Shadster, at long last, mainstream reporters are starting to take the QAnon conspiracy cult seriously. With at least one QAnon devotee about to be elected to Congress, millions of online followers and several big stories in major publications, the cult has come into its own. Pushback against it has come too little, too late. Facebook, Twitter and TikTok only recently started deactivating major QAnon promoters and groups, even as those accounts engage in coordinated ban evasion and continue to peddle lies on other platforms.

I (as others have) use the word “cult” here very intentionally. QAnon is not a political movement centered around an ideology or policy platform: it is a freewheeling grab bag of mostly far-right but also non-partisan conspiracy theories from flat-earthers to believers in lizard people to those who believe that JFK Jr is still alive and coordinating the arrests of a massive global pedophile and Satanic child sacrifice ring. Its adherents demand not allegiance to a specific orthodoxy, but only blind faith in the leader: an anonymous online figure nicknamed “Q” who began posting on 4chan during the early days of the Trump Administration, claiming to be a member of the administration with top “Q” level security clearance (no such clearance actually exists.) Members spend countless hours analyzing specific “drops” from Q, using numerology and other hokey deep reading techniques to parse misspelling in Trump tweets for hidden messages and patterns, fitting them into bizarre and hopelessly complicated “calendars” and “clocks.”

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/the-gop-cant...racy-cult/