When I first started looking at QAnon two years ago, I immediately saw that it was a well-coordinated operation, that the owner of 8chan was involved, and that Mike Flynn and the Russians were behind it. I also saw that it was using alternate reality game techniques which I helped pioneer 20 years ago which gave me a unique insight into how it worked.
It was also very clear right away that its intended goal was political violence.
The article was technically a conspiracy theory of course, because the theory I was writing about was that QAnon itself was a conspiracy. The article went viral but I immediately started getting labeled a “conspiracy theorist” by both the right wing and the controlled opposition on the left. #RealBlueAnon
It could also called “analysis.” This is the kind of thing people in the intelligence community (IC) do all day long. You acquire as much data as you can about an organized criminal activity and try to determine who, how and why it’s happening. Intelligence analysis is not an exact science. For example, IC reports are always based on “confidence level.”
When someone analyzes an organized criminal activity and theorizes about it, the job of the reader is to evaluate the data, the reasoning, and the predictive value of the work.
Throughout history, real conspiracies are almost always covered up by fake ones. Alternate histories are intentionally distributed so that anyone who gets close to the truth can be labeled as “just another conspiracy theory.”
I wrote this three weeks before the insurrection.
It was accurate. QAnon was an attack on democracy as we found shortly thereafter on 1/6 — and every person on my chart knew it. But the goal was not to find out who “Q” was, or to build some elaborate proof, it was to look at open source intelligence (OSINT) to evaluate the goals, means and methods of QAnon so that people could make critical decisions for themselves.
But the operators of QAnon knew that they would need to build not only a false history of the world that would radicalize and incite its victims, they knew that they needed a false history of QAnon itself to cover up their criminal conspiracy.
This effort has been accomplished through an elaborate layering of disinformation about QAnon through the press by people who push fake conspiracy theories that are designed to cover up the real one.
A recent, egregious example was this New York Times article, which ignores a huge amount of evidence that belies its conclusions in favor of the flimsiest of conspiracy theories based on computer “stylometry” — which is a nascent technology which tries to use AI to match writing styles between people to identify anonymous writers.
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the “proof” has the simple problem of GIGO — garbage in, garbage out.
The people who did the study were informed by liars, who gave them false assumptions to put into their analysis. The only people they tested as “potential Q’s” were people that disinformation agents told them were candidates, including a schizophrenic QAnon believer who imitates Q drops all day named Paul Furber.
The goals of these liars are to 1) layer disinformation to confuse and deflect, and 2) to attack people who get close to the truth as conspiracy theorists while they spin their own fake ones. Their “theory” is basically anything except the truth.
Fred Brennan, who is the source of the New York Times article, is one of the most harmful operatives in the history of the internet — an expert at traumatizing people through trolling, infiltration and psyops. His partner in creating disinformation about QAnon is Mike Rothschild who has spent two years conspiring with Fred and others to silence me and my accurate theory of the QAnon conspiracy, for their lies.
This is theater, designed to throw up a cloud of mystery by saying “the majority view” is that the person responsible for QAnon was an “unknowable 4chan anon.”
There is nothing “unknowable” about it. QAnon was started by Justin McConney aka Microchip, Doug Stewart, James Brower and Manny Chavez III aka Defango. McConney, Stewart and Brower were working for MAGA3X — which was operated and funded by Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Flynn and Peter Thiel.
Defango was working with Thomas Schoenberger’s gamejacked version of Cicada3301 and knew all about alternate reality games — including the ones that I helped create.
But “Q” was Mike Flynn. The people who created, wrote it and ran it were working for Flynn. “Q drops” were just Mike Flynn’s alter ego.
Mike Rothschild and Fred Brennan know this. Remember that one of the most important things to evaluate about a “conspiracy theory” is its predictive value.
When our nation was on the brink of an authoritarian takeover, my friends and I were screaming our heads off about it because my conspiracy theory predicted violence conducted by Mike Flynn, QAnon and neo-nazis, while the alternate conspiracy theory was that the most dangerous thing about going to 1/6 was COVID.
You be the judge, which theory was more predictive?
This is not about a Twitter spat, or trolling, it’s about intentional liars who have infected the mainstream narrative with provably false conspiracy theories.
#ArrestMikeFlynn
Fifth column Flynn https://mobile.twitter.com/Imposter_Edits/status/1542077580936941568
I'm not sure political violence was the intended goal. I think that was to create a cult of personalty around Trump. Of course, that is always an element of fascism/authoritarianism and political violence is pretty much inevitable with that because fascism cannot tolerate the opposition it is always going to face. So, I suppose it doesn't matter if it's the goal when it's a necessary means to their despicable ends. As we used to say in junior high "same dff".