Dissecting The Lies
How to tell when the media’s trying to hide things from you.
A friend of mine was telling me the other day about a movement called QAnon. I did a little digging. I wanted to know more about it. I looked to the media for more information. Here is what I found.
This is from NBC News, a source that we’re supposed to implicitly trust as being “real news.” Notice the use of the words “fringe” and “conspiracy” in the headline. Most people scan headlines, they don’t read the stories. And that’s what this article is counting on. They want you to automatically dismiss anything from QAnon as untrue.
By using the word fringe, they imply that anyone who believes this is going to be on the outer edges of society, a threat to your in-born need to belong. By using the word conspiracy theory, they imply that only people who are crazy will believe this stuff. That is an attack against your in-born need to be believed, since people don’t believe crazy people.
They point out the merchandise that exists on Amazon, which actually undermines their attempt to play on your fears of being an outcast since clearly there’s a group of people you would belong to if you were to become a QAnon supporter, but then link that merchandise to being branded as a “far-right conspiracy theorist” aka “right-wing nut job.”
They do tell you one bit of truth: QAnon is tracking a war against the deep state, which Hillary Clinton happens to be part of, and a global child sex cabal. However, they add the words “so-called” in front of deep state and “fictitious” in front of the word global to ensure that you don’t take those things seriously. After all, they are a trusted news source…aren’t they?
They later flat-out state that QAnon is “ a baseless and convoluted theory,” but they never present you any evidence of things that QAnon has stated that were baseless. Convoluted just means complicated, and if we’re talking about a potential deep state threat and a global conspiracy, it’s bound to get complicated in a hurry. They link it to Pizzagate, another thing they discredited without examination, in the hopes that having dismissed the one, you’ll dismiss this one, too.
NBC claims, later in the article, that “ Amazon has routinely had problems policing what is sold on its massive e-commerce platform,” to explain the proliferation of merchandise being sold. They subtly link the QAnon merchandise to white supremacists, Nazis, and the KKK by mentioning that this merchandise is also to be found on Amazon. They know that by drawing that association in your mind, they can influence you to have the same negative reaction to QAnon that you have to racism, Nazism, and the KKK.
NBC also talks about having influenced Apple to pull an app off of their ITunes store called QDrops which would have allowed you to get the latest information provided by QAnon. The implication being that even Apple agrees that this stuff is too dangerous for normal people to be allowed to access and review it. We must trust someone like NBC to tell us what to think rather than being allowed to go directly to the source and find out for ourselves.
They wrap the article up this way:
“ Since its birth in October of last year, the Qanon conspiracy theory has spread from the fringe forums 4chan and 8chan to more widely used platforms like Reddit and Facebook. Conservative celebrities including Roseanne Barr, Curt Schilling and Alex Jones from Infowars have helped amplify the theory, which has often had real-world implications.”
At no point in the article does NBC talk about why it believes that QAnon cannot be trusted or that they are crazy. It gives you no real facts about the movement itself or why it has grown in popularity. In other words, it gives you no room to make your own decision. This isn’t an article. It’s a hit piece.
Ask yourself this question: If NBC is working so hard to make sure that you don’t take QAnon seriously, what is it that they are afraid you will find if you actually examine it for yourself?
If QAnon’s theories really are crazy, why aren’t they writing the article showing just why the theories are crazy, rather than about how crazy you would be to even think about looking at QAnon?
