T. Belman. Its about time I looked into the Q movement. What I found was very disturbing. I wonder why Trump hasn’t distanced himself from them and how many people who identify with Q are antisemetic. Is Q synonymous with Qanon?

What is QAnon, and why is it antisemitic? Let’s break it down.

By Emily Burack, ALMA  October 15, 2020

QAnon, a far-right pro-Trump conspiracy theory, has exploded in 2020. The conspiracy theory, which emerged on the internet, is all about a secret cabal of pedophiles, and has taken root in the minds of some of Donald Trump’s supporters.One troubling aspect of QAnon — all aspects of QAnon are troubling, let’s be real — is that QAnon is inherently antisemitic. It’s an old form of antisemitism in a new package, experts say.

What is QAnon, and why is it antisemitic? We’ll break it down for you.

What is QAnon?

Briefly, QAnon is a conspiracy theory that alleges, falsely, there exists a cabal of pedophiles, run by Democrats, plotting to take down President Trump. (A cabal is a “secret political clique or faction,” thanks Oxford Dictionary.) Followers of QAnon believe that the Democrats involved include politicians like Hillary Clinton and George Soros, celebrities like Tom Hanks, and billionaires like Bill Gates, and they allege that this group molests children, and then kills and eats them (or harvests their blood). You read that sentence correctly.

The New York Times explains it as such: “QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.”

QAnon is also described as an “extremism network” and a “collective delusion.” QAnon Anonymous, a podcast about QAnon, calls it a “big tent conspiracy theory” because it’s constantly evolving and adding new conspiracies.

Now, a QAnon supporter will likely be elected to the House of Representatives, Trump has retweeted QAnon theories, and it just keeps getting worse.

When did it begin?

On October 28, 2017, someone calling themselves “Q” began posting on a message board on 4chan, a series of completely anonymous forums.

We’ll let New York Magazine take it from here: “On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled ‘Calm Before the Storm’ (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called ‘crumbs’ — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane. However, thanks to some rather forced coincidences… and a whole heck of a lot of wishful thinking, people believed he was the real deal.”

Those initial posts snowballed. “Q” believed something called “The Storm” was coming, when “Trump would finally unmask the cabal, punish its members for their crimes and restore America to greatness.”

*Screams*

Yeah, us too.

Okay, where does the antisemitism come in?

We have to remember the core belief system of QAnon: the idea that Democrats are running a secret cabal, where they abduct children, kill them, and harvest their blood, all in an effort to defeat Donald Trump.

If you take out the names (Democrats, Trump), the theory can read as following: “A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.”

Sound familiar? This is essentially the “conspiracy” in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, one of the most antisemitic documents of all time.

But we’ll get to that in a bit, because notably, the “murder children and harvest their blood” thing immediately calls to mind something called the blood libel, a centuries-old antisemitic allegation that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes.

“People are going to start googling ‘killing children for blood.’ That will lead them to anti-Semitism even if they may not be initially inclined,” Magda Teter, a Jewish studies professor and author of Blood Libel: On the Trail of an Antisemitic Myth, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Back up. Can you explain what the blood libel is? 

This first appeared in Norwich, England in 1144, when a boy, William of Norwich, was found dead in the woods. A monk, Thomas of Monmouth, falsely accused Jews of Norwich of ritually murdering William. Soon, similar accusations began popping up throughout the Christian world in the Middle Ages (in Gloucester in 1168, Bury St Edmunds in 1181, Bristol in 1183, etc.).

As the Anti-Defamation League points out: “When a Christian child went missing, it was not uncommon for local Jews to be blamed. Even when there was no evidence that any Jew had anything to do with the missing child, Jews were tortured until they confessed to heinous crimes. Some Christians believed that the four cups of wine that Jews drink at the Passover Seder celebrations were actually blood, or that Jews mixed blood into hamantaschen, sweet pastries eaten on the Jewish holiday of Purim.”

From the 12th to the 16th century, around 100 blood libels took place, and many resulted in massacres of Jews.

Unfortunately, the blood libel persisted long past the Middle Ages — terrible reappearances include Damascus in 1840 (“The Damascus Affair”), Ukraine in 1913, and New York in 1928 (called the Massena blood libel). Additionally, many pogroms (massacres) started because of a blood libel, like the Kishniev pogrom in 1903.

Okay, let’s go back to QAnon and antisemitism?

Since QAnon is so expansive — constantly evolving, more conspiracies being added — there’s just so much antisemitism, it’s hard to cover it all.

As we said above, QAnon’s conspiracy theory is basically a “rebranded Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The Protocols is 24 chapters of antisemitic lies about Jews (read more here) that touches on all the antisemitic tropes we’re about to go over. Plus, central to the Protocols is the blood libel.

Let’s break down a few more tropes that are embedded in QAnon ideology (all of which are also found in Protocols):

1. GEORGE SOROS, THE ROTHSCHILDS, AND THE GENERAL IDEA THAT “WEALTHY JEWS ARE CONTROLLING THE WORLD”:

QAnon followers believe a key member of the “cabal” is billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros. Soros has long been a target of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Members of QAnon Facebook groups were calling for the execution of Soros just this month; Media Matters identified popular posts relating to Soros, and almost every one “had at least one blatant death threat in the comments, including suggestions to shoot him, hang him, and more.”

Also involved, they believe, are the Rothschilds, the wealthy British banking family that happens to be Jewish. The Rothschilds sit at the center of numerous antisemitic conspiracies that they control the world. (Many people think that the Bank of England is owned by the Rothschilds or that the Rothschild family owns most of the world’s wealth. Again, super false.) The Rothschilds are alleged to be behind the Illuminati, the New World Order, the British Royal Family, and now this “cabal” at the heart of QAnon theories.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican congressional nominee and QAnon follower, has shared this conspiracy theory. Recently, Jewish Insider uncovered a 2018 posting from Greene that accused Soros and the Rothschild family of being part of this supposed cabal plotting against Trump.

2. “ZIONIST OCCUPIED GOVERNMENT”:

QAnon forums repeatedly reference not only the Elders of Zion, but the idea of a “Zionist-occupied government,” which is yet another antisemitic conspiracy theory that says Jews control governments of Western states.

This ties back to Jewish support for Democrats. As JTA writes: “QAnon adherents are latching on to widespread Jewish support for Democrats, especially as the election approaches.”

“In terms of Elders of Zion, calling out Hollywood, which tends to be Jewish, calling out specific Jewish congresspeople as pedophiles. Also, it tends to be that Jewish people align more with Democrats. They use that against us to basically say that Jews are pedophiles,” Eric Feinberg, who works at the Coalition for a Safer Web, explained.

Which brings us to…

3. JEWS CONTROL HOLLYWOOD AND THE MEDIA:

Yet another classic antisemitic canard! If there was a bingo card of antisemitic tropes, QAnon would have BINGO in literally all possible ways.

Much of the focus of QAnon is not just on Democrats and George Soros, but on Hollywood celebrities like Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres, and Oprah. This calls to mind the antisemitic idea that “Jews control Hollywood,” which is more broadly part of the idea that “Jews control the media.” Once again, this trope is inspired by the Protocols.

“If they are going to mention the whole package of conspiracy, of blood, of media, of money, even without mentioning Jews, you can definitely get that kind of implicit anti-Semitic message about controlling the media, government and whatnot,” Magda Teter told JTA. “You don’t have to be explicit and then those who know, know.”

4. “GREAT REPLACEMENT”:

Another part of the QAnon theory is the idea of the “Great Replacement.” This is a white nationalist conspiracy theory that is also — you guessed it! — antisemitic. It’s rooted in the idea that the white population is being replaced by non-white immigrants. As JTA explains, it “alleges that Jews are orchestrating the mass migration of nonwhite immigrants into predominantly white countries in order to wipe out the populations there. It says those supporting the refugees are using ‘immigrant pawns’ to commit ‘the biggest genocide in human history.’” (You can also see parts of this theory pop up in the antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding Soros, especially during the 2015 migration crisis in Europe.)

Marjorie Taylor Greene — who will likely be elected to the House of Representatives this coming November — shared a video in 2018 that repeats the “Great Replacement” theory. It was also a core part of the ideology of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the Christchurch mosque shooter, and behind the “Jews will not replace us” chants when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville.

Also related: Where there’s antisemitism, there’s neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Do we even need to explain why they’re antisemitic? They hate Jews, simple as that.

5. GLOBALISTS:

The idea of a global conspiracy is inherently antisemitic; “globalists” has become a dogwhistle for “Jews.” QAnon is about a global group of evil people controlling the world — again, this is inherently antisemitic.

6. WE COULD KEEP GOING…

Some followers of QAnon are also 9/11 truthers, which contains a subset of people who say Israel and/or the Jews are responsible for 9/11. Antisemitic!

I’m overwhelmed.

Us too, pal.

What now?

Hard to say. Our plan is to continue to call out QAnon for what it is: a hateful, antisemitic conspiracy theory that must be unequivocally condemned.

********

THE REAL STORY BEHIND HILLARY CLINTON’S “CARTOON NAZI FROG” WILL BLOW YOUR MIND

 

I’ll cut right to the chase:

Pepe the Frog isn’t a white nationalist symbol.

Pepe the Frog isn’t a harmless meme propagated by teenagers on the internet.

Pepe the Frog is, in fact, the modern-day avatar of an ancient Egyptian deity accidentally resurrected by online imageboard culture. 

Does that sound like the most b@tsh#t crazy thing you’ve ever heard?

Strap in, friendo.  You’re in for one hell of a ride.

(UPDATE 11/9/16: Well memed, America, well memed.  A post-election follow-up to this article has been added here.)

When Memes Collide: The Origins of Pepe the Frog

The precise origins of Pepe the Frog are, like all imageboards memes, obscure and unimportant.

All you really need to know is that sometime around 2010, a sad-looking cartoon frog began to trend among posters on 4chan.org and similar “underground” imageboards.

Shortly after, the age-old piece of online vernacular used to express laughter—”LOL”—fell out of favor on these sites.

In its place a new slang term of synonymous meaning rose to common use: “KEK.”

The origins of this trend are much more important.  It comes from an odd technicality involving the Korean language and the popular video game World of Warcraft.

Keep that in mind for later.

And so, just like that, two seemingly unrelated elements that would later give life to a deity were arranged in piecemeal fashion.  But they remained dormant for several years, up until…

Donald Trump and the 2016 Election

By this time, Pepe the Frog had become the unofficial mascot for 4chan’s political discussion board (a highly despised corner of the Internet fittingly entitled “Politically Incorrect”).

/Pol/ is a place where the unspoken outsiders of Millennial culture gather en masse.  Here you’ll find the lonely and depressed, the socially inept, the generational dropouts, and all shades of disenfranchised youth—every one of them united with an unshakable underdog mentality that pervades the forum’s every kilobyte.

To call this place a “white nationalist” or “alt-right” message board is categorically incorrect.  /Pol/, above all else, is place where our society’s status quo is mercilessly challenged.  It’s a melting pot for well-meaning free thinkers and misguided mad men alike.

It is a place of chaos. 

So when Donald J. Trump strolled onto the political scene in 2015, it was a match made in heaven.  He immediately became /pol/’s candidate of choice.

And it wasn’t long before Trump was mated with /pol/’s beloved mascot, in typical imageboard fashion:

And then, something very strange began to happen…

The Digits Declare a Deity

One last thing you need to understand about imageboard culture: dubs.

Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp.  This number represents that post’s entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard.

With the amount of traffic these sites get, the last couple digits of this number are essentially a random roll.  When a poster gets repeated digits, its called “dubs”, “trips”, “quads”, and so on.

Since a poster can’t know their post number until after they’ve submitted the post, its common for people to “bet” the contents of their message on the occurrence of repeating digits, like so:

When that endeavor proves a successful, a “GET” has been made and the stroke of luck is celebrated.

Out of this practice, a strange phenomenon began to take place on /pol/: discussion threads associated with Trump displayed noticeably frequent GETs. 

It wasn’t long before all of these seemingly random elements discussed so far became irreparably tied together within imageboard culture:

• Pepe the Frog (now /pol/’s unofficial mascot)
• Donald Trump (/pol/’s overwhelming candidate of choice)
• Repeating digit post numbers (“GETS”)
• “KEK” (used as an expression of delight, particular in response to Trump’s “trolling” of the establishment, as well as in reaction to unlikely GETs in general)

…and a god was born.

Here’s Where It Starts To Get Weird: The Queer Coincidence of Kek

Soon, it became all the rage on /pol/ to hail Trump as nothing less than god’s chosen candidate.

But which god’s chosen candidate exactly?

The answer is obvious: Kek.

Remember how we learned that “kek” the meme came about from an obscure Korean language onomatopoeia, completely independently from Pepe the Frog?

Well, it turns out Kek is also—and always has been—an ancient Egyptian deity…

A frog-headed one. 

Quite the coincidence, wouldn’t you say? “A little,” perhaps you reply.

“A little” indeed, but that’s just the very tip of the synchronicity iceberg.  That’s just where this unfathomable string of “coincidences” begins.  And where it ends?  We just don’t know.  Day by day this all getting stranger…

The second major (“little”) coincidence can be found when one looks into what Kek stood for among the ancient Egyptian pantheon:

Kuk (also spelled as Kek or Keku) is the deification of the primordial concept of darkness in ancient Egyptian religion…

…Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuk’s male form was depicted as a frog, or as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a snake, or a snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented obscurity and the unknown, and thus chaos. Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known as the bringer-in of light.

And who else, at this point, had been declared a “bringer of light” into the world by enthusiastic supporters (mainstream and imageboard alike)?

It gets even weirder.

The pot really started to boil when this bizarre misprint statuette was dug up from a mysterious vendor called “Ancient Treasures” on Amazon. For years the product had been coincidentally mislabeled a “KEK” statue, despite actually bearing the hieroglyphics for the frog goddess HEQET.

And ya know, the thing about this ONE unique arrangement of hieroglyphics…they bear an undeniable resemblance to  a certain special something:

Do you see it?

A person sitting down. In front of a computer.

Like say, to post on an imageboard? 

And what’s that on the other side of the computer?

With this “holy talisman’s” discovery, The Cult of Kek suddenly took on a concrete form. This new digital “faith” is summed up neatly in this image passed around on all the major imageboards of the day:

It Gets Weirder: Pepe/Keke “Emerges” in Plain Sight on September 11th, 2016

Soon, /pol/’s users were—quite ironically, at first—attributing all strokes of luck for the Trump campaign (and likewise, all strokes of misfortune for the Hillary campaign) to their benevolent frog-headed deity that spoke to them in dubs.

But all of that came to a head on September 11th, 2016, when three major, mind-blowing events transpired within 48 hours of each other. Three events that would change the face of Kek worship forever:

1. Hillary Clinton fainted or nearly fainted in New York. The overwhelming sentiment of /Pol/ —still reeling from the event—is captured two days later in this post:

(Note this person’s post number)

2. Hillary Clinton literally declares Pepe the Frog an enemy of the state with paper-thin reasoning:

 Here’s the short version: Pepe is a cartoon frog who began his internet life as an innocent meme enjoyed by teenagers and pop stars alike.

But in recent months, Pepe’s been almost entirely co-opted by the white supremacists who call themselves the “alt-right.” They’ve decided to take back Pepe by adding swastikas and other symbols of anti-semitism and white supremacy.

What can I or anyone else hope to add here?  How bizarre does reality get?  How deep does the rabbit hole go?

Oh, I see how deep…

3.  (REALLY F#CKI’N WEIRD)Kek/Pepe’s musical anthem is discovered on YouTube:

Now get a load of this one.

While all of this was happening, one or a few anonymous 4chan contributors discovered an old track from the 80’s on YouTube. A track stamped all over with a very familiar face:

That’s right folks. A B-side vinyl by performer “P. E. P. E.”, sporting a frog with a magic wand.

A frog. 

And what’s P. E. P. E. stand for?

• Point
• Emerging
• Probably 
• Entering

“Probably.” What are sweet repeating digit GETs all about? Probability.

What is this “gist” of Kekism on /pol/?  He speaks to them through dubs.  Their ancient egyptian god of obscurity and chaos “emerges/enters” at “points” of “probability.”

Feel like that’s a stretch?  Check out what the full-length vocal version’s album artwork is adorned with:

Don’t see the significance? Let 4chan help you:

(Again, note the post’s number)

And—hey—who’s that fair-haired man pointed towards Trump Tower’s clock in the artwork?

Gee, I wonder who.

Okay, What The Hell Is Going On?

Most likely? Chaos Magick.

You see, one of the core tenets of Chaos Magick practice (the only mainstay, really) is the creation of magic sigils (also called “glyphs”) to “codify and project one’s Will into the Universe.”

Basically, you make an image that represents your “will”  (desire fueled by powerful emotions or altered states) and the universe will take care of the rest.

When a lot of people pool their united willpower towards a single sigil, its called a Hypersigil, and its exponentially more potent.

Pepe/Kek is 4chan’s hypersigil. 

Millions of the “little people” that browse 4chan have embedded the image of Pepe with their hatred for Hillary’s alleged corruption, and their hope for Trump’s victory over her in November.  Whether they did this consciously or not, its exactly what has happened.

And so far, their hypersigil seems to be working.

Hold Up: You’re Seriously Telling Me Magic Is Real?

Absolutely I am.  But you must understand, “magic” probably isn’t what you think it is. It’s not about wand-waving or pentagrams or sacrificing babies.

Magick is actually much less involved than that.  As a matter of fact, you’re casting magick right now. You pretty much always are, whether you like it or not.

That’s because the REAL magic comes from plain and simple human attention. How you look at reality shapes it in ways that we’re only now beginning to fully understand.  Ironically, the science of quantum physics is rapidly bringing the reality of magick to light (shadilay).

In my book You’re Imagining Things, I’ll tell you how it works–and WHY it works–in plain-spoken English.  I’ll also explain how you can use your attention to alter your own little pocket of reality in extraordinary ways. Click here to check out You’re Imagining Things on Amazon.

 

So What Happens Next?

Most likely? Kek will continue to grow in power and continue to oppose Hillary Clinton and the corrupt political establishment.  Will the Lord of Light win out over the powers that be?  We shall find out very soon. (UPDATE 11/9/16: We found out what happened, didn’t we?)

*******

How three conspiracy theorists took ‘Q’ and sparked Qanon

Aug. 14, 2018, 7:25 PM 

By Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, NBC NEWS

Pushing the theory on to bigger platforms proved to be the key to Qanon’s spread — and the originators’ financial gain.

David Reinert holds a large “Q” sign while waiting to see President Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 2, 2018. “Q” represents QAnon, a conspiracy theory group that has been seen at recent rallies.Rick Loomis / Getty Images

In November 2017, a small-time YouTube video creator and two moderators of the 4chan website, one of the most extreme message boards on the internet, banded together and plucked out of obscurity an anonymous and cryptic post from the many conspiracy theories that populated the website’s message board.<

Over the next several months, they would create videos, a Reddit community, a business and an entire mythology based off the 4chan posts of “Q,” the pseudonym of a person claiming to be a high-ranking military officer. The theory they espoused would become Qanon, and it would eventually make its way from those message boards to national media stories and the rallies of President Donald Trump.

Now, the people behind that effort are at the center of a fractious debate among conspiracy enthusiasts, some of whom believe the three people who first popularized the Qanon theory are promoting it in order to make a living. Others suggest that these original followers actually wrote Q’s mysterious posts.

While the identity of the original author or authors behind “Q” is still unknown, the history of the conspiracy theory’s spread is well-documented — through YouTube videos, social media posts, Reddit archives, and public records reviewed by NBC News.

NBC News has found that the theory can be traced back to three people who sparked some of the first conversation about Qanon and, in doing so, attracted followers who they then asked to help fund Qanon “research.”

Qanon is a convoluted conspiracy theory with no apparent foundation in reality. The heart of it asserts that for the last year the anonymous “Q” has taken to the fringe internet message boards of 4chan and 8chan to leak intelligence about Trump’s top-secret war with a cabal of criminals run by politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite. There is no evidence for these claims.

In addition to peeking into the mainstream, the theory has been increasingly linked to real-world violence. In recent months, Qanon followers have allegedly been involved in a foiled presidential assassination plot, a devastating California wildfire, and an armed standoff with local law enforcement officers in Arizona.

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What is Qanon? A guide to the conspiracy theory taking hold among Trump supporters

Part of the Qanon appeal lies in its game-like quality. Followers wait for clues left by “Q” on the message board. When the clues appear, believers dissect the riddle-like posts alongside Trump’s speeches and tweets and news articles in an effort to validate the main narrative that Trump is winning a war against evil.

There are now dozens of commentators who dissect “Q” posts — on message boards, in YouTube videos and on their personal pages — but the theory was first championed by a handful of people who worked together to stir discussion of the “Q” posts, eventually pushing the theory on to bigger platforms and gaining followers — a strategy that proved to be the key to Qanon’s spread and the originators’ financial gain.

The anons

Before Q, there was a wide variety of “anon” 4chan posters all claiming to have special government access.

In 2016, there was FBIAnon, a self-described “high-level analyst and strategist” offering intel about the 2016 investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Then came HLIAnon, an acronym for High Level Insider, who posted about various dubious conspiracies in riddles, including one that claimed Princess Diana had been killed because she found out about 9/11 “beforehand” and had “tried to stop it.” Then “CIAAnon” and “CIA Intern” took to the boards in early 2017, and last August one called WH Insider Anon offered a supposed preview that something that was “going to go down” regarding the DNC and leaks.

Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the “anon” genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz’s blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News.

“A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” Furber said in an email.

Diaz, a small-time YouTube star who once hosted a talk show on the fringe right-wing network Liberty Movement Radio, had found moderate popularity with a couple of thousand views for her YouTube videos analyzing WikiLeaks releases and discussing the “pizzagate” conspiracy, a baseless theory that alleged a child sex ring was being run out of a Washington pizza shop.

As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well.

On Nov. 3, 2017, just six days after the first 4chan post from “Q,” Diaz posted a video entitled “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon – Is it #happening???” in which she introduced the conspiracy theory to her audience.

“I do not typically do videos like this,” she said, but citing Q’s “very specific and kind of eerie” posts, Diaz explained that she would be covering the 4chan posts, “just in case this stuff turns out to be legit because honestly it kind of seems legit.”

What is QAnon?

AUG. 2, 201807:35

That video, which has been viewed nearly 250,000 times, made Diaz one of the earliest people to seize on “Q” posts and decipher them for a conspiracy-hungry audience. Diaz followed with dozens more Q-themed videos, each containing a call for viewers to donate through links to her Patreon and PayPal accounts

Diaz’s YouTube channel now boasts more than 90,000 subscribers and her videos have been watched over 8 million times. More than 97,000 people follow her on Twitter. Diaz, who emerged from bankruptcy in 2009, says in her YouTube videos that she now relies on donations from patrons funding her YouTube “research” as her sole source of income.

Diaz declined to comment on this story.

“Because I cover Q, I got an audience,” Diaz acknowledged in a video that NBC News reviewed last week before she deleted it.

Building a movement

To reach a more mainstream audience (older people and “normies,” who on their own would have trouble navigating the fringe message boards), Diaz said in a blog post she recommended they move to the more user-friendly Reddit. Archives listing the three as the original posters and moderators show they created a new Reddit community called CBTS_Stream, short for Calm Before The Storm, where subscribers soon gathered to talk all things Q.

Their move to Reddit was key to Qanon’s eventual spread. There, they were able to tap into a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and drive discussion with their analysis of each Q post. From there, Qanon crept to Facebook where it found a new, older audience via dozens of public and private groups.

That audience then started to head to 8chan to check out the original source and interact directly with the posts. (Q posts moved from 4chan to its more toxic offshoot 8chan in November after a post claiming the original board had been “infiltrated.” 8chan became notorious for having no rules, and even hosting child pornography.)

8chan’s owner’s official Twitter account marveled at the influx of older, less internet-savvy visitors to his site, drawn by Qanon. “We joked about it for years, but #Qanon is making it a reality: Boomers! On your imageboard.”

Meanwhile, Diaz kept making videos, racking up hundreds of thousands of views. Over the next several months, Diaz and the two moderators picked up tens of thousands of followers on Reddit and YouTube and added even more moderators to their 8chan and Reddit boards.

They also began to break into what might be considered the mainstream of the conspiracy world. Conspiracy theorist Dr. Jerome Corsi, an Infowars editor and a best-selling author of books about the “deep state,” had taken an interest in Q and was decoding the messages on the Reddit board. In December, Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe even made an appearance on InfoWars.

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Corsi has since disavowed the Qanon conspiracy and called the current Q poster “a fraud,” citing a supposed takeover of the channel by someone posing as Q in April. But last week, facing backlash from his base, Corsi tweeted that he supports the Qanon movement and its supporters’ “excellent research.”

Soon, as Diaz explained on her blog, their expanding crew was spending all their waking hours in chat rooms on the gaming-focused forum Discord analyzing and decoding Q messages and planning for a larger dissemination of Q’s message.

In March, their Reddit board, which boasted some 20,000 subscribers, was shut down by Reddit for “encouraging or inciting violence and posting personal and confidential information,” and the moderators — Diaz and the rest — were banned from the site. Furber had already been booted from the site for allegedly threatening to reveal the personal details of another user, and was pushed out of the private Q discussion groups he had helped form.

“I was very definitely banished,” Furber said, noting that he believes Q’s board has been taken over by imposters.

By then, Pamphlet Anon, whose real name is Coleman Rogers, had developed grander plans. (NBC was able to determine Rogers’ identity through property records that link the address where his business is registered to his parent’s home and to photos from his personal social media account. Those photos show him to be the same person who appears on YouTube as Pamphlet Anon.)

Rogers did not respond to calls seeking comment, but acknowledged his receipt of messages from NBC News via his website’s Twitter, writing in part, “WE DO NOT TALK TO FAKE NEWS.”

Network effect

Kicked off Reddit, Rogers hatched a new plan. He would replace the mainstream media — often a target of Q’s posts — with a constantly streaming YouTube network made up of the self-described “researchers” who were putting together Q’s clues.

Within a month, Rogers, 31, and his wife, Christina Urso, 29, had launched the Patriots’ Soapbox, a round-the-clock livestreamed YouTube channel for Qanon study and discussion. The channel is, in effect, a broadcast of a Discord chatroom with constant audio commentary from a rotating cast of volunteers and moderators with sporadic appearances by Rogers and Urso. In April, Urso registered Patriots’ Soapbox LLC in Virginia.

Rogers and Urso use their channel to call for donations that are accepted through PayPal, cryptocurrencies or mail.

It was a natural progression for Rogers. A review of Rogers’ Facebook page shows he had been active in internet politics and a staunch supporter of Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, self-identifying as part of the “meme war” — the creation and dissemination of images and internet-style commentary that internet agitators on the chans and Reddit credit with Trump’s win. Rogers often posted memes about “liberal tears” as well as the ludicrous claims that Democrats murdered children and worshipped Satan — details similar to those that would eventually form the Qanon theory.

Rogers’ Facebook updates waned after Trump took office but started up again in the fall, when he began posting “Q” messages to both confused and supportive family and friends.

Clint Watts: With QAnon, Russia doesn’t need to make fake news anymore

AUG. 6, 201802:17

Rogers has publicly denied that he is the author of the “Q” posts, though his last visible Facebook post, published on Aug. 2, hinted that he might someday be associated with the theory.

“Ten bucks says you see my face on national news within a few weeks, saying that I’m ‘the mysterious hacker known as #Qanon,’” Rogers wrote, a reference to a CNN segment that mistakenly referred to the website 4chan as a hacker.

Following a request for comment from NBC News, Rogers deleted every post on his Facebook profile after 2014. Following another message from a reporter informing him that NBC News had archived his page, he deleted his Facebook account entirely.

Tables turned

As Qanon picked up steam, growing skepticism over the motives of Diaz, Rogers, and the other early Qanon supporters led some in the internet’s conspiracy circles to turn their paranoia on the group.

Recently, some Qanon followers have accused Diaz and Rogers of profiting from the movement by soliciting donations from their followers. Other pro-Trump online groups have questioned the roles that Diaz and Rogers have played in promoting Q, pointing to a series of slip-ups that they say show Rogers and Diaz may have been involved in the theory from the start.

Those accusations have led Diaz and Rogers to both deny that they are Q and say they don’t know who Q is. There is no direct proof that the group or any individual members are behind it.

Still, Qanon skeptics have pointed to two videos as evidence that Rogers had insider knowledge of Q’s account. Some YouTube channels, like one named Unirock, are mostly dedicated to poring over Patriots’ Soapbox livestreams and dissecting purported slip-ups.

One archived livestream appears to show Rogers logging into the 8chan account of “Q.”The Patriots’ Soapbox feed quickly cuts out after the login attempt. “Sorry, leg cramp,” Rogers says, before the feed reappears seconds later.

Users in the associated chatroom begin to wonder if Rogers had accidentally revealed his identity as Q. “How did you post as Q?” one user wrote.

In another livestreamed video, Rogers begins to analyze a supposed “Q” post on his livestream program when his co-host points out that the post in question doesn’t actually appear on Q’s feed and was authored anonymously. Rogers’ explanation — that Q must have forgotten to sign in before posting — was criticized as extremely unlikely by people familiar with the message boards, as it would require knowledge of the posting to pick it out among hundreds of other anonymous ones.

In part because of the mounting claims against Patriots’ Soapbox, the web’s largest pro-Trump community has banned all mentions of Qanon. Reddit’s 640,000-member community r/The_Donald set up an autodelete function for mentions of Qanon’s claims, two moderators confirmed to NBC News, believing the group of YouTubers is making posts as Q.

Still, Patriots’ Soapbox 24-hour livestream remains live on YouTube, broadcasting to its 46,000 subscribers. And despite the growing skepticism of the group, they still have their supporters who ardently believe in the Qanon theory.

“The funniest thing about those who try to discredit Q. They focus on whether Q is real or not, instead of the information being provided,” tweeted one follower. “NO ONE cares who Q is. WE care about the TRUTH.”

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