The Not-So Secret Origins of Q

WARNING! This is not some silly self-promotional statement, a smug ‘look at how bad I am for saying or posting something.’ No, this is a serious warning regarding some of the visual content in this editorial essay. The purpose behind such grotesque imagery should be immediately apparent if you can get through them. I assure you that every single one of those pictures are real.

Imagine being surrounded by devils, all the flies in the air, every dust particle you breathe in making you sneeze. You see a world full of monsters, both figurative and literal, the stark evil standing right in front of you with its lashing tail and forked tongue, manically laughing. They are all dancing around and committing some ancient perverted fantasy.

The world is a complicated mess, and the meaninglessness of everything seems curiously intentional, many claim. How could life have gone so wrong, so terrible, with all of our potential, with all that we are able to do . . .

It must be a plot! They’re all against us! Someone is organizing this misery and it seems like . . . it seems like whoever it is is targeting especially me! Who are they? Why are they doing this? How?

V

But it is even more complicated than this:

They want to signal us, to let us know that they have discovered the bare truth:

“They’re all trying to get us!” they shout. “Society is broken, and we’ve had enough! Someone must lead our army of righteousness until the end of time, and we shall expose the path to paradise and glory only to those willing to keep the secret they’ve been told!” Everyone on the outside of the initiates is doomed, and “are part a plot against life to get me!”

Secret societies, those private, anxious clubs of nervous people peeking through blinds and jumping at every sound, these are the places devised to offer secular versions of absolute truth. Both those deeply inside a presumptive holy center, or those left out, bitter, angry, viciously attacking the other side’s perfidy, people flock towards answers that can somehow justify their existence. All religions were once secret societies. All of them have always bowed before some sort of messiah.

Let’s take Q:

This is what the followers look like.

This is what they stand for.

And this is who they are:

There is an infatuation with something we might as well call a “Grand Conspiracy Theory,” one of those overwhelming science fiction constructs that includes everything that has ever happened, and everything that will ever happen in the future, all trapped in a flaming nest, laid upon by an omnipotent master.

But the only time is the present. One must act now.

This trend goes back a long way: the Knights Templar

Freemasons

Illuminati

anything and everything. The Catholic Church

Jews, in all their historic guises

There are certainly Muslims involved

Everyone is in on it — aliens

everyone except that dim light hollering through the silent blankness of reality to impose a vision of truth.

There have always been counter-movements — all the believers in such plots gathering together as underground armies, inventing their own preventative plots, seeking to infiltrate the conspirators, and tear them apart from the inside.

This is a curious behavior among many messianic movements: they claim to understand the dense structure of conspiracy ideology so well that their invention of a plot every bit as sinister as their enemies’ is startling. It’s a get-them-before-they-get-you sort of assault, a pre-emptive strike, seeing the world so utterly desolate and corrupt that their dark visions of a post-apocalyptic world recruits them as soldiers, fighting evil under the unquestioning flag of inalterable truth.

Grand conspiracies tie everything together, one of those endless strings pictured above. Somehow it is all connected, the crusader seeing the pattern, then knowing what’s coming next. They see all sorts of symbols in a choice of words, these imprecise grammarians finding meaning in another person’s typographical error.

Does this vagary seem intentional? Why is ‘Five’ related, suddenly, to some encoded Jihad in the acronym — JIH? Couldn’t it mean just one Jihad? And why not circle the ‘F’ too? ‘Five’ works just as well in this context.

Couldn’t Comey’s statements be merely the wry cynicism of an exhausted man angry with his former boss? Why must it point to a specific place in the world? I was a drug store Stock boy, a terrible line Cook, a Waiter and Bartender, a Corporate Recruiter, a high school English Teacher, and a moderate Writer thus far in my working life SCWBCRETW(as well as an overnight security guard in the suicide wing of a city hospital, and the scumbag behind the counter at a porn shop, but acronyms are meaningless as it is— SCWBCRETW — the Summersville Clinic, West Brogdon County, Redwoods Evaluation Therapy Workshop, the place where I sleep and shit and eat, and get my orders from.

And what the hell is the other one about? Mockingbird? Is that October 30, 2017? Isn’t this the day that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were arrested? Was this posted two days before? I mean, look at the evidence . . . what is this alleging?

QAnon never has answers, only suggestions —

• Time is very short.
• . . . terrible news will spread.

What sort of news? About what? Isn’t this more like a fortune teller predicting non-specific things that will certainly happen? Terrible news? That’s what these days passes for entertainment.

• It will shake your world and may turn everything you believe in upside down.

Wow! A regular ‘stay tuned,’ right?

• People you know will be accused of unbelievable, monstrous things.

Wait — people I know? Who? What did they do?

And then they offer some hope to counter these terrifying statements about just how wrong we are about reality, and how they can make us see the truth, and the error of our ways.

• We want you to know that good people have been fighting a silent battle behind the screen —

The screen? On TV? Is this an internet thing?

• — in order to save the world from terrible horrors.

Again, the selling point is suggestion.

• . . . terrible horrors.

Nothing specific is stated. Nothing. It’ll be a surprise, a real twist ending.

• Horrible things happened that will come to light.
• If you want to know more, search for #QAnon.
• . . . some truths are HARD to swallow.

It’s like the tagline for a creepy new TV show.

Things. “Things” will become known. They will provide the truth if you only visit their website and contribute to their growth. And why is HARD capitalized? How many different meanings might apply to this decision? Taking their own ‘everything is connected’ tactic is pretty silly but, “HARD to swallow”? Tell me what you think this might suggest?

QAnon follows an anonymous messiah, and Donald Trump has been elevated to Prophet of their coming Lord. Look at him standing there,

the aloofly elected President of the United States of America. One gets the impression that he’s sliding a number-signed offer into the Wailing Wall for direct delivery to God. The look on his face is one of intention, not humility. The man stands there and wonders how much it might cost to buy the ancient thing, then transport it to the Mexican border.

Followers of the no longer underground QAnon movement see themselves as revolutionaries doing their best to save what remains of the world, to save that handful not involved with or being manipulated by the grand plot. Their enemies are all of the others writing them off and calling them crazy.

QAnon seeks an earth wiped clean of all corruption, sort of like radical Islamists,

,

seeing a poisonous world to be saved only after the War of Armageddon by the joy of their utopian beliefs.

There is some hideous child trafficking and molestation ring right at the center of the QAnon religion, pointing fingers at everyone coming against them, and calling them all witches before the magistrate of their messiah. Apparently liberal Hollywood and the mainstream media is filled, exclusively, with pedophiles, rapists, and anti-American activists, who use their

• Fake news channels

to corrupt children into pornographic lairs, causing the next generation to mirror their darkest desires for eternity. It is Q’s mission to stop this.

There is a scout handbook of rules and guidelines to be a follower of Q:

There are a few inconsistencies here, of course, as with any bible.

• . . . autists.

Are they autistic? What does this have to do with their beliefs? Why do they invent their own definition for a pretty specific word?

• . . . free the enslaved minds
• . . . immune to propaganda —

— isn’t this propaganda too? —

• . . . access to everything.

Wait — what?

• . . . illuminate evil and darkness.
• . . . cannot be divided by them.

“Them,” the classic finger-pointing title for the cause of every unexplained trouble of all of our lives.

• We know how it ends. God wins.

How what ends? When? Who is . . . what is involved and does it really go all the way back to the pyramids?

And what does pizza

have to do with it?

Why are children both victims and weapons?

Everything seems loaded, this unexplained and unexplainable evil they have both planted and are attempting to thwart. It is very easy to cull awful things that have actually happened to people — to children, to the defenseless, to the poor and oppressed and indigent and starving — such examples ravage human history.

Yet these heart-wrenching horrors somehow provide hope to QAnon, their conviction that knowing such things have always happened will allow reactionaries to preempt what they are convinced will be the next horrific massacre. Events like the kidnap, rape, and murder of children provide the heart and soul of the QAnon movement. They need it. Without it they would stray, drift into the netherworld of ordinary paranoia and lunacy, never consolidating the petty arguments of like-minded conspiratorial communities. Being so absolutist one cannot help but wonder if they plot to molest children themselves in order to blame it on others, proving that their realities are true?

But there is salvation, they claim,

and if only everybody would listen then the ‘Satanic monsters’ can be defeated and the world can return to paradise. But first

Society must break so the coming of the Lord can be at hand.

If we can only destroy the civilized world then we can reform it and recreate it in the image of our brand new God.

QAnon, taking pages from numerous bibles, from estachlogical theory, from misunderstandings and applied meanings to historical and current events, and from the observable panic of a world spinning out of control, like every other messianic movement, dare to offer salvation to an unworthy lot.

The fact that this religion continues to grow also follows a classic pattern. The same perceived tyranny (in the past it was merely ruled by kings, with radicals in opposition inventing or declaring themselves God) is still infecting a large group of people, from every political persuasion.

Civil wars, new faiths, radical presumptions on how society is meant to be, QAnon parallels all the monotheisms that have come before. The shouting fanatics, the terrorists who are evil only to their opposition, but righteous crusaders otherwise, believing that one must destroy the world to save it.

QAnon is growing elsewhere in the world too.

Nearly all white faces, a self-perceptively oppressed majority panicking over creeping social and racial equality, suddenly being declared

• unfair,

And

• reverse racism,

a desperate statement that the speaker does not seem to realize acknowledges a white history of racial oppression. They call it “reverse” as though ordinary racism were the acceptable norm.

So who is Q

?

The general mysterious creepiness of the movement has got to be intentional.

Several people have been presumed to be the mysterious leader exposing all the world’s darkness, but only one can be traced back to the very beginning.

This angry white dude is Jim Watkins

For some background, Jim up there, he got his start while in the US Army doing grunt work for the actual soldier-mechanics repairing helicopters. His service record is vague. He was certainly never in a warzone. He was

• a grumbling bastard

that his peers loathed, thinking him a coward and a weakling. They laughed at him, discounted him. Jim had no value to the US military.

Eventually Jim made a name for himself by creating a Japanese porno site

This horror is real, and I apologize for presenting such things to the reader or myself. But these images have been displayed world wide, making fistfuls of money for people like Jim Watkins. He released such pictures to cruelly masturbating outliers, so disgusted with the world and themselves that they fantasized the worst for everyone. They could certainly picture it!

Jim probably found it sexy too. The presumptive Q, this prophet of a new way, he was Muhammad for a growing belief.

Q, however, promoting the horrors, also manages to blame their own sins on others, destroying any faith the world might have in their leaders.

They see things like this

and this

yet all they see is this.

The rabbit in the banner above is about how the members of the cult have “gone down the rabbit hole,” not in the peculiar way that Alice entered into an irrational universe, but somehow reversed, the secrets uncovered from Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum and opening our eyes to the true nature of the world. And so an individual such as Jim Watkins

sounds like a valid source for the New Bible of the social media age.

Let’s explore who this creature is.

So this guy is Frederick Brennan.

Do not feel sorry for this man, with his horrifying physical disabilities, his generally mournful life filled with endless pain and the daily fear of death. Do not pity him, although we should never wish such a man any more harm than he has already done to himself. Frederick suffers from Osteogenesis Imperfecta (Brittle Bone Disease), and we might even hope to help find a way to ease his life.

Of course Freddie is also a destructive cynic, the sort of asshole you meet who tells you everything is shit, the killjoy who ruins your night out with friends. He is also a marketing genius. He is also responsible for the rise of Jim Watkins, and the QAnon movement itself, channelled through his angry 8chan website.

Brennan, a professional gamer, sat busying his immobile life with increasingly brutal video games. Eventually, frustrated with occasional restrictions, he developed 8chan to combat the outrage over so-called “gamer gate,” where it was alleged that “radical feminists,” and “the biased, liberal media,” were forcing gaming companies to remove sexual violence, racism, and targeted political assassinations of real world figures from the entertainment people like himself enjoyed. This eventually led to a campaign terrifying women with public humiliation, kidnapping, and necrophalic murder, all empty threats, but many taken very seriously by both terrified victims and venal Incels.

For Frederick Brennan this was the outlet he was looking for, an audience of angry and miserable young men, barking in cynical voices and targeting people they were proud found them disgusting. But it wasn’t until the guy who ran the technology for the site, Jim Watkins

began making demands, and eventually scared the gloomy Brennan off, sending him to a seperate sour domain where all he needed to talk about is what a bunch of pussies tight-assed gaming censors were, it wasn’t until the kid was out of the way that Watkins took over and declared it a “first amendment” website, and started to run in many different directions.

Watkins, who had evolved his Japanese porno site (always run through American networks to avoid Japan’s pornographic censorship laws) into the more mainstream “Asian Bikini Bar”

, became transfixed by how angry divisive political statements were making people. The concept of “trolling,” a glorious title to a fantasy nerd like himself, monsters under the bridge shouting riddles and riling up the so-called ‘decent’ people, this was a dream come true. Supporting nothing, Jim saw a way he could take his own emptiness and rupture other people’s hope, ruining belief in human progress.

When still supporting each other Frederick Brennan said of Jim’s site

• I can’t tell if Jim owned this domain or just hosted, but, either way…”tiny teen sluts”, “young innocent Japanese girls are violated for the first time right before your eyes!” — Jim offers some great, great stuff.

Jim was exclusively interested in money, neither concerned with the treatment of the models nor his dripping hypocrisy. He said

• I renamed the venture N.T. Technology, a meaningless acronym meant to make pornography purchases less conspicuous on credit card statements.

“Guys don’t like getting caught masturbating to porn,” perhaps he added. “If I charge them thirty bucks a month, and I can hide their identities, and keep supplying dirtier and dirtier images, I can be a millionaire before the end of the year.”

Watkins’ leadership of 8Chan began with the addition of child pornography to the chat boards, the graphic images masked as exposes on what famous liberals are guilty of, with cheaply photoshopped faces placed atop other people’s incongruous bodies, the actual perpetrators of such crimes against humanity concealed because the trouble Jim wanted to cause was far more important than saving innocence.

After this it was easy. Having no moral boundaries, Jim would follow the voices of his raging subscribers. and he would plant suggestions about how everyone in charge, no matter the political party, was in some way involved in a grand scale evil plot to take away our liberty (guns, free speech, being forced to pay taxes, being commanded to not cause public chaos or kill people, et cetera), and crush the very idea of freedom. If you thought gamergate was bad, you lonely rapscallions, then you will not believe what we have in store for you!

Pizza gate was a cheap little slur — Hillary and everyone against humanity

were selling children straight out of this pizza joint, Comet Ping Pong

in DC where Democrats liked to gather, get drunk, and feast.

This whole idea emerged at first on rival sites, the parallel 4Chan,

which promoted itself as a true political site, charging everyone who disagreed with the true liars, putting into doubt everything anyone could possibly believe.

Watkins evolved the growing belief into a remarkable allegation, giving birth in his petrie dish to the germs that became QAnon. The theory kept growing and growing, evolving from its introduction, through the mean-spirited tweets sent to Wikileaks, and eventually published by a shrug-shouldered and increasingly unhinged Julian Assange.

Jim Watkins was proud to have forged a conspiracy theory that the disillusioned masses latched onto not just out of hopeless desperation, but from the selfish conviction that if this were reality then at least life could be interesting again. Jim was a bored man. All of this was for his own amusement.

Jim, a thoroughly unimpressive individual in person,

a man with no access or knowledge whatsoever of the dirty dealings and crimes of the political elite, realized that he needed to invent a mythic figure, a prophet, Q,

a fantasy action figure for sci-fi geeks declaring someone all-knowing and all-seeing was the leak giving the world all the answers to every question or doubt every person has ever had. Q tells you who to blame, and what could make a person feel better than being told that their own failures are somebody else’s fault?

Jim gave his son Ron

a job covering the message boards and putting suggestions out there, assigning the times and places of meetings, and providing links to Q-based merchandise

And with the profits made from these products, QAnon began to rise and rise, consuming whole swaths of angry people.

Now, with social media platforms to vent and convince others readily at hand, it became easy for an otherwise fringe group of snarling people to invade the mainstream (or perhaps pull the mainstream further and further to the edges) with a deadly influence and terrifying impact.

Above, the lady with the gun, is Lauren Boebert, a likely future Congresswoman from Colorado. The woman in red is Marjorie Taylor Greene, a likely future member of Congress from Georgia. Donald Trump and some prominent members of his administration have actively supported these two, while the President himself declared Greene a

• Future Republican star

and

• a real WINNER.

Majorie Greene, for one, has posted political ads like

the gun a shuddering effect for one running for Congress. When called out on this photo, including its potentially racist meanings, her response was

• It is not advertising. It’s incitement.

She declared to her followers that they should

• Hate America(n) leftists (who) want to take this country down. . . .We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart.

Greene has even offered a comment that has been taken up by many QAnon followers, claiming that

• Donald Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the Deep State, and the child sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals like (George) Soros and the Clintons.

She goes on to claim that America is under threat from

• Black and Hispanic . . . gangs . . . dealing drugs

and that there is an

• Islamic invasion

that Jews in collaboration with Nazis are imposing on Christianity. She has even demanded that Ilhan Omar

and Rashida Tlaib

are invalid members of Congress because they swore on the Koran instead of

• the one true bible

and they must reswear on the book of Jesus Christ. She states that the two wish to impose Sharia law, and that Jews like Soros are helping them. She encourages her followers to fight back, yet when death threats were made against the Congresswomen (also including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Greene claimed that the threats of violence she made in no way encouraged the violent death threats, and when asked about this she said

• . . . those who say that are paranoid and ridiculous. Fake news is always looking for the next conspiracy theory. This question is idiotic. . . . the Democrats are trying to cancel me out even before I’ve taken the oath of office (because) I scare them so much.

And Jim Watkins

sits there laughing at what he has created, almost single-handedly, a movement he does not believe in, a cartoon-version of reality that has somehow latched onto the anxieties so prevalent today. One cannot deny that he has done very well for himself, a true online influencer whose name may not be all that well known, but whose impact on the world has been tremendous.

In the end, the final statement on QAnon must be given to its founder:

• It’s all fucking nonsense.

©2020 Lance Polin