The 3 Grifters Who Are Making $$ Off QAnon-Believers (Suckers!)
First, let’s dispense with the notion that all this conspiracy theory shit is just harmless fun:
In recent months, Qanon followers have allegedly been involved in a foiled presidential assassination plot, a devastating California wildfire, and an armed standoff with local law enforcement officers in Arizona.
Welp, as it turns out, as with so much other Trump-related disgrace & idiocy, at the heart, it’s a total con. A fake. A money-grab aimed at mouth-breathing suckers.
NBC has identified the three people who are using QAnon to amass Fat Stacks.
Qanon was just another unremarkable part of the “anon” genre until November 2017, when two moderators of the 4chan board where Q posted predictions, who went by the usernames Pamphlet Anon and BaruchtheScribe, reached out to Tracy Diaz, according to Diaz’s blogs and YouTube videos. BaruchtheScribe, in reality a self-identified web programmer from South Africa named Paul Furber, confirmed that account to NBC News.
“A bunch of us decided that the message needed to go wider so we contacted Youtubers who had been commenting on the Q drops,” Furber said in an email.
Diaz, a small-time YouTube star who once hosted a talk show on the fringe right-wing network Liberty Movement Radio, had found moderate popularity with a couple of thousand views for her YouTube videos analyzing WikiLeaks releases and discussing the “pizzagate” conspiracy, a baseless theory that alleged a child sex ring was being run out of a Washington pizza shop.
As Diaz tells it in a blog post detailing her role in the early days of Qanon, she banded together with the two moderators. Their goal, according to Diaz, was to build a following for Qanon — which would mean bigger followings for them as well.
The QAnon following then migrated to 8chan, where older (read: delusional & gullible after years of watching Fox News) users started just eating it up:
We joked about it for years, but #QAnon is making it a reality: Boomers! On your imageboard. pic.twitter.com/SG6ovnich2
— 8chan (8ch.net) (@infinitechan) January 7, 2018
And then the nutbars just kept metastasizing across the web. No sooner were they banned from one platform, then they moved to another:
Kicked off Reddit, Rogers hatched a new plan. He would replace the mainstream media — often a target of Q’s posts — with a constantly streaming YouTube network made up of the self-described “researchers” who were putting together Q’s clues.
Within a month, Rogers, 31, and his wife, Christina Urso, 29, had launched the Patriots’ Soapbox, a round-the-clock livestreamed YouTube channel for Qanon study and discussion. The channel is, in effect, a broadcast of a Discord chatroom with constant audio commentary from a rotating cast of volunteers and moderators with sporadic appearances by Rogers and Urso. In April, Urso registered Patriots’ Soapbox LLC in Virginia.