166: QAnonAnonymous Goes to Hollywood (w/Travis View and Jake Rockatansky)
In 2017, 4chan user "Q" started LARPing as a Deep State insider with predictions about Hillary Clinton and the pedophile cabal. 10 months later, the online antifascist world assembled its emergency podcast response team: three dubiously-credentialed shitposters( two using pseudonyms themselves) dedicated to covering “the best conspiracy theories of the post-truth era. Exploring online fever swamps and tripping over deranged historical facts that make conspiracy theories sound sane.”
The digital soldiers of QAnonAnonymous Podcast subjected themselves to the most cursed content the internet has to offer. But the real world they traveled through was just as smelly. They went to live QAnon protests, parades, and conferences. They conducted the first interviews with the QAnon Shaman. They attended ball-slapping workshops to raise their testosterone for the Great Awakening. They caught COVID many, many times, all for the cause. And now, as their reward, they get to see their favorite redpilled celebrity, and Mel Gibson's favorite Jesus, Jim Caviezel, star in the fake-u-mentary, "Sound of Freedom."
It’s been a long road to Hollywood for our guests Travis View and Jake Rockatansky, but this is their red-carpet moment where we get to ask them: How did they like working on this show?
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Welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Jake Rakitansky.
And I'm Travis View.
Those are some familiar names.
We are on Instagram at Conspiratuality Pod.
And of course, you can access our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
I want to mention really quickly, I was recently on the Jordan Harbinger Show to talk about our book, Conspiratuality.
We had a great conversation.
Please check that out.
Conspiratuality 166, QAnon Anonymous, goes to Hollywood with Travis View and Jake Borkitansky.
Six years ago, a 4chan user calling themselves Q started LARPing as a deep state insider with predictions about Hillary Clinton and the pedophile cabal.
Ten months after that, the extremely online anti-fascist world assembled its emergency podcast response team.
Three dubiously credentialed shit posters, two using pseudonyms themselves, dedicated to covering, in their words, the best conspiracy theories of the post-truth era.
Exploring online fever swamps and tripping over deranged historical facts that make conspiracy theories sound sane.
The digital soldiers of QAnon Anonymous podcast subjected themselves to the most cursed content the internet has to offer.
But the real world they traveled through was just as smelly.
They went to live QAnon protests and parades and conferences.
They conducted the first interviews with the QAnon shaman.
They attended ball-slapping workshops to raise their testosterone for the Great Awakening.
They caught COVID many, many times, all for the cause.
And now, as their reward, they get to see their favorite red-pilled celebrity and Mel Gibson's favorite personal Jesus, Jim Caviezel, star in the fecumentary Sound of Freedom.
It's been a long road to Hollywood for our guests, Travis View and Jake Rokitansky, but
this is their red carpet moment where we get to ask them, how did they like working on this show?
Welcome Jake and Travis.
It's so great to see you finally and to have you on.
Hey, it's a it's a pleasure to be here.
Yes.
Thanks for inviting us.
Yeah.
We started Conspiratuality a couple of years after QAA.
And I just want to say you guys really blazed the trail and we've been really appreciative of your work.
Yeah, and I hope you don't mind, I'm going to open with just a little bit of adulation.
It's not an exaggeration to say that my own intellectual, I would say emotional, even moral life has been changed by your work in a positive way.
You bring this, like, world-weary gumshoe reporting into this bizarre landscape.
And Jake, you bring this, like, very big, prepubescent, like, my voice is just breaking, wonder and disgust to the movie-like spectacle of QAnon.
And Julian, who will get on soon sometime, he brings his leftist dotism.
So I wanted to start with how this mashup came together.
My understanding, Jake, is that you and Julian were friends first and that you were Starting to collaborate on a gaming podcast, so obviously that would have also had some cultural and existential edge to it, right?
Yeah, so we started because Julian and I had a mutual friend who he had met in France and who I had worked with in an unnamed retail clothing store, who I had remained friends with for You know, for years after we had both long been, you know, long quit or fired in some cases.
And, you know, she basically said, hey, I've got this friend, he wants to do this video game show and he wants to do this kind of weird sort of inclusive take on gaming journalism and culture.
And he asked me if I knew anybody here and she recommended me.
And so I met Julian for coffee.
We went to his friend's, like, craft cold brew pop-up.
And I immediately got a panic attack from the caffeine in the coffee.
And about 10 minutes into the meeting, I left because I was like, man, I'm having a panic attack.
I got to go.
And Julian was so cool about it.
He went, oh, dude, yeah, of course.
I understand.
Yeah, we'll talk later.
And then we ended up working on this gaming journalism show slash we built a website.
There was a whole thing.
We worked on it probably for about two years.
There weren't a ton of listeners.
It didn't really go anywhere.
And eventually we kind of, as the world seemingly got darker and darker,
we were wanting to pivot.
And we were wanting to do something that had a focus on sort of cursed futurism,
popular culture, tech, all of those worlds kind of intertwining.
And we.
We were trying to figure it out.
We had this idea.
We were going to call it Hell Mountain, you know, and, and, and then I discovered QAnon through my regular, you know, our conspiracy subreddit, which, you know, I, I, I follow.
I, I was an enjoyer of conspiracy theories, you know, as a writer and a, you know, storyteller, I was always looking in, you know, interesting places to find, you know, potential content.
And stories are inspiration.
And I noticed that everybody in this, like, subreddit and other, you know, other sort of conspiracy areas, I was never on the chance.
I was never, I was always too scared to go to a place like that.
I knew what it was, but it was just something that I figured that if I logged in without a VPN, you know, they would hack my credit card information.
You know, I'm, you know, very kind of technically an internet unsavvy, believe it or not.
And, um, yeah.
And so I was talking to Julian and I said to you, you know, I was, we were talking on Xbox Live one night and I said, do you know what, have you heard about this thing called QAnon?
And he was like, no, what is it?
Tell me.
And I tried to explain as best as I tried to explain it as best as I could.
And right then he said, you know, and, and it seemed to tap into this, you know, it seemed to tap into this kind of you know, this sort of topic that we were trying to figure
out how to approach.
And here was a, you know, here was this kind of weird example of it.
And, um, we looked online, we, we searched if there were any podcasts about QAnon. There
wasn't, there was nothing. Uh, and we recorded about six episodes,
which was us just kind of arguing back and forth about whether or not
this could be real.
And, you know, who who was it?
Well, you know, just just sort of going over the basic sort of tenets of what even is this thing that's sort of seeping out, you know, from the depths of 4chan.
Um, we noticed there was, there was, you know, another, there was another guy on, on Twitter who was talking about this, you know, one of the very few people at the, at, you know, at the beginning of this.
Um, and it was Travis and we invited him to our, our little hot studio in Julian's apartment as a guest.
And afterwards, I don't know, I think maybe you guested one more time, Travis.
I think we had you on twice as a guest, and Julian said, look, we gotta bring this guy in.
This is the dynamic.
This is the show.
And yeah, and then Travis became a host, and those first six episodes got deleted, and here we are.
So at the time, yeah, I was working at a marketing and software company down in San Diego, and I had this Twitter account under a fake name that I used to like, you know, shitpost and comment or whatever.
And I guess I also had a longstanding interest in fringe beliefs since like college when I was introduced to Young Earth Creationism.
The idea that, you know, there's this community of people who believe that the Earth is six to ten thousand years old and, you know, it just blew me away at the time because of like, it wasn't just that I was wrong, it was like extremely wrong.
It was like, you know, considering that the Earth is actually four and a half billion years old, it's akin to thinking that the distance between LA and New York is about 26 feet.
And so, you know, I was always interested in this belief, these kinds of beliefs, and then I happened upon QAnon, I started tweeting about it, and I guess I grew a little bit of a following, it was like in July and like August of 2018, and occasionally people would like ask me to comment on this, and I would say yes every single time, because usually when I develop an interest in one of these things, no one wants to talk to me about it.
Um, but, uh, but, uh, but, uh, in this particular one, people seemed interested enough in what I had to say to ask me.
So, and so, yeah, Julian was just one of a handful of people who was like, Oh, hey, you want to talk about this thing that has been consuming your mind for the last couple of months on, on our podcast?
I said, yeah, sure.
That sounds great.
I'll, I'll drive up to LA.
It was about like, like, it's like, it's like a two hour drive from where I was.
Um, and so, um, And so yeah, that's that's how I that's how I met up with them.
So I'll ask I'll ask your Julian about this separately.
But Jake, you said that he said, oh, this is the dynamic.
What what's like the the the basic elevator pitch on what you feel that dynamic is?
I mean, I'll be totally upfront.
I, you know, I, when I first started looking into QAnon, um, I was kind of pilled on it.
Not on like the right wing politics aspect.
We were fresh off of what felt like a kind of Let's say unceremonious and potentially sus sort of like
ending to Bernie Sanders campaign through the DNC. And I was very upset about that. I was
really, you know, really hoping that this guy you know, would push through. And what interested me about
QAnon was this idea that if the intelligence agencies didn't want a particular
candidate that they would cut corners to make sure that that happens.
I mean, if you look at a long line of both, you know, local and federal sort of law enforcement,
this is not anything that's sort of out of the ordinary.
And so I was approaching it from that perspective.
Julian, you know, as a lefty, you know, was also not a huge fan of the intelligence agencies
and was willing to kind of meet me sort of halfway on that in this struggle to sort of figure out
what could be true and what wasn't.
And Travis is a tried and true skeptic and a stoic.
And so him...
Uh, sort of existing as the arbiter between this conversation of somebody who is, uh, wanting to believe and, and wanting to, you know, wanting to find an explanation, uh, for the things in the world that are unexplainable sometimes, uh, and, and somebody who is, you know, well-versed in, in lefty politics and has a great understand, you know, much better understanding of, of history than, than I do.
You know, I was a theater major, so, you know, take that for what you will.
That sort of emerged as the dynamic is, is, is, and, and, and honestly, the being friends with the two of them and doing the show in a lot of ways probably saved me from going further and further down the rabbit hole because I started to look at things through a skeptic perception.
I started to learn, learning more about lefty politics.
Uh, allowed a healthier outlet, uh, for some of the anger I was feeling about the current sort of status quo of, of each political party.
And so I kind of think that that dynamic has sort of persevered.
You know, I'm definitely, and unfortunately, and sometimes it's sad because I, I miss, I miss cause I look at everything now, you know, very skeptically.
It's, it's like when you're a screenwriter and you go to the movies, And you're breaking down every bit and you're going, okay, well, here's the, the, okay, there's what they're trying to do.
Okay.
Here's the act break.
Yeah.
It sort of ruins them for you.
Um, but I, I, I feel like that's kind of still where, where we are, you know, I want to, you know, I want to believe Julian's willing to hear, you know, to hear me out.
Um, and, and, and Travis comes in with the hard, the, you know, the gumshoe, like you, like you were saying.
The origin story is great.
All right, so you guys drop your first episode in August of 2018.
Obviously, Q's been posting for some eight months or something.
That August 2018 month is the same month in which the world starts to see the first cable news footage of these enthusiastic, like, merch-wearing, sign-waving QAnon folks at Trump's rally.
And the first one is in Tampa, Florida.
At that point, About 10 months or so into the Q-drops in the aftermath of Pizzagate.
I'm wondering, are you looking at this and saying this fringe digital conspiracy cult really could have some legs?
It could keep growing, it could metastasize, it could become impactful, not only in American politics, but you know, something that people around the world take an interest in.
I mean, yeah, I mean, what really got me first interested in QAnon was the observation that it seemed to be breaking out of the bowels of the Internet and into sort of mainstream conversations.
And what really did that for me was seeing that Charlie Kirk, who is, you know, very much mainstream right commentator and activist.
He tweeted out some bogus statistics about the human trafficking arrests
that originated with QAnon.
And I saw that, I saw basically he claimed that he has some stats about how often Trump
was arresting human traffickers compared to Obama.
And he claimed that these stats came from the Department of Justice.
And I happen to know right away it was bullshit because the Department of Justice doesn't actually immediately release arrest statistics.
It actually takes them years before they arrest those kinds of numbers.
And so I tracked where they really came from.
I found out they came from QAnon.
It wasn't just the fact that QAnon was making up this nonsense.
It struck me that this QAnon nonsense was being amplified and laundered by someone with hundreds of thousands of views who talks over the country, who appears on Fox News, who met with the president.
That really struck me.
It was like, oh my God, this thing is gaining more influence and clout.
then it should.
And so that's sort of what made me take, I guess, a real focused interest in the subject matter.
And then about, like I said, that same month, it was July 2018, it was when that Tampa rally happened
where all of a sudden all these Q people were made themselves very visible.
They wore We Are Q shirts, and then that was just further evidence to me
that's like, wow, this thing is, again, breaking out of the internet and then onto,
into the minds of mainstream Republican pundits.
And into Trump rallies and into the physical world.
And I saw the trajectory, and that's what really made me take a more,
I guess, serious interest in the subject matter.
I don't know if I'm remembering it accurately.
This could be my mind revising it, but I'm picturing like this tracking shot, you know, in a stadium across these joyful people who are having their moments of like, yes, we made it.
We're here.
We're in the front of the Trump rally.
We're holding up these signs.
It's just wild.
Yeah, that was very bizarre to see it sort of come off the screen in such a real way and in such staunch support of Trump.
I knew it was going to be big from a much more personal level because, one, I was susceptible to it and I had been a lifelong liberal.
You know, the idea of entertaining any kind of conservative ideology
was just something I never, ever imagined for myself.
And, you know, you reading it and following it and starting to feel like,
oh, man, I wonder if I wonder if there's something here.
I knew it was I knew I knew that it had the potential to to, you know, so to speak, pill a lot of people.
But also from a storytelling perspective, this was, you know, in the
in the early days, you know, it was exciting.
It was, you know, high level, you know, you know.
Bruh.
claimed to be high level intelligence that was seeping out through coded messages,
you know, on this, you know, anonymous sort of message board and, you know,
making these wild claims like, you know, Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested or
had already been arrested and that the entire establishment was about to be dismantled.
From a story perspective, it was big.
And like we talked about, you know, ad nauseum on the podcast, you know, there was this almost kind of Tom Clancy element to it.
Everybody who followed it felt like they had inside knowledge or that they were themselves, you know, in a weird way, part of the intelligence community.
You know, and for people, you know, I myself, I wasn't in like a really great place in my life.
I was working, you know, really kind of grueling assistant jobs and I wasn't, you know, I wasn't making a lot of money and I, a lot of my friends were, you know, doing really well.
They had found careers, they had found partners, they were becoming adults and I was sort of lost.
And, you know, I think that for people that are, you know, desperately looking for some kind of meaning or an explanation maybe of why your life isn't going the way you sort of thought it was, when somebody comes along and says the entire system is rigged against you and we are about and we're about to fix it, that is incredibly compelling.
So I think from You know, on the one hand, we had no idea how big it would get, but we did know, and Travis, you know, we would always, you know, maybe on the show, but certainly in private conversation to one another, kind of have this belief that it was, we didn't know how bad it was going to get, but it was going to keep getting worse.
There was no sign that this was kind of a Yeah, and so we come to the party a couple years later and we're noticing that QAnon's style of thinking and posting is showing up on Facebook and Instagram and the yoga and wellness space.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so at what point in your coverage of the phenomenon are you noticing, oh, there's a kind of offshoot here that now has a connection to new age beliefs?
Well, I mean, yeah, we first did our episode about what we called, like, the New Age to QAnon pipeline in early 2020.
2020 and it's mostly because we know this a lot of these these people who did you know
yoga and health topics on Instagram started getting really deeply into QA
non and you know, it's like other other people have noticed this for example
There's the the scholar Marc Andre Argentino actually did his PhD thesis on QA non a dub this pastel QA non
Because it's like, you know, it's the it's a QA non Sort of story but a lot softer and a lot more a lot more
I guess a lot more appealing to middle-class women and stuff in some ways
and Yeah, it's like when you look back you do kind of realize
that a lot of these sort of the core I guess QA non myth
Is sort of like already has a lot of elements that are Kind of New Agey and appealing to that that kind of mindset now first and foremost is this belief that well that we are literally on the cusp of a new age that you know there's going to be a Great awakening and that there's going to be this Even though that hat that has a you know a history of sort of American Protestant kind of beliefs the way they talked about is this sudden Change where society it's just going to become more you know higher and more enlightened and more together and more peaceful and
And all these things that have been sort of like, you know, tying down humanity for generations past, disease and war and fighting and like a political strife and all these things that that are ugly are about to end because we're going to raise the awareness about all the evils and what's causing it.
And, you know, that's that's that belief obviously has a very, you know, kind of like Age of Aquarius kind of ring to it.
The intersection seemed plausible because within the new age community and sort of holistic
health and all of that sort of stuff, there was also this kind of healthy distrust of
the government, which was that they're not sharing with you the real ways to maintain
your body and soul and mind and here are these alternative methods.
And so for me, I always thought that that was the in, was that they shared this sort
of idea that the government had been keeping vital information from you.
And so naturally, when somebody like that discovers QAnon, because if you already believe
that the government is hiding these cures or these sort of holistic sort of remedies
And you know, because they.
a good one.
You know, because there is such a huge relationship with big pharma companies, which which is true to, you know, to some extent, you know.
But, you know, wondering what else they're hiding from you, I think, is a natural next step.
And instead of having to wonder it yourself, here's here's somebody that you can't verify if they're credible or not.
You just know that a lot of people are following it, that is giving you the answers to that question.
One thing that cuts across, I think, all of our work are these religious or spiritual undertones.
And a few questions I've had on my own work is like, what does a religion in virtual reality look like?
Like how does a cult leader gain and maintain control?
Like is indoctrination possible in online or virtual spaces?
But a unique aspect of Q is that it's effectively leaderless.
So I'm wondering what markers of a religion, you know, Travis, you said Age of Aquarius, we've been dancing around these ideas, but what markers have you noticed, if any, from how Q formed and how it's evolved?
There's lots of elements of sort of like cult-like thinking.
One of the, you know, one of the core ones is, it's sort of like fosters This distrust in any kind of information source that might
possibly Contradict it. I mean you don't you don't literally have to
physically sort of like Prevent someone from seeing information that might
contradict you as long as you get them to believe that if you they do come across
from some information that might contradict what you say it comes from a corrupt source and
And this is something that, you know, Q has done a lot.
And there's also this belief that in any instance that in which someone criticizes or attacks QAnon or QAnon followers, that's evidence that they're right.
The only reason they get pushback or any, you know, counter arguments is simply because they're on the right track.
They call this, you know, you're over the target.
And of course, this is this bizarrely unfalsifiable kind of position, because like if they are criticized for completely legitimate reasons, it recontextualizes that and the proof that there's no such thing as legitimate criticism.
And the only reason that this is happening is further proof that you're right.
So it creates this, I don't know, this rationing system that sort of pushes people further and further and further into this indoctrinated thinking and, you know, doesn't allow them to, you know, to climb out at all.
I think that one thing that QAnon provided, especially in terms of existing solely on the internet initially, is a sense of community.
QAnon was able to bring together, it was able to use a lot of the greatest hits of conspiracy theories.
To sort of bring together a lot of different types of conspiracy theorists under one tent.
That's why Travis has referred to it, you know, oftentimes as the Big Tent Conspiracy.
And, you know, as you siphon on, you know, and Q, whoever was posting this, Q encouraged this, you know, to get together, to bake, to decode, you know, that was a lot of the, The participation when it came to, you know, people who were following QAnon closely, it was, you know, a lot of it, you know, in the beginning, at least, was you're watching a movie, don't worry, like, we're going to take, we're going to do the action, but it's up to you to sort of decode the message.
And I think that that naturally brought people together in Discord chats, Telegram groups, Twitter, you know, Twitter DM groups and provided a sense of community, a bunch of people who sort of believe in the same thing that you do.
And you're all working together to, you know, crack a puzzle that doesn't really have an answer.
And to me, I think that in some ways that mirrors religion, you know, as it, You know, in the ways that religion is kind of healthy.
You know, when I was growing up, I went to synagogue.
It was a community.
I had friends that I knew who I went to Hebrew school with.
We shared this special connection, mostly complaining about, you know, how boring Hebrew school was.
But there is that element, and if you're, you know, if you're Kind of lonely online and like I was saying before, maybe things, you know, IRL aren't going so great.
You know, being surrounded by a group of people that are all so excited and getting together and talking about this and decoding it and all of that stuff.
I think that in a way it mirrors maybe some of the healthier aspects about religion, but with a belief system that is, you know, inherently negative.
Well, Jake, I'm glad that you brought up the individual and heroic interest that digital soldiers can take as they pursue the meaning of the drops, because I think that partly answers the question of leaderlessness.
Everybody, in a sense, becomes a leader.
Everybody becomes deputized to figure out the truth, not by actually doing anything in the world, but by or or, you know, the most that they'll do is post.
They'll they'll they'll contribute to the posting culture.
But everybody allows is allowed to be a leader in some sense.
And that's very new with regard to, you know, cultic behaviors and dynamics.
I don't think we've seen that before.
Very difficult for the old school cult theorists to understand, actually.
Yeah.
My first job in New York City was as a crossword puzzle editor, and one thing that we were told was that we had to create a lot of easy clues in the earliest puzzles, and then month after month, so people would keep buying because they would have a sense of accomplishment.
And then you can start to make them, you can challenge them more down the line, but to keep them bought in, you had to make them feel like they were always making progress.
But speaking of New York, before we move on to Sound of Freedom, And I'm a little surprised you said you weren't a techie, Jake, because I still don't really know what a twitch is.
And I know you've lived in that space.
But recently, Union Square has historically been a place where the progressive gatherings happen.
George Floyd, like anytime there's a murder, any you know, that's that space.
I spent most of my time in New York in that area.
But we just had an influencer incite a riot there, or at least be charged with inciting a riot.
And I'm wondering what kind of crossover you see with an event like this, where someone who's charismatic, who has a following in the gaming world that I honestly don't know too much about, can rile up a crowd to violence.
And does that cross over with any of the figures that you cover on the podcast?
Hmm.
That's a really good question.
Don't know.
I don't think that it's.
Impossible.
But at least from what we've seen in terms of, you know, I mean, at least in the Twitch sort of space, there are absolutely some, you know, QAnon Twitch streamers like RedPill78 and, you know, there's a a handful of others who don't necessarily stream on Twitch.
They'll stream on DLive or they'll stream on, you know, a different sort of network.
But those tend to be sitting at home talking about, don't worry guys, it's all unfold,
you know, it's all gonna unfold as, you know, as it's supposed to.
And we're just sort of here tracking it and enjoying it together.
We're sitting back with our popcorn.
Now, when you get to some of the Higher levels, you know, talking about Q-pilled politicians or, you know, people like Michael Flynn, you are getting people out into the world.
And obviously, as we saw with with January 6, you know, that is a perfect example of of this kind of ideology, these communities coming out of the Internet, getting together and causing real world violence.
I don't know if a QAnon influencer is, like, I don't know if RedPill78 is ambitious enough to get together like 500 PS5s and, you know, sort of get out into the world and give them away, because it's not about that.
You know, to them, something like that might seem inconsequential because it's, you know, it's promoting something that is going to potentially get them away from baking QAnon stuff.
If you get a brand new PS5, you pick up a copy of Final Fantasy XVI, you know, you might just be Sitting and trying to beat the game and instead of going to 4chan or Telegram or whatever, you're going to IGN to look up guides.
So I think on the one hand, you know, it is sort of every QAnon influencers sort of prerogative to keep people focused on that and not encourage them to enjoy other things that the internet has to offer unless it is adjacent sort of conspiracy sites
or influencers or products, prepper stuff, that kind of shit.
So I'm not sure if, because I'm sure these guys are probably doing fairly well on their
own without having to leave their bedroom or their studio where they're streaming at.
And I can't, I mean, it remains to be seen, but my instinct is no.
But, you know, and I'm sure as Travis will follow up with, there are obviously cases where QAnon influencers have created real-world cults, have brought people out to the world.
This is the case of negative 48.
And as we recently talked about with Mac Lemireux from Vice, Romana Didalew, the Queen of Canada,
these are two instances where these online influencers have amassed real world followings,
have brought people out into the real world and upended in many cases their personal lives.
I would say the closest thing that, you know, that QAnon has ever did to, like, you know, calling upon a flash mob to cause, you know, violence and chaos was January 6th.
And that required President Trump himself to get involved and do this encouraging.
And like you said, there are these breakaway cults, there are spin-off cults like Negative 48 and Roman Adidolo's weird cult up in Canada.
Involved a great deal of, you know, of people going out in the real world and causing problems.
But, like, generally I would say, like, you know, and the other thing I would say is, like, I would never deny that, you know, QAnon followers have committed violence when motivated by QAnon belief.
There has been literally murders.
There's been kidnappings.
There is a, all the way back in June of 2018, there is an incident in which a man Had an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam bridge because he
believed that there was a surfacer a secret OIG report that that needed to be released and he got this
idea from QAnon So not to deny all that but at the same time I I may have
attended more live QA events than anybody on earth I stopped counting but it was over a
dozen and I never really felt threatened at any of them
And this is usually the saving grace of QAnon. This is again. This is QAnon is an extremist movement
I would never deny that But at the same time, they generally, one thing, single saving grace, is that they almost always believe that the violence that they want to have happen is going to be done by someone else.
The law enforcement, by the military, by some sort of authority, and they believe that it's going to be more or less done through official channels rather than, say, revolutionary violence.
And so that has, I think, sort of allowed, prevented QAnon from being As violent as an extremist movement as, say, white nationalism.
Well, and I would add to that that the potential for violence grows exponentially when QAnon invites or intersects with more extremist groups.
I will say the one time, and I think Travis would probably agree, the one time I didn't feel safe at a QAnon event was when we went to a Hollywood Save the Children Rally and at that event they had teamed up with Proud Boys who were running security and I definitely saw that some of the Proud Boys who were running security had knives on their belt which is not illegal in California as long as it's showing you know as long as it's showing and it's in a holster
I don't think you can get in trouble for that, but I would bet the farm that at least one
or two of those guys also had firearms on them concealed.
I would bet the farm on it.
I didn't see it, but knowing what I know about that group and I don't know.
I'm pretty sure.
But that definitely felt, I definitely felt not safe in that moment.
So I think there is the possibility that when QAnon, and in a lot of ways, I think this was an element of January 6 as well, that when you're sort of You know, you know, you're usually peaceful conspiracy theorists team up with groups that are have been preparing for violence in one way or another.
You know, they, you know, it's that that wish that, you know, wish you would type of ideology.
I do think that there is inherent danger there.
Jake, I have to say that, like, you didn't feel safe at that rally, but listening to you report from that rally, I felt endangered myself.
Yes!
And actually, every time you guys went out to something, I was like, oh God, who's going to be masking?
Who's not going to be masking?
Nobody, of course, is going to be masking.
Of course.
Like it was during COVID.
Yeah, it was really harrowing to actually listen to you hit the road and to do those events.
Internally, we talked about doing similar things and it never came together and I just don't think it's in my nature.
So anyway, like kudos for the on-the-street bravery because it really added an amazing amount to the reporting.
I also wanted to pick up on something that you said that I haven't really considered before with regard to, you know, would the typical QAnon influencer encourage or indulge themselves in really rich gameplay?
Or would they, like, offer consoles to people or whatever?
And the way you said it, I haven't really considered it before that there's actually an ascetic streak.
There's like a really disciplined stick to the message, like we're only going to focus on this particular sort of these calms and nothing else.
I haven't really thought about that aspect of it combined with the fact that so many of these people are really alone and isolated.
They're living quite sequestered, almost monastic lives, which is another aspect of the religiosity that I haven't thought about, actually.
Well, because gaming can be a community as well, and if you are introducing or encouraging your followers to dip their toes into other communities, I mean, odds are, depending on what game you're playing, but odds are you're going to run into people with different ideologies, and it feels good not to be Scared all the time or losing all the time.
I mean, if you're a QAnon follower, you went into this hearing, you know, Donald Trump say, we're going to keep winning and we're going to, Oh, and you're going to be so sick of winning.
You're going to be so sick of it.
We're going to win so much.
And all they've seen is loss.
Yeah.
They lost the, they lost the election.
Nobody, nobody from the DNC has been arrested, but Plenty of, you know, plenty of Republicans have Donald Trump now facing, you know, however, you know, dozens and dozens of charges.
You can tell yourself as much as you want that, like, oh, it's just around all this had to happen deep down inside.
There's got to be a piece of you that's going.
Oh, I don't fucking know.
And when you go into, you know, when you get into a game, whether it's, you know, you're playing with friends or you're exploring a story alone, you're getting more and more distance away from that.
And what we've seen just anecdotally, and obviously we are not qualified in any professional way to diagnose how one exits from something like this.
But anecdotally, what we've seen is that when people take a break, when they focus on family or their friends or their community or they take a break from the internet and they're not always online reading and posting.
I've got a great story actually about this.
My wife's father-in-law Was a diehard Trump guy.
I mean, ex-Marine, Vietnam vet, when the 2016 came election roll around, he was a Trump guy.
But he's older, dude.
He's not on the internet at all.
Doesn't post.
He's not involved in that.
He wouldn't know how to connect to 4chan or Reddit or Twitter, even if he wanted to.
And over time, he sort of started to go, I think this guy's an asshole.
I don't know.
I don't like the way that he talks about vets.
I haven't seen him really do anything.
And I watched in real time as this guy completely disconnected from the Trump ideology.
And I was trying to think about it.
I was like, well, what's different here?
And the first thing that immediately came to mind is like, well, he's not connected to this online world in any way.
He doesn't have a group of people online that are kind of puffing each other up and reassuring
each other and saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, actually, actually that idea that
he's bad, that's, that's, you're, you're being brainwashed or, or, um, you know, that's what
they want you to think.
That's the narrative that they want you to do.
There was no coercive sort of control online and this guy just sort of disconnected on
his own.
So I think that that is a, a, a real risk for influencers in the QAnon sphere that more
time spent away from discussing QAnon content or being in chat rooms or live streams where,
you know, they're going over the message of the day.
They're, you know, what's the news of the day.
How can it be baked?
Here's what this means.
Did you guys see this story?
Oh, what about this?
I think there's a real chance that somebody might just lose interest and want to get on with their lives.
So, I don't know, take that for what it is.
Well, I think it's a good place to segue into the next wave of sort of interest capture that we're seeing from the QAnon sort of mythos, which is, you know, the Sound of Freedom moment, which feels like yet another turning point In kind of the normalization of the QAnon mindset from both a news point of view and also a media and entertainment point of view.
So it's now in its fifth week in theaters.
Box office receipts are topping $151 million on a $14.5 million budget.
Everyone's promoting it.
Jordan Peterson, Dana White, the pope-bashing Bishop Strickland of Tyler, Texas, a TradCath guy.
Angel Films is still running this pay-it-forward campaign, but so far it hasn't earmarked any funds from its windfall to help actual anti-trafficking efforts.
Instead, it's offering to reimburse anti-trafficking nonprofits, perhaps like its own, for booking private screenings, but only if they fill the venue to 70% capacity, which is amazing.
It's gamified too.
Yeah.
And then Jim Caviezel is like, he continues to show up at pressers looking like a carved wooden medieval Jesus statue that like miraculously secretes tears.
Yeah.
And let me just say here, to me, this this film is like a spinoff of the Reawaken America tour.
You know, not only in terms of the QAnon adjacent themes, obviously it doesn't go like full fully into them, but in terms of the spectacle and the scam of it all, I know that you guys have really dug into it for your great episode on Sound of Freedom.
Tell us the thumbnail sketch on Tim Ballard, Operation Underground Railroad and this cash cow scam, as I see it, that is Sound of Freedom.
Sure, so yeah, so like Tim Ballard, well his story was that he was a one-time agent for the Department of Homeland Security where he says that he worked on a, as a jump team going and sort of rescuing children.
Now, Now, we do know that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security, but for some reason he's declined to release details about exactly the precise nature of the work he did while he was in that department.
And according to him, he got sick of the fact that as an agent of the government, he couldn't just go overseas and start shooting Uh-huh, you know people that are arresting traffickers or like rescuing children and this these these kinds of things And so he quit his job and he started Operation Underground Railroad to what in his in his view combat child trafficking and this was based upon What was was called the raid and rescue model which is this vision of human trafficking in which you know?
Operators go to dangerous conditions where the traffickers are, bust down doors, you know, save imprisoned children and bring the traffickers to justice.
Now, of course, human trafficking is of course a very real issue that like many humanitarian organizations are actively fighting.
But the thing is, his sort of version of the problem and the solution was very dramatic, and it had a great narrative, it was very masculine, and so consequently he got a lot of fundraising and growth as a consequence over the years.
I think he founded it all the way back in 2013 with help from Glenn Beck.
And so this particular, um, and, uh, this particular movie, um, about his supposed story, uh, has been in the works for years.
It was actually, this movie was completed, um, uh, Sound of Freedom starring, uh, cube-pilled, uh, movie star Jim Caviezel.
It was finished only back in 2018, but was shelved And and consequently Angel Studios, which is a movie studio run by a couple couple of Mormons, you know Tim Ballard is also Mormon Helped bring it back to life and and in a kind of a miracle brought it to theaters, you know It's almost unheard of for for a movie, you know with a little bit of a sort of a Christian tinge in the messaging to have this wide of a release and
And it's also unheard of for a movie that's been shelved for this long to have this wide of a release.
And yeah, it was quite a coup, made over $100 million last I heard.
Now, it's kind of unknown how much of that is actual customers, how much of it might be kind of laundered through this pay it forward program.
But still, it was a bigger hit than I think anyone expected.
Yeah, I mean, you've got to wonder if other movies are going to start having their stars at the end saying, scan the QR code now, buy more tickets for people who can't afford to come.
I mean, the thing that strikes me about about the story is that it's it's so sort of it's such Such a bullshit kind of cowboy emotional self-gratification thing to say, you know, catching child traffickers and child pornographers is not enough.
I want to go out there in the field and rescue individual children.
Like that's going to make a bigger difference somehow.
Well, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a more appealing story.
I mean, it's like you, um, as someone who is, you know, who is supposedly very competent and, uh, and, uh, you know, um, responsible is going out and saving the most vulnerable people in the world from the greatest horrors in the world.
That's a compelling story.
But one of the big problems with Tim Ballard is that he is, well, frankly, he's a bullshitter.
You know, according to great reporting by Anna Merland and others at Vice News, he'll, for example, he'll claim that his organization rescued a woman, a girl who went by the name Liliana, when in reality, she rescued herself.
She is the one who took the initiative to free herself from her own trafficker.
And so this is the other thing.
I mean, it feels like Tim Ballard knows the impact of a good story like that, and he's
willing to sort of like, you know, fudge the truth, sometimes a great deal, in order to
make his organization seem more important and impactful and heroic than it is in reality.
Yeah, and let's not forget that all of that generates more and more fundraising dollars,
most of which appears to be, you know, just sitting in a bank account somewhere.
I also found the bad guys in the film really cartoonish and they seem to be appealing to a kind of You know, white American Christian moral panickery.
You've got the sort of heavyset Colombian dudes with poncho villa beards.
One of them even has a limp, right?
Very ominous.
You've got the sinfully hot, skinny black Latina in lipstick and tight dresses.
There's the little grotesquely grinning gay dude who looks like he's escaped from a David Lynch film, right?
He's got eyeliner on.
It just it really seems to be pandering to that particular kind of mindset.
I mean, yeah.
Obviously, they want the issue of trafficking to be a really pretty simple morality tale.
Like, this happens because of the evil people, not, say, systemic failing.
And not because of other factors.
And they also don't want to...
Yeah, they wanted to create this kind of tale that, you know, falls in line with the idea that, like, well, you know, the bad things happen because of the evil people who are just, just, like, hate God and are evil, and they'll be solved by the good people who love God.
Yeah, and not only that, the fat Colombian guys with the beards are, like, Marxist revolutionaries, right?
Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
At the end, in the movie at least, he wounds up rescuing a girl from some rebels deep in the Colombian jungle.
Yeah, and leaving all the other kids that are there behind.
Yeah, so this kind of brings me to my maybe sort of unpopular take on the movie, which is that it doesn't work.
The reason I think that it's getting shared so widely by people like Jordan Peterson and all of these other guys is because it's probably the most competent You know, there is a clear beginning, middle, and end.
It's pretty competently shot.
It's decently acted, you know, compared to some of the other trash we've had to watch, like the Hunter Biden movie, which just doesn't understand how to, you know, how to tell a story.
This is, to them, the best example of them making you know, a tried and true looking movie.
But it only works when you enter into the movie and you're the the the emotion.
You have to supply the emotion in a lot of ways.
You have to go in and go, Oh man, like, yeah, child trafficking.
I know that's horrible.
And I know that like, these are bad people and they're really out there.
And so I am supplying the emotion that's carrying me through to the end of the film and making it effective.
Um, but, The writing in the film does not do that for you.
The example that I gave when we were talking about it, I think in our episode, I was comparing it to Taken and I was like, Taken works because the movie starts out with Brian Mills, Liam Neeson's character, being a loser.
He's working security.
His wife has left him for this like rich kind of loser guy, you know, who can't beat people up.
You know, 12 at a time.
He can provide for his daughter a lot better than Liam Neeson can.
He's kind of a pariah.
He's like the deadbeat dad.
And so when his daughter gets taken and he has an opportunity to really prove himself, you are along for an emotional journey.
And it is in many ways so much more effective.
This fictitious, you know, this fictitious story about child trafficking as opposed to one that is based off, you know, Tim Ballard's alleged real life claims.
There is no emotional arc for Jim Caviezel's character in the movie.
He starts the movie being disgusted and hating child trafficking as one should.
And that basically does not change.
Anything that could possibly be human in the story, like his wife, conversations with his
wife saying, hey, do you really want to leave your job?
All you would have needed is a couple scenes of her going through overdue bills, worrying
about they might lose the house, all of this stuff.
It had no human element baked into the story.
And it completely relied on the audience coming in with this belief that they are about to
see something horrible.
And this is like really this.
And it happens in real life.
And I'm I'm all go, God, you know.
And so.
On that level, I think that this movie is only going to reinforce the beliefs of people who are kind of already there.
I don't think your average person is going into the movie and coming out a QAnon believer.
It just doesn't It just doesn't have the juice in that regard of following this emotional story, realizing what Ballard has sacrificed and left on the table.
He gave everything up to go find this girl.
He abandoned his own family, his 12 Mormon children, his blonde kids that you see for a fraction of a second in the film.
There's none of that.
All of the conversations with his wife are like 15 seconds long and they kind of fade out in what feels like the middle of what the scene was.
It was as if the filmmakers were like, oh, we don't have time for any of that.
And coincidentally, that's the important stuff.
So, I don't know.
My feeling about this is that it's doing so well because it's the best example of what Christians have to point to.
It's like, see, we can make a movie, and it's good, and it's art, and we can make it, and look who we got.
We got Jim Caviezel.
And we've got Mira Sorvino for those truncated, weird, drive-the-plot-forward scenes, and she's an Oscar winner.
Oh my god, you didn't even... Yeah, like, there was none of the... There was just none... And if you're to believe that these things really happened, these would be major conversations.
I don't want you going over there.
It's dangerous.
What about your family here?
You can't leave your... You're giving it up your pension before?
No, no, I have to.
I have to get these... I have to get it because if I don't... You know, there was none of that in the movie.
It was just...
following the traffickers from point A to point B, to setting up the trap, to getting them,
and they trap them.
There's no stakes unless you supply them yourself.
And I'm sorry, but that's not the job of the audience.
So ultimately she's a good treadwife.
Sure, she just kind of nods and goes, yeah, whatever you want to do, honey.
Yes, I'm terrified of you.
But yeah, so that's kind of my, and maybe that's like my writery sort of thing on it.
But I went and I watched, and at first I was like, oh, this looks pretty competent.
They know how to frame a shot.
It sounds good.
You know, Caviezel is fine.
You know, I mean, it's no like how he was in Thin Red Line, which is like one of my favorite movies, but You know, over the course of the movie, I was just kind of bored.
It was just, there was, I don't know.
It didn't, I was kind of expecting it to be this very scary thing.
Travis and I had been talking about it for months beforehand.
Are they going to show the adrenochrome farms?
How far are they going to go?
How pillable is this movie going to be?
Oh shit, it's getting this wide release.
Is this going to be the great awakening moment?
And I just, I just don't think it's there.
You know, that's very compelling to me, Jake, and I think you're pointing out one of the paradoxes of QAnon discourse, because on one side, you know, as you described in your own kind of indoctrination into excitement about the story back in 2018 or whenever this is, that the storytelling element is crucial for you.
But then there's this other kind of discourse that emerges amongst the Anons, who maybe are not quite sure of what's happening, or they're faced with one loss or disappointment after another, and the refrain comes up over and over again, it's okay, all you have to do is enjoy the show.
And I think that the filmmakers perhaps had this flawed sense that all people had to do was watch Caviezel stare longingly into the camera with his stony face and everybody would know and identify with him.
They would already be there.
They didn't have to take the audience on the journey, as you said, because there's a passive element to the digital warriorship as well, right?
Yes, yeah, that's totally it.
It relies on you going, oh, like, I know what I believe about this stuff, and I'm just, I'm sort of transplanting my own emotions and my own beliefs onto this nice-looking thing that's sort of presented in front of me for two hours and fucking 15 minutes.
I'm like, God, it was already too long.
Yeah, whereas like you look at something like Taken and you know what's at stake.
There's that amazing moment where Liam Neeson asks the stepdad, like, well, are you going
to do anything about this?
And the guy is frozen and you're like, oh, fuck, yeah, Neeson's going to go.
And then every bad guy that he's punching his way through to get to his daughter, you're
filled with it because you are rooting for him.
The filmmakers don't give you any reason to root for Caviezel or Tim Ballard in the film.
You already are rooting for them because you know that child trafficking is disgusting, you hate it, and you just want to go see the images.
You want to see your idealized self, right?
You want to see yourself doing the things that you know that the anti-child trafficker hero does.
And that's all Caviezel does.
And maybe that's why he has to be blank.
It almost makes me think of like he's a weird, twisted Link in Zelda or something like that, who doesn't speak, you know, who's like hardly even there.
And anybody can pretend that they're Link.
And maybe that's Jim Caviezel's mastery, actually, is that he's a total blank slate.
Yeah, there's this moment in the movie that should be like really tense and crazy and that's when they're on the island and the sort of head cartel guy grabs one of the boys and starts to walk off towards like an isolated cabana and Caviezel goes up to to stop him.
And one of the goons, you know, pulls out a gun and puts it to his head.
And this is supposed to be an incredibly tense, you know, an incredibly tense moment.
But it's not at all.
The gun looks fake, one.
The guy doesn't know how to hold it, two.
You know, you know that he's not going to let the kid go.
You know, you know, he's not going to let the kid go off with the guy.
It's going to he's it's going to get saved.
It's just any moment that that could.
There's there's another moment where the FBI or the the Department of whoever, I don't know, pulls out funding from this, you know, island that they're they're going to rent through the use of this billionaire who's willing to help them.
And there's a conversation where the billionaire is like, well, hey, man, like you said that this was you said that I
was only into this because it was like government backed, you know, I, you know, I can't do it.
Now, that's a huge problem. That is a conflict.
That is something that movies are made of.
You have your entire operation hinging on this guy being a part of it.
And, you know, and and and now he's he's pulling out.
What are you going to do?
You have the whole sting set up.
What are you going to do?
Um, and then like five minutes later in the movie, the guy just shows up at his hotel room and he's like, I'm actually in, you know, any moment.
And it's like, if you're already embellishing, which we know Tim Ballard did just based on what we really know about some of these operations versus what was represented in the movie.
If you're already embellishing, then why not embellish, uh, you know, you know, the, the, the, elements that actually have conflict that are going to
really emotionally like you're you're going into that movie with an emotion and you're
coming out with the exact same emotion that you had going in it was just
kind of reinforced you know it was just you're at this baseline sort of disgust
for for you know these types of crimes
And I think that that's a good thing for all of us because had the movie had these emotional arcs and really amplified the emotion and people left the theater, you know, sort of more riled up or somebody who's not necessarily pilled or conservative goes in and turns to their liberal friends and say, How could you, you know, how could you, uh, you know, how could you make fun of this guy?
Or how could you share an article saying that what he did wasn't true?
Like, do you know what he went through?
Do you know what he did?
You're not gonna have that, I don't think, with this film.
Yeah, yeah, it's not. He's not going to become the new Schindler.
Oh my God.
You know, I was, I was watching the film probably similar to you guys with that kind of eye
Like, how is this working?
And I was looking around me.
I saw it in a local theater here in Marina del Rey.
And I noticed the audience seemed to be predominantly female.
And then there were like some little couples, which seemed like maybe husband and wife couples.
There were some little groups.
There were many little gasps.
It seemed to me that most of the audience was Latin.
So that was interesting.
There were little whispered Spanish, you know, oaths of astonishment here and there.
Aye yi yi kind of moments.
There was definitely dismay.
But I also noticed several times in the movie there were sniffles.
There were people who were clearly having a little moment of tears.
And then there's that fourth wall moment at the end where Jim Caviezel is just sitting looking right at us and telling us, you know, that this is the worst.
This is like the modern slavery and it has to be abolished.
And the way for you to do this is to use the QR code on the screen to buy more tickets that you can give away to people who can't afford to it or that you can you can, you know, have invite your friends to come and see.
What did you notice?
What were the dynamics when you saw it in the theater?
I mean, yeah, it was full of people who were very engaged.
I mean, the particular theater I went to, it was a matinee on a weekday in a kind of backwater town, so it wasn't that full.
But the people who did attend, I mean, they, for example, applauded after Jim Caviezel gave that speech.
And so they were very engaged, and that sort of speaks to the fact that the people who do support this movie don't see it as an entertainment film.
They see it as kind of like activism.
The belief that if people simply watch this movie, then they will have a greater appreciation of this global horror of child trafficking.
Yeah, yeah.
And I don't know that people applauded in my theater, but most people were holding up their phones to scan that QR code, right?
Yeah, I didn't really.
I mean, I saw it in, like, Burbank.
And, you know, it was, I mean, for a matinee, it was pretty full.
I had gotten into a little bit of a conversation with a guy in the line for the butter topping that you put on your popcorn.
And he had brought either a female friend or a girlfriend or maybe his wife, I don't know, but he was exactly the type of guy who I thought, you know, would be going to this movie.
You know, the big chunky cargo shorts, you know, the sort of operator shades and, you know.
you know, the woman that he was with was saying, oh, should I, I don't know if I should put
the butter topping on.
I'm just, I'm so nervous to go see this film.
And she turned to the guy and she was like, and he's your friend, right?
He said, oh, well, you know, I donated to my friend, Rick, who works with, he's worked with Tim in the past.
So I was like, okay, so first people I meet going into this are like definitely insiders or, you know,
wanna be insiders.
And yeah, you know, there was a couple sort of like gasps at some of the more heinous stuff.
You know, when you see, you know, honestly, the best thing that this movie has going for it,
other than Vampiro are the kids.
The kids are actually really good actors in the film.
And to me, the most powerful moment of the movie is probably within the first 10, 15 minutes is when the father takes his children to, you know, this fake audition that's being used as a sort of set up to kidnap the kids in the first place.
And there's a scene where they put the girl in front of the camera and the sort of, you know, attractive female trafficker, who becomes a main player later on, is making her put her hair down and she's putting lipstick on her.
And that, to me, I felt something.
Because I know that that's real, and I know how, especially, you know, working in the entertainment industry, how, you know, children can be, there's a potential to be over-sexualized or to, you know, grow up quicker than they should.
And that seemed to be also where the audience was at least audibly in.
For good reason.
I thought that was probably the most effective moment in the movie was this young girl being sexualized in front of this photography camera.
But other than that, I mean, it was...
I don't know.
Maybe my own boredom is sort of, you know, fogging my view, but it didn't feel like there was a ton of tension in the theater.
It didn't feel like, you know, it wasn't like when I saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles last weekend where the audience, young and old, were so in.
They were gasping at the action scenes.
They were, you know, laughing at the jokes.
There was this, There was this beautiful communal moment, you know, I, it was, I was sitting next to my wife and then, you know, to the right of us were like three, you know, young kids, probably, I don't know, ages, you know, five to five to 10 and we were all in it together enjoying it.
I didn't feel that communal thing.
It sort of felt like everybody was having their own sort of individual kind of experience, um, mind boredom and maybe others in their, uh, I don't know.
of reassurance that their anger is placed in the right direction.
But I just, yeah, I walked out of it, I walked into it sort of worried that this was going
to be good and that it was going to be big in the same way that I worried about QAnon
in the early stages.
And I walked out of it going, eh, I don't know, I don't know.
And that's not the reaction that I was sort of expecting to have.
One great offshoot of your podcast is Man Clan, and I know that's piloted by Annie Kelly and Julian Field, but you cover the liver king, you cover semen retention, and it's one of my favorite things that the whole QAA world has produced because it's really excellent.
And I want to know, where does Tim Ballard and or Jim Caviezel fit into the pantheon of Man Clan figures?
I mean, obviously he's projecting this very militaristic view of masculinity, like I said earlier, that is intensely focused on protecting the most vulnerable people who are in the worst situations.
So it is, I guess, a knight in shining armor kind of view of masculinity.
So I think he's been able to ride that to a great deal of success.
Yeah, if you look at Tim, you look at Tim Ballard, he's, you know, a beefy guy, you know, there's often images of him in like a flak jacket, you know, he's like the people's soldier, you know, for the children, which, you know, which is definitely what he wants to, you know, what he wants to convey.
Yeah.
Does he, does he, Have his own sort of circle of worship like some of these
masculine influencers have I don't
Know I think I think that gets cloudy because human trafficking is
real and it is awful and
And it's definitely something that we all should be concerned about, both on a civilian level and on a politician and law enforcement level.
So it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit cheap because you're positioning yourself to be fighting something that really deserves to be, you know, fought.
And so on the one hand, it's you know, you're sort of kind of Uh, you know, uh, gifted into a little bit of, um, uh, what's the word I'm looking for?
Uh, sort of, uh, admiration and, and respect because who in their right mind would, uh, you know, try to, try to insult someone or, or take them down, uh, who, who has devoted their life.
They, they, they, you know, they claim, uh, you know, He's definitely not turning those people off, but are there a dedicated group of Ballard stans?
horrific thing. So I don't know. I mean, he's definitely not turning those people off. But
are there, you know, are there a dedicated group of, you know, Ballard stans? Probably.
But is it concentrated like the liver king?
I I don't know.
I don't know if Tim's online presence is consistent enough to warrant that kind of following.
But who knows?
It might be out there.
It might be growing.
It might grow stronger after this film.
I think remains to be seen.
Yeah, I contrasted earlier one time, I contrasted the work of Operation Underground Railroad, which often involves, you know, creating media and telling stories of dramatic rescues against the work of Casa de Amparo.
And this is a San Diego based organization.
That provides housing, food, and counseling to children who come from abusive circumstances.
And this is very sensitive work and involves, you know, just...
Providing someone a child who is in who is coming from a very terrible circumstances the play a safe place to live food to eat Counseling some stimulation trip to the beach, and it's not very it's not as cool.
It's not as cool as the L flying to South American countries and busting down doors But it's not dramatic enough to make a movie about, but it's far more crucial for helping children if you're serious about it.
But you don't hear about it because, again, it does involve, you know, these kinds of like dramatic tales of, you know, brave ex-DHS agents who are willing to, you know, do what it takes to, you know, rescue children or whatever.
Tim Ballard, you know, as a figure is, it probably would be more universally sort of celebrated if we didn't know so much about him.
You know, the idea that he sells, you know, sells slots on the helicopter to wealthy, you know, wealthy people who, who kind of want to come along for the ride and the race.
There's, there's something that, um, Which is interesting because we're talking about this sort
of this group's foray into Hollywood.
But there is a kind of Hollywood element to the group already.
You know, the raids haven't gone exactly as they've said.
The rescues aren't exactly what they've made them out to be.
You know, journalists and researchers have wondered, you know, does this do more harm than good?
You know, there is a case of, you know, Ballard claiming to rescue somebody who was just a sex worker and didn't necessarily want to be rescued.
And I think that these elements are You know, make his his story.
It does.
It almost has that for show element, which I think to reasonable people makes you question the motives or in a lot of ways sort of detracts from the real problem that they claim to be going after.
You know, both of you have brought up points that make our ending sequence here make a lot of sense, because I've We've created some questions about how we manage ourselves in the real world.
And so the section here in our document is called Blowback and Mental Health.
And I wanted to ask you first, moving away from Sound of Freedom and away from the screen stuff, Travis, you're doing a lot of wildlife I have an Instagram, it's called Logan Strained Photography.
Logan Strained is my real name, so yeah, I post my photos there.
And is that helping make this podcast work sustainable?
It absolutely is.
The way I always phrase it is that somehow, because of circumstances, my day job has turned into Finding ugliness online.
And so to contrast against this, I found a hobby that requires me to find beauty in the physical world.
And so what I, what I, what I, what I, and the problem is, is that like, you know, it's like I've, I've, I've spent a lot more time online on the internet than perhaps I should have over the past couple decades.
And I've enjoyed it.
I've met people.
I've learned things.
It's been, it's been, it's been enriching for me.
I'll say this, but there's this risk, you know, there's this cognitive fallacy called,
you know, what you see is all there is.
You become convinced that because you read all this posts and see all this content that you just have a complete
and total understanding of the world because of all the information that's being funneled
to you every single day.
And it's just not true.
It's actually a quite myopic and limited view of the world, regardless of how much content you consume online.
You need to be able to, you know, engage with things that are a little bit more physical.
And now this might be a hobby that involves physical materials like yarn or leather, or this might be, you know,
you know, something else.
It was just going on walks in photography and Now, Jake, I haven't heard you discuss any outdoor activities or, you know, canoeing or kayaking or anything like that.
But you do do these anti-conspiracy theory radio plays called Jake Stories, which seem to be which seem to be really cathartic.
And so I'm wondering if they help you manage this work, if they are enough.
Sure, I mean, you know, the thinking behind those was if all of this stuff is kind of made up anyways, could I also make up a story that sort of pokes fun at these ideologies or the people who have sort of structured their lives around them?
You know, I mean, definitely creative writing is certainly an outlet for me.
You know, we do the podcast and stuff, but I'm also writing screenplays on the side and taking on projects that have nothing Nothing or little to do with conspiracy theories.
Now, sometimes some of that work bleeds in.
But no, I've also taken the much more sort of expensive route of seeing a therapist for the last, I don't know, two and a half years.
Yeah, excellent choice.
That's been really helpful because, you know, there's, you know, I found myself, uh, you know, probably around, I don't know, right around when COVID, uh, when, when COVID sort of hit, you know, with the onset of the world changing in such a dramatic way.
And, you know, me being a little bit of a hypochondriac as well, you know, didn't help.
Um, also the, the success of the podcast was, you know, something that, I never expected to happen and, you know, to have my life and career change so drastically, I sort of started to disassociate a little bit.
And the kind of content that we look at, you know, on a regular basis aids in that disassociation.
So I found a great guy who I started talking to.
Yeah, that's been really helpful.
I play a lot of video games.
I write music.
I try to aim my creative sort of brain at things that are positive.
And I think that the stories...
And definitely the new series that I'm doing with our co-host Brad Abrahams is definitely in that line, is try to aim the storytelling machine at something that is not inherently harmful, something that still inspires wonder, that isn't attached to politics.
Like Travis said, I don't think the human brain is...
you know, has evolved to read everybody's opinion all at once.
And a lot of times when you turn off the phone or you close Twitter or you close
Reddit or you close the discord or tell it whatever it is, whatever it is you're
on, you, you, you look up and out to a world that is very different than what you
see online.
And I think that it is important for us as a species to remember that, that that is
real.
You know, not to say that what's happening online and people's opinions aren't
real.
They, they, they are.
There is somebody behind that phone typing into an onscreen keyboard or, you know,
maybe a desktop keyboard if, if, if they're not on, you know, iPad or iPhone.
But it's...
I don't know. It's kind of got nothing to do with you at the end of the day.
And I, I try to remember that as, as much as possible.
And you know, who you are is more so what you're out in the world doing,
as opposed to what you're posting.
And I try to maintain a healthy balance.
Sometimes you just got to delete the app for a while and take a break.
And I encourage everybody to do that if you're getting to a point where you're waking up mad.
Jake and Travis, this has been awesome.
Thank you so much for your time.
Fantastic to talk to you.
And thank you for all of your amazing work that you've that you've done on this subject for all of these years.
It's really, really been helpful for me personally and I know for a lot of other people.
Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you guys.
Yeah, our pleasure.
Seriously, this has been a wonderful conversation.
We should do it again.
Thanks.
I second all of that.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
We'll see you here over the weekend for a brief, on Monday for our bonus episode, and next Thursday for our main feed feature.
