We deal with the Balenciaga ad campaigns that caused a flare up of satanic panic, chat a bit about Kanye West, and address Elon's Musk restoration of suspended Twitter accounts. Plus there's new Q drops and boy do they suck. Finally we broach the way the tragic shooting at Club Q has spawned ridiculous conspiracy theories.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like 'Manclan' and 'Trickle Down': http://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Liv Agar: https://linktr.ee/livagar
Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com
Music by Roman85. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 210 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Balenciaga, yay, Club Q episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Agar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
What's up, everybody?
We are back from tour, and our bodies have been resting in vats of adrenochrome for a few days now, so we thought we'd crawl naked out into the light and deliver you a flurry of news growing more muddled and incomprehensible by the day.
Now, unfortunately, the adrenochrome did not take away Jake's allergies and his tummy hurts.
It did not take away whatever Travis has, which is some sort of super flu.
Liv, are you sick too?
Is there something wrong with you?
I'm also sick.
Yeah, I've been sick for like two weeks.
Fantastic.
So I'm the only one who's even remotely healthy in this group right now.
Yeah.
I also was in a really bad car accident on the way to visit my family for Thanksgiving.
Everybody is fine.
Everybody's fine.
But I am a shell of a man.
I don't know how to go forward.
I look at my Xbox controller and it looks like a completely foreign thing to me that I don't care about.
I don't know what's going to happen to me.
I have a feeling that talking about these super not depressing slash infuriating slash confusing topics will make me feel so much better.
Jake's been sitting naked in the bathroom with the Xbox controller inside his mouth like it's a gun.
He tries to open GTA and he has to get in a car and he's like, no.
Coincidentally, I do think that my, you know, 300 or so hours in GTA allowed me to assess the speed and direction of the oncoming vehicle.
And I was able, you know, my hand-eye coordination is pretty good.
I was able to turn my car just enough so that me, my wife, And Teddy did not perish in a fiery wreck.
That tracks because, yeah, there haven't been many accidents since the release of GTA.
And before that, there was just no way for people to understand where cars were going or what speed they were going.
Yeah, I made the mistake of telling my mother-in-law that I thought maybe my hours of video games potentially were what saved us.
And she offered a different explanation, that it was angels and Jesus.
So, you know, somewhere in between those two things is probably the truth.
Yeah, that's for sure.
For sure.
Just aim for the middle ground there.
So today we're going to be chatting about so-called Balenciagagate, which has caused an outbreak of QAnon discourse that somehow dovetailed perfectly with the very public anti-Semitic meltdown of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
Now, if Ye gets his druthers based on his current claims, which, you know, also it does seem clear like he won't, that he won't at all.
But if he did, we'd potentially have a presidential cabinet that would include Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos, two absolute right-wing psychos, if you're not familiar, who are very much on board with blaming Jewish people for everything.
Yeah.
I mean, Fuentes is even beyond that.
He's such a little shit.
He's very much a little shit, and he just has said so many horrible racist things about black people, but yay is in his white lives matter face, so who am I to question the logic of his choice of friends these days?
Every single video, and we'll get into it, but every single video with Milo in it, and I watched him, like, you know, kind of TMZ-style reporters take him aside and talk to him alone during some of these, like, outings he's had with Ye, and he is the most gacked up I've ever seen somebody.
He is on the drugs like in a way where it's like he has meth body language like not not not like coming down like high as shit on meth like basic body motor function is like wiling out and His facial expressions are just yeah, he looks like Roger Stone being interrogated It's it's bad folks.
Everything is really bad vibes about the whole situation We'll get into it in a second and we will also be covering how the Club Q shooting Became the latest horrible flashpoint in the war on LGBTQ people being waged by an increasingly conspiracy-minded political right-wing.
That's a pretty grim tale and story, so we've told Liv.
You handle this.
You can't get depressed, you're too young!
But before all that, we're gonna have to check in on Elon Musk's push to restore banned accounts on Twitter, which may see all of our QAnon faves return to the platform.
All of this, of course, while Q has been posting new drops.
That's right.
I am diagnosing you, listener, with a terminal case of QAnon News.
Yeah, so unfortunately, Q keeps posting.
Q keeps making new drops, despite the fact that recent technical blunders have all but outed Jim Watkins or one of his associates as the people who are making these things.
Despite the fact that even a lot of QAnon influencers are skeptical of these new drops, Q keeps chugging along.
So these new drops all happened on November 27th.
And as friend of the show Karma pointed out, 8Q Noter Jim Watkins was really, really enthusiastic about these new drops.
I will stop.
You know what?
There were three Q posts yesterday.
Why, yes!
There were.
How about that?
How about it, Jim?
How about it?
Yeah, how about that?
How about that?
So, this is the first drop.
Be aware of false prophets.
I am not a prophet.
You are not a prophet.
Oh, boy.
We are not prophets.
Focus on the mission.
Cue.
Inspiring stuff.
The season 2 writers, they really- I'm sorry, there must be a writer's strike or something.
Yeah, they- yeah.
This is a Battlestar Galactica situation.
Oh boy, I mean, this sounds like a Barney song.
It's like- I am not a prophet.
You are not a prophet.
We are not prophets.
Focus on the mission.
Remember when the main worry when Q came back was like, oh, what if Watkins hires some actually competent demigod to actually make some Q drops that do more damage?
No, it's even worse than it was before, even more uninspired.
You would say that to improve Qdrops you should replace the famous author of Sliced Americana, Jim Watkins, novelist, auto-published under the Is It Wet Yet publishing company, this esteemed author, president of many panels.
I'm not trusting the plan.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know what, and whoever is doing this is not trusting the process.
You gotta make an outline.
You gotta figure out what's your beginning, middle, and end here.
Don't offer this for free, Jake.
You could charge people on Instagram for this.
I've seen ads for I will be holding a seminar on how to properly write exciting Q-drops.
I'm going to be starting my own Patreon.
The minimum sign-up fee is $1,000.
The Jake Rokitansky Fascist Propaganda Masterclass?
Yeah, exactly.
How to write for fascist fantasy.
It'll open with me just like, kind of like, I don't know.
Being 20 minutes late because your tummy hurts?
20 minutes late, because my tummy hurts, in front of like a black screen, and just kind
of like laying back, like I'll take a hit off the vape and I'll be like, "So, you want
to be a writer?"
Yeah, that sucks.
Anything else, Travis?
Any other fucking gems?
Well, I want to point out there are a couple things that are kind of confusing about this, is that he is, I mean, in this post, Q is essentially telling the Q followers to not trust Q to predict the future, which is unusual because, you know, a common Q phrase is like, nothing can stop what is coming.
People often believe that, you know, Q Has some special insight into what is happening.
And now Q is kind of like, I don't know, throwing some cold water on the idea that Q actually can provide some information about what's coming down the pipeline.
And the other weird thing is that Q referred to themselves in the first person here.
I'm not a prophet.
I checked through a lot of Q posts.
I mean, I searched through as many as I could, but I'm pretty sure this is the only time that Q refer to themselves as I. Usually Q refer to themselves as we.
This is based on the concept that Q is actually a group of military intelligence officials.
So this is, I don't know, a little bit out of character in a couple ways for Q. Potentially a fuck up.
Is this maybe just Jim Watkins trying to prove to the feds who are, you know, increasingly onto him that, like, Q drops are not to be worried about because they're just terrible?
I don't, I don't know.
Now, the second Q drop was just an indication that Q is going to do a, like, ask me anything or a Q&A session before.
I remember Q did one of these all the way back in 2018.
This was the one in which Q was asked, like, you know, Is the Earth flat?
Or is Seth Rich alive?
Is JFK Jr.
alive?
These sorts of questions.
So I'm curious if that's the kind of questions Q will get for the upcoming Q&A.
I guess we're gonna have to, you know, get some accounts going.
Ask some questions.
God damn it.
The third Q drop makes reference to DNA.
It's characteristically cryptic, but it may refer to the false claim that the COVID vaccine changes your DNA somehow.
It does not.
That's not true.
I got, I got, I got, I got loyalty.
Got royalty inside, mate.
What is coded in your DNA?
Who put it there?
Why?
Mankind is repressed.
We will be repressed no more.
Information is knowledge.
Knowledge is power.
Information is power.
How do you protect your DNA?
There is a war for your DNA.
Protect your DNA.
Ascension.
Cue.
Yikes, stripes, fruit stripes, gum.
This is like, what the fuck?
What is coded in your DNA?
Who put it there?
I think that this is actually relevant because Jim Watkins' DNA is clearly deteriorating.
He's becoming a different type of life form that would watch these drops come in and go, wow, amazing.
You guys don't think this has anything to do with the, um, there's, like, alien shit creeping in here, you know, about the- No, it's like mRNA stuff and, like, how, like, human beings- Well, you know, here's a funny thing.
Looking at the responses to this one, other people did sort of bring up, you know, reptilian stuff.
Sort of the belief that, you know- Yes, because the hybrids and our DNA was crossed, yada yada.
Yes, exactly.
So there was there was some claims that, you know, people reference the, you know, the Anunnaki and stuff.
But yeah, so that's that's a possibility, too.
But yeah, yeah.
So those are the drops.
And I will say it sounds like Q is back to posting and I'm not going to cover every single Q drop going forward.
OK.
I guess we will.
Maybe you will.
Thanks, Travis.
Listen, we didn't cover every single Q-Drop, even when Q was actively posted.
That's because there were thousands of them!
We're getting morsels these days!
It's a famine!
But here's the thing, is that even the QAnon community is like, meh about these new Q-Drops nowadays.
Well, people want to hear it in Jake's voice and us make fun of it, even if it's just to say they're dumb every time.
I think people enjoy it.
Right into Travis to make sure he understands how much you enjoy that.
But yeah, it appears that with these drops, Q is finally doing big potty.
It seems to me that QAnon is simultaneously super important and now also not important at all.
No, yeah.
It's effects are just here forever and just as defined, even Republican politics more broadly.
But all of the new stuff just doesn't matter.
Yeah, no, this is like the Vegas phase, where they have a show in Vegas, they're completely irrelevant, nothing's in the top hundred anymore, play the hits.
I also have to talk about the ongoing saga of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
This has been really chaotic, has involved massive layoffs and resignations, including the resignation of former head of safety Yoel Roth.
The initial rollout of the new Twitter Blue, which included, you know, the $8 paid blue checkmark that Elon was bragging about, that was paused after lots of people used that verified blue checkmark to impersonate brands.
This included an account impersonating the pharmaceutical brand Eli Lilly, announcing that insulin was now free.
So, reportedly, half of Twitter's top advertisers have paused their ad spend for the site.
Elon Musk, in his new capacity as the head of Twitter, has started the process of bringing back previously suspended accounts.
Most notably, he restored the accounts of former President Trump, which was suspended in the aftermath of the January 6 attacks.
But since Trump is heavily invested in his own platform, Truth Social, he has not tweeted yet.
Big respect.
For the self-control.
That is a lot of self-control on the account of the former president.
I fucking hate the fact that Elon Musk sort of like gives cover for decisions he's already made by making a Twitter poll.
It's such bullshit because he's trying to pretend like, oh, you know, should I do this thing that I said I was promised I was going to do?
and he throws up this Twitter poll, and he says this, you know, Vox Populi, Vox Dei,
and he claims that it was part of a democratic process as Alves has, like, fuck off.
You're so patronizing.
Elon is also, like, replying in earnest to, like, some of the, like, slimiest accounts,
like, on Twitter, like, treating them like they're not, you know, like the chewed up starburst
at, like, the bottom of my pocket, you know?
Yeah, he exclusively replies to people who have appeared on Tucker Carlson, I'm pretty sure.
(laughing)
I don't know, Cat Turd hasn't showed its face.
According to the outlet Platformer, Twitter has begun the process of reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers.
Internally, Twitter employees refer to this mass reinstatement as the Big Bang.
Okay.
Yeah.
Or Travis, as you so eloquently put it on Twitter, the gif of the Ghostbusters firehouse exploding once the containment unit is shut down.
Such an apt- Of course he loves it.
You could not have a better popular culture analogy of everybody shaking their heads and being like, no, you don't want to do this.
Then you've got possessed, out of his mind, Rick Moranis sniffing at the guy's hand as he shuts down the thing.
I mean, what a perfect analogy for- And then the Puff Marshmallow man was like, no, I went to work For Michelin.
Sorry.
I'm not coming back.
So, among those who have had their accounts restored so far is the white nationalist Patrick Casey, who is the leader of the alt-right group Identity Europa.
So this is the, you know, the kind of people we should expect to come back.
But I think, you know, the real test is whether or not, like, the all-stars of QAnon are going to return to Twitter.
Like, are we going to see the return of Jo-Em, Jordan Sather, Praying Medic, these sorts of people?
Because, you know, if that happens, then Twitter will truly be hard to distinguish from 8Koon.
Everything is just summer of 2020 forever.
Yes, people just underestimate the power of internet relay chat, and we are entering the Mod Wars phase of social media.
Yeah.
I'm here for it.
Some people are fleeing the Mastodon.
Other people are going to this startup called Post News.
Now, I'm... Post News!
Post nudes.
One issue with this is I'm told that one of the major investors of this is Andreessen Horowitz, who's like another just, you know, VC psychopath, you know, a little different from Elon Musk himself.
The other one I keep hearing is like Hive Social.
I, you know, I mean, this is this is kind of interesting.
If like if Elon's takeover does, in fact, like kind of like fracture sort of like how people use social media, it'll be kind of like, I guess, like the early 2000s or like late 90s internet in which there weren't there weren't just like one or two major dominant sites that just everyone had to use.
If you were on social media at all, there were like dozens of like sites that people kind of fractured into sort of sort of They're all part of like a smaller community rather than one big community consisting of hundreds of millions of people.
People are going back to something awful, folks.
They're paying more than eight dollars a month.
We're resurrecting low tax.
Yeah, what could be better than everybody siphoning off into smaller groups where they're surrounded even more so by people who, you know, agree with them?
But that's exactly it.
This is why it'll never work.
They can't stay on... There's nobody to fight.
There's nobody to fight.
You can't be on the front lines of a digital information war, as so many like to claim, and then just, like, spend time hanging out in, like, HQ, smoking cigs, Playing cards, you know, having a good time with the other soldiers.
No, no, no, no, no.
You gotta be on the front lines.
You gotta be fighting, you know, your ideological enemies.
I honestly think, like, Twitter, like, people aren't actually leaving Twitter.
Everyone's gonna stay on this website till it dies.
It's like when everybody said they were gonna fucking leave America when Trump got elected.
Wrong!
You didn't.
Because, like, the reason why the people on the right left is because they were banned.
Like, they couldn't.
They wanted to go on the bigger sites, but they couldn't.
That's true.
Because I don't think that'll be a problem for Libs.
To some respect, I mean, it seems like a lot more left-wing accounts are being banned, but not enough on the same scale, I think.
Yeah.
That's true.
That's something else worth pointing out that like, disconcertingly, some, like, some left-wing accounts, like, for example, Antifa activist Chad Loder got his account banned shortly after Elon Musk had a interaction with, you know, right-wing propaganda Sandy Ngo.
So it may be the case that, like, you know, that that, you know, obviously, it would be surprising.
Elon Musk is a bullshitter.
So I wouldn't be surprised if, like, he starts, like, cracking down on, like, left-wing accounts.
Hey, this is something you called a long time ago, Travis.
The banhammer is fickle, the banhammer is based on people's moods, and that's how it goes.
He's got the banhammer.
He paid a lot of money for this banhammer, and he's gonna use it.
And for whatever reason, to me, it seems like Elon has framed, like, the right and the alt-right as, like, the popular kids, you know?
It seems like he really wants to get in their good graces.
Oh my god, imagine wanting Ian Miles Chong to think you're cool.
He has truly, for having that much money, man, you can't debase yourself worse than
having to answer Cat Turd's complaints.
You could build a fucking flying DeLorean and go around and do-
No he couldn't!
Because it would set on fire midair and kill you.
He couldn't.
He tried.
He tried to do all the cool stuff.
You can't do cool stuff with money.
It's a lie.
He could make a hoverboard at least.
Something.
No!
What he could do is build a giant gun pointed at...
Well, that's gonna be bleeped out.
Perry!
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Oh, he's working on a new Tesla gun!
Oh, and now he's pointing it to ****!
Oh, he's crying and now he's biting down on the ****!
The Tesla bullet, right out the back ****!
In a video game.
Not in a video game, in real life, on the Tesla factory floor.
No, in a video game, of course, obviously.
Now, there's been one kind of like, I guess, QAnon-like development in Elon Musk's takeover, and that's the fact that there seems to be lots of people who believe that Musk is doing something extra in order to remove child sex abuse material from the platform.
Yeah, he's seeking it out, and when he finds it, he's like, delete this, please, to his staff.
They have whole meetings just where he shows them child porn.
I saw this tweet from one-time One America News Network anchor Liz Wheeler, and it said this.
Can we take a moment and thank at Elon Musk for reading Twitter of child pornography and child trafficking hashtags?
Of all the battles he's fighting, this is the most important one.
Think about how many little children he's saving from sexual abuse, exploitation, and torture.
I could cry.
And then a prayer hand emoji.
Can we talk about how she's focusing on little children?
What about the big children?
What about the big boys?
Those don't deserve to be protected, I guess.
Scathing critique of this woman by Gillian.
Elon Musk replies with such a fucking soy response.
He's like, this will forever be our top priority.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's your top priority?
What's the truth?
What's the truth, Travis?
Tell us the truth.
Well, I want to be careful here because it is true that removing child sex abuse material from Twitter has been a persistent problem and which has not been adequately addressed by management.
And I'm basing this on internal reports that were reported by The Verge.
For example, in February of 2021, the company's health team produced a report which stated that, quote, while the amount of child sex abuse material online has grown exponentially, Twitter's investment in technologies to detect and manage the growth has not.
Wow.
So it's grown exponentially?
Like it seems like the Bitcoin people should have invested in child pornography.
Jesus Christ.
So, the company used an enforcement system called Red Panda, which the report called a legacy, unsupported tool that is by far one of the most fragile, inefficient, and under-supported tools it employs.
Twitter was also forced to delay plans to become an OnlyFans competitor due to concerns that this would risk worsening the platform's child sex abuse material problem.
In April 2022, reports stated that, quote, Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.
In Twitter's latest transparency report, which covers July to December of 2021, the company said that it suspended more than half a million accounts This is, I suppose, like the grain of truth.
which was a 31% increase compared to the previous six months.
In September, brands including Dyson and Forbes suspended advertising campaigns
after their promotions appeared alongside child abuse content.
So, you know, this is, I suppose, like the grain of truth.
This is a problem that, even compared to other social media platforms,
is not really adequately addressed.
So I've really no interest in defending the previous Twitter administration's handling of removing this kind of material.
The issue is that there's really not any evidence that the new Twitter is especially devoted to solving this very real problem.
In fact, according to reporting from Wired, layoffs have gutted Twitter's child safety team.
Just one person remains to enforce the company's ban on child sex abuse content across Japan and the Asia-Pacific region.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
So you're telling me that there is one person who has to look at all of the child pornography posted to Twitter?
They don't have to look at it specifically themselves, but they're just simply in charge with enforcing their rules and the laws regarding the material.
Oh my god, this is like when Homer gets left at the nuclear panel and he's just kind of scrambling around, pushing buttons, trying to avoid Springfield in Chernobyl.
Yeah.
It seems like a lot of the conservative like rhetoric on this is that the previous child safety team could have pressed the ban child pornography button and didn't and then Elon came into power and then pressed it like it's not.
Yeah, that's yes.
Basically, the idea is that that Twitter was highly tolerant of illegal content, horrifying content that Damaged their brand as much as, you know, a brand can be damaged.
And then they just chose not to do it.
But Elon Musk decided to fix it.
I mean, yeah, that's the narrative has been set.
I mean, it just reminds me a lot of like the QAnon community in 2018, because they claim that like, oh, like all previous presidential administrations were highly tolerant of sex trafficking.
But Trump, he pressed the solve sex trafficking, end sex trafficking button.
and he made it all go away.
It was eventually revealed that actually sex trafficking prosecutions plunged under the
Trump administration when compared to the Obama administration.
Now, obviously, it would be great if like, you know, Elon Musk somehow solved this problem.
If, you know, I would be the first person to congratulate him.
I don't give a shit.
But the issue is that the man is a bullshitter.
He claimed that content moderation decisions would be handled by a committee, and that wound up being false.
He's just deciding these things unilaterally.
He claimed that he would tackle Twitter's bot and spam problem.
And I have to say, personally, I'm getting more spam in my mentions and DMs than I ever have.
Yes, Sam.
And, you know, it's just regardless of the reality, Musk is just posing as this protector of children, the guy who pressed the stop child pornography button.
He's doing this, I think, in order to build up clout amongst right wing conspiracists.
Yeah, because they're they're they're rewarding him already for shit that he hasn't done.
Yeah.
So no wonder he's going to cater to them.
It's like, let's see, it's like, do I want to cater to, like, this lefty who's talking about, like, my diamond mine, you know?
Or do I want to cater to, you know, this, like, right-wing pundit who's basically patting me on the back for something that, you know, who's basically buying my bullshit?
Emerald mines.
Oh, who gives a fuck?
It's okay.
It's okay.
He's still bad.
He's a narcissist who's looking for, like, sick offense.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people were, like, debating why Elon actually bought Twitter, because there's, like, a bunch of possible reasons.
But one of them that seems undeniable is that it was ideological.
Mm-hmm.
That he has a right-wing conservative agenda and saw that the previous moderation team was in some ways allowing, I guess, some sort of progressive form of discourse to flourish and he wants to shut down that.
The woke mind virus.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, he is in a war against the woke mind virus and it's a culture war and he's been talking about this online.
It's pretty clear that's definitely one component of it.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the same thing.
The reason why he, you know, did his Hyperloop thing is because he wanted to shut down public transportation that perhaps threatened his, you know, his automobile company.
So, I mean, this is like he he uses resources in order to, you know, shut off avenues that are of thought or infrastructure that he thinks are threatening to him and his businesses.
Alright kids, today we're going to be talking about one of the most important and meaningful parts of life on earth.
Our relationship to brands.
Specifically, what happens when a narrative about a brand, carefully crafted by dozens of marketing people sitting in endless meetings, collides with an even stronger, somewhat more organic narrative.
Widespread moral panic stoked by bad faith reactionaries.
At the center of this specific collision is Balenciaga, an haute couture fashion brand named after a legendary Spanish designer called Cristobal Balenciaga.
Like many brands today, Balenciaga is actually undead.
The fashion house passed in 1968 when Cristobal, who was 74 years old at the time, shut it down.
And he died in 1972.
And then years later, in 1986, the rights to the Balenciaga name were purchased by a French holding company that injected the legendary designer's corpse with new life fluid and started selling clothes again.
The company went through a few iterations before being purchased again by Gucci Group in 2001, at which point it started to grow in popularity due to being embraced by celebs like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, who all were seen with the same handbag.
Georgian designer Demna Gvasalia has been the creative director of Balenciaga since 2015 and has driven its popularity to new heights by pushing the brand into increasingly mainstream collaboration with streetwear companies like Adidas and Crocs, but also with the world of entertainment.
A digital clothing line within Fortnite, a Balenciaga-themed 10-minute Simpsons episode, an expensive handbag made to look like a bag of Lay's potato chips, And in December of last year, GQ wrote a full article about
Vassalia in which they credit him with being a "populist interested in subverting fashion. What he has
done with each of these projects is dismantle, brick by brick, the false boundary between vernacular and
luxury. His platform sole, Crocs, satirical prom suits, and leather Ikea bags, all at
luxurious price points, get a rise from the masses and expose the cliches of
fashion elitism."
So, I mean, very funny to be like, I'm exposing their hypocrisy by selling
incredibly expensive bags that look like cheap shit.
it.
That is actually sticking it to them.
Celebrities flocked to the brand as a result of the image Kvasalia crafted for Balenciaga.
Some to collaborate, and others just to sport his designs on the red carpet.
The cult of personality around him grew, and he leaned into the idea that he was a provocative mastermind, crafting something akin to pop art with his decisions at Balenciaga.
As he told GQ, Everything I do has a reason for it.
The trashy prom suit or an unreasonably expensive market bag did not just accidentally slip into my collection without me super consciously putting it there.
Do I know that this may not be, quote, understood by the average social media critique?
Yes, I do.
Do I care?
I am pretty sure you know the answer.
I just do fashion that I love and enjoy.
It is really as simple as that.
Couldn't possibly backfire to paint yourself as the mastermind who has never missed any details about what's going into your stuff.
Yep.
Oh boy.
To Vasalia, and marketers in general, all cultural signifiers are fair game to be recycled into a product or ad.
The Bernie Sanders campaign logo, a bag of Lay's potato chips, BDSM culture, all just images to be remixed in an attempt to court controversy and garner attention.
But the result, of course, is not art.
It's profit.
Thus, culture is stripped of context, value, and meaning before it reaches the algorithm.
This approach came to a head recently when several ad campaigns for Balenciaga caused a big scandal.
It all started with a holiday ad campaign which featured toddlers holding teddy bears wearing bondage gear.
Tasteless?
Inappropriate?
Sure.
But this campaign was just the beginning.
Because online sleuths then combed through Balenciaga content for more signs that pedo-Satanists were signaling their proclivities.
And they found it, of course, in the form of a photo of a Balenciaga handbag with documents spread all around it.
The photoshoot's theme was the workplace, and when people zoomed into a partially visible document, they found that it was a printout of a Supreme Court decision ruling that free speech did not apply to the distribution of child pornography.
So, anti-child pornography document.
But still, why...
Still a strange choice.
Of course it is.
Are you saying there are no coincidences, Travis?
Go ahead, go ahead.
I'm saying that if you are, you know, I guess a marketer of any talent, like every choice you make in the frame is deliberate.
Yeah.
So why exactly make this deliberate choice?
So make some sort of ruling related to child pornography.
It is strange.
Something to consider.
I honestly think the strategy is to bait people like the conspiracists.
I think, well, we'll get into exactly how that, yeah, like, I'm gonna get into how it appears and humiliate Travis, so.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding.
In another photo from the same shoot, which, once again, is like a totally separate shoot from this holiday shoot with the teddy bears.
It was from the summer, it passed without any comments, and it was, like, set in the workplace, essentially, to sell handbags and other stuff.
So in another photo from that shoot, a stack of books is visible on the table.
Was it dressing for the shoot?
Or a signal from the pedo-elite?
The books reference two artists, Matthew Barney and Michael Bormans.
Both of these figures are contemporary artists whose work is often grim, violent, and sexual.
None of that work was present in the Balenciaga marketing campaign, but the mere presence of the artists' names on book spines was enough to get people going.
And it wasn't just online sleuths anymore.
The right-wing mainstream media stepped in immediately, having identified another perfect topic for their extended war on LGBTQ people and what they perceive as a decadent liberal culture.
So here's Tucker Carlson.
So this week, Balenciaga rolled out a new ad campaign on Instagram, and the selling point of the ads was sex with children.
One photograph showed a very young girl lying face down on a couch with candles, empty wine glasses, and a dog collar on a coffee table in front of her.
Another picture showed the same girl, a toddler, holding a teddy bear dressed in sexual bondage gear, including a leather harness.
And then, in case you missed the point, we're for pedophilia at Balenciaga!
Another picture made it explicit.
That picture showed pages from a Supreme Court opinion that struck down a law designed to fight child pornography.
Whoever staged the photoshoot made certain to include a portion of that opinion that used the word sex or sexual four times.
And of course, that was not an accident.
Balenciaga wanted you to notice.
The Daily Mail went further, digging up Michael Borman's work for an article entitled, Just Another Coincidence?
Photos from Scrap Balenciaga Campaign Feature Book by Artist Whose Works Include Castrated Toddlers After Bondage Teddy Bears Fiasco and Hidden Child Porn Docs.
So one thing to note here is that the order doesn't make any sense like the the child porn docs as they put it were part of that July shoot which was like a separate thing that we'll get into or whatever and then there's of course the thing that set it all off which is the extremely tasteless essentially like having teddy bears have bondage gear on and I would argue that pushing them together and creating a kind of sense of like, first they did this and then they did this, are you paying attention, is like the kind of linchpin of the narrative on the right about why this happened and what it means.
Right-wing pundits on Twitter had a field day as well.
Blair White said, If Balenciaga did something that offended the LGBT community, every celebrity would have cut ties instantly.
They promoted child porn and nearly every celebrity is silent.
Really makes you think, huh?
Bryson Gray said, "Wait, shouldn't Balenciaga have their bank accounts closed, get banned on social media,
stores temporarily shut down and all celebrities condemn them first? Or is that only for black artists and athletes?"
CJ Pearson said, "Balenciaga isn't apologizing for what they did."
Balenciaga is apologizing because they got caught.
Don't confuse the two.
After the lack of outrage from celebrities and the media about Balenciaga's child porn campaign, I'm officially convinced the world is run by a satanic pedophile ring.
That's what did it for you.
Now you're convinced.
So, obviously, these are all kind of, like, mainstream right-wing pundits.
You know, all these posts that I just read from have, like, thousands of likes and tens of thousands of retweets, depending on the one.
But QAnon accounts, of course, went a step further, intimating that this scandal was the beginning of the end for the cabal.
We, the media, said, This Balenciaga situation is going to embroil as many high-profile names, or more, than the FTX drama.
The House of Cards is crumbling.
And they included a screenshot of a TMZ article that read, Kamala Harris' stepdaughter turning heads again, this time in Paris for Balenciaga.
So, I think they think that the Kamala Harris dynasty is going down for this one just because they have like an NB artist daughter who was in one of their... Yeah, and that article is from like a year, like well over a year ago, so...
Now we will, Travis, I can see you're impatient, we will get into how these things are crafted and how possibly they could end up fucking up this bad in so many different small ways.
But before that we have to take a look at how even Manosphere psycho Andrew Tate, who's a future subject of the Man Clan podcast, weighed in as well.
And he sounded extremely QAnon brained.
What are the statistical odds of repeated references to pedophilia being included in multiple advertisement campaigns for one particular brand?
Basically, completely impossible.
This is very, very purposeful, and they've done it because they're trying to give you hints and trying to normalize and show you and tell you what they do.
They're doing this because of karmic retribution.
Satanists believe if they tell you what they're doing, if they make their intentions clear and you still adhere to them, that they are no longer responsible for the negative consequences of them.
That is karmic retribution.
This is elites telling you that they are absolutely and utterly pedophiles and they are here to see if you are complicit in the actions themselves.
Now that you understand that, The question is, what are you really going to do about it?
Boycotting Benzalonciaga is a fantastic start, sure, but it's the very, very tip of an iceberg, and it's a very, very deep and scary rabbit hole.
And when you truly understand who is running the world, and you truly understand how fucked up this world is, then you're going to find out that a larger change than boycotting one particular brand This is ridiculous, and I'll tell you why.
It's one thing to boycott Gatorade, or boycott Goya beans, but what average person can afford a Balenciaga anything?
I've been boycotting Balenciaga my whole fucking life!
Gonna make one of those like conservative burning your merchandise videos, but it's for like a fake Balenciaga bag.
Yeah.
And I mean, you know, it's like, I get it.
You know, people are like, how did all this stuff end up happening?
And there's there, you know, we'll get into like why each thing might have happened separately.
But separately from that, I do want to say the fashion industry has been rife with people abusing young girls forever.
I mean, this is it's literally built on like finding the youngest, thinnest possible girls and putting them in very awkward situations, trying to convince them to be nude.
And then, you know, Epstein style rings of people just kind of, you know, prostituting these people.
I mean, it is no secret that fashion has, you know, a big problem with, you know, You know, essentially taking advantage of youth and sexuality.
That is the cornerstone of a lot of ads in the world at large.
You know, the idea of selling sex or whatever.
Oftentimes it's the youngest possible legal version of it or whatever.
Yeah.
And the fashion industry, yeah, there's lots of predators in it.
It's an obvious magnet for predators like this because it's an industry in which you will, you know, hire young girls to pose provocatively.
And so it's literally built on the commercialization of youth sexuality.
And it's also an industry, and I think it's, you know, similar in this way to Hollywood, where there are so many people competing for these jobs, these modeling gigs, that, you know, your clients are essentially your actors or your models are constantly in this state of desperation that, you know, if I can just do this off, I can just make this connection, you know, that that'll be my career.
You know, it is so hard to get a leg up in this industry that the people who are, you
know, who the folks in power are taking advantage of are in some ways willing to be taken advantage
of because of how hard it is to break into the industry.
They're told it's kind of part of the process.
Yes, exactly.
That is one thing, right?
And then the other thing is the idea that there is a cabal of kind of pedo-satanic elites
that are coming together to go, "Let's put a bunch of stuff, normalizing pedophilia,
into these ads for an imaginary set of reasons," right?
To like, to like rub it in your face.
You know, QAnon has elaborated on this a lot.
You know, it's like, it's either to rub it in your face or it's to normalize it more broadly or Tate's, you know, concept, which is if they, if they tell you it's pedophilia and they sell it to you, then you're the one sending in their satanic worldview or whatever, you know, perception.
So these are two things that I think we should keep separately, right?
I mean, no one is saying, don't look at the fashion industry and in horror because it's worth looking at in horror.
Yeah.
Many industries are, you know, when you commercialize things, especially images of young people looking good, that's already, there's an inherent problem with that, right?
Because it becomes a process of like, who can, who can create the most shocking or the most, Transgressive images to garner attention, and then who can kind of harness young bodies to essentially sell more product.
And my question is, what kind of vehicle is Andrew Tate riding in that video?
I mean, it looks like a Dr. Robotnik contraption.
Like, it's clearly not a real car.
What is this guy?
Uh, yeah, there's a lot behind this guy.
We'll have to do a whole episode on Mankind about him.
I know, he's such a piece of shit.
He's a real piece of shit.
So, the story hit a variety of mainstream outlets, and pressure started building on previous Balenciaga collaborators and evangelists to call the brand out.
Kim Kardashian eventually put out a milquetoast statement about the scandal after being heckled by right-wing pundit Candace Owens.
And this is where the story gets even more fucked up, because it fused with the ongoing Kanye West debacle.
Now for those who aren't aware, and obviously this is a topic that deserves its own episode in depth and hopefully we'll be able to do that at some point, but Kanye has been getting even more unhinged than usual lately.
After debuting a White Lives Matter t-shirt with Candace Owens, he's now palled up with two of the shittiest right-wing operatives out there, Milo Yiannopoulos and Nick Fuentes.
These are the Yes Men remaining at his side as he embarks on a presidential campaign that so far seems to involve calling out Jewish people.
Or as he tweeted, I'm a bit sleepy tonight, but when I wake up, I'm going DEATHCON 3 ON JEWISH PEOPLE, all caps.
The funny thing is, I actually can't be anti-semitic because black people are actually Jew also.
You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone who ever opposes your agenda.
The 31,000 likes on this is a little bit disturbing.
For context, it appears Kanye has bought into black Israelite talking points that posit that black people are the real Jews and thus can't be anti-Semitic when they're publicly proclaiming that a Jewish cabal runs the power structures and media of our world.
This quickly made him a friend to neo-Nazis, of course, who were more than delighted to have a public figure speaking out on the quote-unquote Jewish question.
But for Kanye, it appears to be a very personal thing.
He blames his trainer and ex-wife for conspiring together with a nebulous group of Jewish power brokers to drug him and take away his children.
Here he is talking about it in a TMZ Ambush interview, looking extremely haggard and out of it.
He starts by referring to a red hat, which is a reference to the time he wore a MAGA hat and met with Donald Trump.
The thing about the red hat that drove me to a point of exhaustion, which was misdiagnosed by a, I'm not going to say what race, what people, uh, doctor and what hospital and what media it went to.
We know I can't say that.
It was a Jewish doctor.
I'm sure he's talking about Cedars-Sinai Hospital, which is like where all the like rich people in LA go.
go.
I mean, Cedars-Sinai is the best.
And yes, as the name suggests, it is a Jewish show.
There's a lot of Jews.
Doctors there.
My parents hoped that my brother and I would be doctors or lawyers.
It's not our fault.
And also, we're not a race.
It's just a religion.
I mean, we were created by the Cedars-Sinai podcast division.
Negative reactions to Ye's anti-Semitic turn have caused companies to sever ties with him.
And one of those companies was Balenciaga.
So when they got into their own scandal, he was more than ready to speak about them.
This just shows you all celebrities are controlled.
You don't see no celebrities talking about the Balenciaga situation, right?
So that just shows you all of these celebrities out here don't let them influence you in any way because they're controlled by the people who really influence the world.
There's no such thing as a celebrity influencer.
That is that all these people If they don't, they're not serving God.
If they serve God, then believe what they're talking about.
But we're holding to Christian Christ principles first.
America is a Christian country.
Another issue I have is the fact that Elon won't reinstate Alex Jones.
Alex Jones is a Christian.
But you have a person who doesn't believe that Christ is Lord going to buy An American media outlet and picking and choosing who can be on the platform and who can't be on the platform.
Right.
Jesus is Lord.
Elon Musk, pernicious Canadian slash South African.
Atheist or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, there's, I mean, he literally just sounds like a groyper these days.
You know, it's a lot of like, Jesus is Lord stuff and, um, talk about the Jews and it sucks.
You know, it sucks.
It's really sad.
But you know he'll bring up the Balenciaga thing obviously is is useful for him
But uh you know celebrities have been pressured to like turn on Balenciaga
And they mostly have you know I don't either put out like fucking statements or celebrities know by now that like
their PR teams are so finely tuned into what's cancelable and what's not whether
or not they they condemn Balenciaga is very low on the list in terms of cancelable
offenses I I think that most people know that this will blow over, there will be a new scandal, a new piece of news, you know, within 24 hours.
And it's like, I don't know.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, you know, it's essentially to believe that there's a deeper scandal here than just like, wow, you stepped over the line.
That was a stupid combination to put like your teddy bear bags and, you know, wearing like leather harnesses in the hands of children for these shoots.
That was a terrible idea.
That's, you know, that's something that that would come.
People would speak out about it and it would kind of blow over.
Yeah.
But the real claims here are more sorted, right?
It's like the idea that Balenciaga is actually, you know, secretly putting kind of child pornography messaging in their marketing in some sort of, you know, kind of vicious attempt to change the culture or to make it more pedophilic and to make it more accepting of pedophilia.
Yeah, because there are plenty of advertisement campaigns that are pedophilic in nature, you know, putting young people in, you know, makeup and whatever, dresses, but it's like, but they went, they took it one step further and like paired them with like BDSM teddy bears, you know, just that's a bridge too far, I guess.
It's sad because it's exactly what happens when you're basically, you take culture as culture, art, all this stuff.
It's all the same to you, right?
It's all just flat images you can combine to like create controversy or whatever. So when you look at LGBTQ culture
at large, then you have this sub category of that that you could call like LGBTQ,
you know, sexual culture.
And then you have this subcategory of that that's like this kind of BDSM
leather daddy culture or whatever. And you don't care about that culture
if you're Balenciaga. You care about taking these images and recombining them
so you can make money and a splash, right? So there isn't actually a kind of
necessarily like a gay agenda behind this. This is a cynical company that is
taking...
Gay culture, pieces of gay culture, dismembering that culture, stripping it of context, and recycling it to sell you shit, right?
And one of, probably one of their brand identity, like, things is, like, edgy.
I mean, I don't doubt it, right?
They're an haute couture company, and then they tried to bring it into the mainstream, they want everybody to know about it.
And so then everybody turned their eyes to this fucking haute couture brand that's, like, trying to be edgy.
And guess what?
You find a bunch of questionable material if you comb through their shit.
But if you look at the BDSM bear, like, campaign or whatever, once they had found that, they were like, we need more.
And then they went back to, like, old campaigns.
You know, this is not just something being rolled out together.
It's the process of finding stuff as you dig backwards through someone's Instagram.
And I'm sorry to say, but you would be able to do this for almost anybody.
They did this with Tom Hanks based on gloves like sitting on the ground.
They would do it to anybody.
Balenciaga is maybe the most obvious target.
You could have at any point chosen to just go through Balenciaga's stuff and found a bunch of questionable stuff because they're always toying with the line of taboo because they see it as this kind of, I don't know, brand identity for themselves.
And they do it extremely cynically.
They do it with no ideology.
They do it only for profit.
Yeah, it's like, rich people are always toying the line of taboo as well, you know?
That's who they're catering to!
They're like, this is provocative, you know?
Like, I'm dressing this way because it reminds you of something fucked up, and isn't that interesting?
And that works for contemporary art!
Contemporary art has to, or does, in reality, Deal with taboos and the limits of what is acceptable to humanity at large.
But you have context for it because you walk into a gallery or you get told, this is a contemporary artist.
You're reading a book about this person's work.
You're not being fed it automatically through the Instagram algorithm as an advertisement for a fucking bag, right?
Yeah.
So you have a choice and there is context, but this process has removed both choice, you're being served it automatically, and context.
The amount of people who were served these ads, you know, chances are that they weren't following the Balenciaga Instagram.
Right.
Yeah.
No, it was so that's the problem here is a greater problem.
If you if you I'm sorry, but if you picked any contemporary artists and went through their work, you'd be like, oh, my God, if you're like the average American, like, you know, middle aged person, you'd be horrified.
Because this stuff is dealing with shit that is dark and horrible, you know?
I'm the first to say that I've done photography in the past, I've written books in the past, that if you went back and went, oh look at all this, look at all this, you would see an artistic interest in all of these dark, messed up, borderline topics.
And every once in a while when there's a cultural panic around art, they do the same thing.
They strip it of context, they pull it out into the light, and they go, look at this on face value.
But not just look at this, look at this combined with this combined with this.
From different ads, different phases of Balenciaga marketing.
And it all combines for that perfect QAnon meme, right?
Which is like the same thing they did with Podesta and his art and all of this stuff in early Pizzagate days, right?
So really it's the art of decontextualization to feed a panic.
And that's not to say there aren't pedophile rings, but usually pedophile rings are not the ones that are creating contemporary art that deals with these difficult issues.
Yeah, the pedophile rings are trying not to get caught.
The people who are actually doing this for real are trying to do it in the most secret, obscure way possible so they can continue, you know, committing these horrible crimes.
Which is so crazy that the whole idea of this is that like, oh, they want to, you know, you go back to what, you know, Tate's conspiracy that like, oh, well they have to do it out in the open, you know, because that way, it's like, No!
When you have, like, criminals who are coordinated enough that this is their business and they are operating a ring, a system, they're trying not to get caught.
They don't want you to know about this.
Like, Epstein had all these fucked up decos and all these pictures and stuff and guests would come over and they would all be in the kind of Uh, financial class or in the kind of like perceived like art class and so he thought it was provocative to them.
Did he want to have all this stuff out in billboards and stuff like that?
Of course not!
You know, if you're a pervert, right?
And some perverts are illegal and other perverts are just perverts.
That's okay.
You can have kink, and you can have all these things, you can do BDSM, you can do whatever you want.
If it's not, you know, preying on children.
So, conflating those two things, the idea that like, if you have any interest in sexuality, if you have any interest in contemporary art, in the darker side of human experience on Earth, then automatically, you're actually running a ring that systematically abuses people.
If we're going down that road, oh boy.
And we are, so there will be no end.
But yeah, there's going to be no end, I guess.
That's what I'm saying.
It seems like even if you find a phenomenon that is real, like maybe a part of this does relate to the fact that sexualization of children is formalized in a lot of these spaces, that regardless of the fact that there is some objective truth to it, the QAnon-esque bake is still irrational.
It's still pathological.
Yeah.
Like, Lacan talks about how, like, a jealous husband who thinks that his wife is cheating on him, even if she is, he is being irrational.
Like, it comes from a pathological belief structure.
And I think that's sort of what we see here, that, like, there isn't actually a real discussion about why this type of imagery comes about.
It's turned into this absurd, simplified conspiracy about, like, you know, a global cabal.
There's no discussion of commodification and its relationship to abuse and sexualization of young people.
No, and like the end result is like, okay, maybe some creatives in Balenciaga or stakeholders in Balenciaga will, you know, have problems with their career or will have less of a payday.
They won't really suffer.
The people who will really suffer from kicking up this kind of cultural panic is going to be the average LGBTQ person.
Who is going to be targeted because people's heads are filled with, you know, these conclusions that have been kind of, you know, called for by Tucker Carlson, by whatever, Andrew Tate, by, you know, the Daily Mail.
And they want you to believe that there is essentially that the pedo elite is signaling.
And that all LGBTQ people are actually kind of the foot army of the pedo elite, right?
And, you know, those will be the real victims is the bottom line.
And I guess we're going to be touching on the real victims, you know, in the Club Q shooting segment.
Um, but yeah, it's worth it's worth saying that, like, the people who will suffer are not Balenciaga, are not any elite fashion, you know, person who recruits young girls for shoots or even has a more sordid hidden side to their business, which undoubtedly exist and should be investigated.
But this is not investigation.
This is fucking meme making.
This is copy pasting.
And this is absolutely stoking cultural panic to get a political goal achieved.
So anyways, after that clip we played, Ye got into a black car with Milo Yiannopoulos, his campaign director, and drove off.
And from all the footage I've seen of Milo, it seems like he has consumed heroic amounts of amphetamines to get him through these tough times.
So, good for him.
Also very funny, given the fact that the main reason that Milo was initially deplatformed was because he essentially, like, endorsed, like, pedophilic sexual relations.
Yeah.
He did do that.
So he's going to be fighting the elites for you.
Don't worry about it.
The guy who speaks British is a human bag of amphetamines and has openly said, Oh, no, it's fine.
You can do that with, you know, young, young man.
So this is all part of the Yay 24 campaign, which is, I think, just doomed from the beginning.
But in a video released about it, Kanye spoke about meeting Donald Trump and taking anti-Semite and white supremacist Nick Fuentes along for the ride.
I think the thing that Trump was most perturbed about, me asking him to be my vice president, I think that was like lower on the list of things that caught him off guard.
It was the fact that I walked in with intelligence.
So Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.
And Nick Fuentes, unlike so many of the lawyers and so many people that he was left with on his 2020 campaign, he's actually a loyalist.
When he didn't know where the lawyers is, You'll still have your lawyer list.
And when all the lawyers said, forget it, Trump's done, there are loyalists running up in the White House, right?
And my question would be, why, when you had the chance, did you not free the January Sixers?
And I came to him as someone who loves Trump, and I said, go and get Cory back.
Go and get these people that the media tried to cancel and told you to step away from.
So yeah, they were showing Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and all that, so... This is just one of these topics where I sat down to write about it, and it connects in every way to everything, like, you know, from like, the ex-president, to fucking fashion brand having a panic around it, to the alt-rights kind of...
Surge in the culture as well as the Twitter stuff with Elon just very chaotic stuff
And it just seems to have the effect of dragging QAnon and white supremacist talking points into the mainstream media
just again and again I mean, I know live has been commenting on Twitter about
how fucked up it is that like Jimmy Kimmel is running the Nick Fuentes
Clip, you know, it's just like it's how do we get here?
We're even seeing a revival of old QAnon claims surrounding a young woman called Rachel Chandler who was falsely
accused of going to Epstein Island And helping him run a pedophile ring
Something we've debunked in past episodes.
But nothing ever dies, so here's a guest on the Gospel Broadcasting Network remixing QDrop smearing Chandler and injecting the topic back into the Balenciaga debate.
Balenciaga has very dark kind of things going on.
And in 2016, one of the people that recruited all of the models for Balenciaga's runway show was a woman called Rachel Chandler, who has been on Jeffrey Epstein's Island.
She's even posted the picture on Instagram of CCTV footage back in 2013, bragging about being on the island.
And if you look at her modelling agency, every single one of the models looks like a trafficking victim.
You can see they've got very dark under the eyes.
So people need to research that.
Am I going insane or is that the person who initially said that they were like transracial and got surgery to look more Korean?
Is that it?
The right-wing person who claimed to identify as Korean?
I hope not but maybe it is.
I think it is.
I think they've done like a right-wing thing now and denounced.
Oh yeah!
I know they have.
Didn't quite put that together, but this gets even worse, folks, I guess.
And this was posted by an account that goes by an American patriot, Cold War patriot, who said, Balenciaga, like the demon Bal, Rachel Chandler.
So they're very happy to see the hits replayed, because this is something that appeared in multiple Qdrops.
Now, to discuss the Balenciaga mess a little bit more, it has continued to evolve.
You know, the companies put out public statements condemning like what they did and decided to sue the contractors behind one of the photo shoots, the summer one, for inexplicable acts.
Malevolent or, at the very least, extraordinarily reckless.
The brand's lawsuit explained that "as a result of defendants' misconduct, members of the public,
including the news media, have falsely and horrifically associated Balenciaga with the
repulsive and deeply disturbing subject of the court decision." An agent for the contractor
explained that the papers in the ad "were obtained from a prop house that were rental
pieces used on film and photo shoots."
Everyone from Balenciaga was on the shoot and was present on every shot and worked on the edit of every image in post-production.
And so they accused Balenciaga of attempting to use them as, quote, a scapegoat.
So this is where I think it's worth, like, kind of stopping for a second and examining, like, the three things that have combined to create a scandal here.
There's the teddy bear stuff, which sucks, obviously.
And basically, what should happen happened.
People were like, what the fuck?
They said, we're sorry, we fucked up.
And they took back their campaign.
It was too far.
It wasn't good.
Then there's the document appearing in the shoot.
And from experience, uh, having worked with social media agencies and just like how everything is delegated down the line, I think it's absolutely credible that this was a mistake.
Now, potentially there was somebody assembling these props who's like, Ooh, what if, what if we left this one visible instead of this other one?
And was like, Ooh, that's, that's fucked up.
Or like, maybe that would fuck up Balenciaga or whatever.
Yeah.
You usually hate the people you're working for on a deep level.
So that's potentially something that could have happened, like a mix of kind of like low-level malice with just not caring enough to look.
And the fact that everybody got to see these shots and approved them, I think to me, speaks more to the fact that they don't actually care what ends up in here.
Like all this stuff is just cultural flotsam recombined to create images that sell stuff, right?
They don't actually look at every one of the pieces.
Same thing with the books, the Matthew Barney book and the Bormann's book.
You're looking at a stack of books like in a shot of a woman posing at a desk or whatever,
and they were like, "Okay, well, let's put some like coffee table books
"in the background.
"What's edgy, what's cool, what's Balenciaga?
"All right, let's take these contemporary artists."
So it's like, hey, I'm not making excuses for the company.
Like this sucks.
You know, they should fucking know better than this.
And I don't like Balenciaga in general.
And I don't care about any of these people at all.
But having worked inside companies when they've come up with like, not inside companies, but having been a contractor for big companies while they make insane mistakes because they have their head Totally up their ass and they also like care way too much while also not caring about any of the ingredients that goes into the creative You know I I have to say it is credible that this shit is just like a set of shitty little circumstances that added up to this You know I mean Pepsi did make that ad where you know the fucking Kendall Jenner herself handed the coke or the Pepsi to the cop and it solved the violence and they did that in the middle of you know a
The kind of Black Lives Matter stuff.
So, you know, these people are completely disconnected from culture.
And especially if you're in a company like Balenciaga, that's like all about being cool and chic and haute couture and edgy and shit.
Your brain is just gone.
You like can't see what other people see in the culture anymore.
Does that mean that you're running a big pedophile ring?
I don't, I don't particularly think so.
I mean, I'm not gonna say it's impossible, you know, if it comes out and there's actual evidence, fine.
But if you're gonna be using, like, a fucking Instagram post, uh, that was, like, subcontracted so many times, you know, that, like, you have to, you know, learn the names of, like, More and more unknown, you know, creative outfits and stuff.
And it was it all got pumped out as part of a campaign with, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of images this way.
And they people who are stoking the fear or people who are stoking the panic have to combine different things that they've aggregated that aren't even part of the same kind of creative effort and don't involve the same people.
That's when you know that, yeah, it's it's it has more to do with Satanic panic with sexual panic, which is like an ancient American tradition than anything necessarily deeply nefarious about Balenciaga.
Should Balenciaga be abolished?
Yes.
Should the company be dismantled?
Yes.
Are they immoral?
Yes.
Are they running a pedo-satanic ring?
I don't see any evidence here.
I'm sorry.
I just see fucking dumb high-fashion people who have just grown so disconnected with the culture, so disconnected with the work that's being pumped out every day as part of their ad campaigns, that it created a shitstorm for them.
And honestly, I don't feel sorry for them.
I certainly don't.
But Travis, did you have something to say about too many coincidences?
Yeah, I don't buy the idea that the Supreme Court ruling was just something they happened to have on hand and decided to throw into the frame.
I don't know.
I think we can all agree that Balenciaga, at least the executives at Balenciaga, should be in prison for some reason.
I'm not saying they're all child sex traffickers, but maybe they should be in prison.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I'm glad you can agree that you're waiting for the storm and that there are no coincidences and that you've gone full circle, sir, since your beginnings, your humble beginnings on this podcast.
This is what cracked me too far.
So, meanwhile, the culture war conversation has grown increasingly bizarre as Rod Dreher, an absolute weirdo and recurring character in the Choppo podcasting universe, published a series of articles about Balenciaga, the latest of which in the American Conservative is titled, Lada Volkova, the Devil Styles Balenciaga.
The pedo-chic fashion house's chief stylist is obsessed with satanic themes, child abuse, cannibalism, violence.
So, there doesn't seem to be any direct connection between Volkova and the advertising campaigns in question, but of course, that does not matter in the era of QAnon research, where you can just pull up Instagram feeds of people related to a brand and start baking edgy artist content to stoke more satanic panic.
Dreher knows this.
He's pretty conscious of it.
This is what he wrote in the article.
Yeah, we need Dreyer to start doing the Q drops himself.
So, you know, whatever side you take on this, whatever perspective you have, obviously there's no defending pedophilia.
There's no defending, you know, turning children into ads for, like, haute couture brands and then trying to be edgy at the same time.
There's no defending recycling culture, uh, LGBTQ culture to sell bullshit and stripping it of context.
Really, there's no defending anyone, uh, and everyone sucks.
Um, including Travis Few, who should be blamed somehow for this and put in jail.
I don't know how, but we need to figure it out.
Something about his beard looking like Anton LaVey's or, I don't know, we can figure something out.
But, uh, yeah, it looks like everything is becoming QAnon, and the culture war shows no sign of slowing down.
Commodified images stripped of meaning and cultural context are being fed into the algorithm, and people's brains are increasingly glitching out as they grow obsessed with finding the hidden meanings behind marketing pablum.
And you know what?
I get it.
We've all got a bad feeling about where things are going, and nobody seems to be able to coherently explain where power lies.
So people are just grasping at straws, and they're going directly off the rails, so...
It's gonna be fun to follow.
That made me sick.
Nice.
It could be the allergy medicine, but... It could be that you're, like, dressed head-to-toe in Balenciaga?
Anyways, Liv... Did you pick that up yesterday?
Oh, that's nice.
Whoa, yeah, he still has the tags.
I'm wondering if he's trying out the pieces so he can, like, return certain ones to them if they don't work.
Surely, if anybody can turn this episode around, it's you.
I've been known to find the most normal content for this.
When Jake is in such a position that he's begging for a segment about a shooting in a club, you know things are going well.
Yeah, from our very own Live Normal Content Finder, Agar.
The Normal Correspondent.
I'm gonna make business cards for everybody involved with QA with the title "Normal Content Finder."
It's difficult to imagine how discussions surrounding the Club Q shooting could possibly
get more insane than how the tragedy was covered in large mainstream outlets.
From the most evil of these sources, like Tucker Carlson, who had a guest on to exclaim that actions like the indiscriminate murder of two bartenders and three patrons of Colorado Springs' largest LGBT nightclub would continue until the quote-unquote evil agenda of gender affirmation care ceased, to more respectable conservatives who deflected any politicization of the obviously homophobic and transphobic motivations for the shooting, Because the shooter claimed he was non-binary, to even the failures in liberal outlets who, for instance, reported one of the heroic patrons within the club that stopped the assailant as a drag queen when in reality she was a trans woman.
It seems that a shockingly large amount of political discourse on this tragic event fails to make the most obvious analysis about its causes and implications.
But I guess, what else could the American public possibly do when exposed to the consequences of a highly effective political and media machine whose gears feed off of the blood and bones of society's most defenseless, except, of course, to be the least normal they possibly could?
That's why today's segment on the Club Q shooting won't dwell on the insane responses provided by the mainstream media, but instead we'll look at some of the takes coming directly from the seedy underbelly of American political discourse.
Occupied by the collection of independently minded free thinkers who make up their own damn absurd and irrational political takes and don't rely on the positions handed to them by the lame stream media.
The most obvious pilled reaction to Club Q is the same one that's been used by right-wing conspiracy guys for at least a few decades in relation to shootings, which is to call it a false flag to take away our dang guns.
This reaction, which I saw disseminated among a couple of the more popular QAnon influencers, is a very uninspired form of conspiracist pattern recognition.
This bake typically functions as a cop-out interpretation of the event, as all major news items require baking in some way, but many want to avoid explicitly embracing the Tucker Carlson-esque homophobia and transphobia, so it's essentially uninspired rehashed garbage.
But in sifting through the boring conspiracy takes on the shooting, I was able to find some extremely high quality garbage.
Diamonds in the rough of boring cookie cutter bakes.
Truly creative and by extension even more insane positions on what caused the shooting.
The first bake of this sort was hinged upon one particular letter in the nightclub's name.
You may have heard of it, it's the 17th letter in the alphabet and it's been talked about a lot on this show.
Some people And their desire to view the world through a completely unreflective strategy of pattern recognition came to see an important connection between Club Q and QAnon.
As an example of this bake, in a video uploaded to Rumble titled... Colorado Springs Club Q nightclub shooting was a Trump-slash-QAnon-Freemason-Saturn-cube-game-23-psy-op.
What?
This user makes an interesting set of connections in relation to the shooting's cause.
Now I have no video to play, as instead of the usual, lunatic records themselves talking about politics in their car, sort of video, this one is an exclusively visual slideshow.
Sort of like if Tommy Numbers only knew how to use iMovie.
Which he doesn't.
Yeah.
The video begins with the user highlighting the letter Q in Club Q from a Fox News headline about the shooting, in what is obviously a video recorded on their phone.
It then cuts to the Google image search results for the phrase QAnon.
No reflection or explanation is provided here, or for any other of the connections provided.
But he's not done yet.
Scrolling down in the Fox News article, he then highlights the number 28, found in a paragraph in the article that reads...
The 28-year-old transgender bartender and entertainer has been identified as one of the five victims killed in the Colorado Springs shooting at Club Q. The video then cuts to a Google search result for the zombie outbreak movie 28 Days Later.
Oh my, I can't do this anymore, you guys.
Oh, you can't, huh?
No, I can't even.
I can't even.
And 28 days later?
Well, at least this bake caused Jake to break into AAVE.
Ah, ah, ah, I just... Ah, that's where your brain goes.
You see the... This is where we are.
You see the number 28 and you go, ah, 28 days later.
Oh, who could have taught them to do that?
Not me!
No, just linking it to a fucking barely understandable movie connection.
Totally oblique.
Jumping off from something that makes somewhat sense to fantasies about movies remembered from the late 90s and early 2000s.
You're watching a movie, there's no such thing as coincidences.
I think we got a second person to put in jail.
If we can get Jake and Travis put in jail over all of this stuff.
I'll go quietly!
Take my phone away.
Back to the Fox News article, he highlights LGBT on his phone, then shows us an ordinal gematria calculation of LGBT being equivalent to the number 58.
And you know what else is associated with the number 58?
Donald Trump's 2016 inauguration being the 58th in American history.
There's a lot of other Trump-related stuff in the relatively short, information-packed video.
As an example, this user highlights the date of the shooting, November 19th, then cuts
to a screen of text which reads, "November 19 = 1119 aka 1911 aka 45."
But...
But you rearranged the numbers to get you the 45.
Yeah.
You know what?
1-1-1-9.
It's 3-9-39.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know what?
Yeah?
November-- yeah.
1-1-1-9.
Oh, God.
It's 3-9-39.
It's-- that's how old I am.
And the age at which I expire.
I-- I--
Jail.
Yeah.
Jail.
He then points to a screenshot of a Google search result of Donald Trump, the 45th president, having a personal gun collection containing a 1911 pistol.
My god.
In another headline about the shooting, centered around slain bartender Derek Rump, the user
highlights the "D" in Derek and then Rump, which he then shows text on the screen which reads,
"Derek Rump is D Rump code for Donald Trump."
[Sigh]
So...
Yeah...
Oh...
There is a slurry of other connections that this user finds going through a couple news
articles and highlighting information on his iPhone, all set to the indie rock song "Hey
Man Nice Shot" by the band Filter.
Jesus Christ!
Oh no!
Come on!
What?
Come on!
Yeah!
Jake is having a bad one.
He's gritting his teeth.
28 days later, 1911.
His jaw is clenched.
Hey man, nice shot.
Like, this is, this is a soup.
This is just a, this is a bad, this is a rotten soup of culture.
Yeah.
It's just a rotten, you've left it out.
It's, it's- This is like those ancient- It's trusted over.
Those ancient meat pies from like hundreds of years ago that would make you hallucinate.
I think that's what's happening to me right now.
Jake's had a bad pie.
He's got tummy ache.
(Groans)
Hey man!
Nice shot!
Which is also fucked up if you're using that song to talk about a nightclub shooting
in which people were slaughtered.
Yeah, of course.
Oh God.
Yeah, we've done it to 'em.
You know what? I'm upset that Filter has not come out with a statement condemning this video.
(laughing)
One example of a connection he makes is between a photo of a mother looking at childhood photos of her slain son, in which her hands are crossed in a particular way, that appears to be similar, apparently, to a Masonic hand gesture.
Another area ripe for insane baking around the shooting concerns the already insane interviews with the shooter's father.
I say already insane, given the fact that his father, as he reveals in an extended interview, is a right-wing Mormon former porn star slash professional mixed martial artist who uses meth.
Additionally, among other absurd things in the interview, he notes of his initial reaction to finding out his son is committed to shooting in a gay bar by saying this.
Right.
Yeah, right.
And then later on I'm going to find it's a gay bar.
Yeah, right.
And I was like, "Oh my God, is he gay?" as a stereotype.
"Oh my God, shit, is he gay?"
And he's not gay, so I was like, "Shit."
Imagine being in this state and thinking the biggest issue is homosexuality.
That's, that's your, that's the problem with society.
I'm Mormon, I'm a conservative Republican, and we don't do gay.
Oh man, imagine being in this state and thinking the biggest issue is homosexuality.
That's the problem with society, not like the burns on your lips from smoking meth.
Yeah, or your son killing people.
Yeah.
But so already, already, like, it's insane enough.
Do you need to bake this?
Like, can't we just let this exist on face value?
Like, do you have to?
But no.
One Rumble commenter, who I guess decided the false flag narrative deserved some more uniquely insane details, noted of the interview that The kid looks like shit at 22, prime of his life, and his dad did porn films and looks good for his age if he wasn't on meth slash drugs.
Mom looks okay for her age, too, and I'm sure was straight-up hot when she was younger, yet this quote-unquote shooter is a legit 2 out of 10 in the looks department during the prime years of his life.
I feel like he's not even their kid.
The dad was on season 6 episode 8 or season 8 episode 6 of Intervention, Aaron, he's in a YT video talking about masturbating 12 hours a day on meth.
This cannot be real.
This is staged.
MKUltra or Crisis Actors.
Oh god.
This has been a mere sample of the remarkably insane takes people have decided to unleash about this awful event.
A pattern, I think, among all of them, from the mind-numbing mainstream coverage to the conspiracist baking, that they all essentially function to pave over the truth behind death and suffering.
This is, I think, a good moment, among many other good moments that even we've seen in the episode, to notice one of the main effects of the baking process within QAnon, and how it connects with the far-right media and political machine, both of which work through intensifying the fear of a non-existent enemy, And doing so produce acts of violence against this enemy.
The facts related to the subsequent suffering caused by this violence must be obfuscated for this process to further intensify.
And, you know, what better way of doing that than getting people to look at, I think, an event that is relatively obvious in terms of its conclusions in relation to what inspired the shooter and the ongoing ramping up of homophobia and transphobia and groomer panic and instead interpreting it as an MKUltra false flag to take away our guns or, you know, caused by Donald, like, Yeah.
Yeah, anything to push out the sneaking suspicion that gay and trans people are being targeted and slaughtered.
Like, anything to just push out any kind of compassion for a fellow human being is like... Yeah.
All of this shit makes me sick.
All of this stuff.
I hated this episode.
I feel bad!
Well, no need to leave reviews on iTunes.
Jake is doing it for you in the episodes.
Yeah, I mean it was definitely a grim one.
So, thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Unsubscribe!
No, well, you could do that.
Or you could go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and sub for five bucks a month.
You'll get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and the ongoing series like Man Clan and Trickle Down.
Liv, give us give us your plugs.
I have a Twitch stream.
I stream Monday, Wednesday, Saturday at 6 p.m.
Eastern.
More insane stuff like this.
And also a podcast, a philosophy podcast, which is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
Just search The Vegar and also on Patreon.
If you're a small dog, you stay away from Liv, okay?
Thank you.
You've broken her ankles, you know.
If you interrupted her recordings.
Liv almost gets murdered by a very tiny dog every single day, and people aren't talking about this enough.
This is a problem in Canada.
My own personal hell.
A tiny little wiener dog comes up to me and starts barking at me, and I have to run away.
And then she can't show up to the tour dates that she's supposed to come to because her ankles are broken by, once again, a very tiny dog.
I would push back, but that is exactly what happens.
If you're already a subscriber, thank you so much.
It helps us stay advertising-free and editorially independent.
And for everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listeners, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
I don't think Hitler was a good guy.
I get the Hugo Boss uniforms, amazing.
But, I mean, just because you're in love with the design, you're a designer, can we just kind of say, like, you like the uniforms, but that's about it.
No, we, no, there's a lot of things that I love about Hitler.
