in all my infinite wisdom

Category: Delusionial

QAnon is a prank started by a couple of 4Chan guys as a social experiment.

The target; baby boomer Trump supporters. The prank has worked and most of those taken in are deluded, gullible, weak-minded, lack common sense, and look ridiculous.

QAnon Is A Fake, Decoy Imitation Of A Healthy Revolutionary Impulse

Thursday, 20 August 2020, 4:25 pm
Opinion: Caitlin Johnstone via www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1905/S00134/how-you-can-be-100-certain-that-qanon-is-bullshit.htm

Today the US president moved from tacit endorsement and evading questions on the toxic QAnon psyop to directly endorsing and supporting it, telling reporters “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” and saying they’re just people who love their country and don’t like seeing what’s happening in places like Portland, Chicago, and New York City.

Asked about the driving theory behind QAnon that Trump is waging a covert war against a satanic pedopheliac baby-eating deep state, Trump endorsed the idea but reframed it by saying that he’s leading a fight against “a radical left philosophy”.

“If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there,” Trump said in response to the query. “And we are actually. We’re saving the world from a radical left philosophy that will destroy this country, and when this country is gone, the rest of the world would follow.”

Of course Trump did not claim to be fighting any satanic pedovores, because he is doing nothing of the sort. Nor is he fighting the deep state; despite all the virulent narrative spin he’s been a fairly conventional Republican president in terms of policy and behavior in all the usual depraved and disgusting ways, and has done nothing of note to stand against the unelected power establishment known as the deep state. He absolutely has been brutalizing protesters in places like Portland and attacking socialism in places like Venezuela and Bolivia, though, so he can indeed safely admit to that.

The disingenuous nature of Trump’s endorsement hasn’t done anything to dampen the excitement and enthusiasm of QAnoners online, though.

He basically confirmed the movement. We, together with the US military, are the saviors of mankind.

What an incredible time to be alive. pic.twitter.com/O5O6rt5TAE

— Sokrates (@Sokrates_17) August 19, 2020

I write against QAnon periodically for the exact same reason I write against the plutocratic media: it’s an obvious propaganda construct designed to manufacture support for the status quo among people who otherwise would not support it. It presents itself as an exciting movement where the little guy is finally rising up and throwing off the chains of the tyrannical forces which have been exploiting and oppressing us, yet in reality all it’s doing is telling a discontented sector of the population to relax and “trust the plan” and put all their faith in the leader of the US government.

And that’s exactly what makes QAnon so uniquely toxic. It’s not just that it gets people believing false things which confuse and alienate them, it’s that it’s a fake, decoy imitation of what a healthy revolutionary impulse would look like. It sells people on important truths that they already intuitively know on some level, like the untrustworthiness of the mass media, that the official elected US government aren’t really the ones calling the shots, and we need a great awakening. It takes those vital, truthful, healthy revolutionary impulses, then twists them around into support for the United States president and the agendas of the Republican Party.

And now literally any time I speak out against Trump doing something self-evidently horrible like orchestrating the extradition of Julian Assange or assassinating Iran’s top military official, I get QAnon adherents in the comments section telling me to “relax” and “trust the plan” because this is actually a brilliant strategic maneuver against the deep state. Any argument against any longstanding evil Fox News Republican agenda that Trump advances has a widely promulgated explanation for why it’s actually good and beneficial among the QAnon crowd.

A healthy impulse to fight the power is twisted into support for the most unconscionable aspects of the ruling power establishment. You see healthy impulses twisted and corrupted like this all the time, all across the political spectrum. The healthy impulse to fight racism and bigotry is twisted into support for the warmongering, oppressive and exploitative Democratic Party which is nothing but destructive toward the populations it pretends to protect. The healthy impulse to defend the helpless and fight tyranny is railroaded into support for acts of regime change “humanitarian” interventionism.

How You Can Be 100% Certain That QAnon Is Bullshit

“Here are three reasons you can be absolute, 100 percent certain that it’s bullshit:” #QAnon#WWG1WGA#Q#MAGAhttps://t.co/qAxdiItXFO

(@caitoz) May 26, 2019

Caitlin Johnstone

The fact that people need to be deceived by their healthy impulses in this way is a good sign; it means we’re generally good people with a generally healthy sense of which way to push. If we were intrinsically wicked and unwise their propaganda wouldn’t hook us by telling us to fight tyranny, defend children and tell the truth–it would hook us using our cowardice, our hatred, our greed, our sadism. People are basically good, and propagandists use that goodness to trick us.

But good will and good intentions aren’t enough, unfortunately. Even intelligence, by itself, isn’t enough to save us from being propagandized; some fairly intelligent people have fallen for propaganda operations like QAnon and Russiagate. If you want to have a clear perspective on what’s really going on in the world you’ve got to have an unwavering devotion to knowing what’s true that goes right down into your guts.

Most people don’t have this. Most people do not have truth as a foremost priority. They probably think they do, but they don’t. When it comes right down to it, most people are more invested in finding ways to defend their preexisting biases than in learning what’s objectively true. If they’ve got a special hatred for Democrats, the confirmation biases that will give them leave them susceptible to the QAnon psyop. If they’ve got a special hatred for Trump, they’re susceptible to believing he’s controlled by some kind of Russian government conspiracy. There are any number of other directions such biases can carry someone.

Only by a humble devotion to truth that is willing to sacrifice any worldview or ideology to the uncompromising fire of objective reality can skillfully navigate through a world that is saturated with disinformation and propaganda. Sincerely put truth first in all things while doing your best to find out what’s actually going on in our world, and eventually, you’re guaranteed to free yourself from any perceptual distortion.

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Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s “the least racist person.” His history suggests otherwise.

Donald Trump’s long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2020

Trump has repeatedly claimed he’s “the least racist person.” His history suggests otherwise.

By German Lopez 

If you ask President Donald Trump, he isn’t racist. To the contrary, he’s repeatedly said that he’s “the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.”

Trump’s actual record, however, tells a very different story.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly made explicitly racist and otherwise bigoted remarks, from calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, to proposing a ban on all Muslims entering the US, to suggesting a judge should recuse himself from a case solely because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.
The trend has continued into his presidency. From stereotyping a Black reporter to pandering to white supremacists after they held a violent rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, to making a joke about the Trail of Tears, Trump hasn’t stopped with racist acts after his 2016 election.
Most recently, Trump has called the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” — racist terms that tap into the kind of xenophobia that he latched onto during his 2016 presidential campaign; Trump’s own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, previously called “kung flu” a “highly offensive” term. And Trump insinuated that Sen. Kamala Harris, who’s Black, “doesn’t meet the requirements” to run for vice president — a repeat of the birther conspiracy theory that he perpetuated about former President Barack Obama.

This is nothing new for Trump. In fact, the very first time Trump appeared in the pages of the New York Times, back in the 1970s, was when the US Department of Justice sued him for racial discrimination. Since then, he has repeatedly appeared in newspaper pages across the world as he inspired more similar controversies.
This long history is important. It would be one thing if Trump misspoke one or two times. But when you take all of his actions and comments together, a clear pattern emerges — one that suggests that bigotry is not just political opportunism on Trump’s part but a real element of his personality, character, and career.

Trump has a long history of racist controversies

Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s history, taken largely from Dara Lind’s list for Vox and an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

1973: The US Department of Justice — under the Nixon administration, out of all administrations — sued the Trump Management Corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal officials found evidence that Trump had refused to rent to Black tenants and lied to Black applicants about whether apartments were available, among other accusations. Trump said the federal government was trying to get him to rent to welfare recipients. In the aftermath, he signed an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to discriminate to renters of color without admitting to previous discrimination.

1980s: Kip Brown, a former employee at Trump’s Castle, accused another one of Trump’s businesses of discrimination. “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor,” Brown said. “It was the eighties, I was a teenager, but I remember it: They put us all in the back.”

1989: In a controversial case that’s been characterized as a modern-day lynching, four Black teenagers and one Latino teenager — the “Central Park Five” — were accused of attacking and raping a jogger in New York City. Trump immediately took charge in the case, running an ad in local papers demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” The teens’ convictions were later vacated after they spent seven to 13 years in prison, and the city paid $41 million in a settlement to the teens. But Trump in October 2016 said he still believes they’re guilty, despite the DNA evidence to the contrary.

1991: A book by John O’Donnell, former president of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump’s criticism of a Black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” Trump later said in a 1997 Playboy interview that “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

1992: The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino had to pay a $200,000 fine because it transferred Black and women dealers off tables to accommodate a big-time gambler’s prejudices.

1993: In congressional testimony, Trump said that some Native American reservations operating casinos shouldn’t be allowed because “they don’t look like Indians to me.”

2000: In opposition to a casino proposed by the St. Regis Mohawk tribe, which he saw as a financial threat to his casinos in Atlantic City, Trump secretly ran a series of ads suggesting the tribe had a “record of criminal activity [that] is well documented.”

2004: In season two of The Apprentice, Trump fired Kevin Allen, a Black contestant, for being overeducated. “You’re an unbelievably talented guy in terms of education, and you haven’t done anything,” Trump said on the show. “At some point you have to say, ‘That’s enough.’”

2005: Trump publicly pitched what was essentially The Apprentice: White People vs. Black People. He said he “wasn’t particularly happy” with the most recent season of his show, so he was considering “an idea that is fairly controversial — creating a team of successful African Americans versus a team of successful whites. Whether people like that idea or not, it is somewhat reflective of our very vicious world.”

2010: In 2010, there was a huge national controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” — a proposal to build a Muslim community center in Lower Manhattan, near the site of the 9/11 attacks. Trump opposed the project, calling it “insensitive,” and offered to buy out one of the investors in the project. On The Late Show With David Letterman, Trump argued, referring to Muslims, “Well, somebody’s blowing us up. Somebody’s blowing up buildings, and somebody’s doing lots of bad stuff.”

2011: Trump played a big role in pushing false rumors that Obama — the country’s first Black president — was not born in the US. He claimed to send investigators to Hawaii to look into Obama’s birth certificate. Obama later released his birth certificate, calling Trump a “carnival barker.” The research has found a strong correlation between birtherism, as the conspiracy theory is called, and racism. But Trump has reportedly continued pushing this conspiracy theory in private.

2011: While Trump suggested that Obama wasn’t born in the US, he also argued that maybe Obama wasn’t a good enough student to have gotten into Columbia or Harvard Law School, and demanded Obama release his university transcripts. Trump claimed, “I heard he was a terrible student. Terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

For many people, none of these incidents, individually, may be damning: One of these alone might suggest that Trump is simply a bad speaker and perhaps racially insensitive (“politically incorrect,” as he would put it), but not overtly racist.

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