Is Elon Musk Part of the QAnon Cult?
The Twitter CEO is reading QAnon propaganda and tweeting its conspiracy theories.
QAnon is a terrorist threat. It is a cult that believes prominent Democrats and scientists - including President Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Anthony Fauci - have been taken to Guantanamo, executed, and replaced by clones. Its cult believers have massacred their own families, attacked an FBI field office, tried to kill Pelosi’s husband Paul, and been primary participants in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
So why the hell is Elon Musk, the new CEO of Twitter, reading at least one of the primary sites that traffics in QAnon propaganda? And how can Twitter account holders have faith in his “free speech” mantra now that he is tweeting the delusions of what the FBI deems as a dangerous cult?
Musk’s jaw-dropping revelation today came in a response to a tweet from Hillary Clinton about the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi. In it, she linked to a Los Angeles Times article and wrote a quite rational statement that it was unsurprising that the GOP’s spreading of deranged conspiracy theories - and in this, she was referencing DePape’s beliefs in QAnon cult delusions -resulted in violence.
Musk felt the need to respond to this obvious claim, spreading “news” from the Santa Monica Observer that Pelosi was drunk and that the attempted murder was the result of an argument between him and his male-prostitute lover.
The tweet itself does not do justice to the full article, but I’m not going to give this site any traffic. So, here is a screen grab from the top of the article that Musk considered to be “news.”
Utter, complete nonsense. Some guy - Stan Greene, whose existence I can’t confirm (Years ago, he removed his photo from his articles for “security reasons”) - says something and the richest man in the world with the most powerful information outlet that exists says, “Hmmm…could be.”
Now, a quick aside: I read this garbage regularly. I watch QAnon videos. I do this so you don’t have to - QAnon is a true threat to our safety, and someone must keep on top of what they are saying and doing. I am quite familiar with the Santa Monica Observer, a purveyor of QAnon propaganda
So, today Musk relied on the Santa Monica Observer for his information, and then send it out to his 112 million followers. Either he is the most gullible person in the world - thus the question mark in the headline of this post - or he has been gathering his “news” from a site that regularly spews out QAnon conspiracy theories. The Observer does what it can to appear like a real news outlet, and it does publish some true stuff. But all anyone has to do is read a few of its articles - including the one on Paul Pelosi - to know that it is over-the-top lunacy. The founder of the site is David Ganezer, a former lawyer and city council candidate, who has published numerous conspiracy theories about politics, vaccines, and COVID-19. It is so bad that Newsguard, the technology tool that sniffs out misinformation online, gives the Santa Monica Observer a trust score of just 12.5 out of 100.
QAnon - which depends on sites like Santa Monica News and 73 other fake news sites in California alone as primary spreaders of its information - is a cult that believes in a swirl of conspiracy theories. According to a poll by PRRI, one in four Republicans are adherents to QAnon falsehoods. The cult started out in 2017 as a baseless, online conspiracy theory that claimed then-President Donald Trump was secretly battling a “deep state” cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Since then, it has exploded into what cult experts have called “the conspiracy of conspiracies,” wrapping in an endless assortment of right-wing delusions and off-the-charts madness: Democrats maintain secret tunnels under America where they take kidnapped children (or breed them), then murder them and drink their blood. Many living liberal celebrities and politicians are dead and have been replaced by actors or clones. There are mass executions of Democrats at Guantanamo Bay. John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive and will be running for Vice President in 2024 on a ticket led by Donald Trump 2024. Michael Jackson and Robin Williams are also both alive and will be lending their support to the campaign. UFOs are being used to distract the public from learning that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. The COVID vaccines are a plot to murder hundreds of millions of Americans - and all deaths from COVID are either falsehoods put out by the “deep state” or were caused by the vaccines. Evil Lizard aliens, a beneficent god-like alien controlling cultists’ thoughts, a planned cancellation of all debts through something called Nesara/Gesara, the Queen of Canada, secret Med-Beds that cure all diseases being withheld by government, and so on. There is no end to what they believe.
FBI Director Christopher Wray identified QAnon as a terrorist threat during the Trump Administration and last year - following QAnon murders and their storming the Capitol - said the potential from QAnon violence is growing. Family members and friends of QAnon adherents have reported that - while many of these cultists had forms of mental illness before starting to buy into these bizarre beliefs - people who seemed perfectly sane for decades have grown more and more psychotic as they fall deeper into the rabbit hole by reading outlets like Santa Monica Observer.
And that is where we come back to Musk and the Santa Monica Observer. The biggest question here is, what is the CEO of Twitter doing on sites like this? And how can he so readily traffic in the conspiracy theories that is causing so much death and suffering in this country?
Even a cursory reading of the Santa Monica Observer would have revealed its connections to QAnon. It falsely claimed sunlight cured COVID-19 - one of Trump’s most ridiculous arguments - based on the false claim that COVID had little impact on the African nation of Chad. It also said that “Coronavirus has been well planned to achieve all the aims of the deep state,” which is part of the QAnon gospel. The site also claimed that Microsoft co- founder Bill Gates was responsible for a “devastating vaccine-strain polio epidemic that paralyzed 496,000 children between 2000 and 2017.”
The Observer also published an article claiming that rapper Kanye West had been appointed by Trump to be Under-Secretary of the Interior. There is no such thing as “Under-Secretary of the Interior” - the job is Deputy Secretary of the Interior.
Lots of false stories have been published about Hillary Clinton. A headline on an article read “Hillary Clinton Died on Sept. 11;” her nomination, it said, has been part of a conspiracy to ensure a third term for Barack Obama. QAnon has no problem holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously, and the Observer doesn’t hold back from feeding them to the cult. Four days after reporting Clinton’s death, it reported she was on her death bed and had been replaced by a body double.
Let’s look also at the maybe real-person Stan Greene. He has an amazing collection of “Wut?” articles under “his/her/who knows if this person exists” byline. One of my favorites was from 2019, when “let’s just go ahead and use the name Greene” wrote a piece saying that a bank robber who wore a mask often used on the Day of the Dead, a frequently humorous holiday that had its origins in Mexico, had been arrested. Never mind that the masks are sold everywhere from Amazon to Party City - the Santa Monica police, Greene lied, had charged what Greene called the “unwoke bank robber” with cultural appropriation, and faced a sentence of being forced to attend cultural sensitivity classes - oh, and 20 years in prison.
Greene tripped into danger that same year, when his penchant for making stuff up went too far. He claimed that Tyler Skaggs, the professional baseball player, had died from a drug overdose. Oops - Skaggs family had lawyers. Real ones. Kirkland & Ellis, the international law giant, sent a letter to the owner of the Observer saying that they were going to drag his butt to court. So, the Observer pulled the article, although it later claimed that this was because the “news organization” was receiving death threats, as if anyone other than the Skaggs family cared what these liars had to say.
Sometimes, Greene’s articles seem almost real, unless you know something about the topic. In 2016, Greene wrote that Obama’s Drug Enforcement Agency was about to legalize marijuana, another boogey man in the QAnon world. Reason magazine saw that and wasted the time to dispute it, all while making clear that the article was ridiculous tripe.
This is where Musk got his news. And don’t think that the “gay lover, drunken Pelosi” conspiracy theory started on Santa Monica Observer. They just picked it up from the theories swirling about other QAnon sites; it is that kind of reprinting for lies that start from people who truly sound emotionally unbalanced that gives QAnon theories a level of credibility to the cultists.
While I can’t be sure, it seems that the “drunken Pelosi hit by gay prostitute lover” story began with one of the QAnon influencers on YouTube, who was pushing the argument yesterday. (Again, I will not link to these people because I do not want to send them traffic - and for the YouTube algorithm to start pushing you into QAnon accounts. It has to me because I keep track of these people.) The influencer, whose videos always have him breathing bizarrely before and during his speaking, began talking about how Biden had signed an executive order to allow the government to seize was everyone’s retirement savings, then moved on to the prostitute craziness. That was then picked up on Telegram sites, by other QAnon “news” sites, more YouTubers and finally to a QAnon message board called The Great Awakening
Then, on to the Santa Monica Observer, bouncing back afterwards to The Great Awakening.
After that, on it went to Twitter itself, home of Musk.
This is the problem with QAnon. A post online somewhere feed a conspiracy theory that is posted to a second site, then to another, an another until all the cultists being speaking about it, and it is driven into their heads over and over that it is true. So, when Musk tweeted out his QAnon link, he fed into the cultists’ faith. The Great Awakenings lit up with delight with many, many posts. Musk was taking down Hillary! And proving he was one of the true believers. Here are just a couple of their posts:
So, this returns us to the main questions. Is Musk part of QAnon? Why is he reading their propaganda outlets? Is he the most gullible man in the world? Will he continue to spread QAnon conspiracy theories on Twitter? Are his beliefs in free speech going to mean he will lend aid and support to a terrorist threat that has already resulted in murders? Perhaps this member of QAnon, answered all those questions in a post today on the Great Awakenings.
If Musk is an actual QAnon cultist, perhaps he can translate this for the sane. And if he is not, look at what your recklessness has set off! You should be ashamed.