Lizard people, deadly orgies and JFK: How QAnon hijacked Hollywood to spread conspiracies

Anita Chabria

The Los Angeles Times

Originally posted 7 DEC 21

Here is an excerpt:

Bloom, the extremist researcher, said the familiarity of recycled Hollywood plots may be part of what eases followers into QAnon’s depths: Although the claims are outlandish, they tickle at recollections, whether from fiction or reality.

That sense of recognition gives them a level of believability, said Bloom — an “I’ve heard that before” effect. Part of the QAnon logic, she said, is that films and television shows that contain the conspiratorial story lines are viewed by believers as kernels of truth dropped by the elites — a sort of taunting acknowledgment of their misdeeds.

“Part of the idea is that Hollywood has been doing this for ages and ages, and they have been hiding in plain sight by putting it in film,” Bloom said.

That idea of using art to hide life is sometimes reinforced by actual events, she said. She uses the example of the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut,” about a New York doctor, played by Tom Cruise, who stumbles into a deadly orgy attended by society’s power players. Some QAnon adherents believe that there is a cabal of influential pedophiles who murder children during ritualistic events to harvest a hormone that provides eternal youth and that the film was a nod to that activity.

She points to the Jeffrey Epstein case, and the current trial of his confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, as factual instances of high-profile sex-trafficking allegations that seem pulled from those story lines, and have now been folded into the QAnon narratives.

“That’s one of the reasons some of the more outlandish things resonate, is because it sort of seems plausible,” Bloom said.

She also points out that the fear of sacrifices fits with the antisemitic trajectory of QAnon — it ties into centuries-old conspiracies about “blood libel” — the false belief of Jewish people killing Christians for their blood — which in turn can be tied to myths of European vampires.

The info is here.

How to Look Away

Megan Garber
The Atlantic
Originally published June 20, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

It is a dynamic—the democratic alchemy that converts seeing things into changing them—that the president and his surrogates have been objecting to, as they have defended their policy. They have been, this week (with notable absences), busily appearing on cable-news shows and giving disembodied quotes to news outlets, insisting that things aren’t as bad as they seem: that the images and the audio and the evidence are wrong not merely ontologically, but also emotionally. Don’t be duped, they are telling Americans. Your horror is incorrect. The tragedy is false. Your outrage about it, therefore, is false. Because, actually, the truth is so much more complicated than your easy emotions will allow you to believe. Actually, as Fox News host Laura Ingraham insists, the holding pens that seem to house horrors are “essentially summer camps.” And actually, as Fox & Friends’ Steve Doocy instructs, the pens are not cages so much as “walls” that have merely been “built … out of chain-link fences.” And actually, Kirstjen Nielsen wants you to remember, “We provide food, medical, education, all needs that the child requests.” And actually, too—do not be fooled by your own empathy, Tom Cotton warns—think of the child-smuggling. And of MS-13. And of sexual assault. And of soccer fields. There are so many reasons to look away, so many other situations more deserving of your outrage and your horror.

It is a neat rhetorical trick: the logic of not in my backyard, invoked not merely despite the fact that it is happening in our backyard, but because of it. With seed and sod that we ourselves have planted.

Yes, yes, there are tiny hands, reaching out for people who are not there … but those are not the point, these arguments insist and assure. To focus on those images—instead of seeing the system, a term that Nielsen and even Trump, a man not typically inclined to think in networked terms, have been invoking this week—is to miss the larger point.

The article is here.