by Jack Posobiec, via The Burning Platform:

For the past 10 months, an online movement has been picking up steam in America and has moved from imageboards and online forums to Reddit, to Twitter, and to YouTube. It leapt from the little screen to the big screen when people began showing up at political rallies wearing shirts and waving signs that carried the name of the movement: QAnon, or simply Q.

What is QAnon? Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And, most importantly, who is Q?

Q made its first appearance on the web forum “4chan” on October 31, 2017 as the “Q Clearance Patriot.”

However, several posts prior to this from Oct 28 also appeared to follow this posting pattern of Socratic method questioning, cryptic messages, riddles, and coded “drops” of information.

Here are the first Q posts:

Hillary’s Arrest to take place on Oct 30, 2017
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/146981635/#147005381

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/146981635/#147012719

Mockingbird
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/146981635/#147023341

National Guard deployment
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/147075091/#147104628

But, October 30th, 2017, came and went, and yet Hillary Clinton was not arrested on that day. The original intel drop never came to pass. And still hasn’t.

Instead, what happened on October 30th was quite the contrary. It was the exact opposite of the poster’s prediction. Trump campaign officials and advisors Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos were all indicted. Manafort and Gates were placed under home arrest.

This was devastating for the credibility of the original poster.

However, instead of ending the op, the posters decided upon a different tactic. They would ignore the real world facts, retroactively claim “Manafort was a plant,” and make even bigger predictions: The arrests of John Podesta and Huma Abedin. Then, finally, they gave the character a name.

The goalposts were shifted, and instead the first appearance of the “Q Clearance Patriot”, supposedly a member of military intelligence, arrived just one day after the Hillary arrest that never was.

One of the issues with this is that “Q Clearance” is not found in military intelligence. It is a Department of Energy designation, and deals exclusively with nuclear programs information. To date, QAnon has not posted insider information about US nuclear programs.
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/147433975/#147433975
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/147433975/#147434025

This pattern of big predictions not coming true (such as the military parade) and the moving of goalposts and retroactive hand-waving explanation continues on and on throughout the posts of QAnon, which I read in full in while researching this piece. You can currently find them hosted here: https://qanon.app/

An extensive compendium which tracks the failures and false predictions of the Q posters in realtime is found here, and is regularly updated: https://old.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/93v1ui/a_noncomprehensive_timeline_of_qs_failed/

One of the most glaring examples is here:
07/31/18 – For his 1776th post, Q uploads an image that’s supposed to function as ‘proof’ that he’s working with Trump (Trump’s signature + “#1776”). However, not only are the ‘#’ and ‘1’ very different from Trump’s own handwriting, but even Q’s followers found evidence that it’s another photoshop job.

At one point, the Q posters decided to move from the 4chan message board to the 8chan message board. No explanation was given for this.

Later, the Q posters began using “tripcodes” which is a type of validation password for anonymous message board users. They claimed that these tripcodes were validated by the board moderators, and proved that only Q could post with them. However, these codes were repeatedly hacked and underwent frequent changes. Frequent changes took place during May 2018. Interestingly, the tripcode changes seemed to coincide with changes in the lineup of board moderators as new mods were brought in and old mods were kicked out of the group.

Recently, on 08/10/18, Q’s password was revealed yet again by a former believer attempting to reach out to those who are currently sucked in, and debunks the belief that Q’s passwords contain clues. This hacker posted all of Q’s former passwords, and explained they were made with a fairly amateurish encryption key, one that did not even meet the standads of the current intelligence community.

—-Who Began It

From the start, Q’s underlying message was that President Trump was working behind-the-scenes to arrest and prosecute his political enemies. There were also reports that he was secretly working with Robert Mueller to indict Hillary Clinton and members of the Democrat party.

However, there was always more to the story. Surely, there had to be someone behind all the cryptic posts. Was it truly a “Q-Clearance” holding patriot, or some other member of military intelligence?

Who was Q?

Would Q ever be revealed?

The answer, was actually more simple than all of that.

To an extent, I’ve always known who Q was.

No, I didn’t follow all the posts in realtime, but when they started appearing in my mentions on twitter, or I would write up a story and post it, I would start to see people saying my story had already been coming, with a phrase that goes “Q predicted this.”

At first, I had no earthly clue what people were talking about or who this new source of information was. After a few days of this, I became curious, and began to track it back to 8chan, and before that to the original 4chan posts.

And then it hit me.

I thought back to a conversation I’d had months before with a pro-Trump Twitter troll who goes by the name Dreamcatcher. Dreamcatcher had been around during the 2016 election, and was a constant source of memes and ideas for new and original pro-Trump content. But, perhaps more importantly for our purposes, Dreamcatcher was close to Microchip.

Microchip gained infamy for his effictiveness in creating trending topics on twitter through high bot networks, and twitter’s numerous suspensions of him. He has been profiled in several mainstream publications and credited with having much more effect on the 2016 election in social media than any so-called Russian bot interference.

Months before, Dreamcatcher had told me about an “op” he was planning with Microchip that would plant bits and pieces of information on 4chan and act like it was coming from a high-level source inside the administration or the intel community. At the time he’d asked if I wanted to be a part of it. I declined.

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