Episode 266: We Are Not At War feat Ken Klippenstein
The United States' non-existent war in the Middle East. Taylor Swift being a psyop. A man decapitating his father because he believes in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. A videogame titled simply "Epstein". Another week, another round of feverish visions. Our guest is Ken Klippenstein, investigative journalist for The Intercept.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Ken Klippenstein's Newsletter: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qaapodcast.com
Welcome, listeners, to the 266th chapter of the QAA Podcast, the We Are Not At War episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Ekar, Julian Field, and Travis View.
A strange thing is happening in the Middle East.
Bombs are falling from the sky in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria.
In Palestine, hospitals, universities, and other civilian buildings are being razed to the ground.
Picking through the debris, survivors are finding twisted metal fragments indicating the origin of the ordnance used.
The United States of America.
But when asked, Pentagon spokespeople are clear, we are not at war in the Middle East.
More bizarre still, the planes bombing the Houthis in Yemen are taking off from unidentified bases that the mainstream media has no curiosity about.
Yes, the United States is not at war in the Middle East.
It's merely conducting military operations that we know of in 14 countries there.
All of this is fuel for conspiracy theorists attempting to bridge the contradictions between what we're being told and what is clearly happening.
A month into an election year, we are left to sort through the phantom limbs of the American empire.
An empire we're to believe isn't really there.
So why is it raining death on people halfway across the globe?
To sort through it all, we've got return guest Ken Klippenstein, investigative reporter for The Intercept and famous newsletter haver.
Welcome back, Ken.
Good to be back.
Sorry to have you for such a somber topic, but before that, we've got a little round of what we like to call QAA News.
Taylor Swift.
My official position is that she's a talented musician and performer deserving of her status as a pop icon.
But some sources close to Travis View told me that she's, quote, what passes for culture in this hollow age of hungry ghosts, and, quote, flotsam we're desperately clinging to for meaning as the sun begins to set on the American empire.
You're gonna get me killed, Julian.
Whatever your take, she's in the news again.
Not because people think she's secretly gay this time, but because a decent amount of right-wing pundits have decided that she's a psy-op run by the Biden campaign.
What if, like, the right-wing pundits find out about Gaylor and, like, get even more mad at her?
Do you think this might happen?
Yes.
They're, like, poring over photos of her and Heidi Kloss and just being like, I'm pretty fucking sure.
Uh, Karlie Kloss.
Whoops.
Thank you, Jake.
I just want to know where this idea that the military PSYOPs are competent.
I mean, have you read about any of them historically?
I'll give you an example.
After 9-11, they did one where they distributed dolls to children in Afghanistan that when it rained, it would make the doll's face turn red and it looked like Osama bin Laden.
The idea being that this PSYOP would scare the locals from wanting to make common cause with Osama bin Laden.
That's a pretty median idea, I think, for what the military PSYOPs are.
They made a hyper-colored doll?
Hyper-color?
You know about this somehow.
You know the t-shirts that change, you know, with the heat and the stuff?
I think it was the rain.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it changed and it made him look red and like he had horns, like he was some sort of demonic figure.
Wow.
That is so bizarre.
What a good idea.
We should do that, but with Taylor Swift now.
For American children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Her face turns, she turns into Osama Bin Laden, actually.
When you put her underwater, a beard, a beard appears.
It was like Macklemore.
That might be more D.O.D.
level.
That's the funniest thing.
You talk to soldiers.
This notion civilians have when they say military grade.
Ask any soldier.
Military grade means it probably doesn't work.
Yeah, military grade is what the CIA makes fun of.
Yeah, I read another incident in Afghanistan in which a military PSYOP unit tried to help That's awesome.
How did that conflict go, by the way?
Did they win?
Yeah, we always win.
some of their territory with these pamphlets that included Quranic verses
against violence. But in effect, it was basically Americans throwing pamphlets
containing Quranic verses into the dirt, which was, you know, not a good way to win
hearts and minds. That's awesome. How did that conflict go, by the way? Did they win?
Yeah, we always win. That's how it goes. This all appears to have started in
early January when Jesse Watters, the new Tucker Carlson over at Fox, did his best
impression of the last guy while musing about Swift.
Taylor Swift's the biggest star in the world.
Sorry, Gutfeld.
She's been blanketed across the sports media entertainment atmosphere.
The New York Times just speculated she's a lesbian.
And last year's tour broke Ticketmaster, a tour that's revenue tops the GDP of 50 countries.
I mean, I like her music.
She's alright.
But, I mean, have you ever wondered why or how she blew up like this?
Well, around four years ago, the Pentagon's Psychological Operations Unit floated turning Taylor Swift into an asset during a NATO meeting.
What kind of asset?
A psy-op for combating online misinformation.
Listen.
You came in here wanting to understand how you just go out there and counter an information operation.
The idea is that social influence can help encourage or promote behavior change, so potentially as a peaceful information operation.
I include Taylor Swift in here because she's a fairly influential online person.
I don't know if you've heard of her.
Yeah, that's real.
The Pentagon's PSYOP unit pitched NATO on turning Taylor Swift into an asset for combating misinformation online.
That looks like a freshman college student trying to make their way through a presentation.
It's so funny.
It's so funny to think this is like the Pentagon PSYOP unit.
He's like, well, uh, I put a little, uh, I mean the slides needed photos.
So I did include Taylor Swift on this one.
This reminds me a little bit when I would like sneak in references to the Simpsons in my high school presentation because I liked it a lot.
Yeah.
I really like Tara Swift.
She helped me get through my first breakup last week.
Yeah, like straight up.
That's the best they can get is just a line of someone clearly bumbling their way through a presentation.
Definitely not some sort of a highly placed person in the PsyOps unit.
I thought this was gonna be, you know, a closed room, you know, big circular table, lot of guys in, you know, military dress garb, you know, smoke hanging low, you know, over the room, but it's just, yeah, it's just somebody with a PowerPoint presentation where they tell you, they're like, yeah, make it funny, you know, slip in a little bit of, slip in some pop culture references, you know, keep people on their toes.
What I understand is, why is Taylor Swift the thing that, like, crosses the line?
I mean, we already have the F-16 flyovers and all these other things.
Like, why is this one like, no!
How dare you, sir!
She's supposed to be above all this.
Well, the F-16s didn't vote for Biden.
Exactly, yeah.
My favorite part of this little segment is the part where Fox and Waters cover their asses lest they be accused of outright fabrication.
So is Swift a front for a covert political agenda?
Primetime obviously has no evidence.
If we did, we'd share it.
But we're curious.
Ooh, they're stinging from that Dominion lawsuit, huh?
Yeah.
We're curious.
We're swift curious about her involvement in a military-grade psyops.
I mean, it's just, he is doing such a bad Tucker Carlson.
It's pathetic.
They should have never fired him, let's be honest.
They need him so bad.
Later that month, a variety of crab-like critters elaborated on these musings, also doing their best Tucker.
Here's fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism and pivoted to conservatism, Benny Johnson, on The Benny Show.
Brain dead, low information voters, of course I'm talking about Swifties, Taylor Swift fans, sort of worship this artist, kind of like at random, right?
Like just out of the blue, suddenly Taylor Swift's the most famous person on Earth!
Now she's at every NFL game with her boyfriend, who's backed by Bud Light and Pfizer!
Travis Kelce is this guy who also kind of out of the blue became this big time celebrity.
Really rich, really powerful.
Why?
He's a tight end.
He's like a glorified lineman.
That doesn't make any sense.
Tight ends aren't famous people in football.
What are you talking about?
What world are we living in?
Sure seems planned.
This is what happens when you get all your news from the Daily Caller and then you finally open a newspaper.
You're like, what the hell?
Who the hell is this Taylor Swift character?
Yeah, this is literally a Tim Robinson character from I Think You Should Leave.
He's cornered you at an office party and he's gone, who, who is this Travis Kelsey?
He's so, what the heck?
Like, I mean, he's literally just that character.
Also, it's not true that tight ends aren't famous.
I don't really even follow football that much, but I know that Gronk from the Patriots was one of the most famous football players in the country.
Yeah, just like managing to alienate like 80% of America with like Taylor Swift and then the football inaccuracies.
Livvy, didn't you, like, rizz up Baby Gronk or something?
I did not.
I did not rizz up that Baby Gronk.
Those applications are false.
Is he now the Drip King?
Or, he's the new Drip King, I think.
I don't know, I'm just, I'm also barely following the mainstream news.
Benny further explained this sinister plan which apparently involves rigging the Superbowl.
Sure seems like something that is like concocted in order to accelerate the fame of these two people, get them to the Superbowl, largest screens on earth, get maybe a, get maybe like a proposal after the, this is my, this is what I think is going to happen, there's going to be like some type of proposal at the, after the Superbowl is rigged for the Chiefs, and then the two of these people become It's like reach like crazy levels of absolute fame and then they take all that fame that has been given to them by the rotted corporate press media entertainment industry that explicitly backs Democrats and then they use that in order to try and save Joe Biden.
I, you know, it's a lot of people joke about Benny, about all of these like, you know, Steven Crowder, that they're all, you know, just closeted gay guys who pivoted from entertainment after they failed horribly.
But it sure seems like they are delighted to do the catty thing of like, who the hell is this Travis and does he deserve to be with Taylor?
Well, and they, I, clearly they don't think very highly of their fellow conservatives if they believe that, you know, that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, I don't know, sharing an after game kiss or, or whatever it is, that they go like, ah, ah, ah!
I was, I've been wrong all along!
Go vote for Biden, you know?
Like, I don't understand.
What do they think's going to happen?
That they see that these two beautiful people have coupled up and they're famous and they're rich and they're like, ah, something about this couple just makes me want to vote for Biden.
Well, we know that, like, Democrats have often been saved in presidential elections due to being endorsed by celebrities.
That has worked so effectively for them in the past.
It's made the difference.
Benny finished by saying the plan would culminate in both Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift endorsing Biden on camera, explaining that Swift was already, quote, a psy-op for the NFL wives out there.
Joining Benny was Jack Posobiec, who basically expressed the same conspiracy theory on his Real America's Voice show, Human Events.
His guest?
The first celebrity to endorse QAnon, Roseanne Barr.
I think, and I've said this, I've taken a lot of crap for this online.
I think they're using Taylor Swift right now.
They're gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against everything, against Trump, for Biden.
They're going to get her and all, you know, they call them the Swifties.
They're going to turn those into voters.
You watch.
No, I think that's what they're doing too.
She's definitely somebody who's consented to speak the way the establishment wants to be spoken of.
Right, they push it.
And she has a lot of young girls.
More than anyone.
Yeah, and I think that's going to be the way they try to get on top of the next election.
It's so insane.
Cause like, if that's true, this makes it way worse.
Like you're helping them alienate all the Swifties to be Democrats.
It's the worst possible option.
You should be like, no, actually she's secretly a Republican.
They should do like Gaylor, but for like Republican Taylor.
Yeah.
Like her manager is forcing her to be a Democrat, but like, look at her.
Obviously she's a Republican.
In an election year, calling all Swifties like low IQ voters and shit and just like shitting on them all year is not going to help.
But yeah, I think they need to get their own sort of like musician psy-op guy to combat it.
But who would they get?
I don't know.
Kid Rock maybe?
Yeah, they're kind of losing.
What do you mean?
They have Culture War.
That basketball player that's always rooting on U.S.
foreign policy?
I don't remember his name.
They have Tom McDonald and Ben Shapiro in their duet.
Oh yeah, that's right.
Those guys could be it.
They don't really have any pop stars, really.
Yeah, it's rough.
They're kind of losing.
What about Cat Turd?
Didn't he used to be some music guy or something?
Cat Turd should bring back the Groovy Grapes.
I hear he does all his own arrangements, too.
They have Ted Nugent, the young, fresh up-and-comer.
They should get his son Rocco.
Rocco should do some fucking cool LSD rap at the Super Bowl.
He should bring back the Smiths.
Yeah, that's so true.
That's probably the best that they've got, but I don't think Johnny Marr would go along with that.
I could see Morrissey having a phase.
Yeah, Morrissey could for sure.
Yeah, he's had every other bad opinion, so why not this one?
Absolutely.
In Pasobiak's replies on Twitter, Vivek Ramaswamy, now defunct GOP presidential candidate, decided to get in on the action,
writing, "I wonder who's going to win the Super Bowl next month.
And I wonder if there's a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped up couple
this fall.
Just some wild speculation over here. Let's see how it ages over the next eight months."
I mean, it's like they believe that we actually are living in the Hunger Games.
That the moment, you know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sort of like emerge from the pit or whatever, that they'll join hands and be like, we endorse President Biden.
It just doesn't work like that.
It doesn't even, even if they do endorse President Biden or they are Democrats, things just don't happen like that.
If you want to keep the Swifties at home, I mean, it's already bad enough to call them stupid, but to say they don't even exist, that this is an artificially culturally propped up couple is like so fucking funny.
What does artificially culturally propped up even mean?
Artificial and culture aren't those like total opposites?
You think culture emerged organically?
Ken, don't tell them that, okay?
Yeah, there's nothing artificial about American culture.
American culture is organic.
It's farm to table.
Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh sensing a fun little PR moment told Politico, As for this conspiracy theory, we're going to shake it off.
Goddammit.
But that does highlight that we still need Congress to approve our supplemental budget requests as swiftly as possible so we can be out of the woods with potential fiscal concerns.
That is so cool, dude.
Doing fucking Swift song references as you ask for more money to send to, like, Genesilo's government abroad.
It's brutal.
It's so awesome.
It's a very America moment.
Yes.
Oh, the horror.
It's like the same stuff they've been doing, but can we put it, can we, can we refract that light through the prism of the Pokemon Go to the Poles?
Yeah.
Joe Biden reached for comment, said this.
Beer brewed here.
It is used to make some brew beer.
Oh, Earth Riders.
Thanks for the Great Lakes.
Wow.
I wonder why the majority of his own party thinks he's too old to run.
This guy's sounding great, folks.
I wonder who Earthrider is.
I wanna know.
I think it's the brewery.
It is the brewery, but it's- No, that's the brewery.
That was the nonsensical part of that statement.
Okay, and the brewery, they are somehow responsible for the Great Lakes, or it's sort of a joke about the Great Lakes of beer that flow from this brewery, or?
Honestly, yeah.
I feel like you're on his phone.
Meanwhile, word in the Trump camp is that he's going to wage a, quote, holy war against Taylor Swift, according to Rolling Stone.
According to three people familiar with the matter, Trump loyalists working on or close to the former president's campaign, longtime Trump allies and right-wing media, and an array of outside advisors to the ex-president have long taken it as a given that Swift will eventually endorse Biden, as she did in 2020.
Indeed, several of these Republican and conservative media figures have discussed the matter with Trump over the past few months, the sources say.
In recent weeks, the former president has told people in his orbit that no amount of A-list celebrity endorsements will save Biden.
Trump has also privately claimed that he is, quote, more popular than Swift and that he has more committed fans than she does.
A person close to Trump and another source with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone, He's such a catty bitch.
He's so fucking funny.
That's why, that's why.
She's being artificially dragged into politics because he wants to fight her.
He's bored of all the like old guys that he has to like rag on all the time or like lawyers or this and that.
He's like, bring me someone worthy.
Bring me Taylor Swift.
Well, and look, he's got a point because I, as far as I know, no Swifties have, uh, like posted up on a bridge with, uh, you know, semi-automatic rifles and, uh, signs sort of taped across their pickup trucks.
So, you know, in some ways maybe his fans are a little bit more devoted.
So you're challenging Swifties to do something to prove their dedication.
You're really poking.
Yeah, I'm calling all Swifties.
Show up at my house, okay?
We count on you.
I want you to show up here, I want you to write stuff on your car, and I'd like for you to kill me.
This is the perfect time for me to make an extensive death threat against Jake while using Taylor Swift song titles.
Unfortunately, I don't know any of them.
Jake won't be making it out of the woods.
Yeah, Julian's in his, uh, he's in his, uh, you know, his, his positive phase.
He's entering the positivity zone.
There's going to be less death threats.
Uh, we're going to have to bleep less.
Um, he's generally going to be nicer to me and look, we're all really much better for it, I think.
That's not true.
I'm actually touring, uh, I'm doing my Eras tour in which I do all of the death threats I've done in the past, back to back.
He is remastering his death threats, folks.
Travis, could you finish off this little article piece?
Yes, the Rolling Stone report goes on to say, "Last month, the source close to Trump adds,
the ex-president commented to some confidants that it obviously made no sense that he was not
named Time Magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, an honor that went to none other than Swift in December."
That's so funny.
In 2023, Trump being person of the year would be so funny.
He's just like making it so easy for Swift to be like, really explicitly a Democrat, because she did endorse Biden in 2020.
But like, I feel like not that many people like heard that it didn't, it wasn't as effective as like, if she just like, you know, she did like a, you know, Beyonce 2016, like Clinton campaign sort of thing, like explicit endorsement or whatever.
Yeah, Trump, talk about her hair looking like shit.
Be like, those nails look bad.
Do it.
Do it.
Speaking strictly for myself, this story is a layer cake composed of politicians and pundits I'd like to see fed into a meat grinder, punctuated by pop culture figures I do not care about.
The only cool part of the story is the Pentagon, an organization of noble warriors, and certainly not war criminals who should be tried in the Hague and executed by God.
Next story!
Wait, can I just say, before we move on, maybe this is, like, a hot take, but can we just leave Taylor Swift alone?
Like, I don't understand.
Oh, God, he's doing the Britney thing!
Don't leave the billionaire pop star alone.
What the hell are you talking about?
That's not an option.
Leave her alone.
That's not the world we live in, Jake.
Everybody gets up at these award shows.
They're making fun of her.
Who cares?
She's a musician.
She makes music.
She inspires lots of tween girls.
I don't understand.
Why does everybody feel like they gotta make fun of her?
Jake is pandering.
Travis doesn't like Taylor Swift though.
It's very clear.
Please take note out there.
I just see her get made fun of all the time and I don't see her making fun of people.
So it's like, what's the deal?
That's because she's making something else.
A billion dollars.
Well, it's not her fault that people like her music.
That actually is her fault.
Well, you know what?
She is a very hard worker.
I'll give her that.
Wow.
Wow.
Really fucking, really fucking, he's gritting his teeth saying that.
He hates her so much.
Alright, next up we have an extremely grim story.
Travis, tell us a bit about Justin Moen.
Yeah, so the transition is something much less fun.
So I sometimes like to point out like the most dangerous conspiracy theory just historically in terms of the sheer amount of violence and body count isn't QAnon.
That's not to downplay the extensive damage that QAnon has done to people.
But the deadliest conspiracy theory in recent years is actually Great Replacement.
So, this conspiracy theory is typically expressed as the idea that Jews are attempting to import non-white immigrants as part of a plot to replace and disempower white people, and it has inspired multiple mass shootings.
Very recently, we got another tragic reminder of the connection between migrant paranoia and real-world violence.
Justin Moen A 32-year-old man from Pennsylvania posted a 15-minute YouTube video in which he brandished the decapitated head of his father and then ranted about several conspiracy theories.
In the now deleted video, he said, "This is the head of Mike Mohn, a federal employee of over 20 years, and my
father. He is now in hell for eternity as a traitor to his country."
So his father was in fact a federal government employee with the Army Corps of Engineers.
Yeah, we did watch the video, or at least Travis did, and then I was going to maybe cover this or be involved, and I
just saw the thumbnail of the video and was like, "Nope, nope. Sorry, can't do this, guys."
It was very it was very pretty pretty pretty sick so yeah he has He has dad's head in a plastic bag.
I don't know what to tell you.
I'm not going to post any of it because I don't think that violence should be rewarded with the promotion of your content.
So in the video, he ranted about a bunch of far-right talking points and conspiracy theories, including ones involving Black Lives Matter, taxes, the LGBTQ community, and the Biden administration.
He also urged viewers to kill all federal employees and seize federal offices while railing against far-left woke mobs.
He claimed that he was the head of an American militia network known as Moen's Militia.
Though, as far as we could tell, Moen's Militia consisted of himself.
I saw some headlines from low quality news sites that claimed that Justin Moen was a QAnon conspiracy theorist, but he didn't reference any conspiracy theories or claims that are specific to QAnon.
It's just a weird thing that's sort of like happening with like, I guess, news, sometimes news sites where people think that anyone who believes in any kooky conspiracy theory is a QAnon person, but that's not true.
Yeah, I mean, it's not specifically true, but I think we can agree that this is... QAnon has become a kind of label for this type of, like, far-right paranoia that mixes, you know, like, the idea of, like, a secret cabal, the Great Replacement, the woke people, LGBT, like... It's understandable that you would get confused, but yeah, if you're a reporter for a magazine, you're gonna want to check into that before just throwing the name around.
Yeah, I suppose I don't care if like, just like anyone just like hears a something kooky someone says and it's like, well, I guess you're just in the QAnon.
But you know, if we're gonna be technical, if we're gonna be specific, he just wasn't a QAnon person.
So according to police, they were alerted to this incident after Moan's mother called 911 after she came home and discovered her husband's decapitated body on the floor of their bathroom.
A statement from the Middletown Township Police Department describes the grisly scene they
happened upon.
While patrol officers were responding to the scene, they received further information that
an elderly male in the downstairs bathroom with a large amount of blood around him and
that he had been decapitated.
A machete and a large knife were located in the bathtub.
Police located the male's body in the first floor bathroom.
The deceased male's head was located inside of a plastic bag which was inside of a cooking pot in a first floor bedroom next to the bathroom.
Police located bloody rubber gloves in another first floor bedroom and more bloody rubber gloves in a trash can next to a desk in that room.
He was arrested hours later after breaking into a state National Guard facility about 100 miles away.
Moen was formally charged with first-degree murder, abuse of corpse, and possession of an instrument of crime with intent.
The Bucks County D.A., Jennifer Shorn, held a press conference in which she revealed some more details about the arrest and about Moen's attempt to mobilize an insurrection.
Justin Moen was taken into custody without incident.
The defendant had a loaded Sig Sauer 9mm handgun on him and it was loaded, as mentioned, missing one round.
Justin Moen was taken into custody.
The defendant stated he went to Fort Indiantown Gap in an effort to mobilize the PA National Guard to raise arms against the federal government.
He also indicated that he wanted to speak to Governor Shapiro to join forces.
So what he did is he shot his father, decapitated him, filmed a YouTube video rant, and then drove to this National Guard facility as part of a plan to mobilize an insurrection.
I have to say, just a bad plan.
Not very well thought out.
Yeah, that's the problem here.
CNN interviewed a former roommate of Justin Moen's named Davis Ribbon.
And according to Ribbon, Moen's seemed to suffer from like gang stalking or targeted individual delusions as far back as 2016.
So this is what the roommate said.
Even back then, he had very clear issues.
He would always talk about how the government was out to get him, and it was always like these vague stories about it.
He would never give specific examples.
He would tell me these stories that always seemed exaggerated so it was hard to take anything he was saying seriously or know what he was saying the truth about.
I thought he was just a weird kid who had some issues, but I obviously wasn't thinking he would do this or was dangerous.
Yeah, this story is, uh...
Extremely grim!
Yeah, in the video, he seemed actually primarily fixated on like migrants among the southern U.S.
border and he was some experts have stated that he seemed to be influenced by the standoff between Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Joe Biden's administration over the removal of razor wire on the Texas-Mexico border.
And this is why I mentioned the Great Replacement stuff, because he seems like an already extremely unstable person who was just getting fed poison in his media, and this led him to take these violent actions.
I've seen some right-wing people, I think Laura Loomer was trying to spin it, like, look at how crazy Joe Biden is making people.
I'm like, okay, that is an incredible judo move.
That's what's happening, uh-huh.
Alright, since we are playing a game of like, let's see how brutally we can shift the mood, Jake, tell us about this Epstein game on Steam.
Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, I guess somewhat of a palate cleanser, but I don't know how good.
Yeah, at this point, Epstein stuff is a palate cleanser.
That's how bad things have gotten.
So I have a little update this week in Pilled Gaming news.
On February 16th, Epstein will be released on Steam for all Windows players.
That is the name of the game.
It is just called Epstein and I've included for all of our hosts and guests a little screenshot from the Steam page.
100% AI.
You can see the swimmer to the left has the two arms, one going into the water and one coming out.
Yes.
Well, and on Steam now, uh, developers have to specify if they've used AI to, uh, you know, to help with any game assets.
And, uh, they do admit that this image is AI generated.
They, they, they come out, they come flat out and say it.
So the game promises to be yet another entry into the overcrowded survival crafter space.
Except for the fact that this game takes place on Epstein Island and we'll see players trying to quote rescue the children while also duking it out with the cabal.
Here's the description from their Steam page.
In Epstein, players embark on a survival and exploration journey on a mysterious and dangerous island, uncovering dark secrets and facing numerous hazards.
The game's main antagonist, Jeffrey, spelled J-E-F-R-Y.
So fucked up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I thought it was that Jeffrey with a G was weird.
I've never seen this one.
Rules the island with the help of creatures known as disease makers, who sustain themselves on human blood.
Jeffrey orchestrates his ominous operations from a large temple built on the island.
Whoa, I can't believe how vaguely they're describing Adam Schiff.
So, the game is being developed by Galaxyverse, which is a small Turkish game developer, as far as I can tell.
I checked out their website, and they have a couple games that they're making, but then they also have this kind of weird corporate sort of side hustle, it seems.
Like, they'll come and set up VR at your conference room or that sort of thing.
It's kind of like an all-in-one boutique sort of advertising slash gaming agency, if that makes any sense.
So this is like the labor of love side of it, that they set up to finance.
They're like, yeah, we have to do all these conferences and stuff, you know, set up these set up VR headsets for these total idiots.
But what we, but our real passion is our Epstein Island game.
Yeah.
Going to like their uncle's house to repair his PC and being like, you know, I've been working on this really cool shit.
Well, they're not working too hard because the gameplay itself looks eerily similar to some other indie survival crafters released on Steam.
And that's because it uses pre-made Unreal Engine assets.
Now, I've played probably like 10 of these games.
There is a, there is like a survival game template that you can download from Unreal that a lot of people use as their base.
And then you can pay for different assets.
You know, what do you want your characters to look like?
You know, you can pay for animation packages, that sort of thing.
That's so cool now that they have these templates because we have just games where it's like, okay, take template, add the most insanely shocking thing.
What if it was Kyle Rittenhouse?
What if it was Epstein?
What if it was Hitler?
Like, it's smart.
If I were a foreign person watching America burn to the ground, looking at how Unreal Engine and Steam works, I'd be like, yeah, I'm going to exploit these people's insane culture to make a buck.
Yeah.
So even in the trailer, Epstein's iconic temple sort of looks like something out of Gladiator as opposed to, you know, the signature blue and white stripes and golden dome.
Iconic, huh?
Yeah.
Well, it is.
Iconic temple.
That's awesome, man.
It's iconic.
Yeah.
People know what that looks like.
That's not the wrong use of the word, right?
No, no, no, no.
Definitely not.
Ominous temple.
What do you want me to say?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Go ahead.
Renowned.
Renowned?
How about infamous?
Yeah.
Dope.
Pimped out.
Pimped out.
Attractive looking temple.
So the trailer also sees players engaging in sword fights with pirate skeleton warriors.
So yeah, I don't know.
It seems like the theme is a little bit all over the place.
Pirate skeleton warriors?
But I thought Nancy Pelosi stepped down.
Even though the game appears to be primarily an Unreal asset flip, that hasn't stopped excited PC gamers from flooding the game's Steam forum and chiming in with suggestions, hopes and fears for the game, or even just to post Epstein didn't kill himself.
Many of the potential players are also hopeful that other familiar faces will surface within the game, as mini-bosses, so...
One user from the forums has titled his post, mini-bosses, and they write, sure hope there are mini-bosses named Bill and Steven to fight and get codes to unlock the temple.
And then another user responds to that and says, Prince Andrew as well.
And then to this, the developer themselves respond and they say, don't worry, mini-bosses that you mention are in the game.
What?
Not exactly the ones that you told, but there will be funny minibosses.
So it seems like in some way that the developer is kind of in on the joke.
They know what they're doing.
Of course they do.
There's two more responses.
One person says, we gotta save those children.
And another says, don't forget to Oprah.
I never forget to Oprah.
Yeah, it's weird to hear Oprah used as a verb, but I guess we'll go with it.
Someone else who clearly doesn't know that you're just supposed to be a little more subtle just says, would love to say former President Bill Clinton, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates as side mission characters or something.
Or something.
Wait, so you want to play as them?
You want them as companions?
Yeah, or like NPCs who you get a mission from somehow?
Yeah.
But for those of you who aren't fond of saving the children or trying to thwack Cabal members to death with a 2x4, Epstein offers a variety of content suited for less-pilled players, like farming and fishing.
This is this is from the game description.
It says fish breed animals and produce meat Survive as you develop yourself on the island your character will get hungry You can fish by making a rod and using worms from the soil as bait with a shovel build a farm for pigs and chickens Feeding them with their favorite fruits to produce meat be careful.
Don't forget to cook the meat It sounds so benign I'm picturing somebody buying the game He doesn't know any of the Epstein lore.
And it's just like, I don't know what that name is, but this sounds like a fun sim game for raising the animal.
There's like, there's other like horrible messages in the forum.
It's like, hey, I don't know about this.
I better call my lawyer, Mr. Jewin Jewin Burger.
Just like horrible anti-Semitic shit in the comments.
So basically, like, if you're going to be playing as a protagonist, it would be maybe like Trump, but you'd be born as Trump in tighty-whities on the beach and you'd be pooping through your tighty-whities.
I love it.
One can hope.
Last but not least, the game has a mature content description at the bottom that reads, the developers described the content like this, quote, the game takes place on an island and in the tunnels area.
When you hit morbid and mutant people, blood effects appear.
Okay, cool.
So mark your calendars, February 16th.
No, don't promote the game.
That's gonna be on Steam and I suggest that you buy one of the many other survival asset flips that, you know, doesn't glorify Jeffrey Epstein or his accomplices.
Also, if you buy a game on Steam and play less than two hours, you can refund it.
That's what I did with the Rittenhouse thing.
True.
You can always refund.
If you're curious, yeah.
Yeah, of course.
We've got a real good combo of Jake and Liv here guiding you through life, listeners.
Just make sure you take both of their advice together.
Guiding you through life and, unsurprisingly, to your death.
All right, and in an episode that we should probably just call Whiplash at this point, we are going to now tackle our main story.
Ken, you've written a couple of newsletters recently, which I found both succinct and interesting.
I wanted to start by addressing the one titled, Pentagon Insists We're Not at War.
So could you broadly explain the U.S.' 's current military operations in the Middle East and what statements they've recently made regarding whether or not these constitute a war?
Yeah, so the U.S.
is militarily operating in every country in the Middle East except for Iran and Lebanon.
And so that's something that's just kind of the backdrop of all this that I, because of the public messaging around it, the public doesn't have at the front of their mind because they don't really talk about it.
If you look at the authorities, the legal authorities that the U.S.
has when they're operating in, say, Syria and Iraq, they're still there under the anti-ISIS coalition.
And, you know, as people know, ISIS has mostly been defeated for a number of years now.
So they've never updated that authority.
And because of that, it doesn't receive the kind of coverage and I think transparency that's necessary.
But anyways, since the Israel-Hamas war, which started on October 7th, what you've seen is that conflict spread to other countries.
People sympathetic to the Palestinians, other countries like Iran, which have their own relationship with Hamas, and consider it an existential matter for them to be able to maintain some kind of a presence in Gaza.
This has resulted in, for example, the Houthis shooting at ships passing through the Red Sea, which is a a hugely important shipping lane through which large
amounts of commercial product pass and has ramifications for the global industrial market.
And in addition to that, there were three soldiers that were killed about a week ago
at a US base in Jordan, and the militia that did that, that took credit, said that they
did it as revenge for US support for Israel.
So I think again and again, those are just two examples.
I could list more like U.S.
strikes on Iranian-backed militias in Syria, in Iraq, the U.S.
strikes in Yemen.
I mean, the examples are overwhelming at this point of the number of ways that this conflict has metastasized beyond just Israel.
But despite all that evidence, the Biden administration and the Pentagon insist and have been asked this and insist repeatedly, there's no war outside of Israel.
It's all just in Israel.
These other things, this is something else.
Oh, you know, Yemen, we're doing a self-defense mission for commerce there.
It doesn't have anything to do with Israel, Hamas.
You know, Iraq and Syria, that's just, that's Iranian tensions.
It doesn't have anything to do with Israel.
And it's kind of like, you know, their job is to spin, but it's like, I know it's hack to say Orwell,
but it just sounds very Orwellian.
I don't know any other word.
I hate that word 'cause it's overused, but I don't know any other way to describe
what everyone is seeing and then what the White House is saying, that disjunct.
So another newsletter you wrote was titled, UFOs are bombing Yemen.
So are extraterrestrials really waging war in the Middle East?
What do we got here?
Well, they are unidentified.
They are flying objects, but they're not little green men.
What they are is coalition aircraft, mostly the U.S., but also Britain and other countries conducting these airstrikes.
But when the Pentagon announces it, they don't say where they're conducting them from.
The American public is denied basic information about what our foreign policy is.
I know that some of it is coming out of Jordan, and I know I'm working a story on this now.
Out of respect for the Jordanian government, which is under enormous pressure from their population, which includes millions of Palestinians who are not thrilled about what's happening in Israel and the U.S.' 's role in supporting it.
At the same time, the Jordanian monarchy is hosting our F-16s and F-15s that are conducting these airstrikes, but they're doing it in secret.
The U.S.
government doesn't announce this to maintain relations with their Jordanian government, but I don't think that's a great reason not to explain to the American people, again, basic facts about how our foreign policy is being conducted.
And the worst part is that the media is taking part in this charade.
When you see, I could give you any number of examples from the AP or the New York Times, report on these airstrikes.
Instead of saying where they're conducted from, I know that they know because they're talking to some of the same sources that I'm talking to who explain to me where they're being conducted from and that it's not very hard to find out.
When they report it, they just say aircraft from the region.
Which is the exact same language the administration employs to obscure specifics about its foreign policy, except for the New York Times doesn't have an excuse for it like the White House does.
The White House needs to maintain relations with Saudi Arabia or Jordan or whatever the Middle East country is.
New York Times doesn't have that relationship.
And so their reason for that is deference to the White House because they want to maintain access to their sources.
And the person that ends up losing, you know, the White House gets what they want.
Jordan gets what they want.
The New York Times gets what they want.
The people who lose are the public who are denied this information about what exactly U.S.
conduct is in these conflicts.
Do you think this makes it kind of hard to deny that some of these mainstream media outlets are, you know, in bed with their sources?
Like, are kind of, you know, part of like an exchange where it's like, well, we'll give you the information as long as you portray it in this manner?
Oh, I think it's clearly what's happening.
I mean, and it affects everyone.
I just had to deal with it today.
I had a National Security Council spokesperson who gave me something, they always do this
unilaterally, they say, "This is on background," or whatever.
And it's like, "Well, that's something you're supposed to agree to."
And in a healthy environment, they would ask me about that.
But the power differential is such that they think they can walk all over the press because
they usually do.
So they just put out these dictates.
I ended up naming the person.
But after some consideration and thought past, oh, do I want to piss off NSC?
And the fact that that's crossing my mind, who has little to no relationship to the White House, means that a lot of these major outlets who depend on them for exclusives and things, you know, you can see how they decide by how it's described.
It's not just the airstrikes.
Right after October 7th, we surged Thousands of troops to the Middle East.
And the question, and something the American public should know is, okay, which countries are they going to?
I'm not saying that they have to explain to us, you know, operational details about what exactly, but just general idea, this number here, or they're going here.
They don't even give you the, they just say sent to the region.
And then the media plays along with the charade, again, knowing precisely which countries they're being sent to.
Once again, Everyone goes home in a limo except the American public who has this information withheld from them at a time that they need to be participating in discussion around how this is all being conducted as the stakes are as high as they are.
And I mean, what kind of levers do we even have to affect any of this?
I mean, does the Pentagon listen to even Congress, let alone the people that elect them, supposedly?
They're definitely under pressure.
I think they really benefit if people think, oh, what can you do?
There's, you know, they're not going to care what I think.
They're very receptive.
Especially in an election year like this.
I mean, I've just seen, when I do these kinds of stories, it queues up questions in the press corps, and then the press corps will say, yeah, why don't we know that?
And they'll say something, and then the press secretary will be under pressure, and then they'll release... I'll give you an example.
During the Ukraine conflict, at the very beginning, it's an interesting conflict to compare with this one.
The White House, after a little while, became relatively quite transparent about the nature of the support.
Some of that is because it was a more popular war than the one we have now, but some of it was because the media just started dragging them and saying, why aren't they telling us where all these billions of dollars in weapons
are going. So now you can go on the DOD website. This wasn't available initially, but over time,
pressure from Congress, pressure from segments of the press made it so that they had to post a
quite detailed list of the nature of the materiel and weapons that we were providing to that
government. Conceivably, that could be done in Israel too. Now, of course, it's harder because the
relationship between the US and Israel is much closer than with Ukraine, but they are under a lot of
pressure in general.
I've seen it happen when I do a story and then the next time they take questions, their answers are a little bit more transparent, a little bit more detailed.
But again, I think certainly in an election environment, they're going to be under more pressure than at any other point.
It strikes me that like if you ask the average American, you know, is the United States at war?
The question would probably not be, you know, a kind of resounding yes across the board, because for years now, The state of war has just been kind of blurred, but it seems like it's just continuous.
It's just multiple involvements.
The National Security State has really won.
It's a testament to that victory, because when we went to war with Iraq, everyone knew that.
But, you know, I had a story recently on U.S.
troop presence in Yemen in late December.
The White House, under the War Powers Act, they are required to report to Congress troop presences.
Nobody reads these documents.
I did.
And I found, oh, wow, we have troops in Yemen.
And this was in late December.
and you know, this is a country we're bombing.
And so I write up my story, the DOD starts freaking out.
It's like, oh no, no, no, we don't have troops, we don't have troops.
And then, you know, I said to them, okay, so how do you account for the fact
that the White House said that we do?
They said, you're gonna have to ask them.
And so I go back to my sources trying to find out what the context is and they'd say,
oh, they're playing games with the definition of the word troop.
So if they have someone in SEAL Team Six, or they have someone special operations
under a CIA task force, technically that's under a title authority,
It's not conventional forces.
And so by playing all of these word games, they're able to evade, you know, a basic public understanding of what's going on.
And meanwhile, domestically, you have people claiming, you know, that there's like a shadow government, a deep state, and that they're, you know, doing whatever they want and that we don't get a say.
And it's getting harder and harder to argue with them.
I mean, you know, how do you think this kind of affects the argument against like some of these more paranoid claims?
I mean, not that I don't believe in a deep state, I think, but you know, it's like this just gives, I think, more fuel to the outlandish claims.
Oh yeah, I would imagine these, you guys would know this better than me, but I imagine that kind of anxiety exists in direct proportion to the lack of transparency by the government.
It's been extremely distressing to follow the genocide currently being perpetuated by Israel and Palestine with the help of the American government.
So how has the Biden administration been portraying the US's involvement there?
And do you think that people are buying their PR on the issue?
Yeah.
After President Biden visited, he took a selfie that the White House posted on their Instagram with a member, I think of JSOC, the special operations entity, and they forgot to redact the person's face.
And so after that, the cat was out of the bag and they had to, a couple of days later, the New York Times reported that the U.S.
had commandos in country.
What the White House has said is that these are just for hostage rescue.
They're in an advisory capacity for hostage rescue.
They're not involved in the fighting.
I've heard that it's more complicated than that.
I haven't gotten down quite enough to report more on that, but certainly the U.S.
has been involved.
There have been U.S.
drones spotted over Gaza.
I reported based on a FOIA document several weeks ago that they surged U.S.
Air Force intelligence officers to Israel.
So the U.S.
certainly has, there are a number of signs that the U.S.
has military involvement with it.
What form that takes exactly, it's hard to say because they just haven't been candid about it.
This is just a, you know, this is a note for all of our parents and grandparents, I guess, in Biden's case.
You know, never post your location or, you know, special operations, you know, forces on Instagram.
You know, you just, you want to keep that location hidden until you have left the place.
This is something that I think that our parents are still struggling with.
The kids, we figured it out, but, you know, Biden and his team could probably learn from Biden, don't listen to Jake.
Keep taking selfies.
Make sure the geotag is on too.
Keep giving us the breadcrumbs so we can piece together our foreign policy that the government refuses to provide us with.
You know, it's so many examples like that.
Who knew we had SEALs off the coast of Yemen until those two Navy SEALs died in an accident during, I think, an interdiction of an Iranian ship.
This is the only way we learn anything from this government.
Is when something goes wrong, when some, you know, president posts something to Instagram or a FOIA officer fucks up and gives me a deployment order that they weren't supposed to, it shouldn't be that way.
We shouldn't have to piece together this mosaic of clues to find out what our role internationally is.
I mean, can you imagine if this were, you know, what is happening with, like, Chinese special forces or Russian special forces, where every little conflict in the globe, you had a couple of moments where, like, the kind of curtain slipped and you suddenly saw, oh, like, China is deployed in multiple countries in the Middle East, you know, their special operations guys are dying when something goes wrong, like, off the coast of this country, that country.
I mean, you know, the paranoia would be through the roof.
People would be absolutely going crazy about it, and yet it seems like a lot of this kind of Cold War paranoia is just to mask that, like, this is a relatively lopsided situation now.
This isn't, like, a game of spies between two great powers.
This is an empire lazily throwing troops and special operations at, like, every micro-conflict and even macro-conflict, and then just basically being like, well, it's not really happening.
So you mentioned the three U.S.
troops that were killed in Jordan.
Now, of course, you know, they would argue they're not even troops because they're spec ops.
But you described their deaths as like shrouded in secrecy.
So can you just talk a little bit more about the situation there?
Yeah.
So the real scandal, I think, here is that the first time that any of us in the public are hearing about this base that they were killed at and where 250 other U.S.
personnel are based was when they died.
The time to learn about these things is, you know, when they build the base and when they start sending hundreds of troops to it.
This is the, you can go on Google, uh, search it in quotes.
Um, the, the code name for it is Tower 22, which is what, when people die, that's when you get some measure of transparency because they have to notify the family and it's going to come out.
So they have to explain what happened.
You can't find any formal announcement of a base called Tower 22.
And when you look at that, that's one of a number of unacknowledged bases in Jordan.
I did a story before this tragic event happened about what's called Moaffic Salty Air Base, which is another secret U.S.
air base where a lot of these sorties are flying out of when they conduct the airstrikes.
And again, a really dramatic presence.
Thousands and thousands of troops in that country.
The U.S.
doesn't acknowledge it.
Jordan, when these three soldiers were killed at Tower 22, Jordan not only didn't acknowledge it, they lied.
And they said, oh, that base, that's in Syria.
That's not in Jordan.
They just straight up lied about it.
And so it's like the American public really has the deck stacked against them because you have these autocrats in that region who don't want their public to know that they're cooperating with the United States on things that's deeply unpopular internally.
The US, Washington doesn't want the American public to know that they're at war and that we have troops in places that, as those three deceased service members show, are at serious risk.
They're sitting ducks in the context of something like the Israel war because it's extremely unpopular in the Arab world.
And we have these tiny outposts that are not built up sufficiently to have the kind of hardened defenses you need to protect against drone attacks, which is what killed them.
And so, you know, absent knowledge that these poor guys are sitting out there, people are not able to assess what the US's role in the Israel conflict can be.
I have a feeling that if you told people there are a lot of service members there, I mean, I imagine the average American would just say, like, why the fuck are we involved in all of these things?
the Israel conflict a little bit differently. But since they're denied that information,
they can't.
I mean, I imagine the average American would just say, like, why the fuck are we involved
in all of these things? We have plenty of issues to deal with here. You know, of course,
you know, tugging on heartstrings by being like, our guys are out there unprotected.
It's like, why are our guys out there in the fucking first place?
What do you think these countries feel like?
Imagine having little, like, outposts of another country's military just hanging out in your local town, you know, just on the outskirts.
Like, oh yeah, that's just like the hundred Chinese guys at the secret base down the street.
It's totally insane, and you have to kind of have this empire fever to even not see just how starkly the situation is different, I suppose, than other countries' foreign involvements in general.
It's really striking and interviewing soldiers and I have a piece coming out about this shortly about that base.
I learned that there are at least a dozen other bases in Jordan, just like Tower 22.
So we really have no idea, you know, the public, like what, I mean, that's one country. You know,
we know we have a presence in all these other countries, but the specifics about that are
really hard to surmise. So turning a little bit to domestic influence, I'm talking, of course,
about Taylor Swift, the biggest domestic psyop since Britney Spears.
Last time you were on the podcast, we talked a little bit about, you know, influence operations run by the Pentagon that, you know, do or don't exist.
So have you noticed any shifts like as we enter election year, which is sure to be complicated by the US's foreign policy and involvement in the Middle East?
I've certainly noticed on the part of I think when I think when I was on the show last, I had reported on the creation of a new office within DoD for something called perception management, which is the term of art that they use for certain kinds of psyops.
But I think they're kind of in an awkward position because they were supposed to be revamping this entire superstructure to focus on China, which, you know, whether you believe the U.S.
should have a, you know, global role or not, you know, certainly is more powerful than Iran or, you know, some of these other adversaries.
So they were really trying to reorient around that.
And then now with this whole flare up in the Middle East, if you talk to the strategists in the Pentagon, they are kind of like, this is a kind of outmoded conflict.
We should cut some kind of a deal.
You find surprisingly dovish attitudes within the Pentagon, if only because they think the real threat is in China, and I don't necessarily agree with that, but that was kind of the elite consensus on it.
And so it's like we're kind of in this schizophrenic moment of trying to pivot to Asia, but at the same time having our very retrograde foreign policy, in my opinion, drag us back to this region that we had meant to extricate ourselves from.
The global war on terror was declared essentially over around 2019 during the Trump administration, and they're shifting to what's called great power competition.
Fancy think piece word in the Georgetown University that they use for focusing on superpowers like China, like Russia, and potentially Iran, but in a way from non-state actors of the sort that we fought over the last 20 years during the global war on terror, like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which were still under the authority of to fight.
All of these troops that I mentioned before are still under the anti-ISIS legal coalition.
So it's like the strategic leadership wants to move on, but they're kind of tethered to this old political and legal framework.
I mean, do you feel like there's something to be said about the fact that maybe, you know, asking for better accuracy in picking our enemy that we then pour military funding into the fight against?
Like, I mean, is that even warranted?
Is that outmoded as well?
I mean, do we have that many enemies that we aren't, like, actively creating?
Yeah, no, I think you're right to be skeptical.
I mean, in the case of China, we're so integrated with them economically that I don't think it's going to look like something like Russia, which doesn't, you know, export anywhere near what the Chinese government does.
So to look at them through the framework of some kind of like Formal enemy or something is sort of strange to me.
I don't really know how that's going to work.
But in the case of the region, yeah, we're proliferating enemies right now.
I mean, I just had a story this morning about the airstrike that we conducted in Iraq, which White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said on Friday after the strike, he said, we notified the Iraqis so that they could, you know, make whatever preparations they need to make.
Turns out that was false.
And I had sources telling me that very early on.
I was able to prove this on Monday.
And since the story, the White House has acknowledged that that statement was incorrect.
They didn't give the Iraqis any sort of notification.
The Iraqis summoned the—this is hardly being reported anywhere in the American press as far as I can tell—the Iraqis summoned the U.S.
ambassador, or some senior diplomat, I can't remember who, acting ambassador, to their Ministry of Foreign Affairs and formally issued a complaint citing civilian casualties in relation to this airstrike that they weren't notified of beforehand.
So things are getting really tense in a region which, again, you know, we've been
there at the invitation of the Iraqi government in the past. I would guess we're not
going to see that for very long. But unfortunately, I think there's three deaths. I
mean, this could just be the start of something. Things are certainly not cooling off.
And the logic here is that we are trying to make the world safer for Americans. But it
seems like we are just continuously poking our fingers into hornets' nests and pissing
everybody off and then being like, well, now we need the protection even more.
I mean, is there any end in sight?
Is there any hope that the, you know, as Jake said, the right side of the aisle, the correct, the morally correct side of the aisle, the liberal, Well, if you look at the polling on Israel-Palestine, it does seem like there is not the consensus that there once was.
be involved in everything all the time and try to micromanage every conflict by injecting
it with shadow troops?
Well, if you look at the polling on Israel-Palestine, it does seem like there is not the consensus
that there once was.
I don't mean about support for Israel, but I mean the nature of it.
And so I think you're seeing a pretty dramatic split now again in election year.
It remains to be seen if Biden is going to take that seriously enough to realize that that, you know, imperils his prospects.
But at least on the part of public opinion, I think we're seeing a pretty dramatic shift.
And I think there's more.
I think if the press starts doing its job, and I mean, I can just tell you anecdotally, when I report on these bases, people are like, what?
We're there?
What are we doing there?
People seem annoyed.
Like, Even conservatives are like, wait, what?
And so it's like, I think that skepticism exists, but they need to be given the resources to be able to point that in a certain direction.
Otherwise, it's just this kind of vague distrust of everything.
So for others, what is a kind of, you know, life and death situation of whether or not they're going to get bombed and their skies are just like overall seen as a threatening space that could rain death on them for us is just like, well, maybe it'll affect the the election.
Yeah, that the coalition that they put against the Who thieves in Yemen?
It's literally called Operation Prosperity Guardian.
They're not even hiding it.
It's just to protect global commerce.
Yeah, that's just, that's like, uh, like kind of a one-off Halo game, I feel like.
Didn't they, didn't they rename it something even more euphemistic, but with the same initials?
I think you're thinking of another operation that we have, another coalition that we have for Yemen, because for legal reasons, we have to separate them into different things to pretend like it's defensive in nature.
Sure.
Yeah, Operation Cash Money.
No, people here are cheering for the- I mean, at least anecdotally what I see online.
I mean, you know, I remember during the, you know, well, and still during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, you know, you have liberals posting body counts of Russians and, like, hash marks of how many There is a celebration of violence in the liberal space that feels new to me.
At least it wasn't the case during the Iraq War.
You never saw people posting the body counts from all of these operations like, yeah, we're kicking their asses!
I'm sure you saw some of that in some circles, but I think by and large, you know, most people are so concerned with the election, and just Democrats vs. Republicans, Red Team vs. Blue Team, they are so caught up in that, they believe so wholeheartedly that they are, you know, the good guys, that they have taken the moral high ground, and anybody who thinks otherwise is, you know, some sort of cockroach.
And I don't think people care.
I mean, at least as far as, you know, my sort of cursory understanding of this, is they don't care.
Once they know that they are the good guys, any piece of information that shakes that foundation, they are uninterested in.
Because if they have to admit that the good guys do bad things, then things get complicated.
And we don't want things to get complicated.
We want to feel like we're good, and they're bad, and we know who we're rooting for, and things are clear.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't see this ever ending because I think that, you know, with the introduction of Trump into politics, we always have somebody to point at that is the worst thing.
And not, you know, necessarily be wrong about that.
But what it has done, I think, you know, has given people a sort of free pass to kind of Discard all of these other things that our government has done and continues to do because we have the ultimate enemy and we're going to keep pointing at that.
I mean, that's just what I see.
Are you saying you don't see democracy on the ballot, Jake?
Oh, a loaded question.
No, I don't see democracy on the ballot.
I don't see, I just see, I don't know, two old guys, you know, one not so nice, one pretty nice, you know, at least in front of the cameras.
Oh, you're talking about the nice guy, Genocide Joe?
Yeah, like he, yeah, you know, he's, Generally inoffensive.
Sure, sure, sure.
You know, at least on your on your TV screen.
Oh, JSOC, thanks for the great bombs.
One of the issues as well, I think, is that like America does just have a vested interest in like Palestinian occupation.
Like Israel functioning as a garrison state is profitable for the American arms industry.
Like all the a lot of the funds or maybe all of the funds that like Congress sends to Israel is like basically in like they have to spend that on arms.
It's like Chuck E. Cheese tokens and they can only redeem them at the DoD.
Exactly.
It's like very profitable.
Like I got this whole pocket full of worthless tokens.
I mean, we got to go back to Chuck E. Cheese.
Otherwise, they're just going to sit in my drawer.
So, I mean, I know we've kind of touched on this already, but having spoken about all of this, I mean, what do you think?
Do you think any less conspiracy theorizing is going to be happening this year in the lead up to the election?
Well, what I'm seeing around Israel is an extraordinary and unparalleled amount of secrecy, which again, we have something we can compare this conflict to, to look at it kind of scientifically.
Say, look at the conduct around Ukraine, so much more disclosure.
They were happy to advertise what they were doing.
And then now you have this, and it's extremely awkward for a president that's going to rely on some measure of youth vote to be able to win.
And so the consequence of that is they just don't post anything anymore.
I mean, there's so little that they disclose.
It's crazy.
So to me, the enemy right now is secrecy.
I mean, maybe that's just the perspective of a reporter, but trying to pull this veil back that they've put over, again, very basic questions of what our foreign policy is.
And so long as they continue to do that, people are going to try to make sense
of things as best they can and use heuristics that make sense of things, which unfortunately
are going to mean conspiracy theories. But I guess for me, I think that pushing back
against that secrecy is one way to inoculate people against it instead of just trying to prove kind of
being like, oh, your theory is wrong It's like, well, there's often a reason people have had to kind of grope around in the dark to find out for themselves what happened.
And I think that reason, at least in these questions of foreign policy, is the government didn't explain anything to them.
Yeah, and unfortunately, the dark is the internet, and who knows, like, what you're gonna find on there, you know?
Look, if you go searching for answers on the internet, unless it's like, uh, what temperature does chicken need to be internally, like, so I can eat it?
Like, if you're looking for big answers about the government or the government's involvement in, uh, you know, like, places that are not the United States or anything of that nature, you are going to run into conspiracies, because that's who's asking about the government and what we're up to online.
Unless, of course, you subscribe to Ken's Newsletter!
Ken, where can people find you and your work?
Yes, get inoculated against secrecy at kenklippenstein.substack.com.
Alright, thank you so much for dropping by again and catching us up, Ken.
My pleasure, guys.
Thanks for having me.
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May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's AutoQ.
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