The Q, The Bad, and the Ugly - Part 1: A Beginner's Guide

The Internet is for...

The internet is responsible for a whole raft of things that we sometimes wish hadn’t become a thing. One of these things that I am sure anyone with a reasonable sense of social conscience could agree that 4chan may fit in to this category, and from this pit of sleaze and hatred came Q.

I was asked to describe 4chan once, and the only way I could articulate it with any degree of certainty or accuracy was like this: imagine that the internet was a person and decided one night to hit the town. Well, 4chan is the place the internet ends up after too many jaeger bombs, and lines snorted from the breasts of wannabe socialites. Semi-conscious, rolling around nauseated and about to purge everything that’s been consumed over the last 24 hours; 4chan is the corner the internet unloads in before falling asleep in its own mess.

You might be asking yourself “why is it so bad?” or “if it is that bad, has anything good come from it?”. To answer those questions (and because I kind of enjoy the tapping sound of my new keyboard), I shall elucidate.

4chan as an imageboard (or an extremely frustrating to keep track of forum) is, or used to be, home to a userbase that could post and discuss anonymously everything from anime, conspiracy theories, and horror stories right through to politics, social commentary, and child pornography. Now, it’s basically this list of things (minus the anime) that this post focuses on, but I will touch on a few important parts of 4chan’s history that might provide a clear track for how this got from problematic internet site all the way to potential domestic terrorist threat.

A Brief History of Shitfuckery:

•       Founded in 2003 by Christopher Poole (aka “Moot”)
•       Initially focused on anime content and “random” (aka /b/)
•       Suffers downtime after child pornography uploaded to site
•       Gave us cute captioned photos of animals or “lolcats”
•       Undertook “Project Chanology” where Anonymous identifying people from around the world united to protest, hack, and harass the Church of Scientology. The human rights violation was an afterthought, but gave Anonymous a brief window of social conscience to bring light to a cult that practiced abhorrent disconnection tactics and punishments that bordered on torture.
•      Whatever goodwill Anonymous would work to gain for itself would be very quickly undone with the resurgence of things like child pornography on the site, cyberbullying, hacking campaigns, trolling campaigns, and involvement in gamergate.
•       Q appears on 4chan’s /pol/ board in 2017 dropping information that is near gibberish in how cryptic it is, clinging to Trump’s comments about the “calm before the storm” made during the October 5 photo op with senior military officials.
•       Q and the supporters “QAnon” are kicked off 4chan for basically overrunning the site and turning it into a bigger haven for antisemitism and white supremacy than it already was.
•       Q appears on 8chan and continues the stream of cryptic nonsense to keep the right wing conspiracy breathing ferals amused.
•       8chan goes offline after the NZ mosque shooting and is later allowed to exist on a Russian server, because who else but the Russians would take advantage of something so politically divisive?

And now for something completely different...

To explain what the Q conspiracy is, you need make your brain shift gears. To do this, imagine you’ve just recovered from a self-administered lobotomy, because that’s the kind of territory we are heading in to. Nothing is unbelievable.

You’ve been warned.

First, there’s the scandal dubbed “pizzagate”, where the Clintons and Democrats are involved in a pedophile ring that has dungeons in the basements of inconspicuous buildings throughout the world. The pizzagate example in particular claimed that there were coded messages in the leaked Podesta emails “acquired” by Wikileaks in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Louise Mensch would later investigate Wikileaks, JulianAssange, and their connection to Russia, to conclude (like anyone else who hasn't drunk the Kool Aid) that there's little doubt at all that Wikileaks and Assange are assets used almost exclusively to undermine democracy in the United States. It's also safe to assume that Wikileaks as an organisation is nothing more than a tool to gather intelligence from other nations to benefit Russia's campaign of destabilization for its own ends.

As an aside, my citing this information doesn't mean I support what is happening to Assange since he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy. There's rules for the treatment of prisoners that should be adhered to, and there are better ways to make an example of someone without stripping them of their basic human rights. 

Where this fits in with Q, QAnon, and 8chan is strange in the sense that for the most part QAnons wants Assange hung, drawn, and quartered for his role in the 2010 "Collateral Murder" leak. However, they refuse to acknowledge any involvement from him in regards to not just delivering the DNC email dump that helped hand Trump his election win, but also the Podesta emails that formed the basis for the longest running conspiracy theory surrounding satanic pedophiles who torture children and drink their blood in an "adrenochrome" harvesting ritual. Supposed video evidence of this is purported to be contained on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.

Like everything Q and QAnon circulate though, it either doesn't exist or it is fraudulently constructed. The hostility from Q and QAnon toward Assange and Wikileaks however? That's clever, if nothing more than for the sole purpose of now keeping two assets linked back to Russia from being connected among the fevered egos of the adherents already walking a precariously thin line between faux-patriotism and treason.