A troubled QAnon follower who believes that former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are trying to have her killed booby-trapped her house with shotguns and pepper spray. She claimed her ex-husband was secretly filming child pornography on the Clintons’ behalf, and is now facing felony charges after being arrested last week.

The incident is the latest example of how QAnon, a conspiracy movement that its adherents repeatedly claim to be peaceful, can drive believers to commit violent, and often deadly, acts.

But the incident earlier this month could have been much worse. In a comment on her Facebook page on Tuesday night, the QAnon believer claimed that when police arrived at her home: “I had 20 guns on me.”

On March 9, a door-to-door salesman named Dylan Martin approached the front door of a house occupied by Bryan Hill and Tracy Jo Remington in Colorado. 

Martin, who works for a house painting company, didn’t notice the “no trespassing” sign just to the left of the steps leading up to the front porch, and walked straight into a tripwire the residents had set up.

Martin heard “a loud bang [and] saw a bright white flash of light,” according to an affidavit reviewed by VICE News. He “immediately felt disoriented with his vision being blurred and [causing] his ears to ring.”

A few houses away, Martin’s colleague Christoper Howard heard the bang and was certain it was a gunshot. Howard rushed to the house and checked Martin over. At that point, the garage door opened, and Hill shouted at the pair: “No trespassing.”

After the incident, Howard and Martin quickly left the area. But over the next few days, Martin’s hearing was still affected and he had a constant headache. He called the police to report the incident, and on March 14, officers visited the property and found the tripwire. They also found a shotgun-type device connected to the tripwire that used blanks to recreate the noise of a 12-gauge shotgun but without the projectiles, in a bush to the side of the path.

The officers, after speaking to people in the area, discovered that the residents of the house had told their neighbors not to let their kids play near the house, according to the charging documents.

The tripwire visible in front of the porch at the home of Tracy Jo Remington in Colorado. Credit: Douglas County Sheriff's Office

On March 15, a SWAT team executed a search warrant at the house and found a second device at the rear of the house that was also linked to a tripwire and contained pepper spray. Officers noted in the affidavit that public workers have the right to enter people’s backyards to complete their work and that the device was putting them in danger.

When detectives at the scene asked him about the trip wires, Hill called the booby traps “warning devices,” and said Remington was aware they were there.

Hill and Remington were both charged with six counts, including assault and conspiracy.  The pair were released on bail and are scheduled to appear in court next month, according to court records.

The shotgun-style device attached to the tripwire and hidden in the bushed in front of the home of Tracy Jo Remington in Colorado. Credit: Douglas County Sheriff's Office

When asked, police said they could not comment on why Remington and Hill had placed the devices on their property, citing an on-going investigation—but VICE News has found that Remington believed they were necessary to protect her against the enemies of the QAnon movement.

Remington remains active in the QAnon community and continues to make wild allegations about the Clintons, though her social media following is just a fraction of what it once was. However, dozens of her supporters have contributed to a crowdfunding campaign set up on her behalf, raising over $3,600 of its $60,000 target in just over 24 hours.

Remington’s belief in conspiracy theories began well before the QAnon conspiracy first emerged in late 2017.

In 2008, Remington shot at her then-husband, Gregory Remington, at their home in McMinnville, Oregon, because, she has claimed repeatedly in videos posted on social media, she said that he was creating child pornography. There is no evidence to back up these assertions.

She served 16 months in prison for the incident, but in recent years as the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies emerged, Remington’s claims took on a whole new life—especially when she added the claim that her former husband was working for the Clinton Foundation.

Her claims quickly became a focus of attention on the /qresearch/ board on 8chan in 2018, a message board that was the center of the QAnon universe. Believers spent a lot of time trying, and failing, to find any evidence to back up Remington’s claims.

“The Clinton Foundation Network is the largest child sex trafficking network in the entire world,” she claimed in a 2020 video posted on Twitter, echoing the widely held belief that Hillary Clinton was at the center of the global child sex trafficking conspiracy that QAnon was attempting to expose.

She even gave her former husband a nickname—“The Baby King”—which others in the QAnon community have continued to use in the years since. 

“McDonalds is connected to the Clintons, they chop up the bodies and put them into the sausage and hamburgers,” Remington claimed. “People are being cannibalized. Look it up.” She also claims children’s body parts were being used to make Jolly Rancher and Sour Patch candies.

In another 2020 video, she claimed that she has “almost been killed, threatened, stalked, harassed, followed” for speaking out about the Clintons, adding that “the Illuminati chased me down.”

Those unhinged videos propelled Remington to a certain level of fame within the conspiracy world, with an archived version of her Twitter account showing she had almost 14,000 followers. In recent years, she has become involved with other prominent figures in the QAnon world and the sovereign citizen movement.

She has worked withTimothy Charles Holmseth, a QAnon promoter who claims to work for a secretive government agency called the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force, which does not exist. Holmseth has been linked to efforts to kidnap children from child protective services.

In an affidavit she filed last year, Remington referenced the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force and once again claimed her ex-husband was making “child porn, baby porn and animal porn.”

Hill and Remington will appear in court next month, and in a post on Facebook on Tuesday night, Remington hinted that she may seek to use a sovereign citizen defense. “Sovereign Authority. Written Express TRUST who operates in Private Jurisdiction who has been violated on every level possible,” she wrote. “Thank you for all your help at this time…i need it IN JESUS CHRIST'S HOLY NAME I AM A US FEDERAL COURT WITNESS.”

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In a private group on Telegram, parents whose children are living with a range of disabilities including autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Down Syndrome cheer each other on and provide support when discussing daily struggles.

But the channel’s main function isn’t actually support: It’s to promote the use of veterinary ivermectin as a treatment—and in some cases a cure—for these disabilities. 

Hundreds of parents have turned to this conspiracy network, and are

recommending a drug to each other that experts have repeatedly said is designed only for large animals and is so concentrated that it can be toxic when ingested by humans. In the channel, parents even share stories about their children experiencing horrific side effects from the drug, including brain fog, severe headaches, nausea, muscle pain, and seizures—and are routinely dismissed by those running the channel, who claim it’s a normal part of the ‘healing’ process.

A review of the chat’s eight-month history reveals parents complaining that their children suffer from a wide variety of side effects after taking the ivermectin paste, including: vomiting, change in complexion, seizures, lethargy, hyperactivity, agitation, and headaches.

“Major brain fog today after splitting headache yesterday,” one user wrote last month. Another wrote: “I have been applying Ivermectin liquid to my granddaughter’s feet, belly button, and swabbing her ears for six weeks now. She complains of sporadic blurry vision and sometimes headaches.” 

“Bleeding or mucous or vomiting or diarrhea or acne or pealing or aches/pains or hot flashes & sweating are all good signs of clearing out your body,” another member wrote. “This is healing, keep going.”

The Telegram channel was established in July 2022 as an offshoot of the much larger pro-ivermectin group “Dirt Road Discussions,” which was set up in October 2021 by Danny Lemoi, who took veterinary ivermectin for almost a decade to, he said, treat Lyme disease. When ivermectin became hugely popular among anti-vaxxers as a treatment for COVID-19, Lemoi leveraged his experience with the drug. (There is no evidence to back up the claims that ivermectin formulated for humans or for animals is an effective treatment for COVID-19.) Lemoi died suddenly earlier this month at the age of 50 with what the admins of his channel described as a heart that had “nearly doubled in size.” 

A photo of ivermectin shared in the Learning to Fly channel. (Telegram)

Though Learning to Fly is exclusively focused on the use of ivermectin for children, Lemoi shared an ivermectin routine for kids in the Dirt Road Discussions group before he died as well, and many members of the group speak openly about giving their children veterinary ivermectin. 

The Learning to Fly channel, however, takes usage for children even further.

“It is for mom and dads with kids on the spectrum,” the founder of the channel wrote in a message describing the group last year. “My daughter is

30 yrs old with Asperger’s syndrome and my son is 28 yrs old with autism. We are all 3 on ivermectin and started mid February.”

In a pinned “Where to start” post, the channel admins give new members a guide about what to expect and how to begin giving their kids ivermectin by first applying a liquid form of ivermectin to the bottom of children’s feet. 

“Just get a dab on your finger and run it along the arch of their feet,” the instructions state. A week later, parents are told to start administering ivermectin paste internally.

The channel also provides advice on how to explain the ivermectin usage to children: 

“Best way to explain it is [the kids] have a cluster of parasites that are in a part of the brain that causes outbursts. When the parasites in that part of the brain get attacked [by ivermectin] the parasites panic and release their toxins as well as get active. Their death dance,” the channel guidelines state. “This will affect the kiddos and their behaviors.”

And when children experience side effects, the channel admins claim that it’s all because the ivermectin is driving out parasites. They call this “herxing,” which is a real term used to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease and a number of other illnesses.

“Herxing can be a big issue with our kids,” the channel admins wrote in a pinned message.  “They have so much overloading them already, herxing adds more. Remember things will get worse before they get better. They will have days [when] it looks like their behaviors are getting worse but it is only temporary. This is the herxing.”

“My daughter started having blurry vision on the ivermectin,” a member of the larger Dirt Road Discussions channel wrote. “She started with severe headaches alternating with stomach pain. Now her vision is very blurry. Any advice? She’s in the first grade. I don’t want her to miss out on all the learning that is so crucial at this age.”

In response, another parent wrote: “Press on through…It’s working.”

Members of the Learning to Fly channel believe that almost everything can be cured by taking ivermectin. 

“Some say Down’s syndrome and such can’t be healed, I don’t believe it,” the channel founder wrote in a post earlier this year. Her daughter is also an active member of the group, and when another member asked about the efficacy of ivermectin, the daughter wrote that “everything from inherited multiple generation blood sugar disorders or autoimmune conditions to Cohen and Autism have been cured or made notable progress so far.” 

Other parents have asked about a variety of diseases. “My youngest is 5 and was diagnosed with alopecia in January. It started right around Christmas time. Does anyone have any knowledge of ivermectin being beneficial for that?,” a user wrote last week.

In response, the channel founder wrote: “I haven’t heard anyone in here with it but I did find it on the list of things cured.”

Just before 7 am on March 3, Danny Lemoi posted an update in his hugely popular pro-ivermectin Telegram group, Dirt Road Discussions: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”

Hours later, Lemoi was dead.

For the last decade, Lemoi had taken a daily dose of veterinary ivermectin, a dewormer designed to be used on large animals like horses and cows. In 2021, as ivermectin became a popular alternative COVID-19 treatment among anti-vaxxers, he launched what became one of the largest Telegram channels dedicated to promotion the use of it, including instructions on how to administer ivermectin to children.

But despite Lemoi’s death, the administrators of his channel plan to continue pushing his misinformation—even as his followers share their own worrying possible side effects from taking ivermectin and some question the safety of the drug.

Lemoi, a heavy equipment operator who lived in Forster, Rhode Island, “passed away unexpectedly” on March 3, according to an online obituary post by his family last week. He was survived by his parents and brother. The obituary gave no details about the cause of his death.

In the Telegram channel, administrators broke the news of his death to his followers. “Though it was obvious that Danny had the biggest heart, it was unbeknownst to him that his heart was quite literally overworking and overgrowing beyond its capacity, nearly doubled in size from what it should have been,” the admins wrote, adding: “We understand that this is going to raise questions for those who were following him.”

The admins added that Lemoi had undergone testing on his heart last year, but the results had shown no cause for concern.

Lemoi began taking the version of ivermectin designed for animals on a daily basis in 2012, after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to a detailed account of his medical history he gave on a podcast last November. He said then that five months after first taking the drug, he quit all other treatments and believed ivermectin had “regenerated” his heart muscle.

During the pandemic, Ivermectin became hugely popular among anti-vaxxers, many of whom were taking and recommending the veterinary formulation of the drug, rather than the one designed for human use. While ivermectin for humans is used to treat serious illnesses like river blindness, it has repeatedly been shown to be an ineffective treatment for COVID-19.

And according to the Missouri Poison Center, ingesting large doses of ivermectin formulated for animals has a long list of side effects, including seizures, coma, lung issues, and heart problems. Veterinary ivermectin is not a cure or effective treatment for COVID, the FDA has repeatedly warned, and is highly concentrated because it is designed for large animals like horses and cows. “Such high doses can be highly toxic in humans,” the FDA cautions.

“Danny was fully convinced that his heart had regenerated after his incident with Lyme disease that almost ended in congestive heart failure,” the admins wrote, before claiming that “a family history of heart disease and chronic stress” were why his heart had ultimately become engorged. “All of his other organs were unremarkable,” the admins wrote. “And this was determined to be a death by unfortunate natural causes.”

The admins of Lemoi’s channel did not respond to VICE News’ questions about where they got their information about his death. Lemoi’s surviving family did not respond to VICE News' request for comment on the cause of his death.

But a review of Lemoi’s Telegram channels shows that many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.

“I’m 4 months now and all hell’s breaking loose, all pain has hit my waist down with sciatic, shin splints, restless leg syndrome, tight sore calves & it feels like some pain in the bones,” a member wrote on Friday.

Many of his followers who are taking his dosage recommendations, or “protocols,” for veterinary ivermectin are experiencing numerous known side effects of taking the drug.

Lemoi explained away the negative side effects of taking veterinary ivermectin by describing them as “herxing,” a real term to describe an adverse response that occurs in people who take antibiotics as a treatment for Lyme disease.

“My wife has been taking ivermectin for 3 months,” a member wrote Friday. “She is being treated for autoimmune hepatitis, thyroid, and vertebrae issues. She has had some serious HERXING. Today she has a migraine, vomiting and severe stomach pain. Does anyone have any ideas how to help, and are these HERXING symptoms?”

Some members of the group are taking ivermectin not only as a treatment against COVID, but as a cure-all for almost every disease—from cancer and depression, to autism and ovarian cysts—believing that every disease is caused by a parasite that is removed from the body by ivermectin, just as animals are given the drug to treat parasitic worms like tapeworm.

Lemoi also formulated an ivermectin regimen for children, and numerous members of the group reported that they were using it. This week alone one member wrote that she had established another group for “parents of children on the spectrum, cerebral palsy, pans/panda, downs etc.,” who are using the Lemoi’s recommended children’s dosage.

When some members of the group blamed Lemoi’s death on ivermectin, they were criticized in the Telegram channel; their fellow group members claimed they were spreading misinformation.

​​“No one can convince me that he died because of ivermectin,” one member wrote this week. “He ultimately died because of our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure.”

Despite Lemoi’s death, administrators said this week the Telegram channel would live on, and the group is attracting new members who continue to take ivermectin despite suffering serious side effects.

“I am very new to this… I’ve been on Bimectin paste for 20 days,” one new member wrote on Friday morning, explaining that he too was suffering from Lyme disease. “I have severe chest pain. Costochondritis symptoms. Air hunger, internal tremors, brain fog, headaches on the back of my head, anxiety, depression, doom and gloominess.”

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This might be the reason cassette players never went out of production:

It’s the magnetic head from this credit card reader:

Also, take a look at this video:

This, or this sort of thing, definitely appears possible. Here’s a similar explainer.

Since technologically, cassette tape and credit card magnetic strips are basically the same thing, they shared much of the same factory tooling. Here, in a really great article on the National Audio Company, is the story of a cassette tape manufacturing line adapted to credit card magnetic strips—and then back into a cassette tape line when NAC got into the actual tape-making business few years ago:

Stepp [president of NAC] estimates that tape hadn’t been made in the United States since 1984 at the latest, so they had to scour the country for a machine able to be reconditioned back into making tape. What they found somewhere out in Nevada was a 62-foot long, 20-ton tape-coating line originally built in the 1980s that had most recently been converted into a machine for making credit card strips. They had to haul it in “across the Great Plains during a blizzard” Stepp says, and then take it apart in pieces to move it up their antiquated freight elevators, breaking one in the process. The restoration and reconditioning process took over a year-and-a-half to undergo, mostly done by people Stepp enlisted from around the country who had retired from the industry decades ago.

That article also includes this bit. In other words, we came close to losing the ability to actually manufacture cassette tape at all:

“My son and I sat down together and we said we’ve got to either get out of business within three years or we’ve got to be making tape within three years. So being sort of the stubborn sort, we decided to make tape,” Stepp says. “If we hadn’t done it then it could have never been done. The equipment would have been gone and we could not have afforded to ever have it built again.”

And as far as I can tell, the tape head is basically identical between a cassette player (a cheap one, anyway) and a credit card reader. And those factory setups must either be the same or very similar. Here’s a Hungarian company (along with many Chinese companies) that makes heads for various devices.

Their website notes tape storage systems as one use for magnetic heads, which is, of course, another reason why the knowhow around tapes never fully disappeared. However, storage tape and the heads to read it are, I believe, more different from cassette tape/credit card strip heads than these are from each other. So if credit cards had moved to chips and contactless 10 or 15 years earlier, it’s possible that this particular branch of tape-related hardware would have died out.

I find these industrial/manufacturing stories so interesting. What we see, or don’t see, for sale in stores is just the final step in a long, complex story that often has little to do with retailing per se.

And companies like NAC are not just keeping old products in production; they’re keeping knowledge in circulation, embodying it. It’s weird, and good.

Related Reading:

We’re Still Making Car Cassette Players

The Shape of Metal

Mechanical Romance

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