He's like a horror movie monster, though. He has been suspended dozens of times but always comes back afterwards. 7 day, 14 day, I think he got a month once.
He was the ringleader and the most prolific, but far from being the only one.
We can hope (probably in vain) that Ransomnote, the hostess of the thread, will take responsibility for what she's done here, and renounce her years-long misguided promotion of Q. That would be a fantastic start. She's been as vehement as Bagster, just not as crude.
The worst thing about the Q phenomena at Free Republic has been the coarsening it's had on the site. There is a whole group of them (Bagster's followers) who were just over-the-top rude and vile to anyone questioning their false idol.
Sadly they have not contained either their attacks on targeted individuals, nor their attack-dog style to the Q thread: it has acted like a virus and subtley spread across the site. You never heard people using abusive 4chan style language here before the growth of the Q thread. "Fag" this and that. Etc.
More than a few long time Freepers left Free Republic after being insulted and harassed by Bagster,s little gang.
JR and his team, as always have the tough job of balancing free speech by a dissident sub-group of conservatives, while trying to keep them from blowing up the whole of Free Republic.
Confining them to the single thread was an inspired tactic, at the time.
At this point though, as others have stated here, allowing the Q people to continue to peddle their discredited cultic beliefs here seems as weird as letting any other 4chan sub-cult, like the neo-Nazis or women-haters, to have a space here.
I'm keeping my fingers that the mods will soon decide that this sad chapter in Conservatism needs to come to an end, both here and in the wider conservative movement.
A lot of grifters made a lot of money peddling Q, they aren't going to fade away easily, despite the fact that the jig is up.
The worst thing about the Q phenomena at Free Republic has been the coarsening it’s had on the site.”
This is true; but, I do think we’ve been here before. Maybe not as extreme, but we’ve been here before methinks
While this was a noble exercise, unfortunately, the Q-Tips started wandering outside of that fence more and more each day...