The return of Q, the million MAGA march and the Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory. Plus we take stock of what stage of grief QAnon followers have reached. Our guest is QAnon specialist and Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer who was on the ground at the march.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 117 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the MAGA Dominion Lost episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Just as we thought the roiled waters of American political discourse were cooling off, they had to do it to us.
The Million MAGA March.
A crowd formed of right-wing factions that descended on Washington, D.C.
on Saturday, the 14th of November, just 11 days after the presidential election.
To get an idea of how the Million MAGA March went, We invited journalist, QAnon specialist, and, uh, return guest, Will Sommer, on the show.
He was on the ground that day, and he'll be bringing us some snapshots.
We'll also be covering the Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory and the people promoting it.
OAN's Chanel Rian, X8 Coon admin Ron Watkins, and even Sidney Powell, the pro-QAnon lawyer representing Michael Flynn.
What's more, Q is back!
The anonymous poster has returned to the 8 Coon message board to cobble together its usual dog's breakfast.
So there's lots on our plate, let's get to it.
The big story is, of course, that Q has finally returned after a long absence.
I wasn't worried.
Were you?
No, not in the slightest.
No, Q has been gone for weeks at a time before, so this is not that unusual.
Right.
So Q finally posted on November 12th, and this was Q's first post since Joe Biden was projected to be the president-elect.
And the return was pretty lackluster, I have to say.
It's just a repeat of one of QAnon's thought-terminating cliches, and it said this.
And there was a picture of the American flag.
Yeah, nothing much there.
You had two weeks.
It's a weird time to be Q. Like, it's not fun because your whole messaging has been like, we already won, or we're winning.
And now you're definitely in the opposite state of that, you know?
You've already lost, or you're losing.
And, um, doesn't feel good.
That drop was quickly followed up with a more substantial drop, which included this line.
Who stepped down today?
Forced.
To help answer that question, Q included a link to a bio of Brian Ware, who served as Assistant Director for Cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
If you're doing the question and the answer, this is like an FAQ now.
Yeah, I know.
See, the old Q wouldn't just answer it immediately.
Yeah, he'd let people bake for a little.
Yeah, let it bake!
What's the fun?
Now Q is just sort of like really being patronizing.
Who stepped down today?
Here's the answer.
Just slides you the answer sheet.
Yeah, it's a soggy loaf, you know?
He hasn't really given it proper time to rise.
You know, you stick the little pin in and there's a lot of dough, a lot of sloppy dough still on it.
Maybe Q is like an art teacher just looking down at the classroom and all of the drawings are dog shit.
And so there was really nothing much to work with.
Nothing's going up on the fridge, kids.
Now, Brian Ware did indeed step down that day, again showing off Q's impressive ability to repeat things that are reported in the mainstream news.
The drop goes on to say this.
More coming?
Why is this relevant?
How do you show the public the truth?
How do you safeguard U.S.
elections post-POTUS?
How do you remove foreign interference and corruption and install U.S.-owned voter ID laws and other safeguards?
It had to be this way.
Sometimes you must walk through the darkness before you see the light.
Post-POTUS?
Like when POTUS, the concept is gone?
Zoomed in on that particular line.
Post-POTUS.
Does that mean, obviously Q is deliberately vague and cryptic because that allows for more baking.
But a lot of people are saying, well, does this mean that Q was saying that Trump is no longer going to be POTUS soon, or does post-POTUS refer to 2025, after Trump serves his second term?
Or is he saying post-POTUS is that the actual office of the President of the United States will be no more?
I think that post-POTUS is going to be the President's new SoundCloud rapper identity.
Oh God.
Lil' Pote?
Yeah, Postma-POTUS.
And he's going to be like, I didn't lose.
I didn't lose the election.
Glad we got there.
Dominion Voting Systems As we all know, after the revolution, the people of the United States will be ruled by a noble council of podcasters.
Not that noble, but yeah.
But until that happens, we're gonna have to tolerate being governed by some form of democracy.
Disgusting.
Now, one of the biggest flaws with democracy is that it involves counting ballots, and counting technically involves math, so that angers and confuses a lot of Americans, which inevitably leads to conspiracy theories.
We covered some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the election on the last episode, but one got enough traction to be boosted by President Trump himself.
the claims about Dominion voting systems, which provided election technology to precincts all
across the country. I'm not exactly sure why Dominion got the conspiracy theorists all riled
up and not any of the other election technology providers.
You know, how about, for example, there's one called Democracy Live. Doesn't sound as ominous.
Yeah, not as ominous. Apparently, I learned that Democracy Live systems are used in every
county in Colorado. Is that suspicious?
It has the word Democrat in it, kind of.
Kinda, yeah, maybe.
Or what about, remember Diebold?
Remember the Bush years?
Diebold voting systems?
Everyone's really paranoid about that.
Was that the Hanging Chad people?
No, this was post-Hanging Chad.
This was one of the technology to hopefully avoid the Hanging Chad situation.
But they had some sort of connection to Halliburton and Dick Cheney.
I don't fucking remember anymore.
Who gives a shit?
Loss of election vendors, but the one that really got the heat this time was Dominion.
On November 12th, Trump sent out this all-caps tweet.
Report, Dominion deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide.
Data analysis finds 221,000 Pennsylvania votes switched from President Trump to Biden.
941,000 Trump votes deleted.
States using Dominion voting systems switched 435,000 votes from Trump to Biden.
As you might expect, these claims about Dominion deleting votes are not based on any available evidence.
Trump's own Department of Homeland Security released a statement late on Thursday saying there, quote, is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
The true origin of those claims is a thread on the website thedonald.win, which is where users of the Donald subreddit went to after their subreddit got shut down.
Those claims were then turned into an article on the far-right publication Gateway Pundit, and then it was turned into a report on One American News before it was amplified on Trump's Twitter feed.
This is really, I mean, you kind of get why the Donald people, they love Trump so much, because they really do have a voice in the White House.
They can spit out absolute batshit nonsense and then believe, quite reasonably, that it'll be promoted by Trump himself.
Right, it works its way up the ladder.
The whole thing started on November 10th when a user of TheDonald.Win posted a thread with this title.
Now, for clarity's sake, the word peed in the title is short for centipede, which is a term of affection for The Donald users.
Happening.
Calling every peed to bump this now.
Full list of votes switched or erased by Dominion and all the evidence.
This is a nuke.
Now, that was posted by a The Donald user named Truman Black.
To give you an idea of what Truman Black is all about, he has previously posted a thread titled, If Biden Wins, Goodbye White People.
He did have that on his website.
I thought, a little harsh, but you know.
It's just, you got to his website, it's just a picture of Biden waving goodbye at you.
You know what?
The people voted him in.
The Americans want white people to go away, I guess.
It was right on his policy.
You have to vote in a white guy to get rid of white people.
I wanted to go away.
I'm not liking being here.
So naturally, I voted for Biden.
Right.
It's a type of suicide.
Yeah, it's a type of suicide.
The easiest kind.
Goodbye.
From there, Gateway Pundit published an article repeating the claims.
Here is Gateway Pundit's headline.
Breaking exclusive analysis of election night data from all states shows millions of votes
either switched from President Trump to Biden or were lost using Dominion and other systems.
Now here's an actual section from that article.
Then tonight we were led to a site on the internet, thedonald.win, where someone who
had seen our post decided to do an analysis himself.
In the piece, the author claims his work is a full list of votes switched from Trump to
Biden or votes erased by Dominion, the vote machines used in many states across the U.S.
The author claims that his work has been verified, but we have not verified the results, so we currently are labeling his results unaudited.
We are labeling the evidence we bring you as we haven't looked into it.
That's just the status of things there.
What are you going to do?
From there, the claims were further boosted by a One America News report on November 12th, who also referred to the Donald.Wynn post as an unaudited analysis.
Election systems across the U.S.
are found to have deleted millions of votes cast for President Trump.
According to an unaudited analysis of data obtained from Edison Research, states using Dominion voting systems may have switched as many as 435,000 votes from President Trump to Joe Biden.
Now, the author also finds another 2.7 million Trump votes appear to have been deleted by Dominion, including almost 1 million votes in Pennsylvania.
About half an hour after that OAN report aired, Trump published his tweet repeating the claims.
So, Trump, by the way, now is apparently live tweeting OAN now instead of Fox News.
He's passed Fox News.
He's passed the baton.
He's cancelled them.
Yeah.
I mean, where do you go beyond OAN?
Let's find out.
Now, someone else who got to work sowing doubt about the election results based on Dominion voting systems was Ron Watkins, the allegedly former administrator of 8kun and possible author of some Q-drops.
On November 10th, Ron Watkins tweeted this.
Over the course of the next few days, Ron Watkins proceeded to speculate on possible ways that Dominion Systems could be compromised.
He didn't provide any evidence of actual fraud, mind you.
He was just kind of like riffing.
He even stated as much in a tweet.
Just for the record, I am not alleging voter fraud.
I have no proof of voter fraud.
All I am doing is reading the election machine manuals and security audits and making independent observations about how the systems could potentially be used for fraud.
So I don't have any experience with like penetration testing or white hat hacking or anything.
Dude.
But I don't think it doesn't just consist of like reading manuals and like imagining ways you could like totally, you know, penetrate the system.
Have you ever heard of Tom Clancy?
I have.
He read submarine manuals and that's all he needed.
So Ron Watkins, a lot like him.
I'm going to go through some of the claims by Ron Watkins to give you a sense of what he's trying to promote.
To do that, I'm going to rely partly on research already done by the boys at the Rumor Flies podcast, which is worth checking out if you haven't already.
So, Ron Watkins became convinced that it was at least possible that Dominion systems were used to change the vote in Pennsylvania, tweeting this.
Didn't Pennsylvania take a vote counting break during the night of the election?
People hypothesized that they were spending those hours to make hundreds of thousands of new ballots, a near impossible feat.
All they needed to do was change the settings on all of the vote tabulator machines, which seems reasonable to do with just a couple people in a few hours.
I don't know if there are any change logs on those machines, but that's what I would look for if I was an investigator looking into voter fraud in those areas.
Yeah, he's just saying things like, you know, these ATMs are really insecure.
If someone got admin access who wasn't supposed to, they could take out the money.
Total vulnerability in the system.
You know, before we view the change logs, I think it might be useful to examine the vote count in every single Pennsylvania county that uses Dominion voting systems to see just how much of an advantage Biden has there.
According to information from verifiedvoting.org, Dominion voting systems were used in 14 Pennsylvania counties.
When you examine the voting at the county level, Biden earned more votes in only two of them, Erie and Montgomery.
And when you add together all 14 counties that use Dominion software or hardware, you'll see that Trump has an advantage of 69,039 votes.
Nice.
They hacked it for Trump to give Trump an advantage of 70,000 votes.
They're that nefarious.
Damn.
Yes, to give for make the Trump to give Trump an advantage of 70,000 votes.
They're that nefarious.
Damn, damn, damn.
Red handed cookie jar, etc.
Ron Watkins also pointed to an Associated Press story about USB drives being stolen
from an election staging site in Philadelphia and claimed, based on his analysis of the
Dominion user manual, that they would allow someone to inject or alter votes with impunity.
One of the problems is that Philadelphia County cannot be affected by any vulnerabilities in Dominion systems, even hypothetically, because they do not use any Dominion systems.
Oh no.
That seems like something that's worth checking.
Again, this is like, if you're going to do some penetration testing, it might be useful to check out what reality looks like rather than just reading a manual.
Well, that's what's so funny about the whole thing.
Ryan from Rumorflies, who started debunking this, all he did was find the same manual and Google a couple of things.
And you know, all it takes is just a little bit of extra work and Ron would have seen that none of his claims really hold any water.
But I mean, let's not pretend that's the goal.
No, of course not.
He's gishing, he's having a good time.
He just needs to be loud and say numbers that will get people riled up right now, that's it.
In some instances, Ron Watkins casts suspicion on the Dominion software because he's not familiar with election administration, which is fine.
I'm not either, but I can look things up.
For example, when listing off problems with Dominion, he mentioned his confusion with a tab in the software interface that is labeled rotation.
He said this, cryptic split rotation function that features the ability to force a maximum deviation.
There is no definition of a split rotation, so we cannot know what force a maximum deviation means in
this instance.
So I was pretty confused by this too, but I did do some googling.
I learned some basic election concepts.
So apparently the word split refers to a split precinct, and a split precinct is a subdivision of a precinct which arises when a precinct is split by two or more election districts that may require different ballot styles.
For example, Even if you live in the same precinct as someone a few blocks away from you, you might live in a different water district or a different school district, so you would get a slightly different ballot than that person despite living in the same precinct.
I can't believe we have to give a shit about this right now.
I'm sorry.
This is killing me!
Hold on.
It'll be over soon.
Okay.
It'll all be over soon.
What's he mean by rotation there?
So rotation refers to ballot rotation, which is the practice of rotating the names of candidates on ballots so no one candidate gets top billing because voters are morons and they'll just maybe just vote for the person who's up top.
Nice.
As far as forcing the maximum deviation, that is actually explained right in the Dominion software manual.
And here's what it says.
Enforce maximum deviation checkbox.
When selected, the process validates whether all choices within the rotated contest have been distributed fairly amongst the eligible voters for each rotated contest.
So, the rotation tab deals with the rotation of ballots in precincts or split precincts, and the maximum deviation checkbox is all about validating that those rotations are equally distributed.
I mean, it's a little inside baseball.
It's a little wonky.
I'm sorry I have to explain it to you, but this is how this works.
I can't believe the result of this is not, like, a perfect Berserker build.
You know?
Like, that's where I'm willing to put in the effort here, but there's no- You're not even gonna- You're not even- This- So, we're just- We're just- We're just marching along with some guy who decided to get confused at a 300- A page manual.
That's what we have to cover now.
It's less than shit.
This is the rationalist, this is the skeptic's lot in life, right?
Yes.
Disinformation artists, they have the freedom to just fart out bullshit.
Artists.
Artists.
It's fun.
They're painting.
They're painting.
Exactly.
And we have to take twice as much time as they did in order to put things back together to help them understand where they are mistaken.
And by the time we've done that, they've already, you know, they've spit out some other bullshit about some other part of the manual.
See, you let it slip, though.
You said art because you want it to be art because you want it to be worth stopping in front of the painting and explaining why that, you know, it was painted this way.
Ron Watkins even went on to tweet baseless Sharpiegate allegations.
Arizona had a lot of issues with Sharpie markers.
The ICC hardware might have marked such ballots as ambiguous.
Ambiguous ballots are not counted, but are saved to a folder.
Again, he's just sort of like speculating here again, and Arizona did not have any problems with Sharpie markers.
Sharpies were in fact preferred at polling stations because of the fast-drying ink.
The Arizona Attorney General looked into it.
Lots of people looked into it.
There's a lawsuit.
There's absolutely no substance whatsoever to Sharpiegate.
It's bizarre how persistent this is.
Ah, but have you considered that File-New-Tab-New-Window-New-Private-Window-Open-File-Close-Tab-Close-Window?
I have not.
Ron Watkins managed to turn that thread, as garbage as it is, into an interview with Chanel Rion for One America News Network.
She really is one of the most dogshit reporters out there.
She is.
Now, Chanel Rion opened that segment with some snark.
While voter fraud deniers continue to proclaim the perfection of the US election system, skeptics are looking at irregular patterns in vote data.
In particular, software irregularities that would switch votes from President Trump to Joe Biden.
In this segment, Ron Watkins is referred to as a large systems technical analyst.
They do not mention his long-time association with 8kun or 8chan whatsoever.
Also not mentioned that he's a web admin and has no experience with election software or administration that at least I'm aware of.
Here's Ron's television debut.
How easily could bad actors have used Dominion to switch thousands of votes and alter an election?
County by county, the answer is shocking.
One American News spoke with Ron Watkins, a large systems technical analyst who has been poring over the Dominion Systems manual.
I was looking at this manual with the mindset of a penetration tester, of which I am.
I'm reading the manual with a discerning eye and trying to figure out which parts of the system could be Abused by end users.
In this segment, Watkins speculates on how someone could conceivably tamper with the election, again, without actually claiming there's any evidence of it happening.
Watkins says the vulnerabilities of Dominion reside in the fact that administrative access is so easy to attain.
With administrative access comes direct access to ballots and how they are counted.
So you have the issue of the person who Is inside the tabulation machine, which is just a normal Windows 10 computer.
Are they manipulating the votes before it goes to the flash drive?
And then you have the next issue, which is now the votes are on the flash drive.
Does.
How does that flash drive get to the county commissioner or whoever is assigned to accept the flash drive?
Is the same flash drive being?
Where is he do you think?
Is he still in the Philippines or is he here?
I'm not sure.
there's no accountability there.
And then once the county commissioner or whoever accepts that flash drive,
gets the flash drive, do you trust them to not go in and edit the contents before they report it?
By the way, he's wearing a black cowboy hat and like black and red like checkered kind of lumberjack.
Where is he do you think?
Is he still in the Philippines or is he here?
Larping his ass off is where he is.
A big problem with what Ron is talking about there is that it's not actually that easy
to acquire administrative access, at least according to the same manual he cited.
Administrative access requires the use of a physical I-button security key, which the administrator has to touch to a reader connected to the computer.
Also, according to that manual, any compromised or missing keys could be invalidated by assigning a new key.
So as long as we're playing like the hypothetical game, this hypothetically should be able to limit the chain of custody.
So another issue is the keys.
The keys to the machine are digital devices.
It's unclear what the device is.
It might be like an RFID device or USB or something, but it is clear that it's a digital device that holds some kind of cryptographic key on it.
If you lose this physical key, You lose absolute security of the entire precinct.
So, for example, if, say, Philadelphia was storing these keys in a warehouse and they were robbed and the only thing stolen were these keys and a laptop, then you should consider their entire election to be illegitimate because they have lost the physical security of the system, which is the most important Again, according to that same manual, if a security key is compromised, that doesn't invalidate the election.
I was completely unsecured after that and then I lost my keys.
They have access to my front door.
I was being compromised.
Again, according to that same manual, if a security key is compromised, that doesn't
invalidate the election.
There's actually a specific procedure in the event of a lost or stolen key.
Yeah, replace all of the votes with Joe Biden.
In case a security key is compromised, the correct procedure is to regenerate election
files for all affected tabulators, then regenerate their security keys.
The machines must then be programmed with the regenerated election files.
So he's just throwing a lot of shit at the wall.
It's just half-thought.
Obviously, he doesn't actually give a shit about the integrity of the election.
He's not frantically reading through the manual after the fact because he's very, very concerned about the security of American democracy.
He's just trying to sow doubt.
He's just trying to inject doubt wherever it can, regardless of how substantial or meaningful that doubt is.
All right, let's move on from Ron Watkins.
Another claim being batted around is that votes stored on servers were manipulated using a malware program called QSnatch.
Oh no.
Interesting.
So the bad people are the QSnatch people.
Yes, the bad people are using QSnatch.
And the QAnon people are the good people.
They're good Qs.
No, they're going to snatch the Q away from you.
The deep state is going to snatch the Q away from you.
OK.
Oh boy.
Here is the claim being made by QAnon-friendly Newsmax host Grant Stitchfield.
You are being lied to.
The biggest lie of all is that somehow our state's voting systems are not connected to the internet.
We hear them say this all the time.
Now, that may be true for the individual machines.
It may not be, by the way, but it is certainly not true.
For all of the state and county databases.
In fact, it's an absolute myth that it's not connected to the internet.
Your votes in many cases are being stored on a server in Frankfurt, Germany.
Cyber security investigators tell me they can prove the nation's largest provider of election software, a system used in 28 states, Not only uses servers in Germany, but it's also possibly infected by a malware called QSnatch.
Investigators at Allied Security Operations based in Dallas tell me that they have found malware embedded in the software source code, which could be responsible for everything we're seeing right now.
If that's true, Even the nation's cybersecurity agency CISA warns, Q-Snatch would allow hackers to find everything they would need to change votes in election databases across the country.
Bizarre.
So here's the one grain of truth, is that yes, there actually is malware called Q-Snatch.
It first surfaced in 2014, and it only infects network-attached storage systems produced by the Taiwanese company QNAP.
I hear you can get it by going to a MAGA rally.
But the rest of that segment where he talks about Q-Snatch infecting servers and manipulating votes, that's pure fantasy.
I have no idea where the hell he got this or what he's basing this on.
It's nonsense.
Now, one element of that story is the idea that vote information was somehow stored in servers in Germany.
Congressman Louis Gohmert added a bit of spice to this conspiracy theory by claiming that there was a raid by the army on German servers.
And these servers were allegedly owned by a company called Seidel, which is a Barcelona-based provider of election technology.
I might share one more thing.
Sunday, I had information from some of our former Intel people that there was Extremely compelling evidence that could be gleaned from Seidel, that's S-C-Y-T-L.
That's a company headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, that was responsible for aggregating all the information from all the machines and whatnot.
But now the main headquarters had moved to Frankfurt.
You know Frankfurt, where Merkel in Germany has said the day after the election that Trump needed to go ahead and concede.
Well, they're going through bankruptcy, but that information as to how many votes were switched from Republican for Democrat would have been easily established from the information that Seidel gathered.
You know how?
What were the votes going in and which ones were changed going out?
And he said, can you send me exactly the information we need to gather?
And so I got that information and send it in the wee hours.
Monday morning.
And before he would have had a chance to.
Make a request to get any of that information.
It turns out, I don't know the truth.
I know that there was a German tweet, in German, saying that on Monday, U.S.
Army forces went into Seidel and grabbed their server.
There are some that believe this is the U.S.
intelligence that manipulated all this in order to cover their own rear ends.
But it's a little disturbing to just contemplate How corrupt the government has gotten with the whole Russia hoax, the framing of Mike Flynn, and so many others, Carter Page, Papadopoulos.
So this is a desperate time for our country.
And somebody's fax machine is going off.
Completely pilled.
And, you know, what I really like about this guy is, like, he's probably getting pretty good at his BlackBerry at this point.
Like, he's like, yeah, he's sending texts really well with his BlackBerry.
And he has to talk about stuff just completely out of the dominion of his understanding.
Like, no, you can't look at this man's face and tell me he knows a goddamn thing about how servers work or anything.
What blew me away about this is that this man is a congressman, and he's saying that he's getting information not from current intel people, but from former intel people.
Yeah.
Which seems confusing.
Seems like.
And he also says that he got this information about this army raid from a German tweet in German.
Yeah.
It seems like if you are in Congress, you should know what the army is doing.
You should have firsthand information about what the army is up to, I would hope.
Yeah.
Not have to rely upon tweets.
Yeah, wouldn't you be somewhat approving that funding for the raids going on in Germany?
I don't get these people.
It's like they get the Congress, but they still want to be mad online.
They just want to read tweets and talk to their old Intel buddy friends and be mad.
Yeah.
By the way, the Associated Press reached out to an Army spokesperson about that alleged raid, and they said, quote, those allegations are false.
Also, the company Seidel does not have an office in Germany, nor do they tabulate, tally, or count U.S.
votes.
So everything about this is melted and unimaginably stupid.
It doesn't connect with reality on many points.
Now, to be clear, I'm in favor of scrutinizing democratic processes and making them more transparent.
Those are, I think, good things.
But if anyone was truly disenfranchised or if the election was corrupted in some way, I don't think Twitter or One America News is the best place to settle these issues.
If there is indeed evidence of systematic fraud on a mass scale, I would urge the Trump campaign to bring that up in courts.
And they better do it quick because the deadline for resolving disputes at the state level for the Electoral College is December 8th.
Now, according to the New York Times, Trump has filed 16 lawsuits so far about the election, but none of them allege systematic fraud that could change an election.
The allegations of fraud consist of unverified accusations about the voting or counting process, usually directly affecting too few ballots to change a state's results.
And even then, representatives of the Trump campaign have not been doing great in their legal challenges.
Take, for example, a case filed in Michigan, Constantino v. Detroit.
The plaintiffs are two representatives of the Republican Party who are allowed to monitor the vote counting.
And they alleged fraud and misconduct during the vote count last week at the TCF Center in Detroit.
The plaintiffs claim that the election workers were instructed, quote, to not verify signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process such ballots regardless of their validity.
They presented five affidavits from other poll challengers who said, among other things, that they saw election workers enter January 1st, 1900 as the birth date of many absentee voters.
The plaintiffs offered no corroborating evidence for the affidavits.
They also falsely stated that Republican poll challengers could not observe the count.
In the filing, lawyers for the defendants observed that one of the people who offered
an affidavit is a QAnon follower, and they argued that on that basis, their affidavit
is not credible.
Mr. Cushman appears to be a follower of QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory which has been
associated with various crimes and which the FBI has determined to be a potential domestic
terrorist threat.
If you believe the opposition is cannibalizing children, there is nothing you would not do
to prevent the opposition from winning, including engaging in perjury.
Now this is an interesting development.
If you are a QAnon follower, your testimony is not valid, just inherently, in court.
You are too pilled to be trustworthy.
That sets precedence.
On Friday, Chief Judge Timothy M. Kenney of Wayne County Circuit Court denied the petition from the pro-Trump side, saying, quote, plaintiff's interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.
Also on Friday, the Trump campaign withdrew from all of their challenges in Arizona.
They had previously filed a lawsuit to advance a Sharpegate-like claim, but the most recent
filing says, quote, since the close of yesterday's hearing, the tabulation of votes statewide
has rendered unnecessary a judicial ruling as to the presidential electors.
In Nevada, Trump allies promised they had found problems on a huge scale.
In news conferences, they said thousands of people might have voted illegally from out of state.
They said there were reports of a van decked out in Biden-Harris logos and carrying boxes of ballots that people were opening, filling out, and sealing in envelopes.
But many of the out-of-state voters turned out to be military personnel who are allowed to continue voting while outside of Nevada.
And the lawsuit filed in federal court offered no evidence of widespread fraud.
Instead of thousands of illegal votes, Republicans presented evidence about one.
In the lawsuit, a woman said that a thief had filled out and returned her mail ballot.
When she showed up to vote in person, the woman said that she wasn't allowed.
But according to county officials, they had actually offered the woman a chance to vote in person if she would sign an affidavit saying that the mail-in ballot had been stolen.
She had refused.
Judge Andrew Gordon blocked Republicans' requests for emergency changes in local voting procedures, but said they could return if they found more compelling evidence.
And so far, they have not.
Wow.
Most of, like, Trump's legal challenges are going this way.
And notably absent from all of these legal challenges is the claim that Dominion software systematically changed votes, which seems like it would be worth breaking up at least once if it was true.
And just a room full of lawyers and Ron Watkins sitting there with his black fucking cowboy hat and his shitty lumberjack thing.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
I fucking skimmed the manual.
Skimmed the manual, no evidence, but here's how they could do it if they wanted to.
Look, we know they want to.
On Saturday, November 14th, tens of thousands of MAGA supporters gathered in Washington, D.C.
to protest the defeat of their God Emperor.
Everyone from regular MAGA and CAG to Proud Boys to Groibers, Boog Boys, and Militia groups all marched to defend their belief that the 2020 election had been stolen or rigged by the Democrats.
Now, I tried to track down the organizers for this event, but according to reporting from The Washingtonian, NPS spokesperson Mike LaTerste said no groups called Million MAGA March, Stop the Steal, or March for Trump had registered any sort of permit.
When I did track the permit down, the only group listed as sponsors were Women for America First, which is led by a woman named Cindy Chaffian, who gave one of the first speeches.
Our organization had this crazy idea the day after the election to throw a small rally So, it's turned into a massive rally.
I just want to say welcome to DC!
That was not very impressive.
Let's give that one more shot.
Welcome to DC!
There we go.
Much better.
Despite being the sole signee on the Freedom Plaza permit, I couldn't help but notice other familiar figures boosting this Million MAGA march.
I mentioned in our previous episode a week ago that General Michael Flynn had posted a Stop the Steal website on Parler.
When I clicked on a link last week, it was an homage to GeoCities, a truly crude website with rallies scheduled for multiple cities on November 14th.
Oh, but now when I click on the link, it's a much slicker site with a map and pictures of all the speakers, from the MyPillowGuy to Tracy Beans to Flynn's brother Joe, Gorka, I mean, it's a bizarre cast of characters that blends both QAnon and MAGA seamlessly.
Also on the page now is, uh, a trailer for The March?
It's just a shitty Tucker Carlson rant with epic music and slow crossfades of Trump's billowing long coat.
The trailer links to the YouTube account of far-right operator Ali Alexander.
On the bottom of the website, there's an RSVP portal that asks if you want to also donate for unspecified individuals' travel and lodging.
To make things even more complicated, a day before the rally, General Flynn posted this to Parler.
Now this takes you to another prop site where you have to register to get any details sent to you.
You have to give your phone number, and I'm just not that committed of a journalist, so apologies.
But something fucking weird is going on with Flynn.
Really?
You think so?
We'll be talking to Will Sommer in just a little bit about what it was like on the ground.
But I thought I'd set the scene with some amazing videos captured by Zachary Patrizio, a reporter for the Daily Dot.
I highly recommend you find his thread to see the accompanying videos.
So the first thing is Trump supporters got a huge shot of adrenochrome straight into their veins with a surprise POTUS
drive-by.
Just a closed window, car surrounded by people, can't see shit.
You might see the fragment of his face through the window.
There's actually another video I saw from a different angle where you can see Trump's painful smile through the tinted windows of the SUV.
One would then, of course, assume that the usual cursing of Democrats like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, etc.
would commence.
But surprisingly, the excited crowd took aim at a new enemy, Charlie Kirk.
Let's roll out of here.
Wait, America First is the Groyper thing led by Nick Fuentes and Malkin, right?
But their whole thing is that they're Nazis and they're just pissed off that Kirk is not a proper Nazi?
Exactly.
Great.
So apparently no one is bulletproof at these things, even if you're pushing bogus QAnon intel mainstream like Charlie has done in the past.
Oddly enough, that theme of trashing Republicans seemed to be a recurring one in some of the speeches throughout the day.
Here's what Groyper founder Nick Fuentes had to say.
The Constitution did not protect us.
And the GOP did not protect us.
But President Trump, when he came down that escalator five years ago, he has been the only one who has protected us, and our country, and our heritage, and our interests, and the American people!
And so long as President Trump is the vanguard and the protector of our people and our historic nation, he will have my loyalty.
My loyalty is not to Mitch McConnell.
My loyalty is not to Fox News.
My loyalty is to my president and my people, the American nation.
It must be America first!
Yeah!
America first!
They then broke into other chants like Fox News sucks and really just dragged Republicans all afternoon
is when Sebastian Gorka, the snake oil salesman to end all salesmen
gets up on the podium and warns MAGA followers to watch out for
you guessed it, snake oil salesmen.
So this is up to you, my patriots.
Of all skin colours, of all backgrounds, this is up to you.
You need to put the fear of God into every snake oil merchant, rhino establishment, GOP politician.
If you certify the election, you will never, ever get re-elected.
Will Sommer is a journalist for the Daily Beast and an early days QAnon specialist.
He's also the number one recurring guest.
How many times is it now?
I think it's at least three.
Oh, I think more than that.
I think at least four.
Well, we'll just say 17.
17.
17 times.
How's it going, Will?
Good.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Happy to be on.
You look way too fresh for somebody who attended the Million MAGA March yesterday.
Yeah, in fact, dare I say you look reborn.
Yeah, those guys made some pretty good points.
It's true that hearing Nick Fuentes up there just fucking yelling about how Charlie Kirk is a cuck, you know, it really makes you think.
Terrible, terrible stuff.
Yeah, were you as terrified as I was when I watched the clip of the Nick Fuentes crowd chanting USA in like almost perfect unison?
That is a certainly very disturbing part of that crew.
I mean, you could definitely, it was interesting, you could see sort of each faction
was kind of hanging out with their own crew.
So like the Proud Boys were kind of off the side and then the American First People.
But like the whole Nick Fuentes thing, I mean, that thing freaks me out.
Like, just like a guy walked by me in an America First hoodie and I was like,
oh God, I mean, that's like, you're a neo-Nazi essentially.
Yeah, and he's only 22.
I looked him up.
And from Illinois, the home of The Deep Dish.
I mean, this is not good.
He was interviewed a long time back at the, a long time back, less than two years, but CPAC.
And he was talking about how, yeah, there were people like Jews, too many Jews in there, to our reporter.
And then she turned on her mic and he's like, well, you know.
Too many people with Israel bracelets or something like that.
And that's funny because there's other parts of the MAGA crowd that are Zionists, you know, and they're not down with that bullshit.
Like, they're going to fly that flag with the MAGA flag and stuff like that.
So you were talking about factions on the ground.
It sounds like, yeah, you know, this kind of dystopian Mad Max.
Everyone has their caravan and, you know, they mostly get along with each other.
But, like, what was the scope?
Because I know from images it's all, you know, like Jake said, it sounds like, oh, Nick Fuentes was leading the rally.
But the reality is there's a bunch of different bullhorns.
How many people were there really and what kind of atmosphere reigned on the ground?
I mean, it was an experience. I mean, obviously, you know, I've been to a lot of Trump rallies,
QAnon events, stuff like that. But even by the standards of this, this was, I mean,
everyone had their flags. They were just out there. So yeah, so I mean, I rolled up and
the first thing I see is a lady with, you know, not my pedophile sign with.
Yes!
And a Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong shirt.
Yes!
And I was like, oh boy, like we're kicking it off.
Haven't you heard, Will?
We all have pedophiles.
It's just some are not ours.
You have to figure out what yours is.
Exactly.
And so, yeah, it was just a, you know, obviously there were a ton of kind of just regular Trump rally folks to the extent that that's regular.
But then, you know, you had obviously the Proud Boys were there.
You know, I was struck by the fact that I think the crowd loved Alex Jones probably the most out of any of the speakers.
And at one point, they were like, they just started the speeches at the first location.
And then Alex Jones clearly was like, this sucks, like, we're moving on.
And he's just like, all right, we're marching.
And then, you know, they lost about half the crowd that just said, you know, we're rolling with Alex Jones.
So I wanted to talk to you about these different factions.
Did it feel like you were in an Ubisoft game and you're just kind of like, Oh, we're in this territory now.
Like, were the atmospheres different between, you know, was there enough like character difference between the factions that you can tell them apart?
That's funny you say that.
Yeah.
It is kind of like, I've been playing Watch Dogs Legion and it's, it's very, uh, yeah, it was definitely like, you know, do you, you know, what's your faction rank with the Proud Boys?
I mean, it certainly was, honestly, like I, so, you know, you guys are familiar with disguising yourselves at these events.
And I was wearing a hat, sunglasses, and of course the mask.
And so I felt like I could take the hat off among the regular MAGA people, but like when I went by the Proud Boys, it was like, you know, full disguise, that kind of stuff.
But yeah, no, I mean, it was a really crazy scene and, you know, certainly plenty of QAnon people there as well.
And let me tell you, they love talking about QAnon.
You know, I think as you all have experienced, you know, often these are people who, you know, once you get down to kind of the rank and file QAnon believer, I mean, they're like, yeah, this is a military operation to, you know, everyone's had a military operation first thing when I said, what is QAnon?
Bingo, right off the bat.
So the first QAnon people I talked to were two friends from LA and they were like, one guy had a JFK Jr.
shirt in that it was like the young JFK Jr.
like saluting at the JFK funeral inside a queue.
And when I realized he was a JFK Jr.
guy, it's like, oh, now we're talking.
Like this is the stuff.
And so, yeah, they were friends and they had gotten into it from, oh, they watched Fall of Cabal was how they got into it.
Every time fall cabal.
Yeah Exactly, and so that's how they got into it And then you know I talked to a lot of people brought up the JFK jr.
Thing honestly You know one guy was talking saying he's not a JFK jr.
Guy.
He brought that up on his own He said there's a lot of you know.
It's a big tent movement but I would say maybe the most disturbing conversation I had was I I was walking by a woman and her kids, like really young kids.
And they had, you know, in like a kindergarten, they have like kind of like letters, like kind of puffy letters that you string together.
And so the kids had made QAnon signs.
And so it said like, don't concede with like a Q instead of an O. And then there was just like a where we go one, we go all.
And this is just surreal.
I mean, the lady was into it enough.
And then I said, well, do you tell the kids about QAnon?
And she said, oh, yeah.
And this eight year old, it's like, He explained to us.
And so he said, like, you know, there's these hackers, they're good guys, you know, in white hats and black hats.
Oh my god.
Did they get into the child sacrifice?
Well, I don't think they told him that.
I wasn't like, hey kid, what do you think of Adrenochrome?
Yeah, come on, man.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, I'm not telling you.
No.
I'm just wondering how do you... You learn that word cheap and you become a man.
Julian would start his kids with the mole children in the tunnels.
All joking aside, this is incredibly concerning that we have a generation of kids who are growing up with this sort of weird fascistic fantasy as kind of a story that's being told to them by their parents and they're being brought to places where they see other people that are so inspired by this as well.
Well, I'm wondering because there's a lot of these parents that don't trust the school system.
They think that the school system is contaminated by, you know, pedophiles and Satanists that want to teach their kids about sex like when they're six years old or whatever.
And oftentimes they end up homeschooling their kids.
And so QAnon basically becomes just, I guess, a part of history, you know, a part of their history lessons.
And that's that's not a new thing in America.
There's a huge part of America that's homeschooled for religious reasons or in schools that, you know, kind of reinforce that.
So I don't know.
That's where I think like it's invisible for us.
But it's basically already institutionalized on that side.
Well, it's funny you bring up homeschooling, Julia, because, in fact, this family had said that from what they learned in QAnon and particularly about vaccines, they had pulled their kids out of school because they didn't want to give them the vaccine mandates.
Right.
Is that how it works?
You can just pull out of school and pull out of vaccines?
Yeah, because I think that's the only way they basically make you vaccinate your kids is going to school.
That's how they get you, dude.
It's through education.
You're imprinted with the mark of the beast.
Like, look, you want to be around other kids?
You have to get these shots.
Everybody does.
And that's how society has been working.
These are people gathering to basically deny the reality of Joe Biden winning the presidency, right?
So did it feel angry?
Sad?
Was there any kind of those notes in there?
Or was it just triumph?
Like, kind of, I'm not crying behind this mask.
Well, it was definitely angry.
I mean, there's no question.
You know, I was talking about which stage of grief were they in, but it's like, if they're in denial or bargaining, but they're also very angry.
And, you know, that in addition.
And so they, I mean, they kind of, they did create this bubble where essentially they're saying, you know, it's, they're like, Trump won in a landslide.
All these speakers and then everyone just like, you know, would really cheer.
I mean, it was just surreal.
You know, it was a crazy thing to experience.
Yeah, I guess it's like, if we look at QAnon as a kind of replacement for reality, we're now seeing a larger population segment that probably don't all buy into QAnon, but they're buying into a very big reality-changing moment.
Like, no, this didn't happen, or no, it was a cheat, or actually, he's president.
It's kind of pivotal.
And did you sense that anybody was getting discouraged there?
I mean, they were all really into it, certainly the people I talked to.
I mean, there were really just so many factions.
I mean, there were, like, the tradcaths rolled up with, like, a bunch of priests and cassocks, and, you know, they were all just... Wait, what?
They cosplay as priests and stuff?
You guys might like this story.
Former pickup artist sensation Roosh V, who has since become a, you know, gone from men's rights to now he's, like, essentially a tradcath, although he may be Orthodox.
I turned around at one point and I see a man with a beard and a haunted face carrying a giant crucifix and he's followed by like a trail of incels and I realize it's Roosh V!
My god, everything is a LARP!
We're in the end days!
I think we are.
Everything is just like, the pestilence is all around us, we might as well be the community play we always thought about.
I think we are in a simulation, honestly, because like, as we were talking about this, my brain was like, well, I was like, this is familiar, like in 2016, like, me and all my friends, you know, were basically like, you know, this is, you know, illegitimate, this is Is this an illegitimate president?
We were out in the streets, you know, protesting and all that stuff, and it's just like... You wore that knitted pink cap.
Yeah, like, you know what?
Maybe that's where... Every day for two weeks.
Maybe that's where we are now, where nobody's president ever wins, and it's easier to just decide to choose a completely new reality.
But even if we look on the left, we are kind of developing into factions, right?
Where we say, oh, I'm like, I'm a BLM guy.
Actually, I'm more like in the Antifa thing and stuff.
So I think what we're seeing broadly, and I mean, I'm not saying this in a negative or positive way, is a factionalizing of America where the kind of federal level means less and less. It no longer represents
us deeply, whether it's on the left or the right. And so you're kind of finding a new way
forward, a new culture, a new party, except there's only a two-party system. So everything is
this weird, I don't know, like endlessly fragmenting and fragmenting again.
Yeah. Well, this actually, that's a perfect transition in my next question for Will, which
was going to be, you know, did you notice that QAnon is something that sort of transcends
That, like, there's a little bit of sort of QAnon in all of these different groups, or was QAnon itself kind of, you know, a faction that stuck, you know, sort of kept to their own, that sort of thing?
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question.
Certainly, I would say you see QAnon sort of throughout the groups.
You know, so I mentioned I talked to this mother, so that's kind of your, like, kind of mom QAnon, you know, kind of hanging back.
There was a group of counter-protesters, and this was like a big focal point for the Trump people, and so they were, like, there was just hundreds of people just screaming at them, and I saw a lot of QAnon people up in the mix there.
And so really you had all kind of all kinds.
I met a gentleman named Red Pill Ken.
in the scrum and he was very, check out his YouTube, he was really pushing that.
And he said he got into it from the, I believe the X22 report.
And he was really in the mix.
And so, yeah, I mean, really it was all kinds of people.
And just to Julian's mention of LARPing.
I mean, there was a guy there with a spear.
Like, he was just, like, ready to spear somebody.
I mean, it was a very weird scene.
Wait, you know that the Q Shaman always has a spear, so... Yeah, was he wearing, like, a Skyrim-esque, like, horned hat?
Did he have a furry hat?
No, all of our heads will end up on a pike in the next couple years.
All of our heads will end up on a pike.
Damn, so it was just, like, a regular guy in, like, Trump hoodie, jeans, Merrills, and a fucking spear?
By the way, we're going to... And I kind of looked, and I was like, oh, that guy's got a spear.
It was like, wait a minute!
Oh my God!
Normal.
I'm pretty sure the Second Amendment covers spears, too.
I didn't check.
I feel like you formed your country after the point where spears were highly necessary.
But yeah, sure, man.
Whatever.
I got a question for you.
Did you see Vincent Fuchsia on the ground at the Million MAGA March?
No, unfortunately, it looked like he was there.
But no, sadly, I missed him.
You know, obviously he had his car accident.
So I would want to wish him, you know, best of luck.
Wait, what?
Wait, what happened?
With the car?
With the car?
The Magimobile.
The decal one?
Yeah, it had an accident.
Yeah.
What?
This is so bad.
Julian cannot contain his shingles.
It's so bad.
So bad.
But he can't contain his smile.
And neither can I. And we're all at work.
Because the image of that truck just kind of sitting roadside like smashed into something else and he's just standing by next to it trying to do insurance stuff with some random car.
I mean, it was a really bad accident.
Yeah.
So there was a local news report that was like, Trump van in accident.
And then people were like, holy crap, that's the bus company.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I didn't know any of this.
It's coming to me in waves, and it's funnier.
Glad you're doing okay, Vincent.
Just be clear.
Well, I am glad that Vincent's alive.
Yeah, of course, but don't wish any harm on the guy at all.
I'm thinking of this as just the vehicle and the symbol of, like, a fully-decalled Trump-mobile getting into an accident.
It's just funny.
If you make your fucking car into any flag and then crash it, it's gonna be hilarious.
No, the reason I bring him up is that at the March, he actually was wearing a George Magazine shirt.
I don't know if you saw this.
He seems to be leaning into the I am JFK thing a little bit more, more than I've ever seen him.
He was wearing the George Magazine shirt also as a poll watcher in Pittsburgh.
Oh, I do think he's kind of nodding at it more.
And that, by the way, you know, he did not answer me when I texted him.
Are you okay after your accident?
But when I texted him, did I just see you on Fox News as a poll watcher?
He was like, you better believe it.
Incredible.
Yeah, so wait, how are the DMs with him?
Any non-sequiturs?
Is it a good sensical conversation?
It's all just like, please let me interview you.
Why do you pretend to be JFK Jr.?
I know.
And then, you know, I run into him every year at CPAC, and he's very chill until I'm like, so what's up with the QAnon stuff?
And he goes, ooh, gotta go.
I love this guy.
I do love him.
He's a goddamn character.
He's saving it for something.
I need 5,000 words on his story, honestly.
Oh man, you just hear the sound, the Hanna-Barbera sound of the little feet, like, turning, and he's still there, but you know he's gonna be gone in a second.
Will, one thing I noticed from some of the clips that we listened to earlier is there was a strong sort of anti-Republican or anti-Rhino message.
I mean, is that something that was consistent sort of overall, or was that just kind of like a Groyper's, like, Nick Fuentes type of thing?
Yeah, I mean, there was definitely a feeling, I think, that That the Republicans have abandoned Trump and the Trump people were so mad about it.
You know, certainly the, like, you know, you mentioned the Groypers, they hate, they hate people like Dan Crenshaw.
They think he's like a, like a liberal simp.
And so, like, you know, there's generally this energy that, like, the GOP is trying to ditch Trump.
Like, Sebastian Gorka said, you know, we need to make clear to our state legislators that if they don't certify the election for Trump, no matter what, like, we're just going to primary them.
And so I think it's something potentially that you could see.
And speaking of Gorka, I mean, was he, you know, did he command a crowd?
Was he able to get that Alex Jones following?
Yeah, you know, it was interesting.
It's really interesting seeing who got the crowd going and who didn't.
And Gorka definitely did.
I mean, they loved him.
You know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the crowd loved.
Lauren Boebert, big hit with the crowd.
I mean, really the whole gang was there.
But yeah, they loved Gorka.
And, you know, when he kind of issues his kind of like James Bond villain pronouncements, they go crazy.
And one thing that Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's now Congresswoman-elect, posted recently was her working out, doing CrossFit exercises in her hotel room, claiming that Washington, D.C.
gyms are closed.
So, I mean, you were on the ground.
Did you put some hours in?
Did you lift any weights?
Yeah, I can confirm that our gyms are not closed here.
It's a very strange thing.
They're definitely open.
And in fact, I have gone by many a CrossFit gym.
And seeing people working out outside, so it's possible.
But I think you have to wear a mask, and that may be kind of the sticking point for her.
But yeah, no, I saw her.
I mean, you know, she was the—the crowd was really going wild.
And, you know, I think, unfortunately, what we're seeing in her case is, you know, this may be the birth of a new Republican star.
I mean, you know, she has the way to just drive liberals insane and, you know, frankly, understandably, you know.
But, you know, she's getting those reactions.
Yeah, absolutely.
Did you have a sense on the ground that there was a posse, a movement?
I mean, in the past we've heard stories of journalists being kind of driven up to with a giant Humvee, the husband gets out armed with his gun out, you know, like stuff like that.
So how was it on the actual ground of Washington, D.C.
when you have to approach, I guess, the institutions that you're going to soon be inside?
Yeah, I mean, definitely.
I mean, she was kind of talking about, you know, she's ready to take on the house and all that.
And, you know, we know she's already refusing to wear a mask at her orientation and all that.
So I think, you know, the QAnon caucus, I think, is getting off to a good start.
Oh, great.
Speaking of that, the most vocal anti-QAnon Republican Congressman, Denver Riggleman, is on the way out now.
Do you think that the Republican base in general is going to turn a blind eye to Marjorie?
Or are they going to even give her the kind of treatment that, let's say, a Nancy Pelosi gives AOC, you know?
That's a great question.
I mean, I think the assumption about Marjorie Taylor Greene, probably wrongly, was that she would be kind of a quiet backbencher once she got the seat.
I think once she kind of ditched QAnon, perhaps we thought, or publicly, perhaps we thought that would happen.
Clearly, that's not what's actually going to happen.
I always believed in her, Will.
That's very... Yeah, that's incredible.
Who believed this?
Well, you see her social media game.
She has top-notch social media game.
That's why she's in Congress in the first place.
Of course she wasn't going to give that up when she got in.
I did want to kind of transition to a broader chat about QAnon because now the election is past and we have seen kind of, I guess, the worst, I think, for now, of the kind of big first whiplash.
The Million MAGA March seems like that kind of culmination of the complaint that started the day after the election and has not stopped, basically.
And so I wanted to talk to you about the fact that even though a lot of people, us included, were saying, hey, it's very possible that this will erupt into violence, that the cases of violence have been almost nil, or really there's only one I can think of.
It's that van in Philadelphia.
And that was basically a foiled attempt, you know, a potential attempt.
But we basically have not seen an increase in violence, and there's actually been almost none.
So yeah, does that change your perception of Q?
Were people too worried?
I mean, I'll just say personally, I always saw it as a slow-burning cultural movement that's going to keep gaining speed.
The eruptions of violence are always basically like that system kind of metabolizing and moving forward and spreading and then you get these, you know, particularly mentally ill people or particularly driven people that turn to action, usually misguided, and then they get fucking busted and put in jail for unrelated things.
So I don't know, like, has any of this changed your perception of QAnon?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
I think the thing to be clear about, though, is that these QAnon people think Trump is going to win.
I mean, they think they're in for another four years right now.
And so I think they haven't.
I mean, I think when Biden's inaugurated, probably they're going to enter that new stage.
But right now, everyone I talked to was because I was saying, well, you know, doesn't this disprove QAnon?
I mean, doesn't don't you guys look kind of dumb right now?
And they said, you know, well, yeah, maybe if Trump lost, but he didn't.
And, you know, he's going to pull this off.
He's got the watermarks, you know, he's got hammer and scorecard, he's gonna bust that, like all the dominion, all that kind of stuff.
So it's possible, I'd say, that you would see a Proud Boy or a TPUSA person moving on much faster through the stages of grief, whereas a QAnon person might have delayed stages of grief due to their, you know, lack of contact with reality in so many ways in their existing belief system.
So, Travis, you had named two popping off points, potentially, one of them being the inauguration.
Yeah, I really agree with Will.
The reason we haven't seen a lot of activity from QAnon followers after the election is because they don't really believe it, right?
I feel like we've got to wait for two important milestones.
If and when Trump concedes, because it is such a Trump-focused thing, they're not going to give up fighting until he does.
And of course, the inauguration, January 20th.
Those are going to be two big dates to look out for.
It feels a bit now like QAnon is that thing that allows part of the movement to stay in denial for longer, like that's a kind of function of it within the group.
We're seeing delayed reactions and stuff like that.
I wonder if that, in the end, is to their detriment.
If you have too many people that think you've already won and you're in the process of trying to, let's say, reverse an election, that's not helpful.
So I'm wondering if that's a double-edged sword.
Yeah, I mean, certainly with all the focus on kind of, you know, saving the election for Trump, you know, just in terms of these Georgia special elections, you have to think about, like, you know, you can get a lot more energy, I think, in the Republican Party if you say, look, if we lose these elections, we're going to be totally shut out of the government.
But instead, there's all this kind of like, well, you know, Trump's still going to win, and so maybe it's not such a big deal.
And so you think Trump actually won this?
Or what's your take on that?
When I was there for so long, I kind of started to think that way.
And it was like people, it was like rude to say to people that Trump lost.
Like when I was talking to these QAnon people and I was just trying to say like, well, you know, okay, but like Trump did lose.
And then, you know, they would just, you know, they were like, well, how can you say that?
That's crazy.
So yeah, because none of the names of the media outlets that usually call the U.S.
election, they've even cut out Fox of it, right, due to the early election.
Did you hear a lot of that, like kind of anti-Fox sentiment?
A lot of anti-Fox stuff.
A lot of, you know, it was really kind of maybe the rise of like a new era of conservative media because there was a guy with a parlor sign that was like, you know, Jack Dorsey in handcuffs.
He'd go on parlor.
And then there was, you know, there was someone with a sign that said like, you know, ditch Fox, like OAN or Newsmax only.
You know, and so, as we've seen, Newsmax is really having a moment, and there was a lot of mentions in the speeches of shout-outs to Newsmax.
Did you hear any new conspiracy theories that haven't been floating around yet, just that kind of caught you off guard and went like, oh, whoa, that's a birth of new lore?
Any sprout-storming?
Anything that I could chew on early?
Yeah, any, just a little piece of something, you know.
Yeah, an early teaser.
Yeah, let's see.
You know, honestly, this Dominion thing is just everywhere.
I mean, I'm sure you're familiar with that, but just the idea that the voting machine stole the election is blowing up.
Someone had a hammer and scorecard sign.
That stuff's getting really big right now.
So, I mean, you know, and unfortunately, you know, I think as observers of this, often we want the new stuff.
And I feel like potentially this whole thing is just going to dead end or, you know, just
go down this detour of obsessing over this election and, you know, potentially rather
than grappling with the new things.
But I do have one more anecdote I would like to share from the march.
As I was leaving, there was a woman who was she had set up kind of a stand and she was
selling stuff and what she was her sign said, banned from Etsy, buy my Save the Children
bracelets.
So I talked to her and she was saying she was like, yeah, I got really into QAnon and,
you know, I'm all about saving the kids.
And you know, she and she did indeed.
$15 though for a bracelet is pretty steep.
So I did not pick one up.
No.
Well, thanks so much, Will.
Is there anything you'd like to plug?
Yeah, just, you know, I'm at thedailybeast.com and I'm on Twitter at Will Sommer.
Check it out.
You definitely should.
Follow him if you're not.
One of the OGs.
One of the OGs.
Great content.
Good reporting.
Always a pleasure to have you on, man.
Thanks for having me.
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Listener, till next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's auto-tune.
You- Goodbye, Finbargo.
Wow.
Finally!
Wow, wow, wow.
Do we feel good?
Do we love America?
And do we have Donald Trump's back?
Yes!
We want Trump!
We want Trump!
Let's just be very clear.
What happened on November the 3rd?
Donald John Trump got more votes than any president in history!
And then what happened?
The good Lord smiled on America once again.
And Donald John Trump, the man who wasn't a politician, who wasn't from the swamp, defeated Hillary Clinton!
And now, four years later, sleepy, creepy, Beijing Biden
