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From Vox
The perpetual discourse over LGBTQ Pride, explained -
Some people do not want to see butts at Pride! | Michael Nagle/Getty Images
The fights over Pride are really about whether Pride is even political anymore.
Every big American holiday is accompanied by unspoken, terrible traditions that make us feel like we’re celebrating them right. Thanksgiving will almost always involve a dry turkey. Memorial Day, the first “summer” holiday, is almost always accompanied by bad weather. New Year’s Eve sucks, and if yours is great, you’ve done something terribly wrong.
And June, a.k.a. LGBTQ Pride Month, like clockwork, will always be preceded by a fight over who comes to Pride, and what they look like.
Fighting is ingrained in the DNA of Pride, which refers to both the month of June, when the US celebrates LGBTQ rights, and to a series of events in specific cities. Pride began as a commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City — after being subjected to relentless police brutality, arrests, and raids on gay bars, nightclubs, and bathhouses, LGBTQ people stood up and fought back. The first Pride march was held the next year and became a symbol of resistance as well as a demand for LGBTQ lives to be recognized as equal.
Now, 51 years later, the fight looks a lot different. This year, the most vocal fight isn’t so much about the government’s role in justice or equality, but a debate about harnesses, leather suits, ball gags, and furries. People are fighting over whether kink and fetish have a place at Pride marches.
While fighting about the merit of nipple clamps on parade can seem facetious, especially compared with more serious issues facing LGBTQ communities, it’s actually part of an older and ongoing tension that revolves around sexual identity and mainstream acceptance.
The fight for LGBTQ people to be recognized as equal by mainstream society has often been stylized as a fight about what’s “normal” (e.g., loving someone regardless of your and their gender is a normal thing and should be accepted). But that equation has historically turned into an incremental fight over respectability, with LGBTQ people compromising certain aspects of their lives for baseline recognition. At the same time, there’s been an increased debate over police presence at Pride.
But while fights over kink and the cops at Pride seem disparate, they both center a question about the importance and relevance of Pride and Pride Month celebrations, about who exactly gets to be visible, and how. They bring into focus an existential crisis for Pride itself: Is there any political clout left in what’s considered an important celebration of LGBTQ rights? Is this fighting all for naught?
For corporations, celebrating Pride has become as ubiquitous as major holidays. Cities, politicians, banks, media companies, clothing brands, big-box retail shops, and every entity in between celebrates and recognizes Pride Month; many have merchandise or swag to go with it. At marches and parades with TD Bank floats and Mastercard banners, is kink even out on display? And is something as corporate as Pride itself really about queer politics and queer issues at all?
The “Kink at Pride” debate is about respectability politics
Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Marching in leather during summer is no easy feat.
One of the things that LGBTQ people quickly learn when they come out is that the “sex and respectability at Pride” discourse is like the villain in a horror movie who is never, ever truly defeated, even if you burn the bones.
In 2018, the Advocate reminded us, listicle style, that Pride has always been about sex; in 2019, parents debated openly about kink and whether it was suitable for children; and in 2020, it was written that the debate will never go away. The debate over whether men in chaps should be allowed at Pride goes back to at least 2013, when Barack Obama was president. Though her remarks were not exclusively about sex and kink, gay liberation activist Sylvia Rivera famously lit into the New York City Pride crowd in a 1973 speech about how the predominantly white middle-class people at the gathering were ignoring sex workers, transgender people, and incarcerated queer people. She was booed.
The current fight over kink at Pride was foisted upon the LGBTQ community like many other fights: through social media. It’s virtually impossible to get across depth or nuance in a 280-character tweet or 35-second, front-facing TikTok, let alone one complaining about sexual indecency at Pride.
Of the myriad tweets and TikToks seemingly designed in a lab to challenge my fortitude, the debate against kink and Pride was crystallized in a series of tweets by left-wing YouTuber Vaush. He weighed on May 24, asserting his “no kink” position because kink is not family-friendly:
Pride should be a cool, queer-friendly block party you can attend to meet with organizers and get cute shirts. Everyone should be able to attend. It should be safe and uncontroversial. Dismissing accessibility as “sanitization” is a really underhanded and disgusting strategy
On the surface, this looks like a lot like arguments of the past. Historically, the idea was that you can’t have kink and fetish on display because children might see. No doubt, tiny young humans seeing things that their parents don’t want is a concern that transcends sexuality and gender.
But what’s different in this 2021 iteration is the usage of “accessibility,” and its connection to the idea of consent. The idea is that, hypothetically speaking, a person — not just unsuspecting children with their parents — who shows up to Pride and sees an exposed piece of flesh or a glimmer of genitalia did not consent to it and could possibly be harmed by it, thus limiting their access to Pride. The solution, ergo, would be to have a non-sexual Pride that everyone could attend (but don’t accuse the solution of being “sanitized”).
Vaush’s solution for a place where people feel safe isn’t invalid. There are big parties and celebrations — comic book conventions come to mind — where consent rules have to be printed out and said aloud because of complaints about people crossing said boundaries.
But in the context of Pride, it’s complicated. Queer history is often about resistance to norms and embracing radical existence, so engaging in respectability politics — the idea that marginalized groups need to behave or act in a certain way to validate the compassion shown toward them — flies in the face of those goals.
“Respectability politics is the wedging weapon that conservatives have always used against the queer community — getting us to turn against each other by always trying to live up to their ideas of what a human should be,” said Robin Dembroff, a professor at Yale who specializes in LGBTQ philosophy.
Dembroff explained to me that the respectability game is slippery. If you’re willing to exclude people based on their bedroom fetishes and kink, the worry is that then you’ll exclude already-marginalized LGTBQ members like sex workers, incarcerated people, and substance users.
Instead of broadening mainstream culture to accommodate the humanity of the LGBTQ community as a whole, respectability politics asks a community to change itself for mainstream sympathy. It’s not hard to see why many LGTBQ people, regardless of kink tastes, take issue with installing exclusion or policing behavior at Pride celebrations. Queerness, at its core, is a rejection of that respectability.
“Queerness isn’t just about who you want to fuck, you know? Being queer is still fundamentally rooted in having a political resistance to hegemonic ideas of how humans ought to be.” Dembroff said. “And it’s about whether or not you’re an acceptable human.”
Can Pride be radically political if it’s so corporate?
Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
Chase is proud to celebrate Pride!
Last month, Heritage of Pride, which organizes New York City’s celebrations, announced that it would ban the NYPD from marching because of concern from activists about police presence and how police have treated Black, Latino, and transgender communities. The decision also calls to mind how the very existence of Pride and gay rights was a response to policing and police brutality in New York City. Cities like San Francisco, Denver, and San Diego have instituted a similar ban on uniformed officers at Pride.
The debate over police presence at Pride, not unlike the debate over kink or queer representation at Pride, seems to indicate that many still see the politics within the Pride celebration. But all these arguments over who and what Pride should be about hinge on the subjective individual interpretations of Pride as a symbol of LGTBQ politics.
In recent years and especially in major cities and metropolitan areas, Pride has become a very popular corporate opportunity.
Big-box retailers like Target and Walmart have designated Pride collections where you can buy T-shirts that say “Born This Way,” or a “gender inclusive” T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Ally.” Skittles, in a marketing campaign, removed the rainbow coloring on its candies to make a point about “only one rainbow matters” during Pride. And TD Bank, Mastercard, and Goldman Sachs are among the companies that are very happy to celebrate — and remind you they celebrate — Pride through floats, giveaways, special deals, and dedicated “Pride” sections of their websites.
It’s easier to list the national companies that don’t celebrate Pride than the countless ones that do. And, to be clear, these companies supporting LGBTQ rights is infinitely better than going against them. But the wholesale corporate sponsorship of Pride raises the question of Pride’s political relevance if it’s become so entrenched with capitalism.
“This is all just about selling shit, right?” Greta LaFleur, a professor at Yale who specializes in the American history of sexuality and queer and trans studies, told me.
The corporatization of Pride has been a disappointment for many queer people, including LaFleur and, frankly, myself. As she explains, it’s more about selling a product and asking consumers to purchase their way to some idea of equality than it is about wrestling with the issues — health care for trans people, incarceration, homelessness, sex work, and substance abuse, etc. — that face the LGTBQ community.
If Pride has become so corporate, then at what point does Pride become a product itself? Does all this corporate gesturing rob Pride of measurable political impact?
“This is a bummer of an argument. There’s a part of me that’s like, ‘Why even fight about it? Because Pride is useless to fight about — because Pride itself has no political purchase anymore,’” said LaFleur.
The worry over sanitizing the politics of Pride, respectability politics, and even New York City’s current debate over a police presence at Pride then seem like moot political points if big banks and retailers have already commodified the commemoration. How radically inclusive can queerness be if it’s sponsored by corporate entities?
Maybe Pride is now less of a political symbol and more of a corporate fundraiser that handsomely benefits big companies. And what people are fighting for may be more about the spirit of Pride than the actual product.
LaFleur posits that organizations working for LGBTQ rights did an efficient enough job at styling and marketing the fight for equality in extremely specific ways, including respectability politics.
For example, same-sex marriage becomes the signature win of the last decade, while health care for trans youth is hardly spoken about. Pride in this context, then, becomes the one month of the year, a container of sorts, where LGTBQ activism is expected but comes in the form of facile financial support to mainstream causes.
“Gay rights then becomes this easy thing for people to sign on to, and what’s an easier version to sign on to than Pride,” LaFleur told me, explaining that the challenge is to look beyond Pride and the once-a-year fight about leather-flanked glutes, and think about LGBTQ issues every day.
“You’re not writing letters to incarcerated people, you’re not getting phone calls from the prison system that are charging fucking $5 a minute to talk to someone who’s been locked up for 20 years. You know what I mean? Like, all they’re just asking for you to do is put on a fucking Target rainbow shirt, go to a parade on a really hot day, and, like, watch all these gay people get drunk,” she said.
While you could argue that’s a terribly bleak outlook of LGBTQ rights and Pride, it feels like the natural endpoint to that 1973 scene in which an audience booed Sylvia Rivera while she chastised them for not caring about trans people and incarcerated people who don’t fit with what Pride “should” look like. The wholesale corporatization of Pride would be carved from her nightmares.
“You tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown into jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way?” Rivera told the 1973 crowd. “What the fuck’s wrong with you all? Think about that!”
I can’t imagine what she’d say about the fights we’re having now.
One year after #BlackoutTuesday, what have companies really done for racial justice? -
Protesters march after George Floyd’s death, in June 2020, in Colorado. | Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Checking in on black square-posting brands, from Starbucks to Glossier.
On May 25, 2020, footage of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set the internet ablaze, igniting a fervor for justice among the attentive and then-quarantined online masses. In the now widely circulated video, George Floyd can be heard pleading, “I can’t breathe” — the same three words Eric Garner had yelled not six years prior — 28 times before he became unconscious and later died. What followed was nothing short of a wildfire.
Compounded by the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery — and, later, the killing of activist Oluwatoyin Salau and the shooting of Jacob Blake — Floyd’s murder prompted an international wave of protests and a global dialogue surrounding anti-Blackness and racial injustice in the months following his death. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, by far the largest of its kind, would receive more than $90 million in donations while organizing over 7,750 demonstrations in the US alone between May and August 2020. Online, social media users were quick to take advantage of their digital platforms, informing followers about racial injustice through the sharing of infographics and what artist and educator Mandy Harris Williams aptly titled “critical caption essays.”
Evidently, the posts were impactful, with 23 percent of adult social media users in the US saying they changed their views about a political or social issue in 2020 due to something they saw on those platforms, up from 15 percent in 2018. Corporate commitment to racial advocacy became a necessity rather than a consideration once social media users began to take aim at specific instances of racism and unfair treatment at many companies. Hundreds of businesses rushed to release pledges committing to upholding racial justice within their organization. But did any of these companies do more than commodify a movement? A year later, have any of these companies transformed themselves for the better?
Beginning on June 2, 2020, Blackout Tuesday would merge these growing trends in online activism and calls for corporate accountability on social media. The online protest involved posting a single image of a black square to Instagram feeds, intended to quite literally black out users’ feeds and interrupt regular posting as a show of solidarity to Black victims of police violence. By the end of the day, the number of Instagram posts tagged with #BlackoutTuesday was in the tens of millions — and more than 950 brands, including ViacomCBS and Apple, had participated in some way. However, the social media protest quickly proved to do more harm than good.
What originally began as a hashtag (#TheShowMustBePaused) created by music executives Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas to disrupt “the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard” within the music industry, quickly became appropriated by users, divorced from its original creators and intentions, and made shallow and performative. As #BlackOutTuesday grew in popularity, critiques of the initiative noted how the posting of mostly wordless black squares drowned out Black voices central to movements and obscured valuable information and updates, such as video evidence of police brutality, protest details, and donation links —a far cry from the racial uplift the posts set out to achieve. Instead, a majority of Blackout Tuesday posts were effectively one-off statements functioning as a form of virtue signaling, a public expression of an opinion or backing of an idea intended to demonstrate one’s moral or political correctness, often without much substantive action.
Prior to the end of May 2020, racial advocacy and anti-racism were not a priority for “socially responsible” companies, with consumers struggling to identify businesses seen as “good allies to the Black Lives Matter movement.” However, as the discussion of racial injustice and discrimination solidified the importance of anti-racism in corporate social responsibility, consumers expect more from where they shop — they want donations. In a survey conducted by public relations firm Edelman in 2020, 60 percent of American respondents said brands needed to use their marketing dollars to advocate for racial equality. The same percentage also said they would buy or boycott a brand based on its response to the ongoing protests. How companies reacted to the BLM movement became a litmus test for how consumers would interact with them in the months to come.
Nike is no stranger to making political statements through its advertising campaigns, especially when it comes to Black Lives Matter. The multinational corporation has a long history of navigating issues pertaining to diversity and inclusion through both its sponsorship of Black athletes and its executive management: In 2018, the Wall Street Journal chronicled Nike’s “boys-club culture” and the executive exits that followed a company-wide probe. Following a 2018 partnership with ousted American football player and activist Colin Kaepernick for the 30th anniversary of its “Just Do It” ad campaign, Nike’s response to the growing unrest was heavily awaited.
On May 29, 2020, prior to Blackout Tuesday, Nike released a video statement on the Black Lives Matter movement in which it called on audiences to pay attention to the unrest unfolding before them. It was met with widespread support and acceptance, with many seeing the statement as a model for corporate social responsibility. Since then, Nike has continued to restructure its executive leadership team under the stewardship of CEO John Donahoe, promoting Felicia Mayo, a Black woman executive, to the role of diversity chief in July 2020. And as part of the company’s internal goals, or Purpose 2025 Targets, Nike, with Converse, Jordan Brand, and Michael Jordan, committed a combined $140 million over 10 years in support of local and national organizations dedicated to addressing racial inequality for Black Americans, an initiative known as the Black Community Commitment. Though not a gold standard, Nike’s promise of holistic social responsibility has been matched by few companies.
Millennial-pink beauty brand Glossier’s rather diverse word-of-mouth marketing strategy has helped maintain the company’s reputation as one of the industry’s more inclusive and progressive companies. On May 30, 2020, Glossier similarly posted a statement on Instagram pledging to stand in solidarity with the Black community and the Black Lives Matter movement. It also committed to donating a total of $1 million to Black-owned beauty businesses and organizations addressing racial injustice through an inaugural grant initiative. A year later, Glossier announced it would renew the grant program for 2021 “as part of a broader $10 million commitment to bolster equity, inclusion, and representation in the beauty industry over the next five years.”
Despite this, Outta The Gloss, a collective of former retail employees of the company, shared on Instagram an open letter to Glossier in August 2020. The letter detailed a sometimes racist and inequitable working environment and included a list of demands, such as “standardized anti-racist training for management” and the hiring of an “on site HR Liaison working solely with retail.” Later, the group launched a boycott of Glossier at the urging of its followers. Other than an August blog post from Glossier CEO and founder Emily Weiss, Outta The Gloss maintains that its demands have yet to be meaningfully acknowledged by the company, leaving consumers to question Glossier’s commitment to anti-racism within its own workplace.
In contrast, beauty company Sephora set to make right a history of racist discrimination in its retail stores. On May 30, 2020, Sephora CEO Jean-André Rougeot issued a statement committing to stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement; a few days later, it published its own #BlackoutTuesday post and closed its retail stores for a two-hour company-wide training on racial bias. The company’s US business also became the first major retailer to sign the 15 Percent Pledge, a campaign founded by fashion designer Aurora James asking retailers to dedicate at least 15 percent of their shelf space to Black-owned businesses. (Retailers and brands such as Vogue, Bloomingdales, and Old Navy — among others — have since signed on, too.)
Sephora has also pledged to do the following in 2021: increase the seven Black-owned brands it carries to 16, focus on supporting BIPOC founders in beauty through its Sephora Accelerate program, and continue providing new training modules for in-store employees while reducing the presence of third-party security officers.
Meanwhile, the department store Nordstrom was quick to involve itself in the Black Lives Matter movement, despite the company’s more conservative customer base. It published a #BlackoutTuesday post, and later released a statement committing to “increase representation of Black and Latinx populations” in management roles and “[deliver] $500M in retail sales from brands owned by, operated by, or designed by Black and/or Latinx individuals,” both by the end of 2025. It also promised to ensure that its training resources for customer-facing employees “include anti-racism and bias content.”
Both Sephora and Nordstrom have acknowledged that in their commitment to addressing anti-racism, the work begins internally.
Other retail companies have failed to make any substantial long-term commitments.
E-commerce retailer Fashion Nova was criticized by users and influencers alike for failing to acknowledge or respond to the Black Lives Matter movement prior to June 1, 2020, despite its large consumer base of Black women. The fast-fashion retailer — which has been called out a number of times for stealing designs from small businesses and Black designers and for underpaying garment workers in its Los Angeles factory — ultimately posted a black square with no caption on June 2. It issued a statement the following day in which it remarked, “Our actions speak louder than our words,” and pledged to donate $1 million to various “community resources and activism, awareness campaigns, and other initiatives to help in the fight for racial equality and opportunity.”
Fashion Nova has not made any other statements pertaining to the Black Lives Matter movement since then, though it continues to partner with celebrities such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in its philanthropic initiative, Fashion Nova CARES, which has provided financial support to the Breonna Taylor Foundation and emerging Black designer Tia Adeola, among others. Despite the company’s ubiquity in the Black community and its reliance on Black celebrity and culture for relevance, its Instagram page, which functions as its main form of advertising, is devoid of any mentions of anti-Black racism beyond donations, and lacks representation of Black models.
Starbucks, which also has a fraught history navigating race, pledged to stand in solidarity with its “Black partners, customers, and communities,” and to donate $1 million to organizations promoting racial equity — while simultaneously banning employees and baristas from wearing any pro-Black Lives Matter clothing or accessories. Ultimately, the company revised its decision on the dress code, making 250,000 pro-BLM T-shirts for employees in an attempt to show support for the movement, and continue to offer their elective online anti-bias classes. And in October, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson announced that the company would tie executive pay to the meeting of racial diversity targets set to boost diversity in Starbucks’ workforce — by 2025, the company aims to have “people of color represented in at least 30% of roles in corporate operations and 40% of retail and manufacturing roles,” though the company declined to share details of how exactly these goals would be tied to executive pay. Since then, the company has reached a voluntary agreement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in light of 2007 allegations of racial bias in its promotions, and has also started a $100 million Community Resilience Fund that will “support small business growth and community development projects in BIPOC neighborhoods.”
In the music tech industry, companies such as SiriusXM, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music also made respective Blackout Tuesday posts. On June 2, Spotify shared a number of in-app features intended as a show of solidarity with Black creators and users, though artists were quick to criticize the lack of money being donated. This initial offering included a rather out-of-touch 8-minute, 46-second track of silence meant to memorialize the length of time that George Floyd was suffocated by Derek Chauvin, a Black History Is Now hub, and a selection of Black Lives Matter playlists. Later that week, the company committed to contributing up to $10 million in an employee match allocated to organizations addressing anti-racism and racial justice, donating an additional $1 million in advertising inventory to social justice groups (though $345,000 worth of this advertising budget was used to promote the company’s own Black History Is Now hub).
Now, the question remains; have these companies’ pledges led to any real impact or change in the year since a national racial reckoning? Among the groups that received money from the aforementioned companies — including national organizations such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation and the Equal Justice Initiative — was the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). In a statement, LDF president Sherrilyn Ifill shared that “the most valuable gift over the past year has been the increase in pro bono support” which enabled them to “litigate and advocate with greater intensity, and to increase the pace of our work,” increasing the fund’s capacity to support Black communities.
Still, if anything is to be learned from how these companies have approached corporate accountability it is that it pays to take a stand, even if performative. As millennial and Gen Z consumers increasingly expect brands to be actively involved in social justice movements, publicly choosing a stance has rewarded companies with consumer loyalty.
Following Nike’s BLM statement video, the company moved up 22 places on Social Chain Data’s social media leaderboard in May 2020, into the No. 31 spot. The ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s saw its social media reach grow by 35 percent on Twitter and 27 percent on Facebook, after declaring, “We must dismantle white supremacy” last June. However, #HasBenAndJerrysTweetedYet, a hashtag started by Twitter user @telushk, has been gaining traction this month in light of the company’s refusal to acknowledge its own investments in Israel’s illegal settlements. If these predominantly white and men-owned companies ultimately reap the benefits of committing to anti-racism and the fight against white supremacy, is this change really a transformation? And is it substantively supporting Black Americans who confront the burden of racism and racial injustice in their everyday lives?
The range of company pledges, commitments, and statements we’ve seen indicate an ever-present truth: that no matter how impactful or effective corporate activism is, it will also always be inherently performative. Companies cannot be entrusted to be the leaders of the people’s social justice movements.
Michael Flynn’s coup comments show how QAnon is evolving in the Biden era -
Michael Flynn over the weekend appeared to endorse the idea that a coup should happen in the US. He later backtracked his comments. | Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images
Some QAnon followers think a military coup like the one in Myanmar should also happen in the US.
While speaking at a Dallas conference aimed at QAnon adherents on Sunday, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared to endorse the idea of a military coup to reinstate Donald Trump as president. A member of the audience asked about the possibility of a Myanmar-style coup in the US, and Flynn said there was “no reason” something similar couldn’t happen in America. He added, “I mean, it should happen here.”
After public backlash, Flynn subsequently declared on the encrypted chat app Telegram that the media had manipulated his words, insisting he actually said there was “no reason it (a coup) should happen here (in America).” Still, experts who follow QAnon say Flynn was parroting a Myanmar talking point that’s been building for months within the QAnon conspiracy theory’s online communities.
Flynn’s comments and the resulting backlash show that messages and conspiracy theories associated with QAnon are still getting some traction, including the false idea that Trump will somehow become president again before the 2024 election. Influencers who continue to promote false QAnon theories related to both the election and Trump’s imminent return to the White House seem to be doing well on Telegram, despite being booted from other social media platforms.
Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0
“They are still 100 percent in support of Biden being removed and Trump returning to office, whether it’s a coup [or] whether it’s some reinstatement which doesn’t exist,” Mike Rothschild, a researcher who has tracked the QAnon conspiracy for several years and author of the book The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything, told Recode. “The prophecy of QAnon is now that Trump will be restored to office, and whether that’s through violence or through magic, that’s just what they want to happen.”
Since the January 6 insurrection, QAnon chatter on traditional and social media alike appears to have declined. A recent study from the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab found that after major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube took action against the conspiracy theory, content and language about QAnon has “all but evaporated from the mainstream internet.”
At the same time, however, QAnon adherents have found a way to flourish on alternative apps such as Telegram, where some QAnon influencers have tens of thousands of followers. That this latest strain of the QAnon conspiracy theory invoking the coup in Myanmar was both previously spread on Telegram and subsequently walked back by Michael Flynn on Telegram demonstrates how the platform has taken on a new importance within the fringe movement.
Discussion of this branch of the conspiracy theory has occurred as part of a broader trend of QAnon followers moving to Telegram. After January 6, extremism researchers noticed the growth of Telegram channels catering to QAnon audiences. Even after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, QAnon activity continued in Telegram groups. Throughout 2021, adherents to the conspiracy theory have used the platform to promote the idea that Covid-19 vaccines are a tool of population control and otherwise dangerous, and some QAnon influencers have used the platform to boost explicitly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
“It’s really all happening on Telegram right now,” Rothschild told Recode. “What they’re able to do with Telegram is just sort ofblast these messages out on their own private channels and get tens of thousands of views on them right away and get thousands of comments on them. But the discussion is really one-way, so it’s really changing the way QAnon promoters interact with their followers.”
The conference where Flynn made his conspiratorial comments was called the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and held at the Omni Dallas Hotel. While the event was largely branded to focus on “patriotism,” it made clear references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and the event’s logo explicitly invoked the QAnon catchphrase, “Where we go one, we go all.” Other well-known promoters of the QAnon theory also attended, as did Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, who at one point during the conference said that Trump could “simply be reinstated” and a new inauguration date could be set before the actual next election.
“Flynn’s appearance at this event was not in a vacuum. He has cultivated QAnon support for a while now,” Alex Kaplan, a senior researcher at Media Matters, told Recode. Last year, Flynn posted a video online of himself sharing QAnon slogans, and has formed relationships with influencers in the QAnon movement.
QAnon conspiracy theorists have long believed the November 3, 2020 election was fake, and they’ve circulated the idea that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, including through voting fraud, Kaplan explained. Since the inauguration, supporters of QAnon have continued to look for ways to support the idea that Trump is coming back as president. For a while, some adherents thought that Trump would be reinstated on March 4, a belief that has obviously been proven false. Following the February military coup in Myanmar, some QAnon supporters looked to the events as inspiration for what could happen in the US.
“The Burmese military has arrested the country’s leaders after credible evidence of widespread voter fraud became impossible to ignore … sounds like the controlled media and Biden admin are scared this might happen here,” predicted one account on the Telegram app, according to a Rolling Stone report from February. “We will see this headline here soon.”
Some QAnon supporters have even tried to make connections between voting technology companies that were drawn into conspiracy theories about the US election, and the events in Myanmar. Similar claims have also been made on apps like Rumble and Gab.
Right now, it’s not clear what will happen next with QAnon, or where its supporters will go. A recent survey from the Public Religion Research Institute found that while a large majority of the country disagree with the idea that the government, media, and finance is “controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” — a core belief of the QAnon conspiracy theory — about 15 percent of Americans agree with that idea. Other scholars have questioned the idea that QAnon’s following is actually so widespread.
Regardless, Flynn’s comments and the response to them are a reminder that the future of the QAnon conspiracy theory is more complicated than the content moderation decisions of mainstream social media platforms. While people believed similarconspiracy theories before QAnon arrived, QAnon has managed to repackage many of those beliefs, and they’ve endured and evolved, despite crackdowns.
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Grand Slam leaders pledge to address Naomi Osaka’s concerns - The pledge came in a statement signed by the same four tennis administrators who threatened the possibility of disqualification or suspension for Osaka on Sunday if she continued to skip news conferences.
From The Hindu: National News
KSMSL promises medicine supply to Yadgir district - Karnataka State Medical Supplies Corporation Limited (KSMSL) has promised Deputy Commissioner of Yadgir R. Ragapriya that necessary medicine for COVID
Pandemic brings times of uncertainty for NRIs - Thousands of expatriates waiting to return to their host countries
Decision on board exams of standard XII soon, says Maharashtra Minister - We have sought the approval from disaster management authority to cancel them, she says
Amidst COVID-19, Kodagu gears up for monsoon - Officials visiting flood-prone areas and supervising preventive measures that are being put in place
Smart City projects resume amidst lockdown - Work on multi-level parking lot in Thampanoor and renovation of Connemara market have already begun
From BBC: Europe
Belgium gang rape: Five arrested over assault on teenager - The 14-year-old girl took her life days after images of the alleged attack were shared online.
Italy cable car: Video suggests emergency brake disabled years before - Expert alleges an emergency brake was deactivated seven years before last month’s Italian disaster.
Nato must stand together against eastern threats - PM - Boris Johnson meets the head of Nato at No 10 amid calls for allies to work together against threats.
Covid-19: Hospitality reopens in Republic of Ireland - The reopening of hotels is another important step for the country, says Ireland’s tourism minister.
Wetherspoons boss denies facing shortage of EU workers - Pro-Leave boss Tim Martin says reports he wants a more “liberal” visa scheme for EU workers taken out of context.
From Ars Technica
Review: Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti is a powerhouse—but good luck finding it at $1,199 MSRP - $1,199 MSRP is arguably worth it—in a universe where MSRP means anything, at least. - link
AMD triples Zen 3 CPU cache using 3D stacking technology - Not a pipe dream—CEO Lisa Su demonstrated a working 3D-stacked 5900X prototype. - link
What the physics of skipping stones can tell us about aircraft water landings - A combination of gyro effect and Magnus effect influences the deflection of trajectory - link
Months from the release of Dune 2021, the 1984 version gets a 4K release - Lynch, who disowned the film, won’t be recording a commentary track. - link
Shortages loom as ransomware hamstrings the world’s biggest meat producer - Add meat to the list of critical supply chains disrupted by the malware scourge. - link
It’s Friday night and a young woman gets chatting with a handsome army sergeant in a bar. -
After a couple of drinks she asks: “So when was the last time you slept with a real woman then?”
A little taken aback, the sergeant replies “Let’s see…that would have been about 2015”.
With that, the woman takes him home for a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Afterwards she exclaims: “Well sergeant…for somebody who hasn’t had sex since 2015 you certainly haven’t forgotten anything!”.
The man looks at his watch and says: “I should hope not, it’s only 2230!”
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Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto/Getty Images
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Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images
