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Why can't it be music as well?
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I'm Jeremy Hobson. The election is just days away, and on the middle podcast we open the phones to everyday Americans.
Hi, this is Anna from Tennessee.
This is Amari Khan from Houston.
I find it's always good to talk things out rather than bottling things up.
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And even though they can't vote, our election does matter to them.
So keep an ear out for a special cross -border conversation only on the middle with Jeremy Hobson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and we're just getting conspiratorial here on Stuff You Should Know, the podcast.
That's right. The episode we wanted to do so much that it sat in our folder for four years?
I believe it was, yeah, the very beginning of 2021, I would say probably.
Yeah, all right, let's do it.
We are. I've got to say, it's going to be nice to see that removed from my desktop.
It's just been sitting there for so long.
Just staring at you, that cue, like a big blinky, winky eyeball.
Yes, with one single eyelash attached.
So we should probably say at the outset to anybody tuning in that who is like part of the QAnon movement, we're going to approach this as if everything the QAnon movement believes is not true or made up, not from the perspective of people who believe in the QAnon movement, although we'll explain a lot
of the same stuff. I just don't want anybody to get five minutes in and be like, what is this?
Yeah, I think that's a fair COA, and yeah, I mean, that's just the deal.
Yeah, we're taking the anthropological stance, okay?
Yeah, so let's dive in, shall we?
Well, let's give a little bit of a definition for the three people who've never heard of QAnon.
Yeah, and also what I'm hoping is that there's a lot of people like me who actually probably, I probably knew more about it than some people even, but a lot of people probably just sort of knew a little bit or know a little bit about what this thing was slash is, but, you know, didn't really know much
about it. And it's just good to know about stuff, so hopefully that'll brighten some corners of your life as well.
Yeah, and one thing I kept running into while researching this is that there's a lot of families that have been torn apart, families, friendships.
Sure. Because people will go down the QAnon rabbit hole and the friends and family that are like, that's not true, get left behind because they haven't woken up yet.
It's very sad. So yeah, it can really mess things up.
So possibly, there's some people listening to this who have lost friends or family that might be a little wiser to it, might be able to try to get their friend or family member back afterward.
Who knows? Yeah, and the final COA, I guess, is that some of this stuff is so outlandish that it's hard to not laugh, but it's not funny at all.
It's dangerous and scary and sad.
So if I might laugh at something or giggle, it's not that I don't take it seriously, that it's a serious kind of thing that's happened.
Yeah, not even kind of it, very much traipses into the territory of high camp, but is not at all being ironic or campy.
Just approach this as everything we're going to say is believed seriously by people in the QAnon movement.
Sorry, COA number five.
Oh, boy. We're probably going to get a lot wrong.
This is an incredibly expansive, ever -evolving movement conspiracy theory that we're going to walk right past some stuff.
We might misspeak here or there, but hopefully, the general contours and outlines we're going to get to be able to get across correctly.
All right, onward. So this whole thing, the QAnon movement, is an online conspiracy theory that essentially the world is run by a cabal of global elites, mostly liberals, Hollywood types, high government officials, and that they do all sorts of nefarious things, which we'll get into in a second.
But one of the things to understand about this first is that a lot of it is rooted in some really old, existing conspiracy theories, in particular, a lot of anti -Semitic ones that have been around for centuries.
In particular, the blood libel is one that Jews for like a thousand years, essentially, maybe longer, have been persecuted, executed, massacred because of rumors that they steal Christian babies and kill them and use their blood to make leavened bread or unleavened bread for Passover.
And that stuff gets around, and people get all up in arms and scared about their kids being kidnapped.
And then the next thing you know, Jewish people are dead because of this blood libel.
That's part of it. And although Jewish people are targeted in some quarters, you don't have to be anti -Semitic to be a QAnon member necessarily.
That's right. Other things that it echoes from the past are something called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was in the 19th and 20th century, another anti -Semitic conspiracy, basically the tired trope that there's a global Jewish cabal kind of running the world, running the banking system,
plotting to overthrow the gentile governments of the world.
We mentioned Henry Ford, and our Henry Ford podcast was a believer in this kind of thing.
And versions of this, versions of the blood libel have been sort of wrapped up, given a brand -new shine, a coat of wax, and was trotted out as QAnon, which is, and you know, Dave helped us with this many years ago, and thankfully Dave didn't quit his job and he's still around to help us out more.
But it's a catch -all.
This conspiracy that you said is very vast, very wide -ranging, but mostly has to do with these powerful liberal elites that are, some are pedophiles, some are Satan worshippers, some, they claim, literally, eat children.
And we're talking about the Clintons, of course, and we're talking about Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey and George Soros and Ellen DeGeneres, and even the Dolly Lama.
Yeah, and Pope Francis.
So, anybody who's even remotely left -leaning, who holds power in the world, especially in the government or, you know, pop culture, they are probably a part of the secret cabal.
And it checks all the boxes for pearl clutching.
They run the world.
They worship Satan.
They're pedophiles and they're cannibals.
Can you think of a worse group of people than that?
I can't think of any other thing you could throw at the wall to see what would stick.
Like, that's as bad as anything gets.
So the idea behind QAnon, what else?
I've been trying to think.
Give me something else.
Maybe Philadelphia sports fans?
Oh, boy. Now we're going to get some hate mail, man.
That's where the hate mail's going to come from.
So... I'm just getting brotherly love, right?
Yeah, and batteries.
So the whole thing, though, is that these people who are satanic, pedophile, cannibals...
Cannibals. Thank you.
People new to the podcast are going to be like, what's wrong with that one guy?
It's hard to even get that sentence out.
It is. Thanks, man.
That they run the world.
They run things. And it all happens below the surface.
Everything that normies like you and I and probably most of the people listening to this podcast believe is true is brainwashed.
We've been brainwashed by the mainstream media to be given this line that things are the way they seem.
When in reality, things are not at all the way they seem, there's a satanic worshiping cult running the world.
And they're doing all sorts of terrible things.
Those of us who don't believe in QAnon just haven't awakened to this idea yet of what's actually reality.
Right. So that's one part.
Those are the bad guys.
The good guys or rather the good guy is former president and 2024 candidate Donald Trump, who, according to QAnon and the theory, was picked handpicked by the leaders of the U .S.
military to fight these evil forces.
And everything that he he does and tries to do is in service of that mission, anything working against them, even within his own party as part of the deep state plot.
And they are all awaiting what's known or what they they called the storm, which is when Trump reveals who he is and what he has done to fight these evil forces, declares martial law.
And everyone that has been a part of that secret cabal is rounded up by the military and tried and convicted and killed, at which time that the Great Awakening will occur in which Trump and the QAnon supporters are allotted as heroes around the world.
Yeah. And this will this will bring about the founding of a right wing authoritarian regime that Trump will lead.
This is again, this is what they believe is going on.
So when Donald Trump became president, for some reason, he had to play along with this great charade that the liberal leftist Satanists were producing rather than I don't just being overt about what his mission was.
So that means that since he had to play along, he had to leave little like he had to give little winks and nods and leave what are called breadcrumbs, which are little bits of information or little clues that the QAnon community dissects, discusses, argues over.
And what that's called is baking.
They take the breadcrumbs and they bake it.
And when they finally come to some sort of consensus or somebody comes up with the best craziest interpretation of it, that becomes basically the QAnon canon.
And that spreads throughout social media.
And then the QAnon movement just gets that much more solidified, that much more extensive.
And because of these tweets on social media, some people say, well, what the heck is everybody talking about?
And we'll go look this stuff up and very often fall down the rabbit hole and become QAnon members themselves.
That's right. So are we done?
Yep, that was it. That's everything you need to know about QAnon, everybody.
Yeah, let's just read six ads and go home.
There's two more things I wanted to add about this global Satanist, pedophile, cannibal elite that's running the world secretly.
They are also suspected by some to be actual lizard people, which is a direct ripoff of V, the miniseries from the early eighties.
And then secondly, the reason that they sacrifice the kids that they sexually abuse is because they're after their adrenochrome, which is pretty funny.
Adrenochrome is metabolized adrenaline, it's oxidized adrenaline.
And according to QAnon, it's like the elixir of life.
So these Satanists are sacrificing kids to get their adrenochrome and drinking it and they're staying forever young and vital.
And there's a few things wrong with this.
One, it seems to be based on a misinterpretation of what adrenochrome does and where you get it based on fear and loathing in Las Vegas.
Because Hunter Thompson has basically a throwaway intimation that the adrenochrome that he does and goes on a crazy trip over can only be gotten from the adrenal gland of a live human, right?
That's right. And that is not true.
It's synthesized in a lab.
It's available. That is not true at all.
So none of that is true.
OK. So I think we laid the foundation pretty well.
That's essentially the greatest broad strokes of what people in QAnon believe is going on in reality.
That's right. Should we take a break?
I think so. All right.
We'll come back and we'll talk about pizza right after this.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose.
My latest episode is with Jelly Roll.
This episode is one of the most honest and raw interviews I've ever had.
We go deep into Jelly Roll's life story from being in and out of prison from the age of 13 to being one of today's biggest artists.
We talk about guilt, shame, body image and huge life transformations.
I was a desperate delusional dreamer and the desperate part got me in a lot of trouble.
I encourage delusional dreamers.
Be a delusional dreamer.
Just don't be a desperate delusional dreamer.
I just had such an anger.
I was just so mad at life.
Everything that wasn't right was everybody's fault.
But mine, I had such a victim mentality.
I took zero accountability for anything in my life.
I was the kid that if you ask what happened, I immediately started with everything but me.
It took years for me to break that, like years of work.
So wherever you get your podcasts, trust me, you won't want to miss this one.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
25 years ago I wrote my first book called The Tipping Point.
All about the moments when an idea or trend crosses a certain threshold and spreads like wildfire.
I've had a lot of time to think about that book and the way I thought about tipping points changed.
So now I'm releasing the sequel, Revenge of the Tipping Point, where I return to the subjects of social epidemics and the dark side of contagious phenomena.
You can hear a sneak peek of the audiobook on my podcast, Revisionist History.
Plus, we'll dive into a duo of narrative episodes about my favorite trial in American history and a reevaluation of the broken windows theory I explored in my first book.
Find Revenge of the Tipping Point wherever you get your audiobooks and listen to Revisionist History on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.
From thought -provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture.
Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.
Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.
Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we promised talk of pizza.
That's because you can't talk about QAnon without mentioning a bit of a precursor to QAnon, which was PizzaGate.
That is to say, in 2016, and this is, we should say that the first QAnon sort of activity, which are called QAnon drops, started in 2017, kind of what, like October, and this is in 2016, when the Democratic National Convention servers were hacked and emails were published on WikiLeaks, and one of them
kind of rose to the top, which was an email from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign chairman, in which he put forth, hey, there's this pizza place called Comet Ping Pong in the D .C.
area here, and we should hold a fundraiser there.
I don't know if he said this in the email, but the fact is that his brother was a regular there and said, hey, this is probably a good place to do that.
They got pretty good pizza.
They got a bunch of ping pong tables.
It's a good place for people to meet up.
And that was found in, I guess, Exposed, which is kind of a funny way to say it, on 4chan where people started saying, oh, well, that is the HQ basically.
That's ground zero for where this elite cabal is meeting, and they are sacrificing children in the basement of that place.
There is no basement to that place, but who cares about that?
That was what was put forth on 4chan, and hashtag Pizzagate started spreading like wildfire, surprisingly.
Yeah, and the fact that there is no basement means, according to QAnon thinking, that means that it's hidden.
And even if we don't have any proof, it's there because the fact that it's being used by the secret cabal and it's hidden is proof that it's there, right?
That's the kind of circular thinking that keeps these things going.
And in Pizzagate, in particular with Comet Ping Pong, within a month, October 29th was the first post about how this is one of the home bases of this child sex trafficking that this cabal engaged in.
October 29th was the first post.
By December 4th, a little over a month later, a man so riled up by the idea that Comet Ping Pong was a hub of child sex trafficking, drove a few hundred miles from North Carolina to D .C.
and showed up at Comet Ping Pong with the AR -15 and shot up a door to get the door open.
That's right. He also had a handgun on his side.
Nobody was hurt. People got out of there very quickly.
He kind of wandered around the place alone for about 20 minutes, couldn't get in that door, shot it up, told authorities that he was self investigating Hillary Clinton's pedophile ring.
And that was that. He went to jail, is now out of jail.
I think he went for a few years, interestingly sentenced by Kentaji Jackson Brown, who now sits on the Supreme Court.
Oh, really? Side note.
Yeah. But that was it, basically.
But you know, that was Pizzagate, and it was a precursor to what would follow in October 2017, when Q first, I guess, revealed himself, but not really.
Right. Yeah. So I think the first drop was October 28, 2017, on 4chan, which is an image board, which is like you post images, and then people comment on them, and conversations break out.
And in particular, 4chan was known as like one of the really dark recesses of the internet.
And on this image board, a guy named Q Clearance Patriot, the first post read, Open your eyes, many in our government worship Satan.
That was the first Q drop that ever came out in October 2017.
That's right. And Q Clearance, you know, what QAnon means is Q Clearance is a top secret clearance utilized by the Department of Energy, specifically, meaning you have access to the Nuclear Weapons Program.
And the Anon comes from just a sort of a regular thing that would be people on 4chan who claimed to be like part of the FBI, like FBI non CIA, Anon, like, whistle blowing kind of thing.
So QAnon became the name, and claimed to be a intelligence officer, a very high ranking person within the US government who had direct evidence of this satanic pedophile cult, and very clear, approvable knowledge that Donald Trump was on a secret mission from the US military to reverse all this.
Right. And so between October 2017 and sometime in 2020, the Q drops amounted to, I guess, more than 5 ,000.
And they were really, really cryptic.
They were not like, like, hey, this is going on.
Comet Ping Pong is actually a hub of child sex trafficking.
They were very cryptic.
And so that just lent themselves to be dissected and discussed and thought about and interpreted and misinterpreted.
And so there's an example of one from September 2018.
This would be shortly after the whole thing started.
And it said panic in DC, LL talking equals truth revealed tarmac, BC, LL talking equals truth reveal Comey HRC email case.
And it goes on and on.
And it mentions Hussein, which is how Q always referred to Barack Obama.
Thanks for shortening this, by the way.
Yeah. And it just keeps going on.
But the last line is FISA brings down the house, when do birds sing?
And what the what the focus was on was the at the time, the Hillary Clinton email server scandal that Loretta Lynch was the attorney general at the time.
And she met on a tarmac in private with.
Yeah, yes. With Bill Clinton on a plane.
And it was a huge scandal.
And everybody was like, what were they talking about, really?
And all that. So that's what this cue thing reference.
So that was the kind of stuff that they would say, like, like using just people's initials, just really cryptic, short staccato.
Statements or questions.
And that was it. They would just go away and then people would just go crazy trying to figure out what it meant.
That's right. And really, like, get into the deciphering.
I think that was part of the.
Geez, I don't even know if fun is the word to use, but maybe they were having fun.
But part of the whole experience, I guess, is the best way to say it, is is deciphering these message messages, chatting with each other on what everything means, what these initials are, who everyone is.
And just to get that kind of robust conversation going on these dark corners of the Web, initially dark corners and eventually the mainstream social media of the World Wide Web.
Yeah. So like I said, 4chan is considered one of the darker backwaters of the Web.
And then it moved on to 8chan, which became 8kun and it just kept getting darker and darker and darker.
The places these cue drops were happening.
But then eventually, like I said earlier, people would start tweeting about this stuff.
And all of a sudden it spread out from the darker parts of the Web to the more mainstream parts of the Web.
And then the actual mainstream media started reporting on it.
So this thing spread far and wide.
And the more far and wide it spread, the more believable the whole thing became.
You know, like you'd see it everywhere and people were talking about it seriously.
So it was kind of easy to fall down a rabbit hole the further along this whole thing went, just because there was more and more information to be found down those rabbit holes.
Yeah. And, you know, as scary as it is, all of a sudden and you're at home for the pandemic, you have a lot of more time on your hands, you're or maybe, you know, lost your job or something, which would have been awful and have more time on your hands.
And all of a sudden you're reading things like you don't know what 4chan is or 8chan maybe or how to get there.
And all of a sudden you see something on Facebook or Instagram or one of the close to 70 million tweets referencing QAnon related hashtags and phrases over a three year period.
All of a sudden you're thinking like, oh, well, this is stuff I'm seeing on Facebook, which is where I also see pictures of my kid's soccer team.
So that makes it bona fide and believable, which is in itself kind of sad that that's as far as it goes research wise and people digging into that kind of the truth of the matter.
But that's that's what happened.
Well, people also went to the trouble of essentially compiling books, creating lengthy documentaries, all supporting these QAnon theories and explaining them and busting them out, sometimes grabbing actual verifiable real world examples and interpreting them differently and putting the whole thing together.
And so the fact that there's a documentary on this legitimizes it to a lot of people, too.
So there was it just became legitimized weirdly in some really weird, questionable ways.
And again, all of this, the entire thing was in service to the idea that Donald Trump was secretly fighting this cabal and he would bring about the storm one day and people like Nancy Pelosi would be executed live on TV and people were really psyched about that idea.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I mentioned the pandemic because that's when the biggest spike in QAnon activity took place in March of 2020.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is a think tank, did some investigating about just like spikes in activity and stuff.
And March of 2020 is when it really, really took off, of course, when unique Facebook users jumped 161 percent from year over year, basically.
And Twitter discussion of QAnon increased what was at 139 percent over the month as well.
So that's where it started and really got going there.
So when you are on social media and you see there's hashtags like WWG1GA, where we go one, we go all.
But there's a bunch of them.
One in particular was kind of hijacked from a legitimate anti -child trafficking group.
It's hashtag Save the Children.
And the reason that it was hijacked was because this is part of the mission of QAnon is to stop sex trafficking of children, right?
Which is great. But that is one way that a lot of people were kind of innocently brought into the QAnon sphere.
They were looking up Save the Children hashtags because they were concerned about sex trafficking and they ended up on some tweets or on some Facebook accounts of people who are like, now that you're here, let us explain who's actually doing the sex trafficking.
It's Nancy Pelosi and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.
And that's the rabbit hole that they started to fall down through hashtags like that.
Yeah, for sure. And it even got so far as the online retailer Wayfair.
I guess one of the rumors that got going on via QAnon was that if you were cabinet shopping on Wayfair, then that was a secret sort of portal into children shopping.
Instead of cabinets, it was actual children.
And the other thing we did mention about Pizzagate is that when John Podesta and his email was talking about cheese pizza, it was really child pornography.
So things like that were getting twisted around and served to a willing audience.
Yeah, that whole thing, like $10 ,000 cabinets with female names, that just got translated into, well, Wayfair is a sex trafficking site.
And one of the first posts I saw, the person led it with, my Spidey sense is tingling.
And that's how it just took off.
Somebody's Spidey sense was tingling.
There was a weird price for a cabinet and a girl's name, and that's all it took.
So that's how that stuff spreads.
That's how it takes root.
And that's just the thinking that people have with QAnon.
There's all the clues are everywhere and nothing is what it seems.
Yeah, for sure. So we mentioned how presidential candidate Donald Trump was the supposed savior for all this sex trafficking and everything that's going on.
And this became clear if you ever saw Donald Trump rallies then or now still, I'm sure, you would see like Q posters and Q t -shirts and Q flags and stuff like that.
To be sure, we're not saying that Donald Trump was like, hey, everybody, I am that guy, by the way, and literally got involved in this.
When he was asked, though, directly over the years, specifically in August of 2020, they asked him point blank, are you courting these QAnon followers?
He said he didn't know anything about it.
And then quote, I heard that, but I heard that these are people that love our country.
I understand they like me very much, and it's gaining a popularity.
When they followed up with a question about him being the savior from child sex traffickers, he, you know, that's when I feel like he probably had a choice to directly say, like, this is a ludicrous conspiracy.
But he said, you know, is that supposed to be a bad thing?
If I can help save the world from problems, I'm willing to do it.
And the QAnon crowd ate this stuff up, and they thought it was, you know, him sort of secretly saying that he's on their side when he would wear a pink tie, which is a color associated with the movement.
They would say that's him signaling to us another little breadcrumb that he's leaving for us.
Stuff like that. Yeah.
There's also a very famous press conference, a speech he did in the White House in 2017, where he used two hands to drink from a bottle of Fiji water.
And he did it twice during this speech.
And people - I don't remember that.
Yeah. People made fun of him for it.
Like, what's wrong with you?
How do you not know how to drink out of a bottle of water?
But the QAnon supporters were like, yes.
Was that a breadcrumb?
Yes. The QAnon supporters were like, yep, Fiji is a huge hub for sex trafficking.
It's a destination and a hub.
And he's pointing it out to us.
He's letting us know he knows what's going on.
That's what it was translated to.
And that's one of the explanations that a lot of people gave for why it started to take off, is it came along when Donald Trump was early in his presidency and was getting pummeled from every which way.
So this was kind of a way to transform that, to transform the weird awkwardness into this is what's really going on.
He's actually sending us signals.
Yeah. In 2022, Trump started to sort of openly post QAnon theories, where before he danced it around a little more, after he had founded his own social media gathering place, I guess, Truth Social, where he started using QAnon words to refer to himself like he was a martyr.
He literally reposted a Q drop.
They played a QAnon song, WWG1WGA, at one of his rallies.
And over the years, between 2022 and 2024 – here's the stat I was looking for – Trump reposted QAnon content more than 800 times on Truth Social.
So he definitely amplified the message, I guess we could say, in the kindest way.
Yeah, I did the math.
That's a QAnon repost every 1 .36 days.
So that's a lot. And that's a complete turnaround.
I read somewhere to Chuck that at some of his rallies in 2019, he was trying to distance himself from QAnon so much that there were people who went to his rallies who reported that the Secret Service, as they were going through the metal detector, was like, turn your shirt on inside out, because they
were wearing a QAnon shirt.
They're like, we don't want to see those at the rallies anymore because it's just such bad – there's such a bad name associated with it that Trump didn't even want to be associated with it.
But then something happened in 2022.
It's almost like he stopped and actually listened to what they were saying at QAnon.
And he was like, oh, okay, I really do like that.
And he fully embraced it, like you said.
Yeah, but here's the thing, is when you're dealing with a false conspiracy like this that's based on the idea of a deep state and secrets, there's no turning it around.
You can't prove it wrong.
Even if he came out and fully denounced it, which he never did, they would then just say, you know, that he's got to do that because it's all part of the big secret.
So it's one of those sad cases where it's born out of paranoia and untruth such that you can't truthify it.
Like, no amount of truth will get the most ardent believers to think that they're not right.
No, for sure. And one of the things that I saw also that explained it, in addition to like paranoia, anger, that kind of thing, is you kind of hit upon it earlier when you were questioning like, is it fun?
And I think it definitely is fun for a lot of people because I saw it described as hazardous participatory civics.
So like the people in their way are participating in the machinations, the secret machinations of the government.
So I think it is thrilling and fun in a lot of ways, too.
I don't think it's 100 % negative or angry or ragey.
I think that for people in the QAnon movement, there's a lot of positivity to it, too.
And I think there's one other thing to mention about QAnon people here, Chuck, especially the influencers.
They are well aware that their beliefs look totally crazy to people in the mainstream, people like you and me who just believe things are the way they seem, they are.
But to them, we just haven't woken up to reality yet.
So there's not like just a total loss of perspective and self -reflection.
It's just been inverted in a way.
Like you're the one that's deluded, not me.
That's right. All right.
So I think we should take another break.
We'll come back in a second and talk about who this Q person might be.
And stop your emailing because hazardous participatory civics is the best band name that we've ever had.
We'll be right back.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty and I'm the host of On Purpose.
My latest episode is with Jelly Roll.
This episode is one of the most honest and raw interviews I've ever had.
We go deep into Jelly Roll's life story from being in and out of prison from the age of 13 to being one of today's biggest artists.
We talk about guilt, shame, body image and huge life transformations.
It's the only way for anything in my life.
I was the kid that if you ask what happened, I immediately started with everything but me.
It took years for me to break that.
Like years of work.
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Trust me, you won't want to miss this one.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
25 years ago, I wrote my first book called The Tipping Point, all about the moments when an idea or trend crosses a certain threshold and spreads like wildfire.
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So, there's a lot of people in the QAnon movement who tried to guess who Q is.
One of the big candidates was the Trump's first national security advisor Michael Flynn, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, and we'll get to him again in a minute.
But if you don't believe that QAnon's real, there's some really good candidates for who posted these QAnon drops, and crazy enough, it seems to have been two different people, and the second group of people wrested control of QAnon away from the guy who originally started it.
Yeah, and this story gets a little confusing.
Is there a way we can simplify this a little bit?
Yeah, I think I can.
You want me to try?
Well, sure. Well, let me set up the players first, and then you can simplify what happened there.
What everyone seems to think is that the current Q, even though, and we'll get to how much Q is around these days at all a little bit later, but the last Q or whatever most recent was a father and son team named James and Ronald Watkins, internet entrepreneurs, Americans living in the Philippines, where they
ran, owned and ran 8chan, which was that message board that originally hosted that Q account.
The other guy that we need to mention here is a guy named Frederick Brennan.
He was the original creator of 8chan, but left those boards when it became clear that it was just a home for the worst stuff on the internet.
Yes, and he turned into the greatest critic and largest source of information about who really is Q, because he knew the Watkinses.
That's right. And now maybe if you can explain how the mantle was unwillingly passed.
Okay, so what people think is that the first guy who actually was Q was a South African man named Paul Ferber, who was intensely interested and fascinated by American politics and conspiracy theories.
And they think that he's responsible for the first Q drop up to sometime in 2018, that he was the original Q.
The whole thing started on 4chan, but very quickly migrated to 8chan, because apparently Q's account got hacked.
And he had to create a new account, so he moved to the more anonymous, more secure 8chan, and started posting there.
That's right. And he started posting on a message board called CBTS, Calm Before the Storm, and he owned that sub board.
Paul Ferber did, so that was his sub board.
Yeah, and so that means that he could see who was posting.
He could see their actual metadata, right?
So he was the only person who could verify that Q was Q.
Same thing when they transferred from 4chan to 8chan, he was the only person who could verify that this was actually the same guy, same IP address.
So believe me everybody, it's the same Q.
So go ahead Q, essentially is what they were saying.
And then all of a sudden, in 2018, Q, Paul Ferber said, hey, Q's account got hacked again everybody, so we're gonna have to start a new account.
But then, probably very much to Paul Ferber's surprise, Q joined in and said, actually, no, my account hasn't been hacked.
Paul Ferber's been compromised, so I'm gonna start posting it a new board.
This would be a board that Paul Ferber had no authority or administrative duties over, but Jim and Ron Watkins did.
So now they were the only ones who could verify who Q was, and so they think that with that transition, and because they had administrative domain over 8chan, they took Q away from Paul Ferber and started posting his Q themselves.
Yeah, and to be clear, this was the second time that account had been hacked.
I do want to mention also that the first time it was hacked, it was found out that the password for Q originally was Matlock, which I just think is hysterical.
One of the few laughs we're gonna get here.
But the reason that the Watkinses wanted to sort of wrestle that away was because at some point, Thurber started appearing on some right wing conspiracy, like YouTube shows and stuff like that, YouTube programs.
So it was getting out there in a more mainstream way, and the Watkinses were like, hey, we can turn 8chan into a real conspiracy hotbed for the online right wing space.
And so they saw an opportunity, basically.
Right. So it gets way more intricate than that.
Like, Fred Brennan has really gone into great detail to dig up a lot of evidence that all this happened.
And we're not going to go into it here.
But suffice to say that most people agree that he's probably right about this.
It started out as Paul Ferber, and then turned to Ron Watkins.
And the whole thing went until about June 2020, and then stopped.
And those seemed to be the canonical Q drops.
And then they picked up again in, I think, 2022.
And as we'll see, those kind of got ignored, because the community had changed so much in those 18 months without Q dropping Q drops, right?
But in the meantime, the movement had taken over.
I saw it described as it didn't need Q anymore.
It had become its own, what was, I saw written as the world's first open source cult, where anybody could add or subtract or debate or help create this, again, ever evolving mythos of what was really going on in the world with Donald Trump at the center of the whole thing.
And the problem with that is, is that it, it made it out of the darkest corners of the internet, to the mainstream internet, to the mainstream media, and then into real life, to where it very frequently, yeah, I think you could use the word frequently, disturbed individuals who had fallen down the QAnon hole,
acted out in real life violence.
Not just the comic ping pong guy from North Carolina.
There's a whole slew of people who have engaged in real world violence because of what they learned about from QAnon.
Yeah, for sure. There was one case.
I remember hearing about this when, in 2018, this guy pled guilty to terrorism charges because he got an armored truck and blocked the road crossing the Hoover Dam with two assault rifles and had a sign that said release the OIG report, which was referring to the, quote, unquote, real Mueller report
that QAnon believers thought provided, basically kind of exposed Hillary Clinton's criminal activities because, I mean, there were a lot of people that they targeted, but the Clintons, and especially Hillary were obviously because she ran against Donald Trump, but she was kind of squarely in the crosshairs
for them. Yeah, this was at the time people were chanting, lock her up.
Like she was very much in the crosshairs for sure.
And Obama still was too.
He had just finished being president after all when this whole thing started.
One of the most puzzling acts of violence to me in the real world, based on QAnon, was the assassination of a Gambino Mafia boss named Francesco Franky Boy Calley.
And he was killed by a QAnon supporter who believed he was an agent of the Deep State, like a high up agent of the Deep State.
I could not find anything about what that guy's rationalization was for that.
But this is the first time since 1985, this is 2021, I think, the first time since 1985 that a Mafia boss had been assassinated, and it was by a QAnon, adherent.
Just really bizarre.
But if anybody knows why that guy killed him because of that, like I would love to hear it.
Yeah, the other thing that I don't understand, or not understand, but am really curious about is whoever Q is, Watkinsons or not, like what was their end game here?
Did they really and do they really really believe this stuff?
Or is it, are they just bad actors who have a sick, I don't know, not sense of humor, but maybe sense of humor to try and start something like this?
Or was it financially related?
Or was it did do they really believe that?
It's just, that's, that's the one thing I wish I could find out that we'll probably never know.
I know. And I don't know, but I suspect that they don't believe it.
I mean, if they're posing as Q, I don't, I don't think that they actually believe it, you know?
Well, right, because they're not secret government higher ups that really have this information, obviously.
But I mean, do they really believe Tom Hanks is killing and eating children?
No, I don't, I don't think so.
Again, I don't know the people, I don't know enough about them to really definitively say, but just, I don't, no, I don't think they really believe this.
It's even more sad somehow that it is stretched from the darkest reaches in the internet to literal suburban parents who had too much time on their hands between soccer pickups.
Yeah, there is a really sad, disturbing act of violence based on QAnon that happened in 2021, where a man from California killed both of his children, a baby and a toddler, with a spear gun.
Because he believed that they had gotten reptilian DNA from their mother, because remember, lizard people are walking among us.
So he was, he said that he knew what he was doing was wrong, but it was the only way to save the world.
And it was because of QAnon.
He murdered his two children because of QAnon.
And like Paul Pelosi is another one.
He was beaten with a hammer by a guy who was driven by QAnon motivation.
Like the idea, I'm with you, the idea that these guys were just doing it for lulls and because they were nihilistic, or even for money, and that it translated into real world violence like that is just, it's abominable for sure.
That's right. Are we done?
No, we've got to give a little bit of an update.
Okay? Okay. All right, well, I'll start.
So there was a really big problem because Trump was always in charge as part of the QAnon mythos.
No matter what was going on, Trump was in control is the way they said it.
Well, Trump was obviously supposed to be reelected in 2020, but he wasn't.
And so in in following with tradition of kind of prophetic cults, the people in QAnon just essentially were like, okay, well, this is all just part of the act.
This is trust in the plan, and they kind of rationalized it in all sorts of ways.
And that's kind of part and parcel for what they've been doing.
Like the assassination attempt of Trump in Pennsylvania led to a huge crisis initially among QAnon followers because that clearly demonstrated Trump wasn't in control if he was getting shot at.
And so people were like, it was staged.
And other people were like, no, no, no, we got it.
This is proof positive that Trump has been anointed by God to bring the storm to overthrow the satanic cabal, because how else could he have not been shot in the head by the assassin's bullet?
And so I saw that some people who kind of left QAnon after Trump didn't get elected came raging back into it after the assassination attempt.
And there were a lot of families that were like, okay, good, my friend or family members back.
And then, oh, God, there they go again after the assassination attempt.
Yeah, I read a really sad article about the guy who came into the pizza place about him getting out of prison and marrying his girlfriend and having a kid.
And it was, you know, it's just sad, wreck this guy.
Oh, yeah, I'll bet.
That's the kind of thing that kind of follows you around for life, right?
Yeah, I would imagine.
One of the other things that happened post -election, I believe, is Michael Flynn was a luminary member.
Some people thought he was Q.
And he was outed saying privately that he thought the whole thing was total nonsense and that he believed actually it was a CIA PSYOP to discredit the right by making them look foolish and gullible.
So the whole, the community is very much fractured, but it's still very much alive.
There was a poll that found that in May of 2021, 15 % of people believed, Americans, I should say, believed QAnon beliefs in some form or fashion.
You would think that it would have gone down since Trump didn't get reelected.
In fact, it rose by eight points in 2023, two years later.
So the belief in QAnon just keeps spreading and spreading and spreading and becomes more and more mainstream.
And it's even as it does, it gets kind of divorced from QAnon and becomes just what people think about things, about reality.
I'm sorry. I checked out and I was just thinking in my head.
I was just hearing What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong over and over.
That's your happy face.
The Treases of Green.
That's all I heard.
How am I not surprised that you do a great Louis Armstrong?
Oh, he's easy. I would have guessed you did the Izzy Hawaiian guys version.
Oh, that's a fun one too.
Oh, no, he did Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
There's one other thing.
Let's leave on a semi -positive note, Chuck.
A couple of different places.
I saw people who were interviewed who had lost a friend or family member or hung on to a friend or family member while they'd fallen down the Q rabbit hole.
And the fact that they'd gotten them back universally was because that person stuck with them, let them know they didn't agree with them, but they loved them nonetheless.
And as they put it, provided a soft landing place for the people when they finally were like, this isn't real.
I can't believe that I've believed this for so long.
And they were there for them without any kind of judgment or cruelty or I told you so.
And that helped allow the people to kind of get back on their feet in a very gentle manner.
Yeah. And there's a lot of great websites and organizations that have now had to help people through this stuff.
And like how do you help your family members and things like that?
Like you were just talking about.
Certainly one place you can start is the Anti -Defamation League website.
But there are plenty, plenty of places to go.
So you don't just like argue with your family member and tell them they're not using, you know, rational thought with stuff like this.
You got to try a different tack there.
Yeah. Yeah. And there is all sorts of advice all over the internet.
So if you want to look, go find it.
And be careful what you do look for there.
Be careful of the hashtags you follow.
And since I said that, obviously it's time for listener mail.
That's right. A quick, not correction, but just enlightening because we've had a bunch of people write in already about our glasses episode because we could not figure out why Livia titled her research for eyes bad.
And this is from just one of them.
This is from Marty.
Hey guys. Listen to the episode about glasses.
Great as usual. I've been wearing glasses for over 40 years regarding the phrase for eyes bad.
I believe that is a joke reference to the book Animal Farm by George Orwell in the book.
The animals use the phrase four legs good, two legs bad as they rise against the humans.
That must be it. Love the show.
Longtime listener. That is from Marty Mishka from Omaha, Nebraska.
Parentheses living in the blue dot and I haven't read Animal Farm in so long.
I completely forgot that, but I bet you are right on the money because that's a very Livia kind of Easter egg.
Yeah, that is a deep cut literary wise.
So nice work, Livia.
And who is that Marty?
That was Marty, but many people have written in and will continue to.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Marty.
And thanks a lot to everybody who's written in to let us know, help us figure that out.
We love that kind of thing.
If you want to be somebody like that, you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio .com.
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I'm Jeremy Hobson. The election is just days away and on the middle podcast, we open the phones to everyday Americans.
Hi, this is Anna from Tennessee.
This is Amari Connor from Houston.
I find it's always good to talk things out rather than bottling things up.
So why not open the conversation up to our closest neighbor, Canada?
They are America's biggest trading partner, after all.
And even though they can't vote, our election does matter to them.
So keep an ear out for a special cross border conversation only on the middle of Jeremy Hobson on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey fam, I'm Simone Boyce.
I'm Danielle Robé. And we're the hosts of The Bright Side, the podcast from Hello Sunshine that's guaranteed to light up your day.
Check out our recent episode with Grammy Award winning rapper, Eve, on motherhood and the music industry.
No, it's a great, amazing, beautiful thing.
There's moms in all industries, very high stress industries that have kids all across this world.
Why can't it be music as well?
Listen to The Bright Side from Hello Sunshine on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Trust me, you won't want to miss this one.
