Origin Story

What I saw six years ago. And why I do what I do.

In the summer of 2020, the America I lived in felt beleaguered by four years of Trump. We were in the first huge bloom of COVID deaths, George Floyd was executed in front of the world, and with everyone cooped up, the internet seemed to be going particularly insane.

I was never a Twitter guy. I had less than 300 followers that summer, but I saw something in QAnon that was both familiar and frightening. It was abusing alternate reality game techniques I helped pioneer 15+ years before for marketing campaigns. Moreover, QAnon appeared to have a leader—or at least a main beneficiary—retired three-star general Mike Flynn.

This did not take some grand act of sleuthing or “research.” I simply went to the place QAnon propaganda was being shared and observed at least a third of the accounts showed some kind of direct loyalty to Mike Flynn in the profile. Many believers posted a link to his legal fund—which was started the month before “Q”. It was later revealed he raised at least $8.5 million this way.

Flynn had infamously done the QAnon oath “Where We Go One We Go All” on the Fourth of July, 2020 with his whole family in his own backyard—and posted it to Twitter. To be abundantly clear, a man who receives a $200,000+ pension from the military raised his hand to QAnon, not the Constitution of the United States—in public.

But when Flynn posted this article on a white nationalist website a month later, I became very concerned about what was going to happen around the election. Flynn appeared to be trying to raise some kind of white Christian nationalist army through QAnon. The article was full of violent neo-Nazi signals like scapegoating “antifa,” “BLM,” and “Marxism” as the enemy in a “biblical” war of “good versus evil… happening on the streets of America.”

When that was published six years ago, I gathered up the gumption to tweet about it—to my 300 followers.

Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson

This is going to intensify and Flynn is going to take direct control of them. The part about not allowing the dark forces on the streets is the most terrifying. It’s a preview of Election Day.

11:11 PM · Aug 5, 2020

---

16 Replies · 113 Reposts · 400 Likes

For five months, I tracked Flynn, QAnon, and a growing list of suspected co-conspirators as they openly tried to undermine and then overthrow Biden’s election victory. At first, this was more and more violent propaganda, more radicalized followers, and more absurd election conspiracies. But on December 18th, that changed. Immediately after Trump met with Mike Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Patrick Byrne in the White House, Trump tweeted that his followers should come to DC on January 6th—and that it “will be wild.”

This began mass mobilization of a cult—people obsessed with the Big Lie who were heavily radicalized by coercive, traumatic propaganda to believe that Congress was full of Satanic pedophiles. And no one seemed to be talking about it—except them.

After watching Q believers organize “caravans” to DC, and spelunking in their spaces on Twitter, Telegram, and “CloutHub” for weeks to listen to what they thought would happen, I became convinced a violent attack on the Capitol would happen—well in advance.

It played out more or less exactly how they had broadcast it. I tweeted this a week before.

Jim Stewartson, Decelerationist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇺🇸@jimstewartson

On January 6th, when a normal Constitutional process to mark the peaceful transition of power is supposed to happen, instead we will have: #tEhStorm This will be @GenFlynn, a pile of Proud Boys, neo-nazis, Q cultists and assorted fascists parked outside the Capitol. 2/

3:01 AM · Dec 31, 2020

---

57 Replies · 561 Reposts · 1.6K Likes

The night before J6, there was a gathering of white nationalists in DC. Flynn was a featured speaker and praised his “digital soldiers”—a phrase he coined which “Q” used frequently. He urged them to model “all the men and women standing in freedom’s space around the world, willing to die, willing to sacrifice their very lives… We have got to get this [the election] right!”

I watched it live. The scrolling comments are a good indicator of the kind of impact he was having.

The following day I watched the crowd gather, Trump encourage them to march to the Capitol in a speech, and the violence inevitably erupt. I could only hold my head for hours. It was a gut punch unlike anything I have ever felt.

Later, the footage revealed what I already knew. It was Flynn’s people at the tip of the spear. This included people like recently-freed Proud Boy Joe Biggs (a Sergeant under Flynn in Afghanistan), and neo-Nazi Q believer Brian Gamble—who took Flynn’s speech to heart and helped break down the barricades.

This five months represents the origin story of my work ever since—and the reason for both Mike Flynn and Kash Patel’s harassment lawsuits against me. I happened to be a guy with the know-how to see through what they were doing. And one who was willing to say something about it.

But neither the insurrection nor the lawsuits have been the most difficult part for me personally. After J6, I experienced years of coordinated, brutal smears from hundreds of “leftist” accounts who were dedicated to discrediting, deplatforming, and psychologically tormenting me. I am not exaggerating when I say it was a kind of cult unto itself. I was their “lolcow,” an outlet for collective sadism. I say this not as a victim—I am not—but so people can understand how it works.

While I have made a point of giving them no oxygen for a couple of years now, this smear campaign has done a lot of damage. They repeatedly got me banned from Twitter, including for the entire crucial year of 2022, got me and my documentary banned from YouTube, lied about me to everyone I knew they could harass through DMs, generated multiple hit pieces, and pumped out literally millions of public falsehoods that I could do nothing about. Flynn and Patel both used the hit pieces in their lawsuits.

In the end, the chief complaint of my stalkers was allegedly that I was a “conspiracy theorist” and “mentally ill” because I said Russia was interfering in American politics—and that Mike Flynn was involved with QAnon. Needless to say, I stand by every word.

While I tried to warn about him throughout the Biden administration, Flynn published a series of books, “The Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare” (5GW) that gives instructions on how use psychological warfare (psyops) on your opponents. This included the use of “lawfare” to harass the enemy, and a section called “How to Make People Kill People.”

This was my introduction to psychological warfare—to the impact people like Flynn can have on their enemies and their “friends.” I have reported on it, warned about it, and predicted its impact over and over. And I have been its target.

On the six-year anniversary of warning about Mike Flynn for the first time, I had to sit in court (via Zoom) and listen to a judge say that I must personally go in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay my own legal fees in Flynn’s harassment lawsuit against me. This was despite the fact that he dragged it out for three years to drain me of resources and dropped it at the last minute because he knew he couldn’t win. Nevertheless, the judge seemed particularly offended that I called Flynn a “Nazi.”

Since I didn’t get to say it in court: I make no apologies or corrections for that, Your Honor. When you publish a book that says “fear of Muslims is rational,” you are a Nazi. When you blame Jews for their own genocide, you are a Nazi. When you orchestrate a white nationalist attack on the seat of a democracy, whether it be the Reichstag or the Capitol, you are a Nazi. End of story.

I take full responsibility for my actions, and my words. I made this bed and I will lie in it. But unlike Mike Flynn, I will sleep soundly knowing that I did the right thing.

I recorded a short video below. Thanks to everyone for your support along the journey.

Hey everybody. I did not prevail today in court against Mike Flynn.

The judge said that I am responsible for my own legal fees in a frivolous defamation case that Flynn dragged me through three years of hell for and then chickened out at the last minute—because he didn’t want to hear the explanation for why I called him all those bad names.

Nevertheless, here I am. Lawfare works. There is no doubt that at this point our system is rigged to advantage the rich and the powerful over people like me. Just being able to fight Kash Patel and Mike Flynn in court at all was a gargantuan effort. And I wouldn’t want to wish it on anybody, but I also wouldn’t change a goddamn thing. I say what I say for a reason.

If people want to help, I’d be grateful if you would subscribe to my substack. It is my only source of revenue right now. And I do not have hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay lawyers, but I will get through it. I will figure it out. I’ve been knocked down out here before.

So thanks everybody for your support. I’m not going anywhere. Not until I can retire peacefully into the night knowing that my grandchildren are going to grow up in a country and a world that’s as good as the one that I was born into. And right now it just is not.

Thanks for your support. Long live America. 🇺🇸

Here is my DonorBox.

Here is a GoFundMe for legal fees.