Episode 102: Vote Q No Matter Who feat Dave Weigel
Politicians wrestle with QAnon and other conspiracy theories on the campaign trail as we head into election season. Who better to guide us through the morass than Dave Weigel, seasoned journalist in both electoral cycles and conspiracy theories spawning from Seth Rich's murder.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 102 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Vote Q No Matter Who episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we're turning our aching eyes to the election cycle, both on a state level and nationally.
Our guest is Dave Weigel, and he's going to help us understand multiple rapidly developing stories involving QAnon promoting candidates and disinformation going wide.
He also extensively covered the Seth Rich conspiracy theory back in 2016, which in retrospect hangs like an omen of things to come.
But before all that...
First up, our big story.
Social media companies cracked down on QAnon content.
They finally did it.
Yeah.
So, this past week, both Twitter and TikTok took action to limit the reach of QAnon content on their platforms.
Though, this is the most significant social media action on QAnon content since Reddit banned QAnon subreddits in September of 2018.
R.I.P.
In Twitter's case, they banned 7,000 QAnon accounts and limited 150,000 others as part of a sort of a broad crackdown.
Yeah, fascist crackdown.
Here's the statement issued by Twitter about their actions.
We've been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm.
In line with this approach, this week we are taking further action on so-called Yeah, be careful if you've been posting snake emojis.
We will permanently suspend accounts tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account
policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are
attempting to evade a previous suspension, something we've seen more of in recent weeks.
That's right.
In addition, we will 1. No longer serve content and accounts associated with QAnon in trends and
recommendations.
2. Work to ensure we're not highlighting this activity in search and conversations.
3. Block URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on Twitter, which is a big one.
Nobody can go to QMap.pub and get peeled.
When you listen to that statement, you'll notice that there isn't a blanket ban on QAnon content, as some people have
falsely claimed.
It's more like if people who are promoting QAnon and also violating their policy, then they're going to actually enforce that policy.
This week we did see several major QAnon accounts be deactivated.
For example, there was Inevitable ET, who had close to 300,000 Twitter followers at one point.
Another major account that was banned was the verified QAnon promoter Tommy G and the account for his podcast No Mercy.
This ban of Tommy G, whose real name is Tommy Gelati, Okay I'm sorry.
Tell me ice cream.
I'm an ice cream thief.
Several generations back.
The band came hours after Will Sommer of the Daily Beast published a story about his bank robbing past.
Jiladi apparently and two accomplices stole $202,000 from a bank where Jiladi worked to cover his gambling debts.
Ah, yes.
In response to that story, Jalali published a Twitter video in which he made various threats in apparent violation of Twitter's terms of service.
Some QAnon followers attempted to evade detection on Twitter by spelling QAnon, C-U-E-Anon, or they would just replace Q with the number 17 or an emoji.
They're being very sneaky.
Yeah.
Well, you think they've been fighting in the trenches for two years and they don't have any handy-hand combat skills?
Exactly.
They know how to evade surveillance.
That's right.
The QAnon community was both enraged and emboldened by the Twitter crackdown.
For example, here's what QAnon promoter Joe M, under his Sheep No More username, said on Twitter.
America's enemies are rigging the 2020 election by banning digital soldiers of the new I love the individual words in this particular tweet.
Weapon.
Soldiers.
Herded off.
off a cliff by weaponized corporate media networks.
Q is a peaceful movement.
Our only weapon is truth.
Truth.
I love the individual words in this particular tweet.
Weapon, soldiers, heard it off.
Peaceful.
And peaceful.
My only weapon is truth, as in when the Gestapo shows up, I tell them, yes, the neighbor has Jewish people
I really love what Twitter did here.
So after allowing QAnon to fester for two and a half years on their platform, in fact actively promoting QAnon content to users... You must mean Blossom.
And then just generally, Twitter was basically one of the main engines of the QAnon community's growth.
They decide that doing all that is bad, actually, like now.
And so now, because of these policies, Twitter won't have to deal with QAnon as much, but the rest of us, wider society, still will.
The other platform that took action against QAnon is TikTok.
On that platform, the hashtag QAnon had 80 million views on July 22nd, but it returned zero results on July 23rd, according to the journalist Samuel Oakford.
A TikTok spokesperson told Rolling Stone that QAnon hashtags contained disinformation, which is prohibited in the platform's community guidelines.
TikTok will also be working to remove conspiracy theory related videos and accounts.
So they claim.
R.I.P.
TikTok.
They were just getting started.
Not even a chance.
They just made the rebels cool.
Yeah, I know.
This is the problem.
The teens are going to do it twice as hard in a way you never could expect.
I know.
You don't know.
Some teen will invent their own TikTok platform to specifically do Teenagers are a different species.
You can cut off their limbs and they regrow them, like reptiles, until a certain age when you become an adult.
Now, yeah, I had a lot of people ask me if I thought that this would, like, do anything to, like, stymie the QL community, and, like, no.
No, I mean, obviously not.
The parents and authorities that be don't like the things that I do.
I'm a teenager.
I guess that'll make me change what I'm doing.
I know.
It plays right into their narrative.
I'm not judging the action.
It remains to be seen whether it's good or bad.
Time will tell.
But it definitely did embolden them.
And also, it carries the risk of further radicalizing them if they get into some telegram chat.
No, to be clear, there's no right answer here.
No, no, no.
They're only shitty decisions right now.
I'm just saying that that's definitely what the teens are going to do.
In addition to that, Facebook told the New York Times that they're also preparing to take similar steps to limit the reach of QAnon content on its platform.
So we'll see what those are.
This is certainly a monumental event in the evolution of QAnon.
We're going to see what sort of alternative platforms they flock to.
I've been hearing a lot about some Reddit alternatives.
Gab might get bigger.
We'll see if they take to Parler at all.
Yeah.
I think that one thing to note here is that the Facebook crackdown is going to be the most meaningful one because it's going to be the, I think it's going to hit the core of actual QAnon followers where they have their prayer circle groups and also their QAnon group and the local football team.
I've seen these profiles over and over.
And so I think that that is going to be felt way more by the community.
These are just kids fucking around.
The few, like, you know, adventurers that wandered out onto TikTok and that you observed, you know, they're doing stuff, but it's not really becoming the famous stuff.
Like, they're not ruling TikTok, you know.
So I think we're going to see a really big shift once Facebook decides what they're going to do.
I would say if, because the social media companies, they're not transparent and they lie and they don't follow through with things.
So let's just... Sounds a little conspiratorial.
Yeah.
For my next story, QAnon candidate Joe Ray Perkins resentfully avoids saying Q.
So in a recent video, Oregon Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins attempted to invite people to an event in which sort of a QAnon promoter would be present, but she avoids talking about QAnon in this really strange, petulant way.
I mean, I'm just going to play the video.
For those of you that know what the 17th letter of the alphabet is right off the top of your heads, which I won't say what it is because I get skewered for it, there is an author coming into town.
We're targeting August 23rd if I can find a location for a fundraising event for me.
That would be, I'll let you know.
So if you do read anything from that 17th letter of the alphabet, please send me an email.
Yeah, I was like, when she gets skewered, I want to know, like, what conversation led to this awkwardness?
Did she talk to someone in her campaign?
She talked to somebody in her campaign.
How did she get the lighting to make her look like an Addams Family member?
Like, she is lit from below.
Like, she looks like she's trying to look creepy.
It's so cartoonish.
Her challenge was, for this video, to not mention Q for like 60 seconds.
Just for 60 seconds.
Don't mention QAnon or anything related to it for that period of time.
And she can't do it.
She's shaking.
She's so mad.
She's angry.
She's furious.
She's disappointed in herself.
So what's a QAnon author?
She loves Q so much.
She is pilled to the gills.
She really is, I think, the most pilled out of all of the candidates.
I mean, she's a true believer, mad that people are mad at her for liking this thing that she knows is true.
No, it's like deep sea moss in her eyes.
She's like just in the top 10% of pilled QAnon followers, and she's a Senate candidate.
For my next story, Trump wishes Ghislaine Maxwell well.
Yeah.
So this was interesting.
So Trump has had harsh words for many people.
For example, NBA point guard Stephen Curry, Meryl Streep.
A whore!
The late civil rights icon John Lewis.
I can't even make a joke.
An elderly man who was shoved to the ground by Buffalo police.
But when he was recently asked about Ghislaine Maxwell, he did not have a bad thing to say about her.
Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, and a lot of people want to know if she's going to turn in powerful people.
And I know you've talked in the past about Prince Andrew, and you've criticized Bill Clinton's behavior.
I'm wondering, do you feel that she's going to turn in powerful men?
How do you see that working out?
I don't know.
I haven't really been following her too much.
I just wish her well, frankly.
I've met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach.
But I wish her well, whatever it is.
I don't know the situation with Prince Andrew.
Just don't know.
Not aware of it.
Wow.
They?
Like her and Epstein?
Like a married couple?
Like what?
They.
Who's they?
I guess.
I guess they.
I guess they.
I guess that they were my friends.
This is fishy as fuck.
I guess he was my friend who lived next to me.
This is wide open eye emoji.
No, again, Ghislaine Maxwell flew on Trump's plane.
What is he?
I don't know.
It's a strange response.
Why can't you just say something neutral?
Like, well, I hope justice is done.
She's a handsome woman of a certain age.
This is not the response you want from the guy who's secretly saving the world from the child-trafficking Satan Cabalists.
You got one of the child-trafficking Satan Cabalists in your custody and you say that you wish her well?
Oh, exactly.
Oh, she's just a start or something like that.
Yeah, or the storm.
I guess people could say the storm has arrived.
I mean, even then he could, you know... Admire her conservation efforts?
The things she's done for the ocean?
Of course, the right-wing pundits I saw, Brian Cates, tweet something about, it was like a front sheet from a court order that basically is like a gag order about the trial.
And he was like, oh, that's why Trump wished her well, because technically he can't say anything because he's involved in the case.
So that's where QAnon is going to go with this.
Oh, he's like a witness testifying?
He's a witness testifying.
against her so he had to remain neutral and all that stuff.
Yeah, just insanity.
So just to give you a heads up, that's where they're going.
That's one of the explanations.
I found another one about what Trump's words really meant from QAnon follower Julian's Rum.
Change your name both in terms of the actual name and then also the character, the beloved Trailer Park Boys character
that you're using an AVI of.
Get off the good media.
Remember when Comey said, I wish Andy well? Q showed us that this was actually their code for death threat.
When POTUS said, I wish her well, it's possible he was mocking them with their own code, i.e., I know y'all wanna off Maxwell, but you can't.
Okay.
Incredible.
So, I wish you well is like, is like cabal code for I'm gonna kill you.
Yeah.
But when POTUS said that, it doesn't mean I'm gonna kill you, who was making fun of that code and saying that Maxwell is protected.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, Dean, that makes sense.
Sure.
Copy that?
Yeah, everything.
When he does it... Travis, let me tell you something.
Okay.
Here's how things work.
They work a single way until Trump does it.
When he does it, it's actually not the way that we've been claiming this entire time, but a special, different, new way.
Yeah, so... Whatever Trump does is actually modified by whatever reception it gets.
Yeah.
It's like a time loop.
Philosophy of Trump.
Have you looked into Looking Glass?
Project Looking Glass?
For my next story, counter-extremism think tank publishes report on the growth of QAnon.
So the Institute for Strategic Dialogue just published a report I think it's very much worth reading if you want to better understand the growth of the QAnon community.
Now, the whole thing is really full of fascinating insights about what's been going on.
For example, it presents data to support the idea that QAnon growth was especially robust as the pandemic swept across America, which we've been discussing a lot.
Yeah, we were ahead of you, Institute, for whatever.
For example, both Facebook QAnon group membership and engagement rates within those Facebook groups increased significantly in March of 2020.
Specifically, membership of QAnon groups on Facebook increased by 120% in March, and engagement rates increased by 91%.
Zero percent surprised, yeah.
Wow.
That's incredible.
The report also suggests that the international presence of QAnon is increasing.
On average, the U.S.
accounted for 89.5% of mentions of Q-related hashtags from October of 2017 to October of 2019.
However, in the last eight months, this has dropped to 87%.
So the international Q movement is picking up the pace, getting up a larger share of the total QAnon movement.
Okay, I got the beginning of the paragraph for the historian.
America was an interesting empire.
It brought us blue jeans, rock and roll, and QAnon.
For my next story, One American News airs segment calling QAnon the new mainstream.
So Trump's new favorite news network plays one of the most deranged TV segments about QAnon I've ever seen.
Hell yeah.
It was an entirely pro-QAnon response to recent social media bans.
I'm going to play some clips from that segment, but before I do, I want to clarify that One American News has been repeatedly praised by the president.
For example, here's one tweet that Trump sent in October of 2019.
Thank you to One America News Network for your fair coverage and brilliant reporting.
It is appreciated by many people trying so hard to find new consistent and powerful voice.
So keep that in mind.
The lower third of the segment says Twitter bans QAnon amid DHS sweep in Democrat controlled areas.
So here's how that segment opens.
The Deep State appears to be fighting back.
On Wednesday, mainstream media celebrated a decision by Twitter to remove the accounts and content connected to the QAnon movement.
The group's actions were labeled as leading to offline harm, which may suggest Twitter admits the growing influence of Q in America's social and political life.
So that's how it opens.
It appears the Deep State is fighting back about Twitter changing its moderation policies.
The Deep State's fighting back, man.
That's just news.
And then also when it talks about QAnon leading to offline harm, it was spun as a positive.
It's like, oh, so Twitter admits that QAnon is having significant influence and power.
In the Matrix should definitely come on board OAN.
That would be a net positive.
He would have a great show.
Give him like the Glenn Beck kind of position.
Yeah, exactly.
Sweaty, in a chair, microphone close.
That's right.
I was going to say standing in a blackboard, but let's be honest, sitting in a chair near a blackboard.
Sitting near a blackboard.
The segment goes on to promote the strange idea that Twitter's actions are somehow related to the fact that
federal officers are invading cities.
This latest attempt to purge Q content comes right after President Trump deployed homeland security investigations
to Democrat-run cities.
America's law enforcement was speculated to have connections to Q.
But the latest crime and political terror, glorified in millions of Twitter posts, stand on the opposing side.
The media and Democrats are slamming the president for enforcing the law, and it appears important that the other side is silenced.
He noticed that a lot of police officers are into QAnon, and that's good was sort of the subtext.
And then that the reason why Twitter is opposing QAnon is because they don't like the laws being enforced.
So you see, he's sort of equating law enforcement and QAnon as a sort of a singular entity where if you criticize one, you criticize them both.
He's an insider.
The video goes on to speculate that perhaps QAnon is gaining in popularity because it's awesome and correct.
And while mainstream media criticize law enforcement like that, they also refer to Q as a dangerous conspiracy cult that also happens to support law enforcement.
But a growing number of Americans may be doing their own research, as reports also say QAnon is becoming a widely accepted system of beliefs – the new mainstream.
Indeed, after years of revelations of high corruption in Washington and lies by Democrat media, QAnon ideas appear immensely popular.
My brain is cooked.
No, I mean, this is bad.
This is bad.
This is introducing people to QAnon.
Trump has supported this.
Yeah.
This channel.
Yeah, yeah.
Directly endorsed.
Directly endorsed this channel, which is directly endorsing QAnon.
So QAnon's real, I guess.
Well, no, I mean, there's an interesting wrinkle to this.
Your response to QAnon is real, Travis?
Now, this next bit of the segment I really loved.
Some reports point out Twitter is admittedly afraid of Q, although it's not immediately clear why.
What? Some reports say that jerk Dorsey is sucking his thumb and calling for mommy.
They are very afraid of QAnon.
This reporter then went on to just make things up.
Twitter's ban of QAnon also sparked immediate backlash online.
Commentators say millions of people are being purged from a major social media website for posting in support of their own president, law and order, and hopes for an honest and accountable government.
Bizarre.
This is really bad.
This is a big step in a bad direction.
Oh, unimaginably bad.
I love the way commentators say that millions are being purged.
Millions?
Millions?
Where is he getting this number?
I couldn't find anywhere where there are millions of dropped accounts.
Let alone one million.
I can find you someone on Twitter that'll claim that, though.
Is that what he means?
Commentators?
He probably searched QAnon banned millions.
So yeah, there's nothing to back that up.
So basically what he's doing is that he's making the QAnon community seem bigger than it is and then to make the social media crackdown sound more severe than it really is in reality.
And here's how that segment ended.
But the gleeful far-left are celebrating victory for their anti-Trump agenda and are now calling on Facebook to impose a similar ban on Q thoughtcrime.
All the while the silent majority appears to enjoy the show.
Where we go one, we go all.
God bless America.
God bless America.
Christian Rose, One American News.
Oh, they had General Flynn doing the salute and everything connected it straight to QAnon.
That's right.
The takeaway from that segment is that evil social media companies are cracking down on QAnon followers just for loving their president.
Deranged.
And then also it's fine and General Flynn endorses it and we're all enjoying the show.
Yeah, that's about as much research as your average QAnon believer believes.
But they're like, all this is right, I just love my president, what's wrong with that?
And General Flynn endorses it, so it's gotta be right.
Oh, you just gave a graphics team and millions of dollars of like production set up to a Facebook rant.
Yeah.
So an interesting wrinkle to all of this is that when American News actually once ran a QAnon debunking segment that was reported by Jack Posobiec, that report claimed that QAnon was actually started by the alt-right troll Microchip.
However, that claim was never corroborated.
And in fact, OAN deleted that report from their website without explanation.
Yeah, and we have reason to believe it was false.
It was definitely false.
But then, yeah, then they'd leave the segment and then OAN all of a sudden changes tack and is running pro-QAnon stuff?
Well, they're just going to say they show both sides, so.
Checkmate, Travis.
You know, it does signal something, I think, significant.
And perhaps segments of the far right, you know, at one point really did see QAnon as a liability.
But times are changing and they're starting to see how they can make it an asset.
Boys, I'm going to be proven right again.
When Trump loses the election, he will buy OAN, which will have, at that point, rebranded themselves as a QAnon network.
Trump will go full QAnon and claim that he's doing all the things that he's read about himself for the last three years or whatever.
And nothing will ever happen, and it'll be essentially the same, except this time, because he's not the president anymore, he'll be available to tacitly endorse whatever the QAnon thing is.
That's my prediction.
Dave Weigel covers politics for the Washington Post.
He has extensive experience covering electoral cycles and, since we're in America, often contends with conspiracy theories on the campaign trail.
We thought we'd invite him on so we could pick his brain about the shitshow that we are undoubtedly revving up for.
Welcome to the show, Dave.
It's good to be here.
Long time fan.
So this is kind of an honor.
Oh, well, we really appreciate it.
It's definitely an honor to have you on.
And you've been doing this for a long time.
Do you think this is just the best electoral cycle ever?
Obviously, this is the best time for America, generally.
I mean, I have thoughts about this election.
So I think we'll get into them.
But it's it's There have been dumber cycles in terms of what the focus is from week to week.
I mean, 1988, the presidential race, there were weeks spent on flag burning and ACLU membership and things like that.
This can be more substantive, but not all the time.
And as we will discuss, just the underground has broken out in a way that it did not until really 2016.
But it's just got so much purchase in the conversation this cycle.
And so, you actually, speaking of 2016, you covered the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory during that cycle, and Fox News had to eventually print an apology.
The Trump campaign is broadly seen as having profited from the conspiracy theory's spread.
Do you think it had a real impact in retrospect in 2016, and are we seeing anything like that during this cycle?
It's a little complicated, what it did in 2016.
So, everyone loves Reliever Living 2016.
Let me shorten it.
So, a thing that benefited Donald Trump is that assets around Hillary Clinton's campaign kept getting hacked from the DNC.
Really, that hack had happened by now.
The DNC hack, which was mostly emails from staffers, and that is the one that's relevant here.
That was the one where Seth Rich worked at the DNC.
Seth Rich was killed in apparently this, and then the hack came out.
In all of these hacks in that cycle, what you often saw was that on the left,
a lot of people who were always skeptical of Hillary Clinton,
usually with the attitude that she's gonna win anyway, so why is she so crooked?
We deserve to know what's in her emails.
There was just a lot of ridicule of the idea that something had been done to the Clinton campaign
that was unfair, and I think a lot of people in that, and I'm not trying to print with too broad a brush,
meaning you can go to videos of the debates between Clinton and Trump,
and there's a reporter from The Young Turks who's moved on to something else now,
just kind of blowing off every time Donna Brazile or John Podesta would say, I'm not answering questions about stolen email.
So there were a lot of people who said they didn't want to think about the implications that Hillary Clinton's campaign was being sabotaged by these hacks, and so it was very comfortable for some people to look at the Seth Rich stuff.
I saw that more than on the Republican side.
I mean, it would percolate on the left, and you even had in The Nation, I want to say this was 2017, maybe it was later, speculative articles about how Based on how quickly things were downloaded, I don't know, you guys have talked about it, not to go through it all again, but this speculation that there must have been some kind of inside job in the DNC because the idea that people went along and profited in the form of defeating Hillary Clinton, that people went along with just a theft of information, I think was hard for them to deal with.
So not to psychoanalyze thousands of people in one answer, but that's usually how I saw it manifested.
I didn't see it From the Trump campaign.
And Donald Trump, if he wanted to right now, could tweet about the Cessna murder conspiracy.
He didn't really touch it as much.
I usually saw it percolate from the left and then get to conservative media.
So I think Tucker Carlson had some segments with the people who were part of that Nation article in sort of the tradition of enemy of my enemy reporting, basically, right?
There's something that the left is infighting and pulling hair about, so let's bring it on our show and say, That there are questions raised about whether the theft email from the DNC was actually some kind of inside job.
And you guys have discussed this, but as a story, as a theory, it's nonsense.
But what's been misremembered, I guess, is that it revealed the DNC plotting against Bernie Sanders.
What the emails revealed were kind of less important than what Donna Brazile would write later, which is about the joint funding agreement that Clinton had with the DNC that Bernie didn't, and could have, but didn't.
It was just some very late in the primary, really unfortunately, carpy, whiny DNC staffers annoyed at Bernie Sanders and expecting him to lose.
It was not a The kind of thing that if we lived in the parallax view or the conversation or something, if we lived in a movie, not the kind of smoking gun stuff that says, aha, proof, it was rigged from all along.
It must have been the kind of people who were Democratic Party lifers, preferred Hillary Clinton win and were really annoyed when Bernie didn't drop out.
Should they be working for a DNC with those beliefs?
I don't think so.
But the conspiracy always was just really over-determined and really labored to cover up something that was not I won't say it was that important, but it was so orthogonal to what was actually happening in the campaign.
I mean, the really damaging stuff about Clinton came from the Podesta emails.
Which obviously were hacked after this whole Seth Rich's life was over.
Or from the Comey statement.
I mean, I'd say that that had a bigger impact than even like, yeah, Seth Rich.
I mean, I don't know.
That's obviously completely unqualified.
I don't think the Seth Rich thing really traveled beyond the circles I'm talking about.
I mean, I think you can walk around, you know, media, Pennsylvania or the Milwaukee suburbs and find people who remember the Comey letter, and you won't find people who had strong opinions about this.
If you go to a QAnon rally like us, I'm sorry, but it is the opposite, you know?
Everyone loves Seth Rich, he's a hero, and he died for us.
They loved him on the Donald, R.I.P.
the Donald.
Wow.
That's what you're going to R.I.P.
these days?
They viewed him as this hero because he was like a good Democrat, you know?
They framed it as this thing.
He was a Democrat willing to wear an American flag on his entire body.
Yeah, exactly.
If you live in D.C., every Democratic staffer, like, under 30 is like a GW grad who wears, like, ironic flag stuff on Fourth of July.
By no means, I mean, like, it's horrible.
Like, the definition of tragedy is somebody this young being killed.
Yeah, of course.
None of us are making light of him.
We're making light of the conspiracy theories.
Absolutely.
And so, you know, speaking of the spread of conspiracy theories, Trump has recently publicly endorsed OAN, the One America News Network, which has ex-Pizzagator or who knows what he still believes about that, but definitely was a promoter of it, Jack Posobiec.
And they recently ran a pro QAnon segment and they called it, quote, the new mainstream.
So what do you think about, like, first the network's claim, but also its rise in general and its relationship to Trump in terms of, you know, the election?
Well, the president can make anything, just about anything, a lifestyle choice for his supporters.
So, does he talk about OAN and that turns the swing voter, and this is where I'm going to have to keep steering myself away from pure election analysis, because we're not always, you guys are not talking, we're not talking this second about the swing voter who's unaware of this stuff.
We're talking about the hardcore Trump supporter, the hardcore Republican who's come around on Trump, the person who thinks that he's basically A great president and blameless, and there's a conspiracy out to get him.
For those people, absolutely.
I think he's helping direct eyes to it.
I haven't seen a huge surge of subscribers or OAN content breaking out.
And honestly, there's a veil between, or like a pretty thick veil, almost a wall between OAN content and the rest of the media.
Because usually the goal of, maybe if it's not form this way. The goal, the success of fringe media is
does it break out and get covered elsewhere? An example of this would be there are conspiracy
theories for months and months about how Hillary Clinton's about to die. She has Parkinson's
and needs adrenochrome to overcome it, etc. And then she faints on September 11th,
2016, and it becomes, well, people online have been talking about this.
How does the coronavirus jump from the bat to the pig to the human, basically?
And usually you want...
And it hasn't been happening with OAN.
OAN is unique because, like you say, it might be insulated and it might not be creating conspiracy theories that jump straight to mainstream news.
But never before, or you can tell me if there has been, has a sitting president endorsed that kind of outlet.
I'm always cautious of that stuff because for all I know, Millard Fillmore was like, check out this pamphlet.
But yeah, I just mean like, I guess, modern media in the cable news era.
In the modern TV era, I don't think that's happened.
I mean, like Richard Nixon was honestly the first modern president.
Who had kind of an interest in promoting anti-media sentiment, so there's a book, The News Twisters, that he recommended, that Agnew recommended.
That angle on this, of the Republican president saying, you can't trust the media and my critics are all lying, that's been there for a while.
The Trump twist of saying, you can trust clearly false stuff, and that this network has clearly false information, I do think that's new, and my point was only focusing on, for example, OAN had A few days before our conversation today, exclusive about Biden in Ukraine that seemed to be false, and no one picked up on it because it was false.
It has not been, if there was a grain of truth to it, I think the president promoting it could get it somewhere, but it hasn't had that same effect in the media.
But the president telling people that things that they have seen in the rest of media are wrong, and the things on this website, This channel that are favorable to him and false that they should trust them instead.
That obviously has an effect.
I mean, iteratively week by week, we're seeing ways in which the president says you should not trust this entire environment in which I'm currently behind in polls.
There's something the matter with the voting.
There's something the matter with the media's narratives and focus.
And OAN is part of that.
It does seem unique in somebody saying, check this out.
Because even Bill Clinton would be in trouble and he would not point to the most radical defenses of him.
The White House was always trying to find something that seemed credible.
So Trump going to a news outlet that is not credible and is not respected by certainly people in the White House press corps, because it's attacked them.
That is new.
I'm not sure where it's going because it hasn't been very effective yet.
Yeah, is this almost like what it felt like looking at Fox when it had just been founded and was still an outsider news network, you know, kind of created by people with a certain intent?
I mean, is this larval?
What's this butterfly going to look like?
I wouldn't rule it out.
An analog might be Glenn Beck in 2009, because Glenn Beck, but he had the Fox News sinecure, right?
I mean, he was able to influence because he was on Fox, but then he moves to his own media network and the blaze, and it's not super successful, but that is able to bring stuff into the discourse.
I think one of my overarching theories about this cycle, though, this election cycle, is I kind of joke that conservative media infrastructure got very large and
influential and was incredibly effective and impactful for years.
And I think it got so big that it kind of crossed the event horizon and it now kind
of, it has its own, a lot of the things it shoots out just stay in its orbit.
They don't get anywhere else.
So you have, I think OAN is part of that, but a lot of Fox News content is part of that.
And you'll see analysis on Fox that I think maybe four years ago would have gotten elsewhere, right?
The normal pipeline is something happens, there's a version of it, or maybe even simpler, a campaign notices something.
They give it to a friendly ideological outlet.
That ideological outlet runs it and then the rest of media run it because, well, people are talking about it.
I guess that's always the phrase.
People online are talking about this.
A lot of people are saying this.
And that hasn't really been happening even with fairly mainstream Joe Biden incidents.
A good example recently is he gives this interview, and so I'll get back to Oana, what have you, but he gives this interview and With Eddie Barkin, the Medicare for All activist, and they talk about policing.
Biden talks about how police, if they're overly armed, running community, and don't have community policing aspect, they become the enemy.
And he's asked, you know, should we redirect some of the funding to mental health?
And he says, absolutely.
And on Fox, this has become, Joe Biden gave an interview where he said, cops the enemy and he'll defund the police.
And that has not survived.
When it is transferred to local news or other national news or local newspapers.
And so I'm calling you guys from Michigan, and even the coverage in Michigan does not really follow what Fox says or what the president says.
I think four years ago, eight years ago, certainly when John Kerry was running for president during the Swift Boat controversy, it was much more effective.
And I might be whistling past this because there's a pandemic.
I mean, a reason This can't transfer as much as because this pandemic overwhelms everything.
Right.
There's a different type of virus.
Yeah, I don't think it's in the position in these conditions to move stuff over.
I don't know if it ever could be, but I mean, unless you guys have an example that you're going to point out to me of something that OAN promoted that did get much more traction, I haven't seen a lot of it.
Yeah, I've got a really good one for you.
Sinclair Media has put together a package that will be treating Judy Miscovitz of discredited Plandemic fame, which was promoted by OAN.
That local package is going to be run in local news stations across America, and people are bracing for all of the issues that come with that kind of dump of misinformation.
They've also defended themselves, saying, we also ran someone else who criticized Judy Miscovitz, so it's fine.
So is that not an example of the virus reaching the... Oh, I think that's an example of... but did that come from OAN to Sinclair?
I guess in some ways it did.
I feel like that was something that was burning through YouTube channels and then made it to Sinclair.
I don't know.
I don't know about the provenance of that.
I think that does seem... the plandemic stuff is more something Okay, so that's an example.
I mean, one's relatives have been sharing on Facebook.
No, my relatives too.
Yep.
Yeah.
Everybody has been touched.
Everybody has been touched.
They love being pilled on Plandemic.
So that's, okay, so that's an example.
I don't think that's OAN related exactly.
So it was an unfair question.
I was pushing you around.
To me, it feels almost like OAN.
To me, it feels kind of like OAN sometimes, like they hinder themselves because all of their UI kind of looks like Grand Theft Auto, like the news network on like GTA.
And so it's like, every time I see clips from them, I'm like, oh, this looks like a fake, this looks like a fake news.
That's because you aren't a person who's refusing to use reading glasses at the age of 62.
So then my question is, why isn't it more popular then?
Because then you would think that the people that are into the fake news— I guess my argument against this is that OAN is now part of a conspiracy theory ecosystem that interacts with YouTube, plays off each other, and then eventually reaches things like Sinclair or Fox News.
So I would say that, yes, it's true maybe that the outlet itself is insulated, but it's kind of—like you said, there's orbits, and I think the orbits sometimes crash into each other.
But anyways.
I'll go with that.
Yeah, I was defining it super narrowly.
I'm looking for an example of, is there an OAN thing that is false and that got covered anyway?
Because a couple cycles ago, I think that stuff might have been, and I haven't seen it this time.
And I think part of that is people built up some antibodies, and part of it is just the pandemic itself is so overwhelming.
There's no time.
There's no time to do this.
But Sinclair's I'm sure you guys have talked about it before.
Sinclair has so much clout that doesn't get noticed by people like me, frankly.
Unless I'm traveling to a state with Sinclair Networks, I might not even see it.
So that I would put in its own bucket.
But Sinclair was the 2004 election running this documentary about John Kerry and, you know, provably false stuff about his military record, and it got a huge backlash.
I'm seeing the same thing happen with the pandemic.
Not that the backlash means no one believes it, but I'm not seeing it snuck through in a way.
Because there are people like you, frankly, who are so attentive and watching it.
Yeah, we're going to harass them.
That's right.
So meanwhile, Charles Koch and his Koch pack have asked Marjorie Taylor Greene, she's the congressional candidate in Georgia's 14th who has previously supported QAnon, and they wanted to reimburse her their $5,000 campaign contribution.
They cite her, quote, harmful and divisive rhetoric.
This despite the donation having been made after Facebook had already taken down one of her ads for inciting violence in which she says Antifa is going to come and burn our churches.
She cocks a gun and says stay out of Georgia.
She also has another ad where she uses a high-powered rifle to blow up the word socialism printed on a placard.
So she does a lot of stuff like this.
So they gave her $5,000 and then they took it back even though she has put in $900,000 of her own money.
So it seems like I'm kind of pissing a bucket, but I wanted to hear from you.
What are they playing at here?
Is this a Coke play, or is this a mistake?
I think it's a play by people to distance themselves from a candidate who is to the right of a lot of people who are getting elected this year.
I mean, the ideal GOP candidate for the House, and I've covered some of these, are, they're
not necessarily moderate, but they have military backgrounds and they're pro-Trump but not
conspiratorial, and she's not the ideal.
So it seemed, this donation seemed, I would guess it's one of those things where the candidate
had momentum and the chance to make the GOP's House class more diverse, which is a goal
by a lot of conservative groups this cycle, was there, and only later did they find out
the problems with her.
Now, but I'd point out, though, is the problems didn't, QAnon was not really determinative
in people getting away from her.
She won the nomination, a lot of people pointed out the QAnon stuff, but Politico wrote an investigation based on her Facebook videos and I think other social media, but mostly Facebook videos, where she was saying Fairly racist stuff.
Now some stuff you compare to people who are in politics and are fine, but that is what really started the scramble away from her.
She was somebody running with the endorsement of Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan and touting them, and people started to put their arms up after that stuff came out.
But not the QAnon stuff.
Even Lauren Boebert in Colorado Flirting with it that did not lead to any kind of backlash from Republicans whatsoever.
And I think there's kind of a QAnon continuum for these candidates.
There are some who seem to believe every aspect of whatever comes out of the drops.
And there are some people who I think have been just playing footsie with it.
Which in itself is, I keep, when it comes up, because there's always an instinct to say are we focusing on something kind of fringy.
Look, if a Democrat went on a show, and this happened sometimes in the 2000s, and didn't immediately denounce a 9-11 conspiracy theory, that was the end of their career.
Usually the standard is, if you hear a crazy thing, and you say, well, I hear a lot of people believe in that, and I love patriotism, that usually is a problem.
barricaded against by Republicans, really. Because a lot of these candidates, and you've
talked about them, won nominations in places where they're going to get turfed, they have no chance.
But Marjorie Taylor Greene, I mean, I think if she got the nomination, the party's not going to
abandon her. They're just going to, I think, focus on...
She had a 20, over 20 point lead on the next down.
So I don't know how this runoff is going to play.
I can see that the Kochs are, you know, hedging.
And we've also recently saw that kind of Fox interview with Trump, which for the first time allowed Trump to look ridiculous on their channel.
Do you think they're also reading the polls and just going, well, time to plan for what's next?
I think a little bit of that.
You hear about money moving to defend Senate races, which are, I mean, of the three federal things they can control in the ballot, that is the most The easiest path to victory.
You need to, you know, hold on to senators who won in states that Trump won narrowly.
You might be able to do that.
So I think some of that's money move around.
But you really, in 2018, there was a lot more money sloshing around to save the House than there is right now for Trump.
And I don't, I think some of the incentives are different.
I mean, the threat of Hillary Clinton winning and appointing the Scalia replacement.
Even if there's a Supreme Court vacancy before this election, the stakes were different.
It was losing the court forever to liberals.
Things like that, I think, have made this less enticing.
But every week that Trump is losing badly, yeah, I do think you're going to see people move their money and be a little more strategic.
Because, look, before 2010, the Kochs had enormous charities and influence and political clout.
They didn't really spend a lot on campaigns.
They were all about building a legal infrastructure, building think tanks,
university influence.
I can see them kind of going back to that if they think they've basically gotten as much as they can get out of a
Trump administration.
So could you just put the listeners in the shoes of a potential GOP candidate and tell them how you might
evaluate the risks of embracing QAnon?
Different kind of candidates, right?
If it's like somebody running against a super safe Democrat, and they want to become famous, that's not a bad way for them to become famous.
If you're in a swing district, then it would be, okay, so there's a conspiracy theory out there, and shorthand of conspiracy theory, if people ask you if you follow Q, or people wave a banner with a where we will go when we go all sign
once you take a photo with them, decline and say some version of my problems with Joe Biden
are about the socialist policies that he wants to inflict upon this country. We don't need to go
into conspiracy theories. And I don't know why no one has tried to do that because you could,
every district's different. But I don't think that the downsides of distancing yourself from a
conspiracy theory and just saying, I hate Democrats for all the normal reasons. I don't think that'd
be bad. Certainly I've not seen a primary where somebody was not.
Pro-Q enough and that's why they lost.
It's been manifesting, no I really haven't, it's been manifesting in weirder ways and usually it's people who were running as the reliable super conservative candidates that those are the ones who end up after the election being very Q-curious.
They're not winning because they're the Q candidate and nobody else was.
So do you think if someone embracing QAnon, like let's say Joe Ray Perkins or something like that, who's maybe a dead-end candidate, or let's say Marjorie Taylor Greene was still openly embracing QAnon, do you think they have a shot on a national level?
I mean, I can imagine more of this.
Boiling up, if Biden is president, there being more of a, I think about this a lot, honestly, because I've been checking what InfoWars has been reporting on Portland and on the use of federal agents to suppress protests, or in some cases the stated reason is to crack down on crime.
And it's just striking how InfoWars is like, cool!
Keep them coming, Federal Agents!
Like, decades of mistrust of the government has just been replaced by, well, there are bad guys and they're going to go get the bad guys for us.
So if the Feds, quote-unquote, are back under control of Democrats, I can see this stuff evolving in a way that it evolved in 2009, 2010, 2011.
The problem being they're they're just we've had years of this being exposed and people recoiling at it and being and I think it'd be bad for the Republican Party if it's not.
Stamped out in some way?
I can imagine.
I don't want to get too far into speculation because if Trump doesn't win, I don't know why he would rule out ever running again.
I don't know why the people in the party who don't like him would assert control and be able to purge people.
I'm not sure that would happen.
But I don't know where this kind of conspiracy mongering can go so long as Trump is president.
Maybe I'm not imaginative enough.
I just don't...
See the upside especially because with the Trump people in the campaign keep trying to do is turn his focus to Just well what he's doing now is like talk more about law and order talk more about a vaccine They don't see an upside in the conspiracy stuff, but they don't stop him.
He's still retweeting people with QAnon content all the time and Eric Trump read it shared on Instagram and then deleted it the day of the Tulsa rally and So they're clearly flirting with it.
It's so confusing, and I think you can be like Diet QAnon and just say, oh, I support fighting the deep state, like I think the Michael Flynn answer would probably be, without endorsing all the crazy stuff.
People are getting away with pussyfooting around it in a way that you never got away with 9-11 trutherism or the other conspiracy talk that would Emanate in politics and be ruled out and crazy.
Yeah, there's enough QAnon lore out there now that there's plenty of stuff that you can sort of reference, and most normies wouldn't even know that you were referring to Q. I mean, that's a good way to put it.
Yeah, I think there'll be candidates who say something like, where we go, when we go all, and it's a story, but it's so confusing that if they don't go any further.
But I want to see, like when there's debates, like when these candidates are in debates in October,
it's kind of up to the debate moderators to ask them, like, so, do you believe the president is rooting out
a pedophile ring from tunnels that have mole children?
Like, I would love to see some people's responses to that actual stuff.
That's the real question.
Asking Trump about Q is out.
Asking Trump about the mole children is in.
Where are they, Mr. Trump?
What do they look like?
Are they friendly?
Can I have one?
My question the other day was, if you believe this, why are you cool with him waiting until mostly through the end of his first term before dealing with it?
And I've heard the reasons, but they don't make a lot of sense to me.
If I thought in January 2017 there were mole children, I would be like, OK, let's act on it.
Let me scramble the jets.
Let's fix this right away.
That's a day one promise.
Election promise, honestly.
Trump is not usually in the habit of, I'm doing something really popular and great.
Let me not talk about it.
Let me not tell anybody that I'm doing this.
But like, for them, nothing has changed.
Their level of panic, their satanic panic, like, internally is something that they probably had before QAnon.
They just, like, poured it all into that vessel now or whatever.
But I mean, that feeling of, like, being on the edge and having the Mold Children being like, right now, like, you know, being harmed and abused...
That's like their whole life basically.
I don't even know if that's like a ramping up.
So for them they're just like yeah it's just there's horrible people out there and we're fighting the demons in our minds and like they really believe in a second world that we do not see.
Well that's the funny thing and I mean that's why what that's what the beauty of QAnon as a sort of like device because when you believe that you're actually fighting like legit demons and like legit you know Constantine-esque like satanic creatures like Of course Trump's not going to be able to do it the first couple months of his term.
I mean, these are demons.
He's fighting monsters.
So it builds in this sort of lore where they could be like, oh yeah, he's really taking a long time.
In a mutated form, it's the same kind of thing that I think a lot of liberals felt at the end of Obama's first term, where it's like, well, he hasn't quite done In the second term, I think that he's going to really rev up, because I've been reading all these articles about how that's how it works, and so I think there's a certain amount of that.
I don't know, I feel like I could do the same thing in a different world, bizarro version.
Yeah, and you guys have talked about this, but there's like a Joseph Campbell Quality to all this stuff.
There's like a monomyth about what's being done to children by the scary conspiracy that we need to uncover that has been around for thousands of years.
I never approach any of this stuff saying, what would make it go away?
Because I just don't think it's ever going to fully go away.
It can fade.
I mean, 9-11 conspiracy stuff has faded.
You don't hear it very much anymore.
But it's based on stuff people are going to keep believing.
And, you know, if the president seems to be indulging it, like, that's what's new.
I mean, there was never Obama giving a clue like him emphasizing the words building in seven a bunch of times or something.
I don't know what he could have done.
But certainly his approach to this stuff was very different than Trump's.
And the other day on Twitter you called QAnon the crusher creel of conspiracy theories, which made me laugh.
So could you just explain to the listener who may not be in the comic books?
Oh man, I didn't know anyone still wasn't into comics.
But yeah, Crusher Creel is the Absorbing Man.
So he's one of several Marvel villains who's like a criminal who gets powers in some experiment.
And if he touches some steel, he can turn into steel.
And if he touches some electric current, he can turn into electricity.
So it's really the adaptability, where everything can be folded into the monoconspiracy theory.
And I was thinking, this is already pretty impenetrable, so how can I make it more impenetrable?
Let me use this analogy.
I thought it was good.
It had a visual element, too.
It made me look up the character.
I do read comic books.
Did not know about him.
Definitely didn't know his real name, you know?
Maybe his superhero name, but that's a second.
That's some Eddie Brock knowing level stuff.
They kind of, like, later on, I want to say in the aughts, like, they try to mainstream him a bit, and I believe he hooks up with She-Hulk.
Uh-huh.
But he touches her and becomes She-Hulk, unfortunately.
Yeah, well, that's...
Let's not negotiate how The Absorbing Man would win.
I've never thought about that.
I don't want to.
Yeah, that feels weird.
So do you think QAnon and just extreme conspiracy theories like this are just part and parcel of electoral cycles?
Are they going to become more and more visible?
Is there a breaking point?
Or do you think this is all kind of overblown?
The average voter actually doesn't know anything about this stuff.
What are we dealing with here?
I don't think it's ever going to go away.
I mean, so when I back up off sometimes, I think, let's imagine telling somebody in 1980, in the future, everyone will have a device that they can afford that lets them look up any information at any time.
The Clinton body count is what you're talking about.
You can look it up very easily.
But would they have thought, okay, well that would mean people get, they would have probably assumed Well, that will mean people can learn and reason and find out the truth, and instead people use it to burrow into their obsession.
So I don't think this sort of stuff is going to go away.
I don't know what it would be under Biden, but that's the point, that you don't know what it is.
But the conspiracy theories can be based off of so few things.
Biden's just, you know, Democratic primary voters had this bet, and they would tell you as a reporter, they think he would be very hard to Use as a figure to alienate conservatives and independents because he's an old white guy.
And that has been pretty right.
I mean, even the Ukraine stories, it just keeps dead ending.
You keep finding information about Hunter Biden that looks like he is, you know, like he has definite fails on tendencies and made some money.
But like going back to him being on the board of Amtrak, there's stories you can tell about Hunter Biden.
But you can't get into that without explaining why Donald Trump's son-in-law is allowed to run the entire government.
It's so complicated that it hasn't really connected.
But the last time there was what seemed to be a white male culturally attuned to the middle of the country president was a huge flowering conspiracy theories.
All the crimes he must have committed.
It was in Bill Clinton.
So something will happen.
And the overall cultural poison that makes people go this route, I mean, that's never going to go away.
I don't see what would make people think otherwise, especially as, I guess, sometimes I think it's amazing that we've been in quarantine for four months and we're not crazier, but I don't think we're going to get less crazy as a society the longer that we're all locked down and less interested in finding something to blame it on.
I don't think Things would get less loopy.
But the thing I'm leaving out is, let's imagine an election.
There's an election where Donald Trump wins, and this stuff, I think, keeps evolving the way it's been evolving.
There's an election he loses, and there's going to be a lot of He didn't really lose.
He only lost because of the false media narrative.
Here are the people in the media who spread the false narrative that made him lose, and there's going to be a lot of that.
Even if he wins decisively, there's going to be that thinking, which is going to go into strange and sometimes, hopefully not too dangerous, but sometimes dangerous places.
Everything from laws that are going to make voting more complicated, as we saw after 2008, To what we saw right after the 2016 election, which was Trump saying millions of votes were cast illegally, so I actually won the popular vote.
I mean, that sort of stuff.
That's already been mainstreamed by a president.
So I think we'll see more of that stuff.
I just don't know where it will go because Biden has not lent himself as Yeah, they'll find something.
so much has been known about him, he's been around for so long. I don't think
he's easy to turn into that kind of figure, but something will happen.
Yeah, they'll find something. They'll say he's a clone or that he's...
I mean, I can imagine if he has a good debate, there'll be a Biden body double conspiracy.
I'm willing to predict that happening.
If he shows up and he's fine, let's be clear, as fine as if you watch his Zooms and his meetings that he's been having from his house, he screws up some words, but it's generally in 30 minutes he'll screw up like 90 seconds.
Um, but the Trump campaign is getting people used to him being literally unable to think straight.
And if he's able to think straight, and people didn't watch the first episode, they'll think, oh yeah, well they clearly built a robot, and they're putting Joe Biden's words into it.
Not every Cooper is going to think that, but I'm trying to predict, you know, tomorrow's conspiracy theory today.
Well, you've succeeded in making Travis look into the middle distance.
He's very sad today.
No, it's part of the acceptance process, don't worry.
I will be better momentarily.
So bring us down back to earth.
You, you know, you're in Michigan.
Tell us what you're covering and tell us a little bit about the situation developing there.
Yeah, well, I have a couple stories in Michigan that I'm writing about.
One I already wrote, which was every Democratic governor, I mean, every governor who's been putting in mask orders and stay at home orders has political opposition.
But for the Democratic governors, it's, you know, lawsuits, impeachment drives, recall drives, things like that.
So I focused on that in Michigan.
And I'm writing about Rashida Tlaib's re-election race, Ilhan Omar's re-election in Minnesota, but kind of twinning them both.
And also just looking at how organizing happens on the ground, and actually relevant to this, this discussion.
So I went to one of the Republican GOTV offices, because they're still knocking on doors and Democrats still aren't.
Democrats are still all virtual, and they're really They're very TBD.
They're like, if there's a point where everyone feels comfortable enough to go out and knock on doors, we'll do it, but not until then.
But I went to, in the Republican office, they had on the front door a kind of excerpt from Cleon Skousen's The Mass Communist, a kind of far-right text that was arguing about the very real communist plot, the communist goals, the Soviet Union, but taking it further.
into conspiracy theories.
And so they have that on the door.
Some nice Bircherites.
It's a John Birch thing.
I should have just said that to clarify it.
But there's that.
There's information on voter fraud stuff that wasn't accurate.
And then it was mixed with normal Republican campaign stuff, right?
It was like, here are some, the actual talking points to go to campaign for people were, look at the tax cuts
and the ability to rebuild from the pandemic, et cetera.
But just around the office, the stuff people brought was inching into conspiracy stuff.
But not anti-Biden, not David Icke, not QAnon, kind of classic stuff I had seen
at the beginning of the Tea Party.
And that wasn't what I was out to write about.
But in being out with people for the first time in a little while because of the pandemic, I was like, OK, well, this stuff is definitely still happening.
And there was one state rep I talked to for the story who as an, you know, was talking about the governor's stay-at-home
orders and the idea that Democrats want to make the economy worse to hurt Trump. And
he wasn't saying the virus is fake, but he was saying, you know, Democrats even said this. I
mean, you have Ocasio-Cortez tweeting that we need to keep the country closed. And I was like,
well, that's not a real tweet. We've all debunked that tweet. So you definitely see that the
patterns of misinformation, if not conspiracy theory, are all still there.
There's nobody who's been kind of scared straight or, oh Trump's losing, I wonder if we're doing something wrong.
The funny thing is the Trump campaign's strategy and messaging, it doesn't involve this.
Like when you go to a Republican office, they shoot What's the the thermometer that's kind of like a like a phaser, you know, the one that just point you point at your forehead Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, you have to wear a mask in the office and you have to have your temperature checked like they're they're not the Masks are not real the viruses fake stuff.
That's not the mainstream of Republican organizing but the kind of people The kind of stuff you sometimes see brought in is people who are motivated to get into politics and to knock on doors for a more conspiracy-minded reason.
Right.
Well, so you went out to see what the people were doing, and they were pilled.
And some, what's the phrase?
Some are very nice people.
No, it's most of the Republican campaigning.
I mean, it is clarifying.
It's like, okay, when I get offline, most people who want to elect a Republican president are just anti-abortion people or anti-tax hike people who want that to keep going.
Like, okay, good.
95% of the country is still focused on how things work and not The thing they read online that has uncovered the secret to the lizard people.
Everyone I talked to in the office had normal, traceable political opinions and motivations, and so did the campaign.
But I was noticing some misinformation creeping in.
Yeah.
So everybody just log off.
Log off.
Get out there.
Get more normal.
Stop listening to this podcast.
Get some sunshine.
It's beautiful out.
No more computer.
But it is, yeah.
The two worlds are kind of like blending together.
Like you did two different puzzles on the same coffee table and a couple of the pieces are intermingling.
It's also just kind of hard to track it, like the Koch machine, like you said, I mean they're very organized, they fund the institutes, they have people write books, they try to create like a whole department at a university, like they're very visible and even the way that they interacted with the Tea Party was very visible, you know, once they had kind of come to an agreement, the money started flowing in so that the organizing could continue.
But do you think we're going to get more and more of these points of friction between the Koch machine that still, of course, exists at a kind of structural level and these more conspiracy theory minded people or people that are willing to go that extra fash mile like Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Yeah, I think we'll still see that.
I can imagine if the election goes badly, there being kind of a reckoning inside the party.
I was blowing it off before because I think Trump and his family are going to be very influential.
But if it's a really bad election where they lost everything, I think there will be some discussion of that.
And look, in the media, like Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland, didn't even run against Trump.
He like thought about it and didn't.
And just by lightly criticizing Trump sometimes, he has a book out and he has a glowing media tour.
The thing is just that the outlets that used to be tastemakers, right, like the TV news, That is not seen as having one slant or the other.
It doesn't matter as much if there's a denunciation of conspiracy theories that appears on them.
I mean, I think if tomorrow Charles Koch came out and gave an interview to 60 Minutes about how the Republican Party needs to get rid of conspiracy theorists, I think he'd just be folded by those people who believe it into, oh, well, he's part of the deep state now, too.
I don't think anyone has the clout to say, stop believing in this stuff.
Deep state?
What do you mean?
His dad, you know, built some infrastructure for the Nazis, literally, in Germany.
You should go follow Dave Weigel.
He goes by Dave Weigel on Twitter.
I don't know where you came up with that one.
Dave, W-E-I-G-E-L.
You should read his journalism.
I mean, you've been writing for a few outlets, or is it exclusively for the Washington Post?
Since 2015, I think maybe I wrote one or two freelance things, but like 99% Washington Post.
I have a newsletter that covers campaigns that comes out three days a week, and I write other stories.
I'd say I'm almost exclusively writing about campaigns now, and I like when it can overlap.
You know, there's a platform discussion or something in Congress that we're talking about.
I like when it's actually involving real policy.
So, like the Democratic primary, even though people got tired of talking about Medicare for All, I like that stuff.
But it's Washington Post mostly.
I mean, I wrote a book about progressive rock that is still available and not been remajored.
It's called The Show That Never Ends.
Yeah, like it's still, people are still buying it of their own power.
Nobody's like both buying it for a fundraiser.
If they want to, they should.
But yeah, good idea.
But I did that.
But I mean, once that book came out, I was right back into nonstop politics.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and giving us your expertise.
Yeah, man, it was a pleasure having you on.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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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.
Funny business now.
Q, you know, I guess this conspiracy deal on the internet.
Twitter's basically just cracked down, eliminated about 7,000 accounts, 150 other 100,000 accounts are now in the crosshairs.
Do you think that this is an attempt to kind of Yeah, guess what Adam Schiff does a lot of crazy things and Jerry Nadler and Derek Swalwell.
