Trump's got a plot to win himself re-election, sadly for him he's a moron and it won't work. Also Twitter plays Wack-A-Q and fails to win any tickets. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Hello everyone, Pogrom Politics here. | |
| Today we're going to be talking about Donald Trump's fiendishly clever plan to win re-election. | |
| And the ongoing battle between QAnon and Twitter, where QAnon is winning. | |
| First, a quick shout out. | |
| Someone else has donated to my Patreon, which I am incredibly appreciative of. | |
| And if you are interested in doing so, it's linked in my pinned tweet on Twitter. | |
| So help me out, get me out of the COVID mines that I'm currently working in. | |
| It sucks, but that's life when you are in the gaming industry. | |
| So to Stefan, thank you very much for tipping your dealers and taking care of me. | |
| Beyond that, we're on to the nuts and bolts of Donald Trump's brilliant plans to win re-election. | |
| I know, I get it. | |
| We all have post-traumatic stress disorder from 2016 and Trump winning in the first place. | |
| Trust me, I know. | |
| Come election night, if you shoved a lump of coal up my ass by the time midnight came around, you'd have a diamond. | |
| I'm going to be nervous. | |
| I'm going to be terrified. | |
| No matter how rational and logical I might be, I also understand that nothing is over until it's over. | |
| When you are in a hand of poker and you're all in and you're winning and only one card can make you lose, guess what? | |
| That one card comes out every now and then. | |
| You lose the hand you should have won. | |
| It's just the nature of the game. | |
| It's just something that happens. | |
| And that's what November 3rd is. | |
| It's it's actually running the board out and we might be way ahead but you gotta run that board out and you gotta see that you've won and then you can relax and you can like slink back in your chair and get ready to stack your chips. | |
| But I've been hearing uh all these different sort of like ways to be terrified of this election which I understand. | |
| I understand Why people are terrified? | |
| Because there's so much at stake. | |
| Because four more years of Trump is just devastating. | |
| And it would be inconceivable to a rational person to acknowledge that that would be something that could be sustainable, really. | |
| Because you have a total fucking moron. | |
| As president, who is being led around by the nose by Jared and Ivanka and Stephen Miller and anyone else who happens to orbit in his sphere of influence and gets to talk to him. | |
| And he doesn't know how to handle anything. | |
| They don't know how to handle anything. | |
| So we are effectively leaderless, except for the fact that we are funneling money to the rich and powerful. | |
| And they're waiting for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to die so they can pack the Supreme Court full of even more crazy bullshit. | |
| That's scary. | |
| It's really bad. | |
| But the thing is, is that really Trump is a moron and he doesn't have the wherewithal or skill To do the things that people are scared of. | |
| I have seen it on Twitter a bunch that like QAnon has turned apolitical people into Trump voters and that this was a reserve that had been untapped before. | |
| That in 2016 Trump didn't have the Q vote but now he does and that's gonna invalidate all the polls and prove that there is a silent majority waiting to re-elect Trump in a landslide. | |
| I even heard Jake Rakotansky be scared of this on the latest QAnon Anonymous podcast, and it's really, I mean, it's a great way to get yourself upset, but I think the ultimate example of QAnon's impotence at the ballot box is our good friend Jeff Sessions. | |
| He literally appealed to QAnon the night before his runoff against Tommy Tupperville. | |
| In Alabama, he went full-blown QAnon, just outright tweeted it out, was just like, hey QAnon, I'm your boy, vote Sessions. | |
| And in a Republican primary in Alabama, QAnon had no impact on the vote whatsoever. | |
| Sessions was demolished. | |
| And that's really what this comes down to, is that QAnon, for all of its impact on social media, for all of its ability to sort of obtain mind space when you're dealing with these kinds of things online, in reality the physical actual numbers of QAnon are not that vast. | |
| I think absolutely high end, there's probably a couple million people that buy into QAnon. | |
| Maybe, if that. | |
| And most of them were already on the Trump train. | |
| Most of them were already supporters of the president who just now support the president harder. | |
| Julian's Rum did a poll about this because he was just positive that Trump had, again, the untapped reserve of QAnon to call upon for his re-election campaign. | |
| And when the final voting came in for, like, what kind of a person were you? | |
| Did you vote for Trump in 2016 and you're going to vote for Trump in 2020? | |
| Or were you a non-voter who's now going to vote for Trump? | |
| Or did you vote third party and then vote for Trump? | |
| Or did you even vote for Hillary and now you're going to vote for Trump? | |
| And the end result of Julian's poll was that about 25% of people were people that had not voted for Trump previously. | |
| So 75% of the people that Julian was polling said they had voted for Trump in 2016 and were going to just vote again to re-elect him. | |
| So if you do the back of the cocktail napkin math there, Even at its most powerful numbers of 2 million. | |
| This would translate to 500,000 more votes for Trump nationwide across America that he didn't have previously and I would definitely venture to believe that over the last four years of incompetence that Trump has lost a half million votes in other places. | |
| So the QAnon vote coming up to try to shore up his ranks isn't that powerful or strong. | |
| So I'm not too worried about that. | |
| I'm not worried about QAnon being the secret weapon that gets Trump over the top in this election. | |
| Because if it existed, they would be telling the pollsters about it and it would be an overwhelming sign of their strength. | |
| Because QAnon lives only to talk about themselves and only to talk about how much they love Trump and support Trump. | |
| They would never, in a million years, think to themselves, we're going to lie to the pollsters about this. | |
| We're going to trick them into thinking we support Biden so we can hit them with a razzle-dazzle. | |
| And I've actually heard people say that. | |
| That, oh, right-wingers lie to pollsters. | |
| Oh, they do it all the time. | |
| They sow disinformation. | |
| And this is stupid and pointless and incredibly counterproductive. | |
| There was the poll that came out that had Biden up 56-44 over Trump. | |
| That's a 12 point gap. | |
| Imagine if Biden was up 12 nationally up until election day and that this was actually some sort of right wing trick. | |
| Where we secretly tell the pollsters we're voting Biden, but we're really voting Trump. | |
| And all that kind of stuff. | |
| The thing is, is that when you overwhelmingly show Biden as the winner, you demoralize your own side. | |
| You make your own side depressed and miserable. | |
| And people on that side who are down ballot, they abandon Trump. | |
| Or they distance themselves from Trump and they try to salvage themselves because they see the same polls everybody else sees. | |
| And... | |
| On the other side of the equation, you create a bandwagon effect where people like backing a winner. | |
| They like voting for the person who wins so they can feel like they had a part of the victory. | |
| Yeah, I voted for President Biden. | |
| Fucking love that guy. | |
| And the only reason why they did it was because it's a bandwagon. | |
| It was a cool thing to do. | |
| All their friends are voting for Biden. | |
| Everyone on the television says Biden's gonna win. | |
| I'll put him over the top. | |
| I'm gonna put my shoulder into it and give Biden my vote. | |
| So it's insane to believe that this is some sort of mass right-wing conspiracy to rejigger the polls and set everybody up for the trap. | |
| They don't want that. | |
| I mean, QAnon would kill for Trump to be winning in the polls right now. | |
| They'd be whipping their dicks out and slapping us in the face with them like you read about. | |
| Oh yeah, Trump dominating! | |
| How you like that, motherfucker? | |
| Boom! | |
| Q sent me! | |
| I mean, they'd love it. | |
| They would love it, which is why they... | |
| hate that Trump is losing in the polls, so they have to make up bullshit reasons for why he's really not losing, because they can't abide by weakness. | |
| The God Emperor cannot fail. | |
| The God Emperor cannot be defeated. | |
| And it's absurd. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| So, you have all of that. | |
| You have the polling issue. | |
| You have the QAnon as a secret reserve issue. | |
| Then you have the post office. | |
| Now the post office is bullshit. | |
| Like what Trump is doing is obviously like terrible and bad and I think it's alienating people. | |
| I think it will cost him votes by making people's mail service ineffective and crummy. | |
| And I think that the most important thing to know about that beyond the fact that he's like, oh he's trying to sabotage the election by screwing with vote by mail. | |
| Pennsylvania, the governor already stepped in and said that they will pay the postage on all the envelopes that have ballots in them. | |
| People can fight back. | |
| There can be resistance to this. | |
| There can be ways and means by which to mitigate the damage. | |
| There are lock boxes where you can drop off your vote or you can drop your vote off with your local board of electors. | |
| There's ways to do this to bypass the postal system and get your vote in. | |
| And if the postal system is like just totally hopelessly corrupted you can vote in person and I mean I live in Massachusetts. | |
| I'm gonna be in and out in like five minutes on my voting. | |
| I fully acknowledge that I have this massive privilege because I live in a blue state that values democracy and we have lots of polling places and now we have delicious amounts of early voting which is awesome! | |
| But beyond all that I would gladly wait in line for 10 hours to vote against Trump. | |
| I would crawl across broken glass to vote against this motherfucker. | |
| And I feel like a lot of people feel that way. | |
| And if you have to do this, if you have to spend the day to vote against this guy, I think people will do it. | |
| And I think people know to do it. | |
| Everyone was outraged when Wisconsin was made to vote in person on election day in the primaries in spite of COVID and there was still massive turnout by the Democrats and they won the big Supreme Court In Wisconsin's seat, the landslide victory for the Democrat and people thought that that was the thing that the Republicans were trying to swindle. | |
| They were trying to keep Democrats from voting or scare them off with COVID so that they would win this election and keep their large majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. | |
| And instead they were blown out of the water and now they only have a 4-3 majority. | |
| So I think that this is The post office being rigged. | |
| They've told us they're doing it. | |
| So it's out there. | |
| People know about it and people will come up with ways around it. | |
| Be it dropping off your vote at a lockbox or the or election officials offices, whatever. | |
| There'll be ways around it. | |
| There'll be ways to handle this where they will not be able to deny you your vote in this situation. | |
| And Trump himself He's been talking about the corruption of vote-by-mail for forever. | |
| Suddenly got the message from his staff, yo boss, you're fucking pissing in your own pool, idiot. | |
| We need the old people in Florida that want to vote for you to trust in vote-by-mail because if they don't believe in it, they might not vote at all and we need them voting to give you any chance of winning Florida and thus the election. | |
| So Trump just came out and said, you know what's great? | |
| Vote-by-mail in Florida. | |
| Vote-by-mail in Florida is fucking incredible and I recommend you do it. | |
| And that's totally how little thought he has in any of this. | |
| This is how totally inept he is. | |
| He just pivots and does a 180. | |
| He gets word from his staff that, well, we need vote-by-mail in Florida or we're going to lose bad. | |
| So he's like, oh yeah, yeah, it's great there, but I'm going to sue Nevada to not allow vote by mail. | |
| Nevada is awesome. | |
| I voted there in the elections that I was allowed to when I was a resident, which meant that I got to vote for Obama twice in Nevada. | |
| And I early voted both times, and it was quick and painless. | |
| Just in, out, beep, boop, done. | |
| And I did have to use an evil touchscreen voting machine, but the evil touchscreen voting machine printed out a paper receipt that I could visibly look at and acknowledge as being accurate before I left. | |
| So there was a paper trail. | |
| There was a paper trail that could be used to document all of the votes that I cast on that ballot. | |
| Nevada, on top of their game, good early voting, good system of voting, quick and painless. | |
| It took me like five minutes to vote. | |
| And I've mentioned this before, but they had voter ID. | |
| The voter ID was the last four of my social. | |
| I didn't have to show them anything physical. | |
| I didn't have to do anything. | |
| They were just like, what are the last four of your social? | |
| I told them, they looked it up, and they said, go get them, Mike. | |
| Go cast some votes. | |
| So there are ways to do voter ID without having to require someone to have a driver's license or other documentation that they have to pay for. | |
| You could do date of birth. | |
| You could do last four social. | |
| You could do all kinds. | |
| You could ask for address. | |
| There's all kinds of ways you can verify someone's identity without requiring actual physical stuff that costs money. | |
| And Nevada knocked it out of the park. | |
| 10 out of 10 would vote Nevada again. | |
| So yeah. | |
| So I'm... While the post office thing is troubling, it's not the end of the world. | |
| On top of that, they're trying to run Kanye West as a spoiler and it's obvious what they're doing. | |
| All of Kanye's ridiculous petitions to states to get on the ballot are that. | |
| They are ridiculous. | |
| It's been an absolute clown fiesta of just Kanye showing up with not nearly enough signatures to pass scrutiny. | |
| Republicans are very obviously helping him. | |
| It is the most unbelievably cynical and stupid move in the world where they're just like, Kanye's black and black people vote for Democrats. | |
| Maybe we'll get some black people to vote for the black guy. | |
| And totally ignoring the fact that Kanye has acted like a lunatic Trump supporter for years on end and it's very obvious what he's doing. | |
| And I don't think he's going to get on the ballot in Wisconsin from what I read about his signatures He probably didn't even have enough to make the ballot. | |
| And even if he did, the immediate challenge that will happen followed by the exorbitant number of signatures that get struck down will be incredible. | |
| The thing is that when you file one of these petitions, when you file to run, you have to have your signatures hold up to challenges. | |
| And a lot of times, even a good signature won't get struck down due to some sort of problem with it. | |
| So you always have to pad your total. | |
| If you need 5,000 signatures to make it on a ballot, you should probably bring like 8,000 signatures. | |
| Just to have overwhelming numbers of signatures. | |
| So that if someone does file a challenge, and they strike down a quarter of your signatures, you still have enough to get over the hump and get on the ballot. | |
| So from all accounts, Kanye has not done this and I just think that it is really indicative of how desperate and hopeless they are that this is what they're doing. | |
| They're devoting time and energy to trying to get Kanye on the ballot in a few swing states And it's such an obvious troll because he's not going to be on the ballot in the vast majority of states. | |
| They're just trying to get him on the ballot now in Wisconsin and Ohio and that's like it. | |
| So like even if You had this disease minded person who was voting for Kanye West to be president. | |
| They would know that Kanye West could not win enough electoral votes to become president because he's not on the ballot in nearly enough states. | |
| It just wouldn't work out. | |
| So it's really, really cynical and obvious and stupid. | |
| And this is what they're doing. | |
| This is what they're wasting their time on. | |
| Telling us that vote-by-mail sucks than telling us that vote-by-mail is good in Florida. | |
| Trying to get Kanye West on the ballot because they think that might help. | |
| Trying to destroy the Postal Service and doing it very overtly and obviously in such a way that we can sidestep it. | |
| I mean, they don't have real plans because they are morons. | |
| They are people who were in over their heads the whole time And they only won the last election because much smarter people were able to barely get them over the finish line in the most ridiculous series of events possible. | |
| And now we've had four years of this idiot as president and no one likes him. | |
| I mean, keep in mind, people are always like, oh, he's only going to lose because of this pandemic and this and this and this and all the mistakes he made. | |
| He was down 10 to Biden in national polls before COVID hit. | |
| He made the phone call to Ukraine about digging up dirt on Biden because he saw the Fox News poll that said he was down 10 to Biden. | |
| And he was just like, fuck, I'm getting my ass kicked by this guy. | |
| I gotta do something to knock Joe Biden down a peg or two. | |
| So he calls up the Ukraine. | |
| He's like, hey, Ukraine, tell the world you're investigating Biden for corruption. | |
| And if you don't, I won't give you the stuff I promised we would give you. | |
| But if you do, you'll get your stuff. | |
| So yes, I'm abusing the power of the presidency to try to help myself win a re-election. | |
| Hope that isn't illegal or anything. | |
| Hope I don't get impeached over it. | |
| So, I mean... | |
| This has been the way it always was. | |
| This is why we had everyone bigger than Dogcatcher and Topeka declare for the Democratic nomination for president, because if you were the Democratic nominee, you were going to win the popular vote most likely. | |
| It was almost, I think that it would be incredibly unlikely for the Democrat to not win the popular vote. | |
| And if you're going to win the popular vote, then all you have to do is have the right things break in the right states and you're the president. | |
| I mean, Mayor Pete was polling ahead of Trump. | |
| We could have had President Buttigieg, which is something no one would have said in 2019, except for really hardcore fans of Mayor Pete. | |
| But that's why he ran, because if Pete Mania ran wild and he was the nominee, he would probably be up on Trump. | |
| Not as much as Biden, but he'd be up. | |
| And we would be learning about Mayor Pete. | |
| Potentially our first gay president with our first dude. | |
| Wouldn't that be interesting? | |
| I mean, all of that kind of stuff. | |
| It was out there. | |
| It was a possibility. | |
| So... I mean... Work. | |
| Give money if you can. | |
| Give time if you can. | |
| At the very absolute least, vote. | |
| Please vote. | |
| Please register people to vote if you can. | |
| Put in the work that you can to do the work that you can to make sure that Trump loses on November 3rd, but... | |
| Don't freak out about this. | |
| I mean, it doesn't help anyone. | |
| There's no benefit to being upset or outraged or worried about anything. | |
| Just do what you can and control what you can. | |
| And that's really it in a nutshell. | |
| Just doing that. | |
| And again, rational brain, everything logical and coherent in this world. | |
| Trump's gonna get killed. | |
| I mean, we're now going to be hitting this weekend, and this is going to be the second weekend in a row where everyone who was getting their unemployment bump from the increased unemployment insurance, this is going to be their second straight week of not getting it. | |
| This is going to be their second straight week of getting whatever thin gruel their states give them, without the 600. | |
| And there's going to be the evictions. | |
| And the Republicans are going to dither on this, because they just can't govern. | |
| And then on top of that, you're going to have all these children going to school and getting sick and spreading it because we can't, we have not controlled COVID and we can't control COVID with this moron running the country and leading this anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-everything agenda of his. | |
| So the schools being open is going to be at this in a month. | |
| Just think, if we don't get a bill in a month for more unemployment insurance, more help for people, the damage that's going to do. | |
| It's already going to be bad because they can't just turn the money spigot back on. | |
| They just can't throw the money out and we're going to get it. | |
| There'll be a backfill. | |
| Imagine having to wait two or three weeks before that extra pile of money finally comes in. | |
| It's going to be, you're going to have to find understanding landlords are going to wait for you to have that money. | |
| You're going to have to have, and you're not going to be able to pay any of your other bills. | |
| So The Republicans are just absolutely working as hard as humanly possible to show America that they cannot govern, they don't know what they're doing, and they're a bunch of gutted fucking nihilists. | |
| And they're gonna kill a bunch of children and a bunch of people's families, and you're gonna have a bunch of old teachers dying. | |
| and that when a teacher dies that hurts a lot of people because hundreds and hundreds of people remember that teacher oh i had mrs collins in fifth grade she was great oh i had mr stevens in in the in junior high in in one of my junior year highs actually helped me get that shit i mean just that's a lincoln project ad just waiting to happen just taking like Teachers in swing states who die of COVID and just airing their grieving former students or current students or anyone just it's all there. | |
| I mean Trump is losing right now and he is just setting up to just drop the bottom just he's just he's like a cartoon character just sawing a circle around himself so he can just fall through the floor into the basement. | |
| That's really what's happening and I just Really? | |
| It's gonna be really ugly. | |
| I really think the Republicans are going to get destroyed in the most unimaginable way because they don't care. | |
| They're dumb nihilists who look at what's happening and they say to themselves, yeah, this sucks, but what does it really matter to me in the long run? | |
| Because in the long run, I'll become a lobbyist, or maybe my seat is so gerrymandered, or I'm in such a red state that they won't throw me out on my ass. | |
| But, whatever. | |
| Even if they throw me out, I'll just become a lobbyist. | |
| And the Republican Party itself, well, once Biden gets in, we'll create a new Tea Party, and in 2022 we'll come close to winning the House, or win the House, or maybe we'll win the Senate. | |
| In 2024, maybe Biden wins reelection. | |
| Maybe we can catch him if the economy is still bad, but whatever. | |
| But the American people, they forgive us. | |
| We've never been out of power for more than eight years. | |
| We had eight years of really solid prosperity under Bill Clinton, and we managed to con America into electing George W. Bush, who was a moron to be president. | |
| And then after he fucked things up for eight years and got reelected, Obama came in and cleaned up his mess. | |
| And we rewarded Obama by electing Donald Trump to fuck him up and to try to destroy his legacy. | |
| So they don't care. | |
| They look at this in the longterm and they're just like, you know what? | |
| Even if Trump goes down here and even if we do unimaginable damage, By 2028, we'll have Fox News cranking, we'll have whatever we need going, going for us. | |
| Who are the Democrats going to nominate in 2028? | |
| I mean, it'll be Biden's Vice President, most likely, as one candidate, but you know who else will probably be running in 2028? | |
| Everything stays true to form. | |
| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and oh socialist lady, ooh misogyny and socialism all rolled up in the one. | |
| Oh, they'd love to run against AOC. | |
| I mean, I think she'd be, she'd have a chance to win, but I can totally see her being someone that would have the massive headwind of crippling misogyny and socialism going against her. | |
| So that'd be, that'd be fun in that sense. | |
| And you've got so many dumb white stiffs just waiting to take that spot. | |
| You've got Howley. | |
| You've got Cotton. | |
| You've got... Michael Flynn. | |
| You just have all these people. | |
| And then you can... And then Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio can come in and give it a shot again. | |
| Maybe Rand Paul will kick that tire. | |
| Who knows? | |
| But I mean, you... | |
| We're going to be so far removed from where we are right now, and you'll just have the American people in their standard kind of dithering being like, well, we gave the Democrats eight years. | |
| What's the harm in letting the Republicans have the steering wheel for a little while? | |
| Who knows? | |
| Let's give it a try. | |
| So, I mean, there's no Like, in a way, there's no stakes for the Republicans. | |
| Because they're the alternative, and they just believe that it's inevitable that they'll get power some way, shape, or form. | |
| They have the blessing of the rich, and they have enough dumb racists in America that will vote for them, so... Hey, Trump loses, it sucks, but... | |
| Being the opposition party for a few years is no big deal and we'll be back in power sooner rather than later because that's the nature of America. | |
| That's the nature of the Republican Party. | |
| So I just don't think that there's really that big of a concern if they have to take an L here because It never hurts them in the long run. | |
| It hasn't punished them in any way, shape, or form. | |
| It really matters. | |
| The Republican Party hasn't been discredited and destroyed the way it needs to have been. | |
| But maybe that'll happen this time. | |
| Hopefully it will. | |
| But until it does, they're not going to change how they operate. | |
| We'll be glad to make you homeless and make your kids go to schools filled with COVID and get them sick and have them come home and get you sick, because you'll get over that COVID in eight years and you'll elect Tom Cotton president because he's going to make America safe or whatever his bullshit slogan is going to be. | |
| Hey, that's politics, buddy. | |
| Nice, cynical, absolutely amoral politics. | |
| And on to our second story. | |
| You got QAnon fighting Twitter. | |
| Twitter sucks at this. | |
| They just suck. | |
| And QAnon's getting even more aggressive and brazen. | |
| Pragmatic posted a thing where they're like, here's how you abandon me, idiots! | |
| They're just completely, totally uncaring about this. | |
| This is, to them, what going to jail is for people in the mob. | |
| It's just the price of doing business. | |
| You're just going to catch a few years sooner or later for doing something. | |
| So you just shut up, you don't rat anybody out, you get your five-year sentence, and you get out in a couple years for good behavior because you've bought off somebody on the parole board. | |
| And that's how it is. | |
| So getting your account nuked is no big deal. | |
| You just immediately make a new account. | |
| You immediately tell everybody, hey, it's me. | |
| And then all the grifters who help each other out tell everybody to re-follow you. | |
| That you lost your account to Twitter being mean and making you feel sad. | |
| And bam! | |
| You get your audience back. | |
| You go right back to where you were. | |
| And the fact that Twitter does not do anything to stop these follow chains that literally are designed to circumvent bans is ridiculous and the fact that these people don't get banned on site for their new accounts where they're just openly saying what they're doing and this is why Twitter needs a ban evasion option for a reason why you're flagging a account or a reason why you're flagging a tweet | |
| Because this is a real thing that really happens and they're not being subtle about it. | |
| They're not trying to trick anybody. | |
| They're just outright saying they're band evading. | |
| And if saying that you're ban evading and obviously doing so would get you immediately banned, if doing that would get your account pulled in 24 hours, they would have to resort to different tactics. | |
| They would have to become more subtle. | |
| It would be harder for them to rebuild their audience because this kind of bullshit would not fly or be tolerated. | |
| But all Twitter wants to do is just ban the real accounts of these people and let them make their burners and then let them rebuild their audiences. | |
| And then Twitter can go to the press and be like, we took down all these big QAnon promoters! | |
| Look at this list! | |
| Look at the scalps we collected! | |
| And guess what? | |
| You're literally killing a video game character and the video game character just respawns. | |
| You're not doing any actual damage. | |
| You are not removing these people from the social media platform. | |
| Period. | |
| It's a joke. | |
| People should know it and call it out. | |
| This should not be a PR stunt that works. | |
| It should be a PR stunt that fails, and Twitter should be ashamed of themselves for what they've done. | |
| So, that's my little two cents about that. | |
| On to ye olde questions. | |
| Troy Francis says, what's the hierarchy of conspiracy theories right now? | |
| I'm assuming QAnon is at the top, but what else is going on out there? | |
| Is the New World Order Illuminati still a big deal and do some of these guys disavow Q? | |
| Can you speak on the broader conspiracy ecosystem? | |
| There are anti-Q Illuminati New World Order people. | |
| My good friend A Call for an Uprising is definitely one of them. | |
| Being anti-Q pro Illuminati New World Order is kind of tough in a way because you're literally saying the same shit only in your telling of the tale you're just lumping in Q with the Illuminati New World Order. | |
| You're just saying oh yeah by the way Q is also Illuminati. | |
| Q is also part of the NWO which The problem is that it's just depressing. | |
| The rally that the QAnon Anonymous podcast went to, you have all these people who are so cheerful and hopeful and they're kind of inspired and they want to save the kids and it's all that kind of like happy stuff. | |
| And a lot of that comes from the fact that QAnon promotes this idea that they are going to fix things. | |
| That these children are going to be saved by Q and that you are helping promote the truth that will lead to the salvation of these children. | |
| Whereas when you believe in the New World Order you're just totally fucked. | |
| There's nothing you can do. | |
| If you ever broadcast the truth, a Cabal Death Squad will arrive at your door and can basically offer you the choice of surrendering to the New World Order or be summarily executed. | |
| It's grim. | |
| It's really, really depressing. | |
| So, once you understand that The New World Order stuff is so bleak. | |
| You're never going to get 200 people to show up at a rally for the New World Order stuff because they would just think that a New World Order death squad would murder all of them. | |
| So the happy, cheerful, cute stuff. | |
| To save the kids! | |
| We're changing the world! | |
| We're leading the revolution that's gonna make everything better! | |
| All of that happy horse shit really is what makes QAnon so much more popular and more mainstream than the rest of it. | |
| Because optimism sells. | |
| And that's the thing, that's really the thing, is that when you look at the surface level QAnon stuff, it's drain the swamp, it's save the children, it's fight corruption. | |
| And everyone wants to do those things. | |
| Those things are good. | |
| Those things are positive. | |
| And then you find out a little while later that it's just like, oh man. | |
| Fuck this stuff's terrible. | |
| It's just awful. | |
| So yeah QAnon is definitely the top dog but again when Trump loses in November then it's going to get really interesting because the hope aspect will go away and you'll now just be left with the new world order. | |
| So that'll be tons of crumminess for those involved. | |
| And finally, Kaiju, that's actually how they say their name on Twitter, so please don't yell at me, | |
| says, with Facebook banhammering one of the larger QAnon groups today, | |
| do you think this is a sign of things to come, or is it an abnath- abnormality? | |
| Eugh, I am so tired and punchy. | |
| I really, again, it really doesn't depend on nuking the actual group, | |
| because doing that is like the first step, but it is meaningless. | |
| It is like landing a soft jab The only thing that matters now is what are your follow-up punches. | |
| Do you give them a hard hook to the ribs and then hit them with an uppercut to the chin and really knock them down? | |
| Or do you just flick that little jab out there and be like, ooh, I took away your group. | |
| And then the group reformats with a slightly different name. | |
| And then Facebook just goes, yep, look at what we did. | |
| Victory is ours. | |
| Man, we sure took care of those guys. | |
| So, I mean, it really is that. | |
| It's just a question of what's the follow-through? | |
| What's the actual effort that Facebook is going to put into this? | |
| Because if they don't put much effort into it, then it's going to end up being the exact same thing as Twitter where it's all just a bunch of PR bullshit and it doesn't amount to a goddamn hill of beans. | |
| So we will see. | |
| Time will tell on Facebook. | |
| But given Twitter's less-than-sparkling results, not too hopeful. | |
| Just not very hopeful on this. | |
| So that will be ye olde podcast for this Thursday evening. | |
| I may be getting out of work early sometime this weekend. | |
| Friday, maybe Saturday. | |
| And if I do, I might jump on Twitch with a little heads-up warning for a few hours and play some Catan, maybe some Secret Hitler. | |
| Maybe I'll just get my head kicked in some chess. | |
| I'll do something. | |
| I will do something to try to entertain the masses, as it were, via the powers of gaming. | |
| So I'll do that. | |
| I'll have a podcast on Sunday. | |
| Hope you're all safe. | |
| Hope you're all having as good a time as you can in the hell world. |