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Good morning. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is February twenty first two thousand twenty three. And a new book is out today, trust the plan, the rise of QAnon, and the conspiracy that unhinged America by Will Summer. This is the way Garrett Graff, who’s the author of Watergate in New History …
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On October 18, 2018, film executive Franklin Leonard’s phone started vibrating and would not stop. His eyes grew wide as his screen filled up with Twitter alerts from strangers hurling vicious, baffling insults at him, hundreds of tweets at a time. He was a rent boy for billionaire Democratic donor …
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Daily Beast journalist Will Sommer spent years researching the disturbing QAnon religious movement, which started on 8chan and has spread insidiously across the world, infecting even members of congress, most notably the unpleasant wacko Marjorie Taylor Greene. His new book, Trust the Plan: The …
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“Trust the Plan,” by Will Sommer, tracks the emergence of a bizarre movement from the wastewaters of the internet. TRUST THE PLAN: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America, by Will Sommer It all started, in a way, with Hunter S. Thompson. In “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” …
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Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Reuters One post on a 4Chan message board on the morning of Oct. 30th, 2017, saying that Hillary Clinton would be arrested, written by an anonymous user who would become known as ‘Q’, soon exploded into a group known today as QAnon. The Daily Beast …
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There comes a moment in every new Q follower’s life when the person closest to them realizes that they aren’t joking. The Facebook binges and the sudden adoration for Donald Trump have been waved off until now. The stray remarks about missing children and experimental vaccines have been chalked up …
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Austin Steinbart lured in roughly a dozen dedicated disciples with a messianic story of his past, living a life “complete with a compound, guns, bitter internal feuds, and showdowns with federal law enforcement,” Will Sommer writes in his forthcoming book, Trust the Plan, a stranger-than-fiction …
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Right-wing radio host and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino praised and promoted a known QAnon influencer while discussing the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. On his show, Bongino gave a “hat tip” to Kanekoa, a QAnon supporter and member of the QAnon influencer collective We The …
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Will Sommer. Photograph by Jeff Elkins Growing up in Texas, Will Sommer was a conservative, listening to Rush Limbaugh broadcasts and Ayn Rand audiobooks on family road trips. His politics changed when he went to college, but his obsession with conservative media never dimmed. “I was fascinated by …
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Against the backdrop of a still-accelerating pandemic in 2020, researchers at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California published a paper describing their work with GPT-3, an early iteration of the language model that …
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