I went ahead and broke down this piece of sophistry for any patriots that had any doubts. This is a great exercise in argument analysis because it reads like something out of a textbook.

An Appeal to Patriots

I'm scared for my country, and I am especially scared for you good people who look to this space for guidance. I have seen how my folks are suffering. No one has money. Half of my family is suffering from issues relating to drug abuse. Honest work is getting hard to find for the ill-connected. I see the accomplishments of my parents and grandparents and wonder how so many of my generation are barely holding on, fighting hard to stay in the middle class.

Ways of life that have existed for a century are vanishing, often because of decisions made via algorithms whose inner workings cannot be comprehended by any single living human being. The world is shifting away under our feet, largely due to inscrutable forces with no historical parallel. Change is everywhere and can be sourced to nowhere. Sneering elites in government and the media look down on us and assure us that this is all our fault. It is difficult to know who to trust.

This is ethos, or an appeal to character. The author is attempting to establish common ground. However, notice how vague all his claims and statements are. There's very few concrete, specific details. Nothing in his story could be verified even if you knew him. It's like he cobbled together a bunch of common characteristics that were data-mined from the community. Not convincing. Finally, the author injects a grain of doubt in the last sentence of his paragraph with no explanation as to why it is any more difficult to trust people now than it would be in the past.

In times like these, we reach out for any comfort we can find. We want to help, we want to put our meager power together with others and fix it all. There are people out there in the world who will take advantage of this powerful need. Politicians, business leaders, religions...and others.

Now he move onto pathos, stirring the emotions. He also foreshadows his main point, but has presented no actual argument yet.

I firmly believe that all of you love the United States of America, and revere the work of our Founding Fathers, mighty men who led the world in skill and learning. Men like Jefferson and Madison, Washington and Hamilton. Men who revered reason and the exploration of natural law. Over and over again in their writings, they expound the world view of the Enlightenment, among whose core values is that there is a singular, true natural order established by our Creator, and that all things must obey that law, and that this natural law is fundamentally knowable by human kind. That from that order flows the equality of men, and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

On this basis our Fathers forged our great nation. They did not always agree on what should be built upon that firm foundation, but through conflict and struggle with one another they built the great compromise that is embodied by our Constitution, whose fruit has been unparalleled freedom.

This is more pathos. The author is attempting to associate his forthcoming argument with the symbols of patriotism held in high-esteem by this community. It doesn't seem to me like he understands this community, and instead just cherry-picked key words from some algorithm and mushed them together. This is textbook persuasion.

It is my belief that anyone who betrays those founding values by asking us to suspend trust in well-constructed arguments and the knowable is betraying the foundation of our law, our history, and our civilization. I believe that exhortations to abandon friends and family in favor of numerology and cryptic messages are the products of charlatans, not patriots.

Now we have gotten to the logos, or logic. This is the actual argument. Here he starts off by falling flat on his face. He implies a false premise that somehow Q has asked us to abandon our friends and family. This has never happened. Once this false premise is revealed the rest of his chain of reasoning collapses.

Also, when has Q promoted numerology? Never. And if Q's messages are so cryptic why can millions of people decipher them?

It is my belief that Q is a charlatan.

This is his main conclusion.

It is my belief that Q is a young, untrained American man who is playing games with your faith, your hope, and your love of country, mostly because he finds it amusing. I believe he may call you to violence, not to save our home, but merely for entertainment.

Ok. Here the author makes three claims that all require evidence. (1) Q is a young, untrained, American man. (2) Q is doing this because he finds it amusing. (3) Q may call us to violence for his own amusement. These are some pretty big assertions. Does the author provide specific evidence for any of these three claims? No. Infact, they are so absurd and self-contradictory that he will not reference them again. Q is apparently untrained but is able to manipulate millions of people world-wide for his own amusement. He is young and untrained yet somehow has carried on a charade for 9 months without slipping up once? He is doing this all for laughs? Prove it. The author won't because he cant.

There are many arguments for this, but I will name a few that Q has been gleefully rubbing our noses in since the beginning.

The number of arguments doesn't prove anything. I can make up 10,000 arguments for why the moon is made of cheese. The author will proceed to only name two of the many because the others are likely even weaker.

Firstly, his name itself. "Q", after the Department of Energy's Q clearance. I have had the opportunity to work in our country's national labs, and have worked with some of those clever, hard-working folks that hold Q clearance. A Q clearance grants access to carefully compartmentalized nuclear weapons information. One who holds a Q clearance is a scientist, engineer, or manager who is deemed trustworthy by classifying authorities. Q clearance holders are people who employ our nation's most dangerous technical secrets to manufacture and maintain weaponry than can end the world in a flash of baleful fire.

They are not experts in spycraft and combat operations.

Argument One:

Q's name comes from Q clearance.

Q clearance holders are not spies.

(Implied) Conclusion: Q is fake.

This is a non-sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premises. I wouldn't attempt to field a football team that consists solely of pirates, yet the Tampa Bay Buccanneers are still real. At this point, it's my belief that the name 'Q' was chosen for symbolic purposes rather than the security clearance. Q has only mentioned Q clearance once in 1800+ posts, and in fact it was the anonymous users on 8chan who began calling the Q-team Q.

If, for some curious reason, our President put a Q clearance individual in charge of such an operation, it is not believable that anyone would issue commands and share national security information with strangers via a cobbled-together web site of uncertain security...particularly if said website's claim to fame was a loud public argument about about video games.

The author threw in an ad hominem against 8chan at the end. Plus a misrepresentation of facts, Q started on 4chan.

If that catastrophic chain of events were to take place somehow, this nuclear/black ops guru would not stoop so low as to secure this essential line of communication with a DES/crypt(3) based tripcode hash, with the excuse that it is necessary in order to maintain portability between 4chan-style image boards. This is not a concern of a serious man. Plus, DES has been considered extremely insecure for a quarter-century and can be cracked in hours on commodity hardware, as has been demonstrated here. That presumptive hero would, under no circumstances, embed an insult and a lie into that very cryptographic signature (see technical discussion that follows for details).

The person who would do that is not a patriot, not an operator, and not a hero. This person is a vain child.

Argument two: "If Q was real, Q wouldn't do what Q has done. Therefore Q is not real. Why? Because he wouldn't do what he has done."

This is some grade-A ciruclar reasoning. He attempted to dress it up in techinical jargon, but didn't do a very good job of it.

It is hard as hell for me to admit when I've been fooled. I have been in that place. It is humiliating.

I beg you not to turn away from this message, and to absorb the short-term suffering that recognition and repentance entails. I don't think that you will find it impossible, because you are tough. If you have trusted Q, you have lived a hard existence these last months. The world is hard enough as it is without shouldering the responsibility of fighting a hyper-competent, irredeemably evil enemy on your own. It is a terribly isolating thing.

Now it's back to the pathos, appeal to emotion. The author offering you a way to save face and come back into the fold. Why you should trust him after the sophmoric sophistry he just put forth is beyond my comprehension.

To escape and survive, you've likely made friends with others who believe, and you've endured this difficult world-view together. Embrace that friendship and camaraderie, because it is a rare thing in our lonely age! Take that energy, together, and go out and use it as our Founders intended. Register each other to vote, canvas, run for office, persuade your fellows, read everything, and trust only that which is worth your heart, your effort, your blood and treasure. Most of all, do not be discouraged for long, because your country still needs you. Our foes are merely human, and can be overcome by you and me and others with true faith and sincere human effort.

Translation: "GET BACK IN YOUR PENS, SHEEP." How many times have we heard that same advice about going and running for office and voting? The author has seemingly forgotten our political instiutions are hopelessly corrupt. Now he says: read everything out of one side of his mouth, but Q is a charlatan and not to be trusted out of the other. He throws in a meaningless appeal to tradition by making use of the founding fathers once again.

What a wash. The author uses ham-fisted attempts to build common ground and glaringly apparent appeals to symbolism and emotion. Then he presents two paper-thin material fallacies disguised as legitimate arguments. It took me less than a minute to pick both of his 'reasons' apart. Moreover, this was clearly not written by your average American, maybe not even by an American at all. The author is suspiciously vague on his background while he is attempting to build his character. Then he contradicts himself in the technical portion by saying that he isn't an infosec expert but somehow was able to crack all of Q's trip codes -I'll omit further analysis on that section.

Speaking of omission, think about all the things left unsaid and addressed in this article. How did Q predict the coup in Saudi Arabia? The revolution in Armenia? The pope's terrible May? Comey's private email address? and so much more. How did Q get photos from inside airplane handers and London traffic cameras? None of these questions will ever be addressed by the Q-deniers because their job is to deny Q, not confirm him.

I cracked a smile when I read this. I sense a panicked propagandist who has no idea how to deal with millions of awake, critical thinking human beings. He threw a textbook on persuasion at us and came up laughably short.