• Isn’t it ironic that so quite a few people connected to QAnon transform out to be them selves, involved with sexual abuse and violence against children?
No, as Lindsey Beyerstein writes in this article — “The link in between Trumpland, QAnon, evangelical culture and baby sexual intercourse predators” — it is the reverse of ironic. It’s utterly predictable and predicted:
QAnon’s preoccupation with baby porn is a consequence of overlapping themes in chan culture, conspiracy tradition, Evangelical lifestyle, and parenting/wellness lifestyle. The principle gelled in improperly moderated areas wherever genuine kid porn and jokes about it had been a fact of lifetime.
QAnon was born in the fetid swamps of 4chan imageboard, where by the speech was totally free and child porn was accessible to people who knew wherever to glance. Kid porn was officially from the rules, but the chans had been founded as message boards for unbridled absolutely free speech, so their moderation protocols are purposefully lax. Pedophilia jokes and tropes in shape 4chan’s shock-jock ethos. The unofficial mascot of 4chan is a character acknowledged as Pedobear.
Beyerstein also notes that QAnon was only equipped to distribute amid white evangelical “normies” at the time it experienced migrated from the chans to extra obtainable platforms like Fb mainly because “Chans are an insular entire world that is only navigable by individuals with a fair amount of money of technical sophistication and a substantial tolerance for obscenity and abuse.”
Which is real. The white evangelicals sharing QAnon memes on Facebook rarely venture outside of the official itinerary of Mark Zuckerberg’s tourbus bubble and never have any concept how to navigate the rest of the online. So I feel we will need to instruct them how to do that. Simply because I believe the very best hope for curing Q-addled white evangelical church-goers lies in getting them on a tour of areas like 4chan and 8kun to permit them see for on their own where all of this comes from.
This is a change for me, because I have spent years indicating that no one really should ever visit those people cesspools. But I assume John McArthur demands to. And so does Ken Peters, and Sean Feucht, and Eric Metaxas, and every single other conspiracy-deceived white evangelical.
• “How to help, and what to do if you will need it, throughout Texas’ historic freeze.” This Austin American-Statesman how-to piece has been creating the rounds as a superior overview of strategies for Texans and many others to enable those in need throughout that state’s deep freeze and electrical power disaster.
Which is manufactured this photo by the paper’s Ana Ramirez — and so this quote from Picasso — ubiquitous on social media:
“Everything you can envision is serious,” the quotation claims. In the context of Ramirez’s terrific picture, that’s inspiring and aspirational — reminding us that we can picture a superior environment than the standing quo — that we can make serious a world in which our neighbors are not compelled to huddle in tents through a existence-threatening winter season.
But that estimate hits in different ways for those of us who grew up reading through The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:
All people realized it would be much better not to listen, not to pressure his ears for any sound from the darkness. But no just one could assistance listening. And before long all people was hearing issues. Every one heard something diverse.
“Do you listen to a noise like … like a big pair of scissors opening and shutting … in excess of there?” Eustace requested Rynelf.
“Hush!” reported Rynelf. “I can hear them crawling up the sides of the ship.”
“It is just likely to settle on the mast,” reported Caspian.
“Ugh!” explained a sailor. “There are the gongs commencing. I realized they would.”
I suppose what we can picture usually can be made serious. But that a lot more typically looks legitimate of our fears than of our beliefs.
• Frothing antisemite Rick Wiles has been working so challenging to encourage himself that “cultural Marxism” is a dire menace that he now advocates enormous prosperity distribution as a means to battle it: “Rick Wiles Floats 2024 Presidential Marketing campaign, Guarantees to Seize the Prosperity of Billionaires and Give it to the Inadequate.”
This is interesting since Wiles — who has, for a long time, been a hateful, raving loon promoting an incoherent jumble of contradictory conspiracy theories — stumbles and bumbles his way to a position wherever he’s just inches from a significant epiphany. And he arrives so tantalizingly shut to this perception in the most Rick Wiles way, expressing:
“When you use your funds and electrical power to transform my lifetime, to choose absent my rights, to try to pressure things on me that I item to, that I discover morally repulsive, when you try to prohibit my totally free speech, when you test to advertise populace control, you want to pump vaccines into my overall body, when you want to transform modern society, you know what? You are my enemy,” Wiles declared. “The only way you’re equipped to do it is because you’re a billionaire. So then we will need to choose absent your billions.”
“… Let’s split up the tech corporations. Let us consider the billions. I want to choose Invoice Gates’ billions and give it to the poor. I want to give it to the lousy. I want to strip them, fully strip them, and give it to the very poor. I want Jack Dorsey’s money. I want [Mark] Zuckerberg’s cash. I want to give it to the lousy.”
You can virtually hear the gears in Wiles’ head grinding as he struggles to assume this by way of. He’s starting to dimly comprehend that broad concentrations of wealth consequence in wide concentrations of political electric power, and that this kind of inequality threatens and restricts the freedoms of all people else.
And that’s not wrong. But Wiles is not-completely wrong for the wrong causes — for unsafe, unattractive, hateful, and silly reasons. He would like to “break up the tech companies” and check out the financial power of billionaires due to the fact he thinks this would counter the ability of the Antichrist’s just one-world-federal government and the top secret cabal of globalists fueling the subversive Communist fifth-column. And all of that is however pretty, very incorrect.
• Here is a candid private testimony (one still in progress) from now-previous ideal-wing talk radio dude Chuck Armstrong: “My lifetime with Hurry Limbaugh.” This piece only hints at the encounters with grace that led Armstrong to problem and rethink the lifestyle he’d been born and bred into. Some of people hints are in the writers he rates in this article, and in friendships he located and formed.
But I also suspect that new music played a role in this tale, and so here’s Drive-By Truckers doing “Armageddon’s Back again in Town“:
