#Q #QAnon QCumbers Q-Tip "The Storm” "Any Day Now

[fierceredpanda]

Apologies to anyone who finds that comment ageist.

I find it appalling.

It’s appalling that Grassley is clinging to the dead carcass of his Senate seat, which he should have handed over a couple of terms ago. It’s appalling that this senile old coot is in charge of anything relating to anything.

Totally agree. Dianne Feinstein, too.

[AndyinPA]

[Baidn]

Apologies to anyone who finds that comment ageist.

I find it appalling.

It’s appalling that Grassley is clinging to the dead carcass of his Senate seat, which he should have handed over a couple of terms ago. It’s appalling that this senile old coot is in charge of anything relating to anything.

But then who else will make certain that voices of the unadaptable and hateful bigots are heard and given undo consideration? *Sarcasm on obviously*

[Luke]

Ron Watkins on Telegram says he's not Q. Ron Watkins is not known for being truthful.

CodeMonkeyZ, [18.03.21 20:26]
Ive noticed that the fake news media is FALSELY reporting that i am Q.
It is simply not true.

Here are the facts:
I am not Q.
Ive never spoken privately with Q.
I dont know who Q is.

[Volkonski]

QAnon backer accused of firing paintball rounds at soldiers

https://apnews.com/article/arrests-wisc ... b159249db3

Authorities say a QAnon supporter arrested Friday for allegedly firing paintball rounds at two reservists in a Milwaukee suburb recently traveled to Washington, D.C. and promised violence there.

Prosecutors say Ian Alan Olson, 31, of Nashotah, drove a car spray-painted with QAnon slogans to the Wisconsin Army Reserve Center in Pewaukee on March 15 and shouted, “This is for America” before firing two or three paintball rounds at the soldiers. His gun then jammed.

The rounds did not hit the reservists, one of whom tackled Olson and held him to the ground until police arrived.



Federal court documents accuse Olson of telling intake staff at the Waukesha County Jail that he had just returned from Washington, where he failed to deliver his message. He allegedly said he would cause a “mass casualty” event and that people would remember his name.

[Chilidog]

He seems nice.

[Volkonski]

QAnon followers already claiming Colorado mass shooting was a ‘false flag’ event: ‘Nobody died’
‘This was 100 per cent fake fake,’ one Telegram user baselessly claims

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 1616519911

However, followers of the QAnon conspiracy instead took to messaging platform Telegram on Monday evening to declare that the mass shooting and the media reports about it were faked, according to messages obtained by Newsweek.

“No question Boulder, Co incident today was a false flag. The only question is by which side?,” one Telegram user with more than 260,000 followers wrote on Monday.

“False flag means it’s fake. Nobody actually died. Was this false flag to try and take your guns or scare the s**t out of you?,” the popular user added.

Another user claimed: “Nobody died. I was there for an actual shooting. This was 100 per cent fake fake,” as an account with close to 60,000 followers added: “This Boulder situation reeks of false flag. Anons will pick this apart in a matter of hours if it is,” according to Newsweek.

[MichaelJ]

[Slim Cognito]

Now that the shooter's ethnic-sounding name has been released, they may have a change of heart.

[MN-Skeptic]

Now that the shooter's ethnic-sounding name has been released, they may have a change of heart.

No, they'll just insist all the louder that everyone needs to be armed in order to protect themselves from armed murdering hordes of black thugs, illegal aliens, jihadist Muslims, LGBT fascists, or whatever slurs they currently use in their bigotry. The solution for them is never fewer guns, but more guns.

[Volkonski]

Wisconsin QAnon supporter accused of firing paintballs at soldiers

https://www.wisn.com/article/wisconsin- ... s/35895484#

He allegedly said he would cause a "mass casualty" event when released from custody and people would remember his name.



"I am ready for this. How many people need to die for a message to get across," he said, according to the complaint. "I almost have everything ready."

Capitol police took Olson for a mental evaluation.

He was diagnosed with a "brief psychotic disorder" and discharged after four days.

Prosecutors also said Olson owns armor-piercing bullets, several guns, gun magazines, knives, a tactical vest and a gas mask, among other items.

[neeneko]

No, they'll just insist all the louder that everyone needs to be armed in order to protect themselves from armed murdering hordes of black thugs, illegal aliens, jihadist Muslims, LGBT fascists, or whatever slurs they currently use in their bigotry. The solution for them is never fewer guns, but more guns.

Yeah, the two responses I am seeing are generally: "It is terrorism! Look at how the liberal media is not telling you his name, they would if he was white!' and 'if more people at the store were armed, they would have stopped the inferior brown person!'

[Volkonski]

How QAnon helps its followers find conspiracy in chaos
There's always a new clue to be found in Q's world.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/how-qanon ... d_ms_tw_ma

We recognize ourselves in a few wisps of nimbus cloud, see the curve of a smile in the night sky and form a man out of moon rock; the religiously inclined might recognize, in the patterns on a Maillard-browned bit of toast, the face of a holy savior. Pareidolia is an ancient phenomenon that’s part of a subclass of a broader set of human behaviors, the tendency to see patterns where none exist.

The equally lovely Greek word for that tendency is apophenia. To the apophenia-prone, life is not a jumbled drawer jammed with oddments of numbers and times and chance meetings; there are hidden patterns and significances to nearly everything, just as, to our ancient counterparts, a few clustered celestial bodies might form a bear or a plow or a queen perched all night on a throne of stars. Down here below Cassiopeia, on the dim and bounded Earth, apophenia has its drawbacks.

The term was first coined in 1958, by the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad. He was the head of a large neurological military hospital and observed closely the development and progression of schizophrenia in a large number of soldiers. From his observations, he hypothesized that schizophrenia developed in a series of stages. The first consisted of a general agitation. By the second phase, apophenia, the patient was prone to perceive “abnormal connectedness between seemingly unrelated meanings.”

The term was first used in English in 2001, in an academic book about poltergeists and hauntings. As Swiss psychologist Peter Brugger told Slate in 2014, outside of descriptions of schizophrenia, apophenia is “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidences.” It’s a motivator for gamblers who see patterns in their wins and losses — and stake ever higher amounts on their false perceptions; it's behind Bible code theological fads and the oeuvre of Dan Brown.

[humblescribe]

Ron Watkins on Telegram says he's not Q. Ron Watkins is not known for being truthful.

CodeMonkeyZ, [18.03.21 20:26]
Ive noticed that the fake news media is FALSELY reporting that i am Q.
It is simply not true.

Here are the facts:
I am not Q.
Ive never spoken privately with Q.
I dont know who Q is.

Perhaps Q is really the Dread Pirate Roberts?

[AndyinPA]

I've seen the first two hours of the HBO documentary. There are a lot of weird people there. I could see Watkins as Q. I'm not very much into this stuff, so my opinion on this subject doesn't really matter, though.

The gullibility of people just astounds me, watching this. But I've followed a lot of stuff on cults, so I guess it's not really so different.

[Luke]

Long WaPo story about QAnon, here's the beginning... will make it a weekend read.

QAnon’s Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality
Masculinity, faith and the strange convergence of counterculture and hate
By Marisa Meltzer MARCH 29, 2021

I didn’t choose New Age culture. But I grew up in a college town in Northern California in the 1980s, where the ubiquitous Grateful Dead stickers, crystal shops and tarot card readers suggested that the 1960s ethos of self-discovery never ended. Psychedelic accoutrements and people who self-identified as seekers were normal to me — and so I craved mainstream American culture. I rebelled — mildly — by eating Domino’s pizza at sleepovers and idolizing the nihilism of 1970s punk.

It turns out that I didn’t entirely resist it. In the past decade or so, my fluency in the world of New Age culture, wellness, woo-woo (whatever you might call it) became a professional boon as a journalist. These ideas were taking off once again, especially among women who are White and middle-class, which I also am. I understood that world and had a lot to say about it. While on assignment I’ve gone to menstrual huts and tea ceremonies; I’ve gotten massaged by boa constrictors and I’ve meditated at sound baths. I’ve greeted this all with professional curiosity, something between an open mind and a world-weary arched eyebrow.

On Jan. 6, along with the rest of the country, I followed the news of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the prominence of Confederate flags, nooses and other symbols of the far right. Like many others, I took note of the so-called QAnon Shaman: 33-year-old Jake Angeli, born Jacob Anthony Chansley, of Arizona. He was bare-chested and covered in Nordic tattoos, at least one of which, the Valknot, is a Norse symbol sometimes associated with white supremacy. But he was also, infamously, wearing a headdress fashioned from buffalo horns and coyote skin — elements associated with the American West that seemed to telegraph a pagan spirituality. I’ve been around a lot of White people who have adopted a mishmash of pagan and Indigenous signifiers as a New Age aesthetic. It’s a cringeworthy and offensive display of appropriation that I don’t endorse, but it’s common in that world.

After the attack on the Capitol, news reports unearthed that Chansley was a founder of something called the Star Seed Academy (in a certain New Age vernacular, a star seed is a higher being). The Facebook page for the venture, before it was taken down, read: “Star Seed Academy creates leaders of the highest order! We help people to awaken, evolve and ascend! Are you ready to be a leader? Are you ready to ascend?” Recently, Chansley’s lawyer, Albert Watkins, told me in a statement that his client “is deeply spiritual. His spirituality is serving him well as he traverses the pending federal charges.” He added that Chansley has “a personal commitment to Ahimsa,” the principle (found in Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism) of doing no harm.

As a devotee of QAnon — the sprawling set of false claims that have coalesced into an extremist ideology deemed a domestic terrorist threat by the FBI — and a freedom fighter for Donald Trump, Chansley was my ideological opposite; yet there was also a lot about him that was familiar. It felt shocking and suggested serious flaws in a culture I thought I understood: a fine line between the kind of zeitgeist-y, sensitive New Age-guy version of masculinity, and something more nefarious. The idea of spiritual lineage is too generous to bestow on Chansley, but he represents a growing pipeline between New Age male spirituality, new masculinity movements and QAnon. This pipeline is one of unlikely connections and strange bedfellows, of mixed martial arts fighters and poets, evangelical Christians and yoga teachers.

\https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine ... rituality/

[Luke]

They're a wee bit testy at Jim Hoft's Gateway House of Boys (and Pundits), maybe Jim didn't get laid for Easter.

Leftist Morons Spend Time, Money and their Reputations Creating a Spoof Q-Anon Easter Egg Hunt in Washington DC over Easter Weekend
By Jim Hoft Published April 4, 2021 at 3:18pm





So weak.
The left and FBI Director Chris Wray are consumed by Q-Anon, an internet group on the right that spread information, predictions and rumors about a make-believe honest intelligence community in America. According to Q-Anon these honest operatives were working behind the scene to prosecute and punish those individuals who spied on President Trump during his campaign and presidency and other criminal operatives in the FBI and CIA. It turned out many of their predictions were wrong and no one was ever punished for spying on President Trump or for the attempted coup of his administration.

The left and FBI Director Chris Wray to this day treat Q-Anon as a dangerous right-wing terrorist group. On Easter weekend the leftist art collective INDECLINE spent time, money and their reputations pushing a pathetic “Q-Anon Easter Egg Hunt” in Washington DC.

Colorful banners advertising QAnon Easter Egg Hunts and thousands of plastic eggs randomly appeared across DC in a dozen community parks and neighborhoods late last night. Each of the 3,000+ eggs hidden throughout the city contained a single Kool-Aid packet, its label altered to reflect the controversial conspiracy groups ideologies and buzzwords.

The parks and surrounding neighborhoods include, but are not limited to:

Garfield Park, Stanton Park, Lovejoy Park, Meridian Hill Park, Rose Park, Logan Circle, Kalorama Park, Farragut Square





The infamous Activist Art Collective, INDECLINE was behind the guerrilla installation. The group is best known for its brazen and often illegal activations throughout the US and abroad.

It makes sense that these godless morons would spend their Easter weekend creating a spoof Q-Anon operation.
Did anyone really think they’d spend time thinking about Christ or his resurrection?

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/0 ... r-weekend/

[Baidn]

Seems like it's a good investment to me considering I'd never heard of them and I imagine many other people hadn't before this either. Great plan too by the RWNJ to put out articles about how not mad at all they are about the big stupid meanie poopies on the left doing pranks.

[LM K]

I laughed so damn hard when I read this. Jon was wondering WTF?! because I laughed so damn hard and long.

I do agree with the author; this is circumstantial evidence. However, this makes sense to me. Watkins message to 8kun trying to explain this away is weak. Qanon and 8kun are so bizarre that it's hard to pin anything down.

A QAnon revelation suggests the truth of Q’s identity was right there all along


"'The identity of Q, the supposed top-secret government operative and prophet of the extremist ideology QAnon, has for years been a fiercely debated mystery. But a possible slip-up in a new documentary suggests the answer was always the most obvious one: Ron Watkins, the longtime administrator of the message board 8kun, the conspiratorial movement’s online home.

Most major QAnon researchers have long speculated that Watkins had written many of the false and cryptic posts alleging that former president Donald Trump was waging war against an elite international cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Watkins has long denied his involvement, saying he was merely a neutral backroom operator of the site and never a participant.

But in the Sunday finale for the HBO series “Q: Into the Storm,” filmmaker Cullen Hoback points to what he argues is a key piece of evidence that Watkins had lied about his role in the more than 4,000 messages Q had posted since 2017.

In a final scene, after Watkins talked about how he had shared baseless claims about voter fraud after Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections, he told Hoback: “It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q.”

To Hoback, it was an inadvertent admission that Watkins had actually been Q, crafting secret communiques and shaping the movement for “normies,” or normal people, to consume. But in the scene, Watkins smiled and cleared his throat, seeking to correct — or further muddy — the record: “Never as Q. I promise. I am not Q.”

The evidence is circumstantial, and no proof affirms Watkins’ role. Watkins, for his part, messaged his 150,000 subscribers on the chat service Telegram late Sunday, “Friendly reminder: I am not Q. Have a good weekend.”

But the revelation has reinvigorated debate about the clues of Watkins’ role in one of the biggest conspiracy-theory movements of the Internet age. QAnon has incited violence and criminal acts, and the FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat.

Watkins and his father, 8kun owner Jim Watkins, were the only people who could boast of a behind-the-scenes dialogue with the nameless prophet, and QAnon’s rise had served to give the bizarre duo a level of attention and infamy that they seemed to relish in video live streams and online posts.

As QAnon’s following grew, Q never seemed to show any interest in sharing his exclusive intelligence “drops” anywhere but 8kun, a rickety online watering hole — even when the site, formerly known as 8chan, went offline for nearly three months after a series of mass shootings in 2019.

It was also unclear why such an elite strategic mastermind — with a prized view into the engine of Trump’s secretive war — would trust only a father-son duo, living in the Philippines, whose main claim to fame was a crude website of hate speech, pornography and extremist memes.
For some researchers, the admission does not resolve all lingering questions about Q. Some argue persuasively that, while Ron Watkins probably knows who is behind QAnon, the account could be driven by more than one person, or a team of writers crafting messages for public display.

“It is a collective ensemble of different interested parties that have different levels of knowledge and different access points to the infrastructure,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center. “There’s no single person who could be Q.”

It also does not resolve the true birth story of Q, which first posted on 4chan in 2017 — amid a flurry of anonymous troll posts from purported Trump-administration insiders — before moving to 8chan and the Watkinses’ control in 2018. Some researchers point to differences in writing styles at that time to suggest the Q persona changed hands.

On a live stream last week, Ron and Jim Watkins proposed an alternative explanation: that Q was either Stephen K. Bannon or Hoback himself. (Neither Bannon or Hoback responded immediately to requests for comment.)

The documentary, however, made few waves in the online circles frequented by QAnon believers. Nearly all of the most popular QAnon discussion boards and Telegram channels ignored the Watkins interview, instead focusing on the movement’s latest topics of interest, mostly involving false claims about coronavirus vaccines, President Biden and the Suez Canal.

Q, who once posted several times a day, hasn’t said a thing since Dec. 8. But the movement in many ways has outgrown Q, by having elevated a widespread corps of QAnon promoters, merchandisers and social media influencers who offer their audiences a flurry of absurd baseless claims and far-right talking points.

To many researchers, the identity of QAnon’s leader is less important now than what the rise of QAnon says about the Internet: How it can give global reach to misinformation and rally people to believe incredible, impossible things.

“At the end of the day, the HBO documentary ends exactly where we were before: That Ron Watkins is the one with the ability to be Q or know Q, and that perhaps his father Jim Watkins also played some role in continuing the Q persona. … The ‘definitive proof’ is still missing,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism.

“Even if it was only Ron Watkins, the movement has grown far beyond one person or alias. It is now a global societal virus that has become a vessel for everything from [anti-vaccine] misinformation and coronavirus conspiracy theories to political agendas,” Katz added. But “everything Jim or Ron Watkins say should be taken with skepticism — even if that statement comes in the form of a bizarre ‘slip-up.’”

[LM K]

Did you miss the FBI saying at the Senate hearing last week that they're not allowed to monitor social media? Which was how they missed the mountain range of info about storming the Capitol on Jan 6.

The FBI and other law enforcement carefully monitor social media.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justic ... l-n1259769

"Fact check: false. FBI agents have said in court records that they monitor public social media, and the bureau recently signed a $14 million contract with a "threat intelligence" company called ZeroFox "to proactively identify threats to the United States and its interests" on the internet. For years, the FBI has had a similar arrangement with DataMinr, which can flag social media postings of interest to its clients.

"'A senator had a simple question for the FBI's counterterrorism chief at a hearing last week about the Capitol riot.

Didn't the FBI see all those postings by extremists on social media before the event, she asked Wednesday, including promises to "occupy the Capitol" and bring "revolution" to Washington?

"To my knowledge, no, ma'am," the counterterrorism chief, Jill Sanborn, responded, going on to explain that the FBI can't monitor "First Amendment-protected activities" without a tip or an open investigation that directs agents to a specific post.

The senator, Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., kept pressing. "So the FBI does not monitor publicly available social media conversations?"

"Correct, ma'am," Sanborn replied. "It's not within our authorities."

Fact check: false. FBI agents have said in court records that they monitor public social media, and the bureau recently signed a $14 million contract with a "threat intelligence" company called ZeroFox "to proactively identify threats to the United States and its interests" on the internet. For years, the FBI has had a similar arrangement with DataMinr, which can flag social media postings of interest to its clients.

In a statement to NBC News, the FBI acknowledged that it can and does look at public social media information. An FBI official said Sanborn understood Sinema's question to be referring to "whether the FBI persistently and passively examines internet traffic and social media conversations, to include direct messages between two users." In fact, her question referred to comments made on public-facing social media services.

"The FBI may observe and collect information from open sources as long as the FBI activities are done for a valid law enforcement or national security purpose and in a manner that does not unduly infringe upon the speaker or author's ability to deliver his or her message," an FBI official said. "The authorized purpose must specifically be tied to federal criminal or national security purposes, usually to further an FBI assessment or ... investigation."

Current and former FBI officials and legal experts said Sanborn's misstatement points to a culture of caution — and confusion — within the FBI about the rules of the road regarding FBI monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms. They say the bureau's scandalous history of domestic political spying under J. Edgar Hoover has left the FBI in a defensive crouch about any appearance that it is snooping on law-abiding Americans.

[noblepa]

They say the bureau's scandalous history of domestic political spying under J. Edgar Hoover has left the FBI in a defensive crouch about any appearance that it is snooping on law-abiding Americans.

This reference the J. Edgar Hoover made me take a quick look at Wikipedia. It brought back some things I had forgotten about him.

I think that Hoover would have fit right in with Trump style politics. For decades, he ignored the mafia, even denying its existence, to concentrate on persecuting communists and sympathizers, and anyone else that he, personally, felt constituted a threat to the "American way of life". He regarded the FBI as his personal fiefdom, to do with as he pleased. The organization existed solely to cater to his whims and prejudices.

He would have had a hefty dossier on Donald Trump, his businesses and personal peccadillos, that would have allowed him to control DJT's every move. They say that's why no president ever had the nerve to fire him, even after his excesses became known.

Its been said that the only person DJT never said a bad word about is Vladimir Putin. That would almost certainly have been true of J. Edgar Hoover, as well. Hoover would have had much more dirt on him that Putin ever dreamed of.

[LM K]

I'm finishing ep 1 of "The Storm".

So damn sad. Hilarious, but sad.

[Suranis]

Hoover ignored the Mafia because they were blackmailing him. That's been obvious to me at least.

Anyway... JJ MacNab

https://twitter.com/jjmacnab/status/1379145562943983617

@jjmacnab
I'm going to make an unpopular statement.

Platforming two extremists and a handful of their amplifiers for six freakin' hours on HBO just to kind-of-sort-of out the name of the guy who was "Q" is bad.

The real story of the factors that led so many ordinary people to fall for an obvious trolling effort is far more interesting, pathetic, and important.

I watched Q for more than three years, during which time I spent no time- zero, zip, zilch- trying to figure out who Q was because I had a short list of two people, both named Watkins, and I didn't care whether it was one of both of them, or someone else working with them.

This is not a game. It is not entertainment. It is not a joke. It's a wildly popular conspiracy theory that has ruined people's lives and in the most extreme cases, caused a handful to commit violent and lethal crimes.

To be honest, I stopped watching the series after an entire episode was spent naming Steve Bannon as Q, only to have the theory dropped in the last few minutes.

From September of last year.

https://t.co/sPn6Wc24M9?amp=1

[fierceredpanda]

I finished the series yesterday, and wholeheartedly concur with JJ McNab. The show could hardly have been worse if Jim and Ron Watkins had scripted it. The QAnon Anonymous podcast is both more entertaining and more illuminating.

[Gregg]