January 18, 2021

"Despite these delusions, Ms. Gilbert — a self-described mystic who has written four books, with titles like 'Swami Soup' — mostly struck me as a New Age eccentric who could use some time away from screens."

"She disdains the mainstream media, but she agreed to be profiled, and we kept in touch. Over a series of conversations, I learned that she had a longstanding suspicion of elites dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered snobby rich kids. As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, advocating animal rights and supporting the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous, and looked up to whistle-blowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt. Ms. Gilbert’s path to QAnon began in 2016 when WikiLeaks posted a trove of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. Shortly after, she started seeing posts on social media about something called #Pizzagate. She had dabbled in conspiracy theories before, but Pizzagate — which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and that all of this was detailed in code in the Clinton emails — blew her mind. If it was true, she thought, it would connect all of her suspicions about elites, and explain the horrible truths they had been covering up. 'The world opened up in Technicolor for me,' she said. 'It was like the Matrix — everything just started to download.' Pizzagate primed Ms. Gilbert for QAnon, which she discovered through the YouTube videos of a British psychic.... For her, QAnon was always less about Q and more about the crowdsourced search for truth. She loves assembling her own reality in real time, patching together shards of information and connecting them to the core narrative...."


The article assumes this woman was a person of the left who — encountering QAnon — flipped into a right-winger. But it's pretty clear that the conventional left/right divide doesn't explain her. She's into New Age and conspiracies and fitting interesting, exciting ideas together. It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet.

120 comments:

Unknown said...

As others will say, "That's some weird *bleep* right there."

You could also take a spin through some comments on various blogs, including Instapundit. Supposedly Trump has secretly declared martial law and the National Guard troops there in D.C. are part of the "plan" for him to stay in office.

Um, yeah.

iowan2 said...

After the Vegas shooting, Hunter Biden's laptop, Epstein didn't kill himself, and who killed Ashi Babbitt, I now know the DC Pizza shop/child sex ring is true.

David Begley said...

I saw a QAnon post yesterday on Free Republic. It was, “Trust Trump’s Plan.” I laughed. What Plan? He lost! He’s out of office this week!

David Begley said...

There will be no indictment in the killing of Ashli Babbitt.

Temujin said...

On this topic I would defer to The Crack Emcee, as he's called all of the cult worship for years. That said, I almost feel sorry for her. But looking at the Democratic Party as a group running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a DC pizza parlor is crazy. Everyone knows you just had to contact John Weaver of the Lincoln Project to get hooked up.

RMc said...

But it's pretty clear that the conventional left/right divide doesn't explain her.

Don't be ridiculous. The left/right divide explains everybody; after all, the left and right say so! You either is or you ain't, depending on who's in power.

Meade said...

She does get a few things right. For example— “after deciding that both major parties were corrupt.”

tim in vermont said...

So many questions:

Why does it matter that she "gets back to reality" to anybody?
Isn’t this a free country?
Will she need to be put in a camp?
Is the Biden regime really so fragile?

tim in vermont said...

It doesn’t help to "bring people back to reality" when the New York Times prints obvious lies non stop. “Mostly peaceful” was just one of them.

Lewis Wetzel said...

"I learned that she had a longstanding suspicion of elites dating back to her Harvard days, when she felt out of place among people she considered snobby rich kids."
So it was just her opinion that Harvard is full of snobby rich kids?

Umberto Eco, in all of his work, esp. Foucault's Pendulum, took the position that what we imagine to be reality is actually a conspiracy theory, or, better, that people use the same mental tools to construct what we call reality & to construct what we would call conspiracy theories, so there really is no way to differentiate between reality and a conspiracy theory.

Bob Boyd said...

So is the pizza any good there?

mezzrow said...

The PTB are the PTB for a reason.

Among other talents, their minions are adept at unleashing a 55 gallon drum filled with red herrings to distract anyone who didn't take that blue pill. There is a personality type that is eager and willing to go kill that little red fish that smells and tastes just like evil.

This is true whether you get your talking points from the NYT or from Qanon. Meanwhile, the breaks for the PTB are buried on page 15,234 of the omnibus bill that is passed to prevent a government shutdown. I think we're about to find out what happens when that doesn't work anymore.

That's the reality. I have no idea what comes next, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate it.

tim maguire said...

The traditional left/right divide explains almost nothing. But some people are incapable of thinking past it. Or rather, someone people need it as a substitute for thinking.

which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor,

Is there anybody left who doesn't roll their eyes at the endless repetition of "falsely" or "without evidence" for any claim that is critical of or problematic for the left? Are they so afraid that we might think it's true? Are the people who think it's true likely to pause at the "falsely" and see the error of their ways and become good voting Democrats?

Fernandinande said...

I'd like to see a nyt exposé on people with delusional beliefs in systemic anti-black racism.

tim maguire said...

David Begley said...I saw a QAnon post yesterday on Free Republic. It was, “Trust Trump’s Plan.” I laughed. What Plan?

Seriously. What plan? At this point, what could possibly keep Trump in the White House other than suspending and dismantling everything that makes us a democratic republic? Some people have so lost their way...

MartyH said...

I am now seeing the world through the lenses of facts, truth, and narrative.

Facts are data points. Facts form truth's skeleton, but one can shape that skeleton according to which facts you select and how much you emphasize each one.

Truth is ambiguous. You have to wrestle with the truth, and accept thet is cannot be fully divined.

Narrative fits on a bumper sticker. It does not have to bear any resemblance to the facts or truth, but sometimes it can point out a different truth.

Narrative drives our discourse right now. Right wing narratives (pizzagate, stolen election, Antifa exists) are always "wrong" and explicitly stated as false or debunked. Left wing narratives (Hands Up, Don't Shoot!, Russian collusion, mostly peaceful protests) are mainlined into our body politic. When demonstrably false (Russian collusion) they are no longer mentioned in polite company.

William said...

How common is it that people are sexually attracted to really young children? I don't mean teenagers, but young children. My guess is that it doesn't happen very often and, moreover, the people who are willing to enable or cover for child molesters is even smaller. I don't think that there's any widespread network of powerful people engaging or enabling such crimes.....But then there's Epstein. He conspired to molest underaged teens and had powerful friends who protected him and may have participated in his crimes Epstein was a conspiracy, not a conspiracy theory.

narciso said...

The people who published louise mensch say this.

Richard Aubrey said...

The Pizzagate issue is unfortunate. You can't say such things never happen, so it can't be true. You can't say it can't possibly happen in a big city, so it can't be true. You can't say nobody ever organized such things. You can't say democrat operatives would never do such a thing--Studds was re elected half a dozen times, his constituents didn't see the problem-- and so this can't be true.
You can't say the likely prospects would never do such a thing since their whole lives show they're pure as the driven snow.

Whether it's plausible is one thing. That it's completely implausible is another.

This is one of those issues where individuals have to prove a negative.
As in, "According to my passport, I was in Spain that whole week." So the accusation moves to the following week.

Far as I know, the only issue successfully addressed is whether the pizza place has a basement.

Most conspiracy theories have events not satisfactorily addressed by Authority, and someone might have benefited by the lie. Pizzagate is different. Comes from whole cloth. Those are tougher to address.

Krumhorn said...

....or delusional beliefs in global warming caused by humans.

- Krumhorn

Paul Snively said...

Dr. Althouse: But it's pretty clear that the conventional left/right divide doesn't explain her. She's into New Age and conspiracies and fitting interesting, exciting ideas together. It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet.

The plot to kidnap Gov. Whitmer is an "extreme right" plot, too, in spite of at least one member of the plot of half a dozen people being an anti-Trump anarchist.

You've identified the most important thing to understand: that we're witnessing the working-out of categorical dissolution. Politically, it's easy enough to call it "the collapse of the Washington consensus" or of "the post-WWII order." But this is pretty clearly inadequate, as it doesn't seem to account for the collapse in trust of the media, of professional scientific talking heads, of the intelligence community (I'm so old, I remember when distrust of the CIA was a phenomenon of the left), etc.

It seems like everyone knows we're being, not just propagandized to, but plainly gaslit, by everyone else, 24/7, but no one knows what to do about it. We're all stuck at the global Fyre Festival hoping for one of the few boats to the mainland to rescue us.

Lewis said...

Life is f"cking wierd.I know that b#tch, she was here. My mum said, when they told her it was terminal, "Can I still drink?" "Have you done everything you wanted?" As one of my more unfortunate dullards of brothers said. "Yes, everything bar hang gliding,"

Mr Wibble said...

You've identified the most important thing to understand: that we're witnessing the working-out of categorical dissolution. Politically, it's easy enough to call it "the collapse of the Washington consensus" or of "the post-WWII order." But this is pretty clearly inadequate, as it doesn't seem to account for the collapse in trust of the media, of professional scientific talking heads, of the intelligence community (I'm so old, I remember when distrust of the CIA was a phenomenon of the left), etc.


The "post WWII order" includes all of those institutions. But, if you want another phrase to describe it, I've been saying that it's the Rectification of Names. We've come to realize that the names we ascribe to individuals and organizations, and the associated relationships that flow from those names, no longer apply.

Fernandinande said...

She loves assembling her own reality in real time,

The Whappoo has one of those, Cristina Beltrán:

"In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories."

Mr Wibble said...

Umberto Eco, in all of his work, esp. Foucault's Pendulum, took the position that what we imagine to be reality is actually a conspiracy theory, or, better, that people use the same mental tools to construct what we call reality & to construct what we would call conspiracy theories, so there really is no way to differentiate between reality and a conspiracy theory.


The brain is built for pattern recognition with the least amount of data. It's a survival trait: when you're on the savannah, the one who survives isn't the fastest or the strongest, it's the one who figures out quickest that there's a lion lurking out in the tall grass. Unfortunately it can also backfire. When faced with random noise it will try to incorporate as much as possible into a "coherent" narrative. When faced with too few data points it will "fill in the gaps". It places overemphasis on previous events.

narciso said...

The coen bros militia yeah right.

Mr Wibble said...

The traditional left/right divide explains almost nothing. But some people are incapable of thinking past it. Or rather, someone people need it as a substitute for thinking.

IMHO, a better model of the US political system is a triangle with three points labeled "equality," "stability," and "personal freedom." Most people are somewhere on the edge of the triangle: they balance between two of the three points, while generally disregarding the third. The left-right spectrum appears because one point always gets split between the other two as a practical matter. After WWII it was "stability" meaning conservatives. The right was anchored by "personal freedom" (libertarians), while the left was anchored by "equality" (progressives). White collar conservatives aligned with the right, while blue-collar conservatives aligned with the left.

After the fall of the USSR that slowly began to shift, with the conservatives and the libertarians swapping places. Now the libertarians are split, aligning with progressives on a lot of issues, such as social issues and open borders.

narciso said...

Welcome to the Cold War we lost.

tim in vermont said...

"I remember when distrust of the CIA was a phenomenon of the left), etc.”

It’s OK, the “left” as represented by the Democrats now trusts the CIA and FBI implicitly.

Sebastian said...

"The story of this 'meme queen' hints at how hard it will be to bring people like her back to reality'" (NYT)."

The NYT should know, considering how long it took them to report the Russia hoax as hoax.

"It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind"

But when aesthetic solipsism runs into, you know, facts, it ain't so much fun.

John henry said...

tim maguire said...

Seriously. What plan? At this point, what could possibly keep Trump in the White House...

I agree and I had been pretty vocal in my support of "trust trump, he's got this"

I fully expect to send Dick his $15 this week.

And yet...

I'm not going to send it until president * is actually inaugurated. 2020 was a very strange year. I expect 2021 to be even stranger.

John Henry

Lewis said...

Oh, the ragman draws circles
Up and down the block
I'd ask him what the matter was
But I know that he don't talk
And the ladies treat me kindly
And they furnish me with tape
But deep inside my heart
I know I can't escape
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says, she knows me well
And I would send a message
To find out if she's talked
But the post office has been stolen
And the mailbox is locked
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine
An' I said, "Oh, I didn't know that
But then again there's only one I've met
An' he just smoked my eyelids
And punched my cigarette"
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Grandpa died last week
And now he's buried in the rocks
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked
But me, I expected it to happen
I knew he'd lost control
When I speed built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Now, the senator came down here
Showing everyone his gun
Handing out free tickets
To the wedding of his son
An' me, I nearly got busted
An' wouldn't it be my luck
To get caught without a ticket
And be discovered beneath a truck?
Oh, Mama, is this really the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Now the T-Preacher looked so baffled
When I asked him why he dressed
With twenty pounds of headlines
Stapled to his chest
But he cursed me when I proved to him
Then I whispered and said, "Not even you can hide
You see, you're just like me
I hope you're satisfied"
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Now, the rainman gave me two cures
Then he said, "Jump right in"
The one was Texas medicine
The other was just railroad gin
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
When Ruthie says, "Come see her
In her honky-tonk lagoon
Where I can watch her waltz for free
'Neath her Panamanian moon"
An' I say, "Aw, come on, now
You know you know about my debutante"
An' she says, "Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want"
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?
Now, the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb
They all fall there so perfectly
It all seems so well timed
An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice
Oh, Mama, is this really the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?

Lewis said...

Bob Dylan copyright

Lewis said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kh6K_-a0c4

tim in vermont said...

"The Pizzagate issue is unfortunate.”

I rejected it out of hand untill Prince Andrew claimed that he couldn’t have assaulted that young girl when she said because he was at a “children’s pizza party” at the time.

And of course we have Joe Biden’s daughter’s notebook from drug rehabe that somebody found that described Joe’s “inappropriate” conduct with her. This is the same Joe who has been photographed in his creepiness to young girls many times, and who insists on swimming naken in front of his female secret service agents over their objections and who the press assures us that we just need to get used to his handsiness.

Oh yeah, and there is video out on the internet from Hunter’s laptop of Hunter himself engaging in intercourse with an extremely young Chinese girl, probably provided by the ChiComs who then filmed it, I am sure, but they didn’t need to, Hunter filmed it himself! When Giuliani presented the evidence to the Delaware State Police, Democrat propaganda was so effective that they gave the evidence to the FBI as “evidence of Russian disinformation.”

So maybe the Pizzagate people are full of it, but it isn’t immediately apparent why.

This is why I say that a lot of people here reason from feelings rather than logic. Crack can tell you that one of the mind control techniques that cults us are “thought stopping cliches” For instance there is no way to assert this based on facts and evidence: "Pizzagate is different. Comes from whole cloth.” You don’t know that. "Those are tougher to address.” I guess if the only acceptable outcome is that all people must accept the denian unquestioningly, then yeah, you have a problem.

I Callahan said...

It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet.

Or, it's a way to let everyone know that she's an authentic wacko.

Crack Emcee is right...

tim maguire said...

Mr Wibble said...IMHO, a better model of the US political system is a triangle with three points labeled "equality," "stability," and "personal freedom."

That sounds better--everyone values all three to some degree and forcing them into a left-right divide requires that they embrace some values they don't hold and reject other values they do. And placing them somewhere on the inside based on their relative values doesn't require any particular position on any particular issue.

But that means everyone resides somewhere in the grey, which the media and political parties absolutely will not allow.

narciso said...

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/looking-through-adversarys-eyes-kgb-agents-prophecy

narciso said...

Epstein nxim (the real hellfire club) weunstein that the times celebrated, along with polanski.

Lewis said...

Isn’t that a fool - when the only 'permitted' 'opposition' is to quote an old heebee? That must be stupid, "to be stuck inside a Mobil with the Menphas blues again"?

Shouting Thomas said...

It’s amazing how an obscure website with close to zero influence can be made into the very symbol of everything evil about Trump by his opposition.

Nobody knew about this bullshit or cared about it until it was repurposed into a weapon to be used against Trump.

I'm Full of Soup said...

The Average NYT writer has no clue regarding American reality.

Lewis said...

All my friends, in Poland, Checkland (where they lived), Hungary, Rumania - they think your pissing rain, They're used to 'Strong Men' coming and going. They're boring,

Richard Aubrey said...

As I say, regarding Pizzagate, there is nothing implausible about it. The character of the characters isn't proof it couldn't possibly have happened or be happening.
But the organizing of a group and the organizing of a supply of children are not proven, which is the point, but it would pretty much have to be organized. That's the part that isn't proven..

My point is that, if one is innocent but accused, the issue is proving it and that involves proving a negative. And proving a negative is notoriously difficult.
If you coached, say, Little League thirty years ago and an accusation surfaces, one which is perfectly false, what's your defense? Do you have a calendar a la Kavanagh? You were in Florida that week? Okay, it was the next week. Or the previous week.

Lewis said...

'they' meaning my son and his mum, who I love

Paul Snively said...

Lewis Wetzel: Umberto Eco, in all of his work, esp. Foucault's Pendulum, took the position that what we imagine to be reality is actually a conspiracy theory, or, better, that people use the same mental tools to construct what we call reality & to construct what we would call conspiracy theories, so there really is no way to differentiate between reality and a conspiracy theory.

Foucault's Pendulum posits something even darker: there are organizations of people who do have extraordinary power, but they don't completely understand why, and when they come to believe someone has The Plan, they will pursue it at all costs, Nevermind that "The Plan" was generated by a computer pseudorandomly free-associating.

If you have your copy handy, I'd like to observe that there's a one-sentence plot summary among the quotes on the overleaf. Now consider the sheer despair in the password Jacopo Belbo chose for the computer. Don't ask me why, but when I read it the first time, I immediately cast Kevin Spacey as Jacopo Belbo in my head.

Charlie Currie said...

The Trump Russia Collision was an unhinged conspiracy theory, aka, The Big Lie, run by our own government and the msm. Pizzagate was a school yard rumor in comparison.

wild chicken said...

The Capitol Hill gangbangers remind me a lot of the Ron Paul tards who started coming out of the woodwork for our caucus in 2008.

They were all over the map idealogically, from prolife to pro pot legalization, who probably hadn't thought much about Fed or monetary policy.

Regular gop politics bored or mystified them and I don't think any of them stuck around.

Mr Wibble said...

Pizzagate continues to live because Hollywood and DC are filled with sexual deviants and predators who are protected and enabled by a whole host of people including journalists. When Joe Biden can sniff girls' hair and get grabby for decades without raising a firestorm, when journalists admit that he likely raped Tara Reid, but that it's more important to get rid of Trump, when Ed Buck, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey move freely, when John Weaver was using his position to proposition young men in exchange for jobs and people covered it up... well outsiders are going to assume that there's worse going on that we don't see.

Big Mike said...

So is the pizza any good there?

It’s okay, but someone keeps arranging the pepperoni to spell out HELP! I’M A SEX SLAVE

Laslo Spatula said...

"It’s okay, but someone keeps arranging the pepperoni to spell out HELP! I’M A SEX SLAVE"

On the plus side, that's a lot of pepperoni on one pizza.

I am Laslo.

C R Krieger said...

The three terms I would like to see dropped (not banned) are "baseless", "left" and "right". Left and right are "Tennis Court" terms, but in politics they meet around in the back and the practical difference is zilch.

Regards  —  Cliff

Gusty Winds said...

Pizzagate is nothing more than the “conspiracy” that our leaders who frequented Epstein’s Island like young girls. Really young. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself. That's not a conspiracy. We all know it. He was blackmailing powerful public figures.

Has anybody seen a photo of Giselle Maxwell in prison? Is she being held so she can sing like a bird at her trial, or to keep her from singing like a bird? Who knows anymore?

Howard said...

Q uses gamer techniques to brainwash the suggestible

Howard said...

Do your research!

Krumhorn said...

On the plus side, that's a lot of pepperoni on one pizza.


That’s presumably because the sex slave got all of the sausage.

- Krumhorn

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Regular people don’t give a shit about the right-left dichotomy the DNC-Media Complex is always fixated upon. It just isn’t a helpful template for such a DIVERSE country. And given the rapidity with which “positions” switch regarding key issues the template fails the test of timeliness.

Known Unknown said...

Piss Hookers.

Matt Sablan said...

Maybe Lady Gaga should pull a Christine O'Donnell.

John henry said...

One of the people involved in Pizzagate (allegedly) John Podesta has child porn hanging in his living room. According to the WaPo a few years back. Not a little pic either but poster sized.

They thought it was a cool thing.

The "porn", not their word, is nude photos of young teenage girls.

So it pizzagate plausible? With the kind of people alleged to be involved in it, like Podesta, yes.

Is it real? I think probably not because some of the details, like having a basement, do not check out.

John Henry

Michael K said...

Blogger Howard said...
Q uses gamer techniques to brainwash the suggestible


Howard, the left is all into this stuff. If you hear a dog whistle, maybe you are a dog ? I have never found "Q" or seen OAN. Only lefties with a bad case of paranoia (Is there any other kind?) think about this stuff.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

People want to believe nutty things. old as mud.
In search of...
Sasquatch.

Do these beliefs interfere with reality? Does it matter?
The left LIE to us about the BIG things... The left use big media and big tech to do it.

Since the left are telling us to be afraid of Q-anon - I'd like to know why? What is it that Q-Nanny is saying and doing that makes leftists so nervous? Or is it a diversion?

Bob Boyd said...

Why isn't Q in trouble for inciting insurrection?

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

I have an old pal who lives in the middle of nowhere and her relative isolation puts her on Facebook a lot. She is hooked into the idea that there is a huge child sex trafficking ring going un-punished because the players are too big.

I have no idea if she has fallen into a Q-hole or if it's real.

Not like we can trust major news sources that act as Party Apparatchiks for the Democrat Party to give us real information,. Our media is all-narrative - all the time. To fear or not the fear... the Q.

Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to say about it.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

remember - you will be labeled a heretic for leaving the leftwing plantation.

*Not all people who are anti-leftists are "right-wing"

robother said...

I wonder if Deep State actors don't initiate or feed conspiracy theories (JFK killed by LBJ; Steele Dossier; Pizzagate) as a form of internal warfare, misinformation designed to smoke out and isolate anyone starting to figure out the depth of corruption.

The Kennedy Deep State's war on LBJ was initiated by the JFK conspiracy theories so prevalent on the Left. The Steele Dossier was key to the Deep State's denial of Trump having any semblance of a normal presidency, as well as distracting from the Obama Administration's criminal attempt to spy on and defeat Trump's campaign.

Pizzagate works to distract from the Epstein real scandal, the collection and use of compramat on the politically powerful (ironically the essence of the Steele false accusation on Trump). Whatever leaks out on the Clinton-Epstein scandal will now be dismissed as QAnon conspiracy nuttiness.

tim in vermont said...

“How do you bring her back to ‘reality’”

Sounds like a problem for your favorite tool, propaganda science. For the rest of us, we just deal with her as another exemplar of the diversity of the human experience and take her or leave her for what she is.

This whole staged riot at the Capitol is sure justifying a lot of thought policing though. Not like the Reichstag Fire was used by the Nazis though, no, it’s not like that because we are the Good Americans, not these dangerous nutjobs whose freedom of speech and assembly should be denied them!

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Why do rumors of child sex rings persist?
1. Creeps like podesta, Biden, Epstein and maxwell are extremely well connected because of their sex association not despite it
2. Creepy Joe referred to more than one of hunters underage Chinese sex girls by name (my dad can’t even remember my first wife’s name)
3. Creeps like podesta flaunt their collection of child porn because once framed it’s “art”
4. Creeps who visited pedophile island are still shielded by compliant press
5. Creeps in congress caught paying off underage sex kids both straight and gay have used public funds and campaign dollars to cover their pay-offs and fund NDAs
6. Creeps in the dnc-media complex refuse to write about this, except for occasional hints by Ronan farrow
7. Although the laptop has been in public domain for months no media has shown the underage sex children Hunter Biden is exploiting, despite multiple videos freely available
8. Creepy Joe will never get nor answer a question about any of this
9. Most “news” is just distraction from this and the other “real business” of federal govt, making congresscritters rich
10. In the absence of normal reporting on these facts abnormal news outlets will supply what public demands

tim in vermont said...

" wonder if Deep State actors don't initiate or feed conspiracy theories...”

That’s like saying they invented sex to keep the proles distracted.

YoungHegelian said...

Then again, conspiracies tend to flourish because there always seems to be just enough of a kernel of truth to them. For example, Pizzagate:

Folks attending a house tour in the Lake Barcroft neighborhood in Falls Church earlier this year got an eyeful when they walked into a bedroom at the [Tony] Podesta residence hung with multiple color pictures by Katy Grannan, a photographer known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents' suburban homes.

"They were horrified," Heather [Podesta] recalls, a grin spreading across her face.


Link here from WaPo Archives, 2004.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Word is the Big Guy gets 10% of every sex slave too, not just income. We are about to swear in our first bonified pedo president.

tim in vermont said...

It’s funny how the whole underlying premise of the article is that this lady is thinking wrong thoughts and this must be addressed by the government in concert with the media’s speech oligarchy.

She sounds like Inga who still believes the errant nonsense put out by the infragovernment in the CIA and FBI about Trump and Russia even though we have a declassified document in Brennen’s own hand stating that it was a disinformation operation by the Clinton campaign, a fact that Obama knew while he was still president, and that Sessions should have known when he appointed a Special Persecutor for Trump.

Nonapod said...

QAnon is certainly an extremely useful strawman to reduce anyone who would dare question the official narrative to a pathetic conspiracy crazed lunatic. It seems like lately more ink and pixels are spent fussing over this odd little group than almost any other story.

Bob Smith said...

John Weaver.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

Known Unknown said...

Piss Hookers.

Did Cardi B put out a new release? I must've missed it somehow!

Lewis Wetzel said...


Blogger Howard said...
Q uses gamer techniques to brainwash the suggestible
1/18/21, 9:08 AM


You mean that the incels have joined forces with qanon?
This is the nightmare scenario.

Sam L. said...

I totally distrust anything and everything in the NYT.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

In a way a lot of this is a multiplication of who killed JFK, which I believe tended to come from the left. Experts are supposedly lying and covering up, so it is essential for amateurs to pore over the film/video, and then make claims that experts know are ridiculous. Some fake claims are discredited, but other ones pop up. For decades. Now everyone can see a lot of stuff on their own, and they have to make an initial assessment: what is trustworthy? Good question.

Bob Boyd said...

The real child sex ring operates out of an oyster bar.
They're laughing their asses off right now and feelin' froggy.

Tina Trent said...

"It's a quality of mind, a way of being, a way to feel and to have fun with your mind and with the internet."

Really fun unless you're like one of my several colleagues and friends -- none of them Q followers but still being punished by the people wielding Q as a weapon to attack people like them -- people who have now lost their jobs and access to bank accounts -- people being financially cancelled because they are deemed deplorable.

Or the tens of thousands of graduate students who were systematically eliminated from ever holding a full-time, let alone tenure-track job in academia because they weren't politically correct enough -- or didn't lie well enough about being politically correct enough -- and were reduced to lives of penury after busting their asses to gain degrees.

In my experience, these were usually the smartest and hardest-working people. In my experience, the broom closets they wedge adjunct instructors into by the dozen are almost exclusively filled with white Republicans and conservatives. Coincidence?

Or people like me, who was put on a shadowy watch list by the DOJ and labeled a Nazi by Abe Foxman and was rendered unemployable because I published an editorial vetted by a big city daily mildly opposing hate crime legislation because it created an hierarchy of crime victims.

You can't really think this is fun and games. Not Q itself, whatever the heck that is, but how it and other confusions are being used by Democrat scum to destroy decent people's lives, people who have nothing to do with conspiracies or protests, people who are just exercising speech rights about other things.

How can you not see what is happening to speech? I can't believe you are that callous, or cosseted, or naive.

How can you stare at the dark curtain of fascist, leftist speech suppression descending on America and see playfulness? How could you admire the desperate little flowers painted on broken shop windows in Madison? Do you know that most insurance policies don't cover damage done by riots? Do you not understand that the shop owners dared not even whisper mild dismay because nobody in your home town had the integrity to stand up against the rioting?

Are you that willing to ignore the lessons of history? Don't you know how many hard working and productive people's lives and finances have been destroyed already, by leftist violence or by targeting of conservatives by politicians and corporations?

It would be grotesque to treat what's happening to other people as if it is performance art. Real people are suffering real oppression. I do think I understand what you're trying to do by making light of the idea of Q. But you can't fight back this time by sticking a flower in the end of this rifle. We are far past that point.

Robert Cook said...

"It’s OK, the 'left' as represented by the Democrats now trusts the CIA and FBI implicitly."

The flaw in your statement is that the Democrats are not "left," (notwithstanding a few non-representative members--who are ignored and ridiculed by most of their fellow members).

YoungHegelian said...

The media seems to have phases of what's the conspiracy du jour. Remember, in the 80s, there were all these lurid stories about groups that practiced ritual Satanic child abuse? Turned out to be not quite the case.

Then, in the 90s and 00s, there were the stories on the Left about how the Christian Dominionists were on the march. I thought those stories a mite pee-cu-lee-ar since I had never, ever seen any evidence of anyone on the Christian Right called themselves a "Christian Dominionists".

It looks like now it's time for QAnon to have its time in the sun.

Lewis Wetzel said...

The flaw in your statement is that the Democrats are not "left"
The "no true Scotsman" argument, perfected.

Nonapod said...

Well, in fairness I wouldn't consider many of the elected Republicans to be good representations of Conservativism exactly either. I mean, unless you consider a characters like Mitt Romney to be the epitome of what it is to be right leaning.

LA_Bob said...

I'm disappointed Crack hasn't shown up to comment. The post is tailor-made for him, and unless he just says "toldja so", he probably has some insight into this person and her situation.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

Democrat party elites are far left + and corporate self-enrichment speech-stompers/ freedom-killers.

Bob Boyd said...

If I'd have known you could be a self-described mystic I'd have become one a long time ago.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

During GWB -
the left were certain that Christians were going to create a T H E O C R A C Y...
Big and scary

tim maguire said...

Robert Cook said...The flaw in your statement is that the Democrats are not "left,"

That's true in the sense that Democrats are not really anything. The levers of power are firmly in the grip of American's billionaire class, but they draw their energy from spoiled children who like to run and shout in the street about how nobody has enough respect for their view of the world. They have no principles other than that they should be in power. Since those billionaires who really call the shots don't care about America and are happy so long as the party keeps China happy (and all that goes with that), they are really capable of anything domestically.

Between the catering they do to the billionaires and the pandering they do to the lunatic left, no patriot can afford to relax while the Democrats are in office.

tim maguire said...

BidenFamilyTaxPayerFundedCrackPipe said...
Democrat party elites are far left + and corporate self-enrichment speech-stompers/ freedom-killers.


Ahh, basically the same thing. Just fewer words.

LYNNDH said...

OK, I have seen "Q" mentioned in Blogs. I really don't know what q is? And yes I am afraid to Google it because I don't want to be flagged more than I might, well probably am, now. Someone tell me what it is.

robother said...

LYNNDH: "Someone tell me what it is."

Classic Deep State trap! I don't know what it is, even more than you.

Tina Trent said...

Like most conspiracy (self-motivated) or demoralization (other-imposed) campaigns, the purported Satanic ritual child molestation craze was really none of these things. Few were convicted; fewer were innocent. The media and pundits across the political spectrum had a fun time; real victims of real abuse were further scorned and destroyed, and jurors were even less willing to put away men and women who did horrific things to children.

Some victims I worked with latched onto the idea because they hoped against hope that they would finally see justice if people understood that what happened to them really did happen. They fell in love with a metaphor that expressed their pain, but instead of achieving justice, they were further punished and further scorned and further disbelieved for it.

I found the whole thing horrifying, and it made me hate pundits across the political spectrum. We're still mopping up the damage in human lives. Sometimes I really wonder if it's worth trying anything anymore.

Jupiter said...

"which falsely posited that powerful Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizza parlor, and that all of this was detailed in code in the Clinton emails — blew her mind."

Good thing they included that "falsely" in there. Otherwise, you would never have seen this. Or maybe the censors have just started inserting lie-words everywhere. "falsely". "baseless". "unfounded". That would explain why those words seem to suddenly be everywhere.

Bob Smith said...

Jerry Sandusky, and high placed enablers.

Jupiter said...

"At this point, what could possibly keep Trump in the White House other than suspending and dismantling everything that makes us a democratic republic?"

Been there, done that. No T-shirt, though.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

"The flaw in your statement is that the Democrats are not "left," (notwithstanding a few non-representative members--who are ignored and ridiculed by most of their fellow members)."

Cookie's not wrong here. The Establishment Donks are more Looter than Leftist, and the Shiny Objects in their agenda that are Leftist are there to dupe the broad masses into voting for Democrats so they can get on with raping the country and killing brown people overseas.

iowan2 said...

If you coached, say, Little League thirty years ago and an accusation surfaces, one which is perfectly false, what's your defense?

Great question ask Jim Jordan.

NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...

LYNNDH said...

OK, I have seen "Q" mentioned in Blogs. I really don't know what q is? And yes I am afraid to Google it because I don't want to be flagged more than I might, well probably am, now. Someone tell me what it is.

@LYNNDH

Back in 2016 "Q" posted cryptic crap on 4chan that was interpreted to show that there is a large pedophile ring in the US that involves many very highly placed individuals, including people in government. Jeffery Epstein's death figures into it. It's since gone on to purport to expose other conspiracies involving lefties and swamp rats in the government against Trump. "Q" is supposed to be someone who's fairly high up in the government and had "access" to secret information.

It appears to be either a psyops program or a lone whacko bent on creating unrest. No one knows who its. Of course, I don't know how closely it's been looked into because I suspect most journalist know less about it than you do.

Joe Smith said...

"There will be no indictment in the killing of Ashli Babbitt."

Indictment? We won't even know the shooter's name.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

We have the most corrupt people set to take over our lives... and we need to worry about

Q-anon.

trumpintroublenow said...

"There will be no indictment in the killing of Ashli Babbitt."

I assume you saw the video? How was that not a justified shooting? She and a mob were trying to break in a door leading to the senate chambers. ALso, the cops lives were clearly in danger.

Fernandinande said...

Sometimes I really wonder if it's worth trying anything anymore.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made."

Fernandinande said...

Indictment? We won't even know the shooter's name.

Because he black.

The fascistas want to fire a professor because he correctly claimed that "black privilege is real".

The Crack Emcee said...

For those who want to know what I think of this - I just read about it, here, but I'll speak on it, specifically, where (as Andrew Breitbart insisted) culture is upstream from politics:

The Macho Response.

Bud Pomeroy said...

The desire to place these folks on a left/right spectrum will always be frustrated. They're nuts, totally flipping nuts and cannot be assigned a place on the left/right continuum. Case in point - Timothy McVeigh.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, the Times is playing the Todd Akin game, and with this post you are enthusiastically participating.

For those too young to remember, in 2012 Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill was in trouble. She was a US Senator, she was up for reelection, and her poll numbers were low -- plus the state was trending red. What to do? She took advantage of an open primary to have her followers cross party lines to choose the farthest right Republican in the GOP primary to be her opponent. Oops! Polls showed that even against the farthest right candidate -- Todd Akin -- she was losing. Then Akin was asked about aborting unwanted pregnancies due to rape, and it turned out that Akin believed that women "hardly ever" got pregnant from being raped. Idiot.

But then McCaskill and the news media took it further. It wasn't just Todd Akin who had strange ideas about conception from rape, it was Every. Stinkin'. Republican. Every one of us. Uh huh. Suuuuurrrrre.

So that's the Todd Akin game. The Times tracks down one nutcase who accesses QAnon, and therefore everyone who accesses QAnon is a nutcase. And for all I know that's a true statement, but given that it's the Times pushing it, that is not the way to bet.

And, of course, Althouse gleefully joins in.

Footnote: In 2018 McCaskill was beaten by Josh Hawley, 51% - 46%

Lewis said...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQr9WbBfoD8

Lewis said...

A lovely version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BL596gX36I

Fernandinande said...

Despite these delusions, ...

Diagnosis: sluggish schizophrenia.

Lewis said...

Ough, you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCUIuCuzdII

Lewis said...

Ooohg, you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCUIuCuzdII

William said...

The zeitgeist favors conspiracy theories. First there was the conspiracy within the Catholic Church to protect and coddle child molesters. The Catholic Church! Their core mission is to protect children from sin, not abuse them. Some of the abusers were actually high ranking prelates. The good people of the left are willing to entertain conspiracy theories regarding the Church and some of their suspicions are grounded in fact. I can't imagine that politicians are the moral superiors of prelates. That certainly wasn't the case in Rotherham....Hollywood is one big conspiracy. How can Harvey Weinstein get away with raping some of the most famous and wealthy women on earth for decades. There were an enormous number of people in Hollywood complicit in Harvey's crimes. If they could give Polanski a standing ovation and an Academy Award, what other assistance might they offer that free spirit as he explored the boundaries of love (s/)....The most logical explanation for Epstein's career and death was that it was part of a conspiracy.....You can say this or that conspiracy is foolish, but there's definitely a conspiracy.

boatbuilder said...

So was this Gilbert woman at the "Insurrection?" Was she aware of it beforehand? Was she a leader of the "Q" movement? Are the Q's mostly former leftists?

Why is she being interviewed? It's like interviewing...well, former Democrat Gilbert and presenting her as somehow typical of Democrats in general.

They found a nutcase and they are using her to tar everyone associated with Trump (who has nothing to do with "Q.")

William said...

You can argue that it is playing favorites rather than a conspiracy or a cover up, but the record shows that the press has gone to elaborate lengths to give protection to their favorites. The American public never knew that FDR was wheelchair bound or that JFK was a womanizer. A scandal involving a Democratic politician has to be a good deal greater than one involving a Republican for it to get air play. The left creates an atmosphere conducive to belief in conspiracies and then mocks you for suspecting their might be a conspiracy.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

She and a mob were trying to break in a door leading to the senate chambers. ALso, the cops lives were clearly in danger.

That's a lie. There were three police officers directly behind Ashli close enough to have subdued her easily if they wanted to. It's only dumb luck that the bullet didn't go through her and injure one of them, although the perspective of the camera might have made them look closer together than they actually were, they are within feet of her. She is standing and looking through a broken door when the shooter sticks his gun into the hallway and shoots through his door and her door across at her. They were not even in the same room on the video so he was in no danger from her at all. We've seen the videos so you can't lie your way through this as well you're used to. Ashli was murdered.

I'm Not Sure said...

"That's a lie.

But if it doesn't keep getting repeated, how will it ever become the truth?

mikee said...

My sister, whom I speak with roughly once per year, has been emailing me lengthy epistles daily, rife with references and links and quotes, to convince me of the immorality of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine, which was tested (per international protocols, or some similar reason) on a fetal cell line from a 1970's abortion. I upset her by writing that the company had avoided use of standardized, long-available, reliable cell lines other than this one (required) test, specifically to avoid the wrath of people like her. And that if she was upset, not to get vaccinated.

There is no reasoning with belief, none at all.

n.n said...

An uninterruptible progression from Great Leap to one-child (i.e. minority choice) to selective-child (i.e. delegated responsibility) and concentration/reeducation camps for deplorables. In retrospect, selective-girls was a poorly conceived solution. Some may say a wicked solution to a purportedly hard problem. Forward!

Leora said...

It occurred to me the other day that there's more evidence for an international conspiracy to protect pedophiles than there is for murderous racism in major city police departments. Epstein/Maxwell, NVIXM, the Catholic church scandals, the Scouting scandals, all sorts of trafficking cases could well be just the tip of the iceberg. Just looking at things that end up in the newspapers.