QAnon is one of the most fascinating things happening on the internet. Spinning an obviously false narrative that somehow still ropes in more and more people.
It's worth examining because it sheds light on how the less obviously false narratives most of the rest of us invest in are spun. Since it's so crazy, the mechanisms are more clear. Since it still works on many people, the mechanisms aren't that different.
I don't know who Q is (other than clearly not who they claim to be) or what their objective is, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Cold reading performed as a con is infinitely more effective if the cold reader actually has done homework or is able to somehow influence events. Con men do in fact do this-- a good con does a lot of homework before approaching a "mark" and may try to orchestrate events as well using shills. I've heard this called "hot reading" as opposed to cold reading.
If Q actually were a pro-Trump psyop (not out of the question given how Internet-savvy his campaign was) then Q may actually have some inside information, resulting in some very effective cold reading. This could also be the case if Q is someone else's psyop (Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, organized crime, etc.) and has a line into its employer's intelligence apparatus.
I realize this may also verge on conspiracy theory, but looking around the world at nations as diverse as Russia, China, and Turkey, and now at the USA I feel we are in the final stages of what amounts to a global elite deviant takeover. The world will soon be a mafia state of sorts ruled over by a superclass of amoral gangsters who use state of the art surveillance technology and psychological warfare techniques to manage the population. It will be a "velvet glove, iron fist" system like Singapore where the need to actually "disappear" people is significantly mitigated by the clever deployment of psyops to head off any substantial resistance before it's an issue.
William Gibson was a prophet. It never ceases to amaze me how perfectly he nailed the zeitgeist of the 21st century. This is the criminal age.
I also can't help but factor in the rapid development of the space industry. History does tend to rhyme. During the last "age of discovery" a major motive for people leaving Europe was to escape an extremely corrupt and decadent oligarchy. Maybe people will flee to Mars to escape the modern version of bawdy oligarchs in powdered wigs and merkins.
Who knows... maybe corruption and social meltdown is some kind of built-in developmental phase in our species that works to drive us outward in another burst of colonization. If I were an alien watching I'd be scared to death and debating the wisdom of just hitting Earth with a kinetic weapon before it's too late.
Maybe so, but I just call it like I see it. That's part of what makes his narrative compelling. A good con lies strategically but also peppers the story with truth.
The thing I find alarming is that nobody looks good. The whole thing looks like crooks vs crooks, and I don't just mean in the USA.
IIRC a major part of cold reading is asking leading questions, building rapport, and generally relying on your mark to inadvertently leak information to you during this process.
Like, the "Q" prediction of a "liquidity event"? That's vague enough so as to be applicable to almost anything post-hoc. Dropping "clues", requiring audience participation and effort, claiming you see the truth but can't quite see the truth 100% clearly without the help of your mark? That's cold reading, man.
If I had to put money on a psyop though, it'd be an anti-Trump op, not a pro-Trump op. The Qanon Choose Your Own Adventure™ scam has tarpitted so many Trumpists into days and days of conspiratorial nonsense that their advocacy is ceasing to be effective.
Ive followed Q pretty closely for the last few months. How are we determining falsehood when most of what Q does is ask questions and insinuate things that are (by his own admission) to come true in the future “FUTURE PROVES PAST”?
Are there examples of blatant falsehood you can point me too? I am fascinated by this and would love to read any good analysis you’ve found. I’ve found so much written about it to be lacking in specificity and original sources.
It hardly seems like the academic, probing, research oriented state sponsored kind though. It feels more like the half-baked but polished-seeming "Cloverfield 4" ad campaign kind.
Q's strength comes from one feature: the groups ability to predict future events.
In fact, they have a slogan: "Future proves past." Meaning that as events unfold, the things that intel that has been dropped in the past proves to be correct.
This is something new: an intelligence agency is talking to the public for the very first time about how the world really works.
I used to think the US operated as a democracy, but now I have the opinion that it is an cryptocracy, ruled by elite secret societies. Democracy is staged, public opinion is managed via propaganda masquerading as news, war is an elaborate hoax which launders money from citizen to elite cryptocratic elite.
...and this system is imploding as Trump and the American military dismantle the global deepstate.
Welcome to Qanon, the internet's most fascinating real time conspiracy - unfolding right before our eyes.
The Q twitter account itself seems pretty uninteresting. I'm just about certain its some sort of automatic string generator connected to a few major news feeds.
The interesting thing is the people who comb through the text "cloud-spotting" for little bits of text that fit their narrative and reposting those bits announcing that "Q is right!"
If all you read is that second order feed from those people, you can see how someone who's not very informed might start to believe. Its like a twisted horoscope.
The really interesting thing is that as the random text from the Q account moves down through social media accounts, it somehow becomes "news"!
Q uses 8chan? Wow. Didn't realize that. 8chan is full of basically straight up white nationalist fascism, or that's what I thought. I recall it making 4chan look tame.
What really scares me about the chans is that during the government shutdowns the anti-black posts completely stopped. /pol/ is normally littered with them as well as other kinds of racist garbage, but it was the black ones alone that just vanished. After the shutdowns they returned immediately. Who on earth is being paid to do this and why?
Haha. You've never worked in government. There are buildings of people paid to do nothing, where "nothing" often includes spewing shit on Internet boards and social media sites. When they are off they are out doing other things.
Sounds like the vanguard of the master race need to get a real job.
Talking about Q with people who haven’t followed it closely, to include journalism about Q, feeds the Q phenomenon for the simple reason that so many people get it wrong. By wrong I mean, it’s as if they haven’t done their research, or worse, have an agenda. If you’re going to write about Q, furthermore if you’re going to criticize Q, it would serve your cause well to research it thoroughly because the autists will eat you alive further painting Q as a “deepthroat” the cabal “doesn’t want you to know about”.
Please note my write up on QAnon being a government-sponsored PSYOP for Trump here, and don't forget to petition the government and seek restitution for the harmful propaganda being spread on American citizens:
Since Q was partially outed a couple days ago, Corsi has been on Alex Jonestown twice now (even though they were previously promoting it) saying Q has been taken over and is now disinfo generated by AI.
We must work to repeal the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012, which essentially legalized US government propaganda published directly to the US people.
You mean how Alex and Corsi are now striking back after Q called them out for being money grabbing attention whores playing controlled op who's goal is to discredit valid grassroots truth movements by associating them with insane conspiracy theories? Pretty obvious why they feel the need to team up and discredit Q now... Not that I am picking a side, I don't think any of them are trustworthy.
>petition the government and seek restitution for the harmful propaganda being spread on American citizens
What government agency is sponsoring this PSYOP, do you think?
From your essay:
>as I reported George Webb and the statements to the FBI a week before the port closure. The memories of inaction by the government in order to stop them has impacted me everyday
Kinda like how the FBI was alerted to the 911 hijackers but refused to investigate and in fact went to great lengths (by Mueller) to cover this up. Or how people were reporting the Parkland shooter for months on end to the FBI and they again "failed to act?" What do you think the "deep state" is, and how do they operate?
>You deserve compensation if you've been impacted by a psychological operation
This is the most hilarious part, and really shows how shallow you understanding of all of this is. Literally every single American, then, deserves this. What do you think the mainstream media does exactly? What was/is Operation Mockingbird?
>I believe that I have provided enough ample evidence to convince you that there is something weird with these people
Other people have analyzed these individuals and come to more thorough conclusions than you have. Are you not happy with their conclusions, or do you not know about then?
What agency do you think they belong to, and why do you think they are domestic?
From October 28 to Jan 4, Q was a MILINT insider very close to the President. He provided ironclad proofs of this:
- he predicted the President's Twitter going down.
- he predicted the upheavals in Saudi Arabia.
- he predicted the Pope would want to change the Lord's Prayer.
- he predicted a bombing attempt by a Bangladeshi national in NYC.
- he posted original photos taken from AF1 that matched the President's Far East itinerary.
- he used phrases the President would tweet a few minutes later.
- the President once pasted an anon's comment into his Twitter showing he was watching live.
He leaked on 4chan for a month, then moved to 8chan /cbts/ - my board. I ran this board for just over a month and he made 200+ posts on it. From Jan 5 to the present, it's been an imposter who cracked his tripcode password, and it's worthless nonsense: cold reading, vague terminology and the like.
Out of curiosity, how do you know the Jan 5th onward posts are a different person? To an outsider they all look like vague cold reading. I guess what I'm asking is what difference so you see between the two versions?
38 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 95.3 ms ] threadIt's worth examining because it sheds light on how the less obviously false narratives most of the rest of us invest in are spun. Since it's so crazy, the mechanisms are more clear. Since it still works on many people, the mechanisms aren't that different.
I don't know who Q is (other than clearly not who they claim to be) or what their objective is, but it's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
If Q actually were a pro-Trump psyop (not out of the question given how Internet-savvy his campaign was) then Q may actually have some inside information, resulting in some very effective cold reading. This could also be the case if Q is someone else's psyop (Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, organized crime, etc.) and has a line into its employer's intelligence apparatus.
I realize this may also verge on conspiracy theory, but looking around the world at nations as diverse as Russia, China, and Turkey, and now at the USA I feel we are in the final stages of what amounts to a global elite deviant takeover. The world will soon be a mafia state of sorts ruled over by a superclass of amoral gangsters who use state of the art surveillance technology and psychological warfare techniques to manage the population. It will be a "velvet glove, iron fist" system like Singapore where the need to actually "disappear" people is significantly mitigated by the clever deployment of psyops to head off any substantial resistance before it's an issue.
William Gibson was a prophet. It never ceases to amaze me how perfectly he nailed the zeitgeist of the 21st century. This is the criminal age.
I also can't help but factor in the rapid development of the space industry. History does tend to rhyme. During the last "age of discovery" a major motive for people leaving Europe was to escape an extremely corrupt and decadent oligarchy. Maybe people will flee to Mars to escape the modern version of bawdy oligarchs in powdered wigs and merkins.
Who knows... maybe corruption and social meltdown is some kind of built-in developmental phase in our species that works to drive us outward in another burst of colonization. If I were an alien watching I'd be scared to death and debating the wisdom of just hitting Earth with a kinetic weapon before it's too late.
You realize you sound a lot like this QAnon guy yourself now, right?
The thing I find alarming is that nobody looks good. The whole thing looks like crooks vs crooks, and I don't just mean in the USA.
Like, the "Q" prediction of a "liquidity event"? That's vague enough so as to be applicable to almost anything post-hoc. Dropping "clues", requiring audience participation and effort, claiming you see the truth but can't quite see the truth 100% clearly without the help of your mark? That's cold reading, man.
If I had to put money on a psyop though, it'd be an anti-Trump op, not a pro-Trump op. The Qanon Choose Your Own Adventure™ scam has tarpitted so many Trumpists into days and days of conspiratorial nonsense that their advocacy is ceasing to be effective.
Maybe it's just some basement dweller getting their lulz by taking the fashy "autist" chan crowd for a ride.
Simple explanation: it's not so obviously false.
If you believe in the supernatural, what is basically a supernatural proxy war taking place in the background isn't so unbelievable.
Audience participation doesn't seem too common. Q's genre is the detective story, not the straightforward thriller.
Are there examples of blatant falsehood you can point me too? I am fascinated by this and would love to read any good analysis you’ve found. I’ve found so much written about it to be lacking in specificity and original sources.
Literally posts things that happen VERBATIM days later. "obviously false narrative"? Hardly.
https://i.imgur.com/mEb9p0Q.jpg
In fact, they have a slogan: "Future proves past." Meaning that as events unfold, the things that intel that has been dropped in the past proves to be correct.
This is something new: an intelligence agency is talking to the public for the very first time about how the world really works.
I used to think the US operated as a democracy, but now I have the opinion that it is an cryptocracy, ruled by elite secret societies. Democracy is staged, public opinion is managed via propaganda masquerading as news, war is an elaborate hoax which launders money from citizen to elite cryptocratic elite.
...and this system is imploding as Trump and the American military dismantle the global deepstate.
Welcome to Qanon, the internet's most fascinating real time conspiracy - unfolding right before our eyes.
See the intel drops here: https://qanonposts.com/
The interesting thing is the people who comb through the text "cloud-spotting" for little bits of text that fit their narrative and reposting those bits announcing that "Q is right!"
If all you read is that second order feed from those people, you can see how someone who's not very informed might start to believe. Its like a twisted horoscope.
The really interesting thing is that as the random text from the Q account moves down through social media accounts, it somehow becomes "news"!
Q doesn’t use Twitter. Q has stated numerous times any communication outside of 8chan is not Q.
Sounds like the vanguard of the master race need to get a real job.
I don't read my horoscope very often either.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-citizen-psychological-wa...
Since Q was partially outed a couple days ago, Corsi has been on Alex Jonestown twice now (even though they were previously promoting it) saying Q has been taken over and is now disinfo generated by AI.
>petition the government and seek restitution for the harmful propaganda being spread on American citizens
What government agency is sponsoring this PSYOP, do you think?
From your essay:
>as I reported George Webb and the statements to the FBI a week before the port closure. The memories of inaction by the government in order to stop them has impacted me everyday
Kinda like how the FBI was alerted to the 911 hijackers but refused to investigate and in fact went to great lengths (by Mueller) to cover this up. Or how people were reporting the Parkland shooter for months on end to the FBI and they again "failed to act?" What do you think the "deep state" is, and how do they operate?
>You deserve compensation if you've been impacted by a psychological operation
This is the most hilarious part, and really shows how shallow you understanding of all of this is. Literally every single American, then, deserves this. What do you think the mainstream media does exactly? What was/is Operation Mockingbird?
>I believe that I have provided enough ample evidence to convince you that there is something weird with these people
Other people have analyzed these individuals and come to more thorough conclusions than you have. Are you not happy with their conclusions, or do you not know about then?
What agency do you think they belong to, and why do you think they are domestic?
- he predicted the President's Twitter going down.
- he predicted the upheavals in Saudi Arabia.
- he predicted the Pope would want to change the Lord's Prayer.
- he predicted a bombing attempt by a Bangladeshi national in NYC.
- he posted original photos taken from AF1 that matched the President's Far East itinerary.
- he used phrases the President would tweet a few minutes later.
- the President once pasted an anon's comment into his Twitter showing he was watching live.
He leaked on 4chan for a month, then moved to 8chan /cbts/ - my board. I ran this board for just over a month and he made 200+ posts on it. From Jan 5 to the present, it's been an imposter who cracked his tripcode password, and it's worthless nonsense: cold reading, vague terminology and the like.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980789585801351168.html