How QAnon Ruined A Tiny Earth Day Party By Spreading Rumors Of A Jihad – By Kate Riga (Talking Points Memo) / May 8 2019
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.
https://twitter.com/TopInfoBlogs/status/1122712096066560000
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.
https://twitter.com/TopInfoBlogs/status/1122712096066560000
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.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/qanon-ruined-earth-day-celebration-preparing-jihad
