#qanon cultists

[tehjleck]

RepubliKKKans defunded public education for 40yrs and now we're here

Like most horrible things happening in this country right now - it started in 1983 with Reagan and like-minded republicans (note the "c" there). They felt that an educated population was a bad thing and started working against it.

Fast forward to 2002 and we have Dubya Bush and "No Child left behind" which absolutely left many children behind - notably, the children of anyone who wasn't wealthy and white.

Fast forward again to 2016 when republican candidates all opposed "Common core"... the following year, Betsy DeVos does her part to trash public education, and in the years since, republiKKKans (three K's at this point) have done everything they can to disrupt, defund and destroy our public education system.

Why? Because EDUCATED voters DO NOT VOTE for republiKKKans.

Plain and fucking simple.

[rickmctumbleface]

For too many people, the moon is always full.

[wealmostaneckbeard]

Lord help me I got political thoughts again:

Friday October 29th, 2022, Paul Pelosi, husband of Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by a Qanon cultist. The incident raises the question of how the fuck was attacking an old man with a hammer supposed to expose or take down a global cabal of elite pedophiles?

Maybe the Qanon cultist believed that he'd find a sex dungeon filled with child-slaves at the Pelosi residence. Or that he could take Paul hostage and make demands of the Speaker of the House. And when the cops showed up he realized he failed to accomplish these objectives he took his rage/shame out on Mr. Pelosi.

The Cultist seems to have had the same lack of foresight shared by the rest of the Qanon movement. Foresight leads to contingency plans, contingencies are an admission of doubt, doubt is antithetical to faith, and Qanon recruits people through their faith. From this logic chain emerges the reason why a Qanon cultist would break into a high ranking politician's residence without equipment to secure or search the place.

[downwithpeople]

did you guys know the acting Don of the gambino crime family was assassinated in 2017 and it was the first time a don got assassinated in decades but it wasn't a mob hit it was a qanon cultist who was trying to make a citizen's arrest on the guy like he'd tried to do on multiple politicians by now and he believed that trump would protect him which is why he turned up for his hearing with qanon sigils scribbled on his hands and at the moment the trial is suspended cause the dude's a fruit loop and he's probably gonna get killed if he goes inside because the mob ain't what they used to be but paying one dude to kill one guy should be something they can swing. anyway i learned this because i was trying to figure out who the gambinos are beefing with because my bf asserted that the opposite of Childish Gambino would be Adult Dracula

[dailyadventureprompts]

Monsters Reimagined: Bandits

As a game of heroic fantasy that centers so primarily on combat, D&D  is more often than not a game about righteous violence, which is why I spend so much time thinking about the targets of that violence. Every piece of media made by humans is a thing created from conscious or unconscious design, it’s saying something whether or not its creators intended it to do so. 

Tolkien made his characters peaceloving and pastoral, and coded his embodiment of evil as powerhungry, warlike, and industrial. When d&d directly cribbed from Tolkien's work it purposely changed those enemies to be primitive tribespeople who were resentful of the riches the “civilized” races possessed. Was this intentional? None can say, but as a text d&d says something decidedly different than Tolkien. 

That's why today I want to talk about bandits, the historical concept of being an “outlaw”, and how media uses crime to “un-person” certain classes of people in order to give heroes a target to beat up. 

Tldr: despite presenting bandits as a generic threat, most d&d scenarios never go into detail about what causes bandits to exist, merely presuming the existence of outlaws up to no good that the heroes should feel no qualms about slaughtering. If your story is going to stand up to the scrutiny of your players however, you need to be aware of WHY these individuals have been driven to banditry, rather than defaulting to “they broke the law so they deserve what’s coming to them.”

I got to thinking about writing this post when playing a modded version of fallout 4, an npc offhndedly mentioned to me that raiders (the postapoc bandit rebrand) were too lazy to do any farming and it was good that I’d offed them by the dozens so that they wouldn’t make trouble for those that did. 

That gave me pause, fallout takes place in an irradiated wasteland where folks struggle to survive but this mod was specifically about rebuilding infrastructure like farms and ensuring people had enough to get by. Lack of resources to go around was a specific justification for why raiders existed in the first place, but as the setting became more arable the mod-author had to create an excuse why the bandit’s didn’t give up their violent ways and start a nice little coop, settling on them being inherently lazy , dumb, and psychopathic.   

This is exactly how d&d has historically painted most of its “monstrous humanoid” enemies. Because the game is ostensibly about combat the authors need to give you reasons why a peaceful solution is impossible, why the orcs, goblins, gnolls (and yes, bandits), can’t just integrate with the local town or find a nice stretch of wilderness to build their own settlement on and manage in accordance with their needs. They go so far in this justification that they end up (accidently or not) recreating a lot of IRL arguments for persecution and genocide.

Bandits are interesting because much like cultists, it’s a descriptor that’s used to unperson groups of characters who would traditionally be inside the “not ontologically evil” bubble that’s applied to d&d’s protagonists.   Break the law or worship the wrong god says d&d and you’re just as worth killing as the mindless minions of darkness, your only purpose to serve as a target of the protagonist’s righteous violence.  

The way we get around this self-justification pitfall and get back to our cool fantasy action game is to relentlessly question authority, not only inside the game but the authors too. We have to interrogate anyone who'd show us evil and direct our outrage a certain way because if we don't we end up with crusades, pogroms, and Qanon.

With that ethical pill out of the way, I thought I’d dive into a listing of different historical groups that we might call “Bandits” at one time or another and what worldbuilding conceits their existence necessitates. 

Brigands: By and large the most common sort of “bandit” you’re going to see are former soldiers left over from wars, often with a social gap between them and the people they’re raiding that prevents reintegration ( IE: They’re from a foreign land and can’t speak the local tongue, their side lost and now they’re considered outlaws, they’re mercenaries who have been stiffed on their contract).  Justifying why brigands are out brigading is as easy as asking yourself “What were the most recent conflicts in this region and who was fighting them?”. There’s also something to say about how a life of trauma and violence can be hard to leave even after the battle is over, which is why you historically tend to see lots of gangs and paramilitary groups pop up in the wake of conflict. 

Raiders:  fundamentally the thing that has caused cultures to raid eachother since the dawn of time is sacristy. When the threat of starvation looms it’s far easier to justify potentially throwing your life away if it means securing enough food to last you and those close to you through the next year/season/day. Raider cultures develop in biomes that don’t support steady agriculture, or in times where famine, war, climate change, or disease make the harvests unreliable. They tend to target neighboring cultures that DO have reliable harvests which is why you frequently see raiders emerging from “the barbaric frontier” to raid “civilization” that just so happens to occupy the space of a reliably fertile river valley. When thinking about including raiders in your story, consider what environmental forces have caused this most recent and previous raids, as well as consider how frequent raiding has shaped the targeted society. Frequent attacks by raiders is how we get walled palaces and warrior classes after all, so this shit is important. 

Slavers: Just like raiding, most cultures have engaged in slavery at one point or another, which is a matter I get into here. While raiders taking captives is not uncommon, actively attacking people for slaves is something that starts occurring once you have a built up slave market, necessitating the existence of at least one or more hierarchical societies that need more disposable workers than then their lower class is capable of providing. The roman legion and its constant campaigns was the apparatus by which the imperium fed its insatiable need for cheap slave labor. Subsistence raiders generally don’t take slaves en masse unless they know somewhere to sell them, because if you’re having trouble feeding your own people you’re not going to capture more ( this is what d&d gets wrong about monstrous humanoids most of the time). 

Tax Farmers: special mention to this underused classic, where gangs of toughs would bid to see who could collect money for government officials, and then proceed to ransack the realm looking to squeeze as much money out of the people as possible. This tends to happen in areas where the state apparatus is stretched too thin or is too lighthanded to have established enduring means of funding.  Tax farmers are a great one-two punch for campaigns where you want your party to be set up against a corrupt authority: our heroes defeat the marauding bandits and then oh-no, turns out they were not only sanctioned by the government but backed by an influential political figure who you’ve just punched in the coinpurse.  If tax farming exists it means the government is strong enough to need a yearly budget but not so established (at least in the local region) that it’s developed a reliably peaceful method of maintaining it.  

Robber Baron: Though the term is now synonymous with ruthless industrialists, it originated from the practice of shortmidned petty gentry (barons and knights and counts and the like) going out to extort and even rob THEIR OWN LANDS out of a desire for personal enrichment/boredom. Schemes can range from using their troops to shake down those who pass through their domain to outright murdering their own peasants for sport because you haven’t gotten to fight in a war for a while.  Just as any greed or violence minded noble can be a robber baron so it doesn’t take that much of a storytelling leap but I encourage you to channel all your landlord hate into this one. 

Rebels: More than just simple outlaws, rebels have a particular cause they’re a part of (just or otherwise) that puts them at odds with the reigning authority. They could violently support a disfavoured political faction, be acting out against a law they think is unjust, or hoping to break away from the authority entirely. Though attacks against those figures of authority are to be expected, it’s all too common for rebels to go onto praying on common folk for the sake of the cause.  To make a group of rebels worth having in your campaign pinpoint an issue that two groups of people with their own distinct interests could disagree on, and then ratchet up the tension. Rebels have to be able to beleive in a cause, so they have to have an argument that supports them.

Remnants: Like a hybrid of brigands, rebels, and taxfarmers, Remnants represent a previously legitimate system of authority that has since been replaced but not yet fully disappeared. This can happen either because the local authority has been replaced by something new (feudal nobles left out after a monarchy toppling revolution) or because it has faded entirely ( Colonial forces of an empire left to their own devices after the empire collapses). Remnants often sat at the top of social structures that had endured for generations and so still hold onto the ghost of power ( and the violence it can command) and the traditions that support it.  Think about big changes that have happened in your world of late, are the remnants looking to overturn it? Win new privilege for themselves? Go overlooked by their new overlords?

Art

[creature-wizard]

What's up with the Satanic Panic, in a nutshell.

Around the 1970's, conservative Evangelicals began weaponizing a number of conspiracy theories against anyone who wasn't a conservative Evangelical. These conspiracy theories were essentially repackaged witch hysteria (IE, the conspiracies pushed by early modern witch hunters) and antisemitism (especially blood libel).

The core conspiracy theory was that a global satanic cult was working behind the scenes to manipulate politics and lead people away from Jesus. The exact practices of the cult depended on who you asked, but common allegations were practicing human sacrifice (including plenty of child sacrifice), drinking human blood, engaging in sex slavery, producing CSE and snuff films, doing drugs, and having orgies.

Numerous people stepped forward claiming to have been either former cult members, or cult survivors. Pretty much all of their accounts are full of blatant absurdities, and anytime someone was actually investigated, pretty much all of their claims fell apart. For example, Mike Warnke, one of the earliest self-proclaimed ex-satanists, was found to have made up his entire story. One woman, Lauren Stratford, was not only revealed to be a fraud, but afterward claimed she was a Holocaust survivor to collect benefits.

Some examples of claims made by people who claimed to be ex-members/survivors include:

Neopaganism was created by the global satanic cult, and Aleister Crowley was their main agent in this.

All neopaganism and modern witchcraft is a slippery slope to human sacrifice and "hardcore satanism."

All media that depicts magic or the supernatural in any way is part of the satanic agenda. Yes, literally all of it. Yes, even that.

Homosexuality is part of the global satanic agenda.

Rock and heavy metal music are part of the global satanic agenda.

Fluoride, artificial sweeteners, and various food additives are actually mind control drugs.

Electromagnetic waves are used to control people's thoughts.

Marxism was created by the global satanic agenda.

If you know anything about QAnon conspiracy theories, you might notice that some of these look awfully familiar. This is because QAnon was another manifestation of Satanic Panic. They updated "electromagnetic waves" to 5G, and largely replaced homosexuality with transgender, but it's the same thing.

The conspiracy theory about cultists creating mind controlled slaves by inducing dissociative identity disorder through torture (all that Project Monarch stuff) is purely a product of the Satanic Panic. People's supposed "memories" of this abuse were generally produced via recovered memory therapy, which is now known to be more effective at implanting memories rather than recovering them. No serious investigations ever produced any evidence of the supposedly widespread and incredibly elaborate torture of tens of thousands of children.

Now, there have been actual isolated cases of what might be considered satanic ritual abuse. But they do not constitute evidence of a global satanic conspiracy. Rather, they constitute evidence that the perpetrators were inspired by the conspiracy theory.

Additionally, they had a very pseudoscientific view of DID, and the horrible practices allegedly used to induce it and create mind controlled alters were pure pseudoscience, as were the alleged symptoms that someone might be a victim of satanic ritual abuse and just didn't remember it. Everything from autism to having conflicted feelings about your abuser to liking BDSM could be construed as a sign that you had been ritually abused. With a bunch of therapists fully convinced that thousands of people had been ritually abused and armed with hypnotic techniques that allowed them to implant memories of abuse, you can see where things could turn messy in a hurry.

Those who claimed to be former satanists/SRA victims were extremely clear in their assertions that this global satanic conspiracy really did exist, and that the only way to escape and stay safe from it was to accept Jesus. Tales of demonic attacks that could only be stopped by the power of Jesus were common, as were other claims of grandiose supernatural power.

In short, the Satanic Panic was - and still is - a means of demonizing anyone who isn't a fundagelical Christofascist, and scaring anyone who already is, into remaining such. Many of the conspiracy theories have made their way into supposedly progressive circles, so you'll occasionally come across the Project Monarch stuff in DID communities, or see pro-LGBTQ people subscribing to conspiracy theories about the wealthy elite drinking blood or adrenochrome.

But make no mistake, there is no "grain of truth" to these allegations of a global satanic conspiracy. There was no "time before all of this was corrupted by evil agendas." It was all created by people with with hateful agendas, and continues to be perpetuated by people with hateful agendas. And that's all, folks.

[the-library-alcove]

If you laughed and mocked QAnon cultists for believing in Pizzagate and Adrenochome, but now are going around and claiming that Israel killed its own people on 7/10 and is digging up Palestinian bodies to harvest their organs...

You are literally no different than the QAnoners; it's the same conspiracy theories, just presented differently.

[memecucker]

So apparently that qanon movie about “human trafficking” is a massive astroturf job bc people going to watch it are reporting empty theaters despite online ticket sales showing sold out or nearly sold out

But unlike that one Japanese cult that paid for a propaganda movie and released it in the weakest box office day in Japan and had all their cult members attend so they could pretend they’re popular, I guess the Qanon cultists just buy the tickets and don’t go and claim the movie is a success? Might be money laundering also probably

[tehjleck]

I love it when a MAGAt says some dumb shit and blocks me before I can respond, it really drives home the idea that they've got nothing. No legs to stand on, nothing but problems and grievances mostly of their making.

The world has been watching since your mango messiah first defiled the oval. But the most important thing to be aware of is that the internet remembers everything.

You can post your bullshit about x, y, and z... but you'd better be ready when people do a little internet search and find that it was more like z made x do y ... it's right there. easily proven, with factual evidence.

Without blinking, MAGAts will be like they reported it on fox... because they don't know what came out in the Dominion lawsuit, they don't know that fox news execs think they're "dumb, cousin fucking terrorists".

(heres the fun part, you guys) we get to tell them!

[is-the-owl-video-cute]

One of Meigs friends is now claiming you've doxxed people in the past and are now doxxing Meig lol They also said how you are "unhinged" and take fiction way too seriously- Why are pro shitters like this?

Begging people to learn what doxxing actually is. I don’t know nor do I care who Meig is irl. I don’t go to any of eir accounts, nor do I intend to. Criticizing what someone says on a public platform isn’t doxxing lol.

And again, very bold of anyone in Meig’s circle to claim anyone else is taking fiction too seriously when Meig has compared people making inaccurate dinosaurs in fiction to people being climate deniers and anti-vaxxers.

Sexualizing children? Nah, Meig has no issue with that, that’s goddam freeze peach brother. But if you ever draw an oviraptor comically holding an egg and running off with it?

Jail. Anti-science. Qanon cultist in the making.

[clementine-kesh]

mulled it over a bit more and the thing that rubs me the wrong way about how stephenson’s dodge in hell handles its insular qanon cultists and lacey’s biography of x handles its theocratic south is the way they dismiss the people involved with a sort of hillbilly elegy-esque attitude of them having brought it upon themselves by being dumb hicks instead of there being systemic forces at play which have forced them into these positions. people don’t just start snitching on their neighbours or believing in insane conspiracy theories for no reason y’know. but instead of engaging with the why of it all those potentially interesting pieces of worldbuilding are used as little more than lurid bits of set dressing to add a bit of dystopian flavouring

[sapphire-weapon]

so you'll be able to talk to a rightist? most people won't

And that's what's wrong with our country.

You can't talk to QAnon cultists. You can't. They're in the cult and can't be reached.

But classic Republicans who were/are fans of John McCain and Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger? Yes, talk to them!! Our country was founded on the concept of "agree on what the issues are, disagree on what the solution is, and work together to find a way that benefits everyone." Classic Republicans understand that. We all agree that the cost of living is too high. We all agree that we need better access to education. We all agree that we stand with Ukraine. We just disagree on how to handle those things. And we have to work together.

Even diet MAGA can be reached sometimes -- people who are voting for Trump but aren't in the cult. Those people, shockingly, are willing to listen when you talk facts and ideas without preaching. You have to meet people where they are. You don't win over anyone by screeching about how wrong they are.

It's just the people who disagree on what the issues are that you have to discard. If your stance is that IVF is somehow a problem that this country is facing, you can shut up while adults are talking. You're not invited.

[sabakos]

How are we defining "cult" though? Not to be a pedant but it seems wrong to group them all together and say that there's one kind of person who easily falls into them. I could easily believe that most middle class Christian people could be seduced by Jehovah's witnesses when grieving and the JWs show up to ask them to discuss scripture. Just like with families and relationships there are many different ways for a community of people to be cultish

[Guy who's never been in a cult before voice]: Really what's the definition of a cult, anyway? I want to make very sure I'm not being inexact in my terminology here.

The Jehovah's Witnesses are a cult, yes. In the same way that Heaven's Gate was a cult, in the same way that QAnon is a cult, in the same way the Yud- ...you get the idea. Most middle class Christians aren't susceptible to the Jehovah's witnesses, most people who are susceptible to cults are.

I'm going to stick with the heuristic that half of ratblr has blocked me over - if you get offended or defensive when someone calls an organization you're a member of (or adjacent to?) a cult, that's a cult, and you're the kind of person who is susceptible to cults. People with a healthy relationship towards the organizations that they're a part of do not particularly care if you call their organization a cult. If I called the average ML or anarchist a "cultist" for their political ideology they wouldn't get defensive, they'd just laugh. If I call "Rationalism" a cult I get fifty self-described "rat-adj" posters having meltdowns in my inbox. Ergo...

Edit:

[self-loving-vampire]

A lot of people seem to think that others will just immediately agree with any bad ideas presented to them without question, whether it's in fiction or (at least more realistically) non-fiction.

While some people do become Qanon cultists and such, this is far from universal. Many people have existing convictions and a bit of critical thinking and can read pretty much whatever they want without just agreeing with it.

I was already doing this as a literal child, correcting everything from the chain emails my relatives sent to me to my teachers at school when they said something wrong. I used to read about all kinds of pseudo-science and religious/spiritual bullshit and remained skeptical of it, except now I understood it and could criticize it more completely.

It turns out that reading something you strongly disagree with doesn't necessarily make you agree with it. It can just make you write up essays about how much the thing sucks and why no one should believe it.

[blogparanormalexpresso2stuff]

People who still believe that the news media tell them the truth and that their nation and their world work pretty much the way they were taught in school are just as brainwashed and deluded as any QAnon cultist.