This language now extends beyond politics

June 12, 2024 12:56 AM

Today, QAnon exists in a vastly more complex media ecosystem and seems to be addressing a wider, more amorphous set of concerns. But its rough function is the same: The family order is again seen as being threatened, this time by attacks on gender norms. Q gives people a way to feel they are protecting the traditional atomic family. By devouring fresh posts from QAnon influencers, donning Q gear, or spreading word online about the impending arrest of the cabal, Q faithful felt like they were doing everything they could to support the welfare of children and usher in a new era of conservative family values that would put them in charge. from How Q Became Everything [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Q, conspiracy, Felonious Trump, Epstein, pedophilia etc. etc.]
posted by chavenet (18 comments total)

roots of the idea lie much further back than Margaret Thatcher, but a line she said in 1987 makes the point: “There’s no such thing as society.”

1852: “Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.” ~ Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds [Project Gutenberg, second ed.]

4chan previously: “I simply became racist after I learned the truth.” He credits 4chan as the source of that truth.
posted by HearHere at 2:11 AM on June 12 [11 favorites]

When you disappear up your own ass, every kernel of corn appears as a diamond.
posted by rhizome at 3:14 AM on June 12 [28 favorites]

CONSERVATIVES:

“To me, it’s about sexualizing children,”

ALSO CONSERVATIVES:

Why Are Some Republican Lawmakers Hellbent on Preserving Child Marriage?

Republicans Make a Case for Child Marriage

West Virginia Republicans Block Child Marriage Ban
posted by AlSweigart at 5:23 AM on June 12 [28 favorites]

Journalists need to start using the word "patriarchy." I wish they hadn't buried the lede:

“The single biggest off-the-books investment that keeps stripped-down neoliberal economics working is free female labor,” historian Bethany Moreton told me. American women average over four hours a day of unpaid labor; some estimates put the annual value of this work at $1.5 trillion. If those hours were reduced or paid out, there would be massive cultural and financial repercussions. Men’s lives would be upended, as things stopped happening and they either faced the consequences or had to pick up the slack.

None of them gives a shit about Q or human trafficking or bathrooms or nuclear families (though they are quite ready to do violence over them.) It's about maintaining "traditional" gender roles that put women subjugated under men for free labor.

They don't phrase it like that though. Instead they tell you to get back in the kitchen and make them a sandwich.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:43 AM on June 12 [33 favorites]

Has there ever been a Republican/right-wing accusation that didn't turn out to be a confession?

Voter fraud!
When proven, only done by right-wingers.

Terrorism in America!
Vastly right-wing actors conducting domestic terror campaigns.

Foreign interference!
In Canada, at least, it's becoming increasingly clear that the right-wing Conservative leadership has been the result of manipulation by China and India.

So. I mean. The louder they yell "paedophilia!" the more likely I am to believe it, but not in the direction they're pointing.
posted by Shepherd at 7:09 AM on June 12 [25 favorites]

I wish they hadn't buried the lede

Then they'd have to admit it's not news.

More Work for Mother came out in 1983.

The Second Shift in 1989.

Hannah Alonzo: Tradwives: The business of being a “traditional wife” influencer

münecat: I Debunked Evolutionary Psychology

Kavernacle: The End of Tradwives (on Lauren Southern's repudiation of the movement in attempting to rehab her persona) [kinda remedial, but covers recent events]. Vaush's take, if that wasn't online enough.

miiasaurus: the tradwife/"sprinkle sprinkle" apocalypse [mildly NSFW]

Tara Monkee: Classically Abby's content hits different now. Here's why.

critique from a (somewhat notorious) 'anti-feminist,' from a year ago already - Shoe0nHead: The TikTok TradWife Epidemic


Plus, the whole Crowder scandal.

I also think Taylor Swift's whole cottage-core thing during the pandemic didn't help.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:21 AM on June 12 [6 favorites]

Q faithful felt like they were doing everything they could to support the welfare of children and usher in a new era of conservative family values that would put them in charge.

Not so much about children, but values. I recently watched The Sixth, an excellent J6 documentary*, and the most infuriating thing (aside from the harm done to the individuals defending the Capitol) was how USA, America, and freedom were coopted by the rioters to imply they were the real Americans and they were somehow speaking for all of us.

*Free to checkout on Hoopla, btw.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 9:47 AM on June 12 [5 favorites]

> This language now extends beyond politics. When rapper Kendrick Lamar puts out diss tracks accusing his rival Drake of being a pedophile, he makes the connection explicit: “I’m lookin’ to shoot through any pervert that lives, keep the family safe.”

One thing that's fascinating about the Kendrick side of the beef is that beyond weaponizing child abuse allegations is that reportedly there was an intense amount of "research" by avid fans looking into everything from the timing of when his diss tracks dropped to scrutinizing cryptic Instagram posts to whatever this is. There's something to be said in this time of infinite information spam and loss of trust in our institutions and idols, people seek some sort of gnosis in apophenia and ephemera. I think those means are as significant a part of the legacy of QAnon as the supposed ends of protecting children.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:07 AM on June 12 [6 favorites]

avid fans looking into everything from the timing of when his diss tracks dropped to scrutinizing cryptic Instagram posts to whatever this is

That's "ent lawyer"
posted by chavenet at 11:14 AM on June 12 [1 favorite]

More Work for Mother came out in 1983.

The Second Shift in 1989.

If Women Counted was published in 1988.
posted by Lexica at 11:21 AM on June 12 [5 favorites]

avid fans looking into everything from the timing of when his diss tracks dropped to scrutinizing cryptic Instagram posts to whatever this is.

If you're not on Twitter, it's a 22-page .pdf collection of 'blind items' about Drake and others that I do not remotely cosign (some pieces seem plausible, while others range from over-vague to far-fetched at best to 'this-sounds-like-a-Satanic-Panic-preschool-narrative') other than to say that catbox.moe (?) didn't ring any bells with my workplace's firewall.

So it looks like the Butterfly rapper confirmed what was said in
this space some weeks back. The Canadian rapper leaked his
own video to get attention , and is associated with Weinstein and
Epstein men like the Not Nice person and the Porta Papi who lost
opportunities to the Middle Alphabet rapper after he was caught
trying to brainwash school girls and was accused of selling his
meat in Dubai.

While somebody might know what all that means, I do not remotely.
posted by box at 12:12 PM on June 12 [1 favorite]

Social media algorithms may have created these cult trends by recommendation filters. I wonder the extent of damage done to vulnerable individuals by causing them to become a financial or social risk to those around them, like drug addiction (but harder to hide by exposing incompetency and mental illness).
posted by Brian B. at 1:38 PM on June 12 [4 favorites]

Has there ever been a Republican/right-wing accusation that didn't turn out to be a confession?

It's been obvious to me that QAnon has definitely been right-wing projection the whole time. Before QAnon, there was Pizzagate, that idiotic scandal that claimed child sex trafficking was going on in the basement of a pizza parlor that had no basement.

But why did they pick a pizza parlor? Because cheese pizza 4chan in-joke slang for child pornography.

Seriously, just walk through what you would have to believe to believe that QAnon is true. Let's humor a few idiots and stipulate very briefly that the elite child sex trafficking conspiracy exists. If the FBI or the Deep State wanted to shut down that conspiracy, why would their go-to plan be "I know! Why don't we bust this wide open with help from a bunch of anonymous trolls on 4chan?" This is especially absurd when you consider that 4chan is probably how some of those trolls get tipped off where to find CSA materials themselves.
posted by jonp72 at 1:58 PM on June 12 [6 favorites]

I also wanted to once again post this when talking in reference to QAnon and pop culture fandom:

#ReleaseTheJJCut: “Star Wars” Misinformation Hell Is The New Future Of Everything by Ryan Broderick

The Star Wars fandom is now a nesting doll of speculation, paranoia, and anxiety about corporate overreach — growing more insular and reactionary in the eight years since Disney took over Star Wars.

The misinformation and anger inside the Star Wars fandom is what happens after decades of corporatization and anonymous decentralized networking. It is a glimpse of a future in which anxieties over the motives of the megacorporations that drive our culture — down to our very mythologies — set off conflicts between warring information tribes who inhabit their own artificial narratives. What began with small but vocal insurgent online communities like 4chan or the alt-right has now come for the mainstream.

...

It isn’t just Disney. As corporate monoliths amass more money and power, consumers become more feverish, fanatical, and paranoid. Supreme hypebeasts, Fortnite players, PewDiePie commenters, VSCO girls, K-pop fans, Tesla evangelists — there seems to be a divided fan community for nearly every form of media or product or service.

And as quickly and strangely as modern fandoms form, so are they mutated by Han Shot First moments. These schisms are rarely deliberate — rather, they are sparked by a director's cut of a popular film, an offhand remark made in an interview. They are willed into existence by conspiracy theories, by fanfiction, by leaks of material never intended to be seen.

(I'm surprised he didn't add Swifties to the list.) QAnon and other political conspiracy theories are the ones that might have the most extreme real-world consequences, but we're living in an age where our very entertainment has been corrupted by conspiratorial thinking, parasocial idolization, and tribalist feuding.

As per the above piece's author's original Twitter thread:

The Star Wars community is so polarized and so old that they've evolved past the idea of "post-truth" or whatever into something even weirder. The leaks and the "planted leaks" have all become just part of the normal fan discourse. It's like one meta level up from even QAnon.

There's basically now:
• Stan armies creating fictitious redeeming backstories about movies they don't like set in the universes

• Directors/director supporters spreading fake leaks about studio interference

• Studios revving up fan armies against actors and directors.

Soooo...

[deep breath]

I think what's happening in the Star Wars (and other) fandoms in regards to mass disinformation becoming literal information wars will hit an inflection point pretty soon and, like Gamergate before it, probably have huge sociopolitical ramifications.

posted by Apocryphon at 3:26 PM on June 12 [2 favorites]

I also wanted to once again post this when talking in reference to QAnon and pop culture fandom:

I'm reminded of Adrian Hon's observation that QAnon the game-playing mechanics of alternate reality games (ARGs). Adrian Hon is a game designer who actually designed ARG's themselves & he said that, in designing an ARG, you never admit that something went wrong in your world-building. If you've created an inconsistency or you've boxed yourself in story-wise, you just figure out a way to write through the problem instead of writing around it. I think this same skill is what keeps QAnon and conspiracist culture writ large going.
posted by jonp72 at 3:47 PM on June 12 [7 favorites]

Years ago, hell decades ago at this point, I transitioned from working in traditional media into more digital oriented stuff. I was working on a UFO conspiracy computer game (I told people to think of it like being a playable version of the X FIles), and the more I dug into that scene, the more and more crazy things got - and by that I mean even crazier than "Aliens are here and they're stealing our cows."

Before I knew it, I was down a rabbit hole where UFOs connected to cattle mutilations connected to Elvis connected to child abductions connected to bigfoot connected to Art Bell connected to JFK connected to ... connected to ... connected to ...

And at one point I remember saying to myself, "Sooner or later there's going to be a grand unified conspiracy theory that blends ALL this crazy stuff together."

When QAnon came out of nowhere I said to myself, "There it is. There it is. All the batshit crazy conspiracies have coalesced into one big ball of utter and complete horseshit that only makes sense as long as you never, ever get outside the conspiracy."
posted by Relay at 6:53 PM on June 12 [7 favorites]

The article has a lot of focus on the influencers in QAnon, but I think it really understates the communal aspect that truly makes it tick. As appropriate for a movement with roots in anonymous imageboards like 4chan, the influencers are just signal boosters - the signal they repeat is plucked out of the mass consciousness of adherents, who spend their time looking for hidden symbols, poring over clues, and brainstorming ideas with their compatriots to distill everything down the most potent psychic contagion. The article by the ARG designer is spot on but only hints at it: a lot of these people are alienated and looking for meaning - they are participating in a belief system and getting validation from each other.
posted by ndr at 2:19 AM on June 13 [2 favorites]

Most of the crazy things crazy people believe are just true things with the culprits conveniently switched to avoid any threat to the powerful. There is a cabal of child molesters, actually there are several: the R party, the church, bscouts of a. 5g isnt the technology that causes cancer, plastic is. The hostile aliens poised to control the world and plunder it aren't from Niberu, they are corporations. The threat to american lives and livelihoods aren't from city folks, professors, mainstream reporters, jews, brown immigrants or muslims, they are from CEOs, college presidents, corporate media, russian and chinese disinfo, evangelicals.

The delusional fantasy of the right is to see Peter Theil, Zuckerberg and Oprah and think the problem is gays, jews and blacks instead of the psychopathy of unaccountable wealth.

There is a massive medical conspiracy, its called insurance companies, whose business model is to deny you the service (healthcare) that you buy from them. Its also called treating disease with maintenance drugs instead of reducing/preventing disease with consumer protections and environmental regulations.
There is a conspiracy of scientists, to pretend that its impolite to point out how fucked the ecosystem is and how useless our superstitions are for dealing with it.

In short, Qanon and MAGA is not just antisemitism, hypocrisy and projection, its a murder suicide pact with the truth.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 4:21 AM on June 13 [10 favorites]