Matt Brown and Chris Kavanagh dissect Blind Boy Book Club's "secular guru" rhetoric, critiquing his conflation of verified Epstein DOJ files with unsubstantiated claims about ritual murders on golf courses and Ivana Trump's burial. They dismantle theories linking Epstein to the alt-right via Christopher Poole or the Super Bowl halftime show as controlled opposition, contrasting these lurid narratives with mundane realities like algorithmic engagement and actual Russian disinformation. Ultimately, the hosts argue that Blind Boy's reliance on emotional gut feelings over evidence creates a "cartoonish villain" thesis of vampire elites, ignoring documented behaviors like narcissism and entitlement while overlooking the justice system's severe response to Luigi Mangione's assassination of a UnitedHealthcare CEO. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Satire and Safe Comedy00:08:13
Hello and welcome to the Cody the Gurus podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm the psychologist Matt Brown and with me as always is the cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh and I join you Chris back in God's own country Queensland after being down in the hellhole that is Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
You went to the big smoke, it was like Crocodile Dundee internal version.
Yes, internal version.
That's right.
But it could well be the same.
Everyone down there, it's raining.
There's multi story high rises.
Everyone's wearing leather or black or gray.
Were you confused by moving escalators and ripped out?
That's not a knife.
This is a knife.
Not quite that far.
You city folk don't know how to wrestle an alligator.
Watch this.
That's my Australian accent, by the way.
Let's just say, like, I know you've often admired the bronzed.
Even orange coloring that I have.
Yeah, you know, I stood out in the same way in Melbourne.
They're like wraiths, hardly kissed by the sun.
Probably that's all relative because I feel what you regard as a wraith in Australia would be a swarthy tand.
Well, let me put it this way I think they're about as un Australian as you can get while still being technically Australian.
How does that work?
Oh, that's good.
I like that you're annoying Australians after upsetting.
The Northern Irish and Scottish people from last time.
Nobody's safe.
That's safe.
You'll all come to hate me.
That's right.
Speaking of, we're going to come to here.
No, that's not fair.
That's not fair.
We're looking today, Matt, at a beloved figure amongst some quarters.
Actually, somebody that I enjoyed quite a lot back in the day when they were primarily part of a satirical Irish comedy hip hop band.
We're looking at Blind Boy Book Club.
Okay.
So originally was one half of the band, the Rubber Bandits, which is where I came across him with a famous song, I've Got a Horse Outside, right?
That's, you know, I swear it is a famous song.
As if it's so famous, why haven't I heard of it?
That's what I want to know.
You will have heard it.
The other thing that they're known for, that band, I don't think they still perform.
I think they've kind of went their separate ways, but they wear plastic bags on their heads, like shopping bags with eye holes and mouth holes.
So, this was a signature look of them.
Sorry, it was Horse Outside.
That was the title of their song.
You probably didn't get it because of that.
You would know it as Horse Outside.
Yeah.
I'm at Amanda's wedding in a church on Thomas Street.
I'm looking at her bridesmaid, and she's looking back at me.
A window sour sends her last girl, and she wipes a lift.
A back to the hotel, and if it goes well, finger on a shift.
She says, Fitzy, Twizzy, Mitzy, and he offered me a spin.
Your mind is civic, cause you've a heart so tight Oh, yeah.
And also, Matt, he is a fellow Irishman, right?
He's from the South, you know, the real Ireland, as you would put it.
Yes.
From Limerick.
And, you know, I'm a pretender, as you like to say, Matt.
I'm just a Northern man, you know?
So I probably don't rate, you know, the same level of Irishness, but I'm just saying that, you know, we're from a related background, shall we say?
Yeah.
You're from the same landmass.
We can agree on that.
The same landmass.
That's right.
We're all from the Emerald Isle.
Okay.
Yeah.
So, like I said, kind of satirical comedy stuff.
Some of it is specific to Ireland.
It's like Irish humor, you know, making fun of different counties and this kind of thing.
But some of it was just also broader stuff.
And this is one half, right?
So, this guy goes by Blind Boy Book Club.
After the band, he started a podcast, the Blind Boy podcast, which is apparently very popular.
Lots of people listen to it in Ireland and the rest of the world.
And you might see him pop up on like Novara media, left wing media, he mainly features in or some talk shows.
But yeah, but we are looking at his podcast, the Blind Boy podcast, which in the blurb often discussing mental health, masculinity, sociopolitical issues, so on.
Right.
Yeah.
And he's very well regarded, isn't he?
I don't think there's been much criticism of him online, even when I consulted with Claude.
Claude was very complimentary.
I noticed.
Is that correct?
I think a loyal following on social media like Reddit.
So this will be fun.
Yes, you are right.
He is generally very well regarded.
You know, the thing is, Matt, in general, Irish people, you know, people like them.
And when you're talking about the stances, which you have to work really hard to get people to dislike you.
I've carved out an opinion.
The one Irish person that, you know, doesn't get that.
Well, being Bono.
Me and Pano, but yeah, so the thing is that he is often talking about, like I say, mental health awareness, but also anti globalization, anti capitalism, anti colonialism, the Gaza conflict, right?
So these are things which, at least in left wing quarters, are generally seen as positives.
You're drawing attention to important issues, raising awareness of mental health issues and geopolitical.
Conflicts that need more attention, as well as the horrors of capitalism, right?
Yep, yep, certainly ticking a lot of boxes there.
Yes, so he had a series that was on BBC Three called Blind Boy undestroys the world, and it would be familiar, you know, the kind of manufacturing consent type analyses of how the world functions and global exploitation.
He's not a fan of neoliberal capitalism, let's put it like that.
I mean, we're going to hear that.
Yeah, and on that subject of his popularity, Matt.
May I invite the listeners this time to recall what we do on this podcast, which is we are interested in secular gurus, right?
That's the hook of this podcast.
And we note features that are recurrent amongst that set.
We look at people from that perspective.
And there are people that we've covered that we genuinely don't like.
You know, Dave Rubin, the Red Scare Girls, for example, who don't fit the template.
Very well, right?
Now we've been critical of them, but just because we don't like them doesn't make them a guru.
On the other hand, just because we might agree with someone politically on various issues does not mean that they are not a secular guru.
So we've covered this with Gary Stevenson whenever we were talking about is inequality a problem?
Yes.
Does that mean that Gary Stevenson is not engaged in guruish things because of that?
The Plastic Bag Brand00:04:40
No.
Right.
So I just invite people because I know that, you know, in our audience, there's a little bit of a skew.
Toward the left hand side of politics, and Blind Boy says things that appeal to that side a bit more.
But don't ask yourself, Do I agree with Blind Boy's politics?
Ask yourself, Are the things that he's doing similar to what we've covered with other gurus, right?
That's the question.
Because you can completely agree with whatever criticisms or completely disagree.
And it's a kind of separate question about whether the person is engaged in guruish.
Tactics and rhetoric.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a valiant attempt to avoid getting accused of being a neoliberal shield, Chris.
But, you know, I respect it.
I don't like your chances, but I respect it.
Yeah.
Well, we know what's going to happen, Matt.
But you just got to, I just got to encourage people.
Come on.
Like, just think, you know, this is like, which occasionally happens, which is like, Matt and Chris, they're very good.
I really like what they're doing until they cover someone that I agree with.
And then it just falls apart.
The whole system, it doesn't work.
None of it makes any sense.
They're just biased assholes.
And you're like, just, I mean, is it that?
Is it that?
Told Sam.
Anyway.
Anyway, let's move on.
We may have nothing but nice things to say about that.
That's true.
Who knows what we're going to say?
Who knows?
And the bag he wears on his head, it's not just any old shopping bag.
Well, there's a shopping bag.
Is it?
It looks tightly fitted, at least to the pictures I've seen.
It's almost like a balaclava, but made out of plastic.
It sort of clings to his head.
Yes.
So I don't know if he was joking.
He said at one point that he has like a custom one, which looks like a plastic bag, but which is more comfortable.
But that could have just been a joke.
But the general thing with a plastic bag on the head, the main argument as to why he wears it is that he wants to maintain anonymity, right?
If he has this plastic bag, then outside of his public persona, he's not identified.
He's not recognized in public and he has issues about anxiety and introverted person, according to himself.
Right.
So, this helps him to remain anonymous.
This is the justification, the primary one that he offers for wearing the bag.
Now, a cynical person, Matt, not me, but a cynical person might note that it also functions as somewhat of a brand.
You know, like he rose to prominence as part of a.
Band where the gimmick was that they have a plastic bag on their head, and into his following career, he kept the moniker from the band and the plastic bag.
The other member of the band didn't, right?
He's actually on YouTube doing these quite weird experimental art projects.
Like, he makes these videos about creating these very intricate dioramas or art projects.
And as I mentioned, you One of the things that the other guy did, who goes by the name of Bobby Chrome, right, Mr. Chrome, was that he transplanted one of his arse hairs onto the top of his head in Turkey.
This was like part of, you know, one of those.
So, like, he's very involved.
But that guy is not wearing the plastic bag anymore.
So, I'm just noting.
Otherwise, and otherwise, completely normal with the transplantation of us.
Well, his YouTube channel is interesting, though.
It's like, it's very, you would like him, avant garde.
Avant-garde art.
I get it.
Yeah, I get it.
I get the statement that was getting made there.
Okay, so he's stuck with the bag.
And yes, a cynical person might say it's a brand, a bit of a gimmick, a memorable one.
But he's offered other explanations for wearing it, hasn't he?
Well, I think he's talked about that the specific bags are associated with a local shop, which is no longer in existence.
So it's sort of a tribute to that as well.
But I mean, the majority explanation that gets cited is that it enables him to maintain anonymity that he otherwise wouldn't have.
Whispering with Soft Music00:02:18
So he told a story, for example, where he was out and he got wasted, and the next day he threw up.
While he was walking down a street in Dublin or somewhere, Limerick, I don't know, somewhere in Ireland.
And he was saying if he didn't have the mask, people would have been like, oh, look, that's Blind Boy thrown up there in the street.
But because he wore the mask, people were just like, oh, it's a drunk garage person thrown up.
And it's useful for that purpose.
That makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
Okay.
So in the material we listened to, and you've heard a lot of other stuff by Blind Boy, I've only heard This one, um, you know, I'm doing just enough to get by, but uh, um, so this is a this is like a what does he call it?
A phone call episode, like an it's an off the cuff riff and a stream of consciousness, isn't it?
Yeah, so he he refers to this as a phone call episode, and well, let me just play it because I have the clip where he's explaining um what he's doing.
Repel from the melty bell, you sweltering Emmits.
Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast.
If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.
I'm a busy boy this week.
I'm in the middle of my Irish tour.
Tomorrow night, well, tonight, if you're listening to this podcast on Wednesday morning, I'm in Vickers Street.
Sold out gig in Vickers Street.
I cannot wait.
As I've mentioned before, gigging and touring is very time consuming.
So, for this week's podcast, I'm going to do a phone call episode.
And a phone call episode is where I kind of riff.
I riff off the top of my head.
And the podcast isn't rigorously researched or written.
Yeah, yeah.
So, and you can hear there too, something we forgot to mention, which is that this is a kind of ASMR.
It's, yeah, there's that clinky music in the background, soft piano or whatever it is, is going to play throughout.
And the delivery is like that a guy whispering in your ear and telling you stories.
February as Adolescence00:03:51
And that's what it's like throughout, right?
Some people might love that, man.
Some people might enjoy it.
I can't say I'm a fan of this kind of delivery.
I think, you know, podcasts create, in general, a kind of audio intimacy, if you like, right?
And there are ways to ratchet that up and like whispering with soft music playing might be one of those ways.
But yes, so that's the delivery, take it or leave it.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, the framing there is that this is a stream of consciousness riff.
So I guess it's a caveat that you shouldn't take.
Any of this too seriously.
It's not carefully researched or anything.
It's just thoughts coming into his mind that he's sharing with us.
Yes, that's the general disclaimer, if you like, right?
And just to highlight, man, so that's the way that this episode gets introduced, right?
This is the next episode that came out after.
So just to give you a comparison about the introductions.
If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast.
But if you're a regular listener, you know the crack.
We're in the gosset.
The gosset of February.
Things are getting nice and sweaty out there.
I experienced my first blast of decent sunshine the other day.
The type of sunshine that hits your back and lets you know that you have to start changing the clothes that you're wearing.
That you have to adjust your attire because you're moving into a new season.
And the birds have started chirping.
There's no more silence in the trees.
Now, February, it's a greasy month.
It's dirty, it's mucky.
It's very teenage.
It's a very teenage month.
Remember when you were like 12 or 13 and you get subtle hormonal changes in your body?
You come home from school and your school jumper is sticky and so is your shirt.
And you're suddenly thrust into this new routine of personal hygiene.
It's like, oh, you've got to shower every fucking day now.
You have to wear deodorant and you get spots on your face.
And the change comes so quick that it takes a while to figure it out.
And to get comfortable with the new things that are happening to your body.
February as a month is a bit like that.
Visually, it still looks like winter.
The trees are bare.
But the ground is warming up, so everything's all muddy when you walk in it.
And you're just waiting for things to settle, so you can finally call it spring.
And I'm not going to say February's my favourite month.
It's not.
But the name, the name February, by far it's my favourite month.
Because the origin story.
where the word February came from.
And he's going to go in there to explain the origins of her brain.
So I play that just to mention that his non-phone call podcasts don't have a completely different feel to them.
They're riffing from topic to topic and going into history and myth and legend and linking things together, which he does in this episode.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
It doesn't seem to be a big distinction.
And you get it, it was very familiar there, kind of the, I guess, artistic associational.
Approach he's got there.
His main motif there was comparing the month of February with being an adolescent, like a life stage.
And then he, yeah, presumably just moved on from there.
So, yeah, I heard a lot of that coming through in this episode too.
It's kind of an artistic mode, isn't it?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Left Wing Conspiracy Appeal00:11:20
It's very based on associations.
You know, it actually isn't a million miles from the way that the Sensemakers or Jordan Peterson work, that, you know, they connect things thematically.
And they go into like extended discussions of little stories to illustrate points.
So it's interesting in that respect because, like, I think the people that find Jordan Peterson appealing would not find Blind Boy appealing, right?
Because he's hitting on very different motifs and political points of view.
But in terms of the approach to evidence, to reasoning, and so on, it is actually very similar.
It's interesting, isn't it, how things could be immediately recognizable as being right wing conservative coded.
And left wing coded.
But as you say, that doesn't really mean anything.
They can be structurally or formally, like underneath it, very similar, but be appealing to completely different audiences depending on how the coding is, for want of a better word.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, the Epstein files, Matt, and the release have been just a gold mine, a kind of like online gold mine.
Cornucopia.
Of hot takes and conspiracy takes and so on, as well as legitimate outrage, revelations, all these kind of things.
But whenever you dump a huge amount of content out into the public, you know, it's the same thing that happened with WikiLeaks or anything like that.
You know, the.
The Democrats' email, right?
The Podesta email hacks or these kinds of things.
Like, there just is a rush to kind of connect them to whatever your particular perspective and interpretive framework is, right?
And Blind Boy is doing an episode here because people have asked them, you've got to give your take on these Epstein stuff, right?
So, yeah.
Well, let's see.
Where that goes.
So here's the beginning of how this episode is framed.
Hundreds of you have been sending me DMs and asking me to speak about the Jeffrey Epstein carry on, which is the US Department of Justice.
The US Department of Justice is releasing some of the Epstein files.
And it's the US Department of Justice now, you see, so you have to take that seriously.
And a lot of the Epstein files would suggest that.
A group of very powerful billionaires, multimillionaires, people involved in politics, the royal family, a lot of very, very powerful people are alleged to be involved in sex trafficking, abusing people, abusing children.
Things that to speak about them would get you labelled as a conspiracy theorist.
Now you're looking at files being released by the US Department of Justice which align with Illuminati conspiracy theories, and it would also appear.
Nothing's being done about it.
The current president of the United States, Donald Trump, is implicated heavily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So here there, Blind Boy emphasizes a couple of times that this material was released by the US Department of Justice.
And I think he goes on to repeat that theme a bit.
The implication being that this sort of institutional authority of the DOJ, I guess, elevates the credibility or epistemic status of whatever is in those files.
You have to take it seriously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And there's reference to, you know, The like conspiracies by the Illuminati have been vindicated, and this echoes what other commentators have said about you know, Pizzagate is now not so much of a conspiracy, actually, also highlighting mentions of pizza in the emails.
I'll just say, Matt, that like, no, that's not actually true.
Like, the lurid claims of Pizzagate, QAnon, Illuminati people have not been vindicated by this.
This is like a popular narrative that you see online, it's been echoed on the right by a whole bunch of people as well, people like Bill Maher.
Also, saying, you know, now we know it's true.
And that's not what the emails show.
What the emails show is elite networks, people being sycophantic to Jeffrey Epstein, not caring about his crimes, people like Elon Musk asking to party with him, all this kind of thing, right?
Lawrence Krause being a creepy dude, all these kind of things.
What they don't reveal is that there's a network of secret pedophile trafficking going on that is out in the open, discussed in emails.
No, actually, the emails.
Don't support that claim.
They support what we already knew, which is like Jeffrey Epstein abusing underage girls and people not caring about that.
Right.
And of course, there's a massive corpus of material released.
Like it's a real bulk release, including not only emails, of which I've read that only a small percentage of them are in any way sort of connected to the scandal.
Like the vast majority of communications there are just basically this mover and shaker schmoozing with a bunch of.
Other powerful people, right?
Now, there's also a bunch of material like victim statements and things like that, but like a lot of them are anonymous or.
There's FBI tip offs, for example, from anonymous callers, right?
Which are later.
Some of them, which Blind Boy will reference, that, you know, were later sort of removed whenever they were making lured claims about Donald Trump.
But like in this case, you're talking about a call in line where people are just free to say anything, right?
There are also more serious claims and so on, but it's like.
There's everything mixed in here.
It's fertile ground for conspiracy theorists.
So, with that in mind, let's see where we go here.
But one thing that you've noticed is that Blind Boy does constantly appeal to the fact that the Department of Justice has released this.
So now you have to take it seriously.
And I'm kind of like, you know, an anonymous tip off to the FBI isn't suddenly valid because the FBI released it or an investigative reporter talked about it.
Right.
Like, it doesn't.
It doesn't make it valid because it comes from the government.
No, that's right.
It's conflating random and sometimes totally unsubstantiated allegations as revelations and sort of leveraging the fact that this came through the US DOJ as implying something it doesn't.
Yeah.
And oh, just a clip from later, Matt, to make the point that he actually is talking about conspiracy theorists being vindicated.
So, look, Lords, you were asking me to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
The thing is, right, so fair play to the conspiracy theorists.
All right, you were right about a lot of stuff.
Unfortunately, you were right.
What a lot of the conspiracy theorists were not right about was who was doing it.
You've elected into power Donald Trump, right?
So the people who are funding right wing groups around the world, the people who want you to turn against immigrants, The people who want you to turn against feminists, trans people, women.
The people who want you to hate wokeness.
The people who tell you everyone is a Marxist communist and they want to destroy the world.
The people who've told you to turn against a woke.
They're funding all of that.
Okay, so those people are actually the ones who they really want you to be against immigrants and feminists and trans people.
They really want this.
So that we have the type of division that distracts us from what they're doing.
I think they funded things like QAnon, the alt right.
They also funded conspiracy theories about a shadowy global paedophile elite to make it look ridiculous so that some people would never touch it because it is so ridiculous.
Like adrenochrome.
I think it's ridiculous.
It only just occurred to me now, but that theory has got there.
It's actually incredibly similar to one of Brett Weinstein's theories, or it could have been Eric's.
Do you remember, Chris?
Which one?
Well, he had a theory that the powers that be, Goliath, was actually putting all of this, releasing all these clues about this crazy conspiracy.
So it would attract conspiracy theorists and then would delegitimize them by believing it.
Do you remember that?
Yes, yes, he did.
That was Brett.
Yes, Brett was saying.
People are trying to make this conspiracy appealing so that we can delegitimize conspiracy theorists.
Yeah, there is like a similar DNA there in that claim.
And the thing that is presented there is the conspiracies are right, but it's just your targets are wrong.
Like the shadowy elite are the right wing people and they've created all of this.
It's like they funded QAnon in order to throw you off the scent of the real.
Conspiracies and yeah, yeah, that's that's quite a meta conspiracy theory that is up there.
I've forgot to say with Brett, uh, okay, but you can also hear he's obviously linking this to like kind of all of the left wing badges, I suppose.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um, and this is of course the um commitments of the audience, so I think that's quite a well, I can see that such a move would be effective, I think.
And um, oh, yeah, yeah, and actually, Matt, there's a I know a parallel.
I was going to point this out later, but I think it fits in with these clips that we're playing.
So there's one where he's talking about the global elite's plans, right, and what they're up to.
And he's going to connect it to Gaza, which is something that dramatically comes up quite a lot.
And again, as you say, this is something that is more appealing to the kind of left wing audience.
But when you listen to this, I just want you to try and see how this differs.
From the Great Reset conspiracies that were popular on the right.
Let's see if there's a difference.
Political Power and Sedition00:15:08
In the face of climate collapse, I think they're trying to replace a huge amount of the population with artificial intelligence robots.
I know this sounds fucking nuts, but you can see it unfolding.
They're putting a lot of money into artificial intelligence robots that can perform the work of the working class.
They want to move to a type of technological feudalism where, and you can see this now with.
How huge, giant investment funds invest in property.
So, they don't want a future where people own their own property.
They want a future where we perpetually rent.
So, everything is perpetually rented.
Not just your home, but access to resources like food, water, the technology that you use.
Everything will be shifted towards a subscription model where.
You're not really even a consumer anymore.
Everything is you're subscribing or renting, and you're tied to that.
And then, likely, because of what Palantir is doing, which is Peter Thiel's company, they're going to use AI to try and have some type of social credit system where your access to the things that you can rent is denied if you don't behave properly.
If you look at Trump and his Freedom Council, and some of the proposals that they want to do to Gaza, the city that they will rebuild in Gaza.
Like, if you look at the plans that they have explicitly laid out, the people in Gaza won't have cash.
They'll have, like, digital credits like Disney dollars.
So there's full control over how they spend.
The land is treated as a redevelopment asset, not as a homeland.
Gaza would be a humanitarian zone rather than an autonomous political entity.
The population would be viewed as like aid recipients rather than citizens.
Just this weird AI controlled technocracy ruled by Trump's Board of Peace, as he calls it, right?
Well, Chris, on the surface, that does have a lot in common with the QAnon level conspiracies.
Different branding, of course, different vibes.
So, you know, yes, they're replacing all the people, but it's not the white people they're replacing.
It's the working class and so on.
So the details change, but the structure is very similar.
Yeah.
I just heard a lot of echoes of James Lindsay type stuff, right?
You'll own nothing and be happy.
They want to take everything and make it subscription.
Services and I looked into some of this stuff around like cashless Disney bucks in Gaza.
And this relates to like kind of proposals that have been made about the fact that because there's going to be these rebuilding efforts in Gaza, you know, this is part of the idea because of how much resources have been degraded there, like with money production facilities and so on, that cryptocurrencies or whatnot might play a part in it.
But it's all, you know, it's just very much in the Thing of Trump saying, We'll rebuild and it'll be an incredible utopia and all that kind of stuff.
Like, it's not that they're now setting up that there's going to be like a techno utopia in Gaza where people won't own anything.
And this is a trial for the rest of the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think there's a theme.
I mean, similar to James Lindsay or frankly, any of them, there'll always be grains of truth in the things that you're saying.
There is a great reset.
There was a great reset argument.
That's right.
Like the World Economic Forum did mention eating bugs or something, you know.
So there is, there's always raw material to build off, but you have to look at that narrative and ask yourself, is it reasonable?
I'm still a little bit stuck too about what's the great distinction between renting food and consuming food?
I mean, like, what is this?
Like, is it the same thing?
Like, you buy the food, you eat the food.
Then a few days later, you buy some more food.
What's the big distinction between?
I think the claim would be linked to the kind of Monsanto renting the Terminator seeds and this kind of thing.
I think if you got into it, you would get into it.
So, once again, literal seeds of truth there.
Seeds of truth.
That's what I would take it to be.
But the general thing is they want to extract more money from you in shitification.
Yeah, enslavers.
The elites want to enslave us.
So, yeah.
Okay.
But, you know, even if you agree with that general overall statement, I think you have to realize there are parallels with what Alex Jones says.
Now, he's talking about the fact that Thiel and Curtis Arvin have these anti democratic wet dreams about the techno feudalist states that they're going to set up.
And those are true.
Again, we've listened to Thiel talk about that.
But the fact that people say that does not mean that it is actually a fact that Thiel is controlling all of the.
Government policies.
Yeah.
And likewise, I think you have to take Trump's statements about turning Palestine into the Riviera of the Middle East, filled with gold plated hotels.
I think you have to take that stuff with a grain of salt.
Yeah.
I mean, he might want to do that, but, you know, that's the thing.
Trump wants to do a lot of things and claims a lot of things, right?
So you can't just take it as because he posted that video on Twitter or whatever, that that's.
That's what's going to happen, right?
Like, no, you got to be more skeptical.
But, like, it doesn't mean Trump wouldn't want that or Peter Thiel doesn't want that kind of future where there's the tech feudal overlords, right?
It's not like that.
But even in that case, Matt, like Palantir, for example, he talks about a social credit system.
But the CEO of Palantir and the various other people in that, they also are talking about that because they are anti communist, right?
They're always presenting it that China has social credit systems and we want to destroy that.
But here, Blind boy says, Oh, no, Palantir is the one that's going to bring that in.
But they position themselves as the anti communist.
So everybody's accusing everyone that they're all going to bring in social credit systems and techno slavery.
Yeah.
I mean, it is interesting how the same sort of conspiracy narratives actually can serve politically diametric purposes so easily.
Like it doesn't take much modification to do so.
Yes.
Well, let's return down to earth because it was about Epstein, right?
Those.
Clips that I'm playing come later, but let's build up to those conspiracies.
It goes further, I should say as well.
But here's the beginning.
Millions of files were released this week by the US Department.
Here's the thing some of the things in these files allege cannibalism of infants.
It's, I believe, the testimony of a person who said they witnessed it may not be true.
But the point is.
It's been released by the US Department of Justice, you see.
So now, see, things have moved from.
Tin foil hat online Reddit thread, too, released by the US Department of Justice.
And you see, that massively changes things.
And some information is being interrogated by media, some information isn't being interrogated by the media.
And from what I can tell so far, like I said, police are assessing something to do with Andrew, and police are assessing, over in England, police are assessing something to do with.
Peter Mandelson and whether or not he disclosed.
Mandelson was business secretary to Gordon Brown when he was Prime Minister of the UK in 2009.
And the police are investigating whether he disclosed sensitive government information to Geoffrey Epstein, which is white collar.
We call that white collar.
And it's more serious than white collar crime because.
You're talking about someone in a position of political power and they're going against their country and they might bring a bit of sedition into it, but it's in that white collar territory.
Okay.
So, Matt, you heard there, you know, there's reports of cannibalism and, like, you know, they're not verified, Matt, but the fact they come from the Department of Justice, that changes everything, doesn't it?
And, like, I mean, just to point out, no, it doesn't, right?
It doesn't.
You can get anonymous tips that are.
Reported on Reddit or that are reported to the FBI.
It doesn't mean that you have to take it, especially, I mean, people should be skeptical in general of, you know, authorities and so on.
But in this case, the fact that the Trump Department of Justice releases something, no, it doesn't mean that it's definitely now much more serious or that kind of thing.
Like the Trump administration put out a thing saying the lab leak was proven on the, you know, the official government sites.
That doesn't mean.
No, you have to take that seriously.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And one of the epistemic problems I had with this episode was that he made those caveats, just a couple around.
Now, you know, the cannibalism, those reports may not be true.
But then he goes on to treat a bunch of other equally unsubstantiated reports around, you know, ritualistic murder and bodies being buried all over the place in golf courses as being, you know, very substantiated, that they have to be taken extraordinarily seriously.
So, Yes.
Overall, the framing is we need to take everything in these files as kind of verified to some degree.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you brought up that there's going to be references made to secret buried bodies on golf courses and that kind of thing, right?
And what that is in relation to is some accusations, right, which are reported in the file.
So here's details about them.
So the Department of Justice released this one and then deleted it after an hour, which means.
This wasn't supposed to get released.
So, this is a victim statement, I believe, and it says An unidentified female friend was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in New Jersey.
The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13 to 14 years of age when this occurred.
She allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex and was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump.
The friend said she was also abused by Epstein.
There's another mention of a 14-year-old girl, a big orgy parties with Bill Clinton present, Victoria's Secret models, Donald Trump.
Another part, online complainant reported she was a victim and a witness to a sex trafficking ring at the Trump Golf Course in Palo Verde between 1995 and 1996.
She reported Ghislaine Maxwell as the Madame and broker for the sex parties with Epstein Robin Leach Donald Trump.
Complainant reported participating in orgies and that some girls went missing, rumored to have been murdered and buried at the vicinity.
Complainant reported being threatened by Trump's then head of security that if she ever talked of what went on there and who she saw, she would end up as fertilizer for the back nine holes like the other cunts.
That's a quote there.
That was released by the US Department of Justice.
That was taken down very quickly, but it was released.
It stayed up about two hours.
It's well documented.
The only response from the White House and the Justice Department regarding that is that there was a news release with the new batch of files.
And the Department of Justice and the White House said some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election.
If you've been looking at like corporate media, they're focusing on Peter Mendelssohn, uh, fucking Prince Andrew.
Oh, so this is true, by the way, Matt.
There was a bunch of material released, right, which included those accusations, and they were removed after a couple hours or whatever, right, with this presented.
But can I just mention here that Blind Boy says, you know, the media is not covering this, blah, blah, blah.
When I looked this up, the person who'd reposted it with the documents, right, with the claims in it, was Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor on Twitter, viewed 17 million times, right?
So, like, if the CNN anchor is not mainstream media reporting on it, like, you know, it's that claim that they're not interested in connections to Trump or whatever.
And you're like, what are you talking about?
They are.
Like, the right wing media is constantly trying to downplay it.
But the general media, Is very clearly interested in connections with Trump.
Yeah, yeah, the right wing media is very interested in connections to not, um, Bill Clinton or to Bill Gates, uh, Bill Gates, naturally.
Um, left wing media are very interested in these connections to Donald Trump, and you know, they're obviously incredibly lurid and disturbing allegations, but they are treated as revelations rather than unsubstantiated reports without a source from a data dump now.
Yeah, I think he is guilty of just laying that stuff out there without any kind of what's the word?
You know, there should be some kind of caveat there, I think, rather than taking it or rather letting the emotive work of those statements just substitute for critical analysis.
Yes.
And what he wants to see, Matt, what he suggests, like what should happen in this case, right, is this.
Now we can't remember it because.
Trump's Unforgiving Grudge00:10:24
We're wondering whether or not Trump has been burying women on golf courses.
And like I said, with that allegation, it's a victim statement in the files.
I mean, here's the thing.
If anyone ever says that, you then immediately expect that the golf course gets dug up, don't you?
Someone has just mentioned the murder and a specific place where bodies are buried.
Well, do you not just dig up the golf course then and find out?
I haven't heard anything about that.
The reason the golf course thing is sticking out for me is.
I'm not going to repeat the specific threat that was quoted in the files.
I said it a couple of minutes ago.
I'm not going to repeat it again because it's so violent and misogynistic.
But it's alleged that Trump's then head of security, that his threat to girls who had participated in orgies was, you're going to end up as fertilizer in that golf course.
And I can't stop thinking about Ivana Trump.
Ivana Trump was Trump's first wife, the mother of.
Ivanka and Donald Jr. and Eric.
When Ivana divorced Trump in 1990, she accused him of rape.
She accused him of cruelty and abuse.
She wrote a tell-all book about it.
She got a divorce settlement of 14 million in 1991, which in these days of billionaires, 14 million doesn't sound like a lot.
That was a lot back then.
Knowing Trump's personality, he holds grudges.
Anyone who's close to him says that he holds grudges.
He doesn't let go.
He's not a person who forgives people.
Okay.
So, there, Matt, Blind Boy is like, isn't it suspicious that they haven't gone and dug up the golf course, right, to check if there's any bodies there?
But one, no, that's not suspicious.
Like, you don't offer an anonymous tip.
If you did that, you'd be digging up, like, things all over the place.
And in this case, I went and did a whole bunch of research for various claims that Blind Boy makes here, right?
And he's pointing out that Donald Trump buried his ex wife, Ivana, on the golf course.
This is true.
Now, some things to note here.
Some people have pointed out, well, isn't that a fucking weird thing to do?
Like, why would you want to be buried on a golf course?
And it is, right?
Like, as a normal person, it is weird.
But some counterpoints to that view that it was like intended to diss her.
Is that first, when Trump was requesting permission to create a cemetery on his golf course, the planning thing, he asked for a 10 plot course.
And the justification, this was before anybody died, was that he wants to be buried there because this is his favorite place.
This is where he's going to bury his family, including himself, right, overlooking his golf course.
So the initial thing should be, Okay, and this was done before his wife died, right?
You can go and see the reports around him claiming this.
Other people have claimed this because he wanted to try and get like a tax loophole where he wouldn't have to pay tax on some land if it was classified as a cemetery, right?
Could be as well.
I wouldn't put that past him.
But the other thing, Matt, is that this funeral for his ex wife was very public.
It was in 2022.
It was attended by all her children.
So if this was intended as a huge insult, To her, doesn't it strike as odd that it was all, you know, done in public with Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. and stuff?
They were all there and it was intended as an insult, but like an insult where he justified it in advance by presenting it that that's where he wants to get buried too.
Yeah, but also that the argument or innuendo there is that this is some kind of proof that a Bunch of murdered people are in that golf course.
And so the reasoning is essentially the files contain an allegation that women were threatened with being buried on the golf course.
Ivana Trump was buried on a golf course.
And then this sort of, you know, the pit of his stomach kind of stuff comes out.
You know, he can't separate these two things.
They're just there in his head.
And he builds this sort of emotional case connecting them as if Trump has followed through on this purported threat.
And he disclaims that he doesn't have proof of any of this.
But, you know, he spends quite a lot of time working on that framing, planting the inference firmly in the listener's mind.
So, this seems like a textbook example of just asking questions.
Conversely hypothesizing.
It might not be true, Matt, but what if it was true?
Right.
And yeah, like the other notion is like, isn't it suspicious that they haven't dug up the golf course?
And you're like, no, that's not how that works.
Right.
You know, if I rang up the police and said there's a dead body buried in the cemetery, they wouldn't be like, oh shit, we better go.
Well, Chris, that wouldn't be.
Let me restate that.
Let me restate it.
He said, leave it in.
It's funny.
If I rang up the police and said there's a murdered person and they've been buried in the cemetery in an unmarked grave, you better get down there, toot sweet, and start digging up.
Like, what does blind boy think is going to happen?
They're going to drive down and start excavating the cemetery?
No, it doesn't work like that.
So there's that implication that it's suspicious that they haven't done that.
And it's like, no, that's not suspicious.
And then, as you said, Matt, the inference that he wants to plant into the audience is, well, come on.
Oh, and a small.
Point Matt, but in that clip, you heard him say that you know Donald Trump never forgives a grudge, but like, how does that claim hold up with JD Vance being his vice president?
Didn't JD Vance call him the next American Hitler or something like this, or you know, present that he was a terrible person?
And in fact, a lot of Trump's cabinet seem to have previously disparaged him or claimed that he was a terrible person, and counter to what Blind Boy says, which is he never.
Forgives, it seems more like Donald Trump is extremely transactional.
If you're praising him unreservedly now, he doesn't really seem to care that much if you were strongly opposed to him before.
The main thing is, do you bend the knee now?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that that is his character.
Yeah, and he has interesting friends like Mamdani and from New York City, for instance.
They've got a bit of a bromance going.
So Trump will typically say a bunch of horrible things about someone, but if that person is nice to him, There's no barrier in Trump's brain to just doing a full 360 and either hating someone who was previously loyal or loving someone who was a previous enemy.
Yeah, it's not a huge point.
I was just like, that characterization seems slightly off.
Yes, he's someone that holds grudges, but he also, it does seem like you can get him to forgive his grudges.
Just flatter him.
Just flatter him a few times.
Yeah.
And his ex wife, Ivana, seemed to go down that road initially, strongly criticizing him and accusing him of rape and all that.
But in the end, You know, getting on as well as you can when you're Trump's ex wife.
Yeah, I think because Trump himself is such a bullshit artist and totally transactional and just says things, he expects everyone else to be the same.
So it's all part of the game.
I don't know.
Let's not psychoanalyze Trump, but whatever.
Okay.
Yeah, I'm just saying.
I'm just saying.
You're just saying.
Ivana died in 2022.
She fell down the stairs.
And I don't know if you remember this, but it was very strange.
He buried her on a golf course.
Do you remember that, 2022?
And it being in the media and everyone going, that's so fucking strange.
Why would you bury your ex-wife on a golf course?
The fuck is that about?
That's so strange to have a plot in a golf course.
That's really weird.
And everyone noticed how weird it was.
And there's just something in the pit of my belly that when I read that thing in the files where allegedly women were threatened with, you'll end up as fertilizer in the golf course, that this was the threat, this was the violent, misogynistic threat to women.
I can't separate those two things.
Ivana Trump was buried on the golf course.
I can't separate those two things.
It feels.
It feels like he's getting his revenge on her in death.
It feels like he threatened her with that at one point and then followed through.
I don't have proof for that, but I'm just saying she's buried on a golf course.
And then you have this thing in the files threatening women to be buried on golf courses.
Yeah, so this is what I was saying.
These sort of emotional gut feelings are elevated to paper over the very large cracks in the analysis.
These.
Like talking about my gut feeling, and there's something in the pit of my belly, and I just can't stop thinking about it.
I can't separate these things.
He just keeps repeating this.
And of course, the allegations are awful, right?
They're very emotive.
So it's an effective rhetorical approach, especially when you're dealing with stuff that naturally sparks a strong emotional reaction.
Right.
Yeah.
Violent, misogynistic language, right?
He hammers that point.
And if you think we're being.
Chaos and Division Engineered00:08:36
At a lung fair, the blind boy, in that he's just riffing and like he's not connecting dots that are too far apart.
So, this is the next part of where this goes.
The other huge thing that's standing out for me from the recent release, the Epstein Files release, is since the mid 2010s, we saw a margin online, the culture wars, the emergence of the alt right.
Like, I've been using the internet a long time.
And I remember like coming across neo Nazi message boards, like fucking hardcore racists, and coming across these message boards in like 2009.
And it was not mainstream.
They were weird racists on these tiny little message boards.
It rarely spilled outside of that.
It didn't become popular.
It didn't gain traction.
And then in the mid 2010s, you start to see the emergence of the alt-right.
Neo Nazis, the manosphere, real toxic bad shit starts to emerge in the 2010s from starts on the likes of 4chan, an incredibly toxic place.
Ground zero for this was a message board on 4chan called forward slash pol, forward slash politics.
And the alt right emerged from that message board, okay?
And in the fucking Epstein files, Jeffrey Epstein met with the founder of that board in October 2011.
And within 24 hours of their meeting, that message board is formed, which would suggest that the culture wars themselves of the 2010s might have been a psychological operation, the goal being chaos.
Division, the chaos and division that we're living with right now.
You see, from that 2011 message board, you follow all of that up until Gamergate 2016.
That's what got Trump into power.
Brexit came from that.
Online radicalization, the polarization.
See, before that, you had the Occupy movement, the Occupy movement of 2010, 2011.
So, what we have here is a hypothesis, a conspiracy hypothesis, if you like.
Yeah.
The idea that culture wars were engineered to break the Occupy movement.
So, this flowering of a unified class consciousness was threatening to the elites.
So, they manufactured these identity based divisions to break it.
It's an elegant argument.
I don't see any.
What do you think, Chris?
Well, so, like, to lay it out for people, right?
There's a thing in the Epstein files that shows that Jeffrey Epstein met with Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan.
And that shortly after that meeting, there was the creation of the rslash poll board, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And by the way, Chris, it was like, it wasn't like within the next 24 hours, was it?
Oh, no.
Well, the guy Poole said that Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics board.
There was one previously.
And he said the decision to add the board was made weeks before the meeting.
The board, according to him, was added 24 hours prior to the first chance encounter at a social event.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, So that's the first problem with it, right?
Which is that, first of all, the details around this meeting are not quite correct.
It can very easily be a coincidental meeting, especially given how many people Epstein was always meeting.
And this slash poll discussion board, Blind Boy claims, is like the key thing that created the entire alt right phenomena.
Yeah.
I mean, it was a forum that festered that way, but like the Reddit r slash the Donald also did that.
That was like a cultural movement.
And also, Like the notion here is this happened in 2011 and then it created the grounds for Trump to be elected in 2016.
So, like Epstein planned this out, right?
He met Christopher Poole.
He said, you know, you better put this forum together so that we can gain control.
And like the evidence for this is the meeting.
There's only two emails that reference the meeting with Christopher Poole.
And Poole's account is I met him at a social thing.
I went to one lunch.
It was uneventful.
And that's it.
I regret meeting him, blah, blah, blah.
But for Blind Boy, this can't be a coincidence.
It's got to be connected.
And it's that thing, Matt, that, like, you know, it's conspiratorial reasoning where.
Epstein is now this larger than life figure.
So he has to be a very important node in all these events, right?
Like it all comes back to whatever the specific person you're focusing on at that time is.
Yeah.
And it's a massive claim that the decline of the Occupy movement was engineered by Jeffrey Epstein.
Look, we're not going to spend all our time debunking these things, but I think most listeners can see that.
This is an incredibly weak conspiracy.
It's a big reach.
It's a massive reach.
It's a conspiracy theory worthy of Brett Weinstein.
Yeah, and this comes after the golf course conspiracies, right?
So the point is, there's lots of this.
You're going to hear a lot more of it, right?
And there's also a predictable villain that raises its head here.
This is the connection of where this conspiracy eventually ends up.
See, before that, you had the Occupy movement, the Occupy movement of 2010, 2011.
After the Great Recession, you had a lot of young millennials gathering online and in public spaces saying, We want to take down the bankers.
Something is wrong.
We want to get at systems of power here.
And then all of a sudden, just when Occupy looked as if people were unified against neoliberalism, then this division emerges where these people are racists, then these other people are mad woke.
And now nothing, there's no unification because everyone is fighting about identity politics.
So you get tribalism and polarisation and division.
There was always a part of me that felt that, well, I don't know if that shit was a conspiracy or not, but it's doing the job of what a good conspiracy would do.
I'm not saying it's true.
I'm just saying it could be true.
Yeah.
I mean, do you remember Brett Weinstein's theory about the Israel Palestine conflict?
It was engineered to foster.
So, division amongst him, the COVID dissidents.
Yes.
Just saying.
Just saying.
Yeah, that's the same.
It's just a different target group, right?
Brett's is very much focused on him and his friends.
Blind Boys is more like a traditional.
Marxist interpretation.
But the thing here, Matt, which I want to point out to people, is that according to Brian Boyd, according to what he says, this was all about protecting the neoliberal world order.
So electing Trump was about protecting the neoliberal world order.
Has that worked out for neoliberal globalists?
Because what I see is protectionist tariffs, attacks on the UN, cozying up to totalitarian regimes.
The greatest attack on the neoliberal world.
Global order is Trump and his cronies, right?
Like, so the neoliberals, globalists really miscalculated in this.
Yeah.
Look, this is a common feature of conspiracy theories.
Like, the moment you stop and think about them, you know, they just fall apart.
It doesn't make sense.
But I do have to hand it to Blindboy because I think his narrative is compelling and he tells it well.
Neoliberal World Attack00:15:58
Like, if you don't do the annoying stuff that we've been doing and you just listen to it, it's a nice sounding narrative.
The way he tells it, all of the pieces are kind of aligning and falling into place.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, Matt, one thing is that people, I suspect, will say you're picking a very conspiratorial episode, right?
He's saying that he's just riffing and he's going to float ideas out there.
I just want to play you two clips from the following episode, which didn't have the same disclaimers.
I mean, it had disclaimers, but it was about various things.
But one of the things it was about was the controversy over the halftime show.
You know, in America, Bad Money, Performance and the outrage because it was in Spanish, right?
So, this is from a separate episode, but listen to this.
It's like there's the cave over there where Romulus and Ramus were born.
And now you celebrate this festival.
So, now this pagan thing gets folded into a nationalism.
And the MAGA equivalent is like the Super Bowl there was at the weekend.
And the Puerto Rican performer, Bad Bunny, Was the main event during the fucking Super Bowl.
I don't fully understand the Super Bowl, right?
But it was all Spanish language.
Now, first off, the Super Bowl was also propaganda.
No disrespect to Bad Bunny, no disrespect to people in America who speak Spanish.
It was controlled theatre, it was the appearance of being subversive.
The NFL, the National Football League in America, is not fucking subversive, it's billionaire dominated.
It's a cartel of franchises.
It's the machine of American capitalism.
And it's broadcast on the networks, which are also funded by billionaires.
So I would call the Super Bowl halftime show that everyone saw clips of on the internet.
That's controlled opposition.
The halftime show at the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events in America.
The advertisement slots that are purchased are the most expensive advertisement slots.
This is big money.
This year, the main performance, the main musical and dance performance, was by the Puerto Rican singer.
Bad bunny.
It was all in Spanish.
Why do I consider that to be propaganda?
I think it was deliberately so that white American people would feel overwhelmed and it justifies the actions of ICE.
How about that?
So it was, what do you call that?
Yeah, controlled opposition or whatever.
But it was basically, it was all a plot.
They deliberately platformed a Hispanic singer to do something in Spanish, knowing that it would be like a red rag to the bull of the American right and therefore.
Spur them to greater heights of xenophobia.
Well, it goes a little bit deeper than that, Matt.
It's not just that.
So, yes, it'll cause a counter reaction amongst the right, but also the American people in general, Matt.
I mean, listen to this.
ICE are operating as a Gestapo.
They're illegally detaining people, people who speak Spanish, people from Central and South America.
They're doing this.
They're killing people.
They're imprisoned, detaining people without due process.
You're seeing the collapse of civil rights, of law and order.
If you're a white person, Sitting at home trying to enjoy the Super Bowl in your small little white American town, and if for one second you're starting to think, Jesus, maybe this ice thing is a bit heavy handed, maybe I don't like this.
Two people were murdered in Minnesota, and you're seeing people who voted MAGA now going, I didn't vote for this, I didn't want this.
Podcasters like Joe Rogan, who encouraged people to vote for Trump, they're now saying that, I didn't want this, I didn't know this was going to happen.
Now, all of a sudden, you're trying to watch the Super Bowl, and the half time show is in Spanish language.
It's to make those people feel overwhelmed.
It's to make those people feel, oh my God, the country is actually being taken over by people who are not quote unquote American, people who speak Spanish.
And maybe I'm being cynical, I just refuse to believe that the NFL and the TV networks in America are going to do something subversive on behalf of the Spanish speaking community in America.
I think it was theatre, controlled opposition theatre, to make a white American audience feel as if they're being replaced, they're being overwhelmed.
And then Fox News theatrically were saying, This is wrong.
This is wrong.
We need something American.
So they did the alternative.
The Turning Point USA had an alternative Super Bowl show with Kid Rock.
White people stuff.
All white people stuff.
On the Turning Point USA alternative Super Bowl show, right?
Yeah, how about that?
Well, yeah, that's kind of a wild theory, isn't it?
I mean, I haven't.
I didn't expect that.
Look, I mean, the thing is, Matt, right?
He says there, you know, I don't think the NFL were intended to be subversive.
No, they weren't.
They hired a very, like, the world's most popular musical artist who performs in Spanish.
It's not a subversive thing.
No.
He's a mainstream, very popular artist.
So, my boy's like, there's no other explanation.
Why would anybody want to have a Spanish singer on the thing?
You're like, what are you talking about?
Like, you remember the Korean guy that went popular with Whoopam Gangnam?
Yeah, Gangnam Star.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, it's, I love listening to, yeah, Bossa Nova or whatever.
Like, people always, like, whatever your political persuasion, often listen to music.
Yeah.
The lyrics will often be in another language.
It's not the subversive thing that he thinks it is.
Yeah.
It's a, it's a, look at, let's just be frank.
It's, it's an absolutely stupid conspiracy theory that he's proposing there.
Yeah, and it's Brett Weinsteinian level, right?
Like, it's again this notion that it's all, it's all kayfabe, it's all controlled opposition and secret things.
And it's the millionaires and the billionaires and the capitalists, they're all creating this play of conflict.
And, you know, this is a separate episode, right?
So I'm just highlighting that this is his narrative across episodes, which is the culture wars and all that stuff, right?
It's not really what it's about.
And yes, there are cynical interests, Matt, right?
There are people that are interested in whipping up.
Anti immigrant red, right?
There are people that benefit from culture war channels.
I complain about them every week on here and on Twitter, right?
That does exist.
And yes, capitalists are interested in, you know, selling products and increasing the thing.
But this notion that it's all about dividing the working class and his conspiracy, just to recapitulate, is that the halftime show was orchestrated in order to increase support for ICE by making white people uncomfortable by seeing a Spanish.
Singer talk or sing, and you're just like, no, like it's at the very least, it's again a hell of a reach from the existing evidence.
Yeah, it certainly is.
It certainly is.
And I think, Matt, you know, even if people realize that that is like paradigmatic conspiracy hypothesizing, Alab, Brett Weinstein, the fact that he invokes ICE and you know, ICE, they're acting as a Gestapo, they're imprisoning people.
They're killing Americans in the street.
You know, this is all well documented and true.
And so the feeling is, well, that's right.
I agree with that, right?
I think that what's going on in America and the way that Trump is using ICE as a private army to terrorize immigrants is a problem.
So it's kind of like that is baked into the foundation.
And if you are being critical of the conspiracy theorizing, aren't you then defending ICE?
Yeah.
I don't know whether he's doing it consciously or not, but it's an incredibly effective rhetorical.
Tactic.
I mean, we saw before how, you know, he took care to mention all of the paradigmatic left wing issues, you know, people we should be concerned about and supporting, immigrants, trans people, feminists, et cetera.
And the other kinds of ways in which sort of emotion is laid into it.
So I can imagine, yeah, I mean, if you're a progressive lefty person like I am and you're relaxing at home and you're listening to that, there might be a couple of warning bells going off and sort of thinking, well, maybe, but then the sort of emotional gut punch comes in.
And you totally don't like those things.
So you nod along and accept it.
I think it's effective whether he's doing it on purpose or not.
Yeah.
And when you add in a disclaimer, like, no, I don't know, you know, this is just speculation, but it just feels right to me or whatever.
And then when people respond, they can say, well, he said that he doesn't know definitely that it's like that.
And it's just people pick up on this with Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein and Dave Rubin or whoever, whenever they add in strategic disclaimers that they don't really mean it.
Because they're going on to outline the conspiracies in great depth and very strongly.
And I just want to say it's the same here, right?
That's the same feeling I get here.
Same picture.
Yeah, well, anyway, back to the Epstein stuff.
I always had a feeling in my gut that we would one day find out that the culture wars of the 2010s, both left and right, were being stoked by an intelligence agency of some description.
And the reason I thought this was because sometimes I would look at how people become so divided online and I'd just say to myself, well, if this isn't an intelligence operation or stoked by some type of military intelligence, it's certainly doing the job of it.
Because what I see is chaos.
And one thing I always said too, whether it be Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, fucking Twitter, you're trying to have political arguments on a platform that's owned by billionaires, where the billionaires have decided that all discussion must take place in the form of turn and response combat with algorithms that reward hate, fear, and anger.
So you can't fucking solve anything on those platforms anyway, because they're designed for conflict.
But you have it there in the Epstein files released this week.
Ground zero.
Ground zero for the fucking Culture Wars 2011.
That message board on 4chan forward slash Paul.
That opens 24 hours after the moderator meets Jeffrey Epstein.
And there it is in the emails from 2011.
And then there's another claim, but this one isn't as verified.
You can't see an email about it.
But a lot of people reckon, now this is hearsay, that Ghislaine Maxwell was doing the same shit on Reddit, except for the left.
That one has less proof.
That's not in the files.
It's got less proof than the other one, and the other one had very little proof.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's tempting to fact check this.
I did fact check this.
I know you did.
It's kind of boring doing fact checking.
No, I disagree.
I think it's necessary at times because I heard this same thing crop up two or three times in different contexts about Gillian Maxwell.
Stoking the culture war on the left, and Epstein involved in, at the very least, involved in the creation of Slash Paul on 4chan.
So that's them, you know, taking the right and the left and pitting them against each other.
And it's like a kind of appealing narrative, but it's not true.
We've already mentioned the issues around the claims that Epstein created or was instrumental in the formation of 4chan Paul, right?
And how it doesn't really hang together.
But in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell, this mostly hangs around an account that.
Was identified that the two key pieces of evidence presented are that it has a name which includes Maxwell in the username and that it supposedly stopped posting whenever she was arrested or another key event where she was attending something and stopped posting around that time.
And that's it.
That's literally the only pieces of evidence.
So, you know, people on the internet, Matt, being people on the internet, I'll put a link to it.
Somebody did a very, very detailed deep dive into that account and why it isn't Gillian Maxwell.
And like the only evidence presented is not just very weak, but it's not even convincing in the minimum form because they point out, for example, that these two specific dates that people, Point to.
We have a whole bunch of records of Gillian Maxwell's official appearances, and you can go and look at the account's history and what she was doing.
And there's plenty of events where it's just posting away about random things at the same time.
And then on top of that, this is a Reddit power user.
It's like one of the people that got to the million promotions or whatever before anyone else.
So it's like a head moderator on a whole bunch of different channels.
So it's somebody who was devoted.
A huge amount of their time to moderating on Reddit.
They took place in things like Ask Me Anythings, talking about themselves and described themselves as a middle aged man.
Now, you could say, oh, that's all disinformation that they're trying to do for that, but they were consistent.
Also, on top of this, the account was posting after the alleged stop time.
It was just posting internally to other mods, and those messages have been released.
So, like when she was in going through the legal system, it was still.
Busy being a Reddit moderator.
So, yeah.
I know, it just, but it doesn't work on any level.
Like the Occupy thing happened in about 2011.
This poll thing, this board was around then, sure.
The culture wars emerged like years later.
So, as you said, it's just retrofitting explanations to things that don't need a conspiratorial explanation.
Well, there were culture wars though before 2015 and 16, but you mean like the alt right kind of.
Well, I'm sure there were culture wars before 2011 as well.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, like it's just looking for an explanation for something that doesn't require a conspiratorial explanation.
Like, oh, gee, people fight a lot and respond to rage bait and post provocative things on the internet.
Anyone who was using the very early internet.
Knows what the medium encourages.
And the only version of that I think that is reasonable is the version whereby corporations that are keen to attract users and are keen to promote engagement will obviously design their algorithms to work with them.
Prioritize engagement.
Yeah.
Now, whether it's, you know, cute kitty videos or stuff that, you know, encourages a lot of responses.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, it's just human nature to respond to emotional and negatively valenced content more.
Than serious debate.
Criminal Conspiracy Flaws00:14:55
Likewise, Occupy fell apart for well documented mundane reasons.
And also, that sort of shift towards identity politics also had mundane explanations.
So, like you said, you know, tabloid headlines highlight that people are susceptible to outrage and demonization of outgroups and so on.
But what people will be thinking, Matt, raising counterexamples oh, hold on, are you saying that various propaganda organizations don't engage in efforts to stir up?
Social division.
Didn't we have well documented cases from the Internet Research Agency, right?
The IRA that Renee DeResta talked about, where Russia was attempting to sow discord prior to the 2016 election on Facebook and other social media, right?
Posing as either progressive or hard right groups and like encouraging division amongst American society.
So that does occur, doesn't it?
Professor Brown.
Yes.
Well, that structure of rejoinder is the one that.
Conspiracy theorists apply to literally every conspiracy.
Oh, you think that the government didn't organize for the Twin Towers to be brought down as a false flag operation?
Haven't they done false flag operations?
Don't they do nefarious things like this?
Don't they try to control the population?
The usual thing is to point to a specific historical example.
But actually, somewhat interestingly, in this case, the well documented propaganda by Russia and enemies of America and whatnot.
Tend to not be of much interest to the like a blind boy, I don't think spends much time discussing Russian disinformation efforts and that kind of thing.
I guess the point is that when you have a very clear, mundane, for want of a better word, because often the real causes are not like mundane in the normal sense, for instance, it's not mundane for planes to fly into the Twin Towers, but terrorism is in this sense a mundane thing, it exists in the world, it's not a speculative thing.
Thing.
So you don't need to search for extraordinary answers for events that have pretty clear and well documented non conspiratorial reasons for occurring.
You kind of accept the conspiracy interpretation of events if there is good evidence for it.
And as we just discussed, there isn't any for the idea that the culture wars were orchestrated by a secret group of people involving Jeffrey Epstein and.
The person that created the poll message board has this huge long game back in 2011 to suck energy out of the Occupy movement.
You know, it's an extraordinary thesis which isn't required to explain the social events that have happened over the last 20 years.
Sure, sure.
But I put it to you that maybe there's another explanation.
I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of what's released in the files.
Millions of them.
I've only seen some.
What I have seen is shocking.
Especially some of the fucking images.
Some of the images are almost child sexual abuse material.
The Department of Justice themselves said they did not release images that depict torture and death.
So that means they exist, but they haven't released them.
What we're seeing is organised crime.
That's what this is.
It's organised crime.
Perpetrated by.
The most powerful people and wealthiest people in the world.
I don't think there's going to be accountability for it.
I think the fact that it's slowly being dripped out to us.
The fact that the.
Like, why aren't they just releasing everything at once?
They're not.
They're drip feeding.
And the other thing, too, is.
Like, they have to release these files because of the law, US civil procedure, and the transparency laws.
They require that the disclosure of evidence once secrecy is no longer legally justified.
So they have to.
This is evidence.
And they have to release this legally.
The slow drip feed.
That's the bit that's quasi-legal.
And I think it's like what we saw with the genocide in fucking Gaza.
There's a brazenness to it.
It's a flaunting of a lack of accountability to exert control and power.
What about that, Matt?
Did I follow that correctly?
The drip feed release of the data dumps associated with the Epstein files is a way to flaunt their lack of accountability.
Of accountability and to sort of send a message in the same way that the Israeli actions in Gaza were.
Struggling to see the connection.
Well, I think the claim is that, like, it's psychological warfare, right?
That, like, the powers that be, right?
So here he says, you know, they're not releasing it all at once.
And why aren't they?
Well, I mean, one, there's clear reasons why they're not doing that, which concern things around.
You know, privacy of victims and so on, right?
If you take a very charitable thing, but in a lot of cases, they don't seem to care about identifying victims.
It's more along the lines of protecting people that will get mentioned in the files and which might have connections to the Trump administration or other powerful people and so on.
But even with that, they released three and a half million documents.
So he's like, why didn't they just put it all out there?
And they did.
They put out like a whole bunch of it.
They haven't put out a whole bunch of other material.
I think there's six million.
Documents or something that is supposed to be, but they have just dropped a huge amount.
Now he's saying the fact that this keeps happening, where they're like shoving out a whole bunch of documents in various releases, it's a strat, it's a conscious strategy by them to do psychological warfare where they're flaunting their ability.
Right.
And in the same way in Gaza, they're denying what everybody can see is happening on social media because the mainstream media is just going along with the.
The kind of Trump slash Israeli regime.
Yeah.
So, once again, there's an incredibly mundane reason for the fact that every single document hasn't been released all at once, whether you agree with that reason or not.
But I think I assume that when any government department just releases information under freedom of information, there is some kind of rules there.
And like some human has to kind of cite it and tick it off.
There's some administrative overhead.
And when you're talking about gigabytes and gigabytes of text files, Yeah, there's a very mundane reason why it all hasn't been released in one go.
But I guess it's just a springboard for another.
Bit of speculation.
Yeah.
And also just, you know, incompetence.
The Trump administration has all these factions and people responding differently to requests and so on.
So, like, there's the sheer fact that they're a terrible clown car.
And one thing I want to make clear as well is like the criminal conspiracy stuff that often gets invoked around these kind of things.
So, just to be clear, there was a Primary criminal conspiracy that is very well documented.
You can find it in the emails and it was litigated in court cases as well.
And it concerns Jeffrey Epstein, Gillian Maxwell, and other people in Epstein's orbit and employ that primarily served for him to get access to young women for his sexual pleasure.
This is the primary thing.
Like he's a super predator in the realms of.
Jimmy Savile or the Japanese idol company, Johnny Kitagawa, right?
So a super predator.
And that is well documented.
And the way that it operated, which was detailed by the people doing the investigations, the women themselves who were coerced into taking part in it, was that it was like a pyramid scheme of sorts where young women, vulnerable women, and underage girls were coerced into.
Giving massages to this wealthy millionaire/slash billionaire, right?
And then inevitably, they would go beyond that, be forced into sexual encounters.
And then they got out of that role by bringing in new guards, new women, their friends, contacts.
And it created this horrific pyramid scheme, which a lot of the women involved have talked about, you know, the kind of shame and stuff that's involved in it because they also hurt other people.
And as a result, some of them.
We're potentially going to be prosecuted for their role in it.
Now, there are other people, and there are people mentioned in the files that were considered possibly to be treated as co conspirators, right?
But that's a limited amount of people.
I think you're talking less than 10 people in total, definitely under 20 or that kind of thing.
You're not talking about a network of thousands of people trafficking women across countries and whatnot to all these men and figures in different countries based on, like, you know, a client list that Jeffrey Epstein had.
That is what's not documented.
And that's why the New York Times, if you read, they have an article which is saying, you know, how we're digging through it and they're, Asking people, and they're very clear there's all these horrific crimes going on, there's abuse of young women, but they're saying, but what we don't have evidence of in this material is a huge criminal conspiracy.
And that is partly why you're not currently seeing prosecutions, right?
The prosecutions that have started to emerge are all to do with things like sharing state secrets.
Mandelson is sharing state secrets.
And in Prince Andrew, the case that they're going after is him improperly performing his role, some official role in the government.
Because of what's in the emails and the way that he's performed, that kind of thing.
So that's what they're going after.
Prince Andrew already did go through a court case because there was credible evidence for his abuse of some of the girls associated with Virginia Guthrie.
So it's just that more details might emerge, could emerge, those wider things.
But from what it looks like, it looks like there's a powerful individual who had a predilection for young women and underage girls.
And many, many powerful people didn't give a shit about that.
In some cases, they were happy, you know, to party with him or him to bring girls and do the kind of things that you would imagine that creepy wealthy men want to do with young women.
But the way that it's treated is like that crime and trafficking, that's not interesting enough as a story that there was this highly connected and very wealthy.
Predator that was indulged by the people in this orbit and by many powerful and well connected people, right?
They didn't care that he was doing what he was doing out relatively in the open, right?
They joke about it and all that kind of thing.
That's not enough.
What it has to be is that that was a front for intelligence agencies in order to gather information, which ties it back to the Gaza conflict or the creation of R Paul to get Donald Trump into power.
Or creating the actual culture wars.
And you're like, why is it not?
Like, there is a conspiracy here and there is abuse of people and there are sexual crimes, but it's just not.
That's the bit that seems to be if you focus on that, you're missing the forest for the trees.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, and I think Blind Boy is not alone here, right?
Of course, this is a massive hullabaloo in the public discourse.
And I think the broader point there is that.
There's kind of a fuzzy distinction in people's minds between.
What is established versus the spectrum of increasingly lurid theories and narratives, ranging from an eyes wide shut type, deviant and immoral network and secret club of ultra rich people to the kinds of stuff that Blind Boy is outlining.
And yeah, I mean, what you said is right.
I mean, I think where you and he wouldn't disagree at all is that it all reflects very badly on the so called great and the good.
In modern Western culture.
I mean, there's no doubt about that.
And as well, it should.
It's just maintaining that distinction between reality or what we can establish with any kind of confidence and lurid speculation.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, one point that often strikes me in these conversations is like, there's a thing taken for granted where we're getting these revelations, Matt, that like the rich elites, you know, the kind of people in the All In podcast, the people in Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein's orbit, do you realize that behind closed doors, they're actually bastards?
You know, they're the kind of people that look down on others that don't seem to show much concern except for like, How they're going to have fun, make more money, and you know, the kind of people that make off color jokes and are puerile.
Yeah, or cheating on their wives, you know, like all these kinds of things.
And I'm like, I mean, am I just unusually cynical that my background means that my general baseline point of view towards like rich millionaires and billionaires is that they're arseholes, right?
Like, that's my baseline.
I recognize it's a bias that some of them.
Are not going to be, and there's probably, you know, like a spectrum of arseholeness or shower of bastardness.
Justice System Failures00:13:33
But the general thing is, I expected them to be, you know, when I see David Sachs and Jason Calculus and whatever talking on that show, I'm not like, oh, yeah, they seem really nice guys.
I'm sure their emails are, you know, very reasonable.
And every time Elon Musk's emails or something gets released, it's full of sycophantic simpering and like people imagining themselves the master words.
We listen to them talking podcasts.
Constantly like that.
So it's just, I don't know who it is that finds it a revelation that rich people are sometimes very terrible people.
Like, I don't know.
I've just seen it being presented as, well, now we know.
And I'm like, didn't we always know that?
Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, I don't know.
It's a spectrum.
I mean, you know, Bill Gates might have been having affairs, but he did some good in the world as well.
So.
You know, the people are a mix.
You can do both, right?
But that's the thing.
There's nothing in my mental apparatus that is like Bill Gates couldn't be someone that cheats on his wife and was sleeping with young women or underage women.
It's possible.
And is somebody that helped to eradicate polio or what is it, measles, right?
Whichever ones he's trying to get rid of.
Like, I can imagine both things are entirely possible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Entirely.
There's no contradictions there at all.
No.
Okay.
Well, anyway.
You got that off your chest.
Good, good.
Oh, no.
I'm sure it'll come back.
But, okay.
So, after that, Matt, next is here.
And the goal is to exhaust the average person so that we become conditioned to this being the new reality.
And that's what the Epstein Files is doing.
It's conditioning us to go, oh, I guess there's a big elite pedophile ring and sex trafficking ring, and nothing's going to be done about it.
And.
I as an individual can't do fuck all about it, so better just get on with my life and hope they don't target me.
See if our media isn't aggressively calling out the things that we can see with our own eyes.
And then the justice systems around the world aren't doing it.
Like the Brits are under pressure.
So you've got things like police are assessing the Andrew situation.
You're assessing, really, are you?
If that was my neighbour down the road, I'm pretty sure they'd be arrested.
Don't think he'd be assessing it.
He'd be arrested.
So then we are like, well, you can't rely upon journalism.
You can't rely upon the justice system.
I guess this is the new reality now.
Familiar motifs, Matt.
Journalists are all liars.
The.
Justice system and the institutions can't be trusted.
Yeah.
And there's a secret elite pedophile ring which is being flaunted in public and it's not going to be taken care of.
And also, you know, Alex Jones often says that they have to do it in public, right?
They have to leave clues because it's, yeah, it's like tended to rub it in your face.
And he's saying the same thing, right?
They're conditioning you to be weak willed and what's that word where you demur to authority?
Yeah.
Subserving, where you become subservient, subservient and coward.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Look, I mean, you're right, just in purely analytic grounds, you might agree or disagree to some degree with the wide variety of things that Blind Boy says, but it does fit the structure of conspiracy theories, right?
This is exactly the same format that you will see regardless of the political orientation.
And, you know, it's the kind of messaging that is going to be much more appealing to you if you are.
I guess more on the populist left kind of side of politics, and you don't like elites, and you think that the system is all set up to hold the little guy down, then this kind of thing will work for you.
But you just have to be aware that those motifs, like they're doing it in plain sight just so that they can laugh at us or, you know, make us feel that we're completely impotent, that they're leaving clues.
You just have to recognize this is the structure of all conspiracy theories.
So, yeah, you know, like again, the mundane reasons, like there's no doubt there is a degree of incompetence and corruption in any human institution, including, I'm sure, the current justice system and police in the UK.
But there is a.
A more mundane view of events, which is that to the extent that people are not getting rounded up by the police and getting charged with things, is that they may not have the evidence yet to clinch a case, just like with any criminal investigation.
Yeah.
And there is the fly in the ointment that, like Epstein was facing trial, Gillian Maxwell was convicted.
They're supposed to be in this.
But if there's so much powerful control over the justice, System.
Like the bit that is true is it's well known that if you have money, you can hire better lawyers.
You can have more complex accounting arrangements.
You know, Donald Trump gets treated in court very differently than some random guy on the New York subway.
This is true and it's known all across the world.
It's very hard to prosecute leaders in international courts, right?
Like these kind of things are well established.
But it's this claim that once Accusations exist, you know, like Blind Boy wants the graveyard dug up, right?
If there aren't people clapped in chains every time a release comes out, and you're like, no, but it wouldn't even work that way.
Like, Jeffrey Epstein still would have had to go through a trial, right?
And he says, like, my neighbor wouldn't get that treatment.
Really, your neighbor wouldn't have to go through a trial if he was alleged to be a pedophile?
Like, I know people connected to friends and family members, right?
Accused of child abuse or involved with child abuse or whatever, they went to trial.
Matt, the people presented evidence, they were sentenced.
And it wasn't like they just said, Well, we don't need any evidence because you don't have very much money.
So, justice systems are never perfect.
There's always mistrials of justice.
And you can look at like the deal that Epstein got in the first case as an example of a miscarriage of justice.
But it's just like that presentation that like the whole system is corrupt, nothing applies to things like on the right wing.
People talk about two tier policing, two tier judgments, right?
So, what's the difference in the rhetoric?
Isn't it just the same thing?
But their target is saying, you know, white people are not treated the same, white working class, right wing people are not treated the same as, you know, the minorities and the liberal progressive groups that are favored.
Yeah.
Okay.
Next clip.
Next clip.
Let's move on.
Next clip.
Okay.
So, in comparison, Matt, to the non Treatment of the criminal elite class.
You have counterexamples where they do throw the book at people, and these are telling.
I mean, that's why Luigi Mangione terrifies them.
They came down hard on Luigi Mangione, very hard on him, because Luigi Mangione went, Hold on a second, the US health insurance system.
So people pay for health insurance, but health insurance companies make money not by helping people who need health care, but by profiting from denying it.
Ah.
So ye make money when the person dies from cancer.
That's how ye make money, is it?
When the little child whose parents have paid for health insurance, ye make money by denying the health insurance to that child and figuring out a way to let that child die.
That's how ye make money, is it?
Why isn't that illegal?
It's not illegal.
Oh, that's the system.
And then Luigi Mangione went, That seems like a very serious, evil crime to me.
And the justice system isn't working for me.
And politicians aren't working for me.
And the media isn't working.
And what these health insurance companies are doing, that appears quite like an evil crime.
So Luigi Mangione went, I think I'm going to have to do justice myself.
And he assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare.
And he wrote a little manifesto and laid out very clearly no, this is what this is, and this is why I'm doing it.
I'm not crazy, this is what I'm doing.
And then the justice system came down really hard on him.
They were pushing for the death penalty, the media came down hard on him, politicians, the system came down hard and said, that's a criminal.
See that guy?
Luigi Mangione, that's a criminal.
He's a criminal doing crime.
Yeah, yeah, the system, man.
So, yeah, I mean, look, again, he built a lot of narrative onto a single point, which is that Luigi Magione was charged with the crime.
But there's a mundane explanation, which was that he clearly did shoot someone and kill them.
In broad, yeah.
Well, it might be because it was an evening, but I mean, there was video footage.
Yeah, so that's why he's been charged with the crime.
Crime.
Like, I think if there was incontrovertible evidence of such a serious crime in the evidence around the Epstein case against a particular person, let's say Bill Gates, then Bill Gates would also be charged with the crime.
There is a simpler explanation why.
Manjoni was charged, and someone like Bill Gates or some other rich, random person who was named in the files hasn't been.
Yeah, but if you remember, his narrative is that there are videos in the files of torture and potentially cannibalism and stuff, and nothing's.
So, I think the implication throughout this has been there are documented crimes, probably even worse, because according to his description, Manjoni was pretty much doing the right thing.
He was doing the only reasonable thing by executing the head of United Health Care, because they are the Immoral murderers.
Their goal is to make money by denying life saving treatment to young children.
And I think you've got to realize that that is presenting a cartoonish villain.
What's presented is elites are potentially feasting on the bodies of young children.
The healthcare CEOs are sitting around rubbing their hands because the only way they can make money is denying coverage to sick children.
Chris, where else have I heard the claim that the healthcare system only Profits from making people sick.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
So there is some overlap in the anti-facts.
To be clear, for anyone who's not liking what we're saying, I mean, I live in Australia and I would ban private health if I could.
I like socialized healthcare, I don't like it either.
But it is cartoonish to then treat anyone involved in a private healthcare system as being guilty of murder in the same way that Luigi Mangione. Is.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, just to be clear as well here, Matt.
So there's another fly in the ointment fact here because he's talking about, you know, they came down and like, let's accept his framing for a second that Mangione, you know, he killed someone possibly, right?
But lots of people have killed many people.
So why is he being singled out?
And even if we adopt that, Mangione's not facing the death penalty anymore.
The judge throughout.
The charges that could have led to that, right?
So he's facing life imprisonment.
But given his narrative there, where they seek to do the harshest thing, it's not really about justice, right?
It's all about things.
So, yeah.
So I guess this is the thing when people are talking about this system and gesticulating wildly at all of this.
When you have a politician or a journalist or, you know, a justice system that does something good or in line with what they think is good, for instance, prosecuting someone or maybe dismissing.
The charges that would lead to a death penalty for a man's journey, like that's not the system.
But when the system does something they don't like, like even the prosecutors even proposing that in the first place or not charging someone that you would like to see charged, then that is the system.
I think, on epistemic grounds, that's my issue here, not political ones per se, is that it's very easy to just wave your hands at all of this and it's very vague and nebulous what you're referring to.
Premiums and Profit Margins00:04:09
But It only works as long as you keep things incredibly vague as to what the system is.
And you have to posit these really strong, nefarious motives to this all pervading and all powerful entity.
Whether you call it Goliath, like the Weinsteins do, or you call it the neoliberal capitalist system, it sort of functions the same way.
Yeah.
And like the thing is, insurance, you know, like as a system, it functions as a business by it makes more money than it pays out, right?
Like you insure your car, and the hope is that you don't get into a crash.
But if you get into a crash, your insurance will cover the majority of the expenses.
But the system only works because most people don't crash, right?
This is the general logic of insurance companies.
So it's not wrong to say that like an insurance company profits.
By denying payouts, right?
That's part of its profit.
But like the primary way that the insurance company makes money is that most people are not making insurance claims.
So it's the premiums that people pay.
And then, you know, like the payouts are less than the amount coming in.
So they presented that the only way it makes money is like by denying, you know, necessary medical treatments.
And like you say, I'm not a defender of whatever decisions are made by United Healthcare or any.
Insurance company.
I don't know enough about the details, although I don't think the blind boy will have looked in detail given all the other topics that he raises.
But it's if you present it as purely like the CEOs are all just there and they're all just plotting what is the way that we can kill the most people and make the most amount of money, I think you have a cartoonish view of how those people function.
And it is the kind of view where you can then kill them.
Because they're villains who, like, if you take them out of the world, it's a better world for it.
Yeah.
I mean, if, as you say, if you're going to run a private health system or a private anything system, a private telecom system or a private education system, then some of the payments will be spent on payouts or services, and some will be spent on administration, and there'll be a profit margin.
I think the payouts for American or Australian private health companies, and I've got it too, I've got a private health.
Insurance because you're kind of forced to in Australia because you get taxed more if you don't have it.
But anyway, it's in the high 80s in terms of what the payout ratio is to what the premiums are, right?
And that residual of 10 or 12 or 15%, whatever it is, is going to incorporate all of the administrative stuff, all of the costs of doing business, plus some percentage profit margin.
I don't know what the profit margin is, but it's probably not exceptional.
Now, you know, you could frame that as them feasting on the bodies of sick.
Children to get their filthy lucre.
And you could think like me, just like to be clear, if the government runs it, you're still going to have administrative costs, right?
So it's not going to have a hard time.
Well, you're going to have denials as well for like claims.
Yeah, yeah.
That's right.
There are certainly denials in the Australian system.
The Australian public health system will cover what it can afford and it won't cover other things because they're so expensive.
It's just not considered to be a good thing.
A cost to benefit ratio, yeah.
So, you know, you can frame that stuff as nefarious or more nefarious than it is, but you know, again, it's pretty mundane.
A lot of the stuff that is getting pointed to as just the absolute evilest thing in the world is, you know, you can like it or dislike it, but it's not the caricature that he's presenting it as, no, and you know.
Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Rumors00:15:44
One of the things that I would notice, like when people want to do this, like construct the worst villain on the other side for whatever it is, they'll just emphasize particular selective features.
Like when the right wing media wants to talk about these events, which Blind Boy is talking about, they will much more strongly emphasize the family life of the United Healthcare CEO, the young children he had, right?
And so on, which in Blind Boy's story, they're just not mentioned, right?
Like because.
It's a better story to focus on Luigi Mangione as somebody, you know, crusading to help people.
And they're the ones killing children and doing the evil things, right?
So it was the vigilante action on behalf of the people.
But he doesn't spend much time dwelling about the impacts, right, of the person that was executed or whatever, because it just isn't as nice of a story.
And in the same way, right wing media won't want to focus on the excesses of the insurance.
Company, or like things that they've done, which have led to them being readily vilified in the coverage of them on the left that supports what he did.
So, yeah, I'm just saying, you know, the kind of binary manichaeism and the selective portrayal of sympathetic characters.
Yeah, these are classic rhetorical techniques.
It's universal techniques.
Yeah, that never go out of style.
No.
Yeah, and you just pick whoever's the good guy and whoever's the bad guy, right?
Now, Matt, let's get out of politics for a little bit.
I mean, there's going to be politics in it.
But let's go to rituals.
Rituals are important things.
I'm a researcher that focuses on rituals, right?
This is my Bollywick, as you like to say.
And Blind Boy had some things to say about initiation rituals, something which I've written about.
So I think what we're seeing with the Epstein stuff is a conspiracy, but I contextualize it as it's organized crime, right?
That is organized crime at a massive international scale involving the most powerful and wealthy people.
The.
It looks like a combination of blackmail and gang initiation.
Let's use the Hells Angels as an example.
We can all agree that the Hells Angels are an international criminal, organised crime organisation, all right?
Across different countries.
They're involved in drugs, murder, prostitution, everything and anything.
The Hells Angels and other.
Some outlaw motorcycle groups are.
They're mafias.
That's what they are.
The reason I'm singling out outlaw motorcycle gangs is because.
Because of their really strict initiations, right?
In order to have a successful international criminal organisation where your co workers are not nice people, not people with honour, not people that you can trust, psychopaths, in order to have a good business relationship, you can't trust your co workers because they're murderers and scumbags.
So, what they have to do is everyone has to have dirt on each other.
So, if one person falls, everyone falls.
So, do you follow the logic there?
Is the implication that everyone in these elite circles has dirt on each other that they can use to protect themselves?
Oh, yeah.
You're connecting it to the yes, that is the broader connection.
But I meant about the criminal gangs and what they're up to, like why they're engaging in initiations and this kind of thing.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess so.
Yeah, I guess there's truth in that.
And, you know, it's fine to make analogies, right?
Like, I think you could certainly make an analogy with the way the Trump administration works as some kind of organized crime gang, as long as you appreciate it's a metaphor.
Yeah.
And, you know, look, like I said, I specialize in so far as I specialize in anything, in dysphoric collective rituals.
So I'm very well aware of the bonding effects of, you know, painful rituals and, you know, Initiation type rituals.
I've written about hazing and all these kinds of things.
So there are elements that are true about the bonding effects of people who have talked about initiation rituals as either a means of inducing cognitive dissonance, which we discussed recently under the Code in Academia, or as a kind of coalitional psychology tool where you're testing for free riders, right?
You have to go through the bad initiation in order to be trusted enough with like groups' resources and so on, right?
There's work by Aldo Simino on this.
Topic.
So there's stuff there.
And it is the case that groups that are involved with more high risk activities have to be more concerned about defection and loyalty of members.
So you tend to find initiation events amongst military groups, terrorist groups, criminal organizations, secretive societies, or whatever the case might be.
Right.
So there are these things.
And also sports teams, sumo clubs as well.
But these are like groups that require.
Tight bonds, right?
And high levels of trust amongst members.
But he mentions that the criminal gangs, in particular, get people to do this in order that they have like collateral on the people, right?
And that's how they're able to keep everybody in line.
It's a bit like what we've covered with the cults, where they're encouraged to give incriminating information, you know, provide nude photos of themselves or whatever.
And then if they leave, or Scientology, you know, Keep his darkest secrets.
If you leave the group, we'll tell everyone what you've told us, right?
So, this is a thing which exists.
But now, does it exist where he says it exists and the way he says it exists?
So, let me move on.
He's still talking about the biker gangs here.
So, there are court reports of in order to get to the highest echelons of certain outlaw motorcycle gangs, you have to do some pretty depraved shit in the presence of other people.
One of them, necrophilia is one of them, which is sexual intercourse with a corpse.
Because if a person will do that, well, they're definitely not a police officer.
Because they've figured out any police officer as a job who's undercover, even if they're in the job 10 fucking years, it is highly unlikely that they're going to have sex with a dead body in front of other people in order to get to the top of the organisation.
So if you're willing to do that, then you're not a cop.
So you get to get into the elite inner circle of this.
Outlaw criminal organization.
Now let's move from like motorcycle gangs, which you know, with motorcycle gangs, you're talking about very traumatized, poor, um, working class, usually white men joining motorcycle gangs.
Now let's go for really, really posh people.
So, in I think it's either Oxford or Cambridge, I'm not sure which one, but there's a club called the Bullingdon Club.
There, the claim is there's core reports that in outlaw motorcycle gangs, one of the ways that you get the top of the organization is being forced to do public performances of necrophilia.
And that will prove that you're not a cop.
Matt, that's not true.
No, no.
That's not true.
That is not a documented or proven thing.
That is an urban legend.
And it's not associated just with biker gangs.
It's associated with take your pick, right?
Like whichever moral panic that you want.
So, like, blind boy, there, listen to the tone of confidence that he explains that event, right?
And how this is, you know, the kind of thing that they're doing.
And we know this.
And this is the puzzle piece that is going to help us understand the behavior of Donald Trump and the all in guys and some English aristocrat, et cetera.
Yeah.
The other little non secretos dumb.
That before his thesis was, these terrible things are done in order to have blackmail material, prevent people from defecting.
But then in this one, he said, no, no, this is a way of proving your loyalty, proving that you're not a cop.
That kind of thing.
So it's a bit, I guess it's kind of related.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it kind of fits both.
But it's like Matt, there are gang initiations where you're required to kill people, attack people, beat people up, where you have to get facial tattoos, various other things, right?
There are like costly signals of commitment to a group.
But he goes for the most lurid example of having sex with a corpse.
And it's presented like, and all of the examples that we hear throughout it.
So Donald Trump is murdering.
Young women and burying them with their remains on his golf course as an insult.
There's cannibalism in the files where people are being accused of eating the healthcare CEOs.
They're profiting off the blood of young children.
Like every example is always the most emotionally evocative and lurid.
And this one struck me because I specialize in this particular topic.
And I know that that is not true, right?
Like it is not a well documented fact that.
Outlaw motorcycle gangs or any group required sex with corpses as part of its hierarchy.
And definitely not ones where it was a public spectacle where the people were like, well done, you're now in.
And we now respect you as a high ranking member of the group.
It's just, it would even be better as a punishment or this kind of thing.
But it's based on the truth that there are groups and organizations which require you.
To perform costly signals of commitment.
And these can involve things that involve breaking taboos, right?
So if you just don't reach for the most lurid example, you can make the argument more accurately, but it's not as evocative without the reference to having sex with corpses.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I think this gun balancer was actually one of the better, relatively speaking, parts of his dialogue where the general thesis that you could understand elite depravity through the lens of.
Group cohesion, blackmail, and escalating commitment.
That general point is fair, I think.
But, like you say, when you look at the sorts of things he cites, it is one on the less verified end of the spectrum, or in the case that you mentioned, just merely urban legend, when he could have gone with examples that are better verified.
And also, that he chooses, of course, the most lurid and the most emotionally affecting points.
This is a theme throughout the entire episode that the argument is kind of stitched together from statements of emotion, statements of feeling, and evocative, lurid examples with a kind of tendentious relationship with what is actually verified.
That's the common pattern.
Yeah.
And he moves on here to talk about like the David Cameron story.
You remember this, Matt, about like he was accused of.
Putting his penis inside a pig when he was at university.
A dead pig's mouth, I should say.
And this being part of the upper elite japes that people get on in the Bullingdon Club or whatever, right?
Whatever elite group he was a part of in Oxford or Cambridge.
Did you remember the story?
I vaguely remember that.
Yeah.
There was a Black Mirror episode kind of based on the same theme, right?
Now, I don't like David Cameron.
I'm not a big fan.
And I'm also not a huge fan of the elites in British society.
The Bullingdon Club has well documented terrible history.
He talks about them trashing places and then paying for it after the meal.
Again, that is something that's actually quite well documented.
But the pig thing, Matt, the pig thing, it's not well documented.
It's based on some people giving a quote that they heard from someone that they'd seen the photograph and then nobody was ever able to find.
A photograph and other people denied it.
It was reported like in a book, as I heard this from a source.
So, while it was fun to imagine that David Cameron did that, there's actually not any strong evidence that he did.
But Blind Boy, when he reports it, he's like taking it for granted.
And then, you know, why would he do that?
And he goes into the psychology of, you know, why David Cameron would do that and why it makes him different than.
Normal people, but he was just talking about motorcycle clubs and stuff, and presented that they're working class.
So, in his version, working class people also have sex with corpses, right?
Whenever they want to get up, they're a criminal organization.
But in his next stage, it's like they've got a different psychology than the rest of us because David Cameron and others are willing to do these weird initiations with pigs.
And he talks about the Skull and Bones Society in America.
And so, Listen to this.
So, with the skull and bones, I think Bill Clinton was in it, George Bush was in it, a load of presidents.
It's Princeton or one of them, I don't know.
Same shit.
Elite colleges in America where future presidents, okay?
One of the skull and bones rituals, again, this is rumour, it's not 100% verified, but I think they have to climb into a coffin and masturbate in the coffin while being surrounded by other members and then listing out secrets as if they're at a confession.
And they have to do this for group cohesion.
Humiliation, everyone has dirt on each other, and then a load of them go on to become American presidents.
The point I'm trying to get at is it's not satanic worship.
You don't need anything supernatural here.
You just need horrible people with access to power.
So I imagine you don't know much about this colorful society, but how accurate would you imagine that is?
I'm probably guessing not very accurate.
Yeah.
Well, so at least in this case, there is citations.
So, one Bill Clinton, no, not a member.
Okay.
But whatever.
This is a phone call episode.
Urban Legend Rituals00:04:34
But the coffin masturbation ritual comes from a single investigative article in 1977.
Right.
And it's not that they masturbate.
The account in that one was they lie in the coffin and recount like sexual histories and personal secrets, you know, the same kind of thing that we've talked about.
High demand cults get people to do.
So the masturbation detail has been added in.
In later reports, which seem to have taken this detail, you know, they're reporting their sexual history, including masturbation, and then has kind of like a game of telephone ended up that they have to masturbate in the coffin.
And you see it sometimes mentioned in articles in the Atlantic, but they're referencing back to that 1977 article or another conspiracy book from the 80s, but the actual sources for it, that tends to be the only thing that they deny, right?
They mention that the more lurid claims about masturbation didn't happen.
But, you know, I know Blind Boy is in this case just repeating things which are already existing out there, but it's again like the version of it which is the most lurid, right?
Without the masturbation detail, it's kind of like it's a dramatic ritual, but it's not as depraved, right?
And this is a society.
That you know is like associated with an elite university, a bit like Freemasons.
I can imagine dramatic rituals around skulls and coffins and all this kind of stuff, but here again, it's kind of like Indiana Jones.
You know, people jerk it off of further things, and it's and they're all going to become you know the future presidents.
And you're like, no, it's not.
The thing is, I could very easily imagine that at some points in time, in some fancy private school, I don't know, Zeta.
Omega Delta Society or some weird back alley of Westminster, all kinds of weird shit has happened from time to time.
But I think, you know, what's going on here is pulling out, you know, mostly unverified accounts, if not just urban rumor, and weaving it into what is a compelling narrative about the psychology of elite depravity.
And I think it's fine to have a thesis and it's fine to make analogies and, you know, whatever, understand the psychology and stuff.
But the methods here and what he's resting it on is pretty weak.
And it does remind me of a Jordan Peterson or a Weinstein kind of citing these rather weak little cherry picked things of evidence and from that weaving very strong claims and building basically an entire edifice.
Off of a foundation that's very insubstantial.
Yeah, and often psychoanalytic in the reasons that people are, you know, like with Peterson, why left wing people are doing what they're doing, right?
It's because they love whatever, the transgressions, and it's connected to their authority figures and their love for postmodern neo Marxism and, you know, all these kinds of things.
I've seen narratives like this recently built around the idea of the feminization.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And same kind of sighting, cherry picked random little things, weaving it into a narrative.
And yeah, you could do that.
It's just, I wouldn't trust it.
I know, again, you're going to say, well, this is just Chris, come on.
It's pedantic fact checking.
But can I also mention that the three presidents were William Taft, right, from the early 20th century, and then George H. Bush and George W. Bush.
You know, another factor like the familial connection might play a bigger role in their presidential run than their membership in the Skull and Bone Society.
But in any case, so you mentioned about the whole goal of this is kind of to support the broader edifice about like the psychologizing of how CEOs and politicians are not like the rest of us.
Mundane Pervasive Evil00:05:38
And, you know, like I said, Matt, I share the kind of baseline negative image of that class of people, right?
Because I think it's very normal.
Depending on your background or culture, but you know, blind boy is from Ireland, definitely in Ireland.
It is very, very normal to have a negative view of elite British toffs, right?
Or elite Irish people, but to a lesser extent.
And yeah, so just listen to this.
I'm sure Obama rationalized it by saying, Look, I'm defending the constitution, but like the CIA told me to do it.
I don't know.
People who get into positions of extreme power, they know they have to.
Under the system they have to create a hell of a lot of pain.
Not even drone strikes.
Someone who rises to the very top of a corporation.
The company can make more profits this year if you close that factory and 500 people who are supporting their families lose their jobs, but we'll make more profits.
Okay, do it.
The CEOs of health insurance companies.
Your job is to make profits.
By denying people health insurance, that person who's dying of cancer, who has paid for their health insurance every single year for this exact moment.
You have to figure out how to not pay them and let them die because that's how this model makes money.
The people who rise to the top of the system, the top of that fucking global international shit, they're not good people.
A lot of them might be incredibly cruel sadists.
They might be people who have a curiosity about other people's pain, who get a thrill from other people's pain, who enjoy dominating, enjoy hearting, enjoy abusing.
In joy humiliating.
And judging by the Epstein files, these are the roles of being part of that club.
Again, it's a stretch and it's built on emotions, lurid imagery and emotions.
I mean, there's always a reasonable version of this.
Like, I read, you know, was it John Ronson or someone or John Ron Johnson?
John Ronson, yeah.
Yeah, the other way around.
Like, when he wrote the psychopath test or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, so he had a thesis there that, you know, psychopaths.
You know, rise to corporations overrepresented because essentially the role requires a kind of inhuman kind of attitude, you know.
And I think there's a reasonable version of this, is what I'm saying.
I've no idea whether it's empirically true or not, but his version is pushed up to the max, right?
Like it is incredibly lurid, it is like taking delight, like stringing these things together where you have whatever some initiation rituals and some silly elite school.
And combining that with private health insurer not approving a thing and weaving it together with the Epstein thing into a thesis that they're just bloodthirsty people who enjoy inflicting pain.
And these are the people that are running the world.
Essentially, vampires, a secret clan of vampires are running the world, is what his thesis is.
And it's just over the top.
It is.
And it isn't what the Epstein files present.
Because what the Epstein files present, Matt, is people that feel.
That they have immunity, and also people who are arrogant, entitled arseholes, but they're not people who are like cartoonishly rubbing their hands and plotting out great suffering.
Like, people will find there's a reference to torture in one of the emails or whatever.
But what he's painting is that should be the primary thing throughout all these emails because, like, what they're actually about behind the scenes is getting off on pain and suffering and abuse.
They're all like, like you say, evil vampires, but that's not what it shows.
It shows a much more mundane, pervasive evil, right?
Which is just people being self centered, narcissistic, abusive, sexually abusive, entitled pricks.
And the other people primarily care about like what their interests are.
You know, can they get connected to this other person?
Can they have a nice dinner with someone?
And that is a much more mundane.
Cruelty and exploitative system than what Blind Boy presents, which is like a cartoonish world of an evil vampire class that is feeding on pain and suffering.
The reality is, most people at the top of systems, including the super wealthy and whatever, they don't see themselves as evil people and they're not engaged in satanic rituals to increase their bonds together.
The guys in the All In podcast think they're the masters of the universe and they think they're all great guys.
Yeah, they're probably not cannibals.
Probably not.
I mean, in that case, I don't know if that, but it's just, it's so frustrating.
It's so frustrating.
I don't like them.
I really dislike them.
I don't like them.
I have to admit, they're probably not cannibals.
Now, Matt, you know, that's a cast of villains, world vampires, corpse fucking gang members, bloodthirsty CEOs, right?
We're living in the hell world.
A Cast of Villains00:01:06
Fortunately, in this world, there are some good guys.
You might be looking at two of them.
Or not, depending on your point of view.
But, you know, Blind Boy does detail people that he thinks are doing good in the world, and it makes quite the contrast.
And it might surprise you to find out who is, you know, chief in his presentation of being a good guy.
But I think I'll leave that, Matt, that surprise for next time.
Why don't we leave people on that dark note with the ray of hope that they're going to hear about some more good guys?
See if you can guess.
This is an exercise.
Can you guess who is a good person in this otherwise terrible and fallen world?
Yes.
Okay.
And we look forward to feedback on this episode, as we always do.