Episode 229: Devolution Theory Hits The Road feat Mike Rothschild
There are many QAnon live events one can choose from. There’s the Reawaken America Tour, the Patriot Round Up, and even, most recently, Reckoning Fest. But what if those aren’t enough for you? In that case, there’s another way to meet the modern torchbearers of the Q drops. This one is held by a company run by a man best known for “Devolution Theory,” which posits that Trump or his allies somehow secretly remained in power during the Biden administration. To discuss what the livestream revealed about the current state of pilled Americans, we chat with Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.
https://twitter.com/rothschildmd
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 229 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Devolution Theory Hits the Road episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Mike Rothschild, and Travis View.
I've always been the co-host.
I don't know that other person.
He was never here.
We've airbrushed him out.
Julian has been using AI to reconfigure Mike's voice to sound like his own, and AI as well to change the name in the sort of guest opening.
So while he's still on vacation, we wanted to set the record straight.
We wanted to get Mike, who has been with us for, you know, 400 plus episodes.
I've always been here.
Yeah, he thought he was getting credit for all of the research and shows that he's written for us.
And it turned out, no, he wasn't.
He was actually battling an AI that Julian found online.
So, good to set the record straight.
I should look at contracts more often.
I should call a lawyer.
You should.
You need a better legal team.
So there have been like three or four organizations that launched QAnon-themed live events over the years, but for some people that was not enough.
And that's why today we're going to talk about the newest QAnon live event to hit the scene.
That is the Great American Restoration Tour.
Pretty generic name, but this newest one was launched by Badlands Media, a QAnon organization run by John Harrold and Kate Buckley, who are better known by their online names Patel Patriot and Kate Awakening.
Dream team right there.
Yeah, well, yeah, they're working together.
I'll say, yeah, Kate and John, they're also a couple.
I will say this, they're probably the best looking QAnon influencer couple on the scene today.
Hey, praying medic demands you take that back.
That's right.
She left.
What's his name?
Who was at the UFO conference?
Yeah, we saw that.
We're not a QAnon influencer gossip show, so we're not going to dive into the history of relationships.
No, of course.
But I like that guy.
As somebody who's gotten dumped before for somebody that's better looking, I feel for the guy.
I didn't see this one in person, but I did catch the livestream, and I learned that they have developed a slightly different angle on promoting the pilled version of life.
And to help us out, we have Mike Rothschild, who is, of course, the author of the essential book on QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.
Mike has also done a lot of reporting about Patel Patriot, perhaps more than anyone else, so he will no doubt help us put these events in context.
So, Mike, thanks again for joining us today.
Thanks for having me back, guys.
I'm really happy to be here, and I think that it's really important that we're talking about this new generation of conspiracy promoters who are 100% Q adjacent but don't publicly have anything to do with it.
I think this is kind of the next evolution or devolution of QAnon.
I think it's really important that we're doing this.
Mm-hmm.
Before we get to the Great American Restoration Tour, I want to chat a bit about how Tucker Carlson was very suddenly booted from Fox News.
Like, he signed off on a Friday, it was fired over the weekend.
And this evidently came as a surprise to even him, because he told viewers that he'd be back on the Monday, and it just did not happen.
And what made it worse is the fact that the very last segment of his show involved him eating pizza.
Tyler Morrell of Coco's Pizza.
That's it for us for the week.
We'll be back.
By the way, the entire episode of Let Them Eat Bugs, not quite as good as pizza, streaming now on Fox Station.
Use the promo code ORIGINALS for 30 days free, and we'll be back on Monday.
In the meantime, have the best weekend with the ones that you love, and we'll see you then.
Of course, it had to be pizza.
This fact was seized on by, like, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, as, like, it's suggesting it's comms or something.
So, shocking news.
See, like, here's my thing with that.
If Tucker, you know, just signed off his show like, you know, like normal, and all of a sudden somebody brought him a big pizza box and he went, mmm, pizza, you know, and took a big bite or whatever, it'd be easier to bake.
But the fact is, he was interviewing the guy who tripped the guy who was on the run from the cops.
Right, it was that guy.
He like had him on his show.
He's a pizza delivery guy.
He sort of got in the way of a chase and Tucker had him on the show.
And so naturally they're going to eat pizza together because it's a pizza guy.
And it's such a nothing segment.
It's just it's so clearly like end of the day Friday.
Let's get the hell out of here and, you know, go hunting.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, there's no there's no emphasis behind it other than like, hey, we're finishing a long week with some pizza.
Yeah, exactly.
He's like, oh, what is this I have in front of me?
A cheese pizza.
Well, that's odd.
Perhaps somebody like, I don't know, Hillary Clinton would like to come and share it with me.
You know, I mean, there's definitely, and you know, Tucker is no stranger.
He's signaling left and right all the time to people.
So yeah, Mike, you nailed it.
This is a half day Friday.
you know, end of the quarter, all the work is in and you know, people are popping beers,
it's a pizza party, you know, in the office and yeah, it's casual Friday. Casual firing Friday.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's gonna be, I mean, I guess we'll see who replaces him, but you know,
this is gonna change the landscape of right-wing media pretty significantly because, you know,
one thing that Tucker Carlson did is that he basically, he helped platform a lot of extreme
He did things like, you know, play dumb when it came to QAnon.
Whenever he addressed the QAnon question, he always claimed he wasn't familiar with it.
He couldn't find anything interesting about it.
So he always worked to basically downplay its significance to his, I guess, more normie MAGA viewers.
Yeah, there's there's always the, I don't know anything about it.
I've just read something.
But you know, it just seems like it's people asking questions and wanting the truth.
And don't you want the truth?
What's wrong with wanting the truth?
Why don't you want the truth?
That very generic, not endorsing it, not denying it, you know, the thing that the GOP did for years until they just full on went cupid.
Yeah.
Who is Q?
I don't know.
I tried to look it up online, and all I could find was Q is a letter of the alphabet.
Now how could that be a person?
Yeah.
It's the non-denial denial that everybody who knows what it is knows exactly what he's talking about, but it's just enough cover that he can plausibly, by some people who don't know anything about it, say, well, he doesn't really know anything about it.
It doesn't mean anything.
Q!
Q!
This isn't a conspiracy theory!
This is a letter brought to you by Elmo from Sesame Street!
So yeah, now to what I saw at the Great American Restoration Tour.
So when we started this podcast, there were zero QAnon live events that you could attend.
It was just an online phenomenon.
That changed in September of 2019 when there was the very first QAnon rally in Washington, D.C.
Julian and I attended that one, and attendance just generally was very sparse.
There were like maybe a couple dozen people.
So that rally was put on by a company called the Red Pill Roadshow, and I actually checked on how the Red Pill Roadshow is doing, and the company dissolved last year.
Okay, all right.
But things have changed in the COVID era, post-COVID era, because there are now lots of options for anyone who wants to attend a QAnon event.
Now, the biggest one is, of course, Clay Clark's reawakened tour.
That one has General Michael Flynn as a regular speaker.
So it's the one at the tippy top.
Then there's also events held by the Patriot Voice, which is run by a man named QAnon John.
So these events were like the Patriot Roundup, Patriot Double Down.
More recently, there is Reckoning Fest, which Julian and I attended near Dallas.
Now that one's really off the rails.
It features 107, one of the two proposed JFK juniors.
It's also deeply connected to the Negative 48 cult, so that one's really, really sort of like super-pilled, even more so than the other ones.
Yeah, and all of these, all the titles of these events sound like kind of like limited sandwiches from KFC.
You know, you've got the Roundup, you've got the Double Down, the Reckoning Fest, that one comes with fries.
The Reawaken, it's fried chicken coated in coffee.
Yeah, the Reawaken sandwich, that one comes with a sunny side up egg, really popular.
Don't give them any ideas, please.
Now, the format of all those events seem to take a lot of inspiration from tent revivals, you know, because there's a speaker, and they're usually, you know, very charismatic, and they have the goal of, like, firing the crowd up in, like, a really big, kind of emotional way.
But what if you're pilled on QAnon, or you have, like, a similar conspiracist mindset, but those other events are a little too bombastic for you?
What if you're looking for a live QAnon event that's a little bit more low-key, cerebral, introverted?
In that case, you'd probably be drawn to the newest QAnon live event on the scene, the Great American Restoration Tour.
And they just kicked off with an event in Arizona.
Like I mentioned, this particular event is operated by Badlands Media, owned by Patel Patriot.
And Mike, like I said, you've probably written, you've published more on this guy than probably any other reporter.
So what can you tell us about him and his background?
Sure.
So I also, before we start, I want to say that Fantastic American Restoration Tour was just sitting right out there.
And I think that would be a much more appropriate acronym than GART.
Yeah, this kind of sounds like you might show up and see some some artisan furniture, you know?
Or it's like leg pain.
Oh, I got some gart in my knee.
So yeah, Patel Patriot, aka John Harold is a is a sort of post January 6 conspiracy influencer.
And I first stumbled on devolution, which is his theory this probably in about July or August of 21.
And he'd been writing about it for a couple of months and his first Substack poster because of course, it's all on Substack.
His first substack is, I was distraught that Trump lost.
I couldn't believe that it had happened.
I couldn't understand how the mighty Donald Trump lost to this decrepit husk of a, you know, wasted 80-year-old puppet.
And so I decided he didn't.
And so Patel's entire theory is that Trump was actually still the president and was running a devolved government.
And there's an actual term called devolution, when a sort of national government gets devolved to the local level.
It's sort of a governmental theory that happens after a disaster, where there's no national government, so sort of regional enclaves have to run themselves until the national government can reestablish itself.
But what this guy decided was that there were all these executive orders and all of these secret papers and Trump, of course, was throwing out all these clues that he was still running some kind of devolved military government through executive orders.
And he went on and on and on.
And every post in the original Devolution series, I think there's about 20, gets longer and longer and longer and more and more complicated, more and more layers of documents and history.
It's very galaxy-brained stuff and all of it explains why things are happening the way they are and it's because Trump needs them to happen that way because at a certain time something will happen and he will come back into office and everything that Biden did will be erased because he was never president.
So, he keeps this theory going, gets more and more Substack subscribers, starts getting people paying him to subscribe to his Substack, starts creating podcasts, livestreams.
But at some point, people can be led around for a long time, but they aren't complete idiots.
And after a couple of years of this, you start to realize he's not actually still the president.
If he was going to come back, he would have come back.
And so you have to modulate the grift.
You have to change the story.
And that's really where I think Badlands comes from.
It's not Devolution anymore.
I actually checked on the Devolution sub stack.
It hasn't been updated in months.
But the Badlands page, that's getting new articles every day.
They're pumping out a couple of podcasts every day.
So it's a very kind of classic, you know, prophetic conspiracy thing where you leave behind the old one and you just kind of forget about it and everybody just agrees, eh, didn't really ever happen.
But now the new thing, that's the new thing.
So the new thing is another alternative media company based on the same stuff that everybody else in the alternative media is saying.
And the actual sort of crazy fun of devolution has kind of gotten lost.
That's really why I lost interest in him.
And the whole Badlands thing, I really wasn't paying attention to it when it started.
But he just, he started off, he's just this guy in North Dakota who just cannot believe Trump lost, so he just decided that he didn't.
Yeah, it's interesting because it's like, Badlands is a place that you wander.
You know, you can wander indefinitely, whereas Devolution is a theory with steps in place that is linked to, you know, a real, a reference to a real sort of political event.
You know, that only has so much mileage because the whole thing is dependent on, you You seeing the payoff, right?
But the Badlands, hey, you could be out.
I've been out.
I've been traveling the Badlands for years waiting for Trump's return.
It's like, even the name in it of itself implies, you know, to me signals that the branding is indefinite.
Whereas devolution, yeah, like you said, it can only go on so long.
But what I'm also hearing from you, Mike, is that essentially, and correct me if I'm getting this wrong, is that essentially devolution would be Trump becoming the deep state, but now the deep state is a good thing, but now it's good.
Now you've got a shadow government, but the shadow government who are secretly in control are the guys that I like.
Yeah, it's one of those things where, a lot like QAnon, it's a total reversal of what the far-right conspiracy machine has been.
One of the things that always struck me about Q was that in past conspiracy movements and in past right-wing militias and stuff, the president was always the enemy.
It didn't matter if it was a Republican or a Democrat.
They hated George H.W.
Bush as much as they hated Bill Clinton.
But then they love Trump.
And, like, Trump can do no wrong.
And it's a total reversal.
And I think something like devolution is the same way.
It's this idea of the deep state, of the shadow government, of the secret documents, of the plans that are held in the shadows and they're classified and they can never be revealed, but they're good?
And it really turns things on its head enough that the people who have been sort of living with this idea that there's a secret government and, you know, the powerful hidden hand that is controlling everything, well, now they're on our side.
And it kind of gives a jolt of energy to a lot of these very sort of played out types of conspiracy movements.
Yeah, it's always strange to me that it seems like many, you know, many conspiracy theorists are actually in favor of the conspiracy that they're speaking out against as long as the characters are, you know, rotated out.
Yeah, yeah.
And I've said this about a lot of, you know, Trump MAGA stuff.
These people love fascism.
They just want to be the ones wearing the boot and not under the boot.
So, here's how Badlands Media announced the live conference.
Now, lest there be any question that this is in fact a QAnon conference, it starts with a phrase that appears in many QDrops.
We are the news now.
It's a saying that has come to define a growing movement within the truth and America First communities, and at Badlands Media, we've been doing our best to make it a reality.
Due in large part to your support, Badlands has quickly grown into one of the most watched independent networks online with dozens of citizen journalists, podcasters, and personalities across our shows.
This spring, we're taking Badlands to the next level and would like to invite you folks along for the ride as we kick off the Great American Restoration Tour.
Experience everything you love about Badlands in the form of a live ticketed event with in-person speakers and meet and greets all Weekend long.
That's some great direct marketing copy.
That could be about anything.
Except the cue phrase at the very beginning.
Yeah, I was like, am I reading, like, a Lincoln Project briefing?
Like, this looks like the same, it's the same kind of branding.
We've been fighting, we've been on the ground fighting, and now you can pay to come see us talk about it live!
Yeah, that could be about any live in person conference.
That could be about Salesforce.
Yeah.
So what's what's interesting is with Patel, you know, I was the one who unmasked him as John Harold, this guy who did marketing for a Catholic school in North Dakota, and it sounds like marketing copy, you know, it really sounds very generic, a lot of catchphrases and buzzwords, a lot of passive voice claims, you know, has quickly grown, you know, a lot of sort of just meaningless jargon, but it sounds exciting enough.
If you're a fan of this that you go, Oh, that's interesting.
I'd go see that.
So it says it says a lot and says nothing at the same time.
It's sort of classic ad copy.
Yeah, this is one of the downsides to funneling all of the younger millennials into marketing and sales jobs is that, you know, ultimately when they radicalize, they're armed with a very acute understanding of writing copy and, you know, enticing potential customers, yada yada yada.
Yeah, it's compelling, but also not.
And I really, when I read it, because I read it on the website as well, the first thing that struck me was, we are the news now, which is a QAnon catchphrase.
And that was during January 6th.
You had guys outside the Capitol destroying AP news equipment, screaming, we are the news now.
Couldn't be more linked to QAnon.
But these people all swear up and down, they have nothing to do with QAnon.
John Harold, for a long time, was like, I don't know anything about that.
I haven't read any of QAnon.
Yeah, sounds like it could link up with this, but I don't want to read it because I don't want to steal any ideas.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
They know exactly what all this stuff is.
Yeah, the first rule of QAnon, you don't speak about QAnon.
Right.
What's interesting about the format of the Great American Restoration Tour is that it's closer to a conference organized by a university or a think tank.
Now, there weren't like, You know, slick intro videos or intro music welcoming on like a speaker to the stage or anything like that.
In fact, there wasn't even a single speaker on the stage at a time.
Instead, every topic was discussed by a panel of usually four or five people, and they took questions from the audience in the middle of the panel.
And this resulted in a lot more like roundtable discussion kind of vibe, you know?
That's interesting, because it's, you know, with these shows like Reawaken, it's like speaker after speaker after speaker, and they get 15 minutes.
This, from what you're describing, feels a lot more communal, feels a lot more like, hey, we're all learning together.
And, you know, the people on stage are just like the people off the stage, we all just have questions.
It seems a lot like kind of a unity and community kind of thing.
Yeah, it closely more resembles like a Twitch stream or something like that.
Yeah.
Now the participants of these panels, now we're mostly people who do like Badlands media podcasts, love them, you probably haven't heard of even if you are really into researching QAnon.
But there are also bigger influencers in the QAnon space on stage, such as Zach Payne, aka RedPill78.
There's also Jordan Sather was there.
The other interesting element was that like you mentioned, there was there's very little explicit mention of Q. It was always in the background.
Sometimes they use these QAnon phrases, sometimes like there was Yeah, that seems very on par with where Q is right now.
Just like, we use the phrases, but we don't really talk about it, because anybody who knows what the phrases mean knows, and if you don't, if you're brand new to it, we don't want to scare you off by linking it to Q, because everybody thinks QAnon is crazy.
Yeah, it's like when, um, Always Sunny first came out, and, you know, if you were in college around this time, people just went around speaking in lines from the show to one another, you know?
It's very much just like, oh yeah, hey, like, oh, we watch the same, we consume the same kind of content?
Cool, like, we don't have to do any of the, any of the sort of pleasantries, we know where each other stands.
Yeah.
The event kicked off with a panel on what they called true history.
So the sub headline of the panel is, if the news is fake, how bad do you think our history is?
So things got kind of off the rails very, very fast.
Someone in the audience said, erase some sovereign citizen beliefs.
You know, these lots of nonsense beliefs about how the United States is actually a corporation
and not a country, and a lot of like amendments to the Constitution aren't valid.
And you can tell that panelist Zach Payne was familiar with it, but he tried to move
past it very quickly.
I'm sorry, what is the name of the movement?
Secular.
I'm sorry, what is the name of the movement?
Secular.
Sovereign.
Sovereign Citizens, yes.
Like that's on like the terror watch list.
You search Sovereign Citizen on Google and they're going to know about it.
It seems to be growing.
It was like 3 million and now there's like 12 million people I think?
I mean, it looks like a cool idea.
Where are you seeing information about it?
Because I'd love to check it out.
Well, I think the first place I heard of it was on Man in America where Ann VanderSteel introduced it and then I looked into it more.
There's an American state national website.
And it's like, another way of taking back control is you don't have to pay taxes when you're this status.
Supposedly.
I'm looking at this and it's like, take money away from the government and I'm all for that.
There's probably test cases that have worked, but undoubtedly there are ones that haven't.
And the IRS will come after you for everything.
But I'm gonna check it out.
That is a fair answer from Zach Payne.
Who looks like he just came back from Coachella, by the way.
I mean, the idea that these guys don't know what that is, but, oh man, it sounds cool.
I wonder if it works, you know?
Oh, maybe somebody's gotten away with it.
I mean, it's really kind of sinister because rather than say, no, you know, you can think what you want, but you got to pay your taxes.
It's this like, hey man, it's cool, whatever.
Check it out.
Vibes.
Yeah, I'd like to check it out as a successful Twitch streamer.
But he's like, but the IRS will come for everything that you have.
So he just sort of like couches it with that disclaimer very quickly at the end.
The panel moved on to discussing about who the puppet masters of history really are.
Oh boy, here we go.
Yeah, so normally when a group of conspiracists start talking about who directs history, you can usually predict where this is going.
But this panel had a surprising perspective.
They warned against blaming all the world's ills on any one religion or ethnic group, because that will turn off people who you're trying to convert to the red pill ideology.
That's interesting because it's one of the things that I've noticed in doing a lot of writing about the history of antisemitism over the last century is you had a lot of that in the past.
You'd have somebody like Pat Robertson would have, you know, would be revealed as basing big parts of his book The New World Order from 91 on writing that was based on the protocols.
And then when he would be called out, he would say, oh, no, no, I don't know anything about that.
I love the Jewish people.
You will never find a more devoted friend to Israel than me.
I'm just talking about the wealthy European bankers.
There's a lot of not all Jews, just these Jews, just the Rothschilds, just the Warburgs, you know, obviously later just Soros.
And lately with people like Nick Fuentes, it is all Jews.
So I think that's interesting that this is kind of going back a little bit to that sort of veneer of respectability.
I wonder if this is—because this does show, I think, a certain amount of self-awareness.
Absolutely.
You have younger influencers who are a little bit more in touch, I think, with, you know, what the sort of moral compass of society is leaning, and they're smart enough to know that everything that they believe in can easily be written off if they can easily be labeled as anti-Semitic.
So there is something, I agree, there's something interesting here in the acknowledgement that that kind of idea, that kind of at least blatant sort of ideology is harmful for the sort of, you know, the awakening brand.
Yeah.
You know, pop culture wants to lump it all as one group, like the Illuminati, you know, or something like that.
And, you know, believing that An entire group of people is bad, like the Jews, for example.
You guys are probably familiar with the Protocols of Zion.
I think that the whole purpose of that was to get people, you know, obviously World War I and World War II, and Hitler probably wouldn't have played out the way it did without, you know, that being circulating.
And to do that is to play into the hand of the enemy, I'd say.
Yeah, I feel like I feel like that's a trap, how they get it.
Oh, it's this one, or it's that one.
I saw someone years ago, they were talking about the Vatican, and they were like, yeah, the Catholics.
And I'm like, I'm not evil, what are you talking about?
No, it's the Jesuits.
Yeah, yeah, Jesuits.
And I think that's where they get you.
And they say, everyone wants to hang, oh, it's this group, or it's that group.
And then there's lots of regular people who hear that, who might be, say, a certain religion, or a certain ethnicity, and they go, No, I'm not.
And then you lose them.
They're never going to listen to anything you say.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really, that's very much of that.
Oh, no, we're not writing off everybody.
The grasp of history is a bit wanting, but it's interesting to have people publicly sort of pushing back against something like the protocols when there's been a century of people like that completely embracing that as not necessarily the document itself is true, but the words in the document are true.
Yeah, I for one embrace and am also terrified of the idea of woke-anon.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know.
Yes, woke-anon is like all, you know, not, okay, we can't just say, we can't just say, like, the protocols are more or less basically real because that makes people correctly surmise that we're, you know, bigots and anti-Semites.
Yeah, because look how many people got into QAnon when nobody was saying, hey guys, like, it's not all that, you know, relax, you know, let's, can we relax on the religion stuff?
So I can't begin to imagine, sure, you might lose a couple diehard, you know, protocols guys, you know, a couple diehard neo-Nazis perhaps, but what you do open the ideology up to is a lot of I mean, even just this quote is powerful in and of itself because somebody can use that to say, well, I was told that all of these people were anti-Semitic, but here are four, you know, QAnon influencers expressly stating that we shouldn't do that, that that's a trap.
So how are you going to, I mean, it puts another little piece of small ammunition that somebody can use when they are trying to convince a friend, a family member, a coworker that this stuff is real.
Yeah.
I don't want to give them too much credit because shortly after this, the panelist Zach Payne implied that some people identify as Jewish just to make it difficult to criticize them.
Oh, see?
Okay.
There it is.
There it is.
It is not the real Jews.
It is the fake.
Now that's tried and true.
I mean, that's been going on forever.
That's Mullins.
That's Ike.
That's Pound.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a classic of, we don't hate Jewish people, we hate the people that use the cover of Judaism to get away with unspeakable evil.
And you don't hear that about other religions.
We don't hate all Catholics, we just hate the Catholics who are fake.
You know, fake Catholics, so they can operate in their sort of satanic cabal.
I never hear about fake Catholics or fake Buddhists, fake Protestants.
It's only fake Jews.
Worth noting.
Most evil people, you know, they identify as a marginalized group or, you know, a certain religion, and then it makes it impossible for you to discuss them.
You find your name in the SPLC quarterly the next day.
There's the anti-Semitism.
Yeah.
Just a little, just a little couched, but there it is.
The panel then turns to a discussion of elites who are seen with black eyes.
This is also a classic one, right?
So, they speculate that the black eyes, if you see someone famous or a politician with a black eye, that means that they were involved in some sort of initiation ritual.
One of the panelists had a different suggestion, perhaps it's some kind of implant of a device that could be used by the real puppet masters to kill them instantly if they got out of line.
I've always thought that, I have nothing to put this on, but I always want to, I mean the optical implants or some sort of, or maybe something even then to say, hey, you know, we can hit this switch and it's all over right now.
Like escape from New York?
Yeah, exactly.
I've wondered if the black eyes have anything to do with the pineal gland as well, like They're getting direct injections of young adrenochrome?
Do these guys not know about the heart attack gun?
You don't need an eye implant that is like, we're gonna release sarin gas into your brain if you speak out against the GOP or whatever.
We've got sonic weapons now!
We don't need injections!
Yeah!
They can just destroy your life!
We've got touchless torture!
Yeah, yeah, come on!
Come on, fellas!
Hang out with some T.I.s!
Come on!
You gotta watch the heart attack gun trial, guys!
Come on!
When they also talked about the supposed occult beliefs of the elite, a woman in the audience
brought up the Emerald Tablets.
Oh my gosh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
So there are two kinds of Emerald Tablets people might talk about.
There is actually an ancient Hermetic text that was referenced by alchemists and stuff.
But there's also the other kinds of emerald tablets, and they're called the Emerald Tablets of Toth the Atlantean.
So this is a 20th century text, basically, made by a cult leader and all-around bullshitter, Maurice Dorial, who's also fundamental in sort of creating the lizard person conspiracy theory.
Yeah, so this is the same stuff, the Toth stuff, is the same stuff that was pushed by Billy Carson, who we covered on the show in the past.
He had published a decode of the Emerald Tablets, and this included, of course, proof that Atlantis was real, proof that reptilians are real, and proof that they have infiltrated the highest levels of our government.
That's great.
Yeah, he was on, like, some, like, like, Damon Dash's podcast or something.
Like, he was on, like, some, like, pretty big sort of, like, hip-hop podcast talking about this and plugging his book.
It was wild.
Wow.
So, in answering the question, Zach Payne seems to think that the questioner is referring to the Maurice Dorial Emerald Tablets from supposedly the ancient lost city of Atlantis.
We scoff at some of that stuff from, like, Dark Magic and stuff, but when you look into them, boy, they sure seem to think it's real.
So it's kind of... And they've been damn successful, too.
Do you think it's connected to the Emerald Tablets and why they seek those out and what's so important, obviously?
The Emerald Tablets of Thoth, yes.
I tend to think that that I mean obviously it's ancient you know there's perhaps some implications if it was to be found but I think that if what they say about them is true then I mean that's a lot of power for anybody to be having out in the open and certainly somebody like Hillary Clinton would absolutely love to get her hands on them and I'm sure that if they exist they're being safeguarded in some place you know maybe I don't know in the basement of the Vatican next to the Chronovisor
So we're doing Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Yeah, yeah.
Except the Emerald Tablets are the Ark, and the Nazis are Hillary, and I guess Patel Patriot is Indiana Jones?
Yeah, I guess.
That's disappointing.
Kate Awakening as Marion.
Oh, God.
That's cool.
Great.
That's great.
And yeah, whose face is going to melt off?
All of ours.
Yeah, it's got to be Hillary and President Obama.
All of them just melted into skeletons.
Why not use the Emerald Tablets in 2016 to win the election?
Yeah, that's a good idea.
If you're going to have Emerald Tablets stored in the basement of the Vatican, I mean, if that's not the time to use them, I don't know when is.
The next panel was titled, PSYOPs, how to navigate living through the world's biggest information war.
And I will say that generally I hate it when people use the word PSYOP in a sloppy way because it can be used to refer to a broad variety of things.
So originally PSYOP was used in like military context.
It was some kind of like information operation used to support a bigger operation.
And this could involve something like distributing flyers or distributing messages over loudspeakers,
but it could also involve like an element of like deception or disinformation.
But people also use it like outside of a military context.
They use it to refer to like propaganda or disinformation by a government more broadly,
or they'll use it even more broadly than that to any disinformation campaign,
even if the people involved aren't government agents, or they'll use it even more broadly than that
to refer to anything that influences people's beliefs and attitudes at all.
So, under this definition, even an advertising campaign is a PSYOP, and this is just so far away from the original meaning, it seems like you should just be using more specific words to refer to what you're talking about.
So, the PSYOP's panel seemed to adopt the broadest definition.
In fact, one of the panelists suggested that everything is a PSYOP.
I mean, I get psyoped all the time.
The Uncrustable commercials, you know, New Fruit Snacks.
I mean, it was a lot easier when I was a kid, but, you know, it's still, you know, it's still powerful.
I mean, you know, I bought, I got, I'll tell you who I got psyoped by.
I got psyoped by a company that sells headbands that have Bluetooth speakers in them so that you can listen to your audio books, you know, while laying your head on a pillow.
You know, this just came into my feed.
What happened?
What did I do?
I bought two of them!
You got PSYOPed.
I didn't want that device!
Yeah, you know, my wife asked if I would like lasagna for dinner.
I said yes.
She ran the lasagna PSYOP on me.
I totally got PSYOPed by the lasagna plan.
Layered pasta PSYOP.
Yeah, she got you with the lasagna PSYOP?
Come on, Travis!
You've been doing this too long, man!
Really, everything is a PSYOP because everything is a story.
Right.
Our realities are constructed of a compilation of stories that each one of us individually believe that have come across our table.
Right.
And that's why we all have individual perceptions of reality and why this thing that we do here is so hard because we all have to congeal and get rid of those differences and unite in order to discuss these fundamental truths and how we're going to rebuild this nation.
Right.
And so it's all connected in the lens of PSYOPs and I see the Patriots, and we've all been affected by good PSYOPs here.
Everyone of us that's here has been affected by some of the same things to give us those lenses, right?
So, you know what's actually a PSYOP?
That dude's mustache?
Yep.
Nobody can see it, but you gotta put it up somewhere.
It's a Mr. Potato Head mustache, let's be honest.
That dude should be in a top hat.
He has a well-groomed, curly mustache, I'll say that.
That's really dangerous that that kind of like everybody's lying to you.
Everybody is manipulating you.
But you know, here we're telling you the truth.
I mean, it honestly reminds you a little bit of something like Bill Cooper, who would talk about, you know, don't trust anybody, don't trust the media, don't trust the politicians, don't even trust me, only trust yourself.
There's something kind of sinister about that.
It's very isolating in a time when we're already isolated and we're already polarized.
And yeah, I think that's a very harmful way to go through life.
Yeah, I was really interested in this idea he was talking about how like, well, there are bad Psyops, but there are also good Psyops.
And as an example of a good Psyop, they said that one's relationship with God is a good Psyop.
We normally think of Psyops as being bad, and certainly there's a lot of them, but there's also good Psyops out there.
And, you know, I like to go really big with this stuff.
The biggest PSYOP that's out there, I think, is our relationship to God.
We're finite beings.
We're trying to figure out what the world is like.
God's the source of all truth and all information, and life itself is a kind of grand spiritual PSYOP.
And the reason I say that is because the powers that be, who I think are ancient psychologists, they know about this stuff, and they reverse-engineered it and twisted it and distorted it for their own purposes, and they've been doing it for a very, very long time.
So now we have PSYOPs that are arguably the most sophisticated, technologically advanced PSYOPs the world has ever seen, you know, that are being inflicted on us.
And a motley crew at Badlands is single-handedly taken down.
That's right, yeah.
[applause]
It's just ancient aliens bullshit.
Yes, I love it.
Yeah, when a PSYOP can be anything, and it's the most technically advanced, when you make a statement like, my podcast crew is single-handedly taking it down, you don't have to back that up.
Nobody ever needs to see, you know, receipts from that.
It's like, oh, sure, okay, you guys are fighting the big galaxy cloud in the sky that's trying to poison my brain?
Oh, okay, cool.
I want in on that.
Yeah, yeah, if you say so, I will subscribe.
There was also a panel on spiritual warfare.
During that panel, a man wearing a button-up shirt covered with illustrations, variations of illustrations of Pepe the Frog, explained why Pepe actually had great spiritual significance.
And this is because if you translate the letters of Pepe into numbers and do some numerology, that explains why Pepe helped Trump get elected.
Like, if you start researching Keck, and you start researching darkness, and you start researching all these different, like, esoteric things, you realize, like, back in the Egyptian gods, right, they worshipped, like, these froghead guys.
And then you get deeper into that, and you realize, well, what did Trump use to get elected in 2016?
He used this frog.
And this frog is actually, if you separate the numbers, right, P-E-P-E is 16-5-16-5, which, You know, just spell it out and add the numbers or subtract them.
It's 21-21 or 11-11.
Okay, and so Trump injected this into his campaign and it went absolutely viral.
And it was this magic of this constant repeating numbers and image sequences.
So every time you posted Pepe, every time you said Keck, you were actually, you know, manifesting 11-11, 21-21, 11-11.
11, 11, 21, 21, 11, 11.
Like it was just constant, like vibrations into the universe.
Right.
And so if you look at Tesla's research and you learn about energy, like this
is all about energy manipulation.
Uh, you couldn't see it, but I threw my head back, rolling my eyes when
he started talking about Tesla.
And also Jordan Sather sitting right next to him looking so bored.
Just like, like what the paycheck was.
I mean, it's like, oh, if you add it or subtract it, it makes $11.11 or $21.21.
It's just words.
I mean it's like oh if you add it or subtract it it makes 11 11 or 21 21 it's it's just it just is just words
Does that mean anything? Yeah And numbers, Mike, don't forget.
And numbers.
And then it's very, that cadence of speaking is very similar to negative 48.
That sort of really rapid fire numbers and kind of mumbled terms and kind of very fast and saying a lot, but not really saying anything.
Yeah, it's very familiar if you've ever heard any negative eight media or negative 48 media.
Yeah, yeah, that's what was interesting.
It was sort of like veering off into weird numerology stuff.
And we also talked a bit about on the last episode was like, if someone's a little bit too enthusiastic about the work of Tesla, that's usually a red flag.
Yeah.
Now that guy in the in the shirt, it was it was talking with all the pepes on it.
He goes by the name g money online.
He was also on the next panel, and this one was about finance.
And of course, they talked a lot about cryptocurrency.
And G-Money talked about how Bitcoin is digital 1776.
I think people are kind of familiar with the idea of like, you know, the different boxes to preserve liberty, right?
What are the different boxes we can use to preserve liberty?
Okay.
And so we've got, we've got the soapbox.
Okay.
Soapbox.
Who got kicked off Twitter?
Okay.
Right.
Who voted for Trump?
We got the ballot box, right?
We know that.
We know Trump won, right?
But, you know, we didn't win that either, right?
2020.
How about the jury box?
Did we get any justice there either?
No.
No, we didn't.
And so what's left?
You know, people say the ammo box, right?
However, violence is never the solution to this, OK?
And so what I want you guys to think about is Bitcoin as a weapon, OK?
Because there is a person in the Space Force right now talking about power projection
and how Bitcoin can project power against tyrants.
Bitcoin can project power against other nations.
And so what I'm telling you is Bitcoin is digital 1776.
This is a revolution.
Now, I wonder how many people that works on.
I wonder how many people say, well, I was going to do a violent revolution, but instead I'm going to buy Bitcoin and that's just as good.
Yeah, it's very... There's a lot of, like, this is the last remedy that we can try.
You know, notably, he does talk about the ammo box.
I mean, you're sort of waiting for him to bring it up.
And that whole, like, 1776, it's very Alex Jones.
That's very familiar talk.
But it's also, like, Bitcoin to do what?
I mean, just to invest in it?
What are you supposed to do other than buy crypto?
Like, then what do you do?
You have money?
It's just a lot of talking and it doesn't really mean anything.
Yeah, I think their fantasy is that Bitcoin will become so popular that it'll become the default worldwide currency and this will break the sort of like the stranglehold that the American dollar has on the financial system and therefore you'll have to rely upon, you know, basically, you know, the Federal Reserve anymore.
And so, I don't know, there's this fantasy that you can Be a little bit more sovereign if you rely upon a decentralized currency.
I don't think it's going to work out in their favor as they as they plan.
I think that's that's the way they think it will play out.
Yeah.
I mean, have any of you guys tried to transfer crypto?
Like you think like boomers have a hard time figuring out just, you know, your standards sort of or texting?
Yeah, just texting, you know, sending the proper emoji in the proper circumstances.
Yeah, try explaining to them that they can't get their crypto out because they need to pay a fee in another crypto to transfer it to, oh, it's a cold storage wallet.
You know, like, there's already so many steps.
And, you know, this isn't the first time, right, that conspiracy groups have embraced a sort of, a form of currency that doesn't seem like it's going to do anything, you know, and claim that, hey, when the things flip, when the polls flip, when the Great Awakening happens, all of the Iraqi dinars that you own, you're gonna be a multi-multi-millionaire.
That is, that is exactly it.
And the thing is, is with Bitcoin and crypto, it worked.
You know, there were some people who got very, very, very wealthy off of the initial crypto boom.
So here is actually a real-world case where somebody who, you know, I don't know, had 20 Bitcoins in their online wallet from like when they were online gambling in like 2008 or whatever, and it was paying out in Bitcoin, are all of a sudden cashing out and becoming like, you know, really rich.
So, of course, And that's kind of in the general consciousness.
You know, everybody knows somebody or has a friend of a friend of an acquaintance who, you know, had, you know, oh man, I had all this Bitcoin on a hard drive and I lost it, or oh my god, I, yeah, I came out really big, I bought Dogecoin really early or whatever, and, you know, made tens of thousands of dollars on it.
So, when they reference this kind of stuff, you know, people go, oh yeah, well that happened, yeah, I know, I know for a fact that, I mean, you never hear about people getting rich off the Iraqi dinar, No.
But you've heard of people getting rich off cryptocurrency.
Right.
No, that's a great point.
Because with something like the Dinar or any of these currency scams, there's no example to point to of somebody for whom it worked.
It's always just, well, it's about to happen, it's about to happen.
Right.
It has happened with crypto.
Yes, it has happened.
It's just probably not going to happen for you.
Yes.
It's probably not going to happen again.
Right.
In the same way.
Yeah, it's like the whole joke of buy high, sell low.
It's like...
Now, the final panel of day one, this was a multi-day conference, I don't think I mentioned, but the final panel of day one was on the topic of blackpilling.
And this is basically the name for losing hope that the right wing takeover will ever happen.
In the panel, Kate Buckley gives a tidy definition of blackpilling.
Blackpilling is redpilling without the hope.
A blackpill is like, okay, I see the system that's keeping us down, I see the powers that be, but there's no way we're ever going to do anything about it.
We're just going to maintain our slavery for the rest of eternity.
So it's seeing the level of corruption, but not seeing the hope that we can actually do something about it.
Well, that's an interesting way to talk about it, because I've said for a long time that QAnon is very much not an accelerationist, want-to-watch-the-world-burn kind of movement.
It is very much, the greatness will happen once we get rid of all of these bad people.
Then we'll have the secret cures, and the children will be saved, and we'll have the free energy.
So it's very much in line with that kind of, we need a big upheaval, but then we get utopia at the end.
So how does one avoid the black pill, according to the panel?
So Patriot Patel, John Harold, he gives a surprising answer.
He cautions against putting too much hope that individual events will lead to Trump being restored to office.
Harold provides the example of the case Brunson v. Adams.
So, this was a pro se civil action in Utah that sued hundreds of members of Congress and Biden and Kamala Harris, which attempted to basically overturn the results of the election, and it went nowhere.
It was a nonsense lawsuit by a kook, essentially.
Harold also provides the example of January 6th, which, of course, didn't turn out the way that a lot of QAnon followers thought it might.
Harold says that conspiracists shouldn't lose hope just because these events don't turn out as expected.
One of the reasons I think so many people kind of blackmail is they put so much hope into a certain thing.
And not to like harp on this, but the Brunson versus Adams case from a while ago, right?
A lot of people put a lot of eggs in that basket, and we were like, temporary expectations, guys.
Temporary expectations.
And we got kind of crapped on for it.
And not to say that the case wasn't right or justified or anything, but because it didn't go the way that we expected, People blackpail over it.
Same thing like January 6th.
A lot of people thought that was going to be Trump's moment.
He was going to do something.
He was going to prevent Biden from taking office.
Didn't go the way we expected.
A lot of people blackpailed over that.
If you can go into a situation and just temper your own expectations, that's key to everything.
Because if you don't have your expectations that high, you can't really be disappointed enough to actually blackmail.
Let me just say that this guy became a conspiracy theory superstar on the back of a theory that Trump was still the president.
And at some point was going to come back into office and undo everything that happened.
This guy basically made his bones off that theory.
And now he's basically saying, yeah, don't, don't get your hopes up.
Don't get your hopes up in any one thing.
And never mentions that he is sitting on that stage because of a theory that Donald Trump was still the president.
A theory built on nothing but hopium.
That's pretty galling.
It is super shocking that all of a sudden someone, a post-Jan 6th QAnon influencer who, like I said, got famous on the back of pure hopium, all of a sudden is now telling his audience, don't really expect too much for what's happening in the future.
It reminds me a lot, there's this fascinating study I've referenced a lot.
Some sociologists took a look at a sect of the Baha'i Faith who kept predicting the apocalypse over and over and over again, over a 15-year period.
And they kind of examined, like, how did they cope with so many failed predictions?
What they found was is that eventually they stopped making unqualified predictions of the apocalypse.
It was always couched in sort of these with these caveats and these sort of like these explanations like well, so the real end of the world is going to happen this but it might not so don't get your hopes up.
So if it doesn't, it'll be another day.
So they still have this kind of like, Yeah, it's just when prophecy fails, you know, just keep them on the hook.
And if you've got enough people who are so deep into it that they don't have anywhere else to go, then you've got your meal ticket.
it leading to disappointment when it finally didn't actually happen.
Yeah, it's just when prophecy fails, you know, just keep them on the hook. And if you've got enough people who are
so deep into it that they don't have anywhere else to go, then you've got your meal ticket. It's incredibly cynical.
A panel on day two was called Red Pill 101 learn tools and tricks to wake up our friends, family and even our foes.
And And this was a panel that doled out advice basically on how to be an evangelical for the red pill beliefs.
One man suggested planting a seed that eventually could lead them to the Q-drops, essentially.
They don't want their friends to be agitating them about it.
If you can handle a care, plant the seed, But then still show them that you're their loving friend.
Eventually someone else somewhere will water that seed on its own and then they're gonna call you six months later and be like, hey, you know what?
I don't think that guy likes, you know, I know they have those two pitches of Trump and Epstein, but yeah, he did get arrested under there.
He doesn't seem to like him.
And then someone's been telling me about these drops where everyone's been digging on him for two years before he was even arrested.
I didn't know all that.
And then it'll come, but I don't know.
That's sometimes my start advice for red pilling.
I mean, this is this is also a really cynical way to think about personal relationships, where you see, you know, your friends, not as your friends, but as a potential convert, someone who eventually can be led to the Q drops.
Yeah, it really is just, oh, we haven't woken them up yet.
But if we keep pushing, if we keep annoying them, then they'll eventually come around us.
It's a really kind of evangelism.
Yeah, it's a very, it's another very cynical way of looking at life.
This conference is incredibly depressing.
Yeah, because they are, they sound, I mean, if you just altered the content, you know, but kept the same visual, it looks like you're at a Comic-Con panel.
The sort of normalizing of the discussion of these ideas and casually talking about what's the best way to radicalize a family member, a friend, or potentially even an enemy of yours, and giving people, you know, I mean, it's good advice if that's what you're trying to do.
You don't want to, yeah, you don't want to, you know, hit them with the protocols, you know, right off the bat.
You want to mention, yeah, maybe a little bit of something about Epstein.
And what's so funny about this is, you know, in the clip Travis just played, he talks about, you know, if you discover the Q drops and you find out, oh, they've been discussing Epstein and stuff forever.
There's actually not a ton of Epstein stuff in there.
From there, Epstein is used as a way to say, "Hey, see this real thing that happened?
Now what that means is that all of the other stuff that there's no proof for is also true."
You know, Epstein is sort of used as a stepping stone, and it's a good one, because that is
a crazy thing that happened, you know, that we all saw happen with our own eyes.
And, you know, somebody will definitely come up in the future and say, like, "Yeah, there's
a couple weird things about that Epstein thing."
And then you go, "Oh yeah, my other friend was, like, talking about that stuff.
Maybe I don't know enough.
Maybe I should start researching."
It is.
I mean, it's a dangerous—it's dangerous because it's calculated, and it is a thoughtful
approach to, you know, inspiring people to radicalize their family and friends.
Yeah, and it's also how something like Scientology works.
Right, yeah.
If you think about the mechanisms of Scientology, it's not somebody screaming at you about Xenu and the volcanoes on day one.
It's, hey, do you feel stressed out?
Do you want another way of dealing with anxiety?
I mean, we're all stressed out.
We all want another way of dealing with anxiety.
Sure.
Like, hey, hold these cans and we'll measure something.
And yeah, it seems a little weird, but just go with it.
The Xenu stuff, that comes later and with a lot more money thrown in the pot.
But at the beginning, it's just some kind of generic sage advice.
I mean, there is a playbook for this.
Yeah.
And yeah, and to top it off with Scientology, then they're like, hey, don't take my word for it.
Take this guy's.
And fucking, you know, Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible walks out onto the stage and he's like, hey, you guys feeling a little bit anxious?
You know, there's a lot.
Scientology gets a really bad rap.
You want to know what it's really about?
You know, you're like, Oh God, like, look at this.
This is the greatest movie star of all time.
And like, he's into, he's into this.
Like, yeah, maybe, I don't know.
Maybe there is something to this.
People are looking.
We're always looking for stuff to settle our stress, our anxiety.
Go to Whole Foods and look in the section for all of the natural stress and anxiety reliefs and how expensive those are and how many different brands there are.
It is a booming industry and to, you know, to take advantage of people's own desire to just live a comfortable and content life, increasingly difficult with social media and, you know, the sort of the crushing, you know, economic sort of system that everybody is, you know, sort of forced to play by those rules.
You got a lot of people that are looking for something, for anything.
And so, yeah, this kind of approach, I agree, is insidious.
They know what they're doing.
Oh, they do.
Absolutely.
Day two of the conference also had a panel called Love in the Time of Maga.
And the subtitle was Discussion of Love and Relationships During the Great Awakening.
And the panel, it just had John and Kate talking about the relationship and generally about forming personal relationships with someone else who's also very pilled.
And speaking of depressing, one of the questions from the audience was really heartbreaking.
It was from a woman who talked about how her belief in QAnon strained her relationship
with her adult children.
Question?
Yeah, I think it's really interesting when we're talking about the relationship between,
you know, husband and wife.
And thankfully, my husband and I have been on the same page since the very first QPost.
And we're very lucky that we share that.
And we have both, you know, gone through of losing friends.
I got kicked out of my majan group because I wouldn't be vaccinated.
I'm like, I don't care.
You know, stuff like that that doesn't mean anything.
But the problem is, is when your children have a different viewpoint than you do, is when it really, really becomes hurtful because you can never Have your children out of your life.
So you have to compromise some way.
And it's hard, for example, with my older daughter, she's not awake at all.
And when she decided she was going to vaccinate her two children, who are six and four, it broke our heart.
We're like, please don't do that to our grandchildren.
And it still breaks my heart.
So, we would send her every article that we could.
These are the things you need to think about.
Please think about them.
And her response was, if you continue to send me these, I'm going to have to block you.
And so, I don't know.
Our conversations today are better, but they revolve around the weather.
How are the children doing?
And I have to make sure my visits with her on the phone and I go to California to see her but I have to keep them very superficial and it's heartbreaking for me because I've always been so close to her.
Ugh, I'm furious.
I know.
That is horrifying, deeply depressing, and just unconscionable to nod your head
and go, "Oh, uh-huh, uh-huh."
And everybody sort of gets that pained look when she says, "They vaccinated
their children, they're six and four."
And everybody's like, "Oh, no, oh."
I'm...
Ugh.
Yeah, this is the real heartbreak.
This is all of this stuff.
Yeah, I also thought it was interesting.
It's like, oh, my, you know, my husband and I have been on the same page from the very first Q drop, which is a crazy thing to say that like that's a you know, that would be a source of tension in the marriage potentially if like for some reason her husband wasn't.
We don't even have her husband's story.
He's evidently not at that conference, very tellingly.
But it is interesting how, you know, it's just the way that these beliefs just destroyed everything.
You know, it destroyed, like you said, her membership in her Mahjong club because she was so anti-vax, and then her relationship with her children.
And as a consequence, it strained her relationship with her own grandchildren.
Yeah, really horrifying stuff.
Missing things that you'll never get back.
Memories for you and for them.
You know, the imprinting of a grandparent's love on a young child is so incredibly important and happens so very young and to miss it because of fucking QAnon.
It's absolutely infuriating.
Yeah, Mahjong is like such a source of joy for old ladies.
Totally!
Totally!
My mom's in a Mahjong group!
Yeah, my Safta was an avid, avid Mahjong and Smoker player.
And that matters!
It does!
That is community, that is real community.
That's people who you're meeting with in person to have a real, real relationship over a beautiful tile game.
You know, and God, and the way that everybody was cheering when she was like, Oh, thank God me and my husband are both fucking pilled to the gills.
Everybody's like, Oh, all right.
You're so lucky.
And she's like, ah, and my children like won't talk to me.
I have no relationship with my grandchildren is like, and she's breaking down.
I mean, this is, you know, this is where this is the sneaky, the sneaky sort of real tragedy of QAnon and conspiracy theories.
And the advent of communities who, like Mike was saying, who crowd around and encourage and support and, you know, gently, uh, you know, coax further into.
It's like, yeah, you know, if you didn't have an event to go to, if you didn't have four different streams to watch, if you didn't have, you know, a sub stack to read, you know, would you, would you go back to the Mahjong group and your family?
Or, you know, are these new strangers essentially who, you know, all believe in this conspiracy?
Is that better?
You are standing in front of these people crying about that you were so close with your eldest daughter and now what you talk about with the weather and nothing.
This woman, she doesn't know what to do.
I mean, you can hear it in her voice.
She's like, I don't know.
I don't know.
And God, what?
Can't one of these people have the decency to go, hey, you know what?
We understand that's a huge problem.
There is nothing more important than family.
Take a break.
You can always come back.
We'll be here.
Take a break and spend some time with your family.
Why is there nobody there saying that?
Like, it's ridiculous to me.
Because they create the content that is refreshed every hour on the hour to keep her hooked.
Because if there wasn't a new generation of Badlands Media dudes all sitting on a stage dressed like roadies for Pantera talking about Emerald tablets, then she would have nothing else to do.
And she'd go, Oh, I guess I should go back to my daughter and fix this.
But you know, Oh, there's a new, there's a new Patel Patriot podcast and we're going to get the truth today.
That's part of this is the constant stream of noise never allows you to think.
On day two, there was also a panel on holistic health.
Of course there was.
Of course, Jordan Sather talked about his bleach drinking.
He complained about how like, oh, oh, I drink this and all of a sudden I'm a bleach drinker.
The panel also featured a man by the name of Patrick Gunnels, and he promotes a very bizarre theory that viruses do not exist.
So Gunnels explicitly rejects the germ theory of disease.
Which is probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of medicine.
Saved the health of billions of people in history.
But he thinks it's not true.
So this is what he said.
Get right to it, actually, Ryan.
The problem with germ theory in general is it started in the 1860s and it involved a process of deciding in advance that diseases were caused by germs.
Then you go look for the germ, you find it under a light microscope, You point to it and you say, that caused the disease, and that's the end of the discussion.
That's obviously not true.
It's been tested over and over again through many different diseases.
But yeah, crazy.
I couldn't even figure out what his theory was.
Now, there are some people who reject germ theory who adopt what they call terrain theory, but I couldn't figure out if he believes this particular kook nonsense, but it was very strange.
Yeah, just a rejection of everything you know is a lie.
They're all lying to you, but I'm telling you the truth.
And it's the same thing we've been seeing over and over.
Just reject what you have been told and embrace what we are telling you.
Yeah, because you got to reject everything first, right?
You can't be a blank slate if you're holding on to any...
You know, previous beliefs or opinions or anything like that.
You know, you need to be nice and smooth, you know, for us to dig our little fingers in the cement and make a handprint and sign the year, you know, all that stuff.
Now, day three of the conference is just a half day, and one of the panels was titled Logic, and the subtitle was Logical Fallacies, Epistemology, and How to Spot Poorly Formed Arguments.
Now, under normal circumstances, if I heard a panel at a conference under that name, I'd be very interested in it, but knowing the context, It was very, very different.
So it was basically just another panel on how to red pill people.
One of the panelists recommended not making outright arguments, but rather making suggestions to get people pilled.
He brought up a classic nonsensical QAnon claim that celebrities or politicians who wear walking boots, which is this medical device on your foot that's used to prevent it from getting hurt if it's injured or you'd had surgery or something like that, and that's Possibly evidence that those politicians or celebrities were secretly arrested.
But I'll just throw out some data points of things that I know that are true.
And then I guess you can think about that.
And that's basically what I do on my show.
I'm not so much sticking a stake in the ground and saying, well, I believe this and I'm right.
Basically, I'm throwing out, hey, maybe you don't know about this, maybe you don't know about this.
And I talked about yesterday in this case, I said, well, I find it interesting that, John McCain was wearing a walking boot and someone said on live television that he was put to death.
I find it interesting that Katie Hobbs is wearing a walking boot and the Governor of Ohio is wearing a walking boot.
I really don't know what that means.
But I find it an interesting pattern that we should continue to look at.
Okay, knock off Kendall Roy.
Here's what it means.
Means you hurt your foot and you need to stabilize a tendon or a ligament or bone in your hurt foot while it gets better.
The walking boot claim is the one that I first found when I first found QAnon in beginning of 2018 was the Hillary and John McCain are wearing walking boots because they secretly got arrested.
It's five years later.
And they're still saying, well, we don't really know what these walking boots are for.
It is the, it defies logic.
How anybody could still think five years later, we're, this is finally going to all get uncovered and it's all going to be revealed.
It is, it is just the classic dangling of the carrot.
And at some point you're going to catch the carrot, but you're never going to catch the carrot because there's no carrot.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, it really has, it really shows you, you're right.
I mean, this walking boot claim, I remember it appeared like shortly after QAnon was on the scene.
I mean, like the first memes about it were like in December of 2017.
It is at Absolutely insane how persistent- something that's really easy to explain.
People get their foot hurt, and so they have a device that helps with that.
It's so, so simple.
But yeah, yeah, but this newest generation, this newest crop of post-Gen 6 QAnon influencer has picked it up and is still pushing it.
Yeah, I guess it just shows, you know, what's old is new, I guess.
Yeah, I guess what it shows to prove is that very powerful and influential people are still susceptible to rolling the fuck out of their ankle.
It's like, when I get out of my car, anytime I drive and put all my weight on my left foot to get out of the vehicle, it's one out of ten chance I roll my ankle.
And luckily, you know, I've never, you know, I've never been boot bound.
But yeah, no, guys, you can be a powerful person and still injure yourself like a dummy.
It happens.
Right.
All the time.
All the time.
I mean, hell, Jeremy Renner ran over himself with his tractor.
You know, it's like we're glad he's OK.
And I don't mean to make fun of that situation.
That's fucking awful.
And I wish him the best.
But he drove over himself with a tractor.
It happens.
It happens.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, it's pretty interesting that I was really kind of, like, taken aback by the ways in which they were self-conscious enough to know that, like, ethnic and religious bigotry is a real turnoff if you want to pill people on this stuff.
And you need to, you know, at the very least tone that down a bit.
And I don't know.
So I feel like, I mean, it's true that they will be more successful in, you know, radicalizing people into their particular brand.
I often sometimes joke, sometimes I ask, you know, I get asked about the anti-Semitic elements of QAnon.
And my standard answer is that QAnon is anti-Semitic as you want it to be, in the sense that someone who is like into QAnon could, you know, sort of like choose to be, you know, deliberately ignorant about the obvious anti-Semitic, you know, tropes that are part of the QAnon narrative and pretend that they aren't there and tell themselves like, I'm not into that.
But of course, if you are a total bigot, then you can totally accept the anti-Semitic tropes.
But yeah, it is interesting that they're willing to, I don't know, just willing to tone that down just for the sake of being an evangelical for this kind of belief system.
Yeah, I think it's an interesting sort of next step up the ladder is sanding off the really unacceptable parts of QAnon and embracing it as a much more populist, much more sort of truth-seeking, question-asking, and I think that's what we were seeing a lot of with this conference, is it's not so much about like the super government or the cabal, it's more like what can you do in your own life?
Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.
Now, before we let you go, I know that you have a book now available for presale.
you know, when do you cut your grandchildren out of your life?
As opposed to like, the cabal wants to take your grandchildren away. It's very much like
self-improvement, almost.
And it's an interesting direction for QAnon to take, but it makes a lot of sense.
Mike, thanks so much for joining us today.
Now, before we let you go, I know that you have a book now available for pre-sale.
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what readers should expect from that.
Sure. It's called Jewish Space Lasers, The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories,
written by me, a Rothschild who does not have any relation to the Rothschild family.
It is examining the history of the myths and hoaxes and conspiracy theories about this very powerful, very well-known Jewish banking family who have been used by every Frank and every conspiracy theorist and every guru of the
past two centuries to push their own agenda, whether it's Alex Jones today, whether it's
somebody like the book, None Dare Call it Conspiracy in the 70s, whether it's Ezra Pound,
going all the way back to pro-silver newspapers in the 1890s to the French pamphlet
wars of the 1840s.
It talks about how we perceive Jewish wealth and power in popular culture, how countries
that don't really have a Jewish population have embraced antisemitism and Rothschild
tropes and how all of these tropes have been repeated in George Soros, but taking less
than a decade to do what the Rothschilds it took really generations to do.
So the book is out September 19th.
You can preorder it in hardcover and Kindle through your local bookstore through bookshop.org.
There's some other website that sells books.
I think it starts with an A or something.
You can get it from there too.
But yeah, pre-sales, pre-orders are hugely, hugely important for how many books an outlet carries.
So if you're interested at all in the topic, definitely pre-order it.
And, uh, help us get the word out there.
And, uh, hopefully we'll be doing some kind of a tour in September.
We're still firming the details up of that, but yeah, we'd love, we'd love to engage in a conversation about kind of how we ended up in this conspiracy moment by looking back at 200 years of theories about this one very wealthy and very misunderstood family.
And you can also follow Mike on Twitter at RothschildMD.
I'm still there.
Still in the trenches.
Spelled the scary way, but still no relation.
And also, I would recommend, I assume that listeners of this podcast, at this point, you've got a fairly good understanding of the sort of basics of the QAnon conspiracy.
If you have family or friends who are interested and want to know more, Mike's first book, The Storm Is Upon Us, is a really good read as well to get people who might not be, you know, so deep into this world, you know, a comprehensive way to sort of break down the basic sort of tenets of QAnon.
Yes, I wrote it, you know, sort of just as the election was going on.
I was writing it while January 6th was going on, you know, kept it very up to the minute.
And, you know, QAnon itself is really evolving, but I think the basic tenets of it and the pathway for how it became what it turned into has not changed at all.
And I go into a great amount of detail about that in The Storm Is Upon Us.
Awesome.
Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
Thank you for being in the trenches with us.
You know, since the very beginning of this all in 2018, it's always a pleasure to have you on.
Absolutely.
I love coming on with you guys.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
And if you already do subscribe, thank you so much.
It helps us stay advertising free and editorially independent.
We also have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's fact.
Everything that's in this is fake.
If you want to not be upset by the news or what people are saying, just stop looking at your phone.
If you're in a fight with someone online, it's not real.
Especially if it's a stranger.
You have no guarantee it's even a real person.
Just put it away.
If you follow me on Twitter or pay attention to anything I do on Twitter, you will know that I'm in a fight 24 hours a day about everything all the time.
And it doesn't bother me almost at all.
Every now and then there are a few seconds or minutes during the day where I'm like, oh god, I want to get that guy.
But it's not real.
I don't know the person.
The person's a stranger.
They have no effect on my life.
Even if they have been nice to me in the past, and they've gone mean, I don't know them.
I'm gonna go through the rest of my life, and it's not gonna make any difference at all.
