Welcome to THE Q FILES, National Zero’s new and not-at-all regular series diving into QAnon and Q-adjacent tales of heroism against the Democrats, the Deep State, the Satanic Hollywood cabal, reptilian aliens, non-reptilian aliens, vaccine manufacturers, and other enemies of conservative white Christians. This effort’s been a long time coming and the product of encouragement from our readers, some of whom expressed medium-to-high interest in learning more about the astonishingly fucking insane conspiracy theories that have irradiated the brains of our fellow Americans.
Let’s get this out of the way first: This piece and subsequent installments will meander. A lot. There will be observations within meditations within tangents within parenthetical asides within entire paragraphs that do little if anything to further the story. Conspiracy theories themselves are more often than not rambling messes that connect to whole webs of other rambling conspiracy theories, so you should already have that priced in if you’re going to read this start to finish. If not, you can always just skip to the comments and write “OT Kevin Sorbo actually tweeted this!” accompanied by a Kevin Sorbo tweet. That’s fine. The point is that there may not necessarily be one when chronicling right wing batshittery. That spectacle of the conspiracy itself, its origins and background, and speculation about how the fuck these clowns came up with it is the true purpose. Whatever insights or larger political relevance that can be gleaned in conclusion will be an extra bonus.
SHOWDOWN AT THE ELECTION THEFT SERVER CORRAL
Sometimes when the job is done, and there’s no more need for secrecy to protect an ongoing operation or investigation are the American military intelligence and law enforcement establishments are happy to share with the public the details of the how and why they did this or that covertly. The US military went public in September 1945 with the details of the 1943 air mission to kill Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after pretending it had been just a lucky shot for two years. President Obama announced Osama bin Laden had been killed by Navy SEALs at his hideout in Pakistan hours after it had been confirmed. Federal prosecutors held a press conference last month announcing the arrest of ChiCom agents in New York. So on and so forth.
Going public with these operations didn’t compromise any ongoing actions and – probably more importantly – were wins for the American national security establishment. Justified exercises of the state monopoly on the use of force to maintain order and protect citizens from the bad guys. For every one of those, there are dozens of substantiated episodes in which operations were hidden from the public because they weren’t justifiable and didn’t make the American national security establishment look good: The Iran-Contra scandal, the coverup of bogus intel on weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr and other public figures in the Hoover era. Take your pick with Vietnam and other fronts in the Cold War.
It’s completely understandable that plenty of Americans are suspicious toward the government and military do covertly given the track record of abuses both at home and abroad during the Cold War and into the post-9/11 era. It’s not at all unreasonable to mistrust “the official story” when the particulars don’t quite add up. Just this week the Washington Post reported the FBI admitted to misuse of the Section 702 surveillance system, directing it at American citizens on both sides of the aisle, including those arrested for offenses committed during the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd and at suspects who were present during the January 6th MAGA insurrection at the Capitol. You don’t need to be an Oliver Stone fanboy to find that alarming or to be skeptical this is the full picture about the depth and breadth of the surveillance program.
And there’s the rub. When you learn that the government has been (again) exposed as unlawfully surveilling American citizens, when you learn that the Obama Administration wasn’t always up front about the number of civilians killed in drone strikes on suspected terrorists, when you learn that American special forces personnel are on the ground in Ukraine, when redactions cover page after page after page of a this or that key document, then your imagination is forced to fill in the black ink.
Imaginations can run wild too.
Secret gun battles are a longtime staple of conspiracy theory stories. Arguably the most famous of them stems from the ramblings of Phil Schneider, an alleged former US government contractor who claimed he had witnessed – and lost a few of his fingers in – a battle between government personnel and aliens at the legendary Dulce underground base in New Mexico. You might say Schneider just made it up after seeing Independence Day, except Schneider (probably) committed suicide in January 1996, six months before the alien invasion blockbuster came out.
But – despite the renewed interest in investigating military encounters with “UAPs” – no sitting member of Congress has ever publicly entertained the story that American soldiers engaged in secret action against aliens in an underground laboratory. The same can’t be said about now-former Texas Representative Louie Gohmert and the international voting technology company Scytl.
Sure, Gohmert hedges a bit in the Newsmax hit, not saying it was an actual firefight and that his information only came from a “German tweet in German,” and admitting “I don’t know the truth,” as if he would be bringing this up at all if he didn’t want it to be the truth, that on that day – November 13th, 2020 – that there would be some explosive revelation that would suddenly give hope to Trump fans that the election would be overturned. But where the fuck did this dumb hick get the idea?
A fact check about Scytl lays out their reach into American elections.
FACT: Scytl is a Spain-based business that specializes in “electoral security technology” and electronic voting applications. Its cryptographic research initially was funded by the Spanish government’s Ministry of Science and Technology and later was spun off as a private-sector e-voting venture.
FACT: In January 2012, Scytl acquired U.S.-based SOE Software. SOE writes “election management” programs that assist officials with everything from “Internet voting to election night reporting and online poll worker training.”
FICTION: According to alarmists, Scytl’s acquisition of SOE amounts to a complete takeover of America’s election system. No, not really. While SOE boasts of a presence “with 900 jurisdictions as customers in 26 states,” there is no single contract that the federal government has entered into, or could, with Scytl to count the 2012 presidential election votes. Much of the work Scytl/SOE analysts do is number-crunching and graphics software work after local and state officials have done the vote-counting.
Scytl does have a contract with the feds to use its technology to help overseas and military voters participate in elections. In 2009, the Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act mandated that U.S. jurisdictions allow uniformed and overseas citizens to receive and track their ballots electronically. Scytl’s online ballot program was used in 14 states in the 2010 midterms.
FICTION: Chain e-mails about Scytl claim that George Soros owns, operates or controls Scytl. In reality, the company’s investors are Nauta Capital, Balderton Capital and Spinnaker SCR. Soros doesn’t “own” any of these international venture capital firms — and as far as my research shows, he has no involvement whatsoever with any of them. Moreover, Scytl’s board of directors doesn’t include anyone with Soros financial or management ties. Pressed for evidence, one Internet conspiracy nut cited an “invitation only event” in Moldova that listed both the “Soros Foundation Moldova” and Scytl as attendees.
The fact-check’s author? Longtime conservative influencer Michelle Malkin published it at the Washington Examiner in 2012, opening it with “With six months until Election Day, conspiracy theories are percolating on the Internet like bubbling mud pots at Yellowstone: Left-wing billionaire George Soros is going to rig the election for Barack Obama. Foreigners will oversee the nation’s entire vote-counting system. The fix is in, and all is lost. Before conservatives go all Michael Moore-moonbatty, let’s calm down and separate voter fraud facts from fiction.”
Pretty fucking funny considering eight years later she was named as a defendant in former Dominion exec Eric Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against the Trump Campaign, Sidney “Kraken” Powell, Rudy, the Gateway Pundit, OANN, and other 2020 election conspiracy freaks. Malkin was included over her propagation of bullshit by notorious MAGA podcaster Joel Oltmann (also a defendant).
Scytl isn’t a “household name” like Dominion or Smartmatic, mostly because they haven’t filed any legal action against the usual suspects. Even more interesting is that, as the date of this fact-check makes clear, right wing paranoia toward them was a thing long before your average Gateway Pundit reader had even heard of Dominion or Smartmatic. Malkin’s “Michael Moore-moonbatty” reference is a callback to the era when election hacking conspiracies were the province of the left, when score of liberals were absolutely convinced the Diebold company machines had secretly flipped votes in Ohio from John Kerry to George W Bush in the 2004 election.
In the real world Scytl’s record does raise questions. As recently as 2019 researchers identified vulnerabilities in Switzerland’s Sctyl-provided eVoting system. The same year researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia found security flaws in the Scytl systems used for online elections in New South Wales. A false started pilot program in Toronto in 2014. The list goes on.
But obviously the United States doesn’t have online voting now and certainly did not in 2020. Scytl’s role was limited to providing online training for poll workers, systems to request absentee ballots, and reporting ballot tabulations from local precincts across a patchwork of state, county, and municipal jurisdictions. The tabulation reporting could conceivably be problematic if hacked and manipulated by a malign actor but that’s nothing that an audit couldn’t fix.
collated by Scytl and saved on its own proprietary servers, it would be nearly impossible to track any discrepancies between the numbers it reports & the actually vote tallies as taken at the local polling places."
— ❌Aurora Tracy❌ (@auroratracy0621) December 12, 2019
Funny enough, if you search for tweets about Dominion prior to November 3, 2020 more than a few of them seem to imply they were going to rig the election for Trump. Every tweet about Smartmatic is Spanish. Suspicions about Scytl are roughly split between left and right – and there’s a lot more of it, likely owing to their track record of reported vulnerabilities. Post-election, the earliest mention of a Scytl vote stealing server (or servers) comes just a day later – not on Twitter but in a November 4th 2020 interview with QAnon influencer Juan O Savin.
So who wrote the “German tweet in German” about the actual raid on Scytl? It might have been this:
Heute hat die US-ARMY Rechner in Frankfurt beschlagnahmt!!! Ein riesiges Aufgebot! Und heute Nacht schrieb ich noch, dass der Server in FFM steht:-) Halleluja 🙂
— Ella Bauer (@ellamaus15) November 7, 2020
“Today the US ARMY confiscated computers in Frankfurt!!! A huge contingent! And tonight I wrote that the server is in FFM 🙂 Hallelujah :-)” the tweet says in English, written just hours after Pennsylvania and with it the 2020 election was called for Biden. Of course it’s quite possible this was not the tweet given the post-2020 election purges of MAGA conspiracy theorists from the pre-Elon Musk Twitter. Then there’s the low number of likes and retweets it got. But this is really early on, five days before Gohmert reportedly spewed his nonsense during a prayer call with some far right preacher before saying the same shit on Newsmax the next day.
How did it get to Gohmert? There’s a tweet from another account the next day – November 8th, 2020 – that got more traction but again it really seems that Gohmert’s Newsmax hit – and the Gateway Pundit’s article – was when the Showdown at Scytl made its true primetime debut.
Per the Pundit’s “source” in that article:
The US government, once they determined that this Dominion server was involved in switching votes, then the intelligence community began a search for the server and discovered that the server was in Germany. In order to get access to that server and have it available for use in a legal manner they had to have the State Department work in tandem with the Department of Justice. They had to request that the government of Germany cooperate in allowing this seizure of this server.
The appropriate documents required to affect that kind of seizure were put in place, signed off on, and it appears there was also US military support in this operation. The US military was not in the lead. But this helps explain why Esper was fired and Miller and Kash Patel were put in place — so that the military would not interfere with the operation in any way.
By getting ahold of the server they now are going to have the direct evidence of when they were instructed to stop counting. They will also discover who gave the direction to stop counting and who initiated the algorithm that started switching votes. The CIA was completely excluded from this operation.
It got better. The CIA being “completely excluded” somehow turned into the CIA were the “bad guys” and that they were the ones running the Scytl branded server farm – which according to them didn’t even exist as they had only a temporary presence in Frankfurt for a few months in 2019.
But, you know, facts are for libtards.
Nope. Biden lost in a landslide. Just wait. We have the servers from Germany. Dominion and the CIA are toast! pic.twitter.com/Gan4UQen89
— DavidG (@DavidG02986909) November 23, 2020
So how did it turn from a successful international law enforcement raid to a bloody shootout between the US Army special forces and the CIA? Retired Air Force Lt General Thomas McInerney, a far right asshole so crazy he managed to get himself fired from his analyst job at Fox News for accusing the late John McCain of selling out other Americans while in North Vietnamese captivity.
“The US special forces command seized a server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, because they were sending this data from those six states through the internet to Spain and then into Frankfurt, Germany. Special operation forces seized those, that facility, so they have those servers and they know all this data they are providing,” McInerney told MAGA podcaster Brannon Howse on November 23rd. When Howse asked if the “seizure went down without incident,” McInerney said “Well, I’ve heard it didn’t go down without incident, and I haven’t been able to verify it. I want to be careful. It’s just coming out, but I understand – my initial report is – that there were US soldiers killed in that operation. Now, that was a CIA operation, and so that’s the very worrisome thing.”
So where were the bodies? Well conveniently (for the conspiracy theorists) five American soldiers tragically died in a helicopter crash during a peacekeeping mission on the Sinai Peninsula on November 14th, 2020, naturally leading to claims that the crash was the “official cover story” and that they had heroically fallen in battle with the CIA agents at the Scytl server farm in Germany.
The story remains an open thread in the MAGA-QAnon mythos despite the very obviously expired shelf life. There was no cathartic moment in which the captured server was paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue in chains like a digital Vercingetorix. Its explosive truth was not revealed. The Supreme Court did not find the evidence beyond dispute and intervene to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election. The Supreme Court never saw the the server.
Now to bring it back to the beginning of this overlong tale of nonexistent treachery and a national security state at war with itself: Think of the times when disgraced former President Trump had overseen successful operations to eliminate foreign adversaries like ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in 2019 and then Iranian General Qasem Soliemani a few months later. Did he keep either under wraps? Did he just quietly let the Pentagon issue a news release about the operations and then go back to tweeting stupid bullshit like he did every single day of “Executive Time”?
No. Fuck no. Trump wanted the credit and he took it for both of them. He wouldn’t shut up about either for days afterward. And that’s the real reason why the Showdown at Scytl is quite possibly the fucking dumbest and most outrageous conspiracy theory tale of the last decade. In no universe should Trump’s fans have expected him to not acknowledge that American special forces had seized a server with data that proved the 2020 election had been stolen from him. For everything they know or think they know about him, that alone should’ve given them pause.
It would have been the greatest moment of his presidency, to violently snatch victory from the jaws of defeat from the shadowy forces that dogged him throughout his term. A win within a win.
The immediate aftermath of the 2020 election was a frenzied shitshow, one we’re still covering the aftereffects of every single day. The outlandish tale of the Showdown at Scytl isn’t as well-remembered because it got lost in the noise, but that doesn’t make it any less breathtaking.
RA • 3 years ago
️Have you seen the news about the military operation that just seized the server in Germany that ran the Dominion voting software here? Looks like the jig is up on you and Biden and a whole lot of criminal Dimms.
Sat, 11/14/2020 6:40 AM on ‘Has Congress captured Russia policy?’