Sarah Burris is a long-time veteran of political campaigns, having worked as a fundraiser and media director across the United States. She transitioned into reporting while working for Rock the Vote, Future Majority and Wiretap Magazine, covering the Millennial Generation's perspective during the presidential elections. As a political writer, Burris has had bylines at CNN, Salon.com, BNR, and AlterNet and serves as a senior digital editor for RawStory.com.
Donald Trump's social media website has been authorizing QAnon fanatics, but now Trump insiders on the site have taken the next step to promoting the QAnon world of conspiracy theories.
Speaking about the shocking morning of memes that Trump reposted, MSNBC reporter Ben Collins explained that Trump shared a meme referring to "The Storm," a QAnon conspiracy that says the so-called "deep state," Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden will be "rounded up and executed in public."
"This is a very dark space for the ex-president to be headed," said Collins.
QAnon forums have been quiet lately, he said because they ran out of hope that Trump was secretly still running the country, or that he would somehow rise to power. Trump sharing their posts has fired them up again, said Collins. One of the posts from the former president said, “nuke them from orbit” a reference to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton suggesting bombing them. Commenters begged for Trump to kill them in the comments.
"Your Twitter feed is the stuff of my nightmares," MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said of the screen captures Collins had posted. She said that she's been sending it around to political folks
She went on to cite a comment from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), saying, "I just think everyone, including the mainstream press, needs to take seriously the growing culmination between Trump's operation, the extremist 4chan/Q crowd and the monarchist new right." She also played a clip of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was appointed by Trump. Wray warned that there is a growing domestic terrorism movement from these groups.
Earlier Tuesday, it was revealed that the Google App store would not provide the Truth Social app to users because they don't have content moderation systems in place to ensure they could comply with the terms of service for Google's App store.
"There's such a -- I grapple with it myself — I did all day preparing for this hour," confessed Wallace. "There's such a temptation to say, 'it's the whack jobs,' 'it's the fringe,' 'it's not the mainstream.' But it feels like an urgent political mission -- and I think that's the point of Chris Murphy's tweet -- to explain that Donald Trump is one with the fringe and the crazy and the belief system that, again, is at the very intersection of ideology and domestic violent extremism."
Pollster Cornell Belcher explained that even if 5 percent of Americans buy into the QAnon conspiracies about assassinations, that's still 20 million Americans. Matthew Dowd noted that many of them are also armed, which the United States in a dangerous situation.