Conspiracy and Religion; George Floyd ‘Execution Was Staged Event’ says GOP RWNJ Cynthia Brehm

George Floyd ‘Execution Was Staged Event’ Claims Texas Politician Cynthia Brehm

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She also believes COVID-19 is a Democratic hoax.

George Floyd’s public execution was staged to create civil unrest, according to one Texas politician.

Cynthia Brehm — Republican Party Chair of Bexar County, one of the state’s largest — posted a conspiracy theory on Facebook, claiming the killing was premeditated and set up, with the intention of stymieing Donald Trump’s “rising approval rating.”

In her post, entitled “George Floyd — A Staged Event?” she called on her followers to “Tell me what you think”.

The Bexar County Republican Party chair has a new conspiracy theory. #satx #txelex pic.twitter.com/6T7GxT5DYG

— Gilbert Garcia (@gilgamesh470) June 3, 2020

“These officers were involved with something, I’m not sure exactly what, but something is just not adding up,” she wrote.

On Wednesday, the third-degree murder charge leveled at Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd, was upgraded to second-degree murder, while the other three officers involved in the arrest — Thomas Lane, J.A. Keung and Tou Thao — were newly charged with aiding and abetting the homicide.

“Also this supposed officer is now missing from his home, no where to be found has the smell of MK Ultra activation,” she continued, referring to the CIA mind-control experiments carried out in the 1950s.

“I think there is at the very least the ‘possibility’, that this was a filmed public execution of a black man by a white cop, with the purpose of creating racial tensions and driving a wedge in the growing group of anti deep state sentiment from common people, that have already been psychologically traumatized by Covid 19 fears.”

She went on to claim racial and gun violence were becoming commonplace in politically contested areas, especially in election years.

“Considering the rising approval rating of President Trump in the black community, an event like this was unfortunately ‘Predictable’.”

The post was deleted from Facebook, but not before San Antonio Express-News columnist Gilbert Garcia grabbed a screenshot, which quickly made its way around social media — and her party colleagues.

Many of her GOP peers were not impressed, and called for her resignation.

“These comments are disgusting and have no place in the Republican Party or in public discourse,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s spokesman John Wittman said in a statement Thursday morning. “Cynthia Brehm should immediately resign her position as Chair of the Bexar County Republican Party.”

Texas GOP Chairman James Dickey, Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, Congressman Chip Roy and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick all called for her to step down; Travis County Republican Party Chairman Matt Mackowiak meanwhile said she has been “an embarrassment for 2 years”

She has been an embarrassment for 2 years. With this deleted FB post last night, she is now an embarrassment to @TexasGOP and @gop.

She must resign now.

Bexar GOPers must support John Austin for chair in the runoff. @GregAbbott_TX @tedcruz @JohnCornyn @DanPatrick @georgepbush pic.twitter.com/XD11Cy7oKG

— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) June 3, 2020

Not all GOP members thought the conspiracy theory was wacky though; according to the Texas Tribune, Nueces County chairman Jim Kaelin posted the same text last week, calling it an “interesting perspective.”

Last month Brehm made headlines when she declared the coronavirus pandemic was a Democrat Party hoax.

“This is America and we shouldn’t have to be forced or mandated to wear a mask,” she told a rally at the time, per Express News.

“Why is this happening today? I’ll tell you why — all of this has been promulgated by the Democrats to undo all of the good that President Trump has done for our country, and they are worried.”

“So, take off your masks, exercise your constitutional rights. Stand up, speak up, and vote Republican.”

There have been almost 70,000 cases of COVID-19 reported in Texas alone so far, and 1,767 deaths.

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The links between QAnon Conspiracism and Fundamentalist Christianity

Is QAnon the newest American religion?

Bonnie Kristian Illustrated | Getty Images

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QAnon adherents, insofar as I’ve seen photos of them at President Trump’s campaign rallies or attached to reports on the conspiracy theory they profess, are remarkable mainly for how normal they appear. They look like Midwestern moms or the guy in your neighborhood who lets everyone borrow his pickup.

Still, QAnon isn’t mainstream, at least not yet. A CNN poll published last month found 76 percent of Americans have never heard of it. But QAnon’s affection for Trump and visibility at his events are raising the theory’s profile — and the QAnon movement is evolving in a curious way: It’s spawning a new religion, maybe even the first of new breed of religious organization in America.

The QAnon movement started on 4chan, an anonymous message board influential in online culture but generally considered outside the bounds of the respectable internet, not least because it has repeatedly made the news in connection to child pornography. That makes the site an odd first home for QAnon, whose narrative centers on a cabal of powerful figures in government, business, academia, and media who make time for child sex trafficking and satanic sacrifice in their busy schedule of world domination. Q is the movement’s anonymous digital prophet whose forum posts (“Q drops,” now migrated from 4chan to a similar site called 8kun) reveal both the nature of the cabal and Trump’s heroic plan to defeat it. QAnon’s most fervent followers reach a point of obsession, clinging to it even at cost of total estrangement from their bewildered families.

An in-depth report on QAnon in The Atlantic‘s June issue closes with the suggestion that QAnon could become the latest in a series of “thriving religious movements indigenous to America.” But research from a Concordia University doctoral student, Marc-André Argentino, shows the church of QAnon already exists and seems poised to spread. Argentino attended an online QAnon church where, he reports, two-hour Sunday services with several hundred attendees consist of prayer, communion, and interpretation of the Bible in light of Q drops and vice versa. The leaders’ goal, Argentino says, “is to train congregants to form their own home congregations in the future and grow the movement.”

It’s not inconceivable that they’ll succeed, especially after pandemic restrictions ease and in-person gatherings resume. (The pandemic, of course, fits neatly into the QAnon narrative as a plot to oust Trump before the mass arrests and executions of cabal members can begin.) Many QAnon members express a desire for community, describing how they try to convert loved ones to their cause and browse QAnon hashtags to make like-minded friends. QAnon church would fill that need, as religious gatherings long have done.

That’s what makes me think the church of QAnon may be a portent of things to come: Traditional religiosity is declining in America, but humanity will not cease to be religious. It will merely diversify its sources of increasingly customized religiosity. From lapsed evangelicals, as many QAnon adherents seem to be, to religiously unaffiliated “nones,” people crave the community, meaning, and purpose church provides, even if they abandon or reject its teachings.

Satisfying that craving with politics and conspiracy theories isn’t new, but the QAnon church’s self-description as a church stands out. It’s one thing for outside observers to characterize a political movement as religious in its enthusiasm or expectations of loyalty; it’s another for participants to explicitly brand their own community as religious and start holding services.

Whether other groups, especially of dramatically different political persuasions, will make the same leap is difficult to say. Could we see something comparable on the left?

On the one hand, there is some unique resonance with this style of religiosity and the political right. QAnon builds on apocalyptic thinking common in parts of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity in America. Q drops frequently include Bible passages, and the style of study of scripture and Q texts employed — the careful search for hidden prophetic meaning and correspondence to history and current events — is very much a creature of the religious right, an heir aberrant of Left Behind and The Late, Great Planet Earth.

On the other hand, one of the strangest things about QAnon is it’s a conspiracy theory born of victory, not defeat. Trump is president, after all. But typically, “conspiracy theories are for losers,” University of Miami political scientist Joseph Uscinski told The Daily Beast. “Normally you don’t expect the winning party to use them.” And perhaps this is why QAnon is taking a religious form: Having Trump in power allows for hope where most conspiracy theories offer only an account of evil. QAnon adherents believe their work decoding Q drops contributes to an achievable final triumph. Forming communities, then, has a purpose beyond commiseration.

If the victory-born nature of QAnon is thus significant, we might look for similar “churches” to pop up elsewhere as the national balance of power shifts. A Democratic president in the Trumpian mold — a populist demagogue prone to attributing every failure to sabotage — could inspire something similar. I wouldn’t expect the same Christian syncretism, but neopaganism (remember the story of the Brooklyn witches hexing Brett Kavanaugh?) or broadly new-age spiritualism might do the trick, producing a service with, say, meditation and a spell instead of prayer and communion.

Q, for one, would no doubt take this development in stride, adding it to the QAnon mythology for his followers — er, parishioners? — to parse next Sunday.

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