A few days ago Morning Consult released a poll showing that 18% of American adults believed in QAnon's conspiracy theories. Shazam! That might be down a bit from previous polls, but 18% is still a lot. It's one out of six Americans.
Except that if you read closely, that was 18% "among all adults who had heard of the group." It turns out that two-thirds of adults have never even heard of QAnon, which means Morning Consult's chart should have looked approximately like this:
When people read about this stuff, the chart is all that a lot of them are going to see. They won't read the accompanying text at all, let alone read it carefully. They'll just take a quick glance and come away thinking that Americans are nuts.
But a proper chart shows that only 6% of adults think QAnon is even "somewhat" accurate. And only 2% think it's very accurate. That's really not much. I imagine that 6% of American adults are unsure if we really landed on the moon. And you could get 2% of Americans to believe that the country is run by a secret cabal from Botswana.
Bottom line: We are not QAnon Nation. In fact, QAnon barely has a foothold in the American psyche at all.
If 2% of Americans actually believe in Bigfoot who cares? If 2% actually believe that children are being held in the basement of a pizza parlor and that they are being used in a sex slavery ring and murdered then that might prove to be a problem for the business and it’s patrons.
Until Amanda Knox faces justice* for killing her study abroad roommate just to check killing a person of her bucket list, I could not care less what's happening at Comet Ping Pong.
*Even I will admit the Italian judiciary bollocked that prosecution. But A-Knox is only slightly less coldblooded than Joran van der Sloot.
Then, Such a big impact for such a small group , dotcha think?
The Velvet Underground of crackpottery. Only 25,000 people bought the albums, but they all started bands.
Mo Tucker is the tangent point of the two circles.
this comment is just perfection.
i'm still sad about MAGA mo tucker.
Surprisingly large amount of MAGA in underground, punk, & other extreme rock.
Mo Tucker, as mentioned. Exene Cervenka, Wendy O. Williams, & Dave Mustaine. The frontman & guitarist of Iced Earth at the Insurrection.
& this excludes more anodyne rockers like Bob Ritchie, James Hetfield, Gene Simmons, etc.
I think this is a case where the chart’s Y-Axis should have had a range of 0-100% to better illustrate the point.
That percentage of people who have heard of QAnon seems low - I think other polls have had higher numbers. But it's doubtful if many people ever really did believe in QAnon. A lot of Republicans, when polled, would reply that they believed some of it, or it seemed plausible. This was probably just a signal of partisanship, or of belonging to the cult - it was something that was obviously anti-Democrat, so it must have some merit. On the other hand, the great majority Republicans do still seem to have faith that Trump has some sort of magical powers - if only to put down libs.
Exactly. It's a tribal signifier, in particular one with big visibility but only limited duration. Republicans will say they believe it -- and many will convince themselves they sorta do -- when it's socially acceptable / required to do that as part of membership in the In-Group, and they will just as smoothly declare themselves skeptics when that's acceptable / required. It ain't the issue that matters; it's the tribal identity.
That said, I'm perfectly happy to paint them as the 'Q' party. I loved Pelosi's press release identifying McCarthy as "(Q-CA)." They used it, now lash them to it and throw them overboard, just like Trump!
And even then, how many of even this tiny percentage **really** believe the Qanon fantasy, vs. how many people who view answering "yes" as a badge of loyalty to Donnie.
My santeria altar to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., says otherwise.
The figure that stands out to me is that 7 out of every 100 self-identified Democrats believe that QAnon is somewhat accurate?
Crossover with left-favored conspiracy like Kennedy assassination & moonlanding, with a measure of antivaxxx?
I've never ever associated Kennedy Assassination wackos, moon landing wackos or antivax with the Left. Sure there's a few misguided crunchy granola vegans who are antivax but these days the vast majority are in right wing enclaves with home schooled kids.
Antivaxxx is more heterodox.
I would say moonlanding & Kennedy assassination conspiracymongers tend toward the left, though.
Black helicopters & one world government are the comparable right ones.
This is what makes me believe that this is just some random noise. If there was a question about "Do you believe the Smort Conspiracy is very/somewhat/not at all accurate?" you might get 5%.
An ah. Q is FSB psyops so stupid even Republicans it targets laugh at it. I bet Ron Watkins wish his trip to Russia had gone differently.........maybe Mike Lindell will reconvert back to Judaism.
Ripped from theONION headlines, mid-90s edition:
"Christ converts to Islam".
In the story, it was explained that Jews for Jesus splintered into three parts: Jews still for Jesus; Jews for Allah; & Jews for just being Jews again.
Pew Research has put out a couple of "Religious Landscape" reports which, among other things, document the decline in religious belief in America. In the first of them, in 2007, I think, something like 10% of self-described atheists reported they believed in God.
Since nearly all of them accepted the theory of evolution, it's reasonable to suppose that they were just teasing their interviewers.
Could be hippies, hippy-adjacent, & other crystals-type people who don't believe in a Christian divinity or other, non-Euronormative creed, but still acknowledge a higher power.
I mean, as well, atheists alcoholics can still complete step two
Sorry Kevin, but sometimes seeing at things as a percentage isn't the best way to look at things. Sure 6% doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that there are about 255,000,000 million adults in the USA, that means about 15,000,000 people believing this nonsense (I seriously doubt you can get that many Big Foot believers or Moon Landing deniers). That's a lot of people no matter how you try to spin it.
Right you are, Solar!
And that's 15 million adults, of which probably 10 million or more are between the ages of 21-50, which are the ages that are most inclined to act out their beliefs with activities such as armed militia exercises, violent counter-demonstrations against peaceful protesters, and aggressive intimidation of folks who don't share their stupid fantasies.
Voter suppression, not by legislation, but by armed intervention around polling places? Yeah, that's the new norm for that subset of fanatics. It doesn't take anywhere near 10 million armed aggressive fanatics to turn democracy upside down, does it?
Meh, your trying too hard. Out of those 15,000000 you then break it down further.....not close. Much like your armed poll watcher fantasy. Your easily manipulated by Psyops.
Says the know-nothing white man in a white precinct who never has to face down 25 armed racist fanatics to try to get into the precinct to cast his vote.
I look at it from a classic risk assessment perspective - risk is either high or low, impact is either high or low. A low risk but high impact event might need to be given a higher priority than a high risk but low impact event.
Examples: Say I live in Missouri
Chance of showers forecast, do I bring my umbrella or not? The worst that will happen is that I get wet.
Chance of earthquake - doesn't happen often but boy that New Madrid Quake was a doosy. So I need to lobby my state to demand that building codes take earthquakes into account.
A garden variety crank on the internet claiming Elvis is alive. A dime a dozen and no history of violence among the church of Elvis.
Cranks say election results are false, call for everyone to show up at Capital to stop the certification of the results with your firearms. Do you want to gamble that they are just blowing smoke?
Topline:
"24% of Republicans who had heard of QAnon said they believe QAnon’s claims, a 14-point decrease from the 38% who said the same in October."
Oh great. So, instead of over one-third of Rs who'd heard of QAnon, it's now down to one in four.
Over the centuries, how many people believed that Nostradamus' predictions had been accurate and were expecting to see the Antichrist? How many in Salem, MA in the late 17th century believed witches were running amok?
I think you're underestimating how easily a large share of any given population will easily fall prey to wild conspiracy stories.
KD: Only a tiny handful of Americans rioted and stormed the Capitol on January 6. So, it's really no big deal.
Kevin actually said this.
This is a good example for the difficulty to prove anything with statistics. In this case the problem is those who haven't heard of QAnon. They have not heard the word "QAnon". What if you asked them if they believe that Democrats are running a child abuse conspiracy?How many would have heard this under a different label? And how many would believe this nonsense?
Anyway: Those who are unaware of QAnon--after it has been all over the media for weeks--would be expected to be even more credulous than those who have at least been awake enough to know what QAnon is.
Granted, although the problem here isn't with statistics; it's with polls.
Are you implying they would have to be able to recognize the term "QAnon" in order to believe the conspiracy theories? That's not how it works. There are plenty of people who believe Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccines but don't identify with QAnon explicitly, or even know what it is. That's how idiocy works.
Or they think Q is a Zionist front and the Republicans are the pedo party and Bill Gates is working with Israeli spy Alex Jones on disinformation to control the fringes. I have heard that several times since 2008, but not a peep in the media. Psyops is not just meant to control the fringes, but manipulative use of media to control what is considered "fringe". Play metal gear solid 2. It explains everything.
There is no reason to deny reality, Russia since the 40's has been a leader in psyops. First by inflaming the new left, now the new right since the oligarchs rammed in during the 1992 surge. They finance and build global connectivity with these groups and gaslight their dialectical mumbling. The old left was stunned by 1990 without Russian help, how small insignificant worthless they were, collapsed as political relevance. Sorry progressives and "left" libertarians don't really count.
My brother and his wife got sucked in. Back in September she was posting all kinds of "save the children" nonsense. More than one member of Congress are full Qanoners. Trump's rallies in the fall were full of people decked out in Qanon gear. I know anecdotes are not as good as data but I have my doubts that such a small percentage of Rs believe at least some of this. There's also the question that KD ignores of how fervently people believe something and how important that belief is to them. If you think bigfoot is real or that the earth is flat, that doesn't cause you to go and try to kill someone or overthrow the government.
If 6% of the country were members of a paranoid death cult or Al Queda we'd be worried. We should be worried.
MTG is QANON, but Boebert & Gosar seem closer to next gen variants of 90s Gingrich Revolution GOP like Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) & Bob Smith (LFOD*).
*Live free or die.
Right, but look at the blonde die job, her districts ethnic makeup and you see a facade building. Even her name is a surname of Greenberg...or Grunberg. She gaslights and sells dialectics. That is it. Make her irrelevant, but the media can't resist, because they have a job to do.
Nah, MTG will evolve into a distaff Gohmert or Steve King, an object of curiosity but not empowered.
I don't even see her rising to Issa or Nunes level, though granted the one spearheaded the effort to decapitate the Democrat Party in California with the Gray Davis recall & the other was El Jefe's mole at House Intelligence.
I find your reinterpretation of the chart soothing, Kevin. Five percent of Americans believe in practically every damx thing. It IS bad when their beliefs involve storming the capitol, but all over the country/world, people's beliefs are convincing them to imprison women for driving, pepper spray children with mental problems, step on men's necks for eight minutes, imprison people for warning others about a virus, and so forth. It's just good to know that it's not every second person I meet!
So I guess it doesn't bother you that a much larger fraction of ELECTED REPUBLICANS seem to believe in Q bs? Or, pretend that they do, which is worse actually.
So, again, another fringe rightwing movement with outsized attention and influence.
Not to be dismissed.
Fwiw, the origins of the new right fringe goes back to Portland and Beach's con idea of merging British Israelism with Jewish Libertarian philosophy. It was a brillant stroke. On one hand you have the belief Info-European peoples were the "real" Hebrews off the bibles. On the other you have anti-New Deal populism populism. This heavily influenced different groups such as Jewish Murray Rothbard to stop preaching to the upper middle class, instead take it to the workers themselves. Instead of being the people of William Jennings Bryan or racist socialist Thomas E Watson, they are the people of free markets. Rothbard then influences a young Wolfram ancestor under the surname Paul, you get the foundation of paleo-libertarians. A total con. Don't get me started with Aryan Nations and the Israelist side........half the members were far away from that term lol. The movement stays underground until the 80's and blows up at Ruby Ridge due to Republican bungling. A Russian oligarch has a idea......
This post has already found its way to Hot Air, Politics-99, All Sides Now and Protagonist News, and not always with proper credit to the author. What's up with that, Mr. Drum? At least one of those sites says they will only publish stuff they receive via email, but it appeared there within hours of it appearing here.
I didn't mean to reply to "Midgard" above. I'm going to repost as a regular comment. I don't even know what Midgard is trying to say.
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Counterpoint: 6% is around 1 in 20, meaning that probably at least one person in your beer league softball game believes that QAnon is at least partially correct.
And that's more than I wanna deal with, personally.
"In this Greenpoint kickball league, the beer is Shriner Bock, the soudtrack is Titus Andronicus, & the between innings banter is about Jewish Space Lasers..."
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Reposted here to get this in the right place:
This post has already found its way to Hot Air, Politics-99, All Sides Now and Protagonist News, and not always with proper credit to the author. What's up with that, Mr. Drum? At least one of those sites says they will only publish stuff they receive via email, but it appeared there within hours of it appearing here.
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