Thread by @QOrigins

Just hopped on board the livestream for the Patriot Doubledown (i.e. the QAnon conference) in Las Vegas.

Ron Watkins is on stage, talking abou... aaaaaaaand it froze.

Still, follow this thread for a livetweet!

P.S. It's back and he's -- aaaand it froze.

OK, he was talking about how his Democratic opponent (REMINDER: he has not yet won the primary, of course) is trying to "take away your guns" with red-flag laws.

So far, so standard. But then he commits an unforced error: he tries to offer OTHER POLICIES to protect women.

Here his suggestions are amateurish and ill-considered, but more than that, *Republicans don't care* about protecting -- especially -- indigenous women, who were largely the focus of his answer.

That does not get them to the polls.

OK, Q&A time!

First question: why has the AZ Senate not decertified?

Ron: blahblah, arrests needed, that's why I am constantly in front of AZ Brnovich's office asking him to COME DOWN AND TALK TO US.

(QOP commentary: GOOD LINE! But watch how he immediately undermines it...)

RON: Of course, he's the attorney general so he probably can't comment on ongoing cases. So I'm not being TOO hard on him.

(YOUR AUDIENCE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO MAKE EXCUSES FOR HIM. Why are you doing this, Ron?)

RON: After indictments happen, THEN the Senate will decertify the election.

(Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you, tomorrow...)

NEXT QUESTION: How many people we need to get to to vote to screw up their election fraud?

RON: Everyone. We need a tsunami. In 2022 we're gonna flip the Senate and fix the Presidency.

(Semi-enthusiastic cheers -- the most appreciative the audience has been so far today.)

The stage decor is so weird.

Anyway, Ron is complaining about "ghost voters" and saying "we need to bring out the ghost busters" to find them.

Barely even a scattering of applause. This man is unable to work the room.

He has accepted the THIRD new question since he first said "one more question."

This one is: "Is there a central database of people like me that are endorsing candidates from other states?"

RON: Not that I know of.

(QOP: *This is a softball* -- call for people to volunteer!)

Ron ends it. Hype man comes out.

Ron is introducing Jason Sullivan as "the wizard of Twitter. This guy broke Twitter and really, really showed everyone what could be done with social media... he really helped me out personally."

I'll say. It's been reported that Sullivan's Twitter tools boosted Ron's acct.

The hype man DOESN'T miss the softball, BTW: he says the audience should take Ron's example and ask themselves -- if Ron is doing so much for the country, what can I do for the country?

Still no Sullivan, btw. Ron's introduction was premature.

Hype man's sellin' coffee & shirts

Hype man is shushing the audience, pointing out that chatter is disrespectful to the speakers and "the audience, who paid up to three grand to be here."

THREE GRAND????

This definitely-not-a-Q-conference just aired a video that said "TRUST THE PLAN" and then dissolved to a "Q" card that said JUSTICE IS COMING. Hm!

Right before that, it showed a card about... @cullen's HBO documentary????? I'm very confused.

But here's Jason Sullivan!

Sullivan's first substantial remarks: "You are the plan." (Smattering of applause, a few hoots.) "Every last one of you. You're not gonna stand around and wait" for someone to "come riding in and save the day. Are we?"

Sullivan is a MUCH more polished speaker than Ron, btw.

Sullivan: "Don't take information that you're getting out there that's just clickbait.... That's one of the reasons that people are being perceived as kooks. They're taking clickbait, they're not confirming it, and they're just sharing it."

Audience is dead silent.

Sullivan: Look to your left. Look to the right. Do any of these people look like "potential domestic terrorists" to you?

"That's not us. You got the wrong team."

The refrain he comes back to is "question everything."

The audience reaction is just SO tepid for everything that should be an applause line.

I really wonder what attendance is like.

The first line that REALLY gets a cheer is:

"Not elections by bureaucrats -- elections BY THE PEOPLE."

He adds: "Who else do you trust better than you to count your vote?"

This as the GOP chases out fair vote-counters & installs Trump loyalists. Grim times.

Jason Sullivan -- Roger Stone's social-media guru -- continues to address the QAnon conference, making a series of suggestions about how elections could be definitely fair and trustworthy.

Even if they were adopted, this crowd, & Sullivan, would reject any results they disliked.

Also a BUNCH of the suggestions would just... totally destroy the principle of the *secret* ballot, where no one but you knows how you voted.

Sullivan mentions Nikola Tesla and even THAT doesn't draw a shout. From the QAnon conference! They love that dude!

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE IN THE DAMN ROOM? I'm a conference-attendance truther now. 😡

But now he's talking about social media.

Whoever "drives the narrative drives the outcome," says Roger Stone's social-media guru Jason Sullivan.

"This is an information war," he says to the QAnon conference. "The narrative drives the outcome," he repeats.

Minutes later, he transitions to antivaxx talk.

"They can't tell you that you have to take it" to keep your job. "They can't do that. You have rights."

"Ask for a religious exemption. Fill out the form. But don't just say 'I'm a Christian.' ... They've got us in a corner. You gotta start hitting back hard."

He suggests using "actual good arguments" for "why this violates your religion."

What might such a good reason be? No one suggests the right answer so finally he goes, "Fetal tissue."

Again: that was a softball! C'mon, crowd.

"Get that information out there. That's your job. You are the digital soldiers. You are the plan."

So the digital soldiers have gone from fighting a cabal of pedo-Satanists to spreading information about how to get religious exemptions to vaccines?

Truly an ever-victorious army

Sullivan is now talking (I THINK) about his interactions with Robert Mueller.

A motorcyclist passed by RIGHT at the start of this whole section of the speech, so I *may* have missed key words.

He says that, when investigators request information, they're "trying to control you."

"They're asking you things already knowing the answer, so they want to trip you up."

This is true! Don't talk to the feds, or the cops, without a lawyer.

Sullivan: "There's no Russian collusion!"

The very idea is "nonsense.... They've never proven that."

I *wish* the media worked the way he describes it: as a coordinated attack machine devoted to dragging down America's nascent fascist movement, viz, the *wildly* authoritarian GOP and its leader.

It might actually *help* the fight for democracy if it worked like that.

Instead, it gives INCREDIBLE amounts of free publicity to candidates who are very, very openly in favor of muzzling -- hell, destroying -- the free press.

So that's how the press REALLY rolls. But in Sullivan's world, nope, it's a rabid attack dog aimed squarely at Trumpism. (Reminder: Trump would have lost the GOP primary if not for all that free coverage. Not that I'm still fuckin' mad.)

AAAANYWAY.

Sullivan repeats: no collusion!

Now he's going: "All the things that were 'conspiracies,' they're coming to fruition."

Citation needed.

"So this plan: how do you catch sheep?" Apparently you catch sheep by leaving food in a particular location and getting them to come back???

I feel like that's not how you catch sheep, but I should defer to noted sheep-catching expert Jason Sullivan, I guess.

And then the metaphor spreads out to involve fences -- OHHH, he's saying this is the BAD GUYS' plan to catch sheep. Still makes no sense, but.

The FIRST fence, according to Sullivan, is fear. And COVID.

Sounds like vaccines are another fence and also masks. I just... this analogy isn't working for me, independent of my feelings on anti-vaxxers.

Sullivan starts in on the idea that Australia is a dystopian hellscape groaning under the yoke of oppression.

This is *extremely* false, as any Australian will tell you (and as @vanbadham, specfically, will tell you at great and profane length).

But:

Australia occupies a very particular place in the right-wing imagination. And that IS the place, right now.

The right-wing infosphere is, as a smarter person once said, "truth-neutral." The wildest bullshit -- like this -- can move around it at LEAST as fast as true stories.

Now Sullivan is leading the crowd in an ACTUALLY EFFECTIVE call-and-response.

"Sheep no more," he says, which is a famous QAnon catchphrase.

THAT gets a loud and enthusiastic "SHEEP NO MORE!", and on that note he ends the speech.

This gentleman is named Kirk Wiebe. I have never heard of him in my life, but apparently he's a former NSA employee who blew the whistle on post-9/11 surveillance.

He starts off by recapping the other speakers at the conference so far.

"We on the right of the political spectrum," he says -- hey, he admits it! So many of them pretend they're unifiers -- but we on the right, he says, need to copy the left's tactics of community organizing.

Good luck.

And now he's on to Ashli Babbitt doin' some martyrology.

This shit is extremely dangerous, and probably we should be trying to make Babbitt a less appealing martyr to the right by pointing out that she lived in a bisexual polycule with her husband and another woman.

Anyway, now he's on to:

"What if I told you that the NSA knew 9/11 was coming?" Then he wanders off to talk about ethics.

Now, another slide:

It seems like overall, he's trying to call for Christian moral renewal of the nation (which, in practice, means no publicly visible queer people), without... actually saying that's what he means.

Or couching it in Christian terms.

The audience is DEAD silent for this.

This presentation fucking sucks. The best response he's gotten so far is a tepid round of applause and he's been going for I-don't-know-how-many-minutes, but too many.

Also, fair warning: at some point in the next few hours, I'm gonna have someone in the house to take care of a plumbing emergency.

I'm not subjectin' an innocent civilian to the QAnon conference, so I'll go dark at that point. @2021_Karma is posting videos & @az_rww is tweeting.

I think his grievance against Hayden is that Hayden is *more* majestically bald than he is????????? Is that correct?

(NARRATOR: That is not correct.)

This is such a boring presentation that I --

like, he must have GIVEN this before, right? And noticed that no one enjoyed or engaged with it???????

"There's this and that and there's TikTok and there's everything as a format. So you have to decide: which format am I gonna pay attention to?"

At last, a line that speaks to *me.*

I wasn't kidding about his grudge against Hayden, though. He used a mocking voice to imitate Hayden, then said Hayden's plan "wasted billions of dollars."

This is a bureaucratic program 20+ years ago. NO ONE CARES.

There are only two things this audience wants to hear about the NSA:

1) Admiral Rogers is great and a patriot and a white hat and LOVED Trump SO MUCH, weeping big manly tears when Trump won the election because he knew the Q Team would finally succeed;

or

2) the NSA has all the Cabal's communications, ALL of them, and it'll all come out in the end.

And we know this is true because ONLY WHEN HE WAS LIKE "He belongs in an orange jump suit! IN PRISON!" did he get a sudden, loud burst of applause.

*They want to see arrests.* They don't care about the details. They don't care about why. They just want their enemies to hang.

General Flynn skipped this conference to go speak elsewhere, and honestly I can kinda see why.

It sucks so far and it sounds like there are *maybe* 100 people in the audience.

I cannot emphasize enough that this guy's whole presentation is based on 1) bureaucratic fights in the intelligence community from 20 years ago, and

2) the presenter's ENORMOUS grudge-boner for General Hayden.

Also, he is laboring a the GRAVE misapprehension -- namely, that this audience cares what the NSA actually does.

He promises he's going to sprint to the finish now. I have my doubts.

I was talking to someone in DMs and they said, "You have to feel like this guy's rant is quite a come-down from Q's promised plan."

I SURE DO. Does the audience? I hope so!

He has this slide up about "corruption," and THAT'S NOT WHAT THE AUDIENCE THINKS "CORRUPTION" MEANS.

The audience thinks it means a network of pedovore Satanists controlling the world!

He nodded to that with a throwaway line but I just... man, he HAS NOT read this room.

OK, he's done. They're gonna break for lunch. I'm gonna go for a walk.

I might miss something coming off the break, so keep an eye on @2021_Karma and @az_rww's feeds as well.

UPDATE: The conference has not yet resumed, BUT I'm gonna have a plumber in the house shortly & will go dark for I-don't-know-how-long, bc he doesn't need to hear QAnon bullshit while he works.

Hopefully @az_rww and @2021_Karma can keep you apprised of events.