Q and His 8chan Sidekick

In this episode we piece together clues that build a case for who we think one of the first people involved with Q is. We name them, look at their background, and speak to people who knew them when QAnon first became popular. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Q and On is the world's largest online political conspiracy movement.
Followers believe someone code named Q is provided them with
secret information from inside the White House. No one really
knows the real identity of Q, though we aim to
change that. I'm Jake Hanrahan and this is Q Clearance
podcast series aimed at unmasking the true identity of Q.

(00:25):
This is brought to you by IR Radio and Q
Dayta Media. In this episode, episode three, which is a
bit of a two potter, we're going to be looking
at q and On's initial birth on for chan and
how things began to change once he moved to a Chan.

(00:45):
We're gonna have to go back and forth a little
bit for this to all makes sense, but trust me
on this. It will set up the much needed groundwork
for later episodes and revelations. So let's go back again
to October twenty ev team. Remember that's when Q posted
his first ever drop on four Chan. Along with the

(01:05):
one saying Hillary Clinton would soon be arrested, which we've
already mentioned in previous episodes, there was this bit of
information quote HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with
several countries in case of cross border run passport proved
to be flagged effective ten slash thirty at twelve oh one,
A M expect massive rights organized in defiance and other

(01:30):
fleeing the US to occur. U s m S will
conduct the operation while energy activated. Proof check, locate an
MG member and ask if activated for duty. Ten slash
thirty across most major cities. End quote. Another one of
the first drops attributed to Q Reid's quote, potus will

(01:50):
not go on TV to address the nation, and potus
knew removing criminal rogue elements as the first step was
essential to free and pass legislation. End quote. Now before
we dive into y, Q and A migrated to h
N after those initial posts got traction. I just want
to skip forward a minute to look at a recent

(02:11):
QUE drop. The content isn't exactly important, but let's just
compare the original que drops. I just read to this
one that was published this month on October seven, Q
quote do you remember when the media had wall to
wall living fear coverage re n K? Do you remember
when Hawaii accidentally sounded the incoming missile alarm? What happened?

(02:34):
NK no longer a nuclear threat? Mounting collapse China seeking
NK commitments of fire short long range ballistic missiles pre election.
Q end quote. Now, maybe I'm just not enlightened enough
to understand what qu is talking about fully here, but
one thing I think is obvious is the change of

(02:56):
writing style. In the first drops, Que was on points,
certain of what was about to happen. As you heard,
he made failed predictions with dates, times, everything. Now he
spews these vague, do it yourself jigsaw statements that often
have no relevance to what's actually going on week to week.
Q and on has been growing and growing now for

(03:17):
three years, so it's of course possible that he just
eased into his position, got comfortable, refined his language. It's
also quite possible, though, that someone else took o overt
and change the writing style. Anyway, keep that in your
mind as we go forward. So Q and on posts
originally sprung up in a thread on one of four

(03:39):
chan's political boards known as Pole or the Politically Incorrect Board,
which is overwhelmingly populated with neo Nazis, white nationalists, and
various other stripes of fascist ideology. To read poll frankly
is to rot your brain, so naturally that's where The
first que post appeared as replies in a thread titled

(04:02):
Mula investigation. That thread was basically a comment on how
US right wing news pundits were smiling about the Munal
investigation rather than looking worried. The reaction from Pole users
to the que post back then was at first a
collective site, a sort of oh no, not this ship again.

(04:22):
That's because the essence of what Q and on does
is actually nothing new. It's just the most successful version
of a genre of bullshit Internet hoaxes known as insider
and on. Travis view of the Q and on Anonymous
podcast explains this. What's really interesting about Q and on
is that this is part of a kind of tradition

(04:42):
or a kind of a genre of posts within the
within four champ. I mean, they're called they's called these
insider and nce, and very frequently someone would show up
to the poll board on four chat or whatever and
they would claim to be someone who's deep inside government.
They would uh, you know. One example, as before Q

(05:04):
and on is that there was someone called mega ann
who claimed to have insider information about mega upload and
its owner Kim dot com, or there was there in
two thousand sixteen, there's one called fbi ann who claimed
to have information about Hillary Clinton. Supposedly. They claim baselessly

(05:24):
that they have some kind of insider informations. There's something
that happens frequently. What makes Q and a unique is
that it's the first one that kind of like burst
out of the chance and into wider social networks. And
and eazy is even sort of referenced by the President.
This Q and on began to grow on Fortune topics
spread rapidly across Pole. They didn't have their own board

(05:46):
to post on, so they swam in the same stream
as the neo fascists. It's correct that Q and on
initially gained the following on Fortune, but as we know,
it later began to spill over into the world outside
of the Internet. People start attending pro Trump rallies with
Q and on placards and Q and on t shirts.
Facebook and YouTube were both flooded with Q content, and

(06:08):
one Florida SWAT officer was even seen with a Q
patch attached to his chest rig when meeting with the
Vice President Mike Pence. Q didn't remain simply the newest
strain of a four Chan insider and on for long.
In fact, they were only on four Chan for about
two months in before they had to find a new
place to nest. Now, despite this idea often to out

(06:32):
within the media that there are no rules on four Chan,
there actually are. That's not to say four Chan is
a good place that's well regulated or anything like that,
but there are some rules. Raiding other groups or websites,
for example, is prohibited. Q and On's constant pylon of
anyone against their movement effectively broke this rule for some

(06:52):
of the four Chan moderators. Frederick Brennan, the founder of
h Chan, claims that the q and ons were booted
from chann. Fortune is explicitly anti Q. The reason they
had to leave Fortune because it became a real world movement.
They got kicked off. You know, um here you canu
mora owner of Fortune is not running a superpack called

(07:13):
this on the deep state back you know, um he
he has done everything to try to get rid of Q.
You know that he is in his power. Yes, okay,
it did start unfortunate, but Fortune did everything to get
rid of it. Like they've done a better job than
Facebook and Twitter, you know, to get rid of Q

(07:36):
on their platform. Q is basically a nonentity on their
platform today. So the only time I found Q and
on mentioned recently on for Chune when doing research for
this episode was when people derided the movement or accused
someone of being a Q and on follower. If the
posts reflected that so effectively, Yeah, q and on is
still an aug topic on Fortune now. The Q and

(07:59):
On's generally refute that they were kicked off of Forchune.
They say they left after the password for the Q
account on four Chune was cracked and people began posting
all sorts of nonsense and jokes under the Q no Monica.
Q announced that four chan was compromised, and so they
surfed around for a new home. That's when they found
Frederick Brennan's h n in late aboard much easier to customize.

(08:25):
Let's say you're a four Chan user and a topic
comes up on four Chan and you all want to
go discuss it, right, you have to use one of
the existing boards that are there, like q for example,
they had to use the Politics board because there's no
way for them to get their own board. But h
Chan in the beginning, at least, you know, was self service.

(08:48):
You put in the name of the board you want,
you put in a user name, a password, and email,
and it's entirely kind of self service. I don't need
to do anything. Uh, you can just get set up
by yourself. Some of you might be sitting there thinking, well,
fuck this guy. He allowed you and on on his platform. Well,

(09:10):
like I said, he didn't exactly open the door to them.
It was already open. Anyone could join h chan and
create a board. You didn't need to ask permission, you
already had it. Q and On's had permission to be
there by the default of the ethos of the way
the site was run. I think it's fair to mention
here again as well, that Frederick Brennan did everything he
could to get h and shut down and raise awareness

(09:34):
about hoaxes like Q and on after he quit, when
his creation became a kind of Frankenstein's monster of what
it was intended to be. It was never a nice
place to be, but it wasn't intended to be this
springboard for deep deep Internet hoaxes like Q and On.
Some people find Brennan to be riding on an angry
vendetta against the Watkins family, the people who fucked him

(09:57):
over and became the new owners of h CHAN, which
we will get to in another episode. I've had people
tell me brendan stance against it all is disingenuous for
that reason. I mentioned this for transparency's sake, so you
can make your own mind up. But for what it's worth,

(10:18):
I disagree with the people who say that. I believe
what Brendan is saying, and in all the correspondence I've
had with him, he's been very straightforward about what he
does and doesn't know. So on Brendan's h n Q
and on really began to make its nest. They were
able to have their own board, which was created by
a man named Paul furber There's an excellent reply all

(10:41):
podcast episode mostly about this guy that you should definitely
check out. He has refused to speak to us as
he did with them, but we're going to go into
his role with in qun on anyway. So who is
Paul Furber? Well? On his Twitter account, where he has
more than twenty five thousand followers, he claims to be
a journalist, a programmer, an artist, a musician, a pilot,

(11:04):
a teacher, a luthia, a biker, a Christian, and a
medicine seller whatever that means. What further actually is is
a hardcore conspiracy theorist from South Africa that spreads some
of the most far fetched bullshit you've ever seen on
the Internet. Recently, for example, he was theorizing on Twitter

(11:25):
that Joe Biden had been replaced with a body double
or a clone. This guy is either insane, grift ing,
or a mix of the two. Personally, I think it's
the latter. Paul Furber also states in his bio on
Twitter that he was the owner of the cbt S board.
CBTs stands for Calm before the Storm, one of Q

(11:47):
and On's many slogans, the CBTs board was the one
created by Furber on the h chan board when Q
and ons migrated after being booted or leaving for Chan.
The exclusive reason for CBTs to even exist was for
all things Q and on. Soon Q posted on Fortune

(12:09):
saying that he's migrat into a chann. Q started posting
there on Furber's board, where they wouldn't all get chased
out by the mods like they did on Fortune. Now,
remember I spoke about the trip codes of the trip
code from four Channe was the same on h and
the trip code is what identifies the anonymous user. The
trip codes do change, they do get corracked. Well, speak

(12:32):
about that later on, But at this point people were
happy to believe that Q had moved from Fortune onto
a Chan. I spoke to Frank Brennan about Paul Furber's
role within Q and On at this point. There are
a lot of reasons to believe that Paul was one
of the people originally positing as QUE for sure, because

(12:54):
he has that same kind of writing style and that
same kind of vivid imagination, and so in the very beginning,
when there was no trip code, it was probably passed
between a few different people. It's really hard to say
how many people it was passed between. I definitely think
that he was always very involved in in Q. Yeah,

(13:16):
I mean, he definitely wanted to become famous of of Q,
and in some ways he did for a while. Further
became a sort of unofficial spokesman for the Q and
On movement. He was Que's biggest advocate at the time.
He'd got onto Info Wars to talk about the elusive
Q and On plan. He'd spend all day trying to

(13:37):
red pill anyone he could about Q, and he was
eventually looked to by many in the community as Que's
right hand man. After all, Furber was the owner of
the office where Q came to work the CBTs board
on h Chan. Furber was also the guy who would
verify that Q was in fact Q via the trip coats.

(13:58):
I think the pull furb was involved with Q from
the start on four chant, or at the very least,
he took control of Q as it migrated from four
chan to h chan. He began posting his cue, spreading
the same conspiracy theories he'd been screaming into the ether
online for years. Furber was wrapped up into the center
of the movement as it thrived on h Chan, and

(14:20):
as Frederick Brennan just said, it kind of made him famous.
At least within this strange conspiracy internet bubble. Furber was
completely and utterly on board with Q and on until
he says the account was hijacked and taken over by
somebody else. Furber has said that he thinks who ever

(14:40):
had it before this hijacking was genuinely leaking information from
intelligence from the US government. He now thinks afterwards, now
that it's hijacked, someone else is making fake information up.
I think that's a very interesting claim. Remember, if Furber
was behind this, he can't exactly claim it. If he says, yeah,

(15:01):
actually it was me, the whole life falls apart. Now
we're going to cover the hijacking in the next episode,
but just keep in mind Paul is one part of
the web of people that are possibly behind Q and On.
We haven't cracked the case yet, but certainly I think
this is a very good lead. Before we wrap this

(15:23):
episode up, I want to go over something I was
sent recently by another que researcher. It's a video by
a guy called Steve Pachenk. Other Q researchers I've spoken
to about this aren't particularly interested in it, but it
seems fishy to me on some level, as it did
to the guy who sent me it. Have a listen.
And November one, two thousand sixteen, Hillary and Bill Clinton

(15:47):
and their entourage of assistance affected a civilian coup. In
contrast to the usual concept of a coup where the
military is involved and takes over the White House and
can munication centers, very much like the scenarios you see
in a movie, this coup was done silently and very

(16:07):
effectively through two methods. Corruption, and cooptation. The Clintons have
been involved in co opting our White House, our judiciary,
our CIA, our Federal Bureau of Investigation. In order to
stop this coup, we in the intelligence community and others

(16:27):
involved have informally gotten together and with their permission, I
am beginning to announce that we've initiated a counter coup.
We're going to to stop you from making Hillary the
president of the United States, and at the same time,
we will convict and indict the President of the United States,
Loretta Lynch, and many others who were involved in the

(16:49):
cover up of the massive corruption that occurred under the
Clinton Foundation. So, as you just heard, Patchennik is making
this wild claim that the Clintons are operating a deep
stake who and the secret members of the U. S
Intelligence community are trying to stop It sounds a lot
like Queues first posts on four chant. Remember we went

(17:11):
over them at the beginning. Well. This video by Steve
Pochenick was published on November one, a year before the
first ever Q drop. So who is Steve Pochenick? On
his website, he says that he was the principal international
crisis manager and hostage negotiator under Henry Kissinger. He claims

(17:33):
to be that and an action adventure spy thriller author
working with people like Tom Clancy. As far as I
see it, Pochenck is your archetypal right wing conspiracy theorist
and political US Boomer commentator. He enjoys airtime on Alex
Jones Infools, where he claims him and his network helped

(17:54):
to get Trump elected. He is a die hard MAGA
operative here he is speaking to for wars in much
of this year. But let me ask you this, because
to the to the general population and to the layman
out there, it looks like, now, this is the storm
about to hit. So I think the average American asked, now,

(18:15):
what is the deep state response to them about to
be exposed fully and perhaps even put in jail sober Basically,
we're not even answering it because it's so childish, so immature,
so ineffectual, that this is the reason why we were
able to be so successful. Now, I don't actually think
that Steve Pochenick was behind the initial que drops on fortune,

(18:38):
but he's certainly within the Q and On universe now
and could have inadvertently influenced whoever the first que post awards.
With the things he said in these videos, It's perhaps
worth noting as well that both Pulled Furber and Steve
Pochenic follow each other on Twitter, and that Furber has
tweeted in praise of Pochenic on several occasions. They're both

(19:00):
openly invested in anti Semitic conspiracy theories, and they both
claim to be part of an insider operation. Now, this
is hardly an unusual meeting of the minds and the
Q and On universe, but considering po Chenick's Clinton Deep
State video from I think it's worth mentioning, if nothing else,
we can see that all these ideas were already out there,

(19:23):
bubbling in the conspiracy theory part. It just took Q
and On to bring them all together and launched them
into the mainstream. It was a team effort, even if
it wasn't calculated to be one. I think again that
it's highly likely Paul Ferber used his conspiracy theory influences
to form the Q drops on h N. He take

(19:43):
a bit from here, a bit from there, and spin
it himself with cryptic language and the odd intel phrase
passed in that is, as I mentioned until his empire
was stolen from him. Next episode will look at how
QUE was set adrift once again when HM was shut down,

(20:05):
will go over Paul Furber's new insider and on claims,
and we'll also start looking into how we think the
Q account was hijacked from Paul Furber. Q Clearance is
brought to you by I Heart Radio and Cudaytar Media.
I'm Jake Hanrahan. You can find me online at Jake

(20:25):
underscool Hand Rahand. That's h a N A h a N.
This episode was produced by myself with fact checking by
Sarah hi Tower. The music is by Sam Black and
the sound levels were mixed by Thomas Griffin at Splicing
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