How QAnon Ruined A Tiny Earth Day Party By Spreading Rumors Of A Jihad

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Grass Valley, California is a city nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Each year, it plays host to Grass Valley Charter School’s Blue Marble Jubilee, an Earth Day celebration complete with egg carton painting and “frolicking” in bins of bird seed.

But since it’s 2019, QAnon ruined all of that.

Bizarrely enough, the conspiracies started when former FBI Director James Comey, living some 3,000 miles from Grass Valley, participated in the hashtag trend #FiveJobsIveHad on Twitter.

A Twitter user named Top Blog Sites, who has a QAnon website linked in his bio, extracted words from the tweet, somehow contorting the hashtag into “five Jihads.” He then circled the first letter of all the jobs Comey has had (grocery store clerk, vocal soloist for church weddings, chemist, strike-replacement high school teacher and FBI director, interrupted), stringing together the initials of the Grass Valley Charter School Foundation.

He noted that the group would be manning the Blue Marble Jubilee on May 11, musing that the tweet was a “coded false flag message” indicating that an attack may be planned to target the event.

The convoluted theory spread, with one QAnon follower warning that “nothing better happen at Grass Valley Charter School (@gvcharter) during their Blue Marble Jubilee on May 11, Jim,” before pointing out that Comey’s tweet had the same time stamp as when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. 

QAnon conspiracy theorists believe that there is a secret plot being fomented against President Donald Trump and his supporters by a “deep state” that involves some incoherent combination of coded messages, threatened coups and a secret pedophilic sex ring run by top Democrats.

As unhinged as the beliefs seem, they’ve catalyzed violence before, as when a gunman threatened Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in D.C. due to the man’s (baseless) belief that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta were keeping child sex slaves in the basement (the restaurant had no basement, to start).

According to The Union, a local outlet, Grass Valley Charter was inundated with calls and emails from across the country.

Police dismissed the threats as “not credible,” but the organizers cancelled the event anyway.

“In the current social and political climate, schools and communities must take into consideration matters never before imagined,” the foundation wrote on the event page, calling the cancellation an “abundance of caution.”

“Of course, there is no question about putting safety first, however, we are devastated by the impact on our festival,” said Foundation President Wendy Willoughby in a statement. “Not only is it disappointing that the cancellation of this event deprives the families of our school and community a day of fun and connection, but the Blue Marble Jubilee also serves as a fundraiser. We now find ourselves not only out the potential dollars raised at the event, but also the money already spent in preparation.”

While Grass Valley Charter mourned the loss of needed funds, QAnon believers reveled in a disaster averted.

“It definitely won’t now thanks to anons [sic] decoding abilities,” a QAnon follower tweeted smugly of the “Jihad.” “Amazing people in this movement.”

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Notable Replies

  1. “Amazing people in this movement.”

    “Amazingly stupid people in this movement.” Fixed it.

  2. Is there a vaccine against stupid? If not (wink, wink, nod, nod) a person could make gazillions if they could formulate one.

  3. You read something like this and wonder how humanity can survive…I mean, there is zero to this, no evidence whatsoever except the rantings of some lunatic on Twitter, who convinced other lunatics to harass a small organization, frightening them into shutting down a nice little event they had going. I can understand why they did that, receiving all those phone calls about a threat to the festival really gave them no choice…and the alternative was probably being inundated with self-proclaimed “protectors” and their guns to make sure the festival wasn’t attacked.

    Is this really the world we have to live in, where crazy conspiracies ruin all the good and we cower in fear of being attacked at any event? This isn’t the America I grew up in…I’m wondering if we will see that nation again before I die.

  4. Avatar for dont dont says:

    These are some truly disturbed f’ers.

  5. Q followers: mentally ill, but high functioning enough to blend in.

    Except, of course, when they show up at trump rallies with their Q t-shirts and signs.

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