Episode 227: The Posting to Prison Pipeline feat Michael Edison Hayden
Usually, telling lies on the internet is Constitutionally protected.
But what happens when it’s not? What happens when you post and meme so hard and so maliciously that you go far outside the realm of protected speech and wind up in a federal prison. That’s the story of a 33-year-old man named Douglass Mackey, who operated a few Twitter accounts under the name Rickey Vaughn. Using these accounts he spread Pizzagate lies, racist tropes, and also messages deliberately designed to mislead people into giving up their right to vote. On May 31st, Douglass Mackey was convicted of Election Interference in the 2016 presidential race after a one week trial.
To better understand this case we spoke to someone who has been covering it for years: Michael Edison Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center. We chat about Douglass Mackey’s background, the crime he was found guilty of committing, and what it means for the future of online disinformation campaigns. We also discuss the trial’s involvement of “Microchip,” a notorious troll who is currently working as a federal informant.
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
Michael Edison Hayden: https://twitter.com/MichaelEHayden
QAA's Website: https://qanonanonymous.com
Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 227 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Posting to Prison Pipeline episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky and Travis View.
Now, we've talked a lot on this podcast about disinformation, and usually telling lies on the Internet is constitutionally protected.
But what happens when it's not?
What happens when you post a meme so hard and so maliciously that you go far outside the realm of protected speech and wind up in a federal prison?
That's the story of, barring the unlikely case of a successful appeal, of a 33-year-old man named Douglas Mackey, who operated a few Twitter accounts under the name Ricky Vaughn.
Using these accounts, he spread pizzagate lies, racist tropes, and also messages deliberately designed to mislead people into giving up their right to vote.
On May 31st, Douglas Mackey was convicted of election interference in the 2016 presidential election after a one-week trial.
He faces a sentence of up to 10 years in prison for that conviction, though it remains to be seen what his actual sentence will be.
Today we're going to be talking to Michael Edison Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center about the Douglas Mackey case, what he did, and what this means for the future of online trolling.
But before we get to the main topic of the show, I feel like I have to address the recent reporting concerning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Oh yeah, what's going on with this?
So yeah, so an investigation by ProPublica, a really great investigation, found that Thomas accepted luxury trips from billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow, which is a villain name, honestly.
Yes, yes, Harlan Crow, yes.
He only wears purple.
He lives in the very, you know, in the very gnarliest looking tree.
We've seen this guy.
We know him.
Yeah, so Thomas accepted gifts from Harlan Crow for years without disclosing them.
So this included travel on a private flight to Indonesia, super yacht sailings, and visits to Crow's East Texas ranch.
I thought for sure you were gonna be like, and visits to Crow's evil secret island.
Basically, basically.
I mean, it's like, I mean, it's what good journalism should do, like uncovering, you know, connections and corruption, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
But perhaps most shockingly, it included Clarence Thomas going to the 150 year old San Francisco resort, Bohemian Grove.
Oh dear.
Okay.
We talked about Bohemian Grove, actually, with a former employee of the facility all the way back in episode 36 of this podcast.
Oh, my God.
I know.
It's been that long.
So this is a resort to the elites, and it has included among its membership Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Charles Schwab, you know, the top of the, you know, the finance and politics and even like, you know, entertainment worlds.
So it's where the wealthy and powerful get together and they do like weird plays and they piss in the woods, according to our best understanding.
Famously, Alex Jones snuck into the area in 2000 and he filmed the cremation of care ceremony.
I just want to go in.
I want to see all these.
I want to see all these politicians, all these famous celebrities.
I want to see them pissing in the woods.
That's what I want to see.
I know they're eating children.
I know they're doing a lot of This revelation in the ProPublica article was shocking to me, not because it reveals that Clarence Thomas' shtick about being an everyman is bullshit, or that it reveals yet another way in which billionaires control the government.
You know, this is all a given.
But it's shocking to me because Clarence Thomas' wife, Ginny Thomas, is a conspiracist, right?
The January 6th committee revealed text messages in which she railed against a plot by the elites to steal the election.
She also sent a video by Alex Jones' associate, Steve Pchenik.
So look, you know, if your Supreme Court justice husband is literally attending Bohemian Grove at the invitation of a billionaire, you should be allowed to rail about the elites or share Alex Jones videos.
I feel like that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, there's gotta be some disconnect there.
You know, when Clarence Thomas gets ready to go to Bohemian Grove, like, he doesn't say, like, oh, I'm going up to Bohemian Grove, like, to do the play, like, around the Owl and go tinkle tinkle in the woods.
He's probably like, oh, well, Daddy's getting ready to go on his yearly retreat.
You know, it's like one of those things.
There's got to be some sort of weird disconnect where she's just compartmentalizing her own experience with her husband and then also her conspiratorial beliefs.
I mean, yeah, that's really the best case scenario, which Clarence Thomas is just, like, lying or they just don't talk about where Clarence Thomas is heading off to or something.
Like, most people, like normal people, they have to speculate how the rich and powerful are manipulating the world.
And this can give rise to, like, conspiracizing and, you know, sometimes it can go off the rails.
But if Ginny Thomas wants to know how the rich and powerful are manipulating the world, she just has to wait till dinner time and ask, what'd you do at work today?
You know, it doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, I mean, when he grabs his overcoat, puts on his hat, opens the door, you know, turns over his shoulder and calls up the stairs like, all right, honey, well, I'm going to Dr. Crow's, you know, evil island.
Like, I'll be back, I don't know, in a week or so.
Or like, Yeah, anything.
Oh well, but like, you know how this stuff goes.
People don't know.
It's like, I've got my weekly fishing trip with the guys, or like, I gotta do something for work.
We know how shady dudes operate.
It's, you know, I gotta go ride on the yacht with Dr. Crow.
I mean, it's like, I don't even know if he's a doctor.
I've just started calling him that because I've fully embraced his comic book villain stature.
I don't know.
It feels like in conservative circles, these kinds of conspiracist stances are just like a fashionable thing to do, and they're disconnected from any kind of real attempt to understand, I guess, how power is manipulating the world.
Yeah, it's like when you're like married to perhaps one of the thousand most powerful people in the fucking world is being courted by billionaires and flown all over the world, you shouldn't feel so powerless and confused that we resort to watching Alex Jones videos and getting weird telegram messages about like, you know, what the elites are doing.
Because you are the elite.
That's that's you.
You're the one who controls the world.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think that brings up an interesting point about, you know, there are things that happen out in, you know, in your real life, and then there are things that happen in your life on the internet, and the things that you watch and consume in this very small sort of enclosed space, it's 2D, it's this flat screen, you're laying on a body pillow, and you're, the light from your laptop, uh, You know, is blinding you at two in the morning.
And then there's like, you know, you're having dinner with your husband, you're talking about your day.
You know, I would imagine that there are these two different worlds that just, they never ever seem like they're going to intersect because the medium through which you are experiencing them is so wholly different.
So, on to discussing the Douglas Mackey trial, because this is really fascinating.
So, according to federal prosecutors and the jurors in his trial, between September and November of 2016, Douglas Mackey conspired with other influential Twitter users to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages that encouraged supporters of Hillary Clinton to vote via text message or social media.
In reality, these are not legally valid methods of voting, and the messages were designed to disenfranchise voters.
One of these messages was an image that included the text, avoid the line, vote from home, text Hillary to 59925.
And there were people who did in fact text that number.
And what did it do instead?
It signed them up for some kind of weird supplement?
Well, yeah, I think we might have to talk to Michael Hayden about that, exactly, about what happened.
I want to find out, did the, yeah, did the number go anywhere?
How does our law enforcement even find out how many people texted, like, you know, a phony dummy number?
Very interesting, very interesting stuff.
Douglas Mackey posted these messages under an account named Ricky Vaughn, which is named after a character from the 1989 film Major League.
Wait, who is he?
Is it Charlie Sheen's character?
Is it the main character?
It's the Charlie Sheen character, yeah.
It's like the Charlie Sheen, Ricky Vaughn, but use a MAGA hat instead of the baseball cap.
I mean, that makes sense.
I loved those movies when I was a little kid.
But Charlie Sheen's, his sort of aura in those movies, I think, you know, could very easily serve MAGA through, you know, an altered JPEG on the internet.
So this Ricky Von account was actually really influential in spreading the ideas of the alt-right in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
It peaked at 62,000 followers and posted some 221,000 tweets.
220,000?
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Lots and lots of tweets.
and posted some 221,000 tweets.
220,000?
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
Lots and lots of tweets. He's very active.
Posting all the time.
I think I've tweeted like 5,000 times, maybe.
And that felt like a lot when I saw that little number.
I have, yeah, I mean, yeah, I've posted I think tens of thousands of times, but even that feels excessive.
I've cut back in like this past year or so.
200,000 times?
Oh my god.
Ugh, what a dumb world.
Alright, please continue.
So an MIT election study during the primaries ranked that Ricky Vaughn Twitter account as more influential than the accounts of like NBC News, Stephen Colbert, and the Democratic Party, among many others.
So it was pretty influential.
When Vaughn was banned from Twitter in October of 2016, he became even more popular among the far right.
Vaughn then took his act to the social media platform Gab, where he quickly became a prominent presence.
One of Douglas Mackey's co-conspirators is a longtime alt-right troll who goes by the name Microchip.
Microchip, in addition to being a disinformation super-spreader in his own right,
was revealed to be a federal informant through the course of his trial, and in fact even testified during the trial.
So I'm really excited to talk to Michael Hayden about that.
Yeah, because wasn't Microchip part of that original crew?
Him, James Brower, who we unfortunately had on the show, claiming that they were responsible for the original, the first four Q-drops or something like that?
That is right, Jake.
They did in fact claim that, and yeah, I'm trying to get some clarity on how That went down.
Yeah, if Microchip has been an FBI informant for a very long time and as an informant is claiming that he did some of the Q-drops, that's a whole mess.
I remember because James, after he came on the show, he did reach out to you, correct, and admit that the story was kind of bullshit and he was sorry and felt bad.
Yeah, he did in fact retract his claims after initially claiming that he was responsible for some of the initial Q-drops, so... Good on him!
We are now joined by Michael Edison Hayden.
He is a senior investigative reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and he has been following developments in this case for years.
In fact, he spoke to Douglas Mackey shortly after he was doxed back in 2018.
Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Hey, it's great to be here, Travis.
So, first of all, we covered some of the details of the case briefly before you came on, but how would you describe what Douglas Mackey was found guilty of doing?
I think the easiest way for people to understand this is, you know, Not the non-perverted term of disinformation, right?
Like, not the one that has been sort of mutated on social media among liberals, but like, real disinformation.
Like, basically, he published some very, on Twitter, some very highly crafted, you know, Completely realistic looking images telling people that they could vote by text using a shortcode, a sort of a hijacked shortcode.
And the images targeted women of color, essentially.
So the first one he published had a picture of a black woman on it, and it kind of was targeted at the sort of African Americans for Hillary crowd.
And then seven hours later, he published one that was even, in my opinion, Much more plausible looking, which was written in Spanish, telling people they could text with a woman who appeared to be Latina on there.
And it was very plausible disinformation that the government successfully argued was designed to keep people from voting.
And people actually texted that particular number that was provided, right?
Yep.
So, um, one of the big, there's sort of a lot of smoke coming from the right about this, which we're probably going to get into.
But one of the things that they keep bringing up is the fact that every, that most of the people texted the number, there's about nearly 5,000 people, 4,900 something, I think.
And, you know, they keep bringing up that most of the people who texted this number did so after the media had already covered it.
And there's just two things that are important about that that I just want to isolate here, which is that nearly 100 people did so before they, you know, this had been covered by the media.
So we don't know if those are real people trying to vote or not.
And then as for everyone else, they established during the trial pretty clearly that one of the goals of Mackey and his co-conspirators was to get this covered in the media.
So yes, many people did text.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
So hold on.
So they're saying that like this is less egregious of a crime because oh well they should have been watching the news they should have known that it was a fake thing and you know there's no reason that they should have texted it but then they're also saying well we wanted the media to cover it Ah, these people, they just, ah, they break my brain.
Like, okay, so you want the media to cover it so that people know it's a hoax, but you're also earnestly hoping to disenfranchise voters by giving them false information about how to vote for the candidate.
Right.
So one thing that's exposed in the trial are they like, they have, they were in multiple Twitter direct message groups.
And these were like, I've been in a lot of different DMs in my time, but like, I've never seen anything quite like this where it's like, do you remember Jared Wyand?
He was this guy who was like a, like he was in that Ricky Vaughn tier of kind of just faces you would just randomly see like on your, like, who the fuck is this guy?
And he turned out, he ultimately got suspended from, from Twitter when he started to get more and more radical.
I think it was like a Star Wars comment he made about like, you know, in 2016 about diverse casting or something like that was the first thing.
And then he went to Gab and he got like really, really openly anti-Semitic and then, you know, became really, really hardcore, this guy Jared Wyand.
And one of the first DMs is like, it's just like, okay, this is a place where we're kind of like workshopping information or whatever, and it's pinned to the top.
And essentially what they were doing in there is like plotting out ways to make plausible looking disinfo that they could drive up through coordinated efforts, like up in the algorithm using Twitter's trending topics and things like that.
I had never seen anything quite like this, and I knew that they were doing things like this, but I really had no idea how sophisticated it really was.
Yeah, you know, 2016, that was a very, very long time ago.
This is basically the period that he's been accused of committing these crimes.
And it's tough to remember that period on Twitter.
It was really wild and chaotic.
But this Ricky Vaughn account that Douglas Mackey made had a surprisingly large reach and pretty influential, right?
Oh yeah, I mean it was like, you know, one of the big things that comes up and came up in trial is that MIT did a study where they were like trying to determine who are the most influential social media personalities in the 2016 election and he came up with 107th and he was right in the same tier as people like Cher and whatever else, right?
So all he really had was just this this Charlie Sheen avatar from the film Major League with the MAGA hat, but he would appear on there. And one thing that, like on people's feeds,
and one thing that Mackey did, that, you know, obviously, I'm, you know, I report on the
radical right specifically, much more than the conspiracy world. But that's, you know,
I mean, there's obviously massive overlap. The thing that always intrigued me about Mackey is,
is how successful he was at kind of "uniting the right" in air quotes, you know, to use that
term. He had, he He was able to win support among, like, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, like the really hardcore types.
And, you know, a lot of support among, like, kind of, you know, MAGA grandmas.
and things like that. And he was, because he was a very sophisticated poster, he was like a very,
he was, he was very strategic. He was able to kind of unite these people on Twitter, and it
became kind of an account that drove traffic to Trump's messaging. Well, and he, you know, his,
his, his profile pic, you know, there's something, I don't know if it always looked like,
you know, would look like this, because people change their pictures oftentimes. But you know,
the electric blue and the, and the hat, and there, there is something that is very catchy about it.
I mean, do we know at all where he sort of sharpened these skills?
I mean, was he a Chan guy?
Was he on other forums or?
Yeah, I mean, remind me to like, put a pin in me saying how microchip described 4chan later, but, um, uh, so I'll, I'll mention that, but yeah, I mean, 4chan played a big role in this trial and it was fascinating to see how, you know, just how big a role.
So one of Mackie's kind of defense postures was that like, he just found these on 4chan and thought they were cool and kind of posted them.
Also, in his DMs, they have evidence of saying, like, I have all these, I have so many people who respond to my posts, I can just command people to Photoshop things for me at the drop of a hat.
That's not the quote verbatim, but that is, you know, the core principle behind it.
So the prosecution had to slow things down for people and say that, like, yeah, he was on this particular part of Fortune and he did it seven hours apart.
And rather than the split second of, like, see it, post it, he had to, like, really pick which there were so many different images to choose.
And he chose specifically this black woman and this Latina.
And just that was his focus.
And it was for strategic reasons.
So yeah, 4chan was like really big in this.
He was kind of part of this, what I would describe as kind of a through line between 4chan and MAGA Twitter.
Yeah, I was really interested in, I guess, Douglas Mackey, the man, because, you know, the fact that Douglas Mackey is the man behind the Ricky Vonn accounts was reported in 2018 by your colleague, Luke O'Brien, who we've had on the show before.
And I was looking over his report from that time.
And what really struck me is that Mackey seemed to be on track for a Pretty cushy life, before he decided to devote his time to trolling on Twitter.
Like, his dad was a lobbyist, and he focused on, like, tax policy affecting wireless communication, so he was well-connected.
Mackie attended Middlebury College, and after college he moved to Brooklyn, took a job as an economist at the firm John Dunham & Associates, and he worked there for four years.
But he fell down the alt-right pipeline pretty hard.
So, do we know exactly how he got radicalized?
You really nailed it there, because I can't think of any one person who better symbolizes this idea of being red-pilled than Doug Mackey.
I really can't.
I think he's gotta be the biggest.
I mean, a Middlebury grad who winds up in this particular situation, and I don't mean that in a classist kind of whatever way, but he really had no reason to do, to turn into what he turned into.
He had everything kind of laid out for him in life, and a tremendous amount of white privilege
in a non-arguable kind of way.
I don't mean that in like the sort of, I mean, he's literally had white privilege in a literal
sense and this dude, like the most compelling piece of color
that the prosecution brought in was interviews with his roommate,
who there's no need to name him right now 'cause the guy's a private figure,
but they, you know, over a period of years, he's living with this guy and the roommate says,
you know, what happened?
You know, how did you find out about this stuff?
He's like, I found out because I read Luke's Huff Poe.
So for like years, Mackie is living with this guy and has this whole secret MAGA persona, this weird radical right thing with the anti-Semitism.
He's organizing with members of the Right Stuff Network, now National Justice Party.
Well, not organizing, but he's certainly appearing on their podcasts and debating strategy about the directions of the white supremacist movement.
And the roommate he's living with doesn't know anything like that.
And they asked him when he took the stand, they're like, what was he like?
And this is like, he's just he was like in his room, door closed on the computer.
And it is, it's just like that.
It's a literal thing.
It's like a it's like the red pilling thing, you know, perfectly encapsulated, like where it's just this guy just became addicted to being, you know, a white nationalist icon on Twitter.
Well, what's crazy to me about that is that, you know, typically, and look, I'm speaking from experience of somebody who, you know, is easily taken in by conspiracies that they read online and, you know, have had to surround myself with good, smart people like Travis, you know, to keep me from going overboard.
But when you are discovering these things, when you're, when you are sort of going down the rabbit hole, the first thing you want to do is talk about it with your roommate.
You know, roommates are actually so important here.
I was so lucky when, you know, around 2017, 2018, when, you know, all of this shit was really kicking off.
I was living with a guy, a good friend of mine, who is like a hardcore lefty.
And so, you know, I would come out of my room and be like, oh man, I was like, yeah, I'm reading about, you know, Benghazi, you know, just Hillary Clinton, you know, I don't know.
And he would be like, Uh well I mean you know actually and you know and would provide some kind of realistic explanation or you know very smart dude just just was very plugged in into you know what I would consider like good politics and so that very much surprised
It surprises me that, you know, somebody is becoming the kind of archetypal version of the red pill and the roommate has no idea about it.
On some level I wonder if, you know, if you're getting into anti-semitic stuff, if you're getting into white supremacist and borderline neo-nazi stuff, on some level you gotta know that that's bad?
And maybe you don't want to share with, you know, but usually if you're in the process of getting red-pilled, you're trying to red-pill everybody else around you.
It's like the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where he shows up at the bus stop and he's in a real bad mood and he treats Susie Dirkens like shit.
She gets in a really bad mood and he says, you know, nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it.
And that's kind of been my experience with people getting red-pilled in the process or, you know, just kind of conservatives in general.
Well, just a quick point on that, which is what you're describing, Jake, about like, oh, I want to share the conspiracy.
You know, the difference there is that that Mackie took the role of predator here.
You know, he's not it's not necessarily he believes in conspiracies or anything like that.
He is trying to exploit people he perceives to be gullible.
And he's not an audience member.
He's a person who And that's what made him the center of this trial.
It's not like, oh, well, he definitely believed in the anti-Semitic conspiracies or at least promoted them.
But his main goal was winning power and creating fascist control over the United States.
I mean, that to me is my read on what he did.
And so he's using the conspiracies to get there.
Yeah, yeah, that is very different than what I described.
And I think that that's an interesting distinction that, you know, we don't necessarily often talk about on the podcast is this difference between audience member and, you know, or orator, you know, somebody who wants to take this stuff and use it, you know, even if they don't necessarily, they're not necessarily 100% on board with the kookiness.
Well, Andrew Anglin from Daily Stormer has contacted me from SOC accounts and things like that.
And, you know, he's as bad as you might think he is, you know, but he's very conscious, like he knows that he's manipulating his audience.
He knows what he's doing, and he gets off on it, right?
Like it's, for them, it's a game to try to secure power for, you know, a small group of people that they feel like that they can be a part of.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
I mean, my impression of 4chan is a group of people that all lovingly hate each other.
Yeah, sure.
You know, and so there is this sort of woven in kind of, you know, emotion of like, you know, it's fun to own people.
It's fun to manipulate them.
Like, it's fun to get them to look stupid.
They're trying to do it to you.
That's the whole part of it.
Yep. 100%.
Yeah, I guess what really baffled me about his story is that usually people in his position, like I said, who were born into a lot of privilege and have a pretty easy track in life, what they do is that they get a good job, and then they build up a lot of wealth and connections and clout, and they use that to forward their racist policies through their career or something like that.
like that, you know, banging politicians or whatever.
But he wanted the attention for himself.
I mean, he got, he was so red.
I heard that he went through like, for example, Gamergate.
He connected to bad figures like Mike Cernovich.
You know, he wanted to be the guy online who is like, you know,
spreading the disinformation and like you said, personally helping forward the cause of a fascist state.
Just bizarrely self-destructive.
Not in like, oh, poor boy has so much potential kind of way.
Just like, why aren't you, at the very least, looking out for number one?
Like a lot of other, I guess, like racist people in your positions.
Sure.
Yeah, it's a good question.
You know, the thing about Mackie and I bristle when people be like, feel obligated to say like, Oh, well, they're really smart.
Like this person's really smart in the in the radical, right?
I mean, it's one of the more annoying things that we'd like, I feel like people feel the need to do is like, Well, he's really smart and stuff like that.
No, actually, they're not like most of the time.
They're quite exploitative.
There are a few of them that are smarter than others.
You know, I think Mackie became so beloved from both the extreme far right and from, you know, there's sort of the generic MAGA sludge, you know, brigade that because because of the fact that he was, you know, he was a guy who could have succeeded at something else.
You know, and he and you could tell with the way he posted that he was, you know, I mean, he was he could have he could have been something other than this.
And he committed himself to this.
He had enough talent, I guess, at manipulating people and messaging to be something else.
And they love that because there's so few and far between.
Yeah, work for Pepsi or something.
Yeah, it's really interesting to watch, you know, people who have otherwise, you know, promising careers.
They have a lot of advantages, you know, starting on third base.
But sometimes, sometimes you want to take that silver spoon and just Dig it in the mud, you know, and eat just a big, a big spoonful of mud and rocks and worms.
Or shit.
In the shit posting sense.
Yeah, or shit, whatever kind of, you know, hankering, you know, whatever kind of flavor you're looking for.
And now he's going to face what?
He's facing what, like 10 years in prison?
Yeah, I mean, I'd be surprised if he gets 10.
I think the judge can give him zero.
And the judge can give him 10.
Yeah.
As far as I understand it.
And, you know, I think he's more likely to get something in the two, three years, two-year range.
It depends whether Judge Donnelly wants to... She's a foreign prosecutor.
She's an Obama-appointed judge.
It depends on whether she buys into the changed man narrative that he's trying to sell, or if she really wants to make a statement here, to say like, hey, hold on a second, man.
Like, we're sending black people to jail for fucking Yeah.
Yeah.
and like, are there no repercussions for Middlebury grads who try to stop black people from voting?
I mean, so she has the option to kind of like make it a tough sentence if she wants.
If I were Mackey, I would not, you know, I would buy some Imodium AD or something
'cause it's gonna be real stressful right before that sentencing,
but I wouldn't expect full 10 years.
That is my, if it happens, it's gonna be rough.
Michael, do you know, is there any discussion whatsoever on the idea, because here's the things that I'm sort of looking at, is that he's, you know, on these sort of white supremacist boards, you know, clearly there's, you know, there's a lot of racism there, and he, at the same time, his sort of voter misinformation scheme is targeting people of color.
Do you think, is there anything being brought into play about the, that this is a racist crime or that potentially a hate crime?
Because it is geared towards people of color, you know, assuming that they're gullible and trying to, you know, ruin their opportunity to go out and vote for, you know, whatever candidate they want.
So, you know, I don't know.
There's nothing yet with that.
But his white supremacist posts is kind of like that that world made it into the trial repeatedly.
And he got he got torn up during cross-examination when he took this, you know, when he took the stand.
And it was largely to explain things where he was saying that black people are predisposed to have an 85 IQ, which was, you know, I mean, just standard fair American Renaissance crap, if you're familiar with with them.
And yeah, I mean, he was just basically getting into this, like, you know, this debunked race science bullshit and repeatedly saying black people are gullible.
And you can see that from from what they do on Twitter and stuff like that.
And so, yeah, it came in because it's like, well, you think black people are dumb.
You think black people are gullible.
So therefore you, you know, why wouldn't you think that they would believe this?
Why would you think that they would text this?
I mean, it helped establish the motive very, very clearly.
You know, if you're saying women are children with the right to vote, which is something that he said, which for some reason more than anything else kind of chilled me for some reason.
It's such a fucked up thought.
It's like, you know, maybe if I were, you know, if I were black, maybe the 85 IQ one would, but I just feel like that that kind of racism is so common and whatever.
It's not an either or scenario, but it was something like, you know, dude's mom was at the trial and stuff like that.
You know, even if you are, if lived a life where you're sheltered from black people and stuff like that, it's like to be looking at the women in your life and thinking this is a fucking child in an adult's body who shouldn't be allowed to vote.
It fucked me up.
I mean, it was just like something, the whole thing was just really, really uncomfortable.
Yeah.
Now, I was particularly interested in this case because of the involvement of a notorious alt-right troll who goes by the name Microchip.
Now, for those who aren't aware, Microchip is responsible for spreading a lot of disinformation related to the 2016 election.
He's also responsible for a scheme called Operation Titty Twister, in which he and other people who use- they use Twitter's reporting system to report tweets by reporters and progressives as part of an attempt to have their accounts suspended.
So we discovered through this trial that Microchip is a co-conspirator of Douglas Mackey in the scheme, and no surprises there.
That sounds like something he would do.
But we also learned that Microchip is a federal informant and has been since 2018.
And he in fact testified at this trial, which means that you laid eyes on the very mysterious and still anonymous Microchip.
So what was that like?
Wow.
Okay.
It's going to be a lot.
I would almost say we could do a separate podcast just on microchip.
And the other thing I wanted to say is we need to make some t-shirts that say I survived Operation Titty Twister.
I definitely was on those reporting things.
Yes, those will be going up in the merch shop within the next couple hours.
I did.
I'm an Operation Titty Twister survivor and my account still exists for now.
So where to start?
So I've been in touch with Microchip in some way, shape, or form since 2017, I think.
So has Luke.
Luke has been more involved with him than I have, but there have been times where I've been in, like, you know, where I was talking to Microchip basically all the time, and that was maybe 2018.
When I was on Gab, I was one of the few verified people on Gab who was not a, you know, not friends with, like, Robert Bowers or some other mass murderer.
Yeah, so I was like, yeah, basically microchip presented himself for those who are unfamiliar as like this kind of like, relatively handsome looking avatar with like a micro with a with a ice cream cone in his face and a MAGA hat.
And, you know, the reality was just something very different.
Like all of a sudden this dude comes in to the court.
I don't know how much he weighed like it was 300 something.
Maybe I don't know.
I mean, is it somewhere between 300?
I mean, he's a big, big, big guy.
And not just heavy, not just overweight, but tall, too.
He's kind of like... Like the Mountain.
He's like the... He would be the guard, you know, the MAGA knight's guard, you know, in the 1800s or whatever.
If he had muscle, like he had more muscle and less fat, he would... You could tell me that this guy was, like, the new, like, offensive tackle for the Jets or something, and I'd be like, ah, okay.
Like, yeah, here he is.
Huge dude, like he's got a beard, his neck beard goes down.
He's in a very vibrant looking blue hoodie, like a kind of a royal blue hoodie that just really was like electrically blue, like brand new.
And he had like hair that kind of like strung down like past his ears, like and curled out a little bit.
Greasy looking hair.
Sounds a little bit like the comic book guy from The Simpsons.
Yeah, a little bit, a little bit without the ponytail, but like big, like Yeah.
a big version. Like if you mutated him out and it made him like massive in some Halloween
episode of the Simpsons, then yes, that's kind of what it would be. And as soon as he
came into the court, it was a fucking circus, dude. It was just one, his attitude. He comes
in and he looks at Luke and he looks at me and he's just laughing, right?
He just starts laughing and he gets onto the stand and his posture on the stand, like, he doesn't stop the troll persona.
It's like, you can immediately tell this is the guy you've been chatting with because he's got this cocksure kind of weird fucking comedy, like, vibe from the start.
And it's very, like, you know, it was very challenging for the prosecution because he had Mackie dead to rights with some of the things he's saying.
But because he was so weird, and because the average, you know, person who is a senior citizen, who is many of, you know, there are a few of them on the jury, maybe half of the people there looked pretty old, and all the people there had very limited experience with Twitter, which is important in choosing the jury.
Like, they may have been interested in some other social media sites, but were not super involved.
And it just, they started like laughing.
The jury erupted with laughter multiple times.
We started laughing.
I had to take my COVID mask and put it on because I didn't want the judge was getting pissed with us.
Because Microchip himself was laughing on the stand during a sidebar.
and had to take his hooded sweatshirt and put it up over his mouth like this
and was laughing into it like this because he recognized us
and he had been exposed with no name or anything.
And the situation was just that surreal.
It was one of the, when I die, which could happen tomorrow
or it could happen when I'm 90, it will go down as one of the weirdest fucking hours
I have ever experienced in my life.
How about that?
Whoa, whoa.
I'm fascinated, I'm fascinated.
So this guy walks in, you know, he's King Dick, he's FBI informant, he's untouchable, he's there to, you know, sort of further this troll persona.
It's just, if I, Jake Rokotansky, my real name, if I was in some kind of federal court case, Look, I got summoned to go to jury duty a couple weeks ago, okay?
I was, I'm not in trouble.
I'm going to sit on the jury.
I was scared shitless.
I was late.
I was like, Oh God, what am I going to tell?
Like, Oh God, I'm 10 minutes late.
Like, Oh.
What are they going to do?
Like, all this stuff.
And then I put on the jury, like all of this stuff.
And so the idea to me of somebody coming in and treating the whole
thing as if it's a joke, I think speaks pretty clearly to the
kind of person that this is.
I mean, that's pretty crazy.
Well, to treat it all as a joke, I need to separate that.
So both you and the audience understands something about microchip here, which
is it's like that DAS racist song that's like, haha, joking, whatever.
Or it's I'm joking.
I'm not joking or whatever.
This is the core issue of the whole fucking case, right?
Mackie is saying, I'm not joking, I mean, I'm joking, this was just a joke.
At the same time, he's kind of saying, in these DMs, that what he does on Twitter is serious to try to change the outcome of the election.
In Microchip's case, he can't stop the joking persona, he can't stop the trolling persona, he can't stop Being he can't stop performing.
But at the same time, what he was saying was serious.
So you were like in this and he and he's under oath.
So you're in this world where you're kind of just, you know, he's so weird, but he's also under oath telling the truth and has Mackey dead to rights.
And so the most effective the time that Frisch was who is Mackey's attorney was most effective was it trying to create doubt about microchip sanity and whether he was a credible witness.
Um, so this is like, this is the core of this case and why it makes it so fascinating.
It's like, is it real?
Is it not real?
What is a troll?
Does it live under the bridge?
Is it serious when it tries to club you?
That sort of thing.
Yes.
Yeah.
It sounds like, I mean, yeah, obviously not an endorsement of Microchip, who's said a lot of vile things, but he always, always has this kind of like sardonic sense of, I guess, you know, this 4chan nihilistic kind of sense of humor.
And I guess that translated to his real life persona.
Oh, I mean, look, he was, you know, I mean, I have to admit, he was very funny at times.
And because he's now a federal informant, he's been stripped of his, you know, he can't be openly misogynistic, can't be openly anti-LGBTQ, can't be openly anti-black, can't be openly...
Whatever.
So he's just working with the things that he has that could just be funny from a trolling point of view.
And his timing was very good at times.
Like at one point he said, they asked him like, and what is 4chan to explain it?
And he said, it's a place where internet intellectuals gather to discuss contemporary events.
And he just like, snapped it out there.
And like, it was like, it was very difficult to keep my, you know, I just started laughing because it was like, it was very funny.
And it's a very funny way to describe 4chan, especially when you are yourself a 4chan creature and knowing that it's like you're basically describing the fucking cantina bar from Star Wars.
Right, right, right.
And you're also in a place talking to people for, you know, in front of a jury that has no connection to this world whatsoever.
Yep, 100%.
Wild.
That's wild shit, man.
I can't believe you went and did that.
That's crazy.
I mean... I would love to read someone from his testimony to you, but you can tell me when that's appropriate.
No, let's... Sure.
Let's hear it, yeah.
Yes.
So, I'm going to try to... hopefully this is clear who's talking.
So, here's Frish.
For a period of your life, did you do illegal drugs?
Yeah.
That was a short period back in, jeez, I think, 2002, 2003, something like that.
Is it a fact that you used illegal drugs from 2002 to 2014?
Yeah.
I mean, that's a broad range.
Give me one second.
Do you recall your meetings with the government was July 5th, 2015, 2021?
Yeah.
Say that date again.
July 15th.
Oh, yeah.
Yep.
At that meeting, do you recall telling the government you had previously used drugs from approximately 2002 or 2003 into 2014?
No.
That's incorrect.
When were you using drugs?
Did you have a high use of heroin?
That was... No.
There was some use of heroin.
But not high.
It was a one-off situation back in the early 2000s.
Okay, some stuff about Agent Reese, who's this, you know, his FBI agent.
Uh, do you recall saying that you were addicted to painkillers?
Yeah, same time period.
Uh, do you recall saying you also used a testosterone steroid called TestoGel?
Oh, TestoGel?
Yeah, that was, that was 2001.
Did you tweet about your use of Adderall on February 20th, 2023?
Oh, yeah.
Uh, let me show you what old mark identification is.
Right?
Oh, I already know this tweet.
Did you tweet this?
I did tweet that.
Okay, did you say in this tweet, I am now 36 hours into my Adderall and Chat GPT marathon?
I did.
Did you know what Chat GPT is?
I do.
What is it?
It's a generative AI, a generative artificial intelligence using a language model, etc.
So basically, they basically tried to pin this guy as like a drug addicted, you know, because he's tweeted so many times about his Adderall usage.
So they just have him basically pumped up on Adderall using chat GPT for 36 hours straight, according to him, in his own words on Twitter.
Yikes, that sounds like a horrible time.
Yeah, there were other drugs.
There was mushrooms in this testimony, a bunch of other drugs, which is, again, I've used mushrooms.
That wouldn't stop me from being credible on the stand, especially years after having done them.
Yeah.
But it was very fascinating because it's sort of like his persona went under scrutiny.
He had a Twitter bio.
I'll just get you this real quick.
Let me just quickly get this.
Yes.
Is this in evidence?
Yes.
It says, now this is a very recent Twitter bio, quote, I drink Black Rifle coffee, wear a fishnet trucker hat, have a Jesus tattoo, and inject testosterone.
George Santos and John Kirby stan account, pro balloon.
Did you write that?
I did.
By the way, Stan is a modern slang for word for being a fan of is that fair?
Big fan of those two.
Yeah.
So it's like, like, again, I this is why I had to put on I had to put on my mask during this because I was just laughing so hard because Fro Balloon.
I mean, I assume that he was talking about the Chinese spy balloon.
But it's so fucking weird.
Yeah, it's a weird thing to say black rifle or drink black.
I have a Jesus tattoo.
I inject testosterone.
Right, I mean, it's very easy to take what he... Yeah, it's like schizo-posting.
It's like, yeah, I got the Jesus tattoo, I'm full-on MAGA, but, like, I also do a bunch of, like, hippy-dippy drugs, and, like, I'm, you know, fucking around with chat GTP.
It just, it seems like this conglomeration of all these things that shouldn't, you know, that shouldn't sort of mix together.
It doesn't really make sense.
And I think that's, you know, the sense that I get from just, like, The more I find out about microchip is is the word that comes to mind is slippery.
He's slippery.
He's very hard to grasp.
And again, I said that I caution against people saying, oh, these guys are smart or whatever.
But unfortunately, or fortunately for the feds now, microchip actually is pretty smart.
And he really stands out in that regard.
He's obviously highly functioning freak of some kind.
And you came across on the stand the way he presented himself and also his grasp and ability
to talk about things.
And also in those chats, the ability to sort of shape Twitter through bots and whatever
else he was using was pretty impressive, actually.
I mean, like in a totally destructive way, in a way that he seemed like a fucking Batman
villain or something.
One other quote I will give you, which I remember without reading it, is that somebody kind
of made a declaration on Twitter talking about their mental illness or whatever.
And they fresh pointed out a tweet in which, a reply tweet, in which Mike Richards is like
something of the equivalent to, "Thanks for speaking out.
I also have the crazy."
Which was supposed to, I mean, it was very funny.
And it's also like, I mean, it's supposed to, you know, it's supposed to underscore that that this guy is not credible.
He's saying he's got the crazy.
And if you're an old person who has never dealt with Twitter before and you see that information and you're just saying like, well, what if my grandchildren texted me something like this?
I would think they were crazy.
So.
Hmm, interesting strategy.
Well yeah, and he's also got the electric blue hoodie.
You know, if you're a grandparent, if you're a Safda or a Saba or a Nana, you know, any of those things,
and you see somebody wearing an electric blue anything, you're questioning their sanity.
I showed up once to my grandparents' house in an Abercrombie and Fitch hat,
and my grandpa looked at me and he goes, "Jaco, your hat's broken."
Your hat's fallen apart!
And I went, oh no, it's just, it's supposed to kind of look worn, like, you know, it's supposed to be wear and tear.
He goes, they sell the hat like that?
Totally horrifying!
I'm horrified at the idea that somebody would pay for a destroyed or a distressed product.
Alright, sorry.
No, I mean, that's basically it.
It's just like, I mean, it's very hard to find somebody in the audience who has done heroin and in the jury, excuse me, who's done heroin.
I don't know about your audience, actually.
Who's done heroin?
Most of them not tripped.
As far as testosterone, steroids, I mean, I don't know, man.
Not many people.
I've never met anybody who had testosterone.
As a reporter, I've done some stuff about cops who were shooting testosterone in a gym in Long Island back when I was on the crime beat.
I don't know.
A lot of this stuff is really out there for people.
Frisch, I think, came very close.
I was hoping you can help settle a rumor about the identity of Microchip because, you know, there have been over the years lots of like, you know, speculation about who he really is.
One theory going around was that Microchip was another notorious troll who goes by the name Baked Alaska, who was busted for participating in January 6.
I think we can safely rule that one out.
Yep, they're chatting like in the same DMs there.
Yeah, they're also communicating with each other.
So another theory was that Microchip is Justin McCarty.
He is a social media consultant who worked for Trump before leaving in 2017.
And he's sometimes credited as the man who taught Trump to tweet.
And he wound up leaving and I think he's currently like the social media manager for Aerosmith.
Oh, wow.
What?
Yeah, well, you know, he's a working man.
Aerosmith the band or Aerosmith the arcade game?
Yeah, you see, I can say there's beyond a reasonable doubt that that is not true.
It's just not him.
Okay, so Microchip, not Justin McCartney.
No, this is a guy who appears to be in early middle age or middle age, maybe around my age, who is maybe a little older.
It's tough.
I can't tell.
But the point is that he's just not that.
And also, if he were to walk into a large auditorium with maybe 500 people in it, I would be able to pick him out within a second because he's very distinct looking.
You can't miss him.
It's not like anybody, it's not like he just, he would blend in.
He's just, he's just a big dude who is, you know, a master at shaping online discussions.
Microchip being a federal informant, I have to imagine, has to be somewhat shocking to people who were involved in the alt-right in 2016, and even the years afterwards, because he was in those DM rooms.
That's why he was on the stand, right?
Oh, yeah.
Very.
I read that there's like Microchip may be involved in like future federal cases.
So how has the news of him being a federal informant been received in those sort of online alt-right communities?
Well, we don't know anything about it other than we see people who are former allies of him were very invested in Douglas Mackey's case and trying to make sure that he did not get convicted.
They were really pushing for him to be innocent.
And, you know, I read that as this case being a trial balloon that they needed to kind of get over the line.
It was a very weird case.
It was, you know, it is a case that, you know, may have some roots in the old days when the Ku Klux Klan tried to obstruct people from voting, things like that.
But it's new.
It's, you know, it's kind of, what's the word I'm looking for here?
It's almost like a kind of a noir cyber fucking dystopian future kind of thing, right?
I believe the term you're searching for is neo-noir.
Yeah.
Right, this is like, if this was in the 80s and we were talking about this case, this would be like, well, there's these weird cyber people who are, you know, trying to, I mean, it would seem so weird if you read back, whereas now it feels kind of pedestrian and dumb in some ways, some of the things that they do on Twitter.
But yeah, I mean, what this was is something new.
It kind of tries to, we're trying to get a handle on stuff where everybody who covers this stuff closely, including me, has some feeling of like, wait, Are there crimes here?
There's gotta be some crimes, right?
Like, it's, like, this feels criminal to me.
I don't know what the crimes are, but there's gotta be a law, right?
Like, um, and I don't say that as somebody who's, like, pro, like, you know, I'm not, like, pro law enforcement or... I don't fucking care in some ways.
I'm mostly interested in IDing these guys and using my reporting to push them to the margins.
But sometimes I'm like, what the...
There's gotta be a law, right?
Like, there's gotta be something about this.
And you think about all these high-profile disinformation campaigns and all the damage that they've done.
Think about Pizzagate.
And, I mean, a man lost years in prison because he believed in that.
He's no victim.
He tried to kill people.
But, like, let's also look at his life for a second.
This guy believed full, you know, bought fully into a fucking coordinated lie.
Went in and almost killed people in that thing.
And then he lost years from his life and is now a felon.
And it changes life forever.
I mean, what about all the waiters inside Comic Ping Pong who are still getting therapy, right?
There's a lot of victims of some of these things.
We've seen in the Macron Leaks thing, for instance, which was not a disinformation campaign, but an influence campaign.
And there may be some disinformation there, we don't know.
Macron's campaign suggested that some of the emails were not, were faked or whatever.
But this is like, you know, for your audience, in case you're not familiar, May 2017, Jack Pazobig, Chuck Johnson's website is kind of involved.
Weave, who's in with these DMs, by the way.
Weave from Daily Stormer, Andrew Ornheimer, the neo-Nazi.
They're like, you know, promoting this Russian hack and leak effort to try to get whatever.
And six people from Russian intelligence, you know, they have charges against them now from the Fed, you know, into their actions in that hack and leak campaign.
There's a lot of stuff here that feels weird.
that has happened that felt new also, starting in 2015 until now. And this Mackey case is their
first kind of attempt to see if, well, can we use the laws that exist to try to make some,
you know, put forth some sort of consequence for actions like this. And your comment about them,
like in the old right or whatever, we don't really use that term anymore.
We sort of, the alt-right kind of ended in 2018.
But that's when microchip, that's when microchip sort of turns fed.
And he's like in there with people like Pazobic.
I'm sure he's connected to people like Cernovich.
He was definitely connected to Baked Alaska.
And all these guys are connected to each other.
It's a sort of a small group of online people with very big platforms who are manipulating this stuff.
And I would imagine, and they were all gung-ho trying to get Mackie, trying to get people to perceive Mackie as innocent.
And they must be very nervous right now.
I certainly would be.
If it were like a close ally of mine in this situation, I would be concerned based upon everything that has happened around there.
And I don't know who's going to get charges.
I don't know who commit crimes, but they're looking at this stuff pretty seriously.
So, Microchip was of particular interest to me because he is someone who was claimed to be one of the people who authored some of the first Q-drops.
And speaking of Jack Posobiec, he claimed this in a 2018 report by Jack Posobiec on One America News.
Now, before we even get to the substance of that report, there are already like three big red flags.
Jack Posobiec, One America News, and Microchip.
You can't really recount truth coming out of that.
Yeah.
Right.
So Microchip essentially claimed that he and another pro-Trump troll by the name
of James Brower, who also went by the name Dreamcatcher, like Jake mentioned,
we actually interviewed on the podcast back in 2019.
So Microchip claimed that he came up with the QAnon concept on 4chan back in 2017.
Now, no credible news outlet has verified these claims, but here's
what Microchip said in that report.
One day, Dreamcatcher, on a post on 4chan, there was a post where somebody said
Hillary Clinton will be arrested, like shortly, right?
Something like that.
It was complete stupidity because there's, I mean, she's not arrested.
And it was one of those things where somebody was trying to set up some type
of a gaslight type campaign right again.
And so because we've been talking about this stuff, Dreamcatcher went to the
next level and he took that whole snippet and he added that she'll be arrested at
this specific time, within the next few days or something, right?
And people responded to it.
But the problem with the QAnon stuff, and I'm glad that our small group left,
and it's not that we were ever a part of making the full QAnon, but it's
turned dangerous and I don't like that.
I mean, some of the stuff that's happening, it seems pretty dangerous.
These people are being gaslit by whoever's doing it now.
They didn't want it to go that far.
So that shit is so funny.
I wrote a story about this in 2020 while I was rolling out my series on Jack Bezovic.
So I am very well familiar with it.
And people say like, "Oh my God, how do you do this job?"
Like, and if you have a very weird and dark sense of humor, like clips like this
are like, I mean, you.
You know, I sometimes I feel like it's so lucky to be paid to watch stuff like this because it's so fucking funny.
Anyway, yeah, it's just like, well, now, you know, I mean, this has been I mean, has it ever been totally disproven that this isn't the case that they didn't?
I know James reached out to us after he was on the show and apologized and retracted his claim, but just playing devil's advocate here, that could also be because maybe he realized, hey, if I'm attached to this QAnon thing in any way, that could be real trouble for me down the line now that people are sort of going out into the real world and committing serious crimes under the guise that this QAnon thing is real.
So at the time that Microchip contacted me and tried to get me to run a story or to tweet out some stuff, I was at the time working, it was a very brief six-month period in which I worked for Storyful, which is a social media intelligence thing run by Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and I was not publishing publicly at that time very much.
You know, I was mostly publishing these internal things for other journalists.
This is right before I left for SPLC.
And I looked into it at the time, and I can't remember what I used to verify it, but I found it.
I remember finding something that made me about 99.99% sure that this was fabricated.
I can't recall exactly what it was, but I think it was, you know, there were flaws with the screenshots that I was being shared.
I believe that is what Travis, that was the conclusion that you came to as well, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Screenshots that they had shared, the Discord logs.
There was something weird about it.
I can't remember either.
It was so long ago.
So yeah, the Discord logs were clearly faked.
Yeah, that was what it was.
That's what it was.
I had forgotten about that.
They had fabricated that.
Yeah, so when you're fabricating evidence, and you're already a notorious liar, so that already causes the story to collapse.
There's also the fact that the story itself was kind of inconsistent.
Like James Brower, when he spoke to me, he only claimed responsibility for the Q post with the ID EKA50M1K.
Which if true, which means was that he posted the drops six through 13.
But listening back to that OAN report, I mean, it seemed like Microchip was saying that like James Brower posted the first drop.
The whole story is a mess.
There's fabricated evidence.
It's posted by a notorious liar.
So there's like nothing really credible about it at all.
So yeah, that also made me lean towards again, I can't say for certain, you can't prove a negative, but 99% sure that this was just weird bullshit.
But even if you were to establish this bullshit, you have to, you're left with the question of like, wait, why did they run with the story anyway?
What made it superficially plausible was the fact that James Brower, all the way back on November 4th, 2017, posted about Q and even claimed like, oh, actually Q is a real high level insider.
James Brower posted this on Twitter.
So at the very least, James Brower was familiar with Q very early on.
So maybe there was like, you know, just very online and, um, sort of in those circles. But yeah, just there's really
nothing credible about the story.
Well, yeah, what always was weird to me is, you know, here are two people who it seems like,
you know, given things that they've said themselves and what they've tweeted and
etc, that they are, you know, very interested in pushing out disinformation. They're very interested
in galvanizing people, you know, they're trying to red pill people, trying to turn them to MAGA,
trying to muddy the waters, you know, using, you know, message board tactics. And yet all of a
sudden, these, you know, guys are very concerned about how dangerous, you know, this other op is.
It's very weird to me.
Why wouldn't they champion something like QAnon?
Because, uh, that's, you know, in so many ways that did their job, uh, what they were trying to do so much better.
You know than anything they were doing if you if you look at to the just the number of people who are at the very least favorable to QAnon ideology so so early on to come out with this this thing like oh we started it it was a mistake it was a joke like things are getting really dangerous I mean that just seems very inconsistent with what we know about them especially microchip because James Brower has for the most Most that I understand has basically kind of disappeared.
He's taken a back seat, at least, you know, with his... He might be on an alt or whatever, but you don't really see him come up in the present conversation, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, I don't want to get too deep into, like, which drop here and there.
You guys have an expertise on that type of thing.
And because, you know, I would much more focus from the extremism angle.
But what I will say is, if I were a betting person and I'd be willing to bet the house on it, that there is None of this is, is credible.
You know, that's just my instinct there.
I'd go all in with my chips on that.
And the, uh, the other thing is that there is this pretty, you know, compelling evidence of coordination between Pazovic and Microchip to make this a thing.
So the first thing that they did was they went to me and to Luke and whoever, like, uh, maybe Will Sommer or somebody like that, or you guys, I don't know.
Um, but they were basically going to the folks that they thought like, Hey, let's somebody being like, Hey, let's get this debunked.
Let's get QAnon debunked and try to get one of us to buy in on it and kind of make it a story where they could do that because they knew that would be more legitimate.
And then it seems like that they settled for Jack's nominal title as a journalist.
Of course, you know, anyone who's read my reporting on Pazovic knows that he's not a journalist in any way, shape or form.
But that he, you know, you know, he had this correspondent kind of position at One America News Network that could, you know, at least pure like news, like, and they obviously had extraordinary low standards, and they just, Jack could just ram through whatever he wanted, it seems like, and he was able to ram through this.
And, you know, I mean, this was a I think in a coordinated attempt between pro-Trump operatives working either for someone or not, in the case of Microchip, he could be fully volunteer.
In the case of Pzobek, well, who knows what he does.
I mean, there's a lot of weird shit with that guy.
But the bottom line is they were pro-Trump operatives, whether it's self-assigned or otherwise, and, you know, trying to make QAnon look fake and look like a scam to the many people who had bought into on
it.
And there's theories as to why they would do something like that.
My theory is because at the time it was starting to make Trump look bad and make
the movement look bad. And they were really concerned. That's what I think.
I mean, that sounds that makes that sounds plausible to me.
I mean, it was right. They don't want to be cringe.
Yeah, they don't want to have they've seen 100 100 of these, you know, leaked insider accounts on 4chan.
They know this game.
And when they see one that's getting popular, and essentially the narrative is like, yes, all of your enemies will be arrested tomorrow.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe they look at that and go like, oh God, like we're smart enough to know that this kind of LARP, you know, you make fun of it immediately.
You call it fake and some other things.
But all of these normies out there are buying into it.
It's going to make us look bad.
It's going to make us look like we're crazies.
Maybe we'll say that we did it.
Oh my God, it was a joke.
We didn't know how far it was going to go.
And we're so sorry.
And this is dangerous and it's a hoax.
Well, you know, I have met Jack Bezovic face-to-face.
I've looked him eye-to-eye on multiple occasions now.
I have reported on him more than pretty much anybody else.
And what I will tell you about that guy is, and this, you know, this is as true as the sky you're looking at when you step outside your house.
He is a Deeply, deeply, deeply insecure person.
In a way that, I mean, I can't think of any person that embodies that feeling like Jack Bezovic.
And I think there's nothing that would make this guy more upset than realizing how cringe he is.
And he's quite cringe, actually, often.
But when you are grifting off of a very cringe, you know, an audience who likes cringe, who, like, gobbles up cringe, right, who likes, like, the most insane, stupid things, and that is your audience you're grifting off of, you have to, you know, you have to wear that.
And I think that the QAnon thing, it's both because they want to help Trump, and also because they themselves were starting to get embarrassed about the way the Trump movement was beginning to look.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Interesting analysis.
The other element, I think, is that it was probably like splitting the MAGA movement because like, you know, I guess like most, you know, MAGA followers, they trust Trump and they listen to Trump, but all of a sudden they're listening to this Q figure and they think that by doing that they're actually listening to Trump when they're not actually.
They're just listening to some grifter or a group of grifters.
So it's probably, again, a tactical strategic reason they tried to dispel the mystery of Q on that one American News Report.
Yep. 100%.
I was also wondering if you could comment on how this trial is being reported by the conservative media.
It talked a little bit about this before, but Tucker Carlson, for example, has characterized this as the Biden administration cracking down on someone who dared to make fun of Hillary Clinton.
Here's a clip from a report from a couple weeks ago.
The federal criminal trial of a man called Douglas Mackey began this week in Brooklyn.
It's the single greatest assault on free speech and human rights in this country's modern history.
The Biden administration is trying to send a man to prison for saying things they don't like and create a precedent so they can do it to you too.
Here's the background.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mackey posted memes that made fun of Hillary Clinton and her supporters.
One of them on Twitter read this way, quote, avoid the line, vote from home, text Hillary to 59925.
That was obviously a joke and everyone knew it was a joke.
And yet days after Biden took office, four years after Mackey posted that meme, the feds arrested him and they charged him with conspiring to interfere with the rights of American citizens.
He'd go to jail for 10 years for that.
That means if you crack a joke on the internet that Democrats don't like, federal prosecutors get to decide you're interfering with an election.
It's hard to imagine a more Soviet prosecution than this.
Again, most watch Mad on cable news, millions of MAGA grandmas and grandpas hearing that the Biden administration is making it illegal to crack jokes.
So what do you make of that?
Oh, I think the first thing I gotta say is, why are, like, do Tucker and Trump's fans, like, perceive these guys as being, like, kind of, like, alpha, like, masc, like, macho?
It's, like, he's so, like, you know what I mean?
so like whiny and you know and so you peeved and I mean look at the freeze frame on your screen
right now I mean it's just like it's like this is like this guy is like you know the idea that
this guy is like some sort of like you know macho truth teller is very funny to me so yeah I mean
why are they doing this I mean you know look as Tucker whined on there it's like they can do this
Well, what they can really do to anybody is, if you're trying to cook an election by telling people to vote in a particular way... I mean, think about it like a fucking Roadrunner cartoon or something, where you just put the line to the election thing in a different direction or whatever.
Like, that's what they did!
Right?
I mean, they like, that's what they literally did.
They're like, so yeah, you vote over here, you know, I mean, like, it's, you know, they're upset because they need tricks to win.
I mean, it's like, like, that's the bottom line.
I went, okay, little big picture thing here.
But like, you've heard if you've ever heard Ann Coulter say that, like, Trump picked up $1,000 bill, like off the ground or whatever, when he decided to go with the anti-immigrant route and double down.
In 2014, the Republican Party had all these like diverse faces they were trying to push out there from everyone from Bobby Jindal to Marco Rubio and all these different guys, right?
And they had a plan to try to keep the party together with all these changing demographics.
And Trump was beholden to no one and he just like doubled down on this white, on their sort of white majority domination type stuff and went all in on the white supremacy stuff.
And when he did that, he went against what party leaders wanted, which is a more long-term electoral strategy.
And by doing it, that's why they've had to buy into all these kind of weird fascist tactics because they just can't get a majority with the demographics that exist anymore.
It's very hard for them to appeal to immigrants.
It's very hard to appeal to people of color and women and people in the suburbs.
It's really tough.
So they have to resort to all kinds of scheming, right?
Like they've lost Almost every single, all but one national election in the popular vote since the year 2000.
And they're getting, it's getting worse.
And so what Tucker's really saying here, I think, is he's saying like, oh, you know, you, you meathead who watches me, you can't do your usual posts.
And like your usual posts are usually geared towards just trying to figure out a way to scramble the election or get people not to vote or depress people from voting and Whatever.
These are the tactics they need to use because the margins they've created are so fine, you know?
Yeah, I suppose that leads into the question of, you know, I guess, like, what is the significance for this ruling or this verdict going into the next presidential election, which is about a year and a half from now, because, you know, all of a sudden this is going to set a precedent.
And I guess this might, you know, this might make people rethink their tactics about how they're going to use social media in order to support whoever their candidate is.
Yeah, that's a good question.
How is it going to impact?
Because right now, like, Twitter is at the center of this story.
And right now, as it stands, Elon Musk is trying to get the band back together, right?
He's trying to, like, put together the same type of environment that Doug Mackey succeeded in.
The problem is, there's something missing.
And, you know, I can't exactly describe what it is, but it's just not there.
They're all back, but they're kind of talking in what feels like the Superman 2 little glass thing that they float around in, like the bad guys.
Right.
They feel like they're trapped in ice or something.
They're not reaching the way they reached in 2016, and I'm not sure why it is.
He can put it back together, but it's not doing what it's supposed to do.
Something is missing.
It's almost like a fable or something.
Trump, it's missing Trump.
It doesn't have him on Twitter fighting directly with people.
But even if he were back, even if he were back, I can't, there's something, I think there would be something missing.
And I think it's the way that the rest of us view social media has changed.
And I can't really prove that.
It's just, I mean, look, your podcast didn't exist, right?
I mean, because QAnon didn't exist.
And there's so many, you know, there's been such a big response to what happened.
We're still getting our hands around what happened.
Everyone from historians to journalists to You know, artists to, uh, to podcasters, researchers, everybody.
I mean, everybody's trying to get their handle on, on this, this seismic change in our culture.
Um, and the trial, the trial kind of was, is part of that.
And I do think that this is a different world now.
This is a world in which we are aware, you know, everybody's kind of wounded and knows that there are, you know, much more savvy about, about manipulation and how it works.
So I think that really speaking how it might affect the election is that it only Adds to that feel, right, to that sense that this disinfo is going to be, you know, it's going to have a shorter reach.
They love to talk about the Hunter Biden laptop thing and being censored from Twitter.
We know the stupid Twitter files.
But what they don't talk about with that is the fact that even if they had left the article up there,
that it may not have had much of an impact on Biden.
They keep suggesting that it would, but I think a lot of people are entrenched
with the belief that like, wait a second, we've seen this type of thing happen before, right?
Where something new comes up and then we're very skeptical about these like October surprises.
Like Pazobic was posting right before that, he said, "October surprises are coming."
And it was like a dinosaur with lasers coming out of it or something.
And it's like, man, you're getting diminishing returns.
People have changed.
It's not just that.
It's just that, you know, I was feeling pushed around in 2016 as somebody who was not crazy about Hillary, you know, and watching just on Twitter, just as a reporter, I was with ABC News and just watching these guys go in on everybody so hard.
And I could, it almost felt like a bunch of people like running and pushing something to move it, right?
Like a car or something like that.
They just kept making progress by just running full force into it.
And that energy seems to have dissipated.
And that is just my, you know, that's my ballpark thing.
Well, I think you make a very interesting point specifically about this idea
that people look at social media differently.
And from what I've seen, in a lot of ways, they've gone almost too far, in that everything that comes out is a potential op, and you have to, who's behind it, and where's the dark money?
I mean, liberals themselves, I think, in an effort to Try to sort of understand what happened, like you were saying, and how did this, you know, huge cultural shift take place?
I mean, you know, we are not, you know, we are not bulletproof from, you know, sort of diving into our own conspiracy theories.
Oh, yeah, definitely not.
One thing I've noticed on, especially on Twitter, is that everything that comes out, everything, there is always a comment that's like, oh, the timing on this is very... Everybody is incredibly paranoid, and that paranoia leads to conspiracy theories and the lack of transparency from, you know, these entities that are Sort of controlling our fate, whether it be the people who own the social media companies or whether it be politicians in the government.
You know, there's so little transparency that there is a lot of room for these fires to grow.
And so I do think, personally, that there is something to the idea that we all look at this place differently.
For example, I mean, how many people I see on Twitter describe Twitter as they are in a battle?
You know, Chapo talks about this a lot, where they'll talk about, you know, each side sort of thinks they are in the battle for good, you know, and on the right, where you have, you know, heavy religious sort of ideology, you know, it is a battle between good and evil, between God and Satan, you know, or less or so between communism and freedom.
And on the left, it is democracy and fascism.
Everything is so, you know, everything is so hyper, what's the word, what's the word?
Hyper-Botleth.
Yeah, hyperbolic, exactly.
Oh God, my English teacher mom is going to be so upset about that.
It's a word I like to use now.
I think it's a great one.
Hyperbolic that, yeah, I mean, we are looking and experiencing these things differently.
You know, everybody is a digital soldier now, to some degree, or they believe that they are.
Yeah, I mean, it is.
It will be very interesting to see what plays out.
You know, my personal opinion is that I'm kind of with you, Michael.
I don't think that the juice isn't there anymore.
I think a big part of that is not having a Hillary Clinton to fight against.
I mean, say what you will about Joe Biden, but the guy is, at the very least, inoffensive.
You know, inoffensive.
He's not stoking anything.
Well, Jake, if you think about something like this, right?
I mean, if Tim Poole starts something right now, for instance, this is no longer, oh, it's Tim Poole, the centrist journalist who skatesboards, right?
Like, everybody knows now, right?
Like, we went through the process of proving what Tim Poole is, right?
And some of these guys that they brought back, right?
Like, it's like, if Carpe Duntum is pushing something, Yeah.
It's no longer like, "Who is this guy and what is this?"
It is like, "Oh, it's that oaf."
Yeah.
You know, it's known oaf, Logan Cook, right?
So this is kind of the problem that they have now is, and one of the reasons my reporting on Jack Bezobek,
I think it was so important for me, I felt, to get out there is because I needed people to,
as he was one of the guys who kind of escaped and tried to make it towards the middle,
is to make sure that there's a record for everybody you find
of what this guy did to get there, just in case, right?
Because the bigger the platform this guy gets, if he got onto Fox or something like that, and he's doing his disinfo or hack and leak shit promotion, whatever it was, Russian intelligence plots that he ends up booing, that he just says, by accident, I found this, which, you know, I mean, maybe by accident, he did find it.
But the point is that it is weird.
And, you know, I think it's important to, you know, to remember that these guys are, they no longer have the element of surprise.
Known oaf, I think is maybe the best way to describe this.
Yeah, well, that's Logan Cote for sure.
That's Carpe D'Antonis.
Known oaf.
It should be the first line in his, yeah.
Known oaf.
There are a lot more known oafs nowadays.
And yeah, I think you're right.
I think, yeah, I think the element of surprise is waning.
It's true.
We've been speaking to Michael Edison-Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center, so where can people go to learn more about your work?
Sure.
Well, you can find me on Twitter, what's left of it, at Michael, M-I-C-H-A-E-L, Hayden.
H-A-Y-D-E-N.
And you can go to my newsletter.
Subscribe!
I don't inundate people.
I do it very, you know, here and there, and nobody has to pay.
And it's gonnabealongnight.com.
That's I-T-S-G-O-N-N-A-B-E, I guess.
A-L-O-N-G-N-I-G-H-T.
It's gonnabealongnight.com.
And, you know, I will make sure, if you can't find my articles on the web or anything like that, I always update on Twitter and there.
Newsletter's free, by the way, also, I should add.
Awesome.
Yeah, go check that stuff out, folks.
Michael, it has been a pleasure speaking with you.
Fascinating conversation.
So thank you so much for all the great work that you've done so far, all the great work you will continue to do.
And we look forward to seeing you again.
Yeah, my pleasure.
I'm so happy to be on the show.
All right.
Take care, guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
And the thing is, I even get trolled.
And I'm like, "Goddamn, why did I get trolled again?"
That was really dumb.
Right?
Yeah.
So I get trolled every day, and it's like, "Ah, well, you know, part and parcel of being on Twitter."
Yeah, totally.
It's worth it.
On that note, did you see the guy who got charged for a meme on Twitter?
What were your thoughts on that?
I know you commented on it.
I didn't know if you got to look more into it.
His name's Douglas Mackey.
Oh, that's the guy who, I guess, was accused of election interference or something?
Yeah.
You can text your vote or something.
Yeah, like, people shouldn't believe everything that they see online and, you know, I don't think that should be criminal.
No, I think criminal is over the top there.
I would agree with that, that they went too far.
You know, if that's the standard for throwing someone in prison, then there should be a lot of people in prison.
