A prolific conspiracy theorist whose hyper-colorful photo-montages have made him notorious online. Before he recently passed, Dees created hundreds of images depicting an elaborate secret world in which all conspiracy theories seem to be jostling for position. Documentarian Brad Abrahams (Love and Saucers) joins us to discuss spending time with the man in his last months.
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Welcome, listeners, to Premium Chapter 117 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the David Dees episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we are peering into the life of David Dees, a prolific conspiracy theory promoter whose hyper-colorful photo montages have made him notorious online.
Before he recently passed, Dease created hundreds of images depicting an elaborate secret world in which all conspiracy theories seemed to be jostling for position.
Chemtrails, UFOs, birtherism, fears of UN armies and FEMA camps, 9-11 trutherism, and QAnon.
All of these shot through with a vicious streak of antisemitism made explicit by dozens of stars of David and mentions of Zionism.
But before he went down this path, Dease was just an illustrator working for brands like Disney and Sesame Street.
So what happened to him?
Our guest this week is Brad Abrahams, who is preparing to release a short film about Dease and is probably one of the only people to have spent some time with him.
He was a notoriously sedentary man.
Abrahams is a documentarian that you may also know from movies like Love and Saucers, which we covered in our premium episode 69 entitled Let's Have Sex with Aliens.
Very proud of us for that.
And sorry to Brad.
And we apologize to everybody involved.
After this, Jake has woven a parochial tale involving nine layers, circles if you will, and starring the late David Dees.
David Dees.
David Dees was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1958.
A pale, thin man with green eyes and red hair, Dees was, for most of his life, a professional illustrator, working on projects for brands like Disney and Sesame Street.
But his real passion was airbrush art.
He loved to paint the sides of motorcycles and vans.
He told Gawker in 2015, That was the greatest thing I could imagine.
Having a fantastic painting, driving around on wheels for all to see.
What an audience!
Unfortunately, the cadmium present in the acrylic spray paint David used was toxic, and it began having adverse effects on his health.
Dease claims in Abraham's documentary that it quote, Then, 9-11 happened.
Dease grew obsessed with photos of the attack on the Pentagon.
He explained, The photos show an odd 15-foot hole with all the windows intact around it, and no damage where the wings would have hit, and no plane inside the Pentagon.
I mark the pics attached with an arrow to where the plane went in.
Absurd.
This is in response to Ashley Feinberg's piece on him.
She emailed back and forth, so we'll be using quotes, and they are from that article.
Soon David was opening himself up to many other conspiracy theories, which he was learning about on YouTube, having abandoned television long ago.
He found himself unable to stay quiet about his newfound beliefs.
I was best friends with the editor of Sesame Street Magazine for over 10 years.
She is a Zionist Jew.
I used to ask her what the whole uproar about Jews was because they seemed really nice and intelligent.
She would say she did not know.
Then when I found out about the massacre of Palestinians and stealing their land in 1948, I confronted her with it.
And she was not happy.
Then when I discovered that 9-11 was not the Arabs at all, but a big black op by the Zionist-controlled government America has become, I confronted her with that.
She was yelling that none of that is true.
So I had to leave Sesame Street.
I mean, the tragic comedy of ending that with, I had to leave Sesame Street.
And also, you can already see this weird mix where there are legitimate concerns, like the treatment of Palestinian people, and then he's like, and 9-11 was caused by the Zionist-controlled government.
We have a Zog, Zionist-occupied government.
It was a permanent departure from the mainstream for Deez.
He would go on to make over 400 images which he referred to as activist art, but were really better understood as proto-memes, packed to the gills with conspiracy theories.
They were circulated around the early internet, to the acclaim of those who agreed with him, and the scorn of those shocked by his hyper-conspiratorial beliefs.
A group of people soon gathered in a subreddit called DeezNuts, David Dees has no peers.
He has taken the art of political art to a level never before achieved.
I think never before imagined.
David Dees has no peers.
He has taken the art of political art to a level never before achieved, I think never before imagined.
Asked about the process he used to make the images, Dees explained, My setup to work now could not be simpler.
All I used is Adobe Photoshop and an Intuos Bamboo Pad and Pen, and my understanding of Photoshop is horribly basic.
Mostly I am just doing fancy layering and airbrush.
These pieces average around 100 to 200 layers, and they are just hammered together piece by piece.
I see people who do outrageous art on Photoshop, I have not a single clue how it is done.
I just do a cut and paste style that any pro can see right through.
I guess where I excel is in my color and compositions.
The real meat of an illustration.
The ability to tell a story and entertain the viewer.
That is my strong point.
In 2012, the school book publisher Klett Verlag in Germany apologized for using a David Dees illustration in one of its political textbooks.
The illustration featured a Pac-Man character with a European Union symbol on it and the words Rothschild Bank trailing behind it, as it devoured Europe.
The Times of Israel referred to Dease as a, quote, and explained that the publisher was, quote, The article explains that the publisher sent substitute pages to German schools that could be pasted over the offending page containing the Dease comic, promising to correct the mistake in a, quote, So...
I wonder how many of those actually got pasted over.
Also, and how many kids who, you know, saw the edges, you know, the edges on their textbook frayed and they went, huh, what's this?
And pulled it.
I mean, forget about it.
I mean, right?
Oh, God.
Oh, I found the secret of the universe.
They're trying to hide it by, like, pasting, clumsily pasting a page on.
And of course, it's like the teachers and the staff that have to, like, paste shit into it.
So it's probably done just, like, super haphazardly, if at all.
They probably send the pages and they're like, whatever, dude, I don't want to fucking deal with this.
Accused plainly now of antisemitism, Dees simply doubled down and claimed that he didn't hate Jewish people.
He just wanted to expose the Zionist New World plot.
More than anything, Dees was astonished that so many would choose to stay asleep.
He explained, Someone who cannot figure out 9-11 or chemtrails sprayed right over their heads are people I avoid and consider either remarkably stupid or have an emotional problem keeping them from confronting blatant evidence.
It feels at times that I am in a cheap science fiction movie where the townspeople are unaware of the sinister lifeforms walking amongst us.
That being all the attacks coming in the form of silent weapons, GMOs, vaccines, chemtrails, fluoride, aspartame, cell towers, and on and on.
We are in big trouble and a huge percentage of the population are so affected they cannot see the darts hitting them.
No one is protesting.
I think there is probably some sort of beamed weapon on all of us sedating the masses.
That would explain the odd behavior of the obese American monsters that waddle through Walmart.
Yeah.
It's a strange side, but yeah, he seemed to kind of have a hatred, I think, for the general population, because they wouldn't wake up.
And he believed in everything, as you can see.
So it's very hard, because especially if you're pushing this stuff up front, all it takes is one of those.
Like, for example, his claim that the Sandy Hook school shooting was not just a false flag, but that the school doesn't exist.
You're right.
So, I mean, yeah, these are super extreme beliefs.
His alienation from the American population eventually resulted in Dease moving to Sweden, believing it would be a safe haven for him during the upcoming apocalypse.
Dease was convinced that the country had, quote, a top secret state project of a series of massive underground facilities stocked and large enough for the whole population of nine million.
He explained.
In the USA, you can be sure we will not be invited into the bunkers for protection if the Earth convulses like predicted.
Those are for the elite asses that currently rule over us.
So, I mean, he's kind of right on one half.
It's just that Sweden's not going to do much better and they definitely don't have tunnels where they can fit nine million people.
So but apparently he learned this from an old man he met there like who claimed to be aristocracy.
The whole story is very bizarre.
I mean, you know, he was it sounds like you just like you just picked up every conspiracy theory.
He just heard like he has an interaction with a pilled person.
He hears a story says, yes, I believe that that's true.
Well, you know, the cadmium in the paint, you know, one of the side effects of cadmium poisoning that has been studied scientifically is schizophrenia, which, you know, it's like once your mind becomes this porous, you start absorbing things and you can't really tell what's real or not or what's important or not or if someone that's telling you something is themselves totally out to lunch.
But I mean, I guess this was probably just a meeting of two totally wild people.
If this is Deez after he escaped America for being, you know, too much for him.
But something was rotten in Sweden.
David came to believe that Monsanto, a legitimately and historically awful agrochemical company, were targeting him.
The claims were based on a series of missing keys and stolen bicycles in and around his home.
In 2013, Deez moved back to Oregon, where he continued pumping out conspiratorial work and publishing it for free on the internet.
Despite the lack of pay, Deez seemed happy with the impact his work was having online, where an international community of fans were getting red-pilled on his designs and writing him admiring emails.
He explained in 2015, Before I woke up to 9-11, my work was 100% commissioned.
I never ever did art for my own enjoyment.
It was just a job.
But now, I have a massive audience who are interested in what I have to offer about world events.
That is something I never dreamed could happen.
Dee's paranoia was becoming more acute, and his grip on reality, already tenuous, eroded further.
On Sunday, November 17, 2013, he awoke from a nap to find his shoes in a pile.
He grew worried that somebody had broken into his home to arrange them that way.
He published a diagram with a statement about the event.
Threat against D's.
After an afternoon nap, I awoke to find my shoes had been stacked up like this.
Who the F came in my house when I was asleep?
The CIA runs psyops like these to freak you out.
Perhaps infrared thermal cameras were used to know I was fast asleep before illegally entering.
But why?
Recently, Fukushima radiation expert Michael Collins was intimidated and silenced, never to make another Rents radio talk show appearance.
They probably want me to shut up illustrating the horrific spreading Fukushima radiation exposure and the approaching apocalypse caused by radioactive fallout and the dead zone Pacific Ocean.
Yeah.
And there's a photo of the shoes stacked up and it says, a warning for me to shut up.
And it's underneath that it says actual photo.
So he's, he's baking the objects inside his own house.
Yeah.
And that's what he was doing in Sweden as well.
And you know, I mean, this is, these are pretty clear signs of mental illness that go beyond his conspiratorial beliefs.
Yeah.
By the end of his life, Dease had become entirely sedentary.
Living on a half acre of land in Oregon in a small house with more than a dozen rabbits and some cats.
By his own account, it had grown difficult for Dees to carry on conversations with other human beings.
One thing that did connect David to other people was his guitar playing.
He would attend hospices where he offered his services as a musician and singer to families gathered around their loved ones, often as they were dying.
Dees explained, I wanted to be as close to the moment where the heavens opened up so I could somehow experience it.
In May of 2020, David Dees died of stage 4 melanoma cancer, just three months after filming with the documentarian Brad Abrahams.
Dees had refused orthodox medical treatments for his condition during the majority of the illness.
As the documentary explains, he passed away in a hospice where he used to play guitar.
There was no funeral for David Dees, and he was survived by no one.
Brad Abrahams is the filmmaker behind the amazing documentary Love and Saucers, which we've covered in the past.
I'm sorry, Brad, that you were sucked into Premium Episode 69, Let's Have Sex with Aliens, due to your work on this.
But he recently filmed David Dees for his latest short, Do You See What I See?
I was really, really impressed with it.
And so when Brad wrote it and was like, you know, what's up, guys?
I was excited to have you on the show.
So welcome.
Thank you.
I'm a fan.
You guys are doing good work.
Thank you.
So how did you first become interested in David Dees?
Yes.
So are any of you familiar with Jeff Renz?
Is he the radio host?
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's a big fan of Dees.
He's a big fan of Dees.
He's who put Dees on the map and has sort of God-like poodle hair.
You need to look this up.
A girlfriend of mine in high school and university Her parents were big conspiracy theorists.
So this is like early 2000s.
And they were on that Ren's website and would listen to that radio show.
And she sent it to me.
She's like, this is the sort of stuff my parents are into.
And that's when Ren's first started putting Deez's work up there.
So I saw it and I'm like, Jesus, this is so bizarre, but also really arresting.
Um, and it was before, this was when Dee's was basically just, it was all anti-Bush.
Yes.
Right.
And Cheney and Iraq War.
And it was, you know, um, it was, it was not, it was, was pretty far away from the political spectrum of, of, uh, Republicans or conservatives.
Um, so there was kind of like, Oh yeah, this I'm kind of into this stuff.
Um, some of it is maybe not cool.
Um, but it's, it's interesting and he does, he does a good job of it.
Uh, and I, and you know, since then I had always sort of lurked in the conspiracy verse.
And I'm also a bit of like a, like a weirdo.
Uh, and so I'm, I'm just sort of drawn to these people.
And I kept tabs on David all throughout.
I didn't know anything about him until I started writing for that movie Conspiracy Cruise.
And I started using his art as reference and inspiration.
And I'm like, maybe I should just make a doc about David himself because he seems more interesting than any kind of fiction you could write about him.
Yeah, I was really arrested by just what he looks like.
He has these brilliant blue eyes and this kind of dyed red hair.
I imagine it was red naturally when he was younger.
Very pale skin.
Did you find yourself getting along with him when you first met or was it awkward to kind of break the ice?
No, it was kind of like alarmingly comfortable.
He's really charming and just sort of welcomed us in.
He made us like fish tacos.
And super friendly.
And so sort of the first the first meet and greet that we did, we didn't film the first day, it just seemed pretty normal.
It's like, oh, he's he's like, very surprisingly, a sweet person.
But then as the night went on, and we were eating dinner, it devolved into sort of dark spirals down various conspiracy holes.
And it's like, okay, this is the David that I that I know.
And we just couldn't pull him out of them, like couldn't have like a normal conversation because he'd just keep falling down these holes.
But overall, you know, I wasn't expecting to find him as sort of likable and relatable as I did.
And especially knowing more about how he got to where he is or how I think he got to where he is.
There's a reason to be like to have some empathy for David, I think.
So some of the projects I've got coming up, there is a feature length version springboarding off of David D's about conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories in general that I'm co-directing with my friend Simon Ennis.
So this will be like similar sort of character profiles like D's of various conspiracy theorists.
But then we're also going to bring in historians and psychologists, you know, neurologists, philosophers to create a whole Sort of picture or a pantheon of conspiracy theories.
If anyone knows any interesting conspiracy theorists that we could profile in the vein of David Dees, please let me know.
You can send me a message on Instagram or Twitter or even email me.
I'm brad.wtf at gmail.com.
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