[SEATTLE] – (MTN) Seattle Parks supported by the Seattle Police Department completed a homeless sweep of Denny Park on Wednesday. City officials put notices up of the impending sweep several days ago, when the park had approximately 70 tent encampments. By early this morning, approximately 15 tents remained as Seattle police and parks crew, some wearing hazmat suits, gathered inside the park around 8 AM.
At 8:45 AM officials started to secure the park, while some of the remaining unhomed residents packed belongings or started to move to grassy areas just outside the park. Activists and mutual aid arrived, with some shouting at and heckling Seattle Police officers, drawing two squads of bicycle officers. Others associated with mutual aid brought replacement tents, hand warmers, heaters, and propane, while others helped pack belongings and load them into awaiting cars and vans.
[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”33″ gal_title=”Denny Park Homeless Sweep”]
City officials claim that the number of calls and complaints around Denny Park was increasing, as justification for the sweep. The city initially touted success in finding housing and hotel rooms for many of the people initially in the park, but further probing indicated that for most, March 15, will find them back out on the street.
People we spoke with across the political spectrum, including an SPD officer, expressed frustration with city leadership and the temporary nature of solutions offered. There was strong agreement that permanent housing solutions and medical care were needed. The city and the organizations they support largely focus on temporary housing and short-term programs, while long-term care and housing remain grossly underfunded. One man who claimed to be a business owner got into a shouting match with an activist, threatened him, and then drove around the block to confront the group. After a tense exchange we spoke of frustration, but only offered a solution of shipping the unhomed to Yakima to, “pick apples and cherries.”
Seattle officials did appear to apply a lighter touch during this sweep. For some people residing in the park, employees helped them move belongings to be picked up and relocated and waited while others packed belongings. One Seattle Police officer engaged in what could be described as constructive dialog with activists, despite little common ground being found. In contrast to a more community-oriented approach, in other areas of the park, city workers dumped the belongings of tents onto the ground and then gathered them up as trash, making no effort to review or catalog personal belongings.
The city of Seattle through public and private investment spends $1 billion a year in the battle against homelessness. Despite almost $85,000 per unhomed person available annually, Seattle has made little progress on solving the crisis. City officials swept Cal Anderson Park on December 18, 2020, only to have some people move to Miller Playfields and others move to Pioneer Square. Cal Anderson Park doesn’t have a significant homeless presence while business owners in Pioneer Square are complaining about a spike in encampments.
City officials state Denny Park will be closed for months for repair and rehabilitation. However as night fell, the yellow security tape had been torn down in many areas and area residents were ignoring the park closed signs.
With temperatures tickling 60 degrees and the sun shining, Kingsgate Carwash in Kirkland was buzzing. The bays were full, and lines of cars waited to pass through two touchless lanes while an American flag hung outside. Overhead, hard to see on the building wall, the anacronym “WWG1WGA” faces out toward 124th Ave NE. Where We Go One, We Go All is a rallying cry for the conspiracy theory QAnon.
Kingsgate Car Wash in Kirkland was busy on a sunny Wednesday morning
QAnon started in the dark corners of the Internet, with no one exactly sure who “Q” is, but several theories exist. The individual or individuals that started the movement claim to have a “Q level” security clearance within the government. Q now has millions of followers, some of who have become militant and believe Q is working anonymously to expose the deep state.
QAnon believers subscribe to the idea that an illegitimate shadow government runs the United States. The shadow government architects are liberals, Hollywood elites, Jews, the Clintons, George Soros, the Obamas, and others. Believers further think these individuals and groups are part of a vast international child trafficking ring that supports pedophilia and consumes children’s blood to remain youthful and energetic.
The most high-profile QAnon fueled incident before January 2021 involved Edgar Maddison Welch. On December 4, 2016, Welch entered Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., armed with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. Comet Ping Pong became ground zero for the QAnon pedophilia and blood-drinking liberal conspiracy theory.
Driving from North Carolina, Welch stormed the family-friendly restaurant, and as employees and customers fled in terror, he spent 20 minutes looking for the basement door. Comet Ping Pong has no basement. In frustration, he fired several rounds into a locked supply closet door before police surrounded the restaurant and convinced Welch to surrender.
Welch was sentenced to prison in 2017 and moved to a halfway house in March of 2020. His supervision ended on May 28. His actions in December became laughable within the moment because no one was hurt, and the ideas of QAnon were not mainstream. Today, the theory stands while the audience has grown much more prominent. The support of former President Donald Trump, the belief the 2020 election was stolen, and QAnon’s “save the children” ideas blend together for millions of Americans.
Since June 2020, the ideas supported by QAnon reached a fever pitch. QAnon espoused a “great awakening” where Donald Trump would be named the legitimate President and that warrants for the arrest of 195,000 people were already in place. The great awakening would be preceded by a total communications blackout, including the Internet and martial law declared. For the true believers of QAnon, these two events would signal that the deep state’s exposure was at hand.
Lawyers such as L Lin Wood, Sydney Powell, and Rudy Guiliani embraced some or all of the conspiracy theories within their legal filings. Believers eagerly awaited for Powell to “release the Kraken,” as she threatened. Any attempt to counter the narrative, including Trump-appointed judges and Supreme Court justices, was met with the accusation of being compromised by the deep state. As each promised event didn’t happen, the phrase “trust the plan” echoed through social media and the dark corners of the web.
By the time January 6, 2021, and the insurrection happened, followers became restless. Promised dates of the great awakening came and went. Q, using its social media channels, then moved the goalposts again to inauguration day. The theory being outgoing President Trump was waiting for all his enemies to be in the same place to start the great awakening. All the National Guard troops deployed to protect the Capitol? With so many deep state members in the same area, deployed troops would support mass arrests.
After Biden’s inauguration occurred, Q believers and the message “trust the plan” were fractured. Ron Watkins, who some believe is Q and is the son of 8Chan founder Jim Watkins, told his followers it was time to move on. Extremist organizations like Sovereign Citizen, listed as a domestic terrorism organization, moved in to scoop up crestfallen Q supporters, and a new theory was born.
Sovereign Citizen believes that Congress turned the United States into a corporation in 1871. Further, they think anything past the 14th Amendment and all Presidents elected after Ulysses S. Grant are illegitimate. Sovereign Citizen’s believe the correct inauguration day is March 4, not January 20. They think this because Franklin D. Roosevelt moved inauguration day in 1933.
The QAnon anacronym WWG1WGA isn’t easily visible to the casual observer
The new QAnon theory is Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 19th President on Thursday, March 4, 2021, either in Washington D.C. or Mar-A-Lago in Florida. Some believe Trump will form the new government in Florida, making Mar-A-Lago the seat of power. March 4 will also bring the great awakening, the 195,000 arrests, along with the arrests of the Supreme Court, House, and Senate, for betraying Donald Trump. Like previous theories, the promised great awakening will be preceded by a total blackout of communications. If you’re reading this right now on the Internet, it is unlikely those trusting the plan will be happy on March 4.
To the outside observer, this can seem humorous. In December 2016, a lone gunman looking for an imaginary basement filled with blood-drinking liberals appeared comical. In the four years since QAnon has grown more mainstream, Congressional representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene, former President Trump, and his inner circle have embraced the conspiracy. Blending with Sovereign Citizen, an organization that has murdered more than 40 people, the dangerous belief system continues to tear at our society’s fabric.
Now we come back to the other code of QAnon followers, WWG1WGA. The origin of “where we go one we go all” is a subject of debate. Many believe that the phrase, “where we go one we go all,” was inscribed on the bell of PT-109, the patrol boat John F. Kennedy commanded in World War II. However, there is nothing in the historical record from the U.S. Navy, National Geographic researchers, or the John F. Kennedy Library to support this.
It seems more likely the phrase comes from the 1996 ocean disaster thriller White Squall. The 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica used a similar expression of “so say we all” to symbolize unity in the face of a common enemy. The sun shines brightly in Kirkland today, as cars line up to get washed under the QAnon code “where we go one, we go all.” If there is one thing that is certain after March 4, there will be a moving of the goalposts and true believers saying to “trust the plan.”
Attempts to reach the owner of the car wash went unanswered.
Gab went offline for all users on February 19, 2021, for approximately 7 hours and deleted their Twitter account at the same time
During that outage, Cloudflare reported a 521 error, which indicated that the servers that host Gab was taken offline or shutdown
A group called Distributed Denial of Secrets released what they are calling ‘GabLeaks’ which included 70 gigabytes of data representing 40 million and posts and the account information for all Gab users
The group is only sharing the data with researchers and journalists because it contains passwords and other sensitive information
The data does not include pictures or videos, but does include private messages, private chats
When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn’t moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler’s displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications.
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