingerprint scanners are notoriously slow and unreliable and sensitive to environmental conditions (better hope it ain’t cold enough to need gloves!). Guns that aren’t needed in a hurry can be safely locked up without ammunition and with crucial bits hidden elsewhere.
Maybe it’ll work in 20 years.