The Tea Party: the audience Q inherited

Q did not have to build a movement from scratch. It walked into one. The Tea Party, born in 2009 against Obama, bailouts and "big government," trained millions of people in a specific way of seeing politics: Washington is captured, the media lies, the president is illegitimate, and ordinary "patriots" have to take the country back. Birtherism, the claim that Obama was not born in the United States, was the movement's first mass conspiracy theory.

The clearest bridge is Jerome Corsi. He was the Tea Party's favorite conspiracy writer and the leading birther author, with a 2011 book arguing Obama's birth certificate was fake. In December 2017, by then working for Infowars, he took up QAnon, decoded "drops" on air and told viewers to help "research" the clues. Alex Jones said Corsi had been asked to cover the "8chan beat."

The ideas carried over almost intact. "Patriots," the illegitimate Obama, the captured state that later gets the name "deep state," the elites who will finally be arrested, the idea that you do your own research because the media won't. QAnon added the game and the prophecy. The audience, the vocabulary and many of the broadcasters were already there.

The thread runs straight through this file. In early 2018, while Corsi was decoding Q for a mass audience, Schoenberger was writing to him in private as Q, from the address a858de45f56d9bc9@aol.com, a string taken from the Reddit A858 puzzle (from my archive). On the other side of the line, back in 2010, Neal Rauhauser and his associates ran "TwitterGate," parody accounts aimed at Tea Party members: the same fake-persona craft, eight years earlier, pointed at the same audience.

Steve Pieczenik says it himself. On the Alex Jones Show on October 10, 2016, the day after the second Trump–Clinton debate,, he thanks Bannon and Kushner for "the most brilliant psychological operation" and then: "We, who fought from the day one since 9-11 and created the Tea Party to help you with the Alex Jones Show, have now a spokesperson for that revolution." A former State Department official, on the biggest conspiracy broadcast in the country, claiming the Tea Party as his own and handing it to Trump, a year before Q.

And the bridge reached the top. Ginni Thomas, a Tea Party organizer since 2009 (Liberty Central) and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in November 2020 urging him to look into the claims of Steve Pieczenik, the same man who in 2016 announced a "counter-coup" on video.

I covered this in a 2019 livestream: QAnon and the Tea Party ↗ · Sources: SPLC, 2012, Media Matters, Raw Story on the Thomas texts.

The same year as the "Pentagon mission": a felony stalking plea

In 2011, the year Schoenberger later says the Pentagon invited him onto a covert mission across 17 countries, he was in a Napa courtroom. In People v. Schoenberger, Thomas Andrew, case CR155849, he entered a plea of no contest to felony stalking under California Penal Code § 646.9(a) on May 2, 2011, and was put on probation.

He did not finish it clean. On January 8, 2015, he admitted a petition for violation of probation. Judge Mark Boessenecker revoked and reinstated probation, added 10 more days in county jail on top of the time already ordered, and ordered him to pay $5,500 in restitution to the victim, with 10% annual interest.

Superior Court of California, County of Napa · minute order, Jan 8, 2015 · police report no. NPD10-7746 · the victim's name is withheld here.

This matters for everything that follows. The man who later sues researchers for calling him a harasser, and who presents himself as a target of online stalking, has a stalking conviction on his own record, from the period when he was building the Cicada and "covert operations" story.

The "top secret" mission across 17 countries

Schoenberger says the Pentagon invited him onto a covert mission spanning 17 countries, which he says he shut down himself upon discovering ISIS knew their movements. He names Bijan Kian as his Pentagon contact and Seval Oz — Dr. Oz's sister — as his partner.

Treat the mission as fiction and the names as the finding. He does not invent contacts at random; he borrows real people who are adjacent to real money, and Kian is precisely that.

Notes flag a detail worth keeping: a QAnon account using "OZ" imagery and Schoenberger's own account are two of the nine accounts William Binney follows.

Scheuer and Robert David Steele publish the same Iran theory on the same day

Two former officers, two platforms, one date. Coordination is not proven by synchrony alone — but synchrony is what you log first and explain later.

Seymour Hersh and Flynn's DIA — a running channel

Through this period Hersh appears to be receiving material from Flynn while Flynn heads DIA. The reports embarrass the lobby pushing for escalation in Syria and the removal of Assad. Hersh reports that Flynn's DIA kept sending classified warnings about the consequences of toppling Assad, and Flynn tells him the reports met enormous resistance inside the Obama administration. The grievance that later becomes a movement starts as an internal memo nobody read.

Cicada 3301 — the actual thing, before anyone claimed it

Everything in the Cicada Layer chapter below depends on holding this line: the puzzle is real, anonymous, and unowned. Every subsequent ownership claim is a claim about a vacuum.

"The US fabricated the Iran assassination charge"

Ray McGovern and Steve Pieczenik each say on Infowars that the government lied about the alleged Iranian assassination plot. Same claim as the October 2011 pairing, now moved from blogs onto the largest conspiracy broadcast in the country. That is the escalator this network runs on.

Kian and Alptekin — EA Havacilik and the Nowruz Commission

Butowski / Lara Logan / Matt Couch

Butowski claims the Benghazi story originated with him. Logan's Benghazi reporting was retracted. Couch claims serious sourcing. The same three names resurface in the Seth Rich campaign four years later, which is the reason the fragment stays in the file.

Flynn announces retirement — "Flynn facts" — and goes into business with Kian

Pushed out by the Obama administration, the Kian friendship converts into a business partnership. Kian brings him onto the board of the chip company GreenZone Systems Inc. Flynn's own financial disclosures show GreenZone and its parent paid him over $150,000 in cash.

Woolsey, Justin Freeh, Kian, Flynn — and a meeting that ends early

The 2013 Nowruz Commission annual dinner in DC: Flynn presents an award to Kian's wife, and Woolsey introduces Flynn to Kian. Flynn's DIA clearance process is what qualifies the "green zone chips" pitch.

Schoenberger arrives in the Cicada 3301 forums — the film-rights play

He begins posting in the Cicada forums and making assertions about the game. Shortly after he starts publishing his own puzzles and presenting them as the work of Cicada's original anonymous authors. The objective is legible and stated plainly in the notes: produce enough material to look like the inventor, and thereby hold IP for a film. His partners are Hollywood composer Michael Levine and Richard Lech.

An anonymous organization cannot rebut a claimant. That is not a side effect of the strategy — it is the strategy.

$90,000 from Amadeus LLC, and where it went

Recounted in the December 2015 deposition as "a little over a year" earlier: Schoenberger receives $90,000 paid through the Kazeminy-formed Amadeus LLC, then writes a series of checks.

• One $12,500 check went to Brian Weiner.
• Roughly $25,000 went to a car.

Pieczenik defends Flynn twice, in public, before anyone else does

Schoenberger's trip to Turkey

He says he traveled to Turkey to meet Kurdish rebels out of personal concern that ISIS would break through, that he was on the Syrian border, that he spent his time handing cash to street kids, and that he carried the maximum currency legally permitted. The last detail is the only one that is checkable, and it is the only one that would matter.

Open-source intelligence, and the VIPS letter to Merkel