Zakumi, if you have some spare time please read the following op-ed by a U.S. Rep Denver Riggleman, R-VA, a republican
From Bigfoot to Trump World!
The supporters of President Trump are starting to resemble the people who I used to hang out with more than 15 years ago when — mostly as a lark — I would go on expeditions to the Pacific Northwest looking for
Bigfoot, the mythical hairy behemoth believed by some to be hiding deep in the far-flung forests of North America.
It was almost a cult or a religious belief system. My fellow Bigfoot explorers saw signs of the creature everywhere, especially at night. Everybody saw red eyes. They had rocks thrown at them. They heard hoots and hollers and screams. They saw bent branches that were the territorial markings of
Bigfoot but all I heard were friggin’ squirrels and birds screeching.
The belief was that 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats! I quickly realized there was no way to have a rational discussion about the subject with
Bigfoot believers. No matter what I used as logic, it was turned back on me. There was no basis I could get to them where we had a common understanding of what facts were and what truth was.
After a 15-year career as an Air Force intelligence officer and later as a NSA contractor specializing in counterterrorism issues, I was elected to Congress two years ago during a campaign in which I pledged to join the tea party–friendly House Freedom Caucus. My disaffection with my party grew with the rise of
QAnon and this led to my own evolution to a GOP outcast.
QAnon is the cult-like conspiracy movement whose followers believe that a Deep State cabal of child sex traffickers and devil worshipers is working with Democrats to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidency. My doubts with this bizarre movement were clarified when retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and briefly Trump’s national security adviser, posted a video of himself this summer taking a QAnon-inspired oath:
"Where we go one, we go all!"
I was horrified. There is no reason to have an oath from a baseline conspiracy theory that uses the same stuff from that anti-Semitic blood libel, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, that cobbles together truthers, that cobbles together birthers. I would say it’s a conspiracy sticky bomb.
Look at Rudy Giuliani. Look at Sidney Powell. Look at Jen Ellis. These lawyers have made repeated evidence-free claims about widespread fraud that took place in the 2020 election. They have taken small, isolated instances of voter fraud or election irregularities and “turned it into systemic fraud...
...and that’s turned into the NSA actually exploiting and injecting code into multiple voting machines that aren’t interconnected, that Dominion has implanted code from Venezuela, and that there’s an invasion of a United States military base in Germany, where computer servers used in the election are supposed to have been stolen.
They are creating a false narrative around a small kernel of truth and radicalizing people or pushing them into a belief system through a digital virus that is social media! This is how I became more outspoken in denouncing the mounting conspiracy-minded leanings of my party and led me to note the similarities with those I’d met on
Bigfoot expeditions.