The Man Likely Behind QAnon is Now Running for Congress and I Weep for Our Future

A clearly sane Jake Angeli, Public Domain

Hi!

Here's a list of activities (or legitimate political discourse?) by QAnon followers in recent years:

• 2% of all tweets about the 2020 election were from QAnon accounts. They created 8% of all the “#voterfraud” tweets during that period, too. — Source

• A man blocked the Hoover Dam bridge with an armored vehicle and a crazy amount of guns and ammunition. — Source

• A man from California was arrested after allegedly trying to make a bomb in his car to blow up a satanic display in Illinois — Source

• A North Carolina man drove to Washington D.C. to a pizza parlor and fired three shots at the restaurant, believing it was a secret cabal of pedophiles run by Hilary Clinton. — Source

• A man allegedly murdered the leader of the Gambino crime family, believing “he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself.” The same man also tried to “arrest” NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Member of Congress Maxine Waters. — Source 1, Source 2

• A freight train was intentionally derailed in Los Angeles by a follower. — Source

• A Canadian Rangers reservist allegedly rammed his truck through the gates of Justin Trudeau’s official residence. — Source

• A man from California allegedly took his two young children to Mexico and murdered them after being “enlightened by QAanon” — Source

• A mother from LA drowned her three children to save them from a lifetime of abuse. — Source

• At least 40 QAnon followers were arrested for attacking the Capitol on January 6th— Source

• At least 79 QAnon followers have been arrested in the US as of May —Source

• “The Soufan Center reported that Russia and China had amplified and "weaponized" QAnon stories around the time of the Capitol attack ‘to sow societal discord and even compromise legitimate political processes.’” To the tune of around 20% of all tweets from accounts posing as QAnon. — Source

• By August 2020, “Trump had amplified QAnon messaging at least 216 times by retweeting or mentioning 129 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day.” — Source

• A QAnon book was gamed to rise to the top of Amazon, getting thousands of reviews all towing essentially the same line. — Source

• The group was branded as "conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists" by the FBI in 2019. —Source

And now, after Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert successfully proved democracy is an imperfect system, QAnon is promoting “at least 15 candidates – committed to Trump’s ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from him – who are now running to serve as chief election officials in key swing states.”

As in, they want to hold the office of who decides voting outcomes at the state level.

Nothing to worry about, I’m sure.

But the grand cherry on the OH GOD WE ARE ALL DOOMED cake? The man who was highly highly highly likely to be the “Q” behind all of these insane conspiracy theories is now running for congress in Arizona.

A year ago I did a similar deep dive, trying to figure out if enough information was publically available to identify who was actually behind the most ignoramus cult in the history of ignoramus cults.

And I mostly succeeded.

But now, two independent teams of forensic linguists used AI to determine who “Q” really was, based on analysis of all of “Q’s” previous posts.

Their results?

Pretty much along the same lines. Namely, their output showed the original “Q” was highly likely to be South African Paul Furber, a long-term writer of batshit insane conspiracy theories. It was then highly likely taken over by Ron Watkins until he retired “Q” in December 2020.

It was at that point that Ron Watkins, clearly realizing the terrifying damage he had enacted upon the worl…just kidding, of course.

Watkins chose to then step into the limelight of Twitter.

Posting what, you might ask? A large series of claims the election was fraudulent, of course. He was interviewed on OANN, of course, and The Gateway Pundit, of course, and used as an expert witness in a lawsuit by Sidney Powell, of course.

His reward? Over 500,000 new Twitter followers and 5 retweets from Trump.

He performed his new bootlicking role so well that Foreign Policy magazine claimed he was "an integral part of Trump's post-election messaging."

They were both since banned from Twitter, of course.

And now he’s running for office.

This guy:

Ron Watkins, Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0

A man who is likely responsible for manipulating tens of thousands of people with blatant falsehoods and lies which resulted in dozens of deaths and a democracy partially destroyed.

And now, rather than being investigated or imprisoned for creating and propagating conspiracies knowingly leading to kidnappings, murders, a gosh damn assault on the Capitol Building—and the possible demise of democracy in the United States as we know it—he’s found it fit to run for congress.

If that isn’t a sign of these crazy times, I don’t know WTF is.

Big sigh from all the way over here in Taiwan.

Please get your shit together America.

I want to write about fun things again, of course.

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