Reactions by QAnon followers and influencers. More opsec fuckups. And Ron Watkins' ghost campaign. Travis, Julian Liv and Annie explore the fallout from Q's flimsy return.
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Music by Max Weber & Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Episode 194 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the new Q is Sus episode.
As always, we are your host, Julian Field.
This week we're sitting down to follow up on Q's return.
How are the believers taking it?
What about the influencers who built their reputation on the anonymous poster?
And what of Jim and Ron Watkins, the father-son duo who run 8kun, where Q has been posting?
After years of wrong predictions, far-right incitement, satanic panic, and sloppy operational security, Q has somehow made an even bigger mess of things this time around.
The situation has left everyone involved scrambling to explain what's going on and the results aren't pretty.
So we've convened an international council to wade through this muck.
Representing Canada, of course, we've got Liv.
Annie is here to rep the UK.
And that's all the countries in the world if you include the United States, which is Travis's fatherland.
Jake, unfortunately, could not be with us as he stayed sober on July 4th and has thus shifted timelines and entered 5D.
So, how's it going everybody?
Did you have a nice weekend?
Yeah.
I had a lovely weekend, thank you.
I went to a wedding in Scotland.
Yeah, my weekend was... it was okay.
I was reading some Adorno out in public, because, you know, it's really nice.
And for literally two days, I was, you know, maybe spent two or three hours outside reading.
And I have a very bad sunburn on my neck now.
Just on your neck?
Just on my neck.
So that's what I get for going outside and reading.
Yeah, I'm kind of imagining how intensely you must have been reading that book for it to just get your neck.
You must have been hunched over it.
I am very white and my posture is very bad, is the answer to that question.
I like to think you were never even outside of the house, but just the sheer heat of Adorno's thoughts has burned the back of your head and neck.
Travis, how was your weekend?
Busy, mostly content-focused, I have to admit.
I've been continuing to work on my side project, Trickle Down, which is Almost complete.
We recently did an episode on the long road it took to discover the true cause of peptic ulcers.
I think it was very fascinating because it just took so long.
There were so many false starts to discover that bacteria, a particular bacteria, actually caused peptic ulcers.
Next one I think I'm going to do on microfinance.
This was a much hyped up sort of promised way to cure poverty that a lot of NGOs got on board that Didn't pan out, did not live up to its promise, even though basically everyone with a high degree of connections and money and sort of influence was sure that this would be the silver bullet for curing global poverty.
Dammit, we were all counting on those wonderful NGOs.
Alright, well, you know, you're gonna have to take a break from something legible.
Oh wait, Julian, how was your weekend?
Sorry, sorry nobody asked you.
Oh, it's okay.
I'm used to it.
You know, it's lonely at the top.
But no, my weekend was was just great.
You know, spent some time out in nature and being out of the city, which has been wonderful.
Nice.
But enough about the good life.
Let's get the bad life going.
Travis, kick us off.
Yeah, let's talk about the shit.
I want to start by talking a little bit about how the QAnon community has been reacting to the new QDrops.
Because the reaction was was mixed, kind of.
So on 8chan, there was some debate about the legitimacy of the drops, you know, whether or not Q was really back.
Now, these debates were triggered by those OPSEC issues that we discussed in the last episode.
Now, if you don't recall, first of all, there was the salt rotation prior to the new drops, and that should have rendered a new Q trip code, assuming Q was using the same password.
But somehow Q's trip code worked just fine, despite the fact that everyone else's trip code is broken.
It was also suspicious that 8kun enabled posting using the private web browser, the Tor browser, just a few hours before Q apparently used the Tor browser.
At least we think they used the Tor browser because the post ID showed six zeros in a row.
That could have been manipulated on the back end after the fact, but that's what it looked like.
So both of these indicate that the individual posting as Q either is an 8-coon admin or is working directly with an 8-coon admin.
So I feel it's worth mentioning that Jim Watkins did make a post sort of addressing these issues and explaining why Q's trip code didn't change even though everyone else's did.
And here's what Jim said.
Why didn't the Q trip change with the other trips?
Codemonkeyz made a special whitelist for Q before retiring from 8kun.top.
I don't know how he did that, but even though neither Codemonkeyz nor myself are Q, we both understand the importance of Q communications to the world.
Codemonkeyz did his best before he left to ensure this communication could not be screwed up by any error that I make or my employees.
So, I mean, this is kind of unsatisfactory.
He literally says, um, he made a whitelist.
I don't know how he did it, but he did.
I mean, there's a technical sort of explanation about like why, uh, a different, uh, salt should result in different trip code given the same password.
And he just sort of hand waves everything away.
It's like, well, it was whitelisted.
Well, how, how exactly does that work?
It doesn't seem to make sense.
Yeah.
It doesn't explain the tool browser thing either, right?
No, it doesn't explain that.
Even if we were to grant a much more benefit of the doubt than is warranted in this particular situation, say that, okay, the Q post was whitelisted.
Okay, that still means that you're not treating Q like any other user of the site.
You're granting them special privileges, and it seems like you have some sort of relationship with them in the case you want to protect how they post and stuff.
But Yeah, it's sort of a very incomplete explanation.
The other thing that is an issue here is that even the Tor Browser thing is up for grabs, kind of, because one of the major aggregators, and we'll get into this a little bit later, called QAG, has essentially user IDs on all of the recent Q drops.
As in, none of them are listed with the 000000 that the Tor Browser should have generated.
Which indicates that it's possible that all of these posts were just made normally, without a Tor Browser, and then edited to, say, 00 and etc.
in that field.
And so I don't know if Jim is currently fighting with that aggregator, but that aggregator has all of the IDs up on every single post, which doesn't look great.
Would that mean whoever is posting his cues like attempt to be more anonymous to like dodge maybe federal attention would not even be the case?
I mean, essentially it means that somehow whoever posted this queue was too lazy to even use the Tor browser, but they were just like, well, just edit it immediately after the post, and that maybe the latest post was just done a little too slowly, but that the person running the queue aggregator website, you know, the drops are automatically kind of pulled by him as they go up, which means he pulls the original ID, and then it immediately gets edited to reflect the 000, but it's too late.
So I don't know.
I mean, it certainly feels like this house of cards is collapsing.
The walls!
The walls are closing in, folks!
That's really funny.
There's a lot of back and forth between the Anons on the Q Research Board regarding the legitimacy of these posts.
One Anon tried to split the difference by arguing that it didn't matter whether or not it was real or fake.
Maybe the 3Q post last night was just a dog whistle to those who had left so they would be here when the storm hits.
You Sunshine Anon should be grateful.
Real or fake, it drew you back here.
So all you people who decided to move on with your lives and do something else besides spend all day on 8Koon should be grateful that all of a sudden you're, you know, you're back with us, us Anons, here in the muck.
One of us.
One of us.
I noticed that you're once again in the Wizard of Oz's palace.
So, is he real?
I don't know, but you're here, idiot.
Yeah, but I think it's important to remember that The majority of QAnon followers, they never visit 8Koon.
They might not even know what 8Koon is or how they could visit it if they wanted to.
They get their information about the QDrops either from QAnon drop aggregator sites or they follow influencers who like decode the drops for them.
And even there, the reaction was mixed.
Now, it is true that a lot of rank and file QAnon followers were just ecstatic about the return of QAnon.
For example, I saw one QAnon blogger express total joy that Q had returned.
And as they pointed out, and this is true, Q happened to return exactly 1,700 days after the first post.
Remember Q?
Yes, that Q. After exactly 1,700 days, wink wink, after their first post, and 17 months, nudge nudge, of strict silence, the mysterious unknown entity known as Q, aka 17, has returned.
I missed him.
Really missed him.
Like, also, what would that actually mean, that they posted 1,700 days?
Like, does that mean that it's true?
Like, anyone can count the days and be like, okay, I'll post it 1,700 days after the first drop.
No, no, you need to have access to some real top-level knowledge to be able to know when it's 1,700 days after your first drop.
Annie unlocked her account 1,700 days after locking it.
Coincidence?
They do this all the time.
They always say that these, these, uh, weird little, like, you know, what they call deltas or whatever, or these, these numerology things are hugely significant, but it's like, how, what does it mean?
What does that tell you?
What is the, what's, what's underneath the surface here?
What information is being communicated here?
But I don't know.
It's like, it's like, it means something big, but like, they don't take the extra step to actually explain what the meaning is.
The Q blogger continues.
Of course, you probably know of his return already, but when I first heard the news on Saturday, I felt exactly as one feels upon first hearing the name Aslan in Narnia.
No one knows how that feels because those were fictional characters!
It's real to me, Julian.
After the bitter discouragement of the stolen 2020 election, and barren desert of Biden's America, the return of Q was just the shot in the arm we patriots needed.
After Q fell silent in 2020, we were all forced to consider the awful question.
Was Q wrong?
I drew the conclusion, Q did not err.
We did.
As I slowly came to understand the plan was not the shock and awe we wanted, but it was good.
Slow, but good.
There were enough Q-proofs coming true, without the help of overzealous patriots twisting Q-posts to match Axel events, to keep me in a state of curious anticipation.
Q just had an uncanny way of knowing the future.
Even silly stuff.
So how did Q choose to break his silence?
He wasn't stingy.
There's not merely one new Q-post.
There are now five.
Yeah, so this is often why I say, like, there are obviously people who are going to continue believing this stuff for the rest of their life until they die, you know?
Because, like, this is a person who is deeply, deeply radicalized and, you know, it really feels like getting a new message from God.
This sounds like a person who was smashed in the head with a hammer and then given a small piece of candy.
Yeah, I just love that, like, Q did not err, we did.
Where it's like, Q didn't fail us by telling us that all of these things were going to happen, which didn't.
We failed Q by believing Q when they said all of these things were going to happen, and not realizing that he meant, not in like a literal sense, but a kind of vibes-based sense.
I mean, yeah, it's just like the purest, purest distillation of cope.
It's like we didn't trust the plan enough to make it turn into reality.
This is the Tinkerbell clap.
The claps were not loud enough.
One QAnon influencer named Truthhammer reasoned that there's no way Jim Watkins could hijack Q because the real Q wouldn't stand for that.
In short, there is no sane motive for Jim Watkins to hijack Q, because nobody could get away with doing that.
IMO, the people pushing this story are trying to cast doubt on the authenticity of the return of Q, and they don't care if they throw Jim under the bus to do it.
Don't fall for it, and don't assume Jim is that crazy.
However, shortly after this, TruthHammer became more skeptical, partly because the person posting us Q said you sound envious to someone.
Julian will talk a little bit about that later, but here's what TruthHammer said.
Full disclosure, I'd love to believe the real Q is back.
I estimate I was at 80%.
I'm downgrading my certainty level to 50-50.
Likely Q.
1.
The poster has access to at least two different passwords that were used by Q.
2.
I think someone would have to be crazy or suicidal to impersonate Q and not think consequences will follow.
Strange.
1.
Writer's voice has totally changed.
Yeah, it's a team so this doesn't bother me too much.
2.
Whoever posted early this morning as Q also got snippy with somebody just a few minutes earlier and said you sound envious to somebody.
This strikes me as very odd.
So I think it's funny is that they're working from the assumption that the that this doesn't cast doubt on the original Q. Obviously, the original Q is actually a high level military intelligence operation.
And this is why they think it would be crazy or suicidal to impersonate Q, because obviously the real Q team would rain down hellfire upon that person.
But somehow using weird language and and being sort of like weird and petty, that's enough for them to start having some doubts.
I mean, I'm sorry, have you seen and heard Jim?
You're telling me that you cannot believe that he's either crazy or kind of suicidal and doesn't care anymore?
I mean, the guy is a walking shipwreck.
Yeah, but it's like something I would never have thought of myself because I never believed that Q was who he said he was, do you know?
But I do totally understand how if you do truly believe that Q is this kind of like high-ranking security official, why, yeah, why you would then be doubtful that anyone would bother faking it because surely they're just going to have the FBI and everybody knocking on their door in seconds.
Yeah.
It's a sort of like logic that, yeah, I would never have thought of because I don't have that first starting principle, but it does kind of totally make sense on its own terms.
Yeah.
Like, I mean, especially if Trump leaving office is not enough for you and you still think you exist, like this, you saying you sound envious is not enough.
There was a QAnon influencer named Julien's Rum, who is a full on believer.
It's like anti-Julian.
Julian from the opposite dimension.
Bizarro Julian.
It's not me.
It's our Julian's Wario.
I go by Julian's Root Beer since I stopped drinking.
So Julian's Rum dismissed technical arguments about why this is a fake queue apparently as boring nerd shit.
Notice the argument from those claiming the new Q posts are from fake Q is so damn heavy on technical inside jargon.
Not only that, it takes them at least five paragraphs for them to explain it.
Spare me.
It's simple.
White hats would never allow Q to be compromised at such a critical juncture, and histories shown black hats don't have the patience or capability to execute such an impeccably timed subversion.
I'm all for skepticism, but it's clear to me it's Q.
I'm all for skepticism, but if it's more than one paragraph, then I don't care.
Listen, if you're giving me an intro paragraph, a conclusion paragraph, and three body paragraphs, I can't.
I can't.
What, do you think I have time all day?
I can't read all that.
If you can't put your skepticism in a tweet, I'm not reading.
Another QAnon influencer, Zach Payne, aka RedPill78, expressed suspicion.
One reason he was suspicious was that there was a lack of a delta.
This means that there wasn't a Trump post at the same time or close to the same time that Q made their post.
What's important here is that Q has never established themselves in this way before.
It's always been done through like a delta with POTUS, but it's always been through the confirmation directly on POTUS's account.
And this time it did not happen that way.
So that to me was one thing that was suspect.
One thing I wonder is, why wouldn't they just, like, track it so that, like, the second Trump makes, like, a truth post, there's a Q post?
Like, that would be enough for them, right?
Like, make that automatic?
Sure would.
Yeah, it would.
Yeah, they have this thing.
It's like, the Deltas thing was always nonsense, where it's like, you know, statistically, considering how frequently Trump tweeted, there would have to be a Trump post roughly around the same time as a Q drop.
That's just statistically Would happen pretty often, but they always took this as, you know, especially meaningful.
It's the same thing that they always did, where they took just random noise and then assigned meaning to it.
In a post on True Social, Jim Watkins actually responded to the accusation that a lack of Delta proves as a fake cue.
And here's what he said.
Zero deltas.
Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.
Guys, this is super nonsense, by the way.
I am not Q. Q makes his way, and folks follow or not.
I'm sure those folks making Discord on the Q Research Board are not helping participate in research.
They're just causing trouble.
Those are the folks that used to be called international.
What?
He needs to be called international.
He's suggesting that the people causing trouble are rootless and have no particular loyalty to any particular country.
You get if you understand where the kind of like this.
Accusation is going.
Oh, fuck.
I think you're right.
I think it is an anti-Semitic dog whistle.
Damn.
The obvious one is globalist, but he just forgot the term, I guess.
He's like, what is that term?
Oh, come on.
It's two of my tongue.
Internationalist.
Or he's just really a lot better at hiding his power level.
Now the other thing that made Zach Payne suspicious was the fact that Q used the word populace in the new QDROP when previously Q had only used the word population.
Another thing that was suspect is the use of this word populace.
Who was Jane Roe?
How do you control generations of a populace?
Let's just go ahead and search and see how many times Q has used the word populace.
Isn't that interesting?
Only once!
Well, let's look and see how many times Q has used the word population.
And that one is a lot more.
There are quite a few posts using the word population, and so that seems to me to be something that's a little suspicious.
Something interesting I saw was like in The Matrix on that show, they referred to a lot of this as FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, which has like been a business term for a while, but I know it's recently been picked up by crypto people.
For like anyone who doesn't pump the stock, anyone who's been saying that like, oh, you know, this weird cryptocurrency isn't going to make money, you dismiss as like being FUD.
So it's interesting how like QAnon influencers are basically like crypto guys now.
Like pumping a stock that's just inevitably going to fail in the next, you know, two months and promises 20% annual returns safely.
Yeah, watching Zak Payne especially has kind of given me flashbacks to when I watched the anti-vaccine documentary, Watch the Water, and Zak Payne kind of did this critical interview with the doctor featured on it.
And I don't know, it's this really interesting thing, I think, because I think a lot of people who don't follow conspiracy theories will often assume that the problem with people who do follow conspiracy theories is that they lack critical thinking.
Or they're not sceptical or rigorous in their own way, do you know?
And I don't actually think that's a problem with QAnon followers, do you know?
I think they have plenty of critical thinking and I think, as proven by the fact that they often do push back against one another and have this simulacrum, I guess, of academic debate with one another over whether a kind of cryptic drop means this or that.
It is kind of all sceptical, what they're doing, but the starting principles are just so different to people outside of that world.
Yeah, the terms of debate are like rapidly sort of warped and made something entirely different that is like irrational and makes no sense but like creates a sort of consistency in discussion and a standard for like a proof or in general discussion between them that allows them to discern between what they think isn't real and they think is real.
It's not everything absurd can be real.
Yeah, they don't just believe like everything that like falls in their lap even if they do believe some stuff that sound absurd to anyone who's not heard of QAnon.
Yeah, often the problem isn't a lack of sort of skepticism.
It's that there's like a skepticism applied in just a purely absurd frame of reference.
I was curious to see how Pragmatic had reacted to the new Q drops, because he had been decoding the truth social Q posts and because there's just a There's an account on True Social that's just at Q that people have been sort of like jokingly claiming is maybe Q, maybe not, whatever.
And so it turns out that Praying Medic was kind of ambivalent about whether or not the new Q drops were legitimate.
This update covers messages posted by the at Q account on True Social and there are some new posts on the 8Koon board by what looks like the original Q. I can't say with certainty that the at Q account on True Social is the same person or group that is posted on 4chan, 8chan, and 8kun between 2017 and 2020.
8Koon between 2017 and 2020. I'm also not 100% sure that the person posting on 8Koon is the same queue.
I think we have reason to believe that it is, but we're going to look at some issues
as far as identification goes, and I'll let you make your own conclusions.
So pragmatic, noncommittal, really.
He'll just take any sort of like vaguely sort of cue thing.
It's interesting how for some reason these new Q drops haven't universally captured the influencers.
They seem to be, a lot of them at least, seem to be possibly kind of wary and at worst they are, you know, totally skeptical.
Yeah, which is interesting even for someone who is like literally baking the fake truth social Q drops that like break an important rule of QAnon, of like no outside comms, that he wouldn't be like, oh, no, nevermind.
Fuck all that.
He's back.
Yeah, Patel Patriot, who's, you know, built quite a kind of a following since Q has been gone, and he was one of the first to react.
He kind of called a roundtable, including Jordan Sather, The Kate Awakening, and a few others, and he was basically making the point that Q was like a parent who had sent their kid off to college but couldn't separate.
It was like, almost like, why do we even need this?
Why do we care?
Helicopter parent.
Yeah.
So, at least one person who has been closely aligned with QAnon influencers used the occasion of QAnon's return to denounce Q.
And I'm speaking specifically of Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, who has done a lot of work with, like, Stop the Steal.
In fact, Byrne says that he met with Trump lawyer John Eastman on January 6th.
But in a Telegram post, Patrick Byrne denounced Q by invoking Hegel.
Now, Liv, Annie, as the two most educated hosts of the podcast, I hope you can help me parse what exactly Patrick Byrne is trying to say here.
I'm so excited.
So here's the post from Patrick Byrne.
Q is a psyop.
Psyops use truth and lies in such a way that it elicits a response from the observer.
From my perspective, Q has set up a true Hegelian dialectic by waking and mobilizing the sleeping giant, the quote unquote righteous right, against the deep state, the quote unquote evil left.
What is the fight over?
Control of the financial reset.
No matter what happens, whether the war is won by Q or the deep state, the financial system will be reset and the winner gets to control the reset.
What if you don't care to be part of this squabble?
What if you just want to walk away from the fight?
No.
Neither of these sides will let you take away control of you.
Control is the ultimate goal of both sides.
I say it all the time.
The right wing, Q, and the left wing, Deep State, are attached to the same bird.
By opposing each other, they carry the bird in a single direction together.
This is a Hegelian dialectic.
Yeah, this is, there's a history of this on the right.
I know Alex Jones, like his network had a documentary, I want to say like 10 or so years ago, talking about the Hegelian dialectic and how it's like a, an attempt to control you.
And I know recently, I want to say like a year ago, this became like another far-right conspiracy obsession, which is, it's strange, obviously, because that's not what Hegel's saying.
And he's also like a conservative.
But they take it because Marx uses Hegel, and it's quite important to Marx's dialectic.
So they're like, oh, well, clearly it's bad.
Let me look at the Wikipedia.
Oh, thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
OK, that's clearly an attempt to dominate society.
That's basically what's going on here.
So the return of Q has not been smooth, I think it's fair to say.
But despite all that, Q has been pressing on.
In fact, there was a brand new Q drop and referred to the surprise hearing by the January 6th Committee.
This hearing, which is the sixth so far, focused on the testimony of a little-known White House aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows named Cassidy Hutchinson.
The most relevant bits of the testimony to me were her claims that Trump and Mark Meadows were informed I was part of a conversation.
I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overthink it.
I can't say something to the effect of, you know, I don't effing care that they have weapons.
They're not here to hurt me.
or mags that might have identified who in the crowd had weapons.
I was part of a conversation.
I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overthinked.
I can't say something to the effect of, you know, I don't effing care that they have weapons.
They're not here to hurt me. Take the effing mags away.
Let my people in.
They can march to the Capitol from here.
Let the people in.
Take the acting mags away.
Cassidy Hutchinson also testified that Trump spoke to Roger Stone and Michael Flynn on the evening of January 5th.
Ms.
Hutchinson, is it your understanding that President Trump asked Mark Meadows to speak with Roger Stone and General Flynn on January 5th?
That's correct.
That is my understanding.
And Ms.
Hutchinson, is it your understanding that Mr. Meadows called Mr. Stone on the 5th?
I'm under the impression that Mr. Meadows did complete both a call to Mr. Stone and General Flynn the evening of the 5th.
And do you know what they talked about that evening, Ms.
Hutchinson?
I'm not sure.
Probably salad recipes?
However, I should note that these were not the bits that caught the most attention during her testimony.
The claim that got a lot of activity on social media was a claim that Trump attempted to commandeer the vehicle he was in in order to drive to the Capitol.
So the former aide says that she was told of the altercation in the SUV immediately afterward by a White House security official and that Bobby Engel, who is the head of the detail, was in the room and didn't dispute the account at the time.
The president said something to the effect of, I'm the effing president.
Take me up to the Capitol now.
To which Bobby responded, sir, we have to go back to the West Wing.
The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel.
Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel.
We're going back to the West Wing.
We're not going to the Capitol.
Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel.
And when Mr. Renato had recounted this story to me, he had motioned towards his clavicles.
This is interesting because I think it shows Trump's intention of what he wanted to have done to people on the Capitol Hill, but how poorly planned and how few collaborators he had.
Yeah.
The Secret Service was like, nope, Mr. President, it's time for bed.
Yeah, he's literally throwing a tantrum because his security guards won't let him go and join in on the riot.
I mean, it's also kind of something that is a little out of character for Trump to want to show up to a crowd where he can't stand behind a, you know, plexiglass or something.
What would he do?
Just like be among them?
Yeah.
Walk up the stairs with them?
I mean, you know, I think that this story needs to be taken a little bit with a grain of salt.
You know, like you said, Travis, there are way more interesting aspects of the testimony.
Yeah.
Nah, I believe it.
Yeah, of course you do.
It's very fun to believe that Trump is suddenly turned into fucking Jack Reacher.
I do like that.
I will say I will believe this now because it's the funniest possible result.
That's true.
I should note that the count was disputed in press reports.
Engel, who is the agent who is driving the presidential SUV, and Trump security official Tony Ornado are willing to testify under oath that no agent was assaulted and Trump never lunged for the steering wheel.
I think so.
I mean, if that's the case, it's possible that there was like Trump was like just in a rage demanding to go to the Capitol.
And the bit about the assault and the steering wheel grabbing was perhaps an exaggeration.
I don't know.
It's also impossible to disprove.
Right.
Because she just heard it from somebody.
So she's saying that she heard someone else say something.
And so even if, you know, it's like she can't really get in trouble for this because it's not something she experienced.
Yeah.
So anyways.
This new Q drop, which referenced Cassidy Hutchinson, said this.
"What is at stake? Who has control? Surprise witness? Who was surprised? Who will be surprised? Use your logic. Can
emotions be used to influence decisions? How do you control emotion? Define plant. How do you insert a plant? Can
emotions be used to insert a plant? Who is Cassidy Hutchinson?
Trust the plan. Q."
Use your logic.
It has been pointed out, and this is very, very interesting, that it is kind of awkward for a Q-drop, and specifically the phrase, use your logic, has never been used.
Instead, Q has always used the phrase, use logic.
So it seems as though, you know, people talking about how it seems like Q has kind of like a new voice and stuff.
It's like little things like this that you'd have to be a real brain disease person to really know about.
But it's very important to like the people who like follow the drops.
Like us.
Yes, that's right.
Also, I mean, one thing I will say, I think it's really disturbing that, like, Q named Cassidy Hutchinson specifically because this is an invitation to, like, harassment, and it's an invitation to start forming conspiracy theories, and it's an invitation to, like, you know, dig in.
It's basically saying that this person is fair game.
You know, I sometimes, like, describe, like, Q as, like, a Gamergate gun, because it's like, you know, whoever's controlling Q can just, like, point it at anyone and, like, be assured that there's going to be a lot of people with too much time on their hands and inability to discern fact from fiction who are just going to go nut stores at that person, filling up every social media inbox, trying to dig up dirt, trying to, you know, craft weirdo conspiracy theories and nonsense connections.
It's a bad time.
But of course, QAnon influencers couldn't help but start baking this drop.
They fell right back to their old habits.
One of the things they seized on was this idea of a plant, and one QAnon influencer suggested that this meant that Cassidy Hutchinson was there on purpose and is part of the White Hats and is doing the White Hat work.
So here's what that post said.
Is she a plant?
How do you legally insert evidence?
Is she playing a role to get a star role in the 1-6 committee hearings?
Is she pointing a laser to someone else or more evidence that will implicate higher-ups?
Since 1-6 won't allow any opposing witnesses, is this our inn?
If true, masterful.
Dems and rhinos are surely in for a surprise.
That's awesome.
It's just like, no, it's like a show.
If true, then so cool.
That's like a perfect, especially like QAnon post Trump leaving office brain is like, what if the bad guys were actually secretly the good guys?
That would be awesome.
I mean, they did this during the Mueller report.
They were saying Mueller was a white hat.
One thing I do want to note is that Jim Watkins, who, as he has specifically told us repeatedly, is not Q, is extremely invested in the legitimacy of Q and these new Q-drops.
He wrote the post denouncing trolls who spammed off-topic content on the Q Research Board.
The shills are doing it to wreck the research.
Spending a week derailing folks on whether Q was real or not did not work.
Throwing up a bunch of swastika symbols did not work.
So now they're trying to spam a bunch of porn.
However, the porn is off topic.
I can't believe I just had to say the porn is off topic.
However, the porn is off-topic, which is a good reason to delete it, ban it, and tell folks to post it elsewhere.
There is no free speech issue there.
the places to post that information already exist.
I'm gonna have to say that when he says porn, what I saw on Q Research specifically is basically
what I would call white supremacist bait.
It was all interracial porn and they would caption it with "no white guys" or "this is
what white women actually want."
And so, I mean, to me it doesn't even feel like it's necessarily oppositional.
It's just the usual 8-Kun white supremacist posters, you know, emphasizing interracial porn to make a point that the blacks are coming for your women or whatever.
Yeah.
And it's like, I'm sorry, posting swastikas to 8-Kun?
Oh, how out of fucking, how out of character for 8-Kun.
I mean, that place is jam packed with like Happy Merchant and fucking swastikas.
I like how this implies that the swastikas weren't off topic.
Yeah, no, that makes sense.
That's what people post on these.
But now it's porn, which, off topic, I don't want to see that.
Yeah, you're smearing the good name of 8 Good with all your swastikas and porn.
I will say this, that these questions about which posts are the real Q and which are the fake Q, and using these highly technical methods and linguistic analysis to determine which are which, remind me a lot of biblical scholarship, and thinking specifically about how scholars determine, for example, which books of the New Testament were written by the Apostle Paul.
Traditionally, 13 books are considered the Pauline Epistles.
However, scholars can only agree that seven of those letters were definitely written by Paul himself.
And there's one, the epistle to the Hebrews, that all scholars agree wasn't really written by Paul.
So, you know, I feel like the QAnon community is maturing a little bit.
It's entering its scholarship phase, where people are splitting off and using these highly technical sort of academic techniques to determine what is legitimate and what is not.
Oh, yeah, no, I mean, that completely makes sense to me, actually.
And I think it makes sense as to why so many of these kind of QAnon influencers are actually like, less than psyched that someone seems to be back posting as Q, right?
Because, you know, this is kind of This was the stage that they were kind of almost comfortable at.
Like, we have our kind of holy books, we have our texts and now, you know, we'll kind of do a sort of synod of working out, you know, what they mean and what current events they allude to and what Q did predict and what he didn't predict.
It's kind of entering that kind of sedate sort of scholarly phase and it totally makes sense essentially why you wouldn't want someone new coming in and being like, you know, Oh, it's me guys!
I'm back!
I'm posting more stuff again!
Yeah, in a way it just throws off the whole scholarly work that they're doing because now they have to reckon with new, new texts.
Yeah, imagine you're in the middle of writing the New Testament and suddenly someone's like, oh yeah, we're actually writing a new chapter of the Old Testament.
It's like, no!
You had your time with the crickets and the demons.
Yeah, I mean, well, it's like, I guess, which actually did happen a fair bit in early Christianity, someone popping up and being like, hey guys, it's me, Jesus, again.
I've arisen for the third time, do you know?
Which actually happens a lot in early medieval Europe.
Something I find interesting with this, especially for the Q influencers, is that you would expect if this news would attract a lot more people to their content, they would be like universally ecstatic about it.
Like if you're a Q influencer, maybe they're so deep in the sauce that they're not really thinking about that right now, but I guess that's like the most important question I think with Q coming back.
is like not directly in relation to the already existing audience and how they react but like I guess it's sort of tangential to that question is like does Q coming back create a sort of unified base that is able to pull more people into the theory at a rapid more rapid pace because that's really like yeah where it's terrifying all the pilled people will still be insane and still be pilled regardless if Q comes back but like what was always I think so worrying about Q is like how many people are pulled in so so We'll see, I guess this is a more long-term question.
We'll see if this coming back affects that in any way.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that the key difference in QAnon from then and now, other than Q stopping posting, is like the almost total internet-wide ban from social media, right?
Right.
These days, when Q makes a drop, it's almost guaranteed to be accompanied by a fuck-up that provides further evidence of their identity.
In this case, the flub involved an anonymous post made approximately 19 minutes before the Q drop went up, A discussion had been raging on the Q Research Board on 8coon about the veracity of the new Qdrops, and whether Jim Watkins was behind them.
One of the posts stated this, "Jim wouldn't know whether he deserves shit talk or not.
Clueless admin. Dopey." Pretty innocuous post, and one among many insulting Jim in some way.
But another anonymous poster responded to it, defending Jim.
You sound envious.
The post included user ID 422CCC, which means that any other posts made with the same ID are from the same anonymous user.
19 minutes after it, the Q drop about Casey Hutchinson went up.
And surprise, surprise, it had the same user ID and employed the trip code meant to identify the poster as Q. This indicated that the anonymous poster defending Jim Watkins was the same one posting with Q's trip code.
What happened next increased people's suspicions.
The IDs of both of these posts were edited to remove the 422CCC and replace it with six zeros, essentially faking that the user was employing the Tor browser for further anonymity.
Man, it feels like maybe, maybe this is Q and he like got laid off from his job at the top secret security services administration of the White House.
Maybe now he's just kind of a little bit depressed, a little bit drunk, wanting to relive the glory days, picking fights on 8kun.
I don't know.
I think I'm starting to come round to, it's the same guy.
He's just like, he's had a few, few rough turns in life.
The plan didn't work.
Yeah, if they start boosting crypto, you know.
Despite Jim Watkins denying any manipulation occurred, the fact is users, mods, and board owners are incapable of editing a user ID, which means that whoever did the edits had administrative control over 8kun.
This once again points to Jim Watkins or someone working directly with him at the administrative level.
Jim, of course, denies that the IDs were edited at all, but there is another piece of evidence pointing to this being a lie.
One of the big QAggregator websites, meant to catalogue the drops for normies, actually listed the post with the 422ccc user ID.
This triggered some confusion among pro-Q people, and the aggregator site, known as QAgg, even noted that the ID had changed, writing in a note, We did notice that between the time we pulled the drop and now, that the ID listed did change.
Adding to the sketchiness, QAG has since removed this note about the discrepancy.
But as I noted earlier, it seems like they've also restored the original IDs on, like, all the recent posts.
So there's no posts now on QAG that look like they were made with the Tor browser, and they all have IDs.
I don't know if whoever's behind QAG is fighting with Jim or something, but it's not great.
Now, I'm sure many of you may be thinking, goddammit, more obscure IT stuff.
So, this is the simplified version.
Basically, Q fucked up and posted without using the Tor browser, which adds a layer of anonymity.
The result is that whoever was posting as Q revealed that they had been defending Jim Watkins on 8kun minutes earlier.
A cover-up ensued that could only be carried out on an administrative level, which means Jim Watkins and his team were involved in it.
Conclusion?
More highly suspicious activity, and a massive OPSEC fuck-up on the part of Watkins and his crew.
Julian, that was a single paragraph, and so therefore my skepticism has been engaged with this.
Fred Brennan, the creator and ex-administrator of 8kun who has since denounced the platform, pointed all of this out on Twitter, which infuriated Jim Watkins, who went on a tirade against him during one of his video streams.
Here he is threatening to deport Brennan to the Philippines where he would be flung in jail, which would mean certain death for him as a disabled person in a wheelchair with specific medical needs.
Apologies for the ableist language in the following clip, which sees Jim speaking with two of his flunkies, Dee Stevens and Kevin Laufe, who goes by Major Burdock.
I have found out a new thing, that the Philippine government allows rendition back to the Philippines.
And just because I don't mention it, I do know where he lives.
And I do know the folks that will do the rendition back to the Philippines.
Now it costs $15,000.
I am thinking that a $15,000 rendition might be worth it.
I am thinking that a $15,000 rendition might be worth it.
You know, I could sell a car.
Well, you know, the thing is, is that it could cost a lot less
and we'll talk about that in private.
The money's not the thing.
And it's a boat rendition, so it takes time.
Yeah.
I could see a wheelchair rolling back and forth in a cage.
That's wrong.
Underneath the deck.
Oh, God.
Wrong is so right.
I'm just saying.
Wow.
I'm sorry.
I'm at my limit.
I have no sympathy anymore.
Oh, $15,000 three-week boat ride under the deck in a cage.
Wow.
Wow. Wow.
We're going to have to do something fun and different and I can hear I'm going to.
Can you request, can you request a, uh, I don't know.
Can I request?
To split half the money if you live broadcast it?
If they stream it?
Can you work out a deal with them?
You know, have a have a camera on him at all times and you have a feeding tube inserted.
Insert the feeding tube like a French goose.
*laughter* *overlapping voices*
*overlapping voices* *overlapping voices*
*overlapping voices* *overlapping voices*
So, pretty horrifying stuff.
He's basically making reference to how the French make foie gras, which is force-feeding geese until their livers bloat and you can make more foie gras from them.
Not great stuff.
And, you know, I mean, some people have said, oh, it's just a joke and, like, rendition has a specific definition.
It's not exactly like he's saying, like, oh, he's going to deport him in a specific way.
But I'm sorry, like, he tried to kill him already once.
He tried to get him imprisoned in the Philippines and he nearly succeeded if it weren't for the help of filmmaker Cullen Hoback of HBO's Q Into the Storm, who helped Brennan flee the country in Extremis.
Yeah, I mean, just like a genuinely sick and terrible person.
What else can you?
Just joking, like tried to kill someone is now joking about killing them again.
Just no shame.
Yeah, and Burdock saying, oh, yeah, no, I have a different way.
We'll talk about that in private comms or something.
It's just like, these people are sick.
Meanwhile, in Jim Watkins' Telegram channel, users are being banned for bringing the whole thing up.
A user named TheSunKing666 said, Huh.
Funny how Jim's rating looks just like you's rating.
And Jim responded, I ban The Sun King.
He is always coming and causing trouble.
Damn, it's sad that Louis 14 is going out this way.
He's a real shit poster.
As Watkins Sr.
deals with fallout from Q's incredibly sloppy return, Watkins Jr.
seems to be AWOL on the campaign trail.
Indeed, his last public appearance was on June 4th, according to Jared McDonald Evoy, an Arizona-based reporter who has been following his campaign.
The last time Ron appeared in any media that places him in Arizona is on June 6th in a stream with his dad about Jim's deposition for the January 6th committee.
Nearly a month has gone by since then, and there is no proof that Ron is in Arizona, nor even in the United States.
Haley of Arizona Right Wing Watch, who previously attended a campaign event on our behalf, told me this when I asked her about it.
I haven't seen signs of him in about a month.
Not that he was ever really good at campaigning, but he sure did like to latch on to anyone he could get a photo with, and made occasional trips down to the city to be annoying by the Phoenix Capitol.
And, with early primary voting starting in about a week, you'd think he'd be out here more than ever.
But no.
This is particularly bizarre since the election is only a month away now.
Recent activity on Ron's Telegram may help explain why he isn't out in public these days.
On the 28th of June, Ron posted this to his Telegram channel.
It's a message titled, Outreach from January 6th Select Committee, and it reads, The Select Committee is prepared to issue a subpoena to you for documents and testimony.
Please advise as soon as possible whether you can accept service electronically at this email address or whether you will require physical service of the subpoena by U.S.
Marshals.
If that is the case, can you confirm that your address is, and then they print his address.
If you have counsel representing you, please provide contact information for them as well.
Thank you.
And then it's signed the name of the person and their role, investigative counsel, select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol U.S.
House of Representatives, and the person's phone number.
I also like how the feds are posting pronouns in their emails now.
It does indeed say he, him, his.
This is progress.
Yes, we're getting somewhere.
Ron posted a defiant response to the missive, building on the fact that his father had recently provided testimony to the committee.
The J6 committee has attacked my father in an attempt to derail my congressional campaign.
Now they are asking me to voluntarily accept service of a subpoena.
The J6 committee can pound sand.
I am not hiding.
My campaign schedule is public.
Their incompetence is on display for all to see.
Please help support my campaign.
We need to raise 100k in the next 30 days to win this race.
Donate here.
And he posts his website.
I mean, I guess one reason why he's not showing up, I know there was a poll for his congressional district where he was at, I believe, 1%, which is only a single poll, of course.
So the polls could be cucked, and he could actually be at, you know, 70%.
You never know.
Sure, yeah.
Yeah, it's like it's got a 69% error margin.
Longtime QAnon influencer X22 made a video about the situation, and a clip of it was reposted by Watkins Jr.
and Sr.
Now they're grasping at straws because they don't know what to do.
They're panicking like we've never seen before.
Actually, they're trying to get CodeMonkeyZ.
This is what he put out on Telegram.
The January 6th committee emailed asking how they can subpoena me.
I told them to pound sand.
The J6 scam hearing are embarrassing for our country.
When I get into Congress, we will turn the tables on Pelosi.
And by the way, Ron Watkins, who is Co-Monkey Z, he's running for Congress.
What's very interesting about all this, why would they be going after Ron Watkins?
He wasn't there on January 6th.
He wasn't in the Capitol.
But he was the person who handled the board where Q posted.
So are they really going after him for January 6, or do they want to find out who Q is?
I'm thinking they want to find out who Q is, and that's why they're calling him in, because there's no other reason to call him in.
I mean, it should be also mentioned that Ron Watkins actively encouraged people to go to the Capitol on January 6.
Ron Watkins' campaign has been hitting quite a few speed bumps in the last months.
He had to loan himself $95,000, which may explain the $100k fundraising ask he made to his supporters in the post.
Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers, who's a real psycho, sicced her Groyper army on him as well.
He subsequently filed an ethics complaint against her and made a YouTube video about her many evils.
And, it pains me to say, but Ron Watkins also lost his Mr. Magoo-style campaign manager, Tony Tiora.
Or he fired him, it's not entirely clear.
I found this out because, frustrated with the lack of information on his whereabouts, I called the number on his latest flyers and spoke to the new campaign manager, a guy called Orlando Mangia, who appears frequently with Jim Watkins and crew on their interminable, unwatchable video streams.
This is what he told me about Tony Tiora.
He got... he... he... he's doing something else now.
Mangia informed me he was an ex-marine and seemed highly suspicious of me, Robert Billman of Patriots United.
But he still shared some information about why... I don't know why, that sounds like a trustworthy name.
I know, right?
I was like, we used to be a Facebook group, but now we're activists.
Jonathan Guy person.
Bob Billman, literally.
But he still shared some information about why Ron hasn't been seen in public or even in photos or videos that might lead anyone to believe he's still in the country, undisclosed location or not.
This is what he told me.
He's had death threats, so he hasn't been in public for a bit, so we're not sure, and I'm not at liberty to say when he's gonna be out in public.
Very strange.
It doesn't appear that Ron made it out for the 4th of July, and his next scheduled appearance was supposed to be at the Cobre Valley Republican Club in Globe, Arizona on July 9th, which, by the way, just seems to be a peroxide blonde woman that gets together with people at a coffeehouse every week.
My guess is he won't be showing up to that either.
Mangia also told me that Ron was dealing with fake campaign friends.
Quote, We got screwed over by a guy that was supposed to raise us money, and it didn't happen, so we're trying to do something different.
This happened this past three weeks, okay?
He told me that they weren't giving up, and informed me of a statistic I find highly dubious.
Quote, We're gonna continue on with the campaign.
He has a 25% chance of winning right now.
Nate Silver, eat your heart out.
A new numbers guy dropped.
I told Mangia that I was confused.
We wanted to support Ron, but there didn't seem to be any way to show up in person at one of his events to cheer.
He told me, quote, he's the boss, man.
I'm not going to force him to post something about him being somewhere if he's not comfortable with it.
For now, it seems like they're sticking with the digital approach.
This is what he told me, quote, We're going to do the online campaign because they're really good with computers and stuff.
Oh clearly.
Yeah.
If there's one thing we've learned this week, it's that that is true.
Hey there, this is Julian, uh, checking in with a bit of an editor's note after the fact.
Since we recorded this episode, it appears that Ron Watkins has gone on a bit of a quest to prove that he's still very much involved with his own campaign.
He's been posting tons of videos and photos of himself and Orlando on the campaign trail.
Now, these photos and videos appear to be taken in the past, and Even the text that accompanies them is set in the past tense.
So very suspect.
It seems like maybe Ron has caught wind that people have noticed his absence and he's trying to convince you that no no no he's very much still involved and he still needs your vote.
In fact in one of his posts he says Early voting starts this week in Arizona.
Please help the campaign by calling all your friends and family in Arizona and asking them to vote for Ron Watkins for Congress.
Unfortunately, Telegram strips all the ex-if information from these photos so it's unclear when they were taken, but he is wearing multiple different outfits and none of them appear to be recent.
So a real clusterfuck, and I think it's time to put Ron's face on some milk cartons.
Yeah, it's like that Scientologist guy's wife, Shelley Miscavige, the one who went missing.
I looked up what his competitors are doing in the district.
And one of them is Eli Crane, and he posted a picture of himself at a 4th of July parade in the town of Show Low, what happens to be with Wendy Rogers, who Ron Watkins was beefing with.
So like other people, his competitors are showing up in person at these 4th of July events, which of course, if you're running for Congress, you gotta.
It seems like it makes sense.
But he's not making his face seen in public.
Very, very odd behavior.
Maybe he's just got campaign burnout.
So true.
We don't give politicians enough slack.
Yeah.
He's taking a mental health day.
Yes, take a mental health day, Ron.
Yeah, he's doing some self-care.
And if I may speculate, I mean, I can't really say anything certain yet, but it seems like there's a few different federal entities kind of looking to speak to either him or his dad in various capacities.
I don't want to sound like one of those, like, the walls are closing in guys, but I don't know.
This is not great if you're a politician and you can't show your face in the month before you are, you know, going to be up for election.
So that's it.
That's Q. That's Q's return and the splash that it's made, which is, Liv, I think you made a great point about, like, will they be able to put together a unified enough front, you know, among the influencers and, you know, based on these posts to drag more people into this movement?
And for now, it seems like enough chaos reigns that I would say, no, this is not very effective right now.
Yeah, but you know, that is, to be fair, the history of this podcast is like, well, surely this will have an effect.
So, you know, absolutely.
You never know.
Get me, get me for that optimism.
Never be optimistic.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and for five bucks a month, you'll get an extra episode every week and access to our limited series, Trickle Down, written by Travis Few.
That is one episode away from its first season being over, the 10 episode run.
It's been very, very fun.
And by that, I mean full of body horror and Many people say they don't eat or take baths now listening to it.
It feels really bad.
Fair enough.
Liv, tell us a bit about your latest podcast in which you are attempting to feud with other leftists and destroy our movement.
Yes, my new podcast sponsored by the CIA.
I have a solo podcast that's just called, you know, Liv Agar.
Whichever podcast hosting site you use, you can just search it up.
It is a dispute about an interpretation of Marx and the Marxist labor theory of value.
That's sort of the general theme of the podcast.
That's sort of like leftist philosophical political analysis.
I also have premium episodes for two dollars a month, just patreon.com slash Liv Agar.
And people can also go check you out on Twitch.
Same thing.
Liv Agar.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Annie, tell us where people can find you and your work.
Yeah.
So you can follow me just on Twitter, which is AnnieKNK.
And you can check out my six part limited series podcast called Vaccine The Human Story, which is about the history of the first ever vaccine and naturally the first ever anti-vax movement as well.
Listeners, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
Amen.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
You know, screw the FBI.
Oh my God!
There is this agent in San Diego, last name Rod.
And tell me, tell me he's not a Rod.
He's a Rod.
The first time I saw...
You know, people are always talking about that there's these FBI agents that are posting on 8chan.
This was back when we had 8chan.
And then they capture the clips and it says you on them.
Because if you post something, it'll say you on it.
So you can keep track of what you did.
So this is back when we had 8chan.
He turned in all of these you, you, you, you, you posts to a judge to get a search warrant against me.
I never saw that search warrant before yesterday.
And it's from 2019.
But I saw the you, you, you stuff.
And I said, Oh, yeah, they're a bunch of dumb shits.
