The Secret Source Who Helped Fuel Trump's Big Lie

[Nevilledog]

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The Q Origins Project
@QOrigins
I *cannot* urge you strongly enough to read this article.

If you've followed the lawsuits that spawned from the Big Lie, you'll recognize a LOT of names here -- and you'll learn how many of them crossed paths.

The Secret Source Who Helped Fuel Trump’s Big Lie
Code-named Spider, a Dallas information-technology consultant believes that the New World Order stole the 2020 election.
newyorker.com
6:57 PM · Aug 1, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/the-secret-source-who-helped-fuel-trumps-big-lie

Twelve days after Joe Biden was declared the winner in the 2020 Presidential race, Donald Trump’s legal team laid out its master theory of the election in a dramatic press conference at the Republican National Committee’s headquarters. “What we are really dealing with here, and uncovering more by the day, is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China, and the interference with our elections here in the United States,” Sidney Powell, one of the President’s lawyers, declared as she stood before a row of American flags. Powell said that a Colorado-based company called Dominion Voting Systems had secretly manipulated the vote count in machines that were used in at least two dozen states and helped sway the results in Democrats’ favor. In addition to foreign Marxists, the key conspirators included the Clinton Foundation and a large circle of élite business leaders. When Rudy Giuliani took his turn at the microphone, he added George Soros and big tech companies to the list. “Global interests,” Powell had explained, were behind the failure of major news outlets to report on the fraud.

The following week, Powell began filing lawsuits with affidavits purporting to back her claims. One of them was from an anonymous hacker who was identified as “Spyder,” or sometimes “Spider,” a pseudonym inspired by the web-like diagrams that filled his supporting documents. By examining Dominion’s network connections and finding vulnerabilities in its Web site, Spider alleged, he had uncovered “unambiguous evidence” that the company had allowed America’s foreign adversaries to manipulate election results. In early December, Spider was unmasked after his name appeared in a bookmark of a court document: he was Joshua Merritt, a forty-three-year-old military veteran and information-technology consultant living in Dallas with his wife and children.

Acting on a hunch, I searched for Merritt’s name in a leaked database that I had obtained the previous year which listed members of a militant right-wing group called the Oath Keepers. Merritt, it turned out, had joined the group in 2010, listing himself as a soldier with an address at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. Known for seeking to recruit current and former military and law-enforcement officials, the Oath Keepers had helped promote a version of a decades-old conspiracy theory that a globalist business and political élite—often called the New World Order—were attempting to undermine American democracy and sovereignty. The theory mirrored, in many ways, the claims that Powell, Giuliani, and members of Trump’s legal team advanced after the election. In his membership form, Merritt had written, “I have been in since after Sept. 11 to take up what I felt was the calling of our nation.” He said that his time in Afghanistan and Iraq had left him with unsettling questions. “I started wondering why it felt wrong, there were things that didn’t add up, and I looked around to see who else agreed,” he wrote. Online, Merritt came across a video by an early advocate for the Oath Keepers, and, he wrote, “his words hit me like a wall of reality.” I sent an e-mail to the address on his form. “You’re well researched,” Merritt quickly replied. “Give me a call.”

In the months since, I’ve spent hours speaking with Merritt in person and over the phone. He said he was a turret gunner in Iraq and provided security for a counter-I.E.D. unit in Afghanistan; he received a commendation for serving in combat. A largely self-trained computer sleuth, Merritt can come across as a jarring blend of geek and grunt, moving seamlessly between war stories peppered with military jargon, obsessively detailed accounts of his cybersecurity exploits, and conspiracy theories. During our conversations, he laid out a political journey that illuminates the advance of a once-fringe ideology into the heart of contemporary U.S. politics. Months of interviews that I’d conducted with current and former Oath Keepers had made clear to me that the New World Order theory played a central role in motivating many members to arm themselves and prepare for political violence. The theory’s history runs much deeper on the American right than QAnon.

*snip*

[Brother Mythos]

1. Wasn't "The New World Order" part of the WWE's shtick back in the day?

I'm not really a professional wrestling fan, but I seem to remember this from an especially boring night of TV a long time ago, when Hulk Hogan turned "bad guy."

[dweller]

2. I think it's been around

since Bush 1 …


✌🏻

[Hugh_Lebowski]

3. Indeed, he said it in a speech as POTUS (nt)

[UTUSN]

4. Very interesting, sort of left hanging here

[dalton99a]

5. "The most marginalized people in America are "white Christians""

No wonder they can't find jobs and housing

[czarjak]

6. Codename Dipshit That Doesn't Get Secret Society Agendas...

Ask W.?

[Faux pas]

7. Kickin'

[Nevilledog]

8. Kick

[Champp]

9. Psychobillies - another deluded, anti-American Republican faction