...when you belong to a religion that tells you to dismiss logic and reason in favor of faith and obedience, it’s not that big of a leap for worshipers to accept a difference kind of mythology. If the members of your church are spreading QAnon memes online, then maybe you weren’t doing that great of a job teaching them how to think for themselves.

That’s not specific to evangelicals, obviously. But many of the factors that make a church grow and thrive — a sense of shared purpose, a feeling of knowing something others don’t understand, a desire for knowledge in any form — are the same weapons being used by online conspiracists. If those pastors, who rightly reject QAnon and just want their members back, don’t understand the role Christianity played in convincing people to adopt comforting myths that defy common sense, they have no chance of “saving” the people who need to be rescued.

    • PhaseFour [he/him]
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      4 years ago

      Otherwise they would be outraged that people like Assange is literally imprisoned by american neocons.

      From what I've seen, they are upset about Assange. But they just believe that Trump is a messiah who is taking every correct step towards defeating the deep state. I don't know if you actually talk with QAnon supporters much. If you asked them "what about Assange?" they'd just say his silence is tactical. "If he freed Assange, the deep state would yada-yada-yada."

      Nowadays it’s just shilling for trump and the republican party

      It's shilling for Trump, and the components of the Republican Party that will bend to Trump's will.

      QAnon provides people with a language & political project which identifies the deep state, and conspiracy of finance capital. Until another project can speak to the specifics of these conspiracies, QAnon will continue to fester.

        • PhaseFour [he/him]
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          4 years ago

          Q accounts have been purged, so I cannot provide the tweets. But the primary current in Q lore is that Assange's arrest will be the moment that the deep state over-extends, and their game comes crashing down. They celebrate Assange's arrest because they believe he's a necessary martyr, or at least, a necessary event for Trump to take down the deep state.

          His indictment is important and necessary. Discovery brings it all down. Assange is the Star Witness against the Deep State, just a few more pages of this screenplay before he gets to deliver his lines.

          • Joe M (@StormIsUponUs), deleted twitter account with several hundred thousand followers.

          There are a few voat threads which explain their lore better, but I'm at work right now, can't search much.

          If QAnon was just repackaged neoconservatism, I would not be nearly as concerned as I am. Neoconservatism weighs down its political message with Liberalism, which is antithetical to reality & collapses under its own ideological contradictions much easier.

          That can’t happen by construction, because it necessarily mean rejecting the american civil religion.

          You absolutely can synthesize both, you just need to frame the deep state & the globalists (Jews) as a disease infecting the American nation. It's a tried-and-tested strategy for when the contradictions of capitalism become too great. It's just fascism lol

            • PhaseFour [he/him]
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              4 years ago

              Logic doesn’t matter here. Isn’t that obvious?

              It matters insofar as it can continue to describe reality. Ideas of "freedom", "liberty", etc. can not describe reality when capitalism is in decay. "The American nation is sick & dying because a cabal of Globalists are attacking us from the inside" can continue to describe reality through the decay of capitalism because it is simply rebranding the reality of finance capitalism.

              Yes, neocon orthodoxy is the terminal expression of american fascism: the fascism that genocided an entire civilization and enslaved black people for the entire world.

              No. It is not. It's settler-colonialist, imperialist, and Liberal. Fascism is not just when white people do genocide lol

                • PhaseFour [he/him]
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                  4 years ago

                  What do you think Fascism means?

                  You're denying history, and pretending that Fascism was not a product of the contradictions of imperialism.

                  You're trying to claim that Fascism existed prior to the 20th century, which is wrong. No historian or theoretician would make that claim.