Archive for the ‘Qanon’ Category

Q Investigation Part 2: The Proofs

Sunday, March 17th, 2019

Veracity of so-called ‘Proofs’?

Faithful proponents like to say that the proofs of Qanon are so numerous and so obvious as to make it mathematically impossible for it to be anything else.  Proof of what, exactly?  The idea is that Qanon is a military intelligence operation that has formed a unique alliance with President Trump, not only to protect him from the Deep State, but also and primarily to help him destroy the treasonous elements acting within it.  There are adjuncts to this main theme, of varying degrees of credibility.  For instance, one theme floating around is that JFK Jr. faked his death, and he’s involved with Q, or even is Q.  Apart from the fact that this seems dubious at best, it’s important to note that those who believe that particular theory are not necessarily “mainstream” in the Qanon community.  Like any such phenomenon, there are those who believe some of it without drinking the whole pitcher of kool-aid, and there are those who are “all in.”  In any event, the critical portion they believe is that President Trump is directly involved, and as a way to demonstrate this, the “anons” are always coming up with new and creative ways for Trump to demonstrate the connection is real without simply saying it. This is perhaps the biggest test of the whole Qanon phenomenon: Is it real and is it all it’s been claimed to be? Let us examine evidence they offer to see if we can decide if their proofs are true. Before we can know if it’s all that’s claimed, we ought to know if it’s even plausible.

(For those confused about Qanon, a quick video primer is here by PrayingMedic, and the first article in this series is here.)

There are many videos that attempt to make the case, but I wonder if that is enough to believe the overall theory.  For instance, if Donald Trump is actually involved with Qanon, then it would not be surprising that he could arrange these “proofs.”  That doesn’t mean that Qanon is really a Defense Intelligence operation.  It would only mean that Trump is in control of it, whatever it is.  It could still simply be a purely political operation intended to maintain control and engagement of his base.  In that case, it would be a hoax of a different sort, in which the President is the hoaxer.  I’m going to focus on those “proofs” that demonstrate an actual connection to President Trump.  The question of what that connection means, and what is the nature of the relationship and the underlying motive driving it, is a separate though closely-related question.  First, let us see if there is a relationship.

One of the forms of “proofs” offered by the anons is that in various speeches and appearances, at rallies and at other events, President Trump seems to go out of his way to acknowledge the relationship, although not openly.  Trump doesn’t announce “I’m with Q,” or something along those lines. Instead, it’s pretty clear that he makes somewhat vague hand gestures that seem to be an “Air-Q,” the letter apparently drawn by his finger in the air.  Critics have reviewed these instances, and it’s not entirely clear what it is that Trump’s hand is indicating.  The most recent instance of this is from Saturday’s CPAC 2019 speech by President Trump, as he came on stage to deliver his lengthy(and mostly fantastic) address, here captured by Twitter user mcSNez17(click the play icon at the center of this image):

 


This is hardly the first time Trump has done this. He has done this repeatedly at various rallies all through last Fall, and he’s also done something else that seems extraordinary. Last Fall, during the run-up to the elections, many Q-followers began to appear at the various rallies. As I mentioned in the first part of this series,the Secret Service reportedly began prohibiting people with Qanon outerwear, particularly T-shirts, from entering the rallies, but this hasn’t stopped inventive Q-believers from creating other items with emblems of “Q” that they then place over their clothing.  This was the case with one women at the El Paso rally in February, who President Trump seemed to acknowledge, as shown in Q-post 2695. And again, Trump seemed to make a Q symbol, as this looped video contends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0gksL18eR8

A number of the various content creators on Youtube that I had listed in the first post in this series have created videos dedicated to providing “proof” that Qanon is legitimate. Here’s a sampling from “Q-tubers:”

If you watch a few of the “proofs” videos, what you’ll notice is that a frequent form of “proof” offered is by time synchronicity. The thesis is that very frequently, President Trump and Qanon appear with odd synchronicity that defies the odds of mere coincidence. Now, if the claim was that they appeared in that order, it would be easy enough to dismiss. Anybody can spot a new Trump-Tweet and immediately post something on an Internet message board.  There’s no trick to that.  Here, in these cases, what happens is that Q posts something, and then, within less than a minute, a Trump-Tweet shows up, sometimes in the same second, and on the same subject.  There are numerous examples of these incidents provided repeatedly as “proof.”

I am not certain that this a valid methodology, for a few good reasons. Time synchronization is something that organizations spend an incredible amount of time and money to maintain.  For instance, in my own workplace, it’s important that client computers and servers are synchronized to the same time source and that time correction adjustments are done every few minutes.  Otherwise, what happens is that the servers and clients may experience some time difference creep.  In many organizations where time is critical, the time is actually synchronized from a GPS time-clock source.  On the roof of the building is an antenna designed to receive signal from orbiting GPS satellites.  Time is critical in the world of GPS because as Einstein taught us, time is a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions with which we’re acquainted, so one of the things very important to fixing a location is time.  Many systems simply require time synchronization across machines for the sake of correct collation of records.

When you have very large systems, employing many database servers, with replication and high availability and so on, spread across large geographical distances, time synchronization is especially critical. One would have to imagine that sites like Twitter maintain a number of server farms spread out all over the country. In order to keep them all synchronized, they’d need to rely on something like GPS-based time clocks. Masterclock and Spectracom would be two examples of GPS Network Clock vendors. These are widely used in many industries. The basic idea is to have a singular time reference for every computer, switch, router, and firewall, along with other devices on your network. All of the devices check their time and adjust in tiny increments to keep all the devices within a very tight tolerance, generally for a common source.  GPS makes an excellent common source.

This all leads to the question of the difficulty in faking a small change in time from one event to another. Imagine that President Trump’s tweets are posted on the same server as Q‘s posts. It would be difficult to fake the order in which that happened. Here, however, we have two separate servers, and again, if they were in the same farm, it would be somewhat more difficult for a user to fake this time-wise sequencing, because all of the servers are likely to be synchronized to the same source. On the other hand, if a given server was looking at a different source, or was applying a different time correction, it would be simple to accomplish, even if the ultimate time source for both servers was the same GPS network clock.  I can imagine a scenario in which a user monitors an RSS feed from Twitter for @RealDonaldTrump and has a message ready to go on 8ch.net. Upon seeing the Trump-Tweet, they submit the message to 8ch.net, and if the system time on the 8ch.net server is running, let’s say, thirty seconds behind Twitter’s time, it will appear as though the 8ch.net post came first. In fact, if I had the 8ch.net server’s time running behind Twitter’s by some reliable amount, I could always make it appear that my latest Q-post came just before the President’s tweets. Somebody has recently pointed to the uncanny ability of the Krassenstein brothers(@Krassenstein and @EdKrassen) to appear at or near the top of the list of replies to Trump-Tweets with their venomous hatred for the president. I suspect they have a feed of Trump-Tweets that constantly updates, giving them the ability to respond in a very timely way, or they’ve got an inside track at Twitter.

One e-mailer asked me bluntly, so let me state the answer here: It is possible to fake time-synchronization, so I do not place any stock in the whole line of alleged “Q-proofs” that rely on the synchronicity of Q-posts and Trump-Tweets as evidence of coordination and involvement of President Trump. There would be ways to more accurately demonstrate this. One might be to create feeds of both @realDonaldTrump and of Q-posts happening separately, perhaps different frames in the same browser window, so that one could monitor in something approximating real-time as messages/tweets are posted.

If it could be categorically established that Q‘s posts reliably precede the President’s tweets, that would still only tell you that somebody with access to the President was putting up Q-posts at the same time the President is Tweeting. If one had access to @POTUS, it would be easy enough to observe when he was tweeting, and all of this assumes President Trump does all of his own tweeting.  Let me simply conclude the examination of this class of “proofs” by saying that I am not convinced of its validity. Let some enterprising “Anon” build the interface to simultaneously monitor a feed from both that cannot be manipulated, and I’ll give this another look.  On the other hand, the problem is that even if President Trump knows and is aware of Qanon, and coordinates with Qanon, the question remains: Why?  To what end?

Another form of “proofs” is for Anons to post requests for President Trump to work certain key words into speeches.  Last year, the request was made by an Anon for the President to place “Tip Top” into the State of the Union address.  While that never occurred, strangely, in the Easter Egg Roll speech, here’s President Trump. Listen closely, and notice his emphasis:

That’s a little more convincing, but it’s still not the first or only time Trump has used the term “tip top.”  Still, his emphasis in this case is a little more convincing, as he seems to call attention to it by repeating and extending to “Tippy Top.” I think to fully convince me of this class of “proofs,” it would take Donald Trump to utter a word never mouthed by any President before, perhaps something coined in more obscure circles. For instance, if “Anons” suggested that the President call his antagonists in the Deep State “Ameriphobes,” and the president actually did so, apart from splitting a gut laughing and cheering, I would surely believe in the connection between our President and Qanon.

One can go through all the alleged proofs offered, but to what end? Some of them certainly seem convincing, while others are less than conclusive. One must wonder that even if Trump is involved, how seriously ought we to take some of what Q promises?  After all, some of the things Q seems to forecast are somewhat vague, open to interpretation, and frequently imprecise.  Also, as I mentioned in my first article on this topic, Trump has been known to do some play-acting before.  Could the whole Q phenomenon simply be a Political/Psychological operation by President Trump?  This is the more difficult thing to determine, because even if Trump is “in on it” with Qanon, or even directly behind Qanon, maybe it’s all nonsense with which to manipulate his supporters.  One would hate to think that could be true, because if it were true, and subsequently discovered, it would certainly wreck any chance he had at re-election.

I’m quite willing at this point to consider that Qanon is involve with Trump.  The real proof of the legitimacy of Qanon will come in the results.  Will the things Q forecasts come to pass?  Will there be justice for the Obama/Clinton conspirators? Will the swamp be defeated and drained of its terrible power? What exactly is Q projecting, anyway?  In the third part of the series, we will examine that last question. Is Qanon really telling us anything worth knowing, or is it just a load of generalized guessing based perhaps on inside information?  Some say that we stand now on the precipice, and that the answer is due in the coming week(s.)  Justice is coming, they say, and operatives of the Deep State are about to get their just due.

We are now in the Ides of March. Andrew Weissmann is out. Mueller’s report could come any day. Will we see a draining of the swamp, or is President Trump going to be defeated by the legion of DC-based Ameriphobes? Soon, I believe all of these questions will be answered.

See also: How Donald Trump Can Save the World(or at least the Internet)

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Posted in Donald Trump, Featured, Politics, Qanon | 2 Comments »

Who Or What Is Qanon?

Friday, February 22nd, 2019

The left says it’s a bad conspiracy theory by and for dolts who support Donald Trump.  The media, despite defaming Qanon as a conspiracy theory for brain-addled nitwits, gives this alleged “conspiracy theory” a great deal of print coverage on the Internet, but very little coverage on-air or in actual newsprint.  Why not?  Meanwhile, the very cynical NeverTrumpers either allege(like the left) that it’s a conspiracy theory, or that it’s a psychological operation by the Trump 2020 campaign, as a means and method by which to both recruit voters and also campaign volunteers(all of whom are presumably idiots because they support Donald Trump.)  There is a growing segment of our society, however, among whom Qanon carries great credibility. For them, it’s very nearly an article of faith.  Whatever Qanon is or isn’t, it’s becoming more and more difficult for the media to ignore, with giant “Q” signs showing up at Trump rallies across the country.  I wonder why the media doesn’t ask about “Q” at Whitehouse press briefings.  I wonder why it gets so little coverage on broadcast and cable television.  What do you call a “conspiracy theory” that the mainstream media largely refuses to cover in mass distribution despite its apparent growing reach across the country and around the world? Who or what is Qanon, anyway? Is he/it going to help President Trump vanquish the Deep State?  Is he really a “they?” What may be the most shocking part of this “conspiracy theory”could well be the discovery that it’s not a theory at all.

I began researching this subject a short time ago when somebody who follows me on Twitter contacted me via private messages about it.  In retrospect, I thought at the time that I had run across this someplace or another, but hadn’t given it any attention.  I think I saw some Q signs in a crowd either during a Trump Rally or perhaps in replay coverage last Fall.  I may have raised an eyebrow, but didn’t pay it much attention at the time.  In any event, it was also mentioned in comments on this site by a long-time poster, and while the Twitter follower had piqued my interest a bit, the long-time poster got my attention.  That poster provided some links, and some back-story information, some of which I’d already uncovered in my preliminary research, but some of which was new to me.  What I discovered is that there’s a growing community of people who definitely subscribe to this developing story, whether it’s conspiracy or real, and that fact is by itself all the justification I needed to investigate in earnest.  After all, for every person who exposes his or herself on the Internet, even in approximate anonymity, you must know that there are generally a dozen or more “lurkers” who read but never engage, for various reasons.  I know this to be a fact because at the peak of this blog, back in 2011-12, as many as two thousand people would read each of my posts for every one who commented.  Most people don’t want to create an account, or log into a website, or remember another damned password.  When I see evidence that hundreds of thousands of people are in some way participating in the Qanon phenomenon, I know that the actual number of people may well measure in the millions, or perhaps even tens of millions.

When you have any phenomena in any continental civilization that reaches even one-percent of the population, that is big–time.  Less than two percent of our population watched the last game of the NHL’s Stanley Cup, last year. Less than two-percent of our population viewed the most recent episode of Empire, in which the now-controversial Jussie Smollett is an actor.  I had never heard of Smollett, but then, I’m a poor gauge of the popular culture.  Certainly, however, a movement that seems to have generated a whole cottage industry of Youtube Channels and websites that provide constant coverage of “Q” is not to be ignored.  Tallying the top dozen or so channels’ subscribers, the total comes out to well over a million, but that’s just subscribers. Some of the individual videos have many more than one million views, and some of them accumulate these large number of views in very short periods. If a video is garnering four or five times as many views in a week as the channel has subscribers, that’s an indicator of a large lurking audience, but when you see this consistently in viewership of a Youtube channel, what it means is that there’s a large, lurking audience that prefers to remain anonymous on principle.

In considering this Q phenomenon, what I hope to do is to determine whether there’s any veracity to it.  It’s a very detailed sort of story, but like all things even remotely political, the first question I have with this “Q” phenomenon is the underlying motive driving “Q.” There may be more than one person behind this, but still, there is some highly organized motive for pushing this.  It could be genuine.  It could also be a giant disinformation campaign and distraction.  It could be a campaign operation for Donald Trump or for one of his opponents, declared or undeclared for 2020.  It could be a foreign government, including the Russians, or it could be a past nemesis playing games at the expense of Trump’s supporters.  It could even be a collection of teenagers spoofing adults all over the globe and having one Hell of a good laugh at their expense.  One of the best clues we actually get comes in the examination of motives combined with the information provided to date by “Q.”

The stated motive is along the lines of communicating with patriots about what President Trump is doing to fight the deep state, along with assisting the President in that pursuit.  That sounds comforting, and it surely appeals to all the people who in their fondest wishes would like a superhero to come save us from the Deep State and its parade of villains.  Another possible motive would be money.  Imagine the advertising revenues one could rack up on Youtube and other platforms if you could generate tens of millions of views.  Of course, this must be tempered by the fact that Youtube and other platforms seem to be actively suppressing Qanon-related content, in part by de-monetizing some Q-related videos. (Some of the channel owners have bitterly complained in some videos I’ve seen.)  On Facebook and Twitter, Q-content seems to get suppressed.  Even so, the current strategy for circumventing this is to use graphical memes to carry the message, because those are so much more difficult for automated systems to screen and censor.  One “Q-tuber” seems to use code to speak to his audience, referring to Qanon as “our favorite anon.”  In fairness, however, I must state that it seems as though most of these purveyors of all things “Q” have absolutely no apparent commercial motive to speak of, while just a few seem to be more “about the Benjamins,” but even for those, that still seems like a secondary or tertiary concern.

Setting aside the stated “good intentions,” let’s examine what, apart from the purely commercial, could be among the motives of Qanon.  If I were a President under siege by a deep state, I would like a Qanon-style operation working on my behalf, but aren’t there easier ways?  It is true that the mainstream media is highly controlled so as to prohibit Trump from having much direct interaction with the people.  The State of the Union, earlier this month, is a great example of why the media wants Trump’s direct communications with the American people strictly limited, and why they wish to create a certain image of Trump that does not comport with reality, but creates a false reality they want their viewers to absorb.  This is why the media hates Trump’s use of Twitter, but they eventually remedied this: At first, they covered almost every Tweet; then they became better at framing those Tweets in a manner that was more derogatory to the President.  Still, they can’t put words in his mouth, much as they might like to, but they can misrepresent context.  For this reason alone, it is understandable why a Qanon-like character would certainly be a desirable thing, carrying the President’s water to the public, but bypassing the media.

I also think that if this was bad actor, the President would quickly send forth emissaries to disclaim and disown Qanon.  Imagine what the Democrats and other Deep-State dimwits would do with such a thing if it could be traced back to Russia, or some other locale indicating nefarious origins and intentions.  They would crucify him, and the subsequent impeachment and Senate trial would have been over some time ago.  Hell, Mueller would have been on the case!  He would have ordered a 6am raid on Q-Central, wherever that may be.  More curiously, the press has been mostly hands-off on broadcast and cable television, and in printed versions of their publications.  Online articles are one thing, but they seem to intend to periodically  flood of the zone, whereby somebody new, only now becoming aware of the Qanon phenomenon(much like me,) would do a quick Google Search, finding that the overwhelming majority of the first one-hundred links are highly critical and all refer to it as a conspiracy theory.  Go search for “Qanon” on Google.  (Myself, for the moment, I prefer duckduckgo.com as my search engine.)  I can almost guarantee to you that the linked results account for many fewer page views than the number of total Youtube views, and this means it’s been put in place as a deterrent or smoke screen.  To what end, I cannot yet say, but this is the obvious truth.  It’s also interesting that if you look at them by date, they seem to come in waves.  All of the outlets publish something within a couple of days of one another, followed by silence, perhaps for months, and then another wave comes in.  This is classic disinformation, and the media is carrying it out with apparent zeal.

The reason this is done is fairly simple: Most search algorithms include a weighting of some sort for recency.  Search engine users generally want newer and therefore  more relevant content, in general.  If all of the big media outlets post anti-Qanon content in the same week, they will all age at approximately the same rate too, with respect to the search engines, which means people like me, who may post about Qanon just once will eventually come in as being more current/recent in the search results.  Since I’m not part of their narrative, that’s bad from the suppressors’ point of view.  Periodically, roughly every three to six months, it seems, a new litany of anti-Qanon articles is published.  The same seems to be true on Youtube.  A spate of videos appear from different media sources, all at once, and all with the same theme: Qanon is a conspiracy theory and its adherents are kook-ball, tinfoil-hat-wearing, right-wing, Trump-supporting morons.  It’s so consistent that it’s clearly orchestrated, or at a minimum, herd-directed reporting.  Again, you can search it yourselves. Go to Youtube, and you will see that if you search for “Qanon,” almost all of the top results will be from around six months ago, and it will include videos from large left-wing outfits like MSNBC, as one example.  This is the trend you will see again and again.  If Qanon is really just a silly conspiracy theory, why are all the big outlets expending so much time on it, and why with such regular synchronicity?  Perhaps more importantly, why is it now penetrating into the popular media culture space.  Just days ago, Qanon was mentioned in the popular television series NCIS New Orleans.  I don’t watch any network television, so I didn’t see this, but it’s become big news in the Q-world.  Even though here too, it was defamed as a conspiracy, the fact that it garnered any attention in a major television show acts as a gauge of the phenomenon’s growth.  Here’s the clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7a41LefY6dI

The major media uses their television shows to push narratives they want to see active in the culture.  There’s not a reader of this blog who doesn’t know that, hasn’t noticed it, and hasn’t become sick over how media has been used for at least two generations to besmirch all things conservative, and all things patriotic.  The anti-American bias is a theme that has dominated mass media in the US for a long, long time.  The thing to note is that it’s a powerful tool, and the purveyors don’t generally waste it on things of little or no importance.  Prime-time television space is literally gold, so that you don’t waste part of a scene attacking something you don’t think warrants suppression.  Remember, it’s all about marketing and positioning: Just as they want to associate conservatism with all things bad, evil, hateful, and vile in the world, so too do they seem intent on similarly besmirching Qanon and its followers as crazy conspiracists.  If there’s nothing to see here, why bother?  The answer may be as simple as this: Despite other ongoing attempts to suppress Qanon‘s growth and reach, they’ve failed, and the growth has occurred and the reach has spread. Why would they wish to suppress it?  Well, obviously, it’s because they’re Deep-State shills… or it could be a simpler commercial motive: If you’re spending your time researching Qanon, you’re not consuming as much of their bilge.

Another reason could be that they’re actually behind it.  If one wanted to watch Trump supporters jump through hoops in pursuit of their tails, this would be a fine strategy.  Hell, they already know that the intended audience is not reading, watching or listening to their garbage most of the time, so why not torment them a bit?  After all, since the audience in question considers this collection of outlets to be “FakeNews” anyway, why not give them a real taste of “FakeNews?”  Again, the problem here is that if this were the case, you would expect the Trump team to put out the word that the Qanon phenomenon was a hoax, and part of “FakeNews.” No such disclaimer seems to have been forthcoming.

Or has it? One of the things I found in my research was the claim that the United States Secret Service was prohibiting people from entering Trump rallies while wearing Q-themed outerwear.(T-shirts, etc.)  This seemed to have occurred in the wind-up to last Fall’s elections. This story was posted on the DailyBeast, a publication that is as fake as FakeNews gets, but this claim appears to have been true. It was explained away in Q-posts as the result of some deep-state operative calling in threats against the President referencing Qanon.  That’s a nifty story, and it surely would explain why the Secret Service is keeping Q-merch out of rallies, but not so fast.  The Secret Service isn’t generally staffed by fools, and I doubt whether such a thing would go on for long unless there was a serious threat or the President and his people ordered it. It’s a good deal to explain away, and just a bit too convenient. What if the real reason the Secret Service doesn’t wish to let Q-shirts into rallies is because the President doesn’t want to associate even an implicit endorsement with this Qanon phenomenon?  Or, what if the President doesn’t want the media to give coverage to Qanon because it is a political operation that is part of the President’s campaign, and another fake persona thrust into the limelight by Donald Trump might be embarrassing.  Remember John Miller?  Is he Q?

I jest, but only slightly. One of the things that has appeared in all the Q posts is this: “Q+.”  I can hear the collective groans of my readers.  Yes, when Q+ appears as the signature at the bottom of a post, (rather than the simple “Q,”) it is alleged to either be the President himself, or alternatively, posted in the presence of the President or with his knowledge/consent, depending upon whose particular interpretation you accept.  If Donald Trump can play John Miller, surely he could play Q or Q+(or both.)  In any event, I find some of the Q-posts humorous even when the subject is deadly serious, because here, Barack Obama is invariably referred-to as “Hussein.” If nothing else, it should make all but the Deep-Staters smile.

Let’s summarize some things, so far: Qanon is alleged to be some sort of intelligence officer(or collection of them) who are working with Donald Trump to vanquish the Deep State.  Qanon posts information in “drops” that convey information that at times is very specific, but also sometimes vague, and encoded.  Very often, information is provided in the form of questions that seem to lead inexorably toward a single logical result.  The poster(s) known as “Q” has freely admitted that disinformation is included in some “drops.”

You can visit the following sites for more info:

  • Qanon “drops” can be found here: https://qanon.pub/
  • They can also be found here with added features(for example, the President’s tweets, toggled by clicking a button at the top): https://qmap.pub
  • So-called “proofs” of the legitimacy of Qanon can be found here: https://www.qproofs.com

Here is a list of some popular Qanon-content Youtube channels(a.k.a. “Q-Tubers“):

There are numerous others, many, but these appeared most often in my searches for content, and I must admit humor is a winner with me, so IPOT was my favorite, based purely on delivery and production value. PrayingMedic seems much more serious and sedate. Some of them have voices I just can’t take, and while that’s surely superficial, it makes it harder for me to listen to them. Others, like Craig Mason’s Reasonable Conversation Channel, I just want to tell him to a.) shave, and b.) stop grinning. I know, I know, that’s probably tough advice to swallow coming from a guy who has a face for radio and a voice for print, but again, you just have to call the balls and strikes sometimes. Some of them certainly work harder to deliver interesting content, and some work harder at delivery, and some frankly should stop cluttering the Internet with their babble. I’m sure they’d say the same of me.  One of the quickest ways for a so-called Q-Tuber to cause me to punch out is to talk about 9/11 conspiracies, or other such well-debunked nonsense.  None of the videos I’ve viewed by the list of Q-Tubers above(so far) have mentioned outrageous 9/11 conspiracies of the sort for which Alex Jones has been the purveyor.  Apparently, there’s also a sidebar about Alex Jones and Jerome Corsi that needs to be covered at some point.

Of all the Qanon-related content I’ve encountered so far, that which drives me right to the edge is the decoding videos on Youtube where various forms of Gematria decodes are done with the most tortured logic and fantastic assumptions.  Frankly, I can take just a minute or two of those videos before I’m ready for a rubber-padded cell.  The poster(s) Q frequently exhorts readers to “Learn our comms.”  If their communications involve Gematria decoding, I’m likely out.

For those of you who, like me, are just now becoming acquainted with all of this Qanon business, I beg your indulgence as I continue my research. The material above should provide a good starting point for those of you interested in researching this subject, but if nothing else, ought to provide you a little entertainment.  I’m far from a conclusion on what I think of the veracity of this story, and my default position is to side with David Hannum, who purportedly said of PT Barnum’s Cardiff Giant hoax: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Still, there are some tantalizing details here that seem more than mere coincidence, and  deserve to be ruled-out by facts before dismissal.  I’ve always been a sucker for a good mystery or spy novel, so while some of this research can be tedious, at least it’s not completely dreary. I’d also note that if some of the information posted by Q is accurate, we’re even more vastly under-served by the grotesquely corrupt mainstream media than even a cynic like me had dared to imagine.

In the next installment, I will discuss so-called “Q-proofs,” which is a class of circumstances, events, images and items of news that would seem to lend more credibility to the Qanon claims. I’m still not sure what to think of this, or how seriously to take it, but for the fact that it appears a fairly significant number of Americans seem to believe some or all of this story.  It may all be a hoax, or it may be deadly serious, but I’m not yet convinced either way. I am covering this because some proportion of my readers have now requested it, and because anything that has hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans this engaged is something that demands examination.  Other than to cast aspersions, the lamesteam media certainly isn’t investigating it very seriously.

To be continued.  In the meantime, I leave you with the latest Q-video from IPOT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPi8BgZfPCg

 

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Posted in Donald Trump, Featured, Media, News, Politics, Qanon | 4 Comments »

Our Cold Civil War

Thursday, February 21st, 2019

There’s no shooting yet, unless you ask Steve Scalise(R-LA.)  He might well see it differently, and justifiably so.  He was grievously wounded by a leftist madman with plans of wiping out Republicans. Even in the Cold War, there were occasional incidents that involved shootings, even though most people observed the peace, perhaps just barely.  Now we face something different in character.  It is a combination between our worst fears of the growing police state in the era of the War on Terror we’re still fighting, a new version with different motivations than the bloody Civil War we fought one century and one half ago, and the Cold War we didn’t fight, but ended, some thirty years ago.  This new form of war is different in some ways from what we’ve seen in the past.  Our nation is so thoroughly divided that it seems impossible to heal.  Violence threatens from just beneath the surface, only constrained by our lack of desire.  Like all people under the boot of oppression, we will go a long way before we will rise in rebellion.  We don’t want a fight.  We want to be left alone.  Just as in the war on terror, however, the enemy seems bent on denying us that option called peace, and they’re bringing war to us. For now, it’s cold, or at least cool.  As the rabid left continues to agitate for more from their neighbors’ wallets and souls, the temperature is rising fast. Now we find ourselves in a Cold Civil War in which the violence is just beneath the surface and an open war is just one election or one court ruling away.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously warned:

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.“

We are approaching the end of the American Republic.  Congress discovered in the 1930s that it could bribe the public with the public’s money, and the bribery began in earnest in the 1960s.  Now, the bribery is everywhere.  Now the guns hide just beneath the surface.  There is always the threat that they will be pointed in your face. Somewhere, even now, some statist is contriving the next approach to coerce your rights and your property from your hands.  In fact, there are more statists coming up with ways to spend you into oblivion than there is money to be expropriated and spent.  The Green New Deal is one example, but it’s only the most recent.  Understand that they are willing to use violence.  Let them hem and haw all they will, and let them attempt to conceal their malign plans, but do not let them go without demanding of them: “Where do you get the right to steal from others at gunpoint?”  Do not allow them to hide the gun.  That’s why they immediately shift to nonsense about “social contracts” and so on.  They want to pretend you’ve volunteered to be robbed.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re in a cold civil war that is just one bad incident or one miserable election from going hot.  Some will moan that I’m far too pessimistic about it, but let’s be blunt, shall we?  Look around.  It’s so bad that we now have Americans turning to theories that may or may not have any basis in reality for belief.  The left has its collusion hoax, while Trumpsters have something I’m investigating called “Qanon.” I know the left’s Russia/Collusion story is a thoroughgoing hoax, but only recently, having encountered advocates of this Qanon business, I’m still investigating.  For all I know, Qanon is a political operation of Trump’s to keep his base in line. (Don’t email me to complain, please, as I’m still investigating this, and this is one of a number of theories floating around the Internet about Qanon.) Still, let us imagine Qanon is substantially real, whatever that means. How far have we fallen that such a character (or collection of them) would constitute the only hope of salvation for America?  How thoroughly bankrupt have we become?  How corrupted is our government and those who not only staff it, but also who choose them?  Why are we looking for a hero rather than rising to be heroes ourselves?  We’ve sat by and let them steal our country, and now we wish for some sort of superman with a bold “Q” emblazoned on his chest to save us from our own intransigence?

We let the statists steal our schools and universities.  Having monopolized these platforms, they stole our children and grandchildren away, now to be used as fodder in the war against us.  We let them control all of our media because we have refused to bankrupt their outlets by simple disuse.  That’s all it would take.  That’s all we would need.  Just stop using them.  Turn off their television channels.  We hang onto their platforms(I’m as guilty as any) like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube because… they’re convenient!   The problem is that they’ve turned it all against us.  Where are we now? How can we claim to support the constitutional republic while we join these villains in a “civil” relationship comprised of their guns and their threats, but only our submission? What sort of mixed signals do we send to our progeny? On the one hand, we talk to them about the evils of the popular culture, but on the other, we partake of it.

It’s awful.  The real problem may be that the left is now pushing so hard that people who are only barely anchored to reality may begin to do completely unhinged things, and some may ultimately involve actual shootings.  First, think of this fool Jussie Smollett, who created a hoax hate attack, all so he could defame Trump and his supporters, but perhaps also to help Kamala Harris(D-CA) and Cory Booker(D-NJ) push their anti-lynching bill through the Senate last week.  Then, on Wednesday, an apparently demented US Coastguard Lieutenant was arrested on terrorism charges in Maryland.  Christopher Paul Hasson, of Silver Springs, was planning to kill a number of leftist federal office-holders in particular, but apparently had a more generalized hate on for all of humanity.

If you view these things as I do, it’s becoming obvious that America is being pushed to the brink.  We are still in a “cold” phase of this second civil war, but that won’t last too much longer.  People from both sides of the divide are now openly talking about this as an eventuality. Warfare is much uglier than most can imagine, but that’s part of the reason to worry:  Too many Americans think warfare is clean and easy, because too few Americans have served in the Armed Forces.  Too few among us have borne the real burdens and costs of war.  War, civil or otherwise, must never be treated as the first or best alternative, and those who seem to place it on the table as a first or best option should be watched closely.  Sometimes, wars must be fought, but never should any person contemplate war too easily or too frivolously.

Despite what prudence tells us, there are those who claim to relish a civil war, and would prefer it become “hot.” This is a danger to be avoided at all costs but one.  We must de-escalate this situation by whatever rational means still remain to us.  If we fail, this situation may break down in a tragic way.  I haven’t been an advocate for liberty and freedom just to see it pissed-away by hot-headed numbskulls on both sides of the ideological divide.  There are too many outside provocateurs, and I worry that what Russia was unable to accomplish by colluding with Obama and Clinton, they now intend to accomplish by pitting one side against the other.  Don’t underestimate that problem.  The world is full of enemies who would be thrilled to see the US consumed and effectively neutered by a domestic civil war.  This is a time of intense danger, friends, and I fear for our republic as never before.

Editor’s Note: It came to my attention after the publication of this post that Mr. L had posted a video with a similar theme and title last summer.  First, I apologize to Mr. L, because it had not been my intention to plagiarize his work, either in title or in content.  As he says so frequently, we are like brothers from different mothers, inasmuch as we frequently agree on many things, though we may arrive at our conclusions by somewhat different paths, or express them in different ways.  Due to that, things like this can happen, but unlike some others on the Internet, I go out of my way to avoid it, even inadvertently.  Second, let me commend that most excellent video, The USA Cold Civil War, and present it here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmlQySp40ig

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