Tag: reddit

How Big is the #QAnon Movement?

Mike RothschildLeave a comment

How many people believe in QAnon? That’s a good question, and one that is basically impossible to answer.

To start with, activity in QAnon tends to ebb and flow, with Q going silent for a while, followed by dozens of posts and furious analysis by acolytes – only for Q to go silent again.

(Hint, I talk about this a lot on my YouTube channel, which you should subscribe to.)

Believers likely think it’s because Q is gathering the intel he drops on his following. Skeptics might say it’s because Q only posts when something happens that he can use to retroactively prove his own existence.

They also argue among themselves endlessly over whether or not “something big is happening” and what the plan is.

I did a Twitter thread on this that got picked up by some big news sites, and got a truly insane Neon Revolt article written about me, as well. So RIP my mentions.

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The Worst, Swampiest Migrant Caravan Conspiracy Theories

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

As of this writing, a caravan of Central American migrants is making its way north, crossing into Mexico, and picking up both members and media coverage as it goes.

This isn’t even the first migrant caravan of 2018, with an earlier one moving northward in April, stopping in Tijuana, with only about a dozen of the 700 participants arrested for trying to cross the border.

But things are different now, because we’re just a few weeks away from a midterm election.

And with Republicans looking likely to get blown out in both the House of Representatives and state legislature, a migrant caravan is exactly the thing the far right can use to stoke fear of the brown hordes relentlessly moving north to overwhelm the border and invade the good old’ US of A.

After all, it was fear of immigrants and the desire to keep them out with a giant wall that propelled Trump into office – why not use the same thing to keep his Congressional majority?

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R/Conspiracy Is Just Asking Questions About 9/11

Mike RothschildLeave a comment

Virtually every major new media technology, from the printing press to lithographs to radio and TV, have been adopted early by cranks and conspiracy theorists.

So it went with the nascent internet which was immediately embraced by cranks. A 1999 book called “Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture” describes the early 90’s USENET as a fertile garden of posts about government plots, UFO’s, JFK, and “on topics such as who runs the Federal Reserve, Lyndon LaRouche’s [conspiracy] theories, and the credibility of well-known conspiracy theorists.”

When the September 11th attacks hit, then, the internet was perfectly poised to become a virtual ground zero of accusations that the attacks were “an inside job.” For years, conspiracy theorists and skeptics battled it out over the tiniest details about the attacks, with a variety of plots put forth (The government did it with bombs! The government let it happen to invade Iraq! The Pentagon was hit by a missile fired by…someone! Flight 93 was shot down! The planes never existed!”) and beaten back with evidence.

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