Episode 113: The Second QAnon Purge: Mutation feat Marc-André Argentino
On the ground at a soft-QAnon rally and in the ether of digital space, QAnon is mutating before our eyes. In light of intensifying mainstream media attention and a sweeping ban of QAnon content on Facebook and other platforms, we traveled to a "Save the Children" rally to speak to QAnon followers. A media circus ensued around our old friend and "Save the Children" organizer Scotty The Kid. We also spoke to disinformation researcher Marc-André Argentino about how the bans will continue to change QAnon in the near future.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 113 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Great QAnon Purge of 2020 episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week we are attempting to answer the question, what happens when you ban a conspiracy theory like QAnon on major social networks?
We traveled both out into the world, to a recent Save the Children soft QAnon rally in Los Angeles, and down the rabbit hole, to find out how our QAnon friends were balancing their new responsibilities in light of their entrance into the mainstream.
This is a tricky one for them.
On one hand, they must continue to spread the word about the child-eating cabal, but on the other, they've been given clear instructions by Q to obscure the origin of their beliefs, which, of course, is QAnon.
What's more, these Q followers have now participated in multiple cycles of social media censorship and media attention.
They are changing, adapting, and attempting to preempt what they see as mainstream media's unfair portrayal of them.
Our guest this week is Marc-Andre Argentino.
He's a radicalization researcher and a PhD candidate at Concordia.
But before all that...
QAnon News.
First up, I have Q Pilled Customs and Border Protection Officer Busted for Violent Threats.
One of the worst types of people to become pilled.
Absolutely.
This was first reported by Justin Rolich for The Daily Beast.
According to charges filed in New Jersey, CBP officer Alberto Almeida was arrested after allegedly threatening an agency higher up over a litany of imaginary crimes.
Honestly, accusing the boss is pretty funny and great.
Yeah, right?
I'm with this guy, you know?
Almeida accused CBP Assistant Port Director Ed Fox of being involved in both the Epstein ring and 9-11, which, gotta say, that is quite a criminal if you're involved in all of that.
It seems like you'd want to bring one up first and then just keep the other one for down the line or something.
Yeah, this guy is like basically the shredder.
Operating all major crimes.
One post on Almeida's Facebook page towards Fox is reminiscent of the classic Navy SEAL copypasta.
On September 28th, Almeida posted this.
The next time I come to Newark Airport, I am bringing Donald Trump and the U.S.
military down on your fucking head for your involvement in Hillary-slash-Maxwell-slash-Epstein's child trafficking ring and 9-11.
You fucking treasonous pedophile.
Trump takes down Hillary, JFK Jr., U.S.
military takes down the Mossad, and I take you down, bitch!
That's how this worked.
TikTok.
Hashtag where we go one, we go all.
That is some furious posting.
Yeah.
Intense.
Now, there are two things I think that are very notable here.
First of all, we have talked about QAnon cops before, but this is the first report I've seen of a federal officer who is deeply pilled.
Yeah, I mean, we all agree that CBP assistants are, and I quote, treasonous pedophiles, but this is, you know, I mean, feels like the pot calling the kettle black.
And second thing is that apparently this guy is a JFK Jr.
lives guy who thinks JFK Jr.
is in charge of the military.
That rules.
I mean, I always thought that the JFK Jr.
lives, QAnon people, they were like horny grandmas.
They were mostly harmless, right?
I like the JFK Jr., a guy who spent his whole life doing, like, fashion magazines and, like, hanging out on yachts.
Yeah.
They're just like, this guy can't wait for fucking military executions.
He wants to put it all in place.
He's actually an operative.
Right after he has, like, you know, 30 to 35 years of galas and just mostly just has fun with hot women everywhere.
For my next story, Citigroup fires tech executive who ran Qmap.pub.
So Citigroup announced that it had fired Jason Galinas, the developer responsible for the Qdrop aggregator site Qmap.pub.
The site, which is where most QAnon followers research Qdrops, was taken offline after a report from Logically.ai revealed the identity of Galinas.
A spokesperson for Citigroup said, quote, As outlined in our Code of Conduct, employees are required to disclose and obtain approvals for outside business activities.
A recent investigative report from Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that Glynis wasn't always a conspiracy kook.
Yeah, he used to be a heartless banking piece of shit.
Yeah, just an amoral banker.
QAnon softened him up.
Yeah, which is great.
And actually, they're the job creators, so we gotta kiss them.
Apparently he was a senior vice president at Citigroup in the company's technology department where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers.
So this is really interesting.
Apparently he's a sharp guy and he's ambitious and he's probably really well off, but he's still got crazy Q-pilled.
He was a registered Democrat in the run-up to the 2008 election, but apparently something happened to him after Obama's election.
Galenis would become agitated when the topic of Obama came up, sometimes referring to the then-president as the Antichrist.
He started consuming right-wing conspiracy theories and this led him to swallowing Pizzagate and then QAnon.
So just the election of Obama just fully radicalized him.
Yeah, like many.
And if it didn't by the beginning, if you're a lefty, it did by the end.
For my next story, actress Kirstie Alley appears to support QAnon in a series of tweets.
Some of the worst penned tweets I've seen on the internet.
Oh yeah, she's a maniac.
Just terrible at writing on top of it all.
Now, for our younger listeners, Kirstie Alley was pretty famous in the 80s and 90s.
She was starred in the sitcom Cheers and then also lots of movies like Look Who's Talking.
Yes, Look Who's Talking is a series of films where babies are voiced by, I believe, Bruce Willis voices one of the babies.
That sounds right.
Well, I think it's just one baby in the first, and then he gets a sister in the second movie, and then the third one is Look Who's Talking Now, and this is the dogs begin to talk.
I want to cage you.
I want you both locked.
In one tweet, she posted, where we go one, we go all.
American flag emoji.
I like it.
I mean, just incomprehensible.
Does she like America?
Does she like QAnon?
Not clear.
Does she like just the phrase?
Now, in subsequent posts, she claimed to be unaware of QAnon, claiming at one point that she had only posted the motto because she thought, quote, it sounded like something the Marines would say.
Despite that, she continued to share positive comments regarding the conspiracy theory.
She also claimed that Q haters were acting hideous in her comments.
Aw, babe, were they saying you were going to be hung in Gitmo?
Because that's what the other side's doing.
Now, Christy Alley famously became a member of the Church of Scientology in 1979.
So it seems like she was already pretty softened up for this kind of ideology.
Ideology she's already down the rabbit hole. This is just a sort of a sidestep for her. Mm-hmm
But she is really late to the party. I mean Roseanne. She was the OG
Yeah, as far as far as celebrity endorsements go I mean this one seems just as weird and bumbling where you're
like, how did they why did you get this information?
Why do you care now?
Someone they're having wine with that night after posting the Q content
Ali followed up with a string of tweets in which she claimed that quote a vote for Biden as a vote for socialism
and accused Nancy Pelosi of being evil and a witch, which was misspelled.
She spelled it with an extra E at the end.
I found myself at 9.30am in the passenger seat of Travis' car, heading west once more to cover a rally.
To be clear, LA now seems to have a revolving schedule of events, launched by a variety of groups like Child Lives Matter and Stop Kidding, the newly founded company of one Scotty the Kid, who if you remember was the central organizer of the July 30th, 2020 worldwide QAnon rallies.
Scottie had gone dormant after a period of fighting a two-front war against both people in his old circles worried about his Q beliefs, and QAnon influencers who were not keen to allow him into their club due to his many pizza tattoos among other things, mostly just bullshit cloud stuff.
But truthfully, No, he's launching a QAnon franchise.
Because this time, his team of volunteers were entirely decked out in yellow shirts with a Stop Kidding logo, which
is his fucking company logo.
So he's now branding, it's no longer like Save the Children, it's like my organization's logo is now on the t-shirt.
No, he's launching a QAnon franchise.
Exactly, something like that.
And it was a large group of people in yellow that we spotted as we first got off the highway and found parking
near the Netflix building, which was the rallying point for participants that day.
Free Stop Kidding t-shirts were being handed out to anyone who'd wear one, and there was a merch stand with embroidered caps that said, Save the Children.
I bought one for Travis and I, thinking it might be a memento to hang in the Foam Palace, but after donning it and milling around, I realized I had inadvertently gone undercover again.
That's how easy it is, baby.
The crowd was chatty, friendly, and almost entirely maskless.
We were in N95, so... People were respectful.
They never brought it up.
Across the street, another merch table had been set up to sell Trump and MAGA hats.
The crowd was very diverse, as usual, with overwhelming Hispanic representation, including a young boy who was destined to become a star that day.
Since things were barely getting started and I was feeling a little loose, I just kind of went straight up to Scotty the Kid and started talking to him.
Are you Scotty the Kid, by the way?
Yeah, what's up, man?
I'm Scotty.
I'm so glad to meet you, man.
Nice to meet you, man.
How are you?
I'm good.
Just showing up, man.
It's like a few of these.
I didn't know if you were going to put any on.
There were that other group that was doing some, too.
I got censored this last two weeks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, we all did.
Yeah, yeah.
We all did.
Yeah.
So we all got censored.
So, you know, it's almost like unpredictable based on what's going to happen, because usually there's like, you know, we'll see.
There was like hundreds, over a thousand at the last one.
Clearly, I was in.
Scotty did not consider me media at all.
He would be speaking to me and around me as if I were an ally for the rest of the event.
And he was excited to tell me stuff, too.
I asked him to explain the name of his event, Draw the Line, but he quickly veered into his content creation goals for the day and his fantastic relationship with the cops.
Do you want to tell me a bit about Drawing the Line?
Yeah, so Drawing the Line basically is, you know, it's the It's the motto that's always like, hey, enough is enough.
It's time to draw the line and let people know that this is wrong or whatever.
Obviously that's a very common motto and so we're thinking we could figuratively and literally draw the line on Netflix, on mainstream media, CNN, stuff like that.
So what we're doing is we're all out here We're going to collect in a group, we're going to draw a line in front of Netflix, hold it, hit the drone, show us in front of Netflix in a single file line standing there like yo this is enough.
Then we're going to march down to CNN, then we're going to group there again, get in a straight line, take a drone shot.
We're talking about media, we're talking about the implementation of pedophilia through media, through Netflix, all of that.
So basically I have people in yellow shirts are volunteers.
I know they're really all organized when we came it was all yellow.
Yes, yeah, so I'm just we're trying to get as many people obviously as much awareness as possible.
The captain of the Hollywood Police Division came and spoke to me directly.
Ryan S. Bixler.
What a name.
Yeah, right?
And he came down, he said that they're sending out a squad to protect us at our First Amendment.
And really good energy, good people.
The cops are great.
They've been protecting us and will continue.
And he was saying how, you know, he was like, He's thankful that we were all kind of as peaceful as we are.
He's like, we've never heard anything bad from you guys.
And you know, you have all the right to do this and we're here to let you know that we got you.
Awesome.
If he's not lying, that's so fucked up.
He may be lying about what exactly the cop said, but the reason that I knew the cop's name before him in that clip is because he was holding his business card out to me.
Yes, that's why you not-so-subtly just decided to say his full name out loud for the record.
That's right, because I didn't know if I was going to see it again, and I wasn't taking a photo of it, so I just said it right there and then, and nothing fucking happened.
I love it.
So anyways, uh, don't look into him.
That would be wrong.
He did stay in constant contact with a group of bike police that followed us around everywhere to the delight of all QAnon followers who fucking love the cops.
Scotty was being asked for by one of his volunteers at that point, and I could see him kind of inching away from me.
I quickly asked him about the bulletproof vest he was wearing.
One last thing, is that a bulletproof vest?
Yeah.
Are you in danger?
No, I'm not, but I'm also a warrior for the children.
So in a sense, that's mainly what it's for.
I have had a couple of people on the internet threaten me, but I'm also not scared of somebody who preys on kids.
So he just has his bulletproof vest, his aesthetic, because I'm like a warrior.
He's a warrior.
This is what they wear.
Yeah, also some people have threatened me online, you know, but they're pedophiles, so I'm not scared of them.
He probably just saw Kanye wear the, you know, the flak jacket at that one thing and was like, aw, that's cool, man, I want that.
I think it's a fashion thing, for sure.
Now I've got something real special for you boys.
Feeling that he was escaping my grasp, I went for broke.
Would you just say hello to the listener?
Yes.
Scotty the Kid, QAA listener.
What is your call?
QAA?
Yeah, QAA, exactly.
QAA, is that the name of your show?
It's QAnon America.
QAA?
Yeah, we have like a small YouTube channel.
We're still growing it.
Okay.
What's up, you guys?
This is Scotty the Kid and you're listening to QAA.
Thanks, man.
We appreciate it.
The content gods have parted their clouds for ye.
I can't believe it, man.
He's seen me at every single one, but still I guess has not put together who I am.
I hope he doesn't ever.
He also does not have like a Google alert search for his name.
Scotty smokes a lot of weed, I think.
I don't know if he stopped, but he used to smoke a lot of weed.
Maybe he's just, you know, nothing wrong with that.
Comfortably big, baby.
Yeah.
I encourage that.
Looking back, I'm glad I had an intimate moment with Scotty early because the entire vibe was about to get really fucked.
The sky was overcast and cars were zooming by or idling at the cross light.
The messages on the signs and t-shirts started jangling my thoughts.
Fags for Trump, one man wore proudly on his chest.
BLM, said another guy's sign, spelling it out as Biden Loves Minors.
Two pasty white strange looking men in their 20s were decked out in disturbing images for their homemade movie called Hurt Corps.
They would later explain to the media that it was a short film about a family of pedophiles who make child pornography, to the confusion of most of the other QAnon followers.
Nonetheless, they partook joyfully in all the QAnon chants and stuff, while also promoting their incredibly weird movie.
I looked up hurtcore later, and apparently it's a real term used for what is essentially the most extreme child pornography out there, involving torture and even murder.
I did not know that before, and I really wish I had known that before I entered it into Google, but oh well.
A woman was holding a large sign out to passing cars that just said, Honk if you're not a pedophile!
That seems like a trap bet.
Yeah, it doesn't?
And then, just like that, the scene descended into a hellish game of capture-counter-capture.
A CNN crew, an undercover documentary maker, multiple reporters, a Twitch streamer, and a major YouTuber all started swooping through the small crowd, grabbing interviews where they could.
I estimate there were about 100 honest participants and perhaps 25 rubbernecking liars like Travis and I.
This four to one ratio of believers to imposters made the event feel like a surreal piece of community theater.
Interrupting the multiple simultaneous interviews were two separate individuals emitting long trumpeting sounds from a conch and a kudu horn, which did not help keep my mind tethered to reality at all.
But that's what you can hear in all those recordings.
It's not honking.
There's actually also a conch and a kudu horn.
Just great stuff.
As I beheld the scene, it became clear to me that the QAnon followers had become more versed in a crude form of counterintelligence.
I watched their faces grow concentrated as they engaged in long, winding answers or challenged the interviewer's framing.
And leaning into them?
The breathless content crews attempting to pump them for the wildest possible answers.
The whole thing was fucking tawdry.
My brain detached and started floating above the scene in the choked gray sky.
What the fuck were we doing here?
What unholy pact did humanity sign to gather these 125 people to do this exact thing on this exact Saturday in history, right beside one of the biggest highways in Los Angeles?
I felt fucking nauseous.
To understand the situation properly, I realized I would have to find the cracks in the crowd, where I might temporarily become one with them and capture what they were speaking about among themselves when they felt no mainstream media was watching.
But I also reasoned that I was going to have to take a step back and observe the entire circus at work, imposters included, to understand the dynamics at play.
Earlier you heard Scottie explain that the media was there.
He was referring to the broader group, but especially important among them was the CNN crew, which included disinformation reporter Donio Sullivan, a camera guy, and two relatively subtle security guards.
As they made their way through the crowd interviewing people, you could feel pockets of upheaval directed at them.
At one point, a woman stepped between O'Sullivan and his security guard, and she was physically blocked from doing so.
This led to a small crowd chasing CNN down the block towards me.
You can hear them getting riled up.
Nobody talk to these people!
They're getting physical!
Yeah, right here!
Don't talk to them!
Don't talk to them!
I mean, push it down.
It's not gonna work, man.
Get out of here!
Get out of here!
Get out!
So you can feel just the pure madness.
Wow.
That was the louder chase, but they had a few mini chases like that where everyone kind of shuffled down the block with each other, screaming.
No one really wanted to fight.
The mob eventually chilled out and CNN resumed interviews, but they would be hounded a few more times in that style.
After an extremely weird speech in which Scotty explained to people that Netflix and the California school system's sexual education classes were molesting children's minds and causing ten-year-olds, and this is in his words, to want to give head to older men.
Just... What?
I urged my mind to not dwell on this argument too long, lest I lose it entirely.
That's when I saw the child with the megaphone.
He looked about seven years old.
And this was the moment that would turn him into the de facto leader of Scotty's March.
Save our children!
So, what bizarre hell world have we entered into?
Scotty spotted the kid and immediately was like, you're going to be the leader of this.
And so they were kind of like leading the rally together and doing the chants.
And then there was a moment where they were doing it into each other's faces with megaphones, which was interesting.
They had strapped the kid with a megaphone.
Good stuff.
Good stuff.
Normal stuff.
Meanwhile, CNN had been chased around a bit more, called fake news, and finally landed an interview with Scotty, who quickly found himself flanked by two supporters with signs.
One said, if we start hanging pedophiles in the street now, they will make great Halloween decorations.
The other was a compendium of images including supposed child victims of John Podesta, a claim that Monsters, Inc.
is about child trafficking and adrenochrome harvesting, a giant Q, and an overweight Cholo Pepe wearing a cross pointing a pistol at the head of an adult baby version of Wojak sitting in a puddle of urine and labeled Pedo, which was one of the weirder fucking images that I saw.
They took a sort of a lower tier 8chan meme and just just printed it out and then put it on a poster board.
Donnie O'Sullivan, the CNN reporter, used the word debunked about something Scottie brought up, and that really stirred him up and his entire entourage.
Soon there was a debate about reality going on between O'Sullivan and Scotty the Kid.
Facts are facts. That's all.
Journalism is a part of the American experience.
People are researching for themselves.
And again, we're talking about...
The reference of information that you're going off of from being like, oh, that's debunked.
That's controlled, manipulated information anyway.
It all is.
It all is.
I mean, come on, my Instagram said Biden's not wearing a wire and it said, I could see the wire popping out.
And it says specifically, so the fact checkers are, You're all complicit with fact-checkers!
I interviewed the Facebook fact-checker just yesterday, because he's here in LA, who did that, and then played the label.
He said he did it on a super-zoom, that it was a crease in the shirt.
You don't believe that?
No.
Not a second.
A crease in a shirt is straight, not curved.
I'm not an idiot at this point.
If you think I'm going to buy that, you must be wrong.
Honestly, I don't really care.
I don't really care about Biden wearing an earpiece.
I just... Right, right, right.
Right, right, right.
Of course.
No, I understand what you're saying.
And, like, at the same time, I have my own feelings on that.
But we're not talking about that.
We're talking about kids.
So, that's ultimately what I'm... Sure.
No problem.
Of course.
Scotty dodged the QAnon stuff, explaining that he represents Save the Children.
But there's been a crackdown on that too, so O'Sullivan asked Scotty what he had to say to the social media platforms censoring his movement.
You can try to silence us, but the more you silence us is the more proof that we are doing something that is right, that is helping.
Because why would you silence people trying to help children?
Literally, think about that for one minute.
Why would you try to silence somebody that is trying to save a child?
What do you have to say to that?
That's the classic QAnon line, right?
Over the target, basically.
Yeah, yeah, right.
First of all, it's playing dumb.
It's playing dumb about the connection between Save the Children and QAnon, and then saying that by censoring me, we're over the target, we're on the right path, and also you are pro-pedophile.
I hate it because it's so sticky because it feels like I have to re-educate them over and over again.
No, Save the Children is clearly a QAnon thing.
They were chanting where we go one, we go all at one point during the rally.
There was one woman there who was wearing a QAnon shirt and then leggings that said Q-C-U-E on one leg and then 17 on the other leg.
This was a QAnon rally.
A giant black Hummer showed up that had We Are Q on the front of it and The Great Awakening on the side.
Yeah, it's like the idea is real frustrating gaslighting where they pretend like, oh, this isn't a QAnon thing.
We just welcome everyone.
Shut the fuck up.
Speaking of which, O'Sullivan comments on Scottie's discipline in staying away from QAnon references as he promotes it subtly.
Scottie pivots to their supposed fondness for Biden supporters.
You are very much sticking to the issue.
But I'm saying though, sometimes it devolves so quickly.
Again, Biden's crew could come down here and support us.
Open arms, open arms, we welcome them.
Open arms, open arms.
That's what's up.
Yeah, it's about the kids.
There is no hate in this.
That's the most beautiful part about this movement.
What is the hate in wanting to help a child?
None.
How can you have any hate when you're trying to... We're here to help children.
We're happy, sharing, love, enjoying each other.
Trump's words, Biden's words, whatever.
These conversations really reveal the metagame being played by QAnon promoters and the media, both adapting to each other in this unending joust.
But I've got something even more interesting on tape.
I've got Scotty the Kid talking to his sign-carrying friends directly after the CNN interview, and I think the conversation makes it pretty clear what's going on.
You know I'm with you.
You know I'm with you, but that's why I let y'all do that.
I have to be the frontrunner.
You did the right thing.
I don't trust them.
I won't interview them, but I'm just behind you going... Exactly.
You said the right things.
Because that's who you are.
It's about the kids.
You can make up your mind about this.
Exactly.
I said, maybe she's onto something, maybe she's not.
It's up to you to go find it.
Well, how are they going to edit that?
How are they going to cut it?
That's the question.
I don't know.
I'm kind of scared now.
I know.
I told him, like, every time you're like, I don't care if you're a Biden supporter.
I don't care if you're a Biden supporter.
Just come down here and support the stuff that I like.
I think some of them do sometimes.
How many times you had to say that?
I'm like, they want it to be about Tom Seuss.
So fucking bad.
And we pulled it on them.
And we pulled it on him.
Yeah, it's really clever like how much of their hatred for the mainstream media is totally performative because really they see the mainstream media as an opportunity to spread their message.
So they're welcome to have the cameras pointed at them.
It seemed very important for everyone there to pretend Trump wasn't part and parcel of their movement's belief system.
Here's another guy who was politely harassing the CNN reporter for a bit.
He explained that CNN was trying to push a specific narrative to me afterwards.
And their narrative is that this is a Trump rally.
It is not a Trump rally.
There was one gentleman out of the whole crowd that had a MAGA hat.
Only one person.
But people were selling MAGA hats at the beginning and then all the people rolled by and then people cheered.
The whole MAGA convoy.
The people were cheering because the people were honking their horns.
I'll be confronting him along the way, and it's really quite funny.
You'll see.
But yeah, this one had been thinking about this a lot, and he knew all the different words he wanted to use or whatever, so I had to be a bit... I was on his side, but I was also pushing him a bit, like, oh, what about that?
Like some dumbass who just looks up and sees a contradiction and goes, well, oh, I guess you want to address that, sir.
But he was quite friendly overall.
He did really harass the CNET guy, like the security stepped in.
I asked him if he'd experienced the recent ban hammer.
He claimed to me that a DM of his, a meme about FBI child trafficking statistics, had been flagged and deleted by Instagram because it contained misleading information.
Then I brought up Q's recent instruction to go stealth.
And so Q recently said that we should all go kind of, I guess kind of stealth, stop mentioning Q and QAnon and just focus more on the issues themselves.
Have you been like respecting that online or do you think it's like whatever, you know?
Again, I'm not...
I'm an adherent to Trump, to Q, to Black Lives Matter, to any political organization.
QAnon is actually not a political organization.
No, no, no.
But it's a guy who sends the messages, right?
Or an organization of probably military operation.
As far as QAnon goes, that's not in my wheelhouse.
I know a lot about QAnon, but I don't have a position on it.
And the reason I don't have a position on it is because I'm focused entirely on child trafficking and saving children.
I don't care where your background is from.
I don't care your politics.
If you are for saving children, then I welcome you into the movement and help support it.
Are you from here in LA?
Yes, I am.
Now, QAnon does talk extensively about the child trafficking issue.
Right.
So, people would say that the QAnon movement is an ally.
Be that as it may, A lot of people who wear blue jeans happen to care about saving children.
A lot of people with ten fingers and ten toes care about saving children.
Does that mean that this is somehow a...
A 10 finger movement, you know?
Just because a certain group happens to have an ideology that coincides with what we're doing does not mean that we are the same.
And CNN is trying to do that.
They're trying to conflate the Trump movement.
They're trying to conflate the QAnon movement.
They're trying to conflate anything they can to smear The child-saving movement.
Right.
Why are they trying to smear the child protection?
Why are they trying to silence us about sex traffic?
Why?
That's a good question, that's what I'd like to know.
My theory?
My theory?
Now this is just my theory, I'm not asserting this is fact, but the oligarchs, the people in charge, the puppet masters if you will, whatever you want to call them, they indirectly control all media.
Either through, uh...
Friendships with the board members, direct ownership.
So that is the most euphemized version of QAnon, and he goes back and forth.
I know a lot about it.
It's not in my wheelhouse.
Yeah, he seems like he is deeply immersed in the QAnon stuff, but it seems like he decided the best way, that QAnon has too much baggage, and he decided that this pipeline into his ideology is best expressed.
Just save the children.
Just focus on that.
Then we had a somewhat amusing back and forth about CNN and the Trump supporter issue.
CNN is here today, and I'm shocked.
They sent somebody, but what I feel is going on is damage control.
Oh, okay.
Because they can't, they can't stop this.
They thought we would go away.
Right.
We've only gotten bigger.
And now, and now they, they... See, he's talking to them.
Yeah.
Now, what they want to do is they want to control the narrative.
They want to move the Overton window.
And that's what that guy was doing.
So he talks to people, he talks to one person out of like 100,
who's a Trump guy, and then he says, oh, this is a Trump movement.
He paints it as a Trump movement.
So then they're going to go on the news tonight and they're going to say,
Trump, Trump, uh, instigators.
Trump, Trump, instigators.
Trump saving babies from Hillary on this side.
Yeah, well, I see a guy with blue jeans.
Is this a blue jeans movement?
I see a guy with short hair.
Is this a short hair people's movement?
It's a false equivalency.
It's on the sign.
Right, but it doesn't matter.
So the guy supports Trump.
What does that have to do with anything?
He thinks Trump's saving the children from the pedos.
That's what he thinks.
So that's connected, right?
No, it's not.
I mean, that's his opinion.
I mean, I have an opinion, and I can think.
I could think that CNN is complicit in trying to keep this information suppressed.
Does that mean that I'm right?
No.
Does that mean that this is a CNN...
Is this a suppressor, evil guy movement?
No.
Just because I believe that does not define this movement.
This movement is defined by these words.
Child Lives Matter.
Save Our Children.
That's what defines this movement.
You've got people from all walks of life here.
Young, old.
Is this a young people's movement?
No.
Is this an old people's movement?
No.
Is this a people from LA movement?
No.
Yes, you have people from all walks of life, all geographic regions.
Those do not make what we are.
So if you have a guy who's a Trump supporter, that's a side issue that does not define us.
And that's what I've been trying to say.
Thank you, dude.
Thanks for speaking to me.
God bless.
Man, he sounds really on the verge of tears at the thought of being misunderstood about what he's about.
To me, he kind of sounds like a guilty Trump supporter.
I mean, he's 100% a Trump supporter.
Everybody there was.
Of course, of course.
Everything was obfuscation.
This was an entire dance that he was doing with words.
Even when it came time to say elites, he took that back and said, and then he stopped.
He pulled it back and he said, like the puppet masters of sorts.
Like he's using just, even if the words themselves are clearly conspiracy words, he just doesn't want to use the exact words that the QAnon followers are using because he knows you've been reading the profiles about it on CNN or whatever that say that's what the movement Does.
And sounds like an intelligent enough guy that he knows that if he's associated with QAnon that that's a net negative for maybe his image or could potentially affect future work.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think, yeah, Travis's frustration is palpable, you know, because this is the new breed.
They're going to know where you're going to come at them from.
And they're going to just make you tired, basically, through their arguments.
No, I mean, obviously, they're learning how to hide their power level more aggressively under increasingly large number of layers of obfuscation.
It was kind of hard to fully grasp how the Q people felt about the CNN crew's presence.
So I asked Scotty directly.
So are you guys broadly happy that CNN showed up, or would you rather have not?
We'll see how they edit it.
We'll see how they edit it.
You know, we'll see if they kept it real.
Let's see, has this been filmed?
It seemed to be going well.
Thank you.
And of course, we all know what's up.
I tried my best, that's why I tried my best.
So he says, we all know what's up.
So they know they're talking about it right behind the people's backs right after they do their dances.
You know, they're like, how did you get out?
Like, how was your media appearance?
You know?
Yeah.
So even though they're doing it clumsily and many people were just openly supporting Q, you can sense that a portion of the population is turning to these new tactics.
I also spoke to a blonde woman who appeared to be in her late 30s, early 40s, who had come with her gray Mercedes SUV and a sign explaining that, quote, pedophilia will bring down the royal family, the CIA, the deep state, the Vatican, and Hollywood.
She was among Scottie's entourage when they spoke to CNN, and the reporter eventually asked her a few questions directly.
I asked her how she thought it had gone afterwards.
Well, we'll see when the chop job comes up.
I don't know, but we'll see.
I think it went pretty well.
You think Scottie did a good job representing the movement?
Oh him?
Yeah, I love Scotty.
But I hate it to interject, but I feel like I needed to because there's points there that needed to be said that could help, you know, solidify his message.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
But you don't trust a CNN guy?
Fuck no.
Are you kidding me?
I caught the CNN guy taking a picture at the very back of our march.
And I ran up to him and I go, hey, hey, hey!
If you want a real picture, go to the front of the march and take the picture.
Why are you getting a picture of the back?
I think it's interesting.
You're going to do it.
This is why we don't believe you.
And this is why you guys are a hack job.
And then I said, I go to him, I said, I go, isn't it funny that we've been shadow banned this event?
This is one of our smallest turnouts.
The second event that we had for this, like 1,500 people, okay?
This, they shadowban us, and then I go, isn't it interesting, CNN, that all of a sudden you show up after we know we've been shadowbanned?
I know because I have Instagram, and I was moving up like this in my following, and then all of a sudden I'm not even getting any likes today or yesterday.
So something's up with an algorithm past few days.
So yeah, I called out CNN, and I think it's important.
People like me, I don't care what people think about me, really.
So I just do me, and I try and spread the truth.
So you can hear her say 1,500 people.
Scottie earlier said 1,000.
I spread the truth.
So you can hear her say 1,500 people.
Scotty earlier said 1,000.
Definitely no more than 400 or 500 that day.
The situation grew more surreal as the Twitch streamer and YouTube guys asked Scotty to rap
and he laid down some bars from his latest track, which as you guessed is about child trafficking.
Day by day, I started to notice the way they use COVID to control us.
It started with a mask that happened fast, took away our smiles just like that.
Yeah, the awakening is so evident because of all the evidence-manipulated rhetoric.
This is now, this is now the end of it.
Baby blood for benefit, mass manipulation of our generation Starting with our nation, no more waiting Y'all are getting
flagrant, mind-selling babies Raping on our children, afterwards you killed him The truth
is out, and that's a fact False flags, we'll no longer distract Now the cat is out
the bag, knife life on his last Media will no longer cover your ass
One notable moment was when a small march of BLM protesters, who the Q people had
whispered about as Antifa prior to their arrival.
So I kept hearing whispers with you, oh Antifa is like a block away blah blah blah.
And I was like, I couldn't see them.
But yeah, finally they arrived and it was just a small march of BLM protesters and they walked by with real drums and better chanting.
And it basically just turned the queue people mute until they were half a block away from them.
At which point a single guy desperately yelled, CHILD LIVES MATTER into a bullhorn and everyone pretended basically nothing had happened at all.
So incredibly anticlimactic confrontation with their big evil group.
Who really didn't even glance at them much.
They just walked by, might have been confused by some of the signs they saw, but they had actual business to take care of.
I'm going to put the extended clip of the sound from this, starting with music that's happening at the rally.
It's like Cranberries, I think, or something like that.
It's like a big tune and then you hear BLM arriving and I go towards them.
So I'll put all of that in the auto cue for you.
Another thing that happened was a very much planned drive-by in support of a young black MAGA politician running for governor and, of course, Donald J. Trump.
The honking was fucking out of control, there were flags everywhere, some cars were playing music as well, and all the media people started hanging out the windows attempting to get interviews with these sunglasses wearing lunatics just fucking screaming from their open windows.
Besides the march from Netflix to CNN led by Scotty and someone else's child with bullhorns, there were two video shoots involving a pretty imposing drone which the cops totally allowed to like have fly around during the whole thing even though it almost hit a cop in the head once because it was being like flown at head level on the sidewalk.
And during these video shoots, Scotty was basically just ordering people around with the bullhorn, and the Q-believers all lined up next to each other, holding hands, all down the block.
And then the media started walking up and down the row, using them as, like, Pez dispensers of QAnon soundbites, as Scotty yelled at them to, like, stand closer or further apart over the bullhorn.
Just must have been a real special moment for all the people involved.
These moments of surreal stage management and confusing crossfire I think defined the event for me.
QAnon was no longer just itself, or even its soft front Save the Children.
It had become a reaction to a reaction to a reaction.
A beam refracted into oblivion, but somehow just as blinding.
The Great QAnon Purge of 2020.
It has been evident for a very long time that QAnon communities on social media platforms cause problems.
Boys, perhaps you'll recall that one of the very first episodes that I recorded with you two was titled The Great Reddit Bans of 2018.
So true.
Simpler times.
Simpler times, smaller platforms.
Now that episode covered how Reddit had banned all QAnon subreddits for posting content that incited violence and harassment.
Now, as it turns out, Reddit was ahead of the curve on that one because just this week, Facebook announced that they are banning all QAnon pages and groups, even if they don't promote violence.
In addition, Facebook said that they are banning QAnon Instagram accounts.
According to our guest today, Marc-Andre Argentino, the impact of that announcement was immediate.
Before there were 186 Facebook groups which was slashed to 18.
There were 253 known Facebook pages and that was cut down to 96.
And there were 269 Instagram QAnon accounts and that was cut down to 141.
to 96. And there were 269 Instagram QAnon accounts and that was cut down to 141. So
apparently a progressive kind of thing.
They're still working on apparently cleaning it up.
Yeah.
Not before the election.
Now, of course, we want to get ahead of ourselves.
This move sent QAnon influencers scurrying.
Q responded in a new Q drop that just said this.
Information warfare.
Nice.
Not very helpful, but, uh, yeah.
QAnon promoter Prang Medic said that in reaction to this news, he deleted both his Facebook page and Instagram account.
He also says that as a preventative measure, he deleted all of his YouTube videos that mentioned Q. It looks like he's following through on his promise that he made right after Q gave that instruction.
I have unpublished my Facebook page and I have unpublished my Instagram account.
It's either I take them down or they're going to get taken down.
That's pretty much the choice we're left with.
Now, some of you have been wondering why I took down all my Q videos on YouTube.
Well, this is why.
Facebook is starting this, or they're going to take down everything related to Q.
But it wasn't just Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube and Twitter are going to be next? I suspect they probably will be. I don't think it'll be long before
YouTube cracks down pretty hard on Q related accounts and then and then Twitter.
But wasn't just Facebook and Instagram the online craft market Etsy also reportedly banned all QAnon products.
There goes the QAnon shopping network boy.
Yeah, man.
You fucked it all up.
Those are great episodes, too, but... I'm sure it'll... No, I'm deleting them.
I'm deleting all those episodes out of spite.
Merchant tents will pop up somewhere.
No, I think our audience should suffer for this for some reason.
In addition to that, Peloton, which is an indoor bicycle that offers virtual exercise classes, also removed hashtags associated with QAnon.
Mmm, getting thick thighs for Q. Yeah, this is a weird thing.
I mean, I think it shows that, I mean, obviously people are sharing QAnon memes through their exercise bike.
I don't know, but it seems like it shows how QAnon is becoming really part of a lifestyle, part of a community, part of your identity.
Right?
So this is like... You like to put some Qbling in your accounts and maybe your dating profiles?
Yeah.
It also appears that Discord, the community-based messaging platform, cracked down on QAnon.
So this hasn't been announced yet.
It technically hasn't been reported.
But several QAnon followers complained that their Discord servers were deleted on 8Koon.
Of course, our own Discord server for the podcast got caught in the crassfire and was knocked offline.
Many of our beloved listeners had their Discord accounts deleted, unfortunately.
Yeah, mostly the mod team in the server.
But then the employees got in touch.
The bottom line is they're helping us out, although there's permanent damage.
We lost all the content.
We lost a bunch of emojis.
Our mod team had to work for hours for about a day and a half.
We still haven't resolved some issues connecting it to Patreon or whatever.
So that sucked.
Oh, and the other thing is that no Discord employee that I was in touch with through this process would admit that this was a crackdown on QAnon or discuss QAnon at all.
Yeah, it's very weird.
I don't know why they didn't announce it even after the crackdown happened.
It seems like everyone else is comfortable.
Every other social media platform is comfortable talking about it.
We all know it's happening.
It totally happened.
Breaking news.
By the way, thank you to our beloved mod team who has been working tirelessly to right these wrongs.
We've gotten you banned and you ended up having to do all the work.
You're simply the best.
So that basically means that the last major social media networks that permit QAnon on their platforms are Twitter and YouTube.
In a recent interview with CNN's Poppy Harlow for the Boss Files podcast, the YouTube CEO stopped short of pledging to ban QAnon followers on the platform.
So I guess we'll see what happens with that.
But it sounds like this kind of thing happened in 2018 with Infowars and Alex Jones, where the very first platform to ban Alex Jones was Apple Podcasts, and this was the big one.
And then everyone else follows suit from that.
YouTube banned Alex Jones, Facebook banned Alex Jones, but these social media networks, it seems like they're all actually kind of timid, and they're looking for some sort of signal that's okay to crack down on this kind of stuff, that there are no big consequences for doing so, and then once the signal is sent, then they feel comfortable moving forward.
That's how policy should be written.
Of course, the big question is, what will be the ultimate impact of social media companies banning QAnon?
To get a better sense of that, we are joined by our guest, Marc-Andre Argentino.
He is a PhD candidate at Concordia University, as well as the co-author of the report, The QAnon Conspiracy Theory, A Security Threat in the Making, which was published in West Point's Combating Terrorism Center.
Mark Andre, thanks for returning to the show.
Thank you very much for having me again, boys.
So before we get into the questions, I want to say congratulations for that report I just mentioned, getting cited by Congress in the House resolution condemning QAnon.
That's quite an achievement.
Absolutely insane.
What the fuck?
Honestly, it's not what we expected when we wrote that piece, but that's pretty awesome.
Now, we're talking today about Facebook's crackdown on QAnon content.
Now, this from Facebook is the third announced update to their policy towards QAnon in as many months.
Facebook had previously announced less harsh policies that cracked down on QAnon content in September and August.
Why do you think Facebook's kind of slow rolled their crackdown instead of just banning QAnon groups right off the bat?
I think it's important to realize that when we're talking about the initial ban on QAnon at that time, I guess we could assume that it was not the type of movement that would be linked or was as linked to violence in some people's minds.
For those of us who have been observing QAnon for a while, we realize what it was, but when you're coming to To tackle this issue from the perspective of the platform, you're not dealing with an organized movement like ISIS or The Base or Atomwaffen.
There's no real leadership, there's no structure, and there is different levels of adherence to this, and not everyone in the movement is necessarily So I think Facebook tried to take a different approach to this and not necessarily push all the people that would be in QAnon groups to more extreme places on the internet by automatically banning them.
And I think that was the attempt is to try to make the place inhospitable for those that were highly committed that they would leave the platform and those that were not as convinced by QAnon would simply find something else.
I think that was their initial objective and they've realized over the months that, you know, that didn't necessarily work and they realized the tenacity of QAnon.
This ban has been kind of frustrating to me because, I mean, I feel like it's been evident since 2018 that QAnon is at least potentially a violent movement.
For example, the very first sort of terrorist incident related to QAnon happened all the way back in June of 2018 with Matthew Wright having that standoff on the Hoover Dam Bridge.
In addition to that, Reddit banned all QAnon subreddits all the way back in September of 2018.
So I feel like it's been kind of clear for years that this has been a problem.
But to me, it seems like Facebook has been slow to realize that.
I think like the Reddit ban was quite unique because they did remove those groups for doxing.
And that was the main reason why they banned them.
And if there wasn't going to be that type of behavior.
Reddit would have kept them.
They kept the Donald for the longest time.
And let's be honest, the Great Awakening and the Calm Before the Storm was a lot less toxic to an extent than the Donald was.
So if it wasn't for that, I think we might actually still have those Reddit communities.
But again, when Reddit did completely ban them, some went to Twitter, others ended up on Vote.
And we can understand that the Vote community of QAnon was not the The greatest.
And I think for Facebook, the challenge was they only had in their policy one definition, right?
It's dangerous individuals and organizations.
So that's for those tied to terrorist activity, organized hate, mass murder, human trafficking, organized violence and criminal activity.
So they had to actually create a special policy, not only for QAnon, but other, you know, militia movements that are glorifying, promoting or celebrating violence.
And this is where they kind of put QAnon, which again, makes a lot of sense with the type of content that QAnon posts when you're talking about the storm and the hope for like the destruction of government and the replacing of their own.
But again, it's not necessarily an organization that's out there to necessarily use violence to achieve this. A lot of them is
just, you know, the information war with a sprinkling of violence. And I think that's the challenge
from the platform is there's no real label of QAnon as a dangerous movement. Outside of that CTC
piece I wrote with my colleague Amaranta Marsingham, no one really wrote about QAnon as a security
threat. You know, you've talked about it, other reporters have talked about who have been on the QAnon
beat for years, but no one really thought that this would fall within the public safety
national security threat like we are are talking about now, especially with the cases that have
happened.
Yeah, this is kind of the frustrating thing.
Like a lot of the mainline QAnon followers, they always say, oh, Q has never advocated for violence.
They only talk about information warfare.
They only talk about posting and memeing.
But I feel like what they don't see is that, you know, I feel like a logical conclusion to sort of the more deranged QAnon beliefs It is violence, because it leads people to believe that, you know, they have to take some extreme action towards some really terribly evil people.
I mean, if you really believe that such a such that, you know, people are like literally killing babies, I feel like it would be rational even to to lash out violently.
Well, that's the objective, really, in the sense that or that's the big risk.
If the information war is not enough or you don't achieve your goal through the information war, because, you know, for QAnon, you think the American military or Q team is going to do According to your own analysis, there are still dozens of Facebook pages and groups that were still up after the new policy against QAnon was announced.
leave the followers no choice that if Q fails, and it's in their hands to take up
the mantle and try to bring that, you know, victory against the deep state.
According to your own analysis, there are still dozens of Facebook pages and groups
that that were still up after the new policy against QAnon was announced.
So why did those ones manage to survive?
Most of the groups that I had prior to the takedown are actually all gone.
Oh, okay.
It took a couple of days for Facebook to take them down.
I spent the past few days, I've been adding new pages as they appear, but almost all the big pages that were there are gone.
The ones that remained are not necessarily affiliated to Q, so it's not openly branded as a QAnon group.
But it posts a lot of QAnon content and this is where the policy that Facebook has where it's going to require some reporting by people to say this needs to be taken get down or they need to do work on their back end where you're going to have to look like this community posts a lot of Q stuff it's actually pretending to be.
I don't know, an alternative news site or personal blog.
And this is where the challenge is going to be.
It's the same thing that they had mentioned for Instagram where these Instagram influencers that if they brand themselves as a lifestyle blogger but they post only QAnon content, right now they're not taking them down.
And that's going to require a lot more manpower to do because the platform is really using an automated process.
Yeah, I mean, there's a really I mean, there's a question like how effective these bands are going to be in the long term, because won't they just get like, I mean, better and better at hiding their power levels, so to speak.
I mean, like you mentioned before, they might disguise by pretending to be, you know, human trafficking organizations, they might use code words, they might use dog whistles, and they might be So abstracted away from the original sort of QAnon symbols that it would be hard to tell unless you were genuinely radicalized or you're a deep researcher into the matter that these were QAnon pages.
So, I mean, do you think that, you know, Facebook will be able to keep up to all the ways in which QAnon is going to morph and try to avoid these bans?
It did take Facebook a lot of time to act, but I think when they do act, they've been pretty good to keep stuff off their platform.
If you look at other extremist groups that they've removed, now it's going to be impossible to completely remove QAnon content in the sense that you're going to always have political or meme groups that are going to say QAnon stuff.
The benefit of this, however, if you've taken the large QAnon groups and the large proselytizers off the platform, If you're not already in the movement it's going to be a lot harder for people to realize what they're in so you you kind of slow down the radicalization process to an extent and you're going to take out I guess the low-hanging fruits of the easy people to radicalize.
So I guess any new people coming into the movement will have a lot more difficulty you know radicalizing very quickly. But again if Facebook
is doing this alone without the other platforms it's not really going to be a solution right. We've
seen Twitter try to do a takedown very ineffectively and the groups are still there. And if
YouTube doesn't take down content it doesn't matter if you have no QAnon groups you could still
share Falka Ball from Bitchute or Clout Hub or whatever into whatever group that you want
that may not be QAnon affiliated and you'll still have that impact.
So it's you're not going to have the mass pilling and I don't see we're going to see the growth that I've seen since the start of the pandemic.
But it's not going to necessarily solve the problem until all the platforms get together and start looking at this as a an issue that they all need to tackle.
And Facebook, I guess, is the first step to maybe make people realize that, you know, OK, well, Facebook did it this way.
Maybe we should follow suit.
But again, only time will tell what that'll be.
Are you guys concerned at all that as more and more platforms start to ban, you know, ban QAnon, and they do start to shift and start to move away and don't use QAnon, that it actually makes it easier for people to get into it because there's no QAnon affiliation?
Like, is there some sort of weird Catch-22?
I think that like as it morphs it makes it harder to bring on new people because in order to it you have to understand what the morphing looks like you know you have to sort of understand you know when they say you know save the children what they oh this is really sort of a QAnon message you know you need to be deep into it in order to understand that or if they say CUE I think that even even if you know it might bring in like Some new people but I feel like it makes it harder to bring in newbies.
People there will go deeper too.
I just mean the people who come in from Save the Children because QAnon got banned so they switched to Save the Children and I'm in through Save the Children now.
Not to mention the entire media sphere that is still kowtowing to their beliefs that are contained in QAnon but aren't Clearly delineated as QAnon, which includes, you know, Fox, the president, you know.
It's like different dimensions of pilling, because like... I don't think that censorship on social media, which is what we're talking about here, is some sort of, like, solution.
I mean, we can talk about it positively, but I, at the end of the day, do not think that we're dealing with a long-term solution.
It doesn't change anything about the conditions that Q was born and proliferated in.
So we're just saying, hey, use a new name and proliferate in a different way, and I think we're going to see waves of this stuff.
I think what's going to happen, though, is we're going to see different forms of QAnon.
I think it comes to what Jake was asking, is we're no longer going to be able to talk about QAnon as this single unit, even though it was quite amorphous and, you know, you had all these like umbrella conspiracies, right?
But I think because you're kicking them off Facebook, it's just the next step for an extremist organization.
If you're reaching a certain level, you're going to get kicked off the mainstream platform.
But what we're going to see is, you know, QAnon Gab is going to be different than QAnon Parlay, going to be different from MiWi, going to be different from Telegram.
And within those communities, depending who's present, you're going to again have subsets.
So we're going to have to find a different way.
To talk about QAnon, which is kind of what I'm working on, because you're gonna have different communities.
We saw this with Save the Children.
Pastel QAnon was just like the cute name that I gave to describe, you know, the Instagram influencers and the women that were there.
But it's not new.
You guys reported early on in March about, and April, about the anti-vaxxers and the wellness influencers that got into QAnon.
And we saw a huge spike after Plandemic of anti-vaxxers on Instagram sharing QAnon stuff.
In July, when it was Save the Children, we just saw different Segment of the group get into it.
And what we're going to see is very different variations of what's scary, though, is when, you know, we're talking about the Michigan militia that wanted to kidnap the governor.
One of the individuals was sharing Save the Children content and like this Q adjacent stuff.
And then you're seeing these type of narratives fall into more extreme circles.
This is where it's going to get more alarm, because by banning them on Facebook, you're automatically pushing a large population that are committed onto platforms where they're going to get more and more radicalized, because this is where The groups that were put off, right?
And this is what the risk is, that we're gonna see a more... Those that are committed might be more dangerous in QAnon in the long run.
Some of them might just fall into other things, which, whatever it is, what it is, and that's another problem.
But I think this is where it's scary now, where you're seeing, you know, more and more the militia individuals, or like, the alt-light, alt-right type groups that are still extremists, absorbing QAnon narratives and pushing that forward.
Not to mention MAGA.
I mean, people talk about Proud Boys and militias and stuff, but MAGA has a huge crossover with QAnon, and that movement is a legitimate political movement, a grassroots political movement, that is mobilizing to try to affect the vote, like, right now, this month.
And so that's the hard one, where it's like, you can share something as a totally MAGA person that has no QAnon signifiers, and it can be just as insane and extreme, just as bloodthirsty.
I see what you guys are saying though, but that by doing the ban somebody can't radicalize to QAnon, specifically QAnon, to the storm, to the hangings at Gitmo, right off the bat.
But I wonder... But don't they just go to DuckDuckGo?
But I wonder if the slow pill of getting in to save the children and then discovering the cabal and then seeing Plandemic and then is actually more effective in terms of a more like solidifying radicalization as opposed to somebody who goes right to calm before the storm Fuckin' looks through and goes, QAnon military thing, like, ah man, this is like way, this is like way too- You're basically, I think you're gonna know a little more when you're entering pure QAnon bat country.
You know, it's gonna be, you sign up, there's gonna be like a border, that's what's gonna result from this, but it's true that- There's bats here.
You can't control the denizens of bat country.
They know no boundaries and no borders, so I believe they will live on in la resistance against Travis and Marc Andre.
But what you need, basically, is to be more committed.
Like Jake's saying, it's not going to be as easy from watching Fall Cabal and Out of Shadows and then going to, like, eight or nine Facebook groups.
You're going to have to end up creating a Parley account and following people that's not as interactive.
You're going to go on Gab with all the other trash that's there, or Telegram, or go straight to Vote, or 8kun.
There will be less Normie love bombing.
That is for sure.
But what you will have is a more committed core of followers that are more convinced and more radical.
Basically, the 3.9 million that we saw as an aggregate number on Facebook, most of those are probably not going to go through the effort.
If you go on Parlay, even though It's been a couple of days with the ban.
It's not very active in the QAnon community there.
You go on Gab, yeah, Gab looks like to be the winning community right now for QAnon post-Facebook ban.
But even then, it's like, you know, you've had maybe 6-7,000 new members on, like, some of the larger Gab groups.
It's not the same volume you had on Facebook.
So it's... I guess now it's gonna be like, where are the normies or, like, the...
The QAnon light going to end up and what are they going to talk about?
Is it still going to be QAnon?
Or is it just, you know, general conspiracy theories that are still floating around which are, I guess, acceptable to an extent.
Yeah, I feel like another big effect of this is that it relates to the fact that a big part of QAnon is red-pilling normies.
They feel like they are commissioned to spread the word and then turn non-believers into believers, and this will help accelerate the Great Awakening, because they feel like the only way it's going to happen is if enough people believe as they believe.
And if they get pushed onto these platforms where there are no normies or there are fewer normies, then it's just not as fun.
It feels more frustrated.
It feels like their efforts are futile, you know, on Gab or on Parler.
God, I'm thinking of an old lady from the Midwest just wandering into those toxic spaces.
I just feel so bad.
I feel like I'm watching her wander out into the desert with no water.
Hello!
Come back!
Come back!
You don't know what's out there.
Hello!
Meanwhile, you hear the motors revving up in the distance and people shooting guns in the air.
Dust is rising.
So, I mean, but it sounds like the basic impacts of this kind of crackdown will be less growth of the movement, but more volatile at the fringes.
Yeah, I think that's what we're going to see, which is expected to an extent.
Well, I assume it's better than the alternative.
I don't know.
I guess we'll find out in the coming months and years.
I wouldn't call it ideal.
Yeah, we've been doing the alternative, so I guess we'll find out what two alternatives give.
I mean this really is I mean this really is an inflection point for for QAnon is like is like they're going to Adapt and change very very rapidly as a consequence of these actions Yeah, and I mean they know you said we can speculate exactly what that adaptation is gonna look like but yeah, we're gonna find out so on Twitter you said Marc Andre that July August QAnon was a Different movement than October QAnon and now I'm curious.
What exactly did you mean by that?
So, we've kind of talked about it already, but basically what we saw with the initial ban from Twitter and the follow-up with the initial crackdown from Facebook is QAnon panicking in an extent and starting to look at how to circumvent the movement, and circumvent the ban, I mean.
And what we're seeing then is, we've talked about it already, I guess, online, Travis, you and I, but it's really, like, the Save the Children and, like, Pastel QAnon and, like, the lighter movements that have popped up following this ban.
So, you know, Save the Children was not necessarily a reality prior to the Facebook and Twitter bans.
And, you know, what I'm calling pastel QAnon, or the female influencers that are QAnon adjacent and starting to talk about QAnon, were not necessarily a thing.
It was a very small community.
Prior to July and August, I was following maybe 30 accounts on Instagram that I thought were influencers.
Some of them were adjacent, and that was based on the work that you guys had done earlier in the year.
And prior to the ban, I was up almost 300 accounts in that space with 3.4 million followers.
So what we're seeing is that you saw the initial fragmentation of QAnon entering these new spaces and reporters were talking about QAnon Lite, QAnon Adjacent, QAnon Moms, Conspirituality, all this type of stuff were popping out and you already saw the movement breaking apart and what we end up in October is these various different groups.
Now we're seeing I'm seeing QAnon blend in with groups like the Three Percenters or the Proud Boys or other militia groups.
We're seeing it fragmented to other ideas.
And this is this is the impact when you start censoring.
Yes, you're going to remove them from the large platforms, but they're going to morph and evolve.
And QAnon now is is not what we were seeing in July.
And in September and October, I was seeing an increase in post promoting like vehicle ramming attacks with memes being shared.
All lives splatter.
We don't care about your protests or black lives splatter.
And they're sharing videos of African Americans are protest getting hit by cars and these
are in QAnon groups.
So the escalation of language and violence was not necessarily what I was seeing in July.
When we wrote that CTC piece, we were still saying QAnon may be a security threat based on the limited cases.
I think the platform had to act as well because there was an escalation in the content and the violence that was
promoted.
And it was not manageable for them to just censor the promotion and celebration of violence
because that was taking over more and more of the content that was being shared by people.
Now, I usually when talking about comparing like QAnon and the militia movement or Proud Boys and this kind of thing, I usually say like the big difference is that is that QAnon believes that they can outsource all the violence that they want to do to the military.
They think that the military is eventually going to swoop in and execute all the people that they hate.
Whereas the militia movement, they tend to believe that they want to do it themselves, right?
They think they need to arm up and make the revolutionary changes that they want to happen without relying on anyone else.
And as a consequence, there wasn't a whole lot of overlap between these two movements.
Now, are you saying that quite recently that that amount of overlap has been increasing?
You know, you're seeing individuals talking about the storm is coming and we need to defeat the Deep State.
The Deep State is not necessarily for some of these militia members what QAnon talks about, but it's more about how the government is not as honest as one may perceive it to be, and they need to take it down in order to restore the Constitution as they perceive it.
And they're using QAnon stories and narratives and videos as a way of mobilizing and, you know, firing each other up in a sense.
And Save the Children played a role in this, in the sense that it didn't take long to go from Save the Children to Kill All Pedophiles.
And when you're taking these narratives to Kill All Pedophiles, there's specific groups that were already, you know, against this type of action and they're willing to, you know, I mean, we saw this at the Tampa rally.
Someone shoved a militia recruitment pamphlet in your hand.
I think that the mechanism is not, you know, QAnon to 3%ers, but more like 3%ers recruiting
QAnon, Proud Boys recruiting QAnon believers.
It's QAnon believers that are not seeing the results they want are going to be easy recruits
to target.
Yeah, I mean, we saw this at the Tampa rally.
Someone shoved a militia recruitment pamphlet in your hand.
That's correct.
That's correct.
So before I let you go, Marc-Andre, I have one more question I will ask you that I've
been asked a lot recently.
So now, assuming that Trump loses the coming election that we have here in a couple of weeks and he concedes, so it's definitely he's out.
How do you think QAnon will react to that?
By the way, if you're listening to this three weeks from now, stop laughing.
Shut up.
Yeah, we're speculating here.
Let us have our fun.
So in the possible scenario where it's a Biden win, a Trump loss, I think the most obvious scenario for like hardcore QAnon believers they interfered in the election, and you're gonna see them just push out a bunch of propaganda and content to promote the fact that, you know,
You know, to take down the deep state.
And it's not necessarily going to bring them away.
What's going to happen though is to see what's the socio-political environment after the election that may feed or not feed them.
And I think that's going to have a huge impact to see whether QAnon survives or metastasizes into something else.
I think that's the first one.
The other one is what we've kind of been talking about, right, is just recruitment.
You're going to have individuals that are just like, crap, Q was wrong, but I still think the government's corrupt and I don't think this was a fair election, you know, and it's going to be other groups that'll recruit them.
And the other version is, well, kind of like my little research project is, QAnon's just going to turn into some form of new religious movement.
And there's more and more QAnon-affiliated churches that are talking about these conspiracy theories and everything, and you're probably going to have some type of, you know, couple of church organizations just continuing to peddle from QAnon into other conspiracy theories.
Those are, like, what my guesses are.
Basically, more blood libel in Pentecostalism.
Yeah, or more anti-vax stuff.
As long as the pandemic's around, the anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers are all going to have a role to play with conspiracy theories, and that's just going to keep feeding QAnon.
In all honesty, disappearing QAnon is not one of my scenarios.
The best case is they just stay as keyboard warriors and there's no violence.
But again, it's going to really depend on what November and December and January brings to us.
2020's been a year that just keeps on giving, so it's hard to speculate.
Yeah, and then there's, you know, the material conditions like, is that stimulus package going to pass?
So the question is, yeah, are people hurting as much in January and February?
Like you said, there's a lot of different things that are going to feed into whether radicalization is an interesting alternative for them.
Exactly.
This is what the pandemic has shown, right?
If there's political instability, economic instability, social instability, or health insecurities, it just creates vulnerabilities for individuals to try to find answers.
QAnon provides those answers.
Conspiracy theories and religion provides those answers.
And because QAnon is now the talk of the town, because they've become so mainstream, it's the easy thing to turn to for people that are suffering.
As long as people are suffering, and as long as we have this global pandemic, I think we're going to be talking about For a while.
Marc Andre, thanks again for joining us.
You always have fantastic insights.
Where could someone go and learn more about your work?
They could follow me on Twitter at underscore MA Argentino.
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