- A lot of people I talked to this morning said they’re having some problem with their families when they share the truth with them,” Clark says to the crowd early the second day. “Can anyone relate to this?” Their applause suggests many of them could. He reads them a Bible verse he finds helpful, Matthew 10:34–39:
For I have come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.“My summary,” he tells the crowd, smiling, “is ‘Deal with it!’”
Not only did the internet allow the village idiots to meet up and delude each other further, the algos were like "Hey, they're super engaged and buying merch! This is great! I'll try to keep this going". Some of us just can't handle the internet. We clearly need to adjust things. Is this movement done with the "save the children" tenet? The kids are all safe now? It's safe to say that QAnon-adjacent rhetoric is alive and well when the #3 House GOP member is implicitly calling Biden and the dems pedophiles (btw I've reached out to Stephen Miller to see if we're supposed to abort illegal fetuses so future illegal babies can't steal American baby formula, just waiting to hear back). And of course there's the "grooming" accusations leveled against anyone so much as acknowledging the existence of non-cis-hetero lifestyles that DeSantis et al. are codifying into law. Surprised that no talk of saving kids took place at this, uh, "conference", or at least wasn't prominent enough to make it into the article. Were I the author, I would've noted the links between this movement and the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Surely the overlap is bigly. Victimhood conspiracies are a core feature of Trumpism, after all. Probably good to immortalize this, from veen in chat: The difference between a ReAwaken America event and something like CPAC or a formally-sanctioned RNC event shrinks by the week. I know it's tempting to note the complete lack of braintrust behind it all (besides the billionaires funding things and the politicians pretending to believe the lies) and write it off as unthreatening, but I still can't. Honestly, I never knew how dangerous institutionalized stupid could be. Or that it was possible at all to have this much of it.
About that. Theoretically, this is a book about the history of information warfare. Practically, this is a book about Russian disinformation campaigns because across the broad, sweeping spectrum of history, the overwhelming purveyor of disinformation and active measures are Russian. An example: Okhrana all the way, baby Of course the Protocols were just a formalization of the blood libel which has been haunting the Jews for a thousand years but hey, sometimes the best DJ plays greatest hits. Rid says, without saying, that the "fellow travelers" and "useful idiots" of capitalism are always the first place the Russians look and in general, the more open a forum of communication the more you lean into the fellow travelers and useful idiots. Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden (that dude's been quiet!), Julian Assange, Donald Trump... there is exactly zero cost to playing up each and every thing they say especially since the end goal isn't domination, it's obfuscation ("if we get them thinking AIDS is an American bioweapon they'll stop talking about the poison gas we're using in Afghanistan"). Here's the thing. I spent the better part of a month moving my phones around and hardening my telecom infrastructure and building out spare numbers and improving side channels because the Russians decided to take down my phones. I had every reason to expect that the minute Donbass was declared a breakaway republic my life was going to get tedious. Instead? Crickets. Nuthin'. Zilch. Shit has never been so stable. It's almost like the NSA and CIA were let off the leash. Great Replacement Theory? That's QAnon is Protocols is blood libel is archetypal anti-jew shit, it's just that there aren't enough jews to go around anymore so we're painting up anybody whose ancestors didn't own slaves as jews for purposes of prejudice. And historically? As in, for the past 120 years? All that anti-jew shit has been directly attributable to the Russians. So to me? This whole "precious bodily fluids" / Q / Trump thing is what a right proper Russian disinformatziya campaign looks like when you decapitate it. No, it isn't going to die out immediately. But it's also less likely to storm the capital.Is this movement done with the "save the children" tenet? The kids are all safe now? It's safe to say that QAnon-adjacent rhetoric is alive and well when the #3 House GOP member is implicitly calling Biden and the dems pedophiles (btw I've reached out to Stephen Miller to see if we're supposed to abort illegal fetuses so future illegal babies can't steal American baby formula, just waiting to hear back).
