Ten days, one direction

The Discord logs between CH3SH1R3 (me) and Chuckleface (Stewartson) run August 30 to September 8, 2020. I supplied screenshots, emails, timelines and the network — Schoenberger, Clapier, Levine, Fitzgibbon, the Binney and Steele connections, the EyeTheSpy accounts of chapter 16. Stewartson organizes it into pitches for CNN, VICE, The Atlantic and eventually The Washington Post. On September 8 he writes:

Five weeks. That line is the whole dispute about when and how the Flynn–QAnon research began, in his own words, in the logs.

The same archive, claimed from the other side

Chavez, as @kang_pirate, replying to me: every bit of information "came for me including all of the information Arturo twisted for revenge." The claim is his. The Gmail and Discord records in this chapter are what it is tested against.

"Hijacked by Q": the same reading, in public, in 2021

By early 2021 the reading that Cicada was an old puzzle that Q took over was being repeated in public. Badd Company (Feb 15): "Cicada 3301 is an old Puzzle that got hijacked by Q. LARPing they call it." Another account (Feb 14) adds that Q "was handed off like a baton to internet gamers, specifically puzzle gamers called Cicada 3301 run on 4chan." On Jan 30, The Q Origins Project describes my presentation of the Corsi emails as "a jumbled mass."

That is the credit question from the other side. The story is passing from the person who documented it into other people's threads, with the documenter described as a muddle. The Cicada side of it is chapter 09.

"Don't give him your vault"

Stewartson acts as broker, connecting me to Dale Beran for a major Atlantic piece on Jim Watkins and QAnon. He coaches the interview, and tells me explicitly: "don't give him your vault." He knew the vault existed, and he controlled who got to it. VICE and the Financial Times went on to interview Chavez because I pointed them there, through the August 2020 Discord logs.

The "unity" offer

On the chapter 19 call, Stewartson tries to broker a deal between Chavez and me: he thinks "both of you are telling the truth," and calls the friction "collateral damage from the psychopaths who, like, manufacture drama on purpose." I had told him in writing that Chavez was a known fabricator. He came back later asking me to support Chavez's narrative, on the theory that the two aligned would be unassailable.

That is the false-equivalence move, recorded. Merge the documented archive with the unreliable narrator, and neither can be evaluated without the other.

The public side of the split

My own tweets from the period are claims by me, archived: that Stewartson was promoting Chavez's narratives and misattributing Q's origins, and — February 6, 2023 — that Stewartson, who had contacted a Financial Times reporter, "never told her about me. So she interviewed Defango, Schoenberger." Filed at this tier because the speaker is me; the tweet log is the artifact.

Who I briefed, and when

The first dated email in my outbox to each person who later published or filmed the story. Most of what appeared in 2020–2022 passed through this list first.

From the author's sent mail. Addresses withheld. Dates are first contact, not every exchange.

Five articles, one arc

Daniel Morrison's five Medium pieces track a clean line. November 2020: I am named twice in the acknowledgments. June 2022: "arguably the hero of our story." February 2025: a flagship rewrite carrying Chavez's federal-operation framing, with zero mentions in the body text and a two-word image caption as the only attribution.

"It led me to Cicada, it led me to Arturo"

Three months before the falling-out, this is how she describes her own route into the research:

Set this next to the December 2021 line above ("His name was mentioned in the acknowledgments. That is all.") and the October 2024 posts in chapter 12. Speaking privately, she named me as the way in.

What I deleted to protect Fox

On Beth Bogaerts ("Fox"), in the same message:

This is a witness who later turned hostile to me, confirming that I held back evidence to protect Beth. That is the opposite of the "twisted for revenge" framing.

"Schoenberger found me"

This is her account, and the emails it describes are not reproduced here. It is filed for one reason. In 2023 she described herself as one of Schoenberger's targets inside the Cicada world, not as someone watching from outside.

"Arturo has been hacked. I've seen it."

She says she saw it first-hand. Where the attack came from is her recollection. This moves to Documented once my February 2022 login alerts and the date of the chat-log post are attached.

The Cicada → Q link, in her own paper

The paper says people who promoted the Cicada 3301 puzzle were involved in the early promotion of QAnon, and it names Thomas Schoenberger and Lisa Clapier. It says they organized groups of puzzle solvers and content creators and "groomed and enlisted some participants to post as Q." That is the argument of chapter 9, in a peer-reviewed journal.

Clapier's account was the most influential in the network

In the Study 5 sample, @SnowWhite7IAm is the most influential account of all. Nine of the 20 most influential accounts have prominent connections to Schoenberger, and six of the 20 are tied to Cicada 3301 or other alternate reality games.

Schoenberger "denied or given misleading answers"

The paper says that in interviews and narrative recordings Schoenberger has denied or given misleading answers about his involvement in QAnon propaganda. The documents in this file are what let a reader check that statement.

The "I Am" line

The paper says Clapier's handle alludes to the "I Am" theosophy movement of Guy and Edna Ballard, which it lists as a third area of recruitment. It says both Schoenberger and Clapier are connected to the movement, that the movement's patron saint is St. Germain, and that Schoenberger has repeatedly favored that name as a self-appellation, citing Edel's 2021 reporting.

Until now the "7IAM" reading was only mine. The paper makes the same one. Set it beside the October 4, 2017 agreement earlier in this file, which names him "professionally known as Thomas St. Germain." The paper also describes the movement as promoting fascist ideology. That is the authors' description and I do not adopt it here. The membership claims stay at this tier because the paper's sources are not in this file.

Three kinds of account, one network

The abstract reports overlap among accounts promoting far-right and insurrectionist content, accounts promoting New Age, occult and "esoteric" themes, and accounts tied to Internet puzzle games like Cicada 3301. That is the pipeline in chapter 10, found by network analysis from the other side.

And me

The acknowledgments thank me by name "for research background and feedback on an earlier version of the paper." Read that with two lines earlier in this file: her December 2021 line, "His name was mentioned in the acknowledgments. That is all.", and her July 17, 2026 post, "I retract any mention of Arturo Tafoya in my 2021 paper." In 2021 she thanked me by name. In 2026 she retracted it.

How it started: she wrote to me first

My Twitter DM archive shows who approached whom. On September 28, 2020, Laura Dilley sent the first message in the thread. She called herself a fan, said she had been researching QAnon on Twitter, "hit a wall," and then found my shows. In her words my work helped validate what she had found on her own, "in part because you had already found much (most?) of what I had found and gone beyond it." In the same message she asked what my strongest evidence was that tied Lisa Clapier to @SnowWhite7IAm, and about the accounts I linked to Schoenberger.

• Dec 14–23, 2020. She keeps in touch and writes that my work "has been more helpful to my understanding than anyone else." She asks for my GoFundMe link ("I would like to help out"). She also says she does not feel the need to share all her research on Twitter, because she has "actual credentials & legit outlets for publishing my research."
• Mar 2–4, 2021. She writes that she has just submitted a manuscript for peer review, that she is "very indebted" to me, and that Schoenberger and Cicada 3301 "are a narrative focus of two of the five studies." She says: "I also plan to update the acknowledgments to list you in any case." I read it and sent her a typo. She asked me to "disagree with an interpretation, or think we don't go far enough in some cases."
• Apr 15–18, 2021. She tells me Schoenberger has been "heavily emailing" her to "turn me" to his side, and that I had "presented way way more convincing data." One of the withheld messages, about a third party, ends: "This is a message from the Axis of QAnon research team, not just me." That is seven months before the Wire group of that name in chapter 13.

Gray bubbles are Dilley and blue are me, as exported from my archive; the viewer does not print names. Withheld: a third party, two personal remarks of hers, and my email address.

Two things follow from the dates. The March 2022 Gmail thread in chapter 12 is not the first contact: the first approach was hers, seventeen months earlier, and it was praise for my work. And the promise to list me in the acknowledgments was made on March 3, 2021, the day after the manuscript went in. The manuscript I read names only Zachary Ireland, and the arXiv version adds me, as set out below. These messages do not show what she did with my feedback, and this file does not claim they do.

The March 2021 manuscript, set beside the arXiv version

I have the manuscript the authors submitted to Frontiers in Communication on March 2, 2021, as well as the arXiv version. Compared line by line:

• Acknowledgments. In March they name only Zachary Ireland, for pilot analyses and editing. The arXiv version adds me.
• In both versions. The overlap of QAnon, esoteric and Cicada/ARG accounts. Clapier's account as the most influential in the network. Schoenberger denying or giving misleading answers. A note that Schoenberger promoted himself as the mystic St. Germain.
• Only in the arXiv version. The sentence saying Schoenberger and Clapier groomed and enlisted some participants to post as Q, and the "I Am" theosophy paragraph with its citations to Edel's reporting.

So the sharpest Cicada → Q passages were written during the revision. This file does not say why. The arXiv version thanks me for feedback on an earlier version and does not say what that feedback covered, so I am not claiming the added passages came from it.

Another person who says the paper left them out

On October 23, 2021, the month the paper appeared, a thread of public replies on X had three voices. @DataCollectAc wrote that "the first reference to this was mine Oct 2018," that @WebCoderz and another person "picked it up and ran with it," and that "it wasn't until much later that any media outlet paid attention to their work." @WebCoderz wrote: "wish i could've helped contribute to the paper. it couldve helped me get a job but now i have nothing to differentiate myself from anyone else." Dilley, as @laura_greenaura, answered: "Cody, I don't know why you're complaining."

The subject of the first tweet in the crop is not named; an earlier tweet in the capture, not reproduced, refers to Power10. This is a public exchange, and it shows one more person describing their work as unrecognized next to the paper. It does not establish what he did or did not contribute.