The Q movement, the rise of the far-right in America, her experiences in the military and solidarity with other "clients" of the prison system. We sat with ex-intelligence analyst and network security expert Chelsea Manning who allegedly leaked the 'Iraq War Logs' and 'Afghanistan War Logs' to Wikileaks in 2010 and spent years in jail and solitary confinement since then.
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Welcome, listeners, to Chapter 145 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Interview with Chelsea Manning episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Ager, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
I'm very excited for this week's episode because we are sitting down with Chelsea Manning, a network security expert and ex-intelligence analyst.
As many listeners are probably aware, she served in the U.S.
Army before allegedly becoming a whistleblower and releasing documents to WikiLeaks.
A bulk of these came to be known as the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, respectively, because they revealed atrocities being committed by the U.S.
Army in those countries.
As a result, Chelsea spent years in jail and solitary confinement before having her sentence commuted by Obama in January of 2017.
She was released a month later on time served.
But in 2019, she was jailed once more for contempt of court after refusing to testify in the U.S.
government case against Julian Assange.
By 2020, she was released for the second time because the grand jury investigating the WikiLeaks founder had been disbanded and there was no reason to coerce her any longer.
Today we'll be speaking with Chelsea about the rise of Q, the alt-right, the radicalizing effect of foreign wars, the role of the media, and lots of other stuff.
And then we'll do some QAnon news at the end of the episode.
So let's get this going.
Thanks so much for being our guest and welcome to the show, Chelsea.
Hey, that was a way more serious and intense intro than really fits my personality.
And I do want to correct you on one thing, that is that I actually spent four months waiting to be released, which was kind of a bummer.
It's like, you're gonna be released 120 days from now.
That fucking sucks.
117 of those days were in the Trump administration as well, so definitely a lot of nail-biting moments.
Yeah, definitely a system that's like meant to reduce harm.
Yeah.
In the prisons, totally.
So I wanted to start, I guess, at the beginning of this story.
You enlisted when you were 20 years old.
What were your reasons at the time?
So I enlisted when I, I think it was 19 when I enlisted.
Right.
So that was a summer of 2007.
The Iraq War was at its height.
Every single day you just heard constant news reports about the surge that was going on and at the time I was just, I was like a teenager that was like looking for purpose in life.
I was dealing with kind of trans issues at the time.
I was just trying to figure myself out.
And my instinct at the time was to take the advice of my father, which was like, hey, like, because my father used to just bug me about the military, because he was in the Navy.
You know, I figured what a way to sort of Man up and roar, you know, then to like be in the military.
But I had one thing that I sort of had to compromise on from my father, which was he was in the Navy, and he was always trying to get me into either the Navy or the Air Force.
So I had to go the I had to go to the army.
And it just made sense because it was a ground war.
So, you know, I was like attracted to the idea of like being involved in the action and doing stuff.
And I wasn't that political either.
You know, at like 19, I was pretty politically agnostic.
I think around this time, my politics could easily be described as being as simple as, um, leave Britney alone!
Yeah.
So, okay, so you enlist and you get there and is it what you, I mean, what's the immediate experience?
Do you feel like you are part of this ground army and that it was the right choice to join that part of the military?
It's an interesting question because the military indoctrination process is very intense, and it's very long, especially going in as an intelligence analyst.
Like I went through several months, almost a year of going through training, going through
basic training, going through more advanced training, and then training again to be in
my specific unit and in my specific role before actually deploying anywhere.
So the answer is, I mean, I did feel like I was a part of something, you know?
Like I had a job, and it was more than a job.
It was like a lifestyle because like the military is like a full – it's like a full thing,
right?
you're living your life, you're doing all these different things.
It's like a long process of developing relationships, developing an identity, developing like who you are, and figuring out where to go, you know, what career path to take.
So yeah, I think I did get, you know, I did drink the Kool-Aid, you know, I was really, you know, I was, I really felt a part of something and I really felt like I was, I was, I was And yeah, I think I drank the Kool-Aid more than most people in the military, I think.
And so you're there, among others.
Did you have a feeling that recruitment was a similar experience for them?
Did you meet a lot of people that had joined because they, too, were kind of searching for something?
No, I feel like the intelligence career track is a little different than the rest.
So most of my peers were just like, or they were very similar to me in that they were like mostly people who had completed maybe an associate's degree or dropped out like halfway through college.
Because I went to a community, I went to a community college in Maryland for a few years before I enlisted.
So I had the, I had the education, you know, so I had, I was going down the education track, struggling to like be able to pay for it.
And work at Starbucks, which was where I worked at the time.
So I think I was in a much more precarious position prior to than some of the other people who were clearly career people.
Like they were very, you know, their family had been in the military and they really knew, like, even though my dad was in the Navy, he was in the Navy in the 1970s.
So I had no, I was not a Navy brat.
I had No idea what I was getting into.
I had no military, like, I wasn't around the military ever, you know.
So when I went through the indoctrination process, it was pretty clear that I was one of the least familiar with, like, what the military was actually like and what military culture consisted of than most.
And I, that made me a little bit of an outsider at first.
And so you get into your day-to-day, the operations, and you start to get involved, I guess, with what was currently the project of the military in Iraq, right?
Yeah.
Well, actually, no.
So I was slated to go to Afghanistan first.
We had our orders changed.
So I spent a whole year preparing to go to Afghanistan.
And then we scrubbed those orders.
Those orders were scrubbed suddenly.
And I had to, in I think three to four months, completely change all of the pre-deployment work that I was working on for an entire year.
Did you eventually start to change your mind about the foreign involvements?
which was a nightmare. It was a lot of working late hours and working weekends.
Did you eventually start to change your mind about the foreign involvements?
Because you said you drank the Kool-Aid.
Yeah. Whenever I deployed to Iraq in 2009, I took my job very seriously.
I, you know, I was, you know, I support, you know, I view myself as very much a support role, like I am supporting guys on the ground, kind of, you know, mindset.
And you know, that didn't change instantly.
That was sort of a gradual process.
And you know, it's really hard to... Because I get asked this a lot.
People ask me all the time.
What was the one thing that sort of changed your perspective and make you do the thing, right?
And the answer is that there isn't really a one thing.
It's a gradual process of learning and understanding what's going on, critically analyzing everything, because you're basically getting this just deluge of information.
And I must, you know, so I was essentially what would be called the data scientist in today's parlance, which is somebody who digs into large volumes of data, finding patterns, doing analysis, doing statistical analysis, writing that through.
What we would call machine learning now.
It was a little bit simpler than machine learning in that it's like more Bayesian statistics.
So it's not like neural networks or anything, but you know the purpose and the intent is very similar in sort of understanding like what's going on with the amount of data that you're collecting from various parts of the theater in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Locational data, attacks, intelligence information and just sort of pulling it all together and trying to come up with a statistical projection or kind of like a, kind of like a meteorologist, right?
Like a meteorologist, like, gives you a forecast.
It's, it's sort of, and it gives you like chances and percentages.
So that was very much my, my role was to sort of give a forecast as to what, what's going to happen in the counter insurgency threat.
And so over the course of time, obviously, American public also starts to change its mind about some of these involvements.
What do you think the broad effect of, you know, the foreign engagement has been on domestic politics?
You know, it's interesting.
In 2010, and I remember this very distinctly, I went on leave and there was a Thomas Friedman at some point wrote an article kind of glossed over, you know, because like the Obama administration came in and didn't really change anything from really was just a copy paste of the same pullout strategy that the Bush administration had.
But having a new president sort of created a public perception change, even though there wasn't an actual policy change, there was a sort of perception change.
So the news and the opinion articles were a lot more glowing.
They were a lot more...
Hey, maybe maybe we are bringing democracy to Iraq.
Maybe this wasn't so bad after all.
And that I found that just so wild and bizarre and kind of like personally infuriating because it wasn't that cute and it wasn't that pretty and it wasn't that sort of like, it was pretty clear that they were trying to repackage the war.
Like the mainstream media was repackaging the war that they were criticizing just a year earlier, even though nothing had really changed.
I do feel like a lot of people felt that way too, just kind of like, no, no, we remember what happened.
Why are you trying to retell it in this way?
I mean, that alone, I think that reaction to the ongoing propaganda has had like a profound effect on American domestic politics.
The trust in politicians and the idea that there's any justice, you know, I guess like having Obama pardon, or not pardon, but basically immediately say, well, we're not going to, like, go after anybody in the Bush administration in regards to, you know, any of this stuff around the Iraq War.
I mean, we're sort of starting to see that with the Trump administration, I feel like, because it seems like every time that something comes up in which they can go after the Trump administration, Like Attorney General Barr and the Lafayette protesters, the order to clear the Lafayette Park of protesters last year, the Department of Justice is like, no, you can't go after them for this.
Like they're defending the office of the president, they're defending the office of the Attorney General in
sort of saying, like, yes, this is, like, they're not saying that this was
good, but they're also saying, like, you can't question that, you can't
attack that in a court, because then that would mean that you would be able
to scrutinize all of these other policies and all of these
other things that we do, and we don't want that.
Opening the floodgates, possibly holding these people to the standard of the law is like, oh, hold on.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And so before we, you know, kind of move on into the media and the alt-right and the fact that we both study it in very different ways, since, you know, you are definitely more of a public figure, but I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the fact that during your time in the military, you also came out as trans.
So, I mean, how did the weight of your disagreements with America's foreign policy intertwine with the weight of coming to terms with your gender identity at the same time?
It's a good question.
I can't really untangle it all.
I want to be clear.
I don't think that they're, like, connected.
But I definitely had to go through this, like, period of time where I had to really grapple with the fact that I was also queer, and under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which added a whole other layer of complexity and confusion.
Because there was always this feeling of like, Don't Ask, Don't Tell is in effect trans people don't get access to things in the military.
It is a basis for discharge at that time.
So there's two policies that could basically have me removed if the military finds out.
Their policy was always to sort of pretend like it wasn't a big deal, like on the ground.
That was what the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy reality was at the time, was sort of, we're not going to dig into your private lives, but you got to keep it secret, which was always sort of a big downer.
So it was difficult.
But the way that I responded to that, I feel like, is I just delve deeper into the work, right?
Because I ended up having less and less of a private life and just work just took over everything, you know?
And I went to, you know, when I would go to sleep, before I go to sleep, I would like dream that I was working.
Like it was that, it was that intense, you know?
So I just had this like 24-7, I'm working constantly.
I don't even have enough time to play video games.
I don't even have enough time to just watch.
And you know, the bandwidth wasn't great in Iraq either.
So YouTube videos were a bit of a stretch.
And so then, you know, after kind of serving in the military, you end up spending, how many years was your first prison stint?
Was it seven?
Yeah, so I spent almost seven, just ten days shy of seven years in prison.
I had four months until I was released from prison.
And then the grand jury stuff happened in 2019.
I got a grand jury subpoena.
And, you know, it was about a year, I want to say.
I don't think it was exactly a year, but it was roughly a year and three days, I think, that I was in Alexandria City Jail for.
Not including, I guess it was a two or three day period of time where they released me.
It was civil confinement.
I wasn't charged with a crime, right?
It was, we're going to hold you until you cooperate with us.
I don't cooperate with grand juries or the police ever.
That's just my standard policy.
So I ended up being held for two months.
I think it was for 59 days.
Then they released me because the grand jury subpoena time period ran out.
So they could start up another grand jury.
So they have to seat a new panel.
So I had like six days of off time.
Until my next appearance before the grand jury, which we waived.
So I didn't actually appear before a grand jury a second time.
I said, I'm not going to cooperate.
And then they put me back in, back in the same jail.
So yeah, it was a little weird.
It's so weird that, you know, you don't know how long you're going to be there.
It's a max of 18 months.
And they were charging you by the day.
And yeah, oh yeah, I did get fined.
I got fined $250,000.
Jesus Christ!
Over time, just like...
$250,000?!
Yeah, paying to be in jail, it rocks.
It's America, it rocks.
That is the most American thing ever.
Charging you.
It's actually not legal under international law, so one of the things that we discovered, and actually one of the things that the United Nations discovered as we went through this process, was that civil confinement and civil fines for individuals is to compel them is actually not legal in international law.
So it's actually an unfortunate sort of vestige of British common law that Britain tossed in like the 1800s.
But I'm not an expert in that.
I trust the lawyers on that.
But yeah, it started like a whole UN investigation, but the U.S.
just can veto, I guess, because they can.
They don't have to abide by human rights or anything by another authority.
We had a similar situation in which Jake's feet on HBO started a human rights investigation at the UN.
They're too big?
Hopefully they will find him guilty of something.
So, you know, in and out of jail, and when I heard you in another interview describe this period, you actually described quite a bit of solidarity with other prisoners.
Can you tell me How that was like, and not only that, but also, you know, you mentioned Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the transition, and how difficult that might have been in the military, but now you're in prison.
This is a whole new ballgame, and some of the conditions that they were holding you in with the solitary and all of this stuff, I mean, it's very physical stuff.
It's basically abuse.
It's basically, I mean, I would qualify it as torture.
So yeah, so how was that period of, what were the ups and the downs?
Yeah, it's a good question.
This is actually one of the more difficult things that I struggle with, is that I've actually spent more time, I've spent most of my adult life in prison.
So like prison is the default in my mind, right?
So like everything in my life today that I live, I view through the lens of like, oh, this is different than prison, right?
Because like prison is what I know.
Yeah.
So I always find it, you know, I always have the reverse mindset of most people because, you know, people are always like, what is prison like?
And I'm just like, well, what's what's the rest of the world's like?
What's the rest of the world like?
Chelsea's selling and buying cigarettes just randomly in her life.
And she's like, what do you mean this isn't how it works?
Yeah, and no, Smokey was banned in prisons in 2006, so that might be a bummer for some people.
Definitely a bummer for me.
If I went to prison, the only thing I'd be looking forward to is unfettered cigarette access.
Yeah, it hasn't been allowed since 2004 to 2006.
The only result of that is that we have, like, jacked white supremacists now coming out with perfect lungs so they can, like, chase and beat down Antifa.
This is bad policy.
Do people sneak cigarettes in, though?
I mean, I imagine people have to smoke in prison.
Of course there's a network.
There's a network of everything.
You can get anything.
Anything that you need in prison, you can get.
It's just a matter of, like, what risks you want to take and how serious.
Like, how serious you want to deal with the consequences.
Because you're going to get caught!
Somebody's going to catch you eventually.
It's a matter of time.
And yes, to round this back a little bit and get a bit more serious again.
Yes, they had a lot of solidarity with prisoners because the thing that I always find fascinating whenever I'm asked about prisons is People understand the inherent difficulty of being in prison and the disconnection that people go through and the inherent violentness of the prison system.
One of the things that I think people struggle with is that prison is a... How do I put this?
The most violent people in prison, time and time again, were the prison staff.
Always.
There was never an exception, right?
And that's just mind-boggling, because when you have the state, you know, to back you up, and you have state immunity, and you have authority over another person, like almost absolute authority over another person, and you've stripped the other person's credibility away, then you can just do whatever you want.
And the things that they do are just cruel.
You know, you can Sure, not every prison guard is cruel, but every single one of them looks the other way at the ones who are and backs up the ones who are.
It's just an inherently horrifying experience for anyone.
I've always held full solidarity with people in prison who are under these circumstances because it's horrifying.
And it's some of the worst crimes that happen in prison, time and time again, just go unnoticed because they're official.
They have that rubric of, well, you know, they're just not human, right?
Pop culture kind of does this too.
Because, like, if you watch Law & Order, there is the good, you know, the quote-unquote good people are the cops, right, who do this investigation.
And then there's the prosecutors who take this to trial.
But that's not the end of the story in the criminal justice system, right?
You have people that go to prison and they stay in these boxes for the rest, you know, for huge chunks of their lives.
For me, it's definitely something that I'm very passionate about.
That is always at the front of my mind, the cruelty of prisons.
And that disconnection, right?
And they're always trying to monetize people.
I remember reading once about how prison wardens, both private and publicly owned prisons, have a tendency of talking about their prisoners as clients or as customers, right?
So, in their parlance, whenever they're going to conventions and stuff, right?
Because now it's become a business where every phone call, they can make money off of.
Every visitation, they can make money off of.
Every letter written or package bought and sent, they make money off of.
To get anything reasonable or decent, and they have a monopoly.
You don't get choice.
You don't get price options.
You get one company or two companies to buy stuff from, and they just jack up the price because security, quote unquote.
And so over time, you know, you kind of get to know prisoners, you experience the cruelty from the inside, and eventually you appeal and you're released.
Your sentence was commuted.
I got pulled out and I didn't have time to process either what the hell was going on.
But I got pulled aside and told that I was told like, hey, this is good news that you're being released for prison in 120 days.
And I'm like, that means that I have to be here another 120 days.
Yeah, that's like 120 days knowing that at any minute somebody could change their mind.
I imagine, if I put myself in your shoes, that each one of those days is like, is it real, though?
117 days under the Trump administration, too.
And the Trump administration made it pretty clear that they weren't happy with the commutation.
Via tweet.
Trump actually tweeted about it.
Definitely a nerve-wracking experience and we had a pile of lawyers because a reversal of a pardon has not been tried in recent times, but it's an open question still.
I think ultimately one of the reasons the Trump administration didn't pursue a reversal is because they didn't want their own pardons reversed.
Right.
And so over the last four years, and I know this question is going to sound bad because you actually spent part of it in jail again, but what have been some of the highlights of being a free woman?
It's a good question.
So I've spent most of my time in pandemic in the Trump administration.
And so one of the most remarkable things about being released from prison
was when I got out and I started actually interacting with people.
So I stayed in New York for a few weeks before I moved to where I'm from in Maryland.
Whenever I got out, I was like, oh, this is different.
Everything's changed.
And it was pretty clear that the world was not the same.
And I was like, oh, OK.
And the cognitive dissonance was broken and shattered for me.
So I was like, this world's on fire.
You know that, right?
And everybody else is just trying to live in a daze.
It was 2017.
And so I literally saw everything that happened in the last four years.
I was like, oh, this is coming.
Right?
So it's been kind of bittersweet.
Yeah, I can go to the store when there's not a pandemic and just kind of chill out, and I can talk about my experience in prison, and I can play video games on Twitch, right?
But the idea that I'm quote-unquote free is a little bit of a misnomer, I feel like, especially given the fact that Society and the United States as an institution, not just as a nation, but as an institution is sort of starting to reach the end of its legitimacy cycle.
Yeah, so before we get into exactly that, I was kind of fascinated by the fact that the New York Times and the Washington Post failed to show interest in the documents that eventually made their way to WikiLeaks.
So do you think that some of these institutional media outlets are just poorly prepared or just unwilling to shine a light on these kinds of things?
I don't think it wasn't that they weren't interested.
So when I reached out to the Washington Post in 2010, in early 2010, it was pretty clear that they didn't really understand, you know, because I wanted encrypted communications and they're like, no, just send me a text.
Like it's safe.
It's fine.
Right.
And I'm just like, no, you don't understand.
Yeah.
And it never quite got.
That was the issue, right?
It was it was an understanding of, you know, because I think journalists at the time were pretty old hat and they weren't really aware of how dangerous their job really and how like how haphazard sharing this kind of information was.
And they're having to learn this in a very quick, in a very short period of time because, you know, my leave was two weeks.
And then I was back to not having strong internet again, right?
It was like dial-up, right?
It was pretty clear that I was not going to be able to overcome this lack of understanding of risk, how to mitigate that using technical means like using email encryption or some kind of encryption protocol or meeting in person without electronic devices.
And there was a blizzard in the middle of all this, just to add on top of everything else.
People act like I had this like plan or I had you know like I had the intention of giving it to a specific person or anything like that and it was no I want this out I want this public I don't care what means yeah it needs to happen and I'm running out of time like I only have a specific amount of time before and because I didn't want to go you know I I didn't want to go AWOL because that means I'm in trouble, right?
I wanted to go back.
I needed to get back to work.
So I had this limited amount of time to do this really big thing and not a lot of time to communicate.
So I don't think it was that the New York Times or the Washington Post weren't interested.
I think it's that there was a gap in understanding at the time.
Now they've obviously changed their policies.
So nowadays, The New York Times, The Washington Post have more secure policies.
So you can do what I did in 2010 today through those institutions because the means and methods have changed.
I wanted to just jump back quick on something that Chelsea said, because I'm fascinated by this, and this might be a stupid question, but you said, you know, you were talking about, you know, life outside of prison.
You talked about being able to stream video games on Twitch.
And my question is that when you got out, did you see, like, what video games were like at that point?
Be like, oh my god, the graphic!
They're so much better!
Or, like, was it kind of disappointing?
Yeah.
Yeah, it improved a little bit.
I mean, I was kind of like, okay.
Yeah, like, if you remember, like 2010, like there was like the difference between like, you know, I mean, it came out after I was jailed, but you know, like Red Dead Redemption.
The original Red Dead Redemption is around about the graphics quality and the sort of storyline quality and then I came come out and it's Red Dead Redemption 2 so there's a jump but there isn't that big of a jump no and it's not like I don't it's not like I can't it's not like I can't get video game magazines like I know what the hell's going on right you know yeah okay And I'm around soldiers who are between the ages of 18 and 25 every day.
The idea that I don't know what's going on in the video game world is absurd.
So I wanted to speak a little bit about the things you have gotten up to while you were out of jail.
You know, basically covering the far right.
You said you kind of saw a lot of this coming and kind of watched it develop.
And we've done the same thing.
We've gone either undercover or just kind of we just don't call our attention to ourselves.
And we've been criticized for that, you know.
But you had an incident where there were these photographs that surfaced at this alt-right gathering.
Just can you tell us what happened there?
Yeah.
So it's a very cringe moment of mine where I viewed I viewed the alt-right as a threat, and one of the things that I wanted to do was to be able to use my privilege and access to gather a lot of information about them.
And it's a lot of stuff that, you know, they don't really hide very well if you get close to them, right?
You know, it's like when they're going to do stuff, when they're going to have events, so that way you can have protests to disrupt it, right?
And so I got a little bit closer to them because There was actually a huge supporter of mine, Cassandra Fairbanks, who was a Bernie supporter, actually, and had left-leaning politics for many years.
And I knew her!
So I was at a protest in Berkeley in 2017.
I won't tell you what went down at that protest, but it was a pretty hairy event.
But I noticed, I saw Cassandra there, and I'm like, what the hell is Cassandra doing up there?
Because I know her.
Because she was like with Milo Yiannopoulos, right?
And I was just like, what, what's going on here?
So I wanted to like scratch that a bit.
And so I worked with some journalists and some just activists, right, to sort of unravel this group.
And I ended up, I ended up meeting some of these people in my off time, I just kind of was trying to figure out where's this going?
Like, who are these people?
And I just kept on gathering notes and recording things and trying to pay attention to what they were up to because they weren't hiding anything that they were saying or doing.
They're grifters, right?
They don't believe what they say.
They just want people to make money off of it.
And then I ended up at this... I ended up getting an invite to... I don't know.
I had no information about the event, but I ended up going to this event, doxing the event, And we managed to get a protest outside of the venue out in I think was the Meatpacking District in where it was either Chelsea or the Meatpacking District in New York.
And I ended up going to go actually going inside and into this event and being surrounded by Proud Boys and like extreme like it was literally like the it was I think the last major gathering of the far right before the Trump campaign.
And I got kind of trapped in there and it was a really bad look because I'm there and I'm just sort of like scared and surrounded by people who.
I obviously don't like the fact that me being a trans leftist person is there and I needed to figure out how to get out of there.
And by the time I got out of there, you know, it was sort of like swirling on social media that I was chummy with them or friendly with them.
And I really fucked that up.
I ended up sort of boxing myself into really looking like And I really regret, and I deeply regret, like, you know, sort of like going down this path.
And it was a mistake, but I did have the best intentions of sort of trying to undermine a genuine long-term threat, as I viewed the right at the time.
Because 1-6 did not surprise me one bit, right?
All of us who were doing anti-fascist work in 2017 to 2018 saw a lot of this stuff coming, and at the time I think that more liberal-minded people were just sort of like Trump bad, Orange Man bad, but they viewed the electoral system as the main way to deal with them.
And I was a lot more skeptical because of coup attempts, because of pushes, you know, which I viewed as a real thing in 2017, 2018, and that played out.
So I viewed more extreme and or creative methods to disrupt them and to deal with them as being legitimate, as being proportional.
And this method, I think, ended up not being the best and appropriate thing for me and my role and my position, being an extremely public figure, because they were able to flip the script on that.
Right.
But I still support those who do that kind of work, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, speaking of the Proud Boys, before we jump into the fact that you somehow were into QAnon before us, so cooler than us, definitely cooler than Liv.
Liv is last, let's be very clear.
She got to this two weeks ago, all for the clout.
Yeah, what is this QAnon thing we've been talking about?
Or have we just been going along with this?
Oh, so yeah, one thing that I feel like sort of quickly disappeared from news cycles was this revelation that Enrique Tarrio, who served as the leader of the Proud Boys, had been working with the FBI since at least 2012.
So what do you think this beads for the relationship between the feds and the ongoing violent actions between 2012 and now that the Proud Boys, like, literally organized and participated in so many ways?
Yeah, they're super chummy.
Feds are super chummy with all the far-right groups, really, because they like them, right?
So I think that with Tario, for instance, and it wasn't just the FBI, it was multiple law enforcement agencies, right?
ATF, he was a informant for so many different law enforcement agencies, especially in Portland, I think.
Um, like the PPB, the Portland Police Bureau, for instance, you know, you've got like Joey Gibson, who's extremely chummy with the Portland Police Bureau, the PPA, the Portland Police Association, and here in the NYPD with New York, you have both the New York Police Department And you have the Police Benevolence Association, which is a pretty interesting name to call yourself whenever you're a police union, when you're a police quote unquote union.
The Good Guys Company.
But yeah, you know, I think it's less indicative of like, Of course all these people are snitching on each other, right?
Because they're all trying to get better positions in leadership positions and have better relationships and also avoid getting in trouble for what they're doing.
But also I think it's important to remember that a lot of these federal agencies are sort of pulling a whitey bulger here.
Where they're like, oh, well, if we're chummy with some of the organized criminals that we do like, then we can go after some people, look good, and all we have to do is sort of give these folks a pass.
So I think that it was a two-way... I think it was actually more of a two-way street that ended up biting them in the ass, obviously, after 1-6, right?
Because they can't possibly be excited about 1-6.
They can't possibly be like, this was the goal.
They can't be stoked.
Because the fascists finally turned on the police agencies and the federal agencies.
They finally flipped, right?
They finally went ACAB.
And as soon as that happened, they're like, OK, all this stuff that we've been digging up dirt on you, it's your game now.
And so OK, so tell us about finding out about QAnon before us.
Humiliate us.
OK, so QAnon.
were a couple of weird drops that I noticed, right?
This is before the big bakers came in.
This is before the grifters started, right?
And a few of these accounts, and I'm not sure if I actually beat you to it, I think was around the same time.
So I'm not going to make that claim, right?
But in early 2018, I became aware of this of this individual calling himself Q that was posting on on either was it 4chan or 8chan?
I think it was 8chan.
It started on 4chan.
Yeah, 4chan at first, and then it moved.
Yeah, and I saw the stuff just start to sort of catch fire, and it was a little bit before they started going with the elders of Zion approach, where it became extremely pedophily, but it caught people's attention because it's like, I have information.
Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested, right?
And it is sort of like, that was like, and that was like, the key thing was like, oh, there's all these indictments.
It sort of became a counter to the Mueller conspiracy theorists that were going on on the left on sort of the lip among libs, right?
At the time, that was how I viewed it at the time was like, okay, like, The indictments are coming in the Mueller Report any day now, right?
If you follow Palmer Report, right?
Trump's going to prison at 3 p.m.
It felt like a counter to that at first for me.
But what I found interesting was the same network of signal boosters that I noticed in the alt-right, which share this information, with all of their different groups and signal boost it, right?
Because they have like an A-B test, right?
So the way the Alt-Lite in 2017-2018 operated is they would post something wild and cringy with a smaller account, right?
And they would A-B test to see what catches fire and what doesn't.
And they would have the bigger accounts do the bigger and bigger things, like the things that caught fire.
So they were able to construct a narrative out of what would go the most viral fastest.
And I felt that Q posts and Q drops at that time were A-B tests because not every single Q drop caught fire.
Right.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And it also is a perfect extension of what was already happening on The Chance.
They were just always like A-B testing memes until like the right one took off.
One's actually extremely well educated into actual Nazi ideology and actual fascist sort of strategy.
came into being that's when you started seeing the the the pedophilia that's when you started seeing the the like 1488 type stuff because it you know it was like it was like there was like a change in the tone with Q drops right yeah and there was a change in how they were baked and a lot of this happened I feel like Not as a result of, but certainly came after a lot of the sort of bans and attacks of accounts that were on more mainstream platforms.
In, uh, around the time that Bowers, uh, the, um, the Pittsburgh shooter happened, right?
Because that happened in late 2018.
And I feel like what may, you know, I've always felt that what, what happened is that the Q community was a lot of people who had these very explicitly Nazi ideologies, who couldn't post as Nazis anymore.
Therefore, they found a way to bring this weirder, more anonymous culture And sort of latch onto it and sort of like buy into the anonymity.
I don't know how you feel about that, but that's sort of the direction.
That's sort of when I noticed a direction change was right around late 2018, early 2019.
And then things obviously blew up as soon as the pandemic happened.
Right.
And so in 2019, you saw like this kind of cute community passing around this video of AOC dancing.
And so you texted her about it?
What happened there?
I did.
Oh, yeah.
So one of the funniest moments is that in January 2019, it was like January 9th of 2019.
A QAnon account that I was paying attention to, it was like QAnonimous1776, right?
Was like the account name, like typical on-brand Q baking account, right?
They dug up this video, this extremely cute video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Like dancing in college, right?
Which was like on YouTube before, but they signal boosted this and they tried to use this as like a smear attack.
And it was funny because it immediately went viral, but it went viral in a completely different way.
And I texted Alex as soon as that account like posted that I was like, Hey, this video popped up and it actually makes you look great!
You look awesome!
This is one of the coolest things.
You're one of the coolest people in the world for this.
It blew up and it became sort of a meme at the time.
And it became such a positive boost for Alex at the time that this QAnon account just disappeared.
It like deleted its account and it never reappeared again.
It had a ton of followers.
It had like 70,000 followers.
This is a big account.
Instead of remaining in the fringes, Q jumped into the national spotlight in part due to the success of politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
What do you think of her rise and others like her?
You know, what I find fascinating about Marjorie Taylor Greene is that she is like a perfect example of somebody who has been there the whole time, right?
It's pretty early.
She was an early adopter of Q. I don't think she's a grifter.
I actually don't think that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the like alt... She differs a little bit from a lot of these alt-light folks who do it for the grift.
It's all about the money.
I feel like she is a very much a true believer in this stuff.
Um and I think that she's like having to grapple with the fact that while she's been a true believer in this stuff now she's like in a different position a different role so she has access to different information and now she has to like navigate that but it's interesting because she was always there she was always in the background she was always involved in the stuff.
She harassed Alex in 2019, right?
Before Q became mainstream, she was already fully on board with the stuff, doing direct action protests, being physically present doing stuff.
And really engaged in this stuff.
So yeah, I think she's like a perfect, her history is like a perfect microcosm of like the rise of the Q universe, right?
And you know, you kind of mentioned this earlier, this crisis of legitimacy, people being dissatisfied with the material conditions of their lives in America, the institutions looking.
Less and less like a solution and more and more like an obstacle.
Do you think that, like, January 6th, in a way, was a turning point for that?
And, you know, was it good for the far right?
Or, yeah, how do you see that whole thing?
So, I view 1-6 as one of the most significant moments in American history.
And I think it's funny because it seems like mainstream folks are pretending like it didn't happen right now because of how grave a threat it is to the legitimacy of the United States as a nation.
Because you weren't able to keep your process and your buildings secure.
One of the most secure buildings in the world was overrun, right?
And the world saw that.
That creates a crisis of legitimacy, right?
Because you've punctured the invincibility of this institution, for once.
Now then, one can argue, okay, like, yeah, the fascists already own that building, so, like, of course they can overrun the building, because it's their building, right?
They, you know, like, these institutions already sort of fit the framework and the mindset that they have, and they already have a presence inside of them.
But I do think that from somebody who has like a counterinsurgency mindset, and understanding of this kind of thing.
That's an event that you can't go back from, right?
An attempted putsch that successfully managed to end one of the most important legal processes in the U.S.
legal system in one of the most secure buildings has punctured the invincibility of the United States permanently.
And I don't think that Americans are able to grasp or understand what's happening yet.
But the depth of what this means is going to last decades, right?
I think of it like this, right?
The United States came out of the Second World War with this air of invincibility, this air of heroism, this air of power, and Elevation, right?
The city on a shining hill, as Reagan would put it, right?
The branding of the United States for 70 years, you know, people around the world would take the United States seriously.
People in the United States would take the idea of freedom of democracy seriously.
That has been punctured.
And I don't think you could, you really need an event as epoch-defining as the Second World War.
To elevate you, to elevate the branding and the legitimacy of an institution like the United States, in order for you to get the ability to say, with a straight face, we're bringing freedom and democracy through use of force in some place that isn't even within our direct, that isn't a direct threat to us, or isn't that we don't have any You know, we don't have any influence over, we don't have any, you know, like, what does the United States have to do with Vietnam?
What does the United States have to do with Iraq, right?
So in order for those sort of policies to exist, you had to have this branding of, like, the United States as, like, being a beacon of freedom of democracy.
And you can't do that after a push.
So from here on out, whenever Joe Biden tries to say with a straight face, or, you know, the head of the State Department, hey, we're about freedom and democracy, people are just going to chuckle.
Right.
And, like, that perception was punctured by a guy with a shaman hat and, like, a fake spear.
Yeah.
You know, like, a lot of the coup people weren't particularly competent.
So it's like, imagine if they were.
Right.
Nor did they feel like they were in an ideological war against the institution.
They went in and they were like, oh, look at these beautiful paintings.
They weren't tearing them down or defacing it.
They were taking fucking, like, souvenirs home from this awesome, cool place they love.
Which is, yeah, that's a very strange aspect.
I don't... It's hard to say that it's good for the right, because it has significantly disrupted them.
Like, I asked, you know, good or bad for the alt-right, and what does it mean to have this,
I guess, revolutionary possibility open up in such a weird and ugly way?
I don't—it's hard to say that it's good for the right, because it has significantly
disrupted them. Like, being involved in this many court cases, having a lot of their central
leadership sort of sidelined.
Having Trump have his Twitter account banned for 13 days before he left office has been kind of shattering for their motivation and their energy, which I think is real.
The concern that I have is that the right is able to now re-coalesce and they aren't going to be as
friendly to the idea of a central federal government round two, I don't think.
I think that the far right is starting to coalesce around the idea of, we need to take state houses.
We need to eliminate voting rights for anybody apart from essentially white patriarchal men, right?
I think that's the end state goal, is to just...
Ship away is to just continue what they've been doing for the last 70 years, right?
Yeah.
Since FDR and ship away at progress, but using the state houses, using the governors, using the, um, because they can win those seats and they can gerrymander those places and people and the mainstream media sort of just like, it's just like, Oh, red states, ha ha ha.
Isn't it?
Isn't it funny how wants to, you know, ban trans people from, you know,
playing sports. Like, "Ha ha ha, what kind of issue is this?" Right? But they're accomplishing
it, right? They're doing these things. And I think the federal government is,
ironically, in less of a position to be able to assert authority over states
than it did So I think in the short term, it hurts them.
But in the long term, the crisis of legitimacy that it's created allows them to create a sort of counter to the United States, a sort of more explicitly fascist, more explicitly Nationalist, although not necessarily the United States.
And don't forget, the Confederacy was very nationalist, right?
The Confederacy believed that they were the real Declaration of Independence people, right?
They believed that they were really what the Founding Fathers wanted, right?
So they dressed themselves up.
While actually committing this act of war and treason against the federal government, they claimed to be the genuine keepers of the mantle of sort of national identity, right?
And I think that that's what we're going to start to see happen.
Now, does this mean that Kentucky or Texas secedes from the Union?
No, I don't think we're looking at a sort of traditional secession of Union kind of thing.
But I do think it's going to be a situation where we have a more and more Extreme patchwork quilt where you cross the border and look the laws and rights and frameworks that you have and the guarantees that you have in one state are just so significantly different that it's almost like you're in two different countries.
Well, and we're even seeing that now, the QAnon rally that Travis and I went to a couple weeks ago that was on Hollywood Boulevard.
There was a woman there who's running for governor against Gavin Newsom, and she was going around talking to people saying, hey, we gotta run for local office, you know, we need to take these seats, we need to do this.
And that is a far cry from what people were saying at QAnon rallies just, I don't know, a year and a half ago.
Yeah, the strategy is to take the state houses because you can take them.
And so, but meanwhile we have, I mean, there are obviously active and organized people in this ideological movement, like we were just describing, but then there's some that are just like sitting, you know, in the kind of narcotic haze of terms like, where we go when we go all, and like dark to light, and like these people seem to have a weird warped yearning for solidarity and justice, transparency in government.
And, you know, they're also looking to reveal atrocities they believe are real by way of
an anonymous leaker.
So how do what how is this going to work out as far as that?
And is there is there a way to get some of those people back into reality?
That's a difficult thing, because I the pandemic has sort of scrambled everybody's brains.
And I've talked about this in another podcast, right?
The experience that everybody's had in the last year, um, being in quarantine, having to deal with the pandemic, having to, uh, lockdown, having to see the, one of the largest mass casualty producing events We had mass graves here in New York City, right?
To have, for the first time in history, a contraction.
The first time since the last pandemic, we had a contraction of the U.S.
population, right?
It was a brief period of time.
We're now going back up, but we had a brief contraction where the population of the United States was going down faster than it was going up.
That's a traumatic experience.
And I'm noticing that people are, people are doing what they do, what happens whenever you go through solitary confinement or you go through some kind of restrictive confinement conditions where people who are going through that, all sorts of stuff happens to their brain, right?
You start to become more susceptible to believing in stuff, right?
And you have less information to confirm or deny your reality.
And you have less distractions so you can really go down your rabbit hole, right?
And I think that's what happened with the Q stuff, right?
Is people started with social media allowing them to be exposed to this.
And not having the experience of their daily lives to contradict them, they just start going down this rabbit hole, right?
And this happens in solitary confinement.
This happens in restrictive housing unit conditions, right?
Where you have limited numbers of people.
You start believing things, you start... People seek conspiracies.
And I think this is fascinating.
People who are in restrictive housing units, Like they start seeking different religious ideas.
They start seeking, they start believing in different things.
They start questioning different things.
They start wondering whether things are connected.
It's just I think human nature to sort of have to deal with a traumatic thing that's happening to you and dealing with a traumatic thing.
To seek meaning in that and to find some Some greater purpose and find some greater meaning in that than the reality.
And so without anything to ground you, I think that that's what happened.
But it's also happened with liberals too, where there's just sort of like...
They're sort of just dealing with the same things and me I've been going out and I've been quarantining and I but I I've also been like communicating with people who are out and about and doing stuff so I've had this like contradictory opinion and I've and I've gone through this cognitive dissonance before.
And I think that what I see is I now see people coming out of that and they're just in a daze, right?
And I think as people come out of a daze, they're going to start to come... Now is the time where they're going to start to have to grapple with reality for the first time.
And I think a lot of these people are going to struggle, but all of us are really going to struggle.
And I think we just need...
Everybody just needs to sort of chill and take care of yourself, right?
Because it's not like there's anything wrong with the lockdowns, right?
And I want to be clear about that because I think that's come up before.
No, the lockdowns were necessary for public health reasons because we had a mass casualty event hit the United States and we needed to try to keep people safe.
But the impact of being locked down for a significant chunk of time is going to produce an added layer of that trauma.
And we just kind of have to take care of ourselves and be gentle with ourselves.
And I think that people who go down the Q-hole, you have to be gentle with them.
Because anything that you... if you try to throw them facts, if you try to throw, you know, argue with them, they have... that's not gonna... it's... Right.
It'll just brush it, you know.
They're too far gone, you know.
You can't do that.
What you can do, I feel like, is... And it's hard, because some of them are so far gone that, you know, they're dangerous.
And some of them are only so far gone that that you could start to pull them out if you if you engage with them, but not engage with them on the topics that they're talking about.
So like if you instead like play tennis with them, or you play basketball with them, or you have If you have a constructive relationship with them that has nothing to do with politics, maybe you could start to ground them again.
But it's hard to know because some of them are so far gone and so dangerous and unstable that there's a hazard and a risk in even doing that.
So I think it's a case-by-case basis.
One question I have, and this is, you know, speaking to their kind of belief system, many of them, you know, they kind of go either way on whistleblowers.
Many of them love Assange, but they'll, like, hate Snowden.
They'll call one person a traitor and the other person's a hero.
So what do you think of this weird, inconsistent relationship they have with that?
I mean, because there's just no real—I mean, their facts aren't grounded in reality.
So they construct their—you know, one of the things that I find fascinating about Q, right, is that it's sort of a—it's unlike religion, which has like a—unlike an organized religion, which has like a clear doctrine and clear rules, Q is sort of like a pick.
It's sort of like a pick cherry.
You can pick and choose the realities that you want.
It's sort of a choose-your-own-adventure, right?
So I think that's one.
I think that's one of the reasons why that happens is because it's, you know, they don't actually think about this stuff or care about this stuff, but they're trying to find facts and realities that Fit within their their framework and their their their their sort of idea framework and you know, I think that having a having a an extremely lefty trans woman whistleblower who you know, I don't even I don't even like the word term whistleblower.
It's like a night.
It conjures up the image of a 1910 police officer who's about to beat a union organizer, right?
That's what I see, right?
I don't like that term.
I just view myself as an activist, right?
But to be this activist person Who is viewed as a whistleblower is a contradiction of sort of their value set, right?
You know, because it's like, yeah, I'm very far left and I have no interest in upholding your dream political framework.
So I think that's one of the reasons why that sort of happens is they already have their viewpoints and they're cherry picking their facts to fit that.
Something I noticed with, like, just, like, an anecdote with, like, a distant, like, family friend who had, who is, like, was sort of Northern Canada, relatively country person who was, like, not, didn't want to get the vaccine, was, like, vaccine denialist.
They thought that the vaccine was sterilizing everyone who took it, but, and she was, like, should I take it?
It's okay.
I've been hearing about this.
And the response that got them to take it was just, like, yeah, a bunch of people have taken it.
We're fine.
Like close relatives around people who are just like they see them and are like no this is fine This is a good idea.
You know they're experts whatever will actually help a lot of people and one of the reasons why That a lot of this stuff has gotten so bad is because of like quarantine and isolation Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's a direct consequence of quarantine and isolation.
One of the reasons why, that's one of the reasons why Q blew up, I feel like.
And so yeah, I think, I think, but yeah, arguing with them on Twitter or arguing with them on Facebook is not a good idea.
Don't do it.
Mm-hmm.
And so Liv has some questions for you, including a bunch of stuff on crypto, because of course.
But before that, I wanted to ask you one last question about, you know, can you describe what happened when Harvard gave you a visiting fellowship?
I read about this interesting snafu, and what does it say about the relationship of academia with this kind of military-industrial complex?
So yeah, this was a fascinating thing that happened in 2017.
So Harvard kept on bugging.
So Harvard Institute of Politics, the Kennedy School.
I started bugging my agent, my speaking agent at the time, about coming to Harvard to speak, right?
I said no, right?
Because it wasn't a paying gig, right?
So, I had just gotten out of prison, I needed to make some money, and, you know, I was like, yeah, you know, I don't feel that this is, like, You know, unless you're going to pay for travel and pay some amount of money, I don't think I want to do this.
They bugged my agent multiple times, time and time again.
They asked four times with four rejections.
Fifth time, I actually had an event in the Boston area.
And I was already going to be in town, so I accepted it.
And I said, OK, yeah, I think I can fit this into my schedule.
So the Harvard thing actually wasn't that big a deal.
They do this with a lot of different people.
And it was literally just me showing up to Harvard for three hours to do a speaking engagement, which I do at universities all over the country all the time.
There was nothing unusual about this.
Then the right wing, I think it was Liz Cheney, tweeted about it.
Michael Morrell from the CIA, a former director of the CIA, who really doesn't like me, he has like a personal vendetta against me, also tweeted about it and wrote a statement saying, I am withdrawing from my fellowship at Harvard University over this.
And it just sort of snowballed into this thing.
And we were in communication all of this day with the Institute of Politics and the head of the school.
And we're just like, look, this is becoming a thing.
We don't really want this to be a thing.
Should we just pull out?
This seems to be more trouble than it's worth, from my perspective, right?
And the Institute of Politics was like, no, we want you to come.
We want you to be here.
We want you to Engage with the students.
The students asked you to be here.
We're not backing down.
And they made a very firm, like 3 p.m.
Pacific time, 6 p.m.
East Coast time, which was their time.
They gave us the ultimatum.
They're like, no, we're never backing down on this.
I went to go speak and I actually I was accepting the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for 2017, right?
I actually did an acceptance speech for the award.
As I'm coming down off the stage, I get pulled aside by my agent and my manager and a bunch of other people.
And we get pulled off to the side.
We have this emergency meeting and They pull up the Institute of Politics, the head of the school, who's on the phone.
It was like this awkward conversation where it's like, after further review, blah, blah, blah, blah, we would like to withdraw you from, you know, we would like to withdraw your invitation to the Institute of Politics, you know, to the Institute of Politics as a visiting fellow, blah, blah, blah.
You know, we'd still like you to come.
And I'm just like, I'm just like, You created this problem.
I said no multiple times.
I said sure, there's a controversy if we don't want to deal with this.
It's easy for us.
I didn't get paid for the gig.
I was gonna make no money off of it whatsoever.
And it just became this huge controversy.
So I think it says a lot about how these schools use controversy To drum up their interest and support for events.
And they chose me with like Sean Spicer and a bunch of other like right-wing people that were big names, right?
Like Hillary Clinton's campaign advisor from the 2016 campaign, right?
And so all these big names and they slot me in because I'm a big name that year and They created this controversy and was contrived and and we didn't want anything to do with that.
It became this big thing.
And I'm I'm I wasn't mad about it or anything like that.
It wasn't that big a deal.
Like I do speaking events all the time.
But yeah, it was definitely it's definitely a very telling incident.
And I think it says a lot about.
The priorities of these schools whenever they have these speaking engagements where they bring far right people, right?
They do this stuff to like generate controversy and generate publicity.
I have a couple questions.
Someone related to your upcoming YouTube video which does relate to technology.
Yeah!
As well as Bitcoin.
Surveillance is obviously an increasingly prevalent issue in our society, like facial recognition software, tracking protesters, you know, Amazon workers efficiency being automatically monitored in warehouses.
And it seems like, you know, both resistance movements and labor are deeply affected by uses of these developing technologies.
Is there a way out?
Do you think?
Can these technologies be used to foster resistance?
Can they be resisted?
What are your general thoughts?
Yeah, I think there are ways and means and methods of resisting these kinds of things.
The framework that I use as an expert, as a security expert, we use this term called threat modeling, which basically says not every single person's threat amounts are the same.
So Julian is going to have a very different security framework that he needs from Liv, right?
Because you're different people, and you're exposed to different threats, right?
And if you're a protester, you're going to have to take additional precautions and do certain things to protect yourself electronically, right?
Whereas if you're me, you know, like obviously I have a much wider range of potential threats, including state actors.
So, you know, you just have to view each person's threat model as sort of the framework that they have to work within.
And I think that you're going to use different tools for these different things.
They're not going to be specific to each thing.
And I think that one of the things that a lot of Bitcoin bros try to do A lot of people who don't know about this stuff is they try to give you a one-size-fits-all.
I highly recommend that people just automatically encrypt their conversations, like, no matter what.
So I adhere to the idea that you should use signal as a means of communication over the phone.
But that doesn't mean that you should use cryptocurrency in all instances, in all situations, right?
Some people, certainly those who do sex work or people who deal with illicit substance transactions consensually, they obviously have an interest in using Bitcoin for anonymity purposes.
Or at least, you know, like having something that isn't like paper money or that is electronic that doesn't require the credit card system like Stripe or some payment system.
And so yeah, I think that it depends on what you're trying to do and who you are, and who the threats that you're dealing with are.
Are you trying to keep stuff from the police?
Is that your threat if you're a protester, if you're a sex worker?
Are you trying to deal with it for our right?
Or, you know, in which case sometimes avoiding crypto might be a better option because it's easier to get on the ledger, a sort of trail, and to get you doxxed, unless you're using Ethereum.
And there's different people who, they're just living their lives, they're being chill, and how much protection they need to make, or how many precautions they need to take.
And I think that Normal people should do more than they are doing, but that doesn't mean that they need to have custom routers or server farms or using multiple phones or, you know, having a shell company, right?
There's different threat models.
What about Tactical Oakleys?
Tactical Oakleys?
Yeah, I use Tactical Oakleys because they look cool, not because they keep me safe or secure.
There we go.
It's a good double-sided purpose.
It does both.
Yeah, on the question of Bitcoin, it does seem like there is this double-sided nature to it.
They could be used for, like, sex work, for instance.
Possibly good causes, but then again we can think of, like, it used on the right as well.
I mean, I can imagine, like, with the stuff going on with Matt Gaetz, That if he didn't use Cash App with his name, where it was like, this is for, you know, prostitution of 17 year old in the message, but then used, let's say, crypto instead, he would have been far less in hot water at the moment.
What do you think are going to be the longer effects of something like cryptocurrency?
Like, is it here to stay as a currency model?
Is it going to get more relevant?
Is it a passing fad?
I don't view cryptocurrency as a currency model, personally.
Well, I do think it is.
Cryptocurrency is real, but I don't think that it's a viable alternative to fiat currency.
And the reason why is because there's no enforcement mechanism.
Right?
And you see this with NFTs, for example, right?
Non-fungible tokens are basically these, these certificates that say, these, you know, encryption certificates that say, I own this, this easily reproducible digital item, right?
And this can be verified by the ledger, right?
I am the, thus, the owner of this JPAC.
I mean, it's an absurd notion, right?
Because there's no enforcement mechanism, right?
Because it's easily transferable, it's easily movable, and you can't really do anything with it, right?
Like, what does it mean to say, like, I have a certificate that I've spent an enormous amount of energy trying to obtain a hash value for and apply it to this JPEG file?
Like, what does that mean?
Like, it doesn't mean anything.
Because society still uses fiat currency and it still uses physical ownership and enforcement and protection of these things in order for the world to work as a currency system, right?
Which is one of the reasons why, at the end of the day, Elon Musk said it best in his SNL skit, where it's a hustle, right?
It is!
Cryptocurrency is a way of Using the scarcity of certain hash values and the energy expenditure of calculating a ton of hash values, throwing them out, finding the right ones that meet certain criteria, which uses up an enormous amount of energy because you have to do mining, which requires an enormous amount of energy.
So you have to be rich in order to like get The mining apparatus and the mining equipment.
Because you can't do this on your laptop.
You can't do this on your desktop.
You need an actual facility to do this stuff.
And you have these rich people who are able to do these things, obtain this, gather these certificates that say that they own possession of these hash values.
And those are real.
Those are tangible.
And those are provable.
So I think it's fascinating because these certificates that are generated through the mining process do have a kind of value, but they're as a replacement to fiat currency.
I don't think that it's viable in that way.
So I think that it is a true commodity, but it is not an alternative currency.
Right.
And on the question of Elon Musk, he seemed to have been on the crypto train for a while, dealing with Dogecoin, and then he suddenly seemingly left it, citing environmental reasons.
For instance, is there a rhyme or reason to that?
Did he use that for his personal advantage, or was it really just like he didn't realize the ecological response and that it looked bad?
I think he cares more about it looking bad because one of the problems that Tesla as a corporation has now is that they don't have the air of responsibility that they had and the air of being ecologically responsible as they used to.
So whenever they're trying to say, hey, like we should coup Bolivia.
Right.
They have less sway.
Right.
And in saying that they're the good guys.
Right.
So I think I think that's I think it's a branding issue for Tesla.
I think it has more to do with a branding issue for Tesla than Elon Musk actually caring.
Hmm.
Right.
Maybe the board of execs being like, Elon, you have to stop posting.
Well, they have shortages of materials now.
In fact, one of the things that I've been learning about is how car companies are removing components from their new models of cars.
So for the first time in several years, cars that are being made for the 2021 and 2022 Purchase cycle are less capable than they were in the previous cycles because they're less advanced.
Um, now the, the main portions of the cars for these model years are still arguably changes and maybe better in some way in terms of efficiency and they look better or whatever.
But these cars, because they're, they're, they're short, they have shortages of components.
They're having to just scrap, like, electronic speedometers, right?
So instead, they'll just go back to an analog speedometer or an analog gas meter because there's such a shortage of components and parts because the supply chain is strained so much.
And they can't guarantee, and they still need to make these models of cars, and Tesla's going through Way worse in this regard right now.
So they need to have good relationships with countries in which they can do resource extraction.
And it's hard for them to do that whenever you have Elon Musk basically just sort of wrecking the credibility of the industry.
Tweeting Weku or whoever we want.
Not a good look.
Exactly.
And so I think it has more to do with sort of capitalism and extraction of resources and trying to be actually bad.
Because in a sense, shooting himself in the foot is what he's done here.
He's made the company less viable.
He's made the ability to extract resources less available to him.
And doing these sort of risky brand moves of You know, promoting Dogecoin or being viewed as off the wall or off the cuff for being eccentric, right?
Because, you know, Tesla is now a major corporation and it has to do and it has interest to deal with.
And it can't it can't stay on top unless it remains competitive.
And the car companies have realized the other car companies are able to now produce electric cars.
So Tesla will not be the only name in the game going into the next decade.
And going a bit back to crypto, people generally view it as like super decentralized and impossible to be like used by state actors or other erroneous sort of larger actors.
Yet it seems like this is sort of not the full story in a lot of ways.
Can state actors use crypto to their advantage?
And like how?
Yes, they regularly do, in fact.
So state actors, not necessarily the United States, but other state actors use cryptocurrency to hide the trail of sending, I mean, it's even said, like, they're even sending money to their, like, intelligence officers on the ground, right, to, like, have a have a less traceable way Or a more difficult to trace way of moving funds around without having to send it in a diplomatic pouch or something, right?
You know, so state actors can use it.
Cryptocurrency is not untraceable.
It is traceable.
Even Ethereum, you can untangle it if you're a state actor.
You can untangle the ledger and find out with the mixed nets who is who.
It just becomes the cost is much higher, right?
You need to have an active role and engagement.
You have to be able to invest the resources to be able to untangle this.
And it's not clear that the juice is worth the squeeze for them.
So if they need to, state actors can untangle cryptocurrency.
I don't think that this is currently something that people that are using cryptocurrency should be concerned about.
But the idea that your Ethereum transactions are perfectly secure and will never be traced is, I think, a misnomer.
Tell us about a video game you like.
Let's jump off the crypto train.
All right.
I have been playing video games during the quarantine.
I am very disappointed in the fact that the video games industry has basically sort of hit a rut, right?
Like Red Dead Redemption 2 came out.
Blew my mind.
And I haven't been able to find a game that a new game that has really gotten me since, right?
You and me both.
And I don't know what to do about that because I've just been playing so many classic games, so many games that are old.
I've been going back to old games throughout the quarantine and the last year because, you know, the new titles are just meh.
So what are the old ones that you go back to?
So, what are the old ones that I go back to?
I mean, it can be just like Civilization IV, right?
Like, not Civilization V, not Civilization VI, Civilization IV, right?
Yeah, that's a really good one, I have to say.
Yeah, you know, playing games like City Skylines, which is like five, six years old.
I play a lot of Paradox games.
Like, I'm currently playing a lot of Hearts of Iron 4 right now.
I'm doing that as my streaming bit right now.
I play a lot of first-person shooters that are like spacey, like kind of like Halo.
So I've been playing the Halo games.
I know that Mass Effect has, and I think it's interesting that one of the most creative things that's happening is that some of the franchises are doing remasters of classic games because they can't come up with their own material.
Yeah, Diablo 2's coming back.
The Hollywoodization of the video game industry is very disappointing to see.
Have you tried Elite Dangerous at all?
They just had a new expansion that adds like a whole first-person It's pretty cool so far.
I've only played a little bit of it.
It's pretty cool so far. I've only played a little bit of it.
No I haven't, but I definitely know that, I've definitely heard of that game.
Star Citizen Killer, that just describes like anybody.
I don't know if it's possible to kill a game that's been in alpha for like seven years.
It hasn't even started!
Star Citizen Killer sounds like a dream for Elon Musk.
And so tell us about this YouTube series that you're working on related to science and technology.
Okay, so I, first off, I'm going to start off with the fact that at one point I was bored during the quarantine and I needed to figure out what I was going to do.
So I started Twitch streaming.
And another thing that I was going to do was I was going to, for the first time, start to do content production.
And I decided to use video because I have an interest in film and recording.
And so I was like, okay, I'm going to dive into making YouTube videos.
And it's really hard.
So I'm able to record really easily.
I'm able to come up with ideas really easily.
And in summer of last year, I said, hey, I'm going to do a YouTube.
I'm going to do a YouTube series.
I'm going to start posting YouTube videos.
I had a bunch of material, and I started putting it together.
And I opened up a video editor for the first time.
And I'm very familiar with Photoshop.
I'm very familiar with Illustrator.
I'm very familiar with audio editing programs from I used to be a DJ, in fact.
So I have experience with photography.
I have experience with recording.
No idea what I'm doing.
I open this thing up and I'm like overwhelmed, right?
Mm hmm.
So I take film classes.
Last autumn, I was like, OK, I have no idea how to do digital film editing.
Mm hmm.
I need to admit that.
So I took film classes.
And so for the last six or eight months, I've been learning how to do video editing.
And what I've been doing is I've been producing a YouTube video series that is documentary in nature.
I'm working on the length.
It looks like it's going to be closer to 30 minutes now for the YouTube video length.
I don't want to do these long ass video essays, right?
Where you have these video essays that are boring and they're like an hour and a half long or two hours long, right?
Yeah, it's just a humanities essay, basically.
Like, I have the intent of having something a lot more like Bill Nye, the science guy.
Like, I'm a STEM person, right?
Like, I work in science and technology, so my opinions on stuff are kind of more fluid, but I really want to do an explainer videos because I feel like some issues that are talked about a lot, people don't actually understand what they're talking about.
They'll have opinions about something they don't actually understand.
And I felt that way about cryptocurrency.
I feel that way about artificial intelligence.
I feel that way about encryption.
I feel that way about surveillance.
I feel that way about automation.
I feel that way about a lot of different tech issues, right, where people really don't understand what they're talking about.
But they'll have hella opinions about it, right?
So that's what I want to do is I want to create a video series in which I address that.
And so my first video is on cryptocurrency.
And it's just a fun, meme-filled adventure that delves into What cryptocurrency is, how it works, where it came from, and what the actual environmental effects of it are.
Because I do think that people who don't like cryptocurrency are exaggerating it a bit.
And so I want people, regardless of your political beliefs, regardless of your philosophy, I want you to be like more educated, more aware of what these issues are and what they consist of.
And so that's what I'm trying to do, is I'm trying to produce that.
And where can people find those videos?
Working on that.
So I'm currently in video editing hell.
I have a Patreon.
If you want to support me right now, because I'm actually, financially I am in pretty, I'm pretty tight right now, which is actually slowing down the process.
You can find me on Patreon.com forward slash XYChelsea.
You can also find me on Twitter at XYChelsea.
Go and support her, folks.
Yeah, please support me.
I really need it right now because I'm nearing the end of completion of this video.
I said it was going to come out in May.
I'm under-delivering here, which is unfortunate, but I've had a lot of difficulty with the reopening and everything.
All this deluge of requests coming in all at once as soon as I got vaccinated.
As soon as I got fully vaccinated, everybody's like, Chelsea, you need to come on.
Chelsea, you need to come do this.
Chelsea, you need to come do that.
So managing all of that and trying to be a video editor all by myself has been difficult.
You can also subscribe on YouTube.
YouTube.com forward slash XYChelsea.
I'm also on Twitch.
So I have a Twitch channel where people can hear about what I'm doing.
It's twitch.tv forward slash XYChelsea87.
And yeah, you know, I've been I've been busy.
I have been working, you know, 80-90 hours a week, trying to get this video out and doing a bunch of other stuff all at once with all the reopenings and things.
So if anyone wants to see the first Chelsea drop, it totally exists.
It's a secret drop.
It's a half-hour video drop.
And to get that drop working, we're gonna need you to go to Patreon and get this Patriot movement going.
Yeah, so I have fully morphed into a grifter, Julian.
Welcome aboard.
You've sucked me into this world.
It's very unfortunate, but it turns out that being on the left and having actual principles
isn't very profitable, so I got to change my tune.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I did want to say that early on in the podcast, we did a Q&A with some listeners,
and they asked me what my dream guest would be, and I remember saying Chelsea Manning.
So the podcast is over.
We're wrapping it up.
Folks, this is it.
Last episode.
All right.
Bye.
So yeah, I wanted to thank you for coming on the show, Chelsea, and also invite you if you'd like to stay for the QAnon News, which is the final little segment here.
Let's do it!
We're going to have a little segment where basically we're just going to talk about the big event in Dallas that's going on right now because we're going to need to touch on that if we're going to be a respectable QAnon podcast.
QAnon News!
For our main story, QAnon followers and promoters gather in Dallas for the biggest QAnon event yet.
If you all remember back in September of 2019 on a sweltering 9-11, Julie and I gathered for the first ever QAnon event in which a few dozen QAnon followers gathered for a small Free sort of gathering right in front of the Washington Monument.
And since then, things have gotten a little out of hand because over Memorial Day weekend here, there was a three-day event in Dallas that was $500 a head or $1,000 if you sprung for the VIP tickets.
It's Q-Chella.
Yeah, it was packed.
Three days of adrenochrome, calling for coups.
It's a fun time for all.
Attendees could hear from QAnon promoters like Jordan Sather, RedPill78, and The Kade Awakening.
They could also hear from QAnon heroes Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn, and a sign that the movement is gaining even more mainstream acceptance.
They could also hear from Congressman Louie Gohmert and Texas GOP Chair Allen West.
That's quite a lineup.
Yes, it's quite impressive.
And you know what?
I have to say, I don't want to have to give it to them, but it was well produced, too.
Everything was well lit.
The live stream had like three cameras that transitioned really well.
Yes, the amount of money going into this is terrifying, especially because the logo for the actual event, the cowboy hat that was kind of their sort of like main stage logo, Had WWG1 WGA on it.
I mean, they were not really trying to hide the fact that it was a blatant, you know, QAnon event.
Right, yes.
It was organized by a guy who goes by the name QAnon John, who in a couple of interviews with media outlets, he tried to deny it was a QAnon rally or event.
It's absolute madness.
Unfortunately, I was not able to attend.
I had bought two tickets for myself and Jake, but the organizers refunded them and then told me that I was not welcome because they thought I was lying about the Q movement.
They kicked me out.
For freedom of speech... Liv, you should have asked your CIA contact for access.
That's true.
They let CIA people in for free, I think.
Or they got a bonus, so I should have took advantage.
I saw at least one of them called Brace.
Yeah, Will Sommer, he also bought a ticket, and he did make it, but he was kicked out on the second day.
The organizers, it was right in the middle of the event, as Michael Flynn was ranting about the media, apparently.
The organizers claimed that they had canceled Will Sommer's ticket, but this was evidently not true at all.
I think they confused him for you.
I think that they, because they were saying that they refunded his ticket.
So Jordan Sather, uh, for, you know, basically got Will Sommer kicked out.
He filmed the whole thing.
He then showed it to Flynn later and claims that Flynn laughed because other people in the QAnon community were like, this is not us.
We don't kick people out.
So, yeah, it's that little weasel, and he had the only genuine joy that I've ever seen cross his tawdry little visage as he fucking escorted him out on video.
The cops were, like, borderline.
If Will slowed down, it felt like the cops would have manhandled him.
Like, that was the level of escorting him out that was happening.
Well, I mean, you know what they say, when you're over the target, you get flack.
And the female cop said, you know, don't be coming back now.
The event featured Sidney Powell speculating that Trump would simply be reinstated as president after all the supposed fraud is discovered.
He can simply be reinstated, that a new inauguration date is set.
[Applause]
And Biden is told to move out of the White House.
And President Trump should be moved back in.
I'm sure there's not going to be credit for time lost, unfortunately, because the Constitution itself sets the date for inauguration.
But he should definitely get the remainder of his term and make the best of it.
That's for sure.
Yeah, what they want is, like, not only for Trump to be reinstated, but also get the extra months of Biden's presidency to make up for all that time lost.
High ask.
But this speaks to what you were saying, Chelsea.
It's like, there's going to be, like, a coalition of 12 states inaugurating their president, while, like, halfway across the country, like, another coalition of seven are doing their president.
We could all have our own presidents.
Let's just inaugurate people whenever we all feel like that's something we need.
I think it's interesting that Sidney Powell, who The event also featured General Michael Flynn endorsing a military coup like the type that happened in Myanmar.
I'm a simple Marine.
on with this stuff, right? Because like the right is kind of moving on and they're trying
to figure out how to how to deal with this, this cognitive dissonance that's happening
between the Q movement and the far right.
The event also featured General Michael Flynn endorsing a military coup like the type that
happened in Myanmar.
I'm a simple Marine. I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can't happen here.
No reason. I mean, it should have a reason. One more.
Now I don't see why not this country called. I think it's minimart.
I think that Babar had it right.
Yeah, I'd use a mnemonic technique like minimizing my browser.
We need a full fascist military coup.
We need to take over everything.
It'll be great.
There's no way to protect Freeze Peach other than to establish a totalitarian dictatorship.
Mm-hmm but this one has an open bar.
See this is the thing about the right is that they just want to win.
If there's anything I've learned from being like around people on the far right my entire life it is that they just want to own libs.
They just want their enemies to lose and if that means killing themselves in the process then Yeah!
Let's go!
Yeah.
Suicide cult.
Isn't there rules against former members of the military sort of advocating for the overthrow of American democracy or something?
Yeah, but... Yeah, but, okay guys, one of those, eh, you know, we'll let it slide this time.
I gotcha.
I think that hallway monitor's been asleep for a couple of decades, maybe even centuries at this point.
He didn't do anything.
And no one did anything.
And no one can remember.
He did nothing wrong, right?
No one should be able to remember anything.
We should abolish Wikipedia.
We should all be born today.
Cool.
So yes, thanks so much again, Chelsea, for joining us.
Yeah, thank you.
Fascinating stuff.
Thanks so much, Chelsea.
Thank you.
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.
Please also go to patreon.com slash XYChelsea and subscribe there for five bucks a month to help Chelsea continue making video content, doing all the amazing stuff that she's doing.
When you subscribe, you help us all stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
We usually stream twice a week at twitch.tv slash QAnonAnonymous.
Other Twitch handles you can follow are Julian Field, Liv Agar, Florida Flynn, which is me, and of course, XYChelsea87 on Twitch.
For everything else, there's the website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
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-Q.
(sad music)
(sad music)
♪ Here's room 506 ♪ ♪ It's enough to make you sick ♪
Bridget's all wrapped up in foil.
You wonder if she can uncoil.
Here they come now.
See them run now.
Here they come now.
Chelsea girls.
Here's room 115.
Filled with the St.
Em' Queens.
Magic Margaro, you wonder just how high they go.
Here they come now.
See them run now.
Here they come now, Jersey girls.
Here's Pope, dear, on Dean.
Bronis treated him so mean.
She wants another scene, she wants to be A human being.
