Alex Jones, M.I.A. and True the Vote. Travis, Annie, Liv, Jake and Julian get together to take a look at some recent wins and loses for various conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, in this case, you might have to give it to one of 'em. Our guest is researcher Get_Innocuous.
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Music by G-Dog. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 206 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Conspiracist L's and W's episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Annie Kelly, Liv Ager, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Hello, darlings.
It is Road Julian, a character I've been working on.
He's a road-weary traveler.
Today, we're sitting above the Great Human Junction in side-by-side umpire chairs and watching souls cross back and forth, some running from fate and some towards it.
We'll be calling points and fouls for a cast of characters, including the musician M.I.A., the magical harlequin Alex Jones, and two star-crossed lovers, Greg Phillips and Eugene Yu, heads of election dispute and grifters True The Vote and election software company Konek, respectively.
Now for that last conflict, we'll even have a guest who spends enough time staring at this kind of stuff that he's being driven mad.
Or I suppose some call it expertise.
That's right, it's repeat guest and anonymous researcher Get Innocuous.
But first, you gotta check in with everybody.
Annie, you go first.
How you doing?
Yeah, I'm very well thank you.
It's morning for you guys but it's night time for me and my husband just went out to a concert and I've been reading a scary book so I'm actually really pleased to have you guys for company because I was getting a little bit spooked there.
Oh yeah, I love to spook myself out alone at home.
That is the best.
Where every house creak becomes a monster.
It's one of my favorite things to do.
Whenever Paul's out the house, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm going to watch a scary movie.
And then I'm always just surprised that I'm then scared.
She likes the thrills and chills.
Paul, we're glad to keep you company on this long, dark British night that's going to be followed by a long, dark British winter.
And a long, dark British summer.
Yeah, it's going to be... Listen, I think the spooky season is just starting for Europe.
Let's put it that way.
All right, how about our favorite Canadian Liv Agar?
It's been good.
I'm back in Vancouver.
It's good to be, you know, coastal elite once again in the cities where they obviously organize all of the child sex trafficking and sacrifices and all that.
Yeah, the boats bring in fresh drugs and children.
Exactly.
But it's good.
It's weird because I like there's something in this city that just makes me continually sick, I think.
I'm like, like Bolsonaro style.
Like sick over and over.
Is it the men?
All the men?
I'm getting monkey pox over and over.
That must be it.
It's just a relentless case of monkey pox.
Good to hear.
Travis, how are you recovering from our first leg of the tour?
Uh, yeah, it was, uh, yeah, I managed to get some sleep and sort of reflect upon the weird experience of, like, bouncing from city to city.
Yeah, I got some footage, uh, from, uh, GoPro about our experiences.
You know, Jake, uh, drawing a waffle at a waffle place in San Diego.
Uh, Jake complaining about various ailments.
Um, us picking up bags of meat from, you know, gas stations.
So yeah, I've been reviewing that, so that's been a lot of fun.
Uh, you forgot Jake hitting the jackpot on the Conan the Barbarian slot machine at the casino, which I think is a highlight.
Yes, I got that.
I got, I have video of Jake's expert keno strategy.
Um, what he does is he makes a sort of shapes like Tetris that are sort of kind of geometrical on the board.
He's got a system and he was up, he made it work.
So yeah, yeah.
It's not me though.
I lost, I lost all the money I took out, but Jake made it work.
Thank you for sparing me and not mentioning the story of me driving us up a dirt road and getting the van stuck in the mud.
Oh, I have that too.
I have the video of us traveling down the dirt road, Jake being very agitated, saying something like, I'm coming very close to commandeering this vehicle, and then seconds later...
Getting her ass stuck in the mud on that dirt road.
I was.
I said, I'm going to commenteer this vehicle.
I basically turned into my dad for about like 11 minutes.
And then once we got the van stuck, I went back to being myself.
But when Julian was speeding down a steep incline on a rocky, uneven road in a nine foot tall sprinter, the dad came out.
Then we all turned into Fallout-style wanderers.
Yeah, that's true.
Wandering the dust for debris that might unstick our vehicle.
Yeah, we were lucky we found a couple of items on the ground and fortunately I had enough space in my inventory to pick it up.
How are you doing, Jake?
I feel like the glint has returned to your eyes.
Yes, yes.
I'm back.
I'm back.
Three nights of, like, good sleep, not smoking little rollies, you know, not moving in a van for, you know, 16 hours a day.
That really messed me up because I had this, actually, this horrible moment where we stopped at a gas station in Texas at, like, you know, One in the morning, shortly after being pulled over by the Texas Highway Patrol, which our tour manager deftly got us out of.
And I went to use the bathroom, and as soon as I sat down, my body kept moving as if I was in a car.
It was like a weird feeling, like I was in VR but in real life, and it was unpleasant.
And then, as I'm struggling with that, three giant crickets, like two inches long each, maybe a half inch thick, these big black crickets, crawled under the stall door and attacked me.
Yeah.
And it was unpleasant, to say the least.
Oh, you don't like Texas Jumpin' Shitter Critic crickets?
Well, yeah, you know, you're in a very vulnerable position, and they jump, you know?
I mean, what was I to do?
Well, you're supposed to put your penis through the hole and the crickets take care of the rest.
It's the Texas way.
Come on.
But yeah, I'm better.
I've gotten some good sleep and I've been on solid ground.
For myself, I can't say the same.
I've been screwing up my sleep immediately upon returning by purchasing a new gaming monitor and growing obsessed with calibrating it and such.
Yeah, the PC, the PC gremlins never die.
They never die.
It's the frame rate Satan in the sky.
What type of games are you using it to play?
I've been really looking for a new game because Tarkov is driving me completely insane.
I am just angry all the time playing it.
I'm dying horribly.
I'm making terrible mistakes.
Just yesterday I killed my colleague that ventures out into the wilderness with me with a grenade and then proceeded to run into a room forgetting there was a person in there who shot me.
So... I'll find you a new game, bud.
Yeah, but I don't...
Don't like the sound of that, Jake.
That sounds like a threat.
What early access horrors do you have in store for me?
Nah, man.
You know, I'm too old for that now.
You like finished games now?
Yeah, just stick me on a console where I don't have to fret over how do I optimize my frames versus the picture quality.
I just want to hit power and play, you know?
Daddy Microsoft has your back.
Yeah.
Hand on your shoulder while you play.
Yeah.
Good.
All right.
Well, that's us.
And now it is time to check in with our new sixth mic, M.I.A., the artist and musician known as M.I.A., who has really been going on a tear the last couple of years.
Time to address it.
And who better to address it but a fellow islander of the Kelly clan.
Hi everybody, I'm just popping onto the podcast to talk briefly about yet another pilled pop star, the rapper and singer M.I.A.
Now this is actually quite a painful one for me, as someone who's loved her music since the MySpace days, and so perhaps it's that affection for her that has prevented me from noticing until now what basically looks to be a years-long descent into some questionable conspiracy rabbit holes.
My peaceful fan illusion was shattered the other day when in the wake of Alex Jones being ordered to pay 965 million dollars in damages for popularising the theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, MIA decided to cause a tweet storm of her own.
It began with her asking, quote, If Alex Jones pays for lying, shouldn't every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?
Then following it up with, Alex Jones lying and Pfizer lying, both trending.
One with penalty, other without.
If you have no critical thinking faculty, this is about as crazy as we should get before nuclear war wipe out the human race.
Yeah, so misspellings, spaces before the periods.
She's posting.
She's online.
I see she has a healthy command of the AP posting guides.
That's right.
Now, to be clear, the story she's referencing about Pfizer is one very popular with anti-vax circles right now, which relies on a misinterpretation of a Pfizer executive Janine Small's testimony before the European Parliament Special Committee of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rob Roos, a Dutch MEP, asked Small whether Pfizer had tested their Covid vaccine to see whether it prevented transmission of the virus.
I want a clear answer.
And I will speak in English so there are no misunderstandings.
Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?
If not, please say it clearly.
If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee?
And I really want a straight answer, yes or no, and I'm looking forward to it.
Thank you very much.
Regarding the question around, did we know about stopping humanisation before it's entered the market?
No.
We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.
This is scandalous.
Millions of people worldwide felt forced to get vaccinated because of the myth It's so insane to me that, like, he's making that video as, like, a Dutch politician for the English-speaking world.
He looks like a YouTube content creator.
Please share this video to your, like, American grandma.
Yeah, and as I understand it, I think the Netherlands have an insanely booming anti-vax movement.
Yeah.
I think it's because they all speak English.
I mean, he printed a Pfizer We Demand Answers style conspiracist sheet of paper and put it on the back of his laptop while he sits in the room with everybody.
So yeah, he's on one.
That rocks, man.
Ring the bell for this guy.
It's so good how it just feels like every country gets at least one of these politicians, and they're always blonde.
Yeah.
Blonde like Annie.
Blonde like Travis.
Blonde like the people you shouldn't trust.
In the anti-vax world, this video was treated as an explosive and vindicating revelation.
But as the Associated Press reported, Pfizer never claimed that its clinical trial, upon which the vaccine was authorized for use, evaluated the shot's effect on transmission.
In fact, shortly before the vaccine's release, the company's CEO emphasized that this was still being evaluated.
Instead, it reported that two doses of the vaccine provided 95% protection against contracting symptomatic COVID-19 in people 16 and older.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla also said in a December 2020 interview with NBC News that it was still unclear whether vaccinated individuals could carry the virus and transmit it to others.
As it turns out, this wasn't MIA's first brush with vaccine skeptic sentiments.
In 2020, she tweeted, quote, if I have to choose the vaccine or chip, I'm going to choose death.
A statement which she later clarified with, I'm not against vaccines.
I'm against companies who care more for profit than humans.
I care for better track records that prove this.
I care that African countries are not always the testing ground.
I don't want it to come from banks, slash tech, slash hedge fund sectors, and I want a choice.
Which all seems fair enough, but you did call it a chip.
Yeah.
And because people these days never just seem to pick one conspiracy theory to go with, it was around the same time that she began tweeting one of this podcast's old favourites, Pizzagate.
Hashtag protect children, hashtag BLM.
When you dismantle system, don't put pedos back in.
That's good advice.
Never put pedos back in.
I hate it when that happens.
Yeah.
Hillary went to court for starting slave trade in Libya, and they found the killer of Madeleine McCann, who Podesta was accused of in Hashtag Pizzagate, both on Hashtag Blackout Tuesday.
And there's like a mind explode emoji.
What a coincidence.
No more sickness.
Jesus Christ, what a mess!
That is kind of what I like about M.I.A.
There's so many anti-vaxx celebrities, she's not going to be one of those.
She's always going to go the full hog.
Yeah, let's go.
And yeah, you had to replace slave because she originally typed salve.
I find it very interesting the conspiracy theorists who use, you know, a progressive or, you know, a left hashtag like, you know, BLM to get liberals attention and then, you know, and then going on and on about Pizzagate and the children and whatnot and Hillary being a pedo.
It's very sneaky.
Well, yeah, and she kind of missed the best kind of part here, which is that the eating of children of color has its own, like, sub-term in Pizzagate lore, which is walnut sauce.
Hmm.
Right.
Which also, is she implying, like, it's a critique of the Black Lives Matter movement?
Like, she's calling them in to be like, look, we should dismantle the system, but, like, you guys, make sure you don't put pedos back in.
Yeah, exactly.
Don't support pedos.
Hard to tell, yeah.
As you promote the idea that cops shouldn't shoot people of color.
I mean, obviously, when I think of cops shooting an unarmed teenager running away from them, I think of John Podesta having any power in the future.
Related things.
Despite how long Pizzagate has been discredited for by now, in September this year the musician referenced the theory again, quote tweeting an article about John Podesta being announced as a senior advisor to the White House on clean energy.
Here's what she said.
I guess eating children and winning at climate money is a thing here.
God save us all.
Here on Earth?
Here where?
Where are you MIA?
She's MIA!
In other tweets I managed to find from 2021, she testified to seeing planes "seeding" chemtrails
in London. "As a witness, I saw the sun come out and bright blue sky for about 20 minutes,
then in no time I saw about 10 cloud seeding plane trails instantly and now back to dark grey.
The doll is deliberate. Suicide rates are high in UK. Cancel cloud seeding. I understand it's
unusual to have a warm December at 14 Celsius, but blocking out sun relentlessly for a month
with 2 hours of sun for the whole of December is Britain treating everyone like Julian Assange."
*moans* It's driving up COVID.
It's driving up mental health issues and depleting vitamin D. I love the idea that, like, she sees that it's, like, cloudy in Britain, and she's like, this must be weather control.
Yeah.
Stop seed- we need to cancel the seeding of clouds!
Yeah, maybe that's really what her song Paper Planes was about.
It was about the chemtrails that they leave behind.
Yeah, she should release a chemtrails remix.
Yeah.
Honestly, I would really, because she's a quite talented musician.
I agree with you, Annie.
I like her stuff.
I think she should release a full conspiracist album with insanely good beats and stuff.
Let's get this shit going.
It would honestly be the best thing to happen to the conspiracy theory movement if M.I.A.
actually made a good conspiracy theory song.
Yeah, M.I.A., make a good Conspiracy Theory album, and I will get all of us out to your concert.
And we can meet backstage, because you'll give us VIP passes, and we will eat the meat platter, which you will not be eating, of course.
Yeah, that's an event that we haven't really been to yet, is an event that's primarily a concert where you also have sort of conspiracy theorists gathering and selling merch.
Usually the concert is kind of in the background.
It would be interesting to go to one of these and the concert is sort of the main event.
So it's like a Travis Scott concert, but no second degree.
Like, absolutely no wink.
Just like, this is about the cabal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Interesting.
That's a great idea.
Yes.
Yeah, they should do it.
We need a pilled festival, in fact.
Let's go.
I want porta-potties that pill you with little screens.
Now I promise I'm not just a fan making excuses for MIA here.
All of these tweets are pretty inexcusable, poorly researched and deeply concerning messages to be sending from an account with nearly 700,000 followers.
But I am just going to close this by talking a little bit about MIA's background as a refugee and how I think that's coloured the way she looks at the world and her trust in media especially.
I think this is important because she's not the only person who this effect will apply to when it comes to mistrust of authority and embrace of conspiracy theories as alternative knowledge.
MIA, real name Maya Arulpragasam, was born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents and moved back to Sri Lanka at just six months old.
Sri Lankan Tamils are a minority ethnic population.
They were mostly concentrated in the north of the country, compared to the majority Sinhalese population in the south.
Ethnic discrimination and violence led to calls for Tamil independence and the breakout of civil war in the country in 1983.
Maya's father, who was a founding member of EROS, a Marxist-inspired Tamil revolutionary group, was considered a target, and the singer has recounted harrowing memories of soldiers coming to her house as a child, looking for him and beating up her mother in front of her.
Eventually, the family relocated to the UK, leaving her father behind.
The civil war and violence and discrimination against Tamils was a frequent topic in MIA's music and something she's talked about a lot in interviews.
Often due to her personal connections to the country, she's been ahead of the news, pointing to civilian deaths and military operations that the government told the world were specifically targeting terrorists.
As a Guardian interview in 2010 points out, You're not meant to get emotionally involved when giving out information about war.
After our interview, I watch a clip of her on a US chat show host's program where she very clearly differentiates between the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil citizens.
She then says that the Sri Lankan government has been using the Tamil Tigers as an excuse to wipe out ordinary Tamil civilians.
She gave the interview in January 2009 and later her version of events was confirmed.
It was reported in the New York Times.
Despite that, the political fallout for the singer's outspoken approach has at times been significant, with newspapers and even the Sri Lankan government calling her a terrorist sympathiser, and the US once refusing to grant her a travel visa because, according to the ACLU, government officials concluded that some of her lyrics are overly sympathetic to the Tamil Tigers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Oh, shut the fuck up.
It's easy to see, then, why someone like MIA might over time become increasingly disillusioned with mainstream media and politics in general.
I don't think it's a coincidence that in recent years she's become an advocate for Julian Assange, whose supporters seem to be well represented at some of the UK anti-vaccine and lockdown rallies I've been to here.
In 2019, she gave a press interview outside Belmarsh Prison, where she seemed to speak to the disappointment and mistrust that ferments in pro-Assange spaces, and is the main factor, I think, leading to conspiracy theories thriving there.
What are your thoughts on the media coverage of the situation?
I think that there should be more, given that now we know the truth, and that the debate is about exegetion to the US, and that it's no longer about all of the other things that people have accused him of.
And now that it has come to light, those things should be highlighted even more than before.
Because now it's about truth and that's something that, you know, people have to sort of uphold and fight for, especially in these years that's just so chaotic.
And, you know, I think... I support Julian because I think somebody like this is valuable to society just because of, like, his knowledge about so many different things.
And, you know, I try not to...
I don't want to be prejudiced in a time where I think things change and evolve at such a fast rate.
You know, people's values are changing, people's beliefs are changing, the political climate is changing, the social climate is changing, the financial situation is changing, and throughout all of this change we're so You know, constricting this man, like the bottom line, the basic bottom line is he's in there because he exposed some war crimes, you know, and he just campaigned for peace and this cannot be the example, you know, and we can't make that an example to society where we penalise people for that, you know, and not a single person's been convicted for the financial
crisis of 2008, nobody's been convicted for the war crimes committed before them by the
Bush era, nobody's been convicted for the Obama era and everything that the Democrats
did.
Like, nothing has happened legally.
So why trust the legal system, you know, that hasn't come through on any of those things?
Yep.
I'm with her.
So the reason I'm giving this background is less to defend MIA herself, and more to say that even though she's a very famous and high profile example of this kind of radicalisation, I don't think she's unique.
Legitimate grievances with how events you know and care deeply about are reported can sometimes lead to blanket resentment and assumptions that the stuff you don't understand must be getting misreported in the exact same way.
And this can lead you to some alliances with some very unsavoury characters who probably don't share much of anything with you other than resenting the same people.
As an example, when I was just trawling through her Twitter feed, I saw that when the Freedom Convoy was going on, she, like, tweeted, which I guess was kind of subtle enough that it flew under the radar.
Mm-hmm.
It's interesting because I feel like a lot of the discourse about this happened recently of people being like, oh no, I just found this out, when like, she's been pilled.
Yeah.
For a while.
Like, this was really what pushed it over for people.
Yeah.
Yeah, there was like, it seemed, from what I could find, it seemed there was like a little mini-backlash to when she said the thing about, uh, I'd choose death.
Like, I think she was supposed to have like a feature in Vogue and they cancelled it, but there didn't seem to be much, much discussion of it other than that.
Yeah, I think it's a shame.
She's definitely at that kind of intersection where the term conspiracy theorist is being used to kind of smear people who are bringing up legitimate grievances.
And unfortunately, she's kind of essentially become quite useful, I think, to the powers that be at this point, because, you know, it's like, oh, so you care about these things?
Are you like MIA?
You believe in Pizzagate and chemtrails?
You know what I mean?
So, you know, it's sad because I think now she's a perfect tool to cover up real conspiracies.
Yeah, she strikes me as one of those classic conspiracy folks that was like, you know, into WikiLeaks and into, you know, 9-11 and then just didn't get off the train when Pizzagate sort of rolled up, you know?
Yeah.
It feels like in the past it was coming from, you know, not an evil place, you know, a healthy distrust of, you know, governments and systems or whatever.
No, definitely not.
I think that there's plenty of things you could list that are worth looking into and do involve conspiracies to what degree exactly.
It's up for grabs, I think.
Yeah, then as we saw like this movement for truth as it was kind of squeezed and abused and given, you know, no justice has mutated into this more virulent form and basically been, you know, a perfect discredit to the seek for or the seeking of truth, which yeah, like I really relate to this because Yeah, you can it's hard to to first of all like find yourself on that gradient and get it just right, you know, you know what I mean?
And I think that because the coverage is so weak on a lot of these injustices, you can't
really follow the mainstream media's lead on these things.
And the problem is that then you end up watching, you know, shitty YouTube, right?
Falling down rabbit holes that you maybe wouldn't have fallen down if we had provided a better
official accounting, a better journalistic accounting of, yeah, of some of these issues.
Yeah, when the grain of truth is lumped in with the crazier parts of the conspiracy or
just flat out, you know, not acknowledged, it pisses people off.
And so then when you put the people of power in a more sinister conspiracy like Pizzagate or, you know, child trafficking or whatever, you go, yeah!
Yeah, of course they are, because you're pissed.
You're pissed inside about the thing that you know is true or the thing that appears to be real is, you know, is just not being acknowledged.
And so it leads to this anger that I think, you know, sort of creates the space inside of people to accept something that's a little bit more out there, or a lot a bit more out there.
If you're a PR person or like an intelligence person that like works on, you know, making sure these lines stay blurred, I would definitely be rubbing my hands at the way some of these things are going and specifically the way that MIA's beliefs are shifting.
I think it's ironic that like the same institutions that sort of fail to provide any rational discourse or ability for people to engage with these things in like rational ways are the same ones that lead people to be like mistrustful of sort of you know popular institutions like like news agencies for instance.
So it produces like people that have a harder time I think discerning properly like the world just because of like the Very absurd international discourses they're generally exposed to, but it also produces people who are deeply untrustful of those institutions.
And I think that's where this common line is generally produced, because it is obviously quite popular.
When you explain the fake news phenomenon with Trump, an important part of that is there is fake news.
The news institutions have lost their general goodwill, or any general goodwill that they have had in American society over the past couple of decades or centuries.
Yes.
So yeah, so it's I think it's like both kind of like, you know, we don't want to be making excuses for some of these beliefs being pushed.
But at the same time, if you pull back and look at the macro conditions that they kind of fester and spread in, it's also like a very understandable phenomenon.
Yeah.
All right.
Here to represent the CIA, represent the suits, we've got Travis View of the Central Intelligence Agency, who will be doing a segment on his colleague in intelligence, the clown Alex Jones, a performance artist.
Yeah, I just want to briefly touch on the Alex Jones news, because it is always a rare and strange thing when a conspiracist actually suffers consequences for the things that they say.
And we're starting to see an example of that.
Of course, I do want to give a shout out to our friends Dan and Jordan at Knowledge Fight, who are the best source of all things Alex Jones.
They've been following all of these trials from beginning to end, but Definitely want to talk about this.
So what happened recently was that a jury in Connecticut found that Jones and the parent company of InfoWars must pay $965 million to numerous families of the 20 children and six staff members who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
So this was in reaction to basically claims from Jones and other employees of InfoWars that they were all Actors or being part of some sort of government plot to grab guns.
So a judge is going to decide how much impunitive damage is to award next month, and this comes three months after a Texas jury awarded two Sandy Hook parents nearly 50 million dollars in a similar case.
So this is, all this is like not over, probably might even last years longer.
Jones will appeal, obviously, and they'll probably even try to wiggle out of paying as much as he can
through corporate and personal bankruptcy, but they're still pretty significant
because that's a extraordinary amount of money.
I think that the significance of the civil action was well articulated by Bill Sherlock,
whose wife, Mary, was killed during the Sandy Hook shooting.
And from a personal standpoint, what it does to me is it shows that the internet
is not the wild, wild West, and that your actions have consequences.
[BLANK_AUDIO]
And for someone to stand in front of a camera, probably right now as we're speaking, to spew the lies, to enrich themselves, well, now there's a cost-benefit analysis that'll have to be done.
Because we've sent a response, we've put a dose of civility into the society that we really need at this point in time.
So yeah, I think that's significant.
This is why a lot of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk were so outraged.
Jack Posobiec, they were all expressing outrage at this verdict because if all of a sudden there are massive financial consequences for spreading lies about people, well, their political and even sort of business models are going to become much more complicated.
Yeah, I just hope that we're not moving towards a future where that comes with more Steven Donzigers who, you know, are applied these same kind of sanctions, but for spreading the truth and fighting for it.
I mainly hope that, like, this doesn't lead towards a future where if you, like, trial of Tim Heidecker style defend yourself in a case, it doesn't lead to you losing comically.
I can't imagine living in a world like that.
I want tainted vapes to be able to be spread at festivals and kill multiple people and for Tim to get off.
I mean, like not like the guys that like Knowledge 5 talked about, it's like he blundered this in a bunch of different ways.
He could have like mounted a serious defense, but he just didn't.
And as a consequence, there's a default ruling.
Let's go straight to damages.
So I think this is really an extraordinary case of both a sort of a vicious attack on grieving parents and also and wholly basically absent defense on the part of Alex Jones.
So I don't know if those two elements are I think we're a rare combination of both Absolute malice and absolute incompetence that resulted in this.
So, yeah, I mean, Alex Jones, he was, of course, he's defiant.
He used the opportunity to pitch supplements on his website.
They want to scare everybody away from freedom and scare us away from questioning Uvalde and what really happened there or Parkland or any other event.
And guess what?
We're not scared and we're not going away and we're not going to stop.
And literally, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years, I can appeal this stuff, we can stand up against this travesty, against the billions of dollars they want.
It's a joke.
So please, go to infowarstore.com and get Vitamineral Fusion, get X3, get all the great products.
Better there that keep us on air.
Wow.
It's also important to note he live streamed his like live reaction to the damage ruling like he wasn't there he was posting when it happened.
That's right and he was snarkily dismissing sort of like all the Various sort of massive, you know, announcements of all the damages.
Like, oh, he claims that he doesn't have more than like $2 million in his personal bank account.
We don't know how true that is.
There was a forensic accountant who sort of testified about the true value of Infowars.
But yeah, I mean, he's such a lying, grifting machine.
It's like he's on autopilot.
He's incredible.
He's like, they'll never get the millions in silver coins that are under my bed!
I do wonder though, because he probably could, if he was competent, not pay nearly as much, obviously, as the ruling.
But has he shown any competence in terms of his money, where he's put it, in relation to this trial?
I mean, I know that he showed no competence in terms of actually mounting a defense against the claims, but I think he might.
I mean, he talked about he's just going to basically wage lawfare against the system, try and tie everything up in court, appeal things, try to use corporate structuring to avoid paying, probably.
So he might be successful in doing that.
But again, that's probably a better question to ask our friends at Knowledge Fight.
I think it's kind of sad because he has the money to fight and delay this.
You know, he's talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars and like the people who are going to be punished using the same kind of mechanisms that are not like Alex Jones, a bunch of, you know, smear merchants, etc.
They're not going to have that money.
They're not going to have the platform and they're not going to have the money.
And so we're basically between a shitty rock and a horrible hard place.
But the main thing I want to talk about today relates to the election software company Kinect, I think it's pronounced, and True the Vote, which is a sort of a grifter organization that spreads a lot of election-related conspiracy theories.
So this is a really interesting story that has been reported on by Alex Kaplan at Media Matters and the New York Times.
So what happened was that the organization True the Vote and its chairperson, Greg Phillips, Targeted Connect with accusations of being a foreign asset and mishandling data.
Now, you might remember True The Vote.
This is a Texas-based organization that helped Dinesh D'Souza make his 2000 Mules movie.
And a lot of that was garbage.
What they basically did was they took a lot of geolocation data and then baked it to try
and cook up this sort of conspiracy theory about people who are taking ballots from nonprofits
and then delivering them en masse to mailboxes.
Now conspiracy theorists making up stories about election contractors is pretty standard
fare.
We saw it with Dominion a lot.
But this story has an interesting wrinkle because very recently, the CEO of Connect,
Eugene Yu, was arrested purportedly for improperly storing information in China.
So for this incident, we're going to have to explore perhaps the most fascinating and dangerous question when dealing with conspiracists, which is, do you got to give it to them?
Yes.
You do, Travis.
Done.
Segment over.
Yeah, I mean, I especially want to talk about this because I feel like a lot of conspiracists are going to consider this a win.
So your pilled relatives might be talking about it at Thanksgiving.
It's interesting about Greg Phillips, who is, like I said, chairperson of Truth or Vote.
He's very tight with QAnon influencers.
He has appeared on The Matrix Groove Show, The X-22 Report, Red Pill 78.
So all the major sort of live streaming QAnon guys.
Uh, this led In The Matrix to boast that Phillips was appearing on all of the Anon shows, as he called them.
We are in this together, and this is the unity that we need.
You know, we've got, uh, Greg Phillips, uh, going on all the, uh, Anon shows.
Shady, you got Kash Patel coming on our shows.
I mean, this is, this is amazing time to be alive.
I can't, stress more on how amazing this is.
I don't think that Greg Phillips is really a true QAnon believer.
This is because of a post that he made in May about QAnon.
He seems to indicate that he sees them as useful allies.
He wrote this.
I don't agree with all I hear, but as long as the motive is freedom from tyranny,
I'll stand next to anyone and fight.
Don't agree with all you hear.
Probably the, you know, the murdering and drinking of children's blood might be something you don't agree with.
You know, the enemy of my enemy.
I mean, freedom from tyranny, it feels like when, I don't know, it feels like when people are really struggling to defend somebody who's on their side, because they are just plain wrong.
And they'll kind of do this sort of thing where they're like, oh, come on, all they want is just like a better life for the people around them and a better future for their country, you know, this really like vague stuff.
And you're just like, yeah, I mean, like, that all sounds great, obviously.
Like so did Hitler.
It's how they how they get that better life.
That's like that's the thing that's being debated here You know, yeah, a lot of them just want their favorite tyranny right like the tyranny they could stand behind Not this tyranny So these allegations about connect came from an event in August hosted by true the vote which was called the pit very very Dangerous, weird name, but The Pit.
So The Pit promised to reveal devastating information that showed that the election was stolen.
And I mean, I remember hearing about The Pit back in August, but I was like, oh, here's another sort of weird Mike Lindell cyber symposium stuff.
So I thought it was like it was just going to be worth ignoring.
But what happened was that like they live streamed a lot of these sort of like talks, but it wasn't all live streamed.
There was also a secret meeting for a select group of online conspiracist influencers.
We're having a, I hate to use the word secret, but let's call it a secret meeting coming up.
According to photos from the event, this included Lisa May Crowley, Prang Medek, aka David Hayes,
Liz Crokin, and Jordan Sather.
Greg Phillips discussed this secret meeting during an appearance on The Matrix Groove
Show.
We're having a, I'd use the word secret, but let's call it a secret meeting coming
up.
You know, influencers on our side and, you know, maybe go in some sort of a closed door,
underground something and explain all of this stuff to y'all and give you a heads up.
We're not doing a movie on this other one.
We're probably going to explain it to everybody like you first and just go big with it all
at one time.
Yeah, we're putting together a shadowy cabal behind closed doors.
I hesitate to use the word cabal.
That's literally it.
It's like, to defeat a cabal, you must become the cabal.
So true.
We need an underground lair.
We need closed doors.
During this private meeting at the pit, True The Vote disclosed to attendees that they had been secretly working on something called the Tiger Project, which concerns claims about Kinect.
So, specifically, Truth-O-Vote claimed that they had discovered that Kinect had an unsecured server located in Wuhan, China.
They further claimed that they downloaded information from Kinect's server, and this included personal data on 1.8 million U.S.
poll workers.
The company denied this, saying that all of Kinect's U.S.
customer data is secured and stored exclusively on protected computers located within the United States.
Well, that may not be true if the, you know, if the charges hold up.
But I also think it's important to remember to note that Connect doesn't do anything related to voter information or the tabulation of votes.
And they're really involved in like voting logistics, you know, particularly around poll workers.
Yeah.
So it's like a map of where to send the drones that put the chips, the Chinese chips into the brains.
In the Matrix later, thank Greg Phillips for hosting the pit and using the event to bring what he calls the Anon community together.
And we met so many beautiful patriots.
And Greg, I just, from the bottom of my heart, I want to just thank you for bringing the Anon community together.
Nobody else has done what you did for us.
We're digging a pit!
We're digging a hole!
together and now if there's a renewed vigor on digging, you know, we've been kind of,
you know, you know, making cool memes and digging here and there, but I just see so
much great digging going on with the Anon community.
We're digging a pit, we're digging a hole, and we're all getting in it together.
True The Vote claimed that they brought this information about the unsecured server to
the FBI, but they were rebuffed.
In one clip, Greg Phillips claims that he was betrayed by the FBI.
Information that we ultimately gathered, while it's been dramatically augmented by the anons and by people since the pit that have been doing research and doing some amazing I mean, Catherine, I want you to talk a little bit about what some of the people have done.
But what we've learned has really led us now to a path where, and we had hiccups along the way.
The FBI betrayed us.
First, they were with us for 18 months.
Then, for a period of time, they were against us and were blaming us for having stolen the Chinese internet and all manner of other nonsense.
I would love to know more about these 18 months.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It seems like the claim that they were basically making was that they were trying to bring this information to the FBI.
But then the FBI was basically asking, why were they hacking election data?
And so they felt like they were being attacked.
Yeah.
Listen, Anons, we like what you do.
We just think your methods are uncouth.
Yeah, it's just like the FBI being like, okay, but you do realize you've just given us evidence of you committing several crimes, right?
The CEO of the company, Eugene Yu, said that there were personal consequences for the claims being made about him.
He says that he went to hiding with his family after receiving threatening messages.
Other employees also feared for their safety and started working remotely after users posted details about Connect's headquarters, including the number of cars in the company's parking lot.
Last month, Kinect filed a lawsuit which alleges that Truth-O-Vote made a number of defamatory statements.
The lawsuit says that Truth-O-Vote falsely accused Kinect of bribing the city of Detroit to obtain a contract.
It also says that Truth-O-Vote posted an article claiming that Kinect is owned by the Chinese Communist Party, even though it's owned by U.S.
citizens.
The suit also says that Truth-O-Vote amplified claims which associate Kinect to everything from Mark Zuckerberg to George Soros to the origins of COVID-19.
Greg Phillips, for his part, claimed that there would be some sort of very serious looks at Connect by law enforcement.
He made these remarks back on August 31st.
And I believe strongly, um, Based on information we've received from law enforcement and from some prosecutors, that there's going to be some very serious looks taken on this soon.
And most of it is not thanks to us and our, you know, the debacle with the betrayal with the FBI.
It's thanks to these folks and the work that they've done.
And it's happening now in real time.
I'll give him one thing.
The man has a true mariner's beard.
Yeah, that is an excellent beard.
I'll give him that.
Here's where the story really gets crazy, because on October 4th, the Los Angeles County District Attorney announced that Eugene Yu was arrested as part of an investigation into the possible theft of personal identifying information of L.A.
County poll workers.
Connect had a $2.9 million contract with L.A.
County to help with poll logistics, including tracking worker schedules and payroll.
Notably, the Los Angeles District Attorney made clear that allegations against you have no relation to official election results.
The investigation is concerned solely with the personal identifying information of election workers.
In this case, the alleged conduct had no impact on the tabulation of votes and did not alter election results.
Los Angeles prosecutors initially accused Yu of embezzling public money by knowingly violating the terms of the company's contract.
Since searching Connect's offices and Yu's home, the prosecutors have also accused him of conspiring with others to commit a crime, according to a new legal filing.
The filing includes some evidence that Connect employees were aware that the data was stored on a Chinese server and that posed a possible problem with security.
Prosecutors said that a project manager at Kinect had sent an internal email earlier this month
saying that the company would no longer send personal data to Chinese contractors.
The email said, quote, "We need to ensure the security,
"privacy, and confidentiality."
In a separate message sent in August, the project manager noted that the contractors
had high-level access to all of the poll worker software used by his customers.
He called it, quote, a huge security issue.
And there were some contradictory statements coming out of the district attorney's office, because at first they said that True the Vote did not have any role into the investigation.
But then they reversed course and eventually said its investigation into the matter began after Greg Phillips sent a tip.
So, their office sent this message to Gizmodo to try and clear up what happened.
Our Public Integrity Division routinely accepts complaints from the public.
Oftentimes, these complaints are made by political opponents of the accused.
With that in mind, if a crime is alleged, we have a responsibility to conduct an independent investigation.
Greg Phillips' report to PID was the first step in a thorough, independent and still ongoing investigation, which ultimately led to the arrest and charging of Mr. Yu.
We initially indicated that Mr Phillips played no role in the investigation.
While we performed an independent investigation apart from Greg Phillips, his report to us did in fact result in us initiating our investigation.
I love the possibility that, like, True the Vote had nothing.
Like, they were just doing their sort of random irrational.
But, like, the blind dart that they threw onto the dartboard hit the center.
They're like, oh, there's something here.
Yeah, yeah.
This is pretty wild to me, because it sounds like, in this particular case, they had something that was substantive about one of these election contractors.
And instead of taking this information to a more conventional news outlet, even a right-leaning news outlet that might publish this, like Fox News, maybe, or New York Post.
I'm sure The Daily Caller would have loved to publish this article.
Instead of doing that, they shared it with a bunch of QAnon influencers at a secret meeting in Arizona so that they could fake it, basically.
They could add more embellishments about, for example, Eugene Yu being a Chinese agent, which no legitimate authority has accused him of, and then distributing the information from there.
And that's a very interesting kind of thing, because it would mean that if this organization does actually have the capability to find stuff that is newsworthy, instead of taking it to legitimate outlets, they're going to leverage the relationship with QAnon influencers in order to spread their message.
Yeah, that feels new.
Yeah, because I wonder what the desire there, like the intended effect compared to like a Fox News article.
Like, is that just personal sympathy from the guy, do you think?
Like, what would you gain?
Because it's a much smaller, like, audience, right?
Like, especially because they do platforming.
It's true, but I feel like if you want to help discredit the mainstream media, it does seem like kind of a wise strategy.
If you can find legitimate, worthwhile, newsworthy information and then funnel it into these organizations that are anti-MSM and are highly conspiratorial, I mean, they serve the group of influencers that are really into QAnon who attended are called we the media because there's the idea that like, you know, we the people are going to tell better stories than the MSM can.
So I feel like this is If I had to guess, it seems like a very strategic play by Greg Phillips to distribute whatever he finds through what he calls, you know, the Anons, you know, online influencers.
And that way he can sort of like, you know, he can spread it better to his base, which are already distrustful of the mainstream media, but also further weaken the credibility of the mainstream media in the eyes of his target audience.
It's also possible that this is a case of the Greg Phillips who cried wolf where he has reached out to these, you know, right wing news outlets over and over with a bunch of bullshit and they finally just stopped picking the phone up.
And at that point, you know, the one strand of spaghetti that stuck to the wall like no one gave a shit.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's very, that's very possible.
But the end result, I mean, I mean, if this all, you know, shakes out, is that essentially he delivered a win to, you know, these QAnon influencers who, you know, will claim to have an inside scoop, and that inside scoop will prove to be true, and will be echoed in some kind of mainstream media report down the line, in which they can point to that and say, see, we knew before, you know, we are the news, you know?
I mean, Yeah, it's not ideal, but, you know, you throw enough shit at the wall, eventually you might hit on something, and in the conspiratorial communities, one win is enough to buy you months and months of goodwill from your followers, I feel like.
That's right.
Yeah, I really want to know how much they knew.
Yeah, and even if it's like, totally unrelated, like, this guy could have taken this data for any reason, which, and I imagine it probably wasn't for the reason that they're all thinking it was, right?
Like, even then you can just still kind of, I mean, the relentless, like, optimism I think in conspiracy circles are really interesting. Like
when I was at that march in London or even with the like Pfizer thing I was talking
about earlier, how people can just be like, "This is it. This totally vindicates us. All the
people who called us conspiracy theorists are wrong." Do you know? Yeah.
To talk more about Kinect and True the Vote, we are now joined by Get Underscore Innocuous, as he is known on Twitter.
He is a researcher whose work has been cited by the Daily Beast and the PBS Frontline report, The Plot to Overturn the Election.
Thanks again for coming on the show.
Yeah, thanks again for having me.
So we've talked here a bit before you came on to discuss basically the claims being made and Greg Phillips and True the Vote.
Now, I'm curious, because you are, you're a lot more technically minded than me.
How is it that they say they stumbled upon a server in China that contained information from Kinect?
Yeah, their stories changed a bit after Kinect.
filed their defamation suit against them, and they were kind of forced to respond to some pushback that Kinect had on their story.
But initially, Greg Phillips from True the Vote laid out this very James Bond-like story.
I think he even compared it directly to James Bond and said that there was this team of analysts or maybe just an analyst that called him over to a hotel room at midnight, and they put a towel in front of the door.
And had this, you know, top secret conversation about this data that they supposedly found and and went through it that way through the court filings.
It turns out that the actual story.
It's more that an analyst who does not work for True the Vote and who True the Vote calls an independent contractor contacted them, let them know that they maybe found something suspicious, and started to share the data with Greg Phillips that way.
So it's very much less of the kind of like spy story that True the Vote had been laying out, it seems like.
Usually a towel under the door means that you are smoking mad blunts.
I mean, yeah, it's not like that's going to stop someone.
I mean, I don't know, maybe a fiber optic camera under the door.
Sure, yeah.
That makes sense.
They were protecting against, you know, one of those, like, Rainbow Six snake cameras.
With the new Ridge RFID blocking towels, you can block your secret meetings from being overheard.
But don't wipe your body too closely with them or your skin may become magnetic.
Use code GREGPHILLIPS at checkout for 15% off.
For 15% off, you're my towel.
[laughter]
So now, the practice of like probing servers for vulnerabilities and this kind of thing is, you know, it's
pretty common amongst the both hackers of all hats, including the white hat hackers who just want to, you know,
want more secure information.
But you explained on Twitter that what True The Vote said that they did isn't usually how white hat hackers typically act.
So what exactly did they do that's sort of like a deviation from best practices?
So typically when you're performing ethical pen testing or you're doing a bug bounty program or even just independent research, there are an industry set of guidelines and standards that people typically follow for Uh, vulnerability disclosure and irresponsible vulnerability disclosure.
Uh, so as a contrast, you know, Google, how they work is they scan, uh, a lot of different software for vulnerabilities.
For example, Apple and Microsoft products, they will notify Apple or Microsoft, say, Hey, we found this vulnerability.
We're giving you 90 days to acknowledge this and let us know that you're working on it.
And if you don't respond within the 90 days, we will go public with this information.
Uh, it's, you know, There's been some controversy over whether or not that's acceptable, but really to get some of these firms to act, you need that carrot on the stick to get them to move forward.
What True the Vote did was apparently found this information, decided to hold some weird press conference in a barn to talk about it, And then trickled it out through the people they had invited to be at that conference, and then started encouraging people to do their own research and additional digging based off the breadcrumbs, essentially, that True The Vote dropped.
They also said that they contacted the FBI, which I think is a little bit unusual.
Really, how this probably should have gone is they should have notified Connect directly, and if they had the sense that this was as big as they believed it was, they should have notified CISA as well, who has a common vulnerability disclosure program.
And an entire process where they will help work with the vendor and the researcher in order to make sure that the vulnerability is acknowledged, addressed, and remediated.
And then after that point, they can go public and talk about it once it's fixed.
That's kind of what we saw happen with Dominion and the Halderman report that was created as part of this case in Georgia. The Haldeman
report contained some previously unknown information about exploits in Dominion voting systems. And
rather than just blast that information out onto the internet, he worked with CISA to
make sure that Dominion was in the loop, that they had a response process in place, and that the
entire thing would kind of get released in a way that wouldn't jeopardize the security of the
information.
Now, it was pretty bewildering for people who've been following sort of like the activities of
True the Vote when the Connect CEO, Eugene Yu, was arrested.
This arrest happened to come the day after the New York Times published a report about how he was being targeted by True the Vote and stuff.
But yeah, I guess so far the Los Angeles district attorney, they've really given not a whole lot of information about what led up to the arrest.
But what we know so far is that no one with authority has alleged sort of the most Inflammatory claims coming from true the vote and their allies.
These include like the allegation that Eugene you is like a Chinese agent and this was part of a corrupt plot with the Communist Party to corrupt elections or some sort of blackmail scheme or that kind of thing.
It more relates to allegedly stealing data.
I think it's the term that the DA used and like basically mishandling data improperly and knowing that there are security issues with their Chinese servers.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty much on the nose.
The LADA just released some additional information yesterday, too, about kind of what led to the charges.
And really, it seems like There was a breach of contract because they were able to verify that some amount of election worker PII ended up on a server in China and that Connick did seem to be aware of that fact and that contractors Connick was using based in China did have, I believe, the term in the charging documents was like super administrator access to this data.
So, you know, those those facts are correct.
And that's kind of the ground truth.
Anything outside of that is basically truth or their citizen researchers kind of spinning their their own tail and taking this several steps further than than where the investigations actually at and the actual charges.
I'm not a lawyer.
So, you know, definitely not my wheelhouse, but one of them.
You know, it seemed to be that they were considering it public embezzlement of funds because they breached the contract by having this information on a foreign server.
So, you know, I guess that makes sense.
It seems weird to me because this isn't the first breach that's happened and very few breaches previously have ended up in any type of charges against any individuals, even if there was some amount of knowledge about it.
But that's kind of where we're at now.
So, you know, like we said, we don't, we still don't know, have the full picture.
And so we're kind of speculating here, but why on earth would they have a server in China with information about poll workers on it?
Yeah.
So from what I've seen so far, it, it reads to me like they were just cutting corners, uh, probably to, to save costs probably because they're not a large company.
Uh, every tech firm I've worked at, and there's definitely a handful, Has used contractors based in foreign countries the the
labor tends to be cheaper especially for firms based in the Bay Area not that that
conic was but that's a lot of my background and The the quality of work that comes out of it is just as
good if not better than what you would get a lot of times with stateside labor, so
Being that that you is from China is a native speaker I think they found a talent pool that they could tap into
cheaply and when you have developers working in China You know from just from like a latency standpoint of
interacting with servers and things like that it's going to be a lot quicker to do that with the server
based in China than having your Packets travel all the way through like undersea pipelines
all the way to the stateside side.
Obviously, that's not necessarily a huge barrier.
It's more of a quality of life thing.
But, you know, there's probably some of the considerations that were made.
And from the charging documents, it seemed like the developers had moved data over for testing and development purposes.
Um, versus any type of, you know, enablement of letting the, the CCP access the data or anything like that.
So my, my read is that, you know, really it was just poor security practices.
Um, you know, the charging documents also did say that some conic employees, or maybe this was in a New York times article, but, uh, some conic employees were aware that, Uh, Chinese developers had access to this data, that this data was stored on Chinese servers and that they intentionally went out of their way to not mention that to potential customers.
So it really seems like, you know, they just, they found a way to pull in more money and bring in more profit by outsourcing cheap labor and, uh, went all in on that.
Yeah, and so here we have a situation where it seems like, well, the conspiracists, even if all their claims don't pan out, it seems like they have a bit of a win in terms of like, you know, influencing or like, you know, some of their claims about panning out.
And you were commenting a bit about, like, how badly the Los Angeles District Attorney handled the release about the information about the arrest in light of that fact.
So you commented on how it seems like they were just not aware of, like, how damaging it would be to withhold information about, like, the reasons for the arrest.
Yeah.
To me, I think it would have been better if... So now we know that True the Vote did send the LADA the tip that kind of launched this investigation.
To me, it would have been better if they just came out Off the bat and said, we have started this investigation based off a tip from Drew the Vote.
What they did instead was say, we arrested Eugene Yu, CEO of Connick, for suspicion of identity theft, and they basically said nothing other than that.
I mean, they qualified that the data in question didn't impact voters, and it wasn't actual voter registration data, and that it was limited to poll workers, but they left it very vague and The way that they phrased it and went about it kind of let this disinformation ecosystem flourish in the meantime.
And everyone was left with, or like True the Vote was kind of left with a great opportunity to fill in the blanks with whatever narrative it is they wanted to craft.
And they really took that opportunity and ran with it.
You know, it's also helped their defamation case That they're fighting with Connick right now, which the fact that Connick filed that defamation case, actually considering that true, the vote was kind of right the whole time.
Yeah.
In fact, it seems as though that if like if the I mean, everyone's innocent until proven guilty, but if the charges pan out, it seems as though Connick made false statements both in that lawsuit and to the New York Times about their about storing information in China.
Yeah, this is a story where there's really very few good guys, if any, I think.
Konnick, fucked up.
TrueTheVote, they do have a bit of a win here, but only partially, I think.
The fact that this data did seem to be on a Chinese server, sure, we have to give that to them.
Anything else after that has been pure speculation, but they've been using this one minor win to kind of retroactively validate everything they've said up until then.
And like I would say, To circle back to the original question, the fact that the LADA has really so little information about this, and we're now about two weeks since the original arrest, or 10 days, I think, has really been a disaster.
And then telling the New York Times that the investigation was independent of anything True the Vote was doing, and then walking that back and saying, Actually, True The Vote gave us this tip initially, and Greg Phillips testified before a grand jury.
I mean, it makes everyone look bad.
And maybe there's some semantic thing they thought they were doing where that would make things better, but in my opinion, it didn't.
And I guess I could see maybe if they felt releasing additional information could give oxygen to these false claims, or to these exaggerated claims at least, maybe that was their reasoning behind it.
But if so, it really backfired, I think.
Yeah.
I think for me, one of the most interesting things about this thing is that if we, you know, take it that Trudeau had some had like a legitimate juicy claim.
And, you know, this is very useful to them, especially after the kind of like their claims related to the 2000 mules didn't really pan out, like all that geolocation data was laughed at by, you know, even Bill Barr, you know, it's like no one, no one was really taking this very seriously.
And now all of a sudden they got something really, you know, Solid enough for, you know, the LA District Attorney to take action on.
And so what they do with this information is instead of like taking it to, for example, like a friendly conservative news outlet for fact checking and verification reporting.
And so that would be distributed through conventional news outlets.
They took it to a bunch of QAnon influencers who are affiliated with the We The Media kind of coalition of telegram group.
And that's a that's an odd Strategy for distributing information because Greg Phillips he's been I mean he's been cultivating relationships with these QAnon influencers But he also probably knows that they're going to take the information that is provided to them and build upon it in ways that are maybe not Totally factual they're gonna add embellishments and drama that in a way that a mainstream news outlet would not so I mean I
why exactly do you think he did that? Why is he going straight to basically, you know, these
people who are mostly pretty kicked off of like mainstream platforms and now they have to
do their digs, you know, and their research through Telegram and Substack?
Yeah, to me, it seemed that they were trying to gamify it. And, you know, the QAnon audience
is already kind of prepped and familiar with the idea of doing your own research and connecting
the dots and...
And what better way really to get people that may have kind of been skeptical of further claims based off how 2,000 meals kind of fizzle out.
Then to give them these breadcrumbs and say, follow this trail and do your own research and keep digging and see where that leads because, you know, we promise there's going to be some big payoff at the end of this.
And if you look at their truth social activity too, especially like the days immediately following the pit, it's obvious that they were really pushing those buttons and really encouraging the LARP aspects of this and saying like, This person did a great post, so we're going to collect all of these posts and put them in our own substack that we just launched, and you can follow all of this research and retweet this Tiger Project hashtag, or retruth, sorry.
They really seemed to lean into that, and it paid dividends, because initially the consensus it seemed to be from the announcements they made at the pit itself, like they were Launching this new website where it was supposed to be a repository of information that you couldn't get elsewhere, blah blah blah.
No one's talking about that website anymore.
Like, no one gives a fuck.
It's all about Connick and this information that they've been able to dig and these supposed links to the CCP.
So they went about it, unfortunately I think, very cleverly and knew what buttons to push and they pushed them surprisingly well.
It's been interesting to watch, but very, I think, worrying because, you know, if they can do this, we may just start seeing that kind of method of trickling information out there happen more and more.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, you know, I mean, yeah, QAnon influencers and followers always like fantasize this idea that, oh, they really know what's going on, you know, months and months ahead before the normies even learn about it.
But in this case, if you were following some of these QAnon influencers, you could claim like, oh, yeah, I was reading about Eugene Yu, you know, months before he was arrested.
I knew all about that.
This is like, A real instance of the kind of stuff that they fantasize about.
And that's really, I don't know, that is very dangerous.
Because if Greg Phillips and people affiliated with True the Vote are competent enough to actually collect newsworthy information and then distribute it through these QAnon influencers, that's a method of enabling and empowering them.
Yeah.
So, Travis, get innocuous, where we go on?
Well, what it'll end up doing is what they do, you know, what the QAnon influencers and community does.
With any, you know, perceived W is they won't actually end up talking about it at length.
They'll just use it later on to say, well, because this is true and we were right about this, you know, we're right about everything else that we're about to tell you.
You know, it'll be used just as a stepping stone to try to garnish some kind of credibility in the future, which is always bad.
Yeah, and it just, like, essentially emboldens them for, like, more crowd-sourced harassment, right?
Even if they did find out that this guy was doing something wrong, still, like, the stuff about, like, taking down the number of, like, employees' cars in the parking lot and stuff like that, it kind of reminds me of, like, kiwi farms and places like that, where it's just like, okay, so- Yeah.
You know, one out of every 20 people you decide to just kind of mass stalk turns out to have something, you know, some real dirt on them, something that's genuinely kind of like already like problematic and stuff.
But it kind of doesn't really make up for the fact that this kind of vigilante anonymous internet-like justice actually just ruins a whole bunch of other people's lives, right?
Yeah, obviously.
What's going to wind up happening is that they're going to feel like there's a causal connection between their harassment of innocent employees of this company and the CEO being arrested.
And so they're going to feel like they're trolling, and their other kind of intrusive kind of activity is having a positive impact.
They really are No exposing things.
So yeah, it's is a is a fucked up situation.
I think all around here.
You're right.
Obviously connect fucked up as sounds like, you know, the DA office kind of fucked up by having some inconsistent messaging and I would even argue that the New York Times kind of fucked up by not by basically taking connect at their word and you know, not not scrutinizing the claims that they made while talking about the impacts of the harassment.
Yeah, I mean, the New York Times thing is tricky to me, because when you look at like, I mean, there are options where Connect's word versus True The Vote's word.
And it's like, who?
Yeah, I think is that if I was that if I was, you know, the New York Times shoes, I would probably do the same things.
Like, obviously, this this company that has contracts with cities all over the country, Is worlds more credible than this goofy organization associated with 2000 mules?
That is a sensible assumption to make.
But I mean, it's just really extraordinary that it seems like they straight up, you know, lied to a major newspaper.
Yeah, definitely a big takeaway for me from this is that Eugene Yew is not a reliable narrator.
And, you know, this also reinforces to the fact that Election security or election software companies have notoriously had bad security.
Like, that's not new.
This is not something that just happened all of a sudden.
This has always kind of been the case.
And, you know, I say that and I think there has been an overcorrection in the sense that, you know, things swung so far the other way after 2020 that a lot of individuals, media outlets, whatever, are hesitant to acknowledge the truth, which is that the election vendors are not You know, their hands aren't necessarily clean either.
Things were shitty before 2020.
They didn't all of a sudden clean up after 2020.
And with these niche tech industries, it happens to be the case a lot of the time that if you don't have a lot of competition, or if everything is working, why change it?
And the more security controls you implement, the more friction that introduces, the more money it costs to implement those controls to begin with.
A lot of times, the first handful of attempts to implement those, it fails, so you have to do it again.
It's a huge mess to kind of retroactively go back and implement security in a way that's effective.
So I guess the other takeaway, too, is that we should... I don't know.
It's a mess.
What have we learned today, kids?
You don't trust the QAnon influencers, and you don't trust corporations.
Exactly.
Just don't trust anyone.
The fact that the internet works day to day from a security standpoint is more luck, I think, than anything else at this point.
And that's the internet.
When it comes to smaller things like voting machine vendors, fucking airplanes, like, it's scary.
Well, thank you so much for helping us sort of walk through this very strange situation.
Where could people learn more about your work?
Yeah, so I'm on Twitter at git underscore innocuous.
If you also just Google Trapezoid of Discovery Twitter, you'll probably find me pretty quickly at this point, I think.
I also have a website called threads.trapezoid.news where I've kind of collected a lot of the research I had been putting in random Twitter threads over two years into a kind of like a faux sub-stacky format so it's easy to browse and search and they're tagged.
You don't have to try and click through weird Twitter threads or search Twitter to try and find them.
So a lot of my past work on the election fraud claims can be found there.
You heard him.
Start digging, Anons.
Connect those dots.
Thanks for coming on.
Yeah, thank you guys.
Always a pleasure having you.
Thanks so much.
Yeah, you guys are great.
Always happy to be here.
Great!
Well, I hope you all come out of this trusting things less and becoming Fox Mulders out there.
Trust no one.
Definitely not the smoking man or the vaping man in the case of Jake.
The moral of the story is to do your own research.
No, Liv, no.
You can search for Liv Agar if you want to research her on Twitch and Twitter and you also have a podcast so go check it out folks.
Annie can be found on Twitter and she also has a podcast called Vaccine the Human Story, a mini-series on the history of vaccines and specifically the anti-vax movement that arose out of the first smallpox vaccine.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes, plus episodes of Man Clan, a new podcast series starring Julian Field, And our wonderful Annie Kelly.
You can also get all 10 episodes of Travis View's series, Trickle Down, which is a fantastic look at how misinformation trickles down from the top.
So five bucks gets you all that content.
If you feel so inclined, take a look.
If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much.
It helps us stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
For everything else, there's the website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the Road Julian bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.
And now, today's AutoQ.
I mean, I could do a show anywhere.
I mean, they're not going to show anything now.
They could run off some of our employees.
They could shut down some of our people, which is their big job, shut down America, get rid of American workers.
I mean, that's the part for the course, but I mean, as long as I don't want to quit or they don't put me in prison, they can't stop anything.
You know, I think even though I got caught in our Sandy Hook trap, and I covered other people's theories and barely did it, wasn't much of what I did on the timeline, I think I'd do it all again.
I think this is going to bring us to something bigger.
I mean, technically, if I had it all over to do again, I wouldn't have been caught in that trap.
But that's not how the universe works.
I did these things, and I'm going with the flow of where I'm at.
I did it from a good heart, and I think it'll be turned towards good at the end of the day.