A Bit About Me
Clearing the record.
Hello friends,
As many of you already know, as a result of my work, I’ve attracted a large, coordinated operation to discredit, defame, silence, and psychologically harm me — and anyone who dares to support me.
Their goal is to, as Mike Flynn says, “isolate and divide the target.” But as I’ve written they’ve been escalating their attacks. I believe some of this is the result of additional pressure on the Flynn family.
As a result, I’m taking certain legal measures. It’s the last thing I want to do, but Flynn’s “digital soldiers” are threatening violence, harassing my family, and physically stalking people.
I don’t like asking for help, but if you’d like to donate to my legal fund to fight Flynn and his minions, I’d be grateful: stopmikeflynn.com
At the moment, this Substack and donations are my only income, so if and only if you can afford it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Also, please subscribe to my podcast Radicalized: Truth Survives on YouTube below, or on Xitter. Thanks!
A Bit About Me
I was born James Glassman in Brooklyn, NY to a father who was an Ashkenazi Jew — whose parents, my grandparents, fled the pogroms in Russia a century ago as children.
My parents were divorced when I was 3 and my mom legally changed my name back to her maiden name, Stewartson. She was Scottish-Irish and brought me up as a single mom outside of DC in suburban Maryland. She was a computer programmer for the government her whole career.
I was an extremely shy, anxious kid, and I was brutally bullied all the way through junior high school. When we moved, I went to a fresh high school I made some friends. I was in punk bands, went to Grateful Dead shows and did lots of drugs. As a result, I barely got out of high school. I failed 2nd semester senior English and had to take Summer School.
Despite my intuition it wouldn’t go anywhere, I went to U of MD for a semester. As predicted I just found better stuff to do than have people try to teach me about stuff I didn’t care about or already knew, so I dropped out and bartended for a few years until moving to San Francisco at 21 years old to be in punk bands with my friends. None of them were commercially successful, but I had a shitload of fun.
I met my wife there in 1993. We got married in 1998. We now have three adult sons who are all working their way through college.
In 1992, I got a job in the warehouse of a women’s clothing company. I ended up computerizing the whole place and discovered computer graphics in the process, so two years later, in 1994, I quit and started my first company, a small graphics and web shop called Eponymous Press. The web barely had pictures at that point, but I saw what was coming.
In 1995, I got a job as a consultant for Virtuality, the largest virtual reality operator in the world who wanted to move their technology online. To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing, but as a ferocious autodidact, I taught myself how to program 3D and Java to try and figure it out. The reality was that VR was cool, once, but it also made you very ill, because the technology was not ready yet, and no one came back.
In 1996, I saw an ad for a Star Trek project, to create a 3D game for the web. No one had done this before but, as a devoted Trekkie, I felt I could pull it off. I did, and built the first 3D game on the web. You could run around the Borg cube with phasers and do battle. It was pretty cool for 28 years ago. 6 million people played it.
Based on this work I started a new company, Shout Interactive, we built content and technology for VR on the web. We did work for many major technology companies, major TV networks, and events like the Olympics.
We created a 3D toolkit to allow you to build VR worlds on the internet. We sold that company in 2000 to join a company who had world-class computer vision software. We created 3D engines, content and technology for mobile, web, and consoles—with a focus on using AI for facial animation. I was Chief Technology Officer.
In 2001, I met the people who were creating what later became known as “alternate reality games” (ARGs) while they were running “The Beast” at Microsoft for Steven Spielberg’s movie AI. I was read in on the entire experience. It ended up changing my life because in 2004, I co-founded 42 Entertainment as CTO to create alternate reality games like The Beast. Our first big project was for Halo 2. It was called “I Love Bees.” It got a lot of attention. This ARG won the Innovation Award at the Game Developers Conference the next year.
We ran numerous ARGs for high profile companies after I Love Bees & for properties like Batman & Nine Inch Nails and won many awards, including two Grand Prix Cyberlions at the Cannes Festival of Creativity.
In 2007, several of the founders quit to start a new company. I was one of them. The company was called “Fourth Wall Studios.” We built replayable, contained ARGs that used your entire electronic sphere to tell stories—and we built a technology platform called Rides to do it. It was complex synchronizing your phone, email, text and video those days, but it was mind-blowing to have characters reach out to you — through the Fourth Wall.
I was CEO of FWS for 5 years and we did a lot of cool projects, but the one that sticks out was our first major production on our technology platform, RIDES TV. It was comedy called “Dirty Work” about people who clean up crime scenes. The characters would call and email and otherwise bring you INTO the story. We won the first Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement, Interactive Show in 2012 for Dirty Work and Rides.
I was proud that we cast a brilliant trans actress in her first role, who went on to be a star on several TV shows.
Unfortunately, I also learned a very hard lesson after we won the Emmy, about billionaires and sociopaths who don’t care about people. They care about money, power and control. The investor who funded us thought that the Emmy meant we had built something he could steal. So he did. But without the people it meant nothing. It was just his loss.
I had to let my whole company go, 75 of my best friends. It was the worst day of my life. It was just a terrible waste to satisfy someone’s greed.
In 2014, I got a job at Google/Niantic as Executive Producer on a multi-platform ARG, called Ancient Societies. We created an entire world based on a series of books, ran live events, and gained millions of followers. Working at the behemoth of Google was also an eye-opener. Getting anything done was a nightmare. When Niantic spun out of Google, I went my own way and started another VR company as CEO.
That company, called Awesome Rocketship, built physical VR rigs and content that solved the problem I ran into decades before with VR causing nausea. I had an idea that if you build a motion platform to counteract the problem of your eyes seeing something your body doesn’t feel, that it would solve it.
So I built a physical motion rig connected to a VR set up in my living room. It worked. It eliminated nausea and made the experience much more intense. We had some success selling the product, but COVID destroyed any chance of a physical VR solution being a large market.
I went on to work at several other companies in the VR space and did a bunch of consulting work to build solutions for people.
In Summer 2020, I was following the George Floyd protests very closely. And I was seeing crossover between QAnon and the right wing agitators causing violence.
On August 2nd, 2020, a friend wrote an article about QAnon being a large alternate reality game (ARG). So I went to QAnon Twitter to check it out. The next several days was a horrifying revelation. QAnon WAS an ARG, in part, but it was using those techniques to do something much darker than entertain people. It was brainwashing them. This was a cult. It was getting angry. And it was being influenced by a retired general with ties to the Russians.
I resolved to do something about it.
That was 1376 days ago. I have never stopped. Not for a single day. And I won’t. Not until the people who abused my work to psychologically trap people into a death cult are brought to justice. Not until they stop actively trying to overthrow the country my grandkids are supposed to grow up in.
3 days after I started investigating QAnon, Mike Flynn wrote an article about the dark forces of evil on the streets & it clicked what was going to happen. Flynn was behind the QAnon movement, he was taking control & he was going to aim it at the 2020 election—which he did.
This began a journey that I could have never imagined, a battle for my own right to speak, a battle for justice, and a battle for democracy. At first, I thought I was taking on a “game gone wrong” and it was a bunch of 4chan trolls that ran it, but I ended up face to face with our worst enemies, both foreign and domestic.
I didn’t understand how deep this went and just walked right into the buzzsaw of the people protecting it. The immune system of QAnon is very, very strong—and this is important—across the entire spectrum of politics, from far-left to far-right.
I contacted the people who advertised themselves as pro-democracy experts on QAnon because I figured maybe I could help them. I had a unique set of qualifications and experience to bring to the table, but I had only been really examining it for a week.
There seemed to be a whole community of “Q researchers” that were working on QAnon. They claimed to be against it, and wrote lots of tweets about it. There were “journalists” and a large popular podcast all about it. Surely, they would welcome me?
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It turned out that the people who were supposed to be exposing it, were actually there to protect it. They were making money from it, building careers from it, and had a very, very strong reaction to any suggestion of Russian interference, or that anyone other than random trolls were involved in running it.
That never made sense to me, because, based on my background, I knew building an “alternate reality game” & creating convincing LARPs — live action role play characters, like Q — took a lot of planning and experience. Moreover, this was clearly benefitting specific people—Trump, Putin, and an obscure three star retired general who got in trouble for colluding with the Russians. And he was raising gobs of money from it.
So I wrote a few articles, within a few weeks of starting, that went extremely viral. I only had 300 Twitter followers at the time. But I posted two stories on Medium that got over a million views. It was obviously that I had hit a nerve. People wanted answers and they weren’t getting them. Families were being torn apart, there was a vast ocean of unaddressed trauma, and no one was doing anything to stop it. So I got loud. I wrote this on August 27th, 2020 — coming up on four years ago.
After I wrote this, everything went to hell.
To be continued.
Can hackers play a role in disrupting this cult’s work?
Hi Jim. Thanks so much for sharing your story. You are doing extremely important work. I'm glad to follow you and your updates. Do what you need to take care of yourself.