Just when you thought Pizzagate was the dumbest conspiracy theory of all time (the Bowling Green Massacre notwithstanding), along comes “follow the white rabbit” or “calm before the storm” or “the Great Awakening” or “Q-Anon” or whatever you want to call this latest in a long line of overlapping conspiracies that oozed out of the 2016 Presidential campaign like a backed-up toilet that keeps on giving. (Thanks, Vlad!) The Q-Anon conspiracy could be considered Pizzagate 2.0— or perhaps better, Pizzagate on the “brown acid.” (Pizzagate on bad drugs if it wasn’t on bad drugs already).

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and even rocks have internet service these days) you’ve no doubt come across bits and pieces of Pizzagate in the form of Instagram photos depicting child sex slaves at Comet Ping Pong, child porn code words (CP!), celebrity “spirit cooking,” and tunnels connecting a vast satanic underground supposedly constructed by Democratic Party pervs.

My first taste of Pizzagate came courtesy of a YouTube video featuring alt right rock star Mike Cernovich sitting in a car somewhere in D.C., getting ready to roll to Comet Ping Pong and bust John Podesta’s chops. Other alt right operatives soon got in on the gag with similar Cernovich-in-his-car styled stalker vids, not to mention “urban explorers” showing up outside Comet Ping Pong as documented in this ridiculous video.

Many of the themes dished out with Pizzagate, it so happens, date back to the late ‘80s and ‘90s, echoing the “Satanic Panic” hysteria promoted by the likes of Geraldo Rivera, in particular the repurposing of underground tunnels (ala McMartin Pre-School) that allegedly run from Comet Ping Pong all the way to Capitol Hill. Of course, the only problem is that Comet Ping Pong doesn’t have any basement rooms, but let’s not confuse ourselves with facts.

In the same way that Pizzagate re-purposed the McMartin pre-school tunnels, the Hillary-is-a-satanic-lesbian was another ingredient baked into the cake, a theme dating back to the mid ‘90s tales of alleged MK-Ultra mind control victim Cathy O’Brien featured in such books as Trance Formation in America and the second edition of Walter Bowart’s Operation Mind Control.

Some surmise that Q-Anon was cooked-up as a way to keep the Pizzagate flame alive when enthusiasm was beginning to fizzle, as the much anticipated sealed indictments against Hillary and her cabal of pizza munching pedos never materialized, capped off by a 28 year old fellow from North Carolina named Edgar Welch who got spun out watching too many Infowars videos, and in particular the episode where Alex Jones did his own Pizzagate provocation — a sort of call to arms to the red hats to saddle up and save the world — spouting the same line a la Cernovich about how he was so pissed off he was going to catch the next flight to D.C. and — with trusty bullhorn in hand — take names and kick some Comet Ping Pong ass.

Before you knew it, Welch was on scene with an assault rifle at ready trying to force his way into the supposed underground room at Comet Ping Pong so he could save the children and own the Libs. When all was said and done, Welch fired a single shot to show he meant business. Fortunately no one was injured, and soon after he was apprehended by authorities.

The FBI criminal complaint against Welch stated that:

Shortly after 8:00 P.M. on December 1, 2016, WELCH sent a text message to friend “B.” The text message to “B” included an internet link to a YouTube video. The text message also included the note, “Watch PIZZAGATE: The Bigger Picture on YouTube.”

The YouTube video referenced above (courtesy of Infowars) was the apparent catalyst that propelled Mr. Welch on his ill-fated mission. When later interviewed by the New York Times, Welch admitted that “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” and that he regretted “how [he] handled the situation.” On March 24, 2017, Welch pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. (Thanks, Alex!)

Following the Edgar Welch debacle, things went into a bit of a lull, Pizzagate-wise, as soon after Alex Jones (after being paid a courtesy visit from the Feds), admitted in a sort of wishy-washy way on the Joe Rogan Show that his Comet Ping Pong claims had been, well, not quite accurate, although he was still suggesting there was some sort of child sex trafficking ring in operation that was perpetrated by the Libs to own the Cons.

Afterwards, Jones issued a public apology, which of course has since been flushed down the memory hole as you’ll discover if you follow this link to a 404 page. Here’s AJ’s mea culpa — if you happened to miss it — no doubt composed by his attorneys:

To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon. We apologize to the extent our commentaries could be construed as negative statements about Mr. Alefantis or Comet Ping Pong, and we hope that anyone else involved in commenting on Pizzagate will do the same thing.

The last gasp of the Pizzagate franchise came in the form of a sparsely attended protest documented in this Twitter thread by Will Sommer of the Daily Beast.

The ghost of Cathy O’Brien even made an appearance on a poster at the event, which only goes to show how the Project Monarch mythos continues to thrive 25 years after it was first introduced into mind control lore.

Around the time of this dud Pizzagate protest—and the sentencing of Edgar Welch in March 2017 — the /r/pizzagate subreddit was banned for violating Reddit’s anti-doxing policy, although a similar spin on the theme calling itself #pedogate started making the rounds of Twitter, 4chan and Voat. At some point, Comet Ping Pong was scrubbed from the narrative and the Q-Anon architecture was placed over the Pizzagate remains, as Q-Anon started gaining traction at r/the_donald, the same subreddit where Pizzagate had originally been hatched.

For those of you following along at home, Q-Anon (Q for short) is a high ranking member of the current administration (with a secret “Q” clearance!) who has come forward (in a clandestine manner) to blow the whistle on these Deep State evil-doers that President Trump is allegedly at odds with. Some sources suggest that Q is an employee of the Department of Energy, while others suspect he’s former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. Whoever s/he is, Q-Researchers (as they like to be called) have equated Q to a current day version of “Deep Throat” a la Watergate.

The Q-Anon crowd see Trump as a multi-dimensional chess player methodically dismantling this global pedophile ring that is overseen by the Clintons and rotten-to-the-core-Hollywood-elites. Obama is also in the mix, and is apparently the shadow leader of Antifa, super soldiers and all. In fact, according to Q-Anon lore, Obama is “Alice” and D.C. is the “Wonderland,” hence the “follow the white rabbit” tag line. As I mentioned before, the Q-Anon conspiracy has also been called “calm before the storm,” a reference to a cryptic remark Trump made in October 2017 during a photo op with senior military staff at the White House.

According to Q, President Trump is in the process of rounding up this pernicious pedophile ring and secretly whisking them away to GITMO to stand trial before a military tribunal and no doubt be sentenced to death. This narrative has been cobbled together by interpreting the latest crazy thing that Trump either tweets or says off the cuff, as well as a series of randomly generated bot messages that pop up semi-regularly at Q-Anon related internet sites.

For instance, something like Covfefe is a secret code that would put into action Trump’s grand plan to bust the New World Order’s balls. Another example is when Trump first floated his steel tariffs, and the stock market went into the tank for a couple of days. According to Q-Researchers, this stock market kerfuffle had been orchestrated by chess player Trump to bring Wall Street to its knees and ultimately do away with the Federal Reserve and bring back the gold standard, which has long been the wet dream of right wing conspiracy die-hards. So that is the sort of “connecting-the-dots” Q-Researchers use to rationalize the shit Trump says.

Below is a typical Q-Anon meme incorporating one of these randomly generated bots into a photo of Trump holding a sheet of talking points at a “listening session” on gun violence at the White House in February of this year. What the Q crew were suggesting — in this instance — was that the talking points were some sort of signal to launch the latest phase in his ongoing operation to dismantle the Deep State.

Although Q-Researchers go on ad nauseum about how Trump is upholding the Constitution, they just the same refer to him not as POTUS, but GEOTUS: God Emperor of the United States — which is indeed the sort of cognitive dissonance that can turn your brain inside-out if you decide to follow the white rabbit down the hole and through the looking glass…

Q-Researchers also believe (at least at one time or another) that Trump is working behind the scenes with Robert Mueller to bring down Hillary’s house of cards, and a key piece of this puzzle was the much anticipated release of the Inspector General’s report on the Clinton Email Investigation. When the IG’s report finally hit the streets on June 14, 2018, it left much of the Q crowd scratching their collective noggins in befuddlement as they were expecting some bigley bombshells to drop that would spell lights out for Hillary, but all that really came out of it was the determination (by IG Horowitz) that Comey and other FBI officials should have done a better job handling certain aspects of the case, and that there was no evidence of intentional political bias or wrong doing that affected their decision making process.

Never ones to accept anything at face value, the rumors soon started swirling around Q-Land that there was actually a super secret second IG Report that Trump was waiting for the right moment to drop on Hillary’s head. This delay motivated one Q enthusiast to park a makeshift armored vehicle on the bridge of the Hoover Dam and barricade himself inside along with his friends Smith and Wesson. Taped to the window of the vehicle was a sign that read: “Mr. President release the reports.” The Q follower in question turned out be a 30-year-old Nevada man named Matthew Wright. After about an hour on the bridge, apparently Wright became bored and decided to leave the scene but was foiled when the tires of his command vehicle were blown out after driving over some police spike strips. Afterwards, Mr. Wright stated:

We the people demand full disclosure. We elected you to do a duty. You said you were going to lock certain people up if you were elected. You have yet to do that. Uphold your oath.

One of the more curious artifacts to come out of Q-World is the chart below which incorporates damn near everything in the conspiratorial kitchen sink, including Atlantis, alien greys, and the Bavarian Illuminati.

This brain gobbling beauty is not unlike the conspiratorial fantasy world found in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! that likewise included a cavalcade of conspiracies, among them the Illuminati myth.

Part of the effectiveness of a hoax-conspiracy of this nature (be it the Illuminati or Q-Anon or pick your poison) is to blend facts with fantasy, so when someone starts going down any given rabbit hole you can point to a particular fact (like the once-upon-a-time existence of a certain secret society) to give the story some semblance of credibility. And that was the brilliance of Illuminatus!—taking factual historical elements and weaving them together with shaggy dog tales, such as Mayor Richard Daley was an Illuminati Grand Master screaming “Ewige Blumenkraft!” at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Of course Wilson and Shea had no idea that the fictional monster they helped spawn would live on in the fevered dreams of this and future generations in the form of the dreaded Illuminati. The John Podesta emails performed a similar function within the Pizzagate mythos: factual elements (emails) thrown into the dough along with other half truths (“spirit cooking”) and outright lies, like the Comet Ping Pong “kill room”.

This is not to suggest that Wilson and Shea were solely responsible for the Illuminati mythos as we know it today, but they certainly played a pivotal role in its evolution, along with other modern day Illuminati promoters such as the John Birch Society — and later the likes of Bill Cooper, Anthony Hilder and Alex Jones, to name a few. It should be noted that Wilson and Shea were parodying conspiracy theories — left, right, and off the map — although Illuminatus! nonetheless planted a seed in conspiracy culture that eventually took on a life of its own, as the “Illuminati” basically became a catch-all for every perceived conspiracy under the sun, and before you knew it the eye in the triangle was overlaid on a slice of pizza pie.

If you’ve read any of my books on Discordianism — or have visited HistoriaDiscordia.com — you’re probably hip to the role Wilson and Shea played in the Discordian Society, a gang of free thinking pranksters, who — for shits and giggles — created a spoof religion that worshipped the Greek goddess of chaos and discord, Eris. One of these Discordian Society pranks included placing a fake Illuminati chart in the June 4, 1969 issue of the East Village Other, thus planting a strange satiric seed into the ‘60s counterculture. Wilson, Shea and their Discordian co-conspirators were basically parodying the narrative put out by the John Birch Society that the 60s counterculture and anti-war movement had been infiltrated by global Communism and, by extension, our friends the Illuminati.

The chart in question (above) lists Discordian Society members by their Erisian alter egos: Mordecai the Foul = Robert Anton Wilson, Malaclypse the Younger = Discordian founder Greg Hill, and Lord Omar = Discordian co-founder Kerry Thornley. I later discovered that this Discordian chart was modeled after an old Illuminati chart (pictured below) that I stumbled upon in the Discordian Archives, which only goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun, and the same conspiratorial threads get recycled generation after generation.

While Pizzagate no doubt played a large role in the creation of Q-Anon, an even deeper dive into this white rabbit hole suggests that the origins of Q pre-date P-gate by a couple of weeks, and appear to be part of an ongoing influence campaign (some dare call it a domestic conspiracy) that started in or around November 2, 2016 — just days before the presidential election — when an article was posted at the True Pundit website provocatively titled “BREAKING BOMBSHELL: NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury”

The next day, Mike “Lock ‘er up” Flynn retweeted the True Pundit story, presumably as part of a real conspiracy designed to “rig” the 2016 election, as detailed in this Twitter thread by one of the more spot-on Trump-Russia Twitter commentators, Seth Abramson.

A couple days after the True Pundit article was published, Blackwater founder (and Trump-Russia operative) Erik Prince appeared on a Breitbart radio show spinning the same sketchy story.

On November 4, Mike Flynn retweeted the Erik Prince-Brietbart interview, and oddly enough added #spiritcooking to his tweet.

This seemed rather curious in retrospect because the first mention I could find of Pizzagate was a couple weeks later, around November 22, in a tweet by a re-occurring character in this twisted tale, none other than Mike Cernovich, who appears to have been on the ground floor of the Pizzagate franchise. Go figure…

A month later, on December 4, Mike Flynn Jr. tweeted about Pizzagate, which soon after sparked a controversy and apparent erroneous reporting by some news agencies that Mike Flynn Sr. had tweeted about Pizzagate—when it was actually his son— as detailed in this Washington Post article.

Whatever the case, Mike Flynn Jr. — who had been part of the Trump campaign — was soon after booted from the Trump transition team as apparent damage control over his Pizzagate proclivities.

The Washington Post article notwithstanding, Mike Flynn Sr.’s use of #spiritcooking seemed to suggest he was also on the ground floor of Pizzagate before it became a thing. I know this gets awfully convoluted, but stick with me…

The True Pundit story is connected (according to Seth Abramson) to Rudy Giuliani’s apparent foreknowledge (during a October 26, 2016 interview) that the Clinton email investigation was going to be re-opened — or that something big was gonna drop on Hillary’s head — courtesy of leaks from the FBI’s New York Field Office. Sure enough, two days later, on October 28, James Comey made his formal announcement about re-opening the investigation. As Abramson has pointed out, it appears quite likely that Giuliani, Erik Prince, and the anonymous Thomas Paine of True Pundit, were all in cahoots — not to mention the True Pundit story being pushed out and amplified by Steve Bannon’s Breitbart operation. It turned out to be the perfect shitstorm.

All of these sordid shenanigans bring us back full circle to the IG’s report, and the revelation therein regarding a separate and ongoing investigation related to Giuliani’s foreknowledge of the reopening of the case, as evidenced in this video (around 2:15):

The bottom line here appears to be that there was a pro-Trump anti-Hillary faction at the FBI-NY Field Office who leaked this information to Rudy G., and these leaks, in turn (according to Abramson) basically forced Comey’s hand to re-open the email investigation during a politically sensitive period, less than two weeks before the election.

Over the last week or so — as I was right in the middle of penning this piece — Q-Anon suddenly went mainstream when Q-Supporters showed up en masse at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, sporting Q t-shirts and hurling expletives at the “enemy of the people.” Since then, Q-Anon has been featured in a slew of stories on the major news channels, as MSM talking heads try to wrap their heads around the Q-Anon craze.

Around the same time that Q went mainstream, I received a call from the producer of a Comedy Central show currently working on a Q-Anon segment, who inquired if I was available for an interview. (Apparently they’d heard through the grapevine I was some sort of Q-Anon “expert.”) When I informed said producer that I thought Q was straight up bullshit, she said never mind, as they were looking for someone with a pro-Q perspective, but asked if I had any recommendations of someone who might fit that bill. I suggested visiting a Trump rally was probably her best bet.

Wikileaks has also recently jumped into the Q-Anon fray asserting that Q is some sort of CIA Psy Op, which is probably just deflection/projection given the fact that Wikileaks by all accounts is now nothing more than a Putin propaganda front. In the meantime, Julian Assange is sweating bullets at the Ecuadorian Embassy expecting to be bounced from there any day and extradited into the loving arms of Robert Mueller.

There’s even chatter now that the Anonymous hacker group is back at it and vowing to take down Q-Anon, though I’m not sure what taking down Q-Anon actually means, given the fact that it’s more a cultist belief system than an actual organization. Some independent Q observers are of the opinion that it was actually started by a single dude (or dudette) somewhere in the anonymous dark web hinterlands. With that being said, the jury is still out as to whether Q is actually a 400 pound guy on a bed somewhere, a collection of GRU officers, or —as a recent Buzzfeed article suggests — a “leftist prank.” (We’re getting into Discordian territory again!)

SEMI-BREAKING NEWS

And this just in from the “Karma-is-a-Bitch-Department”: right as I was attempting to finish writing this damned article, the never-ending news cycle kicked me square in the gonads again when word hit that Alex Jones has been permanently bounced from iTunes, Youtube and Facebook. While Alex’s fans are trying to frame this as a free speech issue, the bottom line here is money talks and bullshit walks. Maybe Alex’s buds at RT can find him a spot there. Or better yet — if Sarah Huckabee Sanders steps down — A.J. would make one doozy of a White House Press Secretary.

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To follow is a list of resources pro and con so you can get your Q-Anon-on (if ye dare):

Q-Anon posts can be found at https://qanon.pub

There ‘s also a “Q Alerts” app I almost added to my ipad the other day for a mere 99 cents until I came to my senses before actually clicking the pay button.

If you want to communicate directly to Q-World via Twitter this seems to be the place: @kill_rogue

For the latest in Q-Anon gear just do an Amazon search and you can find all kinds of crap from shirts to coffee mugs to get your Q groove on.

Here’s a couple stories (one, two)about Q-Anon enthusiasts who followed in the footsteps of legendary Pizzagater Edgar Welch, not to mention Matthew Wright, the guy who drove the armored vehicle to Hoover Dam and demanded the release of the super secret second IG report.

Even a handful of celebrities have been swept up in the Q-Anon craze, including Roseanne Barr and former MLB pitcher, Kurt Schilling. I haven’t checked out James Woods’ Twitter feed recently, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he turned out to be Q-Anon crazy, too.

To cap off this brain boiling bonanza, here’s a few links to some of the better Q commentary courtesy of Wapo, Daily Dot, Vice, The Daily Beast, and the incomparable Rick Wilson.