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Ezra, 'Are you QAnon?': One Trump official's brush with an internet cult gone horribly wrong
[Either the ultimate head fake or the joke was on us all along. Why wait till the last 24 hours to make this admission? Well, if nothing happens tomorrow and their goal was to demoralize us all along, I for one will not give them that pleasure. I have no regrets because trusting and thinking for oneself will always be preferable than taking a knee to false authority. Like Christ, I will never bow to the Moneychangers, Levites, nor Pharisees of our day. The State is Not salvation. The truthful individual is salvation. I will never let hate dwell in my heart and will never walk the path of Cain. I accept my suffering voluntarily and I will pick up my cross and bare it. Because that's what Americans do.]
The deadly insurrection in the nation’s capital this month brought intense public scrutiny to the online conspiracy theory QAnon and shock about its pervasiveness, but one prominent Trump administration official said he’s been battling the movement for years — pleading with his government colleagues and figures in the tech industry to recognize the real-world danger posed by the internet-based fantasy.
Since 2018, many members of the cult-like group have been convinced that its shadowy leader and founder is actually Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an intelligence specialist who worked in various Defense Department jobs before accepting a senior post on the National Security Council staff soon after President Donald Trump came into office in 2017. Cohen-Watnick, who was brought in under former national security adviser Michael Flynn, became a figure of controversy when his run-ins with other intelligence officials spilled out into the press.
Cohen’s resulting notoriety led many adherents of QAnon to regard him as “Q,” who according to the conspiracy theory’s lore is a Trump administration official working on the inside to expose a deep-state cabal of pedophiles and Satan-worshippers bent on undermining Trump. Q’s cryptic messages, posted in the form of “Q drops” in online forums, have also fueled an obsession with a coming “Storm” — an apocalyptic event that would expose the evildoers, bring the cabal to justice and cement Trump’s hold on power.
“It's clear that the QAnon conspiracy was a core of what was going on at the Capitol and I want to do everything I can to delegitimize this conspiracy,” Cohen, 34, told POLITICO in an interview. “The country deserved better on Jan. 6 — what transpired was appalling and completely at odds with our democratic principles.”
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Asked about Trump’s role, Cohen responded in general terms, saying that many in the administration treated the conspiracy theory as amusing long after it passed that point.
Cohen, who specializes in countering influence of foreign adversaries like Russia and China, says the persistence and sophistication of some of those involved in QAnon have convinced him of a foreign presence in the movement.
“In my professional opinion, being in the intelligence world, it really appeared to be a foreign state actor or a very organized operation,” he said. “I just don’t see that level of sophistication as just an amateur thing.”
Cohen recently got a verified Twitter account, which he said he didn’t really want, simply in order to make it easier to swat down fake accounts. He knows that some of the fevered QAnon traffic about him has moved to Parler and other forums, but he said he won’t be setting up camp there just to try to drive
others away.
“I absolutely refuse to go on these other platforms,” he said. “I mean, I’m just not going to do it.”
Cohen cleared out of his Pentagon office on Friday and says he’s now planning to take some time off. But his attorney noted that — despite Twitter’s crackdown — messages keep appearing on the platform suggesting that Cohen is hard at work pursuing Q goals and is perhaps even behind a coup that will take place on Inauguration Day.
"The two years we have spent trying to successfully disentangle Ezra from the sticky webs of QAnon conspiracists has required incredible efforts both behind the scenes and publicly,” said Zaid, who has sometimes represented POLITICO reporters in Freedom of Information suits. “This is a movement and ideology that needs to be directly confronted by our government and citizenry.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/19/qanon-trump-ezra-cohen-watnick-460520