QAnon 101: The Search for Q

q anon is the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity you know currency of the elite basically is babies [Music] drinking children's blood adrenal chrome this stuff has been going on where we go one we go there was a new phenomenon this week something called q anon what exactly is q and on and why is it making headlines now on saturday october 28 2017 an anonymous post on the message board calm before the storm on 4chan 4chan which is an anonymous online message board claimed the arrest of hillary clinton was scheduled for the following monday the anonymous user claimed to be a high-level government insider but signed the post only q a nod to q level security clearance granted by the department of energy an army of digital soldiers quickly began to research the questions that q posed god bless america and trump began retweeting accounts associated with q our president just gave the most damning cue proof ever the president condemns and denounces any group that would incite violence this is a militant group there's been two murders tied to this group this year alone anon is a military operation that's why they're not allowed to talk about it as q supporters started running for congress and headlines about q invaded everyone's social media feeds millions around the globe began asking their family and friends what is q anon we have an army of digital soldiers you're dealing with one of the most experienced spies you're ever going to meet it was meant to be kind of like a big joke it's called to cue a non a fringe conspiracy theory that some have likened to an online religion well i don't know much about the movement other than i understand they liked me very much as long as these drops are still continuing it matters a lot because who's writing them and who is having all this influence what exactly is q and on and why is it making headlines now we're right there [Applause] my entire life i've been a bit of a political nerd so unsurprisingly i've spent my career on campaigns or working on public policy at think tanks in washington dc growing up in israel i saw what it looks like to be at war with your neighbor i became a filmmaker to tell stories that positively address ideological divides back in 2012 i helped launch a youtube channel soul pancake soul pancake where our mission was to make videos that inspired deeper conversations than you can typically find online after the 2016 election a friend talked me into quitting my stable job and spending a really weird couple of years making a documentary with him active measures yeah no you've seen it when marley came to la for her film launch we discovered we were both fascinated by a new phenomenon on the scene an anonymous figure known as q connected both of our worlds the internet and politics i wanted to know q's identity who the person behind the cloak was because it seemed like a political operation designed to weaponize divisions and foment distrusted institutions i recognized the same tools of online radicalization that were being used abroad were now being used in america what i didn't see happening in the coverage around q was a desire to better understand why q exists and as a result things have become much more hostile which is a threat to our national security and democracy as a whole so in the middle of a pandemic bayern and i packed our bags and headed out to find q nearly everyone has a friend or family member who suddenly began posting about q in the last few years and i'm no exception we're starting in tampa florida meeting with bayern's friend jt to learn how a former bernie supporter took a turn and has devoted his career to q it feels like the perfect starting point to get an understanding of what cue is and how it's attracted to so many [Music] people [Music] my friend jt is a talented musician who was inspired by q's posts and started writing music about q so i took my hair down i mean it looks very majestic one thing that we connected on early on was that you were a bernie guy in 15 right yes and the reason why cause he he he said break the establishment how did you go from bernie to trump bernie got kicked out of the running i was furious at hillary [Applause] and then trump came out he started saying the things that i liked about bernie which was fighting against the establishment our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt and when i say corrupt i'm talking about totally corrupt political establishment so how did you find q jordan sather who i love literally probably the two days after q posted i saw his feed about it and i'm like what the heck is this hue information all of this is just going to be uh mainly questions i'm going to throw out there and thoughts for you guys to ponder it was so so strategic to like reel you in you know right you like they put in a code and you're like what the hell does that mean and then you figure out what it means you go whoa they figured out what it means it's a game but it's game with insider information that you can't get from anywhere else it's like going to college for the deep state so it wasn't like a moment it was kind of like gradual and over time that you just listen anybody that is involved in the q movement that can admit it's a psyop is too blind to see that it's a psyop it is a psi out what's a scion it's a psychological operation a psyop or psychological operation is usually a military-led strategy to influence a population's emotions motives and objective reasoning after we finished our interview in the parking lot i hopped in the car with jt to catch up right after 2016 i was reunited with one of my best friends we had we started a band it was my dream to be playing with him again i had everything lined up and and in the way you know i thought that i wanted my career to be and and uh and then this happened and my eyes were opened to something that i knew existed and i couldn't put my finger on it and it gave me an opportunity to uh start to put my finger on it in 2018 jt was inspired by q and started writing songs for the movement the songs all came out and um beginning of 2019 he just said nah dude i can't be i can't be around that unfortunately for jt his best friend was not as inspired by cue i had i of course i love the guy i honor him and it was almost like an ultimatum like i could put it away i could like say well this isn't worth um you know just writing music about all the time and for some you know reason i i didn't make that choice i made the choice to take the hard road where we go one we go all um because well i'm a rebel and nobody's gonna tell me what to do we pulled over to eat and jt got an alert on his phone what just happened yeah so dude like you just posted says that this nation under god shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth abraham lincoln november 1863 together we win the question i get from people that don't really know about q but just have heard of them is you know it does make you wonder why they would try so hard to make it sound awful and bad and evil and it's like they thousands are thousands of articles written about about it as a insane and evil and uh extremists conspiracy group whose theories make alien invader claims sound mainstream falsely claim that the world is run by a satanic cabal of elites the bureau warns some of those conspiracy theories will likely motivate some domestic extremists if it was all and it was all fake why would they try so hard to diminish it this is all insane and incoherent it's because they know it isn't it's real but you know dude i just can't wait for a day when we can just sit back and like go see football again to not have to worry if if there's going to be a a protest on the field let them just be the nfl and if people want to watch it they watch it and um that's akin to like you as people saying to you as an artist being like well you just sing songs about booze and women and money and cars but like don't touch this other stuff because that's not what i come to k2l for like no no i love you i love you i triggered you now no no but i just i love that that you know you can you can make me see something i wasn't seeing and and um and we laugh about it man and it's you're right much love dude it was great meeting you guys while jt was drawn to q because of political frustrations and q's gamified model pulled him in further we wanted to see how the q and on conspiracy theories can quickly radicalize everyday americans coming up after the break i i do think that at very high levels it it also involves sort of ritualistic um practices some cold stuff imagine eyes wide shut but with kids q anon satanic rituals drinking children's blood adrenal chrome where did they come from humanon is the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity how responsible are they for the attack on the capital should cube be classified as a domestic terrorism threat and where are they headed next they will excuse and encourage any amount of violence against their political enemies qanon the search for cue three-part investigative event begins tuesday at 10 on vice let's do this bunker times this is really where i shine wow let's go over like sort of just q and on 101. all right so q drops are these cryptic posts that come directly from an anonymous figure that goes by q the people who read those drops they're the ones who are referred to as a nons and that's where the anon part comes the most dedicated anons are known as bakers so if you give me an hour of your time by the end of this you'll probably be able to make up your mind whether you think q is a larp is a phony or whether you think q is worth paying attention to and what those bakers do is they take q's drops which are also called breadcrumbs they obsessively research it and then they create content that could be videos it could be tweets or posts that then interpret it for the general public okay so they're the bakers are the people who are wrapping the breadcrumbs together and creating this actual thing exactly putting it in the oven you know but i will say the og's uh jordan sather praying medic in the matrix uh and dustin nemos yeah that's just that's an abbreviated list yeah all right i don't know if you know this but dustin is on the lineup to be at qcon in jacksonville this weekend let's do it okay q anon's book an invitation to the great awakening shot to number one on amazon's list of best sellers the book contains a compilation of unproven radical conspiracy theories suggesting high-ranking democrats are part of a cult that eats children claiming the government created aids and saying it's also behind the movie monsters inc dustin nemos is a fixture in the queue world in 2018 he published q anon an invitation to the great awakening making him quite literally the guy who wrote the book on cue so the fake news has really gone from ignore q anon to attack and it's beautiful to see first they ignore you then they ridicule you then they attack you and then you win and we are winning my friends sorry i know it's tough but do you think there's something i can try maybe i'm a little sensitive to light because i stay up too late three years of that man i don't work out anymore either i just sit at the computer for like 17 hours a day you are really one of the leaders of the q movement um people look to you in your opinion if we could just start with uh who you are just give us a rundown of i'm i honestly i'm just a entrepreneur who started a youtube channel and that took off and it turned into uh sort of a surprise career i mean i was just covering the news um but then i was banned a month before my daughter was born so here i am with bill's a baby on the way and a pregnant wife and it's like winter six feet of snow outside and i'm about to be evicted because of youtube what was the first time that you kind of ran into q christmas eve 2017 i jumped in new q posts going into who and where the pedophiles in government are when i started to see some of the um the games that they were playing with trump's twitter for example that's when i really started to pay attention to it one famous example he had a zero zero zero zero second difference on a post that q and trump posted at the same time three times in one day so there's like a no time at all difference that was all right guys that's sort of our methodology of establishing who he is and that it's the real legitimate cue uh when they asked president trump to say tip top tippy top and he did so on easter that's a very specific phrase and we keep it in tip top shape we call it sometimes tippy top shape speaking of the messenger there have been a lot of theories on who q is uh first of all do you do you have your own theory i have a few you have a few do you want to tell us i don't want the world to know who q is because it will probably get the team killed okay does that change for you if tomorrow's q drop says that now is the time everybody get their guns and we are going to start take to the streets and hunt these leftists no i would defend them you would defend the leftists yes how do you think the rest of the community would respond i would honestly put forth without even knowing the numbers that the q movement is the most peaceful movement in the history of mankind and i think they would look to trump for sort of clarity on that to me what i see is a lot of people who actually really do want to converse before we reach this tipping point where we can't anymore and in a way i think like this doc is is an attempt to do that you know i hope so that would be great okay but you think that q as a movement will continue to come together post in a post-trump world sure the need would not have stopped kids would still be getting hurt and and probably more boldly than ever because if they had beaten trump then they had kind of beaten the great challenge to their rule so um you know currency of the elite basically is babies they're they're trafficking in children and it's used as blackmail with entities like epstein and nexium it's used to control powerful people like we know maxwell allegedly has uh tapes on high-level us politicians i do think that at very high levels it also involves sort of ritualistic practices some occult stuff and i think that's that's probably kind of a mind control thing you know imagine eyes wide shut but with kids it does carry with it uh part of a conspiracy that's existed for a very long time adrenal chrome is a legitimate drug what is this that stuff adrenicron um it is harvested a specific way and that is through torture and um adrenalization you know fear and pain most often from children adrenochrome is a chemical compound used in some countries to treat blood clots it is not harvested using the pain or fear from children while child trafficking is a real problem there is no evidence to suggest that elites are torturing children to harvest adrenochrome so uh this stuff does happen uh child trafficking is a big business you know multi multi billions of dollars you can sell drugs once you can sell guns once you can sell a child 100 times a day gosh that's dark as our camera team was packing up dustin made one last comment do you happen to know what panda stands for in the cue movement no no i didn't think so uh dustin went on to explain one of the most violent and horrific acts imaginable it shows how for many who see the world through queues filter suddenly the most ordinary things like pizza hot dogs and pandas become confirmation of the worst possible assumptions that you can make about someone coming up after the break bucky wolf out in the pacific northwest this was a young man who was very troubled got into cubanon and he allegedly killed his brother with a samurai sword because he was convinced he was a lizard that's what makes it dangerous it's a call to arms centered around an idea that the people who should be in some way targeted are not even human beings humanity has a complex relationship with psychoactive substances join me as i travel the world to study their chemistry and impact on society [Music] the toads science what's the problem a show about psychoactive substances new season premieres monday at 10. will summer is a national reporter for the daily beast his focus on cue has resulted in him becoming the target of q and the anons and angelo curacao is the president of media matters for america a non-profit media watchdog that has been tracking cues since its creation why is q anon considered so dangerous you know we've always gone after the right we've you know had death threats before and other sorts of things um this has been different you know we've had to have security at the office during periods of time because of the amount of threats that have happened it's harder to i think ensure the safety of staff they go after us and they use the same tactics that they use on people every day doxxing harassment trolling boxing is you know they will pull private information and post about it online you know not that long ago somebody docked my sister and my niece i hear you know several times a week i would say from people who have lost their families to q anon or have lost a husband or a son or a mother and these are often people who you know they go on facebook you know in march when the pandemic's starting and suddenly they see all this q anon stuff and they just fall head first into it a lot of it is tied into the same actions and behaviors that makes them deeply connected to q anon you are doing your own research you're investigating you're deciphering clues you're invested in the idea in a different way than just say believing a conspiracy theory it's a lot harder to disentangle somebody from that should queue be classified as a domestic terrorism threat q anon we know in one case has already inspired domestic terrorism in the case of the the hoover dam armored truck situation you know that there's a man on the bridge with a gun in 2018 a man blocked the entrance of the hoover dam in an armored truck with a sign that said release the oig report they were convinced based off of all this chatter and the queue threads that inside this report finally all of the prime people within the deep state that were running this child sex trafficking conspiracy would be exposed i think with q and it's certainly sort of it can give a sort of force for these people who are already disturbed bucky wolf out on the pacific northwest this was a young man who was very troubled got into cubanon and he allegedly killed his brother with a samurai sword because he was convinced he was a lizard stating i will dash you lizards to pieces like pottery bucky wolf was a young man who fell down the q rabbit hole and became convinced donald trump was communicating with him through coded messages on the keyboards anthony camel is another q anon related crime 24 year old anthony camillo was taken into custody he basically just falls down the queue and on hold like so many people have before and he decides that uh you know he's going to go citizens arrest the head of a mafia family and so he figures out where this guy lives and he rolls up you know allegedly and slams into the guy's truck and shoots him and then camelo gets in court and he holds up his hand and he's drawn a cue on it and i mean people were stunned there's a few major narratives and themes but they always weave it back to this idea of this massive operation of child sex trafficking and the reason why all these democrats and the media and deep state are running these child sex trafficking rings is because they're demons feeding off of these children we're talking about people in banking in hollywood we're drinking children's blood so this is playing on some kind of like classic anti-semitic tropes i mean the george soros looms very large and q anon which means they're not human they're otherworldly that's to me is what makes it dangerous it's a call to arms centered around an idea that the people who should be in some way targeted are not even human beings i think the initial reaction is surely this can't be and surely you know we're talking about maybe a dozen kooks on the internet but then when you start kind of showing to people that really i mean this is the internet reaching into our real worlds and this is really happening and you know we can't just look away from it how big do you think the movement is overall i put it about 10 of the population 10 to 15 though the size of the movement is widely debated angela's assessment closely matches ours which lands at about 30 million followers in the u.s it is true that some of the trafficking stats are awful it's actually a reflection of having bad domestic services so i don't dismiss it i embrace it so yes this is a terrible thing and we better damn well do something about it but the answer is not to run to to any right-wing philosophy that's going to strip those services more i think on kind of a more mundane but still very tragic level i think just people who are alienated from their family from their relatives because they get so into queuing on and then suddenly it's all they want to talk about on a personal level i understand that you have seen this in your own life yeah would you be comfortable talking sure i mean it happens to everybody um even if they they don't fully appreciate even know why that person seems to be gone um you know it you know in my case it's a family member it's an uncle who's gone fully down the cue rabbit hole somebody that i grew up with telling me that donald trump was gonna put my head on a pike you know and like at least i would assume knows that i'm not like running this like massive child sex trafficking ring where i'm a demon eating children i would at least assume that it's pretty clear that he's gone and um yeah he's gone he's completely gone very sorry to hear that yeah that's terrible yeah a lot of times when we think about this the violence like this it seems like it's gonna be in the context of political violence and sure i think that's possible but i actually think it's going to be like most violence that occurs with people they know and love because they will be convinced that they're doing something nefarious that they're running a child sex trafficking ring that they're members of the deep state and they will take matters into their own hands coming up after the break if q does exist and q is real and we are finding out that there is this satanic worshiping and devil and all this stuff if this proves all of that stuff that will make me happy because it will have undeniable proof that satan exists and you have to acknowledge that christ exists q anon satanic rituals drinking children's blood adrenal chrome where did they come from is the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity how responsible are they for the attack on the capital should q be classified as a domestic terrorism threat and where are they headed next they will excuse and encourage any amount of violence against their political enemies q anon the search for q three-part investigative event begins tuesday at 10 on vice we're in chicago to meet dominic izzo a former police officer an online personality who recently began looking into queue oh this one's gonna piss a lot of you off all right how would you describe q to someone who's never heard of it before q is about ending child sex trafficking i don't know another worthy cause outside of that i got bit by the cube bug back in february of this year i think that it was just about the beginning of the lockdown or so before march um i don't recall what it was i thought no i think it was the janet osbard fall of cabal documentary i was captivated and i watched and i watched and i watched and for me somebody who's pretty good at discerning somebody who's pretty good at needing and requiring facts to make a concrete decision i was i wanted to believe it bad what brought you to become a police officer ideology i wanted to change the world are you kidding me loved it i'm christian i was raised catholic well you start looking at what is supposed to be the most righteous organization on the planet rome the vatican the catholic church how hard is it to believe then that you flip that side of the coin and there's going to be a darker more nefarious cabal if you will that is operating off of the same aspect satanic rituals drinking children's blood adrenal chrome this stuff has been going on if q does exist and q is real that will make me happy because it will have undeniable proof that satan exists and you have to acknowledge that christ exists that's insane right ashley bryan is a co-founder of win black polante national campaign hub designed to counter disinformation you're using misinformation and disinformation sort of interchangeably do you find a distinction in those misinformation is without intent in the beginning of the pandemic right there wasn't a lot of information out there the country was scrambling to figure out what's happening disinformation is with the intent to disinform i like to just call them plain old lies quite honestly just the did an instagram post recently that you referred to blm supporters as subhuman 100 what do you mean by that 100 black lives matters anybody who supports them is is subhuman in my opinion i mean i support black lives matter am i sub-human i'm very black and white and i'm extremely polarizing my my sub human that's always going to be my emotional uh polarizing post because i absolutely always post for controversy's sake and to create and to store a narrative the other thing that we're noticing a lot is like language that dehumanizes black lives matter what is the effect of that type of language it has large effects simply being a black person in america is challenging and so to be beat down and diminished and dehumanized as you said it just continues to add this additional layer don't you deserve to know who i really am don't you deserve to know oh he thinks that these people are subhuman 100 another favorite of yours seems to be the pushing that michelle obama's a man can you talk to us about that it's i oh i hate that woman then i will go down that conspiracy theory when she's dancing on ellen you bet i love enjoying these these fantasy and fantastical uh uh possibilities that are out there i'm not a fan of her personally so why would you know why wouldn't i go low and this just goes to show how dark these groups are willing to go because to use that you know transphobic type of of commentary when it's so easily debunked i know i mean i think that's the most confusing thing to me is that they double down on these lies that literally takes a half a second for someone to debunk i mean it's like this birtherism right it's it's you know all of these narratives are are just it's pure ridiculousness are these sophisticated tactics no they're able to do that because they have a listening ear to folks that are willing to believe these narratives to make themselves feel better to make them make them feel better about their unfounded hate they're my opinions and at the end of the day you know i guess i'm i i'll be an but i still will hope you'll see that that's a that's a part of me but it doesn't define everything that i am that was really rough for me uh talking to dom was really unsettling i felt uh i was sort of taken aback at how offensive a lot of the things he said was in this sort of very friendly manner right he's like looking us in the eye and was like yeah yeah i think you're subhuman right yeah i mean i think and the thing his follow-up to that of explanation which is that over time he learned that creating posts that were as polarizing as possible was a way that he can kind of grow his audience online and i think that's a great example when you read between the lines of how social media amplifies kind of the most outrageous messages as a police officer he's had this training and he understands how to investigate things and yet looking at these numbers he felt that he's doing something about it by just posting these things instead of joining a legitimate organization that's fighting human trafficking and that save our children thing becomes kind of the soft the soft pill before you get to the other level of cue right like you kind of come in the door with like let's stop child sex trafficking and then you leave thinking there is this global conspiracy and i think that the thing that stands out to me when i think about the difference between those is they actually get to this roots movement and it's not it's some person somewhere that has made a decision to do this make put these ideas in people's head yeah so i guess i just don't at this point like don't really know how much of that i know to be true how do we untangle the web you know that's been created to try to put some order to what just appears to the outside viewer as chaos let's work on it now the chance may seem chaotic to the naked eye but the chands are actually a constant competition who can create the most viral or outrageous thing this girl went missing and now wafer is selling this cabinet with the same name for 12 000. [Applause] here in minneapolis they set an apm curfew they don't give a damn about a curfew [Music] i'm impressed what do you want us to do you're really worried this will be used for butterfly they don't want us to vote vice news tonight monday to thursday at 11 on [Music] vice [Music] you think this is a distraction no i'm done with this this is why cnn is a joke who can't even report the facts on daily news we're standing up for the whole world for all the kids great awakening here [Music] everybody i have enough for everybody in the crew so you can come and grab me julian field jake rockettansky and travis view have watched the q movement unfold since the very beginning [Music] in august 2018 they launched a podcast called q anon anonymous more than two years later it has become the go-to place for those who are curious looking for the latest update so how do you guys think that q went from being just this sort of obscure movement on the internet living in the chance to a political movement so q started on the 4chan message board the chance uh they go back to japanese nihilism two-channel and other image boards that became prevalent there among young people who didn't have opportunities and uh you know and were just like well i feel alone and disconnected i can't get a girlfriend and so that culture kind of spread to united states what started defining them is the anonymity and go there and say anything just let it loose doesn't matter no no consequences now the chance may seem chaotic to the naked eye but the chands are actually a constant competition who can create the most viral or outrageous thing one classic example is the wayfarer conspiracy theory this girl went missing and now wafer is selling this cabinet with the same name for twelve thousand dollars but that's not it this girl missing this cabinet with coincidentally the same exact name that she has thirteen thousand dollars even though there's no substance to this it caught on amongst people who maybe have never even heard of q the actual people who they would play oh yeah the big person yeah come up on facebook why am i mad because i'm not missing out of here it does seem like there were iterations of q over time and it continues to evolve were there any precursors the insider anon was a common genre on 4chan you know prior to q anon there's one called fbi anon in 2016 who also claimed to have insider information about the imminent prosecution of hillary clinton so this was a common genre of post and usually you know this supposed insider claims that you know some big thing is going to happen and the anons play along or they try to trip them up mostly treated as a game you guys have studied this more than anybody i mean really so who is it who's you i mean could it be some kid in their basement in new jersey or wherever you know who sort of made this larp and all of a sudden it it hit and now maybe he's got a couple friends working i mean it's it almost doesn't matter really who it is anymore some evidence has been gathered of who may or may not be involved there's the early days in which we get to see the kind of early influencers like tracy beans or pamphleted on there's that small crew then we don't know if it's changed hands a bunch of times now at this point we do know that there's another point where some evidence is gathered which is through uh 8chan and now eight itself uh jim watkins and his son ron watkins who run eight and people around them like they at the very least have verified the identity of q and said this is the correct and authentic cue they've had to do that multiple times over so he uh or she or they whoever q is has at the very least be in contact with them and jump through some hoops to kind of reassert that they're cute so we've talked to a ton of people in this community and it is very clear to me that certainly this has been massively impactful i want to know who's behind it let's do this okay so top theories there was the theory of patriot soapbox that was the theory that this company patriot soapbox which was made up of a woman named tracy beans who's a youtuber and coleman rogers and paul ferber said they were sort of i guess bakers but seemed to have a lot of access and then there was videos of tracy yelling at the president that she's cute there is the idea that this was all joke right all for a long time oh yeah that was big in 2018 when jack sobia came out saying that i know who q is i'm going to publish this report on oan i've talked to the founders we started q as a joke on trump supporters and we just wanted to see how far we could take it i could see that being a funny joke recently i just heard this and i've been trying to reach out to him but this guy fred brennan who started 8-chan is claiming that the guy who now runs 8-chan jim watkins that's his name jim watkins uh is the person who controls q who else do we have to look into yeah i mean the last one i think we shouldn't rule out yet is that it actually is somebody close to the president well i'm just not gonna give it that kind of credit though right now so uh we're gonna say that for me the thing that seems most promising at least from just an entry point is the watkins theory so uh let's talk to fred fred brennan has made national news by appearing on my favorite podcast reply all saying that his former business partner jim and ron watkins have taken over q's account i'm making a very specific claim he's not a maker he's a taker he took 8-chan and now he's taken q it is known that he has control over the q account we good where'd you pull that water from just behind the dog what else you got so before things got all darkened up what was like the problem you know that you were looking to solve launching hm the reason i really made a channel was just because i thought that the users of 4chan don't have enough control of the topic of the board that they're only 30 or 40 boards in the whole kind of early tens i very much believed that users having control of the board was a good thing but everything changed in september 2014 when rival platform 4chan banned all discussions of gamergate a coordinated harassment campaign against women working in the video game industry before gamergate we got like a hundred bullets per hour and then after gamergate it was like seven thousand six thousand okay am i gonna kick them off or look at all these users i have now i made the shitty decision to allow them to stay and yeah that totally changed the site hi guys i'm jim was that kind of when when the watkins family is reaching out to you really landed uh-huh yeah the watkins family's pitch to me we own this huge japanese site that gets millions and millions of anonymous posts per day and we want to help you host a channel any problem you're having will fix it they said you know we'll have a contract it'll be like 60 40 of future profits and you know back then i thought there might be some future profits so i went to the philippines in october 2014. so what was your like day-to-day life like in the philippines really easy i mean it really easy compared to here you know all i had to do was kind of focus on hm which took up what my entire day seemed like hey maybe this will work you know but then the shootings happened q anon satanic rituals drinking children's blood adrenal chrome where did they come from humanon is the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity how responsible are they for the attack on the capital should q be classified as a domestic terrorism threat and where are they headed next they will excuse and encourage any amount of violence against their political enemies humanon the search for q three-part investigative event begins tuesday at 10 on vice hours before a 28-year-old australian man calmly walked into this mosque and murdered 51 people he posted a 74-page manifesto laying out his motivation on a website called 8chan i just felt like this isn't maybe such a good idea after all wanted to take it down problem just became that watkins had other ideas proactively censoring something that they would do in the people's republic of china americans don't do that in the beginning when q is maybe 10 to 20 of our users we don't need need it but now where after the shooting queue stops posting their entire site will have no traffic they can't let q stop posting basically by that time fred had washed his hands of his creation paving the way for a full takeover by the watkins 8-chan was now the exclusive home of q-drops fred believes that jim and his son ron also took over q's online persona i knew that queue would move to 8th gen because ron was real excited about that you know and oh we're going to get all this traffic from the q board that moved and you mean like did he bring that business in basically i mean i feel like he he was kind of communicating with paul ferber at the time and making paul forever feel comfortable with 18 basically paul ferber is the first guy we know for sure was running a q-related board 4chan became so unusable that then we all moved to 8chan and the board that i created which was calm before the storm cbts six months after the christchurch murders 8chan is shut down the watkins migrate everything to a new board they call aitkun and q follows while many believe the watkins control the posts fred suspects there may be others working on cue behind the scenes he kind of has all these guys who would be willing to lie to people you know and to write cue style posts i've heard different names thomas john inverter heard his name thrown out tell me about who's that i've tried to avoid going down the thomas rabbit hole because i know people who have and they haven't ever brought anything concrete out of that rabbit wall when you look at this long enough the idea that this is a network of people not an individual not sexy for a documentary right or like a media piece it's not sexy but it's but it's the truth but it's the truth but as long as these drops are still continuing it matters a lot because who's writing them and who is having all this influence who else is kind of in the background and we don't know where do you think jim watkins is right now abc news told us he's somewhere in america you should get you should try to find him he'd probably be somewhere in california actually we all agree that jim has something to do with cueing on you know the publishing of q drops right now but it doesn't really answer a lot of questions for all of the things before uh jim watkins took over a queue like how what was the involvement there and more importantly what was the origin story unsurprising about the jim watkins accusations but interesting about this thomas schoenberger character i think we should definitely look into that yeah hit the bunker good job that was the worst high five nope that's clearly not gonna work ready wait you don't even know wait what so jim watkins is going to be in phoenix tomorrow no way like nobody has talked to this guy yes someone's got to ask jim the queue someone needs to ask that guy the queue so this seems like our shot that's exciting i also have a thing though um this guy thomas schoenberger yep uh i've been looking into him and he's too weird not to go further on uh what kind of weird yeah this is a guy who uh writes music for babies um to make them smarter i don't really know what happens next but apparently he has since really gone down a very dark turn and has now several really serious criminal charges against him including defrauding a bunch of old women of their life savings and also a felony stalking charge um that is a dark turn pretty darn really work in both ends of the age spectrum with the babies and the old people yeah that's what it's making really monetizing definitely not sure yeah so we basically have two key suspects at this point on one hand there's jim who we know has some level of influence over q we just don't really know how much and to play devil's advocate just because he controls the board where q posts doesn't mean that he is actually writing the post our second theory that's incubating and forming right now is figuring out who this guy thomas schoenberger is because fred mentioned him it seems like a few people have tried to dig up some info but nothing has come to light quite yet so i'll go look into the gym theory and you look into the thomas theory i love it um it's done see you in your life too late it's done be safe next time on q and on the search for q you're dealing with one of the most experienced spies you're ever gonna meet it was meant to be a parody it was meant to be kind of like a big joke a joke on the president i joke about all these other people that we could laugh at thomas r-uq q is an elaborately constructed operation i'm a trump fan and i don't care what you say thank you anybody could be a q a like anybody could be a part of it i hate blue correctness don't believe in it i believe that q anon is the single greatest information operation in the history of humanity you live in a dream actually you live in a nightmare you

Channel: VICE

Views: 1,812,771

Rating: 4.3941031 out of 5

Keywords: vice_videos:premiere, politics, internet, movement, Committed, hoax, Trump, conspiracy theories, rabbit hole, followers, evangelists, popular, qanon, The Search for Q, Bayan Joonam, Marley Clements, what is Q?, vice, journalism, documentary, culture, interview, film, movies, vice videos, lifestyle, independent, vice guide, exclusive, vice magazine, vice.com, world, documentaries, short films, docs, yt:cc=on

Id: bsN96zE8FuE

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LetsJerkCircular]

There’s so much to it that it makes my brain wanna explode.

At least this lays it out as it happened, for the most part.

This is where the age of information is shown to backfire.

Think about Wikipedia, and all the problems that it has. Then look at Wikipedia and see how decent it was to all of us.

Then we had the opposite. People can just say whatever the fuck they want, and when one place becomes moderated, people just go to another.

Then there’s the issue of what happens when an interest goes on to host the disenfranchised.

We aren’t just using the internet to receive information. The places we go serve up the bullshit, and we choose whether or not to eat it.

When the fuck did info* ever work like this?

It’s private. We do it alone. When we go outside, we’re usually too timid to talk about it.

We only hear the true crazy bullshit when it comes to a head_IRL

It’s always too late. Those that might help them just have a less crazy understanding of everything, and the dumbest have the most ‘facts’

Edit: *

[u/Aphegis]

wtf?? it's unavailable for me? i wanted so bad to watch this

[u/0o_hm]

It's not rocket science. Looking at the ages of a lot of these people it appears a load of boomers desperate to make sense of the utter incompetence of the man they elected latching on to an elaborate conspiracy theory, designed specifically to exploit the naivety of these people.

That was then taken over by the owner of 8chan and eventually moved over to another site in order to generate traffic and so financially gain from it.

That's it. It's plain, simple and actually pretty fucking dull when you think about it. It's just some guys making shit up to get traffic for their otherwise totally unknown site.

The movement itself has taken on a life of it's own as it's hoovered up people from all the various conspiracy groups. Flat Earth, 9/11 truthers, Anti Vaxx, people from all of these have got swept up in it and interwoven their own conspiracies into it.

That's resulted in the vast, complex network that is QAnon.

I think though that all these different documentaries that are being rushed out on post the Capital attack are about 2 years too late. The movement is at its natural end point now and appears to be doing what most large movements in their last stages and is splintering out. Facebook, YouTube etc clamping down on accounts associated with it has hastened this process as well.

QAnon as it is now is in it's end stages. It's either going to morph into something different or just fizzle out over the next couple of years. It's already splitting out from Trump and the lore is morphing to make Trump less central to it.

[u/mama_t_23]

Isn't this supposed to be a three part series? When do the other parts come out?

[u/thegooddocgonzo]

Anyone know what the extension is that you add onto the url to play a mirror of a youtube video in an unauthorized region? Can't find anything in a google search but I remember seeing someone explain it in the comments somewhere...