ICYMI - If You Don't Know, Now You Know - QAnon
The Daily Show With Trevor Noah: Ears Edition- 998 views
- 8 Sep 2020
Trevor examines QAnon, a popular conspiracy theory claiming President Trump is fighting a pedophile ring run by a cabal of elite celebrities and Democratic politicians.
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You're listening to Comedy Central now. Q And on the biggest thing on the Internet since that time, Kim Kardashians, but was thirsty, it has been all over the news, social media and this weekend. Q And on supporters even held demonstrations in cities across America. But what is Kuhnen? Well, let's find out in another installment of our ongoing segment, if you don't know. Now you know. If you know anything about Kulen, you've probably heard that it's a conspiracy theory, but the truth is it's more like a political cult built around a conspiracy theory and then crossed with a big book of word search puzzles.
And if that sounds complicated. Well, wait till you hear what they believe in for believers.
Q is an anonymous government official who post classified information about a covert battle between the president and a malicious ring of celebrities, political elites and the so-called deep state.
This anonymous poster who was giving secret clues about becoming, quote, Great Awakening.
The central theme here is that Hillary Clinton and many of the world's other politicians and celebrities are members of a murderous child sex ring.
Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks and others eat children in order to extract a life extending chemical from their blood group.
They believe that a group of military generals recruited President Trump to break up this conspiracy and end their control of the government and the media.
And Donald Trump. And the cheating on you is going to save us from this in a moment called The Storm.
His tweets are misspelled for a reason. And when he does, they. The smoking gun, it's all code for what is this telling us? OK, I want whatever these people are smoking because Trump's typos are a secret message. Man, I wish people would this forgiving when I did stupid shit. No, you guys don't get it. When Trevor threw up at that party, he was showing us it's what's on the inside that counts. But look, this guy's also not wrong.
President Trump's tweets are misspelled for a reason. And that reason is. He can't read. Now, look, if Hillary and Oprah were eating children to live longer, I would be horrified because that is such a waste of magic blood. You feed those kids to Ruth Bader Ginsburg people priorities that there's no way this conspiracy theory is actually true. And look, I believe a lot of crazy shit, OK? I believe the TSA confiscates all our lotion in order to secretly sell it back to us at Walgreen.
I believe possums are just dogs that make I believe no one has actually ever broken up with me. They've just all been abducted by aliens. But this conspiracy theory is crazy, even for conspiracy theories.
I mean, set aside everything else you're telling me Trump is doing something heroic, but instead of taking credit for it, he's keeping it a secret. That is the most unbelievable thing I have ever heard. Plus, if you're wondering how it's possible that Trump can be leading the fight against the paedophile ring when he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for years as well, according to Q, Trump has been undercover since the 90s, which I believe I mean, if there's one thing Trump is known for, it's his famously long attention span.
So how did this insane theory take off? Well, partly it latched on to fears about the real phenomenon of human trafficking, partly in fear of ancient anti Semitic tropes about elitists who drink the blood of children. But mostly it was just the good old Internets.
Kuhnen first emerged in the months after President Trump took office, starting on fringe Internet message boards before spreading to social media.
The pandemic has only made things worse. And so these people are just there all day. Facebook groups have grown exponentially with Kuhnen.
In just four months, membership of the biggest Public Cuneen groups rose by 700 percent.
We saw a lot of groups who were wellness communities, people who were interested in alternative health. People would the algorithm would sort these people together with the Cuban people. They would say alternative health. Maybe they're into antibiotics. If they're anti vax, maybe they're into Donald Trump. And within one or two clicks, people would go down these very bad paths. Yep.
That's how the shit always goes on the Internet. Feels like at this point, the entire purpose of Facebook is to funnel everyone towards the craziest conspiracy theories possible because people will join a group about cycling and then five hours later, they're like, Hillary Clinton is a mountain goat people.
She's an actual girl.
And it's not surprising that the pandemic turned out to create the perfect conditions for people to get radicalized. Some people join Kuhnen, some people ordered Pelton's, and nine of them will shut up about it. This also shows you how much the Internet is ruining our brains. When Shakespear was quarantined during the plague, he was like, maybe I should write King Lear. And now people are sitting around during coronavirus going, I wonder if I could prove that Tom Hanks has sex with the devil.
Either way, starting from the swampy parts of the Internet, Kuhnen gradually picked up followers and eventually grew into a major online movement. And it hasn't seemed to matter that many of the things it predicted over the years just never came true.
Early on, they were claiming that Robert Mueller was secretly investigating and not to indict the cabal of Democratic leaders and that President Trump was secretly working with Mueller's team. President Trump was secretly created a police force, by the way, to arrest them and force them to wear ankle bracelets.
The belief is that somehow the late JFK Jr. is alive and helping Trump clean up the deep state.
Nearly all of these clues, including that Hillary Clinton was arrested, turn out to be wrong. But the batting average doesn't seem to matter.
You can present them with evidence. You can demonstrate how the pictures have gone wrong and they don't seem to care. It's just again and again that Q is bigger than anything that they can be presented with to the contrary. That's right.
It doesn't matter how many of Kyuss outlandish predictions fail to pan out, it never seems to have an impact on the movement. And that, my friends, is the classic sign of cult behavior. Once you're invested enough in something, you will make any excuse for its failures. So please don't be looking for logic here. That's not how cults work, OK? Cults don't follow logic. They follow whatever the cult tells them. That's why you always see cult leaders go so quickly from the sacred.
Aliens have chosen us to weird news guys. The sacred aliens told me I should bang all of your wives. I guess it must be for our redemption or something to go somewhere I her. So thanks to this religious fervor, Kuhnen took over the Internet and it would have been fairly harmless if it had just stayed on the Internet. You know, like Momoh. Nothing was a joke was I was weird.
But the scary thing about Kuhnen is what happened when it jumped from the screen to the streets.
This is not just a bunch of online crazy talk. It's dangerous in real life.
The FBI says Kuhnen in there. Many conspiracy theories are a potential domestic terrorism threat. The North Carolina man who shot up this D.C. pizza restaurant looking for nonexistent. Pedophiles believed in similar theories on more than one occasion, people believed to be followers of Kuhnen have shown up, sometimes with weapons in places that the character told them were somehow connected to anti Trump conspiracies. In June, a man armed with a rifle and a handgun drove an armored vehicle to the Hoover Dam on what he said was a mission from Kuhnen Curan.
Followers have allegedly been involved in a foiled presidential assassination plot. Devastating California wildfire, an armed standoff with local law enforcement officers in Arizona.
In July, a 24 year old man was charged in the shooting death of a reputed mob boss. His attorneys argued he was motivated by Kuhnen. Written on his hand in the courtroom were kuhnen symbols.
You cannot be serious. Can you imagine being a mob boss and you get whacked by a kid from a message board? Not a rival, just some random kid.
You almost want them to line your obituary and say you were a snitch. But this is insane. Khlong people out in the world doing real things. Shootings, hijackings, kidnappings. Of all the bad advice I've gotten on the Internet, nothing ever came close to making me murder a mob boss. The worst advice I ever got was to use toothpaste to get rid of pimples. But I ate the entire tube of toothpaste. All I got was a tummy ache.
I didn't go anywhere. And even with sporadic real world violence, it might be tempting to dismiss Kuhnen as just another lunatic fringe.
But it's actually becoming pretty close to mainstream. In fact, there are roughly 50 Kuis supporters who ran for office in the Republican Party this year, and it's almost certain that one of them is actually going to be in Congress next year, although maybe that's a good thing. Nothing will prevent them from getting anything done better than being in Congress, Congress.
The only people with a low approval rating than Kuhnen. And then, of course, there's President Trump. He's the big hero in all these Kuhnen stories. So he could just shut this down quickly by saying, guys, none of this is true.
Who isn't a real person? And besides, if there was a sex group with all the most important people in the world, you know, I'd try to be in it.
Yeah, that's what he could do. But instead, he has come out and declared that.
Q And on some very fine people at President Trump's rally in Tampa, the image was hard to miss the letter.
Q On signs and T-shirts, we are finally putting America first. The Trump campaign even included Kuhnen signs in and out.
President Trump has used his own social media accounts to promote Q and on followers and content nearly two hundred times.
President Trump praising supporters of the bizarre. Q And on conspiracy theory, he told reporters he heard that Kuhnen followers are people who love the country and him.
Well, I don't know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate. But I don't know much about the movement. I have heard that it is gaining in popularity and these are people that love our country and they just don't like seeing it as. Part of the theory, it is this belief that you are secretly saving the world from this satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals, if I can help save the world from problems, I'm willing to do it.
I'm willing to put myself out there.
Yeah. You see, it doesn't matter that Kuhnen is a dangerous cult and all of their beliefs are complete fiction. President Trump is on board. Trump's approach to Kuhnen is basically the same as the Backstreet Boys song. He doesn't care who you are or where you're from, what you did, as long as you love him. And honestly, people nobody should be surprised that Donald Trump is embracing Kuhnen. Donald Trump was always going to embrace on the surprise is that he's president.
So that's Kuhnen in a nutshell. It's a violent delusion that spread from the Internet to prey on vulnerable people and infect an entire political party.
Or maybe I'm just saying that to throw you off the real story and if you don't know now you know.
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