It’s purely a coincidence that this piece about the early days of QAnon is coming out a few days after I learned about the death of 8chan founder turned 8chan opponent Fredrick Brennan. Fred was omnipresent in the first year of organized pushback against Q, including appearing with me on the first big podcast I did about Q, Reply All.

Those first months of Q were frenetic because it was rapidly growing with little understanding of who was behind it, or what they wanted from it. Making matters worse was that for Q’s first year, the mainstream media wanted nothing to do with it. To most news outlets, this was just more dumb Pizzagate crap, irrelevant to only a few hardcore conspiracy theorists, and too weird to waste time on.

Obviously, that wasn’t true. We learned the hard way that ignoring rapidly growing fringe movements doesn’t make them disappear – it only ensures they gain strength with nobody paying attention. And they gain strength because of early promoters who legitimize and spread them, either because they believe they’re real, or because they can see dollar signs. Or both.

Jordan Sather was one of those early promoters, a conspiracy theorist who has touted a variety of false claims and fringe beliefs to a steady audience. Some are harmless, like his belief in a “secret space program,” a notion that’s been around for decades. Some are extremely harmful, like his shilling for medical bleach as an alternative treatment for COVID-19. Sather was in the trenches from almost the start of QAnon, and still somehow believes that the “military intelligence team” of Q was leaking clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state that has not actually happened.

I was curious when I found this piece from Sather about Alex Jones’ early links to Q, from promoting it, to trying to co-opt it, to turning against it – and doing it again and again. As I read it, I was pulled back into a world of competing grifters, a growing mythology, and my unease that you can’t be bombarded with unfulfilled promises that the bad guys are finally going down without eventually trying to do it yourself. We’re getting a lot of that these days, and it’s worth seeing where it all came from.

Here’s my response to the first part of this very lengthy piece. The second part will be out next week, for paid subscribers.

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