Today, Dan and Jordan chat a bit with Mike Rothschild, author of the book The Storm Is Upon Us, about the phenomenon of QAnon. Tune in for a discussion about the intersections of Q and the Infowars world, as well as the broader picture about Q. Also, buy Mike's book.
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
I'm sick of them posing as if they're the good guys, saying we are the bad guys. | |
| Knowledge fight. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Hey, everybody. | ||
| Welcome back to Knowledge Fight. | ||
| I'm Dan. | ||
| I'm Jordan. | ||
| We're a couple dudes like to sit around, worship at the altar of Selene, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. | ||
| Oh, indeed we are, Dan. | ||
| Alex Jones. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I nodded my head, but I refused to clap. | ||
| You were following the beat. | ||
| I was. | ||
| I can't not. | ||
| I was a drummer. | ||
| Can't not follow the beat, man. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| Dan? | ||
| We got the beat. | ||
| I have a question for you. | ||
| What's up, Jordan? | ||
| Do we have the meats? | ||
| We do have the meats, actually. | ||
| You're going to ask me about my bright spot. | ||
| I was going to ask you about your bright spot. | ||
| My bright spot actually kind of comes in the form of something about a meat. | ||
| So I was taking a trip this last weekend. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I was visiting a friend in D.C. And one night we decided to get some Burmese food for dinner. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I was looking at the menu. | ||
| We were going to order it. | ||
| And there was something that was a beef... | ||
| Stewed with chilies. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| And it's hot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Yeah, well, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And so I decided to order this. | ||
| Is it on the bone? | ||
| No, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| That would have been... | ||
| It's kind of like a stew. | ||
| Ah, okay. | ||
| And so I decided to get that, and my friend was ordering it, and I could hear on the other end of the phone the guy taking the order going, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a ridiculous belly laugh. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He wants to order that? | ||
| That's fun. | ||
| That's our joke menu item. | ||
| That idiot. | ||
| I got humiliated. | ||
| And I thought everything was going to be fine, but then it came, and man. | ||
| Hot? | ||
| It was too hot. | ||
| Yeah, I deserve to get laughed at for that. | ||
| Well, I mean, hey. | ||
| I couldn't finish it, and I'm somebody who, you know, like, I'm up on the wall of a Thai restaurant, you know? | ||
| I've had some adventures in spicy. | ||
| Yeah, you got that. | ||
| I think maybe I'm getting old. | ||
| I think it happens. | ||
| Maybe I can't handle it, but it also felt like... | ||
| Did you get some of that heartburn? | ||
| No, not really, but I got, like, overwhelmed. | ||
| Ah. | ||
| I got, like, sweats. | ||
| You went into shock. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was a full-body experience. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| But yeah, the trip was nice. | ||
| I got back Monday, and here we are. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| It was a good time all in all, you know, bright spot, but also that getting laughed at over the phone. | ||
| Yes, of course. | ||
| That's too good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll cherish that moment for the rest of my life. | |
| And that he was right. | ||
| That is also pretty fun. | ||
| It is nice whenever people are confidently mocking you and then they win. | ||
| That's too good. | ||
| Yeah, because the people at the Thai place that I go to, they will give you the, are you sure? | ||
| Yes, yeah. | ||
| And usually it's okay. | ||
| I can handle it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But not this time. | ||
| I actually honestly kind of think that if it was chicken, I could have been okay. | ||
| Because the heat profile was very strong, but there was something about it being the beef, and you have to chew it a little bit more. | ||
| It's a little bit more gamey. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never thought you were a real beef guy anyways. | ||
| I'm generally not. | ||
| I don't go for red meat all that often. | ||
| I'm more of a poultry person. | ||
| That's kind of what I was thinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anyway, what's your bright spot? | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is... | ||
| Somebody tried to order Burmese food from you. | ||
| You laughed your ass off at that. | ||
| That does sound like me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It would be fun if it was my laugh on the other. | |
| That would be great. | ||
| Or if every time I hear a laugh, it's funneled through my ears as your laugh. | ||
| There's only one laugh. | ||
| My bright spot, Dan, is, if you recall, back in the day when I went to see Shohei Otani, they stole my bag. | ||
| I wasn't stoked about it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, because it wasn't see-through. | ||
| Because it wasn't see-through. | ||
| So then I got a backpack because I'm a messenger bag guy all the way. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So then I got a backpack and I tried that out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awful. | |
| It was not fitting right. | ||
| My partner found me the ultimate messenger bag. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| It's got a buckle and shit for the thing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It fits all kinds of stuff. | ||
| A lot of hidden pockets. | ||
| You know what goes in there? | ||
| Proof. | ||
| Evidence. | ||
| So you can whip it out. | ||
| Why do I have this manila envelope? | ||
| You know why. | ||
| Yeah, so the bag is absolutely fantastic. | ||
| She thought about a gift for me. | ||
| I'm notoriously terrible to buy gifts for. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Because I don't really have stuff. | ||
| But I mean, I think when you're in a position where you're struggling with this backpack, it lends itself to a gift. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| Well, I'm happy for you, because I was getting to a point where I started calling you Backpack. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's good to be back. | ||
| It's good to be back to Messenger Baggage. | ||
| What's up, Backpack? | ||
| So, Jordan, we're back from the little break. | ||
| We didn't have an episode on Monday, and we're going to jump back in today with something a little bit different off the beaten path. | ||
| Maybe something that's becoming something we may do a little bit more of as time goes on. | ||
| It's been fun. | ||
| It has. | ||
| It has. | ||
| It's not always... | ||
| Always the easiest thing to get people who would want to talk. | ||
| On our show. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Guests are not something we do very often, but today we got in touch with Mike Rothschild, who is someone who's been following QAnon quite a bit. | ||
| And the banking industry for a long time. | ||
| Calm down. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He has a book out called The Storm is Upon Us, and it's about the roots of QAnon and all that stuff. | ||
| So we had a little conversation with him about some of the book and some of the intersections with the Alex Jones world. | ||
| Speaking of which, it's very funny. | ||
| It's funny that even the book world that we live in, he has to put in parentheses every time he puts his name, Mike Rothschild, no relation. | ||
| To be fair, not every time. | ||
| Not every time, but it's in there. | ||
| And because I bring this up in our conversation with him, it now is going to sound like we're hyper-focused on this, and that's tacky. | ||
| No, it's great. | ||
| So we'll get to that interview here in a moment, but before we do, Jordan, let's say hello to some new wonks. | ||
| Oh, that's a great idea. | ||
| So first, Worshipper of Selene, thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you so much! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, the boys at RateMyCreepyCeiling.com. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| I worry what I just gave a shout-out to. | ||
| I don't know how I rate my creepy ceiling. | ||
| If that becomes the new Facebook, we're in real trouble. | ||
| That will destroy democracy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Next, Cam. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Cam! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Next, James. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You're now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, James! | ||
| Hang out next, Wally the Goodest Boy. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a policy wonk. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Thanks, Wally! | ||
| And we got a technocrat out there to say hello to. | ||
| It is, I hate the 2021 Alex Jones, but the super fake 2003 radio voice is unbelievably worse. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Grrr. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| You are now a technocrat. | ||
| I'm a policy wonk. | ||
| Crikey, mate. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| Have yourself a brew. | ||
| How's your 401k doing, bro? | ||
| All right, we got to go full tilt boogie on this, Watson, all right? | ||
| Let's just get down to business. | ||
| We ain't making that money off that heroin. | ||
| Why are you pimps so good? | ||
| My neck is freakishly large. | ||
| I declare info war on you. | ||
| Thank you so much, grrr. | ||
| Yes, thank you very much, grrr. | ||
| Grrr. | ||
| So, yeah, without further ado, I say we jump into this interview. | ||
| Last time when we had an interview, we had that fun, like, Yeah, we had that. | ||
| We had a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, we didn't know we were going to do it again. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| We wouldn't have done the bit if it was a thing we did. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| This is less of a let's take you to a fantasy world where we're interviewing. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And this is more like welcome to us interviewing again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Enjoy and we'll see you on Friday. | ||
| Well, hello. | ||
| Joining us today, very exciting. | ||
| We're drifting into interviews, Jordan. | ||
| Yeah, this is weird. | ||
| We're doing two very short... | ||
| We've done how many episodes? | ||
| Well over 600. | ||
| And we have two full interviews now. | ||
| Yeah, but opportunities pop up and lend themselves to productive conversations that are interesting to the world that we look at. | ||
| I think it's also that nobody's ever wanted to talk to us before. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| There was a long stretch of time where... | ||
| Who are they? | ||
| Why are they doing that? | ||
| We got a lot of whys. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of why. | ||
| A lot of personal friends asking why also. | ||
| But joining us today, very excited to have Mike Rothschild on the show. | ||
| There's a new book that he has out called The Storm is Upon Us with a long... | ||
| Subtitle. | ||
| A lot of words. | ||
| Let's just call it The Storm. | ||
| I can't even finish the title. | ||
| You subscribe to the Alex Jones School of Just Reading Headlines. | ||
| Just Reading Headlines. | ||
| So, Mike, thank you for joining us. | ||
| Oh, thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm really excited to be here. | ||
| I think the elephant in the room, of course, is that you're very... | ||
| Insistent in the book that you're not related to the Rothschilds. | ||
| I am not related to the Rothschilds. | ||
| Look, I drive a 2004 Toyota Corolla. | ||
| That's just what they would want you to drive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| But it's made of platinum. | ||
| That'll do it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| There are people with the same last name not related to each other. | ||
| Shock, I know. | ||
| My last name's Holmes. | ||
| Nobody's related to me. | ||
| NFL running back Priest Holmes looks just like you. | ||
| I imagine that you get accusations about that a lot, though. | ||
| I noticed in the book there was at least a time there's parenthetically no relation to the author. | ||
| I just have to assume with the world that you cover with QAnon and conspiracy stuff, people would make that connection and probably be mad. | ||
| Yeah, people think that I'm acting as some sort of hype man for the family. | ||
| They're like Chuck D and I'm like Flava Flav and I've got my clock on and I'm yelling like, we don't drink blood, yo! | ||
| It's sort of a defensive hype man. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like a crisis PR hype man. | ||
| Like how Goebbels was a hype man, you know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Goebbels was very flashy. | ||
| Very flashy. | ||
| Wore a big clock. | ||
| Swastika-shaped made it hard to tell time. | ||
| But the thing that you find with a lot of old money families is that they don't address this stuff at all. | ||
| They don't talk about it. | ||
| And I've looked for this stuff. | ||
| I've looked for members of the Rothschild family going on the record and talking about this stuff, and they don't talk about it. | ||
| It doesn't exist for them. | ||
| They just live their lives because they know that anything that they throw into that particular fire is just going to be used as proof that it's all true. | ||
| You can't prove that you're not something, so you just don't talk about it. | ||
| You get that a lot with these older money families, these families that have passed down a lot of wealth and have been the subject of rumors. | ||
| There's nothing to say. | ||
| Yeah, there's no win in coming out and being like, not true. | ||
| You end up in a situation then where it's like the, you know, proving you're not a witch by being drowned. | ||
| Right, right, exactly. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| I would say they could come out and say, peasants, we give no fucks about you. | ||
| That would also count. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It would be the same thing. | ||
| That would be basically the same thing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So you wrote this book about QAnon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And I was curious about how much of this was the result of a passion, or did you set out as a project? | ||
| Was this something that you were interested in before you were getting into the book? | ||
| Were you following it organically as it was happening? | ||
| Yeah, I've been writing about conspiracy theories for about 10 years. | ||
| I mean, most of it just, you know, on blogs and for no money, I mean, obviously. | ||
| But I've been interested in the subject for much longer than that. | ||
| I really got into the whole idea of conspiracy theories as storytelling through Coast to Coast AM. | ||
| I used to listen to Art Bell a lot, and I never believed any of it, but it was so... | ||
| Outside of my own sort of middle-class suburban existence, talking about UFOs and the Illuminati. | ||
| There are ghosts in the suburbs. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| But you just didn't talk about them. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| So I was really into this as a form of storytelling. | ||
| And so I sort of drifted into it more and more professionally. | ||
| And so I had an opportunity to write my first book, which came out beginning of 2020. | ||
| But long before that, I'd started to look at QAnon. | ||
| And my first inkling of seeing something there was beginning of 2018, so just a few months after the first drops came out. | ||
| And I started seeing tweets about John McCain and Hillary Clinton wearing orthopedic walking boots. | ||
| Not because they hurt their feet like the rest of us peasants, but because they were wearing ankle bracelets that were secret. | ||
| Because they'd been arrested in a purge called the Storm. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, this is awesome. | ||
| I've got to dive into this and see where this is going. | ||
| If this is true, what else is true? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If people will believe this. | ||
| Ankle bracelets are bulky. | ||
| They're not like slap bracelets. | ||
| You can't hollow out a walking boot to wear one. | ||
| I've got a moniker bracelet and it's leopard print. | ||
| I've always liked that the most filmed people on Earth need ankle bracelets to track their movements. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, it's because they all have clones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, that's, yes. | ||
| But I started to get a little more concerned about it when I started to see the parallels in QAnon to these previous affinity frauds, the things I write about a lot in the book, the Iraqi dinar scam, and then before that, Nasara, before that, the Omega Trust scam. | ||
| And some of these things have been running since the early 90s and have built a lot of people out of a lot of money using the same kind of setup, this sort of... | ||
| guru who has access to secret intel that they will dole out to a select few people who are the special chosen ones who will know what to do when the great change event happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's always a bad thing. | |
| about to happen and there's always some dark force that gets in the way just as everything's about to change. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's, It's such a coincidence that that happens. | |
| Every time. | ||
| Every time. | ||
| It's always, like, just about to happen. | ||
| And with the Dinar scam, I mean, the level of minutia that went into this, of these anonymous gurus with these names like Wolfie Man and Tia and Tony, who are just, like, these scam artists. | ||
| Shitbag McGee. | ||
| These scam artists who are in, like, Kansas City, who also have, like, secret access to the... | ||
| Inner workings of the Iraqi foreign ministry. | ||
| The dinar revalue has already been announced in the mosques. | ||
| Stand by to get your secret 1-800 number to call in. | ||
| You'll be told where to go and you need to have these code words and you need to dress up and you need to not tell anybody where you're going and bring your dinars in a metal case and in a Faraday cage. | ||
| It's like on and on and on. | ||
| And it works like a A lot of conspiracy theories do, as you guys know, that the more arcane detail you load onto something, the more believable it becomes. | ||
| The more vague something is, the less real it seems. | ||
| Yeah, because I think people have just sort of a way of being tricked by specificity. | ||
| You know, you don't think that someone would make up all of these details. | ||
| That would be exhausting. | ||
| That would be insane. | ||
| That would be crazy. | ||
| Who would do that? | ||
| Yeah, and I think another element, too, is when you have all those details and all of these weird steps that you need to take, If you get tricked by one, you really don't want to admit you got tricked by that one. | ||
| And so you go for the second and the third and fourth step. | ||
| It becomes much easier to rationalize. | ||
| Yeah, it's like blackmail. | ||
| It's like you're not done. | ||
| You're not done being blackmailed. | ||
| There's always going to be more that you're supposed to do, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's always another step. | ||
| There's always another bit of minutiae. | ||
| You know, one of my favorite details with the Omega Trust scam, which was the... | ||
| Precursor to Nassar, which was this grift, this longtime grifter who promised that he had access to prime European banknotes that only five people in the world knew about. | ||
| This dude's a plumber in Mattoon, Illinois. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, really? | |
| I know Mattoon, Illinois. | ||
| And that is where they keep those secret banknotes. | ||
| You better believe that shit. | ||
| My favorite detail of that was that the cash that you sent in to buy your Omega units had to be wrapped in tinfoil. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| You don't want those rays getting in and disrupting the currency. | ||
| But it's those details that make something seem real. | ||
| Because otherwise, why would you do that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I admire the confidence of these people. | ||
| That's why they call them con man. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| There's a reason. | ||
| It's just such... | ||
| I don't know how... | ||
| I mean, I don't even know how I would be able to tell you that I have secret European notes. | ||
| Let alone strangers. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Let alone your sort of circle of church cronies that you have making phone calls to get more people to invest in this thing. | ||
| It's hard not to view that as the story of America, though. | ||
| It was literally founded upon cults and conmen. | ||
| The entire country has been built out of people bullshitting other people for money. | ||
| There's a lot of financial myths intertwining. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The Puritan We're very capitalist. | ||
| And the aspirational model, I think, is something that really works with those kinds of cons and works all the way going up to Trump. | ||
| I mean, so much of Trump's appeal was, I'm going to make you just like me. | ||
| We've got the bigger boats. | ||
| We've got the nicer apartments. | ||
| I mean, you're talking to coal miners in rural Pennsylvania. | ||
| We're talking about boats and penthouse apartments overlooking Central Park? | ||
| Again, really? | ||
| That's such a depressing thought. | ||
| I never really put it that way in my head of Trump being like, I will make you like me. | ||
| I mean, when you look at the social mobility numbers through class systems and you realize that nobody from the lower class is even moving up to the middle class, there's no greater con than the American dream. | ||
| You can build whatever you want and become rich. | ||
| That is the biggest con. | ||
| I really liked your rebuttal in the book for the dinar revaluation thing, where it was just, this is not how this works. | ||
| This would never happen. | ||
| Fundamentally mistaken. | ||
| This would destroy all money in the world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, yeah. | |
| And that's a really useful way to look at something that seems really complex, like the dinar, like QAnon, to break it down into the simple idea of... | ||
| That's not how this works. | ||
| This is not possible. | ||
| This is not how things happen. | ||
| You know, money does not simply appear like that. | ||
| You can't just become a billionaire overnight with the stroke of a pen and have all your friends be billionaires and have money have any value anymore. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Then you have the dollar is the new dinar. | ||
| You just end up, it's circular. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that that is helpful, unless you already believe all the stuff. | ||
| And then I think it's still not penetrative. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Then you start to fall back on, well, that's what they want you to think. | ||
| They don't know what we know. | ||
| We have the secret knowledge. | ||
| They don't know. | ||
| They're asleep. | ||
| It's that feeling of specialness that you get when you are consuming conspiracy media, and it's being reflected back to you. | ||
| I know something you don't know. | ||
| It's paradigm changing. | ||
| Ultimately, when you boil down that DNR scam, your response at the most elemental level is just, No! | ||
| Back! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| You know, you want to be like, hit him with the newspaper. | ||
| You can't think like this. | ||
| One of the things that I think is really interesting about framing QAnon that way or looking at it from that perspective, too, is like, you know, it doesn't appear to be similar necessarily in the same way as those. | ||
| Those are like very clearly I want money kind of schemes, whereas I think externally you view QAnon as like, wow, this is... | ||
| It doesn't seem as much of like a money machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And that was what was really troubling to me was with something like Nasara, the dinar, there's the financial aspect of it. | ||
| And most people are kind of savvy enough to know that you can't buy a million dinars and somebody signs a piece of paper and you're a millionaire. | ||
| Like most people know that that's not how money works. | ||
| But what Q was selling wasn't that you're going to get rich. | ||
| It was you're going to feel awesome. | ||
| When Hillary Clinton and John Podesta get the short drop from the rope at Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| It was selling good feelings. | ||
| And it was selling the idea that these people that they've hated for decades are finally going to get what's coming to them. | ||
| It is absolutely no surprise that the first post by Q was Hillary Clinton is on the run. | ||
| She's going to be extradited. | ||
| There's going to be riots. | ||
| The National Guard's going to come out into the streets. | ||
| Everything that you've wanted is going to happen. | ||
| And it all goes from there. | ||
| Yeah, I think something that's so... | ||
| I don't know if people recognize, but in those communities and conspiracy and right-wing communities in particular, Hillary Clinton's like catnip. | ||
| If you want to pitch something kind of silly, attaching her to it is... | ||
| We've seen this over and over again through years and years on Alex's show. | ||
| Like, Larry Nichols was able to create a cottage industry for himself, just coming up with nonsense, but saying, like, Hillary. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the moment they successfully got everybody to tie the Foster murder to the Clintons, no matter what. | ||
| Like, it doesn't matter if you believe it or not believe it. | ||
| You know that they are associated with the Vince Foster murder. | ||
| Then you can just make up anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was actually, I was listening to an old Art Bell open lines show from, I think, like, Mid or late 1995. | ||
| And one of the things that he was talking about was having a handwriting analyst take a look at the Vince Foster suicide note. | ||
| Now, Art Bell tended to be a little bit more skeptical than a lot of the modern conspiracy gurus. | ||
| But even then, it's like they're just blaming stuff on the Clintons. | ||
| I mean, this is the mid-90s, and it's still happening. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You brought up Lincoln Coast to Coast AM quite a bit. | ||
| You just brought back up Art Bell. | ||
| So now I have to ask this. | ||
| Do you not like George Nori as much as I don't like him? | ||
| I do not like George Nori at all. | ||
| Yeah, that guy sucks. | ||
| It's just a different kind of show, and it's not as fun. | ||
| It's not as like, we're going to figure this out together. | ||
| And Bell was skeptical. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things about his show, is that if somebody called in and had some cockamamie story, he wasn't just going, uh-huh, uh-huh, that totally happened. | ||
| I believe that completely. | ||
| He would actually sort of talk about this. | ||
| And try to tease out, is this possible? | ||
| Did this happen? | ||
| I mean, look, the guy was also a crank, but he was at least sort of a selective crank, if that's a thing. | ||
| He seemed to have less of, like, an agenda than, like, George Norris definitely, like, he has ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But then again, I mean, even Arbel was like, he was the one who had Courtney Brown on when they were talking about the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Totally. | ||
| He fucked up a bit. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But George and Ori, way worse. | ||
| We can all agree on that, and I'm glad. | ||
| What other radio hosts do you hate? | ||
| Go ahead and just give me a list. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All of the fill-in hosts on Coast to Coast. | |
| Yeah, it's just not the same. | ||
| Punnett sucks. | ||
| Very granular hate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, actually, that's an interesting connection, too, is that George Norrie on his show actually has had Steve Pachenik as a guest a number of times. | ||
| And I know that this is something that we'd sort of messaged a little bit about. | ||
| I'm fascinated to understand what kind of an interaction You, someone who's studied Cubanon, would think of him, of Dr. Steve Pachanek. | ||
| So Pachanek is one of those guys, and you get a lot of this in this world. | ||
| These guys who are sort of quasi-military connected, quasi-intelligence connected, and they've turned that into a persona where they know everything, and they have all the secrets, and they can see through everything. | ||
| And they're, like, the most dangerous people in the world because they're the only ones who are willing to tell the truth. | ||
| And meanwhile, like, nothing ever happened. | ||
| You can trust me. | ||
| I murdered Aldo Morrow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Like, I know about the slave colonies on Mars. | ||
| It's the most deadly secret in the world. | ||
| And yet I continue to not be assassinated. | ||
| But you get a lot of those people in that world, these sort of... | ||
| It's tenuously military-connected or tenuously intelligence-connected, and they've turned that into a persona where they are the oracles, and they're the most dangerous people around. | ||
| I mean, Bill Cooper was the same way. | ||
| These guys somehow have all of the secrets and are never actually put in any kind of danger, but they think they are. | ||
| And through some kind of an accident, they ended up stumbling onto the people. | ||
| I guess that's more just like Bill's mythology. | ||
| But yeah, they have something that they can't ever prove, but they know for sure. | ||
| And they can't be killed over it because if they get killed, then you'll know it's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's why they can't assassinate you. | ||
| That's a good explanation for it. | ||
| I think that it's, you know, you're comparing or you're bringing up like Robert David Steele and Steve Pachanik in sort of the same area is relevant, except I don't know what... | ||
| Like, do you know if Robert David Steele actually was in the FBI or anything? | ||
| Like, he makes a lot of claims, whereas Steve Pachenik was in the State Department. | ||
| He did kill Aldo Mora. | ||
| Yeah, but he did do a lot of that stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's always hard with these guys because they're such bullshitters and they lie so much all the time that you kind of never quite know where you are. | ||
| So you just have to take their claims. | ||
| As they come, rather than sort of do that deep dive into their backstory, because so much of it is just so murky and built around their own mythology. | ||
| So it's never quite as satisfying to try to dig in and sort of figure out who these people really are. | ||
| In terms of the QAnon posts and the like, not coming directly from the cadre of potential Qs. | ||
| Do you get the vibe that people are just making stuff up whole cloth? | ||
| Or are they stealing it from somewhere? | ||
| It's both. | ||
| With the Q-drops, you know, the early story told by the Q-drops of what the storm was originally supposed to be, you know, this mass arrests unleashed by Trump through Twitter, you know, the Marines and the National Guard called up, that very much seems like something you would read in a Robert Ludlum novel, in a Tom Clancy novel. | ||
| I mean, that's another, you know, pachanic thing. | ||
| He's the co-creator of the Op Center series. | ||
| I mean, he didn't really do much with those books. | ||
| He tried. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got this sort of Tom Clancy-esque story being told, and it does seem very original. | ||
| But at some point, that story kind of burned out, and then Q just kind of kept kicking the can down the road, which is the traditional thing that you get with this. | ||
| And one of the things that really happened with Q is that there was a need for more content. | ||
| This became really popular very quickly. | ||
| So Q needed to just put more stuff out there. | ||
| So there was a lot of stealing. | ||
| You get a lot of repurposed memes. | ||
| You get a lot of stuff grabbed off of blogs. | ||
| I think fairly early on in Q, there's a four-drop list of Rothschild central banks. | ||
| Again, not a thing. | ||
| That's not how banking works. | ||
| But it's a huge conspiracy, like Rothschilds and central banking and the Federal Reserve. | ||
| But this list of Rothschilds central banks had been floating around since 2012 or 2013 from some anonymous blog, and then somebody else grabbed it, and somebody else grabbed it, and then Q grabbed it, and somebody else will grab it. | ||
| The same thing happened with there is a Q drop where Q insinuates that Angela Merkel is the daughter of Adolf Hitler. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They're both in Germany. | ||
| They're both associated with Germany. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That came from the hoax site, what does it mean? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Hold on, hold on. | ||
| I could just continue saying what does it mean with different inflections for the rest of my life. | ||
| Because I know from other reputable sources that George W. Bush is also the spawn of Hitler. | ||
| And so that would make him and Angela Merkel like cousins? | ||
| Second cousins? | ||
| It gets a little weird. | ||
| You have to think that like Der Führer saved his semen and somebody just like kept it? | ||
| For 10 years? | ||
| Like, how did that work? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They bring it out every Christmas. | ||
| They're just like, hey, let's pass the sperm around. | ||
| This is Hitler. | ||
| Come on, everybody. | ||
| Let's get it. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen enough weird stuff on the History Channel that that doesn't strike me as impossible. | ||
| It really doesn't. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| You can't prove it didn't happen. | ||
| Yeah, I have, like, sort of a pet theory, and I don't know if it'll ever, like, sort of bear out, or actually if there's any credence to it at all, but when we were going back and looking at some of the lead-up to the 2016 election, Steve Pchenik was on Alex's show talking about there being a secret coup of military people on the inside, like... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I didn't follow Q. Alex, it's already happened. | |
| You don't need to worry about it. | ||
| They're all already in jail. | ||
| I never followed QAnon closely enough to know how well that matched up, but it felt very similar. | ||
| It felt like there were at least thematic parallels. | ||
| Yeah, the thing with Q is that it's very different from a lot of traditional conspiracy theories. | ||
| Most traditional conspiracy theories about... | ||
| People out of power, taking it back. | ||
| That's where you get the secret counter coup and the deep state and stuff like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
With Q, it was, we have the power and we're going to use it. | |
| So that's where that aspirational model comes in. | ||
| That's where that Hopi aspect comes in of, we've got the power to do this. | ||
| We just have to wait until all of the pieces are in place. | ||
| Everything is perfect. | ||
| There can't be any questions. | ||
| It has to look... | ||
| It has to be completely legit. | ||
| And then we're going to round up hundreds of thousands of people and kill them. | ||
| So with Q, it wasn't like a coup because it was already the people who were in power. | ||
| Now, the question that the Q people never ask themselves, are we still on? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Okay. | ||
| No, we're just listening really, really intently. | ||
| This is the first time I've done this in a long time. | ||
| When we do not interrupt people, it does seem like we're frozen. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Everybody's like, it's been five seconds. | ||
| It's been five seconds. | ||
| They should have said something by now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The question that the Q people never ask themselves is... | ||
| Why don't we just do it? | ||
| Trump is the president. | ||
| He could just do this. | ||
| He doesn't have to worry about how it looks. | ||
| He's the president. | ||
| He's the god emperor. | ||
| Who cares what the optics are? | ||
| Just grab him. | ||
| Every day that you wait, more children are trafficked. | ||
| More adrenochrome is drained. | ||
| More Rothschild money is moved around. | ||
| Do it now. | ||
| Why are you waiting? | ||
| And they never asked themselves that. | ||
| So you had this period in the summer of 2019 where 8chan went down for about three months and there were no new Q drops. | ||
| And then 8kun comes back and it's the same thing as 8chan. | ||
| Nobody in the Q world is like, wait a minute, this is the military intelligence operation that's saving the world. | ||
| Did they just take the summer off? | ||
| Was it just like were the children being trafficked and they just didn't matter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They just... | |
| These are the simple questions that these people never, ever ask themselves. | ||
| Well, as somebody who believes in workers' rights, I would say that they should take the... | ||
| They should have a full... | ||
| Just because you work for Satan doesn't mean you shouldn't summer somewhere. | ||
| It's just good. | ||
| Probably somewhere cold. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, what a nice change of pace this is. | |
| Yeah, that is one of the interesting disconnects that is the like, well... | ||
| If this really were what it presents itself as, it seems incredibly incompetent. | ||
| Like, what has sort of happened? | ||
| And how the messages have gotten out, the websites being what they are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, being that HN is like... | ||
| Full of child pornography and mass shooter manifestos. | ||
| I mean, there's that great moment in the documentary, Q Into the Storm, where Liz Crokin is being told by Colin Hoback that, you know, there's child porn on 8chan. | ||
| And she's like, well, you know, Q is fighting the child pornographers. | ||
| He's like, you know, 8chan's full of child pornography and she has that look on her face like somebody kicked her dog or something. | ||
| It's just not... | ||
| Computing with her how wild this place is. | ||
| Yeah, and I think some of that has to do with the audience of this being a little bit older, and maybe people who aren't as familiar with the realities of these message board sites, like some of them, and the character that they have and what goes on there. | ||
| Yeah, and there's a reason that the Q ecosystem really revolved around these websites, these sort of aggregators that would post the drops. | ||
| After they went up on 8chan or 8kun where you didn't have to go to the place. | ||
| They didn't want people going to those places. | ||
| Those places are awful. | ||
| You'd probably go there and be like, uh-oh. | ||
| I don't know about this whole thing. | ||
| Maybe this is not something I want to be involved with. | ||
| You want people to be involved with it. | ||
| You just don't want them to know how it actually works. | ||
| You can put them on these very slick, very simple-to-use aggregator sites, and that's where you get your drops. | ||
| That's where you find your decoding threads and your lists of resignations and mysterious deaths and whatever. | ||
| You're not going to the source. | ||
| Everything is getting... | ||
| That's the thing that I was really struck by. | ||
| It was almost distilling less than it was laundering. | ||
| They took out the craziest parts that were on 8chan and they put them one step below and then one step below until the thing that was valuable suddenly shows up on Fox News. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then people go from Fox News to the next step back up to the next step back up until they get more and more extreme. | ||
| So it was kind of a weird almost fluctuation of trickle-down bullshit being pushed back up into a feedback loop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's definitely a pyramid where sort of the worst stuff is like A-chan and just the really swampy Reddit stuff. | ||
| Places that most people just don't go. | ||
| And it moves upward to the more legitimate right-wing blogs and more legitimate right-wing social media. | ||
| Then it winds up on Infowars. | ||
| Then it winds up on Gateway Pundit. | ||
| Then it winds up on Fox News. | ||
| Then Trump tweets it. | ||
| And then it just goes right back down. | ||
| It really was a well-developed system. | ||
| I don't know that anybody sat down and developed it. | ||
| That's just how information flows with these people. | ||
| Because nothing gets in. | ||
| It is a bubble. | ||
| And there's no light that pierces that bubble. | ||
| It is all suffocating darkness and paranoia and anger all the time. | ||
| That's a great sentence. | ||
| And I think it's also an information space where it's truthfulness neutral or whatever. | ||
| Things are expedient or useful. | ||
| It's not a hindrance if something is not true or patently not true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you say, well, it's my truth. | ||
| It's true for me. | ||
| And that's how the wellness world got so sucked in with QAnon. | ||
| Because that's always been a world of like, well, it's my experience. | ||
| It's my journey. | ||
| It's my truth. | ||
| You can't tell me it's wrong. | ||
| It's true to me. | ||
| Objective reality is for suckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| That sucks. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an impenetrable, crushing darkness. | |
| That is my distillation of all of that. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| What a bummer. | ||
| I was wondering, because I was reading through this book, and the beginning of QAnon happens so similarly to just all cults. | ||
| You know, that just, like, progression of step-by-step process. | ||
| And I was seeing it happen. | ||
| And now that it just seems so replicable, do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, there are so many possible new QAnons if you go to any of these different spaces. | ||
| People are trying to create that phenomenon again. | ||
| Do you think that's possible? | ||
| You know, every one of these things is a little bit different, but they're also really similar. | ||
| One of the goals I really had with writing the book was to strip back the social media sheen of QAnon and reveal what the component parts are. | ||
| And the component parts are all... | ||
| It's all stuff that's been floating around for decades, centuries. | ||
| I mean, you go back to the blood libel of the 1200s or whatever it was. | ||
| There's very little in QAnon that's new. | ||
| So the parts of QAnon that work for people can be repurposed into new conspiracy theories, new personas. | ||
| I mean, we saw that. | ||
| We've seen that on Telegram this year, where post-January 6th QAnon promoters have taken QAnon and take it in a completely different direction. | ||
| You've got people like Ghost Ezra, people like Patel Patriot, who are taking the mythology of Q and rebuilding it into something that works for them and that can get them viral fame and money coming. | ||
| Everybody takes it in their own direction and some of it doesn't work and some of it does work. | ||
| And that will continue on and on and on forever because people will always be susceptible to being told. | ||
| What to believe and being validated in what they think is true and in being part of a special secret community. | ||
| And that's QAnon. | ||
| That's the New World Order. | ||
| That's everything Alex Jones has pushed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is going to be with us forever. | |
| That sucks. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| This is the part in TV or normal radio interviews where they're like... | ||
| Okay, well, you've told us a lot about this. | ||
| What do you think our next steps are to stop this? | ||
| And the previous answer is just, this is here forever! | ||
| We die with this! | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's no escape! | |
| It also sucks because these are kind of the feelings and thoughts that I have when I look at this stuff. | ||
| And I wrestle with Alex primarily. | ||
| And, you know, it is hard to fight those feelings of like, well, this is just something that humanity is always going to have to deal with. | ||
| It's not something that can ever be like, well, we've fixed it. | ||
| And it sucks to be talking to somebody else who researches a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Who actually did all the work. | ||
| Have a lot of the same conclusions. | ||
| This is a geometric proof being followed up with, you know, yeah. | ||
| Rats. | ||
| But I do think, I did appreciate in the book also that you did very clearly delineate that blood libel part. | ||
| That's such an important piece of what makes some of this, like the archaic anti-Semitic tropes being cooked into a lot of these conspiracy theories is something that I think a lot of people may miss or may not want to address, and I think that's super important. | ||
| Yeah, there's a real sense with QAnon of we're still doing this. | ||
| We're still dredging up these stereotypes based on things like the protocols of the elders of Zion, these debunked myths that are knocked down over and over and over again. | ||
| But it doesn't matter to people who want these things to be true. | ||
| And everything that they do is validated by the idea that, yeah, there are wealthy string pullers who are... | ||
| Making their lives miserable. | ||
| And the rising tide of progressivism is canceling their way of life. | ||
| It's making it wrong for them to tell the jokes they used to tell, worship the way they used to. | ||
| They can't say certain words. | ||
| They can't, you know. | ||
| Eat 25 burgers a week anymore. | ||
| They have to eat 23 burgers now. | ||
| Socialism! | ||
| This Dr. Seuss book that they've never heard of is suddenly not being printed anymore, and it's like, that's worth dying of. | ||
| That's how Hitler came to power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a Dr. Seuss book that I'd never heard of. | ||
| I just want somebody to come out and be like, look. | ||
| We've got thousands of years of unbroken hatred towards the Jews, and we're just not going to stop now! | ||
| Yeah, well, it's always going to appeal to somebody. | ||
| And whoever made those posts really understood that, understood the way these tropes work, why they work, understood how they are communicated effectively on places like 4chan, and was able to exploit that. | ||
| I mean, whoever wrote these drops... | ||
| Really did know what they were doing. | ||
| They really understood American evangelical hucksterism and exploited it kind of brilliantly. | ||
| That's a really interesting perspective that I don't think I've heard a lot because I think a lot of people look at, you know, QAnon and think like, ah, this is all stupid. | ||
| And like, you know, hearing you say whoever did this was like they knew what they were doing is fascinating to me. | ||
| Yeah, and the idea that they knew what they were doing doesn't necessarily mean that there was some grand conspiracy behind it, that it was some military-grade psychological warfare. | ||
| You just have to know how hateful, conspiratorial people think. | ||
| And if you spend enough time in places like 4chan, you can do that. | ||
| That's not that difficult. | ||
| And of course, we've seen things on 4chan, things on Reddit. | ||
| Go mainstream viral. | ||
| We've seen it with Rickrolling. | ||
| We've seen it with Slenderman. | ||
| I mean, we know where this stuff comes from. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pizza game. | |
| We know where this stuff comes from. | ||
| It's not a mystery. | ||
| People just believe it because they want to. | ||
| Because it's a good story and it validates things that they already believed. | ||
| Yeah, it almost seems like something that somebody who had a really good grasp of marketing could have swung. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, it's wild to me. | ||
| Do you watch Ted Lasso? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Don't worry about it. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| But there was one episode where they straight up rickrolled me and my partner had no idea what I was talking about. | ||
| And that was the first time in a long time I've really felt like, oh, I've been on the internet way too long. | ||
| This is not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and that's great perspective. | ||
| My wife doesn't know anything about this stuff. | ||
| She doesn't do social media really at all. | ||
| This is my world. | ||
| I'll bring up some really common meme that I'm like, everybody knows what that is. | ||
| And she's like, huh? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| And it's a reminder that... | ||
| That while things online are really important, that we can't just dismiss that stuff as like, oh, it's just internet people. | ||
| Like, not everybody is as extremely online as people like us, as people who are mainlining info wars. | ||
| I mean, there is a world that exists not on Twitter that doesn't get this stuff. | ||
| And that's why I wrote the book as a very simple guide to this. | ||
| You know, I didn't want to assume that anybody knew anything. | ||
| I'll talk about QAnon. | ||
| People will ask me, what's QAnon? | ||
| And I'll explain it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And people will go like, wait, what's an image report? | |
| And it's just not their world. | ||
| And so we have to do this very simply. | ||
| And it's what I think you guys are great at is breaking this stuff down into why does it matter? | ||
| What about it matters? | ||
| What can be discarded? | ||
| How does it affect us? | ||
| And that's a really, really important thing to do is to As much as we really like to get into the weeds and the details, that's not where most people live. | ||
| Most people live. | ||
| They don't have time for this. | ||
| They want to know the very basics. | ||
| Does it matter to them? | ||
| How does it affect them? | ||
| And I think you guys are great at that. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Yeah, the thing... | ||
| I definitely agree, too. | ||
| I get a lot of criticism, I think, that sometimes of our show is like, well, why are you speaking like we don't know anything? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, some people... | ||
| May not. | ||
| There's an entry-level... | ||
| I mean, what you just said right there, you know, a lot of these people aren't online. | ||
| This isn't a full thing. | ||
| And then as you're going through the book, you're reading like, oh, okay, so these are people who are inexperienced with the internet who are finding this stuff. | ||
| So they have no concept of what the online people have, which is like... | ||
| Fuck this noise. | ||
| These people are all out of their minds. | ||
| If you're online all the time, your best friends, you're like, these people are out of their fucking minds. | ||
| That kind of feeling. | ||
| If you don't have experience, you also don't know how to discern a wink. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No, all these people were just dodo birds walking up to liars and just getting smashed on the head and then they're overthrowing the country. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| The degree to which fake stories were shared... | ||
| By the older Americans who got into QAnon is enormous. | ||
| I mean, people passing around this stuff because you just don't have the discernment to tell real from fake. | ||
| And you think, well, these people wouldn't lie to me. | ||
| They're my friends. | ||
| I've gotten to know them. | ||
| I hear their stories and their struggles. | ||
| They would never not tell me the truth. | ||
| Well, that's the basis of how Affinity Frog works, is somebody in a community. | ||
| A trusted member of a small insular group ruthlessly exploits the rest of the people in that group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The affinity itself is necessary to be exploited. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I went to a funeral. | ||
| My grandma's funeral was held at a megachurch. | ||
| And I walked in there and I was ready to start fires. | ||
| I just couldn't handle it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was brutal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So one thing I definitely wanted to ask about is, you know, the biggest intersection, I think, between Alex Jones and QAnon directly is the affair of Jerome Corsi. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I watched that happen, but I don't think that we did a good job of covering that. | ||
| Was that an Oscar Wilde book, The Affair of Jerome Corsi? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, yeah. | |
| So, from what I understand, he tried to get involved, basically. | ||
| Like, he tried to become a Q person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he did for a while. | |
| Like, he got really into it, and the timing with this stuff is always really murky, but he got really into it. | ||
| Like, he was tweeting relentlessly about Q, like, decoding the drops. | ||
| Trying to figure out what was going on, tying it into his own personal stuff. | ||
| I believe he was even writing a book. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Alex had him on all the time. | ||
| Alex was talking about how the White House wanted Corsi covering 8chan. | ||
| I mean, just bizarre stuff. | ||
| And then, of course, like so much of the Alex Jones world, Jones just turned on it on a dime. | ||
| And then it was disinfo, and he talked about... | ||
| Talk to somebody who played golf with QAnon and five people who were running QAnon, and now it's been taken over by Mossad. | ||
| You know how it is. | ||
| It's like, this is the most important thing in the world, and now suddenly we have to destroy it. | ||
| Yeah, if I can't take it over, then it must be defeated. | ||
| He has talked about how he tried to co-opt it when it was sort of growing, and he was unable to. | ||
| My own personal opinion, I don't really have anything that backs this up other than just knowing the people involved, is that he was trying to co-opt it and it was getting bigger and it was a threat to him and it was a threat to the sanctity of the Infowars empire because it was a little bit more participatory and a little simpler. | ||
| It was a game. | ||
| It was a game, yeah. | ||
| It was a puzzle. | ||
| I mean, never mind that there was no solution to the puzzle. | ||
| There was just more puzzles. | ||
| But I think he started to see it as more of a threat and less as something that he could sort of integrate into his own mythology. | ||
| And I think that's why he's turned on. | ||
| Yeah, I would definitely agree. | ||
| I don't know if I have anything solid to back that up, but that's my sense, too. | ||
| He's had this period of decades where he's essentially been the authority on a lot of this. | ||
| Kind of conspiracy bullshit. | ||
| And you have something like Q, it threatens that authority because there's decentralized, as you put it, gurus and stuff that he's no longer necessary as a gatekeeper for this stuff. | ||
| And that was the vibe that I got for sure. | ||
| And Q is really good at allowing people to rise up and create their own version of this and profit off. | ||
| You know, you have these promoters, these people I talk about in the book, these people like In The Matrix and Joe M and Jordan Sather and on and on and on, these sort of original QAnon promoters who are making the videos and the podcasts and the live streams and the merchandise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they didn't need Alex Jones. | |
| They thought Alex Jones was a sellout, was a patriot, was controlled up. | ||
| You know, they're doing this without any training. | ||
| They're just building this from the ground up. | ||
| And I can see if you're somebody like Alex Jones, you're going, these people are a threat to me. | ||
| They could take over my audience. | ||
| I need to own this or I need to be against it. | ||
| It's Leno and Conan. | ||
| So some of those early guys, they have fallen off, right? | ||
| A lot of them aren't really Q folk anymore. | ||
| They've shifted their grifts a little. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah, they've really diversified. | ||
| The big promoters all kind of have their own niche. | ||
| Jordan Sather is really into the wellness stuff and the secret space program. | ||
| Drinking bleach, if I recall. | ||
| Yeah, drinking the bleach, the MMS, the miracle medical solution, whatever it is. | ||
| Do not ever take that. | ||
| No. | ||
| Some of them have really disappeared. | ||
| Joe M was one of the really big Q grifters. | ||
| He's the guy I write about in the book who got that charter school fundraiser canceled by sharing this interpretation of a James Comey tweet that there was going to be a false flag attack. | ||
| That was a fun one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That story, like hearing some of the other people just going. | ||
| Why did they? | ||
| What is happening? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why did we do this? | ||
| And, you know, I covered that when it happened and I talked to the people who are organizing it. | ||
| And then, of course, they had to cancel it the next year because of COVID. | ||
| And I think they canceled it again. | ||
| And I don't think they're ever going to have another one. | ||
| And it's just it's enraging to think about these these anonymous gurus who just roll this into their grift and then they just move on. | ||
| But Joe and Joe M's gone now. | ||
| He's really disappeared. | ||
| He kind of went to ground after the big Twitter ban. | ||
| I think he popped up on Gab maybe for a little while, but he's really taken himself out of it. | ||
| He's just a cement mixer now. | ||
| He's a really nice guy. | ||
| Really working a job, you know. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| But then, you know, a lot of them have gotten into sort of evangelicalism. | ||
| Of course, the pandemic is all completely mixed up with it. | ||
| The stolen election's all completely mixed up with it. | ||
| And this is what I talk about with the evolution of Q is it's now just everything. | ||
| QAnon as a brand really doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| These conspiracy theories are just mainstream conservatism now. | ||
| You know, you get people who used to be in these completely different worlds of, you know, big pharma conspiracy theories, you know, anti, you know, where's Barack Obama's birth certificate conspiracy theories? | ||
| This is now all the same thing. | ||
| They all believe that vaccines are poison. | ||
| Masks are slave muzzles. | ||
| Donald Trump is still the real president. | ||
| The deep state controls everything. | ||
| You know, run for school board. | ||
| Everything is now everything. | ||
| And it makes it very difficult to pin down how to deal with some of these things because it's all interconnected and it all bolsters everything else. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So this new generation of Q gurus. | |
| They're sort of pumping out everything. | ||
| Everything is related to everything else. | ||
| And it's a very lucrative persona if you do it well. | ||
| Do you think that they're more fractured now? | ||
| And then I would assume that would mean more likely to compete with each other as they kind of butt. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, there's been a lot of infighting in the Q influencer arena lately. | ||
| Some people who are more stolen elections, some people who are more anti-vax. | ||
| There are some people who think Donald Trump really is the president. | ||
| Some people who think... | ||
| Biden is technically the president, but Trump's going to come back, and they're sort of insulting each other, and then they're yelling at each other over money and over who is a real patriot. | ||
| Marjorie Taylor Greene feuding with Lin Wood, who's feuding with Kuta, who's feuding with QAnon John. | ||
| It's impossible to follow. | ||
| There's no reason to follow. | ||
| I mean, that's kind of my view on this, is this is the type of movement that is inevitably going to destroy itself. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The question is just, how quickly can they take us with them? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Like, it's just going to, they're going to eat each other alive. | ||
| They're going to cannibalize each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And you've got this going on with these health freedom, stolen election conferences that are happening, like, every weekend now. | ||
| You know, it used to be that it, you know, it was a big deal of... | ||
| 52 believers got together. | ||
| Now you've got these massive conferences going on. | ||
| There's sometimes two going on in the same weekend. | ||
| You've got, just coming up, I think it's this weekend, the Patriot Double Down in Vegas, and then there's another one that's going on. | ||
| That's the one that has chicken. | ||
| You can't make that joke before me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those are the rules of our relationship. | |
| Actually, over the weekend, I was looking at Twitter, and I saw some video on a recent episode. | ||
| We were making fun of the Patriot Street Fighter. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because I went and looked at his tour dates. | ||
| He was advertising his tour on Alex's show. | ||
| There was a commercial for it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And so I was looking at the tour dates and everything past like four days in advance was all location TBD. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He didn't have any venues. | ||
| I'm like, ah, look at this. | ||
| This is never going to happen. | ||
| And I saw a video and it was like a full. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like a conference room. | ||
| And granted, it looked like a bunch of, you know, pretty much just all old white people. | ||
| But it still was like, that's a lot more people than I would have expected to be hanging out with the Patriot Street Fighter. | ||
| Yeah, no, they would have, you know, they had a September 11th event, I think it was last year, where there was like 120 people at the Washington Monument. | ||
| And that was a big deal. | ||
| And now there are so many of these things that they are poaching guests from each other. | ||
| Mike Flynn was supposed to speak at the Patriot Double Down, and he got a better offer from some other conference happening in the same weekend. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| I like to think of this as like pro wrestling, and it's almost like you've got competing leagues now, and they're all just swapping talent. | ||
| They all say the same thing. | ||
| I mean, God knows why they haven't. | ||
| Join forces, other than money, obviously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But this has gotten so big and so diffuse that these conferences, they are about everything. | ||
| They're about COVID is a hoax, Second Amendment, the border, media censorship, the deep state. | ||
| You know, Biden is a fake president on a set in Tyler Perry's house. | ||
| Ivermectin, you know, it's everything. | ||
| They say Tyler Perry's house just because he made that show The Oval, right? | ||
| God knows where this stuff comes from. | ||
| It just emerges out of the ground like worms after the rain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The way you're describing it, I have a real sort of ominous feeling of it almost feels like Like tenants are being formed, you know, like a canonization of like a belief system is like in progress and we're sort of seeing it happen through these conferences and these online fights. | ||
| There's going to be a bill of rights theses nailed to the wall of the Capitol building the next time they throw it up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, we're really starting to get into that like people's front of Judea versus Judean people's front aspect of it. | ||
| Like these people all believe the same thing. | ||
| They're just fighting over who has the biggest audience and who has the most money. | ||
| And I think that's where the Q drops come in. | ||
| People ask me, are there going to be more Q drops? | ||
| And I don't think there will be because they're not necessary. | ||
| The Q persona was taken as far as it was going to go. | ||
| And you don't need new Q drops. | ||
| Nobody goes to church and is like, hey, we need new books of the Bible. | ||
| They've got the Bible. | ||
| They don't need anything else. | ||
| They've got the Q drops. | ||
| There's a Q catchphrase. | ||
| You have more than you know. | ||
| Well, they have it. | ||
| The drops are there. | ||
| They're taking them off into a million different directions. | ||
| There never needs to be another Q drop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What a bummer. | ||
| This is all very informative, but very depressing. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, who says that it's done? | ||
| You know, we had the Bible, then we got the Book of Mormon. | ||
| I'm sure that there's an enterprising liar out there who's going to reform QAnon again. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Find the golden plates. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| Yay, nobody in... | ||
| You know, around the crucifixion could have anticipated Joseph Smith. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you are way wrong, sir. | |
| Jesus did several thousand years ago. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it's so weird because I have a lot of similar feelings about a lot of the Alex stuff, but it never feels quite like... | ||
| It has the ability to formalize like QAnon does or to turn into something else. | ||
| I think both of them are primarily scam-oriented. | ||
| Alex is a pill scam and QAnon, the various promoters are basically attention economy scamming and what have you. | ||
| But the danger of QAnon turning into something different is so... | ||
| Another thing than just pure right-wing conspiracy stuff. | ||
| I have a quick question for you. | ||
| I'm working on a theory about Alex actually providing a weird sort of bulwark against something along the lines of QAnon. | ||
| By having more control over that space, he creates almost a bottleneck there. | ||
| And I think what we're seeing is that what happens when you Let all the steam out is a massive, diffuse organization that nobody can have any control over, you know? | ||
| Yeah, like if Alex is in charge, he can funnel all of it to his pill business. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And they're not overthrowing the capital, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's that aspect of Q that is not quite... | ||
| Like a traditional cult. | ||
| There's no charismatic leader. | ||
| There's no figurehead at the very top whose word is bond. | ||
| With Q, you do your own research. | ||
| You are your own leader. | ||
| And that allows these promoters to step in and take control and take their version of the movement spinning off in any number of directions. | ||
| That's why the mythology of QAnon is becoming much more mainstream. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| There's no escape from these people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And never mind that they were using that term right at the very beginning, that the most popular pro-Q book is literally called QAnon, An Invitation to the Great Awakening. | ||
| They all bought it, but then they decide that that term never existed. | ||
| I imagine they're also trying to not have those big maps anymore with the 1,000 things on it that are all connected. | ||
| Yeah, the deep state mapping project and all that stuff, because it makes you look insane. | ||
| It makes you look like, you know, the red strings in the corkboard and, you know, it makes you look like a raving lunatic. | ||
| Whereas, you know, somehow insinuating that Donald Trump is still the president because he signed some executive order. | ||
| 12 years ago, and his time-traveling uncle used Tesla technology. | ||
| I mean, blah, blah, blah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That doesn't make sense. | |
| That all makes sense. | ||
| That's his research. | ||
| I think one of the weirdest things that QAnon has actually revealed is that... | ||
| These people don't know how anything works. | ||
| They don't know how civics works. | ||
| They don't know how economics works. | ||
| So you can kind of just tell them, like, oh, if you sign an executive, if the president signs an executive order, well, then it must be law forever, right? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Biden tomorrow could sign an executive order that we are now all part of Panama. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| And we would be part of Panama. | ||
| That's how it works, you know? | ||
| They just don't know how shit works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they don't know how banking works. | ||
| They don't know how money works. | ||
| They don't know how the media works. | ||
| It's a misunderstanding of the basics of the world filtered through the way that they want things to be or the way that things used to be and are not anymore. | ||
| And they cling to that and they cling to the reality that they have created for themselves. | ||
| And that reality is a lot more entertaining and has them a lot more successful and has the bad people eventually being punished and has somebody in control. | ||
| And that's really what we all want, is somebody in control. | ||
| We want an adult, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Life should not be an endless series of random events that we really don't have any say over. | ||
| Because that's scary. | ||
| Yeah, that's scary. | ||
| I think, too, it's... | ||
| Essentially, what so much of the conspiratorial thinking boils down to is a little bit of magic and then an easy solution with someone in charge. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| It's remarkable. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| In a lot of ways, a lot of it is very simple and a lot of it is impossible to deal with. | ||
| Hopelessly complex. | ||
| It is both incredibly... | ||
| Basic psychology and the most incomprehensible garbage that you will ever stumble upon. | ||
| And somehow these people are able to kind of have one foot in each and make it work for themselves and rationalize away the failures and the cognitive dissonance and the obvious fraud. | ||
| And this is the world they want to live in and nobody's getting them out of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was thinking of this. | |
| I remember this cult. | ||
| I can't remember the name, but it was in the late 1800s. | ||
| And this woman had predicted the end of the world was going to happen at the stroke of midnight on blah, blah, blah day, right? | ||
| And the stroke of midnight happened. | ||
| The end of the world didn't happen. | ||
| They talked about it the next day. | ||
| It was supposed to be next year. | ||
| Something along those lines. | ||
| You know, it was that kind of thing. | ||
| It's an easy mistake. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, you read the things wrong. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But there was one dude who, whenever he believed that the world was going to end, so he went to his own house, stood up on top of his roof, and at the stroke of midnight, just fell off. | ||
| And he died. | ||
| The more I thought about that, the more I was like, oh man, that guy is so stupid. | ||
| He could have survived. | ||
| And then now, looking at all these QAnon people, that guy is easily the happiest person ever to live in that cult, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Like, that was the perfect time to die when everything you believed was true. | ||
| You can't have to live through the deflation and the rationalization. | ||
| Yeah, you don't have to go with the cult leader being like, ah, I messed up. | ||
| And you're like, you were supposed to know everything! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, and it becomes impossible to go back. | ||
| You have, I mean, to use the example of Cortez in the New World, you've burned your ships. | ||
| You can't go home. | ||
| Your family doesn't want anything to do with you. | ||
| Your friends don't want anything to do with you. | ||
| You have sunk your time, your money, your emotional well-being into this conspiracy theory being true, into this great event happening. | ||
| The event doesn't happen. | ||
| And you have the option of either saying, well, I was wrong. | ||
| I got fooled. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Or saying, well, I can't go back. | ||
| I have to just go forward. | ||
| It's going to happen eventually. | ||
| And then I'm going to be right. | ||
| And then everybody's going to be sorry. | ||
| I'll go deeper and then eventually I'll be right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I hate to keep saying this, but that sucks. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| That is the dynamic that I think a lot of people find themselves in. | ||
| And that's why I think it's really important to try and retain some empathy for people who are caught in these belief traps or scams. | ||
| It can be hard because a lot of the beliefs of themselves are destructive and they're causing damage to polite society. | ||
| But a lot of the people are victims. | ||
| It sucks. | ||
| And one of the things that I see so often about all the narratives around QAnon is look at how bad these people on 8chan and 8kun and on. | ||
| Look at how bad all of these people are. | ||
| But no one is at all dealing with the fact that the reason it is easy to believe in QAnon is because all of the systems have failed these people. | ||
| It's not like they were doing great. | ||
| You go into these hoping that Hillary Clinton is murdered by the government because the 90s weren't great. | ||
| You're mad about NAFTA. | ||
| And you should be mad about NAFTA. | ||
| It's just Whitewater. | ||
| I'm still pissed off about Whitewater. | ||
| It's like one of the big things that I wish the systems would look at QAnon and think is, ooh, maybe we fucked up too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I get asked a lot about the demographics of QAnon. | ||
| And yeah, it's primarily white. | ||
| It's split down the middle, men and women, upper middle class, upper middle class. | ||
| But the biggest demographic for belief in QAnon is already being a conspiracy theory. | ||
| Very few people, I mean, practically none that I've seen, have been just like MSNBC watching, New York Times reading, centrist Democrats who just one day, Just happened to go to X-22 report or watch, you know, fall of the cabal and then suddenly got radicalized into thinking that there's a pedophile cult running the world. | ||
| That's not how it goes. | ||
| I was gonna vote for Medicare for all, but now I think I want Hillary Clinton to die in public. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You were already a 9-11 truther. | ||
| You were already a Barack Obama birth certificate person. | ||
| You were already somebody who had their sort of knowledge base rewired by Trump winning. | ||
| And exposing all of the corruption that you thought about, but you never could put into words. | ||
| That was already your world. | ||
| You were already listening to Infowars. | ||
| You were already reading Gateway Pundit or Breitbart or whatever. | ||
| She was just the next rung on the ladder. | ||
| And of course, a lot of people are coming to that ladder from different things, but it's anti-vax stuff. | ||
| It's big pharma conspiracy theories. | ||
| You know, anti-5G, anti-Bill Gates, anti-globalism, super, super hardcore Bernie Sanders who thought Hillary screwed him out of the nomination in 2016. | ||
| Whatever it is, there is a conspiracy theory for you and it will lead to QAnon because QAnon involves all of them. | ||
| Yeah, like if you're eight steps down the road, no matter what road it is, it's easy to take those two steps to get to the final point. | ||
| But if you're like... | ||
| At step one, or you're not even down that road, it's not attractive enough of a conspiracy to get you to be like, I'm going to go from zero to 60 on this. | ||
| All roads lead to Rome unless you live in South America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Unless you just don't also get on the road. | ||
| If you eschew roads. | ||
| Well, there is that, yes. | ||
| If you're a person who understands how things work, then these conspiracy theories don't have a lot of appeal. | ||
| Like the stolen election idea. | ||
| Doesn't really appeal to you because you know that that's not how elections work. | ||
| There isn't one guy in an office at Dominion Voting Systems who just hits a button and Biden wins the election. | ||
| You know that that's not true. | ||
| Counterpoint. | ||
| There is a guy at Dominion who just presses. | ||
| Yeah, I think that one of the things that we always talk about, and it just is like when... | ||
| If you deal with the complexity of a lot of issues and events that happen in the world, a lot of these conspiracies don't really make sense. | ||
| But if you don't want to deal with that and you want to look at things kind of in a sort of overly simplistic black and white way, they're like heroin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, you know, again, you look at this shit right now and you see Manchin and Sinema are like... | ||
| Eh, well, you know, everybody wants this stuff, but I guess we're paid enough to say fuck off. | ||
| And it does make sense for you to think, fuck it, I want Trump to just stroke a pen and do this shit. | ||
| Because these people are fucking corrupt! | ||
| You know, it's like, that's what it is! | ||
| It's the unfortunate reality that there's a basis for the feelings that underpin a lot of conspiracy. | ||
| And the thing is that people believe this stuff for a reason. | ||
| Like, big business is not your friend. | ||
| The government is corrupt. | ||
| You know, Jeffrey Epstein did horrible things. | ||
| Like, this is not made up. | ||
| This is all true. | ||
| This is, I was just thinking, like, a radio interview is like, what do we do next with QAnon? | ||
| And my first question, Epstein, dead or alive? | ||
| JFK Jr., dead or alive? | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| Who's dead? | ||
| Who's not? | ||
| Run down the list. | ||
| I had one question that I definitely wanted to get to, so I'm going to slip it in here. | ||
| I hate if this is putting you on the spot at all, but you're somebody who focuses on this stuff a lot, and I imagine that you see coverage of QAnon that may be frustrating. | ||
| I was wondering if there's one thing that you think is important that people know about it that... | ||
| It just gets missed a lot of the time. | ||
| Oh, wow, that's a great question. | ||
| I think the thing that gets missed a lot is that you can believe in something like QAnon and not be crazy, not be violent, not be stupid. | ||
| You are just looking for something in the wrong place. | ||
| I think what gets missed a lot is that these theories are compelling. | ||
| They grab people for a reason. | ||
| They always have. | ||
| People look at something like QAnon as like, we've never dealt with anything like this before. | ||
| There's never been a mass brainwashing like this. | ||
| Turn and look to your left and all Mormons are wearing the same underwear. | ||
| This is probably no big deal. | ||
| I was alive during the satanic panic. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The number of people who think that there is a conspiracy to kill JFK is basically the same now as it was weeks after the assassination. | ||
| People believe this stuff. | ||
| This is meaningful and compelling and explanatory for a lot of people. | ||
| And I think just writing these people off as either idiots or on the flip side is like mind-controlled zombies with no agency. | ||
| I think you're missing the really compelling aspects of this and the way that this explains so many things to these people. | ||
| Yeah, it fills the needs that maybe people... | ||
| I don't want to recognize are there. | ||
| And one of the things that I think is really key, I think it's close to what you're getting at, is that I think that it's so relevant to make fun of the thing, but not the people. | ||
| And I think people kind of make the mistake of making fun of the people who believe this stuff as opposed to mocking the idea. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Mocking the idea and mocking the promoters. | ||
| I will unsparingly savage people like Ron Watkins, people like Ghost Ezra, people like In The Matrix. | ||
| Like, I will mock those people up and down, left and right. | ||
| I have for a long time. | ||
| I mean, you're still going to vote for Ron, but... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I'm moving Arizona. | ||
| I'm moving Arizona. | ||
| Well, I mean, obviously, he's the best man for the job. | ||
| He has a good school platform. | ||
| Look, I mean, the guy's already pulled off a lot of shit. | ||
| He's a great businessman. | ||
| You know, he... | ||
| Memed and tweeted his way to being an expert on election fraud and getting retweeted by the President of the United States. | ||
| That's impressive, honestly. | ||
| You can't be completely stupid and do that. | ||
| Yeah, that's fair. | ||
| I will mock those people all the time. | ||
| But the actual rank-and-file believers, the people who are really stuck in this, I do have empathy for those people because I think they're caught up in something that is way worse than they think it is. | ||
| And at some point, the rug is going to get pulled out from under them. | ||
| And then what do you have left? | ||
| Who is left in your life that wants to hear about this, that wants to help you after you've said and done possibly reprehensible or illegal things? | ||
| And I have a lot of empathy for the people who are caught up in this. | ||
| And, you know, it is that classic thing of like, you know, when you go down the road towards this, you don't take the first step knowing that it's going to lead to something reprehensible. | ||
| Let's say. | ||
| There's a rational, maybe pseudo-rational reason why you go down the road and then before you know it, you're far down into muck territory. | ||
| Nobody clicks on a link on Facebook going like, well, time to get rid of my family. | ||
| Click. | ||
| Nobody joins a cult. | ||
| You join a group of people who believe the same things you do or want the same things you do or whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wouldn't have any idea about that. | |
| You didn't choose to be born. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But that's the thing is that this is compelling for a lot of people. | ||
| And it was at the very beginning. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing you go back to with those early Q drops is that they told a story that people wanted to be true. | ||
| It wasn't one of these like FBI Anon or White House Insider, one of these early Anon accounts who was like, I have all the secrets. | ||
| I'm going to reveal everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's interesting, but it's not compelling. | |
| Faking that you have inside knowledge that Hillary Clinton is on the run and is going to be arrested on November 3rd, then you go, oh, I want that to happen. | ||
| Let's follow this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, it is compelling. | ||
| I think that you and I are both clear examples that it's compelling even if you don't believe it. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| These things are intellectually and sort of academically interesting and compelling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's great storytelling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I just feel deflated. | ||
| You know, we've got two interviews under our belt. | ||
| We've got one that was happy. | ||
| Alex is going to get his comeuppance. | ||
| And this one is the most unimaginably bleak thing that we could possibly hear. | ||
| I think we're evening out. | ||
| I still think there's a little bit of hope in there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, there is. | |
| There is. | ||
| And if there was no hope, I wouldn't do this. | ||
| Because it would be... | ||
| If you're just telling people that everything is awful all the time, eventually some people like that, but I think most people will tune out. | ||
| I think the thing that keeps me going is people do get out of QAnon. | ||
| People do find the weakness and the dangling thread to pull on, and then the whole thing falls apart. | ||
| People are capable of walking away from this, and people are capable of understanding it. | ||
| And of maybe looking out for the signs that somebody they care about is getting radicalized into Q or a Q-adjacent conspiracy theory. | ||
| And then they maybe have read my book or they've listened to you guys, and then they kind of know what to look for a little bit. | ||
| And then they could maybe stop it before it goes a little bit too far. | ||
| Yeah, and they can approach it with a little bit of care instead of judgment. | ||
| As more people can take that perspective, maybe it'll lead to more people leaving, and then more of those stories will become amplified, and the conversation can completely change a little bit. | ||
| I have some hope of that. | ||
| That's my hope, is that as we go forward into this, more XQ people will come out. | ||
| And talk openly and on the record about their experience. | ||
| You have something like Scientology, where there is a very large group of apostates who are fearlessly speaking out about this without fear of the repercussions that they're going to have. | ||
| Q is just too new to have that. | ||
| The people who have left it, they're reintegrating into the world. | ||
| They can't launch the podcast yet because they're still grappling with it. | ||
| And the good news is, when they do, there aren't those repercussions of the people who have left Scientology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I have one quick question for you. | ||
| What are the chances that in about 10 to 15 years you go full Greenwald and start your own QAnon? | ||
| Well, I would know how to do it. | ||
| See, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| That's what I'm saying here. | ||
| We can't trust you. | ||
| So the chance isn't zero. | ||
| I mean, once you kind of know what buttons to push and who is the audience that can be riled up with this kind of culture war red beat, I can imagine it becomes tempting to cash in. | ||
| And you're tired of, like, fighting for scoops and you're tired of, like, butting your head against the government and the big media. | ||
| And then you go, I'm going to cash in. | ||
| I'm going to go full culture war. | ||
| And then, of course, you start to believe it. | ||
| Because you can't just say this stuff and have it be a persona. | ||
| You believe it to a certain extent. | ||
| I get that a lot with a lot of the big Q promoters. | ||
| They're like, oh, they can't actually believe this. | ||
| No, they do. | ||
| Maybe not all of it, and they know how to monetize it, but this is their world. | ||
| They believe this stuff is real. | ||
| Yeah, you have to convince yourself. | ||
| Or you'll sink. | ||
| You will be an obvious fraud. | ||
| And at the same time, you have to keep some of yourself back, knowing, like, Alex, I know COVID's real, but I keep it to myself to make sure that nobody fucking takes that next step, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That temptation of, like, you know the buttons to push and such. | ||
| I think early on doing the podcast, We did talk a whole lot more about, like, God, it would be so easy just to go turn right-wing commentator. | ||
| Be the best. | ||
| Make so much money. | ||
| Rats. | ||
| Well, we should probably wrap this up. | ||
| This has been a delightful conversation. | ||
| I really appreciate you taking the time. | ||
| The book is called Into the Storm. | ||
| Wait, The Storm is Upon Us? | ||
| All these storms. | ||
| There's too many goddamn storms! | ||
| Too many storms. | ||
| The storm is upon us. | ||
| How QAnon became a movement, cult, and conspiracy theory of everything. | ||
| You can get it everywhere. | ||
| You can get it as a hardcover, an e-book, an audio book. | ||
| However you like information delivered to you and whoever you like delivering it to you, you can find it. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Did you read the audio book? | ||
| I did not read the audio book. | ||
| We got a guy. | ||
| Who has done like 500 audiobooks. | ||
| Maurice LaMarche. | ||
| As Orson Welles. | ||
| But he would, Joe Barrett, he would DM me once in a while and ask, how do I pronounce this? | ||
| And so it was nice that he was committed enough to it to understand how important it is to get the minutia of this right. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| How do I pronounce three X's in the Matrix? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's just cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. | |
| Because that guy, Jeffrey Peterson is his name, and he has turned that into a grift that is like breathtaking, how he's turned that into an industry. | ||
| It's like admirable. | ||
| Well, I mean, you've got the new Matrix movie coming out. | ||
| I'm sure he's going to make some moves on that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the worst thing is that so many psychopaths are so goddamn enterprising. | ||
| It's like, fuck! | ||
| We talked about that on, I think, our last episode. | ||
| The young fascists are hard workers. | ||
| Anything else on the horizon people should be looking out for? | ||
| Hopefully something soon. | ||
| I definitely do not want to be the Q guy forever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That seems a little too much. | ||
| Are you knocking the Alex Jones guys forever? | ||
| Is that what you're knocking us for? | ||
| Everything sort of flows through him. | ||
| So it feels like if you're understanding Alex Jones, you're understanding all of this. | ||
| And the thing with QAnon is that, you know, as we've talked about, that iconography is starting to disappear. | ||
| So, you know, it's sort of like being the best Betamax repairman. | ||
| You know, at some point, you do have to do something else. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| It's that Alex lives on that sort of anti-communist tradition. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff that's sort of rich veins. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's always going to be ripe for exploitation. | |
| Yeah, and I think the QAnon probably has a bit of that too, but it's stolen. | ||
| It's like hijacked from... | ||
| Well, thank you again, Mike. | ||
| This has been a lot of fun. | ||
| I hope... | ||
| Everything goes well for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And everybody! | |
| A good wish to all! |