![]() They saw all of it as a precursor to the 2020 election.Īs Trump spent the year warning about voter fraud, the Oath Keepers were listening. Many of their worst fears had been realized in quick succession: government lockdowns, riots, a movement to abolish police, and leftist groups arming themselves and seizing part of a city. “Civil war is here, right now,” he wrote, before being banned from the platform for inciting violence.īy then, I’d spent months interviewing current and former Oath Keepers, attempting to determine whether they would really take part in violence. And when a Trump supporter was killed later that week in Portland, Oregon, Rhodes declared that there was no going back. In August, when a teenager was charged with shooting and killing two people at protests over police brutality in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rhodes called him “a Hero, a Patriot” on Twitter. Over the summer, Rhodes’s warnings of conflict only grew louder. He had put out a call for his followers to protect the country against what he was calling an “insurrection.” The unrest, he told me, was the latest attempt to undermine Donald Trump. And whereas Rhodes had once cast himself as a revolutionary in waiting, he now saw his role as defending the president. Rhodes had been talking about civil war since he founded the Oath Keepers, in 2009. ![]() With him in his pickup were a pistol and a dusty black hat with the gold logo of the Oath Keepers, a militant group that has drawn in thousands of people from the military and law-enforcement communities. Rhodes, 55, is a stocky man with a gray buzz cut, a wardrobe of tactical-casual attire, and a black eye patch. It added that the risks posed by these extremists were likely to grow during the 2020 presidential election cycle.To hear more feature stories, get the Audm iPhone app. Supporters think he does, and point out that he has retweeted multiple accounts involved in spreading the QAnon message - although there is significant evidence the president doesn't do much vetting of the messages he retweets.Īt a rally for Mr Trump in Cincinnati last August, a man warming up the crowed used a QAnon motto "where we go one, we go all" to conclude his speech, although he later denied it was a reference to the conspiracy theory.ĭid the FBI really describe them as a domestic terror threat?Īn intelligence bulletin from an FBI field office in Phoenix, published by Yahoo News, specifically mentions QAnon and other "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" as a domestic terror threat. Some of these groups are very active, featuring tens of thousands of members and thousands of posts every day. There are dozens and potentially hundreds of QAnon groups on Facebook, which the platform has said it would begin proactively banning. Image: There are dozens of Facebook Groups dedicated to QAnon ![]() Psychologically this only serves to strengthen supporters' belief in the conspiracy, Professor Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Bristol explained to Vox, encouraging supporters to internalise any evidence which contradicts the claims of Q simply as evidence of the conspiracy against it.Īfter all, people believe in conspiracy theories because they fulfil psychological needs - not because they present convincing rational arguments, as Professor Karen Douglas told Sky News. ![]() :: Listen to Divided States on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Spreaker Not only is there no evidence, but many of the claims Q has made - whether predictions regarding particular events on particular dates, or factual accusations - have been proven to be false.īut rather than lose supporters as a result of these incidents, Q has explained that the predictions and claims which haven't come to pass were actually purposeful misdirection, and a necessary part of their cryptic revelations. Has Q ever provided any evidence of the claims? ![]()
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