The Propaganda Puzzle
Solving the Mystery of “Q”
This is an abridged version of a much longer and more detailed story, with more evidence and background information which can be found here.
The world is a mess. People are inhabiting entirely alternative realities, and that’s a problem. So let’s look at some of the people and networks responsible for some of the lies that have caused so much chaos, including who was initially behind the creation of Qanon, right down to the specific people in the room when it was conceived.
It’s a long and complicated story, with many streams and tributaries converging to create the raging waters before us. And like a hydrographer mapping out a river basin, we’re going to take the time to try and tell it properly. So let’s get into it.
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, wealth could be created on a previously unimaginable scale. A few made a fortune, in some cases rivalling or even eclipsing the ancient royal dynasties. Because they could do whatever what they wanted, without regard for any social responsibility. There were no child labour laws, no workplace safety regulations, no minimum wage, overtime or pensions. Just raw, undiluted, free market Darwinian Capitalism.
Naturally, society continued to evolve in response. It’s a wild world, but by working together, and helping each other for the good of the tribe, humans have been able to accomplish incredible things. We thrive as a social species. Care for the community is one of our greatest assets.
Progressivism emerged as a check on the almighty power of these modern oligarchs. Government, with the ability to make and enforce laws that ensured quality of life for the people, became the bulwark. Environmental and Labour Regulations were introduced, to protect people and the planet from the perils of predatory profit-seekers, along with Large-Scale Public Infrastructure Projects that the private sector was unfit to provide. Free Enterprise can be a great tool, but it doesn’t deliver everything that we need, and making “profit” the be all and end all of human endeavour is a recipe for disaster.
The Capitalists, naturally, saw all this as a threat. They could use their capital to basically bribe the government to do what they want anyway of course — it’s made of mortals, very few of whom are immune to corruption. But that’s not always enough.
In 1958, a retired candy salesman called Robert Welch Jr. got twelve of his rich mates together, and formed a group called the John Birch Society.
They picked up the spear of anti-communist sentiment left by Joe McCarthy, tipped it with the powerful poison of Nesta Webster’s “Conspiracy Narrative Virus”, and turbo-charged it all for their American audience. Any policy they didn’t like, or which impinged on their profits or their power to do whatever they wanted — such as Civil Rights, Public Projects, or International Cooperation — became part of a Sinister Globalist Plot by a Secret Cabal of Evil Communists.
The JBS were rabid and relentless in their quest to impact the socio-political conversation. They aggressively distributed pamphlets and other propaganda paraphernalia, and published a magazine called “American Opinion”. Even more insidiously, they held networking dinners, and encouraged their members to engage in activism, telling them to:
“Join your local P.T.A., get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over.”
It may not seem like it, but those envelopes contained the most sophisticated weapon the world had ever seen: The Conspiracy Narrative Virus. Despite not even having a physical form, it enters its host through the eyes or ears, to infect their thoughts and hence affect their actions. And like all effective viruses, that included compelling the host to spread it. By the 1960s, the JBS counted over 100,000 members.
One of the founding members of the John Birch Society was an oil baron called Fred Koch. His sons, Charles and David (the now infamous Koch Brothers), followed him into the family business — selling as much oil and coal and gas as they possibly could, and manipulating the public into thinking that any attempts to regulate them were part of a dastardly “Globalist Agenda”.
Over the course of the 20th century, the universe of Conspiracies was well established. People like Bill Cooper, Jerome Corsi, Art Bell, Eustace Mullins, David Icke, and many more, all made careers out of telling these stories, aided of course by governments and corporations that routinely did genuinely dodgy shit.
Eris cried havoc, and let slip the dogs of Discord. Projects like Operation Mindfuck and the “Illuminatus!” trilogy blurred the line between satire and reality, breathing life into the goddess of chaos.
In the late 1970s, it made its way from the John Birch Society, through two of its devoted members, David and Carol Jones, and into their son Alex. And thus the Virus found its super-spreader.
His stories are obvious nonsense, which fall apart under the slightest scrutiny, which only one brave correspondent and his trusty co-host bother to reliably provide. So a shocking number of people actually believe a shocking amount of what he says. Naturally, this presents a tremendous opportunity for any political operatives who might want to create a narrative.
And this is where we need to meet our next character, a particularly nasty piece of work called Roger Stone. As a child, he read Barry Goldwater’s seminal work “The Conscience of a Conservative”, which was such a formative experience that he volunteered for Barry’s 1964 presidential campaign, at the age of 12. His life then essentially became a series of operations to elect whichever candidate he felt would do the most to preserve that power of Rich White Men.
In 1970, he met a fellow piece of work called Paul Manafort. Together, they basically invented the “Industrial Lobbying Complex”, which brought unprecedented levels of corruption to Washington. They used a big bag of Dirty Tricks do whatever it took to get candidates elected, and then shamelessly charged people for access to the politician afterwards.
Their clients included foreign warlords and dictators, all of whom paid Manafort and Stone significant amounts of money to influence the American political landscape in their favour.
One of their long-time clients lived closer to home, in New York — a dodgy real-estate developer named Donald Trump. In the early ’80s, Trump was having PR trouble on multiple fronts. Roy Cohn advised him to meet with Manafort and Stone, who in turn advised him to basically be an arsehole in all cases, which unfortunately Trump seems to have taken to heart.
Trump essentially embodied the idea that Rich White Men should be able to do whatever they want — to women, to the environment, and to the economy. In the wake of progressive ideas like Feminism, and Environmental Stewardship, society had gradually become marginally kinder and gentler over the years, and conservatives felt forced to mask their greed and bigotry, which was a concession they deeply resented. Then Trump came along, and showed you could just tear the mask right off, to the kind of rapturous applause not seen since Goldwater’s speech at the ’64 RNC. While many considered that kind of rhetoric toxic to civil society, Roger Stone saw an opportunity, and began to explore a potential path to the White House.
Before 2008, it might have been impossible. But during the presidency of a charismatic bi-racial “progressive”, who had the audacity to float the idea of maybe not letting health insurance companies rip people off quite so much, people like the Kochs and their conservative capitalist mates got so freaked out that they had to mobilise a response, which became the Tea Party.
It created a tectonic shift in the political landscape. The gloves came off, and rather than remain cloaked in nuance on the sidelines, the Conspiracy Virus came right out to spit in people’s faces, truth be damned.
Still, Trump was a stretch. A nepotistic narcissist who bragged about committing sexual assault, and lived in a literal gold tower. While a character like that does have a lot going for him in certain circles, getting him over the line in a general election was going to require a Herculean feat of propaganda — the creation of an entirely Alternative Reality, in which his enemies were evil super-villains, and he was the righteous super-hero.
And thus the team began to assemble. Paul Manafort was Campaign Chairman. Roger Stone was Special Advisor. He brought his social media strategist Jason Miller, with toys like the Twitter amplification app Power10, and began regularly appearing on Alex Jones’ Info Wars, cultivating and weaponising a heavy-duty disinformation cannon. Steve Bannon was Campaign President, and then CEO, after being brought along by his buddy David Bossie of Citizens United, who became deputy. He also brought Breitbart, and Cambridge Analytica, fresh from the battlefield of Brexit. Mike Flynn was National Security Advisor and potential VP. Peter Thiel and Erik Prince continued to deploy their extensive resources both behind and in front of the scenes, as did the entire network of groups like the Council for National Policy. And once the Evangelicals and other Establishment Republicans knew that he would give them their judicial nominees and Supreme Courts Justice, they gave him their full support as well.
There is a lot to say about the various sets of skills and experience that each of these people and networks all brought to the campaign. Let’s start with Michael Flynn.
After being nominated Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency by Obama in 2012, he attended an event called the Nowruz Gala in 2013, hosted by a businessman called Bijan Kian. Shortly after, he started acting weird, so was fired in 2014.
He wasted no time starting his own lobbying company with Kian, called the “Flynn Intel Group”, selling services to foreign businesses and governments, mostly Turkey and Russia.
He returned from his international dalliances (definitely free from any undue influence) to meet the Trump Team in the summer, and immediately joined the campaign. He famously gave a fiery speech at the RNC, leading to the chants of “Lock Her Up”.
Helpfully, the week after their election victory, he can’t resist bragging about exactly how they accomplished it:
“We have an army… as a soldier and as a retired general… we have an army of Digital Soldiers. Because this was an insurgency folks. This was irregular warfare at its finest. We have what we call Citizen Journalists. […] The American people decided to take over the idea of information. And they did it through social media”
“Psychological Operations” have been around for a while. They have a certain ~conspiratorial connotation~, but at the end of the day, they’re basically just guerrilla marketing. All advertising is effectively a Psy-Op, trying to persuade people to purchase a particular item. Ever since Thomas Barratt used a nice painting to make Pears Soap more appealing, brands and agencies have sought to shape our perceptions of their products and clients, rewriting “reality” to the point where it’s one the defining features of modern life.
In the past, operatives had to resort to dropping leaflets from helicopters, or blasting messages from a PA on a Humvee. Now, they can plaster the message across the digital landscape, reaching vast swathes of eyes and ears with the flick of a switch.
Not only that, but they can mine the mountains of Big Data to get a deep understanding of different demographics and what makes them tick. Companies like Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica (or SCL or Emerdata or whatever they’re rebranded as now), know exactly what buttons to push, and how to push them.
The headline from the CA scandal was the illegal data harvesting from the “This is Your Digital Life” app on Facebook. But what seems to have been largely overlooked is the fact that they then use that data to create campaigns, specifically to influence elections. They are a Behaviour Change Agency.
One tactic is what’s called “Memetic Warfare”. This would become a foundational principle of a group called MAGA3X, and a key part of the Trump Campaign’s strategy.
Unsurprisingly, there is now an entire commercial industry serving this space. Psy-Group, WikiStrat, and Black Cube, are all companies founded by an ambitious young Israeli Australian and UNSW alumni named Joel Zamel. They specialise in offering manipulation campaigns for governments and corporations and private individuals.
Joel Zamel was apparently introduced to Micheal Flynn by Bijan Kian.
According to the Daily Beast:
“Zamel wanted Flynn to be a member of the firm’s advisory board. Zamel spoke with him about it on multiple occasions around the time Flynn was forming the Flynn Intel Group. “Flynn took a real shining to Joel.”
In April 2016, during the Republican primaries, senior Trump campaign official Rick Gates asked Psy-Group for a proposal for an influence operation. They responded with a quote for $3,125,000 plus media costs, and promised to make it virtually untraceable.
Three months later, Erik Prince arranged a meeting in Trump Tower between Zamel, Donald Trump Jr., and George Nader (an emissary for two wealthy Arab princes). Nader then paid Zamel $2 million.
And what do you know, all of a sudden, strange stuff started bubbling up from the shady backwaters of the internet’s swamplands, and a whole lot of people became completely consumed with the idea that Trump’s political opponents were engaged in such horrific practises as ritualistic sacrifices, and drinking the blood of tortured children harvested in tunnels deep underground.
It’s not an original story. Accusing your enemies of hurting kids is one of the oldest tricks in the book. “Blood Libel” is a trope about people murdering babies in the woods which goes back hundreds of years, and has historically been used to justify persecution of Jewish people. While in ancient times they had to wait for word-of-mouth or the printing press to spread the stories, these days of course we have the wonders of the world wide web, with anonymous message-boards like 4Chan.
4Chan was, and is, a relatively lawless frontier, where pretty much anything goes. Like many message-boards, it provided a community for people who may have been otherwise ostracised from mainstream society. It gave them an opportunity to connect with similar souls, and express themselves creatively in ways they never could before, for better or worse. Much of what we now know as “Internet Culture” — from LOLcats to Rickrolling — originated there.
And sadly, the same can be said for a lot of the hardcore racism and misogyny. The political utility of a forum full of internet-savvy outcasts, with time on their hands and an axe to grind, on a website where you can anonymously drop anything you want, was well known to bastards like “World of Warcraft” gold-farmer Steve Bannon, and he actively and openly began using it as a recruiting ground for his Alt-Right Revolution.
One of their many traditions was known as “LARPing”. Posters could pose as anyone they wanted, from time-travellers to government insiders, or characters in any kind of story. A lot of them were good fun. People playing along, in on the joke, imaginatively blending fact and fantasy. What these threads created, in essence, was a portal to an Alternative Reality. You can invent whatever narratives you like, in whatever world you want, and give them a way to enter this one. Which presents an incredibly valuable proposition for a propaganda campaign.
And so we come to the 2016 Presidential election. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton battling it out in the General. Unfortunately for Hillary, her use of a personal email server was under investigation by the FBI, which the Trump campaign was obviously eager to exploit. But unfortunately for them, the case was pretty dry.
Until the 2nd of July that is, when some posts began appearing on 4Chan, from someone claiming to be an “FBI agent with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case”. The media wasn’t telling the whole story apparently. There were actually far more sinister things going on — “disgusting delights”, arms deals, human trafficking, even black magic! It was exciting stuff. In keeping with the nomenclature of 4Chan users being called “anons”, they came to be known as FBIanon.
It looked like a LARP — albeit a pretty polished and committed one- and it fit in on the forum quite nicely. To the point where most commentators seem content to consider it a random troll. Given the impact of what’s followed, it’s worth exploring who or what it actually was, and whether it might actually have had anything to do with the campaign.
The key message of the ~1000 posts, specifically repeated multiple times, was to “focus on the foundation”. Which, interestingly, is the very same message Steve Bannon was pushing in the book “Clinton Cash”. He understood, of course, the value of using different mediums for different reasons, and tailoring content to its intended target. The purpose of book was to get the message to publications like the NYT, so he says he consciously chose to omit the “nutty conspiracies”. Which is a suspicious thing to have to explicitly specify.
But obviously anyone could have read the book and cribbed the idea. So let’s keep digging. In the rest of the posts, we find a clear directive. They weren’t just idly telling the stories, they were urging the anons to spread the narratives, with very specific instructions (condensed here):
“The task is this: unleash every meme, image, and horrible story about HRC that you can muster… In order to be effective, you must proselytise… For example: Start a website aggregating the images/facts and then try to get it linked to Drudge. Shove the images down every news anchor/journalists throat. Push out to people who you normally would have nothing to do with… Why don’t you invade their circles? … We should be spreading memes to subs on Reddit.… blitz Twitter, Tumblr, and all social media with memes on the Clinton Foundation tonight, the last night of the DNC… We need TrumpGen with us, and the meme division blasting the Tumblr tags. Bring up the old methods that /b/ used to use during their Tumblr raids… We’re going to war tonight …Repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth. Repeat after me: ‘Hillary is evil and will destroy the planet.’…”
It’s an unusual amount of dedication and professional panache for someone who’s not being paid. This person knows what they’re doing, and they’re good at it. Still, it’s possible that a passionate volunteer had the same skills and singular devotion to getting Trump in office as someone working for Bannon or Roger Stone. Plenty of people on 4Chan hated Hillary, and would have been happy to help troll the establishment by making Trump president.
But. In July, FBIanon also says:
“More leaks will come. The time is not right yet. Expect an October Surprise.”
Which sounds a lot more like a confident claim than a lucky guess. It gives us a strong indication that they did in fact have inside knowledge. Not of the FBI case, but of the shady back-channel to Wikileaks that Roger Stone boasted about:
Sure enough, on October 7, 2016, (30 minutes after the Access Hollywood “pussy grabbing” tape came out), Wikileaks began releasing thousands of emails from the account of Clinton’s Campaign Manger, John Podesta. A Russian team called Cozy Bear / Guccifer 2.0 had hacked him, and gave it all to Wikileaks to “publish”.
Surprisingly enough, there wasn’t anything particularly incriminating in there. The closest they got was an invitation to an event by acclaimed performance artist Maria Abramovic.
But if you change some of the words, and tell people it’s sinister, you can make something out of nothing. And on October 17, FBIanon says:
“When you are reading Podesta’s e-mails, remember that the Clintons deal in weapons, drugs, and people. Some terminology in use is far more nefarious than many of you suspect.”
This is the seed that would go on to spawn the notorious phenomenon of #Pizzagate, and serve as the foundation of multiple campaigns to traumatise and then radicalise millions of people.
Out front leading the charge were Jack Posobiec, Erik Prince, Roger Stone, and Mike Flynn. Four guys who absolutely spend their time reading 4Chan, falling for its pranks, and basing their entire media strategy on them, and would never dream of dabbling in any dirty tricks or political influence campaigns to exploit it themselves.
MAGA 3X was an engine room for a lot of these operations. Organised by Peter Thiel and featuring some of the names above (Giesea, Posobiec, Cernovic, Flynn), they approached the situation with literal military-style organisation. Below we can see what appear to be drafts of their strategy documents, which give a pretty chilling insight into their operation:
But the biggest voice by far was of course Alex Jones. He was literally screaming about it all, to millions of viewers, live on air for hours on end. The front page of the InfoWars website was wall-to-wall coverage of the “story”.
In November it all came together, and Trump went on to stun the world by winning the seemingly impossible election.
Still today, almost all coverage of the phenomenon fails to make the connection between #pizzagate and the Trump Campaign’s characters outlined above. It is invariably treated as just a beguiling but “primarily organic” 4Chan prank that got out of control — an anonymous shitposter who happed to accidentally light a fuse. It is a catastrophic miscalculation of the powers at play.
Bushfires can and do happen naturally of course, but arson is also very real. Our world is burning, and we’re looking at a bunch of people with a can full of gas and a handful of matches, a long history of lighting fires throughout their careers, and especially in this campaign, handing out brochures proudly advertising their fire-starting abilities, standing in front of a raging fire that happens to serve their exact political purpose, with a $3.2 million quote for “pyrotechnics” sitting in their outbox, and still weren’t found out.
— / —
Once in office, it became abundantly clear that Trump was a miserable president who couldn’t be bothered even pretending to show the slightest interest in the actual job of governing. He spoiled Santa Claus for a 7 year-old girl, bragged to the Boy Scouts about knowing a guy who had sex parties on a boat, publicly took Putin’s word over the US intelligence services’, and threw paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico. Not even his wife liked him. It’s a long, long list.
In the face of all that, support was going to be tough to maintain, let alone build. So they fired up the UnReality generator, and just lied. From Day One, it was a blistering assault on the Truth.
On October 27, 2017, Manafort and Gates (the one who asked Psy-Group for the proposal during the primaries) were indicted, as part of the Mueller investigation into Russian interference. The next day, another character appeared in the shadows of 4Chan. This time, they claimed to be from Military Intelligence, with inside information on Trump’s righteous quest to Save The World. They went by the mysterious moniker of “Q”.
There are obvious similarities with FBIanon, but the story was more grandiose, and the stakes were higher. This wasn’t just an email investigation case, this was the future of humanity itself. Q often spoke in code or riddles. There was an awful lot of nonsensical trite too, but it engaged the reader by asking cryptic questions, pointing the narrative outward, leaving it to them to dig their own rabbit holes, and generate theories and conspiracy content themselves.
Ultimately, in the minds of many, it successfully transformed this odious steak salesman into a glorious God Emperor, a noble Light Warrior leading the world to a 5D Galactic Ascension. In doing so, it tore a hole in the fabric of the shared reality we rely upon for a functioning society, breaking people’s brains, fracturing families, destroying communities, and even threatening the foundation of democracy itself.
But when it comes to the question of who or what was actually behind it, we find a similar attitude to the one surrounding FBIanon. Some prominent journalists actually dissuade people from even asking the question, and confidently proclaim it was just some lone-wolf having a laugh. Which is somewhat understandable. I mean, look how stupid it is.
But whoever it was, they weren’t doing it ironically. They genuinely supported Trump and his agenda, and were trying to grow that support. It is, by definition, propaganda — an attempt to influence public perception of a political figure. Election campaigns have been doing it since the dawn of time.
As we have seen, identifying the source of an anonymous post on the internet is not easy, but nor is it necessarily impossible. There are over 5,000 “drops”, and when taken together they tell us a lot. To start with, we can look at who or what it serves and protects. Which includes the network, agenda, and reputation, of Micheal Flynn:
Why would an anonymous prankster go to the trouble of carrying such water for someone like Flynn? He was an Obama appointee who sold out America’s interest to foreign powers, and got fired by Trump for lying to the Administration about his dealings with Russia. Furthermore, why would Flynn put so much stock into something which he knew was a “just a LARP” he didn’t have any control of, the rug of which could be pulled out at any moment? He might look goofy, but he is literally a world expert in Special Operations.
Using the Q movement to raise money for his legal defence certainly doesn’t preclude him from being at least associated with whoever is behind it, as some commentators like Mike Rothschild have weirdly and insistently tried to claim. And it sure sounds awfully similar to his trademarked strategy of weaponising “Digital Soldiers”:
But even a professional like Flynn couldn’t pull off something like this all by himself. So let’s have a look at some other drops, to see what other data we can find that could indicate who else may have been involved. There’s a lot, but it’s good to get a taste of the different flavours that were served up:
So, we know that “Q” is a New-Age Fascist, probably a boomer, with delusions of grandeur, some kind of affiliation with Flynn, and some understanding of Psychological Operations, who likes messing with people’s minds, LARPing as a super spy, and posting internet puzzles on 4Chan.
Well that gives us something to work with, so let’s see if we can figure anything out. There are two components to analyse: The “narrative”, or the story, and the “medium”, or the mechanics of the delivery.
First let’s look at the narrative. It’s sometimes been compared to a Tom Clancy novel — a high-stakes spy thriller. Which is notable, because one of Clancy’s writing parters was an insufferable boomer called Steve Pieczenik.
He does have experience in Military Intelligence, specialising in Psychological Operations for the State Department around the world throughout the ’70s. As often happens to people in this position, he became deeply committed to the conservative cause, and fighting progressive policies that called for a more equitable distribution of power and resources. Conspiracies, of course, were a major weapon in his arsenal. He’s been a prolific guest on Alex Jones’ Infowars over the years, masterfully using the platform to pepper the landscape with his narratives, in a way that helped create the universe from which Q would ultimately emerge.
In October 2015, he began talking about Trump :
Thanks to you and your listeners Alex, they are falling apart […] the globalists did get control, but now there is a war to expose them, and they are losing […] Geopolitically, what does this do to the criminal cabals on the inside? This is one of the most phenomenal revolutions America has ever seen,[…] Trump had been monitoring the MSM for some time.. when we put his name up for the next presidency, he took it […] we are so tired of the people who committed the crime of 9/11, that once Trump gets in, many of them will be arrested […] I know a lot about his character […] we have to look at this as very positive movement. The backlash is huge. They never expected us to come in and be able to pronounce the truth […] America is not going quietly into totalitarianism without a fight […] We want them to show how stupid they are.”
This is clearly the foundational narrative of Qanon. A lot of the drops include that very language. So we’ve got 3 options:
- Q came up with this narrative entirely independently,
- Q was an Alex Jones fan who watched that episode (or heard it elsewhere) and committed it to memory, thereby becoming a “product” of Steve’s influence operation,
- Steve Pieczenik, who has openly promoted Q, bragged about running Psy-Ops, and writes spy thrillers professionally, was part of the creative team behind Q.
With that in mind, let’s turn our attention to another of the primary Q-promoters, a guy named Robert David Steele. Like Steve, he worked in the intelligence services (or claimed to have at least), and became deeply conspiratorial. Then he got on the Trump Train, making it his mission to get him elected and keep him in power, using Blood Libel more explicitly and enthusiastically than anyone else. When “Save the Children” took off in 2020, if you followed the sources for people’s posts, most of them would ultimately lead to videos of Steele in a made-up court called the “International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ)”, lying about “Adrenochrome”.
He died of COVID in 2021. But before that, he spent most of his time on video calls with other Q-promoters like Sean Stone, Sacha Stone, Charlie Ward, and Martin Geddes. He called Qanon “the greatest information operation of all time”, and is as close to the centre of this network as it is possible to get. And in January 2017, who does he credit with kicking it all off? Flynn, Putin, Trump, two other ex-intelligence guys called Bill Binney and Ray McGovern, and our mate Stevie P:
“Aided by enormous restraint on the part of Vladimir Putin, the soft coup in the USA has collapsed […] Trump earns most of the credit, bringing to the matter his deep business experience and common sense, he understood that the narrative against Russia was fabricated […] With that Foundation, he was able to listen to Michael Flynn, who’s deep experience in the nether world of black special operations and clandestine and covert action operations informs him in a manner few can claim.
Bill Binney, who created the NSA capability that has been used against US politicians […]was the first to reveal the leaks were coming from insiders. Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst and founder of the “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” (VIPS), has been a respected voice challenging the false assertions by the CIA against Russia. Finally Steve Pieczenik… A former deputy assistant Secretary of State, who was […] the first to announce the countercoup against Hillary Clinton was being undertaken by insiders. I have done what I could and I am proud to stand in support of Donald Trump…”
The “VIPS” appear to be a big part of the driving force in all this. A bunch of disaffected ex — Military Intelligence operatives, who hated progressivism, found some affinity with Russia, and saw Trump’s boorishness as the best way to advance their agenda of a “second American Revolution”. So they deployed their knowledge of and experience in psychological influence operations to release various campaigns to manipulate the public and secure the Presidency. The central theme of Qanon being a small team of “White Hats” from Military Intelligence probably exists because that’s how they saw themselves. Steele, Pieczenik, Binney, McGovern, Posobiec, Flynn, et al. These people haven’t fallen for a prank on 4Chan, they helped put it there.
Are these jabronies good enough at the internet to have actually “done it” themselves? Probably not. So, I wonder if there are any jabronies who might be.
— / —
“Gamification” as a strategy is explicitly articulated in a pitch deck from Wikistrat, one of Psy-Group CEO Joel Zamel’s other “digital influence” companies:
Sounds kind of like Qanon. But it’s also kind of generic, and even for them, this is a little specialised. Creating a “puzzle LARP” on 4Chan requires a fairly niche skill set. And for that, we now come to a character called Thomas Schoenberger.
He was a lot of things, but mostly a “composer”, who made his music more interesting by involving puzzles. He had a thing for prime numbers, for example, and would work them into his compositions to generate more engagement.
The best puzzle going around was a “game” called Cicada 3301. It was a fascinating phenomenon which started with an enigmatic post on 4Chan in January 2012, and then repeated again in 2013, and 2014.
By 2016, it seemed to have gone quiet, so Thomas and some associates, including Hollywood composer Michael Levine, basically tried to take it over.
Even if Thomas’ version didn’t quite match up to the magic of the original, there were plenty of people still willing to work on something so cool. And a number of those people have all pointed the finger at this place as being part of the team that made Qanon. So, let’s have a look to see if that’s plausible.
Court documents reveal that in 2011, someone from the Pentagon asked Thomas to play a concert in Afghanistan, and he somehow ended up in Turkey trying to recruit former special operations officers. To ‘fight ISIS’, you see.
“I was charged with putting together a program that was going to be the basis for clandestine activities near the border of Iran… We were going to go meet with the Governor of the province with an idea of doing a concert… I was involved in operations that had to do with national security… The person is no longer at The Pentagon. The person’s name is Bijan, B-i-j-a-n, Kian, K-i-a-n.”
Bijan Kian, you remember, is Micheal Flynn’s business parter. And the one who introduced him to Joel Zamel. Even if Thomas is lying or exaggerating about the rest of the story (ie. “LARPing as a super spy”), it’s still a very particular name to drop.
So we’re in the right ballpark at least. But we’re still a fair way out. As we move closer, however, we learn that he actually started an influence company of his own, called “ShadowBox”.
Their promotional material describes themselves as:
“An elite online reputation management firm … We create shadow ‘bot’ campaigns… use targeted chaos to confuse your opponents… sow the seeds of doubt and present the counter-narrative that [your enemies] are, in fact, the villains… We do this through sophisticated use of internet technology, meme creation, PR, and cyber-guerrilla tactics […] to sway public opinion in your favor.”
It’s a great name for what’s basically an off-brand version of Black Cube or Psy-Group. Their first (and perhaps only) client was the deep-pocketed GOP donor and friend of Erik Prince called Ed Butowsky, who along with Lara Logan and her husband had pushed the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Benghazi, and #pizzagate.
One of Thomas’ partners in ShadowBox was a political PR strategist called Trevor Fitzgibbon. In 2016, he helped create #Unity4J, ostensibly as a way to build support for Julian Assange. This thing appears to have been a significant “cross-pollinating” event, bringing people from opposite sides of the political spectrum together, under the guise of “government transparency”, and poisoning progressives with conservative conspiracies. People like Jack Posobiec, Cassandra Fairbanks, Cynthia McKinney, Jimmy Dore, Kim Dotcom, and Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan, were sharing a stage with people like the Australian Greens’ Senator Scott Ludlum.
These days, Trevor’s business appears to mostly consist of representing conspiracy theorists. Including Bill Binney, Ray McGovern, and the adrenochrome aficionado and major Q promoter himself, mister Robert David Steele.
Now we come to one of Thomas’ other partners in both Shadowbox and Cicada, a prolific live-streamer by the name of Manuel Chavez III, AKA Defango, who claims to take credit for having the creative inspiration for “Q”. He says he found a book by Italian anarchist collective Luther Blissett, about “an anonymous radical fighting a secret revolution”. There may also be shades of the much-loved Star Trek character, and other threads on 4Chan at the time. In an irony of Discordian proportions, he says the intention was to “expose” disinformation networks.
Thomas sent Chavez to Defcon 2017 to hype up Cicada, and while he was there he booked a space and gave a presentation for this idea he had. Pizzagate pioneer Jack Posobiec and some douche-bros from MAGA3X were in the room, and were happy to spice up one of their digital propaganda operations by sprinkling it with a bit of puzzle dust or whatever. They offered a small crew of trolls (possibly including but not limited to James, Doug, Justin, etc), and badda-bing badda-boom, this particular LARP is born.
They’re all notorious shit-talkers, but even when taken with a shovel full of salt, the broad strokes seem to mostly check out.
It’s hard to know exactly how long all these people have been working together. What we do know is that by 2017 (leading up to the launch of Q), Thomas, Trevor, Tanya, Robert, and Manuel, were all in regular email correspondence regarding their various shenanigans:
Alright, Manny’s claims and all those correlations notwithstanding, we still need to actually connect this crew to Q though. Which can be tricky, because one of Q’s hallmarks was only making ambiguous “predictions”, like “No Name will be back in the headlines”. The believers think that the drops are deliberately cryptic to maintain deniability and stop the ~Deep State~ from getting to them, while the debunkers can confidently claim that Q is just a charlatan. It’s a tidy little arrangement which worked perfectly well over almost all of the 5,000 drops.
But in drop 3110, they appear to overplay their hand. They call out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, invite him to “play a game”, and say the STRIKE will be FAST. The very next day, on behalf of Devin Nunes, Steven Biss hits twitter with a $250 million lawsuit.
It’s a little vague, but not vague enough. They slipped up. It’s like when Dennis Hopper calls Sandra Bullock a “Wildcat” in Speed. It reveals that whoever wrote that drop knew about the lawsuit in advance. Which tells us they were in communication with Biss / Nunes, or the people in that circle.
We also know that some of the key people responsible for taking Q to that wider audience were the Watkins, and a YouTuber called Tracy “Beanz” Diaz. And quelle surprise, in 2017, Thomas was in chats with both a woman called Courtney, who worked for Jim Watkins’ website The Goldwater, and Tracy herself (who Defango was also talking to on Twitter). And guess what Tracy was talking about before she turned on to Qanon? Wikileaks, a puzzle called Vault7, and Cicada 3301.
And if all that isn’t enough, we have a whole bunch of emails between them all discussing the “Q” project, and how best to manage it in varying degrees of deniability:
Anything can be faked of course, so those emails don’t constitute proof in and of themselves. But they are completely consistent with everything else that we’ve seen, and the simplest explanation is that they are genuine. If we want to blunten Occam’s Razor and say they’re not, we need to say who faked them and why.
To go back to our list from before and cap it all off, he’s a boomer with fascist sympathies, delusions of grandeur, a history of messing with people’s minds (and ripping them off), and passionate opinions about psy-op pioneers like Micheal Aquino. Of course he is intimately familiar with running puzzle LARPs on 4Chan, ran a digital influence / online reputation management firm that used cyber-guerrilla tactics to sow targeted chaos, worked with Mike Flynn’s business partner on special ops in Turkey, has a bunch of emails talking about it all with several of the key people involved, and he even likes pretending to be a super spy embroiled in a feud with the CIA.
To be clear, I’m not saying it was all his idea, or that he was the one writing them all. After Defango’s meeting with Jack and the douche-bros, the LARP quickly took on a life of its own. It changed hands a bunch of times, and we’re about to meet a few new faces. But it was doing the same basic thing — energising the MAGA movement with a Military Insider dropping cryptic clues to a crazy conspiracy — so job done.
Linguistic analysis released in 2022 sought to lay responsibility for the authorship at the feet of a South African channer called “Baruch the Scribe” (AKA Paul Furber) for the first month, and then Ron Watkins after that, which has more or less become the “standard theory”. Pamphlet and Radix (AKA Rogers and Urso) could have been in there too. While this tidy explanation is convenient for people who try to deny the involvement of any of the figures outlined here, there are unanswered questions about the report’s methodology, and its sample size. And it doesn’t seem to account for the fact that Furber was deliberately imitating Q’s writing style, or for who or what could have been directing or influencing him. He certainly seems sincere.
But maybe he was on the writing team at one point, because the exact configuration of who typed what when isn’t the point anyway. The point is that there is a big team in a big tent, working hard on at least laying the groundwork for something that looks a lot like Qanon, and the p-value of the whole thing being the mere product of a random anonymous shit-poster, wholly unrelated to any of the above, is well below a reasonable threshold. This was a weird, but deliberate, and devastatingly successful attack.
That’s not to call it all a perfectly controlled conspiracy either. It’s a loose-knit bunch of dickheads, making it up as they go along. They didn’t even have to expect it to work, let alone succeed the way it has. A character on an anonymous message-board is disposable and untraceable. They could roll the dice with crazy posts as many times as they liked, and if they blew it by going too far, so what? It was just a LARP. Try another one. Turns out you can kick the can of failed prophecy down the road more or less indefinitely. They carry virtually no financial or political cost, it’s a free shot to say whatever. Like a machine gun with bullshit bullets, they can spray fire across the internet and see what sticks.
If all this sounds like a “string-on-a-cork-board conspiracy” (as many seem to almost reflexively try to claim), it’s because that’s the way the world is. Everything that happens is the result of a convergence of multiple factors. Every ad that gets aired, or product that gets sold, or campaign that gets run, is the outcome of a vast “conspiracy”. Explaining anything requires looking at how the paths of its various components intersected. As Sagan said, “if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”. We’re not “taking comfort” in a single identifiable villain, we’re documenting the chaotic mess that is reality on this rock that’s hurtling through the universe. All history is just One Big Story, on the same four-dimensional tapestry of space-time.
— / —
2019 saw a series of mass shootings — Christchurch Mosque in March, the Poway synagogue in April, and El Paso in August. 75 dead and 66 injured between them. All the gunmen came from a web forum called 8Chan, and used the platform to post their manifestos and/or livestream their slaughters, to what has been described as “Riotous Glee”.
As the creator of the board where this kept happening, Frederik Brennan received a lot of calls from the media. And in the wake of the El Paso shooting, in August 2019, where 23 people were massacred in 8Chan’s third rampage of the year, he joined the chorus of people calling for it to be removed. Why? Because having the world’s journalists call him for comment about all these mass-shootings that keep coming from the website he built is a drag that gets in the way of “making his fonts”. He wasn’t against image-boards, he just didn’t like the hassle of having his reputation tied to this one.
All he wanted was for the current owners, the Watkins, to change the name. He explicitly told an HBO documentary that if they did that, he’d leave them alone. And since they won’t (and since they did a bunch of other terrible things to him), he has a vendetta against them. Because the Watkins are loathsome filth-merchants who play a major role in keeping Q online however, his vendetta has managed to land him a position as a sympathetic figure and a credible commentator in the “Anti-Q Community”. And he has used that position to keep the focus of that community squarely on his nemeses.
Which is largely fine. They obviously didn’t start it, or have anything to do with the heady days of its first month, but they’re definitely awful enough to keep the 8kun hate machine running, and as the owners of the board Q has exclusively posted on for the last five years, they’re almost certainly involved in some way, with some degree of knowledge of or control over the movement, probably including posting and/or writing at least some of the drops themselves.
And if that’s where Fred left it, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about him at all. Everyone has their journey, and his has been far harder than most. Plenty of people more privileged than him have gone down darker paths, he just happened to be good enough at computers to make a website. That particular tributary is not really of interest to us today. If he’s genuinely turned his back on it all, great. The problem, however, and the reason we are talking about him, is that he has also used his platform to specifically keep the focus of the Q-watchers away from particular people — including General Flynn, and a certain Mr Schoenberger.
And now, when journalists discuss Thomas (or Manuel’s, or Flynn’s) connection to this, it is only to dismiss it.
“I just listened to Fred… If I had an episode where I claimed that Thomas was Q, I would delete that episode…In group chats, Fred was like “Dale investigated this”, and I was like “it’s bullshit, don’t bother”… Ignore it, don’t give it oxygen, just never report on it…The people who investigate the origins are delusional.. How about we exclude the guy who lied about being cicada or whatever… It’s actually dangerous in some ways… To focus on who Q “is” seems like to do it a disservice”
If you dig down into that segment, you’ll find it’s based on what can most charitably be described as a mistake. A reporter called Dale Beran got a key detail wrong (specifically, confusing “MegaAnon” with “FBIanon” in the feet-pic anecdote). That might seem trivial, but he then proceeded to essentially reject the whole story based on that error, and that seems to have defined the entire discourse from that point on. Now, any suggestion of Schoenberger or Defango’s involvement, or even the very idea of Q being any kind of propaganda operation, orchestrated by any of the people in this story, is roundly dismissed and derided as a “crazy Q-style conspiracy theory”.
Which doesn’t make sense. “Q” is built on demonstrable lies and disinformation, which these professional “debunkers” take apart every day. But when it comes to the case described here, they have to literally make something up to point at and say “well it must be all wrong”.
It’s remarkable. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that “Online Perception Management” is these people’s trade. The second thing a psychological influence operation would want to do, after creating the operation itself, is try and make sure that people don’t think it’s an operation. And there are at least a handful of accounts in the “anti-Q” space that seem oddly determined to do just that. But it’s hard to say who is in on what and how deliberate any of this was. What we do know is that Dale and QAA have had the opportunity to address the mistake, and thus far declined to do so.
Among the mix on the right above, we find the name Lisa Clapier. Who Fred wants you to know isn’t Q, she’s the only one he’s sure isn’t Q, and isn’t involved in Q at all. Which is a curious amount of of doth protesting.
And so we come to the final piece of the puzzle, which is how this mess has managed to so effectively penetrate the divine and sacred feminine circles of the New-Age, Holistic Wellness World. They seem nice, so what on Earth could make those kinds of people reconcile those kinds of peaceful inclinations with support for an agenda like Trump’s, as they suddenly did in such alarming numbers in 2020?
Well, right there, giving an adoring interview to a lovely lady who would wipe out a quarter of the world’s population, is the reason why so many in the “Spiritual” community have fallen into this rabbit hole: The one and only Lisa Clapier.
To understand her journey, we first need to look at a film called “THRIVE”. Released on 11/11/2011 by heir to the Proctor & Gamble fortune, Foster Gamble, it’s a well-produced and aesthetically pleasing rollercoaster of a film, who’s pretty colour palate masks a particularly virulent strain of the Conspiracy Narrative Virus.
It’s the same John Birch Society script that Alex Jones is reading from, just said softly instead of shouted. It pretends to be on the side of the hippies, with easy visuals and gentle music. It lures them in by talking about Organic Foods and Ancient Wisdom, then smacks them with a Conspiracy about how doing anything about Climate Change is actually part of a genocidal plot.
There’s even a media network that accompanies the film, called the “FREEDOM PORTAL”, which basically gives the game away. These platforms are some of the delivery vehicles of the Disinformation Factory.
A college kid by the name of Jordan Sather was working in a health store in 2012, when he came across a copy of THRIVE in the video section, and he points to that as his radicalising moment. He would notoriously go on to become one of the earliest and longest-serving Q promoters, leading a lot of the “baking” that went into “decoding” the drops, and pushing them to a wider audience. The virus infected another super-spreader.
Now it’s even managed to get dear old Russell Brand, who is currently platforming propaganda right from this very machine (mostly via Glenn Greenwald) to the prime audience of his 5 million “wonderful awakenings”. There is a lot right with what he says about institutions’ abuse of power, which makes the narratives that are tacked on by the Factory even more dangerous.
But a less famous super-spreader, and the reason we started talking about all this in the first place, is the elusive Lisa Clapier. She pops up in all sorts of interesting places. Like #Occupy LA in 2011, where she was acting as media liaison, and “pilling” otherwise progressive people by hosting screenings of THRIVE.
She’s had a plethora of media platforms over the years, such as “Unify”, “Activism Media”, “The Torch TV”, “BeARealityBender”, etc. They all pushed versions of this “awakening” narrative in one way or another. On the right below, we can also see her going to bat for Putin in 2014, defending Russia’s decision to annex Crimea. As one does.
We’re approaching the confluence of another waterway here, and to chart that we need to take a little esoteric historical detour. In the early 1930’s, a Theosophist and conman called Guy Ballard was hiking on Mt Shasta in California, when he says he met the reincarnated soul of one of the Ascended Masters, whose past lives included: A High Priest in Atlantis (13,000 years ago), Merlin, and most recently, a mysterious 18th century adventurer and polymath called Saint Germain. Guy (and his wife Edna) claimed to be the sole “Accredited Messengers” of the Ascended Master Saint Germain, and formed an offshoot of Theosophy called “I AM”.
Credit where it’s due, it’s a cracking tale. They printed millions of books, attracted tens of thousands of followers, and currently have members in locations in over 300 cities around the world. One of whom, by December 2015 at least, was our new friend Lisa Clapier.
Ok well this is an interesting stream we’ve wandered up, but where on Earth are are we, and what does any of it have to do with Qanon? The answer is we’re a lot closer to the root of it all than you might think. Perhaps you can smell Lisa’s rhetoric in the background of some of the Q drops, or notice some Theosophical themes in the movement, with echoes of the “Silver Legion”. If not, then you can at least hear Mike Flynn openly using I AM prayers in some of his public performances. But you’ll never guess who claims to be a direct descendent of “St Germain”, and was trying to develop a screenplay about his life and adventures, while also scoring the film, and casting himself as the lead… None other than ol’ Tommy Showbags. The “Th Stg” we see in his email addresses actually stands for “Thomas St Germain”. It turns out that he and Clapier had a “unique” relationship. She saw the potential in using ARGs like Cicada to manipulate people too. And in early 2017, she reached out about working on a project together.
Lisa was also deeply involved with #Unity4J, Fitzgibbon’s “cross-pollinating” operation for Wikileaks and Julian Assange. And was using a Twitter account called SnowWhite7IAM, which was one of the primary promoters of Qanon:
All of which makes the “Q-Watching” community’s relentless reluctance to look at any of these figures, and their aggressive insistence that none of them have anything to do with it, extremely bizarre.
Again, it’s unlikely Clapier was writing or posting the drops herself, or was there from start to finish. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that there is a massive amorphous machine behind this, and she is a part of it — the “Spiritual / New Age” stream we’ve so far been missing.
One of the biggest questions of the whole Qanon affair is how everyone’s crystal-loving, “Peace Love and Unify Media” ~hippy Aunt~ suddenly turned into a raging Trump devotee. And a big part of the answer can be found in the story of THRIVE, and Lisa Clapier’s theosophical journey to becoming the Conspiracy Virus’s Typhoid Mary, armed with a puzzle-gun.
Here she is basically admitting to the whole thing. She might be exaggerating her role, but it’s notable nonetheless:
Because it doesn’t stop there either. We have one more character to meet, a dreamy actor/model from the “New Age” community in Ojai, California, named Mikki Willis.
Mikki and Lisa were both at Standing Rock #NODAPL. There is a lot to be said about that whole Thing, and exactly what those two were up to there. The short version is that the Fossil Fuel interests who felt threatened by the protest hired a professional mercenary operation called TigerSwan, to “infiltrate” the camp and manipulate the movement from within. But perhaps that’s a story for another time. For now, it might be worth noting that Jake Angeli, AKA the “Q Shaman”, points to this movement as the beginning of his own radicalisation journey.
When COVID hit, and the conspiratorial tales the Factory had been peddling came the closest they had ever come to reality. Mikki moved quickly, and on the 4th May 2020, just six weeks into the pandemic, he released the now infamous film “Plandemic”, featuring disgraced research scientist Judy Mikovits. It was essentially a lie, which is unfortunately a defining feature of the anti-vax movement.
Despite the shady evidence and contradictory logic, a thriving media ecosystem quickly sprung up. A Community emerged, rallying around powerful words like “freedom” and “sovereignty”, and providing a desperately needed sense of empowerment and connection. But instead of bringing people together, it dragged them directly into the Factory’s pipeline of far-right propaganda.
Which turned into the crisis that we see today. “Plandemic” proved to be the spark that hit the tinderbox that set the world on fire. Or the hammer on the chisel in the crack of our shared foundation of facts, which split it right open. Steve Bannon sent it rocketing around the internet via Breitbart, and millions of people, if not more, can point to that, either directly or indirectly, as their radicalising moment.
Because it typically led straight to two other films that came out around the same time: “Out Of Shadows” and “Fall of Cabal”, which in turn led straight to Qanon and its extended universe. They essentially reanimated the #pizzagate narratives to become the “Save the Children” movement, and the world hasn’t really been the same since.
And on January 6, 2021, guess where Mikki Willis was? In the Capitol, with a few thousand insurrectionists chanting “Hang Mike Pence”.
Speaking of Bannon, who was also in the middle of the coup attempt, we should check in on what he’s been doing. Cambridge Analytica’s worldwide operations appear to also include setting up groups with names like “Nigeria Forward”, “Reignite Britain’s Promise”, and “Reclaim UK”. Meanwhile in Australia, we see groups with names like “Victoria Forward”, “Reignite Democracy Australia”, and “Reclaim Australia”. All of which quickly capitalised on the disruption of the lockdowns to push their political agenda, and convince people that ideas like “Black Lives Matter” and “Anti-Fascism” were actually part of a sinister “globalist conspiracy”.
He is deadset on this Global Revolt. He is very open about his desire to dismantle the administrative state. From Bolsonaro in Brazil, to Brexit in Britain, to Bosi in Australia, dishonest conspiracy-based digital campaigns are a key part of the strategy to install far-right or outright fascist governments, or burn it all down trying.
Anyone, anywhere, can jump on Telegram or Bitchute, or the comment sections of neighbourhood Facebook Groups, and anonymously pump any kind of content into wherever they want. Millenial Social Media Managers can crank out memes or #hashtags to control or confect a conversation, for less than the cost of a long lunch.
Russia has been doing “Active Measures” like these for decades. They want to restore the glory of their empire by destabilising the international order, which aligns with a lot of this chaos. The “Internet Research Agency” were caught creating fake Facebook pages and events (as well as just buying ads) specifically to shit-stir in the lead up to the 2016 election. And their State Media was only too happy to amplify the COVID protests, by broadcasting livestreams filled with Qanon messaging.
Andrew Breitbart said “politics is downstream from culture”, and that has essentially become the mantra for this movement. Change politics by controlling the “culture”. Ultimately that’s what all this is about. How the landscape has been littered with twisted & manipulative content, in order to generate enough energy to impact the halls of power.
And that’s basically why the world’s gone mad. A decentralised, trans-national and inter-generational network of capitalists and theocratic fascists, weaponising the Conspiracy Virus and other Unrealities, across multiple decades and myriad media platforms, who got extremely lucky with the pandemic.
Fuelled by the clinically created “Culture Wars” of Critical Race Theory, Pride, Mask Mandates, Transgenderism, and everything else we’ve seen, the GOP are becoming the party where everything’s made up and the votes don’t matter. But it’s not a game, and it’s not just the elections they’re impacting. They have caused incalculable trauma, both to individuals and their societies.
“Q” was only one “product” from this amorphous “factory”. A concept car, if you will, from a team of semi-rogue sub-contractors, which performed wildly better than expected.
This current level of UnReality is a significant step on the road to societal collapse. Because crucially, this does not just stay online. The whole point of cognitive manipulation is to have very real physical consequences. They believe absurdities, and are ready to commit atrocities. They are quite literally gearing up for Mass Violence.
They’re actively taking over as many levels of administration as possible — from School Boards, to Local Councils, State Legislatures and Governorships, Congress and the Senate, all the way to the Presidency and the Pentagon. They stacked all circuits of the Judiciary with a record number of nominees, including 3 Supreme Court Justices radical enough to overturn settled law. And they restructured the Department of Defence, so that Flynn loyalists in the Special Ops department would report directly to the Acting Secretary.
All of which meant that when the 2020 election didn’t go the way they wanted, they could have a red-hot go at just stealing it anyway. The Factory fired up its manipulation machine, and managed to convince millions of people, and mobilised enough of them to march on Washington and try and physically overturn the result. This was, and is, a full-blown fascist take over attempt.
Progressives aren’t baby-eating demons. They want people to have access to good Healthcare and Education without going into crippling debt, because that’s just a better way to do it. They want your kids to be able to go to school without fear of getting shot, hopefully have a good lunch while they’re there, and grow up to enjoy humane working conditions, in liveable cities, with drinkable water, on a planet with viable ecosystems. They want people to be their true selves, marry the person they love, and choose when they have children. Sometimes they can be annoying, sure, like anyone. And there are important conversations to have about all of those things, which need to take place in the same reality, with a shared foundation of facts.
And so at last we come to the mouth of the river, where the waters of the JBS, VIPS, CNP, BMSK, Freedom Portal, Theosophy, Cicada, ShadowBox, Psy-Group, Discordianism, Mockingbird, Cambridge Analytica, MAGA3X, and many more, all collide to create the roaring flood that divides us in this moment.
We are living in a soup of Psychological Operations, which has everyone at each other’s throats. It’s often difficult to know who is being influenced and who is doing the influencing, and after decades of propaganda the answer is almost certainly not as clear as we would like anyway. That is how the virus works. When we’re not sure what’s what, perhaps the best we can hope for is to be honest, fair, and kind. And be absolutely ruthless with those who aren’t. If we can manage that, then we might have a chance.
Thank you to everyone who has helped in any way to put all this together.
