Episode 215: Q Deposition, the Jan 6 Committee & Musk's Twitter feat Charlie Warzel
We cover Jim Watkins’ deposition in front of the January 6th committee and the ongoing debates around the so-called Twitter Files. To help us with the latter we're joined by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer for the Atlantic who’s been studying these shambolic developments, including private exchanges Musk has been holding with a motley crew of rich weirdos.
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
Charlie Warzel: https://twitter.com/cwarzel
Merch: http://merch.qanonanonymous.com
Music by Cosmic Cars. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 215 of the QAnon Anonymous Podcast, the Q Deposition and Elon Musk's Motives episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
2023, first episode of the new year.
Yeah.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Happy New Year.
While the mainstream press bothers itself with a struggle for speakership of the House of Congress, and Brazilian ex-presidents wander Florida drugstores in a disoriented state, we choose instead to whiff a bouquet of shittier stories, like Jim Watkins' deposition in front of the January 6th Committee, and the ongoing debates around the so-called Twitter files.
For those who joined us recently, Jim Watkins is the owner of 8chan, now 8kun, the message board where Q continues to post sporadically.
Him and his son are also the prime suspects when it comes to figuring out who's behind the mysterious poster that birthed a conspiracy theory movement still coursing the veins of the American body politic.
As for the Twitter files, we're going to be exploring how billionaire Elon Musk, who purchased the social media platform last year, has been faring as its steward in what I can only describe as a self-made storm.
It's like he hired an entire Hollywood cast to, like, make his life hell, and then he's like, Boy, we gotta get this ship to shore!
So, you know, we'll check if he's been having a good time at that.
And to help us with exploring Elon and his beautiful Twitter, we'll be speaking to Charlie Warzel, a staff writer for The Atlantic who's been studying these shambolic developments, including private exchanges Musk's been holding with a motley crew of right-wing weirdos, tech mutants, and culture war freaks.
2023 promises to be a year packed with bullshit.
But before we get into all that, Let's hear it.
What kind of resolutions we got, boys, for this year?
Well, I made a list.
Yeah, you walked into the house and pretty much told me you're like quitting smoking by May.
I don't want to say it out loud, but you're going to have the big 4-0.
Yeah.
The Acme Anvil dropped on your head.
Yeah, I'm going to be 40 fairly soon.
Do you guys want to hear my list of outs for 2023?
I'm not going to do ins.
I'm just going to do outs.
Just outs.
Yeah.
Just to keep it negative.
Make sure the listeners don't hear anything positive or uplifting from us.
Okay, so out.
Feeling less anxiety about my health.
So you're gonna feel more anxiety?
No, feeling less.
Being not so worried about it.
But you're saying that's out.
That's out!
Oh my god, you fucked up the format of out on the first one!
You mean that anxiety is out and less anxiety is in?
Anxiety is out.
Less anxiety is in.
Specifically about my own health.
Hell yeah.
Number two.
Out.
Saying sorry for no reason.
Okay?
It's out.
No more Canada.
We're abolishing Canada.
Out.
Late night McDonald's.
Late night McDonald's.
God, I want that one out too.
Okay.
Out.
COVID-19.
It's out.
It's out.
It's over.
It's so out, dude.
Okay.
Out.
Dad bods.
Alright?
No more... What do you mean?
Dad bods are out.
I don't understand that one.
Maybe for just me personally.
What does that mean?
I'm again on the treadmill, you know.
Oh, you're moving towards Twinkbot.
I'm going to de-softify myself.
Yeah, he's going to be a hard, chiseled Twink.
Okay, out for 2023 NBA 2K.
It's out.
Oh my God!
NBA Live, still in.
I feel like I'm at a funeral.
Out.
Trying to please everybody.
Out.
Worrying about what other people think.
Damn.
Out.
Worrying about what I think.
Okay.
Worrying.
Just out.
Out.
Totally out.
Just worrying out.
He's reading this out of like a pink diary that has a little key?
Well, let me lock it back up.
Till next year.
Till next year.
Dear Diary, see you in one year.
Those are good outs, good resolutions, whatever you want to... Dear Diary, my dad bod is still well in effect here in 2024.
Another night of McDonald's.
Another night of McDonald's runs by.
Another game of NBA 2K flashes on the television.
What about Travis?
Is it to start recording in like different rooms of the house?
Cause right now he's in his living room.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had to, had to change my operation.
We're getting some storms here in California and I think they're screwing with our wifi.
Cause I had to, normally it was not coming into where I usually record.
Had to move my entire operation closer to my router.
So, but other than getting my wifi fixed, I don't know, I'll probably work on, uh, Appreciating the fact that this year my my daughter is actually graduating from high school.
So I'll probably you know, spend more time in light of the fact that you know, I don't Really get to choose how much time you have with your kids.
Travis is going to have more time on his hands.
It is so over for you bitches.
This guy is trying to get us back to work early.
Hey, if you're trying to peddle some bullshit, if you're trying to peddle some lies or some conspiracies, You're fucking out for 2023.
We have unleashed the hounds.
Disagreeing with Travis, out.
Disagreeing with Travis, out.
Full agreement, 100% of the time.
I can count on it.
You sound fucking right.
I don't know.
I think I might wind up using any spare time I might acquire sort of wandering aimlessly in the woods and taking pictures, which I put on my Instagram, so.
That's good.
You can check that out at, what is it?
Is it Strained Photography?
Yes, it's Logan Strained Photography.
Logan Strain Photography on Instagram.
If you're on Instagram, check it out.
There's some really cool shots, some really cool drone footage on there.
My entire life has been about words and thoughts and, you know, reason and doing the right thing.
I got, you know, I got an English degree and then I, you know, I worked in basically in tech doing like marketing and writing and content.
Just words, words, words.
What I like about the Instagram photography is that there's no words.
Just pretty pictures.
Wow.
It's a lot nicer.
You don't even use hashtags?
Yeah, no captions on his shit.
You sound like you're in palliative care demanding a book of kittens, dude.
That's fucking sad.
That's it.
I just want things to be easy as I decline.
Yeah, that's it.
That's the year.
2023 year of palliative care.
We're all entering it.
I'm going to get Travis a t-shirt made that says, recline as I decline.
Well, yeah, what can I say, boys?
I mean, I'm pretty much, you pretty much spoke for me.
I'm gonna care less.
I'm gonna be, hopefully, mean more.
Whatever people have been writing in comments that annoys them about my personality or the way I treat subjects or speak or laugh, anything like that, I'm increasing.
I'm putting up to 200%.
Nice.
We're fucking going full speed ahead on all the most annoying aspects of myself.
Right.
Julian's gonna put out a 10-episode miniseries of him just laughing maniacally for 45 minutes for each episode.
Yeah, that's right.
And I'm gonna force- Yeah, laughing maniacally about this weird, esoteric, lefty bullshit.
That's gonna be, that's gonna really draw people in.
So esoteric.
That's so true.
I do, I mean, I just think that the dolphins are part of the story.
I don't have that many esoteric lefty beliefs.
All lefty beliefs are esoteric in America, where you have no left wing.
You're like, ooh, hidden knowledge!
Well, I think that really explains where we're at.
We clearly are all decaying.
I can already feel like we're not even starting it fresh.
We're already broken.
It's like we gathered our broken toys together to throw them out in the garbage.
Politics have reverted back to how they were in the 1600s when it was just a bunch of people yelling at each other in a room, getting up, leaving the room, yelling at people outside, going back in.
Nothing getting done.
Just an absolute clown show.
Yeah, I kind of... It's so funny to me, that whole situation, just because it's so apparent that nothing good will come out of this, but we are so starved for any kind of stumbling in our enemies that we're just like, yes!
Look at them.
They're in chaos.
It's like the last time I fucking heard that shit, we had Donald Trump within a year.
Yeah.
The last time I heard that the Republicans were in chaos and would never get it back together, we were about to get fucked hard.
So I look forward to that.
Can you guys explain something to me?
How are they allowed to just hold like, you know, 50 different votes?
No, it's because they couldn't come to a consensus that has a high enough amount of votes to actually elect the Speaker.
So they just have to keep doing it over and over.
But there's no real alternative to McCarthy in terms of, like, getting enough votes.
So it's just obfuscation, right?
So you just have, like, six, seven people, whatever, ten people holding hostage the ability to proceed forward, which I love.
Keep doing it.
Keep being a bunch of miscreants.
I just, you know, whatever.
I just hope we see less footage and attention paid to Congress.
We should treat it like one of those buildings, like Willy Wonka's factory, like whatever.
Stuff goes in, we don't see anything, and then nothing ever comes out.
Nothing ever comes out.
Everybody gets sucked into tubes or like drowns in like strange rivers.
I'm assuming Matt Gaetz is currently drowning in a lake of chocolate.
And I think that's about as much attention to the situation as I'll be paying going through the tubes.
I could just imagine him just stuck in the tube, his face pressed up against the glass.
My chocolate!
My beautiful chocolate!
Don't just stand there, do something!
Help.
Police.
Murder.
So, the January 6th Committee, it finally... Boo!
Boo!
Alright, so before I finish the first fucking sentence of the first episode of the first year, I get booze.
Looking forward to the rest of the year.
Just booze every single fucking sentence for the rest of the year.
Alright.
So as I was saying...
The January 6th committee.
It finally ended its work.
It produced its final report.
It disbanded because obviously Republicans aren't going to stand for that to keep going on.
So they wrapped things up real quick.
And the gist is that basically like Trump, he didn't have like a single coherent plan for overturning the election.
He just kind of like, he had like a bunch of different plans and he was just trying to marshal every resource he could to try and stop, you know, basically the Results of the election from happening and the mob that attacked the Capitol to prevent Biden from being certified as president was just the last resort.
So the report, I think it's like if you watched any of the hearings, there's no surprises.
It provides sort of a chronological overview of the role like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, three percenters, groupers, these people, extremists who are who participated in the events of January 6th.
Including extensive operational planning by Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes, who we've talked about before, and Proud Boys chairman Enrique Terrio.
Rhodes was recently convicted on seditious conspiracy charges related to his conduct, while Terrio and his Proud Boys co-defendants are set to face their own seditious conspiracy charges.
and a trial in the coming weeks. So the drama around January 6 isn't over even though the
committee is wrapped up. Right. They also talked about the false slave elector scheme. This is
basically where they tried to get a bunch of people who weren't actually electors to replace
the legitimate electors, which failed. And also as part of sort of their January 6 committee
wrapping up their work, they released a bunch of transcripts of the interviews that they did,
the depositions of like major figures.
This includes the interview with Michael Flynn, which is honestly kind of useless because he just pleaded the fifth over and over again.
Uh, they also interviewed Aitkun owner Jim Watkins, which is relevant to my interests.
So, like we discussed previously, I think there is compelling evidence that he was, or one of his associates, was involved in the posting of the most recent Q drops in 2022.
But in this deposition, he said that he never had contact with the person posting as Q. So, Jake, will you please play Jim Watkins for this Q&A they had at the Capitol?
Of course.
So are you going to play the other person, Travis, or should I play the other person?
You play the other person.
Okay.
Have you ever had any communication with the Q account?
There is no Q account, sir.
Sorry, the Q user.
I've had communications with a lot of people that said they were the Q user, but I doubt that.
Okay, and you've never had any confirmation of who this person is?
No, sir.
It's not me.
Some people say it's me, but it's not me.
It would be impossible to be me, because when they started doing it, I was under medical treatment.
I was still under medical treatment when I went to see the Congress last time.
Got it.
I don't quite understand his alibi here.
So he was under medical treatment, but he was well enough to testify to Congress, but he was not well enough to post as Q?
Yeah, I mean they're trying to interview a drunk guy.
I'm sorry, Your Honor.
I was too sick to post.
I was fucking sauced up.
It was really strange because in his testimony, Jim Watkins repeatedly called QAnon an invention of media matters for America and George Soros.
This is actually not the first time he said this.
He's said this previously on his stream.
But so during the interview, he was asked to clarify this belief.
So I had one other follow up question on the issue of QAnon that we were discussing.
You mentioned a couple times that you thought George Soros was funding that.
You should bring him in here and depose him.
So why did you think he was funding QAnon?
He is funding QAnon.
You can go to, I believe it's Open.
Open Society, I believe, is the name of the company that he owns and funds it.
And he funds it, and then he pays companies like the Daily Beast and Mother Jones and NBC.
And if they post his paragraph in their story, they get paid.
That's interesting.
Why is that?
Well, because he's promulgating propaganda to get his narrative known.
Okay.
Because he wants to take over your country and my country.
He wants the United States to cease to exist.
And what is the evidence for saying, what is that based on?
That's my opinion.
Okay.
Thank you for clarifying.
So wait a minute.
So he's basically like, he's like, there is no such thing as QAnon and I'm not him.
It's George Soros who basically comes back with another conspiracy.
I mean, as usual, he's just really bad at communicating, but I think what he's trying to get at is the idea that QAnon as a term and a phenomenon isn't actually something that was born of the drops, that this was actually somehow born in the coverage that these mainstream media outlets did of it and their denunciations of it or whatever their
characterizations of it, which is an extremely funny perspective on things by Jim. But it's
also perspective that echoes QAnon followers themselves and also one of the Q drops is
that there is no, I said there's Q and there are nons and there is no QAnon.
It's like they have this perspective.
Yeah, but that's like, that was, that was like patchwork.
That was something they applied way later, like a fucking Band-Aid.
I mean, it wasn't like that defined early Q. No, it didn't define early Q, but I don't think he's talking about early Q either.
I think he's taking the same perspective in that like, oh, Q was just a poster and the people who follow Q are just people who are investigating and researching, so it's no big deal.
But QAnon as this phenomenon, as this extremist movement, well, that is just a made up thing by the liberal media
and George Soros.
But you can't, because the reason that QAnon first sort of punctured
the mainstream media sphere was because there were people who--
there was episodes of violence that could be tied to somebody that had posted or subscribed
to QAnon style beliefs.
That's my first memory of it sort of breaking in, was once there was kind of like these sort of like real
world scenarios where Q was somehow, I don't know, part of it.
Yeah, I mean, I think he'd argue that those were all, like, false flag setups or whatever.
But I think when it really, I think, broke into the mainstream was when it showed up at Trump rallies in the form of signs and became known as a kind of, you know, Trump supporter subculture, essentially, that was starting to, like, gain some momentum.
So there's no way that the media couldn't have reported on that.
I mean, they tried not to.
And then after a while, they had to because it just became bigger and more people, I guess, kind of mentioned it or whatever.
But I mean, they always cut loose any of the mentally ill people who take violent action and then mention QAnon.
They never actually say, yeah, that's true.
We take responsibility as a movement for that.
They just go, oh, look at them trying to smear us again.
Mm-hmm.
Jim Watkins also claimed in his testimony that the Q Research Board on 8kun is not related to QAnon, which is crazy anti-reality bullshit.
Like the majority of Q's posts are on that Q Research Board.
Its entire purpose is like decoding Q drops and bringing the QAnon community together at like the source and coming up with QAnon related conspiracy theories.
But here is how Watkins described Q Research in exchange with the January 6th Committee.
So, this exchange happened right after they discussed a QAnon follower who said that Q offered a glimmer of hope for them.
So, can you describe to me what Q Research is?
Q Research is an image board on Aitken.
Is it related to the QAnon theory?
No, sir.
So, when he says in the third full paragraph that Q offered not just a glimmer of hope, but the only glimmer of hope... Can you make it larger, sir?
Maybe?
Maybe I have this letter.
I will look.
So I guess, in the meantime, what is Q-Research and why is it called Q-Research if it's not related to QAnon?
Well, I didn't make Q-Research.
Q-Research is made by the people that are using Q-Research.
Okay.
But it's, uh... Do you know what it's referring to?
Yeah, it's a place where they talk about the current world affairs and they try to research and find meaning behind things and why they oftentimes post propaganda and how to find their way through propaganda.
But you're... It's people researching and looking into things to try and find facts.
But it's your contention that it's not related to the QAnon theory.
The only possible way you could relate it to QAnon is the fact that that's Q Research Board is the reason that Media Matters and George Soros have invented QAnon is to make it a boogeyman.
This makes no sense.
Yeah.
Oh my lord.
It's it's a really absurd claim.
Yeah, it reminds me of that bit in The Simpsons where Milhouse told Bart, he was like, remember you killed my goldfish and you said that I didn't have a goldfish?
Why did I have the bowl, Bart?
Why did I have the bowl?
It's the same thing.
If it's not related to QAnon, why is it called Q Research, Jim?
Why is it called that?
And of course, he kind of like, he breaks down, he just goes back to the, well, QAnon is made up, it's a George Soros Media Matters thing.
It doesn't even make sense.
He says the only possible way you could relate it to QAnon is the fact that that's Q Research Board is the reason that Media Matters and George Soros have invented QAnon is to make it a boogeyman.
Yeah.
It's just... Well, they've put together Q and Anon and they've made it into something that they can, you know, essentially smear.
Oh, it sounds like they're speaking two different languages to me.
But at least he's about to write Tom Sawyer.
Right.
Yeah.
So unfortunately, during the deposition, they, I mean, it sounds like the people who are asking the questions tried to press Jim Watkins about some of the really ugly, frankly, genocidal kind of nature of some of the posts that appear on 8kun.
And so as a consequence of that, they read aloud Some of these posts.
And so in his deposition, the N word appears 13 times.
Yeah.
Four off from 17.
Come on, Jim, you can do it.
The January 6th committee also released new testimony by former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson.
Back in June, Hutchinson testified that Marjorie Taylor Greene met with Mark Meadows in Georgia in the lead up to January 6th and told him that a lot of QAnon supporters from among her constituents would be there.
So here's what Hutchinson said.
I remember Marjorie Taylor Greene bringing QAnon up several times, though, in the presence of the president, privately with Mark.
I remember Mark having a few conversations, too, about more specific to QAnon stuff and more about the idea that they had with the election and, you know, not as much pertaining to the planning of the January 6th rally.
Miss Green came up and began talking to us about QAnon and QAnon going to the rally, and she had a lot of constituents that are QAnon and they'll all be there.
And she was showing him pictures of them traveling up to Washington, D.C.
for the rally on the 6th.
Now, this is very fascinating to me because Marjorie Taylor Greene hasn't, like, mentioned Q or QAnon at all publicly since December of 2020, in which she kind of recommended an article from, like, from Gab about, like, how the QAnon people are kind of good.
But this reveals that, like, at least privately, when she's talking to, like, other power players in Washington, she's very aware of QAnon.
She's talking about them as constituents, as supporters, and she seemed to be kind of tuned into the QAnon community.
Hutchinson also testified that Trump aide Peter Navarro would bring her materials about the election to pass along to Mark Meadows.
Hutchinson said this in her testimony.
And at one point I had sarcastically said, oh, is this from your QAnon friends, Peter?
Because Peter would talk to me frequently about his QAnon friends.
He said, have you looked into it yet, Cass?
I think they point out a lot of good ideas.
You really need to read this.
Make sure the chief sees it.
So we have Peter Navarro saying, um, I don't know what these good ideas are.
So, uh, so Representative Liv Cheney, who is the January 6th panel's top Republican.
Ask Hutchinson whether Navarro was being sarcastic about his QAnon friends, and here's how Hutchinson responded.
I did not take it as sarcasm.
Throughout my tenure working for the Chief of Staff, he would frequently bring in memos and PowerPoints on various policy proposals that he would then expand on.
You know, Q is saying this.
This is kind of baffling to me because Q, I guess, promised the people who believed in it that to provide inside information about what the White House is up to.
But here's a guy who literally works in the fucking White House.
He knows what the White House is up to.
He talks to the people who are doing it.
And still he goes like, oh, here's this secret source about what what's really going on.
It's like, man, you are part of the secret cabal running things.
I think that sometimes Trump stays up, and he goes Q+.
It's when he takes some Adderall, and he writes through the night, he makes some PowerPoints, and he sends them to himself in the future, when he won't remember what he did.
But that's Q. And in order to believe it, he has to send it through AIDS.
You know, if it comes from himself, he's like, I don't trust it!
But if it's brought to him on a printout or whatever, he launders his own ideas.
Smart.
So we also have to talk, unfortunately, about the ongoing drama concerning Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
So I have already broke down and made a Mastodon account.
This is the decentralized competitor to Twitter.
Neither of you has yet.
So I could be found at mastodon.lol slash Travis underscore view.
I have a feeling that I'm going to be alone among my co-hosts being there, at least for a while.
That's good.
There'll be at least one place where Travis can post links to new episodes if we're all still alive.
Masto, do not follow him.
Masto, don't follow this man.
If I get banned from Twitter, I will wipe my hands.
Maybe I'll stream on Twitch or something.
I don't know.
I will wipe my hands of having to scroll that fucking terrible, terrible website that every now and again provides me a nice smile and laugh.
Travis is currently on heroin and suboxone.
So, so what really prompted me to make a Mastodon account was Twitter banning several journalists who had criticized him.
This includes CNN's Donny O'Sullivan, New York Times' Ryan Mack, The Washington Post's Drew Harwell.
So, um, Musk claimed that these journalists had violated his new doxing policy by sharing his exact real-time location, amounting to what he described as assassination coordinates.
So this was all bullshit.
None of the band journalists appear to have actually shared must precise real time location.
I don't know.
I think it's I think it's dope to think of it as like a hit man and he's getting a side question.
It's like go harass Grimes at a gas station.
He drives up into the little yellow circle.
Yeah, that's the GTA mission.
So this policy was obviously the excuse to ban the Twitter account ElonJet, which takes publicly available flight tracking info to document where Elon Musk's jet flies to.
And this is despite the fact that Musk explicitly said he would not ban that account.
So I called it online the Lolita Express Protection Rule.
Yeah.
the rule as written would forbid you from tracking the movements of a jet
owned by a billionaire pedophile. Hypothetically. Yeah, hypothetically.
Now everything about this has been chaotic.
Now in an especially dumb move, he banned links to competing social networks on Twitter.
So a tweet from Twitter about this policy said, quote, we know that many of our users may be active on other social media platforms.
However, going forward, Twitter will no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms on Twitter.
Free promotion?
Okay, and so the band platforms included like Instagram and Facebook, but also like smaller ones like Macedon and Tribal Noster Which I've never fucking heard of post which is another like small upstart kind of alternative and also former President Donald Trump's truth social so Very weird.
At least now you know all the alternate synthetics that you're going to be on within a year.
You're going to be on the Mastodon, the Tribal, the Noster, taking a dose of Post every day.
My conspiracy is that Mastodon will become like a telegram for liberals.
You won't have any opposition on there whatsoever, and they'll be free to run rampant.
So that policy of like banning other social media platforms that lasted less than 24 hours and then Musk said in a tweet that quote, going forward there will be a vote for major policy changes.
My apologies won't happen again.
So he followed this up with a Twitter poll asking if he should step down from the head of Twitter and this closed with 57.5% of the vote saying yes.
Now, despite that, he has not stepped down, because Musk is a bullshitter.
He just says things, you know?
It's like, this is why I hate reporting about like, Musk says that he's, that so-and-so is going to happen.
Maybe he's lying.
Maybe everything that's coming out of his mouth is a truth.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I also want to mention that the Washington Post asked Elon Musk about QAnon, and his response via email was, LOL.
Nice.
Yeah, that's good stuff.
LOL, Washington Post.
Yeah.
Now, before we talk to our guest, I have to touch briefly on the Twitter files.
Now, this is a series of internal documents from Twitter that Musk released to a handful of journalists and authors.
Now, so far, those who have had access to the Twitter files are Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, Lee Fong, Michael Schellenberg, and David DeWig.
So these documents, you know, they cover a bunch of topics related to Twitter's moderation processes, including the supposed, what they call sort of like the moderation of certain users, Twitter's response to the January 6th attack, decision to ban former President Donald Trump from the platform, and communications that Twitter has had with like DHS and FBI.
Now, I think it's helpful to remember that the first batch of the Twitter files were hastily released, and they were clearly released in response to the fact that Kanye West, after returning to Twitter, was banned again after he couldn't stop doing Nazi shit.
Yeah, so clearly what happened was that Elon Musk said, we're bringing back Kanye West.
We're a free speech platform again.
And then all of a sudden it just blew up in his face.
Absolute disastrous.
He just did this awful business and then he was forced to ban him again for doing Nazi shit.
And so he had to change the subject very quickly.
And so he very hastily tried to get Matt Taibbi to do the first of the Twitter files.
Now they've been like eight or so, so far.
Yeah, I've stopped following it, and that's sad.
Of course!
I feel like there could be an interesting story there, and I don't care anymore.
It is!
He's so fucking aggravated, because there is obviously... I think it's wrong to dismiss this as a nothing burger.
It's right to sort of say that this is a political project from Elon Musk to try and sort of endear himself to the right, and sort of demonize liberals, and try to demonize pre-Musk Twitter.
But, I mean, if anyone was given access to the internal communications regarding Twitter, you could find something substantial there.
Yeah, and we also, a lot of the stuff that is interesting about it, we've already talked about in the last few years.
I mean, I know that we haven't, like, covered it extensively, but we've spoken about how intelligence agencies are involved and, you know, kind of integrated into these social media companies and how they work, you know, hand-in-hand with, you know, these private companies to draw up ban lists and stuff like that, so.
Yeah.
I guess we could have made more noise about it, but, like, yeah, this was not exactly news to me.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's I mean, reading through it is is aggravating because it's like I think it's like some of the things that they that they post is clearly just like internal moderation, which is innocuous.
Other stuff is what he talks about, for example, like Lee Fogg had an article for The Intercept about how the how Twitter and the Pentagon work together for basically a propaganda campaign, which is really fascinating.
But other stuff was, I don't know.
So in order to really sort of get the gems out of the muck, you have to read through it doing work.
And by the way, Twitter threads with no editor is perhaps the worst way to report on news items.
He could have done this the right way if he gave his shit.
I don't think he actually gives a shit.
If he could have taken his time and had a team of people working on this
with lawyers and editors and people who put it in a nice package and a multi-article report
and to really emphasize the substantial elements that might be revealed about what was going on
inside of Twitter, because obviously some elements But he didn't do that.
He just sort of like, you know, he wants he sees this as a way to promote new Twitter more than a way to actually promote transparency.
Yeah, and also, if he cares so much about the intelligence agencies, which I doubt he does, he would be, you know, confronted with his own conflicts of interest.
He has relationships with these entities and contracts with the Defense Department and stuff like that.
So, you know, I think that making this kind of a messy, obvious If anything, it kind of almost discredits the very real
stuff that's being revealed, right?
It's like, this is a mess and so hey, you're only going to really be paying attention to this if
you're some sort of right-winger or whatever and then people will just kind of mock you in the
media for being paranoid or whatever. Yeah, yeah, it'll get written off as some
like right-wing op not worth looking at or disinformation or whatever and...
Which is kind of, I mean, it's a form of limited hangout where you're like, here, here's some selected information on this, like, bigger scandal, or should be scandal, and we'll give you just chunks of it, and we'll also make it real messy so it's easy to discredit.
Which I think is kind of, you know, if you're going to have this stuff coming out, this is pretty much how the agencies would like it to come out, right?
I mean, it's sloppy.
To talk more about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, we are now joined by Charlie Worzel.
He is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the newsletter Galaxy Brain.
He was also one of our earliest guests on the podcast.
He appeared on episode 35 about YouTube.
Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show again.
Thanks for having me back.
I appreciate it.
So I wanted to talk to you because I think you have an interesting perspective on what the hell Elon Musk and his associates are motivated by, because I don't feel like I'm able to judge whether or not Musk is being successful in his goals with respect to Twitter, because I don't even know what his goals are exactly.
But you argue that the texts between Musk and other Silicon Valley power players offer a kind of skeleton key into his mindset.
Now, first of all, where did these texts come from and why are we even able to see them?
Sure.
So the actual provenance of the text messages is really interesting.
We were able to see these messages because Elon Musk got in a lawsuit with Twitter over trying to back out of the purchase of the website.
And the board of directors was basically like, they got a great deal on it and they were like, we're not going to let you do that.
So they sued, it went into this this big thing, and then I spoke to a couple people who like understand this happened in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which is like the, you know, Delaware Corporation business court, and some experts there basically told me that these documents didn't have to come out at all.
What ended up happening was Elon Musk's legal team decided, supposedly, this is how it was explained to me, to sue for these to be unsealed.
They were confidential, there was no reason, like Twitter wasn't trying to like dredge these up to make fun of Elon Musk, but Elon Musk's legal team was basically trying to, the theory goes, tie Twitter's legal team up in busy work, right, and redact all these, having to redact all these files and basically, you know, like drag them through the mud, like you're gonna sue me, okay, we're gonna, you know, like do all these, you know, these stupid little requests.
But Twitter's team was like, that's fine.
If you want to unseal all these files, that's great.
And so Twitter's team redacted every single piece of Twitter communication fully.
The pages are just black.
There's nothing there.
But because Musk's team wasn't on top of the ball there, All these text messages just came out.
So this was like a complete unforced error, supposedly, on the part of Musk's legal team.
Basically, I think it's like another example of this like classic hubris of like, we're 10 steps ahead of you, we're gonna, you know, run legal circles around, and Twitter's lawyers were like, that's fine, we'll let all this stuff come out.
So, just the fact that we can see them is kind of... it's indicative of a lot of what happens with Elon Musk.
He thinks he's playing, like, 40-dimensional chess, and it turns out he's playing, like, Tetris, you know?
Well, you know, a challenging game in its own right.
That's true.
That's true.
Yeah, regarding the content of the texts themselves, they're him chatting with other fellow billionaires, talking about their plans for Twitter, essentially.
And you kind of make the point that they kind of like, you know, they kind of like banter back and forth like normal people, like friends.
But at the same time, they behave in ways that reveal that they are totally alienated from normal people.
So what do you think sort of these texts reveal about him in the circle of associates?
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing, like, when these first came out, I scrolled through them, like, that day it was happening, everyone was kind of reacting to them on Twitter and places like that, and the first thing I noticed was like, wow, like, these are our visionary geniuses, like, these are the guys, like, they're, you know, sitting there, one of the guys, Matthias Doffner, who owns the media conglomerate, or the CEO of the media conglomerate, Axel Springer, Like sent a text message to Elon, you know, kind of stroking his ego.
And he's like, I have a plan for this.
We got a step one is to solve for free speech.
And it's just like, I mean, you just have these guys who are, they're so their egos seem so inflated here.
And they just they just seem to think that it No task is too difficult for them.
And so looking through these messages, what's really interesting is that you have a ton of people kind of sucking up to Musk's power, right?
They're telling him, oh, you know, you're the guy to solve this.
You can do this.
You can do this.
And everyone's really giving him a lot of bad advice.
They're saying to him that he definitely has to go along with this.
He should go along with it.
And I think Jason Kalkanis, one of his advisors, has this whole idea of adopting a plan where, uh, if you pay a certain amount of money, you can just spam DM any of your followers, like just at once, like just these terrible ideas to like raise money that go against, you know, the, the idea of what Twitter is as a service.
And then what I realized when I, when I went through the second time is that there's one person in the whole thread that gives him good advice.
And it's the current, then current CEO of Twitter.
Who basically says, Hey, I'm, I'm on board.
I want to work with you.
This is all going to be great.
You know, we'll talk to each other like engineers.
And then Musk is tweeting.
He's tweeting something about like Twitter being a terrible product, like right before, uh, you know, he's going to come on the board and the CEO says, you know, you can tweet whatever you want, but this is not helping us.
Like, this is not, this is a distraction.
Like the media is getting involved.
Can you stop?
And Musk, like that changes, that one text from the CEO changes the entire course of Twitter's history.
Because within two minutes, Musk texts other people and says, this isn't working.
I don't want to deal with this bullshit.
I'm going to go try to take the company private and I'm going to buy Twitter.
It's like the one time somebody, like in his entire phone, like treats him, you know, like an adult and says, like, hold on, man, he absolutely freaks out and decides on this, this impulsive decision to buy Twitter.
And, and, you know, if you look at what's happening now, I mean, it looks like that's going to cost him, you know, billions and billions of dollars in his net worth and possibly, you know, even Tesla.
Yeah, I mean, it is really, really baffling how like all these people simultaneously, they are convinced that the only reason any problems exist anywhere in business or society is because it hasn't been worked on by their golden brains quite yet.
And also they seem to seem to believe that anyone who like pushes back against them, who says that maybe you are on the right track is a moron and they need to be dismissed.
And you need to plow straight through them and just do the most outrageous things that you think will solve the problem.
I think you talked about this before.
It does kind of like, you know, pop the myth of these people as, you know, genius visionaries who, who have, you know, who understand the future and our place in society better than anyone.
Yeah, and you know, they're behaving to some extent like this makes sense, right?
Like when they're conducting whatever their business over text and like, I think the writer Matt Levine, like he, he cited one of the pieces I wrote about this and said, like, well, how do you expect anyone to behave over text?
Like, it's kind of a medium that dumps things down.
Like you're, you're sort of gonna look like a jackass if you're, you know, texting about the future of your company to some degree.
And I get that, right?
Like, the format is going to make them look, you know, too casual.
But when you look at what is actually happening in these messages, like, you have, you know, you have, there's also, there are a couple of direct messages between Musk and Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalists, where like, Andresen's just like, yeah, I'll give you like a cool $200 million, like no strings attached.
I don't even need to see a plan.
I don't need to see anything.
He texts the billionaire, Musk texts the billionaire Larry Ellison asking for like $2 billion.
He's like, yeah, you got it, whatever you need.
There's no due diligence being done on any of this.
Even over text, right?
There's no, what's your plan for Twitter?
What do you think you want to do?
It's just like, nah man, your brand is good enough.
I'm going to do it.
And that's why The whole reason I wanted to go back and sort of focus on these messages a couple months after they came out was because, like, the other character in these texts, like, the other sort of looming figure, is Sam Bankman Freed.
So, like, you have the two big, like, tech meltdown stories of the year, like, both of the characters are in these messages, and, like, you have all these people trying to connect Musk and SBF, Being like, oh, this guy, he's just like you.
He's a genius.
Like, he's trying to build things.
He, you know, he cares about, you know, the future of whatever.
He's, you know, a great effective altruist.
And meanwhile, you just see no vetting going on, right?
It's like, everyone's just like, repeating what they read on Twitter.
And it's very easy to sort of understand like, oh, of course, this is how you get like, you know, the mythos of Elon Musk.
This is how you get the, you know, mythos of Sam Bankman Freed and these like house of cards that just collapse.
And like you would think that those two guys like would be able to come up with something like much shadier and like more successful like you know Elon could have been like okay I'm doing Twitter blue or whatever and you can only pay in like crypto and like this kind of crypto or whatever and it's a partnership with with SBF and he could have made like a Uh, you know, a bunch of like maybe millionaires like overnight who would then be like, you know, feel forever loyal to him, you know, for, for, you know, pumping whatever crypto, you know, they, I don't know, whatever meme coin or whatever.
And yet we got the, the like dumbest and like most ineffective.
like sort of like version of it which is which is ironic because does it wasn't
Musk quoted as saying himself that like the outcome that usually happens is like
the silliest and stupid stupidest and he was I don't know he had some some stupid
quote like that and it's like well you've done it I mean what's really
I mean, what's really funny to the first part of that is like, I've had a bunch of people
funny to the the first part of that is like I've had a bunch of people try to
try to like, who would know what they're talking about with finance explain the FTX stuff to
like who would know what they're talking about with finance explain the FTX stuff
to me and from from what they like tell me in their summaries it's like the real
me.
And from from what they like, tell me in their summaries, it's like, the real crime of FTX
and SPF whole thing, because he owned an exchange and a hedge fund should have been just printing
money.
Like the thing that should have happened is not an implosion.
It should have been like front running trading where they just absolutely printed money,
right?
And like the whole idea with something like Twitter should be like, yeah, you could, you
know, if you were like the evil genius kind of, you know, billionaire person could be
getting all these like addled people like really extracting the money from them, right?
Like, you know, saying like, if you want all these communities, if you want access to your followers, sorry, man, four bucks a month, right?
Like locking everyone in, not just like the super fans.
But they're not even good at like the evil genius part, right?
They're just like stepping all over themselves because they seem to just go into these,
they seem to have no plan.
They go into these things thinking the right people will explain the problem
and my brain will come up with the solution because I was able to do that maybe in one other instance,
right?
Or a lot of people have told me that's what's going to happen.
It's this really, really interesting, like, they created their own marketing.
The marketing was successful, but they're unsuccessful because they believe it, right?
They wrote it, and they believe it.
It's kind of like, I would I would really almost prefer it if like, the evidence show that Elon Musk had a really well thought out evil plan that was very calculated, that marshaled his resource in a very focused way.
And he was acting out of even rational self interest.
Because if there was a plan, and there's like, you know, there's something you can contend with it, you can grasp that.
But if he's just he just thinking of like, well, I'm just gonna stroll into this multi-billion dollar disaster and just figure it out with my genius.
Obviously I'm a genius.
Look at all the magazine covers I've been on.
Then, uh, that's harder to reckon with.
Cause how exactly do you, there's, there's nothing, there's no substance there.
It's just constantly changing.
This, this is why I actually like, I kind of, uh, cringe every time I make the comparison.
Cause it sounds just like classic, like pundit hack thing.
To be like Elon Musk is like Donald Trump.
But there is like a very like one just core similarity is that just like that blundering in with no plan but also with no no like no real shame about not having the plan right?
Like there's a lot of people who don't have a great plan but really want to be seen as knowing what they're doing.
These guys don't care.
They feel that they are above having to care about that.
This is what's bothered me about the media cycle around Elon Musk, of which of course I'm a part of it in a way, is that media articles quote his tweets and they're like, Elon Musk's new plan is X or Y or this.
And it's like, no.
No, there's no plan.
Like, it's very clear that whatever he says today, you know, he'll try to spin it if it fails, you know, like, oh, I was, you know, it was a trial balloon.
Like, he did the whole, you know, should I step down as the head of Twitter thing and got, like, the poll was just, like, such an own goal, right?
Everyone was, like, absolutely stepped down.
Yeah.
And he was like, ah, see, I was trying to fish out all the bots.
It's like, it's like, it's like putting a seventh grader in charge of a company and then having all these, like, you know, reporters and people be like, Sir, sir, sir, like, you know, why did you make that decision?
It's like, he's a seventh grader.
He's not, like, gonna be able to articulate why, and he's just gonna, you know, backtrack.
This is a school project, you know?
Like, you know, Larry Ellison sending over two billion dollars is like, I don't know, giving, you know, giving, like, a friend in need, like, a thousand, but, you know, if you're doing well and you're like, here's, man, here's a thousand dollars, like, get, you know, get you on your feet or whatever.
Like, there's no concept of money or value to anything, so they're just, like, playing with toys.
I mean, that's kind of how I feel about it.
It's like, Elon got, like, a new toy, you know?
And just doesn't really care, necessarily, about what happens with it.
He's just got it now.
The hard part for me to conceptualize on, like, really and truly, and I don't mean to say like, I, you know, I think these guys are super smart or anything like that, but when you look at the finances of the Twitter deal, like, it, like, legitimately doesn't make any sense, right?
Like, there's, you know, I think 1.3 billion in interest that's being accumulated every year on the loans.
I think you have big investment banks that are holding a lot of debt on their books, and they're going to do it for a little while for Elon.
He's Elon Musk, and they want to keep a rich man happy, but after a while, they're going to be like, no way, right?
And then these bills are going to come due.
He seems to sort of try to... He's turned on the game genie cheat code thing, right?
The rules of gravity don't seem to apply to him in most interactions, but this is like...
Like, the whole thing's gonna turn off and he's gonna be like, he's gonna be on hard mode like the rest of us, having to answer for shit.
And that's what I think's really interesting.
Like, that is, the bill is gonna come due.
Like, we're seeing it now.
Charlie, thanks again for coming on.
Pleasure as always.
Where can people learn more about your writing?
If you just search Galaxy Brain and Charlie Worzel, it'll all come up, all that stuff.
And that's where I publish most of my stuff now with The Atlantic.
So thanks!
Awesome.
Thanks so much, Charlie.
Take care, guys.
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It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Q.
General Flynn was on a show recently and he basically did a rant against Q
and against all of this stuff.
And again, this is in line with what Dave just explained.
Same idea, okay?
There's no way General Flynn is gonna go, "Yeah, I've been thinking about this Q thing
and I talked to some people at the top and I talked to the president, talked to Q Plus,
and I'm free to tell you now that it's a thing."
He's not going to do that.
It's not going to happen.
Anybody that knows, anybody that's telling you that they're in touch with Q and that they are in on the operation or that they know for sure that X is happening and that they have intel at that level, No, just no.
I'm telling you, step away from those people.
Flynn has been in military intelligence for 33 years.
Most of which involves psychological operations.
Anything that Flynn tells you, you have to realize is part of a PSYOP.
Which means there's a very good likelihood that what he's telling you isn't true.
