Nothing. Pizzagate and the Comet Ping Pong incident happened BEFORE Q started posting drivel. It certainly could have been the same guy who helped push Pizzagate, but he didn’t do it as “QAnon.”
QAnon crap not only isn’t identifiably classified stuff, but it often barely qualifies as a specific claim. Q more and more posts stuff that’s so vague as to offer the reader the opportunity to read in whatever they want to believe. Originally it was stuff like “this Friday they’re arresting Hillary” but it’s not even that clear anymore. He even posts “Codes” that analysts have shows are literally just him typing keys at random: he just hits 'em all at once like sikprfjsad;oilfdsakrfjesalfjnsdklj and says “Here you go, patriots” and they all convince themselves it says “Ryan Gosling is a child raping dinosaur man” or something.
They believe it because they want to believe it. Because they want their hateful attitudes to be justified. They’re doing it to themselves so that they feel comfortable hating other people.
I was willing to entertain the notion that he might have had security clearance at some point. You don’t have to be a super spy to get one, you just need to be in a job that requires you to work in areas that deal with sensitive data. I almost got one as a grad student working on totally mundane things, but for a group that included some nuclear weapons research (they eventually found a cubical outside the security perimeter for me to work and so I didn’t end up needing clearance).
So I thought he might be the sort of person who would boast about his clearance (look how special I am!) on a message board to bolster his impression. Overall I would have given him about a 20% chance of actually having the clearance.
If Wikipedia, linked above, is accurate about his working as a recruiter when in the Army it is much higher. It is near 100% chance of at least a Secret security clearance. That for a very long time has been a duty that mandated it.
Exactly. The key conceit of QAnon is they have this super-high level clearance that gives them access to look into every dusty corner of the government to ferret out the Deep State Conspiracy. But, in reality a clearance is really just a risk assessment on the trustworthiness of a specific person. Regardless of clearance level you can only access information your superiors deem relevant to your specific job.
According to the Einsteins over at The Federalist QAnon was the “brainchild” of a couple of 4chan trolls trying to come up with a BS conspiracy theory so derpy and woo-rich that even Republicans wouldn’t be able to believe it.