internet disrupted everyday life.
GameStop wasn t the first populist uprising to spread from Reddit into the real world. Take a lot of anger, give it a place to congregate online, and after enough fomenting, it will spill into the street and
markets.
By now, the messaging platform - which declined to comment for this article - has had a years-long history of providing a platform for groups of people organizing their rage before collectively acting in real life. This time it was a brief but epic saga that introduced America to the wonders of the short squeeze, but mass movements are increasingly taking from the front page of the internet to the world beyond screens.
January 28, 2021
Experts believe QAnon conspiracy community may form around personalities other than former President Trump but have similar themes.
SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Many QAnon followers lost faith in the baseless conspiracy theory when former President Donald Trump, a central figure in the QAnon world, left the White House. But not everybody.
According to the QAnon prophecy, the inauguration was supposed to be the day that Trump would arrest Democrats and celebrities for running a global child sex trafficking ring and remain in office for a second term. So help you God? Congratulations, Mr. President.
Inauguration day also came as social media companies expanded efforts to purge QAnon from their platforms. Twitter recently removed 70,000 accounts for pushing QAnon content. Facebook took down more than 45,000 Facebook and Instagram accounts as of early January.
Originally published on January 28, 2021 2:36 pm
Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert stunned political observers last summer when she beat five-term incumbent Congressman Scott Tipton in the Republican primary. She was able to pull off an upset that, by the way, had not been done in Colorado since 1972, said Dick Wadhams, a former chair of the Colorado Republican Party. He points out that Boebert s opponent was endorsed by former President Donald Trump. So how did she pull it off? A lot of it was style, Wadhams said.
Tipton, 64, represented an older, moderate iteration of the Republican Party. On the other hand, Wadhams says Boebert, 34, employed combative rhetoric and didn t campaign much on her conservative-leaning district s central issues: Water, public lands, mining, oil and gas.
Credit: (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
File photo: Rep. Tom Malinowski
Editor’s Note: Funding provided by The Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Anti-Semitism
Of all the urgent tasks bearing down on the nation’s new president and there are many the quest to heal and unite a fractured American populace may be the most difficult. President Donald Trump may be gone, but the core of his unflinching base remains loyal; the country is arguably more polarized than it’s been since the Civil War and thus at its weakest.
President Joe Biden must now lead a nation in which public discourse has become as toxic and dangerous as the pandemic that surrounds it. It lays out an ideological clash that has been largely scripted and promoted by for-profit business models to fuel the ubiquitous and combustible chat of social media. That world of alternate realities is in turn amplified in the silos of cable TV news, which has turned political reporting into entertainment