Feral BureaukKkatz of Instigation =beyond redemption
This is not going away.
Corruption at highest levels of gov.
DOJ_FBI_MSDNC 'political elite' protection struggles during BRIGHT SUNNY days.
Q4939
Summer solstice 2022 in Northern Hemisphere will be at 5:13 AM on
Tuesday, June 21
All times are in Eastern Time.
Kool-Aid, rather than Flavor Aid, is usually erroneously referred to as the drink used in the massacre, most likely due to it having become a generic trademark. The association with Kool-Aid has spawned the figure of speech "drink the Kool-Aid" but is regarded by some sources as a factual error.
https://twitter.com/johnrobertsFox/status/1319391106036006914
BREAKING: Tony Bobulinski will announce that he will turn his electronic devices and records of business dealings with Hunter and Jim Biden over to the FBI
5:32 PM · Oct 22, 2020·Twitter Web App
Replying to @johnrobertsFox
Jim Biden? Is Jim Biden running for office?
5:49 PM · Oct 22, 2020·Twitter Web App
~~M~~Kike Rothschild https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1319395553575223297
Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden and China: an explainer
politifact.com/article/2020/oct/29/tony-bobulinski-hunter-biden-and-china-explainer
Tony Bobulinski speaks with reporters before the presidential debate on Oct. 22, 2020, in Nashville. (AP/Vucci)
By Daniel Funke October 29, 2020
By Bill McCarthy October 29, 2020
If Your Time is short
Tony Bobulinski is a former Navy lieutenant and business partner of Hunter Biden.
In statements and an interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Bobulinski claimed Joe Biden was involved in one of his family’s business ventures with a Chinese oil company.
Credible news organizations have found no evidence to corroborate Bobulinski’s claims about a role in the proposed venture for Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s financial documents show no indication of any income related to the venture.
In the mid-2010s, Hunter Biden was involved in multiple business dealings with Chinese companies. There is no evidence that his father played a role in any of them.
A former associate of Hunter Biden has televised his grievances about former Vice President Joe Biden, telling Fox News host Tucker Carlson that the elder Biden was more involved in his son’s overseas business dealings than he has let on.
Tony Bobulinski claimed that emails, text messages and audio recordings he released show the Democratic presidential nominee was entangled in a 2017 venture involving a Chinese firm.
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No credible news outlets have reported any wrongdoing or role held by Joe Biden, and Biden’s campaign has denied that their candidate got involved in, or stood to gain from, the venture or any other overseas business arrangements.
"I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life," Joe Biden said during the final presidential debate, pointing to reporting about a bank account President Donald Trump has in China.
But Bobulinski’s allegations have dominated Fox News and other conservative websites. Forbes reported that Carlson’s Oct. 27 interview was the highest rated non-debate telecast of the year. Carlson ran a follow-up segment the next night, claiming Fox News had procured additional documents related to Hunter Biden but that they went missing in the mail.
So far, much of what Bobulinski has said remains unverified. What Trump allies were trying to sell as a smoking gun in the run-up to the election has produced little smoke thus far. It’s the latest chapter in the push for dirt on Hunter Biden that led to Trump’s impeachment in 2019.
Who is Tony Bobulinski, why is he all over News Feed?
Bobulinski, a former Navy lieutenant, has claimed that Joe Biden knew about one of his son’s proposed business ventures with a Chinese oil company. Bobulinski claimed he met with the Biden family multiple times.
On Oct. 22, the night of the final presidential debate, Bobulinski said in a statement to reporters that he wanted to "set the record straight" on the Biden family’s "dealings with the Chinese."
Bobulinski said that, in 2017, Hunter Biden consulted with his father about forming a new venture with CEFC China Energy Co. to invest in real estate and technology in the U.S. Bobulinski was brought into the venture by James Gilliar, an English businessman who purportedly knew the Bidens through Rob Walker, a former Clinton administration official.
Bobulinski became a partner and CEO of the venture, which was named SinoHawk Holdings LLC. The company was incorporated in Delaware in May 2017.
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https://youtu.be/2zLfBRgeFFo
Tucker exclusive: Tony Bobulinski, ex-Hunter Biden associate, speaks out on Joe Bidenk
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The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal fell through; SinoHawk never received money from or completed deals with the Chinese oil company. According to the newspaper, Hunter, Joe Biden’s brother James, Gilliar and Walker were also involved — but there was no role for Joe Biden.
Bobulinski claimed otherwise.
"Everything I’m saying is corroborated by emails, WhatsApp chats, agreements, documents and other evidence," he told reporters gathered Oct. 22, before gesturing to three phones that he claimed contained incriminating evidence and said he would hand over to authorities.
Bobulinski provided some of his records to outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. Both reported that they do not show Joe Biden had business dealings with SinoHawk Holdings or took money from the Chinese company.
That wasn’t the angle Trump allies described as they pitched the story to the Wall Street Journal in early October. The New York Times reported that a White House lawyer, a former deputy White House counsel and a public relations man close to Donald Trump Jr. took Bobulinski’s claims to the Wall Street Journal with the hope that the newspaper would cover them before Election Day.
The Journal stalled on the story while its reporters tried to determine whether Bobulinski’s documents implicated Joe Biden. In the meantime, Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani took a version of the allegations to the New York Post.
The tabloid published an article Oct. 14 that made allegations based on emails on a computer hard drive allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden that was left at a repair shop. No news organizations have been able to verify the authenticity of those emails.
Former Trump aide Steve Bannon told the Times that Bobulinski got spooked by the length of time the Journal was taking on the story and sent an on-the-record statement to a range of news organizations. Breitbart, a conservative site, published the statement.
Are Bobulinski’s claims credible?
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Are Bobulinski’s claims credible?
There’s reason to be skeptical about Bobulinski’s allegations, which credible news organizations have not corroborated. The Associated Press, for example, reported that it could not independently verify Bobulinki’s claims. PolitiFact has not been able to, either.
The Wall Street Journal reviewed his documents and found no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe Biden — or that he was active in his family’s foreign business endeavors, as Bobulinski claimed.
Bobulinski’s overarching claim is that Joe Biden was involved in, and may have profited from, his son and brother’s business dealings in China. He called Joe Biden’s claim that he never played a role in Hunter Biden’s foreign business endeavors "a blatant lie."
But the Journal reported that the text messages and emails Bobulinski shared from 2017 "don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture."
The venture in China "never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter," the outlet reported. "Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden."
The Journal also quoted Gilliar, the British national involved in SinoHawk, as saying he was "unaware of any involvement at any time of the former vice president." Gilliar added that "the activity in question never delivered any project revenue."
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, center, son Hunter Biden, left, and his sister Valerie Biden Owens, right, at a ceremony in Sojevo, Kosovo, Aug. 17, 2016. (AP)
The New York Times reached the same conclusion about Bobulinski’s records.
Financial disclosures and tax records for Joe Biden show no indication of any income related to the venture at hand, as the Times and Vox reported.
Bobulinski claimed he met with the elder Biden twice, including once in May 2017 at Hunter and James Biden’s request. Bobulinski told Carlson that it was "crystal clear" that Hunter Biden had told his father about the venture, but he also said the group "didn’t go into too much detail on business" during the meeting.
After a speech Joe Biden gave the next day, Bobulinski said the former vice president asked for his thoughts on the speech and then told him to "keep an eye on his son and his brother."
Joe Biden was not in office at the time, nor had he launched his campaign for president.
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Joe Biden was not in office at the time, nor had he launched his campaign for president.
Bobulinski’s evidence also includes an email, originally published by the New York Post, that he received from Gilliar. The email appeared to describe a proposal for the division of equity related to the venture, before it fell through. The split would have included "20 H," "10 Jim," and "10 held by H for the big guy?"
Bobulinski said the "big guy" referenced in a question was Joe Biden. Bobulinski has also claimed that Joe Biden was the person described in another message days later as "the Chairman."
PolitiFact asked the Biden campaign for comment, but we haven’t heard back.
Bobulinski also provided Carlson with audio that showed Walker — the former Clinton administration official who Bobulinski and Carlson described as a representative of the Biden family — saying that if Bobulinski spoke out publicly, "You’re just going to bury all of us, man."
It’s not clear if the comments were shown in proper context on Carlson’s show, but Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates told the Associated Press "it is totally inaccurate to describe (Walker) as a representative of the Biden campaign or any member of the Biden family."
What do we know about the Bidens and China?
Hunter Biden has been involved in multiple business dealings with Chinese companies, but there is no evidence that his father played a role.
In his statements to the press, Bobulinski cited a September report from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that investigated Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. That report showed that the younger Biden dealt with Chinese companies through a company called Bohai Harvest RST, or BHR.
Hunter Biden got involved with the investment fund after it was set up in 2013 by Rosemont Seneca Partners, a company he helped form in 2009, and the Bank of China. PolitiFact reported how, in 2015 and 2017, BHR inked multi-million dollar deals with various Chinese companies.
In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that 80% of BHR was controlled by Chinese entities, according to business registrations. Hunter Biden was an unpaid board member until October 2017, when he took a 10% financial stake in the company. Two years later, his lawyer announced that he’d resigned without any return on his investment.
Bobulinski said he was also inspired to speak out after the Senate’s report mentioned roughly $5 million in indirect payments CEFC Infrastructure Investment made to Hunter Biden’s law firm.
Hunter Biden’s foreign engagements have created a problem of appearances for his father. But they are not the smoking gun that some have made them out to be, and they have not been found to have had any influence on U.S. policies with respect to foreign nations, according to the Johnson report. There is no evidence that Joe Biden was orchestrating or benefiting from these deals.
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Our Sources
Real Clear Politics, "Tucker Carlson Interviews Hunter Biden Business Partner Tony Bobulinski About Joe Biden Involvement," Oct. 27, 2020
The Associated Press, 'AP Explains: Trump pushes questions about Joe Biden’s son," Oct. 29, 2020
CrowdTangle, accessed Oct. 28, 2020
The Biden campaign, "Financial Disclosures and Tax Returns," accessed Oct. 28, 2020
Forbes, "Tucker Carlson Posts Highest-Rated Non-Debate Telecast This Year," Oct. 28, 2020
Newsweek, "Tony Bobulinski's Tucker Carlson Interview Has QAnon Supporters Thinking He's Conspiracy's Leader," Oct. 28, 2020
The Daily Beast, "Tucker Suggests His Hunter Biden Dirt Was Intercepted in the Mail," Oct. 28, 2020
Delaware Department of State: Division of Corporations, accessed Oct. 28, 2020
The New York Times, "Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It." Oct. 25, 2020
The New York Times, "Questions and Answers About the Bidens and a Deal in China," Oct. 25, 2020
The Wall Street Journal, "Hunter Biden’s Ex-Business Partner Alleges Father Knew About Venture," Oct. 23, 2020
Fox News, "Ex-Hunter Biden associate's records don't show proof of Biden business relationship amid unanswered questions," Oct. 23, 2020
The Daily Beast, "Wall Street Journal’s News Side Debunks Opinion Side’s Hunter Biden Screed," Oct. 23, 2020
Politico, "Trump's sideshow fizzles out," Oct. 23, 2020
The Washington Post, "Trump campaign trots out former business associate of Hunter Biden ahead of debate," Oct. 22, 2020
C-SPAN, "Tony Bobulinski Statement on Hunter Biden," Oct. 22, 2020
Vox, "Mysterious emails and convenient leaks: The Trump campaign’s Hunter Biden attacks, explained," Oct. 22, 2020
Breitbart, "Bombshell Statement: Biden Insider Claims He Was ‘Recipient of the Email’, Says He Witnessed Joe, Hunter Discussing Deals," Oct. 21, 2020
Mediaite, "EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Passed on Hunter Biden Laptop Story Over Credibility Concerns," Oct. 19, 2020
The New York Times, "New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts," Oct. 18, 2020
The New York Post, "Emails reveal how Hunter Biden tried to cash in big on behalf of family with Chinese firm," Oct. 15, 2020
The New York Post, "Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad," Oct. 14, 2020
U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, "Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns," Sept. 23, 2020
Politico, "Biden Inc.," Aug. 2, 2019
PolitiFact, "A look behind the NY Post headline about Joe Biden and a Ukraine meeting," Oct. 15, 2020
PolitiFact, "Fact-checking claims about Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and China," Oct. 19, 2020
PolitiFact, "Hunter Biden and China: Sorting through a murky business deal," May 22, 2020
PolitiFact, "What is QAnon, the baseless conspiracy spilling into US politics?" Aug. 27, 2020
The Wall Street Urinal, "What We Know About Hunter Biden’s Dealings in China," Oct. 4, 2019
7/7
[Q4939]
https://thehill.com/people/tony-bobulinski/
Biden’s ‘absolute’ defense of Hunter leaves media and Justice Department in a muddle
thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/3257164-bidens-absolute-defense-of-hunter-leaves-media-and-justice-department-in-a-muddle
April 2, 2022
Opinion>Judiciary by Jonathan Turley, opinion contributor - 04/02/22 10:30 AM ET
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
“We absolutely stand by the president’s comment.” With those words, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield reaffirmed that President Biden maintains his son Hunter Biden did “nothing [that] was unethical” and never “made money” in China.
Those claims appear demonstrably false
— and they make the positions of both the media and Attorney General Merrick Garland absolutely untenable.
For the media, the ongoing investigation of Hunter Biden by U.S. Attorney David Weiss in Delaware has presented a growing danger of self-indictment over its prior coverage (or noncoverage). Weiss has called a long line of witnesses before a grand jury, and there is growing expectation of criminal charges against Hunter Biden.
Nothing concentrates the mind as much as a looming indictment.
Thus, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and other media faced the embarrassing prospect of an indictment based on a story they previously suggested was either a nonstory or Russian disinformation. Suddenly, in recent days, they all rushed to declare the story legitimate, 18 months after the New York Post reported it in October 2020.
What quickly emerged, though, was a new narrative: None of this implicates President Biden. On CNN, White House correspondent John Harwood declared, “There is zero evidence that Vice President Biden, or President Biden, has done anything wrong in connection with what Hunter Biden has done.” Anchor Brianna Keilar then added for emphasis that Harwood was making “an important distinction.”
It was important, but not because it was true. While many media figures now willingly admit the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned-laptop story, they are avoiding what the emails found on that laptop actually contain. Hundreds of emails appear to detail a multimillion-dollar influence-peddling enterprise by the Biden family, including Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden.
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Influence peddling has long been the way Washington’s elite enriches itself. This common source of political corruption involves the relatives of powerful government figures who shake down corporations or countries for access and influence.
The Bidens would seem to be standouts in this common practice, engaging in a virtual family business. James Biden has been accused of marketing his connection to his brother. And in the emails discovered on his abandoned laptop, Hunter Biden practically sold timeshares of his father by dangling meetings and dinners for investors.
The key in any influence-peddling scheme is to protect the principal. People apparently were told to avoid directly referring to President Biden. In one email, Tony Bobulinski, then a business partner of Hunter’s, was instructed by Biden associate James Gilliar not to speak of the former veep’s connection to any transactions: “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u [sic] are face to face, I know u [sic] know that but they are paranoid.”
Instead, the emails apparently refer to President Biden with code names such as “Celtic” or “the big guy.” In one, “the big guy” is discussed as possibly receiving a 10 percent cut on a deal with a Chinese energy firm; other emails reportedly refer to Hunter Biden paying portions of his father’s expenses and taxes.
Despite President Biden’s repeated claims he knew nothing about these dealings, Bobulinski has said he personally met with the senior Biden to discuss Hunter Biden’s business activities. Bobulinski had been selected by the family to handle these deals.
As vice president, Joe Biden flew to China on Air Force Two with Hunter Biden, who arranged for his father to meet some of his business interests. Hunter Biden’s financial interest in a Chinese-backed investment firm, BHR Partners, was registered within weeks of that 2013 trip. Yet, President Biden repeatedly insisted that he never discussed such dealings with his son, a claim Hunter Biden has contradicted.
There are emails of Ukrainian and other foreign clients thanking Hunter Biden for arranging meetings with his father. There are photos from dinners and meetings that tie President Biden to these figures, including a 2015 dinner with a group of Hunter Biden’s Russian and Kazakh clients.
It is important to note that when these foreign interests were clamoring to give Hunter Biden millions of dollars, he was, by his own admission, a hopeless addict. In his 2021 memoir, Hunter Biden admits he was “drinking a quart of vodka a day” and “smoking crack around the clock,” up until his father’s 2020 presidential campaign began. So why would Russian, Chinese, and other foreign figures give Hunter Biden all of this money, if not to influence his father?
The new narrative suggests that, while Hunter Biden maintained one of the largest influence-peddling schemes in recent history, it did not involve the object of that scheme
— his father.
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The new narrative suggests that, while Hunter Biden maintained one of the largest influence-peddling schemes in recent history, it did not involve the object of that scheme — his father.
Even if President Biden was not influenced by all of this, it’s hard to believe he didn’t know his son was selling access. In his book, Hunter Biden claims his father repeatedly intervened due to his addictions — and yet we are to believe that Joe Biden did not express curiosity about how his addicted son was raking in millions from foreign sources?
The point is that President Biden really did not have to ask: Hunter Biden had nothing to sell butinfluence. All President Biden had to do to facilitate such schemes was to be accessible — to allow his family to deliver face-to-face meetings and photo ops.
And that brings us to the untenable position of Garland.
It is hard to imagine a stronger case for a special counsel. Any effort to investigate Hunter Biden’s dealings will lead investigators to encounter repeated references to the president and how he may have benefited from those schemes. At the same time, the president is “absolutely” standing by his denial that his son did anything wrong or made any money from China.
The White House statement this week serves as a reminder to investigators that the president is heavily invested in this narrative and his denial of now-established facts.
National Gun Violence Awareness Day: What will it take for the GOP to act? Underinvestment in rural America hits the most vulnerable communities hardest
This is not to say that Weiss, the U.S. Attorney investigating Hunter Biden, will not be independent in his efforts. However, the concern is the appearance of how a conflict might affect the investigation or limit the scope of any potential charges. Moreover, absent a special counsel, there is unlikely to be a report on these apparent influence peddling schemes.
Garland pledged to protect the Justice Department from such conflicts and to avoid even the appearance of political influence. He now has a president stating that alleged wrongdoing by his son is “absolutely” untrue, including dealings possibly impacting the president personally and financially. If Garland declines to appoint a special counsel, he will absolutely fail on his pledge.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @JonathanTurley.
3/3
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/522857-tucker-carlson-to-interview-hunter-biden-business-partner-and-discuss-new/
''Tucker Carlson to interview Hunter Biden business partner and discuss ‘new allegations’ =''
thehill.com/homenews/media/522857-tucker-carlson-to-interview-hunter-biden-business-partner-and-discuss-new
October 26, 2020 Media by Joe Concha - 10/26/20 6:14 PM ET
Tucker Carlson of Fox News will interview Hunter Biden’s former business partner ''Tony Bobulinski'' on Tuesday in his first TV appearance since his recent allegations about dealings with the Democratic nominee’s son.
“Bobulinski will discuss new allegations regarding his relationships with both Hunter and the former Vice President,” Fox said in a press release Monday.
Bobulinski has claimed that Joe Biden was lying when he said he never discussed business dealings with his son. The former naval officer also said last week that he turned over documents and phones to the FBI and the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
An earlier investigation led by Senate Republicans found no evidence of wrongdoing. There is similarly no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing by either of the Bidens nor is there evidence that Hunter Biden’s work influenced U.S. policy.
President Trump and his allies are seizing on a New York Post story that alleges that Hunter Biden used his influence to connect a businessman and fellow board member at Ukrainian gas company Burisma with his father when he was vice president.
The Trump campaign has ramped up its attacks in recent weeks, including with a national TV ad about Hunter Biden and six more ads running on digital platforms. The Biden campaign has denied the key allegations in the New York Post story.
Carlson’s program has been drawing record numbers leading up to the election, including 5.3 million total viewers last Tuesday to lead the cable news race.
>PolitiFact, "What is QAnon, the baseless conspiracy spilling into US politics?" Aug. 27, 2020
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/aug/27/what-qanon-baseless-conspiracy-spilling-us-politic/
What is QAnon, the baseless conspiracy spilling into US politics?
politifact.com/article/2020/aug/27/what-qanon-baseless-conspiracy-spilling-us-politic
In this Aug. 2, 2018, file photo, David Reinert holding a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. (AP)
By Daniel Funke August 27, 2020
If Your Time is short
Q is an anonymous internet persona who claims to be a government insider with information on a “deep state” plot to work against Donald Trump. Q’s posts on a fringe internet forum are the basis for the QAnon conspiracy theory.
But it has moved into the mainstream, promoted by congressional candidates, celebrities and influencers and thriving on social networks like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
The FBI has described QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The conspiracy theory has been linked to several criminal acts over the past couple of years.
In mid August, Marjorie Taylor Greene won the primary election in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, which is likely to vote red in November. Two weeks later, she was invited to attend President Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention. Jo Rae Perkins of Oregon and Lauren Boebert of Colorado also won Republican primary elections this summer.
What do these candidates have in common? They are among several aspiring lawmakers who have promoted QAnon.
The conspiracy theory claims public figures like Hillary Clinton, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey are Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles. QAnon is based on posts from Q, an anonymous internet persona who claims to be a government insider with information on a "deep state" plot to work against Trump.
Those claims are not grounded in facts, and lawmakers have introduced bipartisan legislation condemning the conspiracy theory. But QAnon has gained steam since its 2017 emergence, and Trump has, at times, tacitly encouraged its supporters.
Trump has amplified QAnon accounts on Twitter and supported political candidates who subscribe to it. When asked about QAnon in several recent press briefings, the president demurred.
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"Well I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate," he said during an Aug. 19 briefing.
Trump is right — QAnon does like him. But there’s more to the baseless conspiracy theory than presidential politics, and the FBI warned that it’s a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Here’s everything you need to know.
What is "Q"?
The term "QAnon" is a mashup of "Q" and "anon," an abbreviation for "anonymous." The term has been used to reference the conspiracy theory and its followers. The Q is a reference to a high level of security clearance at the Department of Energy.
QAnon has been around since October 2017, when Q started posting vague and cryptic messages — which have become known as "breadcrumbs" and "Q drops" — on a fringe internet forum called 4chan. Those posts serve as the backbone of the conspiracy theory, whose believers trend conservative.
Q has published more than 4,600 posts on 4chan and 8chan message boards, including links, images and obscure messages. Here’s an excerpt from one of Q’s earliest posts:
There are more good people than bad. The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another Satanic Evil POS control our country. Realize Soros, Clintons, Obama, Putin, etc. are all controlled by 3 families (the 4th was removed post Trump's victory).
11.3 - Podesta indicted
11.6 - Huma indicted
The dates at the end of the excerpt reference are a prediction for when John Podesta, former chair of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, and Huma Abedin, the campaign’s vice chair, would be indicted for previously undisclosed crimes. Neither came to pass.
Some believers think that Q is a single person, while others speculate that Q’s identity has changed over time. The forum for Q’s posts has changed, moving from 4chan to 8chan, which rebranded as 8kun in fall 2019 after manifestos related to three mass shootings were posted on the platform.
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What does QAnon claim?
It’s difficult to figure out Q’s exact message, and not all QAnon supporters believe the same things. But the general idea is this:
The world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles that include the most famous Democrats and celebrities.
In addition to molesting children, members of this group also kill and eat their victims in order to ingest a life-extending chemical in human blood.
In order to stop this elite ring of pedophilic cannibals, top military generals convinced Trump to run for president in 2016. He’s now secretly working behind the scenes to bring those involved to justice.
Many QAnon supporters believe that Trump’s efforts will culminate in something called "the storm." That term comes from some comments that Trump made to reporters in October 2017 while posing with military generals: "You guys know what this represents? Maybe it’s the calm before the storm." (The White House never clarified what he was talking about.)
QAnon also touches on other false narratives about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, vaccines and the moon landing.
How is QAnon related to Pizzagate?
QAnon evolved from the Pizzagate conspiracy theory about child sex trafficking and prominent Democrats.
Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 campaign after WikiLeaks released Podesta’s emails. Some people on internet forums noticed that Podesta had communicated with the owner of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C., to discuss a fundraiser.
With no evidence to go on, they claimed Podesta’s use of the word "pizza" was a code word for pedophilia and that Comet Ping Pong was holding children hostage for Clinton and her allies to abuse. In December 2016, a North Carolina man entered the pizzeria with an assault rifle to "self-investigate" the claims. The man fired his rifle inside the restaurant before he surrendered. There were no reported injuries.
How has QAnon spread?
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How has QAnon spread?
QAnon has found a home on more mainstream social networks in the leadup to 2020.
In 2018, QAnon found a larger audience after its supporters started showing up at Trump rallies. Trump has at times retweeted accounts that had promoted the conspiracy theory. Although several of QAnon’s predictions, including January 2019 military tribunals against the "deep state," never came to pass, fervent supporters remain undeterred.
Since then, QAnon found a loyal following on the largest social media platform in the world — and during the coronavirus pandemic.
An analysis from Storyful, a social media research firm, found that, between March and July, membership in 10 large public QAnon Facebook groups increased by nearly 600%. NBC News reported that an internal Facebook investigation found thousands of groups and pages with millions of members and followers dedicated to QAnon.
Michael Flynn, Donald Trump's former national security adviser, leads a generic oath of office followed by a QAnon slogan in a video tweeted on July 4, 2020. (Screenshot from Twitter)
The hashtags that frequently accompany posts about the conspiracy theory include #TheGreatAwakening and #WWG1WGA, which stands for "where we go one, we go all." The latter slogan is a kind of oath that QAnon supporters take to pledge themselves as "digital soldiers" for an upcoming apocalyptic event.
On Aug. 19, Facebook announced that it had removed hundreds of groups — and restricted thousands of groups, pages and Instagram accounts — that regularly promoted QAnon. Some of those groups published information that PolitiFact fact-checked as false or misleading.
Here are a few examples of hoaxes that were promoted by QAnon-supporting groups and pages just since July:
False posts attacked online furniture retailer Wayfair as facilitating a child sex trafficking operation. The narrative originated in communities that regularly promoted QAnon and Pizzagate.
Photo and text posts that claimed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is a pedophile. We rated those posts Pants on Fire!
A viral video called "Shadowgate" made sweeping claims about Trump, the media and protests against police brutality. We rated it Pants on Fire!
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It’s not just Facebook and Instagram — users on YouTube and Twitter were instrumental in helping QAnon jump from 4chan and 8kun to a more mainstream audience. Both companies have also taken action to limit the spread of QAnon-related content, to some effect.
Who supports QAnon?
Supporters of QAnon have broadened since the early days, when data suggested that most adherents were white men who supported Trump or Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. But it appears most Americans are still not familiar with it.
A Pew Research Center survey published in March found that more than three-fourths of Americans still hadn’t heard of QAnon. Those who had tended to be liberals who got their news from outlets like the New York Times, NPR and MSNBC, or active Twitter and Reddit users.
Polling suggests that, among Americans who are familiar with QAnon, the conspiracy theory is unpopular. In June, one online poll of 1,039 Floridians and 1,040 American adults found that both Democrats and Republicans had unfavorable views of QAnon.
Still, QAnon has gained more mainstream support, amplified by influencers and celebrities.
Curt Schilling, a former MLB pitcher and a commentator for conservative news outlet BlazeTV, has amplified QAnon content to his Twitter followers. In 2018, Roseanne Barr tweeted, and deleted, posts about the conspiracy theory and Trump’s efforts to address sex trafficking. Through his podcast, comedian Joe Rogan has given a platform to QAnon supporters.
On Instagram, some lifestyle influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers have promoted QAnon during the coronavirus pandemic. Many are drawn to QAnon’s concern with child sex trafficking and repackage the unsupported claims for a younger audience.
And QAnon has spread beyond the United States. A July report from NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, noted that QAnon has taken root in the European Union, where related Facebook groups have swelled in numbers and applied regional flavor to the conspiracy theory "to target local politicians and elites."
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Why do people believe QAnon?
The QAnon conspiracy theory is as far-fetched as it is bizarre, but it appeals to people because it gives them a sense of control.
"The bad news is that a group of Satanic plotters have incredible power in this country; the good news is that QAnon followers and their hero, the president, have figured out the plot and are going to expose it," said Kathryn Olmsted, a history professor and conspiracy theory expert at the University of California, Davis.
There’s also an appealing element of participation. Q’s posts are like clues at a murder mystery party, but the party is on 8kun and the baseless clues are about pedophilia, cannibalism and Satan worship.
Because Trump is the hero in this narrative, people might assume that only conservatives are likely to support something like QAnon. But that’s not necessarily the case.
According to the book "American Conspiracy Theories," gender and political party do not determine whether someone believes in conspiracy theories. More telling factors include less education and income. People who are less likely to participate in politics or are more likely to accept violence are also more inclined to believe.
"Our predispositions to conspiracy theorizing interact with our political views," said Joseph Parent, the book’s co-author and an associate political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. "So conspiracy theorists on the left are focused on threats from the right and vice versa. People believe what they want to believe; they fear what they want to fear."
Is QAnon dangerous or illegal?
The conspiracy theory has been linked to several crimes, some of them violent, and the FBI has said it’s a potential domestic terrorism threat. Some of QAnon’s claims could be potentially defamatory.
In a May 2019 intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo! News, FBI officials described "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" as a growing threat. The memo mentions QAnon specifically.
"The FBI assesses these conspiracy theories very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts," the document says.
In a July report, West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, an academic institute within the United States Military Academy, cited a number of examples of violence linked to QAnon.
"QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of several people to notable criminal acts or acts of violence," the report said.
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Here are a few examples of such incidents, as documented by several news outlets:
In June 2018, a Nevada man named Matthew Philip Wright blocked traffic on a bridge near the Hoover Dam, demanding that officials release a government document about the handling of Hillary Clinton’s email probe. After a standoff with police, Wright drove away and was later arrested, during which he mentioned QAnon talking points. Police found several firearms, ammunition and a flashbang device in his car.
In March 2019, a New York man named Anthony Comello allegedly killed a member of the Gambino crime family who he said was part of the "deep state." During one court appearance, Comello wrote "Q" on the palm of his hand.
In April, an Illinois woman named Jennifer Prim was arrested after allegedly driving onto a New York City pier with a car full of knives. In a livestreamed video, she threatened to kill Joe Biden for his purported involvement in a sex trafficking ring.
There’s also a question of whether QAnon’s claims could violate defamation laws. Since the conspiracy theory makes many salacious, unproven allegations about public figures, there could be grounds to sue the QAnon supporters who espouse them.
"If there are false factual allegations that would harm someone’s reputation, then that can be fodder for a libel lawsuit," said Clay Calvert, director of the Marion B. Brechner First Amendment Project at the University of Florida. "The problem here, though, that we might think about is the so-called Streisand Effect — that you give more attention to something than it's probably worth by filing the lawsuit."
What does #SaveTheChildren have to do with it?
Posts with #SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren, along with related demonstrations in hundreds of cities across the country, purport to be about ending child sex trafficking. But the hashtags were propped up by supporters of QAnon and Pizzagate.
#SaveTheChildren has been shared millions of times, but it is not linked to any humanitarian organizations. Save the Children, a London organization that aims to improve the lives of children around the world, has nothing to do with the viral hashtag.
#SaveTheChildren and #SaveOurChildren started circulating in QAnon and Pizzagate Facebook groups in July before spreading to conservative sources like PragerU, a powerhouse page on Facebook. More recently, conspiracy theorists helped plan demonstrations in scores of towns and cities across the country.
"The whole danger of this whole thing is that it’s such an effective entrypoint for QAnon and Pizzagate’s style of thinking," said Travis View, co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, in a recent episode. "There’s no decoding involved. It doesn’t ask you to go through the Podesta emails, it doesn’t ask you to read the Q drops — it asks you to recognize that children are being harmed and trafficked and then get outraged about it."
8/
>This is not going away.
>Corruption at highest levels of gov.
>DOJ_FBI_MSDNC 'political elite' protection struggles during BRIGHT SUNNY days.
>Q4939
>>PolitiFact, "What is QAnon, the baseless conspiracy spilling into US politics?" Aug. 27, 2020
Stop Saying 'Drink the Kool-Aid'
theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/11/stop-saying-drink-the-kool-aid/264957
November 8, 2012 Health By Chris Higgins November 8, 2012
Beyond being grossly overused and conjuring a horrendous massacre, it's not even technically accurate.
Before we get to the Kool-Aid part, let's recap some horrible American history. Jim Jones was a complex man. Long story short, he was a communist and occasional Methodist minister who founded his own pseudo-church in the late 1950s, called the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church – known in short as the Peoples Temple. (And yes, the omission of the possessive apostrophe is intentional, as the name apparently refers to peoples of the world.)
While Jones called it a church, it was actually his version of a Marxist commune, with a smattering of Christian references thrown into his sermons/diatribes. The Peoples Temple was arguably a cult, demanding serious dedication
(and financial support) from its members.
As the Peoples Temple grew throughout the 1960s, Jones lost the plot on the whole Marxism thing and began to preach about an impending nuclear apocalypse. He even specified a date (July 15, 1967), and suggested that after the apocalypse, a socialist paradise would exist on Earth. And where would that new Eden be? Jones selected the remote town of Redwood Valley, California, and moved the Peoples Temple there prior to the deadline.
As you know, that end-of-the-world deadline came and went with no nuclear holocaust. In the following years, Jones abandoned all pretenses of Christianity and revealed himself to be an atheist who had simply used religion as a tool to legitimize his views. Jones said: "Those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment – socialism." Oh, and Jones was a drug addict, preferring literal opiates to metaphorical ones.
As media scrutiny increased and his political profile became more complicated, Jones became concerned that the Peoples Temple's tax-exempt religious status in the U.S. would eventually be revoked. He was also paranoid about the U.S. intelligence community. So in 1977, Jones again moved the Temple and its peoples, this time to a settlement he had been building since 1974 in the South American nation of Guyana. He named it "Jonestown," and it was not a nice place. It occupied nearly 4,000 acres, had poor soil and limited fresh water, was dramatically overcrowded, and Temple members were forced to work long hours. Jones figured his people could farm the land in this new utopia. It didn't hurt that he had amassed a multi-million-dollar fortune prior to arriving in Jonestown, though he did not share (or even use) the wealth. Jones himself lived in a small shared house with few luxuries.
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U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown in November of 1978, investigating allegations of human rights abuses within the Jonestown community. Ryan was accompanied by NBC News correspondent Don Harris, various other members of the media, and concerned family members of Jonestown residents. While visiting Jonestown, Congressman Ryan met a little over a dozen Temple members who wanted to leave
(including a couple who passed a note reading in part, "Please help us get out of Jonestown" to news anchor Harris, mistaking him for Congressman Ryan).
That number of defectors was actually quite low, considering the population of Jonestown, which was then over 900.
While processing paperwork to help Temple members return to the U.S., Ryan was attacked by knife-wielding Temple member Don Sly, but the would-be assassin was restrained before he could injure Ryan. Eventually, the entire Ryan party plus the group of Jonestown defectors drove to a nearby airstrip and boarded planes, hoping to leave. But Jim Jones had sent armed Temple members (his creepily-named "Red Brigade") with the group, and the Red Brigade opened fire, killing Ryan, one Temple defector, and three members of the media
– and injuring eleven others. Those who survived fled into the jungle.
When the murderers returned to Jonestown and reported their actions, Jones promptly started up what he called a "White Night" meeting, inviting all Temple members. But this wasn't the first White Night. On various occasions prior to the murders, Jones had hosted White Night meetings in which he suggested that U.S. intelligence agencies would soon attack Jonestown; he had even staged fake attackers around Jonestown to add an air of pseudo-realism to the proceedings
(though it's hard to imagine that such a small community wouldn't recognize their own people pretending to threaten the Temple). Faced with this hypothetical invasion scenario, Jones offered Temple members these choices: stay and fight the imaginary invaders, head for the USSR, head for the Guyana jungle, or commit "revolutionary suicide"
(in other words, mass suicide as an act of political protest). On previous occasions when Temple members mock-voted for suicide, Jones tested them: Temple members were given small cups of liquid purportedly containing poison and were asked to drink it. They did. After a while, Jones revealed that the liquid didn't contain poison
– but that one day it would. And, by the way, he had been stockpiling cyanide for years (not to mention piles of other drugs).
On the final White Night, Jones was not testing his Temple followers. He was killing them all.
After the airstrip murders outside Jonestown, Jim Jones ordered Temple members to create a fruity mix containing a cocktail of chemicals including cyanide, diazepam
(aka Valium – an anti-anxiety medication), promethazine
(aka Phenergan – a sedative), chloral hydrate
(a sedative/hypnotic sometimes called "knockout drops"), and most interestingly… Flavor Aid – a grape-flavored beverage similar to Kool-Aid. We'll get back to that last one in a moment.
Jones urged Temple members to commit suicide in order to make a political point. Some discussion ensued
– an alternate plan put forth by Temple member Christine Miller involved flying Temple members to the USSR
– but Jones prevailed, after repeatedly telling his followers that Congressman Ryan was dead, and that would bring the authorities soon (an audiotape of this meeting exists, and is just as creepy as you'd think). Jones first insisted that mothers squirt poison into the mouths of their children using syringes. As their children died, the mothers were dosed as well, though they were allowed to drink from cups. Temple members wandered out onto the ground, where eventually just over 900 lay dead, including more than 300 children. Only a handful of survivors escaped Jonestown
– primarily residents who happened to be away on errands or playing basketball when the mass suicide/massacre took place.
2/
Jones, his wife, and various other members of the Temple left wills stating that their assets should go to the Communist Party of the USSR. Jones himself did not drink poison; he died from a gunshot to the head, though it's not entirely clear whether it was self-inflicted.
(Because Jones likely died last or nearly so, he may have chosen suicide by gun rather than by cyanide, because a cyanide death is extremely traumatic
– and he would have seen hundreds of people experiencing cyanide death's effects, including foaming at the mouth and convulsions.) Toxicology reports found high levels of barbiturates (sedatives) in his blood. Jones was reportedly hooked on a variety of substances, possibly explaining his increasingly erratic behavior over the decades.
***
In the wake of the tragedy at Jonestown, the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" became a popular term for blind obedience, as the Temple members had apparently accepted cups of fruity poison willingly. What's strange is that, according to various accounts, the primary beverage used at Jonestown was actually Flavor Aid
(sometimes styled "Flav-R-Aid") – although there is photographic evidence that packets of both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were present at the scene. In an early inquest (PDF), coroners referred to "Cool Aid" [sic] . But initial media coverage described the scene differently. One read, in part (emphasis added):
A pair of woman's eyeglasses, a towel, a pair of shorts, packets of unopened Flavor-Aid lie scattered about waiting for the final cleanup that may one day return Jonestown to the tidy, if overcrowded, little community it once was.
This snippet was from an article printed in the Washington Post on December 17, 1978, written by Charles A. Krause. Less than a month after the deaths, here was major media specifying that the beverage was "Flavor Aid," but "Kool-Aid" is the term that stuck in Americans' minds. Why?
The most likely explanation comes in three parts.
The Kool-Aid Brand
First, Kool-Aid was a better-known brand than Flavor Aid. Flavor Aid was a Jel Sert product first sold in 1929 and it was a rival of Kool-Aid, which was introduced in 1927 in powdered form.
''(Trivia note: prior to the Kool-Aid powder, the same beverage was available in liquid form as "Fruit Smack." Powdering the drink reduced shipping costs.) So when Americans thought about a powdered fruity drink mix ''
(at least one that was not "Tang"), "Kool-Aid" came to mind as the market leader. A major brand builder for Kool-Aid was Kool-Aid Man, the anthropomorphic pitcher of red Kool-Aid who is best known for his 1980s catchphrase "Oh Yeah!" He was already in the media spotlight in the 1970s.
3/
''The Merry Pranksters and LSD''
''Second, and more intriguing, was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's nonfiction book published in 1968. In the book, Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they travel the country in their party bus, encouraging non-drug users to try LSD in an Acid Test ''
– including a formulation of LSD in Kool-Aid, dubbed "Electric Kool-Aid." The book includes possibly the first negative instance of the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid," and it came a decade before the deaths at Jonestown. Wolfe's book includes this passage, describing a man who had a bad trip (emphasis added):
"… There was one man who became completely withdrawn … I want to say catatonic, because we tried to bring him out of it, and could not make contact at all … he was sort of a friend of mine, and I had some responsibility for getting him back to town … he had a previous history of mental hospitals, lack of contact with reality, etc., and when I realized what had happened, I begged him not to drink the Kool-Aid, but he did … and it was very bad."
Because of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, many Americans were familiar with the idea of being urged to drink Kool-Aid containing, um, unusual chemicals
– even if they hadn't themselves participated in an Acid Test. This familiarity perversely boosted the profile of Kool-Aid, especially in this particular (adulterated) circumstance.
Both beverages were there
Third, plenty of evidence suggests that both Kool-Aid and Flavor Aid were present at Jonestown
– though there was more of the latter. Therefore, in a sense, everybody's right. It may simply come down to whether the term "Kool-Aid" is catchier than "Flavor Aid," and history decided
– much to the consternation of Kool-Aid's marketing department.
Today, the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" is firmly entrenched in popular language, although the evidence suggests that it should more realistically be either "drink the Flavor Aid/Kool Aid mix" or the even less-catchy suggestion by Al Tompkins of Poynter: "[drink the] grape-flavored drink mix laced with poison." I think this linguistic horse has left the barn, quenching our thirst for metaphors with it. "OH YEAH!"
***
For a thorough examination of the cultural and linguistic effects of the Jonestown massacre, check out "Drinking the Kool-Aid: The Cultural Transformation of a Tragedy" by Rebecca Moore. In it, she makes the point:
… References [to "drinking the Kool-Aid"] are not uniformly negative. On the contrary, they describe the positive qualities of corporate loyalty or team spirit. For example, when Michael Jordan, a former Chicago Bulls basketball player who now plays for a competing team, returned to his former home to attend a Chicago Bears football game, he was willing to drink "Bears' Kool-Aid." This meant that Jordan was willing to set aside basketball rivalries in support of the home team at a football game.
Moore's paper is just one part of the encyclopedic Jonestown Institute website.
It's also worth checking out this Chicago Tribune story rounding up various media mentions of Kool-Aid versus Flavor Aid, 30 years after the Jonestown massacre. If you're into documentaries, I recommend Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (it's on YouTube), which aired on PBS's American Experience in 2008.
This post originally appeared on Mental Floss, an Atlantic partner site.
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The Jonestown Massacre
people.uvawise.edu/pww8y/Supplement/SMSup/Cults/Jones50Con.html
''CIA Mind Control Run Amok?''
Excerpted from 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time
A Citadel Press Book Copyright © 1995 By Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
''On November 18, 1978, in a cleared-out patch of Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones ordered the 911 members of his flock to kill themselves by drinking a cyanide potion, and they did.''
The cultists were brainwashed by the megalomaniac Jones, who had named their jungle village after himself and held them as virtual slaves, if not living zombies. Jones himself was found dead. He'd shot himself in the head, or someone else had shot him. Square-jaw, jet black hair and sunglasses, looking like a secret service agent on antipsychotic drugs, Jones takes his place alongside Charles Manson in America's iconography of evil.
But was Jones really a lone madman as Americans are so often advised about their villains?
Is it plausible that more than nine hundred people took their own lives willingly, simply because he told them to?
Or is there another explanation?
Not long after the slaughter in Jonestown, whispers began–strange hints of human experiments in mind control, even genocide, and the lurking presence of the CIA. At the very least. these stories maintained, the U.S. government could have prevented the Jonestown massacre, but instead it did nothing. At worst, Jonestown was a CIA-run concentration camp set up as a dry run for the secret government's attempt to reprogram the American psyche. There are suggestions of parallel "Jonestowns" and that the conspiracy did not end with the deaths in Guyana.
Jim Jones was born May 13, 1931, son of a Ku Klux Klansman in Lynn, Indiana. His mother, he claimed, was a Cherokee Indian. That has never been verified.
An unsupervised child, Jones became fascinated by church work at an early age. By 1963 he had his own congregation in Indianapolis: The People's Temple Full Gospel Church. It was an interracial congregation, something then unheard of in Indiana. Young Jim Jones crusaded tirelessly on behalf of blacks. He also suffered from mysterious fainting spells, heeded advice from extraterrestrials, practiced faith healing, and experienced visions of nuclear holocaust.
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Certain that Armageddon was imminent, that Indianapolis itself was to be the target of attack, Jones sought guidance. He found it in the January 1962 issue of Esquire magazine. An article in the occasionally ironic men's mag named the nine safest places in the world to get away from the stresses and anxieties of nuclear confrontation. One of those retreats was Brazil. Intimations of Jones's link to the CIA begin all the way back there.
According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, Jones's neighbors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil (where he lived before moving to Rio De Janeiro), remembered his claim to be a retired navy man who "received a monthly payment from the U.S. government." They also remembered that Joneswho later claimed that he was forced to sell his services as a gigolo to support his family"lived like a rich man."
"Some people here believed he was an agent for the American CIA," one neighbor reported.
Neighbors' recollections notwithstanding, Jones's biographer Tim Reiterman says that the Jones family "lived simply" in Brazil, subsisting on rice and beans. When he returned to the United States, shortly after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Jones told his followers that he had spent his time in Brazil helping orphans. Eventually, he moved his church to Ukiah, California, then to San Francisco, where it became a fundraising force courted by local politicians.
Before Jones arrived in Brazil, he'd stopped in Georgetown, Guyana. Though his stop there was a quick one, he managed to garner some ink in the local media by publicly charging churches with spreading communism. According to Reiterman, it appeared a calculated attempt to "put himself on the record as an anticommunist."
Fifteen years later, he would tantalize his Jonestown flock with promises to move the People's Temple from Guyana to the Soviet Union. In a 1979 book, one former Jones devotee, Phil Kerns (whose mother and sister died at Jonestown), raises the possibility of a Soviet conspiracy behind Jonestown.
"Jones was a Marxist," Kerns wrote, "who had numerous contacts with officials of both the Cuban and Soviet governments." Among other suspicious facts, Kerns notes that shortly before the massacre two People's Temple members spirited $500,000 out of the cult's colony to the Soviet embassy.
Jones's deputies did meet frequently with Soviet officials–so frequently, in fact, that they became a running joke in Guyana's diplomatic circles. Jones told his followers that the CIA had "infiltrated" Jonestown.
Later, as we'll see, others raised the possibility that Jonestown was the CIA.
The temple's dalliance with the Soviets, however, is a wholly plausible point of contact between the cult and the Agency. Reiterman, a skeptic of the conspiracy theory, points out that "the CIA's presence in socialist Guyana…could be assumed." They certainly would have taken an interest in the temple's Soviet contacts.
Why exactly was Jones interested in the Soviets? He must have known that his professed dream of moving the temple to the U.S.S.R. was only that, a dream. He dropped it quickly in favor of mass suicide (a follower asked Jones, shortly before the suicides, if it weren't possible to forget the whole thing and escape to Russia; Jones said it wasn't). If the CIA had infiltrated the temple, or if the temple was, even in part, a CIA operation, then members' sojourns to the Soviet embassy would have had a more pragmatic purpose.
The CIA was first with news out of Jonestown, reporting the mass suicides. The suicides followed an attack, ordered by Jones, on a party led by Congressman Leo Ryan, in Guyana to investigate alleged human rights abuses at Jonestown. The gunmen struck at Port Kaituma airfield, as the Ryan party was preparing to depart. Ryan was assassinated in the attack. Four others died as well. Several more were shot, including Reiterman, then a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. Among the wounded was U.S. embassy official Richard Dwyer.
Wounded, but ambulatory.
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Wounded, but ambulatory.
Did Dwyer stroll back to Jonestown after the airstrip assault? Was he there during the massacre? Reportedly, at one point on a tape recorded as the killings began, Jones's own voice commands, "Get Dwyer out of here!" Reiterman assumes that this was a "mistake" on Jones's part, that Dwyer was not actually there. If he was, however, the implications are chilling.
Dwyer was an agent of the CIA.
For his part, Dwyer neither confirms nor denies that he was a CIA agent, but he was identified in the 1968 edition of Who's Who in the CIA. A month after the
massacre the San Mateo Times, a Bay Area newspaper (hometown paper of Leo Ryan), reported that "State Department officials acknowledge that a CIA agent was dispatched to Jonestown within minutes of the airstrip assault." Dwyer denied to the Times that he was there at the time. According to one report, Dwyer's next stop after Guyana was Grenada.
Nor was Dwyer necessarily the only intelligence-connected character in Guyana. The U.S. ambassador himself, John Burke, later went to work for the "intelligence community staff" of the CIA. Richard McCoy, another embassy official, has acknowledged his counterintelligence work for the U.S. Air Force. The socialist government of Guyana had piqued the interest of U.S. intelligence for years. If there were covert operations going on there, no one should be surprised.
Leo Ryan's aide Joseph Holsinger feared that the CIA might have been running a covert operation there so sinister it would shock even hardened CIA-watchdogs. In 1980 Holsinger, who'd already discovered Dwyer's presence at Jonestown, received a paper from a professor at U.C. Berkeley. Called "The Penal Colony," the paper detailed how the CIA's mind-control program, code-named MK-ULTRA, was not stopped in 1973, as the CIA had told Congress. Instead, the paper reported, it had merely been transferred out of public hospitals and prisons into the more secure confines of religious cults.
Jonestown, Holsinger believed, was one of those cults.
There were large amounts of psychoactive, i.e., mind-control, drugs found on the site of the suicides. Larry Layton, the Jones lieutenant who became the only person charged in any of the killings (he was in the airstrip hit team, and somehow survived the Jonestown massacre), was described as sinking into a "posthypnotic trance" as he sunk ever deeper under Jones's spell. Layton's own father called him "a robot."
Layton's brother-in-law, the man who arranged the lease on Jonestown with the Guyanese government for Jones, was reportedly a mercenary for the CIA-backed UNITA rebels in Angola. Layton's father, according to Holsinger, was the biochemist in charge of chemical warfare for the U.S. Army at its Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
Jones himself, the supposed Soviet sympathizer, was once a fundraiser for Richard Nixon, around the same time Jones declared himself the reincarnation of both Jesus and Lenin.
Then there was the problem of the bodies. The Jonestown body count jumped by about four hundred within two days after the suicides, leading to speculation that escapees may have been hunted down and killed. In any case, Guyanese coroner Leslie Mootoo testified that as many as seven hundred of the dead appeared to have been forcibly killed, not "suicides" at all.
"I believe that it is possible that Jonestown may have been a mind-control experiment," Holsinger said in a 1980 lecture, "that Leo Ryan's congressional visit pierced that veil and would have resulted in its exposure, and that our government, or its agent the CIA, deemed it necessary to wipe out over nine hundred American citizens to protect the secrecy of the operation. "
The "operation," if there was one, may have continued after the suicides. There have been attempts to repopulate Jonestown with Dominican and Indochinese refugees, backed by the Billy Graham organization. There was a Jonestown doppelganger in Guyana even while Jones was still in business. Self-styled "Rabbi" David Hill, with his eight thousand-member Nation of Israel cult, was powerful enough to earn the nickname "vice prime minister" in his travels through the country.
3/
One final, weird note: A memo that allegedly passed between Jones and People's Temple lawyer Mark Lane (who escaped the massacre) showed the two pondering the relocation of Grace Walden to Jonestown. Walden was a key witness to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Lane represented King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray. When the memo turned up, Lane denied that he had discussed moving Walden.
(He claims that the memo was part of an "army intelligence coverup" of the King assassination, ostensibly an attempt to discredit him and, through him, Walden.) Most of the People's Temple rank-and-file were black. Most of the leadership was white. Joyce Shaw, a former member, once mused that the mass suicide story was a coverup for "some kind of horrible government experiments, or some sort of sick, racist thing. . . a plan like the Germans' to exterminate blacks."
In 1980, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence announced that there was "no [more]evidence" of CIA involvement at Jonestown.
MAJOR SOURCES
Kerns, Phil. People's Temple, People's Tomb. Plainfield, NJ: Logos International, 1979.
Kilduff, Marshall, and Ron Javers. The Suicide Cult. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.
Krause, Charles. Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account. New York: Berkley Books, 1978.
Moore, Rebecca. A Sympathetic History of Jonestown. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1985.
Reiterman, Tim. Raven: The Untold Story of the Reverend Jim Jones and His People. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982.
This chapter owes a debt to research assembled by John Judge.
We are here: conspire@conspire.com
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>Guyana
https://m.facebook.com/USEmbassyGeorgetown/posts/2474456719237618
George Herbert Walker Bush, who served as the 41st president of the United States, died November 30 at the age of 94. He was the longest-lived president in U.S. history and a statesman whose service to his country spanned his entire adult life. Before becoming president, he served in posts ranging from Navy pilot to Central Intelligence Agency director to vice president of the United States.
https://www.facebook.com/oilpricenews/posts/4821336037910664
Oil Man =>George Bush<=ClA klown
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Guyana-To-Become-The-11th-Country-To-Produce-Over-1-Million-Barrels-Of-Oil-Per-D.html
>Nephilim, Amazon, Mama?
>This is the original - if any of you were curious 🫠
>@paytonbock
>Thank you for posting the original, I was just shit-posting posting on the image I responded to. Trying to be edgy, major fail!!
posts were one-second delta