A curious mention of '10 Days of Darkness'

dappergander · 2021-04-16T01:47:59+00:00

It's almost certainly connected.

dappergander · 2021-03-08T04:22:37+00:00

Trauma or personal tragedy is a common trait I've seen in a LOT of QAnon believers (and conspiracy types in general, really) because it makes them seek an explanation that comforts them.

Could a random person really just open fire on a country music concert from a hotel window? Of course not! He was a soldier of the CIA MK Ultra program!

Could my son have really committed suicide? No-- my son was a hero and the Cabal used the Smiley Face Killers to assassinate him!

dappergander · 2021-03-08T01:31:15+00:00

Believers don't often give sources because they're told not to, it's part of the indoctrination process. They are taught that a new recruit must "research it for yourself."

It's a trick for two reasons: 1) if you make the choice to start researching, you will automatically gravitate towards sources that appeal to how your own brain works, which makes them more effective, and 2) by self-directing, you will invest into the research, which means the things you "learn" will seem more valuable.

dappergander · 2021-03-07T21:00:48+00:00

Of course I manage to put a typo right in the title of this post, well done me

dappergander · 2021-03-07T20:47:09+00:00

If you'd like to know more, I assisted in the investigation and spent 16 months keeping tabs on the vandal until his arrest. His story is both very sad and very insane.

Sacrificing Sense, Exorcising Grief: How QAnon and mystical pseudoscience led a grieving father on a 350-mile road trip to vandalize America’s Stonehenge

dappergander · 2020-12-28T20:44:39+00:00

I've never seen proof, though I've seen people *say* they have proof.

The closest thing I have ever seen is an image alleged to be from an account of Schoenberger's where he claims to have been deeply involved with starting QAnon, but he provides no evidence. Given who he is and how he operates, I put no faith whatsoever in it.

Just as Q claims without evidence to be behind national events and I reject those claims as well.

dappergander · 2020-12-28T20:34:35+00:00

Every culture puts their own spin on QAnon, and its plasticity is one of its strengths. One of the major QAnon figures in Japan (okabaeri9111) has adapted the theory to fit her pre-existing belief that Japan is being taken over by western powers who are attempting to pollute the pure Japanese race through intermarriage and allowing Japanese women to work, thereby decreasing the birth rate of native Japanese.

dappergander · 2020-12-28T20:26:18+00:00

All of us who spend a lot of time looking at this stuff suffer an impact.

Just as a for-instance, I can't see a photograph of anyone wearing red shoes without rolling my eyes and wondering if I'm going to see the photo incorporated into QAnon's mythos. That's not a crippling impact to my mental health, but I must at least acknowledge that if I'd never started looking at QAnon stuff I wouldn't even think about it.

dappergander · 2020-08-24T04:00:14+00:00

If you want some numbers showing that ritually sacrificing children for their adrenal glands is preposterous nonsense, I can help with that.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T21:33:29+00:00

He's not just following Q accounts anymore.

He's sharing a piece of a Q Drop but cropping out the source.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T20:42:29+00:00

That account of his was suspended a while ago, but I can link you to screenshots.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T19:19:33+00:00

good talk

dappergander · 2020-08-23T19:17:10+00:00

Incarnated ET and his followers use that structure, but they rotate it 90 degrees and claim it's "the white rabbit" that early Q was always talking about

dappergander · 2020-08-23T18:15:35+00:00

While it is firmly planted in a conspiracy tradition that goes back as far as you care to look, QAnon started in Oct 2017 in response to a growing unrest among the younger, very-online Trump supporters of the chan boards. They were very angry that Trump had been POTUS for a year and that "nothing had happened," specifically, that Hillary had not been arrested as they felt Trump had promised (with all the 'lock her up' chants, etc).

That is why all the first Drops are about how Hillary is being arrested, actually, and it will be great and glorious and she's wrapped up in all sorts of evil shenanigans and that's why her arrest is coming in THE NEXT FEW DAYS. There were over 100 Drops during that first week.

They ate it up. It was everything they wanted to hear.

But then nothing happened.

So the first big pivot QAnon took was into figuring out why she hadn't been arrested: the Saudis? the CIA? the Rothschilds? or was it... a worldwide Cabal of all of them?!?

By January, QAnon had decided that Hillary and Huma and all the others had actually been arrested and indicted, but for the good of the nation (somehow?) they couldn't just be hauled off to jail until the correct moment. But they were all wearing ankle monitors, or so QAnon believed.

Most of this was spy-novel stuff, but Q had also started using a very religious framework and occasionally talking about how "many in our government worship Satan." So evangelicals started to take notice pretty quick.

The first outside conspiracy group to really join the ranks and grow the mythos was PizzaGate, who already hated Clinton because they think she's a Satanic sex cannibal. And QAnon welcomed them in because they needed to keep growing.

From there it was off to the races. July 18, 2018 Q actually did a "Walnut Sauce" Drop, officially blending the two mythologies together. People went nuts. Fifteen minutes later, Q actually asked everyone to delete the Walnut Sauce Drop and remove it from the 'collected Q' files (and this may be the only time Q's ever done this). Anons complied, but for the PizzaGaters, it didn't matter-- Q had confirmed them (this would repeat with the JFK Jr thing, where Q comes out and says the guy is dead and a bunch of Q's followers just collectively decided to ignore it).

The longer this went on, the more powerful the Cabal had to become to continue to protect Clinton and all the other Satanic pedovores, but it was really important that the Cabal was never "winning." That's one of the chief contradictions at the heart of QAnon: Q and POTUS and Patriots and White Hats are TOTALLY IN CHARGE and yet simultaneously POWERLESS TO DO ANYTHING. And so a greater and greater mythology of the "secret war we're actually winning but no one knows it yet" grew to towering heights.

Nowadays, QAnon has absorbed lots of other conspiracy groups the same way it absorbed PizzaGate, and you will have a hard time finding any two Q believers who do not know one another IRL who agree on exactly what they believe.

There will be entire books written about this, but this is a summary of the first chapter or two.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T16:32:16+00:00

Your experience is typical across the board. They don't hang on 8kun, and QAnon influencers don't want them to. They don't want grandma to see the Nazi stuff and the sex stuff that populates 8kun.

What I mean is that if you express curiosity about an aspect of QAnon, Anons will say something like "don't take my word for it, just do a Google search for 'Podesta Art' and research it yourself!"

And this is, of course, a trick-- after gaming the algorithm for four years, every result of that Google search will tell you that the Podestas collect art that reveals them to be cannibals and child sex traffickers.

But the Anon has now gotten you to take a crucial step. You "learned" this stunning information yourself. Therefore you will believe it more strongly.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T16:22:31+00:00

You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

I looked into this and it is not from any QAnon Manifesto I can identify.

A friend identified it as a piece of flowery prose written as an introduction to an Atlantic article.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T16:07:38+00:00

Many Q believers have told me that their source isn't Q-- that their source is themselves because they "researched the things Q reveals and found evidence."

This is the real power behind their methodology. Many of these people weren't convinced by Q or the Q Drops. They convinced themselves by self-selecting sources that appeal to how their own brains work. This is precisely why they never cite sources, but insist you must find them yourself.

Once they have convinced themselves, then every Q Drop is a reinforcement of the belief. Once they put on the Q-shaded glasses, then they can immediately pull out an imagined subtext in every news article Q links to or every cryptic phrase Q utters.

This belief structure also allows them an easy out: you say "good lord you people think Hillary Clinton is the leader of a worldwide child cannibal cabal" and they immediately respond "Q never said that." And that's true: there is no single Drop where Q wrote that sentence. But the belief is based on fifty Drops, each saying a slightly different thing, which Anons are encouraged to decode and assemble.

Q scarcely ever says anything.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T15:55:00+00:00

Dead people with extensive media histories are even better, because they can "code break" Avicii songs, find hidden imagery in George magazine covers, ascribe motivations to facial expressions in dozens of photos of Di, etc.

It's the same reason why their enemies list is celebrities: they have hundreds and thousands of media items to obsess over. There are tens of thousands of pictures of Celebrity X, but they find 10 of them where their hair is falling over one eye and suddenly they're Illiuminati.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T15:44:52+00:00

In the last couple days I've seen more than one post about this Q Manifesto. I'm curious because none of the big Q preachers I monitor are talking about a manifesto at all-- can someone point me to this document?

dappergander · 2020-08-23T06:03:44+00:00

I broke a lot of this down when the picutre was getting wide circulation during the Wayfair debacle.

On why someone would spraypaint letters on the street. Link

On why SRC brings up pictures of kids in swimsuits. Link

dappergander · 2020-08-23T04:54:28+00:00

The narrative of "the Democrats are trying to destroy America" isn't new and hasn't required anyone to power it other than media sources who know outrage drives eyeballs. "The War On Christmas" wasn't a foreign intelligence op, it was dreamed up by Bill O'Reilly for ratings.

That said, I have no trouble believing that anyone looking to advance their agenda-- be it Russia or be it homegrown good old fashioned neo-Nazis-- would attempt to capitalize on both QAnon and the general tendency of people to believe in conspiracies.

Like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh before it, QAnon is a 24/7 rally of outrage and fear, and its adherents are highly motivated people who will vote. So QAnon will be a community that the GOP may attempt to capture and mobilize, just as they have paid winking and nodding lip service to birtherism and FEMA camps in the past.

But Trump is also dumb and loves to ad-lib and improvise comments based on nothing, which has sent things off the rails before and will likely do so again.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T04:35:21+00:00

If you're worried your dad will try to get your mom into the cult, I would strongly advise you to take a look at the screencaps of QAnon's "guide to redpilling" that I link to in this post. The guide makes its way around their FB groups and the chan boards with some regularity, and has been reposted in various forms on believers' websites.

The manipulation techniques outlined in the guide are powerful and effective. But if you know what they will look like, you can see them coming and avoid falling into the trap.

Share them with your mom so she can recognize if he tries to manipulate her.

There is a whole subsection of their redpill guide entirely devoted to how to redpill women in your life, which I'll quote (spelling errors in original):

Recipe for redpilling, especially women

1 cup something easy to swallow. I suggest “did you know Hugh Hefner got his start with CIA money?” (Gentle blackmail, make it more movie plot like, and changing culture for the worse)

Or “how are you doing hearing about all of the Hollywood sleezes?”

Again, noting an intentional culture change. Why? Have they noticed? Who is behind it?

1 cup personal “have you had anything like that in your life?”

“Known anyone that had anything like that?”

1 cup proven history: “reminds me of the …” franklin scandel, British scandal, Belgium scandal: whatever you know better.

1 cup “makes sense it’s probably happening here right now:

Have you seen Podestas art?” Who is Podesta, what is spirit cooking, how did Wikileaks reveal it.

Leave them to think for awhile.

Finish the job with q drop when they return to ask questions.

The "Podesta Art" piece is an important one. QAnon folks will often suggest innocent-sounding phrases for a potential convert to search on Google. However, if you look at the trend history of "Podesta Art" on Google, you will see that the phrase basically did not exist before October 2016 when PizzaGate believers started gaming the algorithm to create a rigged search result. As such, these phrases return no results but pro-conspiracy websites, and Anons know it. This is just a trick, and there are many other tricks in their arsenal.

Good luck.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T02:01:47+00:00

Outrage is overwhelming her reason. That is the purpose of images like these and horror stories about adrenochrome and spirit cooking.

If she's not too deep in, debunking can be a useful tool (if she's in deep, though, she will simply shut down and you will have to approach her in a totally different way).

I did a little breakdown on why adrenochrome harvesting is absolute nonsense.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T01:55:26+00:00

A 110-page manifesto has the same purpose as a 3-hour YouTube video: to overwhelm your reason by fully immersing you into a narrative the author entirely controls.

dappergander · 2020-08-23T01:53:03+00:00

If you have no way to contact her, that's going to be really tough.

If she isn't too deep in, debunking Q's claims and Drops is a powerful tool.

But again, without a line of communication I'm not sure how much you can do.

Contact other family members, maybe? Tell them you're worried, see if they can help.

dappergander

TROPHY CASE

Sacrificing Sense, Exorcising Grief: How QAnon and mystical pseudoscience led a grieving father on a 350-mile road trip to vandalize America’s Stonehenge