CNN
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If I used to be attempting to mix in, it wasn’t working.
It was October 2020 – the peak of Covid – and I used to be one of many solely individuals carrying a facemask at a gathering in a colorless windowless lodge convention room in Scottsdale, Arizona.
One attendee, wearing some form of elaborate costume, directed a disapproving grunt my means.
We listened as speaker after speaker defined that Trump was sure to win the 2020 presidential election – then simply weeks away – in a landslide. Something much less could be an indication the Democrats had cheated.
If that occurred, warned a person from the rostrum, we could must take issues into our personal fingers. Political violence, he argued, wasn’t all that unhealthy – American historical past had been formed by it in any case.
Slightly greater than two months later that man would participate in an assault on the US Capitol. He’s now serving an 11-year prison sentence.
The opposite man – the one in costume who had grunted – would quickly obtain world infamy. His painted face, and his headpiece product of animal horns, would land him on the quilt of newspapers all all over the world. We’d all come to know him because the “QAnon Shaman.”
The Scottsdale occasion I had wiggled my means into in 2020 was “QCon,” a gathering of QAnon fanatics who had been nonetheless fringe. Trump feigned ignorance in regards to the motion and refused to denounce it. “I don’t know a lot in regards to the motion apart from I perceive they like me very a lot, which I recognize,” Trump mentioned on the time.
Among the individuals in that convention room talked powerful, however, I believed, perhaps that’s about all they might do.
It wasn’t. And we now know what occurred subsequent.
That’s what considerations me most in regards to the second we’re in now in the USA.
The conspiracy theories didn’t go away. They’ve proliferated due to a complicated, relentless marketing campaign. A surge of different social media websites, so-called “free speech” platforms like Trump’s Reality Social and the video streaming platform Rumble have cropped up. There’s additionally been an explosion of on-line MAGA influencers and video streamers, some with tens of millions of followers.
All of them are pushing the identical conspiracy principle: The 2020 election was stolen, and the one means Trump can lose in 2024 is whether it is stolen once more.
That is false, in fact. Not least since polls present Trump and Harris neck-and-neck.
In the course of this rising MAGA misinformation-industrial complicated: an affable pillow salesman.
Mike Lindell, higher referred to as the MyPillow man, says he had by no means voted earlier than 2016. Now, he’s a Trump ally who’s on a misguided campaign to, as he sees it, save American democracy.
Lindell has purchased into the conspiracy theories in regards to the 2020 election – particularly that voting machines had been hacked to steal the election (they weren’t). So he arrange his personal social media and video streaming providers, Frank Social and Frank Speech respectively. They embody programming from the likes of Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani. Exhibits decrying the demise of American democracy and warning of stolen elections are punctuated with pillow promotions.
Once I met Lindell lately on the Republican Nationwide Conference, he was on his method to a stay taping of the Steve Bannon present “Warfare Room” to advertise his “political prisoner” particular – a reduced deal on a mattress topper. Political prisoners are what the MAGA world calls individuals convicted for his or her actions on January 6. It’s additionally how they often seek advice from Bannon, who’s currently serving fourth months in federal prison for defying a congressional subpoena. Bannon’s daughter crammed in for him as host on the RNC.
An enormous array of Trump-supporting, election-denying influencers who’re thriving on the brand new “free speech” platforms have their very own pillow promotion codes. They assist promote Lindell’s pillows, and in flip they get a reduce.
The promotion of election conspiracy theories is being backed by the sale of increasingly “patriot merchandise.” There are freedom steaks made out of “unvaccinated” cows. A patriot mobile service that payments itself as “America’s solely Christian conservative wi-fi supplier.” There’s even patriot water named Freedom2O. Its web site sells Yeti merchandise inscribed with quips like “This drink ain’t woke.”
It’s very attainable that in case you are studying this you’ve by no means heard of any of those so-called “free speech” social media platforms. We live in a much more fractured media surroundings in the present day than we had been on the time of the final presidential election.
Thousands and thousands of Individuals at the moment are getting their information, data, and misinformation on these platforms – and they’re being primed for one more “stolen” election if issues don’t go Trump’s means.
Many people wish to tune all of it out, fake it’s not taking place. We wish to ignore the conspiracy theories, the absurdity of QAnon Shamans and “political prisoner”pillow promotions.
However simply because it’s all a bit absurd doesn’t make it any much less harmful.