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July 1, 2020 - QAA

01:21:15

Episode 98: Tiktok Teens ❤️ Pizzagate w/ Annie Kelly

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	What's up QAA listeners?
	The fun games have begun.
	I found a way to connect to the internet.
	I'm sorry, boy.
	Welcome, listener, to the 98th chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the TikTok Pizzagate episode.
	As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
	The podcast is often described, Pizzagate, as the simpler, more contained forefather of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
	Based on references to stuff like cheese pizza, hot dogs, and walnut sauce, which came out of the Podesta emails during the Hillary Clinton campaign era, Pizzagate's core claim has definitely been debunked.
	There's no basement in the parlor where children could be abused and come at pizza.
	But it has nonetheless maintained a certain charm as shorthand for pedophilic conspiracies like Jeffrey Epstein's, for example.
	However, I think it's fair to say that most of us, Travis included, saw Pizzagate as a bit of a relic in 2020.
	But that's because we underestimated the team's profound love for vintage content.
	That's right, listener.
	Pizzagate is back with a vengeance among our Zoomer population, and they're expressing their newfound love on their favorite ChaiCom platform, TikTok.
	Travis will be taking us on a tour of this brace-infested Jurassic Park, but we promise to keep the enclosures electrified so the young raptors can't disembowel you as you gawk.
	Before that, we have a brand new recurring segment featuring our beloved UK correspondent Annie Kelly, and we'll be getting to that right after...
	QAnon News.
	First up, we have QAnon followers take the oath of the digital soldier.
	So how all this started was that on June 24th, Q responded to an Anon who posted the oath of the digital soldier.
	And this particular oath is exactly like the oath sworn by commissioned officers in the U.S.
	military, but it includes the phrase, where we go one, we go all at the end.
	Q instructed QAnon followers to raise their hand and take the oath with this command.
	Take the oath.
	Mission forward.
	Q.
	And take the oath they did.
	By the hundreds, possibly by the thousands.
	Just tons of these videos of people recording themselves taking the oath.
	Yeah, we just recently watched QCon, which was the first live performance of the Red Pill Roadshow Rallies series that we've been attending.
	And yeah, they took the oath live.
	One of the guys was not down.
	He did not join it.
	But yeah, Praying Medic took it live with Jim Watkins and it was the most stuttered, stepped, awkward fucking thing presented by an NPC in Star Trek.
	Just great stuff.
	Some QAnon followers, like this one, use the occasion to come out as a QAnon follower.
	Hey guys, what's up?
	I usually don't make videos of myself talking, but this is something that's important to me.
	To all of my followers and friends who are confused, go ahead over to qmap.pub to learn more.
	To all the Anons out there, if you're not aware or not, we are taking our oaths to become digital soldiers.
	So here's my oath.
	Let's do this.
	I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I'm about to enter, so help me God.
	Where we go one, we go all.
	Take the oath.
	Other QAnon followers used the occasion to upgrade their status from mere citizen to fully-fledged digital soldier.
	I am a wife, a mother, and today I officially become a digital soldier.
	I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that I take this obligation freely without any mental
	reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of
	the office on which I'm about to enter.
	So help me God. Where we go one, we go all. Wow, so much to unpack in that video.
	You are just straight up not, let's be clear though, you're not entering any office.
	Yeah.
	There's no office.
	This is a participation trophy.
	A cat in the background, maybe a child crying.
	This is like a pre-printed A4 page with your name filled out in Crayola.
	Right.
	This is absolutely hilariously ridiculous that adults are doing this.
	The other funny part is that this is also the oath you have to say if you were to take a federal office.
	Like, for example, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page both had to say this oath, but they had to say it for real because they were actually entering an office in the federal government.
	I hear they said the oath before they entered each other, too.
	Yeah, that must really grind people's gears.
	A couple of traitors, you know, had to say the same oath.
	I kind of find the digital soldier itself just like a really funny terminology.
	Is that like a specific QAnon terminology?
	Because it kind of reminds me of stuff like Keyboard Warrior, right?
	Which is like pretty clearly derogatory.
	No, yeah, yeah.
	Like, Keyboard Warrior is meant to be insulting, but like, they say they're digital soldiers, and this is actually... And that's cool.
	That's cool, because they're part of, like, the Info Army online.
	They post a meme.
	That's how war is done now.
	But it's also a General Flynn term.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	General Flynn did say digital soldiers, right, in a speech famously.
	There's a speech that they love where he literally says digital soldiers, and so ever since then they think they're part of this guy's army.
	Okay?
	As a soldier and as a general, as a retired general.
	We have an army of digital soldiers.
	What we are now, what we call, I call them, because this was an insurgency, folks.
	This was run like an insurgency.
	This was irregular warfare at its finest in politics.
	Oftentimes they'll have those three stars because it's like a kind of symbol of being a digital warrior, being a person who loves General Flynn and wants him to be free, and he's a patriot, etc.
	And I do believe that General Flynn added the hashtag TakeTheOath to his Twitter profile.
	What?
	Yes, that's right!
	Oh God, he did!
	He added it!
	He's feeding back Yes, they were promoting these oaths with the hashtag TakeTheOath and shortly afterwards, General Flynn added the hashtag TakeTheOath to his Twitter bio.
	So listen, just be clear, this is not new, he's signed Where We Go When We Go wall and books and stuff, but it's unambiguous.
	He is actively encouraging a domestic extremist movement in general.
	The thing he wrote in that op-ed is worse than anything QAnon could ever cook up.
	It's pure ISIS, like, we're gonna get you out into the And just to clarify, he's a real general, right?
	Oh yeah, he was a real general.
	He was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
	The head?
	The head!
	We're almost 100 episodes in, and I've told you over and over, being a general in the American military almost guarantees you're stupid, actually.
	Right.
	It's not some sort of good distinction.
	Almost all of them suck.
	Petraeus fucked everything up.
	Give me the last one that was good.
	Mattis?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Mattis?
	I mean, give me a fucking break.
	The last good American general pushed the Southerners into the ocean.
	But I think we can all agree.
	I think boys and girls, we can all agree that QAnon is real because we've got that former head of a real intelligence agent using coded messages through social media.
	It's true.
	Technically it's real.
	I'm afraid I don't agree with your conclusion.
	If you receive the frequency, then there's a radio station emitting it.
	That's what they mean by real.
	They don't mean that the message carried is real or true.
	They just want you to admit there's a radio station emitting it.
	Yeah, and that radio station is kind of a high-up intelligence... Well, it's God.
	It's God, it's Trump, it's my dad, it's the officer I just saw this morning.
	The prophecies aren't real, Travis.
	This is the distinction.
	The prophecies and the predictions of QAnon aren't real.
	QAnon is like worshiping a totem of just a series of fat GOP men stacked on each other with their heads up the ass of the next one.
	And you spin them around like a top to make sure that you're not in a dream.
	Rush Limbaugh on Anity and General Flynn rising, a big flesh totem.
	Travis, what's your take on General Flynn?
	Do you think he's like a real true believer or do you think he's kind of slightly cynically using this?
	I don't know.
	I mean, when you read about the history of General Flynn, apparently while he served, people under him often attributed to him what they called Flynn facts.
	And this is where he would insist on some particular intelligence that was not backed up by any genuine information.
	So he was known.
	They had a nickname for him like Flynn the liar.
	So he was kind of like a voodoo guy being like he was always super pilled.
	So it's hard to tell.
	I mean he's like a hardcore dominionist Christian is the bottom line.
	I think that's it.
	I think he is a real dominious Christian, and they see this digital army as part of the info war under the dominious Christian sort of project.
	Yeah, they believe in a white Christian supremacy, and then they want to accomplish that.
	So it does make sense to harness this, one of the more confusing fringe movements that can lead you in without you really receiving any overt white supremacist messages up front.
	Yeah, no, that makes sense.
	Still others use the occasion to LARP extremely hard, even though they are grown men.
	Hello, patriots around the world.
	This is Reid Reppa coming to you from San Diego, California, America's finest city, ready to swear in and take an oath on the digital battlefield regarding Q-Post 4509 to 4511.
	I do solemnly swear and affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office I am about To enter.
	So help me God.
	Where we go one, we go all.
	Dude, I just wonder, do these people think the federal budget is infinite?
	They're going to triple the federal budget and just add 80,000 employees?
	It seems a bit short-sighted.
	I was so hoping that we'd hear a door open and somebody walk in and Reid would stop mid-sentence and look off to the camera and be like, what?
	I'm fired?
	What?
	You just hear a woman's voice very softly be like, I'm leaving you.
	But it wasn't just random people who took the digital soldier oath.
	The oath was also sworn by the Republican Senate nominee for Oregon, Joe Ray Perkins.
	Hello, my name is Joe Ray Perkins.
	I'm honored and blessed to be the U.S.
	Senate nominee in Oregon on the Republican ticket for 2020.
	I am also one of the thousands of digital soldiers.
	Today, June 25th, I'm taking the oath of office.
	Protocol calls for you to put your left hand upon a Bible.
	I have here the American Patriots Bible.
	It also says to raise your right hand.
	I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely I mean, she has the best shot at entering an office, at least.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I love Jo Rae Perkins.
	She just lets her freak flag fly.
	They all want to get on the government tit, you know, for these, like, super independent people.
	They want a government salary.
	Yeah, they're really expanding the government when you think about it.
	It's all just fantasizing about having a government salary.
	There's kind of a weird one because I don't know, this is maybe like incredibly personal and no one else can relate, but she like reminds me a lot of like my mum's friends.
	That one?
	Yeah.
	Like who are kind of like ex-hippies, still a bit flower power but kind of like slightly aged out of that sort of thing.
	If she's gonna fall for a kind of a conspiracy or some some woo-woo kind of nonsense it should be about vitamins and energies and crystals right?
	No, like, what happened is that basically her staff tried to write an apology because she had been, like, caught promoting QAnon and she, the same day, wrote publicly, like, no, I actually love QAnon.
	And so she fucked, like, went against the staff, fucked them over, and then just continued.
	And now she's taking an oath, but she's running for Congress.
	That's what we call a girl boss.
	That's right.
	That's the path of a girl boss.
	Yeah, she takes charge.
	What's that, staff?
	Shut the fuck up.
	I'll meet you when I need you to hammer the hard drives, OK?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I am into QAnon.
	In fact, I love it.
	In fact, we're building a Molotov cocktail thing in the back to take down the pedos.
	I mean, I actually prefer that as opposed to Marjorie Taylor Greene sort of just hard pivoting to fascism and slowly leaving the QAnon content behind.
	Oh no, the effective full-fached people who are doing fucking chin-ups like Green are so much more terrifying than these people who... That means we're so far gone into fascism that we're begging for fascist mysticism as a kind of calming moment of repose.
	Yeah, oh what happened to that nice fascism?
	You know, slightly eco kind of kind.
	Yeah, the one that had crystals.
	I, you know, I can't imagine, and Travis, I could be wrong, you've done more research on her than I have, but I can't imagine Joe Ray Perkins ordering the slaughter of a different, you know, a group of human beings, whereas Marjorie Taylor Greene, I could see her pulling the trigger.
	Yeah, that's the saving grace of QAnon, is that I think it does qualify as an extremist movement, but is generally the least violent of the ones that we have here in the country.
	But that's why Greene is winning, and will win probably, resoundingly, and that's why Perkins is not going to win, because Greene is the Uruk-hai.
	She has in her the blood of warriors, and she looks only for the savage conquest of her enemies.
	But Perkins could have a nice channel and a following maybe afterwards.
	She will!
	And live a pleasant life.
	That's right.
	She'll be on the Patriot Soapbox.
	For my next story, Palm Beach County residents rant conspiracy theories at Board of Commissioners over mask rule.
	Hell yeah.
	Palm Beach County in Florida is currently battling an alarming spike in coronavirus cases.
	So the board of commissioners in that county prepared to vote whether to require face masks in public places like restaurants and bars.
	But before the vote, they invited comments from the public.
	Unsurprisingly, many of those who spoke up at the meeting had their brains just completely poisoned by nonsense that they read online.
	Many of the Palm Beach County residents who spoke were under the false impression that wearing a mask is harmful because it depletes your oxygen supply while you wear it.
	Yeah, you're all deep state pedophiles.
	Fuck you, I yield my time.
	Suck my dick.
	When you wear a mask, the nose is cut off.
	The mouth is cut off.
	And you're breathing carbon dioxide over and over and over again.
	You're not getting the fresh oxygen that God intended.
	You're sending carbon dioxide to every cell in the body, polluting it.
	Especially the brain.
	You can't do that.
	I can't understand why you at all decide something like this and want to hurt the people.
	You're going to harm the health of all of the people.
	But the virus is going to keep on going because people's bodies are being polluted and the virus is attracted to polluted bodies.
	Yeah, nothing about this is accurate.
	Obviously, like, surgeons, they wear masks for eight, ten hours a day, and it doesn't cause your brain to, like, get oxygen depletion or anything like that.
	But the polluted body thing is like a Luc Jouret, like, Order of the Solar Temple belief.
	He was talking about how all pollution, even worldly pollution, starts with mental pollution and physical pollution, like psychic pollution inside the self.
	So she's on some, yeah, she's on some good shit.
	She probably has a few Ascendant Masters that she listens to frequently.
	Yeah.
	Comments from one woman in particular went viral.
	She gushed out a litany of conspiracy theories about 5G, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates.
	She even pointed at a doctor who was brought in to serve as an expert witness and threatened to arrest her for crimes against humanity.
	Yeah, I come from, I come from Geneva, Texas.
	You literally cannot mandate somebody to wear a mask knowing that that mask is killing people.
	It literally is killing people.
	And my, the people, we the people are waking up and we know what citizen's arrest is.
	Because citizens' arrests are already happening, okay?
	And every single one of you that are obeying the devil's laws are going to be arrested.
	And you, doctor, are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity.
	Every single one of you have a smirk behind that little mask.
	But every single one of you are going to get punished by God.
	You cannot, you cannot escape God.
	You cannot escape God.
	I'm gonna say that again.
	You cannot escape God.
	Not even with a mask or six feet.
	Okay?
	Six feet, like I said before, is military protocol.
	You're trying to get people to train them so when the cameras, the 5G comes out, what?
	They're gonna scan everybody?
	We gotta get scanned?
	We gotta get temperatured?
	The kids have to go to school with masks?
	Are you insane?
	Are you crazy?
	I think all of you should be in a psych ward right the heck now.
	Because none of you, None of you know what the hell you are all talking about.
	This is insane.
	And then you want to open this meeting with a prayer to God.
	Are you praying to the devil?
	Because God is not listening to that prayer.
	Because all of you are practicing the devil's laws.
	What happened to Bill Gates?
	Why is he not in jail?
	Why is Hillary Clinton not in jail?
	Why are all of these pedophiles that are demanding you all to listen to their rules, why are they not in jail?
	Oh, is it because you're part of them?
	Are you part of the Deep State?
	Your time has expired.
	The Deep State is going down.
	And if any of you are in the Deep State, you're going down with it.
	It's just great to hear like early Taliban address the African Council.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, the idea of like a local, like basically like city council meeting being the Deep State.
	Just the incredible, like, balls it must take to accuse everyone of being insane and belonging in a psychiatric asylum before then going on to accuse them all of being pedophiles in league with Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton is like... Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I kind of understand.
	The irony.
	Really.
	I mean, this shit is... Yeah, she's kind of epic.
	I mean...
	I mean, I love this meeting because it really showed the extent to which people have been ruined by online conspiracy theories.
	It really is like the digital zombie apocalypse.
	It's this online virus that's sort of spreading to people's minds and ruining their ability to cogently communicate or think or understand the world.
	And there's going to be a reckoning eventually.
	I just don't know when.
	Oh boy.
	And what?
	Wait, are you becoming a doomsday guy now?
	There's going to be a reckoning, I just don't know when.
	You're also starting with this language.
	There's going to be a crisis point.
	Is everyone fucking losing it?
	You saw this meeting just person after person after person, super pilled.
	How bad does this have to grow before, I don't know, democracy becomes unstable because everyone thinks that, you know, they see Bill Gates and 5G behind every tree.
	I would hate to see democracy get unstable in America.
	Yeah, well, I mean...
	I'd like to believe that for centuries people have been going in front of councils and going like... Yeah, that's true.
	They're all screaming that their goat was cursed by their Jewish neighbor and that they want to go and burn them.
	It's the same shit.
	We're just going back to weird medieval shit where it's like God will rule over your entire system.
	BBQ News with Eddie Kelly.
	Hi there everyone, it's your UK correspondent Annie here.
	I've jumped on the pod to give you a few updates from Fair England.
	The first of these is that Robbie Williams, international pop star and favourite of mums everywhere, has been doing some interesting guest appearances on various YouTube channels lately.
	The first of these was on the 3rd of May with a YouTuber called Chris Thrall and is subtitled The Great Awakening.
	Despite the grandiose and clearly cue-baiting title, Much of the discussion that the two had was actually a quite sweet discussion of the pair's struggles with addictions and mental health.
	When Q-related topics do come up, Williams comes across as somewhat on the fence, but pretty sceptical.
	For seven weeks, I haven't clicked a headline or read the news.
	I also don't really watch the TV, apart from a few odds and sods, but I'm on YouTube all the time.
	Probably a bit like me.
	This is where I get my news.
	Just for context, you know, sold 80 million albums, I sold 10 billion tickets for people to come see me.
	I was the biggest artist on the planet for two years, maybe three years.
	And I say this not for ego, just for context.
	Hey Rob, you can say what you like mate, because you thoroughly deserved it.
	Well, bless you.
	Thanks, Chris.
	But there's a reason that I'm saying this, right?
	Because this is what I'm worried about and it's discernment and the echo chamber that we find ourselves in, right?
	You would think that the platform that I was given and have, that I would have heard something, know something or been invited to something, right?
	I can tell you On my children, I know nothing.
	Haven't been invited, haven't heard.
	The only thing that I ever heard about was what everybody else heard about and I heard about that when I wasn't famous was Jimmy Savile.
	Right?
	So this is what I'm saying to you and it's really important because we're coming up with our own conclusions but we're also magnifying our own thoughts and theories And the maths is off.
	Do you know what I'm saying?
	Yeah, I do, because I... I tell you, you know, everybody's saying, you know, this, and this, and all of these things, and Hollywood's in on it, and everybody is in on it.
	It's not true.
	You know, it's not true.
	You know, everybody's not in on it.
	I'm not saying that there aren't people that are.
	I don't know.
	But you would have thought I would have heard something.
	I mean, this is what's interesting to me, though, because it feels like through this series of YouTube interviews, we can actually kind of watch him descend into these conspiracy theories.
	For instance, his next guest appearance was this time with a YouTuber called Anna Breeze, which premiered on June the 24th.
	And he sounds much more sure of himself when he talks about the kind of classic Pizzagate tropes in this one.
	That's the bit that I'm concerned about.
	Now look, there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation for that language.
	Who knows?
	The fact that we don't know means that nothing has been debunked.
	Yes, there was no basement in the particular pizza place.
	That's not the debunking that I want as a Civilian as a human that's going, hey, this bit, this bit's really fucking weird.
	What is that bit?
	Nobody's been asked.
	Nobody said.
	And there has been no answers.
	But the overarching reporting on this story is debunked fake news.
	It's not.
	It's not.
	The right questions haven't been asked to the right people in the right places.
	Just as I take my pop star hat off, my celebrity hat off, And just talk as Robert from Stoke-on-Trent, SD67HA, opposite the Ancient Britain, big up Stoke-on-Trent.
	Just as that guy, for a moment, that's watching from the terraces, why aren't those questions being asked?
	you know. And when you're trusted. And also, and also, also, if there is an explanation and it's
	perfectly reasonable, then the explanation is perfectly reasonable. It doesn't feel like it,
	but this is where we get in the horse in front of the cart again. What I love about this whole
	bit is like him being like, enter with me my mind palace where I'm just Robert from the council
	flats. I'm looking out over my council flats, my people, and I'm thinking about, you know,
	the injustice that we will never find out whether or not there's a Washington based pizza language.
	Cabal.
	I know!
	What would a council flat guy give a fuck about that?
	It affects his life zero percent.
	Yeah, I mean, exactly.
	I mean, like, I do kind of think, like, you know, he lives in Hollywood, from what I gather.
	Of course he does.
	Or somewhere around there.
	It's like, you know, none of you, nobody in Stoke-on-Trent cares about this, do you know?
	No, no.
	Stoke-on-Trent does not have a big Pizzagate thing going on these days.
	No, no.
	Gotta look to TikTok for that.
	This is why I love that American conspiracy theorists are always better and more confident than UK conspiracy theorists, because he's always like, if there's a reasonable explanation, I'm open to that.
	That's fine.
	Where Alex Jones is like, I know for a fact Hillary Clinton eats babies!
	It's no question!
	It's no question!
	Well, the problem with him is that on a more deeper level, other than the fact that he's misguided, he's kind of correct that the right questions haven't been asked in regards to pedophilia rings.
	That's what I'm saying is that Pizzagate has become a shorthand for the fact that there's an international pedophile conspiracy at the highest levels, which is a real thing.
	They did kill somebody, basically, or he killed himself in unusual circumstances, let's say.
	And that led to basically what is a cover-up and a smothering of the entire affair.
	We've heard nothing about it.
	The problem is that the whole Pizzagate baggage distracts from the real shit.
	No, I get that.
	I get that but I don't think you'll be able to undo the fact that people like Robbie will come in through that name and it's our job to educate them about what the real conspiracy is and to point out like where maybe him as a celebrity he could do way better than this.
	He could go on the BBC and be in the middle of it and be like I want to know why this photo of Jeffrey Epstein and insert whoever exists and I want an explanation officially.
	He could do something way cooler than what he's doing.
	This is sad because he's like calling like these third fucking tier fucking conspiracy theorists from the States like he could have a real impact on on on potentially the real cover ups that are happening.
	You know you see he thinks he is doing that by going on these like shows and talking about it but it's not Epstein-pilled.
	Robbie Robbie if you're listening listen to this podcast and chew it on.
	Yeah.
	It's interesting what you said though is that Pizzagate is kind of like this shorthand for this other, it's like, it's a reference to something that is fake but used to refer to something that is very real.
	The problem is that the essence of what makes it Pizzagate and gives it that label instead
	of just, you know, international pedophile, like cabal or organization or whatever you
	want to call it in a more generic term, is that the emails, the Podesta emails, they're
	obsessed like aesthetically obsessed with these emails and these dumb, like the way
	they were talking, which a lot of the time, like when it was like, oh, we'll get a pizza
	for an hour.
	In my mind, I'm like, oh, well, they're just describing the fact that they meet at this
	pizza place where no one's recording them and they know they can have these private
	conversations or whatever.
	Like, there's a million other reasons before pedophilia to... I don't know.
	There just seems to be easier answers here.
	Whereas, there are no easy answers to Epstein.
	It's always more complicated as you get deeper and you start to understand all the ties to all the people that are still very much alive and very much in power in many places.
	Podesta should have just come out and been like, oh, this is what we were, this is what I meant.
	Like the fact that he just never came out and said anything and gave any explanation
	leaves all the space in the world for all this shit.
	So what you're saying is you want Podesta to answer what the walnut sauce thing was,
	what the handkerchief was, why they keep talking about it.
	That's it.
	No.
	I would not.
	It would be interesting if they just revealed like, listen guys, the pizza stuff was this, because it is weird.
	I'm not gonna say it's not weird.
	I won't say it's connected to an international pedophile cabal in any way,
	but I will say the language in those emails is fucking weird.
	They're doing some sort of weird game there with their language in some of that.
	Like he plays, weird language.
	That's right.
	A million steps before you get to pedophilia.
	No, but if we can't admit they're weird, we'll never find common ground with these people.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Because we're just running cover for the fact that these emails are fucking weird.
	I'm with Julian on this.
	Listen, I'll give you John Podesta as a weird guy.
	That's all I want.
	Half the time that's just what they want to hear, but they want to hear it without this condescension and aggression.
	No condescension.
	They'll get nothing from me then.
	They are weird.
	They're weird emails.
	We can all agree.
	The interviews themselves watched back-to-back are, to me, quite a sad documentation of one man who's been very open about having struggles with bipolar disorder getting, I suppose, very rapidly sucked in and radicalised by this stuff.
	But I think one bit that particularly stuck out to me in these interviews was how Williams described himself as having been introduced to QAnon and Pizzagate theories by accusations of having been involved in the conspiracies themselves.
	So he specifically mentions quite a few times about how people would message him about satanic symbols in his videos and this sort of thing, which I found really interesting.
	I've opened a door, you know, I've opened a door.
	I'm now here talking to you and I have to question my motives and question what is in it for me as a human.
	I don't mean monetary, I don't mean extra fame, I just mean, is this subject matter something that I should actually be talking about?
	And for some reason I am compelled towards doing another interview talking about this subject matter and as I'm talking I'm trying to figure out why I'm here, you know.
	Is it for me or us I would say?
	Is it for the Well, I'm a student of all the fringe stuff that is going on.
	All the voices and all the noise.
	It's not fringe anymore.
	No, especially in the last few days.
	It's just been absolutely mind-blowing.
	When I see celebrities getting attacked and I see this Conspiratorial stuff leveled against people like myself, and then people come over to my comment section to find me to say that, you know, you're in on this hideous, hideous, the most heinous plot you could ever imagine a human being involved with, and you're being accused of that.
	As a human, you kind of go, I need to say something, but As a dad and a responsible human being, I think the best act is to say nothing.
	But that being said, here I am.
	So this is incredible because he basically was accused of being part of Pizzagate and now he got in on like answering the conspiracy theorists like the worst type of the conspiracy theorists like directly instead of... Wow.
	The funny thing is he's describing Podesta's like problem as well basically which is like do I come out and actually talk about this stuff?
	Or am I going to be feeding a fire?
	You know, and Robbie's kind of debating that.
	And then he's also pouring fuel on the fire of, you know, the same kind of predicament.
	Oh, boy.
	Yeah, I mean, that's what's really interesting to me because it's actually like made me question my own
	understanding of how radicalization processes and conspiracy theories work.
	I guess I never really give it much thought, but I'd always assume that getting accused of participation in a
	conspiracy like this would make a person immediately discount said conspiracy.
	So for example like you'd be hard-pressed to find a Jewish person who believed that Jews controlled all of the banking and media and everything like that because usually when you're condemned by a conspiracy theory it doesn't tend to ring true for you, right?
	Your life is just more complicated.
	And it certainly looks to me from Williams' first interview that I showed as if that's the case.
	But it's really interesting to me then that his later response was to presumably look further into it, and despite believing in his own innocence, obviously, buy into the wider Pizzagate project, if you can discuss such a thing.
	It kind of made me wonder, is this the first case of a celebrity being negged into QAnon madness?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Man, that's true.
	He got the game played right all over him.
	The second bit of news from the British Isles I wanted to discuss is less directly QAnon related, but the minute it happened I pretty much begged Julian to let me come on here and talk about it, because watching it go down felt like finally we were seeing a QAnon mindset grow in a very distinctively British fashion.
	So this begins on Saturday the 20th of June, where a man walked into Forbury Gardens, which is a park in Reading, where a Black Lives Matter protest had been held earlier in the day, and began attacking people indiscriminately with a large knife.
	There's still very little that's been confirmed about the man and his motives, but we do know that his name was Karee Sidala, The incident is being investigated as a terrorism incident, and that so far, all the evidence suggests he was acting alone.
	Three of the victims died from their injuries, which is horrible, and my condolences go to their families.
	This is already such a horrible time for so many people, and I can't imagine what it must put you through to find out your family member died like that.
	Now the minute I heard about this attack I thought I knew what to expect from the British far right.
	There'd be a lot of emphasis put on the fact the suspect wasn't born here, he was a Libyan refugee who came here in 2012 and was given leave to remain in 2018 and this would naturally be extrapolated to justifying the feeling of mistrust and non-white immigrants everywhere that nationalists seek to inculcate and encourage.
	Sadly it's a well-worn playbook by now.
	What I didn't expect was the completely and utterly insane social media conspiracy theory surrounding a young left-wing journalist that followed.
	Now, I'm not sure if Ash Sarkar has permeated the Twittersphere over there, but for those of you who don't know her, she's something of a leftist firebrand who's often on politics shows and the like here.
	She achieved a particularly viral fame at one point for shouting, I'm literally a communist, you idiot, at Piers Morgan.
	Which, I have to admit, kind of endeared her to me ever since.
	Yeah, anyone yelling at Piers Morgan is a hero.
	Yeah, yeah, from then on you're just, you're alright in my book, do you know?
	Yeah.
	She's also a young Muslim woman of Bengali descent and so you can imagine the particular kind of hatred she inspires.
	On the evening of Saturday the 20th, Ash posted a picture of herself at the park with an ice lolly and three orange emojis.
	She means a popsicle, by the way.
	Ice lolly is such a better name for it.
	That's an adult baby thing.
	I didn't think to run this through an American English checker.
	No, no, no, this is good.
	Keep going with the ice lollies.
	I've attached a picture so you can see that the ice lolly is orange, her bike wheel is orange and also has an orange saddle.
	Three orange things in the picture, three orange emojis.
	I remember scrolling past the picture on Twitter and thinking it was cute, because it is.
	This, at least, is the normal response to have if your brain hasn't been entirely rotted by poisonous conspiracy theories and racism.
	It was only a while later that I learned that Sarkar's innocuous selfie had attracted even more bizarre hate comments than she usually receives, which given her high profile is saying something.
	One comment read, What an absolutely vile piece of filth.
	This is after three people died in Reading.
	Racist fucking scum.
	Vermin.
	Another simply attached a picture of a noose in response.
	A lot of responses seem to even be trying to get the police involved.
	At Met Police UK, can you look into the hidden meaning and agenda of this tweet?
	Blatantly obvious this vile bitch has posted this, including three emojis,
	from a park to stoke the fires. Hashtag little tramp.
	These commenters were convinced that Sarkar, who I should make clear has never expressed
	support for terrorism in any way, was sending coded celebratory messages about
	the Reading attack through her picture, with the three orange emojis meant to...
	meant to represent three deaths or something. Honestly the more I looked through the replies
	the more confused I became. I would like to give Asda the benefit of the doubt here but
	would be obliged if she would clarify this tweet. Subliminal messaging here I believe,
	because she thinks she's so clever. That is the most polite like hate mail.
	Samuel Jackman, a skeptic, apparently said, Help me out here.
	I've been scrolling through all this for a while now and cannot find any link between murders in Redding and
	oranges.
	Sad way to spend Father's Day, by the way.
	There is no link between the murders and oranges, obviously.
	The correlation is her posting it.
	Even if it has no meaning, given her the benefit of doubt, posting an image of yourself in a park not looking at the camera, BTW is an extremely insensitive post, given what happened.
	What?
	What?
	I know!
	What's the significance of not looking at the camera?
	I don't understand.
	So one popular theory that emerged on right-wing Twitter was that Sarkar had been referencing an obscure Sherlock Holmes story.
	They're doing decodes.
	They're baking!
	They're baking the crumbs!
	Background.
	If you received orange seeds in the mail out of the blue, how would you react?
	In the five orange pips by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, receiving the pips, or seeds, is a bad omen that Elias Openshaw immediately recognizes.
	By the time Sherlock Holmes solves the case, three of the Openshaw men are dead.
	Let's find out the meaning behind the five orange pips in this short story.
	Uncle Elias Openshaw!
	After Elias Openshaw's passing, his nephew, John Openshaw, is quite open about his uncle's flaws.
	At one time, Elias was a colonel in the Confederate Army during the U.S.
	Civil War.
	He was a successful plantation owner in Florida, but gave all of that up to live a solitary life in England With the only excuse being that he didn't want to be around black people in the United States.
	When he unexpectedly receives a letter from Pondicherry, India, containing five little dried orange pips, he recognizes immediately that this is a warning from the KKK.
	What the fuck?
	This is melted.
	This is shit.
	This is sub-Q.
	This makes the Q clock, like, amazingly coherent.
	This is a melted ice lolly.
	Stuck to the pavement.
	God.
	No, but I love that UK crumb baking references 19th century literature.
	This is very nice.
	It's at least interesting.
	Can't we accuse Ash Tarkar of doing MySpace cringe?
	Of like posting thirst at least?
	Come on!
	There's some things we could accuse her of here that would be, you know, insensitive at best, but at least rooted in some form of fucking reality interpretation.
	No, it's the AOC effect, is that they get horny and they don't know how to handle it, and then they sort of transmute it into incoherent anger.
	Yeah, that's so funny.
	I've made that exact same point when I was talking about it with some friends.
	I was just like, she is the British AOC in that all of these right-wing dads really fancy her, but also get angry at her for making them fancy her.
	Yeah, it's like, hashtag little tramp.
	All this stuff is super bizarre.
	So bizarre.
	Really weird the way they sculpt their arguments.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I could also see that guy using it as an affectionate term to a girl that he's trying to groom.
	You know, the only thing worse than bringing us this melted garbage story of, like, very much, very much Z-tier content would be if you told me that we were gonna have to drag a wonderful film through the mud next.
	A movie from my people, you know?
	It's in my blood as an Italian, and it would just be a shame.
	That is something she cannot do.
	Funny that you mention that, Julian.
	Because another theory that gained ground was that the oranges were a reference to the Godfather films, where oranges symbolised death.
	These commenters got particularly excited when they found a 10-year-old tweet of Sarkar saying The Godfather was her favourite film, like pretty much any other teenager on the planet.
	What?
	No, because she's a journalist and after a breaking story of three deaths by a suspected terrorist, her only comment was orange, orange, orange.
	There's absolutely no way she could have gone on Twitter at 10 p.m.
	and not known what was going on.
	This was deliberate for attention by a narcissist.
	It's incredible.
	They hit on the tiny truth that we all post to Instagram to, you know, enhance our own narcissism, have others look at us and look at ourselves, create a moment in time that looks maybe more beautiful than the messy realities, and then they have to go and just drag murder conspiracies into it.
	Perfectly good movies.
	I know.
	I mean what's so funny to me about the whole debacle is that as a woman in my 20s, which Ash Zarkar also is, I totally recognise the impulse where you post a picture of yourself that you know is kind of cute and maybe a little bit risque and a little bit sexy and you don't even know what to say.
	You don't want to say like, oh I look really good in this picture.
	So, you just resort to emojis.
	I've done that.
	Yes, everyone has.
	It is okay to post thirst traps.
	Like, it's fine.
	It should not be illegal.
	You should not be accused of encouraging terrorism just for posting thirst traps.
	Otherwise, Instagram is an entirely terrorist organization from top to bottom.
	It's filled with radical cells about to activate and post their butts.
	So, below that comment that Travis read, it just says, Oranges in the Godfather, and has some screened caps from the movie, and says, Oranges.
	Oranges appear whenever death is in the air.
	When the Godfather gets shot in the street, he's buying oranges, which scatter on the ground as he falls.
	When Vito dies at the very end, it's while peeling an orange and putting the rind in his mouth to make funny faces at his grandson.
	Symbolism will be their downfall.
	And even more insane theory of such a thing as possible from an account called Sue from Somerset speculated that Sarkar had been celebrating the stabbing suspects Libyan heritage due to the fact that oranges are an important part of Libya's export industry.
	I know.
	Dude, wait, this is like, is there an entire, like the Brits are, you guys are ready for like a QAnon, like whatever, whatever it's going to be on your side.
	We're so ready.
	These people are gagging for it.
	Oh my God, everyone's baking their asses off.
	Oh, but it's gonna be much more literary, referencing classic films and literature.
	Nice.
	I mean, isn't Mumsnet British?
	Mumsnet is British, yeah.
	So that might be your QAnon, you know, it might grow out of there.
	It's gonna be Graham Linehan, like, who's now being banned from Twitter, and he's gonna be, like, anonymous posting on Mumsnet under, like, G. So here is the tweet referencing the Libyan Orange production.
	I especially like this tweet because I think it's kind of written in Q language.
	Oh, like that kind of style of writing.
	Sue from Somerset.
	Libya Orange's production, suppliers, exports, and market insight.
	www.selenawamusey.com.
	Insights.
	Wow.
	Literally managed to mistype the number as zero.
	I mean, this is like God-tier post.
	In 2017, orange exports grew by 100%, earning Libya $0 million in 2017 alone.
	The oranges exports are categorized as fresh or dried.
	Wow.
	Sue from Somerset.
	Literally managed to mistype the number as zero.
	I mean this is like God-tier post.
	Like you don't take this down, you don't take this down when your number is a zero?
	I'm just thinking, you know we were saying that kind of UK is calling out for its own
	version of QAnon.
	I'm just imagining how British it would be if our version of Q was Sue from Somerset.
	People are rallying behind a middle-aged woman from Somerset.
	Her name is Sue.
	Suinon!
	Then, of course, there were the boomers who don't know that Urban Dictionary is a nonsense site where teenagers go to record in-jokes, not a serious encyclopedia of hidden terrorist meanings.
	So this was something that was shared by Cheshire Cat, Union Jack Emoji, England Emoji, Heart Emoji.
	Urban Dictionary.
	Orange.
	A phenomenon that occurs when you have an unbroken chain of ancestors going back several generations who have never experienced oppression that prevents you from acknowledging the possibility that oppression may still exist for other social groups besides your own.
	What are they saying?
	What?
	This doesn't make any sense.
	I honestly don't know.
	It's kind of like they sort of recognize that it's kind of left-wing language almost and so they're like, well she's a
	lefty, that's what it means.
	Oh, so there's secret lefty language.
	Revealed by Urban Dictionary, gotcha.
	But I mean, I have to say, having been at a very lefty university for the last five years,
	this is not a term I have ever, ever heard.
	No.
	It's just an Urban Dictionary nonsense word.
	It's not real.
	It's not used in left-wing circles.
	Yeah, if you post an Urban Dictionary term, you should at least show us how far you scrolled down.
	Like, it's a fucking crowd, like, written fucking... it's... come on.
	These interpretations go on and on.
	A new line of attack I've seen was that Sarkar was being homophobic about the victims, all three of which were gay.
	Fruit being a derogatory British slang term for gay men.
	Although given the identities of the victims hadn't even been released at the time she posted the picture, I'm not sure how she would have got that inside information.
	Another one that I saw even argued that the oranges were a reference to Orange Man Bad, a common right-wing meme about the supposed mindless media antagonism President Trump incurs.
	Although again, I have to admit that one didn't gain as much traction because apparently even totally adult geriatric racists struggle to draw a line from a 4chan in-joke about the US media to a Park stabbing.
	Now, this might seem like run-of-the-mill, point-and-laugh, lockdown lunacy.
	But as Sarkar herself pointed out, there is something really sinister about this.
	Because this kind of hysteria, increasingly, isn't just confined to online nutjobs.
	During the Brexit referendum in 2016, a Labour MP was shot and stabbed by a man shouting, Britain first, as he killed her.
	Last year, an outspoken gay left-wing journalist, Owen Jones, was physically attacked by a man with associations with several far-right groups.
	When these kind of rumours and conspiracies spread over social media, they're not simply ginning up a victim complex.
	They're tacitly endorsing violence against Sarkar and other dissenting voices in the British media.
	I scoured through all of the replies to Sarkar's tweet.
	And there's death threats post calling her vermin or a parasite.
	It's really horrifying stuff and it's hard to believe that this theory or this language would have gained half the traction it would have if she was white.
	So I just want to end this section by saying solidarity with Ash Sharkar, who I think is an incredibly brave person and who absolutely does not deserve any of this shit.
	Hey guys, remember 2016?
	It was quite a year for conspiracy theories.
	Trump accused Ted Cruz's father of taking part in JFK's assassination.
	Online rumors spread that Hillary Clinton had Parkinson's disease.
	But no other conspiracy theory captured the imagination of the online far-right quite like Pizzagate.
	In the wake of WikiLeaks releasing the emails of Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, countless 4chananons poured through its contents to try and find something profoundly incriminating.
	And they thought that they found it in the food terms that are occasionally used in that correspondence.
	According to the pizzagators, terms in those emails like pizza, pasta, or walnut sauce didn't refer to Italian food, but were rather code for unspeakable depravities.
	These coded terms, they believe, pointed to a massive child trafficking operation run through a DC pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong.
	The Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory jumped into the real world in a very serious way on December 6, 2016 when a man traveled to Comet Ping Pong armed with a rifle intending to rescue the children and then fired into the pizzeria.
	Now, fortunately, no one was hurt and the shooter was eventually sentenced to four years in prison.
	This dangerous attack caused some of the biggest Pizzagate pushers like Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich, and Alex Jones to delete all of their Pizzagate-related content and never mention it again.
	Pizzagate as a conspiracy theory still survived anyway, and in late 2017, it became a subplot of the more elaborate conspiracy theory, QAnon.
	However, as first reported by Will Sommer at the Daily Beast last week, over the past few months, Pizzagate as a standalone conspiracy theory experienced a bit of a revival.
	And this revival is due in big part to the video-based social media platform, TikTok.
	Now, I'm cool.
	I know what TikTok is.
	Yeah.
	But for the more boomer-brained among us, like Julian, Yeah, you just created an extension of yourself about 13-14 years ago, and now that person is cool, and you're trying to steal their valor as a teen.
	Don't try to do this, man.
	You're a dad, okay?
	Dads are not cool.
	TikTok is a social network in which people post videos of themselves that last just a minute or less, and the users, mostly teenagers and young adults, They do lip syncs, or they do dances, they perform short sketches.
	The majority of the content on TikTok is pretty light and fluffy, revolving around trends, pop culture, or relationship jokes.
	But quite recently, Pizzagate theories on TikTok flourished.
	In retelling the tale of Pizzagate, the Gen Z users drew from the already existing mythology while getting a lot of the factual details wrong.
	For example, here's how one TikTok user explained Pizzagate.
	Let's talk about Pizzagate for a second.
	So, for anybody who doesn't know what Pizzagate or the Pizzagate Theory is, basically, in 2016, when the presidential election rolled around, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta's, email was hacked.
	A short while after that happened, a company called Wikileaks had leaked all of the emails, and the emails are gone now, unfortunately.
	We'll probably never get to see them, but everybody who had seen the emails claimed that they were coded messages that alluded to a child sex trafficking ring.
	And in these coded messages they often talked about pizza or pizza places but referred to nothing else ever.
	It was just always emails about pizza.
	And certain theorists claim that these codes that they used actually alluded to Satanism and pedophilia too.
	And also in these emails they use symbols that people use in like New York and Los Angeles and big places like that.
	And all of these symbols that they used in these emails can often be found in big companies logos if you look hard enough.
	And every article you look up on this will say that it's been debunked and it's false but it is not.
	Right, so obviously there are a few things wrong with that, even if we ignore the Pizzagate claim.
	She is getting all kinds of shit.
	Just all wrong.
	Nightmare, what a mess.
	The hacked Podesta emails aren't gone.
	They can be found on the WikiLeaks website and a bunch of other places.
	You can go read them all right now if you're so inclined.
	It's also not true that the Podesta emails only refer to pizza.
	A tiny minority of the emails refer to food, but the majority of them are just about bland day-to-day campaign business or meetings.
	Now, before we go on, I do want to say that while I normally enjoy fact-checking false claims from conspiracy theorists, it's not quite as enjoyable when the conspiracy theorists are just a couple years older than my daughter.
	Like, it feels a little bit more like correcting a student's homework rather than countering propaganda pushed by extremists.
	So I do want to emphasize that it's every young person's right to post dumb shit online.
	It doesn't necessarily represent someone's potential or their most noble self.
	I mean the stuff that like I posted when I was like 17, 18, 19 was extremely cringe and I'm glad I did it back when the internet was mostly anonymous.
	Yeah.
	But at the same time, the content that people are producing on TikTok represents how the next generation is going to spread disinformation online.
	So I think it's important to talk about, especially since, as we can see in the case of the PC Gate shooting, these kinds of conspiracy theories can have serious consequences.
	So I guess I guess I'm not saying I'm like, I'm not mad.
	I'm just disappointed.
	OK, yeah.
	We are all your daughter today.
	And I think I think that if you apply yourself, you can do a lot better.
	Hear that, teens?
	That's such a charitable man.
	So with that being said, let's go ahead and keep cyberbullying some teenagers.
	Yeah!
	A big hook for the newest incarnation of Peacegate seems to be the Justin Bieber single, Yummy.
	The theory going around is that the pop star knows all about the truth of Peacegate and is trying to expose it by planting secret codes in that song's lyrics and music video.
	Now, I would play a clip of the song for you here, but the QAnon Anonymous legal team consists of just Jake, so I don't want to risk it.
	We don't want to put that on his shoulders.
	So the music video for Yummy consists of Bieber singing in a restaurant that serves gross looking jello dishes.
	It is kind of strange, but it's just strange in a music video kind of way.
	Yeah, it looks a lot like kind of toilet paper magazine, like this kind of like over rich aesthetic that draws from like old film looks and like some of this food food fads from the 50s onwards in these weird magazines.
	Now, promoters of this conspiracy theory also found it suspicious that one point Justin Bieber started posting pictures of babies on his Instagram page that included the hashtag yummy.
	This is what I'm talking about.
	No.
	Like why?
	What is the explanation for this?
	Good point.
	So was Bieber saying that the elites eat babies by doing this?
	Or was it the case that new parents on Instagram were sharing baby photos, tagging Justin Bieber, and then Bieber reposted them with the hashtag yummy because at the time he was doing that with every single Instagram post he was making?
	Oh.
	It was the first one.
	Yeah, I liked the first one a lot better, man.
	I mean, both explanations possibly.
	Decide for yourself, let's say.
	Dad, can I leave the table?
	One YouTuber who promoted the Yummy Pizzagate conspiracy theory goes by the name Shirleyza Moe.
	And Shirleyza Moe is a fairly popular YouTuber.
	She has 500,000 subscribers and she typically does normal social media influencer stuff.
	For example, she like She makes videos on beauty tips.
	She tells personal stories.
	She does travelogues.
	She makes music reviews.
	But in January of this year, she uploaded a 22-minute video titled, Analyzing Justin Bieber's Yummy and Pizzagate.
	The first half of the video is pretty innocuous.
	It's just sort of like a lukewarm review of the song.
	People all over the internet are acting like it's the worst song ever, but it's literally okay.
	Don't exaggerate your dislike for this song just because it's Bieber and it's easy to hate on him.
	The song is okay, it's average, it's simple and to the point, you know, nothing groundbreaking.
	I think it sounds like pretty much every pop song.
	But halfway through that video, she changes tack and says that there's actually a nefarious reason why the imagery in the Yummy music video is so strange.
	And I'm gonna look like Alex Jones with this conspiracy theory, but please bear with me.
	So to keep it as short as possible, Justin is trying to expose Pizzagate.
	He gives us clues in his song, music video, and now in this weird Instagram post of babies that he was or is controlled by pedophiles.
	So Pizzagate is allegedly a pedophile ring and you might ask why the weird name?
	Well, it all started in 2016 when strangers leaked emails from John Podesta Last I checked, this video had over 522,000 views.
	Tons of comments, most largely positive.
	Disaster.
	The yummy Pizzagate conspiracy theory, of course, spread to TikTok and elsewhere.
	According to analysis by the New York Times, interest in Pizzagate on all major platforms has been on the rise.
	TikTok posts with the Pizzagate hashtag have been viewed more than 82 million times in recent months.
	Google searches for Pizzagate have skyrocketed.
	In the first week of June, comments, likes and shares of Pizzagate also spiked to more than 800,000 on Facebook and nearly 600,000 on Instagram, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analysing social interactions.
	That compares with 512,000 interactions on Facebook and 93,000 on Instagram during the first week of December 2016.
	From the start of 2017 through January this year, the average number of weekly Pizzagate mentions, likes and shares on Facebook and Instagram was under 20,000.
	So it's basically even more popular on these platforms than it was at the peak of the Pizzagate frenzy in 2016.
	But I mean, that's crazy that it's like become bigger since 2016.
	It almost feels like it has that sort of veneer of, I don't know, the veneer of the past, which sounds really crazy for something that was four years ago.
	Yeah.
	Oh, I mean, these kids were like in grade school.
	They're in middle school four years ago.
	It seems like they're sort of uncovering ancient arcane knowledge.
	Yeah, it's a JFK death for them.
	Also, like, so you can picture these teens at home, like, these are heavily made up girls.
	The girl you just heard speak of, Pizzagate, has, like, pink kind of seapunk style hair with, like, glitter around her eyes.
	Like, it's very jarring.
	Glam fashion.
	Yeah, to see someone who doesn't look like Jack Pazobiec or fucking Mike Cernovich push this shit.
	These could not be more the polar opposite of the original Pizzagate crew.
	Yeah, so true.
	You know, to go back to Travis's point about how it's spreading even faster, if I look at 2020 and I look at 2016, it's like the truth matters less in 2020 than it did in 2016.
	Good point.
	There's just more internet users.
	There's more users.
	Oh yeah.
	More kids are becoming independent internet users.
	And social media in itself is working back towards very short form content, so these little sound bites, I think, travel a lot quicker.
	It's hard to even imagine a world for these people where the algorithm doesn't exist.
	The algorithm is a fact of life, like water and air.
	And so the algorithm and likes and comments and all of this stuff, which did not fucking exist, I'd like to emphasize, the best you were going to get is like an upvote in a weird forum or something.
	People are being fed information at a fast pace through machine learning, yes, is a new phenomenon.
	The algorithm.
	It's like the market.
	We have the market, now we have the algorithm, and everyone, we just have to accept it.
	Sometimes it does bad stuff to us, like really bad stuff, but they're just part of who we are.
	But most of the time, it sells me on a pair of sunglasses that I need.
	As it turns out, since TikTok videos are typically very fast-paced and they're always a minute long or less, they are an ideal medium for an age-old tactic of bullshitters, the gish gallop.
	So this is a technique where a disingenuous debater will throw out a ton of different false claims, one after the other.
	So that they're just too time-consuming to fact-check.
	I'm going to give you one example of a Gish Gallop.
	What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a, there's this 50-second TikTok video.
	I'm going to break it down into four parts so we can examine each of the claims being made.
	So in the first part of this video, the TikToker claims that while Justin Bieber was hosting an Instagram live stream, someone asked Bieber to touch his hat if the rumors about Yummy were true, and then he did so.
	And this is apparently good enough evidence for her.
	So he did a live one day and someone said, touch your hat if the rumors about Yummy are true.
	And he touches his hat.
	I'm so sad, dude.
	I mean, do I really need to talk about why this is not a good enough reason to believe?
	I don't know, Travis.
	You set up the format.
	You wanted to bully the teens.
	Now you don't have the content to do so?
	Yeah, why?
	You're pretending to pull back?
	Hold me back, bros.
	I don't want to do a tour.
	Let me bully this teen.
	Yeah, go ahead.
	Let me take a crack at bullying this teen.
	Hey, teen!
	First of all, why don't I have a video?
	Show me the comment happening and him touching his hat in a good video, no editing, I'll believe you more.
	Just a flash of him touching his hat from the shed isn't enough.
	Instead of debunking, he's workshopping our content.
	Good job, Travis.
	You handed it over to Jake, you trusted him for a single moment, and now we have the results.
	Here's how you can make it slightly more convincing to your teenage audience.
	You gotta put the video in.
	She then forwarded an interesting theory about why she believes that Justin Bieber was an MKUltra victim.
	He also came out that he has Lyme disease and Lyme disease is a side effect of MKUltra.
	For clarity's sake, MKUltra was a secret CIA program that used human experimentation to research mind control techniques from the 50s through the 70s.
	Exactly the years that Bieber was famous.
	And Lyme disease, on the other hand, is a bacterial infection that is acquired through the bite of an infected tick.
	So they have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
	But she pointed to an article.
	Yeah, I actually, she did.
	So I actually looked up that article.
	I tried to figure out where she got this idea.
	This man.
	Sisyphus.
	This fucking man.
	This guy's gonna, when Travis dies, he will have like the shape of a boulder right through his body.
	He will be a pancake with like just the boulder rolled backwards.
	So that website she points to for like five seconds in the video is called Fighting Monarch.
	And this website describes itself as a resistance site for victims of CIA, NSA, MI5, and Illuminati mind control.
	There we go.
	That's another.
	The Illuminati just listed them as an intelligence agency.
	Just 80 websites.
	NSA, CIA, you know, Illuminati.
	So the article she's referring to is headlined Lyme disease, a symptom of MKUltra.
	It's a question mark.
	Good question, Mark!
	The article itself points out that when Lyme disease patients are bit by the infected tick, it sometimes leaves behind a rash that looks like a bullseye with like a red spot in the middle and a red ring around it.
	The article on Fighting Monarch goes on to make this speculation.
	Could it be that the bullseye is caused not by a tick, but by a dart gun or a hypodermic needle?
	So the theory seems to be like that the CIA is using dart guns to shoot some MKUltra chemicals into people like Justin Bieber and this is how they catch Lyme disease, not the ticks.
	I don't buy it.
	Nothing about this.
	It's so incoherent.
	No, they darted Bieber.
	I mean, they didn't definitively say that it does do that.
	No, no, that's right.
	It just asks the question.
	The article doesn't even say that, but then she does.
	But then she just states out a blasé, oh, by the way, Lyme disease is a symptom of MKUltra.
	Moving on.
	Yeah, I mean, based on the facts so far, I can only think that there's a real cabal and that he might even be involved in exposing them.
	Yeah, the article basically is like, what if the mark from a tick wasn't actually a tick, but instead some sort of dart?
	That's the article!
	It's like, what if all this time the scientists were wrong about ticks and every person who's had Lyme disease has actually been hit with a dart?
	It's just CIA guys hanging out in specific types of forests.
	Just darting anybody who dares walk there.
	This TikToker goes on to promote the completely baseless internet rumor that someone tried to coerce Justin Bieber into molesting a child.
	There was also an article of him talking about how at a party they were making him do stuff to a little boy and he didn't want to because the little boy was drugged.
	And he talks to an anonymous source that he didn't want to do it.
	And I don't know man, this is all so crazy.
	It literally says truthful no in the video.
	That's true.
	It says she's pointing to an article and right below the claim it says truthful no.
	No.
	Yeah, the source of this claim was actually an article that was published in 2017 on the fake news website YourNewsWire.com.
	And Your NewsWire also happens to be one of the main sites that fueled Pizzagate in 2016.
	Oh, God.
	So that article essentially claims that during a Bible study session, Justin Bieber confessed to other participants that he once attended a party where he was promised even greater heights of success if you would just molest and kill a child.
	Now, in this completely false story, Justin Bieber, the good boy, refuses to go through with the act.
	Now, it's trivially easy to find out that this whole story is false with just a Google search.
	In the video, the TikToker even references an article that explains why there is zero substance to the claim.
	But she is convinced that the claim is true anyway.
	This article says it's not true, but like, my thoughts is like, I feel like Justin's trying to fight back in a sense of exposing them and what he went through.
	Also, side note, the fact-checking websites are run by the people behind what they're doing, so I don't know if I trust this.
	Whoa, the fact-checkers are the cabal?
	That's it.
	That's really the final power move.
	You're telling me that everyone who's a fact-checker who says that this is nonsense is part of the cabal, so bye.
	Okay, but this particular conspiracy theory that she pushes here right at the end would potentially lead to the death of the people who created the Pinocchio system.
	That's true.
	So I might actually be with the teens here.
	No.
	They're so unaffected.
	These Zoomers, man.
	It's so weird.
	They're like, whatever.
	Yeah, so I think the fact checkers are also part of the Illuminati.
	I don't know, guys.
	I wouldn't trust them.
	I don't think I would trust them.
	So yeah, so I think this really illustrates the problem.
	So again, this is a 50-second video that we've been talking about for like the last 10 minutes or so.
	She just goes through a litany of completely false claims.
	Of course, in addition to Pizzagate, TikTok yous have also been pushing old conspiracy theories that are adjacent to Pizzagate, such as the completely false claim that DNC staffer Seth Rich leaked emails to WikiLeaks and was subsequently murdered by Hillary Clinton.
	Like with the Gen Z version of Pizzagate, the Gen Z version of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory seems to draw from the existing mythology while adding in their own special factual inaccuracies.
	Take this TikTok video for example.
	What's up guys?
	I'm gonna tell y'all how we got the email from Hillary Clinton.
	Most likely we can think this guy.
	This guy's name is Seth Rich.
	He was an employee at the DNC during the 2016 election.
	Basically, he quits one day working for the DNC, said he had found something that he could not keep quiet.
	Shortly thereafter, the emails are leaked to WikiLeaks.
	Two weeks after this, he's murdered outside of his apartment at 4 a.m.
	This was one single bullet wound to the back of the head.
	It was concluded with a very short investigation that the police called a robbery, even though
	his wallet, cell phone, and watch were still on him.
	There were no witnesses at all.
	His apartment building did have security cameras, but this specific time they were not working.
	Every source saying that this was debunked basically just points back to the police
	report saying it was a robbery.
	The police concluded their investigation with no leads, no further investigations.
	Justice for Seth.
	They're gonna get justice for Seth trending again.
	He's making it sexy.
	I was gonna say, this guy's cool, I believe.
	No, he's not cool.
	He's lame.
	Again, there's just a ton wrong here, even if we ignore the false claim that Seth Rich leaked the DNC emails.
	WikiLeaks actually received an email containing the DNC email archive from the actual source, four days after Seth Rich was murdered in a likely botched robbery attempt.
	Yeah, but you sound like you're panicking.
	Well, I am clearly communicating stuff that I've debunked many times over and over again over the past few years.
	And I will repeat it as many times as necessary.
	I wonder if it is like particularly distressing to Travis to re-explore Pizzagate.
	Having really, I think we did all think that we had kind of put it somewhat to bed.
	We were moving on to something else.
	Yeah, we were like, we got a new thing.
	The Teens will come up with their own new thing.
	Nope.
	I mean, if they continue on the cycle, it's gonna be the Pizzagate, and then, you know, next year the teens are gonna be on QAnon.
	Yeah, I think that you're a bit like a vampire hunter.
	Every few years the vampire rises, you must stake it in the heart and get it back into its coffin, and that's it.
	That's gonna be your life.
	I can't think of any other, like, metaphors for this.
	Yeah.
	Including a giant rock, like, built out of TikTok teen, like, videos, just rolling back down over your face.
	The panopticon of all teen minds.
	I was very disappointed the way I came across this video, right?
	Pushing this nonsense.
	The geode of teen minds.
	I was debunking Seth Rich conspiracy theories while you were still practicing the floss dance in your parents' living room, you little shit.
	Chavis, I think what we're getting out of this is you need to have a TikTok account.
	We need to get some 50 second videos of you just pointing to your own articles.
	Bam, bam, bam, bam.
	Just debunk, debunk.
	There's more things wrong with that video.
	Seth Rich never quit his job at the DNC.
	Seth Rich never said he found something and he couldn't keep quiet.
	Seth Rich was not shot once in the back of the head.
	He was shot twice in the back.
	There's no evidence that his apartment building had a security camera that wasn't functional.
	So again, it's just weird.
	It's almost like they just put all the real Epstein shit like over the Seth Rich story.
	The cameras didn't work.
	That's way more shady.
	It's so funny that, yeah, they take in like what they know are sort of like heavy hitters from other conspiracy theories and kind of lump it in.
	That's what you do as a teenager.
	You sort of embellish.
	Good stuff.
	While watching Pizzagate videos on TikTok, you often get the sense that many of the young people talking about it aren't really true believers.
	They're just maybe intrigued by the lurid claims it makes.
	So I spent like five hours researching about Justin Bieber and Pizzagate and the elite abusing children.
	I'm not one to believe in conspiracy theories, but this is actually really scary.
	Like, it kind of makes sense, and his video is so odd.
	Do you guys believe in Pizzagate?
	Oh, boy.
	Just sipping like a big Jamba Juice.
	Pure engagement posting, by the way.
	Pure engagement.
	These children are wrapped in the warm corporate blanket.
	They're just like... They're anesthetized, actually.
	I thought we were growing up in the 80s and 90s.
	No.
	This is far worse.
	These people are the batteries that feed the giant robot empire that is beneath the dead sun.
	We were wrapped in Coca-Cola products.
	You know, wrestling.
	We were also completely numb.
	It kind of feels maybe like an allegory for when I was a teenager, there was this whole kind of like emo phase where you're supposed to be really dark and listen to My Chemical Romance and watch Tim Burton and stuff like that.
	It's maybe this same kind of teen impulse that you're kind of like attracted to these sort of like dark aesthetics because they kind of look a bit edgy and cool and show how like kind of, you know, sort of like, I don't know, deep and kind of like, Jaded you are.
	Do you know what I mean?
	It's almost the same thing but just 15 years on.
	Exactly.
	Let's say your dad reads the New York Times and cares that Trump is lying to people and then you fucking rebel by believing in Pizzagate and spreading it on your Instagram.
	I mean that is pure dad rage you're going to achieve there.
	Other times you get the sense that these budding Pizzagate promoters don't take it that seriously, but like the idea that song lyrics are secret codes.
	For example, in one video, a TikTok user tries to do a decode on the song Blue World by the late rapper Mac Miller.
	Okay, so we're obsessed with Pizzagate right now, okay?
	And tell me how we were listening to Blue World by Mac Miller, okay?
	And we're listening, okay?
	Alright?
	And you know how, like, Pizzagate is, like, pedophilia and shit like that?
	Okay?
	There is a lyric in this man's song.
	Ready?
	She's gonna, she got you.
	Hold on.
	It says, I'm not politicking, I ain't kissing no babies.
	So, so, so, so, so.
	Mac Miller knew about this game.
	He knew about it and what if they killed him because he was going to expose them?
	Maybe Mac Miller, he might not be, he literally, no before.
	We have come to the conclusion that... The government killed Matt Miller!
	The government is corrupt!
	So yeah, listen to the...
	You heard it first here!
	Something really alarming about the fact that they're, like, driving.
	She's just not familiar with the cliché about politicians campaigning by kissing babies.
	No, but these are... Which was what the Mac Miller was referring to.
	Yeah, that's, like, such a common phrase.
	I can't believe that they wouldn't know what that meant.
	Still, other times, it seems like TikTokers are attracted to Pizzagate because talking about it feels forbidden or dangerous.
	So since people are talking about the Yummy music video, and the conspiracies behind it, conspiracies, and I've researched this a ton, I'm just gonna explain really quickly why this is relevant.
	Because people have been murdered for talking about this, and I'm not trying to be that person.
	But anyways, let's get started.
	So obviously, there isn't actually any evidence that anyone has ever been murdered for talking about Pizzagate.
	It's like, some of them seem to like, really buy into it, others are like, wow, there's just this That's ancient knowledge from all the way back in 2016 that we've just uncovered.
	That's right.
	But even if some young people are exploring these conspiracy theories innocently, the claims continue to have serious consequences in the real world.
	The owner of Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, told the New York Times that because of the resurgence of Pizzagate, he has received fresh death threats.
	Those death threats have even caused the FBI to open a new investigation two months ago.
	Alifantis said that he didn't know how to push back against the endless onslaught of conspiracy theories about his establishment.
	He told the New York Times this.
	There are no real options for someone like me.
	I don't have the names or numbers for people to call at Google or TikTok, but I don't want to be that person who lives their life in fear.
	But it's not all bad news.
	There are a handful of TikTokers who are pushing back against the spread of conspiracy theories on social media.
	For example, this person did a really good job explaining why Pizzagate is worthless in just a minute.
	Pizzagate and why you shouldn't believe the new crazy conspiracy theory.
	So some rumours were started online that people like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, other elites, even Ellen DeGeneres are involved in some kind of crazy pedophile sex ring where they take young children and use them in satanic rituals.
	They use their faces as masks, drink their blood.
	If you search the hashtag on Twitter they're trying to link it to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
	Now of course one reason why you shouldn't believe this is because it's completely crazy bonkers insane.
	More importantly if you look at the people behind this most of them are very strong believers in Trump and they're trying to make you think that he's trying to save the children from Hillary, Barack Obama and everyone else.
	They're also trying to say that things such as Black Lives Matter is a cover-up Yes, a lot of this is funny, like the Justin Bieber yummy stuff.
	But human sex trafficking is a real problem in America and these Trump supporters are making fake news out of it to try and get you to vote for him in the next election.
	Now, TikTok actually took action against the conspiracy theories on its platform shortly after Will Sommer published his story.
	Last Wednesday, TikTok wiped out all of the Pizzagate videos, like all of them.
	Like if the video contained the Pizzagate hashtag, it was gone.
	But many people simply re-uploaded their deleted videos.
	So they just came roaring back.
	It was short-lived.
	And of course, the fact that TikTok cracked down on disinformation on their platform only convinced some TikTok users that the conspiracy theorists were on the right track.
	Pizzagate has been banned on TikTok.
	People are catching on.
	Share this video and wake them up.
	If you need any information, click on my user and go and watch my videos.
	I have multiple videos on Pizzagate and the truth behind it.
	Guys, we are all waking up and the government does not like it.
	Follow me for more information on this.
	This whole issue I think is really difficult because like young people like they always
	forge their political identity by like grabbing ideas out in the information space that they're
	living in.
	Like this is just a natural process.
	And I imagine it has to be very difficult to like be born after you know 9-11 and being
	raised on social media during the Trump administration because that means that your information space
	is just saturated from conspiracy theories.
	So, like, of course the Zoomers, they're gonna be intrigued by them and promote them.
	So, I mean, I don't know.
	I guess I'll just try and hope that as they mature, they'll come to see that, like, searching for secret codes and song lyrics might be fun, but it's just not a productive way to actually understand how the world works.
	Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
	Please go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
	There are over 80 of them currently.
	When you subscribe, you help us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
	We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous.
	For everything else, we have QAnonAnonymous.com where you can find merch, a link to our Discord community where you can chat with people and hang out, access to the lost episodes, that's two to six, and other links, so go there.
	Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
	It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
	And now, today's auto-tune.
	I do.
	I do.
	Solemnly swear.
	I only swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same that I take this obligation
	freely without any mental reservation or purpose of invasion and that I will
	well and faithfully discharge and charge the duties of the office on which I am
	about out.
	About.
	To enter.
	What enter?
	So help.
	So help.
	Me God.
	Me God.
	Where we.
	Where we.
	Go one.
	Go one.
	We go.
	Two.
	We go.
	We go.
	All.
	We go.

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