A doomsday bunker beneath a mansion in Kentucky. A paranoid liquor store chain owner who got involved in right wing politics and went down the QAnon rabbithole. A terrible tragedy.
Plus, the return of QAnon news!
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Music by Roman85, Matthew Delatorre, Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 198 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Home to Die In episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
This week, we'll be exploring the story of a former Kentucky state representative who built a massive luxury home with an underground bunker designed to survive the apocalypse.
We'll trace his path from working at the ATF, to owning a successful chain of liquor stores, to running for government and ultimately falling down the QAnon rabbit hole.
Unfortunately, this story ends in tragedy and horror.
But before all that... QAnon News!
Yeah, you know, we did the Reddit AMA, and one of the questions we got was, why did you stop doing QAnon news?
And my answer was, basically, it felt like QAnon news was just the news now.
It felt like we wanted to give you something a little different than what you can see in just regular news coverage.
I mean, just a hair different.
It seems like just QAnon is everywhere, so I just, I don't know, I stopped doing it.
But I got something to talk about now, and the big thing is that Ron Watkins finished last in his Congressional Republican primary.
Ron Watkins, one-time 8th Coon Administrator and prime suspect for being one of the people behind Q, where it's running for Congress in Arizona's 2nd District.
The campaign has not been going well and has been hindered by lackluster debate performances and weak fundraising efforts.
In the last month of the campaign, he disappeared from the campaign trail entirely.
In a strange sequence of events, Ron revealed that the January 6th committee reached out in an attempt to serve him a subpoena.
He stopped appearing in public in Arizona, and then Q broke a years-long silence to make five more Q drops, the last of which attacked the January 6th committee directly, coincidentally.
Local Arizona reporter Bram Resnick with the NBC affiliate KPNX tried to determine Ron's whereabouts, but he did not have much luck.
In a tweet last month, Resnick said, quote, "Arizona may have seen the last of Ron Watkins.
Interview set for July 11th fell through. Campaign contact says he was on business travel.
Another Arizona 2nd District candidate says Ron Watkins hasn't been seen in weeks."
Ah, this is like in the in the fairy tale when the old man in a tattered cloak shows up with a
wagon on wheels and is, you know, selling potions and stuff and everybody buys the potions and then
they and then they go to be like, wait a minute, these potions, it's just tonic water. And they
go back to the spot where he was and he's mysteriously vanished.
You can just hear the creaking wheels in the distance over the hill.
Sorry, Rubes!
So long!
Former President Trump held a rally in Arizona on July 23rd, but Ron didn't even make it to that event, even though representatives of his campaign were in attendance.
During that rally, Trump actually endorsed Ron's opponent and the man who would go on to win the primary, Eli Crane.
Trump's endorsement was actually met with boos.
Yeah, but Trump knows.
He's like, I gotta pick the winner, otherwise I look like a loser.
And a highly respected man just endorsed by me today, future congressman for the 2nd District, Eli Crane.
[Cheering]
Thank you, Eli.
(audience laughing)
But you like me, right?
But you like me, okay, alright.
Yeah, well, you still like me though, come on.
An incredible specimen.
Now, when the dust cleared on the primary election, Ron Watkins was 7th out of 7 candidates, earning about 3,000 votes with 80% of the ballots counted as of this recording.
So, not great.
Now, Ron Watkins did not offer the most graceful concession note.
So he said this on Telegram.
Elijah Crane raised the most money in my race by using a highly paid DC consultant team.
While Elijah Crane may be a bought and paid for rhino, he may yet be better than the dirty Democrat Tom O'Halloran.
Good luck!
So my opponent in the primary might be better than the Democrat.
Ron's coming around.
He's coming around.
We're going to get him.
We're going to get him and he will do a brand new QAnon for a brand new political party.
And it's going to be great.
I just don't think they can put the old band back together.
I think they're just really sad about that.
If Q comes back and starts attacking Elijah Crane, I think those will be a little much.
The other big election news of the night is that Secretary of State candidate Mark Fincham won the primary for Arizona's race.
So that is a bit of an issue because Mark Fincham is a member of a coalition of candidates organized by QAnon influencer Wano7 who are attempting to install election deniers into Secretary of State positions.
Fincham is actually the fifth member of this coalition to win a nomination.
In November, Fincham will face off against Democratic challenger Adrian Fontes.
Fincham has described himself as an oath-keeper and repeatedly downplayed right-wing violence.
For example, he claimed that the violence during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville He also pushed the absurd idea that the January 6th insurrection was instigated by Antifa.
He, of course, is closely affiliated with QAnon.
He spoke at the QAnon conference in Las Vegas, repeatedly used QAnon-related hashtags, and even posted a screenshot of a Q-drop on Gab on February 13th, 2021.
Here's what Finchem said on episode of the Christian news program Victory News last year about the elite child trafficking cabal.
There are certain things you can't unsee, and things you can't unlearn.
I believe that God's hand is on this work for them, and to get to the point where they're finding so many kids.
We've got a serious problem in this nation, and that's one of the things that disturbs me so much about our current congressional state of affairs.
There's a lot of people involved in a pedophile network and the distribution of children.
And that makes me absolutely sick.
And that is the war that we should be fighting here domestically, rooting that out and finding out every single person who's involved in that kind of behavior.
And unfortunately, there's a whole lot of elected officials that are involved in that.
Wow.
I shouldn't be shocked at that, but that is shocking.
Incredible, the guy's fucking face.
I love the idea of like, oh man, I was supposed to receive my children, but the supply chain is failing.
There's no more children in any of the aisles at the child store.
This is socialism.
Children are being restricted in Biden's economy.
They're putting unnecessary tariffs on child sellers.
It's really hard to overemphasize the degree to which Mark Fincham is a maniac.
If he loses the election in November, he absolutely will not concede.
In fact, he said he wouldn't concede if he lost the primary.
And if he does win, then he will never recognize an election victory by one of his political opponents in the state of Arizona in his capacity as Secretary of State.
If Democrats win Arizona in the 2024 presidential election, Looking forward to finding out what animals and bugs live in the reeds in this territory.
Yeah, maybe time to rethink what kind of powers the Secretary of State has.
that'll look like. America has never seen a Q-drop posting Secretary of State before. This is uncharted territory.
Looking forward to finding out what animals and bugs live in the reeds in this territory.
Yeah, maybe time to rethink what kind of powers the Secretary of State has.
You know, you might have to learn how to hunt and gather animals and bugs in order to survive if that happens.
Okay, I'm going in the pod then.
Fuck it.
I'm eating the bugs.
Good protein.
The larva.
A home to die in.
In 1969, a man named Edgar Morgan opened Morgan's Whiskey Store with his wife Norma Jean in Perry County, Kentucky.
Their son, Clinton Wesley Morgan, was 19 years old at the time and studying political science and history at Cumberland College.
He would help them out with a store on his time off, which gave him a taste of independent business ownership.
After graduating, he went on to study accounting at Eastern Kentucky University, where he graduated in 1974.
The next year, he got a job as an auditor for the Internal Revenue Service before transferring to its Criminal Investigations Division.
He would later claim that it's because he didn't like how they conducted their audits.
He took a liking to law enforcement, and soon joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, where he claims to have helped break gambling and weapons rings and raid marijuana growers in southern Ohio.
During his time with law enforcement, Morgan also claims to have served on the protection detail for Teddy Kennedy and Walter Mondale.
In the early 80s, President Ronald Reagan reduced the number of ATF agents with the intention of merging the operation with another agency.
Around the same time, Morgan's father fell ill, so he moved back to Kentucky and helped his parents run their liquor store.
By 1982, he had taken out a loan and purchased a business, Pete's Liquor, in Richmond, Kentucky.
Over the next 30 years, Morgan scaled up his operation and changed its name multiple times from Wesley's Warehouse Liquor to Mega Liquor, and finally, Liquor World, which would grow into a four-store chain and make him a multi-millionaire.
Over that time, he married, had a daughter, divorced, remarried, and had a second daughter.
At some point, he dropped his first name, Clinton, and opted to go by his middle name, Wesley.
He also grew to hate taxes and regulation, and when Obama took office in 2008, Morgan was not happy.
He would later explain to the Lexington Herald-Leader, I could see the handwriting on the wall that Obama was trying to change our country into a socialist country.
He wasn't alone.
By 2009, the Tea, or Taxed Enough Already Party, was in full swing.
It was a neolibertarian right-wing movement supported by billionaires like the Koch brothers.
But for Morgan, a growing paranoia pushed him even further right.
Here's from a New York Times article by Campbell Robertson.
My feelings were that we were going to have civil unrest because there was so much going on with Obama, Mr. Morgan said.
He believed that people were going to rise up against the attempts to overhaul health care and restrict guns, and that societal collapse would soon follow.
He envisioned roving bands of gangs hunting for food and necessities in the aftermath.
He bought riot gear, bulletproof vests, and a small arsenal of firearms so that if you had to engage a band of marauders, You would have a chance to save your family.
Okay.
So we really think we're on the verge of Mad Max here.
Morgan grew obsessed with providing for and protecting his family from the upcoming apocalypse.
So he decided to build a home on 200 acres of lakefront property he owned near Richmond.
But this wouldn't just be any home.
It would have seven bedrooms, three kitchens, heated floors, a steam room, a saltwater pool, a six-car garage.
And then there was the bunker, which Morgan called the basement.
Here's from the New York Times article.
The keystone of his survival plan was what lay underneath.
A shelter 26 feet underground beneath a 39-inch solid ceiling.
It contained 2,000 square feet of bedrooms and common space along the stock food pantry and an air filtration system and two escape tunnels, one of them 100 feet long.
The company that installed the shelter suggested that Mr. Morgan keep quiet about it because... If anything ever happened, there'd be people that try to take the bunker.
And I've included some photos of this bunker.
Wow.
This is like the base I always fantasize about building in DayZ, but like can never get far enough in the game to do so.
I mean, honestly, I'm taking notes.
This is pretty solid.
Air filtration.
You got a comfy little living room.
This is, you got like, yes, a neatly stocked pantry.
This guy's got a good setup.
He estimated that about 30 people could live down there with him.
Wow.
Morgan explained the rationale behind what he built to the Lexington Herald leader.
"I just wanted some place safe. I saw the bad stuff that was going on in the world,
and I think there's a lot of bad stuff going on in the world right now. If we don't get our act
together, we're going to end up in a civil war. I consider myself to be a Christian and a religious
person. I felt like something was telling me to do that, so that's what I did. Now, it may prove to
be nothing or it may prove to be prophetic. I don't know. I guess we'll see." Morgan later
explained to the New York Times, "My vision was that I was building a place I was going to die in.
The finest everything. I spared no expense."
In 2010, while construction was underway on the luxurious above-ground section, Morgan and his second wife moved into the bunker with their three-year-old daughter, Sydney.
It had no windows.
That same year, he joined Facebook.
Here's one of his first posts.
Tomorrow, Friday, July 23rd, I will be 60 years old.
I can't believe this much time has passed.
What makes my 60th birthday amazing is that on July 24th, Sydney, my young daughter, will be three.
Now how unreal is that?
God has truly blessed me.
But Morgan was furious about what he perceived as a fallen country.
Here's another post from that year.
All right, everyone.
It's almost time to kick out Obama's communists, socialists, and criminals.
Take this country back!
We need to return to our core values of God, Family and country.
I love America and will die for it if necessary.
P.S.
I love Sarah Palin.
Morgan began avidly supporting Rand Paul, who was running for Senate in Kentucky at the time.
In one Facebook post, he explained that he, his wife, and their eldest daughter Jordan all supported Paul.
Please, everyone, please help us take our country back.
Support Dr. Rand Paul.
Dr. Paul will help restore our constitutional rights and stop an out-of-control government.
Lindsay, Jordan and myself will do everything we can to help Dr. Paul win this race.
After Dr. Paul wins tomorrow, I hope my friends who voted for Trey Grayson will join us.
You will see that Dr. Paul was the right man for U.S.
Senate.
His daughter Jordan was 21 at the time and studying political science at Eastern Kentucky University, following in the footsteps of her father.
Ever since high school, she had been involved in right-wing politics, volunteering for various campaigns.
By 2014, Jordan was finishing up her studies at the Chase Law School of Northern Kentucky University.
During her studies, she interned for Rand Paul and was the president of her university's chapter of the Federalist Society, a right-wing libertarian outfit that advocated for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
NPR describes them as a, quote, hugely powerful nationwide organization of conservative lawyers.
It was funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money and aimed to stack the courts.
Every conservative member of the Supreme Court today was or is a member of the Society.
In 2014, Wesley Morgan posted to Facebook about how proud he was of his daughter's involvement.
It is safe to say the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
So proud of my daughter Jordan, who is president of the Federalist Society at NKU Chase Law and will graduate with her JD in May.
She orchestrated this event with Senator Rand Paul, And I hear it was a hit!
Morgan had been donating to campaigns ever since he got involved with the Tea Party, but he found that the candidates he supported weren't doing enough to advance his vision for the country, so he decided to run for government himself.
Specifically, he would challenge Rita Smart, a Democrat representing the 81st District in the Kentucky House of Representatives.
Here's a list of Morgan's priority issues that he later drew up.
Abolishing the state income tax and cut red tape that both hinder small businesses.
Protect the right to keep and bear arms.
Reform the property tax.
Reform education.
Reform the criminal justice system.
Defend the Constitution of the United States.
Preserve the pension system.
Protect the right to life.
Get the government out and put God back in schools.
Get the government off of the people's back.
Morgan lost the race, but grew even more determined to become a politician.
Meanwhile, his daughter Jordan was growing more involved as well.
After passing the bar, she went to work for Governor Matt Bevin.
Bevin had lost a 2014 primary against Mitch McConnell, who he positioned himself to the right of.
He went on to narrowly win his 2015 gubernatorial bid and spent his time in office doing a variety of awful things.
He passed the anti-union right-to-work legislation, several laws limiting abortion access, and a law allowing carrying concealed handguns without permits.
He also pushed to cut pensions for teachers, which led to a protest.
Bevins called the teachers ignorant and selfish and, according to a Vox article, claimed that kids were likely exposed to sexual assault because teachers were protesting instead of staying in their classrooms.
He eventually apologized for the comment, but not before saying teachers were acting like thugs.
Jordan served as deputy finance director for his campaign and later accepted a role in his administration.
A year and a half later, she would go on to accept a position as Assistant Commonwealth Attorney for the 54th Judicial Circuit in Boone and Gallatin Counties.
In 2015, Trump announced his campaign for presidency.
Wesley Morgan immediately supported him and posted a picture of them together on Facebook that year.
In 2016, Morgan ran for Kentucky House Rep again, buoyed by a wave of pro-Trump voters and endorsed by Governor Matt Bevin.
This time, he narrowly won, unseating Rita Smart.
Morgan was spending a lot more time on social media now, accusing Obama of being a Muslim in league with ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
He explained that they were waging civilizational jihad in America, and that Obama was an enemy insurgent.
His Facebook feed grew more and more conspiratorial.
He posted about Nibiru, or Planet X, and the potential upcoming apocalypse.
When Trump won, Morgan was overjoyed, but his own political career was meeting quite a few obstacles.
Here's from the New York Times article.
Within days of taking office, he had become a lightning rod for criticism and derision.
Good government groups expressed shock when Mr. Morgan proposed a slew of bills that would help the retail liquor business.
Democratic lawmakers lambasted his measures allowing teachers to carry guns and granting immunity to motorists who unintentionally hit protesters blocking traffic.
Getting closer to, what was it, that video game where like the point is to run over people?
It was a PC game.
Am I the only one who played that one?
Carmageddon.
Carmageddon, yeah.
So he's trying to make Carmageddon a little closer to real.
I remember playing that as a teenager.
In retrospect, pretty fucked up.
Pretty fucked up.
Yeah.
Well, it was shocking then.
I mean, that was in the days of you got your hands on the game because you knew it was bad.
You knew that it was bad vibes, you know?
It wasn't as bad as Postal, but it was pretty bad.
No, no.
Also one that I played, yeah.
Oh God.
Morgan also drew criticism for introducing a bill to ban marinas from enforcing a lien against a boat owner's boat or interfering in that owner's access to their boat.
Once you start protecting the rights of boat owners, I'm afraid you've revealed yourself to be a bit out of touch.
At the time he owed Lee's Ford dock on Lake Cumberland $28,000 in relation to the boat that he owned.
So pretty clearly pulling a... I think it was Ventura that immediately passed like jet ski law stuff and he had like three jet skis.
I gotta say, it is so amazing to see national policy attempted to be shaped by people's petty debts that they fucked up on their own accord.
And they're like, wow, this is a universal problem for all Americans who potentially owe tens of thousands of dollars to a particular boat doc going by the name of Lee's, who I won't mention.
Lee.
Annoying guy.
Put boxes in front of my boat.
I think it's state level just because he's a Kentucky representative.
But still, it is very funny to have your state's laws change based on like what is owned by the representative.
Like what expensive objects he has at home.
It's a little bit like it's like it's like this is a bill to make it legal to shoot the 12 year old neighbor boy who tramples through someone's prize petunias.
The bill failed to pass.
In May of 2017, Morgan was charged with breaking one of the liquor laws he had attempted to change.
Here's from the Lexington Herald-Leader.
State Representative C. Wesley Morgan, Republican from Richmond, has been charged with breaking one of the half-dozen liquor laws he attempted to change during the 2017 General Assembly.
Morgan, 66, who owns a chain of liquor world retail stores in South Central Kentucky, was charged April 26th with illegally transporting alcoholic beverages through dry or moist territory.
I mean, to be fair to him, these are absurd Prohibition-era laws.
Yeah, it's a little bit, you can't even drive liquor through a dry territory.
That's, yeah, seems kind of unnecessary.
But I mean, look, I mean, this is the American dream, right?
You don't like a law, you run for office, you know, you get elected and you get to change the law that you didn't like that affects you directly.
The insanely specific law.
A Barbourville police officer said he caught Morgan illegally carrying, quote, a large amount of assorted liquor in the back of a 2012 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck.
I mean, I feel like it's really dumb on his part to even get caught.
he was moving the liquor between his stores.
I mean, I feel like it's really dumb on his part to even get caught.
It feels like you should be able to cover that up if it's just in the back of a pickup truck.
Why are you leaving that exposed for the officer to find?
Fourth Amendment, man.
He must have just had like a huge pile of like jangling bottles barely kind of holding on.
Yeah.
Or the conversation went something like this.
He's like, well, Morgan, you know, I, I, I got to write you up for something.
If it's not the DUI, it's got to be the, the open liquor bottles in the back of the truck.
I mean, look, it's going to be a less of a fence.
You know, you won't have to, it's not going to be a strike on your license.
It's a compromise.
It might have also been political opponents kind of knowing that he did this all the time and going to, you know, make sure he got arrested with a friendly cop.
This happened in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, with two Warring fish taco shops.
There was there was a very a very popular fish taco place.
On Hillhurst, and then another one opened nearby.
And the second fish taco place was much higher quality.
The tacos were better.
It was getting better buzz.
But the restaurant owner was operating out of basically a parking lot.
He had, you know, fryer sort of set up.
Yeah.
And soon after, soon after, you know, that place got super popular, it disappeared one day.
And word on the street was that the original I would love to do an episode on that.
you know, tattled on him because he was like, "Wow, he's violating all of these
restaurant laws," which he probably was, but you know, had it been a different kind
of cuisine, you know, maybe, you know, maybe he'd still be there today.
Yeah. Jake Rokotansky reporting on the 2018 taco war.
I would love to do an episode on that. I don't think there's much there beyond what I've just said.
Well, at least the listener got that.
Over the course of his mandate, Morgan grew bitter about his fellow Republicans.
When it came out that Kentucky House Speaker Jeff Hoover had settled a sexual harassment claim by a member of his staff, Morgan took to Twitter and called for his impeachment.
Hoover later resigned as Speaker but remained state representative.
Morgan then accused Republican leadership, including Mitch McConnell, of helping Hoover cover up the scandal.
In his eyes, they were all corrupt.
Then, in 2018, Morgan was successfully unseated in the Republican primary by Deanna L. Frazier.
Here's from an article for The Courier-Journal by Darcy Costello.
State Representative C. Wesley Morgan, who lost to a primary challenger on Tuesday night, says his defeat was orchestrated by Republican leaders in the state.
So now, he's flipping parties.
In a fiery Facebook post, Morgan said he will support the Democratic candidate for his House seat in District 81 rather than his Republican opponent and that he will be a thorn in the side to Republicans who support quote, corrupt individuals.
Tonight, the GOP lost a true conservative and patriot.
He wrote, I will no longer be associated with the Republican Party.
And I think the very next day he went back on that.
He was like, oh, wait a second.
All of his Facebook friends were like, wait a minute, you're an Obama communist now?
Doesn't really work.
He got so mad he forgot how much he hated Democrats.
He is a very, like, vindictive man, for sure.
He's someone who never forgets a grudge.
In that same article, he explained why the Republican leadership, including Mitch McConnell, had conspired to oust him.
I wasn't a go-along to get along.
I can assure you right now that if I had went along with leadership and what they wanted, I would have never had an opponent in the primary and would have had their blessing.
I'm not made like that.
I'm not someone's gopher.
I'm a free thinker.
What I have observed since I became involved in politics is that Republicans do just fine by criticizing when someone else is in power.
But when they get in power, they cannot govern.
And the reason they can't govern is because they're consumed with self-power.
So, not playing well with the other kids in the yard.
By 2019, Morgan's hatred for Mitch McConnell had reached a fever pitch.
He decided that there was only one way to clean up the Republican Party of swamp creatures like him.
He would primary Mitch McConnell.
Okay.
Primary, I mean, Mitch McConnell is a demon, but Jesus Christ, he is the most effective, you know, Senate leader, maybe ever.
Yeah, he's the most powerful Republican, essentially, and you're gonna go and be like, yeah, I'm just gonna primary you.
I just lost, like, a smaller race, but, uh, fuck you.
I mean, a lot of this is driven by spite.
I mean, I really like his approach.
It's like, how do I strike back against the people who I am mad at right in this moment?
He doesn't think about tomorrow or consequences or plausibility or any of this bullshit.
And so, in early 2019, Wesley Morgan announced that he was running for Senator of Kentucky.
Here he is speaking to the host of Hey Kentucky, a show on NBC's local channel.
A lot of people would say as a Republican, choosing to run against Mitch McConnell in a Senate race would be insane.
What made you decide to do it?
Well, country boy was 65 to 1.
That's true!
And you never know that Mitch may be another Maximum Security.
By being in Washington as long as he has, with all the corruption going on, I just don't see how he gets around not being exposed for something before it's over.
Well let me ask you, you've made as a centerpiece of your campaign that you believe Senator McConnell is corrupt.
Why do you say that?
What I dislike about Mitch McConnell is that he will wet his finger and stick it in the air in whichever way the wind is blowing, it's which way he goes.
Let's take Donald Trump as an example.
Mitch was totally anti-Donald Trump all the way up until Trump wins.
When Trump wins and all of a sudden He looks at the polls in Kentucky and sees that Donald Trump's 61% approval rating, his approval rating is 33%.
So what does he do?
He starts becoming Donald Trump's best buddy.
So the mention at the beginning of 65 to 1 is about a racehorse that I think won like their local race or something?
Oh, okay.
They're both familiar with this particular race?
Yeah, he said country boy was 65 to 1.
Well, you know about Country Boy, of course.
Famous horse race two months ago, 65 to 1.
And what'd he do?
Well, ride across the finish line first, winning the race.
Because that's what happens when you finish first.
You win.
Yeah.
So maybe he should, like, shoot himself with steroids or something, because that horse got juiced.
I'll tell you what, we get a short little man on my back, whipping me with a switch, I'll tell you what, you'll carry me right over that line.
And Mitch McConnell, he won't know what hit him.
The odds 3 to 1, people be winning lots of money betting on me.
I also like that his main criticism of Mitch McConnell is basically that he's a savvy politician, that he reads the political environment in every particular moment and then adjusts his position accordingly.
That's basically why he will die in office, because he knows exactly how to read the political environment and then, you know, surf on that.
Well, of course, Travis View.
That's nothing like me, who decided that I would denounce the Republican Party and run as a Democrat.
I've never done anything like this.
Well, yeah, he went back on that a day later.
He was just angry.
He had an angry Facebook post.
I get it.
I shouldn't make fun of him for that.
Everybody can relate.
You know, you lash out, you know.
During the interview, Morgan also complained that Mitch McConnell baselessly smears his political opponents.
Let's look at everyone who's running against McConnell and let's look at all the people that McConnell has opposed.
I mean, he's either calling them pedophiles or crooks in some fashion or racists.
So, yeah, I suspect that probably he's going to come at me at a pretty hard rate.
In fact, I know he's going to.
But I'm 69 years old.
What do you care, right?
If he wants to come after an old man like me, then I'll go after an old man like him.
Speaking of pedophiles, three months prior to the interview, Wesley Morgan had started posting about QAnon.
His first public support of the conspiracy theory came on February 9th, when he reposted a video by In Pursuit of Truth, a Q-supporting conspiracy theorist, which he accompanied by this text.
Wake up, Kentucky!
Which U.S.
Senator has ties to China?
Which Senator repealed the Smith-Muntt Act, which made it legal to use propaganda in American news media, fake news, by slipping the law change into the 2013 National Defense Act?
Which U.S.
Senator slipped into the 2017 National Defense Act, H.R.
5181, that created a slush fund to be used to censor conservative content into social media platforms?
The answer to all these questions is Mitch McConnell.
Ten days later, he posted a video entitled, Ask the Q, from the same user to his official Senate campaign Facebook page, and wrote this.
At this point, how does anyone trust the fake news media?
Fake news media is being controlled by the deep state.
See, Wesley Morgan for U.S.
Senate is never mentioned in the deep state media.
Why?
Because it is okay to have deep state U.S.
Senator, but God forbid a constitutional conservative who will stand for U.S.
sovereignty and the rule of law.
A couple of days after that, he posted a video from long-running QAnon promoter X22 entitled, Trump just signaled it's a go.
It's coming.
Justice is coming.
Morgan wrote this.
Justice will soon be here.
Treason and sedition will be disclosed.
WWG1, WGA.
Hashtag, Ditch Mitch.
By August 2019, Wesley Morgan started live streaming and answering questions on Facebook with an employee of his.
They called the show Hashtag MAGA Morgan Hour before renaming it Operation Liberty for Kentucky in America with Wesley Morgan.
It's mostly boring stuff, a lot of ranting about Mitch McConnell and the Constitution, but here's a part I found pretty telling of Morgan's state of mind.
How many of you out there have seen the movie The Matrix?
Well, The Matrix is a movie about a big computer that is really running the lives, you know, that people really don't have control of their own life.
It's all being controlled by a program.
And you had when in the beginning, they had they had this savior type guy.
His name is Nemo.
It's Keanu Reeves.
And they he's offered two pills, a blue pill and the red pill.
If you take the blue pill, then you go back to sleep, you don't know any difference, you don't worry about nothing.
But if you take the red pill, then your mind opens up and you get all the truth.
Well, you know about Nemo.
You take the blue pill, you go back to the sea anemone with your friends and your family and your dad.
You take the red pill, you set off on a wondrous adventure through the ocean,
and while your dad chases after you.
Who can forget Finding the One by Pixar?
Oh well, we just love that little orange fish.
We love that orange fish and his slow motion diving and dodging and the shark's coming at him and he's holding his hand out and he's telling the shark no.
And then the fish, you know, he's swimming up slow motion and he kicked the big shark, you know, right across the face, you know, turned him into cold, turned him into computer cold.
Yeah.
All right.
That is, that is a Finding Nemo meets the Matrix.
Funny, funny.
Good stuff.
When one person tuning in mentioned that they were being deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Morgan launched into a description of QAnon's version of the storm.
Isa Davis says I'm going to get my orders to be received first week of December.
Well, I think they're getting ready to fill it up with some unruly Democrats, Dave.
So you'll have to take care of them.
They should.
Don't use any brutality on them.
They'll be crying like babies.
No waterboarding or anything like that.
No waterboarding, nothing like that.
You just make sure they stay incarcerated until we get them tried and convicted of treason and sedition.
And then we'll look at coming back to the Washington Mall and maybe making them pay publicly for what they've done.
Fantasizing about the hangings on the Washington Mall.
Hey Dave, look, no waterboarding.
I just want to pump Imagine Dragons into their jail cell for 24 hours straight.
That'll set them right.
Right before you drag them out for a stand on a wooden Wooden platform with a couple stairs going up to it.
You know, everybody knows what I'm talking about.
Yep.
In another broadcast, Morgan lists his media diet, and I'm pretty sure you boys will recognize a few names that he drops.
What are your top three news outlets since all three of them shoved fake news?
That's a tough one.
Well, you know, I watch a little bit of Fox, but that's all, and only very select programs.
Most of them, thank God they got rid of Shepard Smith.
He was an absolute communist, there's no doubt about it.
I watch some Hannity, but he aggravates me to death because he keeps cutting his guests to be trying to tell him something, and he'll cut them off.
Laura Ingram is probably the best show.
I watch that more as far as TV, but I watch very, very little TV.
I watch the X-22 Report on YouTube and the Red Pill 78.
And let's see, is Pursuit of Truth.
And those things are independents that's reporting the truth.
Weeping Angels is good.
The Zero Brain too.
And these people are reporting the truth.
And that's what you want, is the truth, because You know, if you have truth, you know where to go.
All of those are bad, but Serial Brain 2 is an especially weird brain scrambling one.
Yeah, so basically a who's who of, I guess, the most prolific QAnon broadcasters.
Yeah, and the ones who make it kind of respectable, quote-unquote.
No, no In The Matrix there.
Didn't mention In The Matrix.
He's the one who was excluded, but everyone else.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's a who's who there.
No, he doesn't want like morning radio style, which is In The Matrix.
He wants news delivered by a respectable, young to middle-aged man.
Yeah.
I was just gonna say, like, can you imagine being, like, a 70-year-old guy watching Zach from Red Pill 78 and being like, well, this young man, he speaks the truth.
I trust him.
I like his checkered shirt that he wears.
I like his neon background.
It's very bright and colorful.
It's a good way to deliver a very, uh...
Important information it locks the viewer in.
I'm a fan of chillwave aesthetic.
www.twitch.tv.
Now what's going on?
Whoa!
A lot of video games.
A lot of people playing something called Apex Legends.
No, I'm not interested in all that.
Let me find red pill 7a8 here.
By the end of 2019, Morgan was done mincing his words about Mitch McConnell.
He also suspected that there was a secret plot against his candidacy by the media and big tech.
Mitch McConnell is a deep state creature.
The deep state is aiding and abetting him in their attempt to silence me.
I'm being shadow banned and blocked at every turn on social media, and even my emails continue to be rejected by email providers.
They're shadow banning my email.
Oh, God.
When I filed with the Secretary of State on December 17, 2019 to run for U.S.
Senate, not one member of the news media showed up for the event.
I called a reporter from the Lexington Herald-Leader and asked him why had he not attended, especially since he had told me that morning he would be there.
He told me I had been instructed by his supervisor not to attend.
By February 2020, Morgan was publicly stating that declass—QAnon's belief that secret documents will be declassified—was just around the corner, and that the Attorney General was about to indict all these deep state politicians.
He also began interacting directly with QAnon accounts.
Here he is replying to a post by QSentMe77.
QSentMe77. QLisa77, also known as QSentMe77, says "#QAnon is not a cult."
Hashtag Q is a self-deprogramming therapy to deprogram yourself out of the cult of mindless indoctrination through use of Socratic method.
Q provides info, then pushes researching, logical thought, altruism, and the Constitution.
These are never goals of a cult.
You are 100% correct in your assessment of Q. We know the truth, and the truth will set us free.
WWG1, WGA.
But this was like several months.
This was like four months after that original tweet.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That he's responding to.
So he's seeking out this QAnon content on Twitter.
Morgan was clearly going deeper down the rabbit hole.
On March 30th, he posted two crudely copy-pasted Q-drops directly to his Facebook page.
The first was just a PNG of the American flag, which showed up as just the file extension with a PNG at the end, so it didn't work out.
And the second was a long rant about evil, corruption, and the fight ahead for patriots.
Then on June 20th, Morgan posted a Media Matters article entitled, Here are the QAnon supporters running for Congress in 2020.
Here's what he had to say about that.
Hey guys, look, I made it to George Soros' hit list.
I am listed in Media Matters as a Q conspiracy theorist.
For those who aren't familiar with Q, it is an organization of patriots fighting the deep state.
And Q plus is the president.
So deeply red pilled at this point.
Yeah.
Sorry, Alex.
Yeah.
I think it is an Alex article.
Look what you did, Alex.
Look what you did.
Look what you did.
On June 22nd, a day before his primary against McConnell, Wesley Morgan posted a campaign video holding a rifle and wearing a Trump 2020 ball cap.
He can be seen standing near his home in a green field.
This is Wesley Morgan running for United States Senate against Mitch McConnell.
You know, since Mitch McConnell became our United States Senator in 1985, he's voted six times against the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment says, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Now, if you're honest with yourself, you know what shall not be infringed means.
So I can tell you this, I will never be the Senator that Mitch McConnell was because I will protect the Second Amendment.
Because it means exactly what it says.
The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.
Let me tell you a little thing about history.
You go back and you look at Adolf Hitler when he took over Germany, or you look at Mao Zedong when he took over China, or Stalin when he took over Russia.
The first thing they wanted to do is deprive the citizens of their right to bear arms.
You know what they did after that?
Then they started sending them to concentration camps and kill them.
That will never happen with Senator Morgan.
And if Antifa, any of them comes up to Madison County, Kentucky and
wants to come to my house, I will protect my family and I will protect my property.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
That's what they'll get.
So, warning to all, I protect my constitutional rights, I protect my Second Amendment rights, and I will protect your Second Amendment rights.
Thank you very much and vote for C. Wesley Morgan for the United States Senate tomorrow, June the 23rd, 2020.
Thank you.
I'm just going to pretend like those seven rifle shots didn't completely blow my eardrums out as I was wearing no protective gear over my ears when I fired that rifle.
Just firing it on his property.
It's also unclear if he was aiming at anything in particular.
He was wiggling the rifle up and down and just sort of firing randomly.
He was doing the old spray and pray.
You know what's fucked up though?
I was thinking about this watching that video.
You know what I see?
I see a guy in a beautiful landscape.
He's got a beautiful picture-esque background.
Rolling green hills.
20 acres.
20 acres.
Beautiful farmland.
And he's so upset.
It's like, dude, you live in this beautiful area.
You're so blessed, for lack of a better word, to have all of this land and to be able to just fucking spray and pray on your own property and it doesn't matter.
What are you complaining about?
It is this, I think we see this all the time from the right, is this invented oppression.
You know, that when you see them in the places that they live, or how they're interacting with their communities, is completely contradictory to the message that they have, or the fears that they have, or the paranoia.
He's a multi-millionaire.
He could be swimming in his saltwater pool, or hanging out in his steam room, or watching a movie on a giant screen TV.
Or being in his under- But it's all empty! There's nothing there! It sucks!
Yeah, it's like being in his big underground bunker where he's gonna save, you know, 30 people from his town.
But instead, he's like firing an AR-15 at an imaginary Antifa member who-
who snuck onto his property to challenge him.
No.
It's like, nobody's ever coming for you, dude.
No.
Nobody's ever going to come there.
You're never going to have to, you know, murder a trespasser on your property.
Well.
What?
You'll see.
Oh dear.
It's not good.
Oh man.
The next day, Wesley Morgan lost the Kentucky Republican Senate primary to Mitch McConnell, coming in second place with only 6.2% of the vote.
McConnell, for comparison, garnered 82.8%.
It took Morgan 20 days to post his next and final video to YouTube.
In it, he calls Mitch McConnell a son of a bitch and a deep state puppet, explaining that the Republican machine rigged the election and censored him on a national and local level.
He ranted for nearly an hour about the crooked Republican Party, stopping to briefly thank the people who voted for him.
He even ended up calling out Rand Paul for not supporting his candidacy.
Explaining that his one-time hero could never be forgiven.
Three months later, in October of 2020, Morgan seemed in slightly better spirits.
He was gearing up for Trump's big win in November.
He even posted a MAGA YMCA video, which was made by Ricky Rebel, Joy Villa, and The Deplorable Choir, among a few others.
You'll notice that those two first are Q supporters.
And I'm gonna play this video until Travis and Jake beg me to stop.
Oh god.
[Music]
We're all human, and we don't segregate.
Just like women, how big, who better, who great.
We are all in this together.
Colors, all get what they prove.
And they stand for, every one of you.
And together, here's what we're gonna do We're gonna make America great
Woo!
Everybody sing M-A-G-A M-A-G-A
Let them hear our voice Oh, your girly voice
Spare everything, so Alright.
We can turn it off now.
Okay.
Yeah.
That'll be quite enough of that, Julian.
Yeah, it was almost as bad as the Hillary campaign celebrity fight song video.
Yeah.
Not quite that bad, but pretty bad.
When Trump lost, Morgan was plunged once more into a world of bitter conspiracy theories.
He reposted one of his friend's statements about the Ten Days of Darkness.
In his post, his friend explained that, quote, By the end of November, Morgan was on the Kraken bandwagon, believing Sidney Powell and Lin Wood would help reverse the election results.
Here are a couple of posts he made in December.
Patriots, don't be fooled by the MSM.
The President will prevail.
The traitors will never take office.
We will take back this country.
Just watch and see.
Do you really think the President and his military intelligence were not aware of all the election fraud that will be coming against him?
Do you think everything going on isn't by his choice?
This president is brilliant, a God-fearing man who loves his country.
He loves his country even more than his wealth.
He knew he had to let these traitors overplay their hand and reveal their true intentions and character.
Because most of you would have not believed him if he told you Mitch and Elaine were traitors.
But you are seeing the truth right before your eyes.
To understand everything, read the 14th Amendment, sections 3 and 4.
There is no doubt in my mind that he is in total control.
So, still fantasizing about everybody getting murdered and claiming that Trump will take the throne again soon.
Trump will go down as the greatest president in American history.
The man who unselfishly saved the republic.
So, still fantasizing about everybody getting murdered and claiming that Trump will take the throne again soon.
Of course, none of these predictions came to pass.
Morgan was sick and tired of Kentucky.
He listed his house, with the compound, on Zillow.
Here's from the New York Times article.
Perfect for grand-scale entertaining and family living, the listing read, with, quote, the highlight of the property being a $3 million, 2,000 square foot nuclear biological chemical fallout shelter.
He assumed the listing would be seen only by buyers interested in a $6.5 billion property, but it went viral.
The listing was reposted by the Instagram page Zillow Gone Wild, and people across the internet mocked his quote, cult compound.
By 2022, Morgan's home had still not found any buyers.
Not many people in the region could afford the $6.5 million price tag.
Morgan's daughter Jordan had moved back in with her dad and stepmom.
She was 32 now, and her half-sister Sydney was a teenager.
The entire family found itself stuck in the enormous home with its built-in bunker.
Jordan had accepted a job at a law firm in Lexington.
She was looking forward to moving out soon.
Morgan's liquor business was not doing as well as it once did.
Around the house, the mood was gloomy.
Even worse, sometimes the doorbell would ring in the middle of the night, but nobody was there when they opened the door.
It was creeping Jordan out.
She told her father that she was beginning to feel unsafe in the house.
Here's from the New York Times article.
She must have sensed that she was being watched, Morgan said.
Someone had been watching, marking the house's entry points and taking detailed notes on the family's movements.
Early on the morning of February 22, prosecutors say, the watcher, Shannon Gilday, a 23-year-old former soldier who lived in the Cincinnati suburbs, climbed up to a second-floor balcony and began his attack.
Some days later, Morgan described what happened that night to The Courier-Journal.
My daughter, Jordan Morgan, was killed by a lunatic.
He decided that he was going to come in and take her home and kill every member of our family.
I was doing some work on the back porch of my house, so I had some scaffolding up on the back of it.
So he climbed that scaffolding and broke into the upstairs door where Jordan had her Her bedroom and her little living room and her own bathroom.
And she was laying asleep in bed because she had got a new job at Reminger Law Firm in Lexington.
And she was in bed asleep.
Of course, this was at like 3.45 AM in the morning.
And this sorry, low-down piece of dog crap broke into that door He kicked her door open and shot her probably six, seven, eight times with an AR-15.
When he shot her, he killed her of course, that woke me up.
When I got up, I opened the French doors coming out of my bedroom.
Confronting him, he's coming down the steps with his AR-15 dressed in his little army fatigues.
He had a flat jacket on or a bulletproof vest.
That time he opened fire on me.
I immediately hit the floor.
He shot me three times.
I've been shot twice in the arm and once in the hip.
And at that point, I slammed the door, the French door.
My wife was able to come in behind me.
Get into our daughter's bedroom, our 14-year-old daughter's bedroom.
And then while she was doing that, I scampered across the floor behind my bed.
I came up with a Sig 9mm out of my top drawer.
I laid down on my bed, and I shot him 11 times.
I shot at him 11 times.
Now, did I hit him 11 times?
Probably not, but I'm pretty positive I did hit him.
After he did that, he went into the bathroom, the master bathroom.
And when he did that, I was able to retrieve another Sig 9mm.
Now at that time, I crawled away from the bed, all the way into the living area of the master bedroom and got behind the couch.
Then I engaged him again when he came out of the master bath.
And I think I shot him like eight times.
I shot at him 8 times, but again, I'm not positive I was hitting him because he had a flat jacket on.
And finally, I'm pretty positive I hit him the first time, and then at the time I retrieved the second SIG 9mm, I also picked up my cell phone.
When I picked up my cell phone and went behind the couch, I dialed 9-1-1.
When I was talking to the lady on the 9-1-1 call, I engaged him again and we went into a fire.
At the same time, he was firing at me with an AR-15, and those bullets were hitting in the front of the couch and not hitting me in the chest or in the head.
The same thing that was true when I engaged him the first time.
And he was hitting in my master bed.
In fact, all of that property has been taken out of my house now and been destroyed because there's so many gunshot bullets in it.
And then he retreated and went out the front door.
And as he was going out the front door, I was shooting at him.
So I suspect that I don't know if it was more because he was hit or because that he heard me calling 9-1-1.
Now, when 9-1-1, I was in my underwear.
I was in my underwear with shooting, engaged in a firefight in my master bedroom of my house.
This is a low life piece of dog crap.
And I hope I get to engage again.
Because the next time it would be a totally, totally different outcome.
It only took a few days before the police found Gilday, seemingly wandering the streets just a few miles from where the shooting occurred.
They arrested him and brought him in.
Within three hours, the young man had confessed to carrying out the attack.
They searched his home and found that he'd been researching local houses with bunkers.
A friend of Gilday's had dropped by his house after he had gone missing and found notes the young man had been taking about the layout, cameras, and access points of the Morgan home.
Gilday had even previously attempted to gain access to the bunker, to no avail.
A detective later explained at a hearing, His belief at the time was that given the current political environment in our country, as well as in the world at this time, So tragically, the shooter's attack appeared to have been motivated by similar beliefs to those Morgan held when he built the compound in the first place.
and his family and friends.
So tragically, the shooter's attack appeared to have been motivated by similar beliefs to those Morgan held when he
built the compound in the first place.
Here's from the New York Times article.
In the weeks after the shooting, news about Mr. Gilday trickled out.
A friend told the police that he had "a history of psychotic problems."
Neighbors described strange recent encounters in which he talked about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Mr. Gilday's mother said in a statement on Facebook that her son had, quote, not been of sound mind the last couple of weeks, distraught with the certainty a nuclear war was imminent.
He spoke of building a bunker and the CIA following him, she continued.
I tried to get him psychiatric help, but to no avail.
Mr. Morgan did not buy any of this.
The attack was so meticulously planned.
How could that be the work of an insane person, he asked.
He instead speculated about political forces that might have it in for him and his family.
He talked about hired assassins and past CIA experiments with brainwashing and suggested that a violent attack on the home of a Second Amendment champion like himself had all the signs of an operation to justify more gun control.
I just think that I was chosen to be a false flag.
He said, oh, this is so fucking he's like we're just we're just a society just fucking increasingly awash with
paranoid violence.
And because we're also awash with conspiracism, everybody is unable to process the horror in a, you know, a rational
way.
We're unable to actually recognize the genuine causes.
So everyone's just making up stories about the horrible forces that are killing us all the time.
Yeah, I mean, the young man and Morgan were both suffering from basically paranoid delusions and very similar ones, which is one of the kind of more tragic aspects of the entire situation, is that if he hadn't built that bunker, that kid wouldn't have researched and found the bunker.
And if he hadn't run for government, no one would even know about that bunker or whatever.
I mean, he blames his campaign, but it's true that he did list it on Zillow eventually when he realized, I need to move out of here because my liquor store isn't doing well.
Yeah.
I mean... And of course, like, the most tragic thing is that the individual who died, his daughter, had nothing to do with any of this!
Yeah.
After the attack, Morgan could no longer bear to look at the home he had built.
He took his family, and they moved to Tennessee.
The house and its bunker remain listed on Zillow to this day.
Wesley Morgan has continued to post on Facebook, calling the shooter a quote, monster demon, and speculating about the biblical end days.
He's also fantasized about Kentucky reinstating the death penalty.
And under a photo of his daughter, Morgan vowed revenge.
This is who that son of a bitch killed for no reason.
He better never be allowed to walk the streets.
I am waiting for you, you motherfucker.
Yeah, I'd like to go on the record and say that despite all of the crazy shit that this guy said, he did not deserve this.
No, nobody deserves this.
It's awful.
Goddammit, Julian.
What the fuck, man?
I don't know.
Something's wrong with me.
I feel like I have a vision of like, you know, the next stage of America's descent.
It'll be the continued accelerated slaughter of innocents and then everyone processing it by telling different conspiracist stories about who's really responsible, who the puppet masters are that allowed this to happen.
Yeah.
I don't know why I picked these topics.
I gotta stop.
I gotta stop picking these topics.
What's crazy is I never heard about this.
I don't remember.
This was in what?
Fairly recently.
Yeah, there was a really good article about it in the New York Times that people should go check out by Campbell Robertson.
Well, that's the episode.
Hopefully you take care of yourself and your loved ones in a way that isn't paranoid.
But yeah, keep your loved ones close, folks.
Thanks, I guess, for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's AutoQ.
Wesley blames the media for making a big deal of the doomsday bunker he has in his basement that went public when he put his home on the market.
