The GhostEzra account first appeared on Twitter on December 27 2020. By Jan 6, it already had 18.7k followers. When it was deleted in the big post-insurrection ban-wave of Jan 8, it had accumulated 31.1k followers in just twelve days.
How did a new account grow so quickly? It was one of a series of Twitter accounts pretending to be Ezra Cohen-Watnick @EzraACohen, who many QAnon adherents believed to be Q. Note how GhostEzra's avatar was the logo of the DCS, where the real Ezra served.
The most well-known of these impersonators was EyetheSpy or E, who in turn spawned their own impersonators. A bunch of Twitter accounts claiming to be E were banned thanks to the real @EzraACohen and his lawyer @MarkSZaidEsq, but E believers were always looking for the next one.
Looking through the early GhostEzra posts, a lot of his themes are already there: A focus on Melinda Gates, the whole masked impersonators thing, claiming Seth Rich is alive.
But there's also loads of since-failed prophecies. And there isn't, yet, any sign of what would become GhostEzra's trademark on Telegram: no rabid antisemitism, no flat-Earthism.
Today GhostEzra's Telegram channel has 340k subscribers, a mix of normies, QAnon believers and neo-Nazis, which he feeds on a diet of antisemitism, holocaust denial and (for some reason) insisting every famous woman is really a biological male.
Obviously, the Jew-hating GhostEzra has dropped any pretence of being @EzraACohen. I also don't think it's the same person who was behind E/Eye the Spy either. The tone, content, etc is very different.
Did the person behind GhostEzra have other accounts before 27 December? Maybe. Probably. Were there any minor QAnon influencers who had their accounts deleted in the week of 20-27 December?
These images say that the US has seized the domain names. But I am able to access one of the sites at its supposedly-seized name (alalamtv.net) which has been repointed. It looks like the US Govt actually just seized the sites at the host level.
If I am correct about this, the sites will probably be back pretty quickly.
British people are rightly laughing at this story that confuses the Rugby position "hooker" with the American slang term for a prostitute. But it's actually an example of how certain parasitic "news" sites do business.
The Tom Youngs story is stolen from @SkySportsNews. To avoid automated copyright takedowns, the para-sites steal it but change a few words out for synonyms. Compare: skysports.com/rugby-union/ne…
Compare these few paragraphs in the Sky Sports story with the Insider Voice version. It's straight-up plagiarism, with the occasional changing the order of a phrase or substituting a word.
In an hour, a "flag march" through Jerusalem will begin. The march was scheduled for last week but delayed until today after police and security services objected to the route.
There is a march of Israeli flags every Jerusalem Day, which marks the reunification of the city under Israeli rule after the Six Day War. That march, mostly of national-religious youths (men and women separated) goes through the Old City to the Western Wall.
What makes the march controversial is that the men march through the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. Shops are closed and sometimes racist slogans are chanted by some marchers — though the event is once a year and usually not marked by physical violence.
One thing I was asked was about Ra'am, the Islamist party that joined the new coalition. They joined because they wanted to be part of a government and have influence.
Ra'am would have joined Netanyahu instead if he had the numbers. In fact, they tried to, but the far right parties refused to be in a coalition with them.
By joining the Bennett/Lapid government, they won policy commitments on stuff their voters care about: investment in Bedouin towns in the Negev desert, easing of demolitions, a plan to fight organised crime in Arab communities.
The Knesset, Israel's parliament, begins the process of testing the confidence of the government-designate. President Rivlin is joining the session.
Naftali Bennett, Prime-Minister designate, takes the podium to introduce the new government. Immediately, hecklers from Likud and their allies start shouting, screaming and preventing him from speaking
The Speaker (currently Likud's Yariv Levin, but about to be replaced) orders right-wing leader Bezalel Smotrich out of the chamber for intense heckling. Heckles continue. Far right leader Itamar ben-Gvir now ordered out too.