Issued on: 15/10/2021
The conspiracy theorist group QAnon (supporters pictured August 2020) claims without evidence that the pandemic is a conspiracy by a cabal of Satanist paedophiles who control the world
Kyle Grillot AFP/File
Washington (AFP)
A website administrator that many consider to be behind the QAnon conspiracy movement that fired up supporters of Donald Trump has announced he will run for a Republican seat in Congress.
Ron Watkins announced in a video posted on Telegram Thursday that he would contest a House of Representatives seat in Arizona that is currently held by a Democrat, in the election next year.
Echoing Trump's unsupported complaints about the 2020 presidential election, Watkins said voter fraud was a key issue.
"President Trump had his election stolen, not just in Arizona but in other states, too," he said.
"We must now take this fight to Washington DC to vote out all the dirty Democrats who have stolen our republic."
Watkins and his father Jim Watkins ran the 8chan and successor 8kun message boards that became a hub for conspiracy theories.
In 2017 they began publishing anonymous, cryptic postings by "Q" claiming bizarre child exploitation and deep state plots.
Over the next three years that snowballed into the QAnon movement boasting hundreds of thousands of followers in the United States and thousands more in other countries.
At the core of their myriad conspiracy theories was their belief that there was a secret cabal in Washington trying to undermine Trump.
Followers of the movement were convinced they were receiving top-level intelligence and encouragement to take action from inside Trump's circle.
Amid a number of violent incidents and rising threats, the FBI said last year that it was keeping an eye on QAnon as one of several potentially dangerous right-wing fringe groups.
But no one knew who Q was. Many suspected it was the operators of 8chan themselves, the Watkins.
The original founder of 8chan, Frederick Brennan, who turned the site over to them in 2016, and Travis View, a leading investigator of QAnon, both suspected the two Watkins.
Q stopped posting in December after Trump lost the election, and around the time Ron Watkins became active in Trump's campaign to show that voter fraud cost him the election -- a claim never backed by evidence.
While the QAnon movement has lost steam, two Republicans who had endorsed it won seats in Congress, and adherents of the movement took part in the violent attack on Congress on January 6.
Media Matters, which has studied the group's political influence, said in August that at least 45 people who have supported or endorsed QAnon are running for Congress in the 2022 election.
© 2021 AFP
Washington (AFP)
A website administrator that many consider to be behind the QAnon conspiracy movement that fired up supporters of Donald Trump has announced he will run for a Republican seat in Congress.
Ron Watkins announced in a video posted on Telegram Thursday that he would contest a House of Representatives seat in Arizona that is currently held by a Democrat, in the election next year.
Echoing Trump's unsupported complaints about the 2020 presidential election, Watkins said voter fraud was a key issue.
"President Trump had his election stolen, not just in Arizona but in other states, too," he said.
"We must now take this fight to Washington DC to vote out all the dirty Democrats who have stolen our republic."
Watkins and his father Jim Watkins ran the 8chan and successor 8kun message boards that became a hub for conspiracy theories.
In 2017 they began publishing anonymous, cryptic postings by "Q" claiming bizarre child exploitation and deep state plots.
Over the next three years that snowballed into the QAnon movement boasting hundreds of thousands of followers in the United States and thousands more in other countries.
At the core of their myriad conspiracy theories was their belief that there was a secret cabal in Washington trying to undermine Trump.
Followers of the movement were convinced they were receiving top-level intelligence and encouragement to take action from inside Trump's circle.
Amid a number of violent incidents and rising threats, the FBI said last year that it was keeping an eye on QAnon as one of several potentially dangerous right-wing fringe groups.
But no one knew who Q was. Many suspected it was the operators of 8chan themselves, the Watkins.
The original founder of 8chan, Frederick Brennan, who turned the site over to them in 2016, and Travis View, a leading investigator of QAnon, both suspected the two Watkins.
Q stopped posting in December after Trump lost the election, and around the time Ron Watkins became active in Trump's campaign to show that voter fraud cost him the election -- a claim never backed by evidence.
While the QAnon movement has lost steam, two Republicans who had endorsed it won seats in Congress, and adherents of the movement took part in the violent attack on Congress on January 6.
Media Matters, which has studied the group's political influence, said in August that at least 45 people who have supported or endorsed QAnon are running for Congress in the 2022 election.
© 2021 AFP
‘I’m not Q’: Arizona congressional candidate Ron Watkins denies starting satanic cult conspiracy theory
Bob Brigham
October 15, 2021
Ron Watkins @az_rww on Twitter.
Republican congressional hopeful Ron Watkins denied being "Q" from the QAnon conspiracy theory during a Friday interview with the Arizona Republic.
"I have never written a Q post. I'm not Q," Watkins claimed. "I don't have any idea about who Q is."
Although Watkins denied having "any idea" about who Q may be, the newspaper reported, "Watkins said he has his own theory about who Q might be. But said he has no proof and would not share his theory."
Watkins, who has never held public office, also discussed the legislation he would introduce as a member of the House of Representatives.
"Watkins spoke about at least one of his legislative priorities. He said he was drafting a bill that, if it were enacted, would have ensured more coverage of stories about a supposed stolen laptop belonging to President Joe Biden's son, Hunter," the newspaper reported. "The bill would ensure, Watkins said, that the government does not get involved in censoring online content."
Bob Brigham
October 15, 2021
Ron Watkins @az_rww on Twitter.
Republican congressional hopeful Ron Watkins denied being "Q" from the QAnon conspiracy theory during a Friday interview with the Arizona Republic.
"I have never written a Q post. I'm not Q," Watkins claimed. "I don't have any idea about who Q is."
Although Watkins denied having "any idea" about who Q may be, the newspaper reported, "Watkins said he has his own theory about who Q might be. But said he has no proof and would not share his theory."
Watkins, who has never held public office, also discussed the legislation he would introduce as a member of the House of Representatives.
"Watkins spoke about at least one of his legislative priorities. He said he was drafting a bill that, if it were enacted, would have ensured more coverage of stories about a supposed stolen laptop belonging to President Joe Biden's son, Hunter," the newspaper reported. "The bill would ensure, Watkins said, that the government does not get involved in censoring online content."
QAnon’s Ron Watkins Is Running For Congress. How Did We Get Here?
The man who did more than anyone to facilitate the rise of the QAnon cult is now running for office in Arizona.
By David Gilbert
15.10.21
RON WATKINS APPEARS ON ONE AMERICA NEWS (OAN)
Back in May, Ron Watkins announced that he was launching a new venture called Alien Leaks. Essentially, Watkins wanted to make WikiLeaks, but for information about UFOs.
The site was a complete and utter failure. In fact, it attracted so few leaks that Watkins had to post his own close encounter three months later when he claimed to have seen an alien craft flying over his apartment in Sapporo, Japan—at a moment he just happened to be filming the right part of the sky.
When I contacted Watkins about Alien Leaks, I took the opportunity to ask him about what appeared to be his admission in Cullen Hoback’s HBO documentary that he had in fact posted on 8chan as Q, the mysterious leader of the QAnon movement.
Rather than answering my questions directly, Watkins sent me a video of himself in the Japanese wilderness dressed as some sort of cowboy samurai. The video made little sense, especially since Watkins was speaking on camera but the sound came from a voiceover track he had recorded separately.
At the time, with former President Trump out of office and Q gone silent, many people believed that this was the beginning of the end of QAnon, and of Watkins’ moment in the spotlight.
But on Thursday, Watkins showed his ability to reinvent himself once again, announcing that he’s planning to run as a Congressional candidate in Arizona—where he claims he now lives.
How did we get to the point where one of the people who’s most responsible for the rise of QAnon believes that running for public office is a viable option?
Waktins was born in the late 1980s, after his father, Jim Watkins, met a South Korean woman while he was serving in the U.S. military. Watkins moved around a lot as a child due to his father’s job as a helicopter engineer with the army.
After his parents divorced when he was a teenager, Watkins lived mostly with his mother and attended high school in Mukilteo, Washington, where he graduated in 2005.
Meanwhile, Jim Watkins had retired from the U.S. military and had established a Japanese porn website hosted in the U.S. to circumvent Japan’s strict pornography laws. Then, in 2014, he seized an opportunity to take control of a hugely popular online imageboard called 2channel, the precursor to 4chan and 8chan. The founder of the site claims Watkins stole it from him.
The younger Watkins decided to get involved in his father’s businesses, and in 2014 suggested that they contact Fred Brennan, who had founded 8chan as a a "free speech friendly” 4chan alternative in the wake of the Gamergate controversy.
Brennan was at the time struggling to manage the site, and so the Watkinses swooped in and took control, keeping Brennan on board as an employee in the Philippines, where the Watkinses were based at this point.
The partnership between Brennan and Jim Waktins broke down and the father-and-son duo took full control of the site. Then, in early 2018, the nascent QAnon movement moved from 4chan to 8chan, and everything changed.
The mysterious Q began posting on 8chan exclusively, and as the conspiracy movement grew so did traffic to Watkins’ website.
However, at the time, the person who was in control of the 8chan board where Q was posting said that the account was hijacked and that someone else began posting as Q.
For many, this was evidence that Ron and Jim Watkins had decided to take control of the QAnon movement for their own benefit. Analysis of the “Q drop” before the move to 8chan and after it, clearly show there were two distinct authors, but aside from Waktins’ own “admission” on Hoback’s documentary, there is no conclusive proof that Watkins was behind the posts.
In fact there is evidence that due to his location in the globe and the timing of certain Q drops, Watkins could not have been Q.
As well as QAnon, 8chan gained notoriety for hosting child abuse imagery, and several mass shooters posted manifestos on the site prior to beginning their killing sprees. In the space of six months in 2019, the perpetrators of the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Poway synagogue shooting, and the El Paso shooting all used 8chan to disseminate their respective manifestos.
The result was that 8chan was deplatformed for several months, but it soon returned under a new name, 8kun.
But whether or not Ron Watkins was Q is moot. As administrator of the site, he facilitated the QAnon movement to grow to an unprecedented scale, helping it move from the obscure website into the mainstream.
The movement has torn families apart, driven people to conduct acts of horrific violence, and helped fuel the widespread belief that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. QAnon conspiracies have also now become deeply intertwined with mainstream GOP politics.
Ron’s transformation from QAnon facilitator to Congressional candidate began on Election day 2020.
On that day, he announced that he was resigning from 8kun. In the days and weeks that followed, as former President Donald Trump began his long and seemingly-never-ending campaign to discredit the election results, Watkins saw an opportunity.
Using the Twitter account where’d amassed hundreds of thousands of followers as the Q facilitator, he began tweeting about Dominion Voting Machines and obscure election processes, claiming—without evidence—that there was mass vote rigging taking place.
Such claims quickly got the attention of right wing networks like One America News and people in Trump’s orbit, like “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Guiliani.
Soon, Watkins was appearing on TV as a cyber security expert, even though he had no experience in this area.
After the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Watkins was banned from Twitter, but seamlessly moved to Telegram, where he amassed an even greater following. Here he began to drive his followers’ attention to Maricopa County, Arizona, where a bogus election “audit” had been authorized.
In between founding his Alien Leaks website—and launching a career as an NFT artist—Watkins continued to boost election conspiracies. He appeared virtually at the Cyber Symposium of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where his presentation was interrupted when he was told he might be breaking the law by talking about data taken from machines in Mesa, Colorado.
Like Lindell, Watkins loved to tell his followers that something huge was just around the corner, whether it was Trump’s return to office or some explosive lawsuit that would expose widespread vote rigging. But in the end, just like the mysterious Q, Watkins never delivered.
And so it was with the Cyber Ninjas report in late September. Watkins and many others on the right predicted it would provide vindication for their claims of vote rigging. In the end, all it did was further confirm that the election in Maricopa County was run properly and President Joe Biden won it.
But rather than retreating to the dark corners of the internet, Watkins clearly felt that now was the time for him to come into the light.
And so last week he landed in Arizona, weeks ahead of his appearance at a big QAnon conference in Las Vegas. He has spent his time showing how completely unathletic he is, repeatedly failing to get a meeting with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and hobnobbing with some of the state’s most prominent Republicans.
And on Thursday the transformation was complete: Watkins announced he was running for the House seat in Arizona’s first district, where he will have a crowded primary as Republicans try to unseat incumbent Democrat Rep. Tom O’Halleran. And like so many other Republican candidates running in 2022’s midterms, he pegged his decision to run on the baseless belief that the election was a fraud.
“We must stay vigilant and keep up the pressure, both here in Arizona, and throughout the country to indict any and all criminals who have facilitated election fraud,” Watkins said in a video posted to his Telegram channel.
“President Trump had his election stolen, not just in Arizona but in other states too. We must now take this fight to Washington, D.C. and vote out all the dirty Democrats who have stolen our Republic.”
Watkins’ candidacy has already garnered the support of many of the biggest influencers in the QAnon community, but he’ll need more than that in order to secure the Republican nomination.
And Fred Brennan, who worked alongside Ron when Jim Watkins took over 8chan, believes he is missing something vital to win an election.
“Charisma is not optional for a politician,” Brennan told VICE News, adding that he felt the additional scrutiny on Watkins will turn out badly for him and his father.
“I actually welcome him submitting himself to the political process because all it's going to do is just create greater scrutiny into the fact that he has no legitimate source of income and his entire persona in Q is based on lies,” Brennan said.
But not everyone is convinced. Cullen Hoback, who spent a lot of time with Watkins believes that he does have charisma and that his online skills could be enough to get him elected.
“Elections are a popularity contest where facts no longer seem to matter,” Hoback told Vice News. “He’s got a base of followers who he’s strung along with wild promises. Nothing needs to come true. In fact, the more he tricks his followers, the more clever they think he is. Maybe his ability to read from a script isn’t great, but he’s playing a different game. He’s highly skilled at memetic warfare, trolling, and has a passionate army of ‘digital soldiers’ on the ready. In person, I think even Fred would begrudgingly admit Ron can be quite charming. Assuming Ron maintains the steam to keep up the act, he could find himself in a similar situation as Trump—a troll who gets memed into a position of power.”
The man who did more than anyone to facilitate the rise of the QAnon cult is now running for office in Arizona.
By David Gilbert
15.10.21
RON WATKINS APPEARS ON ONE AMERICA NEWS (OAN)
Back in May, Ron Watkins announced that he was launching a new venture called Alien Leaks. Essentially, Watkins wanted to make WikiLeaks, but for information about UFOs.
The site was a complete and utter failure. In fact, it attracted so few leaks that Watkins had to post his own close encounter three months later when he claimed to have seen an alien craft flying over his apartment in Sapporo, Japan—at a moment he just happened to be filming the right part of the sky.
When I contacted Watkins about Alien Leaks, I took the opportunity to ask him about what appeared to be his admission in Cullen Hoback’s HBO documentary that he had in fact posted on 8chan as Q, the mysterious leader of the QAnon movement.
Rather than answering my questions directly, Watkins sent me a video of himself in the Japanese wilderness dressed as some sort of cowboy samurai. The video made little sense, especially since Watkins was speaking on camera but the sound came from a voiceover track he had recorded separately.
At the time, with former President Trump out of office and Q gone silent, many people believed that this was the beginning of the end of QAnon, and of Watkins’ moment in the spotlight.
But on Thursday, Watkins showed his ability to reinvent himself once again, announcing that he’s planning to run as a Congressional candidate in Arizona—where he claims he now lives.
How did we get to the point where one of the people who’s most responsible for the rise of QAnon believes that running for public office is a viable option?
Waktins was born in the late 1980s, after his father, Jim Watkins, met a South Korean woman while he was serving in the U.S. military. Watkins moved around a lot as a child due to his father’s job as a helicopter engineer with the army.
After his parents divorced when he was a teenager, Watkins lived mostly with his mother and attended high school in Mukilteo, Washington, where he graduated in 2005.
Meanwhile, Jim Watkins had retired from the U.S. military and had established a Japanese porn website hosted in the U.S. to circumvent Japan’s strict pornography laws. Then, in 2014, he seized an opportunity to take control of a hugely popular online imageboard called 2channel, the precursor to 4chan and 8chan. The founder of the site claims Watkins stole it from him.
The younger Watkins decided to get involved in his father’s businesses, and in 2014 suggested that they contact Fred Brennan, who had founded 8chan as a a "free speech friendly” 4chan alternative in the wake of the Gamergate controversy.
Brennan was at the time struggling to manage the site, and so the Watkinses swooped in and took control, keeping Brennan on board as an employee in the Philippines, where the Watkinses were based at this point.
The partnership between Brennan and Jim Waktins broke down and the father-and-son duo took full control of the site. Then, in early 2018, the nascent QAnon movement moved from 4chan to 8chan, and everything changed.
The mysterious Q began posting on 8chan exclusively, and as the conspiracy movement grew so did traffic to Watkins’ website.
However, at the time, the person who was in control of the 8chan board where Q was posting said that the account was hijacked and that someone else began posting as Q.
For many, this was evidence that Ron and Jim Watkins had decided to take control of the QAnon movement for their own benefit. Analysis of the “Q drop” before the move to 8chan and after it, clearly show there were two distinct authors, but aside from Waktins’ own “admission” on Hoback’s documentary, there is no conclusive proof that Watkins was behind the posts.
In fact there is evidence that due to his location in the globe and the timing of certain Q drops, Watkins could not have been Q.
As well as QAnon, 8chan gained notoriety for hosting child abuse imagery, and several mass shooters posted manifestos on the site prior to beginning their killing sprees. In the space of six months in 2019, the perpetrators of the Christchurch mosque shootings, the Poway synagogue shooting, and the El Paso shooting all used 8chan to disseminate their respective manifestos.
The result was that 8chan was deplatformed for several months, but it soon returned under a new name, 8kun.
But whether or not Ron Watkins was Q is moot. As administrator of the site, he facilitated the QAnon movement to grow to an unprecedented scale, helping it move from the obscure website into the mainstream.
The movement has torn families apart, driven people to conduct acts of horrific violence, and helped fuel the widespread belief that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. QAnon conspiracies have also now become deeply intertwined with mainstream GOP politics.
Ron’s transformation from QAnon facilitator to Congressional candidate began on Election day 2020.
On that day, he announced that he was resigning from 8kun. In the days and weeks that followed, as former President Donald Trump began his long and seemingly-never-ending campaign to discredit the election results, Watkins saw an opportunity.
Using the Twitter account where’d amassed hundreds of thousands of followers as the Q facilitator, he began tweeting about Dominion Voting Machines and obscure election processes, claiming—without evidence—that there was mass vote rigging taking place.
Such claims quickly got the attention of right wing networks like One America News and people in Trump’s orbit, like “Kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell and Trump’s former personal attorney Rudy Guiliani.
Soon, Watkins was appearing on TV as a cyber security expert, even though he had no experience in this area.
After the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, Watkins was banned from Twitter, but seamlessly moved to Telegram, where he amassed an even greater following. Here he began to drive his followers’ attention to Maricopa County, Arizona, where a bogus election “audit” had been authorized.
In between founding his Alien Leaks website—and launching a career as an NFT artist—Watkins continued to boost election conspiracies. He appeared virtually at the Cyber Symposium of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, where his presentation was interrupted when he was told he might be breaking the law by talking about data taken from machines in Mesa, Colorado.
Like Lindell, Watkins loved to tell his followers that something huge was just around the corner, whether it was Trump’s return to office or some explosive lawsuit that would expose widespread vote rigging. But in the end, just like the mysterious Q, Watkins never delivered.
And so it was with the Cyber Ninjas report in late September. Watkins and many others on the right predicted it would provide vindication for their claims of vote rigging. In the end, all it did was further confirm that the election in Maricopa County was run properly and President Joe Biden won it.
But rather than retreating to the dark corners of the internet, Watkins clearly felt that now was the time for him to come into the light.
And so last week he landed in Arizona, weeks ahead of his appearance at a big QAnon conference in Las Vegas. He has spent his time showing how completely unathletic he is, repeatedly failing to get a meeting with Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, and hobnobbing with some of the state’s most prominent Republicans.
And on Thursday the transformation was complete: Watkins announced he was running for the House seat in Arizona’s first district, where he will have a crowded primary as Republicans try to unseat incumbent Democrat Rep. Tom O’Halleran. And like so many other Republican candidates running in 2022’s midterms, he pegged his decision to run on the baseless belief that the election was a fraud.
“We must stay vigilant and keep up the pressure, both here in Arizona, and throughout the country to indict any and all criminals who have facilitated election fraud,” Watkins said in a video posted to his Telegram channel.
“President Trump had his election stolen, not just in Arizona but in other states too. We must now take this fight to Washington, D.C. and vote out all the dirty Democrats who have stolen our Republic.”
Watkins’ candidacy has already garnered the support of many of the biggest influencers in the QAnon community, but he’ll need more than that in order to secure the Republican nomination.
And Fred Brennan, who worked alongside Ron when Jim Watkins took over 8chan, believes he is missing something vital to win an election.
“Charisma is not optional for a politician,” Brennan told VICE News, adding that he felt the additional scrutiny on Watkins will turn out badly for him and his father.
“I actually welcome him submitting himself to the political process because all it's going to do is just create greater scrutiny into the fact that he has no legitimate source of income and his entire persona in Q is based on lies,” Brennan said.
But not everyone is convinced. Cullen Hoback, who spent a lot of time with Watkins believes that he does have charisma and that his online skills could be enough to get him elected.
“Elections are a popularity contest where facts no longer seem to matter,” Hoback told Vice News. “He’s got a base of followers who he’s strung along with wild promises. Nothing needs to come true. In fact, the more he tricks his followers, the more clever they think he is. Maybe his ability to read from a script isn’t great, but he’s playing a different game. He’s highly skilled at memetic warfare, trolling, and has a passionate army of ‘digital soldiers’ on the ready. In person, I think even Fred would begrudgingly admit Ron can be quite charming. Assuming Ron maintains the steam to keep up the act, he could find himself in a similar situation as Trump—a troll who gets memed into a position of power.”
Election deniers are organizing by state on a QAnon-linked platform to take over the Republican Party
Propelled by conservative media personalities, extremists and election deniers are organizing state by state on Pilled.net
Propelled by conservative media personalities, extremists and election deniers are organizing state by state on Pilled.net
Molly Butler / Media Matters
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ
MMFA
PUBLISHED 10/07/21 1
Election deniers and extremists are organizing state by state on the QAnon-linked website “Pilled.net” in an attempt to “take the Republican Party over” and undermine local election administration.
This effort has been heavily promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his War Room: Pandemic podcast over the past year. Alongside Republican activist Dan Schultz, Bannon has encouraged his listeners to pursue local election jobs that are often left vacant due to lack of public knowledge of the positions.
As explained by ProPublica, precinct officers play an important part in deciding how local elections are run, and the responsibilities of the positions differ by state. These positions can “have a say in choosing poll workers” and even “help pick members of boards that oversee elections,” among other responsibilities.
On the September 27 edition of conservative media personality John Fredericks’ show Outside The Beltway, the host discussed Schultz’s plan to “take the Republican Party over” and “end the Joe Biden regime in its tracks.”
During the interview, Fredericks played a video from Schultz’s group showcasing his “precinct strategy” website. Schultz also promoted a new button on his website to “connect with other conservatives in your state” and suggested the site allows users to “privately and securely communicate and collaborate with one another.” Fredericks responded, saying that is “exactly what we need.”
The button that Schultz referred to takes users to Pilled.net to sign up for a group named “Precinct Strategy.” However, if users were to go to the Pilled.net homepage by clicking the pill icon in the top left corner, they would see that the website is riddled with QAnon-linked content that has been banned by mainstream social media platforms.
QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory that claims former President Donald Trump is secretly working to take down leading Democratic officials, global pedophilia rings, and his purported enemies in the “deep state.” It has been labeled a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI and QAnon followers have been linked to numerous incidents of violence, including the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
For example, QAnon influencer Zak Paine has an active account on the Pilled.net site with over 6,000 followers. Paine, who uses the pseudonym RedPill78, was part of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Patriots’ Soapbox, a livestream outlet devoted to the conspiracy theory, also has a profile on Pilled.net that posts similar content. Other extremist content on the site includes discussions of the chemical compound adrenochrome with QAnon influencer Jordan Sather and suggestions that liberal elites and celebrities are actually pedophiles who “will be exposed.”
Media Matters has previously reported on Bannon and Schultz’s calls to action being amplified and distributed by QAnon influencers and shared on far-right message boards. Schultz himself has appeared on a number of QAnon podcasts to encourage supporters to get involved with GOP precinct officer positions. Unfortunately, his plan seems to be working.
WRITTEN BY JUSTIN HOROWITZ
MMFA
PUBLISHED 10/07/21 1
Election deniers and extremists are organizing state by state on the QAnon-linked website “Pilled.net” in an attempt to “take the Republican Party over” and undermine local election administration.
This effort has been heavily promoted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on his War Room: Pandemic podcast over the past year. Alongside Republican activist Dan Schultz, Bannon has encouraged his listeners to pursue local election jobs that are often left vacant due to lack of public knowledge of the positions.
As explained by ProPublica, precinct officers play an important part in deciding how local elections are run, and the responsibilities of the positions differ by state. These positions can “have a say in choosing poll workers” and even “help pick members of boards that oversee elections,” among other responsibilities.
On the September 27 edition of conservative media personality John Fredericks’ show Outside The Beltway, the host discussed Schultz’s plan to “take the Republican Party over” and “end the Joe Biden regime in its tracks.”
During the interview, Fredericks played a video from Schultz’s group showcasing his “precinct strategy” website. Schultz also promoted a new button on his website to “connect with other conservatives in your state” and suggested the site allows users to “privately and securely communicate and collaborate with one another.” Fredericks responded, saying that is “exactly what we need.”
The button that Schultz referred to takes users to Pilled.net to sign up for a group named “Precinct Strategy.” However, if users were to go to the Pilled.net homepage by clicking the pill icon in the top left corner, they would see that the website is riddled with QAnon-linked content that has been banned by mainstream social media platforms.
QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory that claims former President Donald Trump is secretly working to take down leading Democratic officials, global pedophilia rings, and his purported enemies in the “deep state.” It has been labeled a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI and QAnon followers have been linked to numerous incidents of violence, including the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
For example, QAnon influencer Zak Paine has an active account on the Pilled.net site with over 6,000 followers. Paine, who uses the pseudonym RedPill78, was part of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Patriots’ Soapbox, a livestream outlet devoted to the conspiracy theory, also has a profile on Pilled.net that posts similar content. Other extremist content on the site includes discussions of the chemical compound adrenochrome with QAnon influencer Jordan Sather and suggestions that liberal elites and celebrities are actually pedophiles who “will be exposed.”
Media Matters has previously reported on Bannon and Schultz’s calls to action being amplified and distributed by QAnon influencers and shared on far-right message boards. Schultz himself has appeared on a number of QAnon podcasts to encourage supporters to get involved with GOP precinct officer positions. Unfortunately, his plan seems to be working.
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