#2766: Tracy Diaz

Some dingbat conspiracy theorist
interviewing Beanz at CPAC 2020

A.k.a. Tracy Beanz 

 

Tracy Diaz is a youtuber and conspiracy theorist who was, at least in part, responsible for helping the QAnon conspiracy gain a broader audience back in 2017: prior to the efforts of Diaz and 4chan moderators Pamphlet Anon (Coleman Rogers) and BaruchtheScribe (South African conspiracy theorist Paul Furber), 4chan was riddled with various anonymous “anon” posters claiming to be high-level political operatives, and QAnon seems to have been rather randomly selected among these for wider dissemination; Diaz, at the time a small-time YouTuber with a background as a wingnut talkshow hosts for Liberty Movement Radio and a former Ron Paul staffer, had already achieved moderate popularity (a few thousand views) for YouTube videos with conspiracy-theory-based analyses of WikiLeaks releases and Pizzagate nonsense, apparently realized that promoting QAnon could boost her popularity, and she launched her career with the video “/POL/- Q Clearance Anon - Is it #happening???”. That one was followed by multiple sequels in which Diaz, using the familiar technique of free association, would attempt to “decipher” Q’s “cryptic” messages. Together with Rogers and Furber, Diaz also established the Reddit community CBTS_Stream (“Calm Before The Storm”), where they reached a larger audience of conspiracy theorists, and from which their nonsense would begin – with substantial help from Russian accounts – to infect various other social media channels. Diaz was herself banned from various mainstream platforms like Patreon, Facebook and Twitter (later reinstated), but she continued to earn thousands of dollars from outlets like SubscribeStar.

 

Diaz’s work was apparently sufficiently well received by wingnut leaders for her to be invited as a speaker to the 2020 American Priority Conference, or “AMPFest”, at then-president Trump’s Trump National Doral Miami, together with similarly conspiracy-minded loons like leading anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, jr., leading wingnut conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza, US Representative Matt Gaetz, Simone Gold, Corey Lewandowski and Roger Stone. 

 

In addition to the standard QAnon ideas – centrally, that the world is really run by a cabal of pedophiles – Diaz has also promoted conspiracy theories about Covid-19, claiming that news media exaggerated the pandemic as part of a broader conspiracy to gain “power”: apparently mainstream media deliberately “stopped the economy” in order “to damage the president [Donald Trump] in his re-election. They want people scared.” That Covid also existed outside the US is irrelevant since it doesn’t support Diaz’s narrative. Much of her nonsense, including election fraud conspiracies, is pushed by the website UncoverDC, for which Diaz is editor-in-chief. Diaz is also on the board of directors for Michael Flynn’s organization America’s Future, one of the groups that paid for the Arizona Senate’s self-styled election audit in 2021, and she recently appeared as a talking head in Flynn’s autohagiographic conspiracy flick Flynn.

 

In fact, Diaz has denied that she has promoted QAnon conspiracies at all but instead has approached the topic as “an online journalist”, and she has threatened those who accurately describe her activities otherwise with legal action.

 

In April 2021, Diaz was elected as a Republican committeewoman in South Carolina, as part of a general push from QAnon proponents to seek public office. In 2022, her Twitter account was also reinstated, something she celebrated with a barrage of misinformation about the COVID vaccine and unsupported accusations of voter fraud, mostly stuff that had already been thoroughly debunked.

 

Diagnosis: All nonsense and misinformation, of course, but Diaz doesn’t care; that is, she generally doesn’t seem to consider truth, evidence or accuracy to be relevant for whether she should promote – or even believe ­– something. And given her audience, and that what she does care about is attention and recognition, she’s presumably right about that, unfortunately.