"Jacob's Dream" - Lunch with the QAnon Shaman, the author delves deep in a shallow lake
I am loathe to give these burgeoning characters more attention, but this article on Harpers is excellent. The author sits down for lunch with Jacob, and truthfully the content is like 1/8th of the article, the rest is delving into past philosophy, logic, and conspiracy.
A quote about Jacob from the article:
Which would include January 6. When he reached the west side of the Capitol, he moved as if in a dream, gliding onto the Senate floor as if he were some fabulous pooh-bah whom no one had ever heard of yet. He ambled down the center aisle of the Senate chamber, past one hundred abandoned desks.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” he said.
“What then is the American, this new man?” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked in 1782. At long last, Jacob provided the answer: He is a pagan straight out of central casting, a bro tripping on the hidden figures of the cosmos, a natural man convinced of his own self-evident truths, a hero ready to fight for his blessed fatherland, notwithstanding the fact that he still lived with his mother. Jacob stepped onto the dais, looked out on the sea of marble columns, and flexed his naked biceps.
A cop asked him to leave.
“I’m gonna take a sit in this chair,” he said. “’Cause Mike Pence is a fucking traitor.”
And on the inherent issue with overcoming the conspiracy theorist mindset, even when fact is against them:
With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.
|
"The bizarre far-right coup attempt in Germany, explained by an expert."
Reading this made me understand how much more insane and crazy the whole thing was:
It sounds like something out of a novel: a cell of heavily armed German extremists plotting to overthrow the elected government and elevate a man called Prince Heinrich XIII to the throne of a new Teutonic monarchy.
On Wednesday, German police arrested 25 people attempting to do exactly that — including a former member of parliament from Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD), a far-right anti-immigrant faction.
The plot originated out of a movement called the Reichsbürger — literally, "Reich citizens." They believe that every German state since World War I has been illegitimate, a corporation rather than an authentic government, and thus feel entitled to ignore its laws.
Sounds shockingly similar to the stupidity peddled by parts of QAnon and the sovereign citizen hokum? Well, that's because it is directly derived from the sovereign citizen movement:
To try to understand this bizarre incident and the movement behind it, I reached out to Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London and a leading expert on terrorism in Germany. Neumann has been studying the Reichsbürger for over a decade, which he learned of by researching an older movement that existed in America — so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe that the 14th Amendment (or possibly the end of the gold standard) secretly overturned the US Constitution, and that they are under no obligation to obey America's laws.
"I first took an interest in this when I was teaching at Georgetown, 12 years ago. I learned about the sovereign citizens in the United States," he says. "I didn't know that we had a similar movement in Germany, where I come from."
Recently, Reichsbürger adherents have started taking on ideas from another American conspiracy theory: QAnon, the idea that Donald Trump is leading a secret campaign against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who run the world. Somehow, according to Neumann, this peculiarly American theory has become a major part of the German extremist landscape.
|
"QAnon Believers Flock to Dallas for the Grand Return of JFK Jr." (2021)
This is not current, it's from last November. But it came up in conversation and I had to relive this incredibly absurd belief that dozens of people. It's just all so incredibly crazy.
|
Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol
I am about 1/10th of the way through this article and it is single-handedly going to get me to subscribe to the New Yorker. It's some of the most well written prose I've read in a long time.
I know the white privilege portion of the Capitol riot has been well covered but this particular passage hammers it home:
A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber's center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I'd seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I'd watched Chansley assure people, "We got 'em right where we want 'em! We got 'em by the balls, baby, and we're not lettin' go!"
"Fuckin' A, man," he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, "You good, sir? You need medical attention?"
"I'm good, thank you," Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, "I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet."
"Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?" the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
"We will," Black assured him. "I been making sure they ain't disrespectin' the place."
"O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place."
It is hard to imagine that same tone of voice if the people he had been speaking to were Black Lives Matters protesters behaving exactly the same way. There's no way it would be the same calm tone in his voice.
|
