“Save the Children, Save the World”: The frightening new face of a modern political media campaign.
The most powerful force in the universe is a parent protecting a child. If good people believe there are children in danger, they will stop at nothing to ensure that no harm comes to them. Child sex trafficking is real, and it’s horrific. It’s not ‘2,000 children per day’, that represents the total number of reports. But of course even one is too many.
On the surface, it seems simple enough: Saving children is something everyone can agree on. And there is important work being done in this space. But just below the surface, or sometimes even right out front, is a chilling claim: The progressive movement is engaged in a satanic child sex trafficking ring, torturing hordes of kids to harvest their blood.
Accusing your enemies of a sin like this is a well-worn strategy, reappearing every so often in a slightly different form. This particular iteration has been simmering away of the fringes of the far-right since 2016. But in the first half of this year, capitalising on the panic surrounding the pandemic, it crept into other subcultures, and is now crashing into the mainstream.
This is no accident. It can draw on organic sources, and exploit external events, but it is absolutely orchestrated, by people who plant seeds in the right places, and then carefully water them until they bloom into the toxic flowers we see today.
2016 showed us how social media can be weaponised to win elections. The two big surprises — Trump and Brexit — stunned the wold precisely because they were so unlikely. There were similar stories around the rest of the world. None of them would have happened without this new element of warfare. And in the aftermath, while wondering how it went so wrong, many have been scrambling to figure out how to carefully craft policies that aren’t too progressive, in a good-faith appeal to a certain definition of the working class. Which seems to ignore the fact that the game has changed. There is a whole different dimension at work— deliberate manipulation of key demographics, by strategically spreading disinformation. Completely fabricated narratives, systematically using data designed to exploit anything they can find.
Propaganda is nothing new. But it is now being used on a level which we are not yet fully equipped to deal with. There are several elements to it: First is to use the unprecedented volume of Big, Deep Data now available, to understand exactly where the levers are. Then they can invent a grassroots campaign to push those levers. It doesn’t even have to be coherent - Chaos counts, and confusion works for their purpose. Next, they get a carefully controlled network of accounts to amplify it, to the point where an established news platform will notice it, and from there it will then spread organically through the rest of the media ecosystem. It creates a controversy, which gets attention, and all of a sudden they have taken control of the conversation, without ever even being in it. It’s literally a super-weapon.
We know it is exists. We know how powerful it is. And we know that is being used, right now, by an administration which has signalled it might not necessarily accept the results of an election, and has no qualms about violating the constitution by sending an unidentified militia into states to commit violence against its own people.
To understand where this particular narrative is coming from, we need to go back to 2016. Donald Trump was running for President. Despite being handed millions of dollars and the keys to a property empire, he still managed to bankrupt a casino. His business model in the beginning was largely based on projecting an aura of wealth, while refusing to pay tax, and stiffing contractors wherever he could. After numerous nefarious deals went bad, Russia bailed him out. But by the end of the 90’s, he had largely faded into irrelevancy. Then a man named Mark Burnett came along with a show called The Apprentice, and meticulously crafted Trump in the image of a mogul. It was a literal TV set, but TV is powerful, and it convinced a lot of people that was in fact a successful businessman. And that might have been it. He could have happily gone off to play golf, while taking pot-shots at politicians on twitter. But like Jafar at the end of Aladdin, he was not satisfied to be a sorcerer. He craved the phenomenal cosmic power of the presidency. So, he ran.
He essentially embodied the idea that rich white men should just be able to do what they want. To women, to the environment, to the economy. An overt nationalist, blatant misogynist, and a classic capitalist. And he did not appear to be bound by political norms. He enjoyed saying the quiet part out loud, and thrived on the controversy that followed. Which presented an opportunity to shift the Overton Window way back over to the far-right. So, there were plenty of Americans who wanted him to be president.
But also important is who he was running against: Hillary Clinton. And American conservatives weren’t the only ones who didn’t want her in the White House. As Secretary of State, she had signed off on sanctions against Russia, which would only get worse under her presidency. These are incredibly rich, powerful, and ruthless people, who do not like having their affairs meddled with. And, after 500 days of being locked down because her state department would arrest him if he stepped outside, Julian Assange wasn’t too happy with her either.
The exact extent to which these three forces cooperated, conspired and colluded, and the impact that had, is of course, complicated. But they clearly had the same goal: Help Trump beat Clinton. And that was going to take a lot of work.
The key players are: Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Joel Zamel, Brad Parscale, Dan Scavino, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Julian Assange, an assortment of Russian Oligarchs led by Vladimir Putin, and the Mercer family. The tools they used were: Cambridge Analytica, Psy Group, Internet Research Agency (IRA), Fancy Bear, Wikileaks, Breitbart, and of course the entire pre existing conservative media machine.
Briefly, the story is this: The Russians hacked the DNC, gave the contents to Wikleaks, who released them to hurt the Democrats in the election. 150,000 emails. And there was some damaging stuff in there. It looked like the DNC had sabotaged Bernie Sanders in the primary. And the Republicans got to see all of the Democrats’ data and election strategy. It’s like playing poker when you can see the other side’s hand.
At the same time, the IRA was buying facebook ads, creating groups, and organising astroturfed events. This is of course in addition to the ad buys that the Trump team were making as well. They were able to amplify the message, and create the perception of a candidate with a viable amount of support in the right states.
On October 7, one month out from the election, the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape came out. In any world up until that point, openly bragging about sexual assault would be game over. But this is not that world. Now there are new players, with new toys, playing a new game.
12 hours later, Wikileaks releases thousands more emails . The dump deflects attention from the Trump scandal. Instead of the news being “Trump did this”, it was “Trump did this, and this happened to Hillary”. Which is significant. It gives people an ‘out’. It raised some more questions about the Democrats. But still, it didn’t pack quite enough punch. The emails were embarrassing, but there wasn’t any real suggestion of anything untoward. So it was time for the final card up their sleeve. It was a desperate long shot. But it was all they had left: Invent a scandal. Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the Democratic establishment, were satan worshipping pedophiles.
A story like that can’t just spring up over night. It takes a lot of groundwork to prepare. To understand where that came from, we have to go on a journey to a place called 4chan: An anonymous message board in a dark corner of the web.
The anonymity provided a unique environment. Popular with the ostracised, it gave people who didn’t always fit into the outside world a chance to express themselves in way they never could, for better or worse. Amongst the relentless trolling was an almost endearing sense of community, and an impressive creative spirit. Much of what we consider today to be ‘internet culture’, including the very concept of a meme, originated there. Posters would create characters, and often indulge in role play. They would do anything for a joke, and it was cloaked in so many layers of irony that it was often impossible to know how serious it was.
The potential for this platform to be used as a new weapon in the world of cyber warfare would absolutely have been known to those in the business. ‘Characters’ from intelligence agencies began to appear, like High Level Insider, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, and WH Insider Anon, doing “AMA” (ask me anything) sessions, offering tantalising details from the higher echelons of government. Perhaps it was different jokers playing around, or it could have been someone refining their skills in creating the character — testing the waters, studying their audience, learning their likes and dislikes, how they act and react to certain things.
Either way, on July 2nd 2016, when the FBI were conducting their investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server, someone claiming to be be “a person with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case” appears, who will come to be known as FBIanon.
The investigations were pretty dry, so over hundreds of posts, roughly once a month from July to October, FBIanon began to systematically create the idea that there was actually far more going on with the Democratic candidate — including occult rituals abusing trafficked children. They were even helpful enough to actually articulate their explicit strategy (over many posts which are edited together here):
“Repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth. Repeat after me: ‘Hillary is evil and will destroy the planet.’… The task is this: unleash every meme, image, and horrible story about HRC that you can muster while she gives her speech tonight. You all must find a way to visible disrupt her nomination speech. It can be done — but it is up to you on how to do it. … In order to be effective, you must proselytize. 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. HRC and Correct the Record invade your circles. Why don’t you invade theirs? … We should be spreading memes to /r/HillaryForPrison and /r/The_Donald subs on Reddit.… blitz Twitter, Tumblr, and all social media with memes on the Clinton Foundation tonight, on the last night of the DNC. We should get on it now, sooner the better. 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 …”
It’s possible it was just another joke, a LARP (live action role play). But they also say:
“More leaks will come. The time is not right yet. Expect an October Surprise.”
And then in October, after the Podesta emails are released, they add:
“As an aside, 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.”
They were in on the strategy, almost certainly working with Stone. Although interestingly, when asked for examples of code words, they say “favors”, “extras”, “officers”.
This is a sophisticated effort from a strategic digital influence team. “Sophisticated” feels like a strange word to use in the same breath as 4chan, or Trump for that matter. But if you want to mobilise an army of trolls to do your work for you, it is the perfect place to go.
The narrative connecting Clinton with human trafficking, pedophilia, and the occult, begins here. We know it begins here, because Jerome Corsi, someone who hated the Clintons and had researched an entire book specifically to trying to bring them down, doesn’t mention anything about it.
Timing is important. Like a cyclist, you don’t want to go too hard too far out from the finish. So they were happy to let it simmer until October, the month before the election, when (after the Access Hollywood tape dropped) obscure websites like whatdoesitmean.com begin publishing a story claiming Israeli intelligence have a videotape of Bill Clinton raping a 13-year-old girl. 2 days later, a video is uploaded to youtube by ‘Pseudo-Anonymous’, echoing the story almost verbatim, but going further still, saying that after learning about the tape, Hillary Clinton decided to run for president and set up Donald Trump as a Pied Piper opponent. But unbeknownst to her, Trump was actually noble. This is the genesis of that side of the story. But it still didn’t have anything to actually latch on to.
At the end October, with a week to go till the election, the FBI announced they were reopening the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, after going through Anthony Weiner’s laptop for an unrelated matter. Weiner was a fiery congressman, who liked to send photos of himself in his underwear to people, including a 15 year old. So the police got involved and had a look at his laptop. He was a democrat from New York, as was Hillary Clinton. Unsurprisingly, there were emails from her on there. The FBI said they hadn’t seen them before, so they had some more questions about the server. And finally, after months of fertilising the soil, the pedophile theory had the catalyst needed to take off: A naughty photo that was sent to a 15 year old, was on a computer that also had an email from Hillary Clinton on it, and the FBI was investigating.
The next day, a post appeared on facebook describing the story. A twitter account controlled by the IRA picked it up and tweeted it to hundreds of thousands of followers, including the future deputy assistant to President Trump Sebastian Gorka, and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn.
The “story” went on to be shared over a million times in the next 5 weeks, by more than a 250,000 accounts. Most posted about the story only a few times. 3,000 accounts tweeted five times or more. And a few dozen tweeted up to 900 times a day . This is the power of a bot network. Semi-automated trolls that can be programmed and deployed to amplify anything they want.
Two days later, at least 3 websites (‘Conservative Daily Post’, ‘SubjectPolitics.com’, and ‘True Pundit’) run variations on the story: “FBI confirms evidence of huge underground Clinton sex network”, claiming a “massive child trafficking and pedophile sex ring in DC, run directly with the Clinton Foundation as a front.” It was all, of course, a complete fabrication. It didn’t happen. We can obvioulsy see that now, but even back then, there still wasn’t quite enough for it to take off.
Until the next day, November 3, when Wikileaks releases the ‘Podesta files’. A relatively mundane dump of 20,000 emails. Unless, you can make them sinister. And one hour after the emails were released, this appears:
And so, like ancient astronomers creating constellations by drawing invisible lines between dots in the sky, a story emerges: The ‘Comet Ping Pong’ pizza restaurant in Washington has a secret basement where the Washington Elite host satanic child sex sacrifice parties. “#Pizzagate” was born. Within 24 hours, it was almost fully formed.
There were so many factors at play that it’s impossible to say what swung the election. That’s not the point. The point is that it happened. They created a narrative out of nothing, and successfully took it to launch. And less than a week later, Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, giving him enough electoral college votes to take the presidency.
From day one, the administration set about aggressively destabilising the very idea of truth itself. Brazenly presenting “alternative facts”, and calling anything they don’t like “fake news”. This isn’t just the crucial first step in the process to give Trump any shred of credibility, it was using the power of the podium to shift the norm, and laying the groundwork for a savage disinformation campaign, to test how far they can take it. Who are you going to believe, them, or your lying eyes? They do actually need to know.
While the government swiftly set about enacting almost a caricature of a far-right agenda (slashing regulation and social security, while giving tax cuts to billionaires), a community was cultivated around the conspiracy theories, and the movement began to take on a life of its own. A social media ecosystem sprung up, with people swapping stories on Reddit, Voat, Steemit, 4chan, YouTube, Twitter, Gab, and various obscure alt-right/white supremacist blogs and websites.
A month later, on the 4th of December, a young man called Edgar Welch finally takes the theory to its logical conclusion. If you believe that there really is a child sex trafficking ring happening in the basement of a pizza restaurant, and the authorities don’t appear to care, then you go and you goddamn do something. He drives 30 hours to Washington DC, walks into Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, pokes around, fires a few shots, before realising it doesn’t even have a basement. But good on him for having a look and not killing anyone. That would seem to be about as far as a non-story can go, and by mid 2017, it starts to die off.
Until October, with Trump facing mounting pressure from multiple investigations. Robert Mueller brings charges against Roger Stone’s old partners, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The infamous ‘dirty tricksters’. The next day, our protagonist finally emerges: Q.
While the style is different to FBIanon, the themes are basically identical. Hillary was still the villain, but now that the election was over, Trump had to become more of a central hero in the story. So they built on the narrative from the obscure Pseudo-Anonymous video from the year before: The world was being run by an evil cabal of satan worshipping sex traffickers, and Trump was on a holy mission to take them down. Q, ostensibly, was someone inside the White House, with a front row seat to the whole thing. They had chosen 4chan to communicate with the public. And instead of an AMA format, they flip it, and instead ask open-ended questions themselves, so the readers could fill in the gaps with whatever they found. It was a puzzle, they spoke in mysterious coded riddles, and sent people on what felt like treasure hunts.
It was compelling stuff, and right away people were hooked. It was like a game, but the stakes were high. The interactivity of it all was thrilling — a government insider, posting on their message board. It didn’t matter that none of it came true. It gave a sense of community, and of hope, which in the face of Trump’s performance they desperately needed. Its authenticity was ‘proven’ by coincidences between the Q drops and Trump tweets, which is of course completely consistent with the theory that it is actually just someone in Trump’s communication team.
After about a week of the posts, two guys called Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, (moderators on 4chan who went by the names of Pamphlet Anon and BaruchThe Scribe), approached Youtuber Tracy Diaz about making some videos on the subject. It’s entirely possible Q was just them. Perhaps they had been asked to do it, perhaps they did it of their own accord. Perhaps neither. Regardless, the three of them took it to Reddit, and within a matter of weeks they had audience in the tens of thousands. Powered on by an army of bots and troll farms, it quickly spread through youtube, facebook and twitter. Like a virus infecting our culture. Soon it built up enough material to become self perpetuating.
After a year of predicting things which always failed to materialise, it became apparent that it was dangerously toxic nonsense, so some platforms put quarantine measures in place. Reddit deleted all the Q sub-forums, and twitter banned thousands of Q accounts. It’s still on facebook and youtube and instagram. So while it has remained a relatively healthy community among the far right, dutifully spouting the administration’s ideology, that is largely where it has stayed. Still frighteningly powerful, but relatively contained.
Until this year. An unprecedented pandemic shuts down the whole world. Police keep murdering civilians with no apparent consequence, and people protest. Trump handles it all as badly as ever. It was time to go back to the bag of magical media tricks. And billions of people locked in their homes and feeling afraid, presented an extraordinary opportunity.
Amidst the panic surrounding the epidemic, many people found themselves wondering if there something going on. Asking questions is a natural human impulse. Essential for survival. And so the virus brought several communities together, bound by a shared skepticism: The anti-5G movement, anti-vaccination movement, and the anti-mask / anti lock-down movement.
Q Pounced. Not just the actual character, but the minds that put him there. The machine that’s running the whole thing. They recognised the mindset that makes these people the type to entertain these ideas.They identified an opportunity to target them and exploit their concerns. Between April and May, the Q community doubled in size, and catapulted itself into your news feed. With new and improved branding, focusing on child abuse and human trafficking.
It quietly began in January, from an account that seems to exist solely to share stories from Russian sources, with a tweet connecting Covid to 5G:
Remember, this doesn’t have to make sense. There is no cost, and nothing to lose by sending that tweet at that point. They have what’s basically a machine gun with bullshit bullets, which they can fire all over the place. And this bullet hit a fuse. Fuelled by the bots and amplified by Breitbart, it led directly to millions of people not taking the virus seriously.
Confusion reigned. It all happened so quickly and dramatically, the world seemed to fall apart, and something smelled suspicious. That was all they needed.
Three films were produced. “Plandemic” exposed millions to the idea that this extraordinary event was in fact an evil hoax, and the elites in the mainstream media were lying to you. It was heavily, and almost exclusively promoted by Breitbart. Meanwhile, “Out of Shadows” had studio-quality production values and an engaging protagonist. The opening act is a compellingly edited sequence, essentially saying that our lives are moulded by media. (Q’s first word was ‘Mockingbird’… hey, decoding ‘Q drops’ is fun). The first half was well documented conspiracy theories like Gulf of Tonkin and MK Ultra, media consolidation, the history of satanism, etc. Then, the second half pivots pretty sharply to pure #pizzagate. And “Fall of the Cabal” was a 10-part home made hodge-podge of it all, from what appears to be a sweet and sincere Dutch lady. All this, while people are stuck at home in the midst of a confusing crisis, with nothing but time on their hands. These films were viewed over 50 million times.
Whether it was through a literal briefcase full of money, or by creating a media environment in which they would come to appear naturally, “Q” was responsible for these films and their popularity. They created a pipeline into the mainstream, through which they can pump their propaganda, straight from the Q Universe. A place which by now, has been growing roots for nearly 3 years. An established ecosystem, full of meticulously crafted codes and videos, thoroughly documenting the case for progressives being a satanic child sex trafficking ring.
And that brings us back to where we are today. The “Save the Children” campaign is the latest manifestation of this narrative they have been building since July 2016. It is a clinically created piece of propaganda, spread virally through social media by the same wizards who have a habit of winning seemingly un-winnable elections, to distract from their failings and delegitimise their opponents. The have capitalised on the pandemic, and updated the packaging, even giving it a new-age spiritual dimension, to pivot to a whole new audience who would otherwise never have heard of it, or been within an ideological mile of their agenda. It’s been a long road, and it’s taken a lot of work, but it’s paying off, and now a reheated pizzagate has people toeing the administration’s line: cheering on a secret militia, while shouting at and demonising people peacefully protesting police violence. Instead of marching together in solidarity against injustice.
You know who cares about child sex trafficking? Good people. People with a powerful sense of justice. Free thinkers, who question the dominant narrative. Who speak up for what they think is right, and are prepared to do something about it. Who care about humanity’s spiritual future. This is why Q wants them so badly, and has worked so hard to get them. They have gone to great lengths to hide their roots. Many people found Q through youtube, or facebook. They might not know where it actually comes from. So now, to those whose hearts are aflame with righteousness, I present the the home of Q, where all the ‘Q drops’ appear: 8kun.
There absolutely is a cabal of evil people, who manipulate our culture for their agenda. The elite, who own the global energy infrastructure, political lobbies, the media empires, and multinational corporations, have been completely controlling things for centuries. The only thing they care about is making as much money as possible. They’ll do whatever they can to that end.
They are gearing up for a full-blown take over. They are likely to lose the election, so they are doing everything they can to delegitimise it, including crippling the post office. Trump is already calling the votes fraudulent, and saying you can’t trust the media, while desensitising people to the idea of a secret police just outright abducting protestors.
The issue isn’t just the Q movement itself, nor is it just this election. Nor is even about Trump. Candidates come and go. When he’s finally finished, and Q falls apart, the ideology and the people behind it will remain. As will this power they have. They won’t stop, they will use their billions to rebrand and do it again, but bigger and better. With a character like Trump, they got desperate, and desperation made them sloppy. And it still worked. But it’s not always going to be as obviously absurd as this. It can and will be more insidious, and our future depends on being vigilant to their tricks.
“Q” is just one tool in the box that these people have, and the human trafficking thing has come out of the same box. The box itself is a complicated assortment of tricks, and it includes hacks, leaks, bots, trolls, facebook, 4chan, fake events, the traditional conservative media apparatus, eerily precise psychological analysis, capped off with cleverly crafted campaigns driven by deep data, that use all of the above for maximum effect and behavioural change. It’s not just one thing or another, it’s all of it working in concert.
We’re seeing people move, and we need to pay attention to the strings that are moving them. We need to follow the strings back to the puppeteers that are pulling them. And we need look for the other tools they have too.
The most powerful weapon they have is the hearts and minds of good people. The ones who care about the world, and the welfare of children. The curious, the courageous, the righteous. We need our warriors, who will fight for the innocent.
We can dismantle the deep state, and build a better world. One that works for every man woman and child. It’s time for a new revolution. The Great Awakening. Do your research, uncover the cabal, and defeat the evil which rots the heart of humanity. They want us divided. Let’s come together. Where we go one, we go all.
