RoseMorninStar wrote:
There is very little doubt in my mind that the QAnon conspiracy plot/phenomena wasn't foreign or foreign funded propaganda.
Domestic terrorism, and those sympathetic to domestic terrorism within our system, need to be weeded out. Trump is really good at a couple of things; he's an expert and ruthless (lying) marketer and he's very good at demanding -and obtaining- unquestioned loyalty
to him personally. How he gets so many to override their constitutional oath.. I dunno. It must come down to ambition, greed, or fear.
In a Literature & Film class I audited some 27 years ago (taught by
this guy), the last works we studied were Thomas Harris's novel
The Silence of the Lambs and its famous film adaptation written by Ted Tally, directed by Jonathan Demme, and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. We read the book in advance and then watched the movie together in class, with the screening followed by a pop quiz. One of the questions we were asked was:
What is the last line of the movie? Most of the class had probably seen the film before, and they responded as I think the professor expected them to, answering that the last line was Hopkins's character saying, "I'm having an old friend for dinner." Suspecting a trick question, I answered that the last line was actually Foster's character responding "Dr. Lecter?" several times to the dead phone line. Both answers were wrong, said our professor. The last line, he said, is actually Anthony Heald's character asking his host, at the foreign airport at which he has just arrived, if "the security system is all set up?" Our professor wanted us to be more attentive viewers and not dismiss anything as throwaway dialogue. (To that end, I'll note that the other character actually responds in the affirmative and that Heald's character responds "Thank you," which is the film's actual last line in English; after that there is also some audible singing in another language). And the reason, Prof. Macklin said, was that if a film is made with any serious intention, then its last line would surely be important.
And what import did he place on a request for security? That Americans think the danger is foreign, something outside the U.S., when actually we bring the danger with us to the world. (As a later television series put it, we are the ones who knock.) If so, it seems a bit tacked on to a movie where that has not been the theme, but there certainly is a lot of American iconography in the film. Flags turn up in the most unexpected places. The victim Foster's character is trying to rescue was singing "American Girl" just before she was kidnapped. (We also watched Demme's
Melvin and Howard in that class. Lots of red, white, and blue in that one too.)
In other words, I take your point! That's why I evoked Sarah Kendzior's use of "transnational," but maybe "international" would have been better. I certainly didn't mean to imply "foreign" in opposition to "domestic." It's a loose worldwide association of nasty people reinforcing one another's worst impulses. Russian trolls helped spread the American-born Pizzagate conspiracy theories. QAnon, the step-child of Pizzagate, seems likely to have originated with an American ex-pat in the Philippines and now is lodged pretty firmly in a number of European countries. Trump himself is an entanglement of foreign and domestic schemes. See his mysteriously funded golf courses in Scotland, for instance.
Yup, that could definitely be a motivation!
