206-418: QAnon ( / ˈ k juː ə n ɒ n / CUE -ə-non , or / ˈ k juː æ n ɒ n / CUE -an-on ) is a far-right American political conspiracy theory and political movement that originated in 2017. QAnon centers on fabricated claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals known as "Q". Those claims have been relayed and developed by online communities and influencers . Their core belief
412-409: A United States Department of Energy security clearance required to access Top Secret information on nuclear weapons and materials. Q's first post said that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, which would cause massive unrest and be followed by numerous other arrests. A second message was posted a few hours later, saying that Clinton was being "detained" though not arrested yet and that Trump
618-406: A Washington Post column that QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theorists harm the credibility of the fight against child sexual abuse, as their baseless claims are a distraction from actual crimes. Followers of these theories have also credited themselves for arrests of criminals in which they had no part: QAnon promoter Jordan Sather credited Jeffrey Epstein 's arrest to 4chan and 8chan, while none of
824-582: A cult . Followers believe the Trump administration secretly fought the cabal of pedophiles, and would conduct arrests and executions of thousands of cabal members on a day known as "the Storm" or "the Event". QAnon conspiracy believers have named Democratic politicians, Hollywood actors, high-ranking government officials, business tycoons, and medical experts as members of the cabal. QAnon has also claimed that Trump stimulated
1030-512: A rise of conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine discourse , many in the movement used the pandemic to promote QAnon. Very little of this was directed by Q posts, and Q did not mention the pandemic until March 23, 2020 (when they called COVID-19 the " China virus "), not using the name "COVID-19" until April 8. But influencers in the QAnon community were openly anti-mask and anti-vaccine , and helped spread denialism as well as other misinformation about
1236-566: A viral phenomenon beyond the internet and turned into a political movement. QAnon followers began to appear at Trump campaign rallies in August 2018, and Trump amplified QAnon accounts on Twitter. QAnon's conspiracy theories have also been relayed by Russian and Chinese state-backed media, social media troll accounts, and the far-right Falun Gong –associated Epoch Media Group . Since its emergence in American politics, QAnon spawned movements around
1442-558: A "race struggle" and an hygienist vision of the world. The purity of the bio-mystical and primordial nation theorized by the Völkischen then began to be seen as corrupted by foreign elements, Jewish in particular. Translated in Maurice Barrès ' concept of "the earth and the dead", these ideas influenced the pre-fascist "revolutionary right" across Europe. The latter had its origin in the fin de siècle intellectual crisis and it was, in
1648-434: A "we" excluding a "they". The far right tends to absolutize differences between nations, races, individuals or cultures since they disrupt their efforts towards the utopian dream of the "closed" and naturally organized society, perceived as the condition to ensure the rebirth of a community finally reconnected to its quasi-eternal nature and re-established on firm metaphysical foundations. As they view their community in
1854-609: A March 2021 report, the Justice and Homeland Security Departments flatly rejected accusations of voting fraud conducted by foreign nations. Jonathan Karl , former ABC News chief White House correspondent for the duration of the Trump presidency, wrote in his November 2021 book, Betrayal , that Powell told Defense Department official Ezra Cohen-Watnick that CIA director Gina Haspel had been injured and detained in Germany while attempting to retrieve
2060-764: A Philippines-born Canadian woman claiming to be Canada's rightful "Queen" , built an online following in the course of 2021, creating a cultlike organization using QAnon and sovereign citizen concepts. Because of Didulo's network of followers and calls for violence, researchers identified her in 2022 as one of the most dangerous QAnon influencers in Canada. Cam Smith, an Australian researcher tracking far-right activity online, noticed mentions of QAnon in Australia's local communities as early as 2018. In 2020, when lockdown measures were imposed in Melbourne to contain an outbreak of COVID-19,
2266-488: A Pizzagate follower, was one of the first public figures to embrace QAnon. She went on to become one of the movement's most prominent influencers . Fox News personality Sean Hannity and comedian Roseanne Barr spread the news about it to their social media followers in early 2018, and the conspiracy theory gained traction on the mainstream right. At this time, InfoWars host and far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed to be in personal contact with Q. This led to
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#17328443224172472-573: A Washington, D.C. pizzeria , which led to an armed attack on the establishment by a gunman who believed the conspiracy theory. The allegations of child sexual abuse and the centrality of the Clinton family to this abuse became a key part of the QAnon belief system, but in time the Clintons' centrality was de-emphasized in favor of more general conspiratorial claims of an alleged worldwide elite of child sex traffickers. Q referred to Pizzagate claims without using
2678-572: A catchphrase from the 1981 film Clash of the Titans , and the expression spread across Twitter. After the Trump campaign cut ties with Powell, she continued to file independent election lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Sources described Powell's election-related filings as filled with significant "sloppy mistakes". In her Georgia lawsuit, she claimed that a computer algorithm took votes from Biden and flipped them to Trump, later amending
2884-491: A child trafficking ring, which followers equate with the cabal. They also see Trump as the only person fighting this criminal network. Added to this is the belief that politicians and Hollywood elites engage in " adrenochrome harvesting", in which adrenalin is extracted from children's blood to produce the psychoactive drug adrenochrome. This comprises claims that children are tortured, or sacrificed in Satanic rituals, to harvest
3090-483: A child, drinking her blood and taking turns wearing the skin from her face as a mask. In November 2017, two 4chan moderators, Paul Furber (also known as "BaruchtheScribe", a South African conspiracy theorist with an interest in U.S. politics) and Coleman Rogers (also known as "Pamphlet Anon"), worked with YouTuber Tracy Diaz to promote QAnon to a wider audience. This involved setting up the r/CBTS_Stream subreddit , where subscribers came to talk about QAnon. The subreddit
3296-530: A claim refuted by the U.S., Ukraine, and the United Nations. In reality, the laboratories were first established to secure and dismantle the remnants of the Soviet biological weapons program , and since then have been used to monitor and prevent new epidemics. The laboratories are publicly listed, not secret, and owned and operated by host countries such as Ukraine, not the U.S. QAnon followers have claimed to justify
3502-632: A conspiracy theory —spread by Congressman Louie Gohmert , OANN and others —that election results showing a landslide victory for Trump had been transmitted to the German office of the Spanish electronic voting firm Scytl , after which a company server was supposedly seized in a raid by the United States Army. The US Army and Scytl refuted these claims; Scytl has not had any offices in Germany since September 2019 and does not tabulate US votes. In
3708-623: A former police officer founded the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), a South African neo-Nazi paramilitary organisation, often described as a white supremacist group. Since its founding in 1973 by Eugène Terre'Blanche and six other far-right Afrikaners, it has been dedicated to secessionist Afrikaner nationalism and the creation of an independent Boer -Afrikaner republic in part of South Africa. During negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa in
3914-557: A former "military intelligence expert", the United States Army Intelligence Center stated that he never worked in military intelligence and had not finished a training course in military intelligence. Merritt acknowledged that the description was wrong and attributed the error to Powell's clerks. However, Merritt claimed he did finish the training, producing an "unofficial transcript" as evidence. Powell also presented an affidavit from an individual she described as
4120-553: A former federal prosecutor, Powell became a leading voice against the Mueller investigation; in a February 2018 op-ed, Powell wrote that retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn should "withdraw his guilty plea" for making false statements to the FBI , alleging "egregious government misconduct". Powell's appearances on Fox News to discuss the Flynn case were noticed by President Donald Trump , and
4326-473: A former intelligence contractor with knowledge of a foreign conspiracy to subvert democracy, who Powell said needed to remain anonymous to protect their "reputation, professional career and personal safety". The Washington Post identified the individual as pro-Trump podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman, and that parts of the affidavit matched a blog post she had written in November 2019. Maras-Lindeman had served in
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#17328443224174532-648: A group led by QAnon promoter Timothy Charles Holmseth, which called itself the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force despite having no connection with the Pentagon or any U.S. governmental agency, attracted attention by spreading false claims about tens of thousands of children being held hostage and tortured in New York City. Also by 2020, some followers began using the Twitter hashtag #SaveTheChildren (#SaveOurChildren
4738-706: A group of QAnon adherents from Queensland traveled there to protest, promoting QAnon as they went. A 2020 paper by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue revealed that Australia was the fourth largest producer of QAnon content, after the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The movement has spread to Spain and Latin America, with countries like Costa Rica , Colombia , Argentina , Mexico, Paraguay and Brazil having an online presence. La Nación reported in 2020 that
4944-702: A health clinic which provided COVID-19 vaccinations . Between March and June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic , QAnon activity nearly tripled on Facebook and nearly doubled on Instagram and Twitter. By that time, QAnon had spread to Europe, from the Netherlands to the Balkan Peninsula . In Germany, far-right activists and influencers have created a German audience for QAnon on YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram, estimated at 200,000 in 2020. German Reichsbürger groups adopted QAnon to promote its belief that modern Germany
5150-517: A landslide and spend his second term bringing about "the Storm" by undoing the deep state , disbanding the cabal and arresting its leaders. After Trump lost and Q stopped posting, QAnon followers continued to search for previously unseen clues in old posts or creating new spin-offs of the theory. They subsequently made predictions about Trump remaining president or returning to power, such as: QAnon effectively merged with Pizzagate by incorporating its beliefs - namely, that children are being abducted in
5356-486: A lawyer. She graduated from Needham Broughton High School and attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where she earned a Bachelor of Arts . At the age of 19, she was accepted into the University of North Carolina School of Law , where she graduated in 1978 with a Juris Doctor degree. She began her legal career as one of the youngest federal prosecutors in the U.S. From 1978 through 1988, Powell
5562-543: A lesser extent neo-Fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich or quote historical National Socialism as their ideological influence." One issue is whether parties should be labelled radical or extreme, a distinction that is made by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany when determining whether or not a party should be banned. Within
5768-509: A limited supply of email material to comb through, the /htg/ culture allowed users to actively participate in the imagined storylines. A key /htg/ poster was Anonymous 5 (also known as "Frank"), who claimed to be a child prostitution investigator. But the lack of a coherent narrative was a constraint on the /htg/ trend, and it never achieved Pizzagate's popularity. The main tenets of the QAnon ideology were already present at 4chan before Q's appearance, including claims that Hillary Clinton
5974-485: A major promoter of the conspiracy theory. University of Southern California professor and data scientist Emilio Ferrara found that about 25% of accounts that use QAnon hashtags, retweet InfoWars or had retweeted One America News Network were bots . Marc-André Argentino, a researcher of the movement, noted in August 2020 that QAnon-dedicated Facebook pages existed in 71 countries worldwide. In January 2021, researcher Joel Finkelstein told The Washington Post that
6180-450: A major shift in political thought by challenging the established ideas supporting hierarchy with new ones about universal equality and freedom . The modern left–right political spectrum also emerged during this period. Democrats and proponents of universal suffrage were located on the left side of the elected French Assembly, while monarchists seated farthest to the right. The strongest opponents of liberalism and democracy during
6386-493: A military comradeship that rejected Marxist class analysis , or what Oswald Spengler had called a "socialism of the blood", which is sometimes described by scholars as a form of " socialist revisionism ". They included Charles Maurras , Benito Mussolini , Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Niekisch . Those thinkers eventually split along nationalist lines from the original communist movement , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels contradicting nationalist theories with
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6592-460: A more politically diverse and younger crowd than typical QAnon groups, including people opposed to Trump and his leadership. These groups are considered to be linked to the Pastel QAnon community. QAnon's child abuse allegations against popular entertainers are based on the unproven claims of the actor Isaac Kappy , who in 2018 accused multiple Hollywood stars of pedophilia. Travis View wrote in
6798-569: A motion to drop Flynn's prosecution with presiding federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan in May 2020. Sullivan did not immediately grant the motion; Powell later requested a writ of mandamus from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to compel Sullivan to drop the case. After an initial ruling in favor of Powell by a three-judge panel of the court, the case was appealed to
7004-416: A motion to expedite the case. She dropped the lawsuit on January 19, 2021, one day before Biden's inauguration. In August 2022, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis sought to have Powell testify before a special grand jury seated for the investigation into possible illegal election interference. Powell was involved in arranging for the collection of data from election systems and voting machines at
7210-566: A new Inauguration Day is set", eliciting cheers from the crowd. The date for this was supposedly August 13, however this date passed and Trump was not reinstated. Powell was subpoenaed in January 2022 to testify before the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack . She sued to block release of her phone records. While working for Trump, Powell stated she would "release the Kraken ",
7416-468: A number of precursor conspiracy theories and scams ... no conspiracy theory feeds more immediately into Q than Pizzagate ". The Pizzagate theory began in March 2016 with the leak of Clinton campaigner John Podesta 's emails, which promoters of the theory believed contained a secret code detailing child sexual abuse . Pizzagate followers said that high-profile Democrats were sexually abusing children at
7622-408: A plaintiff). Powell's lawsuits cited an anonymous witness, referred to as "Spyder" or "Spider", who alleged that American voting systems were "certainly compromised by rogue actors, such as Iran and China". Spyder's real name was redacted from submitted documents; however, a bookmark in the file revealed his identity to be Joshua Merritt, an IT consultant. Although Powell's filings describe Merritt as
7828-487: A podcast dedicated to analyzing and debunking the QAnon movement, calls it a " big tent conspiracy theory" due to its ability to evolve and add new claims. QAnon has incorporated elements from many other preexisting conspiracy theories, such as those about the Kennedy assassination , U.F.O.s and 9/11 . In 2018, Liz Crokin said that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and that he is Q. Other followers adopted variations of
8034-722: A postal employee's confession that he had postdated mailed ballots. She said "Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software." "I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that." Powell alleged that a secret international cabal involving communists, " globalists ", George Soros , Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), the Clinton Foundation , the CIA , and thousands of Democratic and Republican officials—including then-Trump ally and Georgia governor Brian Kemp —used voting machines to transfer millions of votes away from Trump in
8240-485: A report from the Soufan Center , a research group focused on national security, found that one-fifth of 166,820 QAnon posts in the United States between January 2020 and February 2021 originated in foreign countries, primarily Russia and China, and that China was the "primary foreign actor touting QAnon-narratives online". The far-right Falun Gong -associated Epoch Media Group , including The Epoch Times , has also been
8446-669: A similar conspiracy theory, the " Soviet Citizens "—which claims the Russian Federation is a Delaware-based LLC that occupies the legal territory of the Soviet Union—also became susceptible to QAnon beliefs. According to a 2020 survey, one in four Britons believed in QAnon-related theories, though only 6% supported QAnon. In October 2020, anti-racist advocacy group Hope not Hate said that British influencer Martin Geddes ran "one of
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8652-583: A similar motion on January 28, 2021, accusing Powell and three Michigan lawyers of violating their oaths by attempting to overturn Biden's victory. On February 1, 2021, Nessel, along with Michigan governor Whitmer and Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson , filed complaints with the State Bar of Texas seeking Powell's disbarment . During a July 2021 hearing to consider sanctions against Powell and other attorneys for their activities in Michigan, Parker discussed
8858-407: A sort of anti-thesis against their own beliefs." While the existence of such a political position is widely accepted among scholars, figures associated with the far-right rarely accept this denomination, preferring terms like "national movement" or "national right". There is also debate about how appropriate the labels neo-fascist or neo-Nazi are. In the words of Mudde, "the labels Neo-Nazi and to
9064-615: A stand against it. More generally, QAnon's rise coincided with increasing radicalization and violent episodes in American far-right movements. QAnon-related merchandise was widely available on Amazon 's online marketplace in 2018. QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening , a book said to be authored by a group of 12 QAnon followers, neared the top of Amazon's bestsellers list in 2019, possibly through algorithmic manipulation . Also in 2019, QAnon blogger Neon Revolt (an alias of former aspiring screenwriter Robert Cornero Jr.) self-published
9270-468: A state of decay facilitated by the ruling elites, far-right members portray themselves as a natural, sane and alternative elite, with the redemptive mission of saving society from its promised doom. They reject both their national political system and the global geopolitical order (including their institutions and values, e.g. political liberalism and egalitarian humanism ) which are presented as needing to be abandoned or purged of their impurities, so that
9476-465: A unified party family, despite the heterogeneity of the far right parties." Kopeček concludes that a comparison of Central European far-right parties with those of Western Europe shows that "these four elements are present in Central Europe as well, though in a somewhat modified form, despite differing political, economic, and social influences." In the American and more general Anglo-Saxon environment,
9682-718: A unique evolution of far-right movements that emphasize nativism and radical opposition to central government. Far-right politics have led to oppression , political violence , forced assimilation , ethnic cleansing , and genocide against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority or their perceived threat to the native ethnic group , nation , state , national religion , dominant culture , or conservative social institutions. Across these contexts, far-right politics has continued to influence discourse, occasionally achieving electoral success and prompting significant debate over its place in democratic societies . According to scholars Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg ,
9888-509: A vehicle into the grounds of Rideau Hall , the temporary residence of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau , to "arrest" Trudeau over COVID-19 restrictions and firearm regulations. A February 8 article in The Guardian described the 2022 convoy protests in Canada as the result of coordination between QAnon, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaccine and anti-government organizations. Romana Didulo ,
10094-478: A very limited basis". Powell appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to expand the restraining order. A three-judge panel unanimously dismissed Powell's appeal on December 4, citing a failure to prove that the restraining order caused serious harm. The panel also indicated that the original lawsuit, in which Powell also sought to have voting machines inspected, was "considerably delayed" by
10300-723: Is against "the Cathedral". Schmitt's friend–enemy distinction has inspired the French Nouvelle Droite idea of ethnopluralism . In a 1961 book deemed influential in the European far-right at large, French neo-fascist writer Maurice Bardèche introduced the idea that fascism could survive the 20th century under a new metapolitical guise adapted to the changes of the times. Rather than trying to revive doomed regimes with their single party , secret police or public display of Caesarism , Bardèche argued that its theorists should promote
10506-569: Is an American attorney , former federal prosecutor , and conspiracy theorist who attempted to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election . In August 2023, she was indicted along with Donald Trump and eighteen others in the Georgia election case for their efforts to subvert the election outcome in Georgia and other key states lost by Trump. In October 2023, she pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiring to intentionally interfere with
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#173284432241710712-463: Is exactly what happened". On December 10, – long after other hosts had started to push her for more evidence – Dobbs continued to praise her. "Sidney Powell, thank you for all you're doing," "It is the Lord's work." The Washington Post indicated Bartiromo asked Powell for proof of specifics of voting fraud made by her, supposedly including dead voters casting ballots, ballots lacking Trump's name, and
10918-467: Is known as the reverse post-material thesis blames both left-wing and progressive parties for embracing a post-material agenda (including feminism and environmentalism ) that alienates traditional working class voters. Another study argues that individuals who join far-right parties determine whether those parties develop into major political players or whether they remain marginalized. Early academic studies adopted psychoanalytical explanations for
11124-416: Is necessary". This has led Australian psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky to emphasize the "self-sealing" quality of the conspiracy theory, highlighting its anonymous purveyor's use of plausible deniability and noting that evidence against it "can become evidence of [its] validity in the minds of believers". The numerous false, unsubstantiated claims Q has posted include: After Trump lost the 2020 election ,
11330-479: Is no general agreement as to where the mainstream ends and the extreme starts, and if there ever had been agreement on this, the recent shift in the mainstream would challenge it." Proponents of the horseshoe theory interpretation of the left–right political spectrum identify the far left and the far right as having more in common with each other as extremists than each of them has with centrists or moderates . This theory has received criticism, including
11536-582: Is not a sovereign republic but rather a corporation created by Allied nations after World War II , and expressed hope that Trump would lead an army to restore the Reich . A March 2022 study by the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy , a German think tank, found that more than one in ten people in Germany agreed with QAnon's theories and that Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) voters were more likely to believe in QAnon. In Russia,
11742-479: Is that a cabal of Satanic , cannibalistic child molesters is operating a global child sex trafficking ring that conspired against President Donald Trump . QAnon has direct roots in Pizzagate , an Internet conspiracy theory that appeared one year earlier, but also incorporates elements of many different conspiracy theories and unifies them into a larger interconnected conspiracy theory. QAnon has been described as
11948-460: The 1973 Rwandan coup d'état , the far right National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND) was founded under president Juvénal Habyarimana . Between 1975 and 1991, the MRND was the only legal political party in the country. It was dominated by Hutus , particularly from Habyarimana's home region of Northern Rwanda. An elite group of MRND party members who were known to have influence on
12154-432: The 2020 presidential election , Dennis Montgomery , a software designer with a history of making dubious claims, asserted that a government supercomputer program would be used to switch votes from Trump to Biden on voting machines. Powell promoted the conspiracy theory on Lou Dobbs Tonight on November 6, and again on November 8, 2020, on Maria Bartiromo 's Fox Business program, ...claiming to have "evidence that that
12360-530: The 2020 presidential election . She also asserted that the CIA ignored warnings about the software, and urged Trump to fire director Gina Haspel . Christopher Krebs , director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), characterized the supercomputer claim as "nonsense" and a "hoax". CISA described the 2020 election as "the most secure in American history", with "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or
12566-579: The Anti-Defamation League reported that sovereign citizen ideology was attracting a growing number of QAnon adherents, as their belief in the Biden administration 's illegitimacy meshed well with sovereign citizens' broader anti-government views. In 2018, Q said that "vaccines [not all]" were part of the Big Pharma conspiracy . Later on, as anxiety and isolation linked to the COVID-19 pandemic fostered
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#173284432241712772-578: The Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, who fled first to Argentina, then Paraguay, before finally settling in Brazil in 1960. Mengele eventually drowned in 1979 in Bertioga , on the coast of São Paulo state, without ever having been recognized in his 19 years in Brazil. The far right has continued to operate throughout Brazil and a number of far-right parties existed in the modern era including Patriota ,
12978-1014: The Bolsonaro family in Brazil , José Antonio Kast in Chile and Keiko Fujimori in Peru . Nationalists from Europe and the United States met at a Holiday Inn in St. Petersburg on March 22, 2015, for first convention of the International Russian Conservative Forum organized by pro-Putin Rodina -party. The event was attended by fringe right-wing extremists like Nordic Resistance Movement from Scandinavia but also by more mainstream MEPs from Golden Dawn and National Democratic Party of Germany . In addition to Rodina, Russian neo-Nazis from Russian Imperial Movement and Rusich Group were also in attendance. The event
13184-876: The Brazilian Labour Renewal Party , the Party of the Reconstruction of the National Order , the National Renewal Alliance and the Social Liberal Party as well as death squads such as the Command for Hunting Communists . Former President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro was a member of the Alliance for Brazil , a far-right nationalist political group that aimed to become a political party, until 2022, when
13390-400: The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda continue to wage an insurgency against Rwanda from neighboring countries, where they are also involved in local conflicts and terrorism. The Interahamwe were the main perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, during which an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi, Twa and moderate Hutus were killed from April to July 1994 and the term Interahamwe
13596-464: The Enron scandal . Later in her career, Powell began promoting conspiracy theories. Powell defended retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn in United States v. Flynn , claiming that he was framed by a covert " deep state " operation, and has promoted personalities and slogans associated with QAnon . After the 2020 election, she claimed that there had been a global conspiracy to tamper with voting machines, despite lacking evidence. After she accused
13802-410: The Jobbik party in Hungary. During the rise of Nazi Germany, far-right international organizations began to emerge in the 1930s with the International Conference of Fascist Parties in 1932 and the Fascist International Congress in 1934. During the 1934 Fascist International Conference, the Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma [ it ] (CAUR; English: Action Committees for
14008-455: The Ligue des Patriotes , with the common goal of a uniting the masses beyond social divisions. The Völkisch movement emerged in the late 19th century, drawing inspiration from German Romanticism and its fascination for a medieval Reich supposedly organized into a harmonious hierarchical order. Erected on the idea of " blood and soil ", it was a racialist , populist , agrarian , romantic nationalist and an antisemitic movement from
14214-416: The Post : "I don't have the same information you do." Powell filed a federal lawsuit against Arizona governor Doug Ducey , Arizona secretary of state Katie Hobbs and other Arizona election officials on December 2, alleging that "poll watchers failed to adequately verify signatures on ballots, that Maricopa County ballot dispute referees were partisan, that Dominion backups had no chain of custody, and
14420-536: The Republican Party and establishing strong ties with American contacts. In March 2019, Abascal tweeted an image of himself wearing a morion similar to a conquistador , with ABC writing in an article detailing the document that this event provided a narrative that "symbolizes in part the expansionist mood of Vox and its ideology far from Spain". The charter subsequently grew to include signers that had little to no relation to Latin America and Spanish-speaking areas. Vox has advised Javier Milei in Argentina ,
14626-509: The Rothschild family , a frequent target of antisemites. Although it has its origins in older conspiracy theories, the first post by Q was in October 2017 on the website 4chan . Q claimed to be a high-level government official with Q clearance , with access to classified information about the Trump administration and its opponents. Q soon moved to 8chan , making it QAnon's online home. Q's often cryptic posts became known as "drops", and were collected by aggregator apps and websites. QAnon became
14832-962: The Russian invasion of Ukraine as an effort by Putin and Trump to destroy "military" laboratories in Ukraine. Far-right Far-right politics , often termed right-wing extremism , encompasses a range of ideologies that are typically marked by radical conservatism , authoritarianism , ultra-nationalism , and nativism . This political spectrum situates itself on the far end of the right, distinguished from more mainstream right-wing ideologies by its opposition to liberal democratic norms and emphasis on exclusivist views. Far-right ideologies have historically included fascism , Nazism , and Falangism , while contemporary manifestations also incorporate neo-fascism , neo-Nazism , white supremacism , and various other movements characterized by chauvinism , xenophobia , and theocratic or reactionary beliefs. Key to
15038-583: The Senate race in Georgia . She also claimed the Democratic Party had used rigged Dominion machines to defeat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary, and that Sanders learned of this but "sold out". She said she would "blow up" Georgia with a "biblical" court filing. Powell suggested that candidates "paid to have the system rigged to work for them". On the basis of these claims, Powell called for Republican-controlled state legislatures in swing states to disregard
15244-648: The Union for the Republic . Throughout the reign of the Gnassingbé family, Togo has been extremely oppressive. According to a United States Department of State report based on conditions in 2010, human rights abuses are common and include "security force use of excessive force, including torture , which resulted in deaths and injuries; official impunity; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrests and detention; lengthy pretrial detention; executive influence over
15450-491: The corruption trial of U.S. senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, held in 2008, before federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia , intentionally withheld " Brady material " they should have disclosed to the defense and that they returned Rocky Williams, a terminally ill witness, to Alaska, ostensibly so that his testimony would not exonerate Stevens. The senator
15656-709: The génocidaires . Kabuga was arrested in France on 16 May 2020, and charged with crimes against humanity . The Interahamwe was formed around 1990 as the youth wing of the MRND and enjoyed the backing of the Hutu Power government. The Interahamwe were driven out of Rwanda after Tutsi -led Rwandan Patriotic Front victory in the Rwandan Civil War in July 1994 and are considered a terrorist organisation by many African and Western governments. The Interahamwe and splinter groups such as
15862-508: The legal expenses incurred by the defense and recommended for disbarment . The State Bar of Texas ' Texas Commission for Lawyer Discipline brought a disciplinary action against Powell, alleging that she violated the rules of professional conduct governing lawyers; that proceeding is pending. Sidney Katherine Powell was born on May 1, 1955 in Durham, North Carolina , grew up in the city of Raleigh , and knew from an early age that she wanted to be
16068-424: The political spectrum : "the left considers the key inequalities between people to be artificial and negative, which should be overcome by an active state, whereas the right believes that inequalities between people are natural and positive, and should be either defended or left alone by the state." Aspects of far-right ideology can be identified in the agenda of some contemporary right-wing parties: in particular,
16274-431: The sixth public hearing on the January 6 Attack , was involved in a plot to disparage Trump. QAnon's core beliefs are that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of Satan -worshipping child molesters, Trump is secretly battling to stop them, and Q reveals details about the battle online. The cabal is thought to cover up its existence by controlling politicians, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Q's revelations imply that
16480-444: The "Event", in which mass, televised arrests of the "Cabal" were forthcoming. In its most basic sense, an " anon " is an anonymous or pseudonymous Internet poster. The concept of anons "doing research" and claiming to disclose otherwise classified information, while a key component of the QAnon conspiracy theory, is not exclusive to it. Q was preceded by so-called anons who also claimed to have special government access. On July 2, 2016,
16686-467: The "redemptive community" can eventually leave the current phase of liminal crisis to usher in the new era. The community itself is idealized through great archetypal figures (the Golden Age , the savior, decadence and global conspiracy theories ) as they glorify non-rationalistic and non- materialistic values such as the youth or the cult of the dead. Political scientist Cas Mudde argues that
16892-419: The "ship has sailed" for most of the relief requested by the plaintiffs, while the rest "is beyond the power of any court". Furthermore, Parker wrote that the relief requested would "greatly harm the public interest" and felt that the plaintiffs' motive for filing the case was not to win, but rather to shake "people's faith in the democratic process and their trust in our government". Powell has filed an appeal of
17098-451: The 1900s onward as a consequence of a growing exclusive and racial connotation. They idealized the myth of an "original nation", that still could be found at their times in the rural regions of Germany, a form of "primitive democracy freely subjected to their natural elites." Thinkers led by Arthur de Gobineau , Houston Stewart Chamberlain , Alexis Carrel and Georges Vacher de Lapouge distorted Darwin 's theory of evolution to advocate
17304-423: The 1920s and 1930s, a local brand of religious fascism appeared known as Brazilian Integralism , coalescing around the party known as Brazilian Integralist Action . It adopted many characteristics of European fascist movements, including a green-shirted paramilitary organization with uniformed ranks, highly regimented street demonstrations and rhetoric against Marxism and liberalism . Prior to World War II,
17510-528: The 1980s, far-right groups began to solidify themselves through official political avenues. With the founding of the European Union in 1993, far-right groups began to espouse Euroscepticism , nationalist and anti-migrant beliefs. By 2010, the Eurosceptic group European Alliance for Freedom emerged and saw some prominence during the 2014 European Parliament election . The majority of far-right groups in
17716-627: The 1990s, the "winning formula" was often to attract anti-immigrant blue collar workers and white collar workers who wanted less state intervention in the economy, but in the 2000s, this switched to welfare chauvinism . In comparing the Western European and post-Communist Central European far-right, Kopeček writes that "[t]he Central European far right was also typified by a strong anti-Communism, much more markedly than in Western Europe", allowing for "a basic ideological classification within
17922-474: The 19th century, such as Joseph de Maistre and Friedrich Nietzsche , were highly critical of the French Revolution. Those who advocated a return to the absolute monarchy during the 19th century called themselves "ultra-monarchists" and embraced a " mystic " and " providentialist " vision of the world where royal dynasties were seen as the "repositories of divine will". The opposition to liberal modernity
18128-424: The 2010s began to establish international contacts with right-wing coalitions to develop a solidified platform. In 2017, Steve Bannon would create The Movement , an organization to create an international far-right group based on Aleksandr Dugin 's The Fourth Political Theory , for the 2019 European Parliament election . The European Alliance for Freedom would also reorganize into Identity and Democracy for
18334-641: The 2019 European Parliament election. The far-right Spanish party Vox initially introduced the Madrid Charter project, a planned group to denounce left-wing groups in Ibero-America , to the government of United States president Donald Trump while visiting the United States in February 2019, with Santiago Abascal and Rafael Bardají using their good relations with the administration to build support within
18540-484: The 4chan board had been "infiltrated". Thereafter, Q posted only on 8chan. In August 2019, 8chan was shut down after it was connected with the El Paso shooting and other violent incidents. Followers of QAnon then moved to Endchan, until 8chan was restored under the name 8kun. QAnon first received attention from the mainstream press in November 2017. Newsweek called it "Pizzagate on steroids". Gossip columnist Liz Crokin ,
18746-550: The Dominion machines themselves suffered from errors during state evaluations." The plaintiffs asked the court to decertify Arizona's election results or order that Arizona certify Trump electors. On December 9, U.S. district judge Diane Humetewa dismissed the case due to plaintiffs' lack of legal standing , and ruled that the allegations of impropriety were "sorely wanting of relevant or reliable evidence", instead being "largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections". The judge singled out
18952-429: The Dominion machines were adopted months earlier), and filed the case in the wrong venue, the appropriate venue being a state court. Batten also stated that the relief sought by Powell was impossible to grant. The plaintiffs filed an appeal (Case No. 20-14579) of Batten's decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on December 8. Powell also appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied
19158-507: The European Union cut off aid in reaction to the regime's human-rights offenses. After's Eyadema's death in 2005, his son Faure Gnassingbe took over, then stood down and was re-elected in elections that were widely described as fraudulent and occasioned violence that resulted in as many as 600 deaths and the flight from Togo of 40,000 refugees. In 2012, Faure Gnassingbe dissolved the RTP and created
19364-521: The Facebook page "QAnon Costa Rica" was spreading misinformation and fake news, called to depose President Carlos Alvarado and praised right-wing figures such as far-right presidential candidate Juan Diego Castro Fernández , and controversial deputies Dragos Dolanescu Valenciano and Erick Rodríguez Steller . In Spain, the far-right Vox party was accused of endorsing anti-Biden conspiracy theories linked to QAnon in its Twitter account by claiming that Biden
19570-621: The German and Japanese QAnon movements were "strong and growing", though according to a later New York Times report, the Japanese version (also known as "JAnon" [ Japanese : Jアノン ]) remains a fringe belief even among conspiracy theorists. Three pro-QAnon groups in Japan are known to exist as of 2022: J-Anon, QArmyJapanFlynn and YamatoQ. In April 2022, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police arrested several members of YamatoQ for breaking into
19776-450: The JFK Jr. theory, while the majority finds it too "farcical on its face". Due to the overlap between the two movements, some QAnon followers have joined the sovereign citizens , a loose grouping of vexatious litigants and tax protesters whose set of pseudolegal beliefs implies that most laws and taxes are illegitimate and can be safely ignored if one uses the correct procedures. In 2022,
19982-548: The Justice Department of prosecutorial misconduct against Flynn; in a footnote to a June 2020 court brief, the department described Powell's allegations as "unfounded and provide no basis for impugning the prosecutors from the D.C. United States Attorney's Office". Powell has been described as a proponent of conspiracy theories about Flynn, namely that he was framed by members of the " deep state " who were trying to eject President Donald Trump from office. Days before
20188-757: The Kennedy conspiracy theory, asserting that a Pittsburgh Trump supporter named Vincent Fusca is Kennedy Jr. in disguise and would be Trump's 2020 running mate. In November 2021, hundreds gathered in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the site of President Kennedy's assassination , believing they would witness the return of Kennedy Jr., or both Kennedys. Attendees expected the event would herald Trump's reinstatement as president, that Trump would step down to allow Kennedy Jr. to become president, and that Kennedy Jr. would then name Michael Flynn as his vice president. According to QAnon researcher Will Sommer , about 20% of QAnon followers believe
20394-477: The Navy for less than a year over two decades earlier, and in a November 2018 civil suit the attorney general of North Dakota accused her of misappropriating funds for personal use from a charitable event she tried to organize. State attorneys asserted that she exaggerated her credentials and used multiple aliases and Social Security numbers in "a persistent effort...to deceive others". Asked about Maras-Lindeman, Powell told
20600-554: The Nazi Party had been making and distributing propaganda among ethnic Germans in Brazil. The Nazi regime built close ties with Brazil through the estimated 100 thousand native Germans and 1 million German descendants living in Brazil at the time. In 1928, the Brazilian section of the Nazi Party was founded in Timbó, Santa Catarina. This section reached 2,822 members and was the largest section of
20806-532: The Nazi Party outside Germany. About 100 thousand born Germans and about one million descendants lived in Brazil at that time. After Germany's defeat in World War II, many Nazi war criminals fled to Brazil and hid among the German-Brazilian communities. The most notable example of this was Josef Mengele , a Nazi SS officer and physician known as the "Angel of Death" for his deadly experiments on prisoners at
21012-573: The President and his wife Agathe Habyarimana are known as the akazu , an informal organization of Hutu extremists whose members planned and lead the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Prominent Hutu businessman and member of the akazu, Félicien Kabuga was one of the genocides main financiers, providing thousands of machetes which were used to commit the genocide. Kabuga also founded Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines , used to broadcast propaganda and direct
21218-599: The Rwandan genocide. The far right in South Africa emerged as the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP) in 1969, formed by Albert Hertzog as breakaway from the predominant right-wing South African National Party , an Afrikaner ethno-nationalist party that implemented the racist, segregationist program of apartheid , the legal system of political, economic and social separation of the races intended to maintain and extend political and economic control of South Africa by
21424-408: The Trump campaign who said that Powell had not given them evidence of her allegations. In an interview with Newsmax on November 21, Powell accused Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp , of being "in on the Dominion scam" and suggested financial impropriety. Powell additionally alleged that fraud had cost Doug Collins the nonpartisan blanket primary against incumbent Kelly Loeffler in
21630-659: The Universality of Rome), created by Benito Mussolini 's Fascist Regime to create a network for a "Fascist International", representatives from far-right groups gathered in Montreux , Switzerland , including Romania 's Iron Guard , Norway 's Nasjonal Samling , the Greek National Socialist Party , Spain 's Falange movement, Ireland's Blueshirts , France 's Mouvement Franciste and Portugal 's União Nacional , among others. However, no international group
21836-648: The White Rabbit". QAnon followers used the "White Rabbit" reference both as a hashtag and as the name of a Facebook group that had around 90,000 members in 2020. Many early posts advanced claims about " deep state " collusion with foreign powers. In 2018, Q mentioned geopolitical conspiracies such as the Obama administration having planned to send technology to Iran and North Korea. Later, Q found new targets such as Planned Parenthood , which they accused of harvesting fetuses for profit, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who they said
22042-521: The White minority. The HNP was formed after the South African National Party re-established diplomatic relations with Malawi and legislated to allow Māori players and spectators to enter the country during the 1970 New Zealand rugby union team tour in South Africa. The HNP advocated for a Calvinist , racially segregated and Afrikaans -speaking nation. In 1973, Eugène Terre'Blanche ,
22248-409: The [Georgia] Secretary of State was awarded to Dominion Voting Systems but is undated." However, the attached certificate had apparently been edited to remove the date; the actual certificate is dated and available publicly. Batten dismissed the case in a ruling from the bench on December 7. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to bring the case, filed the case too late (as
22454-635: The accounting firm Arthur Andersen and former Merrill Lynch executive Jim Brown. She was an outspoken critic of the Enron Task Force prosecutions, and accused prosecutor Andrew Weissmann of overreach. After that, Powell wrote extensively about prosecutorial abuses in the 2014 book Licensed to Lie . The book was noticed by then- Senator Orrin Hatch , who described it as "powerful". The experience contributed to her distrust of government instututions. In Licensed to Lie , Powell contended that prosecutors in
22660-410: The adrenaline that comes from fear. The aforementioned "Frazzledrip" video in which Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin allegedly murdered a child was said to depict an "adrenochrome harvest". One version of the QAnon theory posits that the child abusers use adrenochrome as an elixir to remain young . In reality, adrenochrome is synthesized solely for research purposes and has no medical uses. In June 2020,
22866-480: The aesthetics and language of social media influencers , often using personal anecdotes and gateway issues (i.e. child sex-trafficking) to frame QAnon beliefs as reasonable. Q made thousands of posts on 4chan and 8chan/8kun. These "drops" were often allusive, cryptic, and impossible to verify; some included strings of characters that are allegedly coded messages. Q used a conspiratorial tone, with phrases like "I've said too much" or "Some things must remain classified to
23072-496: The affidavit's conclusion was erroneous since it compared the Michigan vote tallies against population data from Minnesota (whose respective abbreviations are MI and MN, a possible source of the error). When The Washington Post independently checked the numbers, no voter discrepancies were found. When questioned the next day, Wood described this as "a simple mistake" and said the affidavit "will be corrected if it hasn't been already". After Giuliani's segment ended, Powell took
23278-576: The alleged server and destroy the purported evidence. She asked Cohen-Watnick, who previously worked under Flynn in the government, to launch a special operations mission to physically seize Haspel and compel her to confess. Later on the evening of November 14, on his Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight , conservative commentator Carlson said he had invited Powell onto his show to provide proof of her allegations. After repeated requests, he said Powell became angry with him and said he should "stop contacting her." Carlson's team contacted other figures in
23484-573: The anonymous poster "FBIAnon", a self-described "high-level analyst and strategist" who claimed to have "intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case", began posting false information about the 2016 investigation into the Clinton Foundation and claimed that Hillary Clinton would be imprisoned if Trump became president. Around that time, "HLIAnon", standing for "High-Level Insider Anon", hosted long question-and-answer sessions, dispensing various conspiracy theories, including that Princess Diana
23690-466: The appeal. Powell's evidence in the Georgia lawsuit included an affidavit from Ron Watkins , a former administrator of 8chan /8kun, the online home of QAnon . In his affidavit, Watkins stated that his reading of an online user guide for Dominion Voting Systems software led him to conclude that election fraud might be "within the realm of possibility". Watkins did not provide any legitimate evidence of fraud. Powell also claimed that "a certificate from
23896-422: The argument that it has been centrists who have supported far-right and fascist regimes over socialist ones. Jens Rydgren describes a number of theories as to why individuals support far-right political parties and the academic literature on this topic distinguishes between demand-side theories that have changed the "interests, emotions, attitudes and preferences of voters" and supply-side theories which focus on
24102-430: The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic , they spread a rumor that he had been arrested on child abuse charges. Other similar allegations followed and in July 2021, some QAnon adherents took seriously an article from Real Raw News , a fake news website , that claimed the U.S. military had executed Hanks. One key tenet in QAnon's narrative until the 2020 election was the recurring prediction that Trump would be reelected in
24308-478: The book Revolution Q: The Story of QAnon and the 2nd American Revolution , which became an influential text among the QAnon community and was also distributed by Amazon. In 2020, Politico noted that 100 titles associated with QAnon were available on Amazon Marketplace, in many different languages and with generally positive reviews. Sites dedicated to aggregating the Q posts, also called "drops" or "Q drops", became essential for their dissemination and spread. QMap
24514-414: The broader family of the far right, the extreme right is revolutionary, opposing popular sovereignty and majority rule, and sometimes supporting violence, whereas the radical right is reformist, accepting free elections, but opposing fundamental elements of liberal democracy such as minority rights, rule of law, or separation of powers. After a survey of the academic literature, Mudde concluded in 2002 that
24720-460: The cabal includes Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, business people like George Soros and Bill Gates , religious leaders like Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama , Anthony Fauci , and entertainers like Oprah Winfrey , Ellen DeGeneres , Lady Gaga and Chrissy Teigen . Tom Hanks is a special target for QAnon believers. When Hanks went into quarantine at
24926-438: The cabal's destruction is imminent but also that it will be accomplished only with the support of the "patriots" of the QAnon community. This will happen at a time known as "the Event" or "the Storm", when thousands of people will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or face military tribunals. The U.S. military will then take over the country, and the result will be salvation and utopia. QAnon followers believe
25132-419: The community. Followers started looking for "clues" to confirm their beliefs, including common phrases and occurrences. In November 2017, Trump sipping water from a bottle was interpreted as a secret sign that the mass arrests would soon take place. QAnon went further than Pizzagate by implying a worldwide cabal and incorporating elements from other conspiracies. One of the earlier rumors QAnon followers spread
25338-503: The concept of "the masses" was introduced into the political debate through industrialization and the universal suffrage , a new right-wing founded on national and social ideas began to emerge, what Zeev Sternhell has called the "revolutionary right" and a foreshadowing of fascism . The rift between the left and nationalists was furthermore accentuated by the emergence of anti-militarist and anti-patriotic movements like anarchism or syndicalism , which shared even fewer similarities with
25544-401: The conspiracy of Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the sex trafficking ring, and to prevent a coup d'état by Barack Obama , Hillary Clinton , and George Soros . QAnon is described as antisemitic or rooted in antisemitic tropes, due to its fixation on Jewish financier Soros and conspiracy theories about
25750-414: The core of the far right's worldview is organicism , the idea that society functions as a complete, organized and homogeneous living being. Adapted to the community they wish to constitute or reconstitute (whether based on ethnicity, nationality, religion or race), the concept leads them to reject every form of universalism in favor of autophilia and alterophobia , or in other words the idealization of
25956-605: The core philosophical idea of fascism regardless of its framework, i.e. the concept that only a minority, "the physically saner, the morally purer, the most conscious of national interest", can represent best the community and serve the less gifted in what Bardèche calls a new " feudal contract". Another influence on contemporary far-right thought has been the Traditionalist School , which included Julius Evola , and has influenced Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin , advisors to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as well as
26162-466: The county's elections office in rural Coffee County in January 2021. On October 19, 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor charges for her role in the attempt by the former president and his allies to alter the outcome of the election in the State of Georgia and other states. She was sentenced to serve six years' probation (one year for each charge) and pay a $ 6,000 fine, and agreed to testify against
26368-580: The course" to prove election fraud. On November 23, Fox executive Raj Shah informed his superiors that Fox staff had entreated numerous of its sources within Trump's administration "...to inform reporters that Powell offered no evidence for her claims and didn’t speak for the president." Despite this, on November 24 she joined host Lou Dobbs to tell his viewers that in Arizona, "...there were 35,000 votes added to every Democrat candidate just to start their voting off. It's like getting your $ 500 of Monopoly money to begin with when you haven’t done anything, and it
26574-426: The court also pushed back on Powell's characterization of a federal judge's role. After Trump pardoned Flynn in November 2020, Sullivan dismissed the case as moot, though he stated he probably would have denied the Justice Department motion had the case proceeded. According to a Justice Department official, the Justice Department was not consulted about the pardon. Soon after taking the Flynn case, Powell had accused
26780-426: The court cases, this check shows you she says, yes, I lied." Powell filed a lawsuit against Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and other state officials on November 25, alleging a variety of violations of the election code and asking the court to decertify the state's election results or certify them for Trump. In the lawsuit, Powell submitted a witness's declaration that Joe Biden had "received more than 100% of
26986-512: The decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied a motion for expedited review of the case. The city of Detroit has called for sanctions against the plaintiffs in the case as well as their counsel, requesting that Powell and the other attorneys be disbarred for "trying to use this court's processes to validate their conspiracy theories". Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel filed
27192-411: The disappearance of historic frames of reference (e.g. law and order , the family, the ethnic, linguistic and religious community and nation as well as the natural environment ) and a socioeconomic program associating corporatism , state control of certain sectors, agrarianism , and a varying degree of belief in the free play of socially Darwinistic market forces. Mudde then proposes a subdivision of
27398-521: The early 1990s, the organization terrorized and killed black South Africans. Togo has been ruled by members of the Gnassingbé family and the far-right military dictatorship formerly known as the Rally of the Togolese People since 1969. Despite the legalisation of political parties in 1991 and the ratification of a democratic constitution in 1992, the regime continues to be regarded as oppressive. In 1993,
27604-535: The election results and appoint a slate of "loyal" electors who would vote to re-elect Trump, based on authority supposedly resting in Article Two of the Constitution . Giuliani and Ellis issued a November 22 statement that Powell was "practicing law on her own" and was not (or was no longer) a part of the Trump legal team. According to The Washington Post , the Trump campaign cut ties with Powell because she
27810-738: The election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic of engaging in a conspiracy to rig the election, both companies sued her for defamation . In 2020, Powell joined the legal team of then-President Trump in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden 's victory in the 2020 presidential election . Powell continued filing lawsuits independently and ultimately lost four federal lawsuits in Michigan , Georgia , Arizona , and Wisconsin . In August 2021, Michigan federal judge Linda Vivienne Parker formally sanctioned Powell and eight other pro-Trump lawyers for their frivolous suit seeking to overturn Trump's election loss. The attorneys were ordered repay
28016-421: The far right can be viewed as a combination of four broadly defined concepts, namely exclusivism (e.g. racism , xenophobia , ethnocentrism , ethnopluralism , chauvinism , including welfare chauvinism ), anti-democratic and non-individualist traits (e.g. cult of personality , hierarchism , monism , populism , anti-particracy , an organicist view of the state), a traditionalist value system lamenting
28222-430: The far right's support. The 1933 publication The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich argued the theory that fascists came to power in Germany as a result of sexual repression . For some far-right parties in Western Europe, the issue of immigration has become the dominant issue among them, so much so that some scholars refer to these parties as "anti-immigrant" parties. The French Revolution in 1789 created
28428-409: The far right, as they have historically favored a social Darwinistic or elitist hierarchy based on the belief in the legitimacy of the rule of a supposed superior minority over the inferior masses. Regarding the socio-cultural dimension of nationality, culture and migration, one far-right position is the view that certain ethnic, racial or religious groups should stay separate, based on the belief that
28634-475: The far right. The latter began to develop a "nationalist mysticism" entirely different from that on the left, and antisemitism turned into a credo of the far right, marking a break from the traditional economic "anti-Judaism" defended by parts of the far left, in favour of a racial and pseudo-scientific notion of alterity . Various nationalist leagues began to form across Europe like the Pan-German League or
28840-480: The far-right appeals to those who believe in maintaining strict cultural and ethnic divisions and a return to traditional social hierarchies and values. In practice, far-right movements differ widely by region and historical context. In Western Europe, they have often focused on anti-immigration and anti-globalism , while in Eastern Europe, strong anti-communist rhetoric is more common. The United States has seen
29046-522: The far-right nebula into moderate and radical leanings, according to their degree of exclusionism and essentialism . The Encyclopedia of Politics: The Left and the Right states that far-right politics include "persons or groups who hold extreme nationalist, xenophobic, homophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist, or other reactionary views." While the term far right is typically applied to fascists and neo-Nazis , it has also been used to refer to those to
29252-558: The far-right worldview is the notion of societal purity, often invoking ideas of a homogeneous "national" or "ethnic" community. This view generally promotes organicism , which perceives society as a unified, natural entity under threat from diversity or modern pluralism . Far-right movements frequently target perceived threats to their idealized community, whether ethnic, religious, or cultural, leading to anti-immigrant sentiments , welfare chauvinism , and, in extreme cases, political violence or oppression. According to political theorists,
29458-434: The filing. In Powell's submissions to district courts in Georgia and Michigan, district was misspelled three different ways on the first pages. Powell's Michigan filing also had numerous formatting errors and misidentified one of her experts. Two Republicans said they had been named as a plaintiff in the Georgia and Wisconsin lawsuits despite not having given permission to be included (although one later agreed to remain as
29664-566: The fraud allegations being put forth, writing that they "fail in their particularity and plausibility" and that there would be "extreme, and entirely unprecedented" harm to Arizona's more than 3 million voters to entertain Powell's lawsuit "at this late date". Powell filed an appeal of the lawsuit's dismissal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in December, which scheduled the due date for
29870-463: The full court, which denied the mandamus request in an 8–2 ruling and returned the case to Sullivan's court. Powell had argued to the full court that Sullivan's role was " ministerial ", giving him no discretion but to comply with the Justice Department motion, to which judge Thomas Griffith replied: "It's not ministerial and you know it's not. So it's not ministerial, so that means that the judge has to do some thinking about it, right?" Other judges on
30076-618: The hashtag's reach. In the same period, QAnon followers also created a conspiracy theory that falsely accused furniture company Wayfair , a competitor of Overstock in which QAnon promoter Patrick Byrne had been the CEO, of selling expensive furniture to launder money gained from child sex trafficking. Similar groups in both the U.S. and the U.K. helped organize street protests that they say raise awareness of child sexual abuse and human trafficking. These protests and hashtags have often avoided social media restrictions and tend to attract more women and
30282-465: The hundreds of pages of allegations by others that the attorneys had submitted to courts, which included an individual claiming to have witnessed poll workers changing votes from Trump to Biden. None of the attorneys responded when Parker asked if they had spoken to the witness to vet their allegation. On August 25, 2021, Judge Parker ruled that Powell, L. Lin Wood , and seven other pro-Trump lawyers had filed
30488-587: The idea of metapolitics . The apocalyptic strain of thought begins in Oswald Spengler 's The Decline of the West and is shared by Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist . It continues in The Death of the West by Pat Buchanan as well as in fears over Islamization of Europe . Ernst Jünger was concerned about rootless cosmopolitan elites while de Benoist and Buchanan oppose the managerial state and Curtis Yarvin
30694-515: The idea of a military seizure of voting machines. Powell, who had previously called on the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military forces, joined an Oval Office meeting on December 18, with Giuliani, Flynn, and Pat Cipollone . There, Trump suggested naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate allegations of election fraud. Most Trump advisors opposed the idea, while Powell characterized them as quitters. The meeting
30900-516: The idea that "the working men [had] no country." The main reason for that ideological confusion can be found in the consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which according to Swiss historian Philippe Burrin had completely redesigned the political landscape in Europe by diffusing the idea of an anti-individualistic concept of "national unity" rising above the right and left division. As
31106-740: The idea that superior persons should dominate society while undesirable elements should be purged, which in extreme cases has resulted in genocides . Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform in London, distinguishes between fascism and right-wing nationalist parties which are often described as far right such as the National Front in France. Mudde notes that the most successful European far-right parties in 2019 were "former mainstream right-wing parties that have turned into populist radical right ones." According to historian Mark Sedgwick , "[t]here
31312-532: The interests of one's own group should be prioritized. In western Europe, far right parties have been associated with anti-immigrant policies, as well as opposition to globalism and European integration . They often make nationalist and xenophobic appeals which make allusions to ethnic nationalism rather than civic nationalism (or liberal nationalism). Some have at their core illiberal policies such as removing checks on executive authority , and protections for minorities from majority ( multipluralism ). In
31518-503: The investigative reporting nor the indictment referenced these forums. Some of the conspiracy theories about Epstein's death have also brought people to QAnon. In May 2022, The New York Times reported that QAnon supporters were intercepting child migrants at the Mexico–United States border and collecting information about their families on the premise that they were falling prey to sex-trafficking schemes. QAnon Anonymous ,
31724-595: The judiciary; infringement of citizens' privacy rights; restrictions on freedoms of press , assembly , and movement; official corruption; discrimination and violence against women; child abuse, including female genital mutilation (FGM), and sexual exploitation of children; regional and ethnic discrimination; trafficking in persons, especially women and children; societal discrimination against persons with disabilities; official and societal discrimination against homosexual persons; societal discrimination against persons with HIV ; and forced labor, including by children." During
31930-593: The lectern and alleged, without evidence, that an international communist plot to rig the 2020 election had been engineered by Cuba, China, Venezuela, Hugo Chávez (who died in 2013), George Soros , the Clinton Foundation and antifa . She also alleged that Dominion Voting Systems "can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden". The source for many of these claims appeared to be far right news organization One America News Network (OANN). She also repeated
32136-566: The legal team is unknown, even to some campaign officials. One official claimed Powell "simply showed up at headquarters". Giuliani and Powell alleged multiple instances of voter fraud in key states at a November 19 press conference. They cited an affidavit —filed by Russell Ramsland and L. Lin Wood on behalf of the Trump campaign —as evidence of manipulated results. In their comparison of votes cast against total voters registered in Michigan , Powell asserted that they found over-voting of "up to 350 percent in some places". However,
32342-466: The modern ambiguities in the definition of far-right politics lie in the fact that the concept is generally used by political adversaries to "disqualify and stigmatize all forms of partisan nationalism by reducing them to the historical experiments of Italian Fascism [and] German National Socialism ." Mudde agrees and notes that "the term is not only used for scientific purposes but also for political purposes. Several authors define right-wing extremism as
32548-602: The most common term is " radical right ", which has a broader meaning than the European radical right . Mudde defines the American radical right as an "old school of nativism, populism, and hostility to central government [which] was said to have developed into the post-World War II combination of ultranationalism and anti-communism, Christian fundamentalism, militaristic orientation, and anti-alien sentiment." Jodi Dean argues that "the rise of far-right anti-communism in many parts of
32754-471: The most popular QAnon Twitter accounts in the world". In October 2021, Rémy Daillet-Wiedemann, a French QAnon-associated conspiracy theorist, was charged with terrorism for having planned a coup against the French government. Various associates of Daillet-Wiedemann were also arrested and charged in late 2021 and early 2022. Many Canadians have also promoted QAnon. In July 2020, a gunman and QAnon follower drove
32960-529: The opening brief to be two months after the inauguration . That month, Powell also filed an emergency petition with the United States Supreme Court seeking an extraordinary writ of mandamus for intervention in the case. The petition was denied without comment on March 1, 2021, ending the matter. Powell and Lin Wood filed a lawsuit against Georgia governor Brian Kemp and other state officials on November 25, alleging that Dominion Voting Systems
33166-430: The other defendants. On October 31, 2023, the Georgia secretary of state's chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling , displayed the final payment check from Powell at a press conference where he said that the check represented an admission that Powell's claims against Georgia's voting machines were false. He said, "If you didn’t believe the three recounts, if you didn’t believe the investigations, if you didn’t believe
33372-461: The pandemic is fake; others have claimed that the " deep state " created it. QAnon adherents also helped promote the conspiratorial video Plandemic . In March 2022, CNN , France 24 , and Foreign Policy reported that QAnon promoters were echoing Russian disinformation that created conspiracy theories about United States-funded laboratories in Ukraine. Russian state media falsely claimed that "secret United States biolabs" were creating weapons,
33578-425: The pandemic. QAnon conspiracy theorists touted drinking an industrial bleach (known as MMS, or Miracle Mineral Solution ) as a "miracle cure" for COVID-19 . Q suggested that hydroxychloroquine , endorsed by Trump at the time, was a cure for the disease, and accused Democrats of forcing infected patients into nursing homes, deliberately causing most COVID-related deaths in the U.S. Some QAnon followers have said that
33784-634: The party described it as the "party of organized violence". The new government promptly reversed the democratic reforms initiated during the Guatemalan Revolution and the agrarian reform program ( Decree 900 ) that was the main project of president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and which directly impacted the interests of both the United Fruit Company and the Guatemalan landowners. Sidney Powell Sidney Katherine Powell (born May 1, 1955)
33990-602: The party was disbanded. Since 2022, he is a member of the Liberal Party . Bolsonaro has been widely described by numerous media organizations as far right. In Guatemala, the far-right government of Carlos Castillo Armas utilized death squads after coming to power in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état . Along with other far-right extremists, Castillo Armas started the National Liberation Movement ( Movimiento de Liberación Nacional , or MLN). The founders of
34196-485: The performance of election duties. She was sentenced to six years of probation and agreed to testify against the other defendants . Prior to her political involvement, Powell served as an assistant United States attorney in the Western District of Texas . She was best known for prosecuting high-profile drug smuggler Jimmy Chagra and, as private counsel, defending Merrill Lynch executives in proceedings related to
34402-546: The presence of QAnon followers at a July 2018 Trump rally for the midterm elections in Tampa , Florida, the first visible presence of the QAnon movement at Trump rallies. Some Christian pastors introduced their congregations to QAnon ideas. The Indiana-based Omega Kingdom Ministry tried to combine QAnon and Christianity, with Q posts and Bible quotes both read during church services. Some Christians, such as pastor Derek Kubilus, call QAnon heresy , but most U.S. pastors have not taken
34608-436: The programmes of parties, their organization and the opportunity structures within individual political systems. The most common demand-side theories are the social breakdown thesis , the relative deprivation thesis , the modernization losers thesis and the ethnic competition thesis . The rise of far-right parties has also been viewed as a rejection of post-materialist values on the part of some voters. This theory which
34814-631: The rate of Q's posts sharply declined and Q stopped posting altogether one month later. The last "drop" for 18 months was on December 8, 2020. Mike Rothschild, author of a book on QAnon, said that he doubted Q would ever come back, as the movement had "outgrown the need for new drops" and Trump's election loss had invalidated the core QAnon prophecy. But he added that Q might resume posting if "the community really needed new drops to keep it moving forward". On June 24, 2022, Q, or someone who possesses their details, posted on 8kun after an 18-month hiatus. The post claimed that Cassidy Hutchinson , who testified at
35020-450: The results of the election. Associates of Trump, such as Michael Flynn , Lin Wood and Sidney Powell , have promoted QAnon-derived conspiracy theories. When these tactics failed, Trump supporters – many of them QAnon followers – attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 . The Capitol attack led to a further, more sustained social media crackdown on the movement and its claims. According to QAnon researcher Mike Rothschild, "while Q has
35226-569: The right of mainstream right-wing politics . According to political scientist Lubomír Kopeček, "[t]he best working definition of the contemporary far right may be the four-element combination of nationalism, xenophobia, law and order, and welfare chauvinism proposed for the Western European environment by Cas Mudde." Relying on those concepts, far-right politics includes yet is not limited to aspects of authoritarianism , anti-communism and nativism . Claims that superior people should have greater rights than inferior people are often associated with
35432-583: The sake of their expediency." In Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right , Cynthia Miller-Idriss examines the far-right as a global movement and representing a cluster of overlapping " antidemocratic , antiegalitarian, white supremacist " beliefs that are "embedded in solutions like authoritarianism , ethnic cleansing or ethnic migration, and the establishment of separate ethno-states or enclaves along racial and ethnic lines". According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg ,
35638-438: The site's /pol/ board on October 28, 2017, posting in a thread titled "Calm Before the Storm", a phrase Trump had previously used to describe a gathering of American military leaders he attended. "The Storm" later became QAnon parlance for an imminent event in which thousands of alleged suspects would be arrested, imprisoned, and executed for being child-eating pedophiles. The poster's username implied that they held Q clearance ,
35844-437: The social network hosted thousands of QAnon-themed groups and pages, with millions of members and followers. According to Reuters , Russian-backed social media accounts promoted QAnon claims as early as November or December 2017. Russian government -funded state media such as RT and Sputnik have amplified the conspiracy theory since 2019, citing QAnon as evidence that the United States is divided by internal strife. In 2021,
36050-454: The suit "in bad faith and for an improper purpose"; that their litigation was "a historic and profound abuse of the judicial process"; and that they had filed "baseless and frivolous lawsuits in order to undermine public confidence in the democratic process." The court ordered that they pay attorney's fees to the City of Detroit and State of Michigan to reimburse them for the costs of defending against
36256-425: The suit, and referred them to their respective state bars for investigation into ethical violations, which could lead to disbarment . On November 4, 2021, a closed-door investigatory hearing was held by the State Bar of Texas to begin the process of determining possible sanctions or disbarment for Powell. On December 2, 2021, Judge Parker ordered Powell, Wood and the other "Kraken" attorneys to pay $ 175,250 to
36462-513: The term. QAnon followers often used the hashtag # SaveTheChildren to promote the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. This caused protest from the unrelated non-governmental organization Save the Children . The investigative journalism website Bellingcat called /htg/ or "Human Trafficking General" threads on the /pol/ board of 4chan "the missing link" between Pizzagate and QAnon. Instead of focusing on
36668-459: The terms "right-wing extremism", " right-wing populism ", "national populism", or "neo-populism" were often used as synonyms by scholars (or, nonetheless, terms with "striking similarities"), except notably among a few authors studying the extremist-theoretical tradition. Italian philosopher and political scientist Norberto Bobbio argues that attitudes towards equality are primarily what distinguish left-wing politics from right-wing politics on
36874-455: The two spoke on several occasions. To raise money for Flynn's defense, Powell spoke at a November 2018 conference, where she met Flynn's siblings. They agreed that Flynn was the victim of a "deep state plot" and had only pleaded guilty because he was coerced. Flynn released his law firm of Covington & Burling and retained Powell to serve as his lead attorney in June 2019. On the same day this
37080-405: The very end". To sustain faith in a final victory over the "cabal", Q used recurring phrases such as "Trust the plan", "Enjoy the show", and "Nothing can stop what is coming". Q's messages typically claimed that everything was going as planned, that Trump was in control, and that all his adversaries would end up in prison. Q also encouraged followers to do their own research by telling them to "Follow
37286-581: The votes" in Edison County; however, there is no Edison County in Michigan or any other U.S. state. There is an Edison Township in Minnesota, leading to speculation that the information was again taken from a list of Minnesota precincts. U.S. district judge Linda V. Parker denied the requested relief on December 7, stating that the plaintiffs had only offered "theories, conjecture, and speculation" of potential vote switching. The judge also declared that
37492-720: The words of Fritz Stern , the deep "cultural despair" of thinkers feeling uprooted within the rationalism and scientism of the modern world. It was characterized by a rejection of the established social order, with revolutionary tendencies and anti-capitalist stances, a populist and plebiscitary dimension, the advocacy of violence as a means of action and a call for individual and collective palingenesis ("regeneration, rebirth"). The key thinkers of contemporary far-right politics are claimed by Mark Sedgwick to share four key elements, namely apocalyptism , fear of global elites , belief in Carl Schmitt 's friend–enemy distinction and
37698-480: The world" should be interpreted "as a politics of fear, which utilizes the disaffection and anger generated by capitalism. [...] Partisans of far right-wing organizations, in turn, use anti-communism to challenge every political current which is not embedded in a clearly exposed nationalist and racist agenda. For them, both the USSR and the European Union, leftist liberals, ecologists, and supranational corporations – all of these may be called 'communist' for
37904-519: The world. The exact number of QAnon adherents is unclear. After increased scrutiny of the movement, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook began taking action to stop the spread of the conspiracy theory. QAnon followers have perpetrated acts of violence. Members of the movement took part in the 2020 United States presidential election , during which they supported Trump's campaign and waged information warfare to influence voters. After Joe Biden won, they were involved in efforts to overturn
38110-798: Was a member of the cabal. Over the years, other topics of interest included Russian interference , child trafficking , Jeffrey Epstein , Antifa and Hunter Biden . Becoming increasingly vague over time, Q's posts allowed followers to map their own beliefs onto them and develop new variations of the theory. The author Walter Kirn has described Q as an innovator among conspiracy theorists by enthralling readers with "clues" rather than presenting claims directly: "The audience for internet narratives doesn't want to read, it wants to write. It doesn't want answers provided, it wants to search for them." But Q often made specific predictions that did not prove correct: On multiple occasions, Q has dismissed these incorrect predictions as deliberate, claiming that "disinformation
38316-440: Was also used), co-opting a trademarked name for the child welfare organization Save the Children . This led to an August 7 statement by Save the Children on the unauthorized use of its name in campaigns. In September, Facebook and Instagram tried to prevent #SaveTheChildren from being associated with QAnon by redirecting users who searched for the hashtag to the child welfare group. In October, Facebook announced it would try to limit
38522-474: Was an assistant United States attorney for the Western and Northern Districts of Texas and the Eastern District of Virginia , where she handled civil and criminal trial work. She was appointed Appellate Section Chief for the Western District of Texas and then the Northern District of Texas. Powell established her own law firm in 1993 in Dallas, Texas. Around 2002, she began to practice in Asheville, North Carolina, but moved back to Texas later. Powell
38728-481: Was attended by several notable American white supremacists including Jared Taylor and Brandon Russell . Morocco saw a spread of ultranationalism , antifeminism , and opposition to immigration themes in digital spaces. A number of far-right extremist and paramilitary groups carried out the Rwandan genocide under the racial supremacist ideology of Hutu Power , developed by journalist and Hutu supremacist Hassan Ngeze . On 5 July 1975, exactly two years after
38934-504: Was based on the belief that hierarchy and rootedness are more important than equality and liberty, with the latter two being dehumanizing. In the French public debate following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, far right was used to describe the strongest opponents of the far left , those who supported the events occurring in Russia. A number of thinkers on the far right nonetheless claimed an influence from an anti-Marxist and anti-egalitarian interpretation of socialism , based on
39140-422: Was best known as one of the prosecutors in the 1979 trial of Jimmy Chagra who was accused in the assassination of John H. Wood Jr. , a federal judge from Texas. He was acquitted of involvement in the assassination but convicted on other charges. He later admitted to his role in the conspiracy to murder the judge. In the 2000s, Powell represented firms and executives involved in the Enron scandal , including
39346-410: Was directly involved in a pedophile ring , that Robert Mueller was secretly working with Trump, and that large-scale military tribunals were imminent. His posts specifically targeted individuals who were hated in the community beforehand, namely Clinton, Barack Obama , and George Soros. Bellingcat says that the idea of the "Storm" was copied from another poster named Victory of the Light, who predicted
39552-445: Was disclosed, Powell sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr requesting the "utmost confidentiality" and argued that Flynn's prosecution was due to "corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes". Among other things, she requested that Barr appoint an outsider to investigate. Six months later, Barr appointed Jeffrey Jensen to conduct an investigation. The Justice Department filed
39758-403: Was fully established before the outbreak of World War II . Following World War II, other far-right organizations attempted to establish themselves, such as the European organizations of Nouvel Ordre Européen , European Social Movement and Circulo Español de Amigos de Europa or the further-reaching World Union of National Socialists and the League for Pan-Nordic Friendship . Beginning in
39964-514: Was in any way compromised". In the wake of the election, Trump established a legal team to challenge the legitimacy of the results . On November 14, Trump named Rudy Giuliani to lead the team, with Victoria Toensing , her husband Joseph diGenova , Jenna Ellis , and Powell as members of this team. The team proceeded to file numerous lawsuits in several states over alleged vote harvesting , illegal votes, machine errors, vote dumps, and late-counted votes. Precisely how Powell gained prominence in
40170-471: Was murdered after trying to stop the September 11 attacks . Soon after the 2016 United States elections , two anonymous posters, "CIAAnon" and "CIAIntern", falsely claimed to be high-ranking Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers, and in late August 2017, "WHInsiderAnon" offered a supposed preview that something that was "going to go down" regarding leaks that would affect the Democratic Party . A 4chan user named "Q Clearance Patriot" first appeared on
40376-469: Was only for Democrats." Dominion Voting Systems released a statement refuting Powell's fraud claims on November 26. A draft executive order dated December 16 called for Trump to order a military seizure of voting machines and the appointment of a special counsel; when it surfaced a year later, it was not immediately clear who drafted it. Trump ally Bernard Kerik testified to the January 6 committee that Michael Flynn associate Phil Waldron originated
40582-486: Was permanently closed in March 2018 due to incitement of violence and posting private information . QAnon spread to other social media, including Twitter and YouTube. Rogers and his wife, Christina Urso, launched Patriots' Soapbox, a YouTube livestream dedicated to QAnon, which they used to solicit donations. Future U.S. representative Lauren Boebert was a guest on Patriots' Soapbox during her 2020 congressional campaign. Posts by Q moved to 8chan , with Q citing concerns that
40788-472: Was planning to remove "criminal rogue elements". The post also alluded cryptically to George Soros , Huma Abedin and Operation Mockingbird . Q's activity surged in November, with most posts expanding upon previous theories about Hillary Clinton. Other conspiracy theories were added involving Barack Obama, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. An Internet community developed around analyzing posts attributed to Q, and several conspiracy theorists became minor celebrities in
40994-482: Was reportedly heated and included Flynn's proposal for the president to declare martial law . By December 2020 over 4,000 attorneys had signed an open letter asking bar disciplinary authorities to condemn and investigate Powell's behavior. In May 2021, Powell continued to express the hope that the election result would be reversed. She spoke at a QAnon conference in Dallas over Memorial Day weekend, where she falsely asserted Trump "can simply be reinstated, that
41200-405: Was seen as harming Trump's broader legal efforts, and because Trump disliked the coverage she received from Tucker Carlson Tonight . However, she continued to meet with the president in the White House . Shortly after the announcement, her client Michael Flynn tweeted that Twitter had suspended her account for twelve hours, and that she agreed with the campaign's announcement and was "staying
41406-604: Was subsequently convicted of seven felony counts of corruption for failing to annually declare gifts from VECO owner Bill Allen . However, due to numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct, Attorney General Eric Holder moved to dismiss the indictment prior to sentencing, effectively vacating the conviction. After publishing her first book, Powell continued writing opinion pieces for right-leaning websites. In 2017, Weissmann joined Robert Mueller 's Special Counsel investigation , reviving interest in Licensed to Lie from Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity . Using her status as
41612-419: Was that such figures as Hillary Clinton, her daughter Chelsea , and Senator John McCain had already been arrested and indicted, and were wearing ankle monitoring bracelets during their public appearances. In the following months, the QAnon community helped spread other rumors such as the " Frazzledrip " theory, which purported the existence of a "snuff" video showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin murdering
41818-434: Was the candidate "preferred by pedophiles". An RTVE news report found that most Spanish QAnon supporters identified Vox as their preferred political party. Pastel QAnon, identified by Concordia University researcher Marc-André Argentino, is a collection of techniques aimed predominantly at indoctrinating women into the conspiracy theory, mainly on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Telegram and YouTube. It co-opts
42024-454: Was the most popular and famous aggregator, run by a pseudonymous developer and overall key QAnon figure known as "QAPPANON". QMap shut down shortly after the British fact-checking organization Logically published a September 2020 report that identified QAPPANON as a New Jersey-based security analyst named Jason Gelinas. Multiple online communities were created around QAnon: in 2020, Facebook conducted an internal investigation that revealed that
42230-412: Was used to rig votes for Biden. The plaintiffs asked the court to halt the certification of elections results and order Kemp to certify Trump as the winner in Georgia. U.S. district judge Timothy Batten issued a temporary restraining order on November 29 that voting machines in Georgia's Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee counties were to preserve their data, after Wood had argued to retain "this information on
42436-409: Was widened to mean any civilian bands killing Tutsi. Other far-right groups and paramilitaries involved included the anti-democratic segregationist Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), which called for complete segregation of Hutus from Tutsis. The CDR had a paramilitary wing known as the Impuzamugambi . Together with the Interahamwe militia, the Impuzamugambi played a central role in
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