Mr. Paul Furber of South Africa was an Anon and a Moderator on 4chan in October, 2017. On the 27th of that month, he noticed cryptic posts on the /pol/ board. It was a couple of days before the author of those posts began signing himself as “Q,” but Mr. Furber immediately recognized that something unusual was happening.

In the ensuing days and weeks, Mr. Furber became the original Q evangelist. To this day, Mr. Furber still considers himself “under orders from the original Q,” and he continues to promote the Q superconspiracy.

Paul Furber is one reason why QAnon went viral. The role that Mr. Furber played in the early stages of the Q phenomenon led some to suspect that Paul Furber himself was the elusive Q. This was my primary motive in asking him for an interview.

BLUF: I no longer suspect that Paul Furber is QAnon. This long interview (nearly two hours) is rich in detail and it showcases his thinking beyond all preceding coverage: the website heavy published a biopic about him on the same day that an influential NBC News article appeared criticizing the Q superconspiracy. Both were components in a coordinated fake news attack on Q that began in late July, 2018, and continued into September of that year.

(Tom Cleary, “Paul Furber: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” heavy, August 14, 2018; Brandy Zadrozny & Ben Collins, “How three conspiracy theorists took “Q” and sparked Qanon,” NBC News, August 14, 2018).

Examining the objective forensics of this interview leaves me inconclusive, but the subjective consistency and coherence of Mr. Furber’s recounting suggest that he is truthful when he denies masquerading as QAnon. And there are other candidates.

Mr. Furber brings decades of experience writing and coding to his conspiratorial ministry. Graduating from Falcon College in Zimbabwe in 1984, he wrote for South African media company IT Web, for Brainstorm, and CareerWeb. He writes code for Tildedot. Where Q is concerned, we must understand that Paul Furber is a conspiracy theorist with deep foundations, an autodidact with demonstrable expertise in historical conspiracy theory.

This interview will consolidate Paul Furber’s historical role in the evolution of the Q phenomenon. As I say, Q is no longer a mere phenomenon: Q is now a movement, with all the sociopolitical and ideological implications that implies.

This interview was recorded on April 30, 2019. I completed the draft transcript for Mr. Furber’s review on May 17, 2019. After some minor corrections, I published this interview with accompanying commentary and transcript on May 19, 2019. I updated some further corrections on June 3, 2019: 21294 words.

This interview is the second in a projected Q Files series, and the first to be published.

=

Begin Transcript.

Mr. Furber is approximately my age (58), a distinguished, bearded white male broadcasting with an artfully shadowed backdrop behind him. His nickname, “Baruch,” appears at the lower left of the display.

Mr. Furber joins me from Johannesburg, South Africa. I tell him that I have friends who rave about South Africa. He says “it is an amazing country, well, it was an amazing country, we are in trouble at the moment.”

I say that I understand. I do not follow South African politics, but I see blips about it crossing my radar. “It looks horrendous. You’ve got this exodus of white people going to Russia. It is crazy.”

He agrees, “yeah, Georgia, Russia,” he says that “it is very sad, because people have worked very hard for 25 years to make it work, but now that the government has failed so horribly, they are pulling out the race card, so “Oh, whites are racist,” which is absolute nonsense, so, yeah … I think we are headed for a civil war. I don’t see any other way out of it.”

I say, ”well, it won’t be the first time, obviously,.”

“No,” he agrees. “It is going to be nasty.”

I say that I am very sorry about it, and I am. I ask if he has plans to relocate, as civil wars are never benign.

He says no, he is dug in, “I have independent power, and satellite internet, although it is broken at the moment, the guys were just fixing it today, which lands in Europe, so, yeah, I have my own power, my own food, water, internet connectivity. Everything.”

“Good on you.”

He explains: “I am on a reasonably large property, so I can grow, I mean with my vegetable garden I can really live off that.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Fuel, solar, I am prepared for anything. Lots of ammo.” He laughs, as he knows that I am an American. 🙂

“Right,” I say. I am pleased that he has the resources to do that. That is impressive.

Mr. Furber has seen South Africa’s date with destiny coming for a few years. He got into the right mindset, he red-pilled his family. “Just in case,” he said, “let’s get ready. Just prepare. Be ready. Even if nothing happens, nothing will have been wasted.”

I agree: “You are right. It is not a waste.”

I say that I am delighted that he is joining me today. I explain that I am writing on QAnon. I am perplexed and fascinated by the movement. It is not a phenomenon anymore, it is now a movement.

Mr. Furber agrees, “pretty much, yeah,” that Q is now a movement. I mention an article that I wrote about Sebastian Gorka, how clueless the former counselor to the President is, he does not understand Q nor modern conservatism.

(Esteban Trujillo de Gutierrez, “Q Files: Dr. Sebastian Gorka,” Magic Kingdom Dispatch, April 12, 2019).

Me: “To say that Q supporters are not Trump supporters is ludicrous.”

Mr. Furber: “Yeah, that’s crazy.”

I continue: “He really discredited himself. As we know, Gorka has been a consistent critic of QAnon. For quite some time.”

“From the very beginning. He says “Q is garbage. Yeah.”

I say, “the Q’verse just shrugs, they say, well, you should join us, you should do your research, “obviously you are not read into the compartment.” It doesn’t matter.”

I continue: “And this is sort of a pattern that we see repeated, because no matter what kind of exposés come out, what kind of exposure comes out, the folks that are running the Q operation right now, it doesn’t matter, they are impervious. Patriot’s Soapbox just continues to march and to grow.”

He agrees: “Yeah, exactly.”

I say: “This is a situation I think where the Q phenomenon slipped out of its harness and it’s just going, it is going to run.”

He says: “Yeah, very much so.”

(Crosstalk—I must apologize for my inept interviewing skills, I am accustomed to interviewing in person, not virtually across the internet.)

Me: “I was going to say, you have to feel some satisfaction from that…”

Mr. Furber begins his tale: “Yeah, well … let me go back.” He takes a moment, then continues: “It was late October 2017, 18 months ago, I noticed a thread on 4chan, posted by some guy, very out of the ordinary, and he was saying “patriots, your president is taking back your great country,” I said whoa, what is this, that was Saturday or Sunday, by midweek this guy had posted a few times.”

Mr. Furber explains: “He was making outrageous claims. “The National Guard will be deployed, the President’s twitter is probably going to go down,” then Thursday night, the President’s twitter was taken offline. Whoa. How in the hell did he know that?”

He continues: “We were looking on the Friday for reports of the National Guard being deployed, nothing, nothing, Saturday, I was up all night trying to catch up to these threads, and then I noticed that something big was happening in Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince took control of the country, and he arrested 18 crown princes and 14 ministers, and Q came back on and said, “National Guard deployed in Saudi Arabia, have you joined the dots? Or something like that.”

“I said, “ah, man, he was leading us! So now people are really getting interested and more and more Anons were joining the thread. We went back, and we looked at Q’s posts, and there were a whole bunch of hints about Saudi Arabia. Which we didn’t know what he was talking about. He was saying “follow HUMA.” But in capital letters.”

(Editorial Note: This is not a correct reading of Q’s first two drops: Q stated that “US M’s will conduct the operation while NG activated,” and forecasted that “Hillary Clinton will be arrested between 7:45 AM – 8:30 AM EST on Monday – the morning on Oct 30, 2017.” An alternate reading could be that US Marines would conduct the operation.

In any case, Hillary Clinton was not in Saudi Arabia, nor was she arrested, and the likelihood of “US M’s” conducting any operation in Saudi Arabia, “while NG activated,” in that country would be remote.

These first two Q drops are notable because they were the first, and they also established precedents for specificity and failed prediction: “HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 10/30 @ 12:01am.” No confirmation by any US government agency, much less the Department of State, was ever issued.

The Q drops of October 28, 2017 continued: “Expect massive riots organized in defiance and others fleeing the US to occur.” Needless to say, there were no activations of US National Guard units, despite Q proposing a means of confirmation: “Proof check: Locate a NG member and ask if activated for duty 10/30 across most major cities.”)

Mr. Furber continues: “That’s the Harvard University Muslim Alumni (HUMA), not Huma Abedin, it had a double meaning, it was very subtle, which was founded by Crown Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal (b. 1955-) who had just been arrested. So this guy knew in exact detail what was about to happen in Saudi Arabia. A massive upheaval. Then I was convinced. Nobody knows that kind of information unless they are at the very highest levels.”

“He just kept on dropping bombshells after bombshells, he would use phrases that the president would tweet out ten minutes later. So this was clearly a guy, with Q clearance, standing next to the President. He went to the Far East with him. He posted original photos from Air Force One. Which we matched up with the President’s itinerary. Which matched exactly.”

Mr. Furber remembers: “He started (laughs) trolling Rothschilds, and saying, you know, we can hear you breathing, we know where you are at all times. He started posting these weird military signatures that said…they were kind of hard to decipher.”

“Then like four days later there was a kidnap attempt of Lord Jacob, and Lynn de Rothschild, but they were safe in the UK at an airstrip. Then Q said, “did you see this message?”

“Again, you cannot make up that kind of stuff. By about November, mid to late November, the attacks we were getting on 4chan were like nothing I had ever seen. Floods of posters, distractions, all kinds of disgusting images that flooded discussion away.”

Mr. Furber continues: “It must have been about the 19th or 20th, I moved to 8chan, which is kind of a better 4chan than 4chan. It runs almost the same software, but instead of us posting on /pol/, the “politically incorrect” board, which we did not own, you can make your own board.”

“So I made one called Calm Before the Storm (CBTS), and suddenly on the 25th I woke up, and there was a lot of people in there (sic), saying “yeah, we are not going back to 4chan, we’ve been kicked off.” So this is it. I set up some rules, I started organizing threads and then left things alone, hoping that Q would come on, and then he did.”

Mr. Furber continues: “It must have been 1st or 2d December, he posted using his same tripcode. He started posting on my board. I had never been part of history like that before, it was incredible. He was dropping ridiculous predictions and information that nobody could possibly have access to. Except somebody with extraordinary high clearance at NSA, or military intelligence, wherever he was.”

10:37

I refer to Q: “Obviously he was somebody who was read into a compartment where this was conducted, ok, so he was part of a very small cabal.”

Mr. Furber agrees: “Absolutely. I believe that one of his posts said, “Q clearance does not mean that I work with Department of Energy (DOE), it means that I have clearance across all departments.”

“So I kind of suspect that it was … Q was probably Admiral Mike Rogers and a team of his. Because you know that there is a Q Group, at the NSA. Who do this kind of thing.”

“And also, The New York Times, like the 8th or 9th of November, no—the 10th of November, (unintelligible) posted an article about the Q Group at NSA. Which was a direct warning to the Q group, and Q pointed it out, he said look at this article, a direct attack on the president, yeah, stand-by. So we knew that the bad guys were watching the boards, because they are all anonymous, yeah, anyone can go on there and post whatever they want, so….”

(Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, “Security Breach and Spilled Secrets have Shaken the NSA to Its Core,” The New York Times, Nov. 12, 2017).

I say: “Talk to me a little bit about how the 8chan admins facilitated you at that early point on 8chan?”

He says: “Well at first they did not have to do anything, because that’s the point of 8chan … is you just, you know, you log into 8chan and you create a board and it is yours. The admins are kind of in the background just to make sure that the whole board runs properly. They do not mess around with your board.”

I say: “They do not get down in the weeds.”

“No,” he agrees. “CodeMonkey, he was the main 8chan admin, he created secure tripcodes for us. Super secure tripcodes. But I found out later that they are not. They don’t read like the whole password, they only read like the first 7 characters, so they are just as insecure as the original tripcodes.”

I say: “I saw that. Yeah. Let me look at my notes here real quickly. So you do not have any idea, I mean obviously there is a school of thought that contends that Q Anon is a LARP?”

Mr. Furber replies: “I have an unusual point of view because I was very close to it. Q from October 27 to January 5, I believe was 100% genuine. That was a senior guy at the NSA, with the full knowledge of the President, telling us what was going on behind the scenes. After that, no. After that I do not believe that Q was the same people. I believe that the tripcode was compromised, either by a rival agency or by some script kiddies. It is hard to say. However, it doesn’t actually matter. Because….”

(Crosstalk).

(Mr. Furber previously covered this same narrative terrain in a long thread roll on Twitter. Mr. Furber explained:

“Jan 5 is when the imposters take over #qanon’s tripcode password. The style changes radically: it becomes CAPS-ridden, immature and full of outright falsehoods. Q accuses the board owner of /cbts of lying,” Furber tweeted. “/ But the new #qanon was himself lying. The IP he used was one the mods had never seen before. The board owner would clarify all of this in detail later as well as posting the logs as proof. The new #qanon became obsessed with the idea of private communications between the mods and the real Q, denying it had ever happened and that the claims were the reason for the board change. This makes no sense of course. …” “He continued, “The fake #qanon moved his posts over to /thestorm/ board but only for a couple of days. He then insulted the board owners and set up his own board at /greatawakening/. Many of us could already see that this wasn’t the real Q but some script kiddies with the tripcode pw. …So what happened to the real #qanon? Obviously he can’t post on 8chan with any authenticity. And any statement from the President on the current Q might compromise all of Q, including the real drops from last year.” (Tom Cleary, “Paul Furber: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” heavy, August 14, 2018).

Continuing with our interview, Mr. Furber says: “But you see at first, I was furious. The guy is interrupting the mission, blah blah blah. But when I look back now with the clarity of hindsight, I can see it doesn’t matter, what’s happened is, this thing has a life of its own, and you now have millions of people around the world, who are completely informed, just getting more and more informed about what the elites are really up to. Which is a good thing. It’s a good thing. It’s a great thing.”

Mr. Furber explains: “President Trump could have stopped this in its tracks at any one of his rallies. Instead, what does he do? He stands up and he says, “these people are sick!” (repeating a Q statement), or he draws the Q in the air, twice, just to make sure that you absolutely got it.”

“That is a terrible way to disavow the Q movement, terrible, ….if you are going to quote QAnon stuff at rallies, then that is not the president saying Q is garbage or Q is a LARP. No. That is the President saying “You guys keep doing what you are doing. Keep investigating, keep hammering on the boards, keep asking celebrities questions on Twitter, and yeah, I am right behind you.”

Pretty epic Air-Q from last night…😎 pic.twitter.com/Omzyk8S09x — M3thods (@M2Madness) April 28, 2019

Mr. Furber concludes, “So, hey. Yeah. I think what you said at the beginning is absolutely right. The movement has a life of its own, (unintelligible) … and the mainstream media is forced to respond and make asses of themselves. Then we know that we are doing something right.”

I say that the mainstream media are just petrified.

Mr. Furber: “Well, of course, they are enemies of the people.”

I tell him, “There is no question about that. As an American, I am an expatriate, I live in Bangkok, I go to America to get my medical treatment at the Veteran’s Administration. I cannot abide being in my own country. It is horrible what has happened.”

Then I explain, “for me, this is very much a matter of duty, as you know, our oaths never expire.”

Mr. Furber agrees: “No.”

16:32

“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” (5 U.S.C. § 3331, Oath of Office).

I continue: “They never expire. When I swore those oaths as a young man,” referring to my US military oaths of enlistment and commissioning, “I meant every word. As I age I get more consolidated in that oath, as time has passed, as I have gotten older. So yeah. I do not know.”

Mr. Furber says, “the good news is that the good guys are taking it back. For real. It is taking a long time.”

I observe that “we are talking about millions of people that have been red-pilled now.”

Mr. Furber: “Well, yeah, exactly.”

Me: “And they are not going to go back.”

Mr. Furber agrees: “You can’t go back. The information that they have now figured out for themselves based on listening to the questions that Q asked, now allows them to interpret world events, correctly.”

“That’s right.”

He continues: “You can look at the world, you can see the incredible violence between, say, the 13th of this month, and now, and you can say, well this is just the elites who worship Satan. Sacrificing as many people as they can. Bingo. Why was Michael and Barry skulking around in Paris just before the fire? (sic) Because they are high-level members of the cult.”

17:55

(A reference to the destruction of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris by fire on April 15, 2019:

The smoke of Notre Dame burning could be seen across Paris, and from Michael Obama’s cruise boat on the Seine.

The agony of Notre Dame.

Daniel Jativa, “Michelle Obama in Paris near Notre Dame as cathedral went up in flames,” Washington Examiner, April 17, 2019).

Mr. Furber: “They have to do their rituals before they do this sort of thing. All these things fall into place when you have the understanding of the world that Q has given us. You can’t just go back to sleep again.”

I explain that I am not a journalist. “I consider myself a political scientist and an historian. So I am coming at this from a very different attack angle. I look at QAnon as ideology. And conspiracy theory obviously is critical, it is core to it. Conspiracy theory, I believe, is the predominate method that we now must use to understand our reality.”

“Exactly,” he says.

I say that, “We can look at the long list of conspiracies. Since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Act was passed in the middle of the night, on Christmas Eve …”

Mr. Furber interjects, “it was the 22d, wasn’t it, when it was signed into law? It was the 22d of December, 1913, which is a Luciferian elite (unintelligible) and it was signed by Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather, wasn’t it.”

I say: “What I love about this, is that someone like you and I, we have never met, we don’t know one another. We can talk like this based on a common chronology and the approach. (Unintelligible). Shit does not just happen. There are actions of cabals, acting at fulcrum points, throughout history.”

I continue: “And you see it repeated, this is one of the beautiful things I think that QAnon has done, because I think he resolved that false dichotomy that shit just happens … or cabals, is conspiracy theory valid? We’ve resolved that. We’ve just taken that off the table. We know now. We see it. Many people will think that it is ludicrous to say that Luciferian cabals are acting. But you know, when you look at the expanse of history….”

Mr. Furber: “Yep. And as you say, they use the same methods over and over again.”

(Crosstalk).

Mr. Furber recounts Q saying: “Symbols will be their downfall.”

I ask, “What can you tell me about PamphletAnon, about James Coleman Rogers?”

21:02

(Rogers initially assisted Paul Furber as a moderator on 8chan and the now-banned CBTS_Stream subreddit until he led a rebellion of Q moderators and expelled Mr. Furber from their Discord chatroom. Rogers became a Board Owner on 8chan, and founded the popular Q-centric 24/7 Patriot’s Soapbox on YouTube. Mr. Rogers is often accused of masquerading as the elusive Q, and the evidence is compelling. I will address this separately).

Mr. Furber replies: “Not a whole lot there bro. So … I met him December 15, we had massive attacks against 8chan boards. (Unintelligible). There were a few guys helping me. I changed the board to forced anonymous. To stop all this fighting between people who wanted to put names…(unintelligible). I thought that Q would still be able to post. I was actually talking to some guys on TOR. On encrypted chat. They said, “yeah, make it forced anonymous, it will be fine.” Uh, no, it doesn’t work.”

Mr. Furber explains: “Q got locked out of the board, and could not post under his own tripcode. Then I saw another post where some people were getting close to his tripcode. And now, that was weird. Because tripcodes do not work like that.”

Mr. Furber clarifies: That encryption does not work like that. If you put in the alphabet, let us say from A to Z, and you encrypt it, you get a hash, you get a scrambled output. If you change one character of the input, so if you say A BB DEF … if you say scramble that, you get a completely different output, because, you know, it is a cyclical thing.”

He continues: “So that is not how you crack hashes. But, it scared me. So I kept the board locked until Q changed his tripcode. And he changed it on /pol/, and then he came back and posted with us.”

“Now, while I kept the board locked, I had to ignore the moderators screaming at me by email and direct chat and whatever. I had to basically throw my board under the bus, while everyone was wondering what in the fuck I was doing, without telling anyone.”

He remembers: “Terrifying … sort of 24 hours. And then, when I reopened it and Q changed his tripcode, I then reached out to these guys and I said I’m sorry, this was a judgement call, I made it, apologies.”

“That was when I started talking to Pamphlet (Rogers) on Discord, which is that chat app. And then we started working together, along with a couple of other guys, and we started working together and we reached out to a number of people. We decided, enough of just the ’chans, this needed to go wider. So we reached out to people like TracyBeanz.”

22:35

“Uh, Tracy Diaz, who was great, I got a reply back from her in like ten minutes, we went on her show that evening and just chatted. These videos are all available on YouTube, by the way. If you search for “Baruch Interview” you will probably see them.”

“We spoke to InfoWars, we went on Rob Dew’s show about a week after that. We spoke to Alex Jones in the studio. We went with independent YouTubers, I emailed Nathan at Lift the Veil, I emailed Jordan Sather, many people who had been covering Q from the sidelines, the YouTubers, we got in touch with as much as we can (sic).”

(Nathan Stolpman: Lift the Veil, YouTube; Jordan Sather: Destroying the Illusion, YouTube; the reference is to a pivotal interview of the Q moderators on the YouTube channel of Tracy Diaz, aka Tracy Beanz, “Behind the Scenes at “CBTS” #QAnon– MUST WATCH,” YouTube, December 19, 2017).

(Crosstalk).

Mr. Furber: “I am sorry. Carry on?”

I ask: “You were obviously the leader at this point. Was that primarily because you were the board owner?”

He replies: “It was very much a work-together thing, I was kind of working in the background, on the Reddit side I wrote a Wiki entry for the subreddit, (unintelligible) was true, how to do your own research, I did a lot of writing answering people’s questions on subreddits, that kind of thing.”

“It was hard work, and I was putting in 16 hour days in the wrong time zone. So I was seven hours ahead. And I was on vacation. So I was doing this full-time, I had been doing it full time for like three months. It was unsustainable.”

(The reference is to the CBTS_Stream subreddit, founded by Tracy Diaz, Paul Furber and James Coleman Rogers on December 21, 2017. The subreddit was later banned on March 15, 2018: Andrew Wyrich, “Reddit bans popular deep state conspiracy forum for “inciting violence,” The Daily Dot, March 15, 2018.

The other Q-oriented subreddit, r/greatawakening, was likewise banned a few months later on September 12, 2018: Bijan Stephen, “Reddit’s QAnon Ban Points to How It’s Tracking Toxic Communities,” The Verge, September 12, 2018).

But back to Mr. Furber’s tale. With December, 2017 in our rearview mirrors, he is explaining the internecine war that erupted between Anons on 8chan.

“After the January changeover, I said to the guys look, this is not the same Q and I can tell you why. The IP address hash is wrong, the style is different, yeah, I am not interested anymore. You need to do something about it.”

The shit hit the fan on 8chan.

Remember that literally anybody could be posting as Q. The board owner and his moderators, namely Paul Furber and Coleman Rogers—those with access to the board management dashboard—said that they identified QAnon by repetitive access to the board from a limited number of IP addresses and other indicators known only to them.

In other words, either Mr. Furber or Mr. Rogers could be posting as QAnon, or any of the other 8chan moderators who knew the seven-character password that generated the Q tripcode, using a VPN or other means to post from the same range of IP addresses. IP addresses can be spoofed. Anyone intimate with the culture of the ‘chans, any Anon, anyone who knew the password, could be masquerading as the elusive Q.

The Q movement continues, despite all these intramural struggles behind the scenes, because of the internal coherence and consistency of the Q drops themselves. Regardless of multiple scandals, a significant slice of the American public remains so desperate for an alternative to the fake news media that we suspend disbelief and embrace a gnomic anonymous oracle.

When Mr. Furber stated, “Not Q. Q’s second trip has been cracked as I thought it might be,” the balance that nurtured this strange phenomenon on 8chan tipped, and external observers got a glimpse of the egos behind it all.

Some of these egos were surprisingly petty. This was not a military intelligence professional weaving outrageous tales on an anonymous image board. Nor would this be the last time that QAnon stooped to pettiness. In fact, this established a precedent for pettiness. I will address successive examples separately.

As many suspected, these antics confirmed that Q was a LARP, a Live Action Role Play, run by Anons. Put another way, Q was a charade, like Dungeons and Dragons, but with societal implications.

Q could be anybody. Q could be the prototypical 8chan Anon, orange-handed from Cheetos dust, eating microwaved burritos in his mother’s basement. Q could be Paul Furber. Q could be Coleman Rogers. Q could be any of a host of Anons with the cunning and the historical expertise to craft the perplexing “drops” that began in late October, 2017.

From a technical standpoint, all that would be necessary to post as Q is the password that generated the idiosyncratic Q tripcode–and this password was actually circulating in the wild at this time–and the ability to access 8chan from specific IP addresses: assuming that we can take Mr. Furber at his word.

Thirty four minutes later, as the 8chan hive mind raged, Q posted one final drop in the series.

Q said that the board, and the board owner himself, Mr. Paul Furber, were compromised.

Mr. Furber continues:

“Pamphlet stopped answering me. And eventually I got kicked out of that Discord, which is where Patriot’s Soapbox comes from. So I’ve had zero involvement with Patriot’s Soapbox, because they disagreed with me. I believe they really believe that was Q.”

Discord chat log screenshot of Paul Furber aka camperman to Tracy Diaz aka tracybeanz warning that Q moderators Breadbox and PenultimateShitlord removed Furber from the CBTS bakery ‘chan.

This screenshot is significant because Mr. Furber claims that Q sent him a direct message. More specifically, Mr. Furber implies that the message came from Q—but he does not explicitly say so:

“Thank you. Understand. Attempts to divide and conquer in here. Will continue. Be ready and guide, simplify, direct resources. Must lv for now. kkSec$rns/. Careful who you speak to in the future. Several might not be who they seem. Be smart and disciplined. Guide your Anons.”

The problem with this is that Q subsequently stated that he communicated privately with no one. And then there is the tone of this group of Q drops. The logical conclusion is that Q is one of the 8chan moderators, someone with an intimate understanding of ‘chan culture, how the boards worked.

Many suspected that Mr. Furber was QAnon. Others concluded that Mr. Rogers was QAnon. A hypothetical case can be made implicating either of them–or one of the other moderators, working from within the small coterie with access to the Discord server.

Q reinforces this in another drop on January 8, 2018.

Mr. Furber understands where I am going with this line of questioning, so he gets out in front of it:

“I’ve never said and I never will say, unless I see proof to the contrary, that they knowingly are perpetrating a fraud, because I do not believe that is true.”

Then Mr. Furber unlimbers an appeal to authority in the unlikely person of Dr. Jerome Corsi.

“Another thing, Dr. Corsi was with us, quite often, he joined the subreddit, as soon as it was formed, in December, December 21, 22, somewhere around there. So he was decoding Q’s military orders, and he was really cool. We had long chats with him on voice. I got a lot out of it. He was one of the people who believed that this was still Q. After January the 4th or 5th.”

26:33

Dr. Corsi’s materialization on the scene raised for me another possibility—that Corsi was Q, or was collaborating with whomever was posting as Q. Corsi’s “decodes” of Q drops, which I analyze elsewhere, feed this suspicion.

Worse, I became aware–in the course of another interview with another protagonist–that Corsi claimed to secretly correspond with Q, he claimed to secretly exchange emails with Q, and Corsi sold access to these email threads to his feed subscribers on Gab.ai.

Corsi’s appearance also coincided with rumors that an InfoWars source mentioned by Alex Jones called “Zach” might be the elusive Q, a possibility that Anons quickly shot down.

Mr. Furber continued: “So again, I had to take a backseat, because I was so tired. (Unintelligible). It was unsustainable to continue at that pace.”

Which is one way to put this. Another way would be to ask whether Q himself fired Paul Furber. Rephrasing this, remembering that Q could be anyone, it appears that Mr. Furber lost a struggle to control the Q tripcode and hence the Q drops themselves. Which points a finger of suspicion directly at Coleman Rogers, the lone other Anon present at the heart of QAnon since the inception.

Mr. Rogers is the same Anon who seized control of the moderator Discord server and purged Paul Furber. The same Anon that committed a number of perplexing errors that made the Q’verse wonder if he was running a con. The same Anon with an alleged rap sheet including fraud.

I persist: “You and Rogers, there is no state of conflict between you, anything like that?”

Mr. Furber shakes his head. “Not really. No. He does not talk to me anymore. Not particularly.”

I say: “I got to tell you that I think it’s really amazing that he would just seize this the way that he did and then exile you. I find that perplexing.”

Mr. Furber explains, “I, again, it does not particularly bother me, I was never really, I had never been interested in making money from the Q phenomenon. But on the other hand, if people in the media, and I am a former journalist, I still am a journalist….

27:22

“But If people in the media want to make money, great, let them, awesome, I mean I support people on Patreon, there are people like (unintelligible) Tracy, awesome, great. But I certainly am not obsessed with making products that people can buy. I mean, I am writing a book, I am about 12 chapters through my book about all this episode. If people do not want to read it, great, I will send them a copy free (unintelligible).”

I call this the Teflon precedent. The Q movement seems impervious to the revelation that Q is not a military intelligence professional posting from within close proximity to President Donald J. Trump.

As I said: my guess is that a significant demographic of Americans is so desperate for an alternative to the fake news that we will suspend disbelief and accept the irrational assertion that QAnon is a Trump administration insider. Which could be true, despite compelling evidence to the contrary, which I will publish in due order.

An argument can also be made that the Q project is a closely held psyop run by a cell in coordination with the Presidential Twitter account. Or, Q could simply be an audacious Anon whose familiarity with ‘chan culture and experience executing previous LARPs enabled him to pull off the whopper LARP of them all–and to laugh all the way to the bank.

Continuing with the interview:

I explain: “I do that myself. What I do with some books is I will make half of a book available on GoogleBooks. And then you have to buy the rest. One book, which was in fact a revelation from on-high to me, I cannot profit from that, that is fundamentally wrong, I just make that book available free in its entirety on Academia and on GoogleBooks. They send me reports. It is being read in Bangladesh?”

Mr. Furber laughs, and then says that that is not far from where I am now in Bangkok. Which is true in a way.

I say that “It is reaching a global audience and it is so satisfying, it is not huge numbers, but weird people like you and I are finding this. It is really satisfying.”

Then I ask, “What can you tell me about Christina Urso, about Radix?”

Mr. Furber seems surprised by the change of tack, but he recovers: “I never really talked to her. I saw her online. We did not really chat. I know I remember when we were, when Coleman and I were really working hard, in late December (2017), I know my wife spoke to her and encouraged her, supportive, we knew that we were doing something unique, nothing like this had happened in history. It was very, it was very exhausting. It was really exhilarating. I had never really worked at that level before in my life. You are at such a high pitch. And intensity on what was going on….”

29:50

He continues: “Well, you see, at that time, I know I believed, I really thought, that by February last year, pretty much everyone would be rounded up and executed. That was my belief. Because I was so close to the action. I know that things do not work like that anymore. In fact I think that it is going to take the whole of Trump’s term … to deal with … (unintelligible) at least.”

I say: “I pray that we get a 2d term.”

He declares: “You are getting a 2d term.” Then he explains:

“May, tomorrow, starting May, big things are happening. (Rod) Rosenstein has now resigned. That is pretty much the last piece of the puzzle. Now he obviously cannot be in his position, because he is going to be called as a witness. He was being spied on during the transition. Jeff Sessions recused himself—when was that? August 2017—because he was being spied on.

(The reference is to Deputy Attorney General (DAG) Rod Rosenstein, who submitted his resignation effective May 11 on April 29, 2019. Attorney General Jefferson Sessions submitted his resignation to the President on November 7, 2018, immediately following the midterm elections).

Mr. Furber: “This whole cover story. If you get it clear in your head that Rosenstein, Mueller, Sessions are all good guys working for Trump to take down the swamp, then everything makes sense. Watch what happens … (unintelligible) the IG’s report is out soon.”

(Mr. Furber here endorses a disputed Q assertion that DAG Rosenstein, the independent prosecutor Robert Mueller and former Attorney General Jefferson Sessions were all coordinating behind the scenes to assist the President–the theory becomes ludicrous when it claims that Mr. Mueller was helping the President confront the deep state).

I say: “I hope that you are right. I got a very skeptical …”

“I know,” he says, “based on decades of experience. This time it is different. I promise you. This time it is different.”

I say, “I really, really hope so.” Then I pause. “I am sorry to have to ask this, but I have to ask it.”

“Ask anything,” he replies.

“What you can tell me about the criminal history of Coleman Rogers and Christina Urso?”

He is astonished. “No idea. Do they have one? Do they really? Oh, really? What? A criminal history?”

I confirm it: “It is quite extensive, in fact.”

He asks: “Are you joking?”

I am not joking. “No.”

He shakes his head: “That is not good. Again. Sorry. Clueless. What? Was it fraud? Drugs? What was it?”

I explain that Coleman Rogers made videos of himself shopping for firearms, exorting viewers to “buy Pamphlet a gun.” This much is confirmed by the videos linked above and below.

What remains to be clarified is whether Rogers’ prior convictions disqualify him from possessing a firearm. As a convicted felon, Rogers abdicates his rights under the 2d Amendment. I explain: “he is forbidden. He can’t purchase a gun. He can’t own a gun. He can’t touch a gun. It is another felony.”

Mr. Furber: “Oh, dear. I didn’t know that, ok…”

I continue: “These are just dots that need to be connected. He’s got an extensive criminal background, I do not have the report here…. (I look at my screen)…I do not want to be unfair to the guy, I do not want to crucify him. What I am trying to do basically is provide a factual, sequential account, of what happened.”

I continue: “Because we are dealing with something that is an amazing phenomenon, it is an incredible phenomenon. To see it happen at this time, when we can bring so many tools to bear, across the internet, it is amazing, it is just an amazing time.”

Mr. Furber says, “Please feel free. I was not aware of that, I must be perfectly honest.”

Then he adds, “If you want any of the documents that I have written from my website, and on twitter, from my timeline, I’ll send them to you, and feel free to use them in their entirety, be my guest.”

I tell him, “I would be very grateful. And I look forward to your book. I think my own, I am at least 3-4 months out from publication. At least.”

He says, “I am also about that point. (Unintelligible) I work for myself, I am doing writing, and I am preparing for the shit to go down in this country, like you have no idea, and I am writing a book and doing other stuff, so yeah, I have done about 13 chapters out of 20, so I am at about 35,000 words, which isn’t too bad, so I’ve gone pretty far.”

He continues: “I put in a lot of background, I start way…. I start in 2016, with FBI Anon. Now this is a guy who really worked for the FBI. I have been watching and listening to genuine whistleblowers on the internet for many years now, just for my own personal interest and research, so I start with FBI Anon, who told us the truth about Hillary before the election.”

“Then I go into Pizzagate, and various other things like that, and then Q only walks up about chapter 7. So I am giving the readers background of my personal journey into how I got into Q and why I thought it was so important.”

35:01

(FBI Anon Threads 1 & 2 are anonymously posted on PasteBin).

I tell him that that background is important.

He says, “I do refer back to what happened before and why I had a mindset like this. So people can kind of follow along with me. Because if you just say, “on 4chan, some guy posted and claimed that he was next to the President,” you cannot just dump people direct in chapter 1 . You’ve got to like convince them as you go through the journey yourself. So, yeah.”

I tell him, “the way that you explain this, it is compelling. Because one school of thought will say that Q is a LARP. And there is an argument to be made. Another school says that Q is a psyop, and this is very persuasive to me. But the fact of the matter is, neither of those things….even if they are true, they are not disqualifying of what is happening. They do not disqualify it .”

He agrees, “And the information, and the behavior, of the elites, confirm, what is happening.”

I agree: “That is right.”

He continues: “I mean, the mass media, the mainstream media, are petrified with this.”

I believe this to be true: “Completely.”

I say: “I have to ask. It is pretty abundantly clear that they use a theme server to coordinate their articles on a daily basis. Do you have any inside information on what that theme server is, who runs it? I suspect Media Matters for America (MMfA).”

He says, “I think that is one of the organizations. I believe that it is Gannet, the news organization that supplies the MSM with all their talking points for the day. And that is obviously controlled… yeah you can see the major networks all parroting exactly the same … word for word coverage. It is pathetic.”

36:52

I say, “What is incredible to me is that they seem to believe, they seem to be convinced that mere repetition is going to hypnotize us. And they don’t realize that we’re awake now and we’re aware of that and we see what they are doing.”

I continue: “Obviously half of the populace in America is hypnotized, and still asleep. We are not going back to sleep. We are awake. “Q sent us.” We are not going back to sleep.”

Mr. Furber states: “We want our country back.” I find it interesting that Mr. Furber says “our country,” as he is not an American. He manifestly feels a deep affection for our Republic. I appreciate this.

I add, “When you talk about civil war. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to see that this is the direction that these people are pushing. They are hoping and banking on the fact that as they tighten the internal contradictions, as they tighten those up, on the margins, weak-minded people will be forced to act. They will trip, they’ll act. This is where our false flags come from. This is all quite deliberate.”

He agrees: “Very much so.”

I say, “And we see it. We know what they are doing. I’ve got to tell you that really makes me very angry. Cynical is not the word for it.”

He says, “I think that the bad guys behind the scenes are absolutely petrified of the American people who are armed. And ready to defend their Constitution.”

I tell him: “We will not be disarmed.”

38:52

He agrees. “No. You won’t. Come and take them.”

Then he notes, “And in fact, a civil war between the government or whomever and the US people would not even be close.”

I tell him, “We have all the guns.”

He says, “And you would get a 50% defection rate in the armed forces.”

I agree: “At least. That is conservative.”

He adds, “You would get the sympathetic sub captain. Offshore. Then game over. Because DC turns into smoking, melted glass, goodbye, game over.”

He continues: “The American middle class is the one thing that has prevented the elites from really taking over the world,” he says.

He explains: “They were very close, they were a hair’s breadth away from nuking the world, with US uranium, stolen from America, shipped via Canada to the EU, Iran and North Korea. Elon Musk is going to be hanged in public over that.”

I am surprised. “Really?”

He means it. “So is Obama. O, yeah, he was in on it.”

I say that I did not realize that Elon Musk was implicated in Uranium One.

Mr. Furber explains: “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Elon Musk provided the guidance to North Korea for their ICBMs, which was stolen from NASA. I believe that the nuke techs were stolen by John Brennan and given to Hillary, who then emailed it to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea.”

40:05

I say, “Or she just put in on her server so it could be harvested.”

Mr. Furber continues: “The SAP stuff that she had on her server…. is so bad…there is a video that you can see, the Inspector General being questioned by … not Nunes…the head of the Judiciary Committee…” (he means Senate Judiciary ranking member Lindsey Graham), “was there an email, you know, from Hillary, blah blah blah….he says I actually do not know how much I can say about this, because it is not in a form that is allowable to be read by the committee…I will have to get back to you AG Rosenstein, and we are going to try and rework it into a form that can be read in secret by you.”

(As I later reviewed this transcript I realized that Mr. Furber referred to the Inspector General of the DOJ, Michael E. Horowitz, then to DAG Rod Rosenstein. They are obviously different officials. The error slipped past me during the interview).

Mr. Furber continues: “SAP programs are just above top secret stuff. It includes nuke blueprints, the identities of covert agents around the world…why do you think all the agents in China were rounded up and executed three or four years ago? Because Hillary left their identities on her fucking home server. I cannot believe that. She is a reckless idiot. Thank goodness. Because otherwise she would have won.” (Special Access Programs: SAP).

41:30

(An article with no byline on BBC: “Ex-CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee admits spying for China,” May 2, 2019).

I confide that I am still perplexed by the fact that “ClownStrike (CrowdStrike) has never released those servers for forensic analysis by any government agency. And it is tolerated, it is permitted. I am mystified why the FBI does not serve subpoenas and issue orders saying that we are confiscating these servers.”

41:55

Mr. Furber explains, “They will, in due time. I know that we all say “why, why, why?” and then I kind of draw a diagram, and I think this has got to be fixed before that is fixed, before that is fixed…there are multiple chess boards and multiple pieces….so….the original first strike was Saudi Arabia. That had to be stopped.”

He continues: “The country was basically, yeah….The US together with satellite technology and the Russian GRU and Special Forces together with the Saudis rounded up these guys. Then the Rothschilds have been taken out behind the scenes.”

He clarifies: “You know that they are broke, ok? The Rothschild family is broke. They are liquidating! They are liquidating their assets. They have their own little yard sale. Because they don’t have any money. Now that is being done behind the scenes by the President and the US military. They have taken out, he has taken out two of the three families around the world.”

(A web search reveals that the Rothschild family is liquidating assets since at least 2016).

“And the one remaining, George Soros, has been left alone, to precipitate the final takedown, however that is going to work. But at the same time, the whole of the DC culture, the elite culture, the media, the swamp, have been completely outfoxed by Mueller’s investigation. A beautiful operation.”

43:21

Mr. Furber continues: “The President ranted and raved. No, it is gorgeous. While everyone is looking at Mueller, basically, the silent professionals under Huber and Horowitz have been rounding up the swamp and we will see the basis and subpoenas which the grand jury will return, we will see that Rosenstein and Sessions set it up so that Barr could come in and prosecute.”

“I mean, these guys all worked together in the late 80’s early 90’s to take down the mob in New York. They’ve all worked together before. Trump, Barr, Rosenstein, Sessions, Giuliani, hello, they are all friends for like 30 years. They know how to take down criminals. May. Starting tomorrow. Things start kicking off. And we’ll start seeing some scary action.”

44:05

(US Attorney (Utah) John W. Huber, was appointed by AG Sessions to investigate FBI surveillance of Carter Page, the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, effective November, 2017. DOJ Inspector General (IG) Michael E. Horowitz released his report in June, 2018: Prokop, Andrew, “The long-awaited inspector general report on the FBI, Comey, Clinton, and 2016, explained,” Vox Media, June 14, 2018.

Another IG Report is expected to be released by Inspector General Horowitz shortly, within the next 2-4 weeks of publication of this transcript).

I tell Mr. Furber: “I hope that you are right. I am very tired of waiting for indictments to drop. What are your thoughts…on these sealed indictments?”

He replies, “I think that they are real, I think they are real, very real.”

44:26

(Mike Rothschild, “Why QAnon believers think “the Storm” has tripled in size,” The Daily Dot, November 26, 2018. Mr. Rothschild covers QAnon for The Daily Dot and tracks the superconspiracy, which he routinely mocks, one element of which includes a massive number of sealed indictments.

The “welcome” page for the /qresearch/ board on 8chan states that the number of sealed indictments now exceeds 60,000. A Google Docs Criminal Cases Master List is maintained by 8chan Anons).

I mention, “David Seaman….he did put out a video awhile back where he said he had actually held in his own hands a copy of one of the sealed indictments, indicting one of the majors, he said. And he’s like, drinking champagne, you know…if this guy is proven to be engaged in a fabrication, he’s done forever.” (David Seaman, “Indictments NOW Unsealed Takedown imminent,” Disclosure News, April 7, 2018).

45:02

Mr. Furber comments, “David did outstanding work in Pizzagate. I’ll give him that. I think that he is wrong about Q, I think that he is wrong about what he is doing now, in fact I had a spat with him on Twitter and he immediately blocked me, but his Pizzagate work was bloody good, I got it all archived.”

“And he was personally threatened, and I think a friend of his was poisoned. Horrible. These people don’t mess around. That is why I am glad that I live in the ass-end of Africa because nobody cares about me. If I was in the States I would have been taken out by now. I am sure of it.”

45:45

Mr. Furber continues: “As it is I have been told that my Twitter account cannot be banned. (Laughs). But they make sure that people cannot see what I write. My follower count keeps going down, but it cannot be banned, I’ve been told that I am on a list that cannot be banned from Twitter. James Woods can get banned. But I can write what I like. I’ve been protected, somehow, the other great thing about this…”

He explains: “You and I have been obviously doing this for years, this kind of work and research. You know that 20 years ago you had a great theory about a particular incident. And you might’ve been right, but we’ll never know. That is so frustrating. And we all get it.”

“This time, we are going to know. I reckon that if I’ve got 50% of what Q told us right….I will be happy. Because the more I look at those original posts, the more connected and subtle, and like beautifully hidden, just how much information there is, the more I look at it, the more amazed I am.”

(And this is why Mr. Furber was on my list of potential Q’s, as he manifestly draws upon deep familiarity with historical conspiracy theories, as does Dr. Corsi, another candidate. I find it difficult to imagine James Coleman Rogers crafting the Q drops, but he also remains a potential Q. Another possibility is that the Q whisperer known as SerialBrain2 drafts the Q drops in concert with Mr. Rogers, and Anons named David Hayes and Adel Nero, among others).

He continues: “I have spent the last year on Twitter just going through all the stuff and trying to decode it and sharing ideas and whatever. And again I will send you the links so you can have a look at it.”

(Mr. Furber sent me these links, convenient Thread Unrolls to his Twitterfeed:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/980789585801351168.html

https://threadreaderapp.com/user/paul_furber

Here is Mr. Furber on Gab.ai : https://gab.com/paulf ).

I say, “What you see there is a superconspiracy, a conspiracy to gather them all, to absorb them all … from a standpoint as ideology, it is staggering, whomever crafted that ideology, ok, a superconspiracy, I am staggered by it.”

I continue: “I mean, it has flaws. There are subordinate conspiracies which are less persuasive than others. But this is going to require some analysis, and it is, I believe that it is going to require some rectification, ok? One of my hypothetical theses is that QAnon needs to be taken over by hardcore professionals. Assuming that it is not already being run by professionals.”

Mr. Furber tells me, “I had a documentary maker come out to visit me from LA, his name is Cullen, Cullen Hoback, very good guy, he spent a few days with me here in January, and he’s obviously done his homework on Q.” (Cullen Hoback: Twitter, Wiki, IMDB).

“We filmed for a few days, it was great fun, he interviewed me at length here in my house. He thinks that Q has been a couple of different teams since January….he says the style….I have not done that work, so I can’t say yes or no…the style changed in July, and it changed again. So you could be right.”

“And again, because everyone’s anonymous, it’s all behind the scenes, we have to work indirectly, with the clues that you are given.”

(As I said previously, it is clear that multiple iterations of QAnon, different crews drafting the Q drops, can be discerned over the evolution of the phenomenon into a movement. I will address this separately).

49:04

I say: “One of the most perplexing things about this is that we are now crediting an anonymous masked man, we’re believing somebody who is pseudonymous or anonymous, but the problem is that the internal coherence of the Q drops, their internal consistency, this I think is what is so persuasive about it. When people like you and I who have been researching conspiracy theory for decades….”

Mr. Furber interjects, “Decades, yeah. Exactly.”

I continue: “We are bringing decades of context to this.”

Mr. Furber agrees, saying: “And people say….I keep telling people…there are no shortcuts guys, I’m sorry, but you need to have read all of Fritz Springmeier’s work, you need to know this guy and that guy, you need to study the sages… you preferably need to be a Christian or certainly a believer of Deus, or forget understanding any of the human parts….”

“…you need to do this, that, and you need to … not exactly the same as anyone else, as we are all different, however, but that years of experience, and researching and thinking and writing, that will help you … you can start now, but we all have it to a greater or lesser extent, this is not a particularly nice subject to work in, but it’s important…”

I say, “It is vital. It is is the struggle of our time.”

Mr. Furber says, “Well, of all ages, really, isn’t it?”

50:45

I agree, saying “It’s been going on for hundreds of years now. I can tell that you are not aware of it, but I did an analysis of Pizzagate, which I call Pedogate, in 48 installments, it is on my website…to sort of just go bottom line up front…”

He says, “No…hang on, hang on, I read that, you were on Shari Beal’s show talking about it, weren’t you… no, no , no….come on….Not you?”

“Not me.”

I explain, “Most of my writing has been pseudonymous or anonymous.”

“Ok,” he understands.

“Only in 2017 did I actually break cover and begin publishing under my own byline. safety was the primary reason for that.”

(Esteban Trujillo de Gutierrez, “On Pseudonymity,” Magic Kingdom Dispatch, February 10, 2019).

“One of the subjects that I address is the drug wars. I was an employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1990 in the Upper Huallaga Valley of Peru, I was an advisor to the Peruvian drug police…so I have a work that will probably come out, I forecast it for 2020, 2021, should I live that long….”

“Ok.”

“Knock on wood. So I bite off these big subjects and I did the Pizzagate, the PedoGate…what I call pandemic pedophilia.”

“Oh, yes. Certainly,” he agrees.

“I did it in 48 installments. It is on my website. I should make it into a book, but honestly I do not have the heart for it, it is such disgusting, soul sucking information….”

Mr. Furber asks: “What is the address of that, please? So I can read it for myself and also archive it?”

52:52

I reply: “Go to magickingdomdispatch.com. You will need to go back, I think I published that in 2017…it was September, October, 2017.”

(Esteban Trujillo de Gutierrez, “On the Pedophile Pandemic 48 Fin,” Magic Kingdom Dispatch, October 14, 2017).

“Cool. Thank you.”

I add, “The 48th installment actually includes a series of links to all the previous installments so you can sort of get a meta-view of the organization of the analysis. I relied on David Seaman quite a bit on that…but I think that it was imperative to understand PedoGate…which the elites, they dismissed it, they say that it is a deluded, discredited conspiracy theory: they could not be more wrong.”

“Well,” he says, “no, they are doing it. Of course they are going to discredit it.”

I agree, “They have this little phrase that they trot out, they say it is discredited, deluded, and there is no proof and by the way it results in violence… this guy who went and fired a single round … the magic bullet, that hit the hard drive in the closet.”

Mr. Furber remembers, “It hit the hard drive, and the cameras were turned away on the day. So we could not see exactly what he did, there is a massive discrepancy between the eyewitness accounts over what he was carrying, was it a rifle, was it an AR15, was it a shotgun…..which was it, hello.”

He continues: “And the guy himself, Edgar Madison Welch…”

I interject, “he was an actor.”

Mr. Furber continues: “His film credits on IMDB…. I do not know if you picked this up….he acted in a short called There is Something About Pizza. I actually got a screenshot of that website, and it was edited about two minutes later to take it out. I will send you the screenshot. It is just hilarious, how pathetic they are, and all the news reports that appeared before the incident itself actually happened. These morons never get their timing right. Never.”

(Welch’s IMDB entry was edited to remove the reference to Something About Pizza. The approved narrative: Tom Cleary, “Edgar Maddison Welch: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” heavy, December 5, 2016).

Mr. Furber continues, “The first time that I was aware of this was when I watched the interview with the sheriff who was talking about Vince Foster’s murder. He was still alive at that time. Idiot. They never get it right. They did not get it right for Sandy Hook, they didn’t get it right for 9-11.”

55:32

(BBC reported the collapse of the World Trade Center Building 7 some 20 minutes before it actually fell: “BBC Sept. 11, 2001 4:54 pm – 5:36 pm (September 11, 2001)” Archive.org. September 11, 2001. Retrieved May 16, 2019).

I say, “What is really disturbing to me is I see them going back and they are meddling, they are fiddling around with the WayBack Machine. You do a search and click and it will not resolve, the URLs will not resolve.”

Mr. Furber says, “There is actually a good argument to be said that the WayBack Machine at archive.org was compromised in October 2016.”

“And it was pointed secretly to another server, and we are not seeing the original archive at all. That Denial of Service (DDOS) attack on the 26th of October was a huge denial, half the internet went down in the US. It was very bad here.”

I say, “The implications are horrendous. It is thought control. If you control the past, you dictate the future.”

Mr. Furber, musing: “Whomever controls the present controls the past, and whomever controls…yeah. From 1984.”

I intrude. “I want to kind of come back … what can you tell me about SerialBrain2?”

(The archived posts of Q whisperer SerialBrain2 are on the web. SerialBrain2 is a prominent Q whisperer, with a penchant for gematria and technical methods of analyzing Q drops. His analyses are sophisticated, and he must be considered a possible QAnon candidate).

Mr. Furber shrugs, “I do not know. Sorry. No idea. I do not follow him. I haven’t heard anything by him. I just see people arguing about him on Twitter, pro and con. Sorry. I am the wrong person here.”

I say, “You might want to look at some of his analyses, they are very heavy on gematria … personally, I cannot buy it, but it makes great bathtub reading.”

He laughs. “Ok.”

I continue, “It is very entertaining. There are obviously elements that are utterly correct, but his approach is very bizarre. Let me look at my list here. What can you tell me about David Hayes, about Praying Medic?”

57:38

(Mr. Hayes is another notorious Q whisperer, recently accused of collaborating with Coleman Rogers in the “QAnon grift,” the allegation that QAnon is a con perpetrated to defraud millions of loyalists, principally through donations and subscriptions.

My own hypothesis is that a small cabal of Anons post the Q drops, then monetize the movement through a variety of means. There are too many anomalous indicators. The question is, who, precisely, is masquerading as an imaginary military intelligence official in close proximity to President Trump?

The number of co-conspirators is unverified, but it is commonsensical that it varies in number and the participants themselves change over time. Several observers of the Q phenomenon noticed changes at inflection points, and correspondences with external events. There is evidence that different co-conspirators took over the mantle of Q at varying times. I address this in a separate work.

Most co-conspirators appear to be Trump MAGA true believers. The problem with this theory is that it lacks a definitive candidate to craft the Q drops. The Q superconspiracy and the drops themselves are subtle—and few candidates are credible masterminds. Even accepting that the Q drops are a joint endeavor, the result of a process of compilation, the drops evince a consistency suggesting that one identifiable mind is their primary author.

As I say, I suspected that Mr. Furber might be QAnon. My conversation with him now disinclines me to that theory, but until a better candidate emerges, he must remain on our list of potentials. Mr. Furber’s mastery of historical conspiracy theory makes him a strong contender. In fact, it makes him the most likely contender.

The Q whisperer SerialBrain2 could also be posting as the elusive Q. The identity of SerialBrain2 is not known to me, and like Dr. Corsi did, he publishes complex, arcane Q interpretations. I strongly suspect that Jerome Corsi authored some Q drops, at least for a period. It is possible that he still is authoring them. Jerome Corsi must also remain on our list of potential Q’s.

Like Corsi, and like Mr. Furber, SerialBrain2 may also bring sufficient expertise in historical conspiracy theory to be the author of the Q drops.

Prior to this interview, Mr. Furber was my preferred candidate. After talking with him, I am disinclined to think that Mr. Furber is the elusive Q. But he cannot yet be definitively eliminated from contention.

Returning to the “Praying Medic,” Mr. David Hayes, it is important to recall that he edited his website at the peak of recent controversy. Mr. Hayes originally stated that donations to his tax-free religious ministry were tax deductible. Then with no explanation, that phrasing was mysteriously removed from his website.

Then Mr. Hayes ceased accepting donations via Patreon. All of these indicators suggest that Mr. Hayes consulted a lawyer who advised him to minimize his potential exposure. There was undeniable synchronicity between certain Q drops and statements made by Mr. Hayes.

Most famously, Mr. Hayes threatened critics of QAnon: “… Be careful. This is not a threat, but you can end up with 800 anons from 8chan digging through your garbage.” (UniRock Review, “Praying Medic Non Profit exposed as a false prophet profiting – Consp THeory becomes Slacktivism -” YouTube, April 4, 2019).

People need to watch his eyes. pic.twitter.com/kgonGAqWbQ — Lia VM [LISTED] (@LiaS814) March 27, 2019

(Roosevelt Media News, “Patriots’ Soapbox Doxxes Sebastion Gorka, Smears MAGA Coalition (Praying Medic, QAnon),” YouTube, March 25, 2019; Isaac Green (aka antischool), “8chan complies with 12 US Govt. agencies – Microchip predicts Trump tweet,” YouTube, April 6, 2019).

57:43

About Mr. Hayes, Mr. Furber replies, “Again, I do not know him personally, I do follow him on Twitter, again, strange analysis, he interprets his own dreams most of the time, as far as I can tell.”

He continues: “It is weird. But he has been right about a lot of things. I will put it that way. I know he did a Periscope, early on, I am talking about November 2d or 3d, 2017, when he said “I’ve come across this guy Q, on 4chan, he may be the real deal.” So he has been there from the beginning, and been interpreting, so I will give him that. And if you look at his Twitter timeline you will see that he links to the video.”

I comment, “A lot of the synthesis and analysis is taking place behind the scenes on Discord servers. What can you tell me about all that?”

58:46

He agrees. “Yeah. This always happens. You get different groups and individuals doing their work, and they’ll have different interactions, some of them will be in public, some of them will be on the ‘chans, where it is hard to know what is going on unless you are in there.”

“And some will be behind the scenes on Discord. So it is hard to gauge who is talking about what, or who is working with who, especially if you do not know as an outsider.”

He continues, “And I am now officially an outsider. I am only on my own Discord. I do not have time to devote…I have always been kind of a big-picture person anyway. So…I believe that I am still under orders from the original Q.”

“I still consider myself under orders, and the orders are to spread the word, so I have been doing that on social media, but I still do go into the ‘chans, just to see what is going on, and I do watch YouTube videos, and I do follow links of analysis, but I am not nearly as hands-on, just from the point of time, really….” (Unintelligible).

I say, “I do not think that it is profitable to get too deep into the weeds on this, we do not need to be aware of the schisms and the infighting…”

He agrees, “Yeah exactly.”

“It is a waste of our time.”

I redirect, “So we were talking about Tracy Beanz, about Tracy Diaz, she was critical I think in the very beginning, I think that it was the 3d of November she came out with that video, she basically introduced Q Anon to the world….”

Mr. Furber: “To her subscribers, exactly.”

I continue: “I am sure that you read her long 7,000 word apologia on SteemIt: what are your comments on that?”

(The video where Tracy Diaz introduces the world to QAnon: Tracy Beanz, “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon – Is it #happening???,” YouTube, November 3, 2017. The 7,000 word apologia that Ms. Diaz posted on SteemIt: Tracy Diaz (@tracybeanz), “She stood in the Storm …” SteemIt, May 18, 2018. She enjoys a large donation base on Patreon).

Mr. Furber affirms, “I agreed 100%, I stand by every word that she wrote there. She is dead-on.”

Mr. Furber is referring here to the controversy that erupted in the Q’verse after Q posted the infamous “profiteering” Q drop. Certain Anons, Ms. Diaz among them, and Dr. Corsi, were accused of profiting from the Q phenomenon. I also address that controversy in detail separately.

I say, “Let me continue looking on my list here.” Ah. This is a big one. I ask, “Give me your thoughts on the deep state.”

“Phew,” he says.

“I know, I know.” (I agree that it is a big subject. But it is critical to explain where we are coming from as conspiracy theorists. A solid definition of the deep state, or a redefinition, as I put it in an article on my website, is an important element for this interview and for our work.)

Mr. Furber explains, “So I read the Devil’s Chessboard, several times, I have done an awful lot of reading on the CIA, (unintelligible) I read The Secret Team by Fletcher Prouty, Fletcher Prouty’s book on The Secret Team, I’ve done an awful amount of background reading on the CIA.”

(David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, HarperCollins, 2015; L. Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Link is to the 1997 edition).

“I read A Thousand Days, I read all of Robert Caro’s books on LBJ … my father was a US historian, and introduced me to the US and to its politics at a very young age, so, yeah, it is his fault…so I have done years of reading about it…. the deep state…there are a lot of definitions of it.”

(Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002; Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, New York: Knopf, 1982; The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent, 1990; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 2002; The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, 2012; Volume 5 (Untitled), forthcoming).

“I think…it is very much the unelected…it is two things. People talk about it …what do they say? They mean like rogue groups of the CIA, they have been in existence since the 1950’s….when you look at the ’53 overthrow in Iran. That was completely CIA… (referring to CIA case officer Kermit Roosevelt overthrowing the PM of Iran, Mosaddegh: Operation TPAJAX)…”

I interject: “Operation Northwoods.”

Mr. Furber continues, “Northwoods, Mockingbird, (unintelligible) all of those disgraceful operations …MKUltra….which is another thing that I have read an awful bit about….There is that half of it, then there is the unelected bureaucrats and federal workers around the world, not just in the states, though in the states it is the most prevalent.”

(Operation MKULTRA and Operation MONARCH: An alleged subordinate operation to Operation MKULTRA, the best-known reference is the problematic work by Cathy O’Brien & Mark Phillips, Trance Formation of America, 1995).

He explains: “Who basically oppose whomever the elected representatives are of the President. So I see it as those two different aspects of it. I think the most dangerous, the geopolitical ones, are obviously the intelligence agencies, who are their own bosses, with no oversight, no transparency, they have their own rules, and they basically act as private bully boys for the elites.”

He notes: “MI6 can just spy on presidential candidates because it is illegal to in the US…and the FVEY guys. It just makes a mockery of the rule of law and nationalism and citizen’s freedoms around the world…I am not a fan.”

I comment that, “I am pretty much convinced that the ultimate struggle of our time is between nationalism and globalism.”

Mr. Furber agrees: “Correct. Yeah. 100%.”

I say, “Let us talk a little about your thoughts….on the monetization of QAnon. Who is making money from the movement now? How do they do that?”

Mr. Furber: “I think that Patriot’s Soapbox is probably making the most money. Not me. That is for sure. Just the opposite. I lost a couple of jobs because I spent too much time researching Q. Yeah. Yeah.”

I declare: “You are going to be redeemed by history, Mr. Furber. Do not worry.”

He laughs. “Thank you. I believe so. If I can stay alive in my own country. That is one of my biggest motivations, by the way. I want to see The Storm rolling out. I will fight off any number of people just to watch it happen.”

I say, “It is interesting to me, because you know, you are a South African. So talk to me a little bit about how you feel about President Trump, I mean, about 45.”

Mr. Furber replies, “I am a huge fan. A giant fan. From way back when. But I am kind of rare in this country, I am an English-speaking conservative. Most English speakers (in South Africa) are very liberal, and you know, progressive. I have nothing in common with them ideologically.”

“The Afrikaans speakers are big fans of President Trump, and they are nationalists, and they are conservative. I have much more in common with Afrikaans-speakers than I have with other white people here.”

I ask, “Those are pretty much the ones that are migrating to Russia. Is that not correct?”

He says, “Well, lots of them are, but there is a good four million of us who cannot go anywhere, so we are just going to stand right where we are.”

I say, “It is just incredibly ironic that so many of us are fleeing to Russia, to Vladimir Putin. You know, for sanctuary. That is incredible.”

Mr. Furber observes, “Vlad, Vlad is, I have no problems with him at all. He is in favor of Russia.”

I say: “I do not either.”

Mr. Furber: “He is in favor of Russia. And Russia is a white nationalist Christian nation that hates the global elite, really hates them. So does China by the way. And that is why Trump has good relations with both China and Russia, because he knows that they are on his side. And the Saudis, too.”

I say, “Well, they are all nationalists, but we all are in opposition to ….”

Mr. Furber interjects, “Well, of course but in terms of trade, things like that, not in terms of overrunning our country with immigrants, or in trafficking our kids. Which is what the elites do.”

I ask, “What can you tell me about Microchip?” I am going down my list of personalities involved in various aspects of the Q superconspiracy, and Mr. Furber knows many of them.

(Joseph Bernstein, “Never Mind the Russians, Meet the Bot King Who Helps Trump Win Twitter, BuzzFeed News, April 5, 2017; Georgi Boorman, “From Trolling to Fleecing: Co-Creator of “Q” Hoax Explains Its Scary Evolution,” The Federalist, October 29, 2018).

Mr. Furber rolls his eyes. “Oh, God. Yeah. A liar. He did not write the Q posts. Sorry. No way. I do not know him personally. I read his claims. I thought, “rubbish.”

I agree: “Preposterous.”

He affirms, “Absolute nonsense, yeah. Every time that you see a Discord chat being presented as evidence, it probably has been faked, because it is an .html page, and you can go in and edit those to your heart’s content. They are proof of nothing.”

1:07:02

I ask, “Let me … talk to me a little bit about your thoughts about Satanism at high levels of power.”

Mr. Furber: “Yeah. It is endemic. Yeah … Luciferianism, the connection is Masonic, so at high levels Masons, 32 degrees and up, I think 33 and up, worship Lucifer. That is explicitly in their texts.”

“If you go and read Morals and Dogma, by Albert Pike, if you read The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manley P. Hall, if you read some of their … I got my hands on a couple of, I think … that Kentucky Grand Lodge … I got in my hands some of their documents, which are their secret documents, we worship Lucifer, hello.”

(Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, 1871, 2011; Manley Palmer Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928).

He continues: “Yeah, the world is run by the elite Masons, and at that level, they all worship Satan. So, the symbols, the handshakes, the terminology, it is a dead giveaway, if you know their little inside secrets,.”

He explains: “Yeah, so I am pretty sure that most world leaders are senior Masons, most senior leaders are senior Masons, the tech giant guys, if they are not Masons, then they are being controlled by them through the usual blackmail methods, the pedo methods, which is standard.”

“So European royalty, the British Royal family, most of the Obama administration, about 40% of Congress, I know that Larry and Sergei from Google are Satanists, so is Dick Durban, so is Michelle and Barry, they are all connected, hello, they are all members of the cult.”

I must ask it so I do: “Is Michelle a man?” Referring to former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Mr. Furber: “Yeah, absolutely. No question.”

I say: “You look at her videos…”

He continues, “Her digit ratio (referring to her finger lengths, which are masculine)…Well, that is another thing about elites, about elite Masonry, is the worship of the androgynous. Again, you just have to go and read, Cabalistic Keys of the Creation of Man, in The Secret Teaching of All Ages, and you will see, that Adam was created androgynous, which is bullshit, and we all need to get back to the divine androgyne.”

(Manly Palmer Hall, “The Cabalistic Keys of the Creation of Man,” The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928).

“So … the number of trannies at high … there are no real women in Hollywood. There are no real women in the music industry. Taylor Swift is a fucking boy with makeup on. Angelina Jolie is a man. You know, Chuck Schumer is married to a man.” (The wife of Senator Chuck Schumer is Mrs. Iris Weinshall).

“The number of X’s and X’s who are secretly transgender because it has to be done in the spirit of deception, see—the father, Satan, the son, Lucifer, and the spirit of deception—the unholy trinity that deposes the real trinity, and again … because something spiritual happened in October, 2017.”

He explains: “I am not talking about Q, I am talking about … something happened, whether it was the Saudi thing or something else, but something was lifted from the world, and the spirit of deception much reduced.”

He continues: “People are now starting to see, that, oh! so-and-so is transgender! Why? The Prime Minister of New Zealand! Come on, he is a fucking boy with makeup on! A fucking ugly man with makeup on.”

“Who just organized a false flag in Christchurch, I mean, disgraceful, using a professional killer. I downloaded that video from 8chan and I immediately mirrored it on my own website. Just to piss off the elites, because, yeah.” (The 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand is Ms. Jacinda Ardern).

1:10:48

I say, “Unfortunately, this is what we are reduced to, we have to grab stuff like that, and we have to save them, because they are suppressing them.”

Mr. Furber: “I have been saving things for years now because I had some weird experiences with stuff, just went away in a memory hole, but yeah… this is an information war, so if you can host your own information and get it out there, then you are fighting the battle.”

(This is an important point, as the internet makes it possible for us to find information as never before. Likewise, the deep state is acutely aware that controlling access to information is control of minds, and meddling with Google search results, and with the WayBack Machine, is one method that they use to influence the present and hence the future).

I switch gears: “Let us talk a little bit about how brilliant the Socratic questioning of the Q drops is…”

“Ah,” Mr. Furber says.

I ask: “Talk to me about that.”

Mr. Furber: “Uh … we had a guy … we had a guy who was obviously a high-level spook, a good guy, coming on in early November, what he was doing is getting you to ask and answer the questions for yourselves. But they can’t be detected by the normal filters that the bad guys are using…”

I say, “right…”

He continues: “He’s giving you the information and he’s getting you to ask questions. Which … there are certain things that you can only find out for yourself, there are certain things that you can only believe if you have done the work yourself, in fact I think that is true of most of the subjects that we are discussing here. Although this is true of our research.”

I say: “This is how we break our programming.”

Mr. Furber: “Yeah. Ask questions! As soon as Christchurch happened I went on Twitter and I started asking questions, who is this guy, what was his background, how did he get into the country, how did he get ahold of all these weapons when they are illegal?”

1:12:27

He asks: “Why is the video of him performing the massacre out of bounds? Why is he such a stone-cold killer, why does he have a thousand yard stare? Why does he act so professionally? Why does know how to clear a gun jam? Yeah, he was a professional assassin, from beginning to end, that much was clear.”

Mr. Furber continues: “And that very much came from Q, where you ask questions, because the media today does not ask questions, they just vomit propaganda into our homes. So I think Q, that was one of the great things that he did was to get us to ask questions.”

He explains: “It could not be picked up, at least at first, while he got that really good information out, and it got us into the right mindset, where you question everything, because everything we are being told is a lie. So ask questions. But yeah. Love it. It was just brilliant.”

I agree: “It is just brilliant, and as I say the ultimate origins of QAnon increasingly are becoming irrelevant, what really matters is the effectiveness of it, he’s red-pilled … whomever Q is, and has been, and I agree that it (Q) has changed at different times, he’s red-pilled millions of us, millions of people are now…”

“…All over the world,” he confirms.

“Everywhere,” I say. Then I transition again: “Talk to me a little bit about FarmerFunkk.”

Mr. Furber: “Ah, Farmer. Farmer was a regular Anon, on my board. I didn’t see him before on 4chan, though he may have been there. He was a Mod on CBTS (Calm Before the Storm) and I worked with him a lot over Discord. I spoke to him a lot on Discord. I haven’t really spoken to him recently. But I see him occasionally on Twitter. Yeah. Good guy. From Atlanta, I think. And, yeah. He was a Mod, and I got on really well with him.”

1:14:16

I ask: “You do not happen to know his real name?”

Mr. Furber: “No idea, no. Sorry, no. We were all Anonymous. I gave my real name away in May of last year. I outed myself, just so anonymity was not an issue for me anymore.”

I say: “Well I think that is a form of security for you as well.”

He agrees: “Well, true. I decided very early on that I was going to tell the truth about absolutely anything that I was asked, or that I was not going to be deceptive or engage in any playing games with others from day one, in fact. From day one on my board. So it just made things a whole lot easier.”

(Crosstalk).

I observe: “One of the greatest weapons that we have is the internal consistency of our ideas.”

Mr. Furber continues: “And again, people looking back, from October to now, will not catch me in a lie, because I have not told any. No need. Also again, because I consider myself under orders to get the word out, and to tell the truth about what we have been told. People have tried (to catch him in a lie). Very hard. They haven’t. But you can look at any one of my interviews that I have done and see the same story. You will see me tell it in 80 different ways, but it is still the same.”

I say: “It is much easier to keep track of the truth.”

Mr. Furber: “Exactly. Exactly.”

I ask: “Who is Abobo?”

He replies: “Abobo is another guy, a good guy, he lives in Cleveland. Ohio. And Abobo was another Mod from 8chan, good guy, again, I spoke to him a lot on the board, he did a couple of interviews with me and Pamphlet and Tracy.”

1:16:49

I intrude, “Was he in the November 3 interview?” (I misspoke, I meant the December 19 2017 interview by Tracy Diaz (aka TracyBeanz). There was a third moderator who was unnamed, so I am seeking to confirm that this was the Anon known as Abobo).

“Maybe that is possible. There was me and Pam … that is Abobo’s voice. That is Abobo, yeah. Good guy. (He) was a mod, helped me a lot, when the board got out of hand, banning people, keeping control of everything that was going on.”

I ask: “Who is qntmpkts?”

Mr. Furber: “Don’t know that name, sorry. No idea.”

I say: “It is kind of spelled bizarrely. I think that it is the owner of Qanon.pub.”

Mr. Furber: “Don’t know. I downloaded that website to get a local copy of it in case it went bye-bye…I don’t know the name, I do not know who runs it, sorry.”

I say: “We have to have copies.”

Mr. Furber: “I save and I archive everything, everything.”

I intrude again, “We have to, we have to, this is the reality of our times. I was going to tell you, when you are looking at my website, I did write an article, Redefining the Deep State, I think that you will find it useful, and I would appreciate your thoughts on it.”

(Esteban Trujillo de Gutierrez, “Redefining the Deep State,” Magic Kingdom Dispatch, June 22, 2017).

He replies, “Pleasure. Will do.”

I say, “I am wondering, you are a very good interview, you come across very well, you express yourself very clearly and persuasively, I am curious why you do not do any work on YouTube?”

Mr. Furber: “Because it will get taken down.”

1:18:51

I persist: “How about DLIve?”

Mr. Furber: “The things that I have to say on YouTube will just get instantly deleted. In fact, something of mine has been deleted before.”

I suspect that he has not yet heard of DLIve, so I persist: “What about DLIve? Are you aware of DLive?”

Mr. Furber: “I looked at a number of alternatives, BitChute, DLive …”

I say: “DLive just came out, it just happened, Seaman calls it ETH.video, it is DLive, and it looks like a censorship-resistant platform based on blockchain …it looks, phenomenal…”

Mr. Furber: “The publishing deal that I am going to get, well, that I have had a verbal confirmation of, from Vox Day, he just launched a video platform called UnAuthorizedTV, which looks very tempting. That would be very interesting.”

I ask: “Where is it hosted?”

Mr. Furber: “Knowing Vox, somewhere that is completely secure and impervious to attack.”

I reply, “I hope so. We desperately need it. Ah. before I forget….and again, I do have to apologize…”

Mr. Furber: “Ask me anything, anytime.”

I say: “Talk to me a little bit about DeFango (controversial grey hat hacker Manuel Chavez III).”

Mr. Furber: “Ah. Merlin. So. I followed Manny from….because one of the guys…let me step back a bit….roundabout….just after Pizzagate…so January last year…no, January, 2017… I got hooked on George Webb’s videos on YouTube.”

1:20:27

“He continues: “George Webb is an ex-Mossad guy who dropped the most amazing information about trafficking and organ harvesting and deep state … I believe, I knew that he was a limited hangout, so that I treated … kind of information that was ok, and came to most of it as misdirection.”

“It was hard to tell which was which. And then through him via his commentary, I followed Defango’s channel, and I was interested in what Defango was doing with Cicada, because I did not know that project and I found it interesting.”

I agree. “Oh, yeah.”

He nods. “Oh, yeah, it was, it was very interesting, and Defango was pretty damned good at what he was doing with Cicada. So, I followed him for awhile. But I think that it became clear at the end of 2017 that Cicada ended.”

1:21:41

“And I think Defango, um….was trying to latch onto something that he wanted to be involved in, but he wasn’t. Defango had nothing to do with Q, those were two different projects, really, and he wasn’t involved. He tried to make himself involved but he wasn’t, really.”

(Manuel Chavez III and James Brower (aka DreamCatcher) claimed to be the creators of QAnon, in collaboration with the Anon known as Microchip (see above), only to see Q immediately taken over by otherwise unidentified Anons on the ‘chans. The theme that Q is “stolen” recurs, echoing the different iterations of QAnon that can be discerned. We must also remember that Coleman Rogers supplanted Paul Furber on 8chan, stealing the Q account, exiling him from the Q moderator Discord server.

Chavez claims that the first Q drops are from different identities, from different web browsers, and no tripcode was used. Tripcodes (and hence the identity of Q) did not begin until November, when the password was “Matlock.” Chavez did blow the cover of Cicada 3301 on an episode of Nathan Stolpman’s Lift the Veil, but he fails to prove that he also exposed QAnon.

(lifttheveil (@lifttheveil411) (Nathan Stolpman), “#QAnon & Cicada 3301 Exposed? w/ Defango & Cicada members,” SteemIt, May 8, 2018).

Chavez and Brower’s origin tale lacks verifiable elements, and both are notorious internet trolls. Their interview with Jason Bermas (aka Pulse Change) was derided by the Q’verse, nobody believed them, and Bermas was condemned for granting them a platform.

(Jason Bermas (Pulse Change), “Ask Me Anything with the Real Q!” YouTube, January 14, 2019; Alexandra Bruce, “Q And the Fine Art of the Shit Post,” Forbidden Knowledge TV, January 14, 2019).

Still, Chavez and the mysterious Anon known as Microchip separately credited James Brower with the first two Q drops on October 27, 2017. This origin story was given a further push by Jack Posobiec in a news segment for OANN, repeating the same claims but offering no credible forensic evidence. Like Bermas, Posobiec was derided by the Q’verse.

(Defango TV, “OG Q Exposed: MICROCHIP – Defango in Wonderland,” YouTube, September 4, 2018).

Mr. Furber continues: “So yeah. Personally, I get on with him very well, I actually have been on his show a couple of times. (Unintelligible) I actually want to get onto his show where I interview him about Cicada, I want to talk to him, because I do not know enough about it. I would love to get his perspective on what really happened … how he (unintelligible) stuff, I mean, that is just interesting to me.”

I ask: “Can you send me the links for those interviews? I would love to see them.”

“Yeah, no, absolutely, sure.”

“Please make a note. Cicada … I begin my book by discussing Cicada, and the known facts about Cicada are very far and few between. I did interview Arturo Tafoya, who was the predominate videographer, and he was a fascinating interview, really good stuff. I will send you the draft of that chapter.”

Mr. Furber: “Great, yeah, sure.”

I say, “Utterly fascinating about Cicada.”

Mr. Furber: “I haven’t done it yet, well I’ve done one where I went on his show, I did another show where I was with him, talking to UniRock. So…”

1:23:19

I must ask, so I do: “What do you think about UniRock?”

Mr. Furber: “UniRock is a strange guy, he had me on his show a few times talking about Q, and then in March last year, he said that, no, I was behind it all. He accused me of being the LARPer who was behind Q. Nonsense. That is just crazy.”

“There have been a few people like that, again, guys like Roy Potter who spoke to me a lot about Q in the early days, but then he thought that I was involved with Patriot’s Soapbox, and deceiving people at the time, and believe me, I was the first person to be banned from Patriot’s Soapbox so I don’t know what’s going on in there, I am not involved. And I do not want to be.”

I say: “Now that I have spoken with you, and looking at the coherence of your dialogue, it is abundantly clear to me that you are not the LARPer.”

Mr. Furber: “I never pretended to be Q, and I never made a cent out of Q. Those are the two accusations that get thrown at me. Even just the other day somebody said, “this is you,” I said, get lost. Please, Enough.”

I comment, “Well, if you do a superficial analysis, you can come to that conclusion.”

He agrees: “You can do it, yeah. But again we are faced with the same problem that anyone has, as to who is dealing with who behind the scenes on Discord, and who is doing their own work, and who is accused and which group do you belong to, and who is friendly with whom.”

“It is impossible to penetrate that unless you have all the facts in front of you, which none of us do. I have my Discord chat where I have spoken to people, and I have an entire archive on my board of 8chan up until sort of March last year, where I just left it alone, in fact it was taken over, somebody else runs it now. I do not care.”

He explains: “Somebody else said it was an abandoned board, which it was, so yeah, so, they got CBTS, I do not care, I have that piece of history backed up on archive from whenever it was, November 21st to March or April, no problemo.”

I say: “That has got to be a gigantic volume of stuff, very large…”

Mr. Furber: “It is 8GBs I think, images and text, so it is not too bad. It is about 8GB. It is mirrored on my website, you want to check it out anytime, you can, again all information I have is freely available. Help yourself. I will send you the exact link. It is not linked from the front page.”

Me: “Thank you very much.”

Mr. Furber: “Sure, sure.”

I begin to wrap up. “I got to say that this has been a delightful talk with you, I am really pleased to make your acquaintance.”

1:26:33

Mr. Furber: “My pleasure.”

Me: “I am going to have to rework several chapters of this book now in light of this conversation that we have had, recalibrate my thinking in certain ways, now I need to go back and do some hard work, but when I get the draft to a greater point of completion, I will run it past you, that way you are aware….”

Mr. Furber: “Please, please, yes, be my guest…”

I continue: “I do not practice gotcha journalism, that is not what I am about at all, so I will run it past you for your review, so if there are any errors, we can work that out to fix that stuff, because I want to produce a work of political science and history that is an analysis of the ideology behind Q Anon.”

Mr. Furber: “Right, right. That is a really cool angle, I never thought of that angle before, but the more I talk to you, the more I realize that it needs to be done.”

I agree: “It needs to be done. It’s got to be a work of political science. You’ve got to come at this from the standpoint that history does not just happen, shit does not just happen, alright, because conspiracy theory is the reigning method of historical analysis of our time, this is how we understand our reality, conspiracy theory.”

Mr. Furber: “I agree.”

I continue: “And this is the thing, with conspiracy theory we are being tarred and feathered in the media, you know, we are being dismissed as lunatics …”

Mr. Furber: “Well, the term, yeah …well, deliberately so.”

I interject: “Well, the CIA came up with it …”

Mr. Furber is well aware of it: “They come up with the bloody thing as a response to the outrage about the Warren Commission Report, that was a funny part of Devil’s Chessboard, when Dulles goes to university, and there is a guy there, obviously like an Anon from the 60’s, you know, somebody who today would be hanging out on 4chan doing analysis and intelligence research and this young student is immaculately researched in all the bullshit that is in that Report, and he grilled him for a full hour: I was like, Yes! You made him squirm, man, and that is exactly what could never happen today.”

(Mr Furber makes a valid point: who can imagine DCI Gina Haspel ever subjected to a probing interview about illegally erasing the Torture Tapes from Site Green in Thailand, where she was Chief of Base?)

I say: “It is frightening to me the way that we see these assaults on 8chan, and on 4chan, because they are, de facto, the lone remaining bastions of free speech …”

Mr. Furber: “The last bastions of free speech, exactly …”

I continue: “And they are under assault, they are absolutely under assault right now, and it is going to get worse, and when they are gone, I think there is no place left for all the rest of us to go, to have these conversations, we’ve got to go to the deep web.”

1:29:35

Mr. Furber: “I know, which has its own problems. I have been on there quite often, I don’t like saying that, the ‘chans are pretty much …”

I ask: “How do you navigate it?” Which is the key question to ask any habitué of the deep web.

Mr. Furber: “You pick up hints and such from other users, the Silk Road was very useful back in the day, very useful, again, just from an information point of view, but, these days, I have not been on there for a couple of years now, so I don’t know what the status of it is…”

I add, “Part of the problem there as well is that the deep state will have its scrutiny on that, we are in a hazardous time, the internet has revolutionized everything, it changed absolutely everything, it is on par with the development of fire.”

I continue: “Well, I think that I’ve gone down my list, I am sure that I am missing things….talk to me a little bit more about Jerome Corsi.”

Mr. Furber: “I’ve been a fan of many years, actually, because of his books. I read that one about the Clintons from a few years ago, and then FBI Anon actually endorsed it, he said, “Dinesh D’Souza has nothing on Hillary, the one putting pieces together was Jerome Corsi…so I thought, oh, that’s cool….”

(FBIAnon:

“They will only have an effect on public opinion, which will help her get indicted. But I assure you, Dinesh D’Souza has nothing on her. The only person coming close is Jerome Corsi. He is putting the pieces together (loosely).”

“I noticed him….he was huge on Reddit, on the subreddit, he’d been posting like, check this out, this is a link to what Q’s signature meant, his string of code names, it was brilliant… he had a top secret clearance before in the early ’70’s, when he was a young journo he’d been given top secret clearances to work on these stories before, so he knows his stuff. He’s been decoding this stuff since we were born.”

I must intrude: “Do you have any evidence of that, any proof of that?”

(There is no indication anywhere on the net that Jerome Corsi ever did any work for the intelligence community, which most people do not know, unless they searched for it as I did, and came up empty).

Mr. Furber: “ … that he had a TS clearance before? I can find it for you. I think…”

Me: “Please do, because Corsi claims to have a long history in the intelligence community and I came up empty, I looked, I searched…”

Mr. Furber: “Yeah, ok, I took him at face value, and the things that I did check out did check out, so I will help you on that and see what I can find…”

I clarify: “I am not trying to crucify anybody …”

Mr. Furber: “Yeah, Corsi’s work for WMD and for InfoWars and his work, you know, with Roge