Eight people, three scenes

A dash means this desk has nothing on that scene for that person. It does not mean they were absent.

Each row carries the weakest stamp of its cells. The table is an index, not a finding.

Desiree Kane, from the record

In a photo essay dated January 2, 2017, Kane writes that they arrived at Standing Rock in the last days of May 2016 at the request of Wiyaka Eagleman, lived full time in a yurt at Oceti Sakowin Camp, and that "the life that we have built here" was "decolonized" and "anticapitalist." VICE (March 2021) separately describes Kane as an Indigenous investigative journalist who produced a feature documentary about Standing Rock that premiered at Sundance in 2018.

The same person also works as Desiree Acosta. A March 2022 newsletter of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians lists "Desiree Acosta" as the contact for a youth event, with the email address des@desireekane.com. This desk checked that line against the newsletter PDF itself.

The Thinkin Project: where the anti-Q side meets Standing Rock

VICE News (David Gilbert, March 2021) reports that Stewartson started a private Discord server by the end of December 2020 and that the Thinkin Project launched publicly weeks after the January 6 riot. Kane is named as the group's spokesperson and co-founder, and the article ties Kane to Standing Rock in the same sentence. Dave Troy is named among those involved at the start.

VICE also reports that when asked to produce one person the project had helped, or a count, Kane "failed to do so," and that the Discord was focused on collecting disinformation and sharing articles, with no effort to speak to believers directly. That is a statement about efficacy, not about anyone's motives.

One date in a secondary profile of Kane puts the founding in August 2020. VICE's dating is used here because it is the primary report. Rauhauser's presence inside the same Discord is in chapter 12.

Jim Stewartson was a game designer, and he did not build the Discord alone

The pedigree. A Fast Company profile of Stewartson, written around 2011, describes the platform he ran, “Rides,” as one where characters email, text and call players, and says: “In essence, it’s an alternate reality game (ARG).” It adds that, as CTO at Eyematic, he was “the technical director and designer for Halo 2’s ‘ilovebees.com’.” The title is “The Calls Are Coming From Inside The Game!” In March 2021, VICE describes him in its own voice as “an alternative-reality game designer” who spent months researching QAnon. That is two independent sources for the same fact. It shows what he knows how to build. It does not show he ran a Q operation.

The group around him. The same VICE article names Desiree Kane as the Thinkin Project’s spokesperson and co-founder, and says “also involved at the beginning were network analyst Dave Troy, and Aubrey Cottle, one of the founders of the hacktivist movement Anonymous.” VICE says Troy downplayed his involvement in a statement, which includes the line “no connection to the group legally or financially.” VICE also quotes a researcher who worked with Stewartson when he first started looking into QAnon. Rauhauser and Libby Shaw do not appear in the VICE article; Rauhauser is documented inside the Discord in chapter 12, where the claim that he “set up and paid for” it is a poster’s assertion and not adopted here, and Libby Shaw is the highest-connectivity node in that chapter’s chat-export graph, which is a map and not a finding. Rauhauser himself wrote that he owed “Libby a forever debt for introducing us” (chapter 11); the file does not say which Libby. The point is the shape: a group, with a spokesperson, a network analyst, an Anonymous founder and others, not one man.

My own timeline. Documented My first email to Stewartson, through his Rides domain, is dated Sep 2, 2020, and on Oct 16, 2020 he is copied on my message to the Financial Times’ Izabella Kaminska. That matches Clark Jr.’s “Sep 2020” elsewhere in this chapter. Author’s account Before that, someone approached me and interviewed me, said my story made sense, and offered to introduce me to a person with media connections and to Anonymous. That person was Caleb Cain (“Faraday Speaks”), the former far-right YouTube viewer known from the New York Times’ 2019 profile. Cain brought me into a Discord where others read my story, and the people there later introduced me to Stewartson. The Discord exports from that month are now in: see the next entry, which corrects the order. Nothing about Cain is in question: he opened a door.

A vacuum, and who rushed in. This desk’s reading On Feb 25, 2021, Cain told Sky News: “No one has a strategy… the activist fields are completely in disarray, underfunded and understaffed, and volunteers online are not mobilised.” He was not talking about the Thinkin Project, whose Discord already existed. The two simply describe the same moment: a field with no plan, and an experienced game designer building a volunteer organization inside it.

What this does not say. It does not say Stewartson, Troy, Cottle, Kane, Rauhauser, Shaw or Cain worked for, or with, any Q operation. Appearing in the same article or the same server is not coordination. Each person’s role stays at the tier of its own source.

The Discord, August 2020: how I reached Stewartson, and what I handed him

The record. Documented Three Discord chats (one group, two direct messages), saved with DiscordChatExporter in January 2022, a month before my account was hijacked on Feb 9, 2022 and used to post phishing links in every chat. Nothing on that account after that date is me. Private people appear here by initial only. Phone numbers, email addresses and a fellow target’s legal and family details are removed.

Who was in the room. On Aug 22, 2020, W. (StrongerCoffee) opened a group with me and added R. (NOT FOR MISSILE USE), who opened on Aquino, LaVey and “the death cult.” On Aug 23 W. added Caleb Cain (Faradayspeaks), introduced as “also working on the Q / Cicada / ARG project.” Cain set the terms: “Your not gonna be recorded for anything official, and no funding. We are just some independents looking to get answers.” On Sep 3 R. wrote “it’s a mystery school… you have to go for the teachers.” On Sep 4 Cain said to “get advice from [P.]… seriously get her involved,” and a user arrived minutes later offering “media coaching” and opened a server for CNN story pitches. That account later deleted itself.

Who Caleb Cain is. Public record Cain is Faraday Speaks. He posted “My Descent into the Alt-Right Pipeline,” a first-person account of being radicalized on YouTube; it went viral, and the New York Times profiled him in 2019 in “The Making of a YouTube Radical,” then featured him again in its 2020 podcast Rabbit Hole (Doomscroll). He told Newsroom he once identified as “a race realist” and “believed in the Great Replacement,” and that he now works at American University on a project that seeks to inoculate people, particularly students, against far-right radicalization. After January 6 he co-founded Future Freedom with Caolan Robertson, a former producer of anti-immigration YouTube videos, and a former far-right activist identified only as Samantha: an off-ramp for people radicalized online (NBC News, Feb 23, 2021). So when he joined this group in August 2020 and called it “the Q / Cicada / ARG project,” he came as a known researcher of online radicalization, with media contacts of his own.

Stewartson arrives. On Aug 29–30 Stewartson (Chuckleface) joined and said he had “ran into [U.], [W.], Caleb and [P.] who told me they were talking to someone about Thomas.” In his first DM he shared a draft for journalists and I fact-checked it late into the night. His verdict: “there’s not an ounce of bs from you… you back your shit up.” This corrects the order in the previous entry: the group came first, Cain was added to it, and Stewartson found me there. My first email to him on Sep 2 came after.

What he said the press was doing. His words Aug 31: he was about to pitch CNN and “your name will not leave my mouth.” Sep 1: an hour-long Zoom with CNN’s John Avlon and two reporters, “cnn wants to do it,” and a request for three to five strong pieces of evidence. Sep 5: I told the group VICE wanted a three-episode exclusive, and I connected VICE’s Jack Bryan with Stewartson. Sep 6–7: The Atlantic had a piece in progress and CNN sped up; Stewartson sent a first draft: “you’re the star… it would be your name.” Sep 8: he said the Washington Post had four reporters on it, including Craig Timberg. We moved to text and the export ends. These are his statements to me in private. This file has not confirmed any of those meetings. Read them beside chapter 21, on whose name the story ended up under.

What I gave him.

• Public reporting Shadowbox and Butowsky. In February 2020 the Daily Beast (Will Sommer) reported that Schoenberger and Defango had started a company selling bots and “targeted chaos,” and attended a Sept 2017 gathering hosted by Ed Butowsky where, three attendees said, wiretapping Seth Rich’s family was discussed. Butowsky disputes it, and the Beast found no evidence any surveillance happened. I had been sending Sommer material since Dec 2019 (see chapter 8).
• Document in hand “Project Janus.” A slide deck titled “Janus Lares” that I got from a former associate of Trevor FitzGibbon, tied to a pitch to Erik Prince. I sent it to Sommer on Dec 11, 2019 and forwarded the thread to Stewartson on Sep 1, 2020. Who wrote the deck, and whether it was ever shown to Prince, is not confirmed.
• Emails in hand The brainwave tests. In May 2018 Jonathan Chapman (Morbid Monkey Productions) sent Schoenberger EEG and brainwave-entrainment tests run on Sophia Musik videos (“Above/Below,” “Oculus”), with me copied. Schoenberger then pitched it to a collaborator as a VR project where people watch their own brainwaves respond to music: “the grand goal is to make them experts in propaganda.” Chapman answered with one name: “Edward Bernays.” That is what I described to Stewartson on Aug 30, 2020.
• Author’s account A858. The A858 address and the emails it later sent me (see chapter 16), with Defango’s Steemit post “Jerome Corsi and Qanon, Army Jack and A858” and Fright Knight’s “Who is Behind r/A858?” as pointers. The claim that leaked Corsi–Q emails used an A858 address is not confirmed here.

What this does not say. It does not say Cain, W., R. or P. did anything wrong; they made introductions and gave advice. Claims about third parties in these chats are what people said at the time, not findings. As in the previous entry, being in the same server is not coordination.

The same day as the FT message: two public credits

On the day Stewartson was copied on my message to the Financial Times, Dilley, then @laura_greenaura, wrote: "Also h/t @ATafoyovsky for ringing the bell for a long time now about the QAnon-Cicada3301 connection and other important links." Stewartson quoted her: "ALL OF THIS. Lestat has been a loud, clear voice of truth for over THREE YEARS despite a constant campaign of lies and harassment. None of this exposure would be possible without him."

Both said in public, in October 2020, where the Cicada → Q reading came from. Read it beside chapter 21, on who got the credit later.

American Psyop puts Clark and Kane in the same episode

The series' own episode listings pair Clark with Kane for a bonus episode, and bring in Steven Hassan for another (see chapter 12). Both describe being recruited into a religious group at Standing Rock. That is their account, and this desk does not rule on whether either was in a cult.

What a critic adds is a contradiction. In A Mexican Crossing Lines (KPPP-LP FM), Gomez-Schempp plays calls from 2017 in which Clark, she says, criticized Kane's claimed Native identity and distrusted Kane, and she sets that against the two appearing together in 2022. She also describes a PR circle around Clark and Kane that includes Winnie Wong and Sevin McDonald. That is one hostile source describing recordings this desk has not heard. It is stamped accordingly.

One further claim in the show, that Kane was reviewing a leaked cache of police footage with a person Clark called an informant, is Unverified. The name is withheld here.

What Gomez-Schempp has since added about the series' framing. On AMCL PsyOp BS Parts 7 and 10, Gomez-Schempp argues that American Psyop presents Clark Jr. as "this hero worthy of worship, the likes of a saint or an angel" and treats him and Kane as cult survivors rather than examining what they did at Standing Rock — a "brainwashed by a cult" pass. The quotes that back that reading are in the series' own finale and are laid out below.

American Psyop, in its own text: the cult-victim pass, the Blackstone / Energy Transfer Partners question, and the one credit this desk got

The transcript of the American Psyop finale — the episode that pairs Wes Clark Jr. with Desiree Kane in one conversation led by producer Jack Bryan and co-host Emily Bix — is now in this desk's file. Four things settle from it.

1. The "brainwashed by a cult" pass is the series' own frame, from its own text. Across the finale, both subjects are presented as recovering victims rather than organizers:

• Clark Jr., repeatedly: "I was out of my mind" · "I lost my mind" · "I thought I was Enoch" · "my brain starts to fall down that hole, even for like just a minute or two" · "central nervous system post-trauma jitters" · "I just wish I knew what was real and what wasn't real"
• Kane: "Wes's behavior is under heavy undue influence" · "I was definitely bear-hugged by I Am and recruited" · she describes the influence as a "bear hug" under which "no one is prepared for government-grade propaganda for operatives, for all that, weaponized against civilians"
• Bryan, in narration: "Now, believing that you're being targeted is a very common delusion"; and, of others around Clark at Standing Rock, "Producers see no reason to suspect otherwise"

Both subjects of the pipeline question are, in the finale's own words, cult survivors. Kane, who in this chapter's earlier entries is a cofounder and spokesperson of a public organization, is reclassified in the finale as a fellow bear-hug survivor. Clark Jr., who on Caravan to Midnight in November 2016 told Wells before his first day on the ground that Veterans Stand would hold "a permanent presence up at that camp of a few hundred vets" and would return "with 50,000 vets" if challenged, is reclassified as a man whose brain fell down a hole. This desk notes the framing and does not adopt it; what the framing drops is anything either subject did at Standing Rock as an actor with agency.

2. The hard fact the finale puts in play, and Clark denies knowing on-air. Bryan to Clark Jr., in the same episode: "your father was also working as an advisor with the Blackstone Group starting in 2013 and started an overseas energy company for them. Did he tell you that while you were at Standing Rock, the Blackstone Group was negotiating a $5 billion stake in Energy Transfer Partners, which owned the pipeline?" Clark Jr.: "No. No, I'd never heard that." Bryan: "did you know that while that didn't go through, Blackstone has since become a major investor in Energy Transfer Partners?" Clark Jr.: "No." That is American Psyop on the record stating that General Wesley Clark Sr. was advising the Blackstone Group during the same period his son was leading Veterans Stand against the Dakota Access pipeline that Blackstone was negotiating a $5 billion stake in. This desk puts no further frame on the fact; it stands on its own, and it cuts against the finale's own "my dad doesn't have a ton of money" line a few minutes earlier.

3. How Cindy Gomez-Schempp is handled, and the clip the finale uses. The finale plays a short audio clip introduced as "Cindy talking to Wes about Desiree," and the voice says: "this Desiree may actually be the person that they're sending to put all this bullshit out there. … I'm sure that's who they're using for it." As the entry below documents from the primary recording, those words are Wes Clark Jr. talking to Gomez-Schempp, not Gomez-Schempp talking to Clark — i.e. the finale attributes Clark's own line to the critic. Kane then alleges on-air that Gomez-Schempp's radio show led to "a meth head that listened to a Cindy show getting all spun up and chasing me with a gun to the point that I hid in a barn praying not to become the next missing and murdered indigenous woman." That is a serious allegation, and this desk does not adjudicate it; Gomez-Schempp's own account across AMCL "Intercepted" (June 2018), AMCL Part 7 and Part 10 is on the page unaltered.

4. The one credit this desk got. The finale's end-credit list reads: "Thanks to Arthur Tofayevski for finding the Young Turks clip of Lisa Clappier." That is a single clip, with this desk's handle (@ATafoyovsky) rendered as a Slavic surname. The other research this desk fed to the series — the Clark–Wells material, the Standing Rock–Q overlap worked out across the Conspiracy Distillery catalog Gomez-Schempp quotes in Part 7, and the Nov 22, 2021 public tweet that put Jack Bryan on notice about Cicada 3301 — is not credited. The finale's "Special thanks to Jim Stewartson" immediately above that line credits Stewartson for the Flynn / Elizabeth Clare Prophet comparison that drives the I AM / QAnon case.

Nora Maccoby: the one name on both sides of the bridge

Most people in this chapter sit on one side. Maccoby is documented on both: next to Wes Clark Jr. in 2016, and next to the Steele–Cornwell–Defango litigation channel in 2017. Six items, each in this file:

1. Sep 19, 2007. Her wedding at the Cosmos Club, with James Woolsey at the lunch. The couple met through the Energy Consensus Group, formed in 2005 after she challenged Rumsfeld on energy policy (chapter 02).
2. Sep 22, 2016. A Facebook post captioned "Free Radicals — with Nora Maccoby Hathaway and Wesley Clark" in Malibu. Its comments include "I thought you might be hanging with The General," and a commenter displayed as "Seven McDonald." Whether that account is the publicist of the same name is not established. The post is about two months before the veterans' deployment at Standing Rock (chapter 12, cropped to leave out an untagged third person).
3. Feb 18, 2017. Robert David Steele writes to Maccoby, copying Tanya Cornwell, under the subject "connecting Tanya and Robert" (chapter 09). His reply offers to call her father and pitches his Trump memo (below).
4. Jun 7, 2017. Cornwell emails Maccoby, Defango and Steele under the subject "lawsuit," asking Maccoby for "the format of your case that steve wrote" to reformat for Defango (chapter 09).
5. Jul 2, 2017. Cornwell, two days after the HAZMAT email, tells Defango "I will have Nora (maccoby) send you a copy" (chapter 09).
6. Undated, probably 2023. A gallery page says her Oracle deck "Visions of a New Earth" is written by Sean Stone and a co-author of the Sacred Breath Academy (chapter 10).

Put together, the documents show someone whose circle included the Clark family orbit in the autumn of 2016 and the person who ran the litigation channel in 2017, plus, in June of that year, a drafted case of her own that Cornwell proposed to reformat for Defango. That is closer than a handshake, but it is still not a role: her own replies are not in the file.

There is also a video of Maccoby in conversation with Sean Stone, and a gallery page crediting Stone as co-author of her Oracle deck; both are in chapter 10.

John B. Wells hosts Clark Jr. and James Martinez the week they came home from Standing Rock

Earlier the Wells column of the table above read "critic's show only." A copy of the episode now sits in this desk's file. It is John B. Wells's Caravan to Midnight, taped before Christmas 2016, with Trump's inauguration still ahead and the Dakota Access easement just denied. Wells's own closing line to Clark names the show on air: "then when they couldn't be spoken of anymore, well, you came over to Caravan to Midnight."

Across roughly thirty-eight minutes starting near the two-hour mark, Clark Jr. and the activist James Martinez walk the host through their arrival at Standing Rock, their meeting on the bridge with the two-star general commanding the North Dakota National Guard, Sheriff Laney, and "a representative from Tiger Swan, who just stood there and didn't say anything throughout the exchange" (chapter 12), and the forgiveness ceremony where Clark apologized to the tribal elders. The segment ends with Wells wishing them "Merry Christmas" and naming Martinez and Clark alongside J.J. McCartney as examples of people who "did the work."

Two beats of the hour are worth marking down because they land before the Q drops of October 2017:

1. Wells's opening monologue, before Clark comes on. He uses Judge Andrew Napolitano's remarks on Stuart Varney's Fox show as his anchor and tells the audience that "members of the American intelligence community leak this to Julian Assange rather than the Russians," that "there are patriots within those organizations" and that "they are, in fact, looking. They're watching over us." The framing of patriots inside the services watching over the country is almost word for word the frame Q would later reuse.
2. Clark Jr. on-air, warm toward the incoming administration. Asked by Wells whether he can get a message to the president — "I'm thinking you're one person away from him" — Clark answers, "I hold a lot of hope out for Donald Trump. He's really reset the playing board on how stuff can get done … he's got the potential to do more good than anyone who's come before him." Wells closes the segment with "there's reason to be hopeful with this new administration coming in. Got some real heavy hitters coming in to kind of take charge of things in an adult manner."

Clark also pre-empts his own obituary near the end of the hour: "I don't drink alcohol. And I got no major depression. And I'm not suicidal. So, if anything ever happens to me, I've already told you the names of the potential perpetrators in this interview." The list of names he had just given, from the bridge, included the two-star general, Sheriff Laney, "this fellow allotted," and the Tiger Swan representative.

"Insights from Wesley Clark Jr and James Martinez on Standing Rock." John B. Wells, Caravan to Midnight, re-uploaded to this desk's YouTube channel. The Clark/Martinez segment begins near the 02:06 mark; a transcript of the full show is in this desk's private file. · Watch on YouTube ↗

Clark Jr. recognizes the voice six years later: "that's who the initial interview was with on the road to Standing Rock as well"

Six years after the hour above, this desk sent the recording to Wes Clark Jr. in Twitter DMs. His first reply, on Dec 19, 2022, was that he vaguely remembered the call — "That must have been right after I got back. There was another crazy phone interview James put me on the day Sulli, Trek and I reached Standing Rock." Asked specifically whether he recognized the host, Clark Jr. answered: "Holy shit, seriously? I think that's who the initial interview was with on the road to Standing Rock as well."

Two things follow from Clark's own words. First, the primary subject of this desk's artifact above identifies the host as John B. Wells — the confirmation this chapter had been missing from Clark's side. Second, Clark describes a second Wells interview, by phone, on the day the veterans actually reached Standing Rock. That earlier call is not in this desk's file; it is logged here as a Claimed lead to be chased.

Elsewhere in the same DM thread, Clark Jr. volunteers (Nov 6, 2022) that he first met Jim Stewartson and the American Psyop producer Jack Bryan "long after I'd regained my sanity, I think in Sep 2020" — which is also the month Bryan opened his own DM to this desk. In Bryan's own thread with this desk (Nov 28, 2020) Bryan writes: "we met nora 2017 when we were investigation the russian operation for our doc and we knew she got pulled into pizzagate." That is a dated, direct link from Bryan to Nora Maccoby going back to the Active Measures research. It is noted here because it will matter when the fuller Bryan-side material lands; this chapter does not go further than Bryan's own line until then.

Operation Classified: Wells puts on a weekend conference in Dallas to raise money for Michael Flynn's legal defense

Two years after the Caravan to Midnight episode above, Wells put on his own weekend event. A PR.com press release dated Nov 2, 2018 and headlined "Hundreds of Patriots Are Descending on Dallas Texas for Operation Classified" names it "the largest-ever event supporting General Michael Flynn," hosted by John B. Wells, with Flynn's brother Joseph Flynn — spokesperson and trustee of the Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn Legal Defense Fund — attending to "meet and thank attendees," and his sister Barbara Flynn Redgate listed as a co-trustee of the fund. General Flynn himself did not attend; he was under federal investigation, awaiting sentencing on December 18, 2018.

The program named Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes (later convicted of seditious conspiracy for January 6), Flynn's attorney and later Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer as a Flynn-side friend, and the Christian-conspiracy and alternative-medicine speakers LA Marzulli, William Federer, Demetra Antimisiaris and Ty Bollinger, with Will Champion as keynote. Right Wing Watch's Peter Montgomery, writing on Dec 11, 2018, reports that the formal dinner gala raised "a healthy five figure donation" for the fund, and that Wells promised "patriot groups from all over the country," together with the Oath Keepers and Bikers for Trump, would mount a "strong presence" at the federal courthouse in Washington for Flynn's sentencing the following week. In the same piece Wells is quoted saying, "Q is real. That's not some dreamed-up thing."

AMCL "Intercepted" (June 2018): the clip American Psyop's finale used was Clark Jr. himself, telling Gomez-Schempp about Desiree Kane

Four and a half years before American Psyop aired, Gomez-Schempp broadcast an episode of A Mexican Crossing Lines titled Intercepted that played, in full, a recorded phone call between Wes Clark Jr. and herself from June 2018. The transcript is in this desk's private file. One finding from it reframes the finale entry above.

The clip the podcast finale used was Clark Jr., not Gomez-Schempp. In the finale, Jack Bryan plays a short audio clip he introduces as "a clip of Cindy talking to Wes about Desiree," and the words played are: "this Desiree may actually be the person that they're sending to put all this bullshit out there. Who the fuck knows what it is? I'm sure it is. I'm sure that's who they're using for it." Those words, in this 2018 broadcast's primary recording, are spoken by Wes Clark Jr. to Gomez-Schempp, not by Gomez-Schempp to Clark. In the context of the full call Clark Jr. tells Gomez-Schempp that Kane is "going up there into a trap," that he is "going to hook you up with Desiree when I get home … just because I'm afraid she's going up there into a trap," and that Kane may be being "sent" to run interference around the Intercept's TigerSwan leak coverage (the Alleen Brown byline). American Psyop's finale snips Clark's own line out of the call it came from and presents it as Gomez-Schempp attacking Kane. The two are opposite claims about who was influencing whom.

What else is in the full call, in Clark Jr.'s own voice (2018).

• On camp size: "Bill Runningfisher said they had 150 PMCs … that doesn't count the multiple FBI agents, BIA agents, DEA agents, ATF agents, you know, North Dakota undercovers, as well as all their CIs. So you had like, I mean, there must have been 300 people out there working for 10 different teams."
• On L'Oreal Blackshaw: that Michael Marcus had told him there was "no L'Oreal Blackshaw on Pine Ridge," and that an hour later Blackshaw herself volunteered to Clark that "you may not be able to find my name on a Google search because I changed it."
• On Faith Spotted Eagle: "she's like the cherry on the top of this. … She's directed it," and that Kane, going to meet with Faith Spotted Eagle in 2018, is "walking right into that group of bad people."

Kane's own 2018 self-description, from the second call Gomez-Schempp plays. After Clark Jr. hooks them up, Gomez-Schempp calls Kane. Kane says: "the puzzle piece that I am is I don't know if you ever listened to any radio chatter from Oceti Sakowin camp, but I was a dispatch. So, I did a lot of work on things like making maps for scouts. I'm connected with Angry Bird and Bravo One. … So that kills the press and PR person." That is Kane, in her own words in 2018, acknowledging an operational role — dispatch, maps for scouts, call signs — that goes beyond "journalist embedded there" (her finale framing) and beyond "set up the media tent" (the role attributed to her in this chapter's earlier entries). The call drops before Gomez-Schempp can follow up, and Kane never calls back.

Cindy Gomez-Schempp, independently: far-right host, event raised money for Flynn, Stewart Rhodes was on the bill

In February 2023 this desk shared the Caravan to Midnight recording with Cindy Gomez-Schempp, the host of KPPP-LP FM's A Mexican Crossing Lines and a longtime partisan critic of the Clark–Kane circle (she is the "critic's show" cited elsewhere in this chapter). Her reaction, in DMs, independently stands up both artifacts above:

• Feb 26, 2023 — the host greets them like repeat guests. "Suena por la manera en que los saludo qué ya habían estado en su programa de radio antes. Hasta le dice Wells, te dije que iba hacer mucho frio." ("It sounds, from the way he greets them, like they had been on his radio show before. He even says, I told you it was going to be very cold.") That observation lines up with Clark Jr.'s own answer above and leaves open an earlier Wells–Clark appearance.
• Mar 2, 2023 — after listening to the show on her own. "Escuche su programa. Esta claro que es un locutor de la extrema derecha y que hizo un evento para recaudar fondos para Flynn. Qué el evento tenia como speaker a Stewart Rhodes." ("I listened to his show. It is clear he is a far-right host and that he put on an event to raise funds for Flynn. The event had Stewart Rhodes as a speaker.") That is a hostile source confirming, from independent listening, Operation Classified as a Flynn fundraiser with the Oath Keepers' founder on the program.
• Mar 1–2, 2023 — she ran a segment on it. "También quería usar la entrevista con Wells y mostrar tu post sobre lo que le dijiste a Jack. Te parece?" ("I also wanted to use the Wells interview and show your post about what you said to Jack. OK with you?") The segment aired three weeks later on PsyOp BS Part 10 (below).

Why that matters: Gomez-Schempp is explicitly on the other side of this story from the Clark–Kane circle, so an agreement with her is a cross-check rather than an echo. On the two testable things — far-right host, Flynn fundraiser with Stewart Rhodes — her listening confirms what the PR.com release and Right Wing Watch had already said. It does not strengthen anything beyond those two testables.

AMCL Part 7: the second Wells interview dated to November 2016, and Bryan on public notice since 2021

Two Sundays before Part 10, Gomez-Schempp aired PsyOp BS Part 7 of A Mexican Crossing Lines (KPPP-LP 88.1 FM; same simulcast stack as Part 10). The full transcript is in this desk's private file. Three pieces are new here:

1. The earlier Wells–Martinez–Clark interview, dated to November 2016. Gomez-Schempp plays a clip from a second Caravan to Midnight episode, hosted by John B. Wells, that she identifies as having aired BEFORE the mid-December one in this desk's file: "He went there not only in December of 2016, he was there before in November." Internal dating from the clip is tight: Clark Jr. and Martinez correct Wells on air — "I'm not on the ground yet. I am en route" — and Wells refers on air to "President-elect Donald J. Trump," which puts the broadcast between Nov 8, 2016 and Dec 1, 2016 (the day Clark Jr. reached Standing Rock). Gomez-Schempp cites her source as the YouTube channel @FUTCH2313, re-uploaded on this desk's Conspiracy Distillery site. The second Wells call Clark Jr. volunteered in his Dec 2022 DM — "another crazy phone interview James put me on the day Sulli, Trek and I reached Standing Rock" — is now dated by an independent source.
2. What Clark Jr. said, before arrival, on that November show. "We've got another 500 that are going to be a follow on force. And we're probably going to maintain a permanent presence up at that camp of a few hundred vets at any time until this is over and until the Constitution is respected … if they do that, we'll be back there with 50,000 vets." On the same call Clark names "a tribal elder, a woman by the name of Phyllis Young" as the person who first called him, and he identifies the private security on the bridge as Tiger Swan ("Tiger something or other … they're out of Georgia") — cross-linking chapter 12. That is Clark saying out loud, before the camp, that the Veterans Stand deployment was planned as persistent and scalable, not a one-weekend symbolic act.
3. Wolfgang Halbig in the same hour. Gomez-Schempp establishes, from the same broadcast, that Wolfgang Halbig — the Sandy Hook denier later arrested for stealing the personal identification of Leonard Pozner, father of a Sandy Hook victim — was Wells's featured interviewee IMMEDIATELY before Martinez and Clark that night, with a Jonathan Reich / Sandy Hook segment on air. That is Clark Jr.'s November 2016 Caravan to Midnight debut programmed next to the figurehead of the Sandy Hook denial movement. The chapter leaves what that juxtaposition means to the reader.

Part 7 also puts Bryan on documented public notice two years earlier than this desk had previously established. Gomez-Schempp reads out, on air, a Nov 22, 2021 tweet from this desk to @Akon — "Hey, Akon, why are you associating with convicted criminals like Thomas Schoenberger or Michael Levine, owner of the Cicada 3301 trademark? I'm sure at Will Sommer, at Rocco Castoro, at Colin Hoback, at Jack Bryan, at Peter Duke, and at Laura Grannora can tell you about 3301." Her conclusion: "how did Jack Bryan not understand the connections between Wesley Clark and the people that are affiliated with QAnon and 3301? … you're like haciéndose del ojo chiquito. Like you're just trying to miss it, you're willfully ignorant." That is a dated, public ping to Bryan about the Clark–Cicada–Q link a full year before American Psyop aired.

AMCL Part 10: Gomez-Schempp airs the Wells material, corrects a handle, and lays out the whitewash claim

Six days after her Mar 2 DM, Gomez-Schempp aired PsyOp BS Part 10 of A Mexican Crossing Lines on KPPP-LP 88.1 FM Fargo-Moorhead (also streamed to Facebook, to YouTube under "Duke 1517," and to Twitch as "A Mexican Crossing Lines"), co-hosted by Duke Gomez-Schempp. A full transcript is in this desk's private file. Four things in the broadcast matter here:

1. The handle correction, on air. In Part 9 she had read @AttractiveMeasures as @ActiveMeasures (Jack Bryan's documentary account). In Part 10 she corrects it: "I apologize. I misread what that says, which clearly says attractive measures. … This you see right now before your eyes, Attractive Measures, is actually a parody account that was started by and run by Arturo Tafoya." The parody account is independently corroborated as this desk's by a Dec 26, 2021 Twitter DM from the researcher behind @conspirator0 — "Hey you know that filescad link you are posting on the Attractive Measures account self-doxes, right?"
2. What the parody account had asked, read on air. "Can you explain why you gave Nora Maccabee the victim tag? Nora Maccabee's husband is even more suspicious, ex-military and into the free energy movement, and also her association with Tanya Biss, the wife of Nunez's lawyer. It's very significant, so why not mention it?" That is this desk's framing of what American Psyop left out around Nora Maccoby: her husband (Todd Hathaway, ex-military, free-energy movement; see chapter 12 on the Hathaway Facebook caption), and her documented 2017 proximity to Tanya Biss / Cornwell (see chapter 09).
3. Wells named on air as Flynn-side. Gomez-Schempp tells the audience: "remind yourself or go back and listen to the interviews he did with the Midnight Caravan show and the host John B. Wells, one of those Mike Flynn supporters from that defunct radio program, because Wes said that he did not give many interviews anywhere. That he only had spoken to TYT and Task and Purpose. And of course, we learned Wells." That is a second on-record characterization of Wells as Flynn-adjacent, from the chapter's existing "critic's show," and a direct pointer at Clark's own under-reporting of where he had been interviewed. The Caravan to Midnight audio above is one of those "lots of interviews" Clark did not include.
4. The whitewash and the undisclosed friendship. Gomez-Schempp states on air that American Psyop's journalist Emily Bix is Jack Bryan's "fiancee/slash boyfriend," and that the series' framing presents Wes Clark Jr. as "this hero worthy of worship, the likes of a saint or an angel" while putting a "victim" tag on Nora Maccoby. The second part of the claim — that Bryan and his producer Marley Clemens were already friends with Nora Maccoby through Alexandria Chalupa, which American Psyop did not disclose — is in this desk's own hand (above, with Bryan's own 2020 DM "we met nora 2017 … for our doc"), and in this desk's Feb 23, 2023 DM to Gomez-Schempp: "this explains why they know Wes and Nora. Because they never disclosed that Marley Clemens and Nora Maccoby have a friend in common: Alexandria Chalupa." The documented Chalupa link itself is not quoted in this chapter from any American Psyop source; the series' silence on it is the claim.

This desk's own video takes the two Bryan–Hathaway halves — the "whitewash of Nora" and the public hostility Bryan performed toward people around Hathaway's circle — and lays them next to each other:

"Todd Hathaway and Jack Bryan's fake fight." This desk's YouTube channel S3301. · Watch on YouTube ↗

The reception inside this desk's own circle, 2020–2023. Context, not accusation. The researcher this desk was in a relationship with during this window — Dr. Laura Dilley, a Michigan State University professor who was writing a public paper on the same targeting network (chapter 21 covers it) — was close with Desiree Kane and aligned with the anti-Q, "Thinkin Project"-adjacent side of the circle Gomez-Schempp was criticizing. In October 2021 Twitter DMs she acknowledged "I know you hate Jim [Stewartson], and with good reason," kept sharing his material, and once apologized — "Sorry I retweeted Jim, amor. Won't happen again" — after this desk raised the pattern. In February 2023, after this desk began platforming Gomez-Schempp, she wrote: "Cindy Gomez is major trouble she has put out all kinds of defamatory statements … absolutely patently false and defamatory offensive and damaging dangerous and I think that she is somebody to be distance from 100%." In a July 4, 2023 private audio message to a third party (transcript in this desk's file) she described Gomez-Schempp's broadcasts as "spreading hateful messages about a friend of mine" and "misinformation that the podcaster was putting out about my friend" — the friend unnamed in the audio; this desk's own Feb 2023 DM to Gomez-Schempp names the friend as Desiree Kane. The point of including this: pressure to drop the critic came from inside this desk's own household, not only from the American Psyop side; the entries on this page rest on the primary broadcasts and documents cited, not on how this desk was urged to read them.

The pipeline claim, after both Wells artifacts are attached

The working theory in this desk's dossier is that part of the 2016 Standing Rock audience, and some of the people around it, were later reused as validation infrastructure for Q. It still rests on three things: Clapier's résumé as Stewartson describes it on a recorded call (Occupy, Thrive, No DAPL, Standing Rock, then Cicada and Q); a private archive of messages with Clark that mentions Wells as a Flynn-side validator in that period; and the overlap of people in the table above.

Two of the three legs are now on the page. The Caravan to Midnight episode meets the bar for a Standing Rock-era artifact: Wells giving a Standing Rock figure a friendly platform before the first Q drops, inside an hour framed by the same intelligence-community-leak story Q would later reuse. The Operation Classified weekend in Dallas meets the bar for the Flynn-side artifact: Wells hosting a three-day fundraiser for Flynn's own legal defense fund, with Flynn's two trustee siblings on site, Oath Keepers' Stewart Rhodes and Sidney Powell on the program, and Wells on the record at the same event that "Q is real." Only the Clapier résumé piece still rests on an unpublished recording.

The pipeline accordingly sits at Plausible, documented in two of three parts, still claimed in whole, because "validation infrastructure" is an interpretation of the overlap and not something a document can prove on its own. What would move it further: either the Clapier recording published with Stewartson's permission, or a document that shows coordination among the people above, as opposed to the two dated appearances with Wells that are now attached.