QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic

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I just now read the following article: QAnon, Blood Libel, and the Satanic Panic by Talia Lavin, The New Republic, September 29, 2020. It briefly reviews some of the history of similar conspiracy claims through the ages, including the classic medieval European anti-Jewish blood libel and the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" scare of the 1980's and early 1990's. It also contains the following quote from a QAnon believer:

Given the exploding numbers of QAnon believers these days, the above quote is terrifying. Given Trump's desperation to remain in office, I fear the possibility that he might, at some point in the not-too-distant future, decide to claim that the fervent beliefs of his most loyal and devoted supporters are in fact the truth, and try to use that as a basis for imprisoning all his political opponents.

Trump has already endorsed various claims arising from the right wing conspiracy theory subculture. See, for example: White House shares manipulated Infowars video to justify CNN press ban by Natasha Lomas, TechCrunch, November 8, 2018.

For more about the history of the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" scare, of which the QAnon belief system is the latest incarnation, see Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia? by Ali Breland, Mother Jones, July/August 2019.

For more about QAnon and its current status within the Republican Party, see the following articles by Kaleigh Rogers on FiveThirtyEight: QAnon Isn’t Going To Take Over Congress In 2020. But It’s Found A Home In The GOP, Oct. 29, 2020, and Trump Said QAnon ‘Fights’ Pedophilia. But The Group Has Made It Harder To Protect Kids, Oct. 15, 2020.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 10 Nov 2020, 1:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Mona, you seem to have an excellent grasp on the current situation.  Sadly, trying to convince people who would rather believe Trump's lies than everyone else's truth that your fears are valid would be like trying to convince members of the Westboro Baptist church that there is no God.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10 ... 00205/full

It's sort of like what Jules Evans said recently about schizotypy, a certain amount of it (ie. high trait openness of this sort) is a useful tool for grocking new hypotheses and modes of thought to explore but it has to be kept in check as such.

Sadly, ignorance is very old.

I recently came across QAnon stormtroopers preparing to battle for Trump by Nick Lowles, 21 October 2020, on the website of a British-based charity called HOPE Not Hate (which also does some work in the USA).

According to Nick Lowles's article, "Polling of 15,000 people by HOPE not hate reveals that one in 10 Americans now identify themselves to varying degrees as supporters of QAnon ...."

Apparently, though, a significant number of those people haven't yet gotten deeply enough into QAnon to know what its core tenets are. The remainder of the above sentence says, rather incongruously: "... and of those who identify as strong supporters, Trump has 59% support compared to 29% who back Biden."

(Huh? I would have expected them to be close to 100% Trump supporters. Don't they believe that Biden is one of the evil child-raping cultists who rule the world, and that Trump is the holy warrior who can defeat the evil cult? Or perhaps there's a left-leaning variant of QAnon that we haven't heard about in the news yet?)

Be that as it may, the article then goes on to say, "But perhaps more worryingly is that strong QAnon supporters are three times as likely than the average American to believe that violence is sometimes necessary to defend what you believe in. They also express strong support for greater authoritarianism and overwhelmingly think the US is heading for civil war."

More specifically:

Of course, this is just one poll, and I have no idea how reliable this organization's polls are. (Some people might argue that HOPE Not Hate has an interest in exaggerating the scope of the problem.) It will be interesting to see what subsequent studies by other organizations have to say about this.

Looks like QAnon has made its way across the Atlantic, according to the following two Politico articles:

- QAnon goes European by Mark Scott, October 23, 2020.
- Europe’s QAnon followers embrace US election conspiracy theories by Mark Scott, November 6, 2020.

About U.S. politicians who are QAnon believers:

- Here are the QAnon supporters running for state legislatures in 2020 by by Alex Kaplan, Media Matters, originally published 07/27/2020, last updated 11/10/2020): "The QAnon conspiracy theory is rooted in the chan message boards. Here are 23 former state legislative candidates who embraced it during the 2020 election cycle -- including 7 who won."

- QAnon Is Winning by Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic, November 5, 2020. This article begins:

On the other hand:

- This Sure Isn’t the Election QAnon Wanted by Aaron Mak, Slate, Nov 06, 2020: "The president is losing, their prophet has gone silent, and no one defeated the deep state."

Paranoid stoners will believe anything.
A good friend of mine, who also likes the occasional herbal supplement started coming out with loads of conspiracy theories the other day and he is hell bent on believing them.

It is really saddening for me, as he is a mate, but now i think he sees me as part of the conspiracy.

Don't get me wrong, there are cliques within global politics. There are some people who may have manipulated their way into power so that they can abuse their authority. As this is the nature of sociopaths.

However, I doubt that there really is any evidence to suggest that the QAnnon elaborate conspiracies are true.

May I also add, that Politics, as is the entertainment industry and journalism (and in some cases even law enforcement) can be infested by people who will use any means necessary to undermine or destroy their oppositions reputation.

Some of the far right for example, follow the ww2 nazi's strategies in how to ruin their oppositions chances.
Fascism, which nazism is a type of, did use violence, intimidation, bullying, slander, smear, propaganda, misinformation, disinformation. etc.

This is why some of these extreme conspiracy theories have appeared.

As for Satanism.
Well, there are all sorts of people involved in politics and business including some who follow bizarre religious beliefs which include Satanism, however, i doubt there is any real evidence to say that this is prescribed to by the greater number of Hollywood and democratic politics.

As for the 80s satanic panic, i believe that a great deal of what was then seen to be a growing trend was popularised by certain pinnacle metal bands who often did things tongue in cheek, or for sensationalism.

The problem with this is that fans of bands can be influenced by what they see, and some of the fans may take seriously what they see, which isn't meant to be serious, and then commit criminal acts because they think their being cool.

I know of people in the small island that i live in who are into that, they may call it magic.
I don't, as there is nothing "magical" about what they are doing, its just some sad metal heads
deluding themselves that they are creating magic by being even bigger douche bags than they are
normally (which in some cases, takes some doing, no offence towards metal heads, this is more to do
with the people i describe than the entire population of heavy metal fans).

According to Were voters manipulated by QAnon a force behind Trump's 'red wave' in 2020 election? by Nathan Bomey, USA Today, Nov. 6, 2020:

More details in the above article.

See also another, earlier USA Today article: Debunked QAnon conspiracy theories are seeping into mainstream social media. Don't be fooled., also by Nathan Bomey, Sept. 17, 2020.

I just hope very few people take seriously the idea that this counts for any significant quantity of Trump's votes. This is the other thing about conspiracy theories - they can be attempts at overextending deliberate agency (with idea that it's scarier to think no one is in control) as much as they can be quite useful evasions of introspect.

I thought this was interesting, the Covid and 5G conspiracy that was hot this summer (and vaulted Brian Rose of London Real to undeserved fame with his David Icke interview) is thought to have had Russia and some of its allies pushing it:

https://www.businessinsider.com/5g-coro ... ots-2020-4

I think the possibility should be taken seriously, at least until further studies determine whether it is in fact the case.

I'm aware of at least one person, whom I personally know, who used to be left-leaning, but who ended up supporting Trump, apparently as a result of falling down the grand conspiracy ideology rabbit hole. I don't know how common this is.

I think a distinction should be drawn between individual "conspiracy theories" (e.g. "9/11 was an inside job", "5G causes CoViD") and what I would call full-blown grand conspiracy ideologies (the belief that some shadowy group of evildoers, e.g. the "Illuminati" or the "Elders of Zion", has been controlling world events from behind the scenes for centuries or even for millennia).

Grand conspiracy ideologies usually tie together a big bunch of individual "conspiracy theories."

QAnon isn't just a "conspiracy theory"; it's the latest variant of grand conspiracy ideology.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 12 Nov 2020, 11:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I really see a few reasons why people are voting for him who wouldn't do so simply because he's what the Republican party has.

The first - if you ever have a chance to watch Mark Blyth's 2016 'Global Trumpism' it's a really important one. He's of course said many very astute things since and had a book that came out this year called Angrynomics which is, like Global Trumpism, detailing how all of the west is going for populists. Second, and in somewhat a similar manner, Eric Weinstein pointed out something when talking to Sam Harris about this - it's that the middle and working class who are either losing jobs or getting significant wage cuts and can barely make ends meet or don't have $500 for an emergency have a sense that it's the Davos plutocrats who've been ripping them off. In line with what Mark Blyth was saying about populism it's sort of like this with 'He's not a centrist kleptocrat - he's something else, I'll vote for him' or even 'He's probably not anything great but he's at least likely to do damage to their priorities, an enemy of an enemy isn't always a friend but he's all I've got - I'll vote for him'.

Another thing that's also probably helped Trump a lot is Robin DeAngelo and Ibram X Kendi as well as all of the black block and BLM activity people have been seeing, ie. even if they didn't like Trump they saw someone who was more likely to stand up against Maoism, and for police, and worried that Biden would be captured by the extreme elements of his own party.


I tend to think that the people who take the QAnon stuff seriously are likely the same kind of people who would have been Steve Quayle or David Icke fans years ago. The other thing, ie. pedophilia and positions of power, it's probably really important to nail down the mechanics of what that is and why if it's a thing - whether it's people getting too depleted under stress, pedophiles hiding out in workaholism where success is a side effect of their coping mechanisms, etc.. The point is, anything that's dazzlingly lurid like that which we don't have good explanations for is a gold mine for Christian spiritual warfare podcasters and everyone who wants to talk about breakaway civilizations who are sowing chaos to come back with ready-made replacement institutions, computer chips, or whatever else. For what information warfare's getting to be it's not a good time for us to still be rolling in Victorian taboos on certain information, we have to be adults and understand these things to the best of our ability for what they actually are.

It pretty much sounds like something similar to Steve Quayle - ie. Operation High Jump and what I'll call the satanic end-times version of Skycaptain and the World of Tomorrow where the nephilim will be coming to chew on our bones or where DARPA is making chimeras to embody ancient high lieutenants who fought by Lucifer's side against the throne of God. Leviathan circles Antarctica, you have 120 year old nazi supermodels on UFO's that Hitler's third reich engineers (Hitler himself probably still alive and well in Antarctica) figured out how to build with mercury-based fluid dynamic engines and, if that's not enough, they've got Shangri La, Atlantis, and Lemuria under ice! (hence why I invoked Skycaptain - it's that maximalist). If all that's not enough - don't worry, there's Nordic reptilians from Draconis!

There are at least a few of those that seem to run with almost HP Blavatski style cosmologies. There was an author named David Flynn who wrote a book called Cydonia which seemed to be almost like a Christian spiritual warfare rewrite of Manly P Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages referencing the planet Mars and tying it to Hamlet's Mill type astrotheology and pagan religious motifs of the near east. You had Tom Horn writing scorchers there for a while and it got obvious that for as good of a writer as he was and for as good of a pitch he gave he'd have a brand new one in three years when the last one didn't pan out (some of these guys if they'd just commit themselves to writing fiction would give John Grisham a run for his money).

So yeah, I'm aware of those. I'm also wondering how many of them, especially 'US government are Satanic Illuminati witches' might have actually been Russian paid espionage. If you read something like Ringing Cedars of Russia you get a sense for what sorts of metaphysical pulp they like to write and it seems like some of this stuff can be at times loaded with a similar kind of inflation.

Daniel Schmachtenberger's really good on information ecology issues and dealing with human tribalism, QAnon is a great symptom of what's going wrong with both: