Adventures In HellwQrld Episode #68: Maxwell Conviction and more with Shark and Reverend Derek
After an Adventure through HellwQrld to get this podcast uploaded it's finally here. Mike hangs out with Shark and Rev. Derek to talk about the Maxwell conviction, Epstein's death and the conspiracy theories around it, and how are media isn't likely to save us from Republicans becoming more and more insane. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Poker and Politics, and welcome to another episode of Adventures in Hellworld.
This week, I am joined by R.N.
Nurse Shark.
Hello!
There you are!
You exist!
I do exist!
That was terrifying!
I'm here!
You know sharks like to keep it quiet till they attack.
This is true!
Given what's been going on behind the scenes, a little peek behind the curtains for our audience, getting to the moment where we hit the record button has been, quote-unquote, an adventure in Hellworld.
It's been a messing-chumming of the waters.
Yeah.
And I'm also joined by Reverend Derek.
Hello!
So, yes, El and Sarge are out cavorting about America in the midst of our Omicron surge and all that fun stuff.
So I hope everything goes well and the best for them.
But now we have our guest host here.
So I'm going to give the floor first to RN Nurse Shark.
So tell us about yourself.
What's going on in your deck of the woods?
So hi, I am a nurse that's operating in the greater Philadelphia area.
I've been a nurse for quite some time.
I'm not going to tell you super how long because that's going to make me seem super old, but at the same time I've got a couple decades under my belt.
I've practiced in psychiatry and in oncology and in public health and I'm also someone who has experience with having COVID and with having long COVID.
So that's one of the things that Mike and I have talked about just personally and something that like I could speak of of issues that are kind of hitting us today.
Well, I'm sorry that you have a first-hand experience of long COVID that's really not great, but I'm glad that you're up for talking about that.
And also, so Derek, if my listeners haven't heard from the interview I did with you previously, reintroduce yourself to the crowd, as it were.
Yeah, I am Vicar Derek Kabilis.
I'm a United Methodist preacher out here in Uniontown, Ohio.
I run a podcast called Crossover Q, where I try to confront the lies of the QAnon conspiracy, specifically from a Christian perspective.
As your listeners know, a lot of this stuff comes from Christians.
A lot of it is deeply ingrained within evangelical Christian culture.
And so we are combating it, hopefully in Christianity.
Now, I have not posted for quite a while now.
I've been taking a little break just because, Mike, as I'm sure you know, the QAnon world is an awful dark place to spend your time.
And it was starting to get to me a little bit, man.
Just the The negativity and dysfunction of it all, it starts to warp your brain a little bit.
Oh yeah.
I know that I'm, I'm someone who just kind of, uh, I can never in a way kind of like immerse myself into this stuff enough.
I'm always someone who, uh, just, I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
I don't know why I enjoy dealing with this kind of stuff as much as I do, but.
Well, you know, for me, it was like I was just, I found myself being angry all the time about this stuff and getting angrier and angrier.
And then, you know, a lot of folks call me or email me because they want help with friends or a family member.
And it's hard to give that to them when you're so frustrated, right?
Because they're frustrated, and you're frustrated, and it... Oh gosh, I just needed a break?
Oh yeah, I can totally understand that.
I can totally understand how it is when you are...
I definitely can see the way you would feel being someone in the Christian Church, being someone who you've made it your life's work to proselytize Christianity, explain the teachings of Jesus, all that work.
And then you see what are basically con men coming in with this just nonsense version of your faith, trying to Poach people from what is a mainstream traditional and generally positive religion and to put those people into this bleak, dark, nightmare world that they claim has a connection to Christianity, which in a lot of ways it doesn't.
Absolutely.
And you know, a lot of it, a lot of the frustration for me Is come from seeing the way some of these things, which we've been talking about for a long time, the anti-science bent that's in a lot of churches and, you know, arguing against evolution and stuff like that.
Anti-vax stuff is big in the evangelical world.
And seeing all of that come to the fore in this huge way.
And it was just like it was preparing people this whole time.
To be sucked in by QAnon.
It's really frustrating that the credibility of Christianity is being used as a way to make QAnon more popular and more relevant to those people.
I see so many people like Pragmatic, Pepulized Matter, and all those folks.
Like, when Trump doesn't work for them, when Q doesn't work for them, they're like, trust in God, trust in faith, trust in religion, trust in Jesus.
Let's go that way with it, because that'll make this all work better.
Because that's a way to get people to stick with what we're doing and to, as they would say, trust the plan.
Yeah, and it sucks because it gives the rest of us a bad name.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, yeah, it ties Christianity to QAnon, which is something I don't think you guys really want.
Things I find saddest about kind of this Christianity and QAnon meeting in the middle is just kind of the, sorry to use this word, but the bastardization of what is supposed to be the salvation story in Christianity into now a Trump's going to save us through violent means when it was supposed to be about a humble savior giving up his life.
And so that is just so very not getting the point at all and sad.
It actually makes me mourn for people more than makes me upset or disgusted or think they're stupid or something like that.
I'm sad for them.
I've been posting about this a little bit, but like Praying Medic's been like really running this thing about the penny sticking.
Can you explain what that even is to me?
I'm not even familiar with this.
Okay, so what the penny sticking is, is basically you take an object and you find a wall surface that will allow static electricity to attach that object to the wall.
And you just do that trick, and you freak people out with it.
And you have a kid being like, hey, try to stick a penny to this wall.
And they can't do it.
They can't do it because obviously they're a kid.
They don't know how static electricity works.
And then you come in.
And before you do the trick, you pray to God.
You talk to Jesus to imbue you with the Holy Spirit to give a sign.
And then you do the static electricity trick.
You stick the penny to the wall.
And then the kid's like, no way!
And then after you do that, then you get the kid to pray and then you show them the trick and then they do it after they've prayed.
And now they've been imbued with the power of God and they have the penny sticking ability.
And you're just, you're just trying to brainwash kids through parlor tricks.
And it's really, it's incredibly insulting.
It's enraging.
And it's a lost opportunity, actually.
I mean, if you're coming from the perspective of you want to be a Christian parent, it's a lost opportunity because you could actually teach your child, science is one of the ways that God's trying to communicate to you.
So let me teach you about the science of this.
And you can have wonderment everywhere because there's curiosity to have about the natural world everywhere.
Yeah, you could show a natural wonder of God through this.
I mean, this is just the crazy world that God has created for us, where this is the cool stuff that happens when you do this to a penny in a door.
It sticks!
Isn't this crazy?
Isn't this kind of knowledge wacky and wild and the sort of thing that God, like, shows us through his infinite wisdom?
But instead it's just like, hey kid, you can't stick pennies to a door because you don't believe in Jesus.
What did Praying Medic say about it?
I didn't even see that.
He was just saying that this is a great way to convert children, to like get them to believe.
To me it's just, it's so, if I was deeply religious, if I was really Christian, it'd be so offensive to me to being like, You know, you couldn't teach kids about the Sermon on the Mount, or that which you do to the least of us you do to me, to talk about Jesus' belief of taking care of your fellow man, and the sacrifice for the removal of original sin, and all that good stuff.
You have so many things you could actually use to help educate someone in what Christianity is all about, and instead you're just like, Pick a card, any card.
Okay, I'm gonna lose the card in the deck.
Is this your card?
You know how I did that?
Jesus!
It's just so tacky.
If it helps give any context, like literally, because I grew up with my father being a fundamentalist pastor.
I literally recently saw a puppet that my parents still have that they used for Sunday schools used in the Reno 911 The Hunt for Q movie.
Wow.
It was literally in it.
That had to be, like, the weirdest Easter egg for you.
I mean, I feel pretty special, because I can produce it.
Like, I should take pictures and send it to you, because I feel like, whoa, I could practically, like, I want to be Trudy for Halloween now.
It was insane, but yeah.
So anyways, after this in-depth analysis of QAnon's perversion of Christianity, it's probably time to play a content warning.
Content warning.
The Adventures in Hellworld podcast talks in depth about QAnon, which means we have to talk about all kinds of child abuse and violence against people.
Listener discretion advised.
So having said that, let's hop into the news and one of those major subjects is coming right up.
From the digital headlines to the digital front lines, it's Q's in the News!
So Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on five of the six counts that she had been charged with.
And this, of course, led to QAnon freaking out and celebrating.
And then you had a other side of QAnon that was very upset about this whole trial and the farce that it was.
I just have one question.
What about Hillary?
Oh yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, I mean, what always makes me kind of laugh about QAnon so much is that, if only, if only, Bill actually got to be president, Bill actually did all these things, yet she is somehow the nemesis, she's the big bad of the whole story.
Continuing our talk about Christianity from before, QAnon is, I described it to some reporter that was talking to me, and I described QAnon as a devil-based religion.
Because in the Bible, it opens with, in the beginning there was nothing, and then God said, let there be light.
Like, the Quran begins with a passage about God doing something.
Like, both of these holy books are about God.
It starts... How did QAnon begin?
It began with Hillary.
It began with, we're gonna get Hillary.
So, it didn't start with Trump and his benevolence and his glory.
It didn't begin with the hero.
It began with the villain.
And the villain was Hillary.
And it's just so funny to me that...
She didn't even get to be president!
She lost!
And yet they still hate her so much more than Bill, the guy who was actually running the country for all those years and was the actual puppet of the New World Order for eight years.
And it's interesting because I've seen two basic responses from QWorld.
to the whole Jelaine Maxwell thing.
The first one being, hey, this contributes to what we've been saying, like this proves it, right?
Like, this is the first domino that's gonna fall.
And then the other has been, well, where is Hillary?
This is just a waste of time.
We need to go up the ladder and get to Clinton.
And it's just hard for them to come together on any one narrative about Jelaine Maxwell and what it means for the movement.
In a lot of ways, they need to be upset about something.
They'll take victories because they need victories also, but No victory is ever decisive enough to make them truly happy.
No victory is ever complete enough that they're like, yes, we did it!
We won!
And you also had kind of like Black Pillars and Doomers like Jack Posabeck and all these other people lying about the fact that After Maxwell got convicted that they the judge ordered all the records sealed that like that no further evidence is going to be revealed from this trial and that all we got here is all we're ever gonna get and um the the powerful that were uh
The buyers of the women and children that were trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein, they will never be brought to justice.
They will never have their day of accountability.
On the one hand, you can definitely honestly have that view that we need to go through this web and grab everyone that was a part of it, no matter who they were.
But To have one of the two people that were running the operation be convicted in a court of law, you would think that'd be cause for celebration, but they're like, no, don't celebrate this.
You're a sucker if you celebrate.
And it's like, man, that is, that is miserable.
Yeah, you actually had a victory that you could like put under your belt, but instead you've chosen the path of Torment is what it feels like.
Like, you're just choosing to be sad now at this point.
You're just choosing to be angry.
So, I've actually wanted to ask you a question about all this for a long time, Mike.
What do you do with the whole Jeffrey Epstein killing himself thing?
Let me give you a little bit of context.
I was watching a YouTuber And this YouTuber is a history YouTuber.
He just gives boring history YouTubes that I watch because I'm a dork.
And at the end of one of his episodes, he talked about how he like essentially said, Oh, by the way, Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.
And I was like, whoa, like you just launched into some conspiratorial stuff right there out of nowhere.
And I always wondered what the great poker and politics would say about that.
I feel like in a lot of ways that Epstein's suicide, I understand the view that it was expedient for people that wanted it to happen to happen.
And I get that.
I really understand why there is this mindset about there being a conspiracy around that.
And I think, I mean, it is definitely possible that something may have happened where someone told Epstein that it'd be good for him and perhaps for others and anyone he actually cared about, if he did care about anyone, because he was kind of a sociopath, if he did take the easy way out.
And I wonder about that in a lot of ways, but So, but on the whole, I do think that he did kill himself.
I do think that maybe circumstances might have made it possible for him to kill himself.
So, but on the whole, I don't think that there was a conspiracy.
And the thing about it that's really funny is that when this happened, when he was found dead
after his suicide, QAnon did not want to take that as a victory.
Um, what?
What happened was, I remember a lot of them were freaking out after Epstein died, because he was supposed to be the star witness that was going to bring down the Deep State and save everyone.
And that when he died, there were so many people that were posting stuff like, Hey, we don't know if he's actually dead or not.
We need to wait 72 hours for anything to like, to just like stay back on the headlines and watch and observe.
And we'll, we'll find out the truth like down the line.
Cause maybe, maybe Trump's hitting them with a double, triple fake to make them think that like they wiped out the star witness against them.
And now they're going to relax and then boom, they're going to hit him with Epstein being alive and under witness protection or something.
So like it really because the narrative of Epstein being under Trump supervision in a Trump prison under Bill Barr, who was at that time Trump's like most loyal lieutenant and the hero of America before Barr didn't want to tamper with the election results and he became a deep state traitor.
But all of that stuff was so was so difficult for their narrative to process that at the
end of the day, when they had to acknowledge that Epstein was
dead, there were a lot of people who are posting stuff like, well, you know, Epstein only died because we let the deep
state kill him because we got all the information we needed it
out of him. And down the line, we'll reveal that Hillary had
him whacked and that'll be another charge against her when she gets sent to Guantanamo. So in a lot of ways, I mean, QAnon
loved the publicity and the attention they got from hashtag Epstein didn't kill himself. They loved it. But if
they actually cared about their own internal narrative, Epstein was supposed to be the star witness and the first domino
that was going to topple the house of cards that was the cabal.
And so his death actually, narrative-wise, was bad for them.
Yeah, so the details, it seems like, can be fuzzy about any conspiracy.
But if it's a conspiracy, QAnon will tacitly acknowledge it, I think.
Because it just sort of helps promote their grand meta conspiracy.
Yeah, I'm here.
Definitely.
I'm here.
Yeah.
No, I was, I was just thinking of, sorry, I'm, I don't want to like diverge from what Derek just said, but while you were speaking, Mike, about kind of like the whole thing with the suicide of, of Epstein, I just coming from the fact that I've done psych nursing, I don't know why people find it incredibly surprising that someone who was As narcissistic as someone as Jeffrey Epstein had to be, would actually say, I don't want to go through consequences and literally find that to be the best solution.
Yeah, he was a billionaire.
I mean, whatever he was, he was he was ultra rich.
He lived the ultimate life of decadence.
And now he's going to spend the rest of his existence in a it's like six by six cell for 23 hours a day.
I mean, it's the most miserable possible life you could imagine.
Why wouldn't he want to not suffer through that?
Why would he not want to just get it over with?
Well, that's part of it, too, though, because I, in the immediate aftermath of all of that happening, I had a lot of really progressive friends that were saying, oh, no, I bet I bet Trump did it.
I bet I bet Trump snuffed him out.
And I was like, whoa, wait a second here.
Like, you know, the temptation for the conspiracy drug I think can exist no matter who you are, what your political affiliation is.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, there is, I mean, Blue Anon is a real thing.
I mean, there are people who run that side of the racket.
And I mean, I'm guilty of it.
I love Trump Dementia Twitter.
I love people analyzing the speech ticks and the involuntary muscle spasms of our esteemed former president and the fact that it's obvious proof of his crumbling mental state and that he'll soon be like in hospice in 18 months or so.
But that's the thing is that that's why conspiracy theories are so appealing because they give us a satisfactory they give us a satisfying answer to things.
Going back to my hobby horse, the JFK assassination, it is incredibly unsatisfying that a dissatisfied
early 20-somethings moron who washed out of the Marines went to Russia and came back, bought a cheap-ass gun,
and literally didn't even have to do anything to kill the president, literally just went to work one day,
poked his gun out a window and shot the president.
That's terrible compared to a shadowy cabal of the CIA, the FBI, and the Federal Reserve,
all meeting in a smoke-filled back room and saying, we gotta get rid of this Kennedy guy, he's bad for business.
I mean, that's just so much more exciting and awesome and fun by comparison to what happened.
Again, thinking that Trump or Hillary or just some shadowy group of people got into that cell and snuffed out Epstein is way more exciting than Epstein just being like, nope, not dealing with this.
This is a horrible, horrible way to spend the last like 20 odd years of my life.
I'm getting the check right now.
I'm done.
I'm out.
Yeah, and it's also kind of, it's enraging for the people that were his victims because he didn't have to stand trial.
He didn't have to face justice.
He didn't have to have, yeah, he didn't have to, he didn't get, we didn't get to have his accusers like see him in a court of law and say, you did this to me, you no good son of a bitch.
and then he would be convicted.
I mean, that was the thing that was really funny is I saw like a few people.
I didn't see anyone in like the mainstream or any actual observers of this case.
Like no one ever said anything until the effect of that Maxwell was gonna get away with it.
But I did, when she got convicted, I saw a bunch of QAnon promoters being like,
oh, you doers, you black pillars said she was gonna walk.
And it's like, who said that?
That had to be only like, that had to be only miserable QAnon promoters or like just contrarian clickbait seeking idiots that would promote that.
I mean, They, I mean, they had her dead to rights.
There was a reason why.
I mean, this was not going to be a tough case.
They had four witnesses that were willing to testify to the abuse.
And then we had the pilot who said that Clinton and Trump and other people flew on the plane and all that good stuff.
And I think I'll wrap this in a bow and you guys can give final thoughts afterwards if you want, but the thing that was really funny about this trial from the QAnon perspective was that they would complain that the media wasn't covering the trial, that the media was silencing it, that no one was getting the information, that no one was hearing about what was going on.
Federal trial.
Oh yeah, federal trial, no cameras were allowed inside.
It's a federal trial!
Right, right.
I mean, this is...
But beyond that, then you would have, when news of the trial did come out, like when the pilot testified that, yeah, yeah, Clinton and Trump were on the plane.
I flew them around.
That happened.
You literally had everyone in QAnon and all these places like freaking out and screaming like, oh, the lawyers are doing this on purpose.
They're trying to make Trump look bad.
Trump didn't go to the island.
Clinton totally went to the island.
They're trying to conflate the two of them.
This is so not fair.
And then after the conviction, you had a lot of QAnon being like the whole trial was a sham and they were making their generally transphobic, misogynistic comments about the woman who was the judge and how she was getting a cushy appellate.
A gig from Chuck Schumer for covering up everything that happened here, because Chuckie Schumer was up to his neck in this, which no one said until they needed to go after the judge for whatever reason.
The media wasn't covering this trial that was going to blow the lid off this whole thing, but also the trial was a sham, and it was trying to make Trump look bad, and also justice was perverted.
I mean, every layer of it they were mad about.
It was just super, like, they're just, again, they're the Fellowship of the Miserable.
They're just the most upset people on Earth.
You have to be frustrated about something.
That's the duality of QAnon, is that you have to be constantly frustrated and constantly hopeful that, like, bad things are happening to make you upset, but some daddy figure is going to come in and fix it, be it Q or Trump or God.
That's where QAnon lives, in the push-pull sort of hot-cold tension of Extreme hope and unbearable despair, right?
You have to occupy either one of those two positions at any one time and you have to constantly oscillate back and forth between them to keep up the energy just to stick with this thing and keep researching and keep posting and They call it hopium for a reason, I guess.
I think that was really well said about the oscillating part of it, because I had made a
thread about what I called the tension before, where it's like a scale of one to five, where
one is you don't know anything about this stuff, and two through four are the more you know about
it. And then five is you either burn out and black pill and totally reject it because you
just got so invested in it and it crushed you, or five is you start doing crimes. You get so
lathered up you shoot up a pizza joint because you need to save the children in the basement.
And that's QAnon's whole goal is to keep you simmering between two and four at all times.
And...
Because they have to, you have to stay in that tension.
You have to be constantly oscillating between thinking you're going to get a payoff and being depressed over the fact that the bad guys run the country and that nothing's being done to stop them.
But something will be done to stop them very soon.
Yeah, the one answer when if you ask a QAnon person, hey, how's everything going?
The one answer they cannot give you is fine.
Exactly.
Like nothing is ever just okay.
Right?
Like everything, it's either heaven or hell all the time.
And it's just it must be so exhausting.
Yeah, definitely.
But I was also just thinking like this, this whole trial result is such a good thing because I thought their entire premise was to save the children, and this supposedly reached a goal in that.
But I don't think they're celebrating it at all.
I don't know.
Some of them are celebrating it, but some of them are not.
It's brutal.
It's absolutely brutal.
Well, but the thing is, is I question how much this save the children thing is really close to their hearts or maybe Maybe I shouldn't say that.
I don't want to be skeptical of everyone.
I think there are some people that probably it's very close to their hearts.
There might be a lot of survivors in QAnon who find some kind of relationship to it or something like that.
But at the same time, I have found that a lot of people have found that just being part of QAnon is their part of doing something about human trafficking, and that's not going to do anything about helping human trafficking.
This Pryle did something, and it's a celebration for it.
The posting and the getting into fights with your family is their activism against child trafficking.
I mean, and I think you're right as far as some of the people are concerned.
There might be some folks, especially in the past Elenon world, that got into it because they themselves are survivors, and that caught their attention first.
But man, the folks that are out there promoting this stuff, you can tell it's just something that they turned to at the last minute to kind of paint the whole movement over with a sense of righteous indignation, right?
Like, And it allows them to be as angry and violent and just generally as pissed off as they can, because it all serves ultimately, this little thing, this this big thing about, you know, children being traffic, but I don't think it's on the front of most minds, honestly.
Oh, it absolutely is.
It's one of these things they love throwing out there to make themselves look good.
They love saying things like, we are pro-God, anti-pedophile, anti-crime.
Who could possibly oppose our mission?
And that's trying to paint their enemies as pro-Satan, pro-criminality, and pro-pedophilia.
And that's that cloak, that's the shield they arm themselves with.
As you said, Derek, is to try to make themselves righteous, is to try to make themselves the noble side of the argument.
Speaking of crimes, nailed that smooth segue.
Take that, Serge.
Our boy Sean Hannity had a bunch of texts between him and then-President Trump leak out from the 1-6 Committee, and Hannity seemed to be Someone who had knowledge about what was going to happen on the 6th, and then after that all went really badly, Hannity was trying to gracefully shepherd Trump off the national stage to tell him, yo, Donnie, just call it a day.
This didn't work out.
The brakes went against us, so you just move along.
Trump did not get that message from Sean Hannity.
He did not quite listen to him.
So let me say this, like, when I read the texts, I do not get the sense that he knew that he knew for sure, anyway, that there would be this kind of violent thing happening.
I think he absolutely thought that they were going to find a way, whether with Pence or without him, to Just throw a wrench into the gears of the election, so on and so forth.
Maybe get the Supreme Court involved.
Maybe find some way to send it to the House.
I do think he was on board with that.
But it is really telling a that this guy who is cast himself as being a journalist is having this kind of conversation with the chief of staff of the White House.
Um and probably with Donald Trump and that um uh he's just two-faced which we already knew already.
It's really amazing to me that you just see this like this this crossing over this merger between like Fox News and the Trump White House on such a like On every level, that these people who present themselves as just reporters, telling it down the middle, fair and balanced, and yet they're immersed in what is a scheme, as you said, to throw sand in the gears of the election to potentially
Come up with this ridiculous idea that Pence or anyone had the authority to reject electors or to like say these six states, we're not going to count their electors.
We're going to do something where they're disqualified and then the election gets thrown to the House because no one has a majority.
That there was just some absurd plan to try to prevent the outcome from the election for being certified and for Biden to be officially declared the president-elect.
I don't want to take us like too much off of the direction we're going in, but I'm just making like an observation from the side that a news agency, we knew that Fox had so much access to the White House, but like a news agency had This much access to the White House that they were not communicating out to the public.
And we know that they are not going to do the same kind of journalistic standards that we saw happen to Brian Williams and Dan Rather and all this kind of stuff.
And this is just going to, it's just going to pass and that's going to be okay with a ton of people.
And I am just making that observation of what the heck is going on.
And this is one of the problems as to why people are not agreeing on what truth is anymore.
Oh, uh, and for the record, uh, you are completely allowed to steer the show into whatever cliff you want to, whatever telephone pole you want to hit, whatever tree you want to smash into.
The hell world prides itself on going off the rails.
We have no, we do not have a linear structure here.
Wherever the conversation takes us, we go there.
That's fine by, that's fine by me.
That's just how, that's just how we operate.
I want us to be able to get back to talking about the specifics of Hannity, but I was just making that one observation of like, if we found that out about other news organizations, like, you know, the Washington Post for all this time has had all this information.
Come on, there'd be some outrage.
Oh, it would be non-stop.
It would be like the right wing in America would be throwing a fit.
I mean, it would be like this scene of storming of the castle from Beauty and the Beast for the love of God.
Like, it would be crazy.
But now that it's Fox, it'll be like, oh, well, maybe his sponsorship will be changed a little bit.
That's it.
I don't know.
They'll just have to butter up Mike Lindell to get more Mike Pillow ads on Fox.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just this kind of thing that Fox, yeah, they're just a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
And we as a nation have just decided that we're okay with that, that we're okay with them lying about everything and that they just get to be that.
And that's just the way it's going to work out.
Well, I would love to if you have any suggestions for how to stop it.
I mean, the problem is, is that it we have just been like a frog slowly boiling on the stove with that thing.
I mean, going back to the 80s, you know, and now it's reached this ridiculous place.
And there's no sort of breaking it.
I mean, the stuff that, hopefully we'll talk about Tucker and his plans for immigration a little bit later, but like, you know, How do you put an end to it?
You can't?
I don't know.
I've had so many friends get so angry about Fox News and how we have to outlaw it or that, and I just don't know what you can do legally to stop them.
But what I would say is, hey, NFL Players Association, make a real stake that you don't want the NFL on Fox.
Hurt them, take football away from them.
Put football on only on ABC, and NBC, CBS, ESPN, Amazon Prime.
Just don't let them have ratings.
Take away the content from their entertainment side that they use to fund their quote unquote news side.
I've seen a lot of people talking about pressuring cable companies to to de-package Fox from tiers of networks that you can get.
Because like if you get like the silver tier you get a bunch of movie channels but you also get like Fox News and like even if you don't want Fox News they still get your money from like being on that plan so it's like the decoupling of Fox News from cable packages is another thing that like could be done.
Like economic pressure is like the only way they can like try to change this that I can see.
I don't know that there's really Any sort of legislative fix to this issue?
Well, that gives me hope in America.
Cause if it ain't economic pressure, it ain't American.
That is apple pie.
Yes.
I mean, that is a, that's a, I remember like going into one six and all this stuff.
I remember so many people like being afraid that like Trump was going to be able to pull something off and like something was going to happen to prevent Biden from taking office.
And I, and I would tell people, I would say, you know, Shareholders and the CEOs of all these fortune 500 companies, they don't want general strikes.
They don't want people in the streets protesting.
They just want to keep making money.
And these billionaires, these CEOs who run these massive multinational corporations, They're the ones who are eventually going to make some phone calls to Mitch McConnell and other people and telling them, look, boys, you can't keep doing this.
And I told people, I'm like, I trust in cold, soulless capitalism to keep America running.
So don't worry.
Don't be that stressed out about it.
And people were like, man, that is really depressing.
And I'm like, hey, it might be kind of depressing, but it's also realistic.
So I'm going with it.
I mean, ever since the whole Coronavirus, January 6th, just this whole crazy time we've been dealing with.
Like, you'd think that something would happen to the stock market, right?
If anything, it's fine.
Like, if you look at it over the last five years, it's been going like gangbuster, even after Um, COVID.
So... Yeah, the people that own the most stocks, though, are not the ones that are being affected, though.
That's the thing is that it's so top heavy.
So sad.
So there are two different grifts going on here.
There's the Q grift, Which happens at a much lower level with the conferences and, I don't know, flag sales or whatever.
People who are out there selling books and getting views on YouTube and all that stuff.
But then there is, like, the big grift, which is your Fox News and your Newsmax and One America News and stuff like that.
And I wonder how all of this, like, fares into their modeling going forward.
Because if they are too successful, I gotta think they have to understand that, like, this beast that they have on a leash can really mess some things up at some point.
Oh, I absolutely think that that's, I mean, I feel like the Republican party got a taste of that with Trump, that like they had created this ignorant conspiracy theory based voter base.
And then they had a charlatan con man like Trump's who've been and grabbed them with promises of building a wall that Mexico was going to pay for and just like, just insulting people.
And he stole the party away from the Republicans.
And trying to control this Frankenstein's monster is, it's going to be crazy.
And I just wonder if there is a, is there a degree to which the Republicans could go crazy enough that the media would actually throw up their hands?
Cause I don't think there's anything that's been like more disgraceful than the 2016 election coverage where Trump was just this absolute monster.
But we had to hear about Hillary's emails all the time.
I'll tell you why there isn't, because when the election fraud claims started coming out, and if you remember, Fox was the first news organization to call it for Joe Biden.
They called the state of Arizona early before anyone else, and they stuck to that and everything, and they were really quiet for a while after the election.
They were really chill.
And then he started with all of his crap, and then January 6th happened and everything.
And then, if you ask me, if you ask my opinion anyway, then you see this huge influx going to Newsmax and One American News, right?
And so their base just expanded like crazy.
And that's when you have Tucker and Sean and Laura kind of kicking it up a notch to take back some of that market share.
So they they accidentally, I think, created the market for this conspiracy stuff.
And now they're just learning how to compete in that market.
And I don't know where it ends.
I don't know how it ends.
Maybe this will be a battledome.
I don't know.
We can hope.
I'm just wondering, is there a moment where the mainstream media, because the mainstream media was the ones doing the Hillary email stuff, I'm just wondering if there's a moment where the mainstream media, like MSNBC and all the rest of the major networks, just say, no, we're not going to treat a Republican nominee for president, Michael Flynn, as someone who's allowed to be on the same level as Joe Biden.
We're just not going to do it.
We're going to tell the American people directly, like flat out, you cannot vote for Michael Flynn.
This guy is actually going to end the world.
Whereas like Hillary versus Trump, it was just like, everyone kind of hates both of them.
Who knows?
Maybe Trump could run America like a business and make things work.
Stranger things have happened.
Do we really trust the email lady?
Who knows?
Like, that's like the kind of thing I wonder about is like, is there a moment where like the quote unquote, like gatekeepers of democracy, In our media and press, where they would actually not both-siders a 2024 election between a star-craving QAnon-endorsed Republican lunatic and boring, milquetoast-centrist President Biden.
No, because the one thing that the media can't do is punish someone with silence.
Like, I remember when, when I was a kid, okay, I'm from Akron, Ohio, which is near Cleveland.
When I was a kid, there was this guy who played for the baseball team in Cleveland, let's call them, and his name was Albert Bell, if you remember Albert Bell.
And he was awesome, man.
I loved him.
I hit a lot of home runs and everything.
I was just a kid at the time.
And he had to get a new contract.
And he went to the Chicago White Sox, who were our kind of rivals at the time, for like $50 million.
And there was a dude who tried to get the crowd to do this thing the first time Albert Bell came back to Cleveland.
He didn't want them to boo him.
He didn't want them to, like, shout things or hold up nasty signs or anything.
This guy was on the radio talking about, wouldn't it be awesome if he came up to the plate and everyone was just stone cold silent?
And didn't say anything.
Because Albert fed off of the rage of the crowd, right?
And that's the exact same thing that Trump does, that's the exact same thing that someone like Michael Flynn is gonna do, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, whoever it is that they're able to trot out there the next time, they're going to love the heat they get from the mainstream media.
And the mainstream media is going to love giving them that heat because outraged progressive folks are going to tune in to hear about it.
So we're doomed.
Democracy has failed.
I'm glad we've settled this issue.
But speaking of silenced people, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, she just got kicked off Twitter!
So congratulations, Marjorie!
Yay!
She did it.
She did it.
Are you sure you're still an atheist, Mike?
Just kidding.
I'm being torn every day.
Every single day.
I'm like as confused as ever in my life, so don't take anything I say seriously.
I'm here for it.
I'm here for the razzle dazzle.
That's awesome.
I love it.
What I was going to say about Marjorie getting banned from Twitter was this started a rather interesting shift in what was going on in Gab, because Gab is this cesspool of antisemitism and racism.
And a bunch of QAnon conspiracy theorists and anti-vax nonsense.
When Marjorie got kicked off Twitter, there was this desire for her to go to Gab full-time.
But the new trendy place for your racist monsters is Getter.
And Joe Rogan posted that he had started an account on Getter.
So now, Andrew Torba, my buddy Torbs as I call him, and the rest of these people that have been living on Gab for a very long time, have been just seething mad at the idea that their beloved hate platform is being one-upped by Getter, which Um, is not letting Nick Fuentes and the Grapers and the white nationalists on their platform and this allows them to get, uh, their app looked at, listed on Apple and, uh, Android, I assume.
So.
Gitter has more market penetration because they won't cater to white nationalists and Nazis, at least openly and publicly.
And so now you have, yeah, oh, oh God, the winkiest of winks.
Yeah, like totally.
Yeah.
But this is the thing.
It just, it makes for good PR to not let people like Nick Fuentes on your site.
And I just think that it's so silly that, um, I mean, I get what Torb is doing, but I also understand that like, he wants to make money off of Gab and it's never going to happen for him because there's really, his community is too small and it's too angry and they only exist to own libs and there's no libs on Gab.
The funniest thing I saw, and I mentioned this last night when I was on Twitter, is that these people on Gab are like, oh, these politicians, these rhinos, they won't make an account on Gab because we won't ban the people that are asking them the tough questions and all this stuff, and they have to stay in the heat.
If I was like Marco Rubio or Dan Crenshaw or Liz Cheney or any of these people that want to like try to, I don't know, like promote my centrist bona fides, I would make an account on Gab.
I would post crap about like speeches I was giving and bills I was promoting.
And then, when all these lunatics started promoting anti-vax, anti-semitism, holocaust denial in my comment section, I would have an intern who knew their way around the internet reply to a few of these people, engage a few of the trolls, get more negative feedback from them.
And then, go to my Twitter account, post this crap that I got from Gab, explain why I'm deactivating my Gab account, because this is not my constituents, these people do not speak for me or the Republican Party, and then maybe I join Getter, and it's a win-win-win for me on every imaginable level, and Gab just looks like shit!
Oh God, Mike.
I hope they're not listening.
I hope they're not listening.
I don't want them to do this.
That's kind of an evil genius idea.
That's good.
It's such an obvious thing to do, and Gab just paints themselves as the villains so easily because they're so dumb.
I mean, everything about them just makes me laugh.
They're so ridiculous.
I think the issue is, is that Torba thinks that he was the one who sort of defeated Parler to a certain extent.
And now, like, someone has challenged his perceived throne, I guess.
The thing is, is I think conservative, well, not even, let's say, racist social media companies are just the new Bitcoin.
I think they're the new crypto.
Whether you're talking about Gab or Getter or TwitNazi, whatever the next one is, like, you just keep jumping from one to the next.
That is a both perfect and terrifying analysis of social media platforms.
It is.
It is a good analogy.
But at the same time, like, yeah, I think I think I've got a little bit of chest pain right now.
Totally.
I'm going to wedge in our last subject because you brought it up a little bit earlier, Derek, which is Paul Gossert and a few other Republicans and obviously Tucker and all the other neo-Nazis on Fox News have been banging the drum about this like 10-year moratorium on all immigration into America.
And just this, this aggressive appeal to white nationalism.
And it's just, this isn't even a dog whistle.
This is just a bullhorn.
This is just outright blood and soil, 14 words bullshit.
And that's the crazy thing is that the argument, at least as Tucker articulated it last night, is that the country is just getting too big, okay, to be managed effectively.
And so we need to cut off immigration so that it doesn't grow anymore, I guess.
I think his quote was, like, past a certain scale, democracy doesn't function anymore, which may be just trying to prep us for the day when democracy really doesn't function anymore.
These are the same people that are talking about how terrible it is that millennials aren't having enough babies.
I was just about to say JD Vance like freaked out on us.
Did that thing of like the reason that all problems exist is because people are not having kids so they have nothing to be invested in in this world whatsoever.
Like there's no existence that's meaningful.
Outside of being a parent.
To hear this is kind of a little bit dizzying, is the way I kind of put it.
Ultimately, I think they would come up with some kind of way to say, well, if your population grows because you're a white person and you have a child, that's fine.
But if the population grows by a fraction of amount because you're brown and you come from someplace else, then It's going to lead to the complete destruction of Western civilization.
And so yeah, this is like kind of a thing that like Carlson's been working on for a long time is like trying to basically promote white nationalism on Fox News in a mainstream acceptable way where he's just sort of like, you know, is multiculturalism really a good idea?
Like, What do white people have in common with non-white people?
Is that good for society and all that kind of stuff?
You know, maybe we do need the Day of the Rope.
I don't know.
Man, if only Tucker went that dark, that would be super impressive.
There's just no bottom.
No, there never is.
There never is.
It's just so inhumane.
I'm sorry I'm saying the most obvious things and nothing that's poignant or profound, but I mean, it's just so inhuman to think about other people coming here because they want to live a good life and have the same kind of dreams that everybody else had is somehow something to be disgusted at and make rules about and treat them as others.
It's just ridiculous.
Oh, it absolutely is.
And I also think that you've now created our new slogan for Adventures in Hellworld podcast, which is nothing poignant or profound.
I think that's You can't be poignant or profound about what is literally the stupidest thing in the world, but never the least popular, you know?
Like, this stuff, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that it's all complete racist BS, but it's still working.
I mean, people are still signing up every day.
People are still signing up?
Yep.
And it's still horrifying, too.
I think that's the thing that I find is that I can't undo my horror seeing it.
Every time there's a new level, it's not that I'm unsurprised, but the horror still shows up.
I've seen a million horror movies.
I know when the person's going to get killed, but guess what?
There's still a moment of me that tenses up.
This is what they've done by going down this road, is by making us expect the worst of them, but still be absolutely horrified and praying, no, it can't be that bad.
But it is.
There is no bottom.
That is my guideline for the Republican Party, is that there is no bottom, and they can get worse, and it can absolutely be more terrible than you think it is currently, 100% on all these fronts.
So now that we've done all this very happy, cheerful conversation, let's get into the mailbag and see what our listeners have to say.
Our listeners got questions, we got answers.
It's time for Q and A. So Reverend Xenofact opens up by saying, there is no consistent narrative about Omicron that I see on the Q side or indeed the Republican Party.
What are the major and assuredly contradictory takes that you see?
It's just nice to have another Reverend on the show.
Yes!
What I would say is the main things that they talk about is that Omicron is generally seen as a good thing.
Like across the board, Omicron is good.
And either it was created by Operation Warp Speed and Donald Trump to save America and the world, or it's the virus going through its natural course where it's becoming less lethal and less dangerous.
On the whole, I would say that their view of it is that this is a positive thing.
What's really silly is that they have this belief that Omicron is a light at the end of the tunnel where we're all going to get it soon, so we're all going to get herd immunity soon, and then the virus will be over and the deep state will lose, that the deep state will no longer have control over
the world because the medical tyranny they wanted to impose upon us will be thwarted,
which just blows my mind because like, if I'm Joe Biden and I'm the
president of the United States who was installed by the evil cabal using
COVID to destroy the Trump economy, what I would want more than anything on this
earth is to arrive at April 2022 and now COVID is a thing of the past.
It's a mild nuisance.
It's an annoyance.
Now I get to be the president that was in office when COVID went away.
It went from being a pandemic to being endemic and it's no longer that big of a concern.
Of course the Deep State would be thrilled if that happened.
I just love That they think that, oh, once they don't have COVID to bug us with anymore, the deep state's going to be so upset.
No, they're not.
They're going to be like, President Biden beat COVID.
The greatest president ever!
Give him four more years!
Give him ten more years!
Give him a hundred more years!
Biden forever, you dum-dums!
Well, what's crazy, though, is, like, the huge debate that sprung up last week about the vaccines, and Trump came out in support of the booster, and actually said a few times that he supported taking the booster, so on and so forth.
And, man, there were some Q folks who were not very happy about that at all.
That was a total black pill.
That's the big thing, is that you have the anti-Trump side of the Republican Party that is using his pro-vaccine stance as a cudgel against him.
And I saw, like, Cernovich getting mad about him.
And, of course, Torba will do anything to kneecap Trump that he can because he's scared that Trump's going to take away his right-wing social media grift.
But you have that side of the thing that's very mad at Trump for being so aggressively pro-booster, and then you have QAnon who will just twist themselves like a pretzel to try to find a justification or an excuse for why Trump being pro-vaccine and pro-booster is actually secretly 12-dimensional chess to actually fix everything.
So it's very funny that Trump has offended a lot of people by being pro-booster, but Like, all the major QAnon grifters that need to keep this ship sailing and running smoothly, they're going to stick with him no matter what.
And they're going to just pretend that he's talking in code and that he's speaking to the normies and just saying what he needs to say because of quote-unquote optics and all that stuff.
It's really hilarious.
So, beat up Alex Jones is not reading the room right.
Is that what I'm getting from you, Mike?
I think Alex wants to get away from Trump.
Alex wants a different market share.
I think Alex being mad at Trump is...
Something he's always wanted to do, and I think in a lot of ways his schtick plays better when he can actually be mad at both the Republicans and the Democrats.
Because he loves making that claim that he's beyond the left-right paradigm and all that nonsense, which is not true because he's actually incredibly hard right.
So if he can say that Trump is a weak T replacement for Biden and that they're both puppets of George Soros, He's happy.
But I mean, for him, I mean, speaking of April 2022, I mean, that's probably going to be his day of reckoning when he's actually in court having prosecutors or the plaintiff's lawyers in the Sandy Hook cases explaining why Alex needs to pay those families millions and millions of dollars.
So that's going to be a lot of not fun for that guy.
And I hope he gets cleaned out.
I hope they take him for every penny they can.
I hope so, too.
I hope so, too.
I wanted to say one thing real quickly, going back to the Omicron thing, with them talking about getting herd immunity and just talking about what needs to happen to get to herd immunity.
I mean, that means a lot more people have to get sick.
We're talking about people who don't want to get a vaccine and get boosters.
A lot of people have to get sick.
And yes, it is less.
It looks like it's less severe than Delta.
Thank God!
That's great.
I hope it continues that way.
Not all viruses do always stay less severe, though.
They can mutate right back into nasty little buggers.
We have drug-resistant viruses.
You know, there's a reason why things like this happen.
But also on top of it, I want to say, even if we get everybody sick, and maybe it's because it's a personal issue, I don't know what the rates are going to be with this strain, but even if it's half of what it has been for past strains, what's it going to be like for that many people to have long COVID, long-term?
Like, think about how many days they're going to miss at work, how much they're going to flood the healthcare world.
Is it gonna affect their childcare?
Is it gonna affect their ability to support, you know, pay their bills, support the family?
Being sick is expensive.
I just think it's a metric we don't talk about much.
They think that deaths are the only metric that we should be measuring this by.
And I think we should also be measuring it by long-term sequelae.
That's serious because those are the type of things that then bring up issues that people might have to deal with for we don't know how long.
For me, it's been a year and a half.
Yeah, I was about to say that before you very succinctly explained it, that the idea that the only thing we need to care about is death is ridiculous.
And that's QAnon's mentality, is that if 100 people get sick and 3 people die, then 97 people got herd immunity and everything's great, when 20 of those people could be just totally messed up for years and years, and maybe the rest of their lives!
And those 20 people are going to need care, they're going to need to be helped.
That sucks.
That's not good.
And we as a society probably don't want to have 5-10% of all people who got this be messed up for incredibly long periods of time.
So get vaccinated.
Do everything you can to avoid long COVID, you dum-dums.
It's ridiculous.
Yes, so thank you for the question.
Wendyosity asks, Jim Sewardson got banned again.
What do you think about his quote-unquote ideas about QAnon?
I just think that trying to blame everything on Russia and Michael Flynn and putting everything into a neat package is... it's absurd.
I think you have to go where the evidence takes you and To me, if people want to argue about Ron Watkins actually writing the drops and all this kind of stuff, that's fine.
You can do that.
But Ron and Jim ran the board.
They had editorial control over things.
They could change the trip codes.
They could give the queue account to whoever they wanted to.
They could remove queue drops if they didn't like them.
All of that.
Could Q have been an anonymous dude that Jim and Ron didn't have any actual working relationship with?
Possible, but I don't think it's likely.
But at the end of the day, they were the ones monetizing it.
They were the ones promoting it.
They were the ones using Q as a draw to their forum.
So they're the problem.
Period.
That's it for me.
Real quick, have you had Desiree on your show?
Oh, man.
She contacted me after I blew up all over 60 Minutes and everything.
I saw the Thinking Project online, and I asked her to be a part of it.
And we recorded an interview.
And at the end of it, I was like, I just can't use this because what they're literally doing is trying to replace one conspiracy theory with another.
And it's just not helpful for the project right now.
You know what I'm saying?
With Jim out there talking about Michael Flynn and Peter Thiel, like, running QAnon, so on and so forth, like, it's just absolutely... I don't know if it's true.
It may very well be, but you can't just give us more QAnon in order to combat QAnon.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I think that's really what it comes down to, is that I... And the other thing is, is that at the end of the day, whoever started this, it doesn't matter.
Whoever put the body of Frankenstein's monster on the table and shot it with a lightning bolt, whatever.
The monster lives.
The monster's in our society now.
It's now in our neighborhood.
It's terrorizing our children and snatching people away in the dead of night.
Like, let's confront the problems of the monster.
Let's not try to figure out who Dr. Frankenstein was.
And let's not get angry at each other when we have different opinions about who Dr. Frankenstein is.
Because that's the thing that, that was my one interaction, not with Jim directly, but with one of his acolytes that was the most egregious to me.
And I talked about this on the podcast before, but I had someone who was very receptive and supportive of what I thought was a terrible Vice documentary about QAnon.
And they were like, you're letting Robert David Steele get a pass.
You're letting the Cicada 3301 guy get away with everything.
He's got a really long last name I can never You're letting those people off the hook, and they did all these bad things, and I'm just like, I don't care about these people.
I don't think they were behind Q. It doesn't matter to me.
And they're like, but they were behind Q, and you need to go after them.
And the guy told me, and I quote, like, this is the one thing I told you not to do.
And it's like, oh, you're the boss of me now?
You get to tell me what to write on my Twitter timeline?
Wow.
That's, that's cool.
I didn't know who gave you that job, but, uh, Schoenberger.
That's, that's the guy who was the cicada guy, but whatever.
I just don't care about those people.
And in a lot of ways, I don't care about Jim and Ron Watkins having run QAnon.
Cause what I care about is praying medic, telling people to stick pennies to doors to get kids to believe in Jesus.
I care about the current damage that's being done by these grifters.
Not what started this thing.
Yeah, it's just replacing one conspiracy theory for another.
And it taps into that same place, that Vice documentary taps into the same place in people's minds that QAnon does, right?
Like, it just...
tries to wrap everything up in a mystery and says, Oh, go, go chase down the rabbit hole.
See where all this leads.
Do your own research.
And that's the exact thing I want people to not do.
I want people to be happy again and just stop worrying.
Which is the next question, which is from Cleodora Silvestri, which I may have gotten right this time.
I doubt it though.
Cause they always yell at me for getting the name wrong.
Cleodora says, how long until the grifters exploiting the Q movement realize there's more money to be made by selling garbage ape JPEGs as NFTs and abandon the quad dive religious scam in favor of going fully into monkey laundering?
Which made me laugh a lot at the term monkey laundering.
HammerCoin, that's where it's at.
Yes, it's all about HammerCoin.
Forget NFTs.
Please, please support, buy, and shill HammerCoin.
I think the main kind of thing that's holding back the The NFT thing from QAnon is that I don't think a lot of them are technically savvy enough to get into NFTs.
I think like maybe Jordan Sather and those kind of grifters might have enough wherewithal and understanding of that field.
But at the other time, I think that a lot of these grifters sort of know that this isn't their turf.
This isn't their territory.
And that they're going to kind of be chasing.
They're going to be playing catch-up in the grift community of NFTs and bored apes and all that stuff.
So I think that they're I don't know that they want to get into that because I feel like they know that I think game recognizes game and scammer recognizes scammer and that like Sather wants to sell his medical mineral solution and his $32 cans of coffee.
Sather doesn't know the first thing about selling a bored ape JPEG.
Bleach, drink, yeah.
Although I will say, okay, if Ron Watkins listens to your show, which I'm sure he does, it would be a great move for him to make NFTs of the original Q posts.
Can you imagine if you could do an NFT of every single Q post, what people would pay for that?
Well, I mean, this doesn't actually answer their question, but my first response was that I was kind of impressed that they thought that there was something that was going to, and Reverend Derek, this does not include you, nor many, many people, but that there was a grift worse than religion, because there's a ton of people out there that will say that's the way you make money.
My sins.
Yeah, that's actually kind of one of the ones that I was going to say was that like L. Verona Hubbard was kind of like, oh, geez, this like writing fiction novels thing, it's kind of getting through the bills.
But at the same time, like religion is really where it's at and stuff.
And we even know that like Trump's main spiritual advisor, Paula Kane White, is a prosperity preacher like nobody's business and wants to do that.
So I was actually impressed that someone thought that there was anything that would Go outside of that.
As for my insight on the NFTs, I think they're the weirdest things in the world, and I don't know why people are into them.
And I have no other insight than that.
That is fair.
So thank you for the question.
Pancake Peasant asks, Many existing politicians are going along with QAnon narratives.
Do you see evidence of private sector leaders doing the same?
And then they give a shout out to Reverend Derrick for being awesome.
So, um, well, I mean, private sector, you've got the entire right wing social media grift that we've been talking about previously.
The Gab, Getter, Parler, whatever Trump's thing is, Mike Lindell, Patrick Byrne, I think there are plenty of people who think that there is a market to be cashed in on through QAnon, but I don't think it's very mainstream.
I think it's more mainstream in politics than it is in business.
It depends on just what you mean by it too.
Like if you're talking about like hardcore Q stuff, then no, but I think there is going to be a place for like, you know, election denial, anti-vax stuff, those kinds of QAnon lite sorts of things are all over the business world.
So.
I wish I had some kind of great insight on this.
And then the NerdyHorrorFan asks, due to the fighting amongst the Q-Turds, I've compiled a list of wrestling matchups and predict the winners.
Q-Tof vs. PepeLivesMatter in a spicy meme on a pole match.
Winner posts memes on Gab.
Negative48 vs. MyPillowMike, hardcore match.
And Sather vs. Ron Watkins, tables, ladders, and bleach match.
Well, the latter one would definitely be won by Sather, because he's the master of bleach.
And he can go to hell on that front.
Negative 48 to Mike Lindell.
Mike Lindell just needs to get really coked up first, and I think he'll do great.
I think that's it.
Those two men are both very out of shape and not great, so I think whoever is on more performance enhancers has the best chance of winning.
Or whoever gets the better night of rest beforehand.
Yes, yes.
Both of them are such unwell people that it just feels like, oh gosh, we're about to see a scene out of, like, One Flew from the Cuckoo's Nest kind of thing.
And I truly mean that.
Like, they are unwell people.
They are doing insane things that are showing that they need help.
They truly do.
So, I mean, oh my gosh.
They actually just need a padded room and not a fight.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And as for Q-Tah and Pepe Lives Matter, Q-Tah, for those of you who don't know, has done a very poor job of maintaining OPSEC, as one might say.
And since Q-Tah has a criminal record of some kind of not great things, I think they'd be more than capable of handling themselves in whatever sort of ruckus between them and Pepe.
And Pepe seems to be very maudlin.
Pepe's pretty sensitive.
Yes.
I get the feeling that Pepe ain't getting in the ring.
Pepe wants to pray it out.
Pepe is not going to do this.
I think Utah's going to win that by default.
So finally, for the questions that have been asked, I have a secret question from Bobby Ellis, who I interviewed previously on the pod.
And they said, can I make a request for you guys to talk about how to deal with the circular logic when talking to people trying to peddle in this?
And he links to a chat between him and a QAnon promoter where he is asking them to provide him with evidence that Fauci admitted the numbers on COVID are skewed.
And this person constantly refuses to do this.
They constantly refuse to present the evidence that Fauci admitted that the numbers
were skewed and that basically, quote unquote, do your own research. They actually said in
the last one, be a man and do your own homework. So this isn't circular reasoning because circular
reasoning is more along the lines of A proves B and B proves A. When you try to disprove either
one of them, I just say, oh, but no, you're wrong about A because B proves A. And
you're like, but no. And they just run you ragged. This is, they literally are telling
you to do your own research, which is.
The ultimate cop-out, the ultimate escape from... Hypnotize yourself.
Right.
It's because what Do Your Own Research actually is an attempt at is an attempt to get yourself pilled.
And it's also a way to avoid actually having to debate on the merits.
It is.
I'm making a claim and you're going to have to back up.
You're going to have to validate my claim, which is not how arguments work.
Arguments are you make a claim, you defend your claim.
That's how this is supposed to work.
So the first thing you need to understand is that when you're arguing with a QAnon promoter on social media, You are not arguing directly with them.
You're arguing for the people reading the argument.
You're arguing for the audience.
And that is who you should be directing your attention to.
You should be saying, like, when this person says these things to you, you should be saying, what you are doing, sir, is dishonest.
And here are the reasons why it's dishonest.
Because the person who's doing this is a troll.
They know they're being dishonest.
They don't care that they're being dishonest.
But you need to explain it to the reader why they're being dishonest.
And in this case, when someone says, do your own research, what you need to say is, you're being dishonest.
You're asking me to prove your point, which is not how a debate works.
And by you telling me to do my own research, you're asking me to type in a Google search, Anthony Fauci admits numbers are skewed.
which is going to bring up like 50 hits from Breitbart and Gateway Pundit and all of these right-wing cesspool places and I might even get hits from like comments on Gab or whatever and you want me to read through these 30 or so articles trying to find what you were talking about And maybe something in one of these articles sticks in my brain and poisons my mind, and maybe I start getting pilled.
So that is how you engage in a conversation like this.
You engage by explaining what that person is doing to an audience, and at the same time you're telling that person, this is why what you're doing is dishonest and I'm not going to engage you because you're not debating me in good faith.
So that's how you handle these people, especially when they hit you with, do your own research!
That's really good advice.
I think the only thing I would have to say is I'm a firm believer in just avoiding those social media debates.
I don't think in the history of the world anyone has been converted away from QAnon because someone beat them in an online Facebook debate or whatever.
Sometimes if someone is saying something really destructive, I think you do need to point out exactly why it's destructive.
And stop with that.
I think very similar to what Mike said, point out the dishonesty, point out the destruction.
But if you get into a sarcastic tit for tat kind of situation.
There's not going to be a resolution to it.
And in the church, we have a word for that.
It's called casting pearls before swine.
I was about to bring up pigs myself.
I was about to say, don't wrestle with a pig.
You'll just get in the mud and the pig enjoys it.
Yeah.
That's exactly, that's exactly that.
Like you're not, as you said, you're not there to convert that person.
You're not there to help them out.
Like I, I honed my chops on this because I would deal with a very right-wing, very angry, belligerent guy who was just like an ugly, a homophobe, ugly everything kind of person.
And I would argue with him on Facebook.
And every now and then, uh, someone would DM me on Facebook and be like, Hey man, I'm glad you like, uh, stuck up for people and like replied to that guy.
And I was like, no problem, got your back.
And like, that's, I don't even know these people, but that was my audience.
That was the people I was actually debating for.
I wasn't debating that guy.
He was never going to change his mind.
Yeah, the thing is, is QAnon followers fashion themselves as being digital soldiers, that they're out there changing hearts and minds, proselytizing, essentially.
I don't think We beat them by doing it better?
If that makes any sense?
Like, there is no logic that you can use to convert them.
Maybe you can shame them, or maybe you can just try to communicate to those who are around them, but you're not going to be able to wrestle them to the ground with your intellectual knowledge.
I mean, just watch Dr. Fauci and Rand Paul go Round for round in Congress, and you see exactly what I'm talking about.
And Poker, I'm so glad that there are people like you and other debunkers out there that have spent time to really understand kind of what's going on and the multifaceted arms of, oh my gosh, I was about to say Kraken, and I didn't mean that ironically.
Oh my gosh.
But I mean, it's really like, it's constantly moving.
There's multiple arms.
What is it doing?
What are those teeth?
What is that?
It's craziness.
I'm glad there are people out there like you who are able actually to access some of the truth and information faster than some of us because someone like me, sometimes I have to spend some time really looking some things up to understand even what people are talking about.
I will just say one thing from being both a pastor's kid and from being a psychiatric nurse.
I think your point of You were writing for a different audience and not for that person is an important distinction.
But if the person wants to engage with the person who's really talking, and they're really trying to get them to turn over, it does need to drop into a whole different thing of how to de-escalate and get them to disengage.
Like, what is the weapon that they feel that they have and how do I get them to drop it?
How do I get this to cool down?
And what is the actual thing that they needed that drew them to QAnon?
Was it community?
Was it, you know, like survivorship?
What was it?
And that's hard.
In the internet digital world, especially in the Twitter world where you've got character limits and stuff, in the sense of what's actually effective as for people who are dealing with crises or dealing with things that are very, very difficult realities that they're trying to buy into.
And I'm saying realities in quotes in my own home.
And I know you can't see that, so that's silly.
I think it's important to know that Yeah, we're not going to be able to like fight people out of it and knowing the audience is the important thing.
I agree with all of that, exactly.
So, wraps up the secret questions.
So now I ask the question I always ask at the end of these episodes, which is, what are you looking forward to?
I'm looking forward to how Marge is going to tell me that I'm a communist.
I want to know, like, I'm used to a certain diet of being called a communist, and I feel like I'm now going to be put on a severe, you know, restriction, and I don't know how I'm going to do with it, even though I'm not a communist.
I am a full-blooded U.S.
citizen.
Democracy is way.
But at the same time, absolutely, absolutely.
But I'm just saying like in Marge world, you know, kind of thing like that.
I'm just saying, I'm looking forward to figuring out like how she's going to make sure that she takes care of my needs of mislabeling me as a communist.
That's what I'm really looking forward to.
Because I think that's going to take creativity, uniqueness, nerve, and talent.
Anyone who watches RuPaul will know that reference, so.
So, Derek, what are you looking forward to?
I am really looking forward to my day off tomorrow.
Oh, hey!
That's the only thing I can think of.
Today is my long day here at church, so.
And I'm looking forward to getting a new Crossover Q episode up, hopefully sometime this week or next.
We'll see.
I've taken a lot of time off of it.
I was doing a writing project for several weeks, and now that that's done, hopefully I can jump back into the podcast and wrap it up.
What are you going to be doing it on?
The next one?
The next podcast?
I think it's going to have something to do with the January 6th thing and how we're all processing that and moving on from there.
Revolutions, that kind of thing, and how we think about that.
So.
Looking forward to it.
Cool.
I am looking forward to hopefully finally being able to play this board game that I got about a month ago called Spirit Island, which is a cooperative game where you have to fight the board in order to win.
The holiday season and Omicron and all that stuff has put a crimp in my plans, but I am hopeful that this week I will finally be able to actually give this game a whirl, because it looks incredibly complex and interesting.
So it should be a ton of fun, and I'm very much looking forward to that.
So having said all that, I am going to do what Elle usually does and guide us out of what is probably a very questionably successful episode.
So I have to thank Derek and Shark for being on the show.
I appreciate it very much that you guys showed up here.
If you have anything to plug or promote, this is the time to do it.
Crossover Q!
The only thing I'd like to plug is that people get their vaccinations and their boosters because You don't want COVID, doesn't feel good, and you don't want long COVID, and you don't want death, and you don't want to see death in your family, and you don't want to see long COVID in your family.
So please think about all of those things.
Very much yes on all of those things.
You have plugged it.
That ship is now suitable for water travel because it has all the plugs in it.
So thank you for that.
As always, we thank DJ Minimal Effort for our entrance, for our opening.
He doesn't have a social media platform because he is DJ Minimal Effort and he is hiding under a bed somewhere as he has been for the entire COVID pandemic.
The man makes hermits seem outgoing and cheerful.
Beyond him, we have FrostyVO who does all our bumps and did the voice of Q back when we were reading the Q drops.
As for me, I always am jingling my can asking for you to put money in it because I am an internet beggar and a shiftless layabout.
If you wish to give me and the rest of the crew here money, you can go to patreon.com slash pokerpolitics.
And for $5 or more a month, on any or all of those tiers, you can get access to all of the bonus content we have here, which we currently have over 30 hours of, so there's plenty to listen to should you decide to do that.
If you don't think me and the crew are worthy of your hard-earned cash, and since we are a bunch of idiots talking in the cans on the internet, why would we be worthy of your money?
Please give that money instead to love146.org.
They are an anti-child trafficking organization that does the good work that QAnon always talks about doing, but doesn't because all they really care about is turning America into a Christian fascist dictatorship.
So I think I've hit all the bases.
So for Reverend Derrick and Nurse Shirk, I am Mike Rains signing off.
