We put Brace Belden of the TrueAnon podcast on trial for starting an elaborate hoax on Twitter about an Ebola outbreak at Burning Man, FEMA and a "triple kiss at the marshmallow hut". Jake regales us with a story about the playa.
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Music by Nick Sena & Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 226 of the QAA Podcast, the Burning Man Ebola
outbreak episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
This week, we're joined by Brace Belden of the True or Non podcast to discuss some conspiracy theories around this year's Burning Man, some of which he may have started.
So, basically, this is going to be the trial of Brace Belden.
And we've already determined that you're guilty and your punishment will be to feature in a Jake story at the end of the episode.
So, my condolences and let's jump right in.
The place was once a spiritual vortex where dreamers built a yearly utopian celebration of art, music, drugs, and sex.
A place without currency and bad vibes.
But Burning Man has changed since its inception in the 90s, dude.
It's now plagued by celebrities, Silicon Valley types in luxury RVs, and Instagram influencers.
And this year things got even worse when nearly an inch of rain caused a flood, stranding tens of thousands of people in mud, and even forcing the organizers to close the event's entrance and exit to vehicles.
President Joe Biden was briefed on the situation, and attendees were told to shelter in place and conserve food, water, and fuel.
Here's from the New York Times.
Bike wheels became clogged with mud, and people had to navigate the normally powdery desert with plastic bags over their shoes.
That's such a funny image.
It's like, yes, all of these burners who have cornered me for years at parties, you're finally forced to wear plastic bags over your shoes.
Oh, I see you're going to have no pity for these poor people that went through so much.
I've been to too many house parties with too many burners.
Yeah, we know about that experience for sure.
Plastic bags over their shoes to protect them from the oatmeal-thick mud.
Some decided to bail, trudging through miles of mud to reach the road and hitchhike.
A widely shared video showed the music producer Diplo and the comedian Chris Rock sandwiched in the back of a pickup truck after being picked up by fans.
In times of great crises like this, when celebrities are at risk of missing their next gig because they can't get to the airport to fly out of Nevada in their private jets, conspiracy theorists see an opportunity.
Hello.
Welcome to the podcast.
It's a pleasure to be here.
You, sir, may have been the source of a rumor that there was an Ebola outbreak at Burning Man and that Diplo was present, quote, at the source of infection.
So how are you doing, man?
I'm doing a lot better than Diplo.
I don't know if you guys have seen the ticker on the Skype, the little page where you can see the news here, but Diplo has apparently passed away as of today.
1236 in Las Vegas General Hospital.
They are not releasing the cause of death, but are putting as the source it was a triple kiss at the Marshmallow Hut.
Travis, please, fact check, fact check.
Travis, Travis, Travis, we're in trouble.
Who gives a shit anymore?
Sure, why not?
You know, I just, I give up.
White flag.
Diplo's dead!
Yeah, Diplo's definitely dead!
Diplo's dead!
He's not the first guy to die and he won't be the last, you know?
It's just, his time has passed.
You know, and I look forward to the four posthumous albums that he will release over the next six to seven years.
I mean, many have called him the White Avicii, and I think he will...
History will look back at him as sort of a mixture between Bach and the great painter Michelangelo.
Yeah.
He died of being sick as fuck.
Mm-hmm.
Facts.
So, okay.
Let's kick this off by reading a tweet that you posted this last Saturday.
The rumor's on the ground here that there's some sort of virus on the loose at Burning Man that causes boils, vomiting, hemorrhaging.
Apparently that's why they're not letting people in.
No idea if this is true.
Been in RV all day.
Source, I'm at Burning Man slash Black Rock City.
So, to be clear, you were, I think, in the Black Rock City known as New York.
I was actually sitting precisely where I'm sitting now, at the right end of my couch, although wearing considerably more clothes than I am at present.
And you were quote-tweeting a tweet from Burning Man Traffic that said, Do not travel to Black Rock City.
Access to the city is closed for the remainder of the event and you will be turned around.
Yeah, so I mean, the thing is, I'd actually quote tweeted that a couple seconds before with something about how I was at, I was still at Black Rock City, but I had seen several what looked like military aircraft doing practice runs over it.
And I was like, that's not as believable.
And so I was like, I'm going to pretend that I'm there and I have reports of the bubonic plague, which was my original idea, was that the plague is spreading there and that they're covering it up.
You know, that would have been a little less believable.
That might not have gone as far, honestly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I also like the no idea if this is true.
That's a nice touch, a little skeptical.
It's just stuff you're hearing, you know?
Well, so yeah, Travis, I think that you, I think, are probably a connoisseur of these kind of tweets.
But the point is, as you well know, is you've got to say something that is so insane and then slightly walk back any culpability that you might have in spreading that by being like, Yeah, I mean, you know, there's there's credible rumors that Obama was voted Mr. Bathhouse 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008.
They, of course, missed 2005 because it was too busy.
Not in the bathhouse, but in just regular cruising zones.
Gay sex Chicago.
I don't know if this is true.
I'm just hearing this.
And so it's like what you just do is you have a specific lie and then you just walk back any culpability that you have in it.
Yeah, you're encouraging the readers to, you know, quote unquote, do their own research.
I don't know if this is true.
You can go and look it up and, you know, see for yourself.
I like the idea that you were going to spread, you know, disinformation about the Bubonic Plague, which I guess is like a hornier version of the Bubonic Plague.
I don't know.
I read a book on it.
I know more about that thing than about Ebola.
And so I read a book on it like 10 years ago.
And so I know that like it's kind of going to try to do something a little, not more high concept, but it's slightly different direction.
But then people started saying Ebola.
And so I was like, oh, well, fair enough.
Ebola.
There we go.
Let's go.
Yes.
Somebody built on this, I believe.
One of the people that was in on the joke, they posted a fake CDC tweet that said, Ebola outbreak confirmed at Black Rock City, Nevada.
It is recommended that all Burning Man attendees remain in their dwellings until further notice.
Current state of emergency in progress.
Learn more.
And they took this health advisory, which was for an African country, and switched it to Nevada and put an aerial photo of what they call Black Rock City, but it's really just Yeah, so, you know.
Very well done.
That was just some, I didn't coordinate this with anybody.
No, no, no, I know.
There was immediately a few people kind of picked up on it.
Yeah, yeah, they wanted to have some fun.
Less than I thought, but yeah, a couple people.
This image actually has probably saved me from, I don't know, getting, I guess, in further trouble because this is pointed at, the CDC image is pointed to by most of like the sort of AI-generated debunking, like fact-checking sites.
As like the source of it, so I kind of escaped any actual culpability.
No, I did notice that, that a lot of like big outlets don't name you at all.
There's like a few smaller ones.
None do.
None do.
Not a single outlet has pointed to me as the source of the Ebola outbreak at the Triple Kiss at the Marshmallow Hut with Diplo.
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