QAnon believers have been thrilled by last week’s return of Q, the anonymous internet poster who launched the far-right conspiracy theory.
In this week’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Sam Brodey talk about how Q’s new posts after a near-two-year hiatus, published on anarchic internet message board 8kun, have energized QAnon believers looking for hope after Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
“We thought Q was gone!” Sommer said.
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QAnon supporters reacted with excitement for Q’s return, peppering the conspiracy theory leader with questions about why he had abandoned them. The podcast’s hosts considered whether Ron Watkins, the former 8kun administrator who has been accused of operating the Q account, relaunched the messages to draw more attention to himself. Watkins is currently waging a longshot Republican primary fight for an Arizona House seat, prompting the hosts to speculate about whether Watkins is looking to return to his old ways.
“Time to rev up the ol’ Q-machine,” Sommer said.
“I’ve seen weirder strategic plays in a Republican primary,” Brodey said.
Elsewhere in the episode, Brodey talks about the latest hearings from the House investigation into the Capitol riot, saying they were remarkable for how close they revealed the country was to “going off the rails” as Trump tried to overturn the election.
“This has really continued to be a pretty remarkable series of presentations of evidence and testimony from folks who were close to the Trump White House,” Brodey said.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Brodey and Sommer discussed the right-wing media’s attempts to pump the idea that abortion supporters would engage in a violent “Night of Rage” after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. After that chaos failed to ensue, they were left scrambling for proof of liberal violence—and eventually cited a handful of rude signs held by peaceful protesters.
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discussed new reporting from Logically alleging that QAnon believers have lost nearly $2 million in a cryptocurrency scam. Some of the conspiracy theory’s leaders cited bogus evidence from mysterious intelligence sources to convince their fans to invest big money in the digital currencies, only for the coins’ operators to pull the money once they had it.
Brodey wondered whether everyone who buys cryptocurrencies wasn’t already getting conned.
“I think the crypto stuff has revealed that so many of us are easy marks, not just the Q folks,” Brodey said.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
