Personal Blog/Diary

Here I write about anything and everything.

As QAnon swirls down the drain….

I see the posts from a former narc blogger still finding signs everywhere that QAnoners should keep “trusting the plan.”  Everything she writes is a ridiculous break from reality, but she continues to give pep talks and claim that Trump has never lied to them.  Not only was she raised by narcissists, but she appears to be an Evangelical, two things which probably made her susceptible.  She wrote the other day that everyone who doesn’t believe in QAnon will soon go through painful deprogramming where everything they believed is proven wrong, that she knows what that’s like because she deprogrammed from narc parents, that QAnoners need to be there to help them.  And I shake my head and think, “No, you’ve got that backwards.”

I see Richard’s friend Chris spiraling down further and further into a psychotic break, posting on Facebook that he’s leaving Facebook along with his home–and he won’t say where he’s going, because he believes the Facebook Powers That Be somehow care WTF he does with his personal life.  Over the years, I’ve seen Chris fall for every single conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, from aliens to birtherism to FEMA camps to Flat Earth to anti-vaxx to microchipped vaccines and QAnon.  There has to be some kind of mental illness at work, along with his past in Jehovah’s Witnesses.  And yes, some of the weird stuff I’m reading in QAnon blogs about the US being a “corporation” sounds familiar because of a daffy webpage Richard sent to me, many years ago, something he actually believed even though I debunked it in two minutes.  That makes me wonder if Richard has fallen for any of this QAnon crap, too.  That daffy webpage was part of a website that squirted some of the Sovereign Citizen crap I’m seeing on these QAnon pages.

I see in the Reddit forum QAnon Casualties that many couples and families are being driven apart by this, even turning violent.

I see QAnoners looking at us like we’re the poor, deluded fools.  I get my news and history from respected, fact-based sources, which agree with each other and with primary documents.  I respect science and doctors.  Yet because I don’t listen to some mysterious stranger on the Net, I’m the fool?

But then I’m jolted with familiarity, thinking back to decades ago, when I myself was raised in a fundamentalist church which talked about God “speaking” to people and setting out fleeces and the Satanic Panic.  We believed in demons.  We believed the Rapture was nigh.  One day, I daydreamed about being at school prophesying about the End Times as I got Raptured up in front of all my classmates.  Even worse, I started watching Pat Robertson in 1985, where I learned all sorts of Charismatic ideas which tied right in to the teachings of my dad’s favorite TV preachers, such as Oral Roberts.

For years I thought I was the one who knew the truth.  “Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” was often sung in my church; we imagined the day when all the doubters would see that we’d been right all along.

In college, I imagined God telling me the outcomes of some romantic relationships.  I saw a bunch of signs and everything, and kept telling myself to trust the “words of knowledge” even when they didn’t seem to be coming to pass.

Starting in 1991, Pat Robertson claimed that God told him that Bush would ride the wave of his post-Gulf War popularity into re-election in 1992.  This was my first election; sometimes I read about Clinton’s ideas and thought they sounded pretty good, but it would be pointless to vote for him when God said Bush would win.

Well, we all know how that turned out: Clinton won in 1992, and won re-election in 1996, while Bush went into retirement.  I remember staring at the TV in disbelief, waiting for the news media to correct themselves, then jokingly saying, “Impeach!”  Yet shortly thereafter, when the GOP started their Whitewater investigations, I thought they smacked of partisan digging and persecution.  This was the second crack in the shell of political and charismatic Christianity that Pat Robertson had built around me.  The first crack was the previous year, when an essay in my Persuasive textbook informed me that the 700 Club didn’t tell the full story of the Mapplethorpe exhibit.

So I was there once, myself, in a haze of magical thinking and unreal expectations, based on cult-like brainwashing.  Fortunately, reality kept breaking in and finally got me out of it.  And yes, it was painful and confusing for some time, but ultimately it was the best thing for me.

However, many people never leave the brainwashing.  I don’t know why some people do and some people don’t.  Some might attribute it to the Holy Spirit’s leading, but why wouldn’t He lead them, too?

How long will it take QAnon to break out now that all their fantasies are proven false?  According to news reports and social media postings, some are breaking out, while others are digging in deeper, looking for signs where none exist, just as I looked for signs that my “words” would come true.

But they weren’t real.  They were a fantasy.  Q is all fantasy, delusion, brainwashing.  Come out of it, QAnoners!  Come to the Truth.  Come to Reality.  Deprogramming will be painful as everything you think is real will fall around you, but it will ultimately be better for you.  And no, Biden’s administration does NOT mean the end of the world.  On the contrary, we should soon rebound, as an adult finally steps back into the White House and starts repairing the damage done by an idiot who never told you the truth and never had a clue and never cared about you or the country and has the blood of 400,000+ people on his hands.  And then you’ll see that your despair is not warranted, that Democrats are not demons and there is no secret cabal and that “V” was just a movie.

I was right about Trump

I was right about Trump 1

I scan the images from that day, looking for a familiar body shape and face.  One looked like him, but the next pic showed him near somebody else, so I dismissed him as too short.  Was Richard at the insurrection?  Was his buddy Chris, who has gone full QAnon?

I don’t know, but I do know one thing:

I WAS RIGHT.

For years, we’ve been dismissed for warning about Trump.  We’ve been called libtards.  We’ve been accused of hyperbole and alarmism and “not giving Trump a chance to govern” and Trump Derangement Syndrome.  We were mocked for saying that neo-Nazis and white supremacy are a huge, dangerous problem in this country.  I was harassed and trolled by my own friends and family when I started to finally speak up.  I had to lose a few, and it looked like a few dropped me on Facebook, our only link to the outside world most of the time in this plague-ridden world.  And yeah, it makes me angry.

But we were right.  We were all right.  Dems, Never Trumpers, liberals, Independents, we were all right.  People said it could never happen here, while ignoring that it is happening around the world–What makes us so special?  Are our institutions really that secure?  Could we go the way of Venezuela or Hungary or Brazil (or Nazi Germany)?

I recently saw in horror that a narc blogger, whose blog I liked to read on occasion, totally missed the biggest narc of them all, and accused us of thinking he’s a narc because of our political beliefs.  Now her blog has gone full MAGA, even after Wednesday, where she denies the truth of what happened.  She’s one of those poor souls conned into thinking that this is somehow God’s will.  She switched from her narc parents to the most dangerous narcissist in our country, and is down deep in the delusion, where she has become one of Trump’s flying monkey army, spreading lies and Trump’s smear campaign around the Net; it breaks my heart to see it.  How could she have missed all the signs after blogging about narcissism for years?  Meanwhile, other narc bloggers recognized the truth years ago.

Many Republicans are finally waking up from the Hitler-like spell they’ve been under.  Our European allies are horrified and, even with Biden about to take power, are backing away from letting America lead them on anything anymore.  Our enemies are mocking us, using our own words against other countries, against us.  Even our local Rep, who’s been MAGA all this time, went against Trump.

I’ve even been listening to the Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes lately, a conservative, because it’s so reassuring to hear the words of the Resistance coming out of a conservative’s mouth.  He used to support Ron Johnson, but that, also, has ended.  He once supported Ted Cruz, but only because the alternative was Trump–while he privately noted that Cruz is “a snake.”  (That’s what he called him on his latest podcast.)  It seems that as the primaries wound up in 2016, Republicans came down to a choice between the Stupid Demagogue and the Smart Snake.

Sykes warns that Cruz is setting himself up to take Trump’s place; other names being tossed around by conservatives and liberals alike as dangerous, are Hawley and Cotton.  They warn that the way has been opened for smart autocrats to step in and actually succeed this time, because of all the damage our stupid autocrat has done in the last four years, even as he finally fails to hold onto power.

These people who attacked our Capitol call themselves Patriots, but they’re not: They’re Traitors, trying to subvert the will of the People, overturn Democracy, and set up an Autocrat.  They are modern-day Visigoths, or Confederate traitors, the legacy of our first Civil War (is another coming?).  They are our own homegrown ISIS, radicalized on the Net and just as delusional and dangerous.  ISIS and al-Qaeda don’t seem to be doing much around here lately, just leaving us to burn ourselves down.

Meanwhile, Trump the Toddler is whining and tantrumming because 80 million people finally stood up and told him NO and, so far, our institutions have been holding.  But it’s very disturbing to see how easily those institutions could fail, because of corruption in the people within them.  For years I’ve seen how the GOP has been installing corrupt people in various parts of government and the justice system.  I’ve seen it here in Wisconsin, which led to Scott Walker being let off when he was clearly guilty.  And now Trump’s been doing it, putting the whole country at risk, not just one state.

As I wrote on this blog more than a year ago,

Because these days, supporting the Republican Party means supporting evil and the demolition of our great democracy. It means supporting racism, torture, mistreatment of immigrants, oppression of various minority groups, yanking food and health care and help away from the poor. It means ignoring cries that someone has been sexually assaulted. It means permitting persecution as long as your favored group commits it. It means forcing women to carry babies to term even when they are at high risk of dying, or the father is her father, or they’ll be so poor they can’t even keep a roof over their heads, while doing absolutely nothing to help those women so they don’t see the need for abortions. It also means that if the 15-year-old girl does carry the baby to term, she’ll now be seen as a bad sort of girl who (gasp) has had sex.

It makes me not want to hear about anyone who voted for Trump, or supported Trump or whatever.

Many of us are saying that we can now see and understand how Hitler took control of the hearts and conscience of the Germans, because we see it happening all over again in our friends, neighbors, and family.

You can find my own warnings on this blog, going back to 2015.  You can find my outrage when I saw Richard and Tracy in a newspaper photo of people working for Trump 2020.  And you can see that

I WAS RIGHT.

 

Confirmed: Richard lied about Executive Order

More than a year ago, I posted this about my years-long search to verify Richard’s story that Clinton ordered border guards to shoot migrants on sight in a super-secret Executive Order.  Please go there and read it to see what I uncovered then.

Well, a few weeks ago, I finally spoke on Twitter to Jenn Budd about this.  She said that NO, THERE WAS NO SUCH ORDER.

I also said that Richard claimed to have shot and killed a migrant woman who had a baby, that the guilt drove him out of the force.  Budd said that wasn’t likely and he sounds like a wannabe.

She was on the force at the same time Richard was.  She verifies his claims that many border guards are corrupt and participate in such things as smuggling and human trafficking, but she says that this Executive Order DID NOT EXIST.

Why did Richard lie about such a thing?  As I wrote in my post last year,

The only reason I can think of for Richard’s claim of murdering somebody, is political, to suit his usual narrative that Democratic presidents are evil and only conservative presidents can be trusted to do the right thing.  Or maybe it was from some narcissistic desire to paint an image of himself as bigger and badder than he really was, in order to impress people.

You can see the Twitter thread here.

WHAT ELSE DID YOU LIE ABOUT, RICHARD?

I found someone like me who records memories for future self

I was reading a blog on NVLD when I came across a comment by Shava Nerad which read, in part,

My episodic memory is pretty good, but spotty. I can remember things going back to my toddler years. I started trying to remember events of my life when I was about eight years old when I realized that most adults didn’t remember what it was like to be a child anymore, and had the foresight as a gifted kid to try to “record” my memories for my future self so this wouldn’t be my fate (it worked!). My idea of my unfathomably ancient future self, in my mind at the time, was me-at-forty, lol, and here I am at nearly 60, still quite easily remembering my internal states as a kid.

I did this, too: When I was maybe ten, I read the Little House books, assumed they were all based on memory (not knowing that Wilder did some fictionalizing), and wanted to be able to do the same thing when I got older.  So I asked my psychologist to hypnotize me to remember everything.  I also started writing down everything, in diaries and letters and journals, and then backing them up: typing them, copying them, saving them on computers, locking them in fireproof vaults.  As I got older, saving e-mails became a new way of remembering.  Nowadays, I do my saving electronically, which is much easier to find room for and access at will.

So just like Nerad, I can remember many things from as far back as age one because I was determined to remember them.  I wrote down many old memories into Word Perfect; there are many things I’ve forgotten which I remember by looking back through these journals.  They are valuable to me, no matter if anybody else cares about the things I write about.  Even if nobody reads much of the memoirs I’ve posted here on my website, they are there for me to re-read and search through whenever I want to remember something.

And yes, I remember vividly what it was like to be a kid, to be a teenager, even at the ripe old age of 47.  😉  So when I see somebody my age post a comment online like, “Back in MY day, we didn’t act up in class/disrespect our parents/act like today’s spoiled rotten kids/etc. etc.,” I can say, “Um, yes, you did.  You were just as bad.  Spanking didn’t stop you.”

Too bad I can’t post a reply to Nerad.  I mean, I could, but this person’s comment was posted two and a half years ago….

Christians are being propagandized into a surreal bubble of nonreality, extremism, and hate

In the past few days, I’ve posted a couple of comments on blogs that I want to reproduce here:

[First post, a few days ago on the claytoonz blog:]

I had to unfriend a couple of Trumpers on Facebook on Saturday after the race was called. It was upsetting because they weren’t old high school classmates–They were people I see a lot (or at least, used to, in the Before times). I liked them, stuck up for them in other contexts. And here they were harassing me on Facebook with snarky comments.

One had been doing this for the past year, ever since I started posting about immigrants in 2019.

The other–Well, once he called one of my other friends [Enema] “slime” on Facebook for supporting abortion rights.  [Enema recently died of COVID; he was an awesome person who loved kids.]  Then he dissed modern Goth literarature/music/art (grrr).  Then one day I posted the Benjamin Corey post which starts by tongue-in-cheeky comparing the Antichrist prophecies to Trump (and ends feeling “unsettled”).  This person wrote, “My church teaches that the Catholic Church is the Antichrist/Whore of Babylon.”  That was a red alert right there, because the churches that teach that tend to be the extremists of the fundies.  I was fundie once, and we didn’t say that.

Well, yesterday I changed my cover photo to Love Trumps Hate.  I come back a short time later and find a comment that says (paraphrasing), “If PERVERT love is what the Greek Orthodox Church teaches, then I’m glad I was never a part of it.”

I’d been ignoring a lot of his comments lately; I wonder now what the other ones were like, if he could post this jaw-dropper.  And there he was with the other guy on another post, exchanging things like “I’ll never accept Biden as my president” and “I agree” with each other.  I’d had enough.

I’d heard from people in different minority groups that my town has issues.  Here it was right in front of me, which I didn’t see before because I mostly kept quiet on Facebook and in real life about politics/race/LGBTQ/etc.  Kept my mouth shut at church and at club, and as a white person, people treated me fine.  I start speaking up about minority groups, I start talking in opposition to Trump, and look what happens.  People start unfriending me, I start unfriending others.  I start to see the ugliness.  The blinders of privilege are real.

And these people are unapologetic about what they’re doing and saying.  These two people are not blocked; have they messaged me with apologies, asked to restore friendship?  Nope.

[Second post, today:]

In 2003, in the EFCA church, there were people who wanted the pastor to preach about politics, but he said no.  He wanted people to make up their own minds.  I was a Bush fan, but we had at least 3 staunch Democrats in the church.  But the church was also tilting Calvinistic at this time, and Evangelicalism had been getting crazier and crazier (Halloween, Harry Potter, etc), so shortly after, we left.

2004 was the turning point for me.  There was Gitmo, stories of Bush allowing torture, the Patriot Act, doubts about the Iraq War–so I voted for Kerry.  I went first to a liberal church and then became Greek Orthodox, so there was no idolizing of Bush there.  The church was mostly cradle, not converts, so they weren’t affected so much by Evangelical nationalism.  But I saw it elsewhere, especially on Jesus Camp.

However, the couple who first influenced me into Orthodoxy–a convert couple I found online, who later moved to my town–was also right-wing.  *He* was a Libertarian and didn’t like Bush, but *she* was a Republican and sounded very much like the extreme side of Evangelicalism that I’d been trying to escape.  And *he* became a Tea Partier.  Even though he didn’t like Bush, he still hated Obama, thought he was going to outlaw Christianity.  So even though they were Orthodox now, they brought that Evangelical extremism with them.  At the time I was upset that they didn’t like my church and went to another one in a different county.  Now I’m glad.  That church closed, but they never started coming to mine.  We have Republicans and conservatives, but we also have Democrats, and usually conversation is about gardening or arguing over who left what mess in the basement.

Then over time, the right-wing converts in Orthodoxy have been bringing in the extremism, so I see it online.  I haven’t seen it in my church so much, fortunately.  Though for the past 8 months, I haven’t been to church….

I see it online, though: People I used to know in college or in the church where I grew up, posting about guns.  I don’t remember them ever mentioning an interest in guns before this past decade.  One person just posted a picture of herself with an AR-15.  One was in my church youth group; we never talked about guns back in the day.  Christianity was about peace and love, not shooting people, though shooting deer was okay.  Then I found one of my exes [Shawn] and friended him on Facebook; his wall was covered with memes about guns and Sean Hannity quotes.  I knew he was conservative, but I knew him for two years and he never mentioned guns!

Ever since I came out and started posting political things on Facebook after a 5-year break, the claws started coming out.  I was tired of people posting their conservative memes and assuming that I agreed with them because I never said anything.  People I thought were nice, started to actually harass me for my posts.  On Saturday I had to unfriend two people.  One of them made a nasty, homophobic comment that insulted me and my church as well.  When did this become Christian?

This could’ve been me, if not for the crises of faith I experienced in college.  Many of my beliefs on many things were tested in a college I thought would be a safe Christian bubble.  (They actually let everybody in and didn’t care what they did.)  Pat Robertson said God told him Bush would win re-election; that didn’t happen.  I learned that what he said about a LOT of things wasn’t true, everything from politics to Dungeons and Dragons.  Media class taught me that Rush Limbaugh was manipulating people.  My eyes were opened and, while I was still Republican for a while, I was moving away from it.  When Fox News came out, I knew better than to watch it, and stuck to the newspaper, news magazines, and occasionally CNN.  While everybody around me was starting to go nuts, I still kept my head.  Now I look at people’s social media posts and it’s like they’re in a totally different reality.  It’s surreal.

But I keep reminding myself that the Church has survived 2000 years of political upheavals and religious wars.  The German church turned Nazi for a time, but many Christians kept their faith.  The Church survived Soviet Russia.  I can’t let American fascism turn me away from it.

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