After 563 days of silence, Q made a surprising return on June 24th, the same day that the Supreme Court announced the repeal of Roe v. Wade. We discuss the new Q Drops, the technical mishaps that point the finger at the 8kun administrators, and the context surrounding Q’s reappearance.
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Music by Max Weber. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 193 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Q Returns episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, Dale Buran, and Travis View.
On December 8th, 2020, a mysterious entity known as Q made their last post, a URL for a music video on YouTube of Twisted Sisters' We're Not Gonna Take It.
But as it turns out, Q was not quite yet dead.
After 563 days of silence, Q made a surprising return on June 24.
They decided to break their extended silence on the same day that the Supreme Court announced the repeal of Roe v. Wade.
As reproductive rights protesters gathered all over the country, Q made three separate posts.
The very next day, another Q post went up, this time directly referencing the Supreme Court decision.
So on today's emergency episode, we're going to be exploring the new Qdrops, discussing a technical mishap that may point the finger at the 8coon administrators, and getting into some of the context surrounding Q's reappearance.
Amazingly, Dale was just in the neighborhood, kind of hanging out, waiting for something terrible to happen, and it finally has.
Yeah.
You were just driving by your house two or three times a day waiting, just checking Akon.
And it just happened that I was reading Akon and Q posted and I just knocked on your door.
It's a little bit of a missed opportunity that Q didn't wait a little bit longer so that our 200th episode could be a Q Returns.
It turns out 193 is, you know, could have been a little bit better.
You should pass him some notes like a Hollywood exec or something.
I'd be like, yeah, the timing of this actually could have been a little bit better for me personally, actually.
Yeah, so the absurd has happened.
And before, I mean, before we get into it, let's talk about whether we thought this was going to happen.
I admit that I did not.
I was like, you know, sometimes things end.
Sometimes like something's cool or in and then it's fucking gone and that's it.
That's that.
I would have given it a maybe 20%.
In my heart of hearts, I was ardently praying for the swift collapse of Aitken and all chans.
I don't know if it was an accurate prediction, I guess it wasn't, but that's sort of what I always hope will happen, that it'll all be swept away like a bunch of flotsam out into the ocean, and then there'll be a new garbage pile that they'll know nothing about, and I won't have to report on it anymore.
It's like an amazing mirror of their own accelerationism, but for their downfall instead of all of society's.
Right.
Yes.
I'm hoping for like a different Q-style revolution, like a different storm that will end all the chans.
And Jake, I think you have a victory lap to take.
We haven't checked into this, folks, so please go do your own research.
Let's find Jake commenting on whether he thinks Q will return before today.
Anybody who asked me in the last two years, if you asked me if I thought that Q was going to return, I gave you this answer.
So please write into Julian and the podcast at large to confirm if I said this to you or not.
But my go-to answer was always that, from a marketing standpoint, Q is too good of an IP to just let go.
Because, look, think about it this way.
You have this character, right, that has swayed millions of people who might not have normally been, you know, on your sort of political side, over to a more far-right ideology.
The character doesn't really get found out.
I mean, there's no definitive proof that we know exactly who did it, and it's kind of taken the magic out of it.
So, you didn't get burned, and you have this thing that has been wildly successful, wildly popular, that requires almost little to no overhead to produce.
So, to me, from an IP standpoint, a marketing standpoint, don't forget, my background is in entertainment, I thought that to not have some sort of resurgence of Q, knowing the power it had, And using it now as a political tool I just thought would be such a largely missed opportunity that whoever is the author or the sort of controller of the IP of QAnon would have to bring it back for a sequel.
I would have to say that it's probably more like a Season 2, and it is gonna suck so fucking bad.
Oh, it's gonna be so bad, I know.
It's gonna be Westworld Season 2.
Yeah, what do we have in store?
Do we have, like, a CGI reboot?
Like, when the Lion King came back and it was, like, live action?
Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, as we were talking when we were walking back from lunch, you know, the original QAnon sort of emerged, you know, about a year after Trump was in office and things, you know, he wasn't really draining the swamp.
You know, I've sort of categorized that as Q emerged as almost damage control to be like, hey, don't worry, you know, hey, don't worry, things are going on behind the scenes and it's great.
But now, but as we watch Q transform to take on stuff like the satanic panic and to spread election misinformation and all of that stuff, now Q is being brought back Knowing full well the political power that it has.
And so I think that the drops are, you know, most likely going to be much less esoteric and just more kind of your GOP mainline with maybe a little conspiracy mixed in.
I think everyone was definitely disappointed with the cliffhanger of posting a Twisted Sister video right before J6.
Then J6 happening and going completely silent.
That makes the ending of Sopranos look legible.
But yeah, no, season two is going to suck.
Travis is so fucking excited because this is bread and butter.
So Travis, tell us how excited you are.
And Travis, did you predict?
Did you ever think that it would come back?
I thought, I mean, I always thought it was possible, but I thought the odds weren't in its favor, mostly because of January 6th.
I think that, you know, you know, the individuals behind Q wouldn't want that much heat.
Now that QAnon, I think, became more famous in 2021 than it was in 2020.
Uh, because all of a sudden is now is it was bursting out of the real world previous in previous years, but now it burst into the real world in a real historic way.
All of a sudden you have the Q shaman, uh, and you know, Doug Jensen with his Q shirt at the Capitol, all of a sudden the whole world.
knows what the hell is this QAnon thing?
And you know, once I mean, that's that's I thought it was too much heat, too much scrutiny
for the individuals behind Q2Want.
But I guess I was wrong.
They're willing to roll the dice and return again and invite more scrutiny upon themselves.
I want to ask once again, I know I brought this back many times in season one.
So as we kick off season two, I just want to say what the Feds can make like a 15 year
old Muslim kid commit like and arm himself and commit some sort of violence.
They have crushed every fucking resistance they've ever tried to with COINTELPRO.
You're gonna tell me that years later, after J6 has occurred, you buffoons are still holding your dicks in your hands?
Don't you have the technology at this point?
You can't even do the Scooby-Doo, take the fucking hat off?
You can't take the fucking hood off Q?
You're the fucking FBI!
I know I'm becoming, like, a little, like, Lebanon here, but, like, can't you just, like, get the intelligence agencies to issue a warrant to, like, 8kun's back end or whatever and just find the fuck out?
Well, if they did that, they would do the same thing as what they did with the fucking CDs that were in Epstein's safe.
And we all know those went into the public record.
They go, like, with the ET cartridges in the desert, that's where you put them.
So let's start a conspiracy theory that these are feds.
That's why they're not catching him because these are the feds and the FBI is Q. Yeah, you and Michael Flynn agree
There you go folks The weird thing about it is that it was so sloppy before.
There were things like Discord, I think.
There were places where that data existed, where you could kind of easily find out.
And on 4chan and on 8chan, right?
Where if you just subpoenaed them, they would tell you.
But it turns out that most companies delete all of their data every two years just to save money.
And that's probably why it's all gone.
So now it feels like they're also coming back.
Maybe, Travis, as you say, because they had to Get a little safety plan in place that they had to use TOR this time.
It seems like maybe that they were worried that they were too sloppy before.
What would make them think that?
Sloppy?
Trip codes that even when we talk about super secure, that's one thing I do want to bring up.
We are talking about this is not like a PGP key.
This is not like high level encryption.
Like you can break these things.
And there is, I think Fred tweeted that the FBI came and asked him about Ron Watkins and the Watkinses.
So there is something going on.
They're just, you know, they're just taking their sweet time.
Think about the kid who ran the Silk Road.
They fucking they literally were observing him so closely that they knew when he went to the bathroom with his laptop open and busted down his fucking front door so they could have it.
And he's already logged in as the administrator.
That kid's in jail and he's going to stay there.
How could the FBI get enough resources to do the same job that Cullen Hoback, an independent filmmaker funding himself?
How could they possibly build the capacity for that?
The servers are in California, last I checked for Akon, so it makes sense now that if Q was doing what he was doing before, he was just writing in without the Tor browser, the FBI is probably monitoring those servers, or at least could subpoena them right now that there's some scrutiny.
I mean, they could, but the Tor browser is probably, that's the difference now, that he seems to be using that, and it makes sense now that he would.
I think my theory now actually is not that the feds are Q. It's that the guy in charge of their Q task force is bad lieutenant, and he's just out there exposing himself to young girls and committing gun crimes and dealing drugs.
I don't know.
He's got his own grift.
It could be so many things.
It could be that, yeah, the guy in charge of it is like, pilled himself in his own way,
and you know, it's like, doesn't necessarily seem to harm.
It could be that they know who it is and it won't change the narrative
or do anything for them one way or another.
So they're like, fuck it, it doesn't even matter.
It's actually better if people are, you know, still guessing on this for whatever reason.
I mean, there's just so much, we'll never, I would love to get a definitive answer.
I would love to have that chapter closed.
And in a lot of ways leading up to this episode, I sort of thought that it had been,
despite me maintaining that I thought Q would come back.
But it felt like there was no need, and we've talked about this, it felt like there was no need for Q anymore because, you know, what is sort of the meat and potatoes of QAnon became just a general talking point of your, you know, a GOP politician.
Well, yeah, here we are again, um, podcasting about Q-Drops, like we were when we started this podcast nearly four fucking years ago.
So let's start with the big return.
So here is the first Q-Drop after the long silence, and it's Q-Drop 4954.
Shall we play a game once more?
So, pretty classic return.
I think pretty solid.
Cryptic, weird, and also like a hundred previous Q-drops make reference to a game in one capacity or another.
There are also 16 previous Q-drops that specifically use the phrase, you know, shall we play a game?
So he's, you know, riffing on the theme.
He's doing exactly what Q has done before.
You didn't even finish the game.
This is like you play, you know, 45 minutes of Monopoly.
Everybody is at various levels of cash in their bank.
People are getting bored.
You put the game away.
And then like, you know, two years later you pull it out and you're like,
"Are you ready to play Monopoly once more?"
Yeah.
You know, the confusing thing about that was like, shall we play a game?
There are actually 25 Q-drops which use the phrase, this is not a game, which happens to be like a foundational principle of designing alternate reality games.
Kind of a mixed message.
This is not a game.
Shall we play it?
Now, the second Q-drop came in response to this question from an Anon on 8kun.
Throw us a bone, Q. We've all been waiting for what seemed like an eternity.
What's going on?
And Q replied this way.
It had to be done this way, Q. Are you ready to serve your country again?
You know, classic sort of themes like even all the chaos and the long waiting is all
necessary for some mysterious unknown reason.
The third Q drop on the first day of Q's return says this.
"Are you ready to serve your country again?
Remember your oath, Q."
Now this is of course a reference to the Digital Soldier Oath back in the summer of 2020.
Q encouraged people to take the oath, which is just the oath that like military officers and federal officials take, but with where we go one we go all added to the end of it.
And of course, on July 4th, 2020, Michael Flynn posted a video of himself and his family saying the QAnon oath.
So just, you know, revisiting all the old themes over and over again.
So Pithy playing the hits, you know, he opens up, he plays the hits.
Of course.
It's the sequel.
It's season two, as Julian likes to say.
If Q came back and was like, here is a detailed strategy for grassroots organization, like, you know, people would have been like, oh, man, like, oh, just another political thing, I guess.
Like, no promise of spy shit, no nothing.
Like, they know what they're doing.
But I mean, all of this is just saying, like, I'll be back, and like, oh, so that's gotta hurt before you go, let's bake Roe v. Wade.
You know what I mean?
It was all just set up for the next day, where it's like, this is why we're here.
And actually, the post about Roe is a response to two anonymous posts, and you'll see why it's a response to those after we read these.
Who was Jane Roe?
How do you control generations of a populace?
50 years of conditioning.
50 years of propaganda.
50 years of lies.
Peaceful protests.
Riots.
Summer of love redux.
What happens when you corner an animal?
Midterms.
D. Power implosion.
And the second post?
And then Q under the actual trip code response to both of those anonymous posts?
I mean, is this just them within one day fucking up and posting anonymously without the password?
This happens a few times, as Fred's noted as well.
It's just really easy to do.
The trip code system on the Chans is so crappy.
You forget all the time, you mess up, and Q's done all of those too.
You're just like, oh, I forgot to put the trip code in.
Because it automatically fills it in sometimes for you.
Yeah, I mean, he's done this before.
He's been like, just post it without the trip code, and then he has to go back and reply and say, yes, this is me.
I would also note that like, so I went back to look at the threads that these are in, and you just have to paint the picture of the flood of garbage that this is put in.
You can barely find them.
It's just picture hundreds and hundreds of posts of like, just gibberish, people posting butts, like people Spamming the same word over again, and then in this like flotsam of garbage, there's like these three posts and Q just picks one to respond to.
And they've been posting that for six months, for years, just like floods and floods of garbage.
And this is the context in which these things appear.
So decontextualized, they actually appear more cogent.
The only thing that makes them special is the trip code, right?
There's just like thousands of posts that look exactly like this.
And it's interesting, yeah, that he's responding to a question that people have been asking since Q left, which is, what the fuck is happening?
Q?
Hello?
I love that he does also, he does this thing sometimes where he's like patching in.
Establishing comms is like, he does this where he's like, I'm hooking up all my wires.
I'm like, I'm powering up my radio.
Like he does this.
This is a thing that he often does, which is like not how posting on 8chan or 8com works.
It's the posting equivalent of like the screen they show you that hackers use in like movies, where it's like, progressing, like initializing or whatever.
Flipping all the buttons to green.
A loading bar.
You're just a guy who's on Tor, which you can download easily, and you're just posting on 8chan.
My favorite one of those was when Q acknowledged some typos that they had made in a previous post and then blamed it on the fact that they were riding in a helicopter at the time.
In the chopper.
Sorry for the typo.
Sorry, I used the wrong version of there.
Getting my dicks sucked while I ride in this chopper.
Sorry.
That's a great excuse.
I'm going to use that.
Oh, sorry, I was riding in a helicopter.
I could arrange a helicopter ride for you, my friend.
Yeah, why aren't we podcasting from a helicopter?
Now, a lot has happened since Q previously stopped posting, and most notably for our purposes, there has emerged a prevailing theory that the individual most responsible for QAnon is one-time 8chan 8kun administrator Ron Watkins.
This was sort of the basic thesis of a Reply All episode.
This was the basic argument forwarded by Colin Hoback's excellent docuseries Q Into the Storm.
And the theory is basically that Q was fostered on 4chan by a mod named Paul Ferber.
And then when Q made the move to 8chan, Ron Watkins and crew hijacked it.
Paul Ferber and Ron Watkins, for their part, deny any authoring of the Q drops.
I'm not going to revisit all the evidence here, but that's the sort of the basic outline of what a lot of this really great journalism over the past couple of years have sort of stated.
Now, this theory was granted even more support thanks to the work by a Swiss startup called Orph Analytics.
They used software to examine the writing style of Q and then compared it to the writing style of several candidates for the author of the Q drops.
This analysis landed on Paul Ferber and Ron Watkins as most likely candidates.
So I will say just for my own purposes, like even if like it's true, I don't think it's like a complete theory.
I doubt those two were solely responsible for all the 4,000 plus QDROPs.
And if you were to identify those two as primarily responsible for the QDROPs, the explanation doesn't account for the people who may have helped promote QAnon off the chans, who might have been directly working with the QDROP authors.
And I think they're just as responsible for aiding in the success of QAnon as the people who personally wrote and posted the drops.
But that's basically the theory with the most evidence going for it so far.
On Twitter, Frederic Brennan, the creator of 8chan, who has since totally disowned it and actually worked pretty vigorously to help take it down, he posted evidence that suggests that Jim and or Ron Watkins were personally involved in these new Q-drops.
And I figure this might be an opportunity to take a step back and revisit how these trip codes work, because this concerns basically how Q verified themselves.
Now, we discussed this in the intro episode we released, but again, this was in 2018.
This was pre-COVID, pre-January 6th, pre-lots of things.
It was a different world.
I was a younger person.
My face did not have quite as many lines.
So the reason that we know that this is the so-called real Q on 8kun's Q Research Board, and not an imitator, is because the new posts are accompanied by a trip code.
And a trip code is just a string of characters that are on the post.
Q has gone through a few TripCos, about seven or eight in the past, since the passwords for previous TripCos were leaked or cracked.
The first password that Q ever used for their first TripCode, some may recall, was the word Matlock.
Just extremely insecure password.
Just the word Matlock.
No one's quite sure what exactly that meant, what the hell that may have referenced the famous TV lawyer, may reference a former U.S.
ambassador to the Soviet Union.
But yeah, Matlock.
The current trip code for Q is double exclamation point HS1JQ13JV6.
The two exclamation points at the beginning of the post let us know that's what they call a secure trip.
Like the name implies, it's more secure than a regular trip code.
This trip code is generated by a hashing algorithm.
This algorithm converts a password, which might vary in length, into the trip code, which has a fixed length.
But for extra security, the password isn't hashed by itself.
On the server side, there's a salt or a variable that nobody except for the administrators are supposed to know about.
So the server takes your password and then adds the salt value to it and then runs those together through the hashing algorithm to generate the unique trip code that can identify a particular user on an image board like 4Shan or 8Koon.
And what this means is that different salt values generate different trip codes even given the same password.
All this is relevant because there's evidence that the salt on 8kun has changed since Q stopped posting back in 2020.
This was first noticed by some 8kun users and was verified by others.
Ron Watkins says that occasionally, for security purposes, changes the salt and the procedure called salt rotation.
Dale, you're saying this is this is not done very often.
It was done possibly once on 4chan?
Yeah, it happens very rarely because, of course, if you change the salt, it breaks everyone's trip codes on the site.
So I guess it doesn't really make it more secure because if you're doing that, that means everyone has to say, hey, this used to be me.
This is my new trip code.
And it's very awkward.
So Ron, like two years ago in a Twitter thread, very defensively said that he was going to explain how salts work on what was then And he said, Oh, yeah, I rotate them every once in a while.
But that was actually in response to him suspiciously rotating them right when Q lost control of his Matlock password.
So it's not something that really is sort of typically done very rarely.
So yeah, for example, on 4chan, when I was looking into the Matlock issue and Q's trip code back when I did the reply all piece, I could post using Q's old passwords on 4chan.
So for whatever, 15 years, 4chan was using the same algorithm for at least unsecured trip codes for normal trip codes.
And then like last year I tried again because, you know, I just love to go on 4chan and post his queue sometimes.
Who doesn't love to post his queue now and again?
And it didn't work.
So they had rotated like once over, you know, 15, 18 years or something.
So it's very weird that this is something that is happening.
And the weird thing about this is that people thought, so the salt had remained the same from when Q last posted his last YouTube video link a year ago or whatever.
And then people at first thought they had rotated it a week ago, and then just a few hours before Q posted, it rotated.
So there wouldn't have been a problem, except a few hours before Q posted, the salt appeared to rotate.
Everyone's trip code appeared to break on the site.
And in that weird moment when no one's trip code was working, then Q posted with his old trip code that shouldn't have worked.
So a very just strange, goofy set of sloppy events that sort of fit very well into the history of sloppy events that are Q posting with trip codes.
So since the salt changed, you know, the question is, like, why Q was able to verify themselves when no one else who used the trip code was able to?
Right, exactly.
So it doesn't make sense if everyone else's trip code now spits out a different result.
Q's be the old one.
The idea that the salt rotate it makes the only possibility or the most logical possibility is that we know through Frederick Brennan that it's very easy for an admin to just type in anything they want as the trip code and that will appear.
So the admin, of course, has total control over the website.
So it looks like the easiest explanation here is that whoever was posting as Q was someone with administrator access who could just type in whatever they please as the trip code.
So is there any way that he fed the trip code backwards through the salt or is this like kind of a one-way street that he could never find a password that made Q post under that new trip code using the new salt?
No, yeah, so that you can't go backwards.
You can't kind of sort of take the trip code and then feed it backwards in and get the password.
That's the whole idea so that even the admin would never know Q's password.
The basic thing to understand here is The same password would have yielded a totally different trip code.
The only way that that old trip code can pop up with new salt is if you just enter it manually or some other manipulation occurs.
And the manipulation would have to occur on an administrative level, aka Jim and Ron Watkins or someone working with or for them.
Right.
Yeah, Jim Watkins, he apparently he was notified of this, this strangeness, the fact that for some reason, Q was the only person able to use or able to use the old trip code where even though that there was a different salt.
And he offered an explanation in the stream.
He said that Q's trip code was whitelisted or Q was whitelisted.
That doesn't seem like it makes sense.
It's my understanding that this term that Q was whitelisted was used to refer to the fact that only Q could use trip code at all on the Q Research Board.
Right.
So they, in their defense, they have used this term whitelisted before to refer to Q. And this was a problem that stemmed back from when Q's password, like Matlock, got leaked and so forth.
So what they did is that on the only board that Q posts on, Q Research, Q can post and a few other moderators can post with a trip code.
Everyone else just has to post anonymously.
So they refer to that as whitelisted.
But it's very confusing to think about, well, how was it whitelisted in a way where Q is posting and he's posting under this old salted algorithm where everyone else is posting and they're getting a different result?
So even though only a few people can do it on that board, it still didn't make sense.
So there was a moderator there, a board volunteer, who posted with his trip code and got a different trip code.
And he's like, what's going on?
I don't understand.
And when researchers noticed that, and that that had happened a few hours before Q posted, they went and tested it.
And they couldn't test on the Q Research Board because you can't post there with a trip code unless you're a moderator or Q. So they went elsewhere on the site, put in old trip codes, and they got a new result just like the moderator.
They encountered the same problem.
And that's relevant because the reason why you don't change the salt is because it changes the entire site.
We're not talking about just Cube's board.
We're talking about every board on the entirety of 8kun.
Suddenly anyone who is using a tripcode to identify themselves, even if they're part of the elite mod group or whatever, their passwords are giving out different tripcodes so no one can verify it's them.
Right.
I mean, they can reassert control with a variety of different things.
I mean, it's super murky, right?
Like, who knows?
That's the typical thing, right?
That's what you would imagine.
It's the easiest, laziest thing to do, right?
You go in and you can change the word in the salt from one word to another word, and then that breaks all the trip codes on the site.
That appears to be what happened.
I mean, but who knows what's going on behind the scenes?
There are different tiers of trip code, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
So like, it seemed like also they changed.
There's a higher tier than secure.
They're super secure.
And those trip codes broke.
So someone came in, that's a different salt.
So someone came in and broke both of those, changed both those salts.
Mm-hmm.
It seems very strange.
Here's a question.
Here's a question for you guys.
Let's say, okay, let's say I'm like a Dave Hayes.
Let's say I'm somebody who writes the Q drops that isn't affiliated with Ron or is, you know, maybe loosely associated or whatever, but isn't an 8chan admin myself.
In order to post, if I say, okay, you know what?
I'm praying medic.
My book sales are shitty.
I'm gonna come back as Q today on the Roe v. Wade thing.
In order to post with the same trip code, he would essentially have to contact somebody that was an admin at Ahan, say, hey, guys, I know how the salt works, or tried it out anonymously and went, hey, I'm not getting the same thing.
I'm not getting the same intro.
Can you guys make it sure that it's the same trip code as the last time so I can be properly identified at Q?
That was what would have to happen if it was a third party or somebody affiliated.
So if it's a third party, they would have had to go through the admins anyways.
So whether it's them specifically who made the post, I think it's obviously becoming more, there's more and more evidence and it's more and more likely that they're directly or very like one degree, you know, like employee type thing, but I don't know.
I mean the way that I think about it metaphorically is like there's a sleazy bar called 8chan and inside the bar You know all these little crimes go on it's full of shitty people and then there's a scam going on in the bar where there's like they're hiding by the curtain they have a little theater show and and and there's a guy named Q and he's a secret agent he gives special special messages and then while the show is going on the bar owner's like I have nothing to do with that that's nothing that I don't and then but then you keep seeing them behind the curtain when the curtain falls down they keep picking it back up right that's what happens you see glimpses of them making the drama yeah as it's happening
Yeah, and we'll see the clips of Jim Watkins doing the exact same thing this time.
Yeah.
So, Jake, what you were saying where people have to go and then ask the admins, that's what was happening.
So there's another board where you kind of go if you have a problem.
And so they were all going to that board and being like, I have a problem with my trip code.
And then they were getting verified.
They said, well, OK, well, here's your new trip code, and you can post with the old one to verify that you're the same person or whatever.
By the way, there is a special board set up for Q for this problem that Q has never used.
Oh yeah, it's called like DCOMS or something like that?
Yeah, so this would have been a way for Q to solve this problem.
That's just a version of like the Better Business Bureau where the grade is always just A+.
It's just sitting there like, there's been no complaints from The man or person known as QAnon about the Watkins service.
Yeah, what you have to understand that this big sloppy like mess that we're talking about has happened like ten times already, right?
This is typical.
Why are we still covering it?
Yeah, so in one of the many times in the past that's why that board was set up, right?
And it's just and he still didn't use it.
So like none of it makes any sense Why was the trip code staying the same for 10 months and then broke an hour before?
There is maybe a slender argument that It's possible that the trip codes broke in some way where like a lot of them broke, but Q's was still working, but it's just so improbable and it looks... The only really rational explanation is that the administration was helping Q do this.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, so Jim Watkins responded to news that it seems like the salt had rotated, and the Q posted with their old trip code.
Despite that, in the video that was flagged by Twitter user 2022 underscore karma, who we've had on the show before, she does really amazing work tracking QAnon influencers.
So here's what Jim had to say about about this nonsense.
Then it's the same account that hasn't logged in for a long, long time.
So That should be proof enough that it's at least the people that have the proper password and everyone says it's a It's like ten or less.
Well, that may be I don't know because I don't know who they are.
They're there He they they're they're a group of people that don't give me what's going on.
I As far as the trip code's changing, the server's changed a lot and that's possible.
But that particular trip code is whitelisted and exempted from any sort of thing like that.
So that would be a separate thing.
But I didn't do any editing to the machines at all this weekend because I am in Southern California and I don't bring my Wow, unbelievable.
I couldn't have done the crime because I was out of town.
I'm in California where you can't use computers.
Can't you see I've got chocolate pudding on my face?
I was eating chocolate pudding!
I didn't know... I love that I was in Southern California is a great excuse for anything.
Yeah, really.
Yeah, that's so true.
I love that the video is shot as if...
He has put the phone like on a sidewalk and he's leaning over like he's just hit you over the head.
He's about to go rifle through your pockets.
He's explaining to you why he didn't do anything wrong.
That's the framing.
This is essentially POV.
Jim Watkins has you in the trunk of his car.
It's just, from a filmmaking standpoint, yeah, it belongs in the Criterion Collection.
He rocks.
After this was pointed out to Jim and some 8toon users complained that their password no longer generated the same trip code, the issue was resolved and old passwords started generating their typical trip codes again.
While Jim Watkins was driving down the freeway in Southern California, he recorded a video saying that the problem is fixed.
So anyway, I have my lab partner.
looking at the problems online and and he found the problem and he's fixed it already and should be good your your trip code should be back to normal okay that's a separate problem from what uh and i and i'll i'll give you a good report on that on tuesday I think an interesting note is that Alex Kaplan from Media Matters pointed out that last year, Jim Watkins expressed hope that Q would return.
Anyway, the reason we had to put up with all of this is because 8Q.top is over the target all the time.
And then it's full of all these divisive characters and what have you, and you're all hoping Q will come back.
Me too.
You know?
But I'm not Q. I don't have control over that.
All I can do is try to get these things up.
While we were recording, Frederick Brennan and Robert Amor
of the Q Origins Project posted some further evidence that Jim and or Ron Watkins are involved
in the new Qdrops.
And it relates to the fact that Q used a Tor browser in order to make these new drops.
We know that Q used the Tor browser because the ID of the new drops is just six zeros in a row.
Robert Amor posted some data about how often this Tor posting has happened
on 8Toon in the past few years.
And he could check this by seeing how many posts include that six zero ID.
It turns out, according to posts that have been archived, that the Tor posting was disabled since September of 2021, but enabled about 5 hours before the first new Q post.
Now, Robert Amore tells me that he archives hundreds of posts per hour.
Now, the board owner of Q Research claims that Tor Posting was actually enabled a few days ago.
But, like, either way, the browser that Q used to make these new drops was permitted, like, right before Q posted.
I mean, come on.
It's just, it signals that, like, you know, the people who are actually running the site are In league with the, at the very least, in league with who is ever posting as Q. Yeah, that's pretty incredible.
And I think that it would be crazy to go back on a cunning post as Q without TOR protection.
In that case, if an authority subpoenas them, which happens all the time with the chans, and wants to know where that information is from, if it's
just a VPN, that's not as strong a protection as what they're doing. So it definitely
implies a lot of savviness on the part of the Q and I guess the administration of Aitken who
seem to be collaborating on this project.
>>STEVE You think, you know, I think that they thought they were being more secure.
It's like, oh, let's use Tor Browser from now on.
Let's just switch on Tor Browser and that way it can't be linked to us.
But as a matter of fact, because they didn't consider the fact that they would basically tilt their hand to reveal that they're using the Tor Browser and that they happen to enable the Tor Browser right before it, it actually is a stronger signal that administration is involved in these posts.
But not in the case of a subpoena.
And I think that's that's where it's savvy.
It's like, they don't give, I'm sorry, but the Watkins probably don't give a shit about any of us.
And they're just thinking, like, when the FBI comes and asks, we can be like, this is Tor.
We have no control over that.
We can't, we can't track that IP or whatever.
I suppose that's true.
I mean, like, if they're, if they're trying to uncover data about exactly which browser was used or whatever, then yeah, that can't be accessed because they're using Tor.
It has to pass in court, basically, not just us going, "This is more and more insanely obvious," which it is.
But, you know, it's like one of those movies where you know who the guy is, like, right at the beginning of the movie.
And the whole thing is just like trying to get anything from that knowledge.
Yeah. So as you can imagine, the usual suspects, QAnon followers and promoters and people who have been following
this for years and sincerely believe it, we're all ecstatic about the return of Q.
For example, QAnon promoter Clandestine, who made news for promoting false claims about conventions breaking research
in U.S.-funded Ukrainian biolabs, wrote this.
For those that don't understand why it had to be this way, think about the optics in 2017 juxtaposed to 2022.
I think many of you forgot what it was like in 2017.
Trying to wake up normies was a tough business.
My friends and family looked at me like I was an eight-headed monster when I told them that a global deep state entity infiltrated the U.S.
government to include the White House, nearly all of Congress, the highest echelons of the DOJ, FBI, CIA, DNI, State Department, the mainstream media, big tech, social media, Hollywood, academia, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, etc.
In 2002, the normies are much more willing to accept this reality simply because they've seen it proven to them.
So in the near future, when we have to introduce uncomfortable realities like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Bill Gates, and more using U.S.
funds to facilitate a biological weapons network in Ukraine to commit global biogenocide, The public are more willing to believe it because they have a well-established precedent of the deep state players exhibiting untrustworthy and nefarious behavior.
In addition, this subsequently generates a well-established precedent that Trump was right about everything.
It's really like nothing has changed.
I'm transported back to 2018.
The normies are about to wake up.
The truth, the flood of truth is going to flow forth.
All of my friends who made fun of me for having stupid beliefs are going to come to me and say, you were right the whole time.
Trump was a good guy after all.
I was wrong.
If I were to say the normies getting red pilled was their goal, where do you think they're at with that goal at this point?
I'm not, not very, not like they had hoped.
You don't think we've had a huge surge in red-pilled lunatics?
Maybe a takeover of the GOP?
You don't think this victory lap is warranted?
You know, I think the extremists have consolidated a little bit more power now than they have in 2022, but it's nowhere near quite No, I don't think there's a massive, you know, red-pilling of people who believe that Hillary Clinton deserves Gitmo.
I don't think... I do!
Look, it's only... I think that's like base GOP beliefs at this point.
Five or six...
Yeah, but I think there's a little difference between, you know, there's a little dent.
local governments actively promote still to this day QAnon talking points and ideologies and and
and QAnon itself uh you know at the beginning of their political careers. I hate to say you
gotta hand it to them but in this case you gotta hand it to them they made a fucking dent a little
bit. Yeah but I think there's a little difference between you know there's a little dent you got a
few uh Q-pilled uh members of congress is a very different than the great awakening this vision
where everyone wakes up to uh the horrors of our reality and then and then people like me
no in their vision I am not podcasting.
I'm too ashamed for ever doubting their genius.
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
But when you're talking about extremist Christians and conspiracy theorists, you can't judge them by their own... They literally think like someone's gonna come down from heaven or fucking aliens are gonna take over.
But they have gained ground with their belief system.
Which is what I'm saying.
Normies have been red-pilled!
And look, and look, to defend Travis, to defend Travis... I think we're talking about two different things.
He doesn't want to give it to him.
He doesn't want to give it to him.
No, I don't want to give it to him because like it's like it's if you're talking about like there are more people now who Who are you?
Believe in a red pill more normies red pill.
That's the only that's what they wanted to do I mean, yeah Well, I suppose that's like, you know That's that was always my concern like it's like there's like an increasing number of people who were you know Buying into this QAnon nonsense is harming them.
That's I suppose been my thesis for years So I suppose in the terms of like are there more people who built who are you?
Believe in QAnon now or believe in the QAnon-like beliefs than the beginning of 2018?
I suppose that's true.
But look... But that's kind of it, right?
Red-pilling the normies, like, when it gets down to their actual tangible... When Q followers become pragmatic, that's always what they go to.
Now they've stacked that with, you know, local government takeover stuff.
Yeah, but now they're back to, like, you know, they don't believe in, like, you know, Yeah, you're right.
They sort of fall back on like, go vote.
Let's run for your local office.
Let's get our guys in Secretary of State positions, which is like, you know, sort of like cold, steely-eyed politics strategy.
But that's actually happening, and it's working, and the new Q actually is pushing people out of their... We used to think of this as an armchair kind of thing, and we used to think of it as, like, you know, or there was more of a focus on, like, enjoy the movie because Trump was in office.
But this is actually an activist version of QAnon that is now being spoken to.
Well, maybe this will get them back in their seats, you know?
But look, look, look.
I knew it was the Fed.
Look.
I knew it.
Look.
Go back to your seats.
It's all a movie.
Ray?
Egon, if you were to have the Great Awakening as the QAnon believers fantasized about,
what would have to happen for that to take place is for it to be true.
You would have to have the master rests and Hillary going to get Moe and Barack Obama, you know, being charged with treason for the great awakening that they were envisioning.
That's the only way you get a massive awakening if it- If it's real!
And so people will never get there.
I know that's what I'm saying.
So there's no point like judging their success on that.
I judge their success on how many people are they pushing into this conspiracy because it is millenarian.
It's always like something's about to happen.
That's the nature of it.
So the question is how many people can you convert to that millenarian way of thinking and even maybe doing like activism and running for government and shit because again you can't you can't you can't be like millenarians have you know are not gaining any ground, they're not successful because
Jesus hasn't come back.
No, right? I mean, there has to be... we can't judge them on that, otherwise, of course,
why even study them then?
I also feel like QAnon is also like a convenient container for a lot of this stuff,
where a lot of the times when devotees talk about it, they subscribe to a variety of conspiracy theories or
political beliefs.
And they're like, well, isn't that easy?
I can just wrap it.
I can just say QAnon.
I can just sort of wrap it up.
I can put most of this in my little basket.
Yeah, so it's kind of hard to tell whether, without the basket of QAnon, they would probably be subscribing to a bunch of other loopy things on the internet.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think the far-right shift would have happened without the label of QAnon.
It could have been any other thing.
Right.
These are all essentially extensions of this shift rightward in American consciousness and a shift towards more dissociation and more despair that has been occurring over, you know, generations now.
Yeah, I mean it could have just happened with Epstein.
You know, which is one thing we've talked about that's interesting about QAnon is they don't really talk about Epstein all that much.
They say that the fact that Epstein exists and his story is real proves all of the other stuff that they're talking about.
But in the absence of QAnon, they would have just baked the shit out of the Epstein suicide and maybe arrived at the same place.
You never know.
But if you see them as activists...
Epstein served to red pill more normies.
Again, if that's the final goal, you know, like, I think we have to kind of look at them now in a more tangible way.
Like what are their actual effects in organizing?
Because you show up to these things, and there's like two layers, right?
Like you've got an event that's like highly organized, there's speakers, there's money flowing, there's people taking fucking hotels and shit.
And then there's the shit they say on stage, which obviously is insane and half of it makes no sense or it's just wish-casting or whatever.
But that's not the actual thing we're studying.
What we're studying is those people getting hotels, those people getting together around this kind of system and giving it cultural purchase, giving it funding, and giving it the type of infrastructure needed to have events or to have talking points come up comfortably in the mouths of politicians.
And I think in that measure, I mean, you know, again, I don't think we disagree fundamentally, Travis, but I think they've been quite successful.
And when they take a victory lap, are they still not going to make sense?
Of course!
By definition, that's what they do, is use these dissociative fantasies to feed what has become, in my opinion, kind of out of the chair and into the streets or into the school boards kind of movement.
Now, throughout the history of QAnon, QAnon followers have been notorious for overbaking.
They find extreme amount of meaning in little symbols and little things.
Now, Clandestine warned QAnon followers about this kind of overbaking.
Use discernment before posting something.
If you have to think if it's a proof, it's not a proof.
There should be zero stretching involved.
Stop trying to find 17s in everything.
Just talk about the content of the drops and how they relate to real-world happenings.
That's it.
The things critics point to are never directly from Q. It's always from followers who don't know how to interpret the drops or Anon's guessing on dates that big things will happen.
The critics point to these things instead of the drops themselves because, quite frankly, Q was right about pretty much everything, with the major exception being that people will be held accountable, which obviously hasn't happened.
And this podcaster would like to add the major exception of Trump winning the 2020 election also didn't materialize for them.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, Q was right about everything except for the main things.
And I, you know, I hate to repeat this and revisit this, but the specific content of the Q-drops, not just the bakers and the people who are interpreting Q-drops, was wrong.
The Q-drops were wrong.
For example, Huma Abedin wasn't indicted on 11-6-2018, which is contradicts Q-drop 15. And there wasn't an unforgettable
parade on 11-11-18 contra Q-drop 8-5-6. And the world didn't learn the truth
in July of 2018, and Rod Rosenstein didn't resign and the resignation that was
initiated by a FISA D-class, and there wasn't a red wave or red tsunami in
2018. The Democrats won that. So the Q-drops specifically were wrong, repeatedly.
Yes, yes. Yes, keep telling us all the wrongs.
And I guess what it comes down to is that we don't have a disagreement.
I just think they're wrong, but effective.
I guess we don't have a disagreement.
The only reason I was interested in QAnon in the first place, because they were disturbingly effective at sort of Getting these nonsense conspiracist beliefs up the media chain, you know, or I guess getting it to spread to people who otherwise wouldn't, would be embarrassed to sort of talk about these nonsense because they felt like they had sort of an insider.
They felt like they were getting information from someone, you know, who knew what they were talking about.
And bringing it back to even the early days, Dale, before Q signed their drops, Q, when these were all just a series of kind of, you know, pranks or trolling campaigns on the chans, they, even the people who didn't believe in Q but just wanted to push it because they thought it was funny, that was the idea.
It was like, it's going to red pill normies, which is what we want.
Right.
If you kind of look at it in the larger pattern of these Chan pranks that are used for political purposes, this strategy of just workshopping an idea that gets traction that sort of can be used as a political weapon, because it's successful in like the meme verse, that it's somehow sticks in people's minds.
Right.
QAnon has been great as generating a series of sort of political arguments that then have been picked up by senators or congressmen.
Yeah.
And then they just use the QAnon stuff because they realize like, oh, it's virally successful.
It's something that people stick with.
And so they're sort of workshopping talking points or means of attack.
So in that sense, it's been very successful.
I mean, it's opened a larger channel to push Chan beliefs into the mainstream.
You know, it used to be a little more like, oh, a political operative drops by to get some ideas or Alex Jones doing some research or whatever.
But now it's it's there's there's an actual way for that information to travel way easier and continue to do what the Chan members wanted originally in their hatred for society in the world, which is these people need to think like us.
If they don't see it like we're not going to get anywhere.
Right, yeah.
So ideas about the other side being secret criminals that are involved in a conspiracy.
All of those things were picked up by political actors, or at least used in a way that resembled QAnon.
So it looks more like 4chan.
And that's stuff that had started, you know, back in 2016, when Bannon was calling from the Chans and so forth, that he realized that, yeah, you could take viral ideas, far-right viral ideas, and use them in political campaigns.
So yeah, QAnon is just sort of like the last in that line, has also been very successful.
We've probably discussed this point before, but this idea that the boomers are just having their technological moment, that when they get on Facebook for the first time, they're the most overwhelmed, more overwhelmed than the younger people who have slowly been inoculated to it.
And Facebook resembles 4chan, all the social media networks that People are just now older people just not getting on to.
Resemble 4chan, it works on a stream of memes.
So this idea that 4chan can then inject memes into those places and radicalize people in the same way and turn people into channers in a sense where they're all just hyper addicted to posting, hyper addicted to weird marginalia that's coming through their feed and entertaining themselves by sitting online in the same way that 4chan developed 10-15 years ago.
And then inflecting that with right-wing ideas.
Yeah, that's been a very successful methodology because the sea of people, the amount of people onboard it onto Chan-like spaces is just immense.
Now, there's a question of why exactly Q would return at this time.
And it's been speculated that Q returned on the same day that Roe v. Wade was overturned because, I mean, there's really no sugarcoating it.
It's like the biggest victory for the American right in generations.
And over the past two years, at least, Trump supporters were taking a few losses.
The, you know, the lack of the storm was a bummer.
Trump's loss was a bummer.
It's hard to reconcile with a movement that's all about how victory is imminent.
There was a big high of the American right and then Q decided to rush into now in order to, you know.
Make their make their sort of presence and basically that you know, it's interesting if it if the if the tour posting was enabled just hours before the first new queue drop, that basically means that that signals that like they saw the Roe v. Wade was was being overturned, they saw an opportunity and then they decide to just switch on tour posting right then because of that.
This is how prosperity gospels work, right?
Oh, the money came in.
Hey, it's me, your guy from two years ago.
Remember the cult leader?
Yeah, you haven't heard from me in a little while, but look what I did!
Right.
It's like it was all me the whole time.
Your victory, all because of me.
There's also a sense of momentum, I think.
I mean, Roe v. Wade, obviously, like you said, a huge kind of setback for progressivism and a huge kind of conservative victory for these ghouls who've been plotting this kind of stuff for a while.
But this comes on the heels of a series of victories that they've had.
In a kind of tangible political sense, not a cultural sense, where they were able to kind of change laws around transgender people and gay people.
And so, you know, they're starting to get a really unfortunate sense of momentum where promises are being delivered to them right before the election.
Whereas with the Democrats, I would just argue that saying a poem in front of the building is not going to get you more voters.
And they are the ones supposedly in control of Congress and the presidency.
And yet they can't even deliver even an aesthetic win, let alone like something as deep as getting fucking Roe v. Wade reverse, which is like the wet dream of every little pence of this world who dreams of kind of doing electroshock therapy to to the pink hairs.
You know, there's also been some speculation that Q is returning because the original Q was facing pressure from an imposter.
Specifically, I'm referring to the Truth Social Q. So, Truth Social is Trump's social media platform, which he started with former Congressman Devin Nunes.
And it's a platform where posts are called truths and reposting is called retruthing.
One of many attempts to create Twitter, but for the right, there is, you know, Parler and Gab.
But this is different because it involves Trump, Trump posting.
So, but from the start, the site suffered from technical glitches.
It was a huge waiting list when it first launched.
There was a lack of support on Android and Trump actually didn't even bother posting anything on the site until May, even though the site self-launched in February.
He was a little ambivalent, let's say.
He did come back to start talking about golfers and calling people little rats and stuff.
And in addition to that, started retweeting a bunch of QAnon followers, which is so he's right back to his old habits.
Another thing is that the people behind Truth Social seem to be actively courting the QAnon community, and one line of evidence is the fact that there's an account on True Social that's just called AtQ.
It seems to be like one of the first accounts that they ever made.
Like, they wanted to park that one to make sure that they had that in their pocket.
Former Trump defense official Kash Patel actively encouraged speculation that it's the real Q by posting a picture of someone wearing a flannel shirt, and then the post says, having a beer with AtQ right now.
And there's a big beer.
Let's be clear.
There's a big, juicy beer.
Come on, Travis.
It is a nice, cold, refreshing lager, it looks like.
It looks very nice.
This is just gonna be a thing where, like, for the next 30 years, whenever there's a right-wing social media site, there's gonna be a Q section like a Santa Claus at the mall.
Like, there's just, there's gonna be a Q there.
And they'll be like, oh, Q's over there, too!
It's gonna be like a little Q franchise.
Okay, now sit on Q's knees and ask him who you want to be sent to Gitmo this year.
Who's on your list?
Makes sense.
He might as well install a Q section.
Devin Nunes actually also responded to a post from the Truth Social Q by saying, who is Q?
And you know, even, what's his name?
Oh yeah, Praying Medic.
He's apparently so starved for Q drops.
that he started baking the Truth Social Q Q-drop.
So there's been a lot of energy around this new Truth Social Q.
When you start fucking hitting the baking powder 'cause you're out of coke.
Yeah, he's starving.
So Kash Patel was directly asked about Q on the live stream show, Patriot Party News,
and a clip flagged by Karma on Twitter.
Patel says that he is deliberately appealing to the QAnon base.
He's pretty open about it.
I know that there are a whole lot of Qs on shirts and things like that.
I know that the number 17 means a whole lot to us.
Does any of that mean anything to you in your real life?
No, look, you know, I think people are having fun with Q, and I think also that, you know, I don't really follow him.
We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences, because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement.
There it fucking is!
Jesus Christ!
Hey, no, no, no, we don't follow Q at all, but, uh, damn does it do numbers.
Yeah.
We just use him for our own purposes.
Okay, straightforward.
Oh, Q, no, that's a pawn in our propaganda game.
Yeah, right.
He's a great marketing tool, yes.
Q, yes.
Oh, no, no, no, obviously Q, that's bullshit, but the people who believe in this bullshit put money in my pocket, so I can't pay anything.
Very nice.
What do you want me to do?
Listen, it's a wide breadth of people and they have deep pockets.
No, but interestingly, Kash Patel, in that same interview, he acknowledged that QAnon followers believe in a lot of kooky conspiracy theories.
And he objects to them, not because they believe false things, but because they hurt his cause.
He, for example, singles out the belief that fraud could be proven and then that would get Trump back into the White House.
Of course, that's impossible.
There's simply no legal mechanism that would allow Trump to be returned to the White House unless he's re-elected in 2024.
You can't ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following, but what you can do is educate them on what is true versus what is, you know, conspiracy theory or what is a waste of time.
And I'll give you a great example.
And some people don't like hearing it from me, but they're like, hey, how do we get President Trump back in office?
I'm like, well, in 2024, you put him back in office by winning.
They're like, well, can't we get him back in now?
And I'm like, no.
I'm sorry.
You know, like, even if tomorrow there was a recount and it all went away the way that many, so many of us thought it was going to go in President Trump's favor, there's literally no mechanism on planet Earth that would allow him to be put back in the Oval Office.
I mean, look, I wish it wasn't true.
I wish there was another way to do it.
I mean, but that's the reality.
So I have those tough conversations and, you know, on programs, whether it's yours or whoever.
And when I go to live speaking events, a lot of people bring up Q and a lot of these other theories.
And I'm like, look, there's a lot of good to a lot of it.
But if we don't unite on the one thing that we want, which is America first candidates, be President Trump or senators or governors or attorney generals, then we're going to fail.
I like that he was like, well, look, I I'm I wouldn't love that these Democratic protections weren't in place.
I would love!
I would love to be a way, a backdoor that we could just install the guy that we like.
Like, as a dictator for life.
That's obviously... What I want!
We share the same, we share the same desires, but I'm, look, I'm better than you, I'm more realistic, you know, I know that it comes down to the vote, you know, you can't change anything in this system, it's only with your vote, so... It's like the equivalent of your parents being like, don't you want to study law instead of art?
You know, Jim Watkins actually has an account on True Social and his account name is JimIsNotQ.
One word, this is true.
Unbelievable.
I mean, seems like you're protesting a little too much at this point.
Yeah, yeah, the lady doth protest a little too much.
Others have theorized that Q is returning to help the congressional campaign of Ron Watkins.
Now, Ron, as you may remember, is running for Congress in Arizona, and he's run into some speed bumps on his political journey.
I remember when I bumped into Ron Watkins at the Trump rally in Arizona, and people were treating him like a rock star there.
They were like fist bumping him.
It's been reported that he's had some difficulty fundraising and most of his campaign funds come from a loan he gave his own campaign.
they think he is, but that kind of a support at the Trump rally doesn't seem to have translated to
support more broadly. It's been reported that he's had some difficulty fundraising,
and most of his campaign funds come from a loan he gave his own campaign.
Watkins reported making a $95,000 loan to his campaign on March 29th. Watkins' loan came just
four days after his campaign amended a campaign finance report to include over $20,000 in funds
that originally failed to disclose, and one day after, the Federal Election Commission sent a
letter asking Watkins to disclose the source of those funds before May 2nd.
The fundraising for Watkins' campaign remains far behind other contenders for Arizona's second district congressional seat.
Another candidate named Tom O'Halloran raised $578,000 in the first quarter and ended March with $1.7 million cash on
hand.
Republican candidate and former Navy SEAL Eli Crane raised $647,000 in the quarter and he has $483,000 cash on hand.
So there are multiple times more wealthy campaigns than Watkins is doing.
And he's also not been doing so great at the debates.
At a recent debate, Ron was chastised by his fellow Republican Walt Blackman for misunderstanding the situation regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Military aid to Ukraine.
What do you think, Ron?
I support military aid to Ukraine, but I want to say that we would not even be in Ukraine if President Biden did not shut down the Keystone Pipeline on the first day.
Because now that that's shut down, we have to get our oil and we're getting it from Russia and we're getting all these problems through the Ukraine.
And that would not have happened if Biden did not.
So you see the Ukraine, the pipeline helped prompt Russia to invade Ukraine.
Yes sir, because we've got all of this oil coming through from Russia to the United States and they want the better routes to bring the oil through.
Can I clarify?
This is what I'm talking about.
That's not why they went into Ukraine.
He went into Ukraine because Ukraine didn't want to be part of NATO.
Listen, you're trying to work on a national stage and you don't even know why the war started in Ukraine.
It had nothing to do with the Keystone Pipeline.
The Keystone Pipeline caused the inflation and the increase in our gas prices.
The reason why he went into Ukraine is because Russia wanted Ukraine, as they had them pre-World War II in Ukraine, wanted to be part of NATO.
Respond, please.
He's right.
I made a mistake.
All right.
It's like watching Ron Watkins join a professional basketball game in the NBA.
Yeah, this is painful.
Painful to watch.
People who actually are politicians playing around him very quickly.
That's something I have never once ever seen in a political debate, where he's sort of dunked on by his fellow candidates, and then the candidate says, yeah, you're right.
I agree.
Never mind.
Forget everything I just said.
That's very weird.
Ron's not actually trying to be elected, right?
He's just trying to seem like not the guy behind Q for a certain period of time and also maybe run a campaign so he doesn't get, like, arrested or something.
Ron also knows that the people who are going to vote for him is not because he has a command over the politics of the situation.
They're voting for him because they like Ron Watkins, or they think it's funny, or they like that he's not in this sort of stuck-up political class or whatever.
He doesn't have to prove anything to anybody.
They're going to bake those answers.
They're going to say, A, disinformation is necessary, that's why he said that, and B, he's trolling.
And they're like, we won.
Yeah, exactly.
They go, oh my god, he trolled him so hard.
He just wanted to get that guy upset.
And he did.
Epic.
Also possibly relevant to this whole situation, Ron Watkins is about to be subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee.
Earlier in June, Ron Watkins posted a letter that was an outrage from the January 6th Select Committee, and then he posted this defiant response.
The January 6th Committee has attacked my father in an attempt to derail my congressional campaign.
Now they are asking me to voluntarily accept service of the subpoena.
The January 6th Committee can pound sand.
I am not hiding.
My campaign schedule is public.
Their incompetence is on display for all to see.
And also, you know, Jim Watkins actually testified for a few hours recently.
So yeah.
So that's it, boys.
Q is back.
Great.
Bad news all around.
Great.
Yeah, no, this is very encouraging, you know?
And, you know, when you kind of prompt us and Jake just inhales a giant vape cloud, you know that he's also probably done.
He's tuckered up.
I'm done.
I'm done.
This was bad news all around for me.
It was really nice not having to... Are there going to be new drops?
How are the people reacting to the drops?
How are the drops now percolating out into the real world?
It was nice to have a show for a while where it was like, QAnon has existed in many forms over over the last hundreds of years.
Like, that was fucking nice.
You know, I really enjoyed that.
I was at my best.
I mean, 13 months of therapy, doing great, doing great.
(laughing)
It was good.
And now I can even feel it.
I can feel myself just, it's like the record ended and then there was like, you know, a little bit of silence and then the needle went back to the beginning and like you're hearing the same songs over and over again and it's just, it doesn't feel great.
I don't care.
I mean, I don't know if that's, like, being, like, you know, brutally honest.
It's like, you know, especially in the face, you have this fucking completely evil, you know, Supreme Court ruling that's setting us back, you know, God knows how many fucking years.
It's barbaric.
And people are like, oh, the internet spy's back!
Like, what's the internet spy gonna get people to say this week?
And, like, what are they gonna...
Yes, when the Gestapo shows up to your door and they put the gun to the back of your head, you'll just be whispering stuff like, assault rotation.
This is just another little harbinger.
It's just like if a Goatman were wandering around.
You're like, oh, Goatman's back.
That's just small potatoes to you.
I looked at the paint diagram.
I looked at the paint diagram and it seems other people looked at the paint diagram and they seem to understand it a little bit better.
I still don't understand it at all.
We're going to have to get an entire bathtub filled with ice and cool Jake off like every episode now.
We're going to be dipping him.
Baptizing this boy.
If possible, I would like to wake up with stitches in my side, all vital organs gone, you know, gone, sold.
I can take care of that.
You send the money to my family and do with me what you will.
Well, I can do everything except to send the money to your family.
Obviously, if I'm selling your organs, that's a really intense activity.
I think it deserves a bit of the money for myself, yeah.
Well, I'm looking forward to an era where there are like...
18 rival Qs, like petty princes in like a warring state period where they're all calling each other false Qs.
Yeah.
And that there will be like a lot of petty quarreling and so Q will kind of split off into like a rainbow of different dumb shit.
Like a prism of schisms.
Yeah.
Literally just like there's 18 popes and they all have their own fucking giant building in some city you've never heard of.
This is like Jake's creative interpretation.
From a creative perspective, there needs to be character growth on Q, right?
And we need, if this is season two, you know, there's got to be something a little different to happen.
It could be like Breaking Bad, just be getting worse and dumber.
No, Dale's got it right.
Look, the first four years or three and a half years, that's Alien, right?
There's one monster.
Now, this is very Cameron-esque, now in the sequel, Aliens, multiple monsters.
Okay.
Multiple Qs, fighting with another, maybe there's a Queen.
I want to carry the big Gatling gun to point at the Qs advancing down the tunnel.
We can give you the smart gun.
Yeah, like I want to carry the big Gatling gun. Yes, we can point at the cues advancing
You can be we can give you the smart we can give you the smart gun Dale's gonna be Hicks. He's gonna have
Okay I'll be Hudson, obviously, with a pulse rifle, worried, complaining, anxious, ready to quit.
That's it, man.
Game over, man.
Game over.
And Travis is gonna be Frost, the poor Marine who falls over the balcony with all of the ammo bags on him and just explodes.
I think you're right about everything except Travis.
Travis is obviously the Xenomorph.
He lives in the rafters, ready to descend when bad things are supposed to happen.
He's like the guy... He's like, I don't like doing this job at all!
I'm not happy Q is back!
He's killing us all.
He's like the guy that was like monitoring all the rest of the Space Marines as they're slowly dying.
Gorman.
He's Gorman.
Yeah, right.
And he's like, oh yeah, right.
He's like, there's one blip, there's another three blips, two blips.
Yeah.
All right.
What if you were Mother, the ship?
I'm sorry, Jake.
I can't do... And the third, though.
It's part of the general lore.
Yeah, so like an era where Truth Social Q is like, that is a false Q!
And they're pointing at two other Qs, and there's like...
Yeah, like that.
And guys like Sather are gonna be like, I stake my claim in helping you figure out which Q is the most authentic.
He already is.
He already did it.
I checked his Telegram.
Of course.
He's with the new Q. He likes it.
He likes it because, specifically, great logic, he specifically likes the new Q because all the influencers that he considers usurpers and fakers, they liked the other one and they think these new drops are fake.
So he's like, all these disinformation peddling QAnon supporters.
Well, there's something else.
He does not have to actually interpret the drops.
And that way you don't have to make a false prediction or something doesn't come true.
If you stake your claim and I'm gonna be the guy who's helping you figure out which is the true person to listen to... No, he'll still bake them.
I mean, he'll bake, but I mean, you know... He wants to go back to it so bad, dude.
These guys have been...
Like, they have not branched out properly, you know?
They aren't making cool episodes like us that have nothing to do with QAnon.
Except for... These people have just been, like, so thirsty that their mouth has, like, swallowed itself.
They're trying to, like, pucker through.
So yeah, my prediction is going to be, like, the death of Superman.
Where, yeah.
You see, like, now there's going to be, like, metal Q and, like, robot Q. And then, like, the original Q is going to come back.
He's like, no, I'm the original Q. Welcome to the Clone Wars.
Yeah.
So I'm very excited.
Yep.
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 week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and ongoing podcast series like Trickle Down.
Dale, where can people find your stuff and check out your book?
They can look at my Twitter account, which is my name, Dale Buran.
Nice.
Go check it out and go buy his book, It Came From Something Awful.
When you subscribe to our podcast, you help us stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until 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 Q.
Q, kind of been thrust into the limelight again, lately with the new drops, right?
And so, for those of you who haven't followed me or haven't seen my work, I'm assuming most of you have,
but I've heard about Q, like back when I first got into, you know, following politics, right, back in 2018,
I caught a Brian Cates thread, got me hooked, and it was impossible on Twitter not to see Q drops.
But honestly, the mainstream media did a damn good job of making people think that Q was this just wacky conspiracy thing.
And I kind of fell for it.
So I never dug in.
I kind of thought it was just a little woo-woo.
And I never dug into it.
But it was impossible not to see drops.
You'd see them here and there.
Never dug in.
Once I got to the point where I started writing the series, you know, I started writing some articles and people started sending me Q drops and it was compelling stuff, but I never, I still never dug in, right?
There's a lot that seemed to line up, but at that point I was like, okay, well, I want to get as far as I can in the series, but once I get to a point where You know, I feel like I'm done or whatever.
Maybe I'll dig in.
I think we even talked to Kate and we're at the parade about doing a show of going through the Q drops together.
So it's not that I haven't seen Q. It's just I haven't read through all the drops.
If you've read my most recent article, Part 23, I basically think I, you know, I speculate on who I think the Q team is.
And I even say in there that Q is just objectively When you're looking at what, in an information warfare, right?
The enemy controls the mainstream media, big tech, social media, all these things.
They have the best tools at their disposal.
Q is like, objectively, a weapon against that.
It bypassed them and dismantled their grip on the narrative.
Whatever it is, you know, whether it's... I don't even know if you can call it real or not, whatever, but...
We can talk about that in this panel, but it's objectively, it was one of the most impactful things in this movement, okay?
So my thoughts on Q, I'm very, if you would say, pro-Q, but I just haven't read the drop.
So those of you bashing me on True Social or whatever, saying, you know, I've been dissing Q, that's never been the case.
Where I do think people need to, and I've been saying this for a long time, I got a lot of hate for this too, is I don't think Q should be used to red pill people.
I don't think, I think there's better ways to do it.
It's something you show them after the fact.
But with Q's new drops coming out, I kind of want to talk about, not only do these, you know, the people I'm going to be having on this panel think Q is real, or like this is the real Q, the same Q as before, doing these drops, but I also want to kind of discuss if it's, does it even matter, like what's the point of What's the point of Q posting again?
Like, what impact is it going to have now, right?
If this is actually Q, why is he posting again?
Or they, whatever.
So, there are a couple people in the waiting room.
I don't know where Jordan and Kate are, but Craig and Beer are here.
Beer?
How you doing, man?
Hello, my brother.
Good to see you again.
Yeah, I'm gonna bring Craig on.
Craig, how you doing?
Good, man.
How you doing?
Good.
I'm going to text the other two and see where they're at.
I know we're a little early, but... Oh, there's Jordan.
