Marjorie Taylor Greene endorses a Lil Wayne track. Jim Watkins gets busted for hosting child pornography subdomains. The election is upon us. We chat with intrepid election reporter Dave Weigel, to get a better temperature for the actual voting public (not just sickos who listen to podcasts). We also discuss the growth of conspiracy theorizing among broadly liberal voters and how the surveillance and intelligence state is being empowered further by the tools developed to track and censor extremism.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 115 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the pre-electinon episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
The U.S.
election is finally upon us.
In millions of Americans' homes, glass surfaces are humming with electrostatic charge after being chafed for months by sickly, anxious fingers.
The curtain is drawn, but outside the seasons have changed, and yet, in some ways, there remains nothing except the screen.
Reclined in the miasma, we are more convinced than ever.
Dark forces are fomenting anxiety from just behind the looking glass.
We crane our necks further, peering at our enemies through the lingering smoke of the digital battlefield.
Yes, it's certain now.
This is a time of reckoning for the impure energies plaguing our Earth.
A blinding light is coming to cleanse us.
Now I see everyone in the audience is nodding, and that's very good.
That's really positive.
Today we have this Marriott conference room for about an hour, and we're going to be doing some harnessing of our intention.
The goal here is to create a hybrid Reiki meditation and hashtag campaign, a solution for QAnon, in the few days we have left before November 3rd.
We stand at the brink of a new era.
Our repeat guest is Dave Weigel, who's been covering the election for the Washington Post,
and somehow still remembers a bunch of stuff about Trump.
still remembers a bunch of stuff about We'll ask him what he's been seeing on the campaign trail in these final hours, and what he thinks it portends for the future of conspiracy theories in American politics.
But before we dive into that conversation, we wanted to catch you up on all the latest developments in the QAnon world, as well as take a look at the ever-growing number of politicos and candidates who've kowtowed to Q in some way.
From Jim Watkins hosting child pornography sites to Marjorie Taylor Greene declaring her favorite Lil Wayne song, there's plenty to chew on in QAnon News.
For my first story, Jim Watkins gets caught hosting child porn web domains.
This is a story that was reported by Ali Breland and A.G.
Visons for Mother Jones.
Jim Watkins, owner of the 8chan and 8coon message boards and who is suspected of being the person currently behind Q, controls a company that hosted scores of web domains whose names are suggestive of child pornography.
One domain created in 1998 and hosted by Watkins' company NT Technology lists Watkins as its administrator and names a separate holding company he owns, Is It Wet Yet, Inc., as the administration organization.
According to historical domain and web archive records, The domain has, over the years, been associated with dozens of subdomains whose names combine terms like preteen, kidnap, and rape.
They include a comprehensive system of subdomains referencing age ranges as young as 10.
When Watkins was asked about that specific domain, he told Mother Jones, I have really no idea about it.
Watkins also insisted... We're not child pornographers, and we don't host child pornography, and we don't condone that.
So, of course, important context for those quotes.
Watkins lies a lot.
Interestingly, the domains were brought to the attention of Mother Jones by a group of anti-Q researchers that include Aubrey Cottle, Who is the owner of the image board 420chan and a founder of the activist hacker collective Anonymous.
In a tweeted press release, Aubrey Caudill indicated that this is the opening salvo of what he's calling Operation Vindicator, and announced, quote, this is a formal, official declaration of war against QAnon.
For my next story, the crackdowns on QAnon content continue.
After social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube all brought the ban hammer down on QAnon content, QAnon has continued to take multiple L's.
The subscription service Patreon also cracked down on QAnon on October 24th.
Here's how they described the new policy in a blog post.
QAnon dedicated creators that are identified by our policy and trust and safety teams will have their accounts removed from Patreon.
Creators who have propagated some QAnon content but are not dedicated to spreading QAnon disinformation will have the opportunity to bring their campaigns into compliance with our updated guidelines.
Creators whose campaigns seek to analyze the QAnon conspiracy theory Oh, there's a little carve-out just for people like us.
JT Wilde was also affected by the recent sort of rolling crackdown.
SoundCloud took down his song, Where We Go One, We Go All.
Also, I think I saw that Saviranon, who's another QAnon musician, had some of his songs taken down.
So this is a very broad sort of cross-platform crackdown.
How do you guys feel about that?
Like music?
I think that it's just a world in which increasingly we are handing over the kind of keys of the discourse to a shadowy group of people who make decisions based on profit.
And how things actually work is, yeah, massive false targetings and people start using it to take care of vendettas that they have.
I'm not sure about the whole thing because there's also the formation recently of what's becoming a more tightly knit group of basically international intel agencies working with private companies that are, you know, helping to make social media company PR problems go away, you know, and by that I mean, you know, help combat extremism on their platforms, which has been really problematic for them for a long time.
And they've been trying to figure out how to do it without anybody getting pissed off or without them losing any money.
So I think within the context of a surveillance state, It's very different.
It's not like we just have some communities in this non-surveillance state that are becoming problematic.
We have a profoundly far-gone surveillance state and now the private companies have basically like account managers assigned to like the CIA and they're like, you know, just kind of working with them on whatever projects.
The CIA doesn't have to set up, uh, the social media companies.
They got set up, and little by little, public opinion over, like, shootings and insane, like, right-wing stuff that they were always using to, uh, get engagement.
Now people are, you know, oh fuck, they're pissed off about this.
The government steps in, they send all the intel guys in, we'll help you take care of this problem.
And little by little, you have basically the organic creation of a private-public intelligence network that is going to be monitoring us for QAnon.
Now, the day that that fucking private-public setup switches hands, those tools fall into the hands of someone else who's using different keywords because they have different fucking beliefs, different ideologies, which is what we're ignoring here, that it's always going to be ideological.
That's the day that I'm very worried about, but I suppose we'll see.
You know what?
I love this plan.
So I think it's this tricky line, I think, that we're now walking where we cover QAnon, but we also have to keep an eye on how the state is going to use panic over something like QAnon or, you know, they're convinced it's a cult and a militia.
And that these people are coming after them like physically any day now.
This kind of fear is exactly the kind of fear that people use to just get more power over other people, more surveillance, less regulation over that.
So something to keep an eye on, you know, not to make that the central topic of conversation, but as we slide to censorship that includes like, you know, SoundCloud songs, it's important to take a look at that.
It's also a valuable point about the question of disinformation because there's like, I think there is A risk that when we talk about
Monitoring extremism, monitoring disinformation, we will turn into the nightmare of QAnon, where we just become a tool of supporting standard established narratives and supporting institutions, regardless of how useful they actually are.
So the thing about monitoring things that are on the fringes is that, by its nature, it encourages a regression to the mean, even if the mean isn't that great.
So, I think that those were all sort of valuable points.
The new Patreon policy also kicked out a lot of QAnon promoters like Martin Geddes and InTheMatrix and Jordan Sather, but it also affected Chief Police, who famously made a few grand a month by providing lists of celebrities and politicians who were supposedly executed or sent to Gitmo.
He also claimed that I was sent to Gitmo and I was caught with Zim bonds, these worthless Zimbabwe banknotes that some people believe are going to revaluate and be worth millions.
I don't know why he added that little detail.
It's the weirdest shit.
But then he also erased you from the list, so he regretted it somehow.
It's completely gone.
There's no trace of that claim ever being made.
That's funny.
You saw that I was having too much fun with it, apparently.
You want to hear something funny?
Our podcast was subscribed to him because we needed the information for the research that we were doing.
And now it still says we're subscribed to him, but it's like says deactivated.
And if I click on it to try to go and unsubscribe from him, it just tells me that page doesn't exist.
So we will forever be ghost subscribed to Chief Police, a dead entity who lives on in the ether.
Just another body in the graveyard.
It's just you and me, baby, in my settings tab.
So in addition to that, Facebook has announced that they will limit the reach of the Save Our Children hashtag, which is often used by QAnon followers.
So they say that they're going to instead redirect users to actual sort of child welfare resources.
But interestingly, they did not say that they're going to do the same for Save the Children,
which is actually the more popular kind of hashtag used with QAnon followers.
But that's because that's an actual organization, right?
So it would be weird?
Yes.
That makes it a lot trickier.
Yeah, they said that they will continue to monitor different hashtags and other methods
by which QAnon supporters might try to continue evading detection.
So yeah, this is the tricky thing, that like, so as sort of QAnon morphs, changes sort of symbols, changes sort of slogans, and tries to sort of reinvent itself in reaction to these bans, The question is, I think, well, there are two questions.
Number one is, like, will Facebook, you know, have both the will and the means to sort of keep up with that?
The second question is, like, will they inadvertently wind up targeting sort of more innocent terms?
Like, to your point, Julian, is like, are they going to sort of like, is QAnon trying to graft onto sort of legitimate organizations?
And is that going to lead to sort of actual good content getting caught in the crossfire?
Yeah, we're going to have to see, but it's going to be interesting basically to see,
like we talked in the previous episodes with Marc-Andre Argentino, how the social media
companies are going to react to the sort of the...
Shapeshifting nature of QAnon and it's also a period of time where we're developing tools.
Essentially.
That's that's the main thing I'm looking at as well It's not just the institutions at work here It's that we're developing targeting tools.
One of the things that the Facebook CEO said was hey, you know we have some encrypted platforms like WhatsApp, right?
But it's okay because we can still track extremists because we track them from unencrypted platforms
like Facebook and then we gain access to the information that they're spreading on the encrypted platforms.
And so they can just cross-reference.
It's some console that none of us have any control over, some sort of surveillance and censorship tool.
That's a scary thought.
Congressional candidates and the future of QAnon.
This episode is coming out just before the election, so I thought it'd be a good time to get an update
on the QAnon congressional candidates.
Alex Kaplan over at Media Matters has been diligently keeping track of every candidate who has endorsed, promoted, or given credence to QAnon in any way.
Thank you so much for that, Alex.
The most recent number, updated on October 29th, is 92 candidates.
That includes 86 Republican candidates who have promoted QAnon.
I checked the FEC website and apparently the total number of GOP Senate and House candidates for this cycle is 1,685.
1,685. If you do the math, that means that 5.1% of all Republican candidates this cycle
are QAnon candidates.
That's one in 20, Travis.
Line up 20 Republicans right now.
One of them is a QAnon follower.
I know.
We're doing good.
We're doing good, boys.
Of those 92 candidates, 27 have secured a spot on the ballot in the general election by competing in primary elections or by fulfilling some other requirements needed to get on the ballot.
We've already talked about Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is cruising to victory since she is running unopposed after her opponent dropped out.
Recently, the rapper Lil Wayne got some heat because he was photographed with President Trump and praised him.
And on Twitter, Greene recently said, and this is not a joke, that her favorite Lil Wayne album is the Carter III.
Green also made a reference to the song on that album, Mrs. Officer, adding hashtag back the blue.
100% sure she's never listened to.
Not a chance.
Absolutely.
She really hasn't.
So yeah, Mrs. Officer is not a pro-police anthem as she seemed to believe, but rather a song about having a sexual
relationship with a female police officer.
Yeah, and I'm healed, I make her wear none but handcuffs and heels
Then I beat her like a cop, ride the king baby, yeah I beat her like a cop
Beat her like a cop, ride the king baby, yeah I beat her like a cop
But I ain't trying to be violent, but I do the time, but her love is timeless
Mrs. Officer, I know you wish your name was Mrs. Carter, huh
We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, Like a cop car.
Green has been pretty well covered.
I want to talk about another candidate, Burgess Owens, who is the Republican candidate in Utah's 4th Congressional District.
Now, he technically isn't a QAnon candidate.
He hasn't endorsed or said any words of support to QAnon in any way, but he is kind of like an anti-anti-QAnon candidate.
Unlike sort of the QAnon candidates, most of them, his race actually is competitive.
He could quite possibly unseat the incumbent Democrat Ben McAdams in the Republican-leading district.
As reported by Media Matters, Burgess Owens has twice appeared on pro-QAnon shows to ask for money.
In May, Owens appeared on the QAnon program The Common Sense Show on the Patriot Soapbox livestream and asked for cash in support for his campaign.
In September, Owens appeared on the QAnon-supporting program Flock Op.
The program airs on the Freedom First Network, an obscure right-wing podcast network.
Flock Op, which is hosted by two individuals who call themselves Goose and Tee, has promoted QAnon on several shows.
The Owens campaign has said that he doesn't believe QAnon.
But when asked about child sex trafficking recently during an interview on the program Real Talk Radio, the candidate mentioned QAnon and said that if the left dismisses something as a conspiracy theory, that indicates it's worth looking into.
He didn't really provide any more specifics.
Wow.
Anytime you bring up child trafficking, we get from the left a word called QAnon.
Now, again, some of you guys might have heard this word before.
I have no idea what this organization is about until about four or five months ago.
I have no idea.
But it's interesting.
Anyone who talks about trafficking, child trafficking, instead of the left adding into the conversation, trying to figure out what's happening, how to make sure we resolve it, instead of doing that, they throw conspiracies at us.
One of the things we need to recognize with the left is, if they ever say the word conspiracy, let's look into it much deeper.
Because it's something they're trying to keep us away from.
Oh dear.
There are layers of incomprehension here.
I mean, he's using the word conspiracy, even though I think he means conspiracy theory.
He's talking about child trafficking as if that wasn't born of QAnon.
He says he doesn't know anything about it.
But he's parroting a QAnon point, which is over the target.
Yes, you're over the target.
That's exactly what he's saying in a euphemized way.
Yeah, I think we're going to be seeing that a lot more is the dog whistles to QAnon.
During a Wednesday news conference, his opponent, McAdams, said Owens should, quote, once and for all condemn the baseless, dangerous conspiracy theory.
But it does seem like that's happening because, I don't know, it seems like, you know, the more sort of like mainstream, I guess, GOP, at least those sort of not all the way in the fringe, but it seems like some of them are sort of forming a kind of coalition, you know, with general QAnon followers without endorsing QAnon in any way, you know.
We saw this recently with when the White House advisor and white nationalist Stephen Miller echoed QAnon themes when he said that a Biden presidency would quote incentivize child smuggling and child trafficking on an epic global scale.
I mean, this This plays into the general belief that Donald Trump is the only uncorrupted elite.
He's the only one preventing fighting child trafficking.
He's the only one who cares about it.
So this, I think, is probably going to be the future of QAnon and the Republican Party.
Even if genuinely influential politicians don't explicitly endorse Q, they're going to appeal to the QAnon community for votes, support, and money in these more subtle, dog whistly ways.
And so yeah, so they're just going to be a big sort of a sort of significant minority of the Republican base.
Before we move on to our interview with Dave Weigel, I do want our listeners to watch out for something moving
forward.
The possible rise of sort of a lib version of QAnon, sometimes referred to as Blue Q.
Now we've already covered like this kind of stuff before with like
Louise Minch or Bill Palmer or like the Time for Some Game Theory guy.
But, you know, I think the election is like is, I don't know, it's cooking people's brains even more than usual.
And it's making, I think, some of them believe that Donald Trump's arrest is imminent.
Or that there's some sort of secret operation to arrest Trump?
To give you one example, I spotted this video on TikTok recently from a guy who has like 16,000 followers and this particular video I saw had 8,000 likes.
As our international effort to bring Trump to justice continues to move forward, there's been some other developments that I want to update you guys on.
My friends at the FBI have informed me that Donald Trump will be in prison within one month of him leaving office.
They told me what Robert Mueller did.
Robert Mueller's scope was to look into obstruction and collusion with the Russians.
But if in the process of looking into those crimes, he came across any other potential crimes committed by Trump or the Trump Organization, he would then pass those off to other Attorney Generals or jurisdictions.
As we speak, there are currently eight open investigations going on behind the scenes.
Everything from tax evasion to fraud to campaign finance laws and more.
And I've been told that three out of those eight are conclusive in their findings.
The walls are caving in on this administration.
And it's only a matter of time before justice is served.
The only difference between this and QAnon is that this narrative is being pumped by almost every fucking corporatized media fucking station.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, we have a big issue, I think, with this right now.
Just the encouragement of, um, I guess, ops.
You know, everyone thinks that they're doing an op.
Now this is, I think we're going to see, I mean, I'm...
I would bet the farm that we're going to see the rise of this exact shit, because it's been pumped.
It's been pumped by people like Maddow.
It's been pumped by, you know, fucking people like, what's his name, Chris Silliza or whatever.
It won't be good enough.
Just like 2016, it will not be good enough that Donald Trump has been defeated and that our guy, you know, for lack of a better term, is in the White House.
It won't be enough.
There has to be.
Because that's still no justice.
The people who have watched the MSM for four years straight and have followed Judd Apatow and their entire vision is just red, seething rage for Donald Trump.
Him losing will not be enough.
Mark my words.
Which is really funny because that's essentially what happened in 2016.
Donald Trump won and it wasn't enough.
So you had people who were on top but were still painting a kind of victim narrative and talking about how there's a deep state getting in the way of this.
What we're going to see with Joe Biden is a rise of like insiders that are telling you that Joe actually has to clear out the Trump appointees.
That there's a network, a kind of deep state of Trump appointees that are still following his instructions and they are trying to break away.
You know, it's going to become their version of those, uh, what are the cities?
The, uh, sanctuary cities.
We are so not fucked.
You know, everything is going to be great.
Everything is going to be fine, I think.
Look at Travis's eyes.
They're not like staring in the middle distance.
I'm so happy that we decided to attach ourselves to this line of business.
I wasn't anxious, a person, I wasn't an anxious person before.
And you know, studying this hasn't made me more anxious at all.
In fact, I feel so much healthier.
It's so much better.
Really connected, not disassociated or feel like I'm living in a simulation whatsoever at all.
Well, I believe you killed Sean Connery by writing a story about- I did!
I killed him!
I did!
The last time we saw him in the Flynn universe, he was like, he basically was a ghost talking from the future.
He had connected to the internet at speeds, you know, so great.
I mean, am I writing reality?
He said, I will look down on you.
I will look down on you as if you were in some sort of astral level.
This is so bad for me and my brain.
You need to bake this, by the way.
If you're in the community, make sure you understand what he's saying.
What did Jake just use as words?
Make sure you, yeah, everything means something.
I'm, you know, you know the movie Knowing with, um, with Nicolas Cage.
Uh, have you guys seen it?
No.
Oh, anyways, well, to listeners who have seen Knowing, I'm the piece of paper with all the numbers written on it.
Is this a bad movie again?
It is.
No, it's a fucking good, it's actually kind of a good bad movie.
Zero percent.
It's all about baking.
You know what?
We should do a QAnon movie night on Knowing.
It's all about baking.
He bakes a letter that his daughter pulls out of a time capsule from the 1950s.
It has 33% on rotten tomatoes.
What's the audience score, though?
Let me see.
The audience score is 42.
Not even that much better!
Listen, I'm not into aggregators, you know, but to humiliate you, Jake, anything.
Dude, find me on Twitter, find me on Twitter, at realrockatansky, and tag Julian as well and tell him that Knowing is a good movie.
Tag Travis only, actually, not me or Jake.
He wants to hear more about Knowing by Nick Cage.
Dave Weigel covers politics for the Washington Post and is a repeat guest.
Welcome back, Dave.
It's good to be back.
We wanted to talk to you because you're about to get sucked into the kind of heart of the storm, as it were, the real Great Awakening, the moment where we're going to find out or maybe find out that it's being delayed and being, you know, pushed up to the courts.
But whatever, we're going to have some form of results on this, you know, for this election soon.
And you've been Basically, you know, feet on the ground, nonstop.
And since the last time we spoke, I'm sure you've come into contact with a few people who are promoting conspiracy theories, both, you know, elected officials and not.
Can you give us some snapshots?
Like, do you find America as transformed as some of these op-eds that we're reading in the mainstream media by conspiracy theories and what they call disinformation?
I have not, and maybe it's naivete, maybe it's that I've been so attuned to that stuff forever.
Not like you guys, but I've always been interested in what bubbles up from Fever Swamps.
What goes from online to real life, and I honestly haven't seen it manifest the same way.
What I have seen is Republicans being more comfortable not distancing themselves from it, right?
So you have the Republican committees giving to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who literally does not need money to win that race.
She's gonna win.
There's no Democrat running against her because they bullied her out.
And then you have Lauren Witski in Delaware, the QAnon candidate.
Getting the support of the party.
The party was not embarrassed.
I remember when Christine O'Donnell won, the party got behind her, but they were really frustrated.
It was different because they thought she was giving up an easy win and replacing it with something that would be tough and it turned out to be impossible.
But you didn't see the same resistance.
But when it comes to the mood in the country and what's around there, I guess I've always looked for conspiracy theories.
I don't see new ones.
And I was just in a Kind of the outskirts of the Philly suburbs is the suburbs closest to Philadelphia that are super liberal.
And then there's stuff that has been switching but still has majority Republican or the kind of place that used to be landslide Republican.
And what I noticed, I didn't see the same anti-Democratic nominee stuff that I did in 2016.
So I'd drive around those sort of areas four years ago and there'd be Hillary for prison, And, you know, billboards with Hillary as a demon and that sort of thing.
Kind of all over the country, but in that sort of area.
I didn't, I saw Biden signs and I saw Trump signs.
So the people who represent majority of the country and are not following conspiracy theories down where they take them, I've not seen the same sort of mania that I saw in 16, but I've seen more Republican comfort with the crazy stuff that bubbles up.
Yeah, there's a Politico article recently about basically the QAnon GOP caucus and how these candidates are now being courted or people are feeling more comfortable thinking of QAnon as kind of part of the electorate that they have to please or cater to.
And do you think that Trump has contributed to that by basically, you know, making it seem like it's your slightly weird aunts but, you know, nothing to be ashamed of, still in the family?
I think you characterized it pretty well.
I have not seen it, and I've seen a little bit of...
Try hard, haha, you guys in the media want to ask about this, but real voters don't care about this, which is obviously not the case.
I think there was actually resistance compared to maybe news cycles about birtherism and stuff like that.
There was resistance for a long time to chasing QAnon stuff until it became unignorable.
I think it was the Oregon Senate primary, which we talked about when Joe Ray Perkins won.
Another state where, look, I mean, Republicans would lose nothing if they said, Okay, we want to do really well this year.
We're focused on this House race and winning back some legislative seats, but we're kind of taking a buy on the Senate race.
And they didn't!
I was in Oregon too, and Republicans, you know, she's part of their literature, and their signs are in their offices, and they have been fine with somebody who believes that there is a child trafficking adrenochrome conspiracy.
So, They definitely have not been distancing themselves from it.
Democrats haven't had to deal with this in a while, right?
And it's hard to find something comparable.
But occasionally there'll be a candidate who wins a primary and they're in some way fringe, extremist, dangerous.
You know, pick your adjective, right?
And that ranges from Alvin Green, this guy who appears to honestly just been a little bit mentally disabled, who accidentally won a Senate primary.
They said, yeah, he's not our candidate.
He must be a fake.
They didn't help it out at all, but he became a huge drag on the ticket, honestly, but they tried to distance themselves from him.
There are people who, there was a guy in Tennessee, I think either two years later or four years later, a right-wing Democrat who happened to win a primary.
And the party said he's not really our candidate.
Same thing.
This happens sometimes where a conspiracy theory becomes a primary.
And if it is discovered, usually Democrats just cut bait.
And that has not been happening with Republicans in some of these cases.
There are people who do something, I think, a little more familiar in its extremism, like straight-up right supremacy.
When that happens, Republicans definitely say, nope, not our candidate.
We don't support this person.
And that's happened a few races.
But when it comes to QAnon itself, again, it's been a giant deal when the president doesn't denounce this scandal.
It has not been a gigantic issue.
And honestly, I think some Republicans, I can't decide if they got off easy or if they lost an opportunity, because even some of the debates, it hasn't come up, or people haven't been pushing them to respond to QAnon and take a position on it.
You probably have talked about this recently.
The last episode I listened to was the undercover convention episode, which was fantastic.
I'm sorry that I have to be in one that follows that.
Thanks, Dave.
But you've seen, I think in the final weeks of this, right?
So one thing that came up in, again, I'm always interested, you guys are interested, in what it takes for something to pierce the veil.
Lots of things are happening in the Black Lodge.
What comes out?
What comes out?
I was trying to make an extended Twin Peaks analogy, and it's been too long, and my brain's now full of other stuff, so I couldn't.
Anyway!
What comes up when you show up to that part of the woods and you talk to the owl?
Yeah, what comes out of the red curtain?
Who is kneeling behind the bedpost?
I mean, there's a lot of great Twin Peaks-related questions, I think, that can come out of all this.
Thank you for laying the analogy.
So, like, I'm always interested in what goes from, we can ignore that it's crazy, to the mainstream.
And you saw in the last two weeks some of the allegations made against Hunter Biden, which are very hard to follow unless it's the only thing you're following, sort of in a Q sort of way.
They've dovetailed into everything is pedophilia, everything is Q, right?
They've started to do some of that.
So there are allegations based on basically How far do we want to go into this?
I mean, I'm fine with it.
I went too deep.
Let's go.
I went on Yandex, and I wanted to find out, is he hung?
And you know what?
He's OK.
Yeah, he's got a decent penis.
But let's talk about it outright.
The video shows a woman.
What video?
What video are you describing, Julian?
A video has been leaked, supposedly from China.
I mean, just a nightmare.
Every mention of China right now on the right wing is part of some demented Black Lodge shit that they definitely are cooking up and hiding.
Anyway, the point is, it was leaked through this supposedly Chinese outlet, and it shows... What's it?
The video.
What do you mean the video?
The video depicts Hunter Biden receiving a foot job from an adult woman while he is smoking a crack pipe.
This very much is true.
I watched the video myself.
And actually, I want to hear what you were about to basically say before I interrupted you rudely, Dave.
This seems to be a thing that I do.
It's traditional now.
You come on and I rudely interrupt you.
But I wanted to kind of dovetail into a conversation about the use of the word disinformation or the use of the word conspiracy theory or the banning of the Hunter Biden New York Post article on Twitter.
This kind of new move on the on the kind of liberal or corporate left where we're seeing the use of these words to describe stuff like that would just, you know, four years ago have been described as an oppo dump.
which it was. It's laundered, obviously, as they always are, as was the Steele dossier.
Every fucking four years we deal with this stuff. But now I'm seeing kind of both kind of top-level
media and people in the kind of OSINT community starting to communicate about disinformation and
conspiracy theories when describing something that actually exists, like the Hunter tape.
So please, take this from me. Take this burden.
So you set it up pretty well, but there's other stuff just floating online insisting
that Hunter Biden must be involved with pedophilia in some way.
And then I have seen that signal boosted by people who are not Q related necessarily, but like Republicans who have, they kind of, you know, they're Trump reply guys.
They do a little bit of political consulting.
They One of these, Ali Alexander, formerly Akbar, who was at the White House's social media summit, for example, I saw kind of signal boosting some of that stuff.
And then you have Steve Bannon saying that Q is directionally correct on his show right now.
I must say it.
I've laughed at the QAnon guys.
You know, people, for the first year I was at the White House, it came out, oh, Bannon's QAnon, all the stuff QAnon.
I'd laugh, because I'm not a conspiracy theory guy.
Which is also a lie, because QAnon didn't really happen until Well, I think he was gone already from the White House.
Yeah, it was 17.
Late October of 17.
Yeah, so the first year he's at the White House does not make a lot of sense.
Moving on from that... But the elephant in the room, it's got to be addressed.
The elephant in the room is, this stuff is real.
This stuff is dangerous.
This is unacceptable that this went on.
It's unacceptable it wasn't reported.
He doesn't say what this stuff is.
Yeah.
How did law enforcement, the FBI is this legendary place, and you can see under Comey that's one thing.
You know, Comey was weak.
McCabe and these guys, that was a weak management team.
Companies go through stretches, they have bad management, and you get them out.
Our football teams, USC's got bad things, boom, you get a new thing, Notre Dame's hurting, boom, new thing, turn them around.
Giants get Parcell, boom.
Belichick, you see it.
The elephant in the room is, you know, people say they're crazy, people say that, I'm just leaving that, put a pin in it, take that off, but when they look at the facts of this, how are they not, at least an aspect of their argument, at least appears directionally to be correct.
And so what does that mean?
Does he referring to, because it's not really expanded on, does it mean that The idea that there are people in the government who don't like Donald Trump is true?
Well, I mean, yeah, we know that's true, but that's not new and exciting.
So it sounded like he was playing around a little bit with the rumor mill.
And we're not to tangent off too much from QAnon itself.
There's a conservative messaging machine.
It has different components.
I don't want to trap myself into another analogy I can't finish, but there's the stuff that gets on Fox News.
There's the stuff that gets the Wall Street Journal.
And then there's stuff that can't quite land there.
And over the last few weeks, the Hunter stuff has been matriculating on the real far reaches of it and occasionally getting somewhere else.
And so that is so muddled together that that can change at any time.
Somebody like a Somebody like a Bannon, frankly, can just grab on and boost it.
So that's a big level, a higher level of interest in some conspiratorial stuff than we had before.
Yeah, I wanted to, you know, one example of what you're talking about, there was a case of, was it Tony Bobulensky, who is apparently a former business associate of Hunter Biden?
Bobulensky!
Oh, what a name.
And so when Fox News took this story, their headline is, and I'm reading is, Ex-Hunter Biden Associates Records Don't Show Proof of Biden-Business Relationship Amid Unanswered Questions.
So the Fox News, at least the news department, is saying there's nothing really that interesting there.
But then tonight, on the day that we're recording this, Tucker Carlson is going to have Tony Bobulenski on his show to discuss the alleged corruption that the Bidens were involved with.
Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight.
We're going to devote the entire next hour to a single interview, something we've never done before.
In this case, it's a conversation with a man called Tony Bobulinski.
Bobulinski is the former business partner of James and Hunter Biden, of course, the brother and the son of the current Democratic candidate.
Remember, I'm the son of a naval officer.
I'm a naval officer, was a naval officer myself.
And because I held acute clearance, which is the equivalent of a top secret clearance, I'm doing this out of a patriotic duty.
to our country based on my military background and my grandfather's background. So other people
can determine the facts and what matters and how they want to vote. But I had to go on record
because they chose to sort of mar up my name. So I have a former SEAL team protecting my family.
I'm not at home right now. And I'll travel the next four years if I have to. I had to do this.
Because some of the stuff they're accusing Hunter Biden of doing is we've discussed and some of it
is he had meetings with people, was trying to get around, get as much money as possible without
declaring, etc. etc.
That stuff is kind of separate, but that's what I mean, that you don't know which of this is going to be advanced by somebody like a Steve Bannon or some of it by Rudy Giuliani, right?
And actually, if you go back four years ago, again, pre-QAnon, the final week of the campaign was really crazy in terms of how much stuff was broadcast that wasn't actually true.
Kind of the return of the Hillary is sick and has Parkinson's stuff, that was bumping around.
You had Pizzagate, not to relive all of that, but you had that being boosted again on social media, Facebook, etc.
By people who were Republicans who were going to turn out the vote, sharing some of that stuff to get it out there.
I remember Mike Cernovich is not a Republican official, but that was pretty explicit in what Cernovich was doing, was like, let's get especially Latino voters believing that Hillary is involved in Satanism, right?
Because we can do that.
And then you had Giuliani, at that point, just kind of an energetic Trump supporter in the campaign, just predicting stuff about what was going to come out against Hillary, just, there's going to be something that drops and it's going to win the election for us.
It turned out that Comey happened and that was enough, and there's other reasons, but they were saying, to the point where Fox News incorrectly reported that Clinton was about to be indicted over the Clinton Foundation.
So you have already this dynamic where the final week of the campaign in this modern media era with Trump as the leader of the Republican Party, Like the standard is now there's going to be a bazooka of stuff that is, if you spend a day confirming it, that's all you did that day, right?
Yeah.
And so it's gotten, it's not surprising that it's taken a turn into even weirder stuff that politically, I'm not like trying to make a judgment on how it's going to, how it's going to end politically, but politically hasn't like impacted much so far.
It actually hasn't jumped the way that those attacks on Hillary Clinton jumped.
And I think maybe that's the problem with basing things more on Well, the obvious thing is that people aren't voting on Hunter Biden or not.
They're voting on his dad.
But the crazier stuff, I think, has been more mainstreamed in a lot of conservative media.
You're on Twitter.
The diet you get if you're just a conservative media consumer, I think, has more stuff that is Tinge by conspiracy, even that did four years ago.
But that stuff doesn't get to everybody else, and the voter who is not paying attention to that universe, and that's a lot of them, and that's most of the country that's not getting this, or I should say most of the country is not seeking out that kind of information, right?
Right.
Maybe they have the uncle that forwards it.
It clearly has just not been connecting in the same way.
People are not willing to believe, and by people I mean just the people, the ones who don't already believe this, hear something like, did you hear that the Chinese have
secret videos of the Democratic candidate's son doing pedophilia, but we have people who are like, yeah,
whatever, dude. I don't know, like, what are you talking about? Which is not, I mean,
that wasn't obvious that would happen, but you still, I think, have like a healthy anti-QAnon majority
in the country manifested in like the polling in the last couple days here.
The way I always approach conspiracies is, I'm not above this.
I think it's interesting to think that there's somebody secretly running the world.
I think rumors are interesting, but once I became a reporter, I realized... I hope I wasn't naive before, but I realized, like, you need to chase this stuff down and see if it's real or not.
And I realize the power people have to spread something without anybody ever vetting it, or people debunking it days ago.
This has been interesting, the Hunter stuff, and I'm blending together Q plus things that are legitimate, plus things that might be in email that are forged, plus things that are in email that are not forged, whatever.
But it's clearly just been tough for people to follow when their brains are already full of, I'm voting in this election on who will stop me from dying of the disease.
That's why I think that oftentimes when I read about conspiracy theories, people want to write a story that's scarier, you know, pretend it's a militia, some sort of organized thing that sends out its followers to do its bidding, trying to scare people, you know, so that we will trust the institutions again, you know, we want to look.
at the CIA and the FBI to explain to us what is disinformation, what isn't, is this a foreign government's doing or not?
We've been seeing that, and my worry is that, yeah, the damage done by the QAnon movement is paltry if it means that it pushes all the broad liberal voter into the arms of the intelligence community.
I think that's definitely a concern.
And look, it's not like liberals, by no means, are they immune to disinformation.
I mean, when I first was The conspiracy du jour that had this left-right coalition, but a decent amount of left-wing stuff, was 9-11 conspiracy theories, right?
But even those, the premise was that the government's evil and it's plotting to expand its power and things like the security state.
I don't know what will happen to it.
The general You know, petit bourgeois liberal attitude that we need the FBI to save us.
I think a lot of that faded after Mueller didn't make Trump go away magically.
Not in your show, but I've talked and thought about this, that it does feel that they pass the baton of hoping that something will magically come around and make things good again to Trump, who now will talk about the Spygate investigation.
Or the laptop from hell, or these things that, if you are not free enough to spend your time looking up this stuff, is impenetrable.
And I'm not, as a reporter, I don't want to say, oh, a thing that's complicated is too hard to understand.
Not like that.
I just, there's lots of things that are complicated.
They're like, people are, people don't have the time, people who are voting and are not obsessed with one thing or the other do not have the time to study lots of things.
So ask them to study the The conspiracy that is the reason that they can't trust these Democrats in power is very difficult.
Especially, it turns out to be tough to use it against someone like Joe Biden, for whom people have a very solid public impression.
They've known him for years.
It's weird to suggest somebody who's never been accused of anything this weird must be behind it.
So I think it's not been clicking for very distinct reasons on the right.
But in general, the attitude of something will come along and The skies will open and people's minds will be changed and they'll realize they can't vote for Biden.
I see a lot more of that on the right.
I mean, there's something I noticed on some Turning Point USA accounts, like Benny Johnson and Charlie Kirk, is they won't just say, here's the Hunter Biden emails.
They'll say, Joe Biden must step aside until we figure this out, which is like, oh, that's convenient.
The guy I don't like should forfeit the election because of this complicated thing that we need to investigate.
And I don't think that that's a perfect example of something that I think gets some retweets inside their epistemic bubble and nothing
outside of it. But I noticed it. I noticed the desirousness out there for something will happen and
they aren't the opposite of Orange Man going away. The Orange Man sticking around or the...
Have they ever come up with a good nickname for Biden? I guess it's just Sleepy Joe, right?
Yeah, Sleepy Joe. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the main nickname.
The nickname is in most common use, but it does seem like that's shifted, but I'm getting away from the question you asked about liberals.
I don't, I generally, I think like that's a TBD.
We don't know what if Trump, let's say he loses the election.
He might definitely do this if he wins.
Let's say he loses the election, fires Chris Wray.
Will there be like a liberals, let's get in the streets and defend the honor of Chris Wray?
Oh, totally.
That would happen.
If he removed a bunch of people after the election, I think the Democratic impulse would be, let's restore them.
I've seen some of that with Scott Gottlieb, formerly of the CDC, saying we need to restore these people who were trying to do a good job and Trump stopped them.
There is more of a trust that there is a state and people with suits and subpoenas, and they're going to save us eventually.
I think it's just been flattened post-Mueller, post-impeachment, because they're like, well, I guess that didn't work.
We just have to get more votes.
Yeah.
I mean, my big worry is, assuming Trump loses, is that the liberals, they will be so deeply wounded by the Trump administration that they're going to want justice themselves.
They'll do a kind of QAnon thing where they'll think that The Biden administration is secretly going to go after Trump for as many crimes in office and it'll all be revealed soon.
All the hidden things that Trump did that never made it to light will be revealed soon.
Then the whole world will see what a monster he really was.
The surveillance state is going to be your friend suddenly because we need to actually eliminate these militia people, these domestic terrorists, these cults.
We need to track these people and I want to make sure my neighbor is not some mega QAnon guy.
And so suddenly we're in this world where we are trusting even more all these intelligence agencies to, you know, kind of clean our society of the undesirables, pushing them further and further into the fringe.
That's absolutely going to happen.
I remember there's an anecdote about, I think it's like, Don Henley and Larry Cohen or something, but there's two people who were at the Clinton inauguration in 1993, and vaguely liberal celebrities, and one of them remarked on the plane flyover, and the other one said, those are our planes now.
So there definitely will be an attitude that is, well, once Uncle Joe and Auntie Kamala run things and they're good again, then we should have the FBI and police investigating right-wing extremism.
I don't know if that Impulse is bad because there's a lot of right-wing extremism, and it's dangerous, right?
I mean, the last time there was a bite that apple was 2009, and the Obama administration, it was DHS that did this, and you've talked about this, but DHS puts out a report saying there's a threat of former veterans being radicalized by extremist groups.
There's, at the same time, this is happening when the Tea Party is building up, so Tea Party activists decide that as the Trump, sorry, Obama administration coming up with a plan to liquidate their opponent, etc.
I mean, eight years of At any point, Obama's going to use the jade helm and the troops and the acorn to wipe us out, right?
So it fit into that, but clearly...
There's a sense that, boy, what would have been prevented, I think a general sense among liberals, what could have been prevented if Obama, instead of looking at his shadow and being worried about offending people, unleashed the FBI on white supremacists?
And if that happens in 2021, you'll get a huge attaboy for doing it.
I think that's a pretty good prediction on your part.
I'm wondering also about, you know, this very gentle auntie and father figure that we're about to potentially usher in.
If all goes well, if the numbers hold, I keep reading, you know, in the right-wing press, and this might be a better sticking point to your point, what pierces the veil, That, you know, they're actually secretly being manipulated by the far left of the party.
AOC and Bernie Sanders are actually the people running here.
So what other chances do you think that the DNC is going to move towards, like, the New Deal after, you know, supporting fracking or dare I say even give someone like Bernie a spot in the administration?
Oh, we're talking about normal politics now?
I could do that, too.
DNC has no role in it.
If Biden wins, the DNC is whoever he wants to run it.
So maybe he puts Chris Coons in charge or something, and Chris Coons wants more than that.
But he puts an ally in charge, and they raise money and stuff.
Biden can't control is that, let's, I'll deal with the Bernie thing later. So at the moment,
Bernie Sanders has a big network of supporters who are matriculated through a lot of organizations,
and they're very good at organizing and the Biden campaign is not. I'm not saying the Biden
campaign can't organize and win the election, I'm just saying, unlike the Obama campaign,
it has, which built a gigantic grassroots door-to-door organization, this one didn't do it.
They're relying on a bunch of other stuff.
And some of it, I think, has waxed and waned over the last four years.
The Women's March is not as big a force as it was two years ago for reasons.
Yeah, good reason.
When Democrats were aware that there was a group that had members who'd praised Louis Farrakhan, they got away quickly.
So they're very adept at pushing somebody overboard if they think it's gonna be bad for them.
But when it comes to Biden and the Democratic infrastructure, I think that their attitude is gonna be, let's keep encouraging stuff.
When you ask about Sanders and the administration, that's TBD.
The concerns there, and this is boring to get into, the concerns is just the two most famous people on the left in America.
Three, I guess, if you want to add like a Katie Porter.
Katie Porter, if she joined the administration, there'd be a special election in Orange County six months into Biden's term, which they'd worry they'd lose.
Sanders and Warren would be replaced initially by Republican governors and Democrats, if they wanted to change the law in those states, they could try, but there are these complications that make that stuff annoying to talk about because we don't know what the cost-benefit analysis is for Senate appointments.
Biden's approach has, it's more people you don't know about, it's more which economics advisors he depends on, if he listens to like a Jared Bernstein versus a Ted Kaufman, or on some things Ted Kaufman's pretty good.
He doesn't have, and this is an advantage I think, if you're on the left, if you're looking at what he's going to be like, he does not have this, he's been around longer than Hillary Clinton in politics, but he does not have the same sprawling network of people Who have gone off and become lobbyists for every industry on the planet.
He has his Delaware crew who like banks a lot.
But apart from that, there's a reason you don't hear about Biden world and these sorts of connections, because they aren't there.
He doesn't have the same ones.
So I think it's a more, I wouldn't say it's an open door.
And look, this can change in a second.
Like people were optimistic about Bill Clinton in 1992 and his transition didn't deliver
what they wanted.
It was part of a couple of things.
But even Bill Clinton gave you like Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, which at the time,
not quite as radical as the Secretary of Labor Bernie Sanders sounds, but something people
There are people that I think Bernie could recommend a list of 20 people, with your Sarah Nelsons and some other people who are well known in labor and very liberal.
With big agendas.
They would not be struck from a Biden list, where I think some of them might have been from another list.
And this is—hearing about Biden, and I'm—am I naive in taking him literally?
I mean, I take him literally, and I take Trump literally, until they prove otherwise.
He is conceiving of this presidency more in terms of doing a lot of stuff in a hurry,
because he's been around forever and he's watched several Democratic presidents either
fail like Jimmy Carter or come into office with a head of steam and then the austerity
forces rise up and the ones who just take a nap for four to 12 years, probably the president.
He's seen that happen a lot and he's actually talked about this.
So he has some advisors who will mention that the debt exists.
And then he even like if you look at 60 minutes before the election gets the how will you
pay for it question about his agenda and he's like we're going to raise taxes of the rich.
He didn't do what Democrats often do, which is like, well, look, we're all very concerned
about the debt and the debt's a problem we're going to place on our grandchildren.
He doesn't do that, so I do wonder if he's left himself more room, not just to appoint more people who've been pushing from the outside for change, but to sign off on some of that in the Congress.
And I don't want to get, like, let's not do a future history of the next year. I don't know what the, but
because frankly like in some of the coverage people have X amount of minutes to talk to Biden and he keeps getting
the same stupid questions about like court packing and whether he's
a socialist and stuff that doesn't really tell us what his domestic agenda
would be. We know what his priority is. We know what he wants to do, right? If you gave Biden the ability to just
like take his website and make it law, we know that stuff, but
it matters what you decide to do first.
It matters what you decide is too hard. It matters what you think, like you could push to like, well,
we'll do this next year because better for the election.
I think he would do minimum wage $15 an hour as fast as possible, because he's been talking about that for, like, six years.
That would be insane for him to drop.
And when it comes to the rest of the infrastructure spending, like, he loves trains.
He loves building trains especially.
He loves charging stations for electricity.
His, like, you know, Happiest moments as Vice President were really front-loaded at the beginning when he was working on stimulus stuff and going around the country and, you know, check out this new factory we just gave a ton of money to.
He loves that kind of stuff, so I think he's going to do a lot of that.
I think the question is actually some of the environmental priorities that are estimated to cost jobs, some of the health care stuff that's a heavier carry, that stuff I think people need to push on.
But some of the basic populist economic stuff He really would need to like rip off a mask and change the way he's been talking for 20 years.
Right.
No, not 40 years.
You go back to Biden in the 80s when Delaware was more conservative and he had to run right to win.
He was more conservative.
He talked about the debt.
He talked about Social Security freezes.
He doesn't do that anymore.
I mean, if he wins, once he started winning as Barack Obama's vice president, His horizons changed a bit.
And if he wins the election with a Democratic majority, he's signaled that he wants to do more stuff than I even think maybe the Joe Biden of 2010 would have.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess he's also lived through eight years of his own administration and saw the limits of some of the tactics.
So let's hope he's learned from that.
Let's hope the new manager is kinder than the old manager.
As always, we here on the QAA podcast, we have our very own squid that, you know, during every World Cup, It kind of floats in the tank towards some country's flag and we go, wow, the squid got it right again.
Our squid, in this case, just as much black ink filling the world with darkness as Jake.
And Jake always predicts the worst.
And he is convinced on some level, on and off these days because of all the polls and stuff, that Trump is going to take it in a landslide.
And that's where we're heading.
Well, I have that fear, right?
Because I think everybody is shell-shocked from 2016.
Everything feels right.
You've got all of the big people that you look to polling-wise.
It's looking real good for Biden.
It seems like a shoo-in, even!
So I think I'm not the only one.
And look, obviously I'm aware that I'm a little bit biased because I look at all of the crazy, far-right, extreme online shit.
Yeah.
So we need your help, basically.
But I feel it in my friend groups, too.
I have some liberal friends who I used to play video games with online, and I checked in with
them recently, and they're like, they're going to vote for Trump.
And it's like, I ask them why.
And these are guys who, 10 years ago were in our group chat talking about Gamergate and being like,
you know, this is the massage game.
I mean, they were feminists.
And now they're telling me that's like, oh, well, we're worried about like Antifa and we're worried about the riots.
And it's like they buy all of the shit.
And so I'm terrified that there is this again, kind of like maybe even more so in 2016, a secret sort of like, as Travis says, the shy Trump vote, you know, that is just going to like all of a sudden catch us all on our asses again.
So you have to reach into the tank, Dave, and you have to yeah, you have to direct.
You basically have to manipulate the squid so it answers what you want it to.
So go ahead.
I manipulate the squid.
All right.
I'll go with that.
I think that's that's fair.
Like without running through all the these years are different.
I think like two two quick things on that is just one voters tell pollsters they like Joe Biden and more than they told them they like that they like Hillary Clinton.
His favorable ratings.
Have been higher, and in a way that I kind of joke, and I think there's a, this is maybe something like Felix Machapo says too, that like, it's just a reversal of 2016, where Trump has absorbed the weaknesses of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, and it's Biden who's the one who just nothing seems to hurt him.
Scandals don't seem to hurt him, gaffes don't seem to hurt him, debates that are fine, we learn after the debate that everyone thought he did amazing, things like that, he just seems to be Navigating the raindrops in a way that people did not expect.
And the other thing is, when it comes to, you just, I mean, you mentioned one issue, so other things can blow up, but again, I was in Pennsylvania, and a part of Pennsylvania that Trump needs to, you know, like, the towns I was in, he's probably either gonna, like, lose by 10 points or tie.
He's not blowing it out like Mitt Romney would have, but he's doing okay.
And listening to Republicans there, Republican messaging is not even about
Antifa and unrest anymore.
And it's surprisingly, I wouldn't say there's a sense they lost on that,
but you see in some races emphasis on, fires happen, riots happen,
but the rest of the campaign messaging has turned to other stuff.
I mean, Trump, and this is a reflection of Trump in some part is that he just watches Fox
and Fox is doing other things now.
I mean, Fox changed its coverage in the last week or so.
I think Media Matters added it up, as they do.
But, like, the amount of time spent on Hunter Biden was intense.
Like, hours and hours.
Like, Berlin's Alexander Plot's level of content about the Hunter Biden story.
And as you mentioned, like, that's what will be on Tucker Carlson Night.
You know, like 60 minutes of TV, like any finite amount of time, if you're talking about X, you can't be talking about Y. So if Tucker Carlson is pivoting to Tony Wabaluski in the final week, that means Tucker Carlson is not talking about how Antifa is going to tear your house down.
And is that message still out there?
Are there people who still maybe, you know, switch their votes for good because they're so angry about it?
I think maybe.
The Trump campaign, I'm interested in what they message on, and when I was in, again, in states they're trying to win, the TV messaging, which is like the money that they've got left, they're throwing on TV, the PACs, the money they've got left, it has switched to, Biden will raise your taxes and your healthcare will be at risk, which is, you know, like a Mitt Romney argument.
Yeah, back to normal politics.
like really and it's kind of an admission that by the campaign if not the president that they have
not found the the the magic beans that make Joe Biden, that make Joe Biden's supporters flee him.
So I don't know.
I'm more at this moment, and as somebody who was, I was traveling around the country in the final week of 2016, too, and I happened to be in places where Hillary was doing fine, but you still found this kind of aura of, even when you talk to Democratic activists, like, we got to turn out because we can't wait for this to be over.
She's fine, I guess.
And you do have, like, the selling of Joe Biden, I think, is going to be something people maybe only appreciate if he wins the campaign after the campaign.
Like, they've turned a guy who And the Obama administration was seen as kind of like an amiable dummy at points.
They've said, okay, allowing for that, allowing for him being the guy who's gonna make a lot of verbal mistakes, isn't he nice?
He's like your uncle, he hugs everybody, he's a good dad, and all this stuff.
And that has really, when you talk to just like rank and file Democrats, now there are people who
are angry that the first female president was cheated out of the presidency and all that stuff.
But you just find like an affinity for Biden that's unironic that took a while to build and they did it.
And you do not find, the other thing I'd point out about, I keep like emphasizing Pennsylvania
as if like I'm the only reporter who went there.
It's my 10th, maybe 15th weekend.
But like one thing I noticed, and there was actually a Democrat in Ohio
who first pointed out to me and said, in my area four years ago, the only signs I saw
that had Hillary's name were Hillary for prison.
And I thought, yeah, me too.
When I was driving around Eastern Ohio or rural Pennsylvania, I saw Hillary for prison signs.
I didn't see Hillary signs.
And I see a mix of campaign art, Barnes with Biden or Trump stuff on it, what have you.
I see no anti-Biden stuff.
I see no, like, where's Hunter billboards.
I see no big guy t-shirts.
I see no, like, I support Tony Bobulinski, like, trucker hats.
I don't see stuff that, even if I go to a Trump rally, and I haven't been to one in a couple weeks, but at a Trump rally I see anti-Hillary merchandise and I do not see anti-Biden merchandise because they've never They were, I think, so obsessed, even the president clearly is still obsessed with Hillary Clinton and how he thinks he's treated unfairly.
They never got their hands around this guy in the way that other Republican candidates have.
So I think he just has a bunch of advantages that Hillary Clinton didn't and John Kerry didn't.
And then the more unknowable stuff is the ability of Republicans to pull out their voters because they did spend more time knocking on doors this year because of the pandemic.
Votes being counted fairly.
But that second part, I think, is also changing week to week because, look, we were at, as I talked to you, I think it's 62 million.
It's probably going to be north of 80 million by the end of the week, people who voted already.
So we're going to get a majority of, if not a majority of everyone who votes, like most of the, majority of turnout relative to 2016, Perhaps most of the country will have voted by election day.
So you're going to see this like big surge of Trump voters turning out on election day because they tell everyone they don't trust the mail.
They're going to wait.
Right.
I think you're going to have a picture on election day of changing.
But when I talk to Democrats, they're like they're more worried about not winning the Senate or winning it decisively than they are about about Biden.
They just think Biden.
And for all these reasons that we went through, it just We have an unpopular president, we have a pandemic, and we have a Democratic nominee people are at least fine with.
And that combination is not—you don't get the sense of momentum every day, you just get this march towards what would, if the polls held up, be a gigantic win over an incumbent.
I'm sorry, the squid is on Donald Trump.
You lose.
Maybe you should go follow Dave at Dave Weigel, W-E-I-G-E-L, on Twitter if you don't already, but is there anything else you'd like to plug?
I mean, everyone should buy my book still, if they haven't, The Show That Never Ends.
The trailer, I think, the newsletter, right?
You can subscribe.
If you look at me on Twitter, it's my pinned tweet is a subscription.
It's free.
I mean, it includes a lot of other post content, but it's like original every day.
And I really, the final week, I'm doing a couple stories from the field.
I, because I'm a genius, chose stories in literally the coldest swing states.
Iowa, Minnesota, unless plans change.
Both stuff on the ground and answers to the kind of questions you're asking.
Like if I'm paying close, semi-close attention to the election, what do I think will happen?
So yeah, subscribe to the newsletter, buy the book.
One of them is free.
One of them is cheaper than it should be.
And it's a history of progressive rock, right?
It is.
It's great.
Everyone loves it.
Everyone loves it, okay?
So you love it.
And yeah, no, we do want a kind of redux, you know?
That's why you should go to Dave, because you need the other 95% of your brainpower to follow QAnon with all of your heart and soul and subscribe to our Patreon, etc., you know?
That's the real fight.
Digital soldiers.
We respect you.
So yeah, thanks again, Dave.
Always a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you, man.
Absolutely.
Thanks, guys.
So I think we just wanted to thank our listeners.
Take a moment to thank our listeners and the people who've been supporting us as well on Patreon.
But just broadly, if you're interested in the show and you're listening and you're having fun and you're enjoying it, you've allowed us to find new meaning in our lives.
Infinite thanks.
Thanks 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.
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We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous.
It's really fun.
We'll do deep dives, just talk about stuff more in-depth that we've covered on the show, like where we can show videos.
It's been a lot of fun, and thanks to everybody who's been coming and hanging out with us on Twitch.
It's been a blast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
If I say to you, here's the deal, you have to give me this information, and then you would be treated as my slave.
And let's say you agree to that.
You agree to be a slave, for whatever reason, and you agree to give that private information.
And then later you decide that you have to do what you're told because you have agreed to this situation.
Where's the crime exactly?
Where's the crime?
Because it'd be one thing if somebody stole black male information and then used it against you, but there's no indication that happened.
It was all voluntary.
So where does free will come into this?
Can a person not agree in this country?
Is it illegal to agree to be somebody else's slave and to give them private information?
