October 22, 2024 • 48 mins
Q Anon believes many things, including that Tom Hanks is a Satan-worshipping, child-eating pedophile. Yeah. We'll just leave our "drop" right here for you to make up your own mind.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just getting conspiratorial
here on Stuff you should know the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right, the episode we wanted to do so much
that it sat in our folder for four.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Years I believe it was. Yeah, the very beginning of
twenty twenty one, I would say, probably.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We are. I gotta say, it's gonna be nice to
see that removed from my desktop. It's just been sitting
there for so long.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Just staring at you. That que like a big blinky,
winky eyeball.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yes with a one single eyelash attached. So we should
probably say at the outset to anybody tuning in that
who is like part of the q and No movement?
We're going to approach this as if everything the QAnon
movement believes is not true or made up, not from
(01:08):
the perspective of people who believe in the QAnon movement,
although we'll explain a lot of the same stuff. I
just don't want anybody to, you know, get five minutes
in and be like, what is this, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, I think that's a fair CoA And yeah, I
mean that's just the deal.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, yeah, we're taking the anthropological stance.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Okay, Yeah, so let's dive in, shall we.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Well let's give a little bit of a definition for
the three people who've never heard of QAnon.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, and also, what I'm hoping is is that there's
a lot of people like me who actually probably I
probably knew more about it than some people even, but
a lot of people probably just sort of knew a
little bit or know a little bit about what this
thing was slash is m M, but you know, didn't
really know much about it, and it's just good to
(02:00):
know about stuff. So hopefully that'll brighten some corners of
your life as well.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, and one thing I kept running into while researching
this is that there's a lot of families that have
been torn apart, families, friendships, sure, because people will go
down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the friends and family
that are like, that's not true get left behind because
they haven't woken up yet. So yeah, I can really
mess things up. So possibly there's some people listening to
(02:27):
this who have lost friends or family that might be
a little wiser to it might be able to try
to get their friend or family member back afterwards. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, And the final CoA I guess is that some
of this stuff is so outlandish that it's hard to
not laugh.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But it's not funny at all.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
It's dangerous and scary and sad. So if I might
laugh at something or giggle, it's not that I don't
take it seriously. That it's a serious kind of thing
that's happened.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, it kind of like not even kind of. It
very much trapes us into the territory of high camp,
but is not at all being ironic or campy. It's
just just approach this as like everything we're gonna say
is believed seriously by people in the QAnon movement. And
then sorry, CoA Number five, we're probably going to get
(03:22):
a lot wrong. This is an incredibly expansive, ever evolving
movement conspiracy theory that you know, we're not We're going
to walk right past some stuff where we might misspeak
here there, but hopefully the general contours and outlines we're
going to we're going to get to be able to
get across.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Correctly all right onward.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
So this whole thing The q Andon movement is a
online conspiracy theory that essentially the world is run by
a cabal of global elites, mostly liberals, Hollywood typesment high
government officials, and that they do all sorts of nefarious things,
which we'll get into in a second. But one of
the things to understand about this first is that a
(04:07):
lot of it is rooted in some really old existing
conspiracy theories, in particular a lot of anti Semitic ones
that have been around for centuries. In particular, the blood
libel is one that Jews for like a thousand years essentially,
maybe longer, have been persecuted, executed, massacred because of rumors
(04:31):
that they steal Christian babies and kill them and use
their blood to make leaven bread or unleavened bread for Passover,
and that stuff gets around and people get all up
in arms and scared about their kids being kidnapped, and
then the next thing you know, Jewish people are dead
because of this blood libel. That's part of it. And
although Jewish people are targeted in some quarters, you don't
(04:55):
have to be anti Semitic to be a queue not
member necessarily, right.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Other things that it echoes from the past are something
called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was
in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Another anti Semitic conspiracy,
basically the tired trope that there's a global Jewish cabal
kind of running the world, running the banking system, plotting
(05:21):
to overthrow the gentile governments of the world. We mentioned
Henry Ford and our Henry Ford podcast was a believer
in this kind of thing. And versions of this, versions
of the Blood Libel have been sort of wrapped up,
given a new, brand new shine coat of wax, and
was trotted out as QAnon, which is and you know,
(05:44):
Dave helped us with this many years ago, and thankfully
Dave didn't quit his job and he's still around to
help us out more.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
But it's a catch all.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
This conspiracy that you said is very vast, very wide ranging,
but mostly has to do with these power or full
liberal elites that are some are pedophiles, some are Satan worshippers.
Some they claim literally eat children. And we're talking about
the Clintons, of course, and we're talking about Tom Hanks
(06:15):
and Oprah Winfrey and George Soros and Ellen DeGeneres and
even the Dali Lama.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and Pope Francis. So anybody who's even remotely left
leaning who holds power in the world, especially in the
government or you know, pop culture, they are probably a
part of this secret cabal. And it checks all the
boxes for pearl clutching. They run the world, They worship Satan,
(06:41):
their pedophiles, and their cannibals. Can you think of a
worse group of people than that. I can't think of
any other thing you could throw at the at the
wall to see what would stick. Like, that's as bad
as anything gets. So the idea behind QAnon? What else
could I've been trying to think? Give me something.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Else, maybe Philadelphia sports fans.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Oh, now we're gonna get some hate mail, man, And.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
That's where the hate mail is gonna come from. So
I'm just getting brotherly love.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Right, Yeah, and batteries. So the whole thing, though, is
that these people who are Satanic, pedophile cannibals, thank you.
People new to the podcasts are gonna be like, what's
wrong with that one guy?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
It's hard to even get that sentence out.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It is thanks man, that they run the world. They
run things, and it all happens below the surface. Everything
that normies like you and I and probably most of
the people listening to this podcast believe is true. Is brainwashed.
We've been brainwashed by the mainstream media to be given
(07:49):
this line that things are the way they seem, when
in reality, things are not at all the way they seem.
There's a Satanic worshiping cult running the world, and they're
doing all sorts of terrible things. Those of us who
don't believe in QAnon just haven't awakened to this idea
yet of what's actually reality.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Right, So that's one part. Those are the bad guys.
The good guys, or rather the good guy is former
president and twenty twenty four candidate Donald Trump, who, according
to QAnon and the theory, was picked, handpicked by the
leaders of the US military to fight these evil forces,
(08:29):
and everything that he does and tries to do is
in service of that mission. Anything working against him, even
within his own party, as part of the deep state plot,
and they are all awaiting what's known or what they
call the storm, which is when Trump reveals who he
is and what he has done to fight these evil forces,
(08:52):
declares martial law, and everyone that has been a part
of that secret cabal is rounded up by the military
and tried and convicted and killed, at which time that
the Great Awakening will occur, in which Trump and the
QAnon supporters are a lot of his heroes around the world.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and this will bring about the founding of a
right wing authoritarian regime that Trump will lead. This is again,
this is what they believe is going on. So when
Donald Trump became president, for some reason, he had to
play along with this great charade that the liberal leftist
Satanists were producing, rather than I don't know, just being
(09:34):
overt about what his mission was. So that means that
since he had to play along, he had to leave
little like he had to give little winks and nods
and leave what are called bread crumbs, which are little
bits of information or little clues that the QAnon community dissects, discusses,
argues over. And what that's called is baking. They take
(09:56):
the breadcrumbs and they bake it, and when they finally
come to some sort of consensus or somebody comes up
with the best craziest interpretation of it, that becomes basically
the QAnon canon, and that spreads throughout social media, and
then the QAnon movement just gets that much more solidified
that much more extensive, and because of these tweets on
(10:17):
social media, some people say, well, what the heck is
everybody talking about, and we'll go look this stuff up
and very often fall down the rabbit rabbit hole and
become q andon members themselves.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
That's right, So are we done?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yep? That was it. That's everything you need to know
about QAnon. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, let's just read six ads and go home.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
There's two more things I wanted to add about this
global Satanist pedophile cannibal elite that's running the world secretly.
They are also suspected by some to be actual lizard people,
which is a direct ripoff of the the mini series
from the early eighties. And then, secondly, the reason that
they sacrifice the kids that they sexually abuse is because
(11:02):
they're after they're adrenochrome, which.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Yeah, this is this is pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Metabolis. Adrenochrome is metabolized adrenaline. It's oxidized adrenaline, and according
to QAnon, it's like the elixir of life. So these
Satanists are sacrificing kids to get their adrenochrome and drinking it,
and they're they're staying forever young and vital. And there's
a few things wrong with this one. It seems to
be based on a misinterpretation of what adrenochrome does and
(11:30):
where you get it, based on fear and loathing in
Las Vegas, because Hunter Thompson has basically a throwaway intimation
that the adrenochrome that he does and goes on a
crazy trip over it can only be gotten from the
adrenal gland of a live human.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Right, that's right, And that is not true. It's synthesized
in a lab. You can it's it's available. That is
not true at all. So none of that is true.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Okay, so I think we'd laid the foundation pretty well,
Like that's essentially the greatest broad strokes of what people
in QAnon believe is going on in reality.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
That's right. Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about pizza
right after this. All right, we promised talk of pizza.
(12:37):
That's because you can't talk about q and on without
mentioning a bit of a precursor to QAnon, which was Pizzagate,
that is to say, in twenty sixteen, and this is
we should say that the first QAnon sort of activity,
which are called q andon drops started in twenty seventeen
kind of what like October. And this is in twenty
sixteen when the Democratic Convention servers were hacked and emails
(13:02):
were published on Wiki leaks, and one of them kind
of rose to the top, which was an email from
John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's twenty sixteen campaign chairman,
in which he put forth, Hey, there's this pizza place
called Comet Ping Pong in the DC area here, and
(13:25):
we should hold a fundraiser there. I don't know if
he said this in the email, but the fact is
that his brother was a regular there and said, hey,
this is probably a good place to do that. They
got pretty good pizza, they got a bunch of ping
pong tables. It's a good place for people to meet up.
And that was found in I guess exposed, which is
kind of a funny way to say it on four Chan,
(13:48):
where people started saying, oh, well, that is the HQ.
Basically that's ground zero for where this elite cabal is
meeting and they are sacrificing children in the basement of
that place. There is no basement to that place, but
who cares about that? That was what was put forth
on four Chan and hashtag pizzagate started spreading like wildfire.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Surprisingly, yeah, and the fact that there is no basement means,
according to like qann thinking, that means that it's hidden.
And even if we don't have any proof it's there,
because the fact that it's being used by this secret
cabal and it's hidden is proof that it's there. Right,
That's the kind of circular thinking that keeps these things going,
and in Pizzagate in particular with Comet ping Pong, within
(14:34):
a month October twenty ninth was the first post about
how this is this is one of the home bases
of this child sex trafficking that this cabal engaged in
October twenty ninth was the first post. By December fourth,
a little over a month later, a man so riled
up by the idea that Comet ping Pong was a
(14:54):
hub of child sex trafficking drove a few hundred miles
from North Carolina to DC and showed up with at
comment Ping Pong with the AR fifteen and shot up
a door to get the door open.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
He also had a handgun on his side. Nobody was hurt.
People got out of there, very quickly. He kind of
wandered around the place alone for about twenty minutes. I
couldn't get in that door shot it up, told authorities
that he was self investigating Hillary Clinton's pedophile.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Ring, and that was that. He went to jail. Is
now out of jail.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I think he went for a few years, interestingly sentenced
by Kintaji Jackson Brown who now sits on the Supreme Court.
Oh really, side note, huh, Yeah, but that was it basically,
But you know, that was Pizzagate, and it was a
precursor to what would follow in October twenty seventeen when
(15:51):
Q first, I guess revealed himself but not really.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Right, Yeah, so I think. Yeah. The first drop was
October twentieth seventeen on four Chan, which is an image
board which is like you post images and then people
comment on them and conversations breakout, and in particular, four
Chan was known as like one of the really dark
recesses of the Internet. And on this image board a
(16:16):
guy named Q Clearance Patriot, and the first post read
open your eyes many in our government worship Satan. That
was the first Q drop that ever came out. In
October twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
That's right. And Q clearance.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
You know what QAnon means is Q clearance is a
top secret clearance utilized by the Department of Energy, specifically
meaning you have access to nuclear the nuclear weapons program.
And the anon comes from just a sort of a
regular thing that would be people on four Chan who
claim to be like part of the FBI, like FBI,
(16:51):
non ciaann like whitstler blowing kind of thing. So q
anon became the name and claimed to be a intelligence officer,
a very high ranking person within the US government who
had direct evidence of this satanic pedophile cult and very
clear approvable knowledge that Donald Trump was on a secret
(17:15):
mission from the US military to reverse all this.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Right, and so between October twenty seventeen and sometime in
twenty twenty, the Q drops amounted to I guess more
than five thousand, and they were really really cryptic. They
were not like, hey, this is going on comet ping
Pong is actually a hub of child sex trafficking. They
(17:38):
were very cryptic, and so that just lent themselves to
be dissected and discussed and thought about and interpreted and misinterpreted.
And so there's an example of one from September twenty eighteen.
This would be shortly after the whole thing started, and
it said panic in dc LL talking equals truth revealed,
(17:58):
Tarmac bc LL talking equals truth revealed Comy HRC email case.
And it goes on and on and it mentions Hussein,
which is how Q always referred to Barack Obama.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Thanks for shortening this, by the way, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And it just it keeps going on. But the last
line is Faiza brings down the house? When do bird sing?
And what the what the focus was on was the
at the time, the Hillary Clinton email server scandal that
Loretta Lynch was the Attorney General at the time, and
she met on a tarmac and in private with yeah, yes,
(18:32):
with Bill Clinton on a plane and it was a
huge scandal and everybody's like, what were they talking about
really and all that. So that's what this Q thing reference.
So that was the kind of stuff that they would say,
like like using just people's initials, just really cryptic, short
staccato statements or questions and like that was it. It
would they would just go away, and then people would
(18:54):
just go crazy trying to figure out what it meant that's.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Right, and really like get into the deciphering. I think
that was part of the oh geez. I don't even
know if fun is the word to use, but maybe
they were having fun. But part of the whole experience,
I guess is the best way to say it, is
deciphering these message messages, chatting with each other on what
everything means, what these initials are, who everyone is, and
(19:20):
just to get that kind of robust conversation going on
these dark corners of the web, initially dark corners, and
eventually the mainstream social media of the World Wide Web.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, so, like I said, four chan is considered one
of the darker backwaters of the web, and then it
moved on to eight chan, which became eight kun or
eight kun, and it just kept getting darker and darker
and darker the places these Q drops were happening. But
then eventually, like I said earlier, people would start tweeting
(19:52):
about this stuff, and all of a sudden it spread
out from the darker parts of the web to the
more mainstream parts of the web, and then the actual
mainstream media started reporting on it. So this thing spread
far and wide, and the more far and wide its spread,
the more believable the whole thing became you know, like
you'd see it everywhere and people were talking about it seriously,
(20:13):
so it was kind of easy to fall down a
rabbit hole the further along this whole thing went, just
because there was more and more information to be found
down those rabbit holes.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, And you know, as scary as it is, all
of a sudden and you're at home for the pandemic,
you have a lot of more time on your hands.
You're or maybe you know, lost your job or something
which would have been awful, and have more time on
your hands, and all of a sudden, you're reading things
like you don't know what four chan is or eight
chan maybe, or how to get there, And all of
(20:44):
a sudden, you see something on Facebook or Instagram or
one of the close to seventy million tweets referencing QAnon
related hashtags and.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Phrases over a three year period.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
All of a sudden, you're thinking like, oh, well, this
is this is if I'm seeing on Facebook, which is
where I also see pictures of my kid's soccer team.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
So that makes it.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Bona fide and believable, which is in itself kind of
sad that that's as far as it goes research wise,
and people digging into that kind of the truth.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Of the matter. But that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Well. People also went to the trouble of essentially compiling books,
creating lengthy documentaries all supporting these QAnon theories and explaining
them and busting them out, sometimes grabbing actual, verifiable, real
world examples and interpreting them differently and putting the whole
thing together. And so the fact that there's a documentary
(21:38):
on this legitimizes it to a lot of people too,
So there was it just became legitimized weirdly in some
really weird, questionable ways. And again, all of this, the
entire thing was in service to the idea that Donald
Trump was secretly fighting this cabal and he would bring
about the storm one day and people like Nancy Pelosi
would be executed live on TV. And people were really
(22:02):
psyched about that idea.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Absolutely, you know, I mentioned the pandemic because that's when
the biggest spike and QAnon activity took place. In March
of twenty twenty, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is
a think tank, did some investigating about just like spikes
and activity and stuff, and March of twenty twenty is
(22:24):
when it really really took off, of course, when unique
Facebook users jumped one hundred and sixty one percent from
year over year basically, and Twitter discussion of q and
on increased what was at one hundred and thirty nine
percent over the month as well, So that's where it
(22:44):
started and really got going there.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
So when you are on social media and you see
there's hashtags like WWG onega where we go one, we
go all, but there's a bunch of them. One in
particular was kind of hijacked from a legitimate anti child
trafficking group. It's hashtag saved the Children. And the reason
(23:10):
that it was hijacked was because this is part of
the mission of QAnon is to stop sex trafficking of children, right,
which is great, but that is one way that a
lot of people were kind of innocently brought into the
QAnon sphere. They were looking up save the children hashtags
because they were concerned about sex trafficking, and they ended
(23:33):
up on some tweets or on Facebook accounts of people
who are like, now that you're here, let us explain
who's actually doing the sex trafficking. It's Nancy Pelosi and
Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and that's the rabbit hole
that they started to fall down through hashtags like that.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yeah, for sure, And it even got so far as
the online retailer Wayfair. I guess one of the rumors
that got going on q via QAnon was that if
you were cabinet shopping on Wayfair, then that was a
secret sort of portal into children shopping. Instead of cabinets,
it was actual children. And the other thing we didn't
(24:11):
mention about Pizzagate is that when John Podesta and his
email was talking about cheese pizza, it was really child pornography.
So it's like things like that were getting twisted around
and served to a willing audience.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, that whole thing, like ten thousand dollars cabinets with
female names that just got translated into well, Wayfair's a
sex trafficking site. And one of the first posts I saw,
the person led it with my spidey sense is tingling,
and that's how it just took off. Somebody's spidy sense
was tingling. There was a weird price for a cabinet
and a girl's name, and that's all it took. So
(24:49):
that's how that stuff spreads, It's how it takes root
and that's just the thinking that people have with Q nine.
There's all the clues are everywhere, and nothing is what
it seems.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So we mentioned how presidential candidate Donald Trump was the
supposed savior for all this sex trafficking and everything that's
going on, and this became clear.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
If you ever, you know, saw.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Donald Trump rallies then or now still, I'm sure you
would see like Q posters and Q T shirts and
Q flags and stuff like that. To be sure, we're
not saying that Donald Trump was like, hey, everybody, I am.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
That guy, by the way, and.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Literally got involved in this when he was asked though
directly over the years, specifically in August of twenty twenty,
they asked him point blank, you know, are you courting
these QAnon followers? He said he didn't know anything about it,
and then quote, I heard that, but I heard that
these are people that love our country. I understand they
(25:58):
like me very much, and it's gaining a popular larity.
When they followed up with a question about him being
the savior from child sex traffickers, he you know, that's
when I feel like he probably had a choice to
directly say, like this is a ludicrous conspiracy. But he said,
you know, is that supposed to be a bad thing.
If I can help save the world from problems, I'm
(26:18):
willing to do it. And the QAnon crowd ate this
stuff up and they thought it was, you know, him
sort of secretly saying that he is on their side.
When he would wear a pink tie, which is a
color associated with the movement, they would say, that's him
signaling to us another little breadcrumb that he's leaving for us.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah. There's also a very famous press conference a speech
he did in the White House in twenty seventeen where
he used two hands to drink from a bottle of
Fiji water and he did it twice during this speech
and people like remember that. Yeah, people made fun of
him for it, like what's wrong with you? How do
you not know how to drink out of a bottle
of water? But the qan On support were like, yes,
(27:00):
that a breadcrumb. Yes, the q and On supporters are like, yep,
Fiji is a huge hub for sex trafficking. It's a
destination and a hub, and he's pointing it out to us.
He's letting us know he knows what's going on. That's
what it was translated to. And that's one of the
explanations that a lot of people gave for why it
started to take off. Is it came along when Donald
(27:21):
Trump was early in his presidency and was getting pummeled
from every which way. So this was kind of a
way to transform that, to transform the weird awkwardness into
this is what's really going on, He's actually sending us signals.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
In twenty twenty two, Trump started to sort of openly
post q and on theories, where before he danced it
around a little more. After he had founded his own
social media gathering place, I guess, Truth Social, where he
started using q and on words to refer to himself
like he was a martyr. He literally reposted a Q
(27:59):
draw up. They played a q and on song WWG
one WGA at one of his rallies, and.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Over the years.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four, here's the
stat I was looking for. Trump reposted q andon content
more than eight hundred times on truth Social, so he
definitely amplified the message. I guess we could say in
the kindest.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Way, Yeah, I did the math. That's a q andon
repost every one point three six days, so that's a lot,
and that's a complete turnaround. I read somewhere Chuck that
at some of his rallies in twenty nineteen, he was
trying to distance himself from q and On so much
that there were people who went to his rallies who
reported that the Secret Service as they were going through
(28:46):
the metal detector was like, turn your shirt on inside
out because they were wearing a q Andon shirt. They're like,
we don't want to see those at the rallies anymore
because it's just such bad there's such a bad name
associated with it that Trump didn't even want to be
associated with it. But then something happened in twenty twenty two.
It's almost like he stopped and actually listened to what
they were saying at QAnon and he was like, oh, okay,
(29:08):
I really do like that, and he fully embraced it,
like you said, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
But here's the thing is, when you're dealing with a
false conspiracy like this that's based on the idea of
a deep state and secrets, there's no turning it around.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You can't prove it wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Even if he came out and fully denounced it, which
he never did.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
They would then just say, you know.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That he's got to do that because it's all part
of the big secret. So it's one of those sad
cases where it's born out of paranoia and untruth such
that you can't you can't truthify it, like no amount
of truth will get the most ardent believers to think
that they're not right.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
No, for sure. And one of the things that I
saw also that explained it, in addition to like paranoia, anger,
that kind of thing, as you kind of hit upon
it earlier when you were questioning, like is it fun?
And I think it definitely is fun for a lot
of people because it's I saw it described as hazardous
participatory civics, so like the people in their way are
(30:14):
participating in the machinations, the secret machinations of the government.
So I think it is thrilling and fun in a
lot of ways too. I don't think it's one hundred
percent negative or angry or ragy. I think that for
people in the q Andon movement there's a lot of
positivity to it too. And I think there's one other
thing to mention about QAnon people here, Chuck, especially the influencers,
(30:38):
they are well aware that their beliefs look totally crazy
to people in the mainstream, people like you and me
who just believe things are the way they seem they are.
But to them, we just haven't woken up to reality yet.
So there's not like there's not like just a total
loss of perspective and self reflection. It's just been inverted
(31:01):
in a way like you're the one that's deluded, not me.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
That's right, all right, So I think we should take
another break. We'll come back in a second and talk
about who this q person might be and stop your
emailing because Hazardous Participatory Civics is the best band name
that we've ever had. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
So there's a lot of people in the q andon
movement who've tried to guess who q is. One of
the big candidates was the Trump's first national security advisor,
Michael Flynn, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and we'll get to
him again in a minute. But if you don't believe
that QAnon's real, there's some really good candidates for who
(32:04):
posted these q andon drops, And crazy enough, it seems
to have been two different people, and the second group
of people rested control of q andon away from the
guy who originally started it.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, and this story gets a little confusing. Is there
a way we can simplify this a little bit?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah? I think I can. You want me to try, well, sure, well, let.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Me set up the players first, and then you can
simplify what happened there. What everyone seems to think is
that the current Q even though and we'll get to
how much Q is around these days at all a
little bit later. But the last Q or whatever most
recent was a father and son team named James and
Ronald Watkins, internet entrepreneurs, Americans living in the Philippines, where
(32:53):
they ran owned and ran eight chan, which was that
message board that originally hosted.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
That Q account.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
The other guy that we need to mention here is
a guy named Frederick Brennan. He was the original creator
of eight chan, but left those boards when it became
clear that it was just a home for the worst
stuff on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yes, and he turned into the greatest critic and largest
source of information about who really is Q because he
knew the watkinses.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
That's right, And now maybe if you can explain how
it was the mantle was unwillingly passed.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Okay, so what people think is that the first guy
who actually was Q was a South African man named
Paul Ferber who was intensely interested and fascinated by American
politics and conspiracy theories. And they think that he's responsible
for the first Q drop up to sometime in twenty eighteen,
that he was the original Q. The whole thing started
(33:56):
on four chan, but very quickly migrated to eight chan
because of apparently Q's account got hacked and he had
to create a new account, so he moved to the
more anonymous, more secure eight chan and started posting there.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
That's right, And he started posting on a message board
called CBTs Calm before the storm, and he owned that
sub board, Paul Ferber did, so that was his sub board.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, And so that means that he could see who
was posting it, could see like their actual metadata, right,
So he was the only person who could verify that
Q was Q. Same thing when they transferred from four
chan to eight chan. He was the only person who
could verify that this was actually the same guy, same
IP address. So believe me, everybody, it's the same Q.
(34:41):
So go ahead, Q essentially is what they were saying.
And then all of a sudden, in twenty eighteen, Q
Paul Thurber said, hey, q'sq's account got hacked again, everybody,
so we're gonna have to start a new account. But then,
probably very much to Paul Therber's surprise, Q joined in
and said, actually, no, my account hasn't been hacked. Paul
(35:03):
Thurber's been compromised. So I'm going to start posting it
a new board. This would be a board that Paul
Thurber had no authority or administrative duties over, but Jim
and Ron Watkins did. So now they were the only
ones who could verify he Q was. And so they
think that with that transition, and because they had administrative
(35:23):
domain over eight chan, they took Q away from Paul
Thurber and started posting his Q themselves.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, and to be clear, this was the second time
that account had been hacked. I do want to mention
also that the first time it was hacked, they it
was found out that the password for Q originally was
Matt Block, which I just think is hysterical one of the.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Few laughs were going to get here.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, but the reason that the Watkinses wanted to sort
of wrestle that away was because at some point Thurber
started appearing on some right wing conspiracy like YouTube shows
and stuff like that YouTube programs, so it was getting
out there in a more mainstream way, and the Watkinsons
(36:08):
were like, hey, this is you know, we can turn
eight chan into a real conspiracy hotbed for the online
right wing space, and so they saw an opportunity basically right.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
So it gets way more intricate than that. Like Fred
Brennan has really gone into great detail to dig up
a lot of evidence that all this happened, and we're
not going to go into it here, but suffice to
say that most people agree that he's probably right about this.
That it started out as Paul Ferber and then turned
to Ron Watkins, and the whole thing went until about
(36:45):
June twenty twenty and then stopped, and those seemed to
be the canonical Q drops, and then they picked up
again in I think twenty twenty two, and as we'll see,
those kind of got ignored because the community had changed
so much in those eighteen months without Q dropping Q drops, right,
But in the meantime the movement had taken over. I
(37:07):
saw it described as it didn't need Q anymore. It
had become its own. What was I saw written as
the world's first open source cult where anybody could add
or subtract, or debate or help create this again ever
evolving mythos of what was really going on in the
(37:27):
world with Donald Trump at the center of the whole thing.
And the problem with that is is that it made
it out of the darkest corners of the Internet to
the mainstream Internet, to the mainstream media, and then into
real life to where it very frequently Yeah, I think
you could use the word frequently disturbed individuals who had
fallen down the QAnon hole acted out in real life violence.
(37:51):
Not just the comet ping pong guy from North Carolina.
There's a whole slew of people who have engaged in
real world violence because of what they learned about from QAnon.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
There was one case I remember hearing about this when
in twenty eighteen, this guy pled guilty to terrorism charges
because he got an armored truck and blocked the road
crossing the Hoover Dam with two assault rifles and had
a sign that said release the OIG report, which was
referring to the quote unquote real Mueller report that QAnon
(38:26):
believers thought provided basically kind of exposed Hillary Clinton's criminal
activities because I mean, there were a lot of people
that they targeted, but the Clintons and especially Hillary were
obviously because she ran against Donald Trump, but she was
kind of squarely in the crosshairs for them.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah, this was at the time people were chanting lock
her up, like she was very much in the crosshairs
for sure. And Obama still was too. He had just
finished being president after all when this whole thing started.
One of the most puzzling acts of violence to me
in the real world based on QAnon was the assassination
of a Gambino mafia boss named Francesco Frankie Boy Cali,
(39:09):
and he was killed by a Quanon supporter who believed
he was an agent of the deep state, like a
high up agent of the deep state. I could not
find anything about what that guy's rationalization was for that.
But this is the first time since nineteen eighty five,
This is a twenty twenty one, I think, the first
time since nineteen eighty five that a mafia boss had
(39:31):
been assassinated and it was by a QAnon adherent.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, just really bizarre.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But if anybody knows why that guy killed him because
of that, like I would love to hear it.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
The other thing that I don't understand or not understand,
but I'm really curious about, is whoever Q is Watkinson's
or not? Like what was their endgame here? Like did
they really and do they really really believe this stuff?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Or is it Are they just bad.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Actors who have a sick I don't know, not sense
of humor, but maybe sense of humor to try and
start something like this, or was it financially related or
do they really believe that it's just that's That's the
one thing I wish I could find out that we'll
probably never know.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
I know, and I don't know, but I suspect that
they don't believe it. I mean, if they're posing as Q,
I don't I don't think that they actually believe it,
you know, well.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Right, because they're not secret government higher ups that really
have this information obviously, But I mean, do they really
believe Tom Hanks is killing and eating children?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
No? I don't. I don't think so. Again, I don't
know the people. I don't know enough about him to
really definitively say, but just don't know. I don't think
that makes.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
It even more sad somehow that it is stretched from
the darkest reaches in the Internet to literal suburban parents
who had too much time on their hands between soccer pickups.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, there is a really sad, disturbing act of violence
based on QAnon that happened in twenty twenty one where
a man from California killed both of his children, a
baby and a toddler, with a spear gun because he
believed that they had gotten reptilian DNA from their mother.
Because remember, lizard people are walking among us. So he
(41:30):
said that he knew what he was doing was wrong,
but it was the only way to save the world.
And it was because of QAnon. He murdered his two
children because of QAnon. And like Paul Pelosi is another one.
He was beaten with a hammer by a guy who
was driven by q and on motivation. Like the idea,
(41:50):
I'm with you if the idea that these guys were
just doing it for lulls and because they were nihilistic
or even for money, and that it translated into real
world violence like that is just it's abominable for sure.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
That's right. Are we done?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
No, We've got to give a little bit of an update. Okay, okay,
all right, well, I'll start. So there was a really
big problem because Trump was always in charge as part
of the QAnon mythos. No matter what was going on,
Trump was in control, is the way they said it. Well,
Trump was obviously supposed to be re elected in twenty twenty,
but he wasn't. And so in following with tradition of
(42:35):
kind of prophetic cults, the people in QAnon just essentially
were like, Okay, well, this is all just part of
the act. This is trust in the plan, and they
kind of rationalized it in all sorts of ways, and
that's kind of part and parcel for what they've been doing.
Like the assassination attempt of Trump in Pennsylvania led to
a huge crisis initially among QAnon followers because because that
(43:00):
clearly demonstrated Trump wasn't in control if he was getting
shot at, and some people were like it was stage
and other people are like, no, no, no, we got it.
This is proof positive that Trump has been anointed by
God to bring the storm to overthrow the Satanic cabal,
because how else could he have not been shot in
the head by the assassin's bullet. And so I saw
(43:21):
that some people who kind of left QAnon after Trump
didn't get elected, came raging back into it after the
assassination attempt, and there were a lot of families that
were like, Okay, good my friend or family members back
and then oh god, there they go again. After the
assassination attempt.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, I read a really sad article about the guy
who came into the pizza place about him getting out
of prison and marrying his girlfriend and having a kid,
and it was you know, it's just sad, wreckless guy.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Oh yeah, I bet that's the kind of thing that
kind of follows you around for life.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Right, Yeah, I would imagine.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
One of the other things that happened post election, I
believe is Michael Flynn was a luminary. Remember, some people
thought he was Q and he was outed as saying
privately that he thought the whole thing was total nonsense
and that he believed actually it was a CIA psyop
to discredit the Right by making them look foolish and gullible.
(44:18):
So the whole the community is very much fractured, but
it's still very much alive. There was a poll that
found that in May of twenty twenty one, fifteen percent
of people believed Americans I should say, believed QAnon beliefs
in some form or fashion. You would think that it
would have gone down since Trump didn't get re elected.
(44:39):
In fact, it rose by eight points in twenty twenty three,
two years later. So the belief in QAnon just keeps
spreading and spreading and spreading and becomes more and more mainstream.
And it's even as it does, it gets kind of
divorced from QAnon and becomes just what people think about
things about reality.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Sorry, I checked out, and I was just thinking in
my head, I was just hearing what a wonderful warl
by Louis Armstrong, over and over.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
That's a good. How am I not surprised that you
do a great Louis Armstrong?
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Oh he's easy.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I would have guessed you did the izzy Hawaiian guys version.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Oh that's a fun one too.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Or no, he did somewhere over the rainbow. I'm sorry, Yeah, yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Somewhere over the rainbow.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
There's one o the things. Let's leave on a semi
positive note, Chuck. A couple of different places, I saw
people who were interviewed who had lost a friend or
family member or hung on to a friend or family
member while they'd fallen down the Q rabbit hole, and
the fact that they'd gotten him back, universally was because
that person stuck with them, let him know they didn't
(45:46):
agree with them, but they loved them nonetheless, and as
they put it, provided a soft landing place for the
people when they finally were like, this isn't real. I
can't believe that I've believed this for so long. Had
they were there for them without any kind of judgment
or cruelty or I told you so, And that helped
(46:07):
allow the people to kind of get back on their
feet in a very gentle manner.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
And there's a lot of great websites and organizations that
have now had to help people through this stuff, and
like how do you help your family members and things
like that, like you were just talking about. Certainly one
place you can start is the Anti Defamation League website,
but there are plenty plenty of places to go so
(46:34):
you don't just like argue with your family member and
tell them they're not using you know, rational thought with
stuff like this. You got you gotta you gotta try
a different tack there, yep.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Yeah, And there's all sorts of advice all over the internet.
So if you want to look go find it, uh,
and be careful what you do look for there, be
careful of the hashtags you follow. And since I said that,
obviously it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's right, a quick not correction, but just enlightening because
we've had a bunch of people write in already about
our glasses episode because we could not figure out why
Livia titled her research four eyes bad.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
And this is from just one of them. Is from Marty.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Hey, guys, listen to the episode about glass as great
as usual. I've been wearing glasses for over forty years.
Regarding the phrase four eyes bad, I believe that as
a joke reference to the book Animal Farm by George Orwell.
In the book, the animals use the phrase four legs good,
two legs bad as they rise against the humans.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
That must be it. Love the show, longtime listener.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
That is from Marty Mishka from Omaha, Nebraska, parentheses living
in the Blue Dot, and I haven't read Animal Farm
in so long I completely forgot that, But I bet
you are right on the money because that's a very
Livia kind of easter egg.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Yeah, that is a deep cut literary wise, So nice work, Libya,
and who is that Marty?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
That was Marty, But many people have written in and
we'll continue.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
To Yeah, thanks a lot, Marty, and thanks a lot
to everybody who's written in to let us know, help
us figure that out. We love that kind of thing.
If you want to be somebody like that, you can
send us an email too, to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just getting conspiratorial
here on Stuff you should know the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's right, the episode we wanted to do so much
that it sat in our folder for four.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Years I believe it was. Yeah, the very beginning of
twenty twenty one, I would say, probably.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
Yeah, all right, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
We are. I gotta say, it's gonna be nice to
see that removed from my desktop. It's just been sitting
there for so long.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Just staring at you. That que like a big blinky,
winky eyeball.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Yes with a one single eyelash attached. So we should
probably say at the outset to anybody tuning in that
who is like part of the q and No movement?
We're going to approach this as if everything the QAnon
movement believes is not true or made up, not from
(01:08):
the perspective of people who believe in the QAnon movement,
although we'll explain a lot of the same stuff. I
just don't want anybody to, you know, get five minutes
in and be like, what is this, you know.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, I think that's a fair CoA And yeah, I
mean that's just the deal.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, yeah, we're taking the anthropological stance.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Okay, Yeah, so let's dive in, shall we.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Well let's give a little bit of a definition for
the three people who've never heard of QAnon.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, and also, what I'm hoping is is that there's
a lot of people like me who actually probably I
probably knew more about it than some people even, but
a lot of people probably just sort of knew a
little bit or know a little bit about what this
thing was slash is m M, but you know, didn't
really know much about it, and it's just good to
(02:00):
know about stuff. So hopefully that'll brighten some corners of
your life as well.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, and one thing I kept running into while researching
this is that there's a lot of families that have
been torn apart, families, friendships, sure, because people will go
down the QAnon rabbit hole, and the friends and family
that are like, that's not true get left behind because
they haven't woken up yet. So yeah, I can really
mess things up. So possibly there's some people listening to
(02:27):
this who have lost friends or family that might be
a little wiser to it might be able to try
to get their friend or family member back afterwards. Who knows.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, And the final CoA I guess is that some
of this stuff is so outlandish that it's hard to
not laugh.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
But it's not funny at all.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
It's dangerous and scary and sad. So if I might
laugh at something or giggle, it's not that I don't
take it seriously. That it's a serious kind of thing
that's happened.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah, it kind of like not even kind of. It
very much trapes us into the territory of high camp,
but is not at all being ironic or campy. It's
just just approach this as like everything we're gonna say
is believed seriously by people in the QAnon movement. And
then sorry, CoA Number five, we're probably going to get
(03:22):
a lot wrong. This is an incredibly expansive, ever evolving
movement conspiracy theory that you know, we're not We're going
to walk right past some stuff where we might misspeak
here there, but hopefully the general contours and outlines we're
going to we're going to get to be able to
get across.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
Correctly all right onward.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
So this whole thing The q Andon movement is a
online conspiracy theory that essentially the world is run by
a cabal of global elites, mostly liberals, Hollywood typesment high
government officials, and that they do all sorts of nefarious things,
which we'll get into in a second. But one of
the things to understand about this first is that a
(04:07):
lot of it is rooted in some really old existing
conspiracy theories, in particular a lot of anti Semitic ones
that have been around for centuries. In particular, the blood
libel is one that Jews for like a thousand years essentially,
maybe longer, have been persecuted, executed, massacred because of rumors
(04:31):
that they steal Christian babies and kill them and use
their blood to make leaven bread or unleavened bread for Passover,
and that stuff gets around and people get all up
in arms and scared about their kids being kidnapped, and
then the next thing you know, Jewish people are dead
because of this blood libel. That's part of it. And
although Jewish people are targeted in some quarters, you don't
(04:55):
have to be anti Semitic to be a queue not
member necessarily, right.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Other things that it echoes from the past are something
called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was
in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Another anti Semitic conspiracy,
basically the tired trope that there's a global Jewish cabal
kind of running the world, running the banking system, plotting
(05:21):
to overthrow the gentile governments of the world. We mentioned
Henry Ford and our Henry Ford podcast was a believer
in this kind of thing. And versions of this, versions
of the Blood Libel have been sort of wrapped up,
given a new, brand new shine coat of wax, and
was trotted out as QAnon, which is and you know,
(05:44):
Dave helped us with this many years ago, and thankfully
Dave didn't quit his job and he's still around to
help us out more.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
But it's a catch all.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
This conspiracy that you said is very vast, very wide ranging,
but mostly has to do with these power or full
liberal elites that are some are pedophiles, some are Satan worshippers.
Some they claim literally eat children. And we're talking about
the Clintons, of course, and we're talking about Tom Hanks
(06:15):
and Oprah Winfrey and George Soros and Ellen DeGeneres and
even the Dali Lama.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and Pope Francis. So anybody who's even remotely left
leaning who holds power in the world, especially in the
government or you know, pop culture, they are probably a
part of this secret cabal. And it checks all the
boxes for pearl clutching. They run the world, They worship Satan,
(06:41):
their pedophiles, and their cannibals. Can you think of a
worse group of people than that. I can't think of
any other thing you could throw at the at the
wall to see what would stick. Like, that's as bad
as anything gets. So the idea behind QAnon? What else
could I've been trying to think? Give me something.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Else, maybe Philadelphia sports fans.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Oh, now we're gonna get some hate mail, man, And.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
That's where the hate mail is gonna come from. So
I'm just getting brotherly love.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Right, Yeah, and batteries. So the whole thing, though, is
that these people who are Satanic, pedophile cannibals, thank you.
People new to the podcasts are gonna be like, what's
wrong with that one guy?
Speaker 3 (07:26):
It's hard to even get that sentence out.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
It is thanks man, that they run the world. They
run things, and it all happens below the surface. Everything
that normies like you and I and probably most of
the people listening to this podcast believe is true. Is brainwashed.
We've been brainwashed by the mainstream media to be given
(07:49):
this line that things are the way they seem, when
in reality, things are not at all the way they seem.
There's a Satanic worshiping cult running the world, and they're
doing all sorts of terrible things. Those of us who
don't believe in QAnon just haven't awakened to this idea
yet of what's actually reality.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
Right, So that's one part. Those are the bad guys.
The good guys, or rather the good guy is former
president and twenty twenty four candidate Donald Trump, who, according
to QAnon and the theory, was picked, handpicked by the
leaders of the US military to fight these evil forces,
(08:29):
and everything that he does and tries to do is
in service of that mission. Anything working against him, even
within his own party, as part of the deep state plot,
and they are all awaiting what's known or what they
call the storm, which is when Trump reveals who he
is and what he has done to fight these evil forces,
(08:52):
declares martial law, and everyone that has been a part
of that secret cabal is rounded up by the military
and tried and convicted and killed, at which time that
the Great Awakening will occur, in which Trump and the
QAnon supporters are a lot of his heroes around the world.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Yeah, and this will bring about the founding of a
right wing authoritarian regime that Trump will lead. This is again,
this is what they believe is going on. So when
Donald Trump became president, for some reason, he had to
play along with this great charade that the liberal leftist
Satanists were producing, rather than I don't know, just being
(09:34):
overt about what his mission was. So that means that
since he had to play along, he had to leave
little like he had to give little winks and nods
and leave what are called bread crumbs, which are little
bits of information or little clues that the QAnon community dissects, discusses,
argues over. And what that's called is baking. They take
(09:56):
the breadcrumbs and they bake it, and when they finally
come to some sort of consensus or somebody comes up
with the best craziest interpretation of it, that becomes basically
the QAnon canon, and that spreads throughout social media, and
then the QAnon movement just gets that much more solidified
that much more extensive, and because of these tweets on
(10:17):
social media, some people say, well, what the heck is
everybody talking about, and we'll go look this stuff up
and very often fall down the rabbit rabbit hole and
become q andon members themselves.
Speaker 3 (10:29):
That's right, So are we done?
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yep? That was it. That's everything you need to know
about QAnon. Everybody.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
Yeah, let's just read six ads and go home.
Speaker 2 (10:38):
There's two more things I wanted to add about this
global Satanist pedophile cannibal elite that's running the world secretly.
They are also suspected by some to be actual lizard people,
which is a direct ripoff of the the mini series
from the early eighties. And then, secondly, the reason that
they sacrifice the kids that they sexually abuse is because
(11:02):
they're after they're adrenochrome, which.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Yeah, this is this is pretty fun.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Metabolis. Adrenochrome is metabolized adrenaline. It's oxidized adrenaline, and according
to QAnon, it's like the elixir of life. So these
Satanists are sacrificing kids to get their adrenochrome and drinking it,
and they're they're staying forever young and vital. And there's
a few things wrong with this one. It seems to
be based on a misinterpretation of what adrenochrome does and
(11:30):
where you get it, based on fear and loathing in
Las Vegas, because Hunter Thompson has basically a throwaway intimation
that the adrenochrome that he does and goes on a
crazy trip over it can only be gotten from the
adrenal gland of a live human.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Right, that's right, And that is not true. It's synthesized
in a lab. You can it's it's available. That is
not true at all. So none of that is true.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
Okay, so I think we'd laid the foundation pretty well,
Like that's essentially the greatest broad strokes of what people
in QAnon believe is going on in reality.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
That's right. Should we take a break?
Speaker 2 (12:10):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
All right, we'll come back and we'll talk about pizza
right after this. All right, we promised talk of pizza.
(12:37):
That's because you can't talk about q and on without
mentioning a bit of a precursor to QAnon, which was Pizzagate,
that is to say, in twenty sixteen, and this is
we should say that the first QAnon sort of activity,
which are called q andon drops started in twenty seventeen
kind of what like October. And this is in twenty
sixteen when the Democratic Convention servers were hacked and emails
(13:02):
were published on Wiki leaks, and one of them kind
of rose to the top, which was an email from
John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's twenty sixteen campaign chairman,
in which he put forth, Hey, there's this pizza place
called Comet Ping Pong in the DC area here, and
(13:25):
we should hold a fundraiser there. I don't know if
he said this in the email, but the fact is
that his brother was a regular there and said, hey,
this is probably a good place to do that. They
got pretty good pizza, they got a bunch of ping
pong tables. It's a good place for people to meet up.
And that was found in I guess exposed, which is
kind of a funny way to say it on four Chan,
(13:48):
where people started saying, oh, well, that is the HQ.
Basically that's ground zero for where this elite cabal is
meeting and they are sacrificing children in the basement of
that place. There is no basement to that place, but
who cares about that? That was what was put forth
on four Chan and hashtag pizzagate started spreading like wildfire.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Surprisingly, yeah, and the fact that there is no basement means,
according to like qann thinking, that means that it's hidden.
And even if we don't have any proof it's there,
because the fact that it's being used by this secret
cabal and it's hidden is proof that it's there. Right,
That's the kind of circular thinking that keeps these things going,
and in Pizzagate in particular with Comet ping Pong, within
(14:34):
a month October twenty ninth was the first post about
how this is this is one of the home bases
of this child sex trafficking that this cabal engaged in
October twenty ninth was the first post. By December fourth,
a little over a month later, a man so riled
up by the idea that Comet ping Pong was a
(14:54):
hub of child sex trafficking drove a few hundred miles
from North Carolina to DC and showed up with at
comment Ping Pong with the AR fifteen and shot up
a door to get the door open.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
He also had a handgun on his side. Nobody was hurt.
People got out of there, very quickly. He kind of
wandered around the place alone for about twenty minutes. I
couldn't get in that door shot it up, told authorities
that he was self investigating Hillary Clinton's pedophile.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
Ring, and that was that. He went to jail. Is
now out of jail.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
I think he went for a few years, interestingly sentenced
by Kintaji Jackson Brown who now sits on the Supreme Court.
Oh really, side note, huh, Yeah, but that was it basically,
But you know, that was Pizzagate, and it was a
precursor to what would follow in October twenty seventeen when
(15:51):
Q first, I guess revealed himself but not really.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
Right, Yeah, so I think. Yeah. The first drop was
October twentieth seventeen on four Chan, which is an image
board which is like you post images and then people
comment on them and conversations breakout, and in particular, four
Chan was known as like one of the really dark
recesses of the Internet. And on this image board a
(16:16):
guy named Q Clearance Patriot, and the first post read
open your eyes many in our government worship Satan. That
was the first Q drop that ever came out. In
October twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
That's right. And Q clearance.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
You know what QAnon means is Q clearance is a
top secret clearance utilized by the Department of Energy, specifically
meaning you have access to nuclear the nuclear weapons program.
And the anon comes from just a sort of a
regular thing that would be people on four Chan who
claim to be like part of the FBI, like FBI,
(16:51):
non ciaann like whitstler blowing kind of thing. So q
anon became the name and claimed to be a intelligence officer,
a very high ranking person within the US government who
had direct evidence of this satanic pedophile cult and very
clear approvable knowledge that Donald Trump was on a secret
(17:15):
mission from the US military to reverse all this.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Right, and so between October twenty seventeen and sometime in
twenty twenty, the Q drops amounted to I guess more
than five thousand, and they were really really cryptic. They
were not like, hey, this is going on comet ping
Pong is actually a hub of child sex trafficking. They
(17:38):
were very cryptic, and so that just lent themselves to
be dissected and discussed and thought about and interpreted and misinterpreted.
And so there's an example of one from September twenty eighteen.
This would be shortly after the whole thing started, and
it said panic in dc LL talking equals truth revealed,
(17:58):
Tarmac bc LL talking equals truth revealed Comy HRC email case.
And it goes on and on and it mentions Hussein,
which is how Q always referred to Barack Obama.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
Thanks for shortening this, by the way, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
And it just it keeps going on. But the last
line is Faiza brings down the house? When do bird sing?
And what the what the focus was on was the
at the time, the Hillary Clinton email server scandal that
Loretta Lynch was the Attorney General at the time, and
she met on a tarmac and in private with yeah, yes,
(18:32):
with Bill Clinton on a plane and it was a
huge scandal and everybody's like, what were they talking about
really and all that. So that's what this Q thing reference.
So that was the kind of stuff that they would say,
like like using just people's initials, just really cryptic, short
staccato statements or questions and like that was it. It
would they would just go away, and then people would
(18:54):
just go crazy trying to figure out what it meant that's.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
Right, and really like get into the deciphering. I think
that was part of the oh geez. I don't even
know if fun is the word to use, but maybe
they were having fun. But part of the whole experience,
I guess is the best way to say it, is
deciphering these message messages, chatting with each other on what
everything means, what these initials are, who everyone is, and
(19:20):
just to get that kind of robust conversation going on
these dark corners of the web, initially dark corners, and
eventually the mainstream social media of the World Wide Web.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Yeah, so, like I said, four chan is considered one
of the darker backwaters of the web, and then it
moved on to eight chan, which became eight kun or
eight kun, and it just kept getting darker and darker
and darker the places these Q drops were happening. But
then eventually, like I said earlier, people would start tweeting
(19:52):
about this stuff, and all of a sudden it spread
out from the darker parts of the web to the
more mainstream parts of the web, and then the actual
mainstream media started reporting on it. So this thing spread
far and wide, and the more far and wide its spread,
the more believable the whole thing became you know, like
you'd see it everywhere and people were talking about it seriously,
(20:13):
so it was kind of easy to fall down a
rabbit hole the further along this whole thing went, just
because there was more and more information to be found
down those rabbit holes.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
Yeah, And you know, as scary as it is, all
of a sudden and you're at home for the pandemic,
you have a lot of more time on your hands.
You're or maybe you know, lost your job or something
which would have been awful, and have more time on
your hands, and all of a sudden, you're reading things
like you don't know what four chan is or eight
chan maybe, or how to get there, And all of
(20:44):
a sudden, you see something on Facebook or Instagram or
one of the close to seventy million tweets referencing QAnon
related hashtags and.
Speaker 3 (20:53):
Phrases over a three year period.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
All of a sudden, you're thinking like, oh, well, this
is this is if I'm seeing on Facebook, which is
where I also see pictures of my kid's soccer team.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
So that makes it.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Bona fide and believable, which is in itself kind of
sad that that's as far as it goes research wise,
and people digging into that kind of the truth.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Of the matter. But that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Well. People also went to the trouble of essentially compiling books,
creating lengthy documentaries all supporting these QAnon theories and explaining
them and busting them out, sometimes grabbing actual, verifiable, real
world examples and interpreting them differently and putting the whole
thing together. And so the fact that there's a documentary
(21:38):
on this legitimizes it to a lot of people too,
So there was it just became legitimized weirdly in some
really weird, questionable ways. And again, all of this, the
entire thing was in service to the idea that Donald
Trump was secretly fighting this cabal and he would bring
about the storm one day and people like Nancy Pelosi
would be executed live on TV. And people were really
(22:02):
psyched about that idea.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Absolutely, you know, I mentioned the pandemic because that's when
the biggest spike and QAnon activity took place. In March
of twenty twenty, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is
a think tank, did some investigating about just like spikes
and activity and stuff, and March of twenty twenty is
(22:24):
when it really really took off, of course, when unique
Facebook users jumped one hundred and sixty one percent from
year over year basically, and Twitter discussion of q and
on increased what was at one hundred and thirty nine
percent over the month as well, So that's where it
(22:44):
started and really got going there.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
So when you are on social media and you see
there's hashtags like WWG onega where we go one, we
go all, but there's a bunch of them. One in
particular was kind of hijacked from a legitimate anti child
trafficking group. It's hashtag saved the Children. And the reason
(23:10):
that it was hijacked was because this is part of
the mission of QAnon is to stop sex trafficking of children, right,
which is great, but that is one way that a
lot of people were kind of innocently brought into the
QAnon sphere. They were looking up save the children hashtags
because they were concerned about sex trafficking, and they ended
(23:33):
up on some tweets or on Facebook accounts of people
who are like, now that you're here, let us explain
who's actually doing the sex trafficking. It's Nancy Pelosi and
Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and that's the rabbit hole
that they started to fall down through hashtags like that.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Yeah, for sure, And it even got so far as
the online retailer Wayfair. I guess one of the rumors
that got going on q via QAnon was that if
you were cabinet shopping on Wayfair, then that was a
secret sort of portal into children shopping. Instead of cabinets,
it was actual children. And the other thing we didn't
(24:11):
mention about Pizzagate is that when John Podesta and his
email was talking about cheese pizza, it was really child pornography.
So it's like things like that were getting twisted around
and served to a willing audience.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, that whole thing, like ten thousand dollars cabinets with
female names that just got translated into well, Wayfair's a
sex trafficking site. And one of the first posts I saw,
the person led it with my spidey sense is tingling,
and that's how it just took off. Somebody's spidy sense
was tingling. There was a weird price for a cabinet
and a girl's name, and that's all it took. So
(24:49):
that's how that stuff spreads, It's how it takes root
and that's just the thinking that people have with Q nine.
There's all the clues are everywhere, and nothing is what
it seems.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (25:03):
So we mentioned how presidential candidate Donald Trump was the
supposed savior for all this sex trafficking and everything that's
going on, and this became clear.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
If you ever, you know, saw.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Donald Trump rallies then or now still, I'm sure you
would see like Q posters and Q T shirts and
Q flags and stuff like that. To be sure, we're
not saying that Donald Trump was like, hey, everybody, I am.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
That guy, by the way, and.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Literally got involved in this when he was asked though
directly over the years, specifically in August of twenty twenty,
they asked him point blank, you know, are you courting
these QAnon followers? He said he didn't know anything about it,
and then quote, I heard that, but I heard that
these are people that love our country. I understand they
(25:58):
like me very much, and it's gaining a popular larity.
When they followed up with a question about him being
the savior from child sex traffickers, he you know, that's
when I feel like he probably had a choice to
directly say, like this is a ludicrous conspiracy. But he said,
you know, is that supposed to be a bad thing.
If I can help save the world from problems, I'm
(26:18):
willing to do it. And the QAnon crowd ate this
stuff up and they thought it was, you know, him
sort of secretly saying that he is on their side.
When he would wear a pink tie, which is a
color associated with the movement, they would say, that's him
signaling to us another little breadcrumb that he's leaving for us.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah. There's also a very famous press conference a speech
he did in the White House in twenty seventeen where
he used two hands to drink from a bottle of
Fiji water and he did it twice during this speech
and people like remember that. Yeah, people made fun of
him for it, like what's wrong with you? How do
you not know how to drink out of a bottle
of water? But the qan On support were like, yes,
(27:00):
that a breadcrumb. Yes, the q and On supporters are like, yep,
Fiji is a huge hub for sex trafficking. It's a
destination and a hub, and he's pointing it out to us.
He's letting us know he knows what's going on. That's
what it was translated to. And that's one of the
explanations that a lot of people gave for why it
started to take off. Is it came along when Donald
(27:21):
Trump was early in his presidency and was getting pummeled
from every which way. So this was kind of a
way to transform that, to transform the weird awkwardness into
this is what's really going on, He's actually sending us signals.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
In twenty twenty two, Trump started to sort of openly
post q and on theories, where before he danced it
around a little more. After he had founded his own
social media gathering place, I guess, Truth Social, where he
started using q and on words to refer to himself
like he was a martyr. He literally reposted a Q
(27:59):
draw up. They played a q and on song WWG
one WGA at one of his rallies, and.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Over the years.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four, here's the
stat I was looking for. Trump reposted q andon content
more than eight hundred times on truth Social, so he
definitely amplified the message. I guess we could say in
the kindest.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Way, Yeah, I did the math. That's a q andon
repost every one point three six days, so that's a lot,
and that's a complete turnaround. I read somewhere Chuck that
at some of his rallies in twenty nineteen, he was
trying to distance himself from q and On so much
that there were people who went to his rallies who
reported that the Secret Service as they were going through
(28:46):
the metal detector was like, turn your shirt on inside
out because they were wearing a q Andon shirt. They're like,
we don't want to see those at the rallies anymore
because it's just such bad there's such a bad name
associated with it that Trump didn't even want to be
associated with it. But then something happened in twenty twenty two.
It's almost like he stopped and actually listened to what
they were saying at QAnon and he was like, oh, okay,
(29:08):
I really do like that, and he fully embraced it,
like you said, yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
But here's the thing is, when you're dealing with a
false conspiracy like this that's based on the idea of
a deep state and secrets, there's no turning it around.
Speaker 3 (29:25):
You can't prove it wrong.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Even if he came out and fully denounced it, which
he never did.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
They would then just say, you know.
Speaker 1 (29:34):
That he's got to do that because it's all part
of the big secret. So it's one of those sad
cases where it's born out of paranoia and untruth such
that you can't you can't truthify it, like no amount
of truth will get the most ardent believers to think
that they're not right.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
No, for sure. And one of the things that I
saw also that explained it, in addition to like paranoia, anger,
that kind of thing, as you kind of hit upon
it earlier when you were questioning, like is it fun?
And I think it definitely is fun for a lot
of people because it's I saw it described as hazardous
participatory civics, so like the people in their way are
(30:14):
participating in the machinations, the secret machinations of the government.
So I think it is thrilling and fun in a
lot of ways too. I don't think it's one hundred
percent negative or angry or ragy. I think that for
people in the q Andon movement there's a lot of
positivity to it too. And I think there's one other
thing to mention about QAnon people here, Chuck, especially the influencers,
(30:38):
they are well aware that their beliefs look totally crazy
to people in the mainstream, people like you and me
who just believe things are the way they seem they are.
But to them, we just haven't woken up to reality yet.
So there's not like there's not like just a total
loss of perspective and self reflection. It's just been inverted
(31:01):
in a way like you're the one that's deluded, not me.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
That's right, all right, So I think we should take
another break. We'll come back in a second and talk
about who this q person might be and stop your
emailing because Hazardous Participatory Civics is the best band name
that we've ever had. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
So there's a lot of people in the q andon
movement who've tried to guess who q is. One of
the big candidates was the Trump's first national security advisor,
Michael Flynn, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and we'll get to
him again in a minute. But if you don't believe
that QAnon's real, there's some really good candidates for who
(32:04):
posted these q andon drops, And crazy enough, it seems
to have been two different people, and the second group
of people rested control of q andon away from the
guy who originally started it.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, and this story gets a little confusing. Is there
a way we can simplify this a little bit?
Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah? I think I can. You want me to try, well, sure, well, let.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
Me set up the players first, and then you can
simplify what happened there. What everyone seems to think is
that the current Q even though and we'll get to
how much Q is around these days at all a
little bit later. But the last Q or whatever most
recent was a father and son team named James and
Ronald Watkins, internet entrepreneurs, Americans living in the Philippines, where
(32:53):
they ran owned and ran eight chan, which was that
message board that originally hosted.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
That Q account.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
The other guy that we need to mention here is
a guy named Frederick Brennan. He was the original creator
of eight chan, but left those boards when it became
clear that it was just a home for the worst
stuff on the Internet.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yes, and he turned into the greatest critic and largest
source of information about who really is Q because he
knew the watkinses.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
That's right, And now maybe if you can explain how
it was the mantle was unwillingly passed.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
Okay, so what people think is that the first guy
who actually was Q was a South African man named
Paul Ferber who was intensely interested and fascinated by American
politics and conspiracy theories. And they think that he's responsible
for the first Q drop up to sometime in twenty eighteen,
that he was the original Q. The whole thing started
(33:56):
on four chan, but very quickly migrated to eight chan
because of apparently Q's account got hacked and he had
to create a new account, so he moved to the
more anonymous, more secure eight chan and started posting there.
Speaker 1 (34:09):
That's right, And he started posting on a message board
called CBTs Calm before the storm, and he owned that
sub board, Paul Ferber did, so that was his sub board.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Yeah, And so that means that he could see who
was posting it, could see like their actual metadata, right,
So he was the only person who could verify that
Q was Q. Same thing when they transferred from four
chan to eight chan. He was the only person who
could verify that this was actually the same guy, same
IP address. So believe me, everybody, it's the same Q.
(34:41):
So go ahead, Q essentially is what they were saying.
And then all of a sudden, in twenty eighteen, Q
Paul Thurber said, hey, q'sq's account got hacked again, everybody,
so we're gonna have to start a new account. But then,
probably very much to Paul Therber's surprise, Q joined in
and said, actually, no, my account hasn't been hacked. Paul
(35:03):
Thurber's been compromised. So I'm going to start posting it
a new board. This would be a board that Paul
Thurber had no authority or administrative duties over, but Jim
and Ron Watkins did. So now they were the only
ones who could verify he Q was. And so they
think that with that transition, and because they had administrative
(35:23):
domain over eight chan, they took Q away from Paul
Thurber and started posting his Q themselves.
Speaker 1 (35:31):
Yeah, and to be clear, this was the second time
that account had been hacked. I do want to mention
also that the first time it was hacked, they it
was found out that the password for Q originally was
Matt Block, which I just think is hysterical one of the.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Few laughs were going to get here.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Yeah, but the reason that the Watkinses wanted to sort
of wrestle that away was because at some point Thurber
started appearing on some right wing conspiracy like YouTube shows
and stuff like that YouTube programs, so it was getting
out there in a more mainstream way, and the Watkinsons
(36:08):
were like, hey, this is you know, we can turn
eight chan into a real conspiracy hotbed for the online
right wing space, and so they saw an opportunity basically right.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
So it gets way more intricate than that. Like Fred
Brennan has really gone into great detail to dig up
a lot of evidence that all this happened, and we're
not going to go into it here, but suffice to
say that most people agree that he's probably right about this.
That it started out as Paul Ferber and then turned
to Ron Watkins, and the whole thing went until about
(36:45):
June twenty twenty and then stopped, and those seemed to
be the canonical Q drops, and then they picked up
again in I think twenty twenty two, and as we'll see,
those kind of got ignored because the community had changed
so much in those eighteen months without Q dropping Q drops, right,
But in the meantime the movement had taken over. I
(37:07):
saw it described as it didn't need Q anymore. It
had become its own. What was I saw written as
the world's first open source cult where anybody could add
or subtract, or debate or help create this again ever
evolving mythos of what was really going on in the
(37:27):
world with Donald Trump at the center of the whole thing.
And the problem with that is is that it made
it out of the darkest corners of the Internet to
the mainstream Internet, to the mainstream media, and then into
real life to where it very frequently Yeah, I think
you could use the word frequently disturbed individuals who had
fallen down the QAnon hole acted out in real life violence.
(37:51):
Not just the comet ping pong guy from North Carolina.
There's a whole slew of people who have engaged in
real world violence because of what they learned about from QAnon.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
There was one case I remember hearing about this when
in twenty eighteen, this guy pled guilty to terrorism charges
because he got an armored truck and blocked the road
crossing the Hoover Dam with two assault rifles and had
a sign that said release the OIG report, which was
referring to the quote unquote real Mueller report that QAnon
(38:26):
believers thought provided basically kind of exposed Hillary Clinton's criminal
activities because I mean, there were a lot of people
that they targeted, but the Clintons and especially Hillary were
obviously because she ran against Donald Trump, but she was
kind of squarely in the crosshairs for them.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah, this was at the time people were chanting lock
her up, like she was very much in the crosshairs
for sure. And Obama still was too. He had just
finished being president after all when this whole thing started.
One of the most puzzling acts of violence to me
in the real world based on QAnon was the assassination
of a Gambino mafia boss named Francesco Frankie Boy Cali,
(39:09):
and he was killed by a Quanon supporter who believed
he was an agent of the deep state, like a
high up agent of the deep state. I could not
find anything about what that guy's rationalization was for that.
But this is the first time since nineteen eighty five,
This is a twenty twenty one, I think, the first
time since nineteen eighty five that a mafia boss had
(39:31):
been assassinated and it was by a QAnon adherent.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, just really bizarre.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
But if anybody knows why that guy killed him because
of that, like I would love to hear it.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
The other thing that I don't understand or not understand,
but I'm really curious about, is whoever Q is Watkinson's
or not? Like what was their endgame here? Like did
they really and do they really really believe this stuff?
Speaker 3 (40:00):
Or is it Are they just bad.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Actors who have a sick I don't know, not sense
of humor, but maybe sense of humor to try and
start something like this, or was it financially related or
do they really believe that it's just that's That's the
one thing I wish I could find out that we'll
probably never know.
Speaker 2 (40:23):
I know, and I don't know, but I suspect that
they don't believe it. I mean, if they're posing as Q,
I don't I don't think that they actually believe it,
you know, well.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Right, because they're not secret government higher ups that really
have this information obviously, But I mean, do they really
believe Tom Hanks is killing and eating children?
Speaker 2 (40:45):
No? I don't. I don't think so. Again, I don't
know the people. I don't know enough about him to
really definitively say, but just don't know. I don't think
that makes.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
It even more sad somehow that it is stretched from
the darkest reaches in the Internet to literal suburban parents
who had too much time on their hands between soccer pickups.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, there is a really sad, disturbing act of violence
based on QAnon that happened in twenty twenty one where
a man from California killed both of his children, a
baby and a toddler, with a spear gun because he
believed that they had gotten reptilian DNA from their mother.
Because remember, lizard people are walking among us. So he
(41:30):
said that he knew what he was doing was wrong,
but it was the only way to save the world.
And it was because of QAnon. He murdered his two
children because of QAnon. And like Paul Pelosi is another one.
He was beaten with a hammer by a guy who
was driven by q and on motivation. Like the idea,
(41:50):
I'm with you if the idea that these guys were
just doing it for lulls and because they were nihilistic
or even for money, and that it translated into real
world violence like that is just it's abominable for sure.
Speaker 3 (42:06):
That's right. Are we done?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
No, We've got to give a little bit of an update. Okay, okay,
all right, well, I'll start. So there was a really
big problem because Trump was always in charge as part
of the QAnon mythos. No matter what was going on,
Trump was in control, is the way they said it. Well,
Trump was obviously supposed to be re elected in twenty twenty,
but he wasn't. And so in following with tradition of
(42:35):
kind of prophetic cults, the people in QAnon just essentially
were like, Okay, well, this is all just part of
the act. This is trust in the plan, and they
kind of rationalized it in all sorts of ways, and
that's kind of part and parcel for what they've been doing.
Like the assassination attempt of Trump in Pennsylvania led to
a huge crisis initially among QAnon followers because because that
(43:00):
clearly demonstrated Trump wasn't in control if he was getting
shot at, and some people were like it was stage
and other people are like, no, no, no, we got it.
This is proof positive that Trump has been anointed by
God to bring the storm to overthrow the Satanic cabal,
because how else could he have not been shot in
the head by the assassin's bullet. And so I saw
(43:21):
that some people who kind of left QAnon after Trump
didn't get elected, came raging back into it after the
assassination attempt, and there were a lot of families that
were like, Okay, good my friend or family members back
and then oh god, there they go again. After the
assassination attempt.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Yeah, I read a really sad article about the guy
who came into the pizza place about him getting out
of prison and marrying his girlfriend and having a kid,
and it was you know, it's just sad, wreckless guy.
Speaker 2 (43:52):
Oh yeah, I bet that's the kind of thing that
kind of follows you around for life.
Speaker 3 (43:56):
Right, Yeah, I would imagine.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
One of the other things that happened post election, I
believe is Michael Flynn was a luminary. Remember, some people
thought he was Q and he was outed as saying
privately that he thought the whole thing was total nonsense
and that he believed actually it was a CIA psyop
to discredit the Right by making them look foolish and gullible.
(44:18):
So the whole the community is very much fractured, but
it's still very much alive. There was a poll that
found that in May of twenty twenty one, fifteen percent
of people believed Americans I should say, believed QAnon beliefs
in some form or fashion. You would think that it
would have gone down since Trump didn't get re elected.
(44:39):
In fact, it rose by eight points in twenty twenty three,
two years later. So the belief in QAnon just keeps
spreading and spreading and spreading and becomes more and more mainstream.
And it's even as it does, it gets kind of
divorced from QAnon and becomes just what people think about
things about reality.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Sorry, I checked out, and I was just thinking in
my head, I was just hearing what a wonderful warl
by Louis Armstrong, over and over.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
That's a good. How am I not surprised that you
do a great Louis Armstrong?
Speaker 3 (45:14):
Oh he's easy.
Speaker 2 (45:15):
I would have guessed you did the izzy Hawaiian guys version.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
Oh that's a fun one too.
Speaker 2 (45:21):
Or no, he did somewhere over the rainbow. I'm sorry, Yeah, yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 3 (45:23):
Somewhere over the rainbow.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
There's one o the things. Let's leave on a semi
positive note, Chuck. A couple of different places, I saw
people who were interviewed who had lost a friend or
family member or hung on to a friend or family
member while they'd fallen down the Q rabbit hole, and
the fact that they'd gotten him back, universally was because
that person stuck with them, let him know they didn't
(45:46):
agree with them, but they loved them nonetheless, and as
they put it, provided a soft landing place for the
people when they finally were like, this isn't real. I
can't believe that I've believed this for so long. Had
they were there for them without any kind of judgment
or cruelty or I told you so, And that helped
(46:07):
allow the people to kind of get back on their
feet in a very gentle manner.
Speaker 3 (46:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
And there's a lot of great websites and organizations that
have now had to help people through this stuff, and
like how do you help your family members and things
like that, like you were just talking about. Certainly one
place you can start is the Anti Defamation League website,
but there are plenty plenty of places to go so
(46:34):
you don't just like argue with your family member and
tell them they're not using you know, rational thought with
stuff like this. You got you gotta you gotta try
a different tack there, yep.
Speaker 2 (46:44):
Yeah, And there's all sorts of advice all over the internet.
So if you want to look go find it, uh,
and be careful what you do look for there, be
careful of the hashtags you follow. And since I said that,
obviously it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
That's right, a quick not correction, but just enlightening because
we've had a bunch of people write in already about
our glasses episode because we could not figure out why
Livia titled her research four eyes bad.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
And this is from just one of them. Is from Marty.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Hey, guys, listen to the episode about glass as great
as usual. I've been wearing glasses for over forty years.
Regarding the phrase four eyes bad, I believe that as
a joke reference to the book Animal Farm by George Orwell.
In the book, the animals use the phrase four legs good,
two legs bad as they rise against the humans.
Speaker 3 (47:34):
That must be it. Love the show, longtime listener.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
That is from Marty Mishka from Omaha, Nebraska, parentheses living
in the Blue Dot, and I haven't read Animal Farm
in so long I completely forgot that, But I bet
you are right on the money because that's a very
Livia kind of easter egg.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
Yeah, that is a deep cut literary wise, So nice work, Libya,
and who is that Marty?
Speaker 3 (48:00):
That was Marty, But many people have written in and
we'll continue.
Speaker 2 (48:03):
To Yeah, thanks a lot, Marty, and thanks a lot
to everybody who's written in to let us know, help
us figure that out. We love that kind of thing.
If you want to be somebody like that, you can
send us an email too, to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio
dot com.
Speaker 3 (48:18):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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