Is QAnon a Leftist Prank?

leftist prank on US Republicans. Also, in a minute, we'll hear what Trump has had to say about Q and on this week. So as the US presidential election is closer, the two competing sides did their town hall events last week. Both Biden and Trump were lightly grilled on various topics, but hanging to their policies the election that finances all sorts. Amongst many things that Trump was criticized for his town hall event was his failure to disavow Q and On

when asked about it a few weeks back. If you don't know what I'm talking about here, be sure to go back and listen to episode one of this podcast. So once again, the topic of Q came up, and this is what happened when Trump was asked about thing to denounce Q and On. It is this theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now, can you just once and for all state that that is completely not true about Q and On in its entirety. I know nothing about

you and On. I just tried to know very little. You told me, But what you tell me doesn't necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much get pedophilia. That okay, okay, yeah, you did hear that, right? The president of the United States, the most powerful country on Earth, arguably for a second time, refused to disavow the Q and On conspiracy theory. So maybe the Q and On theory is real after all. Now I'm joking,

of course, I don't think that. But Trump is feeding into that idea with these theories every time he goes on TV and refuses to speak out against them. For the followers of Q and On, it's a big thumbs up. Their ideas are being reaffirmed each time he does this. Anyway, let's move on to talk about the main topic of this episode, the idea that suggests Q and on is a prank carried out by leftists meant to make us

Trump followers look stupid. It began inen when BuzzFeed really than article with the catchy headline it's looking extremely likely that Q and on is a leftist prank on Trump voters, which they later changed to people think this whole q and on conspiracy theories of prank on Trump supporters. I remember when I first saw this article myself, and I just thought not, surely not. But to be fair, as I read the article, the coincidences within the piece were

quite striking at times. We'll go into those a little bit more in a minute, but just bear in mind, on paper, this isn't actually the far reaching theory that it might sound like at first. And for those concerned about the creeping rise of Q and on, I think it acted almost as a bit of a comforter. They could laugh at Q and on again if it was all a big prank being played out against Trump boomers on no go websites like four chant, the threat was

somewhat extinguished with this idea. A sense of having the upper hand could be restored. It was all a joke. Now, I'm not above thinking that it would be absolutely fucking hilarious if hundreds of thousands of right wing MAGA people had gathered online only to be led by a group of secret leftists talking nonsense at them. But I do think again, for some people, there was a sense of

faux relief. They could think that this increasingly powerful global conspiracy network was all made up by the good guys decide that they're more likely to agree with. But was it someone who looked deeper into this leftist prank theory is Matthew golt Goal is a journalist and a personal friend of mine. He works for vices Motherboard and runs the current affairs podcast Angry Plant. He's good at what he does and he's never wont to be swayed by

a useful media narrative. I spoke to him about this theory. So the origin of this idea that Q and on is a leftist prank had been kind of bubbling in the fortune, you know, gross parts of the Internet for a few months in the summer of um and then it takes off on August six, when BuzzFeed publishes a story with the subhead what the fund is wrong with Boomers? Right?

So the basic, the very very basic thrust of this thing is that the reporter seems to have found some people on some of non's on four Chan talking about how q is the politics Board's greatest achievement. Look, how many norms and boomers got sucked into our lulls chaos. Good job, and on's looking forward to our next big prank, right, which would appear to be a smoking gun unless you know anything about four Chan and how it works and

how the politics board works. We've covered a lot of what four Chan and eighth Chan is and isn't in the last episode, but just to reiterate what Matthew god is talking about, he is how four Chan will often just put out prank saying anything, make things up, put stories out there aren't real. Basically us to folk with everybody. And in this case it kind of worked. In regards to this article, however, you will see that it's not just that there is more to it. Random people just

say random ship just you know, just because they can. Um. So, where things get kind of weird is that like the conspiracy theory I would say behind this conspiracy theory is that in nine nine, Luther Blissett published a novel in Italy. It's titled Q. It became a cult classic in Europe, never really took off in America. It was translated into English in two thousand four and released in Britain and

the US. Then. Um. The novel was set in the sixteenth century, and it's against this backdrop of societal upheaval that follows the Reformation. Martin Martin, Martin Lutheran nails Martin Luther nails the ninety nine Theses onto the church door, and like the Catholic Church starts to lose power, the Protestant movement begins. Uh. There's a lot of war or

in chaos and fighting that goes on after that. And so the main character of this book is moving throughout Europe and moving throughout the century and basically participating in various religious wars and rebellions. He doesn't have a name, and he's adopting different identities as he goes, and he's this radical revolutionary figure. Um kind of think of him as like a precursor to like a v for Vendetta

kind of character. Right. Um, So, the antagonist of the story is this agent of the Pope named Q, and this agent of the Pope is the bad guy, and he's sending letters to radical leaders, spreading misinformation to so chaos among the ranks of the revolutionaries. He claims to be a person, sometimes he claims to be a group of people, and he always claims that he's writing from within the halls of power, right, like, you know, I've got the Count's ear, so I know what's really going on.

And if your revolutionaries will just do what I tell you, uh, you know, we'll be able to wipe out all of these bad guys, like all of these the ruling class that's on top of you. Right. So he says he's on the side of the rebel, so that he's infiltrated the institutions of power. But at the same time he's always feeding information back into the Vatican Um. And when he is talking to the rebels, he always science this missives Q. Sounds familiar, right, Well, this is where the

coincidences or the clues come in. Think about this cue book for a second. As Matthew said, the book is about a secret shadow entity within the government that is moving from place to place whispering ideas in people's ears to stoke conflict. And his name just so happens to be Q as well, same emo, same name as our Q and On. That's a pretty big coincidence, if you ask me. And remember, according to Q and On, there is no such thing as coincidences. That's one of Que's

many mantras. Certainly, if there is a collective of mischievous leftist behind Q and On, this might start to sound like an inside joke, right, a way to openly laugh at the Q followers whilst remaining hidden in plain sight. This is also kind of Q and On style as well, hidden in plain sight. It gets weirder. So, the author of this book Q is Luther Blisset, right, So who is Luther Blisset um? And could it be possible that this person is involved somehow in the Q and On movement? Well,

Luther Blisset is not one person. It's a collective of writers that describe themselves as a collective of cultural agitation and guerrilla communication. These are like cultural pranksters that we kind of don't have any more, um and now they've they're still around. They call themselves the Womming Collective UM and so after this BuzzFeed article comes out, I reach out and I talked to them. So now you're going to hear a snippet of an interview Matthew Gold did

with a man named wu Ming Wooming. He's a member of the Wooming Collective. Again a joke name. These lot like to mess around. Now, remember the Women Collective is the obscure leftist pranksters that came together to write the Cube Book, the one we're talking about that has the parallels with Q and On. What Woman has to say here is particularly interesting, I think in regards to if they are or aren't behind Q and On. Some conspiracies

do exist. What is a conspiracy? You have a conspiracy when a group of people or more than one people agree in secret to take some action against someone else, a third party, against someone else's interests at least. Okay, so you can just say that conspiracies do exist, but real, actual conspiracies have some key characteristics that make them very different from the kind of convoluted, cumbersome conspiracy theories which

spiracists dream about and share and spread. Okay, and you've you've designed some conspiracies yourself, correct or you've been a part of it, we practically debunked some conspiracies. We devised the pranks as a practical critique and a direct intervention

against conspiracism. That's what we did. From the horse's mouth there, a member of the Women Collective is saying what they do is construct events, construct pranks to kind of show that the intricacies and nonsense of many conspiracy theories are a problem, and they aim to use a kind of satire to debunk them. Now does that mean that that's what they did with Q and on? Are they creating a conspiracy to show the people fall for anything? When you look at how outlandish some of Q and on

theories are, you might think, yeah, that makes sense. Now, let's scale back a minute to talk about some of the wombing collectives other activities. Specifically, let me explain how they took part in their own way in Italy's Satanic panic in the nineties. Satanic panic being a time when the country's law enforcement, the media, everybody seems to think there's some kind of occult ritual's going on with kids saying devil worship. It's all there, and throughout history we've

seen this happen in different countries. Almost always there's nothing to it, devil worship, pedophile rings, and lots of empty accusations. It all has a parallel to cun On, as you will see. Stay with me on this. So Italy Satanic Panic took place off the back of the so called Years of Lead, a time from the sixties to the eighties when there were thousands of far right and far terror attacks in the country. Italy was still very much a nervous culture in some respects because of this. In

the nineties, a new threat emerged, devil worshipers. Several people were accused of satanic pedophile abuse, sixteen children were taken from their parents by the state, and one mother even killed herself Off the back of all this. I won't go into too much detail here, but basically it was later found that Italian officials had aggressively coerced people into giving evidence about something that just wasn't true. The Satanic

panic accusations were baseless. To show the government how stupid, heavy handed and irrational they'd been, the Women Collective began planning fake evidence in the woods to make it look like there had been a cult satanic practices taking place. Eventually, they revealed themselves to show that it was a prank. It sounds funked up, but what they did was show that the police were not doing their due diligence whilst investigating something extremely sensitive. The Women Collective had pulled a

prank to expose a serious problem within Italian policing. Now let me be clear here, it wasn't like the Woming Collective planet it and then the satanic panic began that had already happened. The satanic panic was not because of them, but they were the ones who took part in this prank to show, hey, you were not doing the proper work here. These satanic panic Shenanigans also kind of strike a parallel with what Q and On is doing right.

Cure has told his followers many times that the Democrat Party is a devil worshiping Peter following he's insinuated all sorts around the occult worship in various different cue drops. He has said the following obscure things quote spirit cooking, what does spirit cooking represent? Cult? And does Satan exist? Does the thought of Satan exists? Who worshiped Satan? What

is a cult? Epstein Island and Operation mocking Bird Priority to clean out the bad actors to unite people behind the America First agenda, Many and our government worships Satan end quote. Satanic occultism is part of the central Q and On mythos. However, unlike the Woming collective, Q and On has not dropped the mask to say, yeah, this

was all a prank. In fact, what Q and On is doing is more like what the Italian police did in the nineties, tearing families apart by putting out false information. So are the Wombing Collective behind Q on on or not? Matthew go asked them directly, are you responsible for q

and On? Of course not. They they basically said, like they don't think that it's possible for stuff like this to to work anymore because of the way that the modern information ecosystem works and the way like parity and satire work, Like all of that stuff's broken down, and they so they think like any kind of any kind of prank that they would try to pull them this way would just end up making things worse at the time. And like what's quoted in the BuzzFeed article is Wooming

is tweeting about the connections. So they're out there saying like, hey, this is kind of strange. This is similar to our book, and BuzzFeed kind of implies that, you know, hey, this is them taking responsibility. Um. And when I talk to them, they're like, no, we we didn't do this, um we And I believe that their exact quote is believe me, we had never heard about Q until six weeks ago.

I've seen the emails that Goal is speaking about there, I've seen the communications, and every turn the Wooming Collective have outright denied any involvement with Q and On. What's more, they've never once staged a prank without claiming it and have never engaged in anything as malicious as it will be to keep Q and On going this long. The other clues to who Q and On might be don't

add up if it were the Women Collective either. We'll speak about that in another episode, but basically, the Women Collective Cue book is a handy coincidence that was spurred on by fortune and blown out of proportion by the media. The Women Collective do bring attention to a good point, though, that satire in a post truth world is all but dead. We saw a clear example of this last week when Trump retweeted a satirical article by Babylon b as if

it was real. The joke was in the article that Twitter had shut down its network to stop the spread of negative comments about Trump's adversary, Joe Biden. It was meant to be funny. It was meant to be taken seriously. This is what the Babylon be does, much like its counterpart The Onion their satire news sites. The same week, Trump also retweeted a wild que and On conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated the killing of Seal Team six members to cover up a plot where they didn't actually

kill Osama Bin Ladding. The theory states, without any evidence whatsoever, that in fact, only been Laddin's body double was killed, and that it was done as a blood sacrifice to Iran. Trump retweeted this outlandish theory. You couldn't make it up. I think the women collective theory ultimately serves as a cautionary tale within the q and On universe. Just because you want something to be true because it fits your

ideals doesn't make it so. It works both ways. What I'm saying is we have to be very careful when looking at who Q and on actually is or who he might be. Everyone has their own ideas, their own clues, their own evidence, but if we don't come through it all carefully and objectively, the prank might end up being pulled on us. Next week, we'll be looking at y Q and our mood from four chance Hn what that

meant for the direction of queues messages. And also I'll be going over some new leads that might explain where the original cue post came from. Q Clearance is brought to you by I Heart Radio and Codatar Media. I'm Jake Handrahan. You can find me online at Jake Underscore hand Rahan. That's h a N A h a N. This episode was produced by myself with fact checking by Sarah hi Tower. The music is by Sam Black and the sound levels were mixed by Thomas Griffin at Splicing Block wo untold