WikiLeaks Calls Q-Anon a Likely ‘Pied Piper’ Operation

Guest Post By Caitlin Johnstone  /  The Burning Platform

A few months back I started having bizarre interactions on social media of a kind I’d never experienced previously. Suddenly, whenever I’d write about President Trump’s nonstop warmongering and capitulations to longstanding neoconservative agendas like implementing aggressive new cold war escalations against Russia along multiple fronts, the illegal occupation of Syria with the stated goal of effecting regime change, increasing troop presence in Afghanistan, unprecedented civilian deaths in drone strikes, facilitating the slaughter of civilians in Yemen, or the administration’s open regime change policy against Iran, I’d get all these weird accounts telling me things like “Trust the plan” and “This is the Art of the Deal, Trump is playing 4-D chess”, and saying I should research something called “QAnon” or “Q”.

It happens literally every time I write anything critical of this administration; a deluge of commenters telling me in effect, “Shush. Calm down. This is nothing. What looks like Trump facilitating longtime establishment agendas just like his predecessors is actually brilliant strategic maneuvering.” Every single time, without a single solitary exception.

It got particularly frustrating when I’d try to talk about Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ statement that arresting WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is a high priority for this administration, a statement Trump personally supported. These Q people told me they had great news for me: Assange is no longer languishing in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. No, some clever researchers had deciphered some cryptic statements from an anonymous poster on 8chan, and it turns out that Assange is now walking free and enjoying a full presidential pardon. Some even say it to Assange’s own mother.

Unless you move in certain circles you may never have even heard of the Q phenomenon; it’s almost never in the news and very seldom comes up in anything resembling mainstream discourse. But for people like me who write about the behavior of America’s unelected power establishment, it comes up a lot and can be a bit of an obstacle to the lucid sharing of ideas and information.

To summarize, someone claiming to be an insider with “Q clearance” began making posts on the anonymous message board 4chan, a notorious online playground for millions of meme creators, trolls and nerds which has fostered a massively enthusiastic pro-Trump zeitgeist since 2015. 4chan users refer to one another as “anons”, so “Q” is often referred to as QAnon. Q would share intentionally vague clues they referred to as “crumbs” and encourage readers to research what was meant by them, usually leading toward incriminating information about Trump’s political rivals and never toward any incriminating information about Trump. The posts moved from 4chan to the related forum 8chan, with disputed claims of authenticity.

This has created a dynamic wherein an anonymous poster shares extremely vague messages, and many thousands of Q enthusiasts go off combing the internet to find out what is meant by them. There are disputes within the community about precisely what is meant by which posts, but the net result is universally the same: all the information confirms that Trump is a brilliant hero who is fighting the Deep State, and all of Trump’s political enemies are corrupt criminals/pedophiles/satanists. All that is asked of Q’s army of woke patriots is that they have faith and trust the plan, and to know in their hearts that soon the President of the United States will solve all the nation’s problems.

Now who could possibly benefit from such an arrangement?

I’ve been openly critical of Qanon for many months, but it’s hard to write anything substantial about this subject because the QAnon phenomenon is so amorphous and is spread all over the internet in a sprawling, non-cohesive conversation consisting of many thousands of parts, so anything you say about it will be immediately slammed as untrue by its more passionate enthusiasts because you’re not saying it in exactly the way that they would say it. That plus the faith-based, religion-like reality tunnel Q enthusiasm requires one to espouse makes engaging this topic about as much fun as debating creationists online, so I’ve been avoiding writing about it.

For that reason, I was very happy to see that journalist Suzie Dawson had posted an epic, in-depth thread about why she views QAnon as a “Pied Piper operation”.

The thread is worth reading in its entirety, easier done here in this thread reader due to its size. Dawson explains how QAnon uses standard psyop tactics, first establishing credibility and then implementing gamification and spirituality to suck followers into an energized, cultish mentality which leaves them susceptible to suggestion, manipulation and direction. From there they are told things like not to worry about Julian Assange at a time when he needs our support and activism more than ever before, or told to be suspicious of Edward Snowden. She shows using primary source documents that Snowden has revealed vastly more to the public about the mechanics of the deep state than QAnon ever has, including information about the CIA, and shows who does and does not benefit from the operation.

Yesterday, Dawson’s thread was shared by the WikiLeaks Twitter accountwith the comment “This analysis, unfortunately, increasingly appears that it may be correct.”

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2018/05/28/wikileaks-calls-qanon-a-likely-pied-piper-operation/

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