Don’t Discount QAnon, It’s A Political Cult With A Mega Church. This Sermon By Lin Wood Is Scary

How did we get to the place where a disgraced lawyer with a messianic complex, facing disbarment on the grounds of mental instability, is headlining counter culture events all summer, spreading the Big Lie and preaching the crazed doctrine of QAnon? We can trace the roots back to the end of the last century when the internet was invented and the number of cable channels exploded. That led to the expansion of the information bandwidth and then social media was born. And that led to the planting of disinformation and that’s where the crazy conspiracy theories have all taken root. Under the guise of “free speech” or “telling the truth” all manner of nonsense is allowed to flourish, unabated.

The poster child of this phenomenon is QAnon, which is the voice of the grievance counter culture in this nation. Their latest outing was this weekend in Oklahoma at an event headlined by none other than Lin Wood. He got a standing ovation when he made the Q sign in the air and claimed that Trump was still president, to a crowd gathered at Rhema Bible College in Tulsa for the Health and Freedom Conference.

Lin Wood stating Q is the truth and that the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bidens, and the Bushes are all involved in sex trafficking. pic.twitter.com/aoip6cpgYw

— PatriotTakes ?? (@patriottakes) April 18, 2021

Lin Wood wanted to execute the vice president of the United States on January 6. No due process, no trial, no judge, no jury, just put Mike Pence in front of a vigilante firing squad. That’s nuts for anybody but for a lawyer? But Wood is enabled, encouraged in fact, to be completely off his rocker, because he’s got what amounts to the Church of QAnon behind him. And QAnon has its platforms, the disinformation faux news channels, Fox News, Newsmax and OAN, bolstering up both its child trafficking dogma and the Big Lie, and the two together constitute the foundation of the counter culture, right-wing gospel. New York Times:

Months after the inauguration of President Biden, One America News Network, a right-wing cable news channel available in some 35 million households, has continued to broadcast segments questioning the validity of the 2020 presidential election.

“There’s still serious doubts about who’s actually president,” the OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a March 28 report. […]

To go by much of OAN’s reporting, it is almost as if a transfer of power had never taken place. The channel did not broadcast live coverage of Mr. Biden’s swearing-in ceremony and Inaugural Address. Into April, news articles on the OAN website consistently referred to Donald J. Trump as “President Trump” and to President Biden as just “Joe Biden” or “Biden.” That practice is not followed by other news organizations, including the OAN competitor Newsmax, a conservative cable channel and news site.

OAN has also promoted the debunked theory that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were left-wing agitators. Toward the end of a March 4 news segment that described the attack as the work of “antifa” and “anti-Trump extremists” — and referred to the president as “Beijing Biden” — Mr. Sharp said, “History will show it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who called for this violence.” Investigations have found no evidence that people who identify with antifa, a loose collective of antifascist activists, were involved in the Capitol riot.

Charles Herring, the president of Herring Networks, the company that owns OAN, defended the reports casting doubt on the election. “Based on our investigations, voter irregularities clearly took place in the November 2020 election,” he said. “The real question is to what extent.” […]

While OAN appeals to a relatively small audience, its coverage reflects views commonly held by Republicans. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month, about half of Republicans said they believed that the Jan. 6 attack, which left five dead, was largely a nonviolent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists. Six in 10 of Republicans surveyed said they also believed Mr. Trump’s claim that the election was “stolen.”

This is dangerous. Trump may be gone, but lies and crazy ideas are proliferating. The next meeting of the QAnon clan is Memorial Day weekend in Dallas, at the For God & Country Patriot roundup. “Patriot” is a word about to go into disrepute, the way “Christian” has. Both are becoming synonymous with extremist wingnut.