Thoughts from Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain: 13.12.20

 Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.  

- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain'*  

Covid

Lockdowns are widely - and rightly - seen as an admission of earlier failures. Come 2022 - or even 2021 - will they also be widely seen as misguided and pointless, given that infection and death rates don't seem to differ much between those countries which have applied them and those which haven't? Maybe the ultimate conclusion will be that, once you've failed to act as quickly and as efficiently/effectively as Taiwan, you'll be chasing your tail for the next 12-24 months, until herd immunity is achieved either naturally or via the several vaccines - amidst panic magnified by incompetence. And causing confusion and almost immeasurable economic and healthcare damage outside the prism of Covid. At least in the UK but very possibly elsewhere as well. 

Meanwhile, claims continue to emerge that the virus was in Europe before the Wuhan outbreak. 

Living La Vida Loca in Galicia/Spain

A nice Xmassy post from Mark Stücklin of Spanish Property Insight

Such is the rate of tax-avoidance in Spain, the Tax Office (La Hacienda) naturally loves picking and squeezing low-hanging fruit. So it is that all non-resident property owners must pay tax on imputed rental income, even if they don't rent out their property at all. As Mark has said, this is a form of wealth tax. And now it's being applied to owners of Airbnb properties that couldn't be rented out because of Covid this year.

The Hacienda can be as unscrupulous as any other organisation in Spain. Or 'thieves', as one asesoria told me a few years ago. Here's Mark on one of their 'cynically used devious wheezes' which might explain why I've have so many motoring fines here, after none in several countries ever earlier decades: They love relatively small fines and penalties that the bureaucratic Spanish system makes time-consuming and costly to contest, safe in the knowledge that only a tiny percentage of people will bother to do so, however unjustified the penalty. Parking and traffic fines are a classic example. I’ve just been hit with a traffic fine of €330. I have no idea what it related to, but my lawyer advised me it would cost more than the fine to contest it, so I just had to suck it up.

Here's Marìa's Riding the Wave: Day 28   

The UK 

Writing from Madrid,  Giles Tremlett says here that Since Brexit has been wrapped and sold in grand terms, the minutiae of real, everyday disruption – the part that impacts ordinary lives – has been ignored. 

The USA 

I cited yesterday the allegation that Trump is a delusional liar. A propos  . . The Supreme Court decision will be a bitter blow to Mr Trump, who has given every indication of harbouring a genuine belief that his baseless claims of mass fraud would be vindicated in court. Three hours before the ruling was announced, Mr Trump tweeted: “If the Supreme Court shows great Wisdom and Courage, the American People will win perhaps the most important case in history, and our Electoral Process will be respected again!”

Der Spiegel has named Trump Loser of the Year. Surely the century. At least.

I so wish I could read the history books of 50 years from now. With luck, I might be able to read those of 20 - or even 30 - years hence,

The Way of the World

Qanon has grown from one single cryptic posting about Trump saving the world from paedophiles to the world’s biggest conspiracy theory that plays on all the fears and anxieties of the age, and the deep distrust of government, institutions, the media and big tech, against which Trump is seen to be the bulwark.  while the paranoia may be timeless, social media has provided a platform for Q’s theories to flourish, spreading them far beyond those predisposed to believe.  . . . In its capacity to capture the minds of its adherents, as much as it is a conspiracy theory or a movement, one might almost describe QAnon as a global cult – even, a faith. ‘And it’s not faith in Q, it is faith in this idea that there’s this epic battle between good and evil, but there is a saviour, and the saviour is Trump.’  For more on this, see the (long) article below.

Spanish

We say ‘sweating like a pig’, Spaniards say 'sweating like a chicken'. As it happens, neither pigs nor chickens have sweat glands. So, the Spanish idiom, it’s said, refers to birds on a spit roast.

 

Finally . . .

I’ve taken to listening to a (low-ad) Dutch radio station. These are all the Dutch words I've learned in the last 2-3 weeks:-

Black Friday 

Deals

Relax

Slash

Credit card 

Peak period 

On line

Download

Super

News (maybe Neuws . . .)

Non-stop

Cyber Monday to Tuesday

News brief

Design

Direct

Podcast

Discover

THE ARTICLE

   

QAnon: Outlandish conspiracy theory or dangerous global cult? It has grown from one single cryptic posting about Trump saving the world from paedophiles to the world’s biggest conspiracy theory. Mick Brown  

On 3 November, the morning of the US election, a posting appeared on an internet message board about Donald Trump’s secret plan to take down a cabal of ‘deep state’ politicians, bureaucrats and elite liberals engaged in a global satanic paedophile ring. The post, showing a picture of a large Stars and Stripes flag, was from ‘Q’, the mysterious figure whose posts for the past three years have been seeding the conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Since its inception, QAnon has grown from a single cryptic posting on an obscure message board to lay claim to being the world’s biggest conspiracy theory. But this was its moment of reckoning. In the days before the election, Q’s postings had demonstrated a rising expectation of resounding triumph. ‘Are you ready to finish what we started?’; ‘“Nothing can stop what is coming” is not just a catchphrase’; and ‘Are you ready to hold the political elite… accountable?’ But as Trump’s defeat became clear, Q fell silent. Among some followers there was shock and disbelief. This is not how ‘the Plan’ – Trump’s supposed scheme to destroy the liberal elites in the coming ‘Storm’ – was supposed to pan out. Could everything Q had been saying have been a hoax? ‘HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q????’, one poster wrote in panicked caps. ‘MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED TH  PLAN. T RUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???' On 13 November, as Trump stepped up his insistence that the election had been rigged, Q finally broke his (or her) silence: ‘It had to be this way. Sometimes you must walk through the darkness before you see the light.’ And, portentously, ‘Nothing can stop what is coming. Nothing!’

The QAnon movement, which has spread around the world, bringing hundreds of thousands – some researchers say millions – into its fold, is centred around Q, who is purported to be an anonymous government official posting classified information to aid and abet efforts by Trump to fight the ‘deep state’ conspiracy. (It is a reference to ‘Q clearance’ – the US Department of Energy’s security clearance required to access top secret data.) Postings on QAnon message boards can often seem like a curious hybrid of political paranoia, messianic prophecy and a Tom Clancy novel, stamping the Q ‘brand’ on other conspiracy theories, many of increasing outlandishness: satanic cabals, Covid, UFOs, ‘interdimensional demons’, celebrity vampires harvesting adrenochrome from children in order to stay healthy and young.

Q has become the big tent under which all manner of new and pre-existing conspiracies may gather. One of the most bizarre, promoted by Q, and which circulated last year, was that John Kennedy Jnr, who died in 1999 in a plane crash, was actually alive and in hiding and would emerge as Trump’s running mate for the election. Ridiculous as these ideas seem, in America the theory has moved from the deepest recesses of the internet to the very heart of the Republican Party. Two women elected to Congress in November – Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert – have on occasion espoused QAnon beliefs. Donald Trump himself has spread Q-related tweets. And in Britain, at anti-lockdown and ‘save our children’ protests around the country, protestors have brandished placards with QAnon slogans. With the aid of ‘digital warriors’ and a ‘patriot army’, the theory goes, there will come a ‘Great Awakening’ when Trump will vanquish the depraved liberal elites. In short, it is a theory that plays on all the fears and anxieties of the age, and the deep distrust of government, institutions, the media and big tech, against which Trump is seen to be the bulwark.

The first posting by Q appeared on 28 October 2017 on a message board on the fringe, ‘no rules’ platform 4chan. Even before Q, 4chan had hosted numerous ‘Anon’ sites perpetuating conspiracy theories. The most significant was ‘Pizzagate’, in 2016, when it was claimed that emails hacked from the account of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign manager, John Podesta (former White House chief of staff under President Clinton), contained coded references to a paedophile ring involving Democratic party officials, which was supposedly run from the basement of a family pizzeria in Washington, DC. The hysteria culminated in a man bursting into the restaurant with a pistol and a rifle, bent on revenge. It turned out that there was no basement. Couched in cod military jargon, the first Q posting picked up on Pizzagate – predicting Clinton’s imminent arrest. Clinton, of course, was not arrested. And it is likely the posting would have gone unnoticed had it not been picked up and amplified by a minor right-wing YouTube personality named Tracy Diaz. Six days after the first Q posting, Diaz introduced the conspiracy theory to her audience in a video that went on to be viewed nearly 250,000 times.

Other channels, such as Patriots’ Soapbox, also began to pick up on Q’s ‘drops’, spreading the theory to the more easily accessible Reddit forums and then to Facebook, through the use of cryptic hashtags associated with the group – #trusttheplan, #WeAreQ and #WWG1WGA [an acronym for ‘Where We Go One, We Go All’] which allowed sympathisers to find each other, and to stamp the Q ‘brand’ on message boards. Benjamin Decker, the founder of the digital investigation consultancy Memetica, who has been researching QAnon since its inception, says that in its early days the spread was driven as much by profit as ideology. ‘The people who began propagating the conspiracy in 2017, and as it grew in 2018 and 2019, were also financially invested in its growth. These were people with YouTube channels, Patreon accounts and online merchandising. There’s an entire e-commerce industry around this thing. So there was always an intention to grow it.’

While purporting to come from a deep intelligence source, it is notable that nothing that Q has posted is revelatory. Rather it is largely reactive, gleaning bits of ‘intel’ from news stories and published reports, many aggregated from right-wing media sites, and often posted in the form of cryptic ‘crumbs’ as they are called (think Hansel and Gretel), encouraging followers to ‘do your own research’. ‘The reason QAnon works,’ says Joseph Uscinski, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami and co-author of the book American Conspiracy Theories, ‘is that it has largely piggybacked on to existing conspiracy tropes, and espouses ideas a lot of people have already bought into. ‘The idea of elites eating babies has been around for millennia; the idea of a deep state working against the president is the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK, which came out 30 years ago. About 50 per cent of Americans buy into the deep state idea; about a third think that there is elite sex-trafficking going on. All of these ideas predate QAnon.’  The difference is that while the paranoia may be timeless, social media has provided a platform for Q’s theories to flourish, spreading them far beyond those predisposed to believe. Research published by the BBC in October found that QAnon had generated more than 100 million comments, shares and likes on social media sites this year. The biggest QAnon groups on Facebook had generated 44 million comments, shares and likes – that’s about two thirds the number of reactions generated by Black Lives Matter groups.

In May 2019, the FBI released a memo listing QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat, linking the conspiracy to multiple violent incidents and threats of violence, including a man accused of murdering his brother with a sword, a man who reportedly threatened to kill YouTube employees, and an armed man who blocked the Hoover Dam with an armoured vehicle. By then, people had begun showing up at Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and brandishing placards bearing QAnon slogans, and Trump himself had begun to apparently court the conspiracy, alive to the support it was gaining among his voting base.

A survey by Media Matters, a left-of-centre not-for-profit organisation that monitors right-wing media, and which has tracked QAnon postings since the beginning, revealed that as of 30 October 2020 Trump had retweeted postings promoting Q-related conspiracy theories at least 265 times. Additionally, members of Trump’s family, campaign staffers, and current and former Trump administration officials have also repeatedly amplified QAnon supporters and their content. In August, responding to a question about QAnon and its supporters, Trump replied that he ‘appreciate[d]’ that ‘they like me very much’, adding that ‘these are people that love our country’. When a reporter noted that the conspiracy theory’s premise is that Trump is ‘secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals,’ Trump replied, ‘But is that supposed to be a bad thing or good thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.’ To its followers, Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from the movement has been taken as endorsement. ‘#Qanon’s intel drops are approved by President Trump and the proofs provided here will debunk any claims otherwise,’ reads one posting on the Qproofs site – ‘A collection of QAnon evidence provided by Anonymous Patriots’. There has even been speculation in some quarters of the movement that Trump himself is Q.

Media Matters counted no fewer than 97 candidates running in the Congressional primaries who had either endorsed or given credence to QAnon ideas, 26 of whom ended up on the ballot. The most prominent is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a House seat in Georgia, and who had posted numerous videos promoting QAnon theories, including one calling ‘Q’ a ‘patriot’ and ‘worth listening to’. According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Greene also posted a series of tweets defending QAnon, including one – subsequently deleted – encouraging her followers to message her with questions so she could ‘walk you through the whole thing’. However in August 2020, in an interview on Fox TV, as her campaign for Congress gathered pace, Greene refuted suggestions that she was running as a ‘QAnon candidate’, saying that after discovering ‘misinformation’ on the site she had chosen ‘another path’. Greene did not respond to requests from the Telegraph for an interview. She will be joined in Congress by another Republican, Lauren Boebert, the owner of a restaurant named Shooters Grill in the town of Rifle in Colorado, who has stopped short of describing herself as a QAnon follower but said in one interview, ‘Everything that I’ve heard of Q, I hope that this is real because it only means that America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values.’ ‘So many people are hard-wired to ignore what they consider to be the fringe, that it’s hard to reconcile that with the fact that oftentimes now power is being organised on the fringe,’ says Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters.

A study by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank that looks at extremist movements and ideas, shows how particular events have provoked a sharp rise in Q activity on social media – such as the first appearance of Q followers at Trump rallies in the summer of 2018, and the death of Jeffrey Epstein in August 2019. But inevitably Covid has proved a particularly strong catalyst. In March, at the onset of the pandemic, according to ISD, membership of QAnon groups on Facebook increased by 120 per cent. Unsurprisingly, the US is the largest QAnon ‘content producing’ country, followed by the UK, Canada and Australia. But there are Q groups in Hungary, Spain and Finland. In Germany, researchers have noted how QAnon theories about ‘the deep state’ have begun to penetrate far-right Reichsbürgerbewegung groups. It is the ease with which QAnon has attached itself to legitimate concerns that alarms observers, infiltrating parenting and child-protection groups on Facebook through the use of hashtags such as #saveourchildren and #savethechildren, while also promoting anti-vaccine theories. (In October, Facebook banned all accounts linked to QAnon from its platforms, labelling it a ‘militarized social movement’. But the movement continues to flourish on other platforms such as Telegram, Parler and Gab.) ‘There has been an attempt to rebrand [QAnon] to get the yoga moms and essential-oil healers interested – all of the pseudo-science influencers who are closer to anti-vaccine stuff than they are to satanic deep state conspiracies,’ Benjamin Decker says. ‘It’s really easy to rebrand Q to something everybody hates to attract a following.’ QAnon has even reached the discussion groups on Mumsnet.

In August there were a series of rallies held in towns and cities around the UK protesting about child trafficking and organised by a group called Freedom for the Children UK, where protesters brandished placards bearing Q hashtags and slogans. The same placards were evident at a large anti-lockdown rally held in London, also in August, where Piers Corbyn and the veteran conspiracy-monger David Icke were among the speakers. QAnon, says Carusone, is ‘David Icke’s dream come true’. I n all of this, one central question remains unanswered. Who exactly is Q? It was long believed that the man behind QAnon was Jim Watkins – the owner of the site where where Q posts. Watkins is a former US Army helicopter mechanic and self-described ‘serial entrepreneur’, whose first internet start-up was a porn website, Asian Bikini Bar. Leaving the services, Watkins decamped to the Philippines and ran a pig farm outside Manila. In 2014 he took control of the 8chan platform, an unregulated haven for a bizarre assortment of fringe and dark interests, including conspiracy and extremist groups, where Q was then posting. In September 2019, following the shooting of 22 people in El Paso, Texas, and where the suspect was reported to have posted a manifesto on 8chan, 8chan’s cyber-security provider cut ties to the site, forcing it offline. But in November 2019 Watkins reappeared with a new platform, 8kun, with his son, Ron, acting as the site’s moderator. The Q postings followed him. In an interview in September with a far right news outlet American Broadcasting CommUnity (‘Time To Wake Up!’) Watkins denied that he was Q, or knowing who Q is, saying ‘Q, as far as I know, is just a user on our website,’ but added, ‘I’m thinking it’s real. I think that Q is more than one person posting, I’m guessing, but I don’t know. They seem to be very few people, and they seem to have a lot of back information.’ In September 2019, following the El Paso killings, Watkins was ordered to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security about 8chan’s efforts to address ‘the proliferation of extremist content, including “white supremacist content” on the platform’. Watkins was photographed leaving the hearing wearing a Q pin on his lapel.

Most Q watchers agree that Q is more likely to be the cover for a group rather than one individual. Angelo Carusone agrees that it’s surprising that after three years, in which the conspiracy has been avidly followed and researched, no one has yet been able to establish who Q is – or are. But he points to the fact that those who stand to profit from perpetuating the conspiracy would be the last to blow the whistle. ‘If I’m running a Q show that’s dedicated to the conspiracy, do I really want to uncover who Q is, and let people know it may not be somebody with Q level clearance – may not be a real person at all? ‘But at the end of the day, who Q is doesn’t matter as much as the idea does. Nor does it matter whether or not Q ever posts again. It’s so much bigger than that now. And that’s why it’s basically here to stay.’ Carusone has his own reasons for lamenting the rise of QAnon – and the baleful influence it may have. A relative of his cut off ties to the family after ‘getting lost’ in the rabbit hole of Q conspiracies, particularly angered by Carusone’s work at Media Matters. ‘He had been in this Q stuff for a while, but in the summer his posture just changed. He came to see me as not just someone who was supposedly defending, but actually participating in, massive child-sex trafficking. It got to the point where I said, you have to put this in check. I am not a vampire. The last thing he said to me was, “Donald Trump is going to end up putting your head on a pike, and I can’t wait for that day.” And he really meant it.’

Carusone is not alone in his concerns. There is a Reddit forum, QAnonCasualties, with more than 50,000 members, offering support and advice to people who have become estranged from friends and loved ones who are following QAnon. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ reads one post. ‘I’m 16, my mum is going down the Qanon rabbit hole… She says I have done my “research” but she sits on facebook staring at the same two live streams and it breaks me.’ And this: ‘My husband refuses to believe that Trump lost the election. He bet a sizable amount of money that Trump would win. Now he’s saying that he can’t pay his half of the mortgage. He’s been caught up with Q since the get go and he’s fully delusional. All conversations turn to Trump/Q. I’ve lost all hope that he will normalize and we are divorcing. It’s almost like dealing with an addict; at some point you just have to walk away.’ In its capacity to capture the minds of its adherents, as much as it is a conspiracy theory or a movement, one might almost describe QAnon as a global cult – even, as Carusone puts it, a faith. ‘And it’s not faith in Q, it is faith in this idea that there’s this epic battle between good and evil, but there is a saviour, and the saviour is Trump.’

For Benjamin Decker the biggest concern around QAnon is its potential to inflame more violence. ‘For the last couple of years there have been a number of violent incidents stemming from people’s support and interpretation of QAnon. These things happened because people believe in QAnon and that they are participating in something that gives their life more meaning. ‘But instead of talking about it like we’re pointing at the crazy uncle in the corner and laughing at him for being nuts, what we need to be doing is having that conciliatory conversation: “Why do you believe this and how can we move forward?”’ In the meantime, as Carusone says, QAnon ‘is not going away. Trump is only leaving office. He will still exist, and he’ll still be tweeting.’ In coming months, he adds, there will be the roll-out of mass vaccinations. ‘And the Q people are going to go crazy over that…

Some of the Q's most outlandish theories:-

He (or she) encouraged followers to look into whether supporters of Hillary Clinton employ occult symbols to signify their involvement in a deep-state paedophile ring and child trafficking. November 2017

Q theorised that there are links between the death of John F Kennedy Jnr in a plane crash in 1999 and the election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate the following year. A later theory also claimed that Kennedy was alive, in hiding and about to be revealed as Trump’s running mate in the 2020 election. April 2018

Q posted a timeline suggesting that the Covid-19 pandemic is a plot by China to unseat President Trump. September 2020

* A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant.