I’m not making any concrete statements here. Some of these people are litigious and I don’t need that in my life. But for those that have been wondering, the search has been narrowing on the identity of Q.

The first thing to understand is that there have been three “eras” of QAnon. The LARP/Counter-Narrative, the evangelical eschatology narrative, and now The Dumb Times.

After discussing the phases and probable culprits, I will touch on the underlying force behind QAnon.

First phase is the LARP era. It began on 4Chan where lots of people would post, role playing as high-level government insiders. There was FBIAnon, CIAAnon, etc., however, the first one to really take off was QAnon. The Q was in relation to the Q level security clearance.

That clearance level usually relates to the U.S. Department of Energy. In order to understand how QAnon caught on, you have to remember what was happening at the time. What began as a fanciful LARP became a powerful counter-narrative tool.

President Trump was embroiled in a investigation over his ties to Russia. His poll numbers were starting to dip, even among his supporters, as each day brought new headlines of the president’s nefarious connections to Russian oligarchs, etc.

Lo and behold, in comes QAnon, a conspiracy theory that posits that Trump isn’t the bad guy the media is portraying, he’s actually the hero, and is secretly working with Robert Mueller to take down the “real” criminals: the Democrats.

All in all, a convenient story to release the anxiety of Republican voters seeing their favorite president lambasted in the daily press. The style of posting by Q at that time was what I consider to be the most “professional” looking. It used cryptic references to intelligence.

Around that time, it is believed that the QAnon account was being passed around by a number of people, mostly right wing nut job grifters. NBC News reported that some of them may in fact have been “bakers”.

“Bakers” are people that serve to interpret the posts called “Q Drops” because of course everything has to have its own terminology. Think of them as a priestly class that fills your grandmother’s head with poison in exchange for her retirement money.

During this time, the account was believed to be passed around, but one specific individual seemed to fit the profile: Coleman Rogers. He refuses to deny he was Q, and has posted right-wing claptrap for years. The posting style appears heavily influenced by two people.

Retired military/intelligence crank Michael Scheuer and Thomas Wictor. Scheuer seemed to have enough memory of intelligence lingo to make posts sound legit, and Wictor is the king of “Trump is the grandmaster of 12 dimensional chess” mindset.

Keep in mind I said influenced because all right wing conspiracy theories are constructed in syncretic echo chambers. QAnon is the end result: a conservative conspiracy theory that incorporates every paranoid and psychotic GOP lie that existed over the last 40 years.

Then Q moved, forced out from 4Chan, it made its new home on 8Chan, the favored site for mass shooters to post their manifesto. This was the beginning of the Evangelical/End Times Era of posting. Much of the wonky CIA-speak was dropped in favor of an eternal light versus darkness

storyline. This is where we started seeing lazy posts like “GOD WINS”, etc. This is where it found it’s wider audience: religious Boomers infected with brainworms from years of absorbing conservative propaganda. It was speaking their language and they ate it up.

At that time, Q was posting on a specific message board /CBTS or Calm Before the Storm (in reference to an offhanded comment Trump made at a dinner to sound cool and his idiot followers thought he was speaking in code). The board was run by James Ferber.

I strongly suggest you listen to the Reply All episode “Country of Liars” as they present more evidence than I am ready to go over here. James is an evangelical South African conspiracy theorist (what could go wrong?). The South African white connection doesn’t end with him.

Joe M. a.k.a. TheStormIsUponUs is the person most cited as Q-pilling people. Q-pilling is convincing people of this nonsense theory. He created a video called “Q - The Plan to Save the World”. It had millions of views on YouTube before it was taken down.

Anyway, he also is South African and lied saying he was an American from the Phoenix area. It is a wonder how post-apartheid SA whites can so easily connect with post-civil rights evangelicals. I’m sure it has nothing to do with their shared history of black oppression. /s

This is the era when they incorporated the blood libel/satanic panic narrative about Democrats taking part in secret Satanic cannibalistic child sex rituals. Also, JFK Jr. never died and he is now shorter, fatter, and named Vincent Fusca.

There was a fight for control of the Q account and the site owner of 8Chan/8Kun stole it. Thus, The Dumb Times era. The Q account has been run by Ron Watkins on behalf of his father, Jim Watkins (website owner). Jim Watkins is a racist, sexist pornographer that now controls Q.

The posts now have more obvious mistakes and show a much lower level of effort. But that doesn’t matter, because the “bakers” (read: grifters) like Praying Medic would be happy to takeover the narrative. They don’t really need Q anymore in order to siphon money from gullible

rubes. So if we are keeping score:
1st: Coleman Rogers
2nd: James Ferber
3rd: Jim Watkins (also Ron)

Others have covered the cult-like nature of QAnon. I would rather touch on its most dangerous property: potential. The narrative started as a way to wave a shiny object in front of Republicans to have them ignore reports of malfeasance by their president.

Once it entered the evangelical blood libel stage it became far more dangerous. First, it acts as a thought-stopping tool. You would never listen to a pedophilic cannibal, so “you should never listen to Americans with an opposing view because they’re all part of the cabal.”

The Cabal being the catch all term for a network of elite (Democrat) cannibalistic pedophiles. All nonsense. But the most important thing to take away from all this is what it gives them: justification. When your enemies are pedophile cannibals, you are justified in anything

you do to them. Additionally, the entire story is a fascist fantasy narrative borrowed from the white supremacist “Day of the Rope”. In the same way white supremacists fantasize about a day where whites destroy all non-whites in an orgy of blood and violence,

QAnon followers pine for a day where they will see their political opponents executed on national television. This doesn’t lead anywhere good folks. Priming people to see anyone who opposes them as the worst of the worst will eventually lead to genocide.

The underlying goal of QAnon is to dehumanize their political opposition. It should be seen for what it is: eliminationist rhetoric.

You should be concerned at how cozy the Republican Party has become with QAnon. It speaks to their will to power, their opposition to democracy, their drive for authoritarian minority rule, and their death drive in the form of genocide.

Everyone associated with QAnon should never have a place in public office, but it’s already too late for that. We have to fight harder to prevent this cancer of the mind to spread further.