About

Alternate Title: “Statement About QAnon”

We never had an “about page” until today, February 6, 2021.

I decided that it was important to help first-time visitors, and people who don’t know us, understand what this site is about.

We here – most of us, and definitely most of the commenters – have been following the QAnon phenomenon from the beginning.

That is NOT to say that we are all “believers” in Q – whatever that means. Many of us, and maybe half the authors, are actually SKEPTICS of QAnon, to various degrees.

But don’t get me wrong – we are all strident DEFENDERS of QAnon, and in particular, we are unswerving defenders of the right to discuss and consider Q’s postings and questions.

As a retired scientist, I’m a natural skeptic. That is how I became interested in QAnon. I wanted to understand what it was. That is how I learned to differentiate between Q’s postings and the beliefs and ideas of the people who were affected by them – followers, believers, skeptics, haters, and mockers.

An H2O molecule has a two-fold axis, C2 , and NH3 has a three axis, C3 .

I started this site so that people who wanted to discuss QAnon on platforms where it was forbidden, had somewhere to go. That was in roughly September of 2018. After the mid-term election of 2018, many of us on The Conservative Treehouse (a.k.a. “The Last Refuge“, ironically) were kicked out, because QAnon became a forbidden topic for commenters, even off-site.

I am a 100% backer of free speech. We try to have free speech here, but it has to be civil, because WordPress does not have a “mute” capability, and we’re all biased toward civility, anyway, so it was just easier for us, as a group, to add that one requirement.

I’m a huge fan of Gab, and have been since the beginning, because Andrew Torba is committed to REAL free speech. We have a somewhat inactive group there, too.

My values are from an era when ALL prominent Jewish civil libertarians defended the rights of Nazis to enjoy the rights of the Constitution IDENTICALLY with their own enjoyment. Free speech, right of assembly, own as many guns as the law allows, habeus corpus, take the Fifth – THE WORKS. No differences between people. These were the people who supported Martin Luther King, Jr., who is still my hero.

My own personal views on QAnon should not overshadow or burden in any way the views of others here – but you may find them interesting.

I have stated almost from the beginning that QAnon is a psy-op – a psychological operation. Calling it a “conspiracy theory” in and of itself is intellectually lazy, but good press and DNC politics, so poor journalists do it. Calling it a LARP is closer to the truth, but still untrue. Calling QAnon a deniable psy-op hiding behind a plausible LARP is my best answer to normies, but even that still falls short of the complex information warfare beauty of the QAnon operation.

Q’s postings (“Q drops”) touch upon and interact with many ideas that are often labeled as conspiracy theories, but they do so in a highly credible way, and THAT is part of the design of the psy-op. Anybody who knows anything about “classified matters” – for whatever reasons – knows that there is, in fact, a lot of intrigue and “truth stranger than fiction” in the world of secrets, espionage, military matters, and hidden or bleeding-edge science.

Q – alleging to be part of that world – is able to hint at things in vague and exciting manners, and the hints eventually match up with verifiable information, adding credibility to the psy-op. One of the strongest techniques Q uses is to state things which are unbelievable or surprising at first, but which then become obviously true later. President Trump used that technique constantly, to great effect.

Because Q also alleged to provide some disinformation – and there was a LOT – the most strongly captured audience had a ready excuse to deny its own doubts, and to thus suspend disbelief which otherwise would have resulted from the many “misses” and failed pronouncements. The audience together worked out such rationalizations and skepticisms.

On the other hand, Q very frequently MATCHED or LED TRUMP on key pronouncements, showing that it had to have SOME kind of access to the White House. There was a certain fascinating coordination which said that – even if Q’s team didn’t actually intersect with Team Trump, it had to have had some kind of insider access.

However, none of this is what really convinced me that QAnon was “on Trump’s side”.

It was WHAT Q DID – the EFFECTS ON THE CROWD – that told me Q was helping Trump.

QAnon is – or was – a deniable psy-op, and the administration did in fact deny it – repeatedly but carefully. Nevertheless, QAnon was radically effective in exposing the “Fake News” as not merely partisan propagandists for Democrats, but LIARS of the highest degree.

THAT was impressive, and could only be of service to Trump.

Perhaps more importantly, Q began to move many of its followers AWAY from slavish thinking, to more logical and investigatory thinking. It was a kind of “treasure hunt” lesson in thinking which DID, as Wikileaks accused, keep the audience pacified, but which also made them QUESTION everything and everybody. Even the psy-op itself and the Q drops were questioned, because of known disinformation.

QAnon had other effects, which I won’t get into here, but they were likewise beneficial to Trump. All in all, I came to the conclusion that QAnon could be trusted BY ITS EFFECTS – less so on individual statements.

Some of the “misinformation” from Q – NOT from his followers – I mean from the Q drops themselves – now appears to have been strategic deception, not so much of Q followers or Trump’s base, but of the media and of Trump’s more cunning political enemies – including some in his own administration. Again, I’m not going to get into that – but some of it was very slick.

All in all, QAnon was VERY smart – VERY intelligent – VERY professional. And we LOVE to analyze it.

Lambasting ANYBODY for following this stuff, is like going after people who follow stocks (often wrong) or edge science (often wrong) and telling them they’re idiots – that they should be following the exactness and clarity of football.

I don’t think so.

Anyway, now you know SOME of what we are about here. We VIGOROUSLY research and discuss all things in the news, particularly politics, and very frequently QAnon.

We do NOT segregate religious discussion in any way, and encourage religious expression at all times and in all places on the site. Although the Sunday open thread is intentionally MORE religious than all the others, you will find calls to prayer in almost all threads here – either in the post or in the comments. This is not only because we believe such speech acts DIRECTLY as a form of spiritual protection.

We consider this very site a church, or a synagogue, or a house of worship – in keeping with a rigorously historical view of the First Amendment. The Declaration and Constitution both resulted from a revolution where political discussion took place largely in churches, bars, and inns / restaurants.

You may thus find this place a bit more like a BAR on Fridays, and a CHURCH on Sundays, and even a UNIVERSITY, COIN SHOP, CHOIR, BIBLE STUDY, or HOPIUM DEN. And yes, occasionally the BURGER JOINT PARKING LOT ON SATURDAY NIGHT.

And why not? That is what free speech is all about.

W

PS: At the request of the ladies, James Coburn is our mascot. He is one of many memes that appear here. Enjoy the show!