0:00

Q and On is the world's largest online

0:03

political conspiracy movement. Followers

0:05

believe someone code named Q is provided

0:08

them with secret information from inside the

0:10

White House. No one really knows

0:12

the real identity of Q, though we

0:14

aim to change that. I'm

0:17

Jake Hanrahan and this is Q Clearance

0:20

podcast series aimed unmasking the true

0:22

identity of Q. This

0:25

is brought to you by I R Radio and

0:27

Q Data Media. In

0:30

this episode, episode two, we're

0:32

gonna be looking into the claim that Q and

0:34

on is a leftist prank on US

0:37

Republicans. Also, in

0:39

a minute, we'll hear what Trump has had to

0:41

say about Q and on this week. So

0:48

as the US presidential election is

0:50

closer, the two competing sides

0:53

did their town hall events last week. Both

0:55

Biden and Trump were lightly

0:58

grilled on various topics, but hanging

1:00

to their policies the election that finances

1:03

all sorts. Amongst many

1:05

things that Trump was criticized for

1:07

his town hall event was his failure

1:10

to disavow Q and On when asked about

1:12

it a few weeks back. If you don't

1:14

know what I'm talking about here, be sure to go

1:16

back and listen to episode one of this

1:18

podcast. So once

1:20

again, the topic of Q came

1:23

up, and this is what happened

1:25

when Trump was asked about thing to denounce

1:27

Q and On. It is this theory

1:31

that Democrats

1:33

are a satanic pedophile ring

1:35

and that you are the savior of

1:38

that. Now, can you just once

1:40

and for all state that that is

1:43

completely not true about

1:46

Q and On in its entirety. I know

1:48

nothing about you and On. I just

1:50

tried to know very little. You told me, But what

1:52

you tell me doesn't necessarily make it fact.

1:55

I hate to say that I know nothing

1:57

about it. I do know they are very

1:59

much get pedophilia.

2:06

That okay,

2:10

okay, yeah,

2:12

you did hear that, right? The president

2:14

of the United States, the most

2:16

powerful country on Earth, arguably for

2:19

a second time, refused

2:21

to disavow the Q and On conspiracy

2:23

theory. So maybe the Q and

2:26

On theory is real after all. Now

2:28

I'm joking, of course, I don't think that. But

2:31

Trump is feeding into that idea with

2:33

these theories every time he goes

2:35

on TV and refuses to speak out against

2:37

them. For the followers of Q and On, it's

2:39

a big thumbs up. Their ideas

2:41

are being reaffirmed each time he does

2:44

this. Anyway, let's move on to talk

2:46

about the main topic of this episode,

2:48

the idea that suggests Q and on is

2:51

a prank carried out by leftists

2:53

meant to make us Trump followers look

2:55

stupid. It began inen

2:58

when BuzzFeed really than article with

3:01

the catchy headline it's looking

3:03

extremely likely that Q and on is a leftist

3:05

prank on Trump voters, which they

3:07

later changed to people think this

3:09

whole q and on conspiracy theories of prank

3:11

on Trump supporters. I remember

3:13

when I first saw this article myself, and

3:16

I just thought not, surely not.

3:19

But to be fair, as I read the article,

3:21

the coincidences within the piece were quite

3:23

striking at times. We'll go

3:25

into those a little bit more in a minute, but just

3:28

bear in mind, on paper, this isn't

3:30

actually the far reaching theory that it might

3:32

sound like at first. And

3:34

for those concerned about the creeping rise of Q

3:37

and on, I think it acted almost

3:39

as a bit of a comforter. They could laugh

3:41

at Q and on again if it was all a big

3:43

prank being played out against Trump boomers

3:46

on no go websites like four

3:48

chant, the threat was somewhat

3:50

extinguished with this idea. A

3:52

sense of having the upper hand could be restored.

3:55

It was all a joke. Now, I'm

3:57

not above thinking that it would be absolutely

4:00

fucking hilarious if hundreds of thousands

4:02

of right wing MAGA people had gathered

4:04

online only to be led by a group of secret

4:07

leftists talking nonsense

4:09

at them. But I do think again,

4:11

for some people, there was a sense of

4:14

faux relief. They could think that this

4:16

increasingly powerful global conspiracy

4:19

network was all made up by

4:21

the good guys decide that they're more likely

4:23

to agree with. But was

4:25

it someone who looked deeper

4:27

into this leftist prank theory is Matthew

4:30

golt Goal is a journalist

4:32

and a personal friend of mine. He works

4:35

for vices Motherboard and runs

4:37

the current affairs podcast Angry

4:39

Plant. He's good at what he does and

4:41

he's never wont to be swayed by

4:43

a useful media narrative. I

4:46

spoke to him about this theory. So

4:49

the origin of this idea that Q

4:51

and on is a leftist prank had

4:54

been kind of bubbling in the

4:56

fortune, you

4:58

know, gross parts of the Internet for

5:01

a few months in the summer

5:03

of um and then it

5:05

takes off on August six,

5:08

when BuzzFeed publishes a story with

5:10

the subhead what the fund is wrong

5:12

with Boomers? Right? So the

5:16

basic, the very very basic thrust

5:18

of this thing is

5:20

that the reporter seems to have found

5:22

some people on some of non's on four

5:24

Chan talking about how q

5:27

is the politics Board's greatest achievement.

5:30

Look, how many norms and boomers got sucked into

5:32

our lulls chaos. Good job, and on's

5:34

looking forward to our next big prank, right, which

5:37

would appear to be a smoking gun unless you

5:39

know anything about four Chan and how

5:42

it works and how the politics board works.

5:44

We've covered a lot of what four Chan and eighth

5:46

Chan is and isn't in the last episode,

5:49

but just to reiterate what Matthew god

5:51

is talking about, he is how four Chan will

5:53

often just put out prank saying

5:55

anything, make things up, put stories

5:58

out there aren't real. Basically us

6:00

to folk with everybody. And in this case

6:02

it kind of worked. In regards to this article,

6:05

however, you will see that it's not

6:08

just that there is more to it. Random

6:10

people just say random ship just

6:13

you know, just because they can. Um.

6:15

So, where things get kind of weird

6:19

is that like the

6:21

conspiracy theory I would say behind

6:23

this conspiracy theory is

6:25

that in nine nine, Luther

6:28

Blissett published a novel in Italy. It's

6:30

titled Q. It became

6:32

a cult classic in Europe, never really took

6:34

off in America. It was translated into English

6:36

in two thousand four and released in Britain and

6:39

the US. Then. Um. The novel

6:41

was set in the sixteenth century, and it's against

6:43

this backdrop of societal upheaval

6:45

that follows the Reformation.

6:48

Martin Martin, Martin Lutheran nails Martin

6:50

Luther nails the ninety nine Theses onto

6:53

the church door, and like

6:55

the Catholic Church starts to lose power, the Protestant

6:57

movement begins. Uh. There's a lot

6:59

of war or in chaos and fighting that goes

7:01

on after that. And so the main character

7:04

of this book is moving

7:06

throughout Europe and moving

7:08

throughout the century and basically participating

7:10

in various religious wars and rebellions.

7:13

He doesn't have a name, and he's adopting different

7:15

identities as he goes, and he's this radical

7:17

revolutionary figure. Um kind

7:20

of think of him as like a precursor to like

7:22

a v for Vendetta kind of character.

7:24

Right. Um, So, the

7:26

antagonist of the story is this agent

7:29

of the Pope named Q, and

7:32

this agent of the Pope is the bad guy,

7:34

and he's sending letters to radical

7:36

leaders, spreading misinformation

7:38

to so chaos among the ranks of the revolutionaries.

7:41

He claims to be a person, sometimes he claims

7:43

to be a group of people, and he always claims

7:46

that he's writing from within the halls of power, right,

7:48

like, you know, I've got the Count's ear, so

7:50

I know what's really going on. And if your

7:52

revolutionaries will just do what I tell you, uh,

7:55

you know, we'll be able to wipe out all of these bad guys,

7:57

like all of these the ruling class that's on top

7:59

of you. Right. So he says he's on the side of the rebel,

8:01

so that he's infiltrated the institutions of power.

8:03

But at the same time he's always feeding information

8:05

back into the Vatican Um. And when

8:07

he is talking to the rebels,

8:09

he always science this missives Q.

8:12

Sounds familiar, right, Well,

8:14

this is where the coincidences or

8:16

the clues come in. Think about

8:19

this cue book for a second. As

8:21

Matthew said, the book is about a secret

8:23

shadow entity within the government that

8:26

is moving from place to place whispering

8:28

ideas in people's ears to stoke conflict.

8:31

And his name just so happens to be

8:33

Q as well, same emo,

8:36

same name as our Q and On. That's

8:38

a pretty big coincidence, if you ask me.

8:41

And remember, according to Q and On,

8:43

there is no such thing as coincidences.

8:46

That's one of Que's many mantras.

8:48

Certainly, if there is a collective of

8:51

mischievous leftist behind Q and On, this

8:53

might start to sound like an inside

8:55

joke, right, a way to openly laugh

8:58

at the Q followers whilst remaining hidden

9:00

in plain sight. This is also

9:02

kind of Q and On style as well, hidden

9:05

in plain sight. It gets weirder. So,

9:07

the author of this book Q

9:10

is Luther Blisset, right, So who is Luther

9:12

Blisset um? And could

9:14

it be possible that this person is involved

9:16

somehow in the Q and On movement? Well,

9:20

Luther Blisset is not one person. It's

9:23

a collective of writers that describe

9:25

themselves as a collective of

9:27

cultural agitation and guerrilla communication.

9:30

These are like cultural

9:33

pranksters that we kind of don't have

9:35

any more, um

9:38

and now they've they're still around.

9:40

They call themselves the Womming Collective UM

9:42

and so after this BuzzFeed article comes out, I

9:45

reach out and I talked to them. So now you're

9:47

going to hear a snippet of an interview

9:49

Matthew Gold did with a man named wu

9:52

Ming Wooming. He's a

9:54

member of the Wooming Collective.

9:57

Again a joke name. These lot like

9:59

to mess around. Now, remember the Women

10:01

Collective is the obscure leftist

10:03

pranksters that came together to write the Cube

10:06

Book, the one we're talking about that has

10:08

the parallels with Q and On. What

10:11

Woman has to say here is particularly

10:13

interesting, I think in regards

10:15

to if they are or aren't behind Q

10:18

and On. Some conspiracies do

10:21

exist. What is a conspiracy?

10:23

You have a conspiracy when a group

10:25

of people or more than one

10:27

people agree in secret

10:30

to take some action against

10:33

someone else, a third party, against

10:35

someone else's interests at least.

10:37

Okay, so you

10:39

can just say that conspiracies

10:42

do exist, but real,

10:45

actual conspiracies have some key

10:47

characteristics that make

10:51

them very different from the kind

10:54

of convoluted, cumbersome

10:57

conspiracy theories which

11:00

spiracists dream about and share

11:03

and spread. Okay, and you've

11:05

you've designed some conspiracies

11:07

yourself, correct or you've been a part

11:10

of it, we practically debunked

11:13

some conspiracies. We devised

11:15

the pranks as a practical critique

11:18

and a direct intervention against

11:20

conspiracism. That's what we did.

11:23

From the horse's mouth there, a member

11:25

of the Women Collective is saying what they do

11:27

is construct events, construct

11:30

pranks to kind of show that

11:32

the intricacies and nonsense

11:34

of many conspiracy theories are a problem,

11:37

and they aim to use a kind of

11:39

satire to debunk them.

11:47

Now does that mean that that's what they did

11:49

with Q and on? Are they creating a conspiracy

11:52

to show the people fall for anything?

11:55

When you look at how outlandish some of Q and

11:57

on theories are, you might think, yeah,

12:00

that makes sense. Now, let's

12:02

scale back a minute to talk about some of

12:04

the wombing collectives other activities.

12:07

Specifically, let me explain how

12:10

they took part in their own way in

12:12

Italy's Satanic panic in the

12:14

nineties. Satanic panic being a

12:17

time when the country's

12:19

law enforcement, the media, everybody

12:21

seems to think there's some kind of occult

12:24

ritual's going on with kids saying

12:26

devil worship. It's all there, and

12:28

throughout history we've seen this happen in different countries.

12:31

Almost always there's nothing to it,

12:38

devil worship, pedophile rings,

12:41

and lots of empty accusations.

12:43

It all has a parallel to cun On, as

12:46

you will see. Stay with me

12:48

on this. So Italy Satanic

12:50

Panic took place off the back of the so

12:52

called Years of Lead, a time

12:54

from the sixties to the eighties when

12:57

there were thousands of far right and

12:59

far terror attacks in the country. Italy

13:02

was still very much a nervous culture in

13:04

some respects because of this. In the

13:06

nineties, a new threat emerged,

13:09

devil worshipers. Several

13:11

people were accused of satanic pedophile

13:14

abuse, sixteen children were taken

13:16

from their parents by the state, and

13:18

one mother even killed herself Off

13:20

the back of all this. I

13:22

won't go into too much detail here,

13:25

but basically it was later found that Italian

13:27

officials had aggressively coerced

13:30

people into giving evidence about something

13:32

that just wasn't true. The Satanic

13:35

panic accusations were baseless.

13:38

To show the government how stupid, heavy

13:41

handed and irrational they'd been, the

13:43

Women Collective began planning fake evidence

13:45

in the woods to make it look like there

13:47

had been a cult satanic practices

13:50

taking place. Eventually,

13:52

they revealed themselves to show that it

13:54

was a prank. It sounds funked up,

13:56

but what they did was show that the police were

13:59

not doing their due diligence whilst investigating

14:01

something extremely sensitive. The

14:04

Women Collective had pulled a prank to

14:06

expose a serious problem within Italian

14:09

policing. Now let me be clear

14:11

here, it wasn't like the Woming Collective

14:13

planet it and then the satanic panic began

14:16

that had already happened. The satanic

14:18

panic was not because of them, but they

14:20

were the ones who took part in this prank to

14:22

show, hey, you were not doing the proper

14:24

work here. These satanic

14:27

panic Shenanigans also kind

14:29

of strike a parallel with what Q and On is doing

14:31

right. Cure has told his followers

14:34

many times that the Democrat Party

14:36

is a devil worshiping Peter following

14:39

he's insinuated all sorts around the occult

14:41

worship in various different cue

14:43

drops. He has said the following obscure

14:46

things quote spirit

14:48

cooking, what does spirit cooking represent?

14:51

Cult? And does

14:54

Satan exist? Does the thought

14:56

of Satan exists? Who worshiped Satan?

14:59

What is a cult? Epstein Island

15:02

and Operation mocking Bird

15:04

Priority to clean out the bad actors to

15:06

unite people behind the America First agenda,

15:09

Many and our government worships Satan

15:12

end quote. Satanic

15:15

occultism is part of the central

15:17

Q and On mythos. However, unlike

15:20

the Woming collective, Q and On has

15:22

not dropped the mask to say, yeah,

15:24

this was all a prank. In fact, what

15:26

Q and On is doing is more like what the Italian

15:28

police did in the nineties, tearing

15:31

families apart by putting out false

15:33

information. So are the Wombing

15:35

Collective behind Q on on or not? Matthew

15:38

go asked them directly, are

15:40

you responsible for q and

15:42

On? Of course not. They

15:46

they basically said, like they don't think

15:49

that it's possible for stuff like this to

15:51

to work anymore because of

15:53

the way that the modern information

15:56

ecosystem works and

15:59

the way like parity

16:02

and satire work, Like all of that stuff's broken

16:04

down, and they so they think like any kind of any

16:06

kind of prank that they would try to pull them this way would just

16:08

end up making things worse at the time.

16:10

And like what's quoted in the BuzzFeed article is

16:13

Wooming is tweeting about the connections.

16:16

So they're out there saying like, hey, this is kind of strange. This

16:18

is similar to our book, and BuzzFeed kind

16:20

of implies that, you know, hey, this is

16:22

them taking responsibility. Um.

16:24

And when I talk to them, they're like, no, we

16:27

we didn't do this, um

16:29

we And I believe that their exact quote

16:31

is believe me, we had never

16:34

heard about Q until six weeks ago. I've

16:36

seen the emails that Goal is speaking

16:38

about there, I've seen the communications,

16:41

and every turn the Wooming

16:43

Collective have outright denied any

16:45

involvement with Q and On. What's

16:48

more, they've never once staged a prank

16:50

without claiming it and have never engaged

16:52

in anything as malicious as it will

16:54

be to keep Q and On going this long. The

16:57

other clues to who Q and On might be don't

16:59

add up if it were the Women Collective

17:02

either. We'll speak about that in another

17:04

episode, but basically, the

17:06

Women Collective Cue book is a handy

17:08

coincidence that was spurred on by

17:10

fortune and blown out of proportion

17:13

by the media. The Women Collective

17:15

do bring attention to a good point, though, that

17:17

satire in a post truth world

17:20

is all but dead. We saw a clear

17:22

example of this last week when Trump

17:24

retweeted a satirical article

17:27

by Babylon b as

17:29

if it was real. The joke

17:31

was in the article that Twitter had

17:33

shut down its network to stop

17:36

the spread of negative comments about

17:39

Trump's adversary, Joe Biden.

17:41

It was meant to be funny. It was meant to be taken

17:43

seriously. This is what the Babylon be

17:46

does, much like its counterpart

17:48

The Onion their satire news

17:50

sites. The same week, Trump

17:53

also retweeted a wild que

17:55

and On conspiracy theory that Joe

17:57

Biden orchestrated the killing of

17:59

Seal Team six members to

18:02

cover up a plot where they didn't actually

18:04

kill Osama Bin Ladding. The

18:06

theory states, without any evidence whatsoever,

18:09

that in fact, only been Laddin's body double

18:11

was killed, and that it

18:13

was done as a blood sacrifice to

18:16

Iran. Trump retweeted

18:18

this outlandish theory. You couldn't

18:20

make it up. I

18:25

think the women collective theory ultimately

18:27

serves as a cautionary tale within the

18:29

q and On universe. Just because

18:32

you want something to be true because it fits

18:34

your ideals doesn't make it so.

18:36

It works both ways. What I'm

18:38

saying is we have to be very careful when

18:40

looking at who Q and on actually is

18:43

or who he might be. Everyone has

18:45

their own ideas, their own clues, their own

18:48

evidence, but if we don't come through

18:50

it all carefully and objectively, the

18:52

prank might end up being pulled on us.

18:56

Next week, we'll be looking at y Q and our mood

18:58

from four chance Hn what

19:01

that meant for the direction of queues messages.

19:04

And also I'll be going over some new leads

19:06

that might explain where the original

19:09

cue post came from.

19:13

Q Clearance is brought to you by I Heart Radio

19:16

and Codatar Media. I'm

19:18

Jake Handrahan. You can find me online

19:20

at Jake Underscore hand

19:22

Rahan. That's h a N

19:25

A h a N. This

19:28

episode was produced by myself with

19:31

fact checking by Sarah hi Tower. The

19:34

music is by Sam Black and the

19:36

sound levels were mixed by Thomas Griffin

19:38

at Splicing Block wo

20:01

untold