In the age of QAnon Telegram, old tenuous relationships are quickly souring between top promoters and rookie pests. Meanwhile, Q followers have factionalized and diversified. Long-time QAnon researcher Dapper Gander (not his real name) joins us to discuss the taxonomy he's developed for the movement's adherents.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 142 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the QAnon Factions episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
On recent episodes, we observed how some QAnon adherents have continued to gather in public for an endless production of their favorite community play, Save the Children.
This week, we're examining how the movement's influencers are splintering into factions that have taken to feuding with one another.
Amid the chaos, a new figure has risen, one that goes by Ghost Ezra, and is quite representative of the telegram era for Q followers, organized into a series of siloed soapboxes, micro-communities, and voice chats.
Still reeling from multiple PR disasters, a hologram being elected president, and the widespread censorship of QAnon content on social media platforms, a paranoid tribalism has come to define the Q movement.
To take a deeper look at these factions, we're going to be speaking to Dapper Gander, a longtime QAnon researcher who recently took it upon himself to catalog their various animosities.
But before all that, QAnon News!
My main story this week, dubious Arizona election audit looks for evidence of foreign interference by looking for bamboo fibers.
This rocks because it hadn't happened on last week's episode, and so we couldn't predict how much stupider the process would get.
The UV lights were really dumb already, but to literally do like a China equal bamboo, that is like a child's understanding of the world.
Yeah, I mean, it's like your idea of the world has basically been influenced by, like, Looney Tunes cartoons.
It's ludicrous.
Yeah, we're going to be examining the ballots for mozzarella grease stains to see if the Italians have taken over this process.
We're looking for evidence of Russian interference.
We see vodka and caviar all over these ballots.
We got another indication of just how goofy the audit is thanks to an interview with John Brakey, an official helping oversee the audit.
Brakey said that auditors are looking for bamboo fibers because of a baseless accusation that 40,000 ballots from Asia were smuggled into Arizona.
The other day at the press conference you were talking about bamboo.
What was that about?
Well, is that there's accusations that 40,000 ballots were flown in To Arizona?
To Arizona.
And it was stuffed into the box.
OK.
And it came from the southeast part of the world, Asia.
OK.
And what they're doing is to find out if there's bamboo in the paper.
You know, I like the idea that China is so devious that they're able to swing the election by importing all these ballots.
But they forgot to remove all indications by including the bamboo fibers.
It's great.
They were like, we do not have access to American paper.
We must use our own bamboo made paper.
I've often described QAnon as a big tent conspiracy theory movement.
By this, I just mean that the community of QAnon followers are generally tolerant of all conspiracists.
For example, if you're an old school conspiracist who believes that all historical events were driven by the Illuminati, then you're welcome into the QAnon club.
If you believe that the government is hiding secret extraterrestrial technology that will be revealed soon, then you're welcome into the QAnon Club.
If you believe in something even wilder, such as the idea that the world is run by lizard people or in flat earth, then...
More mainline QAnon followers may be a little uncomfortable with you, but at the end of the day they'll still welcome you into the QAnon club.
Which is like, I think, a really welcoming stance if like your friends and family think that you're a moron for believing these things.
You know, it's an instant online community that you can be a part of and you know that they will welcome you with open arms.
This big tent welcoming stance helped the QAnon community unify and grow rapidly.
But it also led to rapid factionalization.
Probably the most notable breaks within the QAnon community concerned the living status of JFK Jr.
And this led to a famous incident in late 2018 in which QAnon very specifically denied that JFK Jr.
is alive.
Despite that, QAnon followers and Q themselves never said that, well, you're not allowed to be part of our club.
You're not allowed to be part of the Great Awakening if you believe that JFK Jr.
is alive.
And in fact, when we went to the Q conference in Arizona, we saw In The Matrix be, you know, very accommodating to the JFK Jr.
followers, you know, so they're still welcoming, even if they, you know, they, they're sort of very image conscious, they don't want to look bad, but they still want to welcome the people who believe the batshit stuff into the general broader QAnon community.
I think there are two elements to be taken into account here.
First is that Q is no longer posting, so there's less of that top-down feeding of information so you can all agree on the same reality at the same time.
But then also the nature of Telegram means that the people who used to kind of just at least read each other's posts are no longer doing that, so there's less of like a forming of common reality just naturally on these bigger open platforms that they're now banned from.
So the result is now, if an idea arises, it's like, which Telegram channel did it come from?
Because it didn't come from Q, and it didn't come from a kind of broad community playing with each other on Twitter until something stuck, or even, you know, 4chan or 8chan in that sense.
But now it's like, oh, this came from, like, the Charlie Ward Telegram channel, or this came from, you know, In The Matrix's Telegram channel.
And, you know, as a result, it is getting harder and harder, even for them, who are so far from the, I think, the consensus of reality that most human beings are in.
But it's hard for them to even settle on one that would please even a majority of the QAnon followers today.
Right.
It's like, which influencer do you trust the most?
Which influencer do you think actually has a potential connection to a real QAnon insider?
In 2021, the QAnon promoter causing the most internal strife goes by the name Ghost Ezra on Telegram.
Some have speculated that Ghost Ezra is actually run by Ezra Cohen Watnick, a former intelligence officer with the Trump administration.
This has led to Ezra Cohen Watnick's lawyer, Mark Zaid, angrily denouncing those rumors in a Twitter post.
There is a hashtag GhostEzra account on Telegram.
The usual conspiracy-laden QAnon garbage.
This is NOT, in all caps, my client at Ezra A. Cohen.
It is an impersonator, and we have asked that the account be removed.
Wake up already, people.
Stop believing everything.
Yeah, it's funny, I mean this isn't in defense of like Ezra Cohen Watnick or Mark Zaid, but it is funny that basically his main job is now is just angrily denouncing anyone who claims to be Ezra Cohen Watnick on Twitter or other platforms.
Because there's a lot of rumors that he ran the, was it the e-account or also known as like eTheFriend.
This was actually believed by a lot of QAnon followers as well.
Ghost Ezra currently has over 325,000 subscribers on Telegram, making them perhaps the most popular QAnon promoter on the messaging service.
By comparison, QAnon promoter CJ Truth has 116,000, Jordan Sather has 57,000, and the Telegram channel WeAreTheMedia, which is run by a collection of QAnon all-stars, has 210,000 followers.
Gosezra's popularity is strange and troubling, considering that their account pushes some of the most bizarre QAnon theories.
For example, Gosezra has claimed that the president has been replaced with an actor pretending to be Biden, as he explains in this post.
Trump told you a dozen times, Biden is shot.
The actor playing president right now under a dissolved corporation holds no power.
It's bankrupt, like writing checks with no account.
You saw the flags, gold fringe is gone.
17, 1776 Constitutional Republic.
The D.C.
Owl is captured.
It's all theater at this point in D.C.
So you can see Ghost Ezra here weaving in some sovereign citizen ideas.
Also, the part about Biden is shot.
This is reference to the fact that Trump a few times said that Biden is shot in reference to he's gone.
He's like, he's not going to win.
And so Ghost does interpret that literally, in that Biden was shot to death and executed, and therefore we have now an imposter Biden in the White House.
You would think if they got an imposter they would, you know, get somebody a little bit younger looking, you know what I mean?
If you're gonna hire an actor... Listen, they had what they could take at the casting call, all right?
Sometimes you can't get the perfect person for the role.
I will say he does look pretty, pretty damn close to Joe Biden.
I believe it.
If you look closely, it's actually Pete Buttigieg in an old man suit.
The two most taboo topics are the shape of the Earth and the Holocaust.
I wonder why this is.
Take for example this post.
Whenever I say this stupid thing people call me a moron who should shut up.
Whenever I say this stupid thing, people call me a moron who should shut up.
Very curious.
Now, that post has 6,000 supportive comments under it.
Insane.
And 148,000 views.
Yeah.
So, you read through all the comments.
I mean, this is why I really don't think Ghost Ezra's metrics are artificially pumped up, because you see a lot of, like, real engagement.
It's sad and bizarre.
I also, I don't know that Telegram has a huge, like, way to pump things yet.
It seems less, uh, predisposed to, like, bot armies.
I mean, yeah, it's, it's harder, but it would certainly be possible, but... Yeah, maybe just harder so the barrier to entry is higher.
Also, there are fewer rewards because it's not possible to make things go viral on Telegram like it is with other social media platforms, so there's less incentive to artificially pump up stats.
Most recently, Gosezra has been combining militant rhetoric and anti-Semitism, which has historically been a bad combo.
One Gosezra post said this.
A hundred million armed and awakened patriots is a dangerous thing.
The number only increases by the day.
Keep waking up because this genie is never going back in the bottle.
To quote Christina Aguilera.
He didn't say that.
I added it.
But he does go on to say, we the people are coming after the synagogue of Satan.
God always wins.
Every single time.
The funny thing is, as the sole Jewish person on this show, Jews don't really believe in Satan.
In fact, we don't believe in hell either.
Because you are it.
That's the ultimate trick.
The ultimate trick the devil played was to forget who he was.
I don't think that's the right quote, but I understand the sentiment.
Yeah, that Synagogue of Satan line, that comes from a Bible verse, and it's often quoted by Christian anti-Semites.
And it's basically, it's used to imply that, you know, there are people who are, like, fake Jews.
It's the whole fake Jews line.
It's like all these people who are, like, in power, the puppet masters of the world, they are the fake Jews who are fine to hate.
Yeah, I mean, Joanne believed that the Rothschilds weren't really Jewish, but were the Nazis.
Which is just incredible.
Of course.
I mean, the thing is, is like, you know it's bad to outwardly hate Jewish people.
You know that it makes you look not so good and people are going to be less likely to take you seriously.
So you've got to, you know, you have to bend yourself around in a pretzel to figure out how you can still hate Jewish people, but not make it look like you're anti-Semitic.
Despite Gosezra's popularity, he's either ignored or actively hated by the other major QAnon promoters.
The most vocal opponent of Gosezra and their ilk is Jordan Sather, who has been in the QAnon game since 2017.
Sather is an interesting case because he's positioning himself as the reasonable, skeptical QAnon promoter.
This is despite the fact that Sather himself promotes stuff like alien technology disclosure and using the industrial bleach chlorine dioxide as a miracle cure.
For example, earlier this month, Sather made this post.
You'll often find the clickbait garbage promoters pumping the same rhetoric.
Nisara and quantum financial system narratives are very common.
You'll see hints of flat earth strewn about with some JFK Jr.' 's cue in there too.
Don't forget the My Insider Say line that is so overused.
Well, that's just fucking Q. Q is supposed to be an insider who says things.
Excuse me, Travis.
This is Jordan Sather, and I'm in the middle of writing this post.
How is it even possible for you to interrupt me at this stage?
I don't understand.
Are you in the system?
And somehow these accounts and personalities claim to know exactly what's going on or what's going to happen.
If it doesn't happen, They make up some lame excuse and move the goalposts for themselves.
Remember that some people are literally paid to promote disinfo on the internet.
Others just get high from having a large following so they'll post whatever gets them the clicks and a good reputation.
Seeking truth on the internet has become a shitshow.
My man.
I know.
That rocks.
Like, Sather's shtick has always been bizarre for me.
He's a real kind of gatekeeper in, like, QAnon world, where he's most willing to say, no, no, no, this goes too far, you shouldn't listen to these people, these people are bad, and this is ridiculous, no one should believe it.
Again, he's QAnon, but he's, like, skeptical.
At least he positions himself as skeptical.
He's hedging his bets, you know?
He's got other grifts to promote.
I mean, he's got other things that he believes in.
He doesn't want to completely alienate himself from the conspiracy community at large if QAnon turns out to be, you know, even more of a bust than it is now.
And also, I mean, he never did this for any of the other figures in the movement in the early days.
He never called out Praying Medic or Joe M when they said dumb shit or, I don't know, even someone smaller like the Kate Awakening or IET or whatever.
He never gave a shit.
Like, him suddenly growing a conscience about what gets shared within the broader QAnon movement, To me, it just, it reads as he is somebody who has correctly diagnosed that the online eyeballs you can monetize through Q are shrinking.
And I am going to have to fight my competitors.
Sather has also explained why he is so willing to shoot inside the Qnon tent in a Telegram post.
There is a reason why I've been so openly against the fake conspiracy clickbait and those who promote it for a while.
Many reasons.
I've gotten quite a bit of flack for my opinions, but hopefully people are starting to see how much of a danger the LARPers and covert disinformation agents really are to the truth movement and societal awakening as a whole.
What is interesting here is that Travis, you're no longer in the crosshairs.
Like, he doesn't give a shit because, you know what?
He decided, if I can't beat him, I'll become him.
He's absorbing my power.
Mostly I think Sather, he still wants to have a career doing this shit in like 10 years.
Whereas like the ghost stars, Ezra's of the world, since they're anonymous, they can sort of burn out people.
They can make false predictions and they can burn the reputation in an instant.
They don't give a shit.
You know what it also might be?
He might be basically preparing everybody who's following him for him to officially leave Q and say, well, it was worthy, it was good while it lasted, things have gone to hell, now it's all disinfo and LARPers and clickbait.
You're right, because he's been doing basically this sort of, like, conspiracist promotion before Q.
And so he probably wants to, like, sort of, like, off-board the audience he's built with Q off the QAnon train, but still stay with him.
So he can't, like, so he has to walk a very, very fine line.
To help us make sense of QAnon factions, I've invited on QAnon researcher Dapper Gander.
Dapper, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me, guys.
Now, before we get into it, I just want to make one thing sure.
So Dapper Gander is your Twitter handle and not your real name, correct?
It is indeed.
That's correct.
Okay.
So you're telling me you're anonymous on the Internet while researching extremism.
Is this what you're telling me?
I am anonymous on the Internet.
I do the best I can.
I'm pseudo-anonymous.
All right.
I'm sorry, I'm getting a message from the Ethics Committee, the QAA Ethics Committee, and yet it turns out that this whole time we shouldn't have been doing that, letting people stay anonymous.
So if you could retroactively dox yourself, please?
I will see what I can do on that.
You've made a name for yourself through your very clear and thorough explanations of like various QAnon concepts on your Twitter account, your Patreon.
So I gotta ask, what first got you interested in this subject matter?
We're setting the Wayback Machine all the way back to the 1980s, when I am growing up in New York City, and I am playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends.
That was just when The Satanic Panic really started to hit.
We started hearing—my friends and I, I mean—started hearing about how you could use the Player's Handbook to summon demons, and how Dungeons & Dragons was recruiting kids into Satanism.
And basically, as young as we were, we sat there and we said, well, I know that's not true.
And yet we knew everyone was saying it.
And it was probably a little easier for us growing up in the city.
I can't imagine what it would have been like if I'd been growing up, you know, with my grandparents in rural Ohio.
Because my grandmother was full on the, you can't let my grandson play that game, train.
I knew something was really wrong.
I just kind of wasn't able to express it because I was so young.
And that stayed with me forever.
I mean, to this day, I still play Dungeons & Dragons and I run Dungeons & Dragons for kids.
And that event of the nightly news, the newspaper, People magazine saying, there is this cult, and it is national.
And one of the ways it expresses itself is with heavy metal music.
And the other way it expresses itself is with Dungeons and Dragons.
And I didn't listen to heavy metal music growing up.
But I remember as a young kid, I was sort of like, well, that's probably not true either.
So, sort of without knowing it, I was affected by Satanic Panic in America, and I never forgot what that felt like.
So, as I got older, I continued to sort of be interested in, I mean, what we called at the time, urban legends.
You almost never even hear anybody say that anymore.
How these stories get told and retold and change over time.
Fast forward quite a number of years to me being in college.
I wind up taking a course about the apocalypse and how it was represented in Renaissance literature and the different ways that the Bible was being interpreted to say that The Papacy was really the Antichrist and the seven hills of Rome were being represented by the horns of the beast.
And when I really started to learn that we're talking about traditions that go back hundreds of years and are just reinvented every generation or two.
So, when I first started seeing Really, Pizzagate, kind of coming up in the ranks.
And I went, well, this seems awfully familiar, but it's been thoroughly modernized.
At the same time, it's taking these conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton that have gone back to the mid-90s and Again, gradually reinvented them and reinvented them and reinvented them until now.
There's a, again, there's yet another worldwide sex cabal of demon worshippers.
And then the gunman went into Comet Pizza and the whole situation blew up and suddenly it was very embarrassing.
To be a Pizzagate believer.
And then I'm going to out myself here.
I was not in on cue at the ground floor.
I got in on about the first or second floor.
I didn't really even hear about it until January or February of 2018.
I think the context I first heard about it was someone on Twitter saying, Pizzagate's been reinvented and it's even bigger and it's even more complicated.
And so I knew I was going to tune in and I started paying attention then.
You said you got into QAnon in about early 2018.
That's actually around the same time that QAnon's actually started to break apart a little bit into different kind of categories.
So why do you think that was?
Why did it start like, you know, breaking apart and having some internal conflict so early?
I think that a lot of it had to do with the decision, the very conscious decision, on the part of the very first believers on the poll board, really deciding in a very calculated way that this message needs to get out.
The precursor Anons to QAnon, you know, CIA Anon and those others, had virtually no audience off of the Chan boards.
No one was discussing them on Twitter, and I think one of the big differences about Q is a number of believers—and it's so hard to say whether or not we're even talking about people who believed or whether or not we're talking about people who just wanted it out there or thought it was really good shitposting or whatever they believed—decided really early to get some real conspiracy theory types on Twitter involved.
And there's been a lot of documentation about this, not so much while it was happening, but there have been a lot of accounts now that look back on those early days and are tracing who was talking to who and how long it took before some of these big accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers started, you know, retweeting the white rabbit hashtags.
Absolutely.
So it's going out now to a much wider audience.
And as soon as that happens, and interest starts coming back on it, Then you almost immediately start to see, I mean, at first I would sort of call them camps.
These camps form.
People coming in in massive numbers and saying, essentially, as QAnon has always done with the cart leading the horse a little bit, coming in and saying, what does this have to do with the pizza parlor?
What does this have to do with the sex trafficking ring?
And at the time, I mean, in those very early few weeks, the answer was virtually nothing.
I mean, the first time that Q mentioned the whole people-in-government-worship-Satan, if you look back on it now on the aggregator sites, it looks really early.
It looks in like drop six.
But you've got to remember, nobody as of drop six was paying attention.
Drop six was gone.
They went back and found Drop six later.
QAnon really started becoming popular with the big breadcrumbs posts.
Some of us come here to post crumbs, just crumbs.
And working with their Q map, they then went backwards and found those earlier posts.
So from the time Q started getting really popular, it was not a big theme, Satanism, until it started exploding out onto Twitter.
And basically all of these conspiracy minded people on Twitter wanted to know, how does it relate to this thing I already believe is happening?
And when those people came on board, they already brought their own baggage with them.
And some of that baggage did not fit really neatly in with what was going on.
And so QAnon had to sort of decide if it was going to stay narrow and potentially stay small, or if it was going to broaden and embrace all of these people.
And it's a cycle that we've now seen played again and again and again.
QAnon widens its arms and a whole new group of people find it.
And the people who were already there do this whole, well, I, you know, oh, I knew about the gin blossoms before you did.
You know, it's, it's, they're talking about how, well, this isn't really Q. You know, the difficulty of course is, is that like any other radicalization engine, You, or I should say the audience, is going to find themselves pulled further and further from that original core political subway novel thriller, and is going to suddenly find themselves in the position of someone who says, well, and also reptilians, and also this, and also this.
And some influencers and promoters really rolled with that.
And some have always sort of accepted it but very begrudgingly and then from time to time there are influencers and promoters who kind of have a they freak out and they're like I can't believe you people are listening to whatever x thing and as time's gone on what's been amusing to me to watch anyway is that people Influencers, I should say, who were once considered reasonably fringe are now looking at the further fringe and saying, I can't believe anybody is listening to these people.
And I mean, it's happening today on Telegram.
There's another round of this.
With good old Jordan, with Miracle Mineral Solution Jordan, having a freakout about Nasara and Kasara again.
And I apologize to the audience.
I'm going to assume that if you're listening to QAnon Anonymous, I don't need to stop and define my terms every seven seconds.
No, you're safe here.
Beautiful.
Or cursed, whichever way you want to look at it.
And so Jordan's having this freakout, and then you look at the comments on Jordan's own Telegram, and it's all the Anons saying exactly what they've been trained to say, which is, why are you dividing us?
We are stronger together.
Everyone belongs in this tent.
And then people saying, Jesus, Jordan, you're always angry.
I'm leaving the channel.
I want to go listen to what Ghost Ezra has to say.
And now recently, within the last week or so, there has been direct interaction between Ghost Ezra and Lin Wood.
So the two massive accounts, one coming very much from QAnon, and the other one has always been sort of a more of a Q adjacent evangelical, but very pro-Trump and all that, and now suddenly Lin Wood is reposting Ghost Ezra, and Ghost Ezra is reposting Lin Wood, and Jordan went ballistic.
But that kind of power you can't really fight against too much.
I mean, there's a reason why Ghost Ezra as a single anonymous came from nowhere.
No one really knows who, if anyone, Ghost Ezra was before the Twitter purge of January 8th.
So he's sort of a new unknown promoter, and he is eating the lunch of the main QAnon telegram channel, you know, collectively run by two dozen of the biggest names in QAnon, Twitter.
That's the We The Media channel on Telegram?
Yes, We The Media, which is a channel run by 24, 28 of massive, massively popular influencers, and now does not have half the audience as Ghost Ezra, who is much more from the tradition of Chief Police or Major Patriot or these other, who used to be reasonably small accounts.
Continually pushing the envelope sort of further and further.
I mean, if you are a believer in what Ghost Ezra is selling, then every celebrity and every politician is really being played by some other celebrity or some other politician.
And Joe Biden is not alive.
Joe Biden is dead and is being played by James Woods in a mask.
And you can tell because they both Make X or Y hand gesture and it's really out there stuff but is becoming more and more mainstream stuff really.
We're watching this very powerful group of QAnon promoters just being buried under these much more popular channels That are willing to push the fiction and the extremist content further and further and further.
A lot of what is going on, and it sort of has been for a while to bring it full circle back to the factions and the way that they interact.
Ever since QAnon lost its footing on traditional social media, its growth rate by any metric has slowed down To a crawl.
I mean, they are probably gaining more recruits at Save the Children rallies than they are on social media, and that's really saying something.
So, the number of eyeballs feels like it's dwindling.
So, for the first time, a lot of these large or formerly large QAnon promoters are actively feeling their slice of the pie get smaller and smaller.
They've got two choices.
They can Embrace the crazy, and they can go further.
But Julian's Rum or Jordan have been at this.
They've had their brand for years.
Whether they started off as true believers, they've been selling their own brand for so long that they now believe they're in their brand.
So they won't.
They're now trying to convince a bunch of QAnon believers that quantum economics isn't real, or that reptilians aren't real, or these things that are drawing eyeballs away from them.
And it's like watching them fighting against a tide that they themselves helped create.
There might be some schadenfreude in there, but at the same time you have to acknowledge that if no one can stop it, If 300,000, 400,000 people are listening to Ghost Ezra say that the Holocaust is a fiction, that's a huge step that they never were able to make when they were on Twitter flirting with anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.
The really big influencers always sort of, they threw bones to it, and I have dozens of screenshots to prove it, but it wasn't their brand.
We're watching the Anons now voting with their eyeballs and leaving behind some of the people who used to be extremely powerful in the movement, and that breeds resentment.
I suppose this is a true example of economic anxiety, really.
Their paychecks are on the line now.
The money that they make through their own accounts is threatened by a completely anonymous guy who thinks that Joe Biden is dead.
And has been replaced by a body double.
That's what's always caused these huge eruptions within the factions.
When it feels like believers are a resource, whenever it feels like the total number of believers isn't growing, a conflict erupts.
It was all a free-for-all last summer when the lockdown happened and they were again gaining massive numbers of new believers who they fought over as a commodity.
Speaking of the different camps, you've developed kind of like a taxonomy of the different Q factions that I think are really interesting.
So you've identified seven main factions, which you've dubbed the Super Spies, the Q Vangelicals, the Booberchans, the Lone Gunmen, Team Tesla, the Q-Age, and Pastel QAnon.
Well, I can't claim Pastel QAnon.
You know, it's Mark Argentino's.
This sort of this constellation of the different sort of tribes within QAnon, you sort of discussed a lot.
So what exactly what's the super spies?
I think this is like this basically Jake's faction, right?
The super spies are sort of the original OGQ believers.
They fully bought into the original central message.
I am a government insider.
I have the This information that I need to share with you.
I can't do it directly, so you're going to have to puzzle out what I'm saying, but don't worry.
All of the things that you've been promised are about to come true.
They're all about to happen.
We're going to move into a post-Democrat, post-left world where everyone will accept that These things that you've been saying and believing for so long are going to become absolutely the new normal.
You will be written about in history books!
But also, I think that this element that the people who pretend to be the good ones, the people who call you racist, who call you transphobic, who call you xenophobic, you know, all of the phobics, We are going to expose that they are the real bad guys.
You know, they are the ones who have been eating children and running drugs across the border.
And the people who talk down to you, we're going to expose them as, you know, the real bad guys.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, the Super Spies very much – the way that I talk about these factions when I'm talking about them is that if you think about rating each faction on sort of an XY axis, and one of them is what sort of technology do they believe exists in the world, and the other axis is how spiritual is this group of people.
The original Super Spies sort of believed that we lived in a Tom Clancy Rainbow Six kind of technology level.
Like, there's probably satellites that can read your email from space, but no one has a time machine.
You know, there's not cloning.
They might believe in the sort of masks from, you know, the Mission Impossible movies, where it's a perfect mask, but it's not a clone.
You know, it's not a robot double.
It's a person wearing a technological wonder.
And the Super Spies very much embrace that heightened reality of technology.
It's not exactly science fiction, but it's also not exactly real-world technology.
You also talked about the Qvangelicals.
What are they all about?
They started off as being the people who had originally come to the Chan boards through Pizzagate.
The Qvangelicals are the people who came into this already believing in the worldwide cults, already believing in witchcraft.
I mean, I just went back last week and rewatched Jesus Camp, a fascinating documentary, and you can see Those people believing that we are in a spiritual war and we have been for our entire lives.
I mean, it's a fine tradition going back over a hundred years in America.
These are the people who are really in for like the satanic panic kind of stuff.
Absolutely.
They're a little bit lower on the tech axis from the super spies, but all dial the spiritualism axis all the way up.
They might not believe that Hillary Clinton is a clone, but they have no problem believing that she is indwelt by a demon.
That is perfectly fine.
And you can tell, because in that part where the CNN feed pixelated for a second, her eyes went red, and that's because she's a demon.
But between the Super Spies and the Q Evangelicals, those were the two sort of pre-existing groups to be found on the Chan board at the time Q came into being.
They were already there.
They were already ready.
Well, moving on from them, what about the Boomer Chans?
How'd they come into the picture?
The boober chans came in during the same time about when I did, when Q started hitting Twitter hard.
And there was this big new theory and it was, it wasn't even, you know, for the first few weeks it wasn't even QAnon, it was follow the white rabbit.
And those hashtags got huge and as soon as it made the jump from Twitter to Facebook, is sort of when the boomer chans started to arrive and they were the first group of people who i would say i call them a faction because it's really easy to put to draw sort of draw a circle around them and say this is sort of where they're coming from this is what they believe but they have never been movers nor shakers they've never been a leadership
They've always been a recruitment pool who can talk to the boomers and get them on board and get their money, and they brought a lot of money into Q. Without the boomer chans coming from Facebook, I don't think we would have seen, you know, the explosion of Q t-shirts and Q merchandise.
And they're coming in, also, they're the first who have baggage and beliefs that originate from outside the Chan boards.
Both the Super Spies and the Q Evangelicals, they were already sort of part of Chan culture.
And the Boomer Chans, they had to learn it all.
And they were roundly made fun of for a long time by the people who saw them as rubes and they didn't know what was going on.
And so what a lot of the early promoters and influencers figured out real quick was keep them off of the Chan boards.
We don't want them to see what it looks like.
That's when the aggregators were the lifeblood for the Boomer Chans because they would go to 4chan or 8chan or 8kun and they would look at it and they would say, wow, that's a lot of nudity and a lot of Nazis.
And I don't understand and why are they calling me a fag?
I do not understand this.
And so you watch all these big promoters basically say, someone will come onto their feed back in the day and say, where do I find Q?
And the promoter would say, oh, qmap.org.
They would never say, oh, go to the Chanboards, because they wanted that resource to stay right where they were, which was in a world where Check it out, Mulder.
I had breakfast with the guy who shot John F. Kennedy.
Is that so?
Old dude now, but yeah.
Who are the Lone Gunmen in QAnon world?
The Lone Gunmen, named after my favorite characters from the X-Files.
The three conspiracy theorists who believed everything and always turned out somehow to be right.
Check it out, Mulder.
I had breakfast with the guy who shot John F. Kennedy.
Is that so?
Old dude now, but yeah.
Says he was dressed as a cop on the grassy knoll.
Hey Mulder, listen to this.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian Social Democrats?
He's being put into power by the most heinous and evil force of the 20th century.
Barney?
The C.I.A.
The lone gunman is a catch-all for the faction that would follow the boomer chans into the movement based on recruiting.
The lone gunman didn't really discover Q by accident the way that a lot of other people did.
They were purposely recruited.
A lot of the, you know, how to red pill documents that QAnon circulates all start with the paragraph that says, everybody believes something that doesn't really adhere to reality, and we can use that.
That will be our in.
So, if they are a 9-11 truther, there you go.
That's your in.
If they believe in Bigfoot, there you go.
That's your in.
And the whole process involved Engaging these other conspiracy factions on their own terms and saying, oh, you know, I myself have never really felt comfortable with what happened on 9-11.
Why don't you tell me all about that?
And then the key is you let the person, you let the 9-11 truther talk.
Talk until they are done talking.
And at the end, you are advised, according to the Red Pill Guide, you are advised to say, wow, you are so much smarter than me about this.
You know so much more than I do.
Huh, have you ever looked into X QAnon adjacent topic?
And if the person says, no, I don't know anything about that, you do not talk.
You say, oh, I was just really curious because somebody was talking about that the other day and I did not understand a word they were saying.
But you, you seem smart.
You seem like the kind of person who could explain that to me.
And with luck, now you've got a 9-11 truther looking up information about the Podesta Art Collection, and when they come back to you, they have taken a step towards your camp.
So basically throughout most of 2018, that's when the Lone Gunmen started showing up.
All these theories got dragged in and dragged in through purposeful recruitment, and their presence was sort of what caused the first big fallouts that I remember.
I mean, that was back when Matrix and Shady Groove went and gave their talk to the Ramtha cult compound, and Joe M. lost his shit about it.
Yeah.
Dionne Revolt hated that, too, I remember.
And he's like, why are you going and talking to a cult?
That's a cult!
We're not a cult.
And at the end of that year, the end of 2018, was the famous Q gave an Ask Me Anything on the Chan boards.
And Q answered 16 questions that day, and four of them So, 25% of the questions he answered were, can you please tell these crazy people that JFK Jr.
is not alive?
Can you please tell us that the Earth isn't flat?
Can you please tell us that space is real?
So, there were these major simmering issues that were brought into QAnon as it grew, as more outside people came into the movement, bringing with them these beliefs.
That again, the Q evangelicals and the super spies did not believe in that stuff and or viewed those beliefs as embarrassing or potentially harmful to the continued monetization of Q. Like JFK Jr.
I don't think Any of the Q promoters really give a rat's ass about JFK Jr., but they know it makes their movement look stupid.
And if the movement looks stupid, that curtails their ability to recruit.
It curtails their ability to continue to make money.
And I think that's why they push back on some of that stuff so hard.
But, again, at that Ask Me Anything, Q, is JFK Jr.
alive?
And Q says, no.
And it did not matter that Q said no.
Didn't matter at all.
Oh, well, the reason Q said no is because since JFK Jr.' 's father was assassinated, he's not really a junior anymore.
So that's why Q said that JFK Jr.
wasn't alive, because now junior is senior because his father's dead.
I mean, the stuff that they would come up with to explain why Q said no was hilarious.
But yeah, by the end of 2018, the lone gunman faction was really very much on the rise.
They were a force within the movement.
They were not going to be stopped, even by Q. And they were beginning to become a real embarrassment.
You also write about the Team Tesla.
What do they believe?
Team Tesla is a very specific, it's almost like a micro faction.
Team Tesla involves some people who were before Q, some people during Q, but it all kind of refers back to the long-standing idea.
And as we are all people who have grown up in our culture, There is a fascination with Nikola Tesla, and there always has been.
I mean, he's in movies, he's in books, the whole steampunk mythology around him is pre-existing, and the view that somehow Edison was the bad guy who stole everything from Tesla and ruined him, and if he hadn't, then we'd be plugging our devices right into the ground, and whatever, and we'd have electrical teleporters like in the Prestige.
I have seen Edison's men.
Where?
In the hotel, and I have every mind to bring them up here myself.
That would be unwise, Mr. Angier.
It is true that you are our last remaining financier, but we have not stolen your money.
When I told you I could make your machine, I spoke a simple truth.
Then why isn't the machine working?
Because exact science, Mr. Angier, is not an exact science.
The machine simply does not operate as expected.
It requires further examination.
You need to try a different material.
It may provoke A different result.
That met up with the marvelous adventures of Baron Von Trump novels that went around about a young boy named Baron Von Trump who could travel in time and went underground to the hollow earth and all of this.
And it was very funny.
And it got, you know, these novels for the first time in a hundred years got written up in major publications about how weird they were.
But on the Chan boards, it was like, And this is all pre-Q.
This is before QAnon even existed.
How could all this be happening?
Why would there be a novel about X and Y and Z?
And someone goes, oh, well, it's because Donald Trump's uncle, John Trump, was one of the MIT researchers who was handed all the boxes of Tesla's papers after Tesla died.
And that's true.
That's actually true.
Got to give it to him.
But they spun that into, oh, okay, well then, clearly… That somehow Donald Trump's uncle, like, stole Tesla's ideas and handed it down to Donald, now Donald Trump knows the secrets of time travel.
Absolutely.
Created the time machine, has presumably, you know, a free fusion energy, you know, cold fusion devices, who knows what else.
Then essentially those people broke off of the larger lone gunman faction and really made Q their own because viewed through the lens of Tesla worship, all of Q's prophecies make more sense because he's got time travel technology and he's got X technology and Y technology and it's all back to Tesla.
And so, they had a lens through which to view QAnon that was very unique and appealed to a lot of people because it all – again, it is based in that grain of truth about John Trump.
Finally, there are two QAnon factions that are kind of similar, that fall under the broader kind of like 5D Ascension QAnon.
There's the QH and the Pastel QAnon.
So how are these similar and different?
So, the Q Age, again, it started as the Lone Gunman faction got bigger and more powerful.
That faction, by its very nature, touches on the edges of a lot of stuff going on.
Because once you're talking about, you know, the Reptilians, or the Arcturans, and the Galactic Federation, it is only so long until you're gonna run into Spirit Science.
You're gonna run into, well, did you know, That Jews and Atlanteans were higher dimensional beings from space who came here to teach us.
And that's why the carvings of Egyptian pharaohs were 50 feet tall, because they really were 50 feet tall.
And from there, you're going into the biblical accounts of giants, but it's not really fully biblical because you're also bringing in aliens.
And this whole sort of Christ consciousness Movement, and they start getting pulled in, that's where you start seeing the whole light worker stuff.
Donald Trump is a light worker, and he's influencing the vibrations of the human race, which will allow us to ascend.
Obviously, as the name would suggest, it's very much a set of New Age beliefs, but very, very Republican New Age.
It's New Age that's been filtered through a kind of biblical filter to allow the two sets of beliefs to sort of exist simultaneously in the same brain.
That like, oh yeah, Christ was real, and he was a great teacher of men, and he was probably 12 feet tall.
Because, as you know, people who exist on this higher level of vibration are bigger than normal people are.
You know, and that's where you get Lemurians and Atlanteans and all these movements starting to come in with this, again, that's very appealing to QAnon.
There's an older, purer, more spiritual kind of technology.
And that's what we're working back towards.
We're going to have this beautiful, perfect world.
And for the Q Age, that perfect world is a mythological one from antiquity.
But at the same time had hovering cars and spaceships and could align, you know, the vibrations of the universe to produce whatever.
So it's high-tech and spiritual sort of all at the same time.
And it became that's what the Great Awakening is going to lead us towards, is reclaiming this lost knowledge.
And Pastel QAnon, we've talked a lot about it before.
We've had Marc-Andre Argentino.
This is like the Instagram version of QAnon.
Exactly right.
It's the people who, I mean, truthfully, for a lot of these people, I don't think they had any idea what they were signing up for.
They were signing up, but they didn't know what for.
The yoga studios and the Reiki healers and To a certain degree, the anti-vax movement, these groups that 10 years ago, you would have said, oh, that's all the loony left.
It was, you know, they're traditionally feminine, traditionally left-leaning communities that, and I think I'm quoting you guys here, who signed up for Save the Children and then learned that underneath Save the Children was the QAnon pitch, and it was coming.
Right.
But they didn't know it at first.
They signed up because pedophiles are real.
I mean, you know, I don't think anyone's disputing that.
So this idea that we need to protect kids is very appealing cross-market, but those who stuck around after the rally, Got handed what I presume to be extremely interesting literature about how much more they had to learn and where the real source of danger was to the kids.
They were a faction that's very much a commodity.
They were seen as something to be recruited, something to be pulled in, something to be exploited.
And like the Boomer Chans, they had disposable income.
They absolutely did.
They have a tremendous amount of income.
But what I think was surprising to a lot of the pre-existing QAnon influencers is they didn't realize quite the power of the mommy blogger.
You know, the power of the Instagram celebrity where, no, I'm not going to pitch your idea to my people.
I'm going to listen to you, sure, but I'm going to retain my own audience.
I have 400,000 Instagram followers who watch me do stretches, and I'm going to tell them about what I think Q is.
And it sort of backfired.
It didn't shore up the numbers for the older generations of Q promoters.
They didn't recruit a lot of those people.
The Pastel QAnon joined the collective But really remained its own thing and marketed more or less to its own ranks.
It's fascinating stuff.
Yeah, that's if you want to learn more about this, I highly recommend Dapper Gander's Patreon page where he regularly publishes these really detailed and comprehensive sort of QAnon explainers to help a lot of people sort of understand what these people are talking about.
Is there anything else you want to plug before we let you go?
Anything I want to plug, I'm not used to this.
You're in the podcasting world now, baby.
I am on Twitter at Dapper Gander.
One word.
D-A-P-P-E-R-G-A-N-D-E-R.
And my Patreon is exactly the same.
The explainers are public, so don't have any fear about that.
There's not a paywall.
But if you did want to support me, I certainly wouldn't mind.
Dapper, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every single week plus access to our entire archive.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's Auto QQ.
Oh, Quill Feather.
I think this was our friend from yesterday's stream as well.
Would I box Travis View?
Well, I would box Logan Strain, if that's what you're talking about.
Heck yeah, I would.
Although, he would probably hit.
He would definitely hit a little harder than Will Sommer and Mike Rothschild would.
Got a little more meat on them bones.
And Logan Strain, he just seems like an angry dude.
Like, he's just got so much pent-up anger that... He needs an outlet for that, that's for sure.
He would probably, you know, take that, like, anger out on me.
