I haven’t heard anything about them in quite a while. It’s like they were a hot-button topic of conversation, and then everyone just stopped talking about them. If they’re still around, what would be the reason they seemingly disappeared from the news?
These things always go this way. Society has seen them before and society will see them again. There’s always some Doomsday Cult out there predicting the end, predicting upheaval, appealing to the viewer to make them feel special, sell them this idea that they and only they have seen the truth. The end of the world is July 14th, the end of the world was really September 22nd, come along, feel special, feel fear but exhilaration, and while you do, your money will soon be useless so you may as well give it to me!
And when the dates go by and nothing happens, when enough questions go unanswered, when enough predictions are unfulfilled… eventually the shorn sheep return to their pen, their field, and pretend it never happened. It would be too terrible for introspection, too painful to recognize you weren’t special, just another rube. Every relationship you threw away was sacrificed in vain, every dollar you threw at the prophet was just his fee for how good you felt. Like a drug. And just like addiction, you don’t ever have to come face-to-face with your victims and your failure, your pride doesn’t have to take a hit. Ignore the people who hold you accountable, thrust your head in the sand, it was a misunderstanding, maybe the details were wrong, you never really believed it anyway…
And just like a drug, if you never stop to connect the dots, to come to grips with what it did to you and those you love, when the next hit is offered, you take it. Now, this is a new prophet. This time, it’s for real. The world will end on May 8th. I always knew in my heart something was coming, I just listened to the wrong prophet… Got the year wrong. Got the cause wrong. This time it’s for real. I want to be special. I’ve seen the secret truth. The message is for real this time! Last time it was just a test…
The internet amplifies these people, makes them brave, but they’ve always been there if you knew where to look. It’s a fundamental flaw in our species. I don’t know if it will ever go away.
Well said and very detailed! Thanks for the in-depth answer. Very appreciated!
It was always a russian influence operation. That effort is probably spent on another operation atm.
I don’t think it started that way, but I’m sure literally everyone (Russian troll farm included) got in on the action eventually.
It was a LARP that got jacked by Jim and Ron Watkins. Of course the Russians did everything they could to spread and benefit from QAnon, but, no, they didn’t start it.
They do seem to be quieter after Russia got isolated as a result of their war.
Or maybe it happened after the Jan6 arrests and convictions.
Hard to tell an exact date
Alot of these conservative “movements” come and go pretty quickly, seemingly overnight, as soon as they’ve fulfilled whatever use they had. They’ll pop up to rant & rave and grab headlines for whatever idiotic/heartless/cruel thing. Then, after a few waves of outrage and meme counter-attacks, when the spotlight is starting to fade, it’s like whatever group originally funded them pulls the plug and they just sort of disappear.
I’ve never seen any as…. influential as them though. As shitty as they are/were, in my mind, it’s never been that bad before.
They seemed to have gotten a lot of boost from the pandemic beyond what they normally would’ve all with a satanic panic style outrage
That’s odd, because I remember their height as the 2016 election through (maybe) 2019.
Pandemic helped bring in more of the left leaning granola folks than would usually happen. Antivax and antilockdown to Q-anon pipeline.
They don’t disappear, the people still exist. They just change the justification for their actions. They can’t say out loud their real motivation: they desire a hierarchy where they are on top and others are below them.
Just remember that. It’s not about democracy or freedom or even religion or the economy. Conservatives want to be on top. They want an authoritarian leader to put everyone in their place. Do not argue with them about policy details. They value hierarchy more than anything.
Most of what they were talking about had something to do with the Trump presidency. That is long over by now, it has now become clear to everyone that Biden isn’t going to be replaced by Trump except through an election.
They became absorbed by the republican party who tempered the insanity (though still clearly insane) so that they could keep some semblance of normalcy to retain followers.
They’re still out there. People seem to think there needs to be a centralized platform or symbol for them to exist. Most of us, I’d guess, are ex-Reddit or have frequented enough social media platforms for us to have curated our feed to limit the noise, limiting comms to those we follow or friends. Or at least I have. That excludes the insanity that is the open-to-the-public postings of every stripe ever. Nextdoor. Facebook. The comments section on popular news sites. Heck, even here where we defederate stuff like hexbear. The comments immediately degrade into fear, hate, paranoia, racism, lib-bashing, conspiracy theories, JAQing off, and everything else we’ve seen before.
Just because we don’t hear the Q noise doesn’t mean they’re disappearing. They may not cling to the “Q” part, but they haven’t changed. They just make up new memes, but it’s the same old hateful insanity. They very much still exist.
It’s still going although it’s morphed quite a bit. Check out https://reddit.com/r/qanoncasualties to see the effects.
Since my comment was removed, I’ll just state objective facts: there was never any evidence to support the conspiracy posted by this 4Chan commentor. The hysteria around it eventually died out.
https://www.qanonanonymous.com/
Here’s a dope podcast that follows Q related stuff critically. The back catalog is good to go through, too.
The Q stuff I used to follow (for fun) has morphed and most of the shows have devolved back to the original grift or angle.
https://nemosnewsnetwork.com/ <-This guy is full anti-Semite now.
https://toresays.com/tore-says-show/ <-This lady is full on pathological. I listen for the mental illness.
https://x22report.com/ You can find various q weirdos (or whatever they’ve become) here.
Praying medic and neon revolt are still out there.
Edit: I did not write this, but I cannot explain it better.
Wow… I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so…. Profound- on 4chan.
There was a time when all the best stuff, the most enlightened, the most accurate, the best analysis of society as a whole, the memes all came from 4chan.
The problem was that it was full of pure shit too.
I’ll live and die by the need for freedom of speech and anonymity in discourse at least in a lot of places. Because its far to valuable without it. But now people are too weak to even handle someone telling then to go kill themselves so they can’t hand all the other shit.
The prime of the Internet is gone forever. We rapidly moving into corporate 1984.
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Idiots like me, eh? Care to expand on this since you seem to know so much about me from a single post?
Of course. There was never any evidence to suggest that anything that random 4Channer said was true, but it sparked controversy and made for a good headline, so people who can’t bother to think for themselves ate it up, until the more intelligent of them realized there wasn’t actually anything to back it up, and presumably moved on to the next click bait headline that grabbed their attention.
Which only leaves you.
Fucking brain dead take.
“oh this global phenomenon, of which many of us interacted directly with people who were buying into it never existed”
“Christianity doesn’t exist because God isn’t real”
Pokémon Go was a global phenomenon. It made exactly as many correct claims as your internet troll.
What are you on about?
Nobody here believes in the QAnon shit, we’re talking about what happened to the people who did and you’re trying to say they never existed.
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That’s a bit uncalled for when it’s become clear they’ve just made a mistake and misinterpreted something.
Obviously people do believe in that shit. That was not the impression I got from OP’s post or the replies I’ve gotten, but maybe I read them wrong. I’ll freely admit that I could be wrong.
I also think I addressed why we’ve stopped talking about it: people realized there were no facts behind it and moved on.
You clearly are in need of reading comprehension course or two if you came to the conclusion that I have any belief in that nonsense at all.
Nothing I have said could be interpreted as such.
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