This is #12 in my investigation series. David Brock pays a guy whom I call HLI to spread disinfo. He has used many "sockpuppet" identities including HighLevelInsider, Senate Anon, and Wisconsin_Is_Corrupt. He is also the YouTuber "Tory Smith". See my submission history for all reports to date.

I haven't made any submissions this month. Partly lack of time, but mostly following the rule: Do not interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake. Brock and HLI have been making a big one.

Many of you have noticed that Wisconsin_Is_Corrupt is no longer posting. A month ago, he abandoned his daily recitals of "Racine is the center of global evil, Paul Ryan is a monster, this is the TRUTH, blah blah blah". It is not a coincidence that he stopped on the same day that I posted about John Boehner's role in the Glenn Beck whistleblower episode. WIC was willing to argue and call me a liar and a shill only so long as Boehner's name stayed out of the conversation. Now he is gone.

HLI has abandoned two other "insider" IDs. He dropped @HighLevelInsider two months ago, when I called him out for claiming the work of other researchers as his own. Same story with Senate Anon. Plus he has dropped several IDs that weren't claiming to be insiders:

@ababcb -- Screwed up and claimed that Sarasota info he had supplied came from Senate Anon. Then offered lame excuse that he knew it was Senate Anon in disguise. @polwarrior1030 -- Created same time as @HighLevelInsider, inactive for five months, slid one of my submissions using "Galactics and Blue Avians" talk that is typical of old Tory Smith account but extremely unusual for anyone on Voat. @Donk_Quixote -- Joined Voat the same day as @HighLevelInsider, completely inactive for five months, then slid one of my early submissions

Here are a few more IDs that HLI is still using:

@nameof, @fogdryer -- Both posted long, rambling, evasive defenses of WIC at suspiciously convenient moments. @Tyranny-News-Network -- Asked me to phone him to discuss a vague "joint plan". @4_InquiringMinds -- Staged a phony fight with WIC to try and gain my confidence, bombarded me with messages and questions.

The outstanding example from this group is @ESOTERICshade. My detailed complaint about him is here.

None of this should be a huge revelation. HLI is here every day, and no one will ever detect all his sockpuppets. I'm just noting those that relate to my project.

But if HLI has dumped his original insider IDs, should we expect new ones? Without the glamor of "insider" info, the most HLI can do is pose as a researcher, just one more goat. That's a dull tactic. So he has indeed created two new "insider" IDs: ShareBlue Anon and Q Anon.

The ShareBlue Anon is kind of minor, and I already gave a brief critique of it here and here. However, as I said, the Q Anon project has been a huge mistake on the part of HLI and David Brock.

To be clear: I'd like people not to run after the breadcrumbs Q is dropping. Invest time in something else. But if you don't believe me, it's fine. The longer the Q Anon farce drags on, the worse it will be for HLI and Brock.

My main goal remains to expose the cover-up of the Glenn Beck whistleblower. Meanwhile, their goal back in 2014 was to maintain the cover-up. But that was several versions back, before Pizzagate or Trump being elected; now it's different. They've had a tough 18 months, with crisis after crisis, and they have lost track of the plot. With the Q Anon LARP, they are trying to "win" in ways that aren't worth winning. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

First, here are two things HLI is doing right.

1. Avoiding his old material. Before, each "insider" reinforced the others. Senate Anon would say that "Mike Pence is a traitor" or "keep digging on Racine," backing up Tory Smith or WIC. But now he's talking about all-new subjects like military tribunals or Barack Obama's travel plans.

2. Being more careful about getting caught in a lie. Q's new schtick of putting everything in a question, or code, is not as interesting as HLI's long AMAs where he would talk about space elevators and Plato and whatever the hell he liked. As several people have observed, he's doing cold readings now. That throws the burden on the audience; people expend energy on imagining what he means. It's a relatively safe and proven method.

Something neither good nor bad is his trick of taking credit for other people's information. In his Nov 1 post Q said that Mueller is actually working for Trump. That helped him gain credibility, because it's true. But how do we know it's true? MegaAnon talked about Mueller being pardoned and working for Trump back on July 25, but we didn't get it from MegaAnon. He cited a tweet by Maggie Haberman of the New York Times. And she tweeted about Mueller being on Trump's side because Trump hinted it to her and two colleagues in a July 19th interview. Trump said he had "a wonderful meeting" with Mueller after Mueller became special counsel. So who told us? Trump did it himself.

So far as I can see, all of Q's valid info is of that kind: Borrowed from someone else. Now here are the two biggest things he's doing wrong:

1. Telling a more pro-Trump, optimistic, and short-term story than he's ever allowed himself before. As HLI, Senate Anon, "Tory Smith," or @Wisconsin_Is_Corrupt, he could tell a consistently downbeat story: Everyone in Washington has been blackmailed, Trump is either compromised or incompetent, this is just the way the system will always be. Now, faced with 4,300 sealed indictments and other genuine bad news, he's trying the opposite tack: He's promising big breakthroughs and change. This choice has already cost him credibility. At the start he predicted huge riots, martial law, a national crisis, starting November 4th. It didn't happen.

2. Letting the Q Anon story blow up into the normie media. Even Newsweek has written about him. http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-conspiracy-theory-trump-717398. This is truly bad planning on their part.

One big reason I'm sure that Brock and HLI have let this LARP run away with them, is because I've had messages that confirm this from HLI himself. During the past month, HLI has been puzzled by my silence. He has found excuses to contact me using several sockpuppets, as I noted above. The most revealing exchange was three weeks ago.

Back in November, HLI used @djklbd to run a complicated con where he claimed to have had someone break in to his apartment, look in his refrigerator, and give him a list of his various Reddit IDs. The goal was to frighten and discourage researchers. At the start of December, HLI used this same account to contact me and ask for information about himself. He wanted to know what I hadn't shared publicly, like HLI's name or address.

He didn't try very hard to be convincing, and I told him I thought it was a pathetic effort. I asked if he was high, and he admitted that he was. I didn't have anything else to say, but he sure did (Voat time shown):

5:24 I know your real name now

5:26 How aboit you leaves the fuck alone?

5:28 I'm a much better actor than you. Would you like to see? I have whole screenplay written.

5:29 Are you too scared to answer?

6:07 I advise you call me.

He doesn't know my name. What I infer from these messages, and another where he mentioned the "cult" of Q Anon that he has created, is that HLI has let his ego dictate strategy, rather than logic or the needs of the gang. Dropping WIC was sensible. Ceasing to talk about Racine and Paul Ryan limited the damage from my Boehner post. But rather than wind down a failed project, he launched this Q thing, even before he dropped WIC. Why? Because he's their phony insider guy, and he was about to run out of phony insider roles to play. Having a phony insider has become an end in itself, instead of a means to an end.

I had a public exchange with HLI a month ago where I hinted at what he was doing wrong, but he didn't catch on.

Brock and HLI actually made a similar mistake, when they set up the HLI identity on Voat, back in May. The goal then was for HLI to use his "insider" credibility to steer researchers (especially me) away from dangerous topics. That blew up in their faces because I knew what they were trying to do. But it would have been a bad idea even if I hadn't known. The phony insider is not an all-purpose tool. Using it to discourage research in general is realistic. Using it to steer research in a direction of your choosing is not. Too many things can go wrong.

The key error lies in HLI or Brock not asking why they should want to focus the attention of Pizzagaters on the Q LARP. They can use Q to spread all kinds of disinfo, yes. But betting so heavily on Q has transformed their original project. This isn't a long-term cover-up any more. It's just chaos, a daily hurricane of rumors, and it isn't sustainable.

So to answer your question, HLI, yes, you're a much better actor than me. You're brilliant! People see code words and secret ops everywhere. DOITQ!!! But what was the point? How will you dismount this tiger you are riding? Traffic on Voat is up, and the Q threads are getting epic view counts, over 4,000. How is that helping the cover-up? Newsweek wrote about you, which has to be good for your fragile pedosadist mercenary ego, but how is that helping the cover-up?

Merry Christmas to all the intrepid goats. I will have details about the relationship between the CIA and the Clinton gang next time.