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The Batshit Insane QAnon Conspiracy Theory

Hugo Stiglitz

By Hugo Stiglitz
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Jiggy-Z

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On 8/11/2018 at 9:50 PM, mdmost said:

You need aggy and QAnon people around so you can remind yourself that you’re not as batshit crazy as those f-heads. 

...and they usually advertise via confederate wear, aggy flair, maga/nra hats etc. so you can keep your distance.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531

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How three conspiracy theorists took 'Q' and sparked Qanon

Pushing the theory on to bigger platforms proved to be the key to Qanon’s spread — and the originators’ financial gain.

In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website's message board.

Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.

Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q’s mysterious posts.

While the identity of the original author or authors behind “Q” is still unknown, the history of the conspiracy theory’s spread is well-documented — through YouTube videos, social media posts, Reddit archives, and public records reviewed by NBC News.

NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon “research.”

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Before Q, there was a wide variety of “anon” 4chan posters all claiming to have special government access.

In 2016, there was FBIAnon, a self-described “high-level analyst and strategist” offering intel about the 2016 investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Then came HLIAnon, an acronym for High Level Insider, who posted about various dubious conspiracies in riddles, including one that claimed Princess Diana had been killed because she found out about 9/11 “beforehand” and had “tried to stop it.” Then “CIAAnon” and “CIA Intern” took to the boards in early 2017, and last August one called WH Insider Anon offered a supposed preview that something that was “going to go down” regarding the DNC and leaks.

Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the “anon” genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz’s blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News.

“A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” Furber said in an email.

Diaz, a small-time YouTube star who once hosted a talk show on the fringe right-wing network Liberty Movement Radio, had found moderate popularity with a couple of thousand views for her YouTube videos analyzing WikiLeaks releases and discussing the "pizzagate" conspiracy, a baseless theory that alleged a child sex ring was being run out of a Washington pizza shop.

As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well.

On Nov. 3, 2017, just six days after the first 4chan post from “Q,” Diaz posted a video entitled “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon - Is it #happening???” in which she introduced the conspiracy theory to her audience.

“I do not typically do videos like this,” she said, but citing Q’s “very specific and kind of eerie” posts, Diaz explained that she would be covering the 4chan posts, “just in case this stuff turns out to be legit because honestly it kind of seems legit.”

That video, which has been viewed nearly 250,000 times, made Diaz one of the earliest people to seize on “Q” posts and decipher them for a conspiracy-hungry audience. Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts

Diaz’s YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter. Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube “research” as her sole source of income.

Diaz declined to comment on this story.

“Because I cover Q, I got an audience,” Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.

To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and “normies,” who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in a blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community called CBTS_Stream, short for Calm Before The Storm, where subscribers soon gathered to talk all things Q.

Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon’s eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups.

That audience then started to head to 8chan to check out the original source and interact directly with the posts. (Q posts moved from 4chan to its more toxic offshoot 8chan in November after a post claiming the original board had been “infiltrated.” 8chan became notorious for having no rules, and even hosting child pornography.)

8chan’s owner’s official Twitter account marveled at the influx of older, less internet-savvy visitors to his site, drawn by Qanon. “We joked about it for years, but #Qanon is making it a reality: Boomers! On your imageboard.”

Meanwhile, Diaz kept making videos, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Over the next several months, Diaz and the two moderators picked up tens of thousands of followers on Reddit and YouTube and added even more moderators to their 8chan and Reddit boards.

The whole thing is worth a read, and confirms what I felt (as somebody who used to be into conspiracy theories).  They hit the right platforms at the right time.   

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When this stuff was confined to BBSes or the alt.conspiracy groups, it was next to impossible for your family/friends to find out, outside of the bookshelf full of JFK and Alien books, because most folks kept it to themselves.

But now they can't seem to help themselves and have to fucking email everybody they know about it.  That's a big change, for the better, because at least it's easy to identify the crazies.

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F250

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4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

When this stuff was confined to BBSes or the alt.conspiracy groups, it was next to impossible for your family/friends to find out, outside of the bookshelf full of JFK and Alien books, because most folks kept it to themselves.

But now they can't seem to help themselves and have to fucking email everybody they know about it.  That's a big change, for the better, because at least it's easy to identify the crazies.

LOL My first encounter with a BBS was conspiracy theory themed. It also had an associated Public Access Channel show. Lots of Anarchist Cookbook type content.

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1 hour ago, F250 said:

LOL My first encounter with a BBS was conspiracy theory themed. It also had an associated Public Access Channel show. Lots of Anarchist Cookbook type content.

A lot of BBSes had conspiracy stuff, because people would hand out floppies full of conspiracy text-files and so it was free content.

That stuff appealed to 14 year olds.  And sysops liked it, because it was easy on the downloads section, versus porn.

There were some amazing conspiracy-themed websites though, especially out of Dallas in the early 90s.  Not redistributing what everybody else had, but guys putting together their own content/theories.

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Hugo Stiglitz

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Michael Cohen’s guilty plea Tuesday shook up believers in the QAnon conspiracy theory, who had previously believed special counsel Robert Mueller was secretly working with President Donald Trump, not investigating him. 

QAnon supporters believe in clues from “Q” that posit a world where Trump is engaged in a life-or-death struggle with a global pedophile cabal. In Q’s telling, Mueller is working hand-in-hand with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump to stop Democrats.

Along with the conviction of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on the same day, the Cohen plea left QAnon believers questioning whether they had been wrong to place all their hope in an anonymous internet poster.

In response, QAnon leaders on Reddit responded by cracking down on any mention of Cohen’s guilty plea, which was made with federal prosecutors in Manhattan—not Mueller.

But how, QAnon believers wondered, could sending Cohen and Manafort to prison amount to a win for Trump?

“Q, you have claimed that you are in control, can you explain how this helps the good guys???” pleaded one user on TheGreatAwakening, the main subreddit for QAnon supporters. 

As alienated QAnon supporters began to complain to each other about feeling duped, TheGreatAwakening’s moderators decided to cut the spread of the discontent off at the source by ruling that most mentions of Cohen were off-topic. 

While it’s unknown how many threads or posts about Cohen’s guilty plea were deleted, users on the subreddit were soon complaining that threads about Cohen were being deleted or hidden for being “off-topic.” In a thread about the aggressive moderator response to posts from QAnon believers who were losing heart after Cohen’s guilty plea, one of TheGreatAwakening’s moderators confirmed that posts about Cohen were considered off-topic. 

With moderators pulling questions about Cohen, the theories about how his guilty plea actually proves QAnon is real have become even more elaborate. QAnon believers who are still on board with the conspiracy theory are becoming increasingly interested in numerology, or spinning up worlds where Cohen has either deliberately sacrificed himself.

Grasping for any good news, several QAnon believers  have claimed that the unnamed presidential candidate implicated in Cohen’s guilty plea is actually Hillary Clinton, when, in reality, it’s clearly Trump.

“Is this the move that Trump has been waiting for?” asked on Reddit user commenter pushing the idea that Cohen would soon testify against Clinton. 

But that poster backtracked on the theory when someone pointed out that the presidential candidate mentioned in the indictment is obviously Trump. 

“It doesn't look good for trump then,” the original poster agreed.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/qanon-leaders-crack-down-on-mentions-of-cohen-after-he-turned-on-trump

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In response, QAnon leaders on Reddit responded by cracking down on any mention of Cohen’s guilty plea, which was made with federal prosecutors in Manhattan—not Mueller.

But how, QAnon believers wondered, could sending Cohen and Manafort to prison amount to a win for Trump?

“Q, you have claimed that you are in control, can you explain how this helps the good guys???” pleaded one user on TheGreatAwakening, the main subreddit for QAnon supporters. 

As alienated QAnon supporters began to complain to each other about feeling duped, TheGreatAwakening’s moderators decided to cut the spread of the discontent off at the source by ruling that most mentions of Cohen were off-topic.

Having a family member into this shit, I can tell you that the Great Awakening mods trying to shut down mentions of Cohen are just driving posters to other sub-reddits that claim GA is compromised (or Kompromised).  That whole movement is splitting apart in places.

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Brisketexan

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23 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Having a family member into this shit, I can tell you that the Great Awakening mods trying to shut down mentions of Cohen are just driving posters to other sub-reddits that claim GA is compromised (or Kompromised).  That whole movement is splitting apart in places.

ppfj.jpg

Splitters!

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1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

This guy and Bill Burr are my two favorite comedians.  Check out Jeffries' YouTube videos on gun control.  He fucking nails it.

Ok, there's no way those dipshits actually believe that right?  Aside from the one Q guy from youtube, who surely is doing it just for money, Comedy Central paid the other 3 right?  

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2 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Having a family member into this shit, I can tell you that the Great Awakening mods trying to shut down mentions of Cohen are just driving posters to other sub-reddits that claim GA is compromised (or Kompromised).  That whole movement is splitting apart in places.

I have no idea what any of this shit means and for that I am grateful.

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pyrohornIII

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14 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

Ok, there's no way those dipshits actually believe that right?  Aside from the one Q guy from youtube, who surely is doing it just for money, Comedy Central paid the other 3 right?  

I know a guy who has been in on this from the start.  He's smart like an idiot savant.  Reads voraciously and remembers everything.  Good with computers.  He talks just like these 4, absolutely convinced he is right.  Nearly arrogant about it, but in a way that subtly says "I pity you for not being as bright as I am and ignoring the facts I so plainly see.  Grid going down tomorrow."  

So yeah, they are sincere.  And while they have diverging opinions on certain fringe conspiracies, the two things they all agree on vehemently is Trump is God and Dems are demons.   Tell me this movement hasn't been manipulated by Russians over time.  Too bad they didn't call it Ranon. 

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4 minutes ago, relapse98 said:

I still think a lot of it is just trolling. 

It could be, but I know 3 very strong supporter of all this.  Two are huge into conspiracies, and Q takes advantage of that by encompassing pretty much all conspiracies.   The other is an old lady who is reasonably well off and all her white kids and white grandchildren are set up pretty well for the good life.  She supports Trump for trying to preserve that world, even though she despises a lot of what Trump does.  So she justifies it by believing in Q shit...telling herself she is choosing the lesser evil. 

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3 hours ago, relapse98 said:

I still think a lot of it is just trolling. 

I think the people creating the content are trolling/making money off of it. 

I think some who are spreading it far and wide are trolling/making money off of it.  

I think many who consume it, are buying in on some level.  

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ChiTownDoc

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On 8/18/2018 at 1:12 PM, Longhornfan1024 said:

Saw a moron wearing a we are q shirt while riding his bike through Great Hills today. There goes the neighborhood.

Sent from my SM-G950U1 using Tapatalk
 

I'd follow that guy to his house and take note.  Then send him mailers for the dumbest shit ever.  Sell him tap water etc.  I'm not joking. 

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