QAnon's Corrosive Impact On The U.S.

[Shabibilicious]

2 minutes ago, caddieman said:

Big day for the GOPQ............wonder what date will be next?

 

Right?!....something around Easter seems likely....they'll find a way to capitalize on the resurrection for their own means.  As always, just my opinion.

 

GO RV, then BV

[coorslite21]

41 minutes ago, Shabibilicious said:

 

Sometimes Truth isn't for the squeamish, CL.....so go ahead and put me on your naughty list, I don't hold grudges.  

 

GO RV, then BV

 

Your "truth".....????

No thanks!

 

No grudge here either....just no need to waste any more time on any of this with you....

 

Those of you who choose to accept the Biden/left establishment doctrine just might be the ruin to the US.

CL

[Shabibilicious]

6 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

 

Your "truth".....????

No thanks!

 

No grudge here either....just no need to waste any more time on any of this with you....

 

Those of you who choose to accept the Biden/left establishment doctrine just might be the ruin to the US.

CL

 

Yeah....I remember hearing the exact same thing during the Clinton and Obama years as well.....And also from over-the-top nervous type Lefties during every GOP presidency.

 

And I can same the same about Your "truth"....No thanks!

 

GO RV, then BV

Edited March 4, 2021 by Shabibilicious

[Shabibilicious]

QAnon influencers are attacking their movement's hyped March 4 event, calling it a false flag conspiracy theory

 

 

Rachel E. Greenspan

Wed, March 3, 2021, 5:15 PM

 

 

 

Protesters gathered at the state's legislative building to protest various causes such as the Biden inauguration, Covid-19 restriction, vaccine, religious ideas, Qanon, common core education, without a cohesive message, during the first day of the 81st (2021) Session of the Nevada Legislature. Ty O'Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

• QAnon conspiracy theorists planned March 4 as their next big date, claiming Trump would be inaugurated.

• Some of the movement's influencers are now claiming that conspiracy theory is a false flag.

• The conspiracy-theory movement is already looking forward to its next goal post.

•  

When President Joe Biden was inaugurated on January 20, the QAnon conspiracy-theory community set its sights on March 4, the day they baselessly believed former President Donald Trump would actually be inaugurated and retake power.

QAnon, the false far-right conspiracy theory alleging Trump is fighting a "deep state" cabal of human traffickers, chose March 4 because it used to be the inauguration date for American presidents, before the ratification of the 20th Amendment in 1933. Trump International Hotel prices reportedly skyrocketed last month as QAnon believers planned to flock to Washington, DC, for the imagined inauguration.

But now, QAnon influencers are backtracking via another conspiracy theory, claiming that the March 4 date is a false flag event planned by outsiders to "make the whole movement look dumb," as David Gilbert reported for Vice.

One Wednesday post on a QAnon Telegram channel with 195,000 subscribers called the plan "BS." In January, that same channel told their followers, "The start date for the new Republic is March 4."

 

Another channel run by a major QAnon influencer with 71,000 subscribers made a similar claim on Wednesday morning. "March 4 is a Trap," the post said, sharing a screenshot of a "Q drop" - a cryptic message from the anonymous message board who began the conspiracy-theory movement in 2017 - that included the March 4 date and the word "trap."

"Q knew," the post said. "Q" has not posted on the message board, 8kun, since December 2020.

On an anonymous message board that's popular within the QAnon community, one post Wednesday morning echoed the same sentiment. "This whole March 4th warning reeks of false flag incoming," the post said.

The March 4 conspiracy theory comes after the failed prophecies predicting Trump would win the election, or that the results would be overturned on January 6, or that Trump would actually be the president inaugurated on January 20.

QAnon's top leaders turning on the movement's latest goal post ahead of Thursday, March 4, is an unsurprising move from the conspiracy theory's influencers, according to Nick Backovic, a contributing editor at fact-checking website Logically, where he researches misinformation and disinformation.

Shifting blame onto others and disavowing certain events is common practice for extremists, Backovic told Insider. "It's sort of a disclaimer," he said. Framing the March 4 date as a false flag event gives QAnon influencers an opportunity to waive responsibility if need be.

In many cases, far-right extremists have blamed their own groups' violence on Antifa, the antifascism movement. Former President Trump was so focused on accusing Antifa of threatening the country that he shifted law enforcement's focus away from the threat of far-right domestic terrorism, The New York Times reported.

Even after the January 6 insurrection, conspiracy theorists - and some Republicans in Congress - baselessly alleged that Antifa was responsible for storming the Capitol, not Trump supporters. While testifying before Congress on Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said there was no evidence Antifa was involved in the deadly riot.

QAnon leaders are likely also trying to dissuade believers from getting too invested in the March 4 mythology, because every time the movement's goalposts pass, some people leave the community, Backovic said. "QAnon is not intact - it's definitely lost some followers along the way after what happened in January," he said.

Though March 4 will soon pass without Trump's inauguration, there's already evidence that the community is preparing for new dates, like March 20, while some are looking forward to Trump's potential presidential run in 2024.

"I think it's an indication that some of them are in for the long haul," Backovic said.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/qanon-influencers-attacking-movements-hyped-221507921.html

 

GO RV, then BV

[md11fr8dawg]

28 minutes ago, coorslite21 said:

just might be the ruin to the US.

MIGHT???

[coorslite21]

Just watched a CNN live report from DC.....Young male Reporter stated that the threats for violence had come from the left.....the same groups that were responsible for all the damage in the large cities.....that clip will pop up again......bet the kid just wrecked his career....

CL

[Shabibilicious]

 

QAnon and conspiracy theories are taking hold in churches. Pastors are fighting back

 

 

Jaweed Kaleem

Wed, March 3, 2021, 6:00 AM

 

 

 

A man dressed as George Washington kneels in prayer near the Washington Monument with a Trump flag on Jan. 6 in Washington. (Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)

The congregation was in the middle of an online service when a longtime churchgoer in her 60s texted her pastor to complain that his prayer lamenting the riot at the U.S. Capitol in January was “too political."

The woman later unloaded a barrage of conspiracy theories. The election of Joe Biden was a fraud. The insurrection was instigated by Black Lives Matter and antifa activists disguised as Donald Trump supporters. The FBI was in on it all. The day would soon come, she said, “when all the evil, the corruption would come to light and the truth would be revealed.”

Startled and moved to tears, Pastor David Rice told the woman she had been "tricked by lies."

“You need to know how crazy this is,” he said to his congregant at the Markey Church in Roscommon County, Mich., a rural region of 25,000 residents that voted 2 to 1 for Trump. "You have been with my family and in my home and I care for you but you are dabbling in darkness. You are telling me it’s giving you hope. I’m telling you as your pastor that it’s evil."

 

The two haven't spoken since.

Details emerging from investigations into hundreds of Capitol rioters have cast an unsettling light on the toxic roles that fringe religious beliefs and QAnon conspiracy theories have played in shaking big and small churches across the nation. Trump's false insistence that he won the 2020 election may have incited the mob, but it also pointed to a dangerous intersection of God and politics.

A Kentucky man who the FBI charged as the first to enter the Capitol through a broken window saw himself as fighting a holy war on behalf of his president and, in a booking photo, wore a T-shirt that quoted Ephesians 6:11: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes." Jacob Chansley, the shirtless man dubbed the "QAnon Shaman" for his distinctive fur hat, horns and American flag face paint, said a prayer from the vice president's U.S. Senate dais, thanking the "Heavenly Father" for “allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors within our government.”

In photos from the Capitol on Jan. 6, religion abounds: "Jesus 2020" and "Proud American Christian" banners, a flag with an ichthys, or "Jesus fish", and a man in a jacket advertising the Knights of Columbus Catholic fraternity among them.

For pastors like Rice, whose church members were hundreds of miles away from Washington, D.C., and by and large abhorred the attacks, the lawlessness that day has spurred them to speak out against the rising tide of misinformation and Christian nationalism that they, too, have seen gripping their congregations and evangelical life in the U.S.

"Something disturbing has happened with evangelicals in this country where we have become prone to conspiracies and believing the worst about our enemies, where we end up placing the Republican Party and ourselves as Americans first before true Christianity," said Rice, 39, who has pastored the Baptist church for six years and doesn't identify with either major party.

 

Rioters, including Jacob Chansley, wearing a fur hat, are confronted by U.S. Capitol Police officers on Jan. 6. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

His fears are matched by recent data.

In a February report from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, more than a quarter of white evangelicals said the QAnon conspiracy theory, in which a cabal of powerful politicians run a global child sex trafficking ring, was "mostly" or "completely" accurate. The number was the highest of any religious group. The same survey found that 3 in 5 white evangelicals believe Biden's win was "not legitimate." A poll released this year from Nashville-based Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 49% of Protestant pastors said they often hear congregants repeating conspiracies about national events.

The trends led a group of more than 500 influential evangelical pastors, thinkers and faith leaders to recently publish an open letter condemning "radicalized Christian nationalism" and the "rise of violent acts by radicalized extremists using the name of Christ." Signers of letter, called "Say No To Christian Nationalism," included Jerushah Duford, the granddaughter of the late Rev. Billy Graham, and the Rev. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, a prominent progressive Christian advocacy organization.

The spread of disinformation isn't exclusive to religious groups and is widely seen as a larger casualty of the internet. In the last year, Facebook and Twitter have cracked down on QAnon-related accounts and appended fact checks to posts on COVID-19 and the presidential election. Conservatives and free speech supporters have said the social media companies have gone too far in canceling Trump's accounts for their role in the insurrection.

Yet, because Christianity is the largest faith in the U.S., "it's key to look at churches and pastors as spaces where people organize and spread their ideas," said Andrew Whitehead, an Indiana University-Purdue University sociologist and co-author of "Taking America Back For God."

Whitehead studies the growth of Christian nationalism, which he described as the "the fusing of Christianity with the belief that we are a Christian nation, one that God has chosen specifically for success and a particular Christian path, one that has been tied to the Republican Party and being white." This joining of politics and faith "has been influential for decades but was given a much bigger megaphone by Trump," he said. "We've seen that those who embrace Christian nationalism are also more likely to believe in conspiracies."

In interviews, pastors said houses of worship were particularly susceptible. But this new brand of identity politics has tested the power of the preacher against extremist voices in the pews. A Sunday morning can veer from the poetry of the Sermon on the Mount to the latest screed on Telegram.

"Fringe ideas can spread very quickly," said Mark Fugitt, the pastor of Round Grove Baptist Church in Miller, Mo., who said he's battled them in his rural congregation of 300.

He recalled going on Facebook a few months ago and making a list of the radical ideas church members shared: face masks cause carbon dioxide poisoning, germ theory is fake, 5G networks are part of a ploy for mind-control and the theory of a child sex trafficking ring with connections to Hillarious Clinton and her allies that's run out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C.

Fugitt, who plans his sermons months ahead of time, said he tries to incorporate Christian messages that apply to the modern-day plague of conspiracies as well as everyday life.

"I don’t look at the news and then write my sermon, but I look at Scripture and highlight biblical virtues like not lying and loving your neighbor," said Fugitt, 35. The Sunday after the Capitol attacks, he spoke in church about the parable of the good Samaritan from Luke 10:25-37. The following Sunday, the topics included the parable of the prodigal son.

Still, he's sometimes at a loss. After seeing a recent Facebook post by a pastor who said rolling blackouts in Texas were "trying to condition us for communist control" by the federal government, Fugitt didn't reply privately or comment publicly because he was unsure if he could change any minds.

For some pastors, church climates in the last year have become too much to bear.

 

Rioters try to break through a police barrier at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (Associated Press)

Vern Swieringa, a Christian Reformed Church pastor, agreed to leave his post in the small western Michigan village of Hamilton in December after months of disputes with his congregation over his request to require masks.

"That was the biggest part of it but there was so much more," said Swieringa, 61. "There were elderly members of my congregation that would share videos with me saying that Democrats were going to turn this country to socialism, that they were evil and QAnon was right. I tried to say with love that these were conspiracies and they would thank me but I'm not sure if it worked."

Swieringa recently got a new part-time job pastoring at Kibbie Christian Reformed Church in South Haven, Mich., where masks are mandatory.

Jared Stacy, a Southern Baptist pastor, had a similar experience.

Over his four years minister in Virginia, Stacy noticed a gradual uptick in conspiratorial conversations beginning to divide his congregation, which was split between young professionals and retirees. After George Floyd died at the hands of police in Minneapolis last summer, he said the problem got worse.

"Older members would ignore Black Lives Matter and instead say we had to focus on sex trafficking," he said. Stacy, 30, tried to tell congregants that both issues — racial justice and sex abuse — needed their prayers and attention. But he noticed that the concerns about sex trafficking were more specific to a QAnon belief in "Democrat pedophilia."

"It's like 2020 just exposed so many undercurrents that were already there and growing," Stacy said. "How could I compete with an hour of a sermon on Sunday with a person who was committing hours and hours to media and information on YouTube and Facebook?"

Stacy left the church in November. Today, he lives in Scotland, where he studies theology at the University of Aberdeen, and hopes to one day return to the U.S., possibly again as a pastor.

"The year 2020 drove my family to take a distance from America," he said. "Christianity is global. Evangelical Christianity is global. When you look at the U.S. Christianity from the outside, you wonder what happened."

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/qanon-conspiracy-theories-taking-hold-110008408.html

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

Your one sided thinking is on full display today.  If you are so upset with the Q movement as a destructive force in America then you should be just as upset with the BLM and Antifa movements that have burned and looted many US cities.  Why does your indignation only know one side?  

 

 

[Shabibilicious]

11 minutes ago, Pitcher said:

Your one sided thinking is on full display today.  If you are so upset with the Q movement as a destructive force in America then you should be just as upset with the BLM and Antifa movements that have burned and looted many US cities.  Why does your indignation only know one side?  

 

Is my "one sided" thinking really any different than yours, or any other poster in the political forum?  Why do you never ask the same question of others....like in the "Biden Supporters Be Like" forum for example?  Why must I always be asked to conform when nobody else does?

 

GO RV, then BV

[nstoolman1]

1 minute ago, Shabibilicious said:

 

Is my "one sided" thinking really any different than yours, or any other poster in the political forum?  Why do you never ask the same question of others....like in the "Biden Supporters Be Like" forum for example?  Why must I always be asked to conform when nobody else does?

 

GO RV, then BV

 

 

Yet you won't denounce them. Many on here have denounced people on the right that have done violence.

 

[Pitcher]

5 minutes ago, Shabibilicious said:

Is my "one sided" thinking really any different than yours, or any other poster in the political forum

 

Yes, it is very different..  

[Shabibilicious]

3 minutes ago, nstoolman1 said:

 

 

Yet you won't denounce them. Many on here have denounced people on the right that have done violence.

 

 

I've denounced violence from the left many times....from all violent rioters, in fact.

 

GO RV, then BV

[Shabibilicious]

Just now, Pitcher said:

 

Yes, it is very different..  

 

How so.....are you above the fray?

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

18 minutes ago, Shabibilicious said:

How so.....are you above the fray?

 

I have a real problem with you and your divisive rhetoric.   Instead of responding in a long drawn out post I think I will remain above the fray and pass for now.  I have more important things to do.  

[Shabibilicious]

2 minutes ago, Pitcher said:

 

I have a real problem with you and your divisive rhetoric.   Instead of reponing in a long drawn out post I think I will remain above the fray and pass for now.  I have more important things to do.  

 

Of course only one of us has called the other a piece of garbage, and trash.

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

1 minute ago, Shabibilicious said:

Of course only one of us has called the other a piece of garbage, and trash.

 

Yes I said that and I believe you earned it.  I stand by my words.

[Shabibilicious]

Just now, Pitcher said:

 

Yes I said that and I believe you earned it.  I stand by my words.

 

Uh huh....certainly above the fray.  

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

Let’s just say I don’t like you, and you don’t like me. So what else you want to throw at me.  

[Shabibilicious]

U.S. Capitol building under tight security after warnings of possible attack plot by QAnon conspiracy followers

Thu, March 4, 2021, 9:37 AM

 

 

The U.S. Capitol building is under heightened security Thursday following warnings from intelligence officials of possible violence by QAnon followers. The conspiracy group believes that Donald Trump will be restored to the presidency today, March 4, which was America's inauguration day until 1933. CBS News' Debra Alfarone joins "CBSN AM" from Capitol Hill to discuss.

 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-capitol-building-under-tight-143708298.html

 

GO to the link for the video

 

GO RV, then BV

[Shabibilicious]

1 minute ago, Pitcher said:

Let’s just say I don’t like you, and you don’t like me. So what else you want to throw at me.  

 

I never said I didn't like you....didn't realize you had dislike for me personally, rather than my posting you abhor.  Good to know, I suppose....shame politics can do that to people.

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

2 minutes ago, Shabibilicious said:

never said I didn't like you....didn't realize you had dislike for me personally, rather than my posting you abhor.  Good to know, I suppose....shame politics can do that to people.

 

What is a shame is that some people use politics to divide.  

[Shabibilicious]

4 minutes ago, Pitcher said:

 

What is a shame is that some people use politics to divide.  

 

Sure is.  In fact DJT and friends are out there right now, trying to "divide" some Republicans from the GOP for attempting to hold him accountable for his actions of January 6th.  How's that for dividing?

 

GO RV, then BV

[Pitcher]

1 minute ago, Shabibilicious said:

In fact DJT and friends are out there right now, trying to "divide" some Republicans from the GOP for attempting to hold him accountable for his actions of January 6th.  How's that for dividing?

 

 

Haha, there it is, the Trump Obsession.   

 

 

[Pitcher]

I’ve got 15 minutes before I have to leave.  Would you like to talk about our current President.  The one who is destroying America one EO at a time.

 

The Dictator in Chief 

[Shabibilicious]

Just now, Pitcher said:

 

 

Haha, there it is, the Trump Obsession.   

 

 

 

Haha, and there it is, the Trump Enabling.  Have a nice day Pitcher.

 

GO RV, then BV