From Trolling To Fleecing: Co-Creator Of ‘Q’ Hoax Explains Its Scary Evolution
How the QAnon internet hoax sowed lies, spread chaos and conspiracy theories, and profited off its surprisingly large following.
A little less than a year after the first QAnon post, which has since led hundreds of thousands of news junkies down a conspiracy rabbit hole, news correspondent Jack Posobiec from One America News Network spoke with one of the co-originators of the “Q” persona who runs a group of individuals posing as a high-level government intelligence officer. On an anonymous “free speech” platform called 8Chan, they leave thousands of riddles, “clues,” odd questions, and cryptic lines as bread crumbs for their followers to help them in their search for truth.
Many major media outlets have overviewed the nest of conspiracy theories nurtured within Q followers. While many have speculated about who is behind Q and how it came to exist, thanks to Posobiec’s extensive research and the confession of a co-creator who goes by the pseudonym “Microchip,” we now know, with a high degree of certainty, the real origin story of QAnon.
Microchip’s story is believable, and he doesn’t appear to have a good motivation for taking credit for QAnon if he didn’t actually help create it. Additionally, Posobiec indicated he had long suspected it was him before Microchip confessed, after following the suspected Q creators closely for many months.
Although the OANN report was published in early September, it’s hard to take down Q enthusiasts. On the internet, lies don’t die, but continue on in half-life until, like ancient cockroaches, they silently crawl off into the far dark corners of the web. QAnon, while fully discredited for numerous failed predictions and false information in its posts alone, is a full-blown enigmatic cult.
Was QAnon A Mistake?
Like many cults, QAnon encourages its most dedicated followers to give money to the further the “great awakening” (of which Q is supposedly a leader). There is ample evidence outside of Posobiec’s report that the individuals currently running Q are financially motivated and have been for some time.
Several threads of evidence, including Microchip’s confession and Discord logs of his conversation with a co-conspirator, reveal how what was originally intended as a harmless troll to “get people thinking” quickly spun into a mythical persona whose cryptic words developed into a full-fledged conspiratorial worldview for a growing audience, now eager for more riddles (and ripe for financial exploitation).
Microchip, who is a master at creating trending topics on Twitter, and another successful pro-Trump meme-creator named Dreamcatcher, were inspired to do their own trolling by another false identity on 4Chan called FBIAnon, who also claimed to have had insider information as a high-level intelligence officer. Microchip wrote on Discord on August 18, 2017:
that signing FBIAnon is good too. Looks spooky, but we should do our own thing, like change the name to something else and use the Socratic method to question stuff out of ppl. This is what I do while trolling, gets people excited and flip sh** on suggestions alone. You know we’ve I’ve [sic] been doing this forever, we should think of something.
He said Q was more of a “mistake” than a planned, purposeful operation to “take down something.”
In his interview with Posobiec and in the chat logs with Dreamcatcher, Microchip referred to the book “Q” by the Italian prankster/writer collective Luther Blissett, whom he referred to as “the Italian author guy.” As a representative of the Wu Ming (Mandarin for “anonymous”) Foundation, an offshoot of the Luther Blissett collective, told BuzzFeed, “’Q’ is a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. It is often described as Blissett’s ‘playbook,’ an ‘operations manual’ for cultural disruption.”
Sauce: http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/29/trolling-fleecing-co-creator-q-hoax-explains-dangerous-evolution/
Moar at link.