Drop 885 (Mar 8 2018) Everything has meaning.
This is not a game.
Learn to play the game.
SAPPORO, JAPAN NOVEMBER 2019
Anywhere you want to sit.
I know it's hard to get beer off tatami floors, but...
No, no, please. Feel... Make yourself at home totally.
I got five emails this morning.
New York Times, BBC, NPR, and FOX.
For me, those are the enemy.
What are these people are accusing you of?
- Have you heard of QAnon? - Yes.
What do you know about QAnon?
A type of movement that's shrouded in secrecy.
And I have heard of it, but I have no idea what it is.
I see. This is how the story goes.
I believe one of Donald Trump's most trusted people,
who has a Q level security clearance,
is dropping like these little tidbits of information anonymously online.
So, this is the second Q drop.
It really sets the stage for everything else.
Mockingbird. HRC detained, not arrested yet.
Where's Huma? Follow Huma.
This has nothing to do with Russia yet.
What is military intelligence?
Why go around the three-letter agencies?
God bless fellow patriots.
This information was dropped anonymously
by someone with a pseudonym QAnon.
- This is QAnon? - Yeah.
He rarely states specific facts with a period.
Basically, this is the very beginning of these drops
that have captivated the minds of...
- Millions. - Yeah.
And people are attacking me to get this shut down
because I provide a place for him to talk.
Or, her. Or, whatever it is.
I'm not going out of my way to host QAnon.
QAnon's just another user of my website.
- QAnon picked your website. - Correct.
Because every other website banned him.
Reddit banned him. 4chan banned him.
What about 8chan? Is there eight... Isn't there...
Yeah, that's my website. We have not banned him.
- You're 8chan? - Yeah.
- I'm your neighbor. - Oh. Wow.
You are a user?
No, but I know it.
What do you think? Like I've been your neighbor for two years now.
What'd you think I did?
I thought you were a Chinese translator.
Everybody likes free speech,
but there's a tipping point for everybody.
When is free speech too much?
The storming of the Capitol.
The Storm.
It was an event that Q had promised its followers for nearly three years.
The persona behind this movement,
an anonymous figure known only as Q,
had somehow risen from the darkest reaches of the Internet
to the seat of the Capitol.
And while a shocked nation searched for answers,
to me, it seemed like an inevitable conclusion
to an absurd and almost unbelievable story.
A story of how a website changed the world
all with the help of a single letter.
And we're gonna win big. Q just watch.
Q: INTO THE STORM
Have you ever wondered why we go to war
or why you never seem to be able to get out of debt?
Why there is poverty, division, and crime?
What if I told you there was a reason for it all?
What if I told you it was done on purpose?
OCALA, FLORIDA SEPTEMBER 2018
Q. The media's trying to label it as a conspiracy theory.
It's interesting how they use that. The conspiracy word.
How they relate conspiracy with Trump's audience.
Conspiring against what? What is it?
Did anybody ever ask that question? What did we conspired against?
The deep state? What is it?
What are we after? We just want information.
What are we a threat to?
We're a threat to the organizations that control the information.
That's all it is.
Good patriots in the US military and their global partners
asked Trump to run for president
so they could take back control of America legitimately
without alarming the public.
Trump was a good choice obviously
because he overcame the voter fraud and won.
But he was a patriot, and he was loved and admired by the public.
Even when he won, the cabal still had no idea what he was a part of,
and the sophisticated plan that was about to unfold against them.
The Plan. Now, in the normal world,
the word plan, it wouldn't have had any special meaning to me.
But in the Q universe, it takes on a totally different meaning.
Because whenever I hear plan, I think trust the plan.
And when I see the number 17, I think Q.
When I see an owl, I think Moloch.
The Nike slogan, Just Do It. Q.
I can't hear the name Clinton without thinking body count,
and it doesn't matter if you trust the plan or want to unravel it,
QAnon creeps into your thoughts.
It changes the lens through which you see the world.
And maybe that was Q's true purpose,
to lure in people with a question
then slowly change how they think.
- So, what is Q? - What is QAnon?
I am Q.
Q's method of reaching the masses
seemed like something pulled from the pages of a Sci-Fi novel.
They wore shirts and signs emblazoned with only the letter Q.
An anonymous character who shares cryptic messages
through an online forum in order to reveal a secret plan
and save the world from an evil global cabal.
- Hillary Clinton's a pedophile? - Worse.
What's worse than a pedophile?
Human sacrifice, child sacrifice, newborn babies.
QAnon also told its followers to question everything.
It was part interactive game,
part religion, part political movement.
More traction after some famous faces,
Roseanne Barr, Curt Schilling, the former major leaguer.
Followers shared a desire for revolution,
that all of the ills of the world were on the brink of being cured.
You could even get inside access to this plan.
You could even help.
- We voted for Obama each time. - Twice.
I bought into the media, the first black president.
Sure, let's check it out. Let's give him a shot. That's how I felt.
We always voted democrat.
We were in a democrat state.
We had a very busy lifestyle. We never really researched.
And now, with Q, our eyes are open.
That's why they call it The Great Awakening
'cause we're like, holy crap, there was a lot of stuff going on
that it was only our fault for not paying attention.
Jenn and Jaime had been redpilled in 2018.
And this concept of redpilling comes from that scene in The Matrix
where Keanu Reeves' character chooses to take the red pill,
which reveals a hidden reality.
All I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more.
This is how followers see Q, as the ultimate red pill.
That's one thing about Q. He's positive, he's patriotic.
Whoever the Q is, they want everybody to come together.
They want you to do your own individual research.
The media, everything, everybody's just lying to you.
We know the corruption is bad.
We just didn't realize how bad it was.
Q gives us an insight.
Millions of people were following
this supposed government insider's every message,
also known as Q drops,
waiting for the moment that justice would be served.
From October of 2017 and continuing through the 2020 election,
Q wrote nearly five thousand drops.
Sometimes there would be more than 10 drops in a single day.
Sometimes 10 days would go by without a single message.
Q's drops were numbered in sequence, interpreted by followers,
then translated into memes
and fired like ammo across the battlefield of the Internet
before eventually landing on your grandma's Facebook page.
And on more than one occasion,
they found their way to the President's Twitter feed,
the resolute desk of the Internet.
We don't believe Q is just one specific person.
We believe it's a team of what some people say is military people.
Back in October of 2017, before Q got started,
President Trump met with a number of military officials
and foreign dignitaries, as a president often will do.
But it's what he said in the press conference after
that caught people's attention.
Do you guys know what this represents?
Tell us, sir.
Maybe it's the calm before the storm.
What's the storm? What does that mean?
The calm before the storm.
Trump likes to troll the media,
and admittedly, this was a pretty fucking weird thing to say,
even for Trump. But once Q started posting,
the anticipation of the storm became a key part of the Q-lore.
Waiting for the moment that martial law would be triggered,
the evil global cabal rounded up,
and then for the military tribunals that would follow.
Some of these politicians are gonna be arrested and swooped up and...
I'm still waiting for all the arrests.
There's over 55 thousand sealed indictments right now.
They're all probably people that have stuff to do with trafficking, drugs.
I think there's just gonna be this big bust
that goes down for a whole bunch of stuff.
What the storm involves is elite military units going in,
arresting specific individuals.
It's not to be used against the people long term,
it's to temporarily restore order.
What storm, Mr. President?
We have the world's great military people in this room,
I will tell you that.
Q understood how to turn attacks into ammunition.
The more the mainstream media tried to debunk Qanon...
Like unfortunately, a lot more people believe in this than you think they do.
The more they became a part of the conspiracy against it.
And eventually, it was estimated that tens of millions believed in Q.
But the campaign to derail QAnon started gaining steam in 2018
when Reddit, a popular Internet forum, banned QAnon,
and that's when I picked up a camera.
I had spent much of the last decade talking to audiences
about why digital privacy mattered.
And now, it seemed that QAnon was on the front lines of a new debate.
Just how free speech online should actually be.
And even though I don't believe Hillary Clinton eats babies,
I also wasn't convinced
that silencing Q's followers was the right idea either.
Q derives its power from anonymity.
The faceless Anon could be anyone in the minds of its followers.
A flawless patriot mobilizing an army without fear of repercussion.
So, I set out to chart Q's origins, and meet the players
in order to understand the underlying motives and build a list of suspects.
It seemed unmasking Q might bring an end
to what in 2018 was still mostly a game.
So, we don't really have a list of plausible Qs at this point.
Things we think we know about this guy: he's probably military,
high IQ, probably high psychopathy, operating alone.
Definitely a homebody.
It reads almost like you're looking at some kind of secret memo.
It really feels like somebody who has probably
their whole life wanted the spotlight shined on them.
This is the moment that they always knew would come, and now it's here.
But to understand QAnon,
you have to start at the place where Q posts, 8chan.
8chan is one of many imageboard websites.
An imageboard is essentially an Internet forum
where folks can share images and discuss different topics.
On 8chan, there are hundreds of boards, and each topic gets its own board.
They've got it all here, diaper porn, white supremacy, the occult.
They've also got videogames and Christianity.
Seriously, Christians is in their top 10 boards, and Islam isn't far behind.
If it's legal within the bounds of US law, it's legal on 8chan.
And everybody who posts there is anonymous.
And that's why users call themselves Anons.
Or anonymous users.
And those who run the site
consider it to be the ultimate expression of free speech.
And it's the website that Q calls home.
It was originally created by Fredrick Brennan when he was 19 years old.
Q is extremely genius
in how he is able to keep putting out these breadcrumbs, as he calls them.
Or as the users call them and keep everybody engaged.
Fred lives in the Philippines,
and has a rare genetic disorder called brittle bone disease.
In 2018, I reached out to him over Twitter.
He seemed hesitant at first,
though once we started talking on Skype,
the conversation went on for hours.
Q is whoever you want it to be. You know what I mean?
I've talked to different Q believers.
On one day they'll think it's Steve Bannon,
on another day they'll think it's, sometimes they'll even think it's me.
I have this one guy who asks me all the time are you Q?
Are you Q? And he won't believe it if I say no.
Fred also played a role within the Q narrative.
One day, a mysterious giant blue Q appeared at his apartment in Manila.
This is apparently a gift from Q, as referenced in one of the drops.
Even my little thing of receiving the Q,
if you will debate with a Q believer why Q was real,
my post with the Q ironically is one of the reasons that Q exists now.
I have the Q if you wanna see it.
May, do you wanna go get that? Go get the blue Q.
Now, being Q'd was one of the most integral mechanics of QAnon.
Q had somehow taken the banality of a retweet
and elevated the meaning to be part of a higher plan
or purpose connected to Trump.
There was a sense that Q was always watching, always making moves.
It was a powerful notion,
and it transformed followers into true believers.
I asked a friend who else do you know who's going to the rally?
And she said well, I think Joy is going.
So she became famous for wearing the MAGA dress to the Emmys.
So, I offered to pick Joy up at the airport and bring her over.
We were invited VIP, and we went in front of the VIP line.
I was the second or third person in the door.
This is the Q. This is wood. This is not cardboard.
And we were right pretty much in the center a couple rows back,
right in front of President Trump.
Trump came out, and yeah, first he pointed straight to me.
I instantly understood the communication.
I whipped out my phone.
My son, Jordan, he turned around to me
and goes I think President Trump just pointed to it. To me.
He looks at me, and he gives me a little finger wag. Fairly subtle.
Yeah, it just sort of happened. It wasn't planned.
And someone said Q's looking for whoever had a cutout.
Q's looking for you.
So, then, people behind me started shouting
hey, guy in the red shirt, you just made Q.
Q found me within six minutes, which means that he had eyes on the rally.
Somehow, they knew my name.
Q don't reach out to anybody, he just puts you in his drops.
And he said VIPs, thank you patriots.
He was right with us.
Build the wall. Build the wall. And he was chanting with us. It was funny.
I think Q is something that could only happen in our current day,
where there are just so many people
distrusting of all of the mainstream sources.
So, the fact that people are speaking out,
and that the holes in the system are so clear
that it only takes a five-minute YouTube video
to get people on your side, that's the real problem.
Hello world, Jordan Sather reporting for duty.
Hi. Thanks for joining me.
This is the video I have been wanting to make forever.
And since Q's messages were hard to understand,
followers would turn to YouTubers, or Qtubers.
People who spent every day analyzing Q's drops,
to tell them what it all meant.
Obviously today is a big day.
Yes, this is the real deal, guys. This is it.
Guys, we have to be very careful about what's about to happen.
The absolute biggest mindfuck for truthers that we've ever seen.
I would just say you know what? Sit back. Hey, pop some popcorn.
I mean, shit's gonna hit the fan.
YouTube directed normies to Q.
it's algorithms the mathematical equivalent of a digital sociopath
with just one goal: keeping your attention.
You have so much more than you know. So much.
Satanic pedophile elites.
Looks like he's having a relationship with a minor.
Deceptive and manipulative.
It looks suspicious.
Oh my god, this is so sick.
Again, thank you all for supporting on Patreon.
Please check out some of my other videos.
Keep up the fight. You can follow me on Twitter.
Also, hit the like button if you guys like this content,
and want to see me make more.
I was turned on to Q
probably about a month and a half after it started.
I had seen on different websites and YouTube channels
how a lot of people started talking about this QAnon phenomenon.
I thought it was a great topic for my channel.
What's interesting now is that Q's talking more about...
Craig James is one of the most popular QTubers.
When we first met, he'd been living and breathing Q for months
and had built a career around it.
I got god above, right?
So, the crosses, I like to keep those the highest 'cause god's first.
But then I got Trump looking over our work.
It's his war face. It's my favorite.
For home defense, obviously.
Don't keep that.
OCTOBER 2018
How long has it been since there's been a Q drop?
It's been 10 days. I'm checking my phone all day.
I'm checking the computer all night.
So, as soon as a Q post is up, I'm doing a breakdown video analysis of it.
It says freedom of the press is vital to retain.
Trust the plan. There are a lot more good than bad.
My channel on YouTube has around 166 thousand subscribers right now.
That's basically looking at about two and a half million views a month.
So, the reach is there. We're reaching millions of people.
Another guy that's doing great work on the Q posts in my opinion
would be somebody like Dustin Nemos.
He's got a pretty good channel.
This is a new movie from Disney of all places,
and you guys know how I feel about Disney.
It's filled with pedophiles and abuse.
I'm just saying, there it is. You see it?
That big, beautiful brazen Q right there on the chest of this guy's shirt.
My channel has just grown so much.
It's unbelievable. This Q thing. It's exponential.
They even dropped some of the metrics on one of the boards,
and they went from early a couple dozen thousand
to over a million in a few months.
It's just exponential growth.
I can get on YouTube and speak my piece.
I've been trying to tell people the truth all my life.
Why not go where someone might actually listen
instead of harassing my family members?
Hi, everybody. I wanna do a quick video and update you guys.
There's people out there like Liz Crokin
who are just completely experts in breaking this down.
President Trump can't just come out and say, hey, guess what?
The world's being run by satanic pedophiles
who rape and torture babies, and drink their blood.
Q asked questions, and followers conjured answers.
Almost any theory was welcome.
The most predominant theory was that a group of global elites,
including Hollywood celebrities,
prominent politicians, and billionaires,
were running a sex trafficking ring
and eating babies for their rejuvenating powers.
Calling your enemy a baby eater is an age-old strategy.
Atrocity stories were used during the Crusades against Islam,
as British propaganda against Germany during World War I,
and against the Jewish people since, well, forever.
For many Q followers,
believing in this movement alienated them from their friends, family,
and in some cases, cost them their careers.
I actually got my first news job when I was 16 or 17.
I've worked on two presidential campaigns,
I've worked for many different media companies.
I worked for the Tribune company
and I ran their gossip column for seven years.
I had people in the mainstream media tell me
we will not cover the child sex trafficking, and I found it appalling.
So, I left the mainstream media,
but I was also blacklisted and censored from other organizations.
So, I rely completely on donations.
I don't make enough money to pay all of my bills.
They're all frauds. They're all puppets.
They are all tools
that are used by and manipulated by the deep state to distract.
To distract from what is really going on in Hollywood,
and that is the rape, torture,
trafficking, and sacrificing of children.
Literally nothing would surprise me.
So, if you tell me that aliens are real
and the earth's flat, or it's... We're being...
The earth's flat wouldn't surprise you?
- No. - Really?
There is nothing that...
I expose people that literally rape and eat babies.
To me, if that is able to exist in this world,
I think anything is possible.
After Q dropped his first drop,
I just immediately knew that this was legit.
I just knew it intuitively.
I started researching some of the things that Q was posting,
and everything resonated with me, and everything added up.
So, yeah, so I lost a ton of friends from high school,
I've had strained relationships with family members.
I became targeted, so I have been followed and harassed
ever since I went public telling the truth about Pizzagate.
PIZZAGATE IS REAL
So, QAnon is almost sort of a mega conspiracy theory
that absorbs so many conspiracy theories
both of our time and decades ago.
We saw in the runup, especially in the 2016 election,
a lot of conspiracy theories gaining steam,
that have now been folded into QAnon,
and are sort the precursors to QAnon.
So, for example, Pizzagate...
Pizzagate is something that started
with the release of John Podesta's hacked emails on WikiLeaks.
People started going through,
and they're seeing these references to pizza.
And these are mostly innocuous references,
but they're like wow, this guy's getting a lot of pizza.
And so, someone who's going through it
and really is sort of looking for nefarious explanations,
they see that John Podesta is going to this Comet Ping Pong place,
which is a pizzeria in Washington,
and these guys are just screaming about
how John Podesta, Hillary Clinton,
they're raping children in this dungeon,
and pizza is the codeword for essentially a child you wanna rape.
Q doesn't overtly mention Pizzagate in the drops.
Right, and that's something
that I think a lot of researchers get wrong about it.
They always say that one grew out of the other,
and maybe, but only in the methodology.
Getting people to pay attention to you because of codes.
In Jack Posobiec's case, he was relatively little known,
but he was in the DC area,
and so he went to Comet Ping Pong
and livestreamed himself sort of like,
okay, I'm going into this child rape dungeon.
And I decided that I wanted to go for some pizza.
Jack Posobiec actually took this weird route where he claimed
that he went to Comet Ping Pong to debunk Pizzagate.
Which is... If you play back the footage from that night
is absolutely not what was going on.
We're gonna go in, and we're gonna infiltrate Comet Pizza.
I thought why don't I just show people that it's a regular restaurant?
I was making fun of people who believe in this type of stuff.
And partially that's on me because I didn't understand
that the IQ of the Internet is below the average.
So, a lot of people have been going into that back room.
So, a secret-secret door to get into the bathroom. See that?
He's walking around the restaurant
being like some creepy stuff in here, guys. Like I think we're being watched.
See the the face on the wall over there?
I mean, it did end up sort of fanning the flames, right?
Like more people believed in it after your video.
Inadvertently, yeah.
I understand that to you, this is maybe like a game,
but considering that I myself or my staff received death threats, it's...
I tried to explain to them, I said, I'm not trying to push this thing.
I'm actually trying to go in the other direction,
and then say said well, we don't care.
We just want you to go.
Wow. Wow. Wow.
- It almost makes bigger news. - Wow.
And then going on Infowars and detailing your experience,
traveling to the pizza place,
just being like I don't know man, it was really weird. That's not debunking.
Pizzagate. It has been trending on Twitter.
Certainly, some weird stuff there. We'll see if that trend continues.
The culmination of that comes in December
when the man from North Carolina comes up and fires some shots,
claims here's there to rescue children.
28-year-old Edgar Madison Welch was inspired by a lie spread online.
QAnon is almost a more palatable way to look at something like Pizzagate
because Pizzagate is so disprovable.
Okay, in the basement of Comet Ping Pong they're saying
there's a rape dungeon.
Well, Comet Ping Pong doesn't have a basement.
So, oh well. But QAnon is much vaguer.
You can always say, your interpretation of QAnon is wrong,
but that doesn't mean that QAnon itself is wrong or fake.
What is QAnon? Where did it come from?
But Jack did try to debunk Q,
even pretending that he knew who started it,
claiming that Q was a LARP.
Now, LARP stands for live action roleplay,
which usually refers to people dressing up like wizards and elves
to live out a collective fantasy.
In this case, calling Q a LARP implied
that Q was just some A hole pretending to be a secret government insider.
And Q didn't like that so much,
going so far as to call Jack out in a drop.
And in doing so, sending the Q army after him.
This digital army worked in unison,
attacking targets with harassment campaigns, or cheering allies,
usually by posting a meme or simply scrawling Q sent me.
It makes it very hard to report or deal with them,
because you both know that there's a good chance
they're lying to you about anything,
and that they're also collecting what you're saying to them,
and either recording it or, I mean, I've asked people for comment
and then like 20 minutes later they posted my phone number
and the email and everything to their fans, and yeah.
The Q army would be us. So, people like me.
Everyone that follows Q is part of the the Q army.
Q would often repeat itself using key words and phrases
that found their way onto mugs, t-shirts, hats,
and the occasional baby.
We have calm before the storm, red October, this is not a game,
Godfather III, trust the plan, dark to light, Alice in Wonderland,
future proves past, panic in DC, the great awakening, the storm,
do you believe in coincidences? And topping the charts...
Where we go one, we go all.
It's a reference to a largely forgotten '90s flick, called White Squall.
You told us where we go one, we go all. Well, we believed you.
Q understands that repetition is a useful psychological tactic
when trying to mobilize people behind a common cause.
It's also a clue that leads us to a much bigger question,
who Q actually is.
Now, when considering possible suspects,
false positives are everywhere.
And just looking at Q's digital trail,
I can make a case for any number of people being behind the operation.
Hell, I can even make a case for myself.
You can really find yourself falling down a hole,
in terms of trying to find out who Q is.
Obviously, the one QAnon people think is
that they think it's someone close to Trump.
So, they think it's Donald Trump Jr. Maybe it's Michael Flynn.
Do you think that Flynn is in on it?
Flynn seems to be aware of it for sure.
He's signing things where we go one, we go all.
You know, that's a Q expression.
Q has said that less than 10 people in the world can identify me.
But there are several theories.
There's a guy named Vincent Fusca
who's been filmed at several Trump rallies.
I think it's Vincent Fusca who's actually JFK Junior
'cause if you look at his grave in Arlington Cemetery,
from above, it's this huge Q.
He didn't die. He was already Trump's best friend,
and they've been working together all along.
Q is a real insider with real inside information.
It's not one person, that's for sure. It's a group of people.
There's always been the thought that like Q is maybe a team,
but I've kind of suspected it might be like one person
who's like an aide something.
It's safe to say that Roger Stone and Q sort of speak
to the same cut of the conservative base.
You can't rule out some foreign influence operation,
although, I don't think there's a ton of evidence
pointing in that direction now.
I was thinking more like maybe Steve Miller or Dan Scavino.
So, what you're saying is you are not Q.
No, I'm not.
Steve Bannon would be a high possibility for me.
He would be probably one of my higher up candidates.
I think Q is President Trump.
The verifications that we've seen between his Twitter account
and posts by Q where they're almost dropping posts at the same time...
This Q post came out September 30th at 14:53. 2:53 PM.
Then you got Donald J. Trump tweeted at 2:56, three minutes after Q.
If you look at the very end, stay tuned and watch. See that?
When you start looking into it,
like when I was trying to figure out who was behind QAnon,
it was like I gotta follow the money. Like, of course.
Some of the first promoters of QAnon is some of the first people
who took this from Internet 4chan thing into something that was more accessible
and easier to reach people.
So, I mean, these were people with names like Pamphlet Anon.
He runs the site called Patriot Soapbox.
Good morning, afternoon, evening around the world, patriots.
It's top of the hour.
You're listening to We the People, Patriot Soapbox, 24/7 livestream.
Patriot Soapbox ran the earliest and most successful chatroom
dedicated to Q before starting a 24-hour QAnon YouTube channel.
These are people who are making money off of QAnon
through their livestreams that people donate to.
They would seem like one of the major suspects.
Like most Anons,
the couple behind Patriot Soapbox was deeply distrustful of mainstream media.
To compound matters, NBC had written an article
that suggested Patriot Soapbox might be behind Q.
The article also revealed their real names to the world.
Yeah, it was a big thing when we got doxed.
Our names weren't out there, and if we had our way,
they still wouldn't be, probably.
One of the things that made it so interesting and mysterious
was like you didn't know who was talking to you.
It could be anybody, and you know, facing...
That's true. When they thought I was Don Jr. we got like...
Oh my gosh that was so funny.
I was the one that latched on first.
One day I saw a post on some mysterious insider,
and I immediately started following on 4chan.
So, when did you decide to quit your respective jobs
or whatever you were doing before and go full time on this?
February 15th was my last day of work.
I had already thrown myself into it full time at that point.
Everybody that's here, go ahead and introduce yourself.
Jane Anon LaBay from Illinois.
- We're from the Pacific Northwest. - Freedom Anon from Arizona.
- M Tex from Missouri. - Warrior B-Yotch from Wisconsin.
We're sorry everybody. I know it's hard.
There's a lot of us tuning in tonight.
The impetus was trying to provide a platform
that allowed people to just speak their mind
with a bare minimum of technological knowledge.
- Was there a specific age group? - Mainly boomers. Retirees.
Many of the people I've met here,
this is more than I could've ever imagined my life to be.
Uh, somebody told Pam this was a bad idea.
Yes, exactly right. It was a bad idea for the deep state.
It certainly wasn't a bad idea for us.
Despite all the hate that boomers got,
they had a lot to offer, and they were not being engaged.
We have a full book of like letters.
We get letters from people that tell us
that we have like saved them from depression and death and suicide.
- It's weird. - It blows your mind.
I've read these stupid hit pieces they write about,
my husband started reading Q posts,
and now we don't talk or whatever.
And I fear for his mental wellbeing.
And then there were all these other weird people
that come out of like nowhere. This Travis View guy.
Iit's where their whole persona is just like attacking anybody
that covers the Q posts.
Like in any good game, QAnons have opposition.
People who are just as obsessed with Q,
only they devote their time to debunking it.
When I created my account,
I thought I was going to use it to make snarky comments occasionally.
Just sort of do it with the safety of anonymity
as I've done for years and years and years.
I've always been sort of an anonymous shitposter through accounts
since I was like 14.
I was just sort of like irritated with QAnon,
and I started making these screenshots about what they're doing
and what they're up to 'cause it was pissing me off
that they were operating in the shadows,
and they're believing these crazy things,
and no one was talking about it.
And so I wanted to show people.
Welcome, listeners to the 56th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rockatansky...
- Julian Fields. - And Travis View.
But before all that, QAnon news.
We're like a Brita water filter for all the horrible shit on the Internet.
Bad for the world, good for the podcast.
So, we may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg.
Llike they know how crazy it sounds, and so they won't actually come out
and out themselves that they believe in this shit.
So, I think when we talk about QAnon believers versus nonbelievers,
I think that's actually the wrong way to look at it.
These beliefs have been festering in American consciousness way before.
That's the scary thing is that if 8chan went down,
Q never came back, it would still be just as strong.
Now, Q didn't actually start on 8chan.
Q started on 4chan, its less infamous stepfather.
Both 4chan and 8chan have very similar formats,
except 4chan is more heavily moderated.
So, one day, Q decided to move on.
Q moves from 4chan to 8chan to CBTS, or Calm Before the Storm.
They move to a board that is controlled by a QAnon true believer.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA
When Q moved from 4chan to 8chan,
for some reason, Q chose Paul's board.
Paul Furber, also known as Baruch The Scribe.
An Anon living in South Africa.
Now, Furber was another character named in the NBC article
as a likely suspect for Q.
So, I was surprised he was going to talk
and more surprised still that he accepted my offer
to come visit him in Johannesburg.
Though we had communicated over Skype,
I wasn't even sure what he looked like.
And if Paul had started Q or knew who did,
then he would be extremely well versed in the art of deception.
What you see is what you get with me.
I'm going to just be honest here.
No one has ever caught me in a single lie about this whole incident,
and I I'll challenge anyone who claims that
because I decided very early on that I would tell the truth
about what happened and what I thought at the time.
Why did Q trust your board?
I would imagine that I was vetted in the background.
After we got basically blown off 4chan like a pile of leaves in the wind,
that Q had a look at 8chan and saw there was a CBTS board.
Q showed up on my board, and it was a mixture of pure fear
and awesome responsibility and excitement
and all kind of rolled into one second.
I remember like telling my wife at supper
that Q has posted on my board,
and she was like, wow, so he has moved.
What I remember about those days was just the intensity of it all.
Because so much was happening,
so Paul would come out and grab a coffee.
While the kettle was boiling,
he would tell us what's been the latest with Q,
and then he'd disappear again.
I had to be reminded that it was Christmas Eve.
- Do you remember that? - I do.
I said, no, but Q has just like posted Merry Christmas, patriots.
I have to go and run the board.
This is what my daily view would look like in the eye of the storm.
People could post whatever they wanted.
There was a lot of research.
This is a local archival backup of the whole board.
I used to take automatic backups every hour.
Q would post its drops on CBTS,
the first board on 8chan devoted to researching Q.
When making a post, Q would enter a secret password.
That password would get cryptographically scrambled,
resulting in something called a tripcode.
It's essentially a digital signature
that lets everyone know the real Q was posting,
all while remaining anonymous.
Q's drops would often include leading questions and clues.
Anons would go on digs,
scouring the Internet for answers,
and post what they'd found on the board.
Specialized Anons, called bakers,
would then select the best research and theories
that came from the digs.
Being a baker is a terrible job.
It's like laying down railroad tracks in front of an oncoming train
because you have a thousand monkeys inside a thread,
all throwing poo at you.
However, in amongst that is a piece of pure gold,
and you have to make sure that you both see it
and get it into the next thread.
The bakers made Q's job a little easier.
Q could look at the curated research and theories
and fold its favorite answers into an ever expanding narrative.
Anons would then thank the bakers, usually with some porn.
Q is extremely intelligent on how he drops his posts.
And then Trump says something similar.
And then they tie that all together into proof Q exists.
Anybody, I'll show 'em Q proofs and say, look, talk me out of it.
Tell me why this ain't real, or tell me, prove it wrong.
Q Proofs. Evidence that Q is close to Trump.
Or close to somebody who is close to Trump.
Photos, random codes, obtuse and sometimes dated references.
They inspire the player to research online,
to connect whatever dots they may find, and invent new theories.
Trump put this photo on Twitter.
So, you can see if you trace the thumbs, they make a Q.
Twitter assigns a filename of totally random numbers and letters.
And the filename just happens to start with do it Q.
Q came up with things that were so utterly outrageous.
Yeah, they still blow my mind.
Remarkable times in Saudi Arabia.
There's been an unprecedented anticorruption purge.
Q basically predicted the arrest
of dozens of members of the Saudi royal family.
This is when I realized that Q was the real deal.
November the 10th I think it was,
Q posted a couple of original photos of Air Force One,
which we then tracked down.
It matched the president's itinerary exactly.
We keep it in tiptop shape.
We call it sometimes tippy top shape. And it's a great, great place.
I want somebody to talk me out of why Trump said tippy top.
And then he makes this reference to every dog has its day.
I guess officially you would say that John McCain passed yesterday,
which was August 25th, but what is today?
I'm not making this up. It is the national dog day.
There's the January 13th DEFCON1 Hawaii missile proof.
That emergency alert that said
that there was an incoming ballistic missile to Hawaii to seek shelter
and that it was not a drill did send out a sense of panic.
When Q, for instance, just tacks on the Catholic version of the Lord's Prayer
onto one of his posts, and then three weeks later,
suddenly the pope announce that he wants to change the Lord's Prayer.
And Q pops up the next day and says, did you see the news?
This man knew the mind of the pope
who lives in one of the most closely guarded buildings in the world,
which is the Vatican. How could he possibly have known that?
Because he's a senior Mil Int guy standing next to the president
who has satellite tracking that we can only dream of.
All Q does is that Q throws out a lot of nonsense,
and the claims that hit are treated as psychic almost.
But the ones that fail, it was something else.
There's an explanation.
There's a rationalization, so we can dismiss that.
All Q claims that appear to be predictive prove that Q is real,
and all the ones that fail can be dismissed for one reason or another.
Trump does a video.
Instead of saying, you just watch, he said Q just watch.
We're gonna win, and we're gonna win big. Q just watch.
To me, this looks like another proof of Q
that President Trump would pick the number 17
to be his official jersey number.
The 17th letter of the alphabet is Q.
It says can POTUS tweet a misspelling with a Q? Trump tweeted this here.
I've seen so many good, strong, solid reasons to think
that Q is just mathematically impossible to be anything other
than a legitimate insider working with Trump to disclose what's happening.
Everything he says ends up coming true in some form or fashion.
When he makes a prediction, he'll say this is gonna happen, and it does.
I've stopped believing in coincidences.
I used to believe in them, but I don't anymore.
Paul Furber, Patriot Soapbox, and an aspiring journalist named Tracy Beanz
ushered Q into wide Internet fame.
But it's arguable that Q would never have broken into the mainstream
without the help of this guy.
It can be attacked as a conspiracy theory
until you see every single statement that QAnon is making
can be proved to be true.
Jerome Corsi has 20-plus years of planting wild conspiracy theories
into the mainstream.
A man whose name should be a household word,
it's dr. Jerome Corsi.
From the John Kerry Swift Boat campaign of 2004
that helped to derail the democrats' presidential bid,
to the Obama birther story.
Sure, let's all believe President Obama was born in Hawaii like he says he is.
To you name it.
There's no evidence that Hitler died. What happened to him?
And when he was invited on Patriot Soapbox to discuss Q,
he made an impression.
This grizzled old veteran of chasing the deep state was telling us
that he rates Q, and he thinks he's legit.
I'm a big fan from way back when.
So, we invited him to come and chat.
Mr. Corsi, I'd like to let you know how honored it is to be sitting here
and just listening to your voice and...
The one video that kind of changed my perspective was a Jerome Corsi video,
and it was Jerome Corsi doing a full breakdown of a QAnon post,
and I was just fascinated.
And the pen is a Mont Blanc ink pen,
that Trump has used for a long time.
And so, when QAnon showed a picture of the pen and the desk
and says, now, look familiar? Note the desk.
That's Camp David over the weekend,
and that picture had to have been taken by somebody who was there
with President Trump.
Cause he was, at the time, the bureau chief for Alex Jones's Infowars.
So, dr. Corsi, it's great to have you here.
I'm honored now to be an official part of Infowars, and...
Jerome's brought a lot of people to the movement in general.
Honestly, if Alex hadn't covered Q through Corsi,
I would've never covered it.
I basically know from sources who QAnon is.
A lot of what I saw QAnon say was really good intel
and is spot on with other intel I had.
Everybody's jumping ship now... I'm getting chills.
...Over to Make America Great Again.
God, this is so incredible. This is real. This is happening.
Alex Jones and all of them, the intellectual class,
the intelligentsia would watch that, and they would think,
the audience is laughing along with us, right?
But when Donald Trump won the presidency, it flipped the script
because suddenly, this is not just jokes on the Internet.
This is not just crazy people.
There's a real impact from people moving away from the mainstream.
And it doesn't really matter what they're moving towards
because even Bernie Sanders was an example
of people moving away from the mainstream
faster than the political process in the United States would've wanted to.
- Hi, Baruch. - It's terrifying.
The fact that the world is run by Satan worshippers.
We've had confirmation now from the individual
who is obviously one of President Trump's right-hand men.
January 5th, 2018.
Paul is rolling high off of his Infowars appearance.
He's planning to write a book.
Then something happens behind the scenes
that makes Paul suspicious that Q was no longer real.
The board owner can see a whole lot of things
that the normal user can't see.
So, I can click on a post as the board owner,
and I can see a scrambled version of the IP address.
An IP address is kind of like your phone number.
And if the person on the other end has caller ID, they know who you are.
I had seen the ones that Q had been posting from,
and this was nothing like, this was not even close.
The first thing that was wrong
was that they were all from exactly the same address,
which was something Q had never done before.
Q posted from at least six different devices and addresses,
because of security reasons.
Very few people agreed with me that it was a fake.
I mean, did you think that it was possible that it was a fake Q?
No. To me, it seems like there's one continuous handoff
from one identifier to the next as far as Q's concerned.
I think he convinced both Corsi and Coleman Rogers at that point
that the posts were illegitimate.
Coleman Rogers was trying to start a fucking news network,
and Corsi was trying to make money.
Corsi was making thousands of dollars per stream on those livestreams.
I did not. He was making thousands of dollars?
And Dr. Corsi funnily enough was on my side initially,
but dr. Corsi changed his mind within a few days.
I checked it out with one of my sources
who talks to the White House pretty constantly,
and they seem to think that this is Q.
Here's the argument. Okay? They're saying that...
He and I'd agreed to disagree.
He thought it was still the same Q continuing.
Eventually, Coleman Rogers had to cut ties with Corsi
because Corsi was threatening his revenue stream.
The last straw ended up coming
when Q posted about people making personal financial gain
from the movement.
But nobody was... He didn't name him and that point.
Honey. Can't even finish a thought.
I don't even know what I was saying now.
Making money from the movement.
Q came in there and made that post about...
- Be careful who you follow. - Be careful who you follow.
People are making personal gain off off of this movement.
- And he immediately took it as... - Personal.
- Slight too, slight directed at him. - At him.
Pamphlet Anon is an idiot.
I don't say that lightly. He is a very controllable idiot.
He was very easily convinced by Baruch
about whatever Baruch thought was needed to be done.
Paul decides to block Q from using the tripcode.
In fact, Paul blocks everyone from being able to use tripcodes.
So, what does Q do? Q goes somewhere the tripcode will work.
The board run by Coleman Rogers from Patriot Soapbox.
Q left and went to this board that I had created.
Tell me a little bit about the board change that happened.
- What did you feel like? - On top of the world.
This is a really important role that I now have in my hands.
I kind of felt for Baruch of course.
He took it rough. Like you could hear it in his voice.
Like it sucked everything out of him. And then he got mad.
For him, it all rested on this idea that Q would never do that to me.
And he looked for every confirmation he could.
So, was that the real Q? I'm not sure.
Actually, I think, hang on, I think CodeMonkey made an announcement.
In the 8chan hierarchy of power, the board owner was near the top.
There was only one person above Paul, and that was CodeMonkey.
CodeMonkey, as the admin of 8chan,
he steps in and says, oh no, this is the real Q.
The buck stops with him. So, if he's saying this is the real Q,
then, as far as the public goes, or perhaps someone who,
like Paul Furber who disputes this, there's not anywhere you can go
because he has sort of the ultimate access
in terms of the technology of 8chan.
Ultimately, I blame CodeMonkey
because without his help, fake Q would've gone absolutely nowhere.
I sent a private message to CodeMonkey, and I said,
dude, thanks for throwing the whole board under the bus.
That is not Q, and you know it.
When you're online and you're up against the administrator,
you're wasting your time.
And that's where Paul Furber kind of jumps off the train.
There was this bunch of hardcore Anons on CBTS that said,
this is a LARP. Q is compromised, bye.
But most of the sheep immediately moved over to the storm.
They believed it. 'Cause CodeMonkey said it was real.
So, who exactly is CodeMonkey?
A lengthy search online only produced scattered results.
His real name was Ron Watkins.
And in terms of pictures, I could only find shots of his father, Jim.
Even in his high school yearbook, he had no photo.
It's as if this guy had been training his whole life to be a ghost.
I've certainly never had any interaction with CodeMonkey,
and just strikes me as sort of an online punk.
The funny thing is he is the one that offered to take over 8chan
'cause he knew he could convince his father.
So, I think it was sort of his plan all along.
I don't even know who CodeMonkey is.
It's just his name is synonymous with what we do.
CodeMonkey's in direct contact with Q, and that's a pretty rare thing.
He's the only person Q's actually talked to on the boards.
CodeMonkey's either such a useless admin
that yeah, you cannot tell the difference.
Or CodeMonkey is treacherous and that he is in on it.
So, if anybody has access to or knows who Q is...
- It might be CodeMonkey? - Yeah.
I can't fucking believe it. This... Fuck. Stupid fucking Skype.
To my knowledge, this was the first recorded interview
that CodeMonkey had ever given.
I don't know why he agreed to talk to me,
but I wasn't going to pass up the opportunity.
Of course Skype is just being a fucking asshole.
- Hey. - Hello, Cullen.
- Sorry about that. - No worries.
What has it been like for you watching the Q movement evolve on 8chan?
I've watched it like any other person.
I go to the Q research board and see what he's posted,
and read what people are saying about it. It's interesting.
I like how Q is very consistent with what he does.
To me, it's the biggest factor that Q is real.
Currently, they're the most active board on 8chan by a lot.
Recently, QAnon said there's like 410 thousand users on 8chan.
Q said that?
Q said that, which is strange 'cause how does he know?
I don't even know.
Yeah, I'd really enjoy having some time with you in person.
Early December works works well for me.
It does?
I was getting on a plane to hang out with the guys
behind the most notorious website on Earth
because if anyone knew who was behind Q,
it would be those closest to the source.