47pigfarminthePhilippines,hadsent
Brennanona missiontobringdown
thesiteandQAnon.Watkinsdidnot
respondtoa requestforcomment.
Brennanstartedbytryingtofigure
outwhichcompanieswereoperating
serversthathosted8chan’scontent.
Thenhewouldpostpublicmessages,
onTwitterandelsewhere,urgingthe
companiestocuttieswiththesite.After8chanwasdropped
bythecybersecuritycompanyCloudflareInc.,whichpro-
tectedit fromdenialofservice,orDDoS,attacks,it found
safeharborina newU.S.-basedDDoSprotectioncompany,
VanwaTechLLC,whichhadtakenanextremelypermissive
attitudetowardcontroversialcontent.“Ifit’slegal,I don’t
care,”says23-year-oldchiefexecutiveofficerNickLim.
Thissummer,GelinasalsomovedhissitetoVanwaTech.
Thismade him a target of Brennan, who also began
pressuring Patreon to block Gelinas’s site. He referred to
QMap in a tweet as “the main vector for Q radicalization.”
QMap, Brennan explains in an interview, helped “turn
this anonymous format into a way people can be notified
immediately.”
Patreon never banned QMap, and Gelinas took down all
his posts on the crowdfunding site after he was identified as
QMap’s owner. In messages exchanged over WhatsApp, he told
Bloomberg Businessweek that he has no connection to Watkins
and has never met him. He said he began using VanwaTech
because it protected Qmap from frequent DDoS attacks.
Ondrak, the fact-checker, and Nick Backovic, another
Logically.ai researcher, joined Brennan’s hunt. It took
Ondrak and Backovic only a few days to trace an email
address associated with Patriot Platforms LLC, which
had been listed as the publisher of a QMap mobile app in
Google’s Android app store, to a post office box in Berkeley
Heights, N.J. The next day, the pair published a story out-
ing Gelinas as the operator of QMap. Public records show
that Gelinas is the sole employee associated with Patriot
Platforms, and New Jersey business records obtained by
Bloomberg Businessweek list the company’s address as a
house in the same town, a few miles from the P.O. box.
On the morning of Sept. 10, a reporter drove to the house.
It was a beautiful day in suburban New Jersey. Gelinas, in
shorts and an American flag cap, was in the front yard, fill-
ing up a wheelbarrow with cut-up tree stumps.
Gelinas is tall and fit at age 43. He clearly didn’t want to
talk. He paced around his yard, mostly evading questions,
while the reporter stood in the grass. He first said he wasn’t Q,
though he did allow that he was familiar with QAnon, which
he described as “a patriotic movement to save the country.”
Finally, his wife opened the front door and rescued him with
a vague request for technical assistance. “I don’t want to get
involved, I want to stay out of it,” Gelinas said before he dis-
appeared into the house and, rather than asking the reporter
to leave, called the authorities. A few minutes later, after thereporter had left the property, two
police SUVs showed up.
That afternoon, QMap.pub and the
social media profiles of Gelinas and
his wife disappeared from the inter-
net. Within days, Citi had put him on
administrative leave and his name was
removed from the company’s internal
directory. He was later terminated.
“Mr. Gelinas is no longer employed by Citi,” the company
says in a statement. “Our code of conduct includes specific
policies that employees are required to adhere to, and when
breaches are identified, the firm takes action.”
In the weeks after he was outed, Gelinas mostly ignored
reporters’ calls and text messages, though he did acknowl-
edge he was the only developer for QMap and clarified sev-
eral other points. “I’m not going to talk about my own story
right now,” he said. “When the time is right, it will come out.”QMap’s disappearance has been a significant but tem-
porary setback for the QAnon movement. “It’s not going to be
a death blow to the QAnon community, but it is a disruption,”
says Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher who hosts
a podcast dedicated to QAnon. QMap popped back online a
few days later, but it now consists entirely of links to other
QAnon aggregator websites.
Google has tried to make it harder to find such QAnon sites
by keeping them from showing up in searches, and Facebook
and Twitter have blocked links to them, though posts about Q
are easy to find on Facebook and other social networks such
as Telegram. Followers also sometimes spread the word about
Q-related sites by writing their URLs on signs and holding them
up at Trump rallies.
Meanwhile,Gelinas’sprojectofbringingthegospelofQ
tothemainstreamisaliveandwell.Latethissummerand
earlythisfall,Q supportersorganizeda waveofin-person
rallies, ostensibly to combat human trafficking, many of
them under the social media hashtag #SaveTheChildren.
Someestablishedanti-traffickinggroups,includingthereal
SavetheChildren,a 101-year-oldBritishnonprofit,com-
plainedtheywerebeingco-optedindangerous ways.
Janja Lalich, a professor emerita of sociology at California
State University at Chico who’s studied cults for decades, says
internet movements such as QAnon have grown at an alarm-
ing rate, because of a political debate that’s become increas-
ingly unmoored from a set of universally agreed-upon facts.
“It’s times like these that cults can thrive,” she says. “We have
leadership that has tried very hard to change our relation-
ship with reality, and people are grasping at straws. The last
four years have been precedent-setting in creating an atmo-
sphere of disbelief.”
Returning from that collective delusion, Lalich insists,
won’t be easy. “It’s very daunting,” she says. “You have
to give up everything you believed in and decide what to
QANON FLAG: CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS. BRENNAN: TED ALJIBE/GETTY IMAGES believe again.”
Bloomberg Businessweek October 12, 2020Brennan