trakfactri posted:The people who believe the Q thing are not the "fringe,"
They definitely are, though. They're either oddball-loner kids who don't really buy it but think it's fun to entertain the idea, or they're the 40-year-old vegan, colloidal-silver types who used to be Ron Paul obsessives. Most of Trump's Republican supporters don't bother with some weirdo online conspiracy theory about him seizing power, because they realize he's already taken power and they're pretty happy about it.
Should've listened to Nancy.
trakfactri posted:I think you're underestimating its reach for the boomer generation
"generations" don't exist in that sense. they're the product of con artistry used to sell books to mid-level managers about how to get ahead in business. class is propagated through continuity between parents and children.
cars posted:I think probably the biggest mistake people make about Trump, and I've made it myself before, is believing that his administration is all that different from previous ones.
the closer you look into how the actual sausage is made, as in how the government actually conducts itself, the more this seems evident. i ended up doing a huge amount of reading just today about some very inside baseball FDA & legislative stuff and there was no discontinuity in anything important to business afaict between obama and trump
That doesn't make Q very appealing to people who want to crow over Trump being president, which is most Republicans, or those who fantasize about an unpatriotic fifth column of Communist Democrat college professors preventing him from fixing everything, which is a good number of Republicans. But it's perfect for the former-Ron-Pauler fringe, far-right conspiracy-theory loons who backed Trump because they thought he was too honest for the powers that be to allow him to win—and then he won, and now they're in the uncomfortable position of mainstream ideology absorbing their supposed advanced rebel wisdom and superseding it in front of their eyes.
I think Q is kind of adorable, though, because it's got certain things in common with the social-liberal UFO religions of the 20th century that said aliens were going to drop in more and more often to help us avoid nuclear war and bring us into the fold of an intergalactic utopia. It's a theory where those who believe in it don't think the conspiracy is out to silence them or kill them or their heroes. Instead it's like, Mom and Dad are hiding our Christmas presents and we can't wait to open them.
I sometimes wonder if that guy became Q, or if Q was just someone who thought what a few of us probably thought back during that thread, that the guy playing that game of rope-a-dope was pretty bad at pretending to be a federal agent, and it might be funny to head over to Stupidville and see how much better someone else could do, but the guy who became Q actually followed through on it. It was pretty smart of him to do stuff like throw a bunch of code-looking combos of characters around his communiques, even though it took like one nerd a few minutes to figure out they were created by someone trying to press random keys on a keyboard who didn't realize that it's a lot harder to do that than it seems. But still smart, because it had the right look, and of course the people who bought into Q were not going to be concerned over anything that straightforward.
toyotathon posted:and how deep throat was #2 in the FBI, laundering the FBI's political program thru wapo, and then a compliant congress.
wait what happened here exactly
sovnarkoman posted:toyotathon posted:and how deep throat was #2 in the FBI, laundering the FBI's political program thru wapo, and then a compliant congress.
wait what happened here exactly
It was the fbi informant leaking to the watergate reporters
dimashq posted:sovnarkoman posted:toyotathon posted:and how deep throat was #2 in the FBI, laundering the FBI's political program thru wapo, and then a compliant congress.
wait what happened here exactly
It was the fbi informant leaking to the watergate reporters
nah i got that part, i just dont get the outcome
After two and a half years of the loudest, shrillest bout of insanity since the McCarthy era, the verdict is in: There was no collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government, according to Russiagate Special Counsel Robert Meuller, a former head of the FBI. One would think that that would be the end of it, since the corporate media and Democrats seem to believe everything the FBI and CIA say.
As executive editor of a website that was slandered as a dupe of the Kremlin on the front page of the Washington Post, I’d like Russiagate to be over. That would mean Google would stop rigging its algorithms to hide Black Agenda Report’s stories from the public. If Russiagate were over, then Mark Zuckerberg would stop collaborating with the Atlantic Council and other Cold Warriors to purge Facebook of all political speech that is uncomfortable to the moneyed classes. If Russiagate were over, then Twitter would restore the 2,000 accounts of people thought to be too friendly to the government in Venezuela – a government whose elections were deemed the fairest in the world by a former U.S. president.
If Russiagate were over, Rachel Maddow would be fired, and the top management at CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post would be huddled in some leafy retreat pondering where they went wrong.
If Russiagate were over, the Democrats could finally clear their heads to realize that Trump won the Rust Belt the same way Republicans have been winning elections for the whole of the 21stcentury, by suppressing the Black vote, just as Greg Palaste told them.
But the Democrats haven’t learned a thing. Google and Facebook and Twitter won’t call off their algorithmic dogs, Rachel Maddow will refuse to believe that collusion has been disproven until her own lips tell her so, and the top management of corporate media are not about the fire themselves.
The truth is, Russiagate was both a civil war within the ruling class -- oligarch versus oligarch -- and a conspiracy among the corporate media, the national security state and the Democratic Party. The various conspirators had different goals. The national security state was desperate to ensure that there be no interruption to America’s endless wars and the military encirclement of Russia and China. Corporate media used Russiagate to reimpose its control over the political narrative, by impugning all other versions of reality as Russian dupes. And, the Democrats wanted an excuse for losing to the likes of Donald Trump.
The conspirators have won. Donald Trump couldn’t make peace with Russia if he tried, and he probably never intended to. There’s no reason to expect that censorship of the Left media will be lifted, and the Democrats have successfully avoided any soul-searching on why they lost in 2016. Even Donald Trump comes out of this with a campaign issue for 2020 – that he was victimized by an elite.
But Black votes will still be suppressed by the millions in the next election; the world has gotten a lot warmer while the U.S. spent two years paranoid about Russians; and the two nuclear powers that can destroy the earth in an instant, still aren’t talking. Thank you, Russiagate.
I’m Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report.
I know that's how the federal cop "community" feels, and it's probably even how the guy saying it feels, but the spooks slamming the previous president at a press conference for failing to declare a coup against his successor is something they usually reserve for other countries. They pretty much just told the existing Democrat leadership that the FBI and CIA are confident enough in the durability of their positives/very positives to declare through CNN that they run the Democratic Party now.
The visibility and sheer number of "veterans" of the "community" running as Democrats in the next couple rounds of federal elections just got a lot harder to ignore. Directly capturing an entire political party they can probably control just fine through implied threats, especially now, that seems almost redundant for those clowns. But I'm sure the fringe benefits are stuff I can't even imagine, like, you get to play poker with the Roswell aliens every weekend.
cars posted:One of the weirder things to come out of all this Russia thing is, when Trump finally fired the guy working for him who told the FBI he'd wear a wire to help take his boss down, and snitchy went sliding out of the AG's office on his ass at speed like a hockey puck, the last thing he did for his new bosses was... threaten Barack Hussein Obama for failing to use his super-cop powers in 2016 to nullify the results of the presidential election.
I know that's how the federal cop "community" feels, and it's probably even how the guy saying it feels, but the spooks slamming the previous president at a press conference for failing to declare a coup against his successor is something they usually reserve for other countries. They pretty much just told the existing Democrat leadership that the FBI and CIA are confident enough in the durability of their positives/very positives to declare through CNN that they run the Democratic Party now.
The visibility and sheer number of "veterans" of the "community" running as Democrats in the next couple rounds of federal elections just got a lot harder to ignore. Directly capturing an entire political party they can probably control just fine through implied threats, especially now, that seems almost redundant for those clowns. But I'm sure the fringe benefits are stuff I can't even imagine, like, you get to play poker with the Roswell aliens every weekend.
When did they say/hint at this? Was it recent?
Including the guy who just fired him and accused him of treason
Edited by cars ()
At his rally tonight, Trump says the government is unable to violently attack immigrants, someone in the crowd shouted "Shoot them!"
— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 9, 2019
The crowd & Trump erupt in laughter & cheers. Trump says, "Only in the panhandle can you get away with that statement."pic.twitter.com/SgQd2OH9ti
I think the thing i find most distressing about this is that it literally happened on this week's episode of 'veep' first
From what I could tell, the USS Abraham Lincoln went through a regularly scheduled maintenance job and is now switching home ports from the East Coast to the West Coast as part of a reorganization, and instead of going through Panama the fleet opted to send it on a circumnavigating "presence" op where it can show the flag in the usual places. This was decided long before Bolton was even in the White House. But he can declare that the mullahs are on watch as the flattop cruises by. There's also a bit of a backlog in terms of maintenance here and the carrier presence in the Persian Gulf over the last 18 months has been "irregular" as they say in the press, which might be why the fleet is sending the Lincoln to San Diego by way of the scenic route.
cars posted:The visibility and sheer number of "veterans" of the "community" running as Democrats in the next couple rounds of federal elections just got a lot harder to ignore. Directly capturing an entire political party they can probably control just fine through implied threats, especially now, that seems almost redundant for those clowns. But I'm sure the fringe benefits are stuff I can't even imagine, like, you get to play poker with the Roswell aliens every weekend.
The Biden campaign's message so far seems to be to acknowledge the left's existence and the potential of an intensifying class struggle, and then blaming it on an external enemy which must be fought by declaring a truce between classes and then destroying that enemy for the good of the nation. As a result he is leading in the polls in the Democratic Party primaries. The message of the Pete Buttigieg campaign meanwhile can be summed up by the Northrop Grumman-like slogan: "Freedom, security and democracy."
As an aside, in Texas, the Democrats are taking their enthusiasm from only losing the 2018 Senate election by 2.6 points by running an Air Force helicopter pilot for 2020 who served her country by destroying the livelihoods of cannabis farmers before being shot down. She later wrote a memoir of her experiences titled "Shoot Like a Girl." I predict she will lose by more than 2.6 points.
The pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory has garnered a surprising number of fans over the past two years, considering that it’s based on the idea that Trump is engaged in ceaseless war against powerful cannibal-pedophiles in Hollywood and the Democratic Party.
Now QAnon has a new group of allies: a woman who claims she’s a conduit for a 35,000-year-old warrior god, and her thousands of followers. Since February, at least three top QAnon promoters have made plans to visit a sprawling Washington-state property owned by J.Z. Knight, a New Age guru whose former acolytes have accused her of running a cult.
Knight claims that she can channel the spirit of Ramtha, a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit who supposedly waged war on the mythical city of Atlantis. In practice, though, Knight’s “channeling” of Ramtha is just her speaking in a different voice.