The wind-up.Magistrate judge: “The Flynns’ tweets and retweets reflect that they meet the dictionary definition of follower in the sense that they have “follow[ed] the opinions” of QAnon.” https://t.co/Yv6U4AOq05
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) October 23, 2021
And the hits just keep on coming:Big loss for Michael Flynn's family in their $75 million lawsuit against CNN.
— Jan Wolfe (@JanNWolfe) October 23, 2021
A magistrate judge says it wasn't defamatory to call them QAnon followers.
The judge wrote: "The Flynns’ own statements establish that they meet the dictionary definition of a follower of QAnon." pic.twitter.com/72hZ8XqY1E
One of America's most abundant resources, that never seems to diminish, is reactionary hysteria. Breitbart, Fox, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, all of them have just found one gusher after another...and every time the flow is just as forceful as the last time.
— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) October 22, 2021
The end is always near. And it’s not just right-wing cranks and TeeVee preachers making that pitch. It’s not only as American as apple pie, it’s as ubiquitously employed.The end is near. Send money. An appeal as American as apple pie. https://t.co/ZevB1C7nuZ
— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) October 22, 2021
Ah, dem was de days!This is really insightful as well. https://t.co/j3kC9aazZW
— Seth Cotlar (@SethCotlar) October 22, 2021
It reminds me of the scene in the Clifford Simak novel All Flesh is Grass when the narrator goes to another planet by mistake and finds a group of friendly alien terror tourists who go to different places in the universe to experience past catastrophes and horrors. Never been big on horror, myself. Who needs it when reality has enough of that?
ReplyDeleteThe left does the same thing only not as well funded and not always as dangerously loony.
I remember the fear of cults, satanic worship, and child care. Easily as absurd as cellars under pizza parlors or anything Q-Anon came up with. The difference is people actually went to jail for using child care to cover up satanic rituals that never happened.
DeleteI can't really match that up to anything anyone has done in the name of Q-Anon. The capitol riot was a criminal act (a bunch of them), but it didn't result in prosecutions based on equally loony conspiracy theories.
We've been here before (and many times since Salem. People forget Miller wrote "The Crucible," which revived interest in the witch trials, as a commentary of McCarthyism, another serious abuse of government, not private, power). We just wake up in a brand new world every ten years or so, and reset the outrage machine as if the past were an unbroken glory and the present is beset by monsters who are always...not us!
It's tiresome.
I got some pretty angry denunciation when I pointed out Miller had to invent his hero having an affair with a 9 or 10 year old girl to come up with the plot to that play. College-credentialed PhDs were enraged when I told them that the play wasn't real history. I can credit going online and interacting with more of my fellow credentialed with opening my eyes to the danger of using real characters in show-biz because even those would-be sophisticates are no more likely to separate that from reality than the dolts who believed Trump was the savvy all powerful wiseguy he played on The Apprentice. Show biz is the most inefficient educational medium there is if you want to use one story to tell a far different story. Jesus was a lot better at doing that but he used parables instead of Broadway plays and movies and he knew how to do it, though some of it taken out of the milieu of those he told them to requires some work now.
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