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.
The Long History of Infowars Propaganda Against Q (Alex Jones, Jack Posobiec, and Jerome Corsi)
Feb 10, 2026
There are many stories to be told from the saga of “Q”, a saga which we may not have seen the resolution of quite yet. Unfortunately, there is no database where one can go to find many of these stories, no Anon-ipedia or “official source” that shares the true history of what occurred with the Q operation during Trump’s first term. For those that were there in real time while the Q posts were happening from late 2017 to late 2020, they may be familiar with some of the tales, but many are still largely unfamiliar, and those folks are getting influenced by popular alternative media personalities who may have an agenda to lie to them about Q.
One of those stories is Infowars’ attempt to infiltrate and subvert the Q posts and the Q community itself by rebranding, repackaging, and shutting down what they deem as competition. Alex Jones, and other Infowars affiliates, have told many fairy tales over the years about Q by misrepresenting what actually happened, and Alex Jones is still fabricating narratives to his audience about Q to this day, even going so far as to claim he helped create it.
This is a common trait of folklore or religious stories: there’s no one accepted version of it. Q promoters can’t agree on who is making the posts, what the purpose is, whether it’s okay to make money off it, or even what to call it. As with other conspiracy theories, internal consistency and continuity don’t really matter. The facts are malleable to the point of being meaningless. All that matters is how it makes you feel and what parts you want to be true.
Q was a big part of the Infowars mythology for a lot of reasons, but Sather is right in that Alex and his employees have consistently misrepresented it, and essentially used it for their own purposes, sometimes for it and sometimes against it. Whatever it was depended on what they needed it to be for audience capture purposes. It’s an incredibly cynical view of newsgathering that Alex is absolutely soaked in right now, as he passionately rambles in favor of things he would have once fought to the death against, like US troops in the streets demanding ID papers and a president using their office as an imperial piggy bank. Oh well.
I would like to tell this story – and given that Infowars and their affiliates in some ways placed me at the center of their attempts to undermine Q, I feel like I’m a good person to tell it.
The thing is, one of the goals of the Q operation was to create a backchannel whereby Trump and his behind the scenes advisors (“Q Team”) could speak directly to the American people and the world. The Mainstream Media was too compromised, and a good portion of the alternative media sphere was too compromised as well. Controlled opposition, shills, and useful idiots everywhere. It was better to create anonymous posts, create a myriad of proofs showing us the posts are legitimately coming from them, and then offer information and guidance through these posts.
[…]
Still believing that Q was an operation to create a backchannel for Trump to speak to the American people is a remarkable commitment to the bit. Trump has never, at any time, needed someone else to speak for him. During his first and second terms, he has spoken to the media constantly. He speaks almost daily, and posts on Truth Social dozens or even hundreds of times.
The only time he really needed a “backchannel to the American people” was during his 2021-2022 interregnum between January 6th and declaring his third candidacy. And Q went silent just before that. Q has also not posted at all in 2025 or 2026 (so far), as Trump’s remarks have veered into an uncanny valley of erratic insanity and franticness. So maybe Trump never needed Q at all? Weird.
INTRODUCING Q TO THE INFOWARS AUDIENCE
In early December 2017 I was contacted by a lawyer named Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s co-host on Infowars “War Room” radio show. Tyler was my go-to for any conversations I had or appearances that I made on the Infowars network, I never talked to anyone else or had anyone else reach out to me from Infowars.
[…]
Below is a clip from the War Room program where they had me discuss Q. This aired somewhere between December 8th and December 12th, 2017.
The clip aired on December 8th, just six weeks after the first Q posts on 4chan. Interestingly, it’s not the first time QAnon was mentioned on Infowars. That would have been in November, as Owen Shroyer talked about it several times in the guise of something interesting that was gaining steam on 4chan. Sather talks to Roger Stone about how QAnon predicted the “shake-up” in Saudi Arabia, neglecting to mention that Q’s original prediction was about Hillary Clinton being arrested and riots breaking out across America which Trump would crush with the National Guard. Maybe they just ran out of time before getting to that crucial detail which would, you know, falsify the entirety of QAnon.
I clipped out some other stuff from Sather’s piece about other times he spoke to Roger Stone, because they aren’t relevant to this.
ENTER JEROME CORSI AND “ZACH” THE INSIDER
Not long after I was on War Room, Infowars brought out their own in-house “Q expert” to begin “decoding” the drops for their audience – enter Dr. Jerome Corsi. Jerome Corsi had began working with Infowars in January 2017 to lead their “Washington D.C. bureau”, and now they were positioning him to be the point man for everything Q related.He began doing Q videos for Infowars, as well as his own channels, sometime in late December 2017 or early January 2018 – just a couple weeks after my appearance on Infowars.
[…]
Corsi became a big cheerleader for Q, posting that they’ve been “fully corroborated and legitimate” in February 2018. Through March and April, he would do many livestreams “decoding” Q’s posts.
He wasn’t wrong about Q being corroborated and legitimized, but his Turn was soon approaching.
Sather leaves out a major event in the chronology of early QAnon, making it seem like his appearance on Roger Stone’s show directly led to Infowars embracing QAnon. There’s another step here, and it’s something I wrote about at length in my book The Storm is Upon Us. It’s when early QAnon evangelists BaruchTheScribe and Pamphlet Anon went on the main Infowars show on December 30th to evangelize for Q and put out a call for anyone with military intelligence background to join them on 8chan to decode Q’s posts. Corsi made one appearance on Infowars before that, but it was brief and undistinguished.
Two QAnon promoters getting an in-person interview segment was a big deal though, as was their call for listeners to join them. Plenty of people had pretended to be high level insiders with secret sources, but never before had anyone the rabble listening at home been asked to fight along side them. This was a huge deal, and traffic to 8chan massively spiked in the days that followed.
As 2018 dawned, it was clear that QAnon was a big deal, and Alex wanted a piece of it. Enter Corsi, a well-regarded figure on the far right due to his promotion of the Barack Obama fake birth certificate conspiracy theory. Corsi would do almost daily appearances and videos for the next few months, decoding Q drops and feeding Alex’s audience information about the supposed purge that was always just about to happen.
Alex clearly was glomming on to Q’s audience, seeing a way to freshen up his follower base and find new people to sell boner pills and sea moss to. But on Infowars, there’s only room for one future-predicting truthteller, and it’s not Q. So things would go bad pretty soon – but not before they got really stupid.
It’s also of significance that not only did Infowars bring out their own decoder in Corsi to capture the Q-aligned audience, they brought out their own “insider” as well, an anonymous gentleman that they called Zach.Infowars claimed he was a “high level intelligence source”, and that he “confirmed QAnon is REAL” in January.
[…]
Alex and “Zach” claimed that they would soon expose his real identity, which to my knowledge never happened.
The Infowars play:
> Insert a “decoder” to capture the audience interested in Q
> Insert their own “insider” to bring a sense of legitimacy to themselves
(and don’t forgot, Corsi had just come out with a book he was selling… was this money motivated, as well?)
> Position themselves as experts on the Q topic with inside intel on it
This leads us to where the true colors began to be shown.
I didn’t write about Zach in The Storm is Upon Us because there are already way too many fringe characters to keep track of in the Q firmament. And Zach is not that interesting. But Zach did indeed make a number of appearances on Infowars, starting with a Christmas Eve special broadcast from Alex called “The Secrets of QAnon, The Storm and The Deep State Counterstrike.”
Obviously, this is a few days before the big Pamphlet/Baruch appearance on main Infowars, but I look at that one as the big public breakthrough for Q, because who the hell was listening to a random special broadcast on Christmas Eve about some random guy? I hadn’t even heard of it until years after I wrote the book.
Alex refers to “Zach” as “a famous former member of Army Special Operations and the whole Joint Forces operation out of Florida. And he is part Muslim.” Zach apparently is feeding Alex the same intel that Q is putting out, only faster and direct from the source. Apparently, the Trump intelligence apparatus is so leaky that it has two different sources pumping out secrets to the media, which seems bad.
By early 2018, Alex had two different major sources of QAnon decoding, and seemed primed to become a major player in the Q drama. He did, but for reasons that would make him turn on Q in a very embarrassing way.
THE TURN
The Corsi/Infowars subversion attempts apparently became such a nuisance that Q had to do something about it.
In late April 2018, Q made a series of posts urging people to be careful of who they were following, stating that some people are trying to profit off of the movement, and then posted a series of photos before updating their Tripcode (a unique identifier used on imageboard websites to clarify that it’s the same person/device posting).
This is all true, and Sather’s post goes into much more detail that I don’t want to get bogged down in. Essentially, after six months of bending over backwards to try to stick himself into the rapidly growing Q narrative, the Q poster or posters had had enough. They pushed back against Jones as a grifter and shill, though not by name. Corsi responded by claiming Q had been “compromised” and “pulled by the White House,” which was absurd since Q never had anything to do with the White House.
By May, the gloves were off, and Alex and Q were roasting each other as frauds and traitors. Q’s following very much sided against Alex, calling him a Mossad agent and a hack. For many, all Alex provided was self-promoting rambling (again, they’re not wrong) and lacked any sort of call to action beyond buying his products and listening to more Infowars.
Q was getting results, Alex was just hot air. And Alex did not like this.
Alex’s entire May 11, 2018 show is about how Q had been taken over by the deep state, which Alex knew because he played golf with people from the original Q operation. Alex never asks why people tasked with saving the world from a 5,000 year old death cult hell-bent on stealing the blood of our children has time to hit the links, but whatever.
Incidentally, we never saw Zach again after this, and I still have no idea who he was. It doesn’t really matter.
The official stance of Infowars becomes “QAnon said some real things but was really a psyop,” which different entirely from the stance of OG promoters like Sather. They believed more than ever, were proud of Q for kicking Jones and Corsi out of the temple, and thought Q was leading a great awakening of Americans to the evils and corruption and depravity that Donald Trump was eventually going to get around to doing something about.
Enter the next character in Sather’s airing of grievances, right wing influencer Jack Posobiec.
THE NEXT INFOWARS SUBVERSION ATTEMPT THROUGH JACK POSOBIEC
Given that Infowars’ infiltration and subversion attempts through Corsi failed miserably, their new apparent plan was to use another affiliate of theirs, Jack Posobiec, to claim that internet shitposters fabricated these Q posts as part of a “LARP” (live action role play) – basically nerd speak to claim something is faked by an actor.
And it appears that part of this attempt was to frame me for being behind Q’s posts. Crazy to suggest, but I’ll show you what I mean.
Jack’s first foray into battling Q and the movement was in June 2018 (one month after Corsi’s blow up). He calls Q a LARP.
[…]
August 5th, Posobiec began creating his “Q debunk piece” where he claimed Q was a “code game” created by internet LARPers, even saying he had “chat logs” to prove this.
Again, Sather misses a massively important event in the timeline of QAnon. That’s when a Trump rally in Tampa was swamped by QAnon believers carrying signs, wearing handmade shirts, and shouting Q catchphrases at Trump, who seems amused and slightly baffled by the whole thing. The mainstream press and conservative intellectual class, both of whom had dismissed Q as fringe nuttery, couldn’t ignore it anymore. Q got a ton of coverage, and most of it featured weirdos waving signs and yelling “where we go one we go all.” It wasn’t good for the right, particularly with the midterm election so close.
Here’s when the trolls closed ranks and tried to work together to get the media focus off QAnon and back to Trump. And an old name from the 2016 election frenzy re-emerged, with little success.
In a follow up video on Q, Posobiec’s big “debunk piece” that OANN aired on September 4th, 2018, they bring out their Microchip [sic], who they allege to be the founder of “the Q hoax”.
Posobiec’s “debunk” video came out in early September on OANN, and it was a big fizzle. Posobiec claimed the alt-right troll Microchip had been behind the whole thing, using Discord chat logs and Microchip’s own word as proof. It was pretty thin, particularly when it became clear that Discord logs could be manipulated, and also because trust alt-right trolls to actually tell the truth this time is not a journalism best practice.
[…]
Posobiec claimed he had “chat logs” to prove this, but it was later found that Discord chats can be altered, including timestamps. So Microchip (or someone else) apparently changed the times and dates of the Discord chats to make it appear like his messages “coming up with the idea of Q’s posts” were dated to before Q started posting.
And in another attempt to frame me for posting as Q, Microchip brazenly posted on his Gab account claiming that I was a “behind QAnon”.
Ok, that’s funny. Microchip is another big name in the hazy troll-o-sphere of 2016-2018, though his biggest brush with fame was when he testified in court in 2023 as an FBI informant in the election interference trial of Douglass Mackey, who was convicted of concocting a scheme to disenfranchise black voters with text messages telling them they could vote by phone. Never meet your heroes, I guess.
There’s no evidence he had any particular role in starting QAnon, and the “debunk” was quickly forgotten.
So who is it?
Alex claims Q was legit, then got compromised.
Posobiec claims it was an internet LARPer.
But the internet LARPer claims it was me.
Straighten your stories out, guys!
But Jordan Sather knows that the whole point of conspiracy theories is that the stories are never straightened out. There is no “anon-ipedia” because everyone has a different version of Q, depending on what they want out of it. Alex Jones wanted to be part of what he saw as the hot new conspiracy movement on the block, and when the people behind Q told him to piss off, he wanted everyone to think he’d exposed it. Posobiec wanted people to think Microchip started Q not because he wanted the truth, but because he wanted Republican voters to dissociate from Q and its weirdo cult of followers.
After Posobiec’s report aired, Q felt the need to call out Poso for the mess they were attempting.
“Why are the majority of Q attacks that are coming from the so-called proMAGA supporters coming from Infowars or affiliates of Alex Jones?”
Darn good question.
Posobiec’s debunk had no effect on QAnon, which continued gaining followers even as the GOP descended into a clown show of Trump scandals and electoral defeats, culminating in the Republicans being crushed in the 2018 midterms. Q, naturally, had predicted a “red wave” with Republicans gaining seats in the House and Senate as normie Americans woke up to the corruption and depravity of the Democrats. Oops.
Important to note: don’t let Posobiec’s lame hit piece corrupt a GOOD organization: One America News. OANN had no idea what they were dealing with, don’t blame them.
Another notable line: ”We are a threat to their livelihood.”
Almost as if a certain portion of the “alternative media” who claims to be “reporting the truth so we can get justice” may not really want the Deep State’s corruption to end at all, because the Deep State in power is what keeps people listening to their shows.
No more Deep State = no more people listening (and no more backdoor handouts if, in fact, they are controlled opposition getting money from CIA or Mossad).
Everything is a lie, even the people telling us everything is a lie!
This is the predictable result of an alternative media where there are only so many listeners, and way too many influencers trying to get their attention. Again, Sather never asks why Trump doesn’t just get rid of the deep state altogether. He’s the president, he’s “clearly” planning something and letting us know through Q – why not pull the trigger? Every day that goes by allows more children to be stolen and trafficked, more corruption and depravity, more debasement of America on the world stage by the globalist controllers.
Rather than posting crap on 8chan and golfing, why not arrest people??
Sather never demands accountability or results from Trump or Q. It’s just more empty promises and beefing all through the rest of Trump’s first term and into the weird time between terms.
We’ll get to that part of the QAnon/Infowars saga in my next piece, which you can read by subscribing to my Patreon.
Mike Rothschild 