Episode 114: Undercover at QCon feat Fredrick Brennan
Scottsdale, Arizona. Jim Watkins, owner of the 8kun imageboard where QAnon posts, has gathered at QCon with figures like Praying Medic, InTheMatrixxx, musician JT Wilde and the Q Shaman. We're there undercover. Plus we've got a telepathic connection to the original creator of 8chan, Fredrick Brennan.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 114 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Undercover at QCon in Scottsdale, Arizona episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
My plan is to be invisible, to blend into the crowd.
Normally, this should be easy for a white guy in his 30s in an Arizona resort, but it's made more challenging by the fact that I'm attending a Q conference, and I am notorious among QAnon promoters.
I started following QAnon just by exploring the community's posts and explaining their beliefs and behavior through my anonymous Twitter account.
But that had turned into columns for the Washington Post, quotes in every major news outlet in the country, appearances on television news programs.
The more notoriety I gain for being interested in them, the more interested they became in me.
I first realized that I'm recognizable to QAnon promoters when we attended the QAnon rally in Tampa, Florida, when one of the organizers acknowledged me in a friendly way.
The main perk of invisibility is that it allows me to listen to QAnon followers without influencing how they speak or behave.
Unfortunately, if they know that opposition is in their midst, they won't be as candid.
That means whatever conversations I capture in the lav microphone I have placed in my front shirt pocket won't be as genuine.
So, I do something drastic.
I shave off my beard the night before the trip.
A beard I've had for the last decade or so.
Even my own family doesn't know what I look like with just a mustache.
That, combined with a sensible haircut and my glasses, which I'm rarely photographed wearing, should help me stay incognito.
If Hollywood celebrities can be anonymous in public with nothing more than oversized sunglasses and a floppy hat, surely that should be sufficient to disguise my identity.
I arrive at Julian's house.
Both he and Jake marvel at my new look.
You look like a completely different person.
Jake says.
Julian concurs.
Totally.
We load up Julian's black 4Runner and I take my initial spot in the passenger seat, flipping down the mirror to confirm that I'm sufficiently transformed.
Julian starts the car and we head east, towards the desert.
Okay, we are recording.
This is QAnon Anonymous, Arizona trip to QCon on October 16th, 2020.
May the Lord have mercy on each one of our souls and may the Deep Dish bless us and keep us.
We are plagued by car troubles almost immediately.
Jake uses duct tape to patch our fuselage, and we continue barreling east on Interstate 10, through the lingering smoke of California, and all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona.
I drive most of the way, and Travis takes the wheel for the last two hours.
We stop to eat sandwiches at a firefighter-themed chain restaurant, I roll a joint on the tables outside, But sense the worried eyes of Jake skidding back and forth between my incredible rolling skills and the group of law enforcement style meatheads who had just piled out of a truck with an extended cab.
Not to mention, we were in the parking lot of the Ontario Police Department.
I ignore him.
Travis is fiddling with his lav mic.
He will be our pussy bump in Saro.
As I pop the remains of my joint into a container, I watch his strangely bare face.
The mustache gives him a singular look which alternates between guy I'd buy drugs from and specialist at a gun show.
I should have taken one less puff.
His face is now that of a fish.
How's it going?
I peer into the scintillating black depths of his open mouth.
You know I'm working for the Deep State, right Jules?
Anyways, welcome to the Scottsdale Plaza Resort Hotel.
We hope you enjoy your stay.
I look up at the masked concierge.
A great weight is lifted from me.
I'm no longer bothered by thoughts of the massive hill we passed along the way.
Maybe a landfill of some sort, with a giant white cube beaming from its yellowed flank.
The Scottsdale Plaza Resort is relatively upscale, and most everyone is wearing masks, save some patrons enjoying their supper on the patio.
It's a breezy desert night.
We check in and drive through the quiet resort neighborhood to our townhouse, where we deposit our gear and begin to unpack all the drugs everyone had brought.
There's an air of real excitement.
We'd chosen wisely to stay in the resort itself.
This added a new layer of slime to the entire weekend.
Would we be swept away in some weird MAGA tantric boomer orgy?
Julian might.
Despite his toe being potentially fractured, and on strict orders not to consume any hard liquor, he and Travis can't fucking wait to pull one over on these rubes.
They're kitted out to the max with cameras and recording equipment.
I unpack a small, detachable game controller, hoping the hotel Wi-Fi will be good enough to get in a little mobile gaming.
We find a table just outside the hotel bar and enjoy a nice supper together.
Feels weird to be out, eating at a restaurant.
Everyone else seems less concerned than I am.
I order the strongest drink in my repertoire, a very dirty martini with Tito's vodka.
Our waiter is a super friendly guy and we let him know we are attending the conferences, undercover.
We settle into our chairs on the outdoor patio, sharing drinks as we look out over the multi-level swimming pools.
Groups of people splash about in the pockets of blue light.
I am tricked into a lull by the felted atmosphere of gas fire pits surrounding us.
For a brief moment, I feel no anxiety.
Jake is sipping a dirty martini.
Travis' gaze is off-axis.
Staring past the brown Santa Fe style buildings and into the night.
We share some meaningless words as the obscurity settles around us.
Lying face up on the cold asphalt of the hotel parking lot, I watch the stars pinned against the vast gauzy darkness as if to hold it together.
I walk upstairs I don't recognize, curl on the mattress and dream of nothing.
I wake up in the resort suite earlier than Jake or Julian.
Before I even shower or dress, I reach for my phone and browse Twitter with my QAnon Alt account.
I'm sure, on some level, it's unhealthy to fill my brain with conspiracy theory posts each day before I eat, drink, or see sunlight, but it's a bad habit that has given me a lot of positive reinforcement so far, so I'm probably not going to stop soon.
I spot a few tweets from members of the minority sect of QAnon followers who believe that JFK Jr.
is alive.
They're claiming that JFK Jr.
will reveal himself today at a Trump rally in Dallas and announce that he is Trump's new running mate.
Now, even setting aside the fact that JFK Jr.
died in 1999, There are a couple of problems with that.
The ballots for the election had already been printed and were being distributed.
And in addition to that, there is no Trump rally in Dallas today.
I snagged a couple of screenshots of tweets proclaiming that JFK Jr's second coming is nigh and composed a tweet, making sure to specify that it is a belief from a sect of QAnon and not a mainline QAnon belief.
Q has historically been very touchy on the subject of JFK Jr.' 's living status.
Several QDrops have emphasized that Q specifically said that JFK Jr.
is not alive.
I want to be fair, but I also want to irritate QAnon followers who are embarrassed by their fellow travelers who think that JFK Jr.
is in hiding.
Just because Q deems the JFK Jr.
lives people to be heretics, that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
I hit send on the tweet, shower, dress, sling my camera bag over my shoulder, and head out to the conference room.
The sun is barring in from a glass pane in the doorway.
It's early.
I can hear someone showering upstairs.
As my consciousness transitions from one nightmare to another, I can just make out Travis standing in the living room and adjusting the wire under his shirt.
He is headed to 8 Coon Coffee and networking with Jim Watkins.
I think I wish him luck before hitting the snooze button and dozing back off.
I have the far easier task today of capturing B-roll of the MAGA Parade, a much safer event with a much later call time, 10.30am to be exact.
By the time I properly wake up, both Julian and Travis have been absorbed by the conference.
I'm walking alone through the bright neighborhood, wearing my Dead & Co.
t-shirt I got attending a concert with my parents last June.
I can see the parade participants staging near the front of the resort.
I'm anxious about getting the proper coverage of the parade before it departs.
I was told I needed to check in near the Q conference room and receive my wristband for the day's events.
With my N95 secured firmly on my face, I walk through the double doors of the conference wing and immediately see Jim Watkins at one of the coffee machines.
He pays no attention to me as I make a beeline towards the table where two middle-aged women are getting a couple checked in.
They're processing the woman first.
Her boyfriend, truly a human cigarette of a man, waiting a couple feet behind her, immediately
zeroes in on my mask.
We don't believe in that stuff around here.
I hear myself giving some lame excuse about a pre-existing condition.
What a loser I am.
There's no way I'm ever going to fit in with these people, despite having so much in common.
Before I can sink further into despair, he's called up to the check-in table, where his
credit card is declined.
Over and over again.
piano music begins to emanate from behind the conference room doors.
I panic.
I'm trapped here in some sort of QAnon airlock.
Eventually, the woman let the man go inside without resolving his credit card issue, so I'm pretty sure he ended up attending for free.
Player.
I was called forward, and as I'm getting my credentials in order, InTheMatrix himself explodes through the conference doors and directs me to sign the large yellow Q flag draped over one of the tables.
At this point, I have a clear look into the auditorium.
Not a single person I can see is wearing a mask.
The women begin to gesture towards the conference room, ushering me to go inside towards my death.
I have to think quick.
You're checked in.
Okay, great.
We're at least on our end of the hall.
Are there, uh, where are the closest guest rooms?
Right around this corner.
Right on the other side.
Yeah, right.
The swishing sounds of an absolute coward.
That was literally the sound of Jake running away for the entire day.
He'd never return.
Just the fastest you can.
Basically sprinting.
He's in a 995 mask.
Now you guys know what kind of friend I am.
I will leave you to your death.
I took one look in there and I was like, These boys, I was like, these boys have decided to die for this project.
That is a commitment I am not willing to make today.
And the next time he was spotted, it was at the bar, drinking a Bloody Mary at 1130 AM.
Congrats, Jake.
I enter the small conference room and take a seat in the third row.
Signs along the wall say maximum capacity 42.
As the room fills, it becomes clear that this is not a strictly enforced rule.
I strike up a conversation with the woman next to me, Jeannie.
She has driven all the way from Oklahoma.
15 hours on the road, she says.
She's attending because she wasn't able to take a vacation this year.
Yet another person pushed into the welcoming arms of the QAnon community by the pandemic.
I had no idea what to expect from this.
I just saw it on the internet on Monday, on Twitter.
I was like, I thought about it for like 10 seconds.
I was like, Google, how far is it to Phoenix?
Yeah, I think I'll go to that.
Yeah, why not?
It's like, I didn't take a vacation this year.
There's nothing to do.
I'm like, okay, I'll just go do this.
She asks how long I have been following QAnon.
My answer is mostly truthful, but misleading.
She, newly pandemic-billed, was surprised that I've been following it for years.
So how did you discover all this?
You know, I really discovered it really in the middle of July of 2018.
Oh, a long time ago.
Yeah, a long time ago.
I've been following it for a while.
Not as intensely as some people.
But, you know, I follow a few accounts if you ever know me.
Decoders and sort of information sources I thought had some insight into what was going on.
Kind of like different perspectives.
I thought it was really valuable.
I had come to observe fanatics, but the first person I speak with is amazed at my Q obsession.
I look around the room and realize that I certainly have attended more QAnon events than anyone here.
This is my sixth.
QAnon promoter InTheMatrix, aka Jeffrey Pedersen, rose to address the crowd.
I've traded a few barbs with him on Twitter.
He once faulted me for giving an interview for Salon.com because they published an article sympathetic to pedophiles.
I once referred to him as a lizard-eyed maniac.
Which is rude in retrospect.
Is this an apology?
In the Matrix celebrates how well Trump had recently answered a question about QAnon, refusing to denounce the movement.
As he speaks, my new friend turns to me to learn about what's going on.
Who's this guy?
I asked you a question the other day.
That was pretty...
The one at the town hall when she was like, didn't you know that there was a satanic pedophile elite
club?
You just admitted it.
Yeah.
It was admitted.
So now we've got us, and we're just waiting to get this started.
Who's this guy?
We have a lot of people here.
We have Jim Watkins.
He's the major, that's the major.
He's the award winner for Q, for Q Post.
So he's here, and that's the coffee club.
We're excited about that, guys.
Fantastic.
Now I'm introducing a newbie to the stars of the QAnon world.
After washing my hands three times, I head out into the parking lot where the parade is staging.
It's a sad affair.
A handful of bikers, a trio of teenage girls on motorized neon ponies, and a group of cowboys mulling around one lonely horse.
The only folks who seemed lined up for the parade were family members of individuals who were in the parade.
I keep to a relatively safe distance as I capture some GoPro footage of an elderly woman very carefully and slowly getting on the back of her husband's bike.
The engines rev and the bikes take off across the parking lot towards their starting positions.
Not quite Fury Road, but it sure beats sitting inside a cramped auditorium with a bunch of people cheering about not wearing masks in the midst of a pandemic.
To my and others' confusion, instead of heading towards the Cypress Courtyard, as the schedule suggested, the caravan of 25 bikes and pickup trucks drives out into the street, away from the hotel.
Panic sets in.
Again, my one fucking job was to grab footage of this stupid parade, and now I had no idea where they were heading.
Julian was going to beat me.
Desperate, I approached the one other man and his wife, who seemed to be interested in the parade.
Do you guys know where the parade actually starts?
It's supposed to be over in the courtyard, I think?
Well, it's going here and then it'll go around over there and come back.
Okay, cool.
And then it takes a left out on the stairs.
So this is a good area to sort of hang out?
It'll go, I don't know if it comes back here, I'm assuming it does, but I think it goes out down this way and then comes back.
Copy that.
Confident now that I had a couple minutes to relax, I set out towards the bar to order food and strong drink.
The first of many protective layers I would need if I was to make it through the day.
Over my shoulder I can hear dozens of cars honking in support of Donald Trump.
People are sticking their torsos out their windows and pumping their fists as the parade goes by, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Have we gotten it all wrong again?
I think to myself.
There's no question these people were happier than I was.
In their world, the virus was fake, and they seemed free from the dread I and my loved ones have lived with for these past eight months.
Jim cuts a strange figure against the beige conference room wall.
A middle-aged man with bearded jowls.
It appears someone shoved him into a yellow 8-kun t-shirt.
It says join or 404.
He is the owner of the message board that Q calls home.
His disposition masks a deep contempt.
And engaging in niceties seems physically painful for him.
He breaks into a strange falsetto when doing so.
After some fumbling, Jim launches into his written speech.
We can't go back and change the past.
If we could, though, would you change?
Surely, we have all made stupid mistakes.
Things that are laughable now, but at the time were so wrenching.
Hardly anyone would choose to change one of these events.
You only get one shot, chance, opportunity to make that change, so... You have to choose just the right one to touch for maximum impact.
Perhaps as a loved one burned into your memory, you could save them.
And whatever unfortunate end they come to would never have happened.
In the end, they will be gone.
So will you.
Would removing whatever memory you possess of their ending make the world a better place?
After this, Jim asks you to think harder.
Specifically, about assassination.
Think harder?
What about removing someone from history that caused suffering to massive amounts of people?
Brutal leaders might get your attention next.
Since you seem to have this history-changing power as a one-time use, then it's gone.
You start looking at historical events harder.
Maybe you could assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot.
Perhaps you could remove someone.
Who would you remove?
You know?
Perhaps you could remove someone who took even more lives.
How about Mao or Stalin?
Their body counts are the highest in modern history.
However, when you look at these events that changed the world because of these monsters, if Hitler hadn't been responsible for the Holocaust, would the modern state of Israel exist?
If Joe hadn't killed so many of those intelligent folks in the Soviet Union, would the United States have won the space race?
With the Berlin Wall that fell?
It is a troubling thought, so maybe we ought to move on, scrolling back farther in time.
Who would you remove?
What about Genghis Khan?
He ruled over a big part of the world.
Many of you may be related to him.
His pastimes included hunting and sleeping with the traumatized wives of the nobility he killed in front of them.
Jim continues by making a full-throated defense of colonialism and genocide.
There are a few people in history that most of us have as common ancestors.
So, well, maybe we shouldn't kill the Khan or Charlemagne.
As our one change to history, what about others?
Why not just sink Magellan's ship before word got back to Europe?
Or maybe burn his ship and leave the crew with the Filipino after Lapu-Lapu murdered Magellan.
The history of Southeast Asia could have been completely different, and surely Europe would have had a different destiny.
Of course, they would have eventually found their way around the world, but it would have been given some lands conquered by the Spanish and Portuguese time to develop on their own.
Their culture might have survived.
Would that have stopped Colonel Funston?
From killing all the boys over the age of 10?
Because they might be enemy combatants?
Or maybe we could just stop them from happening by stopping Queen Isabella from sending Columbus across the ocean blue in 1492.
But then none of us would be here now.
I guess dwelling on and trying to change the past is not a useful way for us to spend the day.
We will have better luck and results if we learn from the mistakes of the past and use
our knowledge to touch the present, thus writing a better future for all of us.
The past is for our learning.
We can only touch the present.
Our future is not written.
In fact it exists in multiple versions.
Please do the right thing and choose the most optimal version of the future to follow as
your path.
You only experience consciously the path you choose, so don't dwell in the I would have,
I should have, I could have melancholy mentality.
That world of second-guessing your past actions?
Individually, our actions may not have much effect on the future, but in the words of Captain Planet, let our powers combine.
Truly, just mind-bending, awful stuff.
I felt like the life force draining out of the room.
Jesus Christ.
Jim ends his prepared speech with something that sounds like a mix of a Hallmark card, a guided meditation, and a jihadi depersonalization technique.
Listen to that inner voice that keeps you on the right path and believe in angels.
The Lord God will send a messenger when you come to a crossroad.
It might not be so obvious, but listen for the inner intuition when you're at that obvious point where you have to make a decision.
Make the right decision.
Go the right way.
Go the way where you can live with the results of your decision.
Let's all do the right thing and help our country go the way that we need to go to be the leader in the world stage Go forth aggressively and with integrity toward that goal.
Let's be American through and through.
Let's be brave, and let's continue to be free.
As he bumbles to a close, Jim Watkins offers to take audience questions, with some aggressive caveats.
Everybody asks me questions, I mean, I always answer questions, but I don't like to do that where they put the word in your mouth thing.
So, I guess, do you guys have any questions for Mr. Watkins?
Go ahead and step up to the mic.
We'd like to take a couple questions.
I've got one question, Jim.
In the Matrix asks Jim a question about his congressional deposition.
You were actually invited to go to the House of Representatives, correct?
I was.
How did that go?
I mean, you might not be able to talk about it, I don't know, but... They didn't put any gag order on me.
It was a deposition in the It was like a San Francisco room of some kind.
They took me into a private room with a bunch of lawyers and congressmen would come in and out and just look at me like I was in Fishbowl.
None of them talked to me, but they had lawyers questioning me the whole time.
You see depositions on TV where they ask you the same question in ten different ways.
That's what they did.
They tell you if you lie they're going to arrest you.
So they lie all the time.
I was very truthful with them and I guess I'm one of the first technology company people
they ever had go there and tell them the truth.
And they, both the Republicans and Democrats thanked me after that, which was not much
use because the Twitter subpoena sort of ruined my life.
This makes me lean back in my conference room chair and think of a future conversation I will have with Frederick Brennan, the original founder of the 8chan image board, now renamed 8kun, which is home to QAnon and their Qdrops.
I ask him a question in my mind's eye.
A lot of people are under the impression that Jim Watkins is Q. Contributing to that was your recent appearance on the Reply All podcast and some of the tweets you've been making.
To clarify, Are you saying Jim is Q?
So what I mean when I say Jim is Q is probably different than the picture a lot of people have in their mind.
Because of Jim's wealth, I don't necessarily mean that he is sitting behind the keyboard writing every Q drop and pressing pause.
What I mean that is that he decides who gets to be Q, who the trip code is going to be used by.
And he is essentially the final arbiter of what is a cue post.
So he's more of the pope in this situation than a disciple.
So he's deciding which cue drops are actually canon, but I don't believe that he's writing them physically himself.
I do think that most likely he has kind of anointed somebody to be cue.
We know that Jim Watkins Before Q really became a thing, he started a fake news website called The Goldwater.
And even in 2017, that website was pushing the Clinton body count theory.
It was in fact, like, stickied to the top of thegoldwater.com.
So, we do know that Watkins has had kind of this farm of so-called reporters that are willing to lie to people.
And for me, it seems most likely that if he needed somebody to post his queue, he would pick out of, kind of, I call them the Goldwater Flunkies.
That's what I used to call them when I worked there too, because I did not have any respect for these people.
But yeah, he would pick out of one of those flunkies, essentially, who can't make any kind of real living
in journalism or any kind of other living.
So sign an NDA with Jim and then just start writing Q-drops.
But he could also be doing it a million billion other ways, right?
He could just be selling certain drops.
And I do think that he has written at least one or two drops,
especially the one that said in it, essentially, heel.
And it had like that spinning yoga thing.
I really, that just seems like him because he's so into the binaural beats and yoga.
But no, I'm not saying that Jim is sitting down and writing every drop.
Interestingly, by attempting to explain the situation that happened on Jim's board
with the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand posting a manifesto there,
In the Matrix actually puts Jim in a sticky situation.
And it gets even stickier when Jim says he can't hear the question, causing the entire room to focus on the topic.
Jim is audibly unhappy about it.
Jim is audibly upset about it.
The live stream.
They live streamed a New Zealand shooting from Facebook.
Yeah, we didn't live stream that.
So that's why they said, oh, we're going to take it down because of some of the things that Anna put a link to.
Another big platform that probably should have been taken down.
Not this one, is what I'm saying.
You really want me to keep going on New Zealand?
We can all go on New Zealand.
Unfortunately, New Zealand, it's permanent.
They took away their guns, and now the people are sitting there.
They took their guns away last year because of this event.
A horrendous event, and nobody in America had anything to do with it.
An Australian illegal alien in New Zealand shot a bunch of people in two different churches.
No one here had anything to do with that.
But we were used, and the New Zealand government TV even came to my house.
They interviewed my wife, but I wasn't there.
She just said, go away, he's not here.
He just can't help but offend the victims of the Christchurch shooting, and I don't know why.
He always needs to take this line that the shooter was an illegal immigrant and that that is why the shooting happened.
He always seems to blame it on this Australian illegal immigration as if that's a real problem in New Zealand.
And not on white supremacy, not on racism.
It's just that Australia apparently is not sending their best to New Zealand and causing these shootings.
It's just a ridiculous way to look at the shooting and everything that happened in it.
I'll just say the same thing that I said in 2019, which is that the shooter posted the Facebook stream
and his manifesto on 8chan first because he knew that 8chan users
had the technical ability to copy that stream.
And had it just appeared on Facebook, nobody would have saved it, nobody would have ripped it,
it would have just completely disappeared because nobody would have known to even watch it.
So he very calculatedly put it on 8chan.
And had 8chan had a live streaming capability, he probably would have live streamed it directly to 8chan.
But he used Facebook basically as the streaming platform but posted his manifesto, his reasons,
and told the users what to expect so they would know to start downloading the stream.
And he started it when he was in his car to give them time.
Like, it was all very calculated.
He knew that while he was driving over there, people were going to set up the kind of recording software so that when he actually got into the mosque, He could do his shooting, and it would all be recorded, and they would start sharing it on 8chan.
So it's ridiculous to say that 8chan played no part.
Completely nonsense.
In an attempt to promote his new streaming platform, Jim unwittingly enters into a war on hashtags themselves, and he gives advice that mirrors QAnon's recent drop, calling on followers to use camouflage on social media, so as to evade bans.
We're streaming live on the Tora3.com network.
Tora3.com.
Yeah, maybe in the Matrix could retweet that.
But I hope y'all will use that because a lot of people have lost... Yes ma'am?
Is there a hashtag for it?
No.
No, that's pretty much useless.
Be careful of the hashtags, guys.
Super be careful because they're just using that to track you.
Oh, there's 300 people using this?
These are great.
And then they're going to turn it off in a moment, and they're going to collect everyone that used that hashtag, and you just get segregated all that much more, and nobody sees what you have to say.
So I put hashtags sometimes, but I don't put ones that have anything to do with what I'm talking about.
I think I put the Phoenix Suns on yesterday, you know, because I'm here.
But don't use the hashtags, guys.
Don't fall for it, because as soon as they figure out you are involved with the QAnon movement or you're following it or listening to it, they will categorize you.
Put you in a market, they will send you inferior product commercials out the yin-yang, and you will be just stuck not being able to talk to anyone.
My family can't even see what I post, you know?
It's like, what are you talking about?
Oh, they have to actually type it in because you don't show up on anybody's radar anymore.
So, don't use those hashtags unless you're playing a Like a hashtag troll game.
Again, I am seized with a vision of my future conversation with Frederick Brennan.
What are the latest concrete developments you think tie Jim to whoever posts his queue?
So there have been quite a few.
We can look really at, for example, what happened with 8kun in 2019, when it went down and it came back online.
And we've noticed that 8kun8chan, whatever you want to call it, is now completely about
Q. There really is no other community that's still using it to the same degree.
In 2019, it wasn't such a question because he had all these other communities in the
same way that we wouldn't expect, like a Jack of Twitter, to pretend to be a certain reporter,
even though he could do the exact same thing Jim can.
Jack could log into Twitter and just commandeer somebody's account.
Jack could post as Barack Obama because a trip code is essentially the same thing as
a verified checkmark.
But we wouldn't expect Jack to do that because, first of all, it's a public company.
Second of all, Barack Obama can actually show his face and say, hey, I'm Barack Obama.
That isn't me.
But Q can't do that because nobody knows what Q looks like.
So there's no way that Q could prove he's Q without 8chan.
But one thing that has happened since then is that 8chan has become kind of completely
about Q. At any given moment, 95% or more of the posts made every hour are on the Q
board and every other board has died.
Since we last spoke and Mark resigned, I did not actually expect that resignation to have
any impact, but it did.
It had actually a sizable impact on 8chan.
They essentially lost every community that was not about Q, because I guess Mark was
just the final straw for them.
They just decided, you know, this guy who really cared about the community kind of got fired for bullshit reasons.
So they just decided that they don't like Jim anymore.
And, oh, Mark set up his own site.
So every community that's not Q related has left.
So all he really has left at this point is Q. And, I mean, he's going to the Q convention.
He definitely knows Uh, which side the butter is going on the toast, you know, so.
We've seen that he's started trying to take over a lot of the aggregators and we would expect that if he was kind of trying to make sure that nobody could question his control of queue.
One thing that I always thought might happen before was that whoever was in control of queue map Very easily could have said, hey, you know what?
This Jim guy, he's taking over Q. You know, he could just make the same kind of argument I made and Paul Ferber made that Q has been taken over.
But because Jim got in control of QMAP, suddenly he's not able to do that anymore.
He owns everything now. You know, like all of these aggregators
have come under his control.
And now that QMAP Jason Galinas is totally out of the way, I mean, every large aggregator is posted
on, you know, Vanwa Tech. Another thing that we've discovered recently is that Jim Watkins
owns his internet service provider. We didn't know this before.
Before, we thought that he had just kind of hired this guy named Nick Lim, but Nick Lim had a third-party company.
But no, we've discovered quite clearly in the contracts that you have to agree to when you sign up for this ISP called Vanuatec.
That you're agreeing that Jim's company, Is It Wet Yet, Inc., in Mississippi, has authority over basically who gets to use this ISP.
And they also own the software that does everything.
So we've, it's kind of this weird legal maneuvering that Jim always does when he takes something over.
Very similar to what he did in Japan, where when he took over 2Channel, he just put it through like a maze of shell companies.
You had Erase Queen Inc.
and Loki Technology Inc., and they were all kind of involved.
It's very much his MO.
So, yeah, I mean, I'm more convinced than ever that Jim is Q. There really is no other credible theory at this point, because we can just look at the fact that he is in total control of the Dripcode, and he is now taking over all these aggregators,
appearing at Q conventions, and yeah.
I personally would feel more comfortable if the investigation had more people working on it
before we say that this is our only credible lead.
Jim Watkins is, at minimum, involved in a federal conspiracy
to impersonate a federal officer, period, and profit off of that impersonation.
I mean, definitely crimes have been committed here even without like the RICO Act, right?
Like there are specific breaches to the statute that are obvious that you have made.
There is no way to look at what he's done here with Q and to say that, well, he is not helping a federal officer be impersonated.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
In order to have actual military intelligence to leak, you need to be a federal officer.
And we know that Q is not a federal officer, ergo it's impersonation.
So at the very least, they should be investigating him for kind of profiting off of this.
Conspiracy, and we don't know how many people are involved in the conspiracy, right?
It could easily just be a conspiracy of one.
Jim Watkins logging on, posting the drops, whatever.
It could be more than one.
You know, it could be Jim and Ron and maybe some people in the Goldwater that have non-disclosure agreements.
But because the government has failed so much, you know, all we really have is Jim because they aren't following up any of the leads, you know what I mean?
So, yeah.
You stated earlier that a lot of people are under the impression that Jim is Q and yet you just said Jim is Q again.
So, what would you say to the people who are under this impression but are still waiting for evidence?
What I would just say is that...
So, if they are expecting that we are going to come across evidence that Jim is physically writing every single cue drop, that's not going to happen.
Even if it's true, which I don't think it is true, but even if it were true, Jim is not recording himself sitting down on the computer and publishing the cue drops.
So, that kind of evidence is never going to materialize, in my opinion.
There would have to be some kind of federal government investigation that, you know, would actually put somebody in his organization or whatever to figure out, you know, that kind of extreme detail.
But...
It seems extremely obvious to me that you can look at the fact that he controls this platform.
Nobody else uses the platform.
The only reason people go there is to talk about the Q drops.
He obviously doesn't want to lose this platform because he is, you know, putting in so much effort to go to these conventions and do a kind of dog whistle to the Q people that he's on their side.
And I mean, you know, in the clips that you have, he's gone way beyond dog whistling, you know, so.
On the Reply All podcast, they mentioned that you have a horse in this race, that you want to see Jim fall.
Of course, yeah.
And I recognize that I'm a biased source, which is why I don't try to lean too much on my private experience with Jim.
And I tend to just talk about kind of the infrastructure, things like that.
Oh, look, you know, QMAP is being hosted by Vanuatec now, and we have this contract that shows that Vanuatec is owned by Jim.
You know, I don't try to lean too much on my own experience and my own things that I saw while I was there.
I will talk about them if reporters ask me to.
And one other thing that I would say is, you know, when it comes to journalism, they can't really print speculation.
If I'm asked to speculate, and a lot of reporters do ask me to, but it doesn't make it into their stories, you know, I'll tell them, look, we really have no idea who is sitting down and putting pen to paper and writing the cue drops.
We know that Jim most likely knows, but we don't know anything else other than that.
And I will speculate and give them a few, you know, possible leads on who it could be.
But I mean, a reporter is not going to publish that.
They're only going to publish the facts that I gave them, which You know, even Ben Collins of NBC has told me that it's essentially unimpeachable that Jim Watkins could reassign Q whenever he wants, and yeah, so... One thing I think we can say as fact is that without Jim, Q would be unable to carry out their operations.
Absolutely correct, and I easily proved that at the end of 2019 by taking 8chan down over and over and over again, and Q was not able to post for I believe it was something like 92 or 93 days, so...
The next question seems asked by a Deep State or MSM plant to me, but honestly, who the hell knows?
The person asked Jim about Q's history of posting on the image boards he owns.
I have a question right here.
What did you got, sir?
Yeah, my name is Christian.
Thanks so much for having me here.
But I'm just really curious to kind of know how you first became aware that Q was posting on the boards and when you really started following the movement or supporting the movement yourself.
Last August.
Okay, and what was the process, or how did that happen?
Was it just like, what is this going on here?
And then you started looking and seeing that there was value in it?
Well, I had heard of it, but I hadn't been following it, and I didn't know it was any more than just a board on HN.
But when they turned off our servers, then I realized what it was all about.
I'm a big follower of this movement.
And I started following it in August last year.
When I got a subpoena.
Jim claims that he received that information in August, and that's the first point at which he became aware of Q.
I know for a fact that that's not true because Jim Watkins has been involved in a documentary,
and the guy that's making it wants to figure out who Q is, right?
So that guy has been doing this since end of 2018.
So that was way before him going to the House of Reps.
Where would you say you landed before that?
I mean, were you aware of anything, like, that the movie talks about, or was there anything that really got you interested in it, or what was it?
Well, when it started getting big, I was busy with, like, chemotherapy and radiation stuff.
I had to go through, like, some cancer treatment, and I wasn't paying attention to anything.
I was pretty much not working.
I had other people that were working, doing my job.
Some of which had become working for the enemy, so to speak.
Jim is interrupted by a video from his website, accidentally playing as In The Matrix pulls it up on the
screen.
Jim says, perfect timing, and laughs.
At the end of one of the clips, he talks about how one of his employees is now working with the enemy, but basically was doing his job for him while he was undergoing chemotherapy.
I'm pretty sure that's referring to me, because that was when I was most mostly involved with like 2channel, that kind of thing, trying to fix his Japanese side of his business, do certain things with the software there.
Soon the question period is interrupted by the event organizer who is raffling off a signed piece of printer paper with some Q promoter signatures.
Jim takes the opportunity to leave the stage and sit down.
I'm at the bar.
It's relatively empty.
Four different football games are playing across seven different screens.
The waitress is lovely.
I feel bad that she has to work the Q conference.
I hope she doesn't think that I am one of them.
I order a Spicy Bloody Mary and a Shrimp BLT.
Out of the corner of my eye, I recognize Julian's Hawaiian shirt.
I went back in and it's still the same financial guy and I'm like, no.
I went back in and it's still the same financial guy and I'm like, no.
Oh, that guy.
And then I'm outside and I just hear inside the microphone go loud and it's like, alright,
say hello to your neighbor.
And we hug here. Everybody hugged here.
And I'm like, I hope Travis is okay in there.
I politely introduced myself to the people around me, but I did not hug anyone.
At this point, I know that Travis and Julian, and most likely myself, are dead.
Julian and I break out and head our separate ways.
Him, back to the conference, and I, towards the parade.
But where was it?
Nothing was happening according to schedule.
I start to feel anxious.
Julie and Travis were risking their lives to capture AAA content.
All I had to do was cover some measly parade, and I couldn't even do that.
I procure a map of the grounds from the concierge.
Aha!
The Cypress Courtyard!
It was behind the tennis courts!
I would go out and set up for the parade when it returned.
But as I reach the courtyard, something is off.
This is a very small courtyard, made for walking.
And sitting.
In no reality could a flock of motorcycles or one of the double-wide pickup trucks fit on the walkway.
Perhaps they would just walk the one sad horse around, I think.
I wait.
I sit on one of the courtyard benches and light a smoke.
Tastes like absolute shit in the hot Arizona sun.
I wolfed down an entire turkey BLT and blackout during In the Matrix and Shady Groove segment.
As I attempt to conjure it, sitting here writing this, I can only picture a cocaine party in the back of a Florida bar where a small group of stragglers have devolved into showing each other YouTube videos as the sun rises.
I head over to the resort's restaurant and grab lunch.
A shrimp BLT and an iced tea.
Triple BLT, we didn't even plan it.
Hell yes.
Sitting alone at a small high table, I open Twitter again.
My notifications are a shitshow.
My JFK Jr.
tweet went viral, getting 18,000 likes and over 6,000 retweets and quote tweets.
Many of those quote tweets and retweets are from blue checkmarks.
Thanks to a boost from people like Keith Olbermann, Chris Hayes, and Molly Jong Fast, My tweet is gaining attention outside of the community who fixates on the daily moves of online extremists.
It's reaching Normie Twitter.
I noticed that the comedian Christopher Titus has downloaded and reposted my screenshots and made his own starky comment rather than just quote tweeting me.
Not that I care about that sort of thing.
Gossip Rag TMZ even wrote an article inspired by my tweet, headlined, JFK Jr.
Running Mate Theory Foiled.
Sorry folks, no Dallas Rally.
All of this activity makes JFK Jr.
the number one trending topic on Twitter.
What's more, right in the middle of my lunch, at 12.29, a new Q-Drop lands, addressing all those smug libs on Twitter.
That Q drop, one of several posted today, includes yet another reminder that Q specifically denied that JFK Jr.
is alive, plus links to several tweets from blue checkmarks mocking the belief.
Three of the linked tweets quote tweet me.
I usually don't do this well with a single tweet, even when I'm not preoccupied with a conference.
I pay for my sandwich and head back to the conference room, hoping to grab my good seat before the room fills again.
In the large, mostly empty reception area of the resort, I cross paths with JT Wild, a talented musician who has become popular in the QAnon community.
I keep my eyes forward, but he greets me as if he knows me, which indicates that my mustachioed face has fooled nobody.
I suppose he technically does know me.
We had met at the QAnon rally in Tampa, Florida.
He offers to connect me to a documentary filmmaker.
Hey man, how are you?
It's good to see you again.
Yeah, yeah, you too.
I was just talking to Bayan.
You know Bayan?
I don't.
What's your name again?
Travis.
Travis, yeah.
JT Wilde gives nothing but positive vibes.
Honestly, bro, I'm a... So, uh, it's really a pleasure to meet you and, you know, thank you for being here.
Joe Quirk.
Pleasure to come.
Hopefully we get to do that.
It was close by.
A little closer than Tampa for me.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Are you... Oh, you're from... You're in California?
Yeah, I'm Californian.
Oh, cool.
So that isn't that far.
No, it's about a six hour drive.
Oh, cool.
Well, Travis, it's great to talk to you.
Yeah, you too.
I'll see you soon.
Destroyed with kindness.
If that's the storm, I am so ready.
When I first started attending QAnon events, my wife asked me if it's dangerous to be a prominent critic of QAnon while being surrounded by Q followers.
I told her, of course it's dangerous.
But it's in service of something important.
Plus, it's not more than I can handle.
But I only said that because chicks dig that kind of shit.
In truth, these people aren't skinheads.
QAnon followers generally don't fantasize of doing violence.
They fantasize about institutions like the military or the court system doing violence on their behalf.
I've never felt threatened once.
I walk to the conference room, humbled by both my blown cover and JT Wilde's earnest friendliness.
If JT knows who I am, then every host and organizer here knows too.
JT may have thanked me for my attendance, but there's no guarantee the rest of them felt the same way.
I resign myself to the possibility that I might be called out or kicked out very shortly.
As I enter the bar area, looking for Travis, who had been eating there, I run into JT Wilde who looks me right in the eyes and says, Are you looking for Travis?
I hear the question over my shoulder.
Julian mumbles something.
This is not good.
I keep walking.
Maybe they didn't see us together.
Maybe I haven't been burned.
I have to hope.
The last thing I want is for my anxieties to come true and that I would be discovered and beaten to a bloody pulp by the bikers and cowboys for Trump, trampled by their one horse.
Via text, Julian decided it was best if all three of us kept our distance.
In my mind, I was the last one who had remained undercover.
Special Agent JT Wilde had made both Julian and Travis.
With no parade to cover and no friends to smoke with, I again wander the grounds, clutching the selfie stick and attached GoPro in my sweaty hands.
I feel completely directionless, empty, and hot.
I spy a secret swimming pool near our resort townhouse.
There is no one in it.
I quickly return to the room, do a giant dab, change into my swimsuit, and creep out towards the pool.
The water caresses my face as I float on my back watching the setting desert sun.
It is a moment of peace.
I wonder if chlorine is effective at killing COVID-19.
It must be, or the pools would be closed, I reassure myself.
I allow my body to sink into the sea foam green water, the weight of the weekend, pulling me closer to the bottom.
A few minutes later, I'm standing next to JT Wilde in the conference room again, and I purchase his compact disc, paying with Venmo.
Then I remember.
My account is labeled with the podcast's name.
JT doesn't mention it.
When I see him again, he is sitting on the conference room patio, looking at his iPad.
I show him a giant spliff, and ask him if he partakes.
Soon JT and I are chatting and hanging out.
He tilts his iPad screen towards me.
It's displaying the podcast's Twitter handle.
Is this you?
He asks.
I say, yes, to which he responds, I can't tell if you're for or against QAnon.
I explain to him that we're critical of everyone we cover, including the hated DNC.
As he reads over the podcast's Twitter feed, I pray that he does not simply take a look at the host names listed in the bio.
I explain that I really do enjoy his music, attempting to patch things up quickly.
JT looks up and lets me know that if I ever need a guest, he's available.
Soon, he moves on to a more serious topic.
The enemy in our midst.
Travis View, he tells me.
His paid opposition.
With a grim face, he adds, I spoke to him.
He's a nice guy.
I play dumb again, and he pulls up Travis' Twitter account, showing me his profile pic.
My mind is racing.
I'm praying that he doesn't read the bio which lists Travis as a co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Instead, he puts away his iPad, and we continue smoking.
Somehow, I am undercover again.
After about 45 minutes in the pool, I receive a text from Julian.
To our relief, he has somehow been able to unmake himself, and the exclamation marks over the QAnon influencers' heads had turned to yellow, and they've gone back to their usual routes.
Back in the conference room, Julian texts me as I take my seat.
JT asked me if I was looking for Travis.
I played dumb.
We cannot be seen together.
I text back.
Yeah, he's well I flatter myself by thinking that only someone exceptionally perceptive could see through my disguise of somewhat altered facial hair.
The conference kicks off again.
InTheMatrix seems excited about the new Qdrops.
He brings them up on a Qdrop aggregator site displayed on a large television at the front of the conference room.
We want to talk to you a little bit about the new Qdrops.
Oh, so right now, in front of me, at this conference, they're going to go over the new Qdrops, which includes the Qdrop I inspired.
The Qdrop that includes three links to quote tweets of my tweet about JFK Jr.
While the hosts know that the person who composed that tweet, me, is a few feet from them.
You know, and we do have the JFK Jr.
stuff, and that is a very divisive tactic because I don't want to hurt anybody's, you know, hope, right?
That JFK Jr.
can be a lie, right?
I get that.
I like to address it as, okay, it's plausible, but I can't prove it.
I think about the chain of events over the day that led to this moment.
I wrote a tweet that caused JFK Jr.
to trend on Twitter, which caused Q to react to that trending topic, and a Q drop, which dictated the content of the conference I am attending.
My physical surroundings are bending through my digital influence.
...as a tactic that MSM is actually using against us, so just so you know.
Alright, so basically we got this Q post right here, We kind of went through, this is the knowingly, knowingly, knowingly... Do you want to take that one?
Yeah.
So now we have all these different Q posts about... TMZ is saying, ah, JFK Jr.
matrix addresses the JFK Jr. lives drop. It begins clicking on a few links from that drop.
I am the elephant in the room. It's only a question of whether In The Matrix will point
me out.
So, this is a... I'm just going to go over a couple of them, but here's an example.
I apologize to the QAnonQ, you guys are really steady and sane.
I'm in!
So, we're trying to make you look stupid, you see, but we're not stupid.
And with that, let's go to the last QPost... And with that, In The Matrix moves on without clicking on any of the links that include my tweet.
If they were going to call me out, that would have been the moment to do it.
They don't want to publicly oust the Infiltrator.
The YouTube duo known as Black White No Difference take to the stage.
One of them is white, the other black.
They are sporting MAGA and QAnon gear.
Here's Eric, the African-American half of the duo, giving his opinions on black people who dislike Trump.
His co-host Chris then takes over to introduce their shtick.
It quickly becomes clear that they will be laundering the racial guilts of the overwhelmingly white, middle-aged audience.
Like, I know a lot of people have a lot of people out there that see people with my skin color that don't feel the same way.
I feel like that's just the worst thing ever.
Because this guy has done so much for my community.
I mean, for me personally, he's made a lot of my dreams come true and a lot of things that I never thought would be possible are now becoming possible.
So, I'm just glad I got him, man.
What's up, Chris?
What's up?
Man, look.
Black and white, no difference.
This came about basically me and Eric were talking on the phone and Yeah, we worked together, we were talking on the phone about an opportunity and Donald Trump came up.
And he was telling me about a lot of his family and friends, you know, obviously don't really agree with Donald Trump.
And what we were talking about, we figured would wake up the masses, right?
So we started our YouTube channel.
And the main thing behind Black, White, No Difference is that we all have the same opportunities, no matter what.
In this country, no matter if you're black, White, green, red, orange, Jamaican, Catholic, whatever, whatever religion, whatever, whatever you are, if you go out and go after your dreams, you can make it happen.
But the thing is, what they want us to think, is they want us to think we're all victims.
They want us to think things just happen to us all the time, right?
They want us, the victimhood is ridiculous, and that's what we're here to slash.
The claim made by the white side of the duo paints Donald Trump as a savior of black communities who were falling prey at the time to racist policies.
But I just want to give you a couple of points that you can help with your friends on Donald Trump, right?
And when they say he's racist.
Just say this.
In the 90s, in the early 90s, there was a bunch of black entrepreneurs that were trying to get loans from banks.
And these racist banks, in my opinion, wouldn't give them loans.
Right.
Guess where they went?
They went to Donald Trump.
And guess what happened when they went back to pay Donald Trump?
He ripped their check off and said, do great in your business.
Congratulations.
It's pretty hard to, you know, give a black person $100,000 and not want it back.
Are you racist?
I mean, I don't care if you're racist or not.
You can't just give a person that's under 20 a stick and they're not going to get back to you.
Oh yeah, I wanted that.
That takes a good person. That's a great person.
To do his job, he needs to be good at all.
I'm glad she's the bashing president.
I'm almost to the point where I would fight a person to badmouth Donald Trump.
Because I'm like, no, he's done way too much for you and you don't even know it.
Like, stop disrespecting the greatest man ever.
This gross misrepresentation of Donald Trump's role in the housing market of the 90s caused my brain to start spinning.
I spring up from my post and see, on the other end of the compound, the parade vehicles returning from their adventure.
I run towards the smell of gasoline, hoping to grab at least a couple shots as the bikes roll in.
To my relief, I'm able to make it over in time to welcome the war boys as they return home from battle.
Perhaps it's because I'm relieved that I did not miss out on content, or perhaps I feel uncomfortable sticking a camera on the end of a selfie stick into people's faces.
I find myself hooting and hollering as the cars roll in.
Woo!
Woo!
Drop 2020!
Let's do it!
Sleepy Joe's got nothing!
California's going red!
You're telling me, I'm from there!
I am too!
Hell yeah!
What the fuck am I doing?
I feel disgusted with myself.
But in a way, a small piece of me feels satisfied.
Feels good to yell and cheer for someone, even if he is a dictator.
I am envious of the passion these folks have for their president.
I am envious of any passion towards our government.
With the parade seemingly over, I wander the grounds, looking sus, for about 45 minutes.
I find myself...
At a small outdoor table, watching people splash in the pool and have fun.
Why can't I be having fun?
I think to myself.
Why am I so fucking terrified of anything and everything?
Maybe the MAGA people have it right.
Maybe they have this tiny little part right.
To go out and live your life regardless of the fear-mongering and devastating statistics being listed on the television.
Even Travis and Julian had thrown caution to the wind for the weekend.
Was I letting them down by being annoyingly cautious?
No, I think.
They have the better equipment.
It would be a foolish waste to throw my life away out of mere solidarity.
Surely they would feel the same.
I hate being undercover.
I am uncomfortable deceiving people.
Maybe this isn't the right path for me.
No, no.
When the virus is over, I will be more fun to hang out with.
I know it.
As the thoughts swirl through my mind, dismantling what little confidence I have left, a young woman walks by and owns me.
You're not gonna get a sun tan, is it?
Duly noted.
You're not going to get a suntan sitting there.
I was sitting in the shade far away from any of the people at the pool enjoying themselves.
And you can actually hear me dying a slow death in my lap.
The next conference speaker is Alan Hostetter, the founder of the American Phoenix Project, an anti-lockdown and COVID denialist group.
The group describes itself on its website this way.
The American Phoenix Project came about as the result of the COVID-19 virus,
the subsequent worldwide lockdown, the destruction of economies and lives,
and the great awakening of we the people that resulted from it.
Hostetter had quite a career, going from army infantryman to local cop to yoga instructor.
Now he's using social media to organize civil disobedience against lockdown orders.
He is sure that every news outlet, including Fox, is exaggerating the threat of COVID.
The mainstream media, including Fox News.
Don't ever think Fox is your friend, conservatives.
I know the people in here know better, but there's a lot of conservatives walking around in this country going, What?
You don't like Fox?
What do you mean?
How could you not like Fox?
Fox has a couple of conservative commentators, and then other than that, they're in the same game, all the rest of them.
They're told by the same globalist bigwigs.
It charms the room by talking about the time he was arrested for clinging to a fence that was placed on his local beach to prevent people from congregating and spreading the virus.
I had every member from the lieutenant, Captain, assistant sheriff, deputy, the chief, you know, they all, one at a time, walked up to me and in my right ear said, now, can you just cut this?
I just kept, no.
Next.
No.
Next.
No.
And so then finally they walked up and said, would you just cut your hands out of this with some bolt cutters?
Just promise, you know, that you're going to have something sharp in your hands.
And when your hands are free, just give this to the deputies who are holding your wrists.
As an admirer of civil disobedience and wasting cops time, I have to admit I'm charmed too.
He says that masks are useless and he'll always refuse to wear one.
Whether I go limp or I, you know, I don't know.
We'll see what we can do.
As an admirer of civil disobedience and wasting cops' time, I have to admit I'm charmed too.
He says that masks are useless and he'll always refuse to wear one.
My purpose really in being with you here today is I hope that there's something that I say
today, a video that I show you today, something that I share with you today that inspires
you to act.
We are at war right now.
And we in this room understand that very, very much.
People outside this room, not so much.
And you can tell that by the number of people that are walking around wearing these masks.
I'm going to echo what those awesome gentlemen before me said, take off those damn masks
and leave them.
If I had to be somewhere, if I had to be in New York City in three days to do another
conference, I would drive there.
I'm not going on an airplane and putting on a mask.
I mean, nothing personal with anybody who does that, and I agree.
There are things, like if you're an employee somewhere, and you work, and you have to wear a mask, I totally get that.
No grudge there.
But if you're walking around, like I see, on our beaches in San Clemente, entire families, on the beach, on the sand, walking with their kids that are like six, seven years old, fully masked, you're, I'm sorry, you're immoral.
There's just no way to get around that.
Hossetter claims that America is on the brink, but violence will be avoided by the presumed blowout victory for President Trump in the coming election, just 17 days away.
Nobody wants violence.
Nobody wants violence.
And we are conditioned from the time we are children in this country to always think that violence is a horrible, horrible thing.
Until we go back and reflect on our Revolutionary War, they picked up guns at some point and said enough.
Until we reflect on the Civil War, We ended slavery by picking up guns and dealing with it that way.
We don't want that to have to happen.
But it always has to be something in the back of your mind.
We've never been as close to it as we are today since the Civil War.
And you have to be thinking like that.
There comes a time when people end up picking up guns.
I'm not advocating that.
I think through the ballot box on November 3rd, it's going to be such a huge victory that we will avoid violence by a landslide election because the other side will be so marginalized at that point.
Their voices so subdued when the Pelosi's and the Schumer's and the AOC's in the squad are just left speechless when they see the devastation around them from this.
He ends his presentation by playing a recently released music video produced by the band Five Finger Death Punch.
The video portrays a society subdued into mask wearing by a hypocritical politician.
It ends with a violent uprising that's revealed to be just a nightmare of a founding father.
In the conference room, a panel is arranged on stage, and they transition to audience questions.
I go up second, after a guy a bit younger than me, who asks about Antifa infiltrators dressing as Trump supporters to commit false flags.
Alright, thank you very much for that question.
Very good.
Thank you, panel.
Alright, so we got another question right here.
Want to ask a question?
Thank you.
Sorry, I'm a bit nervous.
It's okay. Me too.
It's all good.
It's exciting to see everybody up there, that's all.
Thank you, sir.
I just wanted to say thank you to everybody standing up for free speech, especially Jim, because I've been using his platform for years and it's the only place that we can actually still go.
Thank you, Anna.
Yeah, exactly.
And I wanted to say one of the things that recently I was not allowed to say on the kind of mainstream platforms was something that was mentioned by somebody else up there, which is that Donald Trump has helped the black community historically with housing.
But that's the thing is, one thing people don't know is in 1994 album Nas Illmatic, one of the best hip hop albums, that he had a meeting with Trump before that and there was a certain amount of funding that went his way.
I want to thank Jim once again and ask Jim, you're probably the only person that has actually chatted with our hero, you know, or they, you know, whatever the cue is.
So I just want to know, are they nice?
Are they cool?
I'm not Q and I don't know who Q is.
But, if Q has ever talked to me, they could tell me who they were.
But were they cool?
Like, were they nice?
I don't know.
I didn't ask a guy that's making a documentary about this whole thing just to make sure we
looked cool.
Yeah.
And we are cool.
Thank you very much.
Jim is back in the US.
and he sold his pig farm.
We learned that because of reporting in ABC News.
He seems to have kind of abandoned the Philippines.
It's not clear if he's ever going to go back.
He would need to return by, I believe the date is January 31, 2021.
Or he'll be permanently blacklisted from the country.
He has an active immigration case because the Filipino authorities have declared that he is basically an undesirable alien.
Kind of the same thing that happened to me.
Not really exactly the same because it's not a criminal charge.
It's just a...
Kind of immigration deciding that you are undesirable and deporting you on that basis, which is totally legal under their law, by the way.
There is no judicial appeal.
Yeah, so he seems like he's going to be in the US long term now.
I really hope that eventually there will be kind of some degree of consequences brought on him.
I do think that The way that he's profited off of Q through merchandise, through the super PAC, through 8kun itself, is just entirely based on the fact that Q is impersonating a federal officer.
And had Q not been impersonating a federal officer, none of this money and none of these benefits would have come to him.
So I definitely would like to see some kind of actual consequences brought on him on that basis.
You know, it is kind of ridiculous to say that it's free speech to claim that you're a federal agent.
That is not free speech.
Sorry.
A lot of things are, but there's just no way that that is.
One of the biggest figures in the Q movement is Praying Medic, who, by surprise, takes the stage, and he plays bashful.
A single bead of sweat rolls down in the Matrix's forehead as he realizes that this shorn, Arizona,
Pentecostalist grifter, who claims to be able to cure cancer with his hands,
is more beloved than him.
— The war over public opinion, the war over information, is being fought on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, mostly.
And that's where most people go to get their information.
They don't really get their information from CNN and MSNBC.
Very, very small.
Small number of people.
They try to magnify it and make it look like the mainstream media is having a major influence, but they don't.
I don't do Qthreads on Twitter right now because I'm trying to outlast... I do.
I'm glad you do.
I'm glad you're doing it, and I'm glad certain people are still doing that stuff.
I'm trying to outlast the Bandhammer, but it's gonna come.
We're able to.
But the thing is, here's the reality.
CBS, ABC, whoever, just go on their Twitter accounts.
Look at their tweets.
And look at the engagement that they're having.
They're lucky to get 100 people like or retweet their tweets.
These are major broadcasts.
Dave, we have more people here than a Biden rally.
No!
Prangmedic is soft-spoken and introverted, a contrast to In The Matrix's high-energy salesman spatter.
He boasts about the continued engagement of the QAnon community in spite of the recent social media bans, and confirms his continuing dedication to the movement.
We collectively are massively killing them in engagement on social media.
And they know it.
That's why they shut us down.
That's right.
They shut us down because we're killing their narrative.
is our accounts. They knew as soon as Joe Biden, Hunter Biden connection with China and Ukraine,
as soon as it got out, they knew that we would all be spreading it on YouTube and we're not
going to let that happen. So they took our accounts down.
Because we're having a big impact on the public perception of information.
Changing the narrative.
What did General Flynn say? We took over the idea of information and we did it on social media.
And that's where the war is.
And they know that's where the war is.
That's why they're taking our accounts down.
That's why we get suspended from Facebook and YouTube.
And it's coming down Twitter.
They're going to take our accounts down on Twitter.
So, if you're interested in finding information from people like us, you're going to have to go where we are.
If it's on Gantt, if it's on Parler, if it's on CloudHub, wherever it is, you're just going to have to find us there.
A lot of us will create new Twitter accounts that will be suspended.
You'll have to look for us and find us and figure out who we are, because a lot of us are going to be incognito.
I'm just letting you know.
If I don't go, if they suspend my Twitter account and I come back on Twitter, you will not recognize my wall of flowers.
So we're getting this exhortation from General Flynn.
Who is telling us in very clear terms, you do not abandon the battlefield.
They take your account down, you create another one.
You keep messaging.
You get out there.
I'm still working on a way to get back on Facebook and YouTube.
JT Wilde is now performing a song I've never heard before, based on something Michael Flynn said.
I'm entranced, finding the music itself quite beautiful while remaining keenly aware that the lyrics express bloodlust, pure and simple.
Snakes are not that cunning Not as deadly as you think We ain't built on running Yeah, we're hunting down the freaks What a beautiful black sky.
Covering the light.
Sweet revenge takes time.
The way you draw the line.
Nothing can stop it.
It's on the way.
We gave you the warning.
It's clear as day.
What a beautiful black sky.
A middle-aged blonde woman takes to the microphone during the Q&A panel session and recommends spray-painting certain words on California congresspeople's homes.
Specifically, the congresspeople that pass what she calls a pedophile law, but is in fact a modification to statutory rape laws that simply allow homosexuals to enjoy the same rights as straight people.
Shady Groove squints in disapproval at what she proposes.
He starts pushing back.
Confusion ensues as people break into speech, audience-wide.
In the Matrix and Shady Groove then cut her mic and attempt to regain control, but she refuses to back down.
When California passed the pedophile law recently... The same guy called us, what?
Chewing on bat.
Yeah.
So I told my friends in California, I said, you know what you need to do is get a list of all those congressmen that passed that rule.
Get your fluffin spray cans out and go right on their house with Pedophile Brewer.
We need to expose them.
The Anons have it all.
We know who they are.
And you guys pretty much know who they are.
But it would also, it's like if you, every city, that those people, and you see it locally,
those people would not do something like that.
We need to expose them.
So what we're doing is, the Anons have it all.
We know who they are.
And you guys pretty much know who they are, and if you don't, make sure you're active
in your local, and state, and federal government, and vote them out!
That's how we do it.
And don't do anything violent like that.
Don't do anything criminal.
I mean, hey, look.
I want to do just about everyone else, but I think that we need to realize that legally and lawfully we can expose them and we can do this by not stooping to the level.
Don't become Antifa.
Don't become the enemy.
You know what?
It's like Romans in Romans.
Do not be conquered by evil.
Conquer evil with good.
That's how we do it.
Thank you.
I would like that.
The Q&A drags on.
The stage is filled with all the speakers and many of them want their turn to answer the questions.
So we're getting one question and then maybe five or six answers.
It's a tedious process.
Finally, the Q Shaman, a legendary figure in our community who always wears a large furry hat with horns, fully tattooed body, So, I just wanted to start by saying I've actually worked in the group home community for about five and a half years and what they were saying about infiltrators is very true.
I've worked in the good and bad and the ugly.
I've actually worked in the group home community for about five and a half years.
And what they were saying about April triggers is very true.
I've worked in the good, and bad, and the ugly.
I've actually worked to bring down a pedophile that was taking a sex offender home and told his staff
to report that the child was at the group home.
OK, yeah, I reported this to DCS.
And I stopped working for the psychopath.
Next, I'd also like to say that if anybody in this room has ever considered working in a group home
or working to, like say, adopt a child, we need you.
Okay, and if you understand what to look for, like the symbolism and the grooming and stuff like that, then we can act like eyes and ears in the group home system to help bring down infiltrators, to help bring down group homes that are trafficking children.
And it is very real.
Phoenix is, if I'm not mistaken, the number two city in the world when it comes to human trafficking, next to Mexico City.
At least that's what I remember reading.
I could be wrong with that.
I also wanted to add... Boys, all the coughing in the room.
I mean, holy shit, this is bad.
That's an average amount of coughing for a room, Jake.
Are you feeling uncomfortable recording with us?
Not this room.
Yes.
Are you looking forward to your test?
No.
Then he goes into the findings of his now infamous investigation of the Arrowhead Mall in Glendale, Arizona, which involved finding triangular spiral shapes on the architecture and signs in the mall, clearly representing an arrowhead, and then stomping around the food court yelling about how they are pedophile symbols.
For those of you that don't know, Arrowhead Mall here in northern Phoenix has this symbol, the Boy Lover Pedophile symbol, as their official symbol, okay?
And it's right by their bathrooms where they have three, count that, three family, quote-unquote, family restrooms next to a boys room, a girls room, and a changing station, okay?
So why do we need three family restrooms in a mall where this symbol, by the way,
is right by their bathrooms.
It also is leading all the way up to the mall.
And this symbol is also outside of the mall.
And a Costco is right down the street as well.
And if we really understand that many of these malls and places like Costco have basements and stuff,
then we may ask ourselves a few questions about what could be happening to some of the children
that have gone with some of their own.
I also wanted to say that this whole idea of being able to spot infiltrators and stuff like that
in the question earlier, I noticed that in Portland, when they were trying to say that the Q
movement was violent, a lot of the people that were a part of this news story
had spirals on their shields.
The pedo spirals and stuff like that.
They also tend to Right now, I don't yet know it.
But I'm gonna have a great time infiltrating a beer with the shaman a little later.
Are we people?
about Trump as a pedophile and stuff like that.
So a lot of the time, all it really takes is keeping our eyes and our ears open
to see who is on what side.
Right now, I don't yet know it.
But I'm going to have a great time infiltrating a beer with the shaman a little later.
Are we people?
You people?
Are we white supremacists?
Where we go when we go?
All!
That's right. That's right.
The truth hurts. The truth is belligerent.
Alright, so I'm going to basically cruise out there to you guys.
I want to see if you guys have any questions.
At one point during the Q&A, Praying Medic feels the need to address the pesky issue of
never-Q pastors rejecting his movement.
If you have been listening to church pastors and religious leaders slam Q,
For being an end times deception, a satanic deception.
It's, you know, he was a false god.
He was leading people away from God.
I receive messages every single day.
I got another one this morning.
I printed it out.
You'll get to see it when you get home.
I receive messages every single day from atheists, former Satanists, agnostics, Buddhists, you
name it, from people who don't believe in God, who used to believe in God but walked
away.
Every single day I receive messages, emails, DMs on Twitter, from people who are coming
back to God because of faith.
It is absolutely amazing the millions of people that are finding or coming back to God because
their eyes are open to the evil and the corruption and the sickness that they're seeing as they
start watching, reading, developing, and doing their own research.
And people's eyes are being awakened.
And when Q says the Great Awakening, it's a spiritual awakening as well as an intellectual awakening.
Jim Watkins feels the momentum and builds on Praying Medic's screed, proning a new analog form of redpilling.
Your pastors, they may be saying, yeah, well, this queue is all this crazy wacko stuff.
They are only seeing what they go home and Google.
And everything has been removed.
All of the research, all the work that these guys are doing, you can't find it in a search engine.
And you can't find it on YouTube anymore, can you?
As of two days ago, right?
And welcome to my world now, where everything you do is destroyed.
Nobody gets to see you anymore, unless you tell people what's going on.
And that's what he's talking about.
We are the news now.
It's important, because Those clergy aren't bad.
They aren't.
They...
All they know is that I go to Google, Google does everything.
Or maybe I go to Bing, Bing is the same thing.
They only see this wacko craziness and the few people out there that have committed crimes and then say they write Q on the palm of their hand or something.
Those are really edge cases that are not the normal thing.
But that's the only thing that the normal people that want to know something about what's going on
can see now.
They can't even find my website unless you tell them how to get there.
And they won't be able to find your website anymore unless you tell them how to get there.
So please tell your friends what's going on.
You have to talk it in the supermarket and when you're waiting in line.
You've got to talk about it at church.
You've got to tell your past people who you are.
And don't argue with them.
Don't get yelling back and forth because that doesn't convince anybody.
You know, just, you know, drop a truth bomb and walk on, you know.
If they have questions, answer them.
That's all you can do.
He is giving out these like ideas to people of how they can red pill friends and basically that they need to do it in supermarkets and on the street and kind of in an analog way right?
So the thing about it is in 2019 when those terror attacks happened we had a few scattered clips of Jim Watkins maybe being racist You know, we're not stealing your data.
If I wanted to, that's legal now.
It's not stealing anymore.
Watkins is a white supremacist, right? We don't really have proof of that. We have
proof of him saying that Jews are conspiring to make it so he can't make
money. I can send you that clip. He calls it the Jew trap.
We're not stealing your data. If I wanted to, that's legal now. It's not stealing anymore.
They signed that law. Awesome.
Awesome sauce.
But we're not doing that.
Because why?
Nobody will give us advertising so there's no money to make.
It's a public service from my company to you.
Make it nice.
Maybe someday we'll get some advertising that people like.
We can do like Alex Jones and sell water filters.
Please buy Alex Jones water filters.
I'm pretty sure he uses that to pay for his bills to run his awesome website and streaming service.
It's good stuff because nobody will advertise.
This is the idea.
You guys are falling into the Jew trap if you accept that.
All of these big companies that only want their point of view, their POV, is like your mouth on them and they're looking down at you.
That's their POV.
Their point of view only.
There's no other people's point of view.
If you don't have their point of view, then they'll make sure you can't make any money.
But we don't, you know, we can't really say Jim Watkins is a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist.
So he was kind of able, with his attorney in front of the House of Representatives, to put on this kind of cloak of, well, I'm just running this free speech platform.
Now it's very clear that Jim Watkins views himself as, as he wrote on YouTube, one of the people that was, quote, condemned by the House of Representatives.
So, have a good time, but quit making it worse.
You know, that's useless, because I'm not going to listen to you.
And I might just delete it every time I see it, because fuck you.
Okay, what were we talking about?
Sorry, I just had something on my mind.
Oh, I'm gonna turn on the YouTube and see what people are saying.
After hearing about pilling my pastor, Shady and Matrix put up a bit of their YouTube show.
It's essentially just them reading a Q-drop.
The one calling for people to take a certain pledge.
I solemnly rose to my feet, put my hand in the air, and took the pledge.
I stay seated and observe the people around me take the pledge.
Then I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.
And I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office of which I am about to enter.
So help me God.
Whatever you don't want me to do at all.
Take notes.
The crowd in the conference is breaking up.
I make my way through it and ask Jim for a selfie.
He tells me, thank you for your question, and where we go one, we go all!
To which I respond, where we go one, we go all.
His eyes in the picture are absent.
A text from Julian on Signal.
He's heading outside in search of a cigarette.
Exactly what I need!
I meet him just outside the QCon conference area, and we duck out of sight and light up.
He looks a bit on tilt.
We all spill out to a nearby patio after the conference ends.
Everyone is energized and chatty from the experience.
A group, including Jim Watkins and Pragmatic, have their photos taken by a half-circle of admirers in front of a QCon Live sign.
As the crowd around Jim begins to thin, I inch my way towards him.
The question I really want to ask Jim is, why are you doing this?
The motivation of this one man is the root of so much.
Akoon's existence, QAnon, broken families, congressional careers, a congressional resolution, my podcast, my new friends, the changed trajectory of my life over the past two years.
What's the ideology here?
There are easier ways to make money than a creaky and heavily scrutinized image board.
So why?
I approach him like a fan, hoping that will inspire a candid answer.
It doesn't.
You're a businessman.
And you've always said that 8chan is not profitable.
Where are you from?
San Diego?
Yes.
What part?
So why have you invested so many resources into something else?
It shouldn't be profitable.
Why shouldn't it be profitable?
It's being artificially blocked from the income.
So when that stops, then it will be profitable.
Makes sense.
Where are you from?
I'm from San Diego.
San Diego?
Yes.
What part?
North County.
North County, San Diego.
I like North County San Diego.
Yes, it's a beautiful place.
Have you ever heard of Fallbrook?
No.
Oh well, it's a nice little small town.
It's very nice.
So, I have to go check on my wife.
This is my feeling.
Okay, I'll let you go then.
Yeah, it'll be profitable when we stop getting blocked and so on.
Gotcha.
But, I mean, do you really think that'll come a day when it stops getting blocked?
When regulators stop coming to you?
Stop coming down on you?
I believe that one day, when the other sides get in trouble for Section 235, they just... people start realizing that, wow, they aren't just selling advertising, they know everything about us.
Wow, they aren't just selling advertising, they know everything about us.
We don't know anything about our youth.
Unsatisfied with his answer, but not harboring any hope for satisfaction,
I walk a lap around the building, observing the cacti, flowers, and giddy resort goers.
I'm on the outside patio of the conference, having a beer, when the Q Shaman comes to sit at the table I'm sharing with two older folks.
We're discussing Q. I am audibly excited by his arrival.
Hey, man!
I was hoping to get a selfie with you, and you came and sat at my table.
This is Fortuitous, my friend.
He's a star-studded Academy of Gents.
Oh, I love him, man.
I love him.
You're working at the Arizona Mall as legendary, my friend.
Oh, for real?
I play that video and I can't get over the line where it's like, right by the restroom.
I watch it all the time.
Big fan of that shit.
I watch it all the time.
He is confused for a moment.
Can you show me the video?
Because I have no idea what you're talking about.
It's the one that you posted on YouTube.
Oh, that one!
Oh, that one!
Yeah, okay.
The one where I was in the mall, right?
Exactly, that's what I'm saying.
I'm like, this dude is just, like, coming in.
Fuck yeah, dude.
And everyone's like...
The shaman then sits down and starts speaking to a blonde Christian woman in her early 50s who has a master's in social work and is wearing a Where We Go One, We Go All t-shirt.
She wants to help the shaman with the infiltrators he mentioned earlier in the group homes.
Amazingly, he just pivots and explains that she should work for a local art therapy initiative that I won't name, but appears to be a highly legitimate organization founded in 1993.
When the woman asks the shaman what they do, he explains it perfectly.
What do they do?
They basically make it free for kids like in the group home system or in the foster care system or stuff like that.
make it free for them to do art and heal.
It's part of their healing process.
Sometimes they'll do camps like theater camp.
They'll do things like hip hop camp.
They have one thing called mat camp or leadership camp.
They have all these different camps that these kids can go to.
And they create a real community, a real sense of like a safe place
because a lot of these kids are traumatized because they've been through a lot.
So they give them the supplies.
They give them the safe space.
They give them the encouragement to do a bunch of different kinds of art.
A bunch of different versions of art.
So all you got to do is get in touch with them.
You can volunteer.
So after all my worry, things end up kosher.
He's giving her good advice.
The woman loses interest and seems confused, explaining that her favorite mode of therapy is equine therapy, to which the shaman replies that the organization avoids putting abused children on horses due to the risk of them getting kicked by the animal or falling from the saddle.
The conversation ends in a discussion of how great horses are and how their electromagnetic fields, quote, expand like 10 to 15 feet away from their bodies.
Ours only goes about 6 feet, so theirs is huge, so they're very sensitive to our vibes.
To which the woman responds, Yeah, yeah, and that's cool.
After the blonde woman inquired whether shamanism was Christian, our man launches into a very long explanation, involving Christ being the first whistleblower to call out the cabal, in a way.
After this conversation with the woman fades, I ask the shaman why none of the speakers on the stage had mentioned adrenochrome, or the ritual sacrifice of children.
He explains it to me in terms of the audience members' frequencies and energies.
What you are asking people to do is mentally and emotionally imbibe that frequency of energy where you are that child being tortured to death and then having your blood drained.
Okay?
And nobody wants to go through that.
Nobody wants to even have it reach their ears let alone come out their mouth that this is happening.
I spot Julian and the Shaman chatting.
I walk up and take a photo with my phone.
Julian, pretending to not know me, asks if I would be willing to take his photo.
I grab his phone and take a picture of them co-holding the Shaman's sacred staff.
Night has fallen.
We're sitting on the table over from praying Medic on the patio.
He's drinking cocktails and chatting with his wife and some friends.
I close one eye and practice crushing his head with my thumb and index finger.
Eventually, the man moves on.
In the Matrix soon arrives, and Medic addresses him.
I had a great time.
Thanks for talking me into coming here.
The group proceeds to giggle about In the Matrix's peaceful protester shirt with the O replaced by a Q.
They settle into a growing din.
Praying Medic is regaling the table with a cue proof, carefully teasing his audience with details like, He explains to the table that Trump's retweets have meaning, and the president's interactions with young black MAGA celebrity C.J.
Pearson do as well.
As Medic loosens up a bit after a few cocktails, I hear something rare from him, swearing.
He calls Nancy Pelosi a dumb bitch.
He also expresses surprise at Jim Watkins, saying that he'd expected the owner of Acoon to be, quote, sophisticated, not a pig farmer from the friggin' Philippines.
He goes on to exclaim, Soon he's being invited to the Patriot afterparty in the big tent down the way.
Medic looks at Matrix, That evening, I shed all of my gear and put on a salmon-colored shirt.
Along with my white Sequoia National Forest hat, I can pass as a young Republican.
It would do.
The conference had let out and our crew was meeting at one of the tables at the bar for a couple of drinks to decompress.
As I walked through the bar, I immediately spy Praying Medic at the table next to ours.
No one seems to care that the opposition podcast is sitting mere feet away.
I sit at the table with my two friends who I am now extremely wary of.
I'm excitedly talking to Jake when I see a decent piece of spittle fly from my mouth into his.
I apologize, but it's no use.
I can feel the wet droplet on my lip.
I'm careful not to inhale it before rubbing it away with a clean piece of my shirt.
Julian is making fun of Praying Medic somewhat loudly and trying to take a picture of him crushing Medic's tiny head with his fingers.
Some operators, I think to myself.
We are joined by another operator, a journalist who works for one of the big boys.
He has a security guard with him.
I instantly feel safer, wrapped in the corporate protection provided to our friend, and us, by association.
I drink three beers right away, forgetting that I am on my allergy medication, and should probably take it slow.
All the while, Julian is keeping an eye out for his friend, JT Wilde.
He cannot be seen sitting with Travis, or the one guy who wore his mask throughout the entire conference.
Our cover will be blown, again.
I mention I haven't eaten since 11.
Around 8 or 9 p.m., we stand up and walk over to the Patriot Party, which is taking place beneath a large tent just beyond the resort pool.
It's a fairly sad affair.
About 50 people.
Gene Ho is speaking.
This is the second time I've seen Gene Ho speak live, and the second time I've heard this exact same speech.
I hang just outside the tent, 15 feet from everyone else.
Mask off.
I breathe out a sigh of relief.
It feels like I made it to the end of the event.
A group of middle-aged guys stroll in late, singing, And we love the name.
They got the bodies in the dirt and need someone to blame.
Got a pension for greed and money to spare.
They put the dollars in the coffers and the lies in the air.
Well, we go one.
We go all.
I won't push you down.
You won't let me fall.
One day for sure we will stand tall.
Well, we go one.
They are having the time of their lives.
I grab a seat near where Travis is sitting and watch praying medics slowly sway back and forth on the dance floor with his wife.
We are the patriots.
Trust the plan because we have it all and the fate is in our hands.
Had a reason to fool us but we didn't take the bait.
They wanna take us to hell but we got guns in the cage.
I watch as In The Matrix approaches Travis and the two engage in polite conversation.
I videotape them and post it to Twitter.
Nothing feels confrontational, just two players on different sides of the game,
coming together at the end of the night to acknowledge one another.
At the Patriot Party, JT Wilde croons Where We Go One, We Go All from a much better stage than the conference room.
In the Matrix, Spotson approaches me.
I know he knows who I am, so I take the initiative to greet him first.
It's a pleasure to meet you, sir.
A pleasure to meet you, too.
How are you?
No, not really.
You're Travis View?
Yeah, that's me.
Are you really?
You know, it's a pleasure to meet you, sir.
Pleasure to meet you, too.
Really?
How are you?
I'm doing alright.
Alright.
Yeah, so, we're just regular people, man.
Well, of course, of course.
You know?
So are you.
And thanks for coming today.
Of course.
You know, it means a lot.
It means a lot.
You wouldn't be here if I had, right?
You know?
I wouldn't be here if I wasn't intriguing.
Thanks for that, you know?
In the Matrix talks like a fan, and compliments our podcast episode of the Tampa Rally, in which we also covered him.
I'm just a regular person here.
Of course you are.
And you know, you trolled me, like you guys, and it's actually an honor.
You know, it really is.
Of course, of course.
Over the target, right?
I mean, I don't know.
I mean, you might not think so.
Right, right.
Or you might.
Or it's just, here we are.
You know?
Sure.
So, thanks for coming up and saying hello.
I'm like, that isn't him, is it?
It is him!
Is that Travis Bue?
I'm like, no way!
When you guys did that cue show after the Tampa rally, You guys were fucking hilarious.
Remember?
Do you remember that?
I do remember that.
Tampa?
I think it was Duck?
Was it Duck Stewart there?
Was he there?
Duck Stewart wasn't there.
But you guys are funny.
And it actually helped me.
Because I'm like, oh my god, you're right.
I sound like a complete idiot right there.
You know?
Because I'm just a regular guy.
He reminds me of his personal epistemology.
Perception is reality.
I don't think that's the case.
I think reality is reality and our perception can be close or far away from it.
In my buzz state, I remind him of an incident in which he himself was targeted by faulty perceptions of reality.
Photos circulated of him wearing red shoes for a charity.
That got him caught up in the ludicrous claim that somehow red shoes meant that he was part of the cabal.
In the Matrix tries to sell me on a pet theory of his that he's very excited about.
Namely, that when Trump referred to 300 miles of border wall, this really was pointing to Q-drop 300.
Q-drop 300 addresses somebody who was just referred to as L-period, whom Q taunts, heard you can't sleep, don't come here again.
In The Matrix believes L is referring to Chinese premier Li Ka-shing, as well as Chinese business magnate Li Ka-shing.
This all somehow ties into the bloodlines of the Illuminati, misspellings in Trump tweets, Trump's visit to Walter Reed, and Anthony Weiner's laptop.
He has explained all of this in a Twitter thread before.
I like these people.
L.I. family. So, Q-Post 300. I find a picture with Halaweed, Hussein, Kerry, Clinton, and
any other U.S. politicians. L. Period. And it says, I heard you can't sleep. Do not come
here no more. The reason I got to 300 is, remember when the prompt was, I like these
people, they like me. And he says, we got 300 miles of walls. How about the numbers?
300. 300 numbers. Okay, that's our, that's our...
That's like, if he repeats the numbers several times, we go look at QAG, you know, the QAnon.
So let's hope Q goes 300.
I had already done China Week.
And Rockefeller giving it to a Lee family.
Costco was there, and also Lee Kexing.
Hong Kong, right?
Controls the pharmaceutical industry.
The guy's a billionaire, and the Lees are also satanic geneticists.
They're in the book, Bloodlines of the Illuminati.
And so, what's interesting is that, I've heard you can't sleep.
Li Keqian can't sleep because of his problems in Hong Kong.
Do not come here anymore.
China ban.
So then POTUS was going into Walter Reed.
That's true.
It was right after I did his Never Forget thread, because remember he said Never Forget?
I did a whole thread on all the Never Forget.
It was like, oh my god, he's thanking you, he's thanking you, he's thanking people.
He's talking about 9-11.
He has that with La Familia, the aunt, the beautiful black aunt lady that he was hugging and kissing.
And that's the leader laptop because of the 187s possibly because of the information there.
It's all... never forget.
And then 20 minutes later he tweeted, I'm feeling better or something like that.
Well-ly. W-E-L-I.
And then he said, thank you for the love.
And the love all capitals are three exclamation points.
And so that was 300 minutes later too.
I'm watching Travis's matrix speaks very closely at him His chin is drooped towards his chest.
I realize that I'm listening to a sincere man.
When he makes these elaborate connections and long Twitter threads, that's not an act for retweets and follows.
He believes this.
I had always separated the QAnon community into two categories, the people who built an audience using Q, who I assumed were cynical grifters who don't believe a word they say, and the true believers, the people who, for one reason or another, fall down the rabbit hole because it fills an emotional need that isn't being met elsewhere.
But what if that's all wrong?
What if there was no clean division between evil grifters and the vulnerable true believers?
What if that's my own black and white oversimplification I tell myself because the truth is too messy to handle?
Like JT Wilde did in The Matrix Thanks Me For Coming, I break away and meet up with Jake, who is nearby and eager to hear what I just discussed.
The two of us sit together, watching the events wind down like the end of some sad wedding.
After JT Wilde's haunting second acoustic rendition of Beautiful Black Sky, we call it a night, and decide to treat ourselves with a casino trip.
I'm feeling worse and worse by the second.
The booze and dope have combined with my allergy medicine in a compromising way, and the lack of food has made my body as weak as my mind.
I beg the boys to stop at the bar so I might order a brick oven pizza before we hit the slots.
They oblige, and the three of us find ourselves with our bartender from the very first night, chatting excitedly about the day's events.
I am a slug, leaning like an absolute piece of shit on the bar, my face hot, my neck feeling wet.
I can feel my soul leaving my body.
How long would my food take?
Had I ordered shrimp tacos in addition to the pizza?
Or had I just imagined this?
I wait until the room begins to swirl around me.
Jake looks like a dying soldier who's just been shot up with morphine.
I feel sorry for him.
I gotta get out of here.
Please, bring me my food if it comes, I mumble, before booking it out of the bar and taking refuge at one of the outdoor tables.
Had I been a couple years younger, this would have been the moment my face became grey and I found a planter to vomit in.
But I was older now, so instead I sat quietly and texted the boys my location.
Go out left past the bar pits.
I'm at the small round table, hidden behind bush.
Finally, I see them rounding the corner, carrying a whole pizza and fish tacos.
I open the box and begin to sloppily devour the banquet.
All of a sudden, Julian stands up and seems to float away from the patio.
I'm hungrier than I thought.
As I pick up the small slice of pizza, my eyes rise to see two QAnon promoters milling about near our table.
Instinct kicking in, I stand with my slice and pivot around a large concrete pillar.
As the cuepasta accosts my co-hosts, I take a bite of my slice and, chewing, slide further around the pillar and break into a natural, confident stride.
Once I've covered some distance, I look back at my ex-co-hosts, framed beneath a small arch on the outdoor patio.
They are now captives of QAnon.
Good luck, I mutter to myself, before lighting a half-burned joint and disappearing into some nearby shadows.
I recognize the two men from the Tampa rally, Justin Formtok and Captain Roy D. Roy looks like he's on another planet.
He asked me if I'm on the podcast.
Inebriated and starving, I relent and admit that I am an infiltrator as well.
Justin Formtalks, an evangelical pastor who preaches about the Bible and QAnon, tells us that people have been whispering about Travis the Boogeyman all day long.
They describe him as, quote, Will Sommer on steroids.
He introduces himself as Craig and says that he thought he might come up and see what we were all about.
Here we go, I think.
The conversation is friendly and respectful.
Craig tells us that he has no hate in his heart for us.
Travis mentions that some Q followers had put out verifiably false data into the world via Charlie Kirk.
Craig apologizes on behalf of the community for getting that one wrong.
I find myself defending the podcast, saying that we are completely independent.
No deep state sponsors, no shill money, no nothing.
I tell Craig that we push back when asked if the QAnon community is, overall, a violent one.
He is genuinely interested in what it is we find wrong with Q. Quote, it's just people who love their country looking for the truth, he says.
Travis uses some religious terminology I don't understand.
I continue to eat my pizza and tacos.
I feel more alive.
I attempt to explain that our differences are beyond disagreements over what is true.
We have a different epistemology.
We just don't have the same method for trying to arrive at what is true.
To Craig, QAnon is just one side of a valid argument.
It's hard for Travis and I to articulate that it's the satanic, cabal-eating children part that rubs us the wrong way.
We don't want to get into it.
I'm in no position to.
Craig tells us that we seem like good men.
He asks if we are both Christian.
Not me.
I'm Jewish, I say, stuffing my face with pizza, loose gold coins falling out of my pocket.
I look to see how he'll react.
He smiles.
Well, I'm from South Florida, so all my best friends growing up were Jewish.
He laments how the media is only interested in dividing us.
I agree.
Hey, you sound a little bit red-pilled, he says.
I laugh.
We're all a little bit red-pilled.
Captain Roy D, one of the authors of the original QAnon The Great Awakening book, buzzes back into frame like a busy little hummingbird.
He laughs about emailing back and forth with Will Sommer ad nauseum.
We chat for a bit and he admits, quote, Will is a great guy.
He hands me his card and says he'd love to come on the show and talk if we ever want him.
It's like all the wrestlers coming backstage after a WWF match, high-fiving and complimenting each other on their hits.
Days later, I receive an email from Captain Roy D, inviting himself, once again, onto the show.
I do not respond.
I notice an out.
We get up to leave.
JustInformed tells us that this has been one of the most meaningful discussions he's had at the conference, and thanks us for our time.
We reconnect with Julian and regale him with the story as we wait for our Uber to take us to the casino up the road.
All I can envision is myself getting carsick on the way there.
It's already past midnight, but fuck, I love gambling so much.
But I had to be real with myself.
If we went now, we were committing to at least a 4am bedtime.
Julian had the fire in his eyes.
He would be down to stay up late.
Images of myself at the big Texas Hold'em poker game in the sky started flashing before me in the night sky.
Guys, I just don't think I can do the casino, I sadly hear myself saying.
To my surprise and relief, everyone agrees.
We waddle back to the room, buzzing calmly about the day's events.
All in all, it had been a good trip.
Once back in the room, I turned on some good old-fashioned cable TV as Travis and Julian hung out on the balcony, talking into the wee hours of the night.
Drifting off to sleep, I can vaguely hear Rob Dyrdek showing me videos of people getting hurt.
I wake late and pack fast, the blinds casting shapes in the dim room.
My friends are downstairs.
We sit around our little patio table, having one last smoke before our departure.
It's nearly 11 a.m., and the resort is deserted.
Even my companions sound distant and muted.
Yesterday it felt sprawling, like the vital heart of some crazed machinery.
Now I look through the rows of cookie-cutter townhouses and see only the endless crisscross of dry brush, truck dust, and chain-link fences.
The air feels thin.
Even the lighting is off.
It appears that we're sitting in the middle of a cheap set.
On the way home, we listen to JT Wilde's CD on the car stereo.
I flip through the tracks, selecting Beautiful Black Sky.
After a few seconds, I can tell something's off.
The production is too slick.
Nothing like the acoustic version we heard the night before.
Had I been too drunk to maintain my immaculate, journalistic objectivity?
Definitely not, I decide.
He always said that he just never had any contact with Q, doesn't know who Q is.
But it seems like he's admitted to you here that, yes, he has had contact with Q, but he doesn't know who Q is.
That's a huge leap, in my opinion, from where we were before.
And it seems to be an admission that there's more there.
Now, I don't believe at all that he doesn't know who Q is.
I mean, because if you think about it from his perspective, if he's trying to keep the Q people on his board, he is only going to let somebody post as Q who he can trust not to leave, because all it would take to destroy 8kun is Q posting, hey guys, I'm moving to Gab, here's my Gab account, and that would be it, right?
Obviously Watkins is not going to allow whoever Q is to write that, if you see what I mean.
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