QAnon is no more, but it'll never go away. How power and fear make people enjoy QAnon and how that relates to a good D&D campaign and my many years of dealing to Republicans tells me that QAnon isn't too far off from where their minds are at. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here. | |
| Today I'm going to be talking about the shocking decision by Q to disband QAnon and now to just make everybody their own separate free little snowflake able to fly along the wind and land on your destination whenever you see fit to do so. | |
| Beyond that, I wanted to talk about the power fear dynamic of QAnon and cults like QAnon and why this cycle is so exciting and engrossing to people and this is why they join these movements. | |
| And then finally, I wanted to talk about the fact that QAnon really isn't that far out there when you deal with actual Republicans, which I do, because I work in an industry where dealing with old white men is how I pay the bills. | |
| So when you're dealing with old white men, you deal with lots of Republicans and you hear what they say. | |
| And not a lot of difference, not a lot of difference between the QAnon and the MAGA. | |
| So first of all, Q has declared that he does not want his followers using Q or QAnon anymore in order to defeat algorithms and censorship means and he just wants you to just Catapult the propaganda. | |
| Just push the narratives that he uses. | |
| But don't credit him. | |
| Don't bring up QAnon. | |
| Don't bring up Q. We are no longer a group. | |
| We are no longer a monolith. | |
| We are merely a bunch of independent actors who are trying to understand the truth by peacefully doing research. | |
| All that good shit. | |
| So that is our new narrative of QAnon, that it is no longer QAnon, that the king is dead, long live the king. | |
| How this will actually play out, how will people accept it? | |
| I mean, the grifters love it because in a lot of ways the grifters really wish they just didn't have to fucking talk about what Jim Watkins is saying all the time. | |
| And the less Q-y QAnon is for them, the better it is. | |
| So we'll see how that all kind of plays out in the grand scheme of things. | |
| Now, beyond that, we also have the fact that QAnon is about anger and fear and power. | |
| And it's why people get into these kinds of movements. | |
| It's why people buy into this sort of thing. | |
| Joe M, when he wasn't mourning the passing of QAnon and celebrating the rebirth of QAnon in its glorious new form, posted a tweet that said, and just like that, the hashtag Pettowood elite collectively soiled their britches and canceled their plans for October. | |
| And he was saying this in response to the Q drop of a Mickey Mouse watch. | |
| And that this Mickey Mouse watch Q-drop terrified the global elites. | |
| The global satanic pedivore ring is now quaking in its boots because Q has put them on notice via a picture of a Mickey Mouse watch. | |
| And this is why people get into this kind of thing. | |
| Because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel strong, and it makes them feel like they are important and that they can bring ruin and devastation to their supposed enemies. | |
| Read that post as a QAnon supporter and just feel the dopamine hit pour through you as you think about what's happening. | |
| That Q just gave the signal to Pettowood that, hey motherfuckers, I know what you're up to and I will stop it. | |
| And Pettowood being like, oh no! | |
| Oh my god, Q's figured us out! | |
| We're totally fucked! | |
| That's... | |
| That's what makes these people just wake up in the morning and just keep on keeping on and just inspires them to do more and more terrible things and to just be inhuman monsters and the terrible human beings that they are. | |
| They live for this. | |
| It's so good to be a QAnon supporter and follower and to know that Q has the Deep State on the run. | |
| He has them scared for their lives, that they know pain is coming, that they know nothing can stop what is coming, that they're sick, that they're evil, that they're Satanists, and that justice will be done to them, and they can't escape it. | |
| God wins! | |
| This is why these people talk shit to Christy Teigen and John Legend and Katy Perry and Lady Gaga and Madonna and anyone else they hate. | |
| Ellen, Tom Hanks, blah blah blah. | |
| It makes them feel good to tell the rich, famous, powerful people that they hate that they're gonna get fucking killed. | |
| That Q is gonna kill you. | |
| And you're gonna suffer for the terrible things you did to those children. | |
| That's that's what makes them tick. | |
| It's why they enjoy this so much that whatever was going on in their lives, whatever they were doing with themselves, now they are a digital soldier in the great battle between God and Satan. | |
| And they're on the right side of things. | |
| And the bad celebrities are on the evil side of things. | |
| And the bad celebrities are going to pay. | |
| They are going to get what's coming to them. | |
| And boy, howdy, is it going to be bad? | |
| That's their mentality. | |
| That is their belief. | |
| And that is what drives them. | |
| And the alternative is also true. | |
| That they kind of enjoy dealing with the fact that their enemies are powerful and intimidating and dangerous and are capable of inflicting damage on them. | |
| Victory isn't sweet if you win the game 50 to nothing. | |
| If there's no struggle, if there's no conflict, there's really no satisfaction. | |
| Your enemy has to be powerful and strong and capable of fighting back, but in the end you defeat them. | |
| It is like a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. | |
| The unwritten rule or the implicit contract in a game of Dungeons and Dragons between the Dungeon Master and the people playing is that the Dungeon Master will make it feel challenging and make it feel hard. | |
| But at the end of the campaign, the players will win. | |
| That's it. | |
| And if the players get killed, they're pissed because they lost and that sucks. | |
| And if the players win without resistance, they are unsatisfied because the game is boring and there was nothing to it. | |
| They just won. | |
| I was involved in a contest called Iron GM, which was like the cooking show Iron Chef. | |
| But this was a thing where you had a dungeon master have to whip up an adventure very quickly to entertain a group of players. | |
| And the session was going to take about I'd say maybe three or four hours. | |
| We were going to play like about two hours, have a lunch break, and then come back and wrap it up about an hour and 90 minutes afterwards. | |
| So you had to kind of crank out a three and a half hour session of Dungeons and Dragons off the top of your head using secret ingredients And so me and my group of strangers that were at my table as players, I was a player not a DM, and what happened was one person picked a barbarian, there was a younger child, he picked a halfling rogue, | |
| Someone else picked a spellcaster of some kind. | |
| So the healing slot was open, so I made a paladin to keep the party healthy and healed and pure in the eyes of God and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And no jokes, during combat, every single time the dungeon master came to me and said, Poker, what is your action? | |
| My reply was, I beg our enemies to surrender because we are killing them too quickly. | |
| And that they need to understand that they are being slaughtered by the dozens, by our unstoppable murderous force. | |
| And that they need to surrender and quit fighting us because they cannot win. | |
| Twitch the Dungeon Master would say, ah, they're crazy cultists, so they ignore you and continue fighting against the rest of the party. | |
| OK, Half-Orc Barbarian, what do you do? | |
| And the Half-Orc Barbarian was like, I slashed him with my broadsword. | |
| He's like, you cleaved three of them in half. | |
| Oh, my God, they're all dead. | |
| And when it was all over and we gave our reviews of our GM, we flunked him. | |
| We gave him an F minus because it sucked. | |
| And that's the thing is that QAnon would not enjoy this story if there wasn't tension, if there wasn't suspense, if there wasn't drama, if there wasn't something intriguing about what is going on. | |
| So they do need to devastated to throw punches. | |
| They do need Chrissy Teigen to eat pizza on her Twitter channel to offend and horrify them. | |
| They need to see the bad people doing the bad things because that's what gets them jeeped up. | |
| That the bad people have got to pay for the bad things they're doing. | |
| And the bad people who will get it at some ill-defined point in the future need to be really bad. | |
| And they need to be successful, scary, dominant in the mainstream media, important. | |
| That will make their fall all the more glorious. | |
| That will make their ruin that much sweeter. | |
| When God reveals his divine light and justice prevails, it'll just be so cool. | |
| And that's how these people operate. | |
| This is the game these people live in and it makes their lives exciting and fun and enjoyable. | |
| And that's why they do it. | |
| Now the one thing that's really funny about all of this is you think to yourselves that QAnon is like sick and depraved and it's this fantasy world detached from our world. | |
| But in reality, it's not that far gone from what the Republicans believe. | |
| Now, as a dealer, as someone who has been doing this for a long time, I can tell you what happens when you are dealing to a table full of old white men and you yourself are a white dude. | |
| You blend into the background. | |
| You become part of the furniture. | |
| You no longer have eyes for seeing or ears for hearing. | |
| You no longer really are a human being. | |
| You are just there. | |
| And these people feel that they can talk openly and freely in front of you and that there will be no repercussions for it. | |
| That you are Probably in the club. | |
| You're a white guy like us. | |
| So white guys, we like Trump, right? | |
| And so I'm dealing. | |
| And people are there. | |
| And they're talking about how great Donald Trump is and how he might be a jerk. | |
| But he gets things done. | |
| And would you rather have a jerk that gets things done or some nice guy who's a pushover who just is ineffective and weak and timid and can't get you results the way Donald Trump gets results? | |
| And then we smoothly segue into a long-running dialogue about how you have to say Kamala Harris' name correctly or else you're a racist. | |
| And at this point, we then get everyone saying her name wrong intentionally. | |
| Kamala, Camila, Carmela, Kabala, Kavila, blah blah blah. | |
| And this is just a massive wave of brofisting and celebrating going around as they intentionally butcher her name. | |
| Because that's how you prove that you're in the club. | |
| This is how you prove you're cool. | |
| by letting people know wow that really ethnic name is so weird how do you say it and I promise none of these guys have ever gotten Alvin Kamara's name wrong because they love their football and they play the fantasy and bah bah bah and that Kamara is an incredible running back But uh Camilla oh Jesus Christ you you triggered SJW beta male cucks expect me to try to figure out how to say that terrible woman's name? | |
| Uh, one guy was incredibly, incredibly happy, uh, because his wife, uh, called, uh, called Harris the C word. | |
| And he was just like, he was, and then when, when he said that one of the other guys at the table laughed and was like, Oh man, I wish I had seen that. | |
| The dude wish he had lived in this other dude's house and was there to see that dude's wife use a slur to describe Kamala Harris, because that's how weird and hateful these people are. | |
| They then went through the whole thing about how Biden's a Trojan horse for Harris and how he's beholden to the far left. | |
| George Soros got name-dropped. | |
| There was talk about Elizabeth Warren's racist statues in her house. | |
| Then there was a younger man who was, he was hardcore about this stuff. | |
| And he talked about the Epoch Times and the Babylon B. | |
| And then he went into this whole thing about how Miss Buttersworth got cancel cultured, | |
| but the actress, the family of the actress who played Miss Butterworth was angry | |
| about the royalties they had lost and that Miss Buttersworth was not removed | |
| due to political correctness or sensitivity, but rather it was a cold corporate move | |
| in order to cut off royalties to a family. | |
| The guy of course got all of this wrong because it was the intramayama that got discontinued, | |
| not Miss Buttersworth. | |
| And the whole royalties thing is a steaming pile of bullshit that was created out of a whole cloth in order to make the world seem like a weirder, more confusing, and ugly place. | |
| And this is... | |
| The stuff that I was hearing, and of course Biden's a senile moron. | |
| He doesn't know anything. | |
| He would be a terrible president. | |
| He would crash the economy. | |
| He's going to raise our taxes, which you can't do under these conditions. | |
| Blah, blah, blah. | |
| And there was a part of me that was debating the pro-con of when I left the table, dude. | |
| Should I have said, okay everybody, see y'all later, have a good one, good luck everybody. | |
| There was a serious part of me that wanted to finish the standard dealer walks away from a table schtick by declaring where we go one we go all. | |
| I just wanted to see it. | |
| I just wanted to throw the sacred words out. | |
| I just wanted to let them know that I was in the club. | |
| Maybe the club beyond the club for them, but still of the club. | |
| Because I felt like that young guy who was bringing up the Babylon Bee and the Epoch Times and all this stuff. | |
| I felt like he might be there. | |
| He might be there. | |
| But I decided against it because I didn't want to potentially send some people down a dark path if they didn't know what those words meant and they decided to look into them. | |
| I did not wish to red pill people as a joke. | |
| Because that would be ugly and bad. | |
| So I stayed my tongue and just walked away from the table. | |
| So happy that I was wearing a mask the whole time because oh god was I just Oh, the grin on my face listening to these people talk about this stuff. | |
| It was so, so powerful. | |
| And the thing is, is I've been doing this for so long because white people are the people that go to these casinos and it's mostly white men as well. | |
| I had this one really awesome crazy person customer of mine in 2008. | |
| deal I was working and this guy was the election was coming up and this guy was | |
| pissing and moaning about Obama being a socialist and how America would be | |
| fucked if we elected him and we were doomed and all this kind of stuff and he | |
| was definitely voting for McCain and McCain was a good man and Bargall | |
| Bargall and this was going on and on and on and on and on and then finally he was | |
| leaving and he asked me to reserve a tip for one of the dealers that was working | |
| that night He wanted to give that guy five bucks and I told him I would take care of it for him. | |
| I would get him that you get that guy the five bucks and he's like hey well you better call that guy up on the phone right now and see if he's gonna vote for Obama or not because I don't want to give him the money if he is voting for Obama. | |
| And I told him, no, he's not political. | |
| He doesn't vote. | |
| He doesn't care about any of this stuff. | |
| He just puts his head down and deals cards. | |
| You know how he is. | |
| And the guy was placated by that. | |
| And he's like, who are you going to vote for? | |
| And I told him, well, I mean, the economy's in the toilet, so I am going to vote for Obama. | |
| And his wife looked at me and the sadness in her eyes was so intense. | |
| And she said to me, why are you going to vote for Obama? | |
| It was like I had shot her dog. | |
| I mean, it was so devastating a betrayal and a revelation that I Dude in Las Vegas was going to be the only man in America to cast a vote for Barack Hussein Obama to become the next president of the United States. | |
| That was like the look on her face. | |
| That was the tone of her voice. | |
| She just really couldn't believe that I was going to do this. | |
| That I was going to sell our nation out. | |
| And I reiterated, I'm like, the fact that everyone in Vegas is losing their jobs. | |
| And as it turned out, I lost my job shortly thereafter. | |
| Yeah, so I was like, no, I am voting for Obama. | |
| And that's how this works. | |
| That's how the cookie crumbles. | |
| So this has been my life for an incredibly long period of time, being elbow to elbow with Republicans always. | |
| And after the 2016 election it was real, it sucked. | |
| Just the celebration, the joy, the delight. | |
| And also the weird rage. | |
| I mean, even though they had won, they were still mad. | |
| I remember there was this one guy, he was... the Electoral College was getting ready to ratify Trump's victory, and the Electoral College was happening that day or something. | |
| And I remember dealing, and he was just furious at the idea. | |
| He just thought the other shoe was going to drop. | |
| He just thought the electoral college was going to like, fucking pull a swerve on us and put Hillary in or something. | |
| And he was just pissed. | |
| And like, and I just remember him like being like, yeah, they better not fuck us with this bullshit. | |
| They better not do anything. | |
| Trump won this election and he's the president and that's the way it is. | |
| And that's what's kind of happening. | |
| And I told him, I'm like, ah, the electoral college already voted. | |
| Trump's been confirmed. | |
| It's good. | |
| You're all set. | |
| And he was just like, it better be. | |
| And it's just it was just that it's just that mentality. | |
| And it's just this rage, just this palpable rage that they just have carry with them all the time. | |
| It's weird. | |
| It's a awful way to live your life. | |
| And I would recommend not doing so. | |
| I know I seem like a pretty rage-filled person since I'm constantly fighting with QAnon all the time, but I'm not. | |
| This is a joke to me. | |
| This is hilarious to me. | |
| I find QAnon endlessly entertaining. | |
| I find them hilarious. | |
| So, having said all of that, I have a couple questions. | |
| The Grand Inquisitor A.I.S. | |
| Millard asks, Twitter made an announcement today regarding Q content enforcement saying 50% fewer impressions have happened. | |
| What changes are still necessary from Twitter's safety team? | |
| If you were in charge, what policies would you make today? | |
| I would ban the fuck out of them. | |
| I don't give a shit about their lack of trending and their lack of bullshit and all this other crap. | |
| They let these people on the site and they don't care. | |
| They need to make a subcategory for ban evasion immediately so that these people's bullshit 30th, 40th, | |
| and 50th accounts can be flagged and banned and removed. | |
| So they are no longer allowed on the website that they have been banned from. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| None of the people who have been banned are off of Twitter unless they choose to be. | |
| The only person I can think of that is not on Twitter is Lisa May Crowley and that's just because she wants to martyr herself and pretend to be a victim when she was suspended for no good reason. | |
| But every other dirtbag that has been banned and then re-banned and then banned, they're back. | |
| They're all back. | |
| None of them are gone. | |
| My QAnon ban evasion thread is almost at 50 posts now and no one is barred. | |
| No one is kept off the site. | |
| ET made a goddamn YouTube video pissing and moaning about how he's not allowed on Twitter and he's back on Twitter. | |
| He doesn't give a shit. | |
| None of these people care. | |
| Twitter needs to hire someone, it could be me if they wanted it to be, and just be like, hey, you, you are in charge of keeping QAnon off Twitter, and I will ban the shit out of all their accounts, and I will keep them off the site. | |
| I will ban all the ban evasion accounts immediately, and then the rest of them, I'll run that up the flagpole, be like, praying medic, that's a problem. | |
| 72 seconds, that's a problem. | |
| Awakened Outlaw, I don't know if he has a previous history, if there's any ban evasion for him, but all the people that have not been banned evasion, have not been banned previously, and I can't just get them straight on ban evasion. | |
| I'll just be like, look, QAnon supporter, massive QAnon supporter. | |
| Jordan Sather, massive QAnon supporter. | |
| Martin Geddes, massive QAnon supporter. | |
| And I'd just ban all of them. | |
| I would just get rid of everyone. | |
| And then we would go from there. | |
| And they would piss and moan about it, but hey, this is Twitter's sandbox and they claim they don't want you playing in it. | |
| Wink, nod, nod, wink, but whatever. | |
| Off topic, what is your favorite way to relax at a park? | |
| Walking. | |
| When I'm at a park, I like to walk. | |
| If the park has a basketball court, I will shoot free throws and run around and grab rebounds and put up little short shots. | |
| Every now and then I'll take a college three-pointer and brick it because I am a deeply unathletic human being. | |
| But yeah, walking and shooting some hoops. | |
| I enjoy these things. | |
| Troy Francis asks, thoughts on the 1776 commission? | |
| Holy fucking shit! | |
| We are now doing right-think and wrong-think. | |
| I feel like this is just shit being thrown at a wall by Trump and his campaign because they're just desperate to try to find anything to Either change the narrative or to galvanize his base. | |
| They're just desperate. | |
| They're just flailing. | |
| They're just trying to do something to let the people that they think are going to vote for them know that they should vote for them. | |
| Being like, yeah, if you vote for us, we're going to edit American history to make America look even more awesome than it already does. | |
| I mean, that's great, isn't it? | |
| And I sneezed. | |
| Man, that was a massive spike on the audio. | |
| But anyways, yeah, it's it's one of these things that like you hear about it and it's horrifying and it's stupid. | |
| But after you think about it for a few moments. | |
| It dawns on you that this is in a way a good thing because people who think they got an election in the bag don't do dumb shit like this 45 odd days out from the election. | |
| People who think they know what they're doing and they know how to accrue votes and win states aren't screaming and yelling about changing the history curriculum of schools with no previous declarations that they were going to do any such thing. | |
| Trump is flailing and desperate and he is in quicksand. | |
| It is obvious. | |
| All the polling indicates that he is in incredibly rough shape. | |
| He is falling apart in Arizona which is devastating. | |
| He is way behind in Michigan and Wisconsin. | |
| Basically at this point, I mean, There are so many states that Biden can win that finish the job. | |
| His electoral vote total right now is just insane and it's ridiculous. | |
| It gives me hope. | |
| I wake up in the morning and I'm like, maybe the world won't end on November 3rd. | |
| That'd be really nice. | |
| I fully expect people to get shot on November 4th. | |
| That's neither here nor there, and that's kind of ripping off the band-aid and starting to drain the abscess that is America's poisonous culture. | |
| And that just sucks, but that's where we're at. | |
| So that will wrap up Poker and Politics going El Lobo Solo tonight. | |
| I will pimp my Patreon, slash Poker and Politics. | |
| Help me out, get me out of the COVID mines, get me away from all these crazy Republicans. | |
| If you can. | |
| If you do not find me worthy of your hard-earned cold hard cash, which is completely acceptable, consider a donation to love146.org. | |
| The link is in my Twitter timeline. | |
| Close to the top. | |
| If you don't want to dig through there, you can click on the link to QAnon Casualties, the support group, in my pinned tweet. | |
| And the top thing on the subreddit is the link to Love4146. | |
| They are an anti-child, anti-human trafficking organization that actually does the work that QAnon claims to care about, but actually doesn't. | |
| So, having put that all out there, I may or may not do another podcast this weekend, given how crazy my work may or may not be. | |
| If I don't do a solo podcast over the weekend, either way I should say, you can expect The Sarge and Elle to meet up with me again. | |
| Tuesday night so we will hopefully have that podcast done then and uploaded Tuesday night into Wednesday morning so you can enjoy that. | |
| I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about that our first shin dig as it were and I hope to keep the forward momentum on that going strong. |