Every four years we gather in this sacred formation of circles to usher in our dark lord. Golden treasure is offered to the Satan Worshiper who can spin around the fastest on the Pommel Horse. Cursed podcast hosts break down the latest in Satanic Panic, Transvestigation, and Underwater Hockey Conspiracy Theories surrounding the 2024 Paris Olympics. How many times will Jake brag about having attended the X-games last year? Which sport tickles Travis’ fancy the most? What other melted conspiracy theories are churning in the shallow water during the hundred-meter freestyle? Join us… or perish.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to podcast mini-series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: http://www.patreon.com/QAA
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 288, Pilled Olympics.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Aker, Julian Field, and Travis View.
The best athletes from 184 countries have gathered in Paris to dazzle the world with their competitive fire and athletic skill.
But we're not a sports podcast, so we're not talking about the Olympics for any good reason.
Some have taken this as a perfect opportunity to let their paranoia consume them.
So today we're going to talk about how the Olympics has inspired, you know, satanic panic, transvestigations, and some less consequential disinformation and conspiracy theories.
So guys, are you watching the Olympics?
I have actually been watching the Olympics.
Quite a bit of it.
I mean, some of it is just a little too weird and specific.
Like pommel horse in gymnastics.
It just looks goofy to me.
But there's other parts of the gymnastics that are really good to watch.
I caught some table tennis last night that was fascinating.
They serve extremely weirdly now in table tennis.
I guess that's the meta.
Yeah.
I actually, I love table tennis.
I mean, it was, it was, it was, it's pretty stunning to watch.
Like when they go on like a really long rally and all of a sudden you see them like five, 10 feet away from the table slamming that thing.
It's pretty impressive.
That's right.
Only thing I've been watching is women's climbing.
It's like the only thing I'm really invested in, as well as basketball, I guess, for the Serbian team.
But it's kind of insane because there's two fields of climbing and one of which is combined lead, which is on rope and then bouldering.
And the other one is speed climbing.
And like speed climbing, in my opinion, is kind of like a fake sport.
Like it's a sport that people who don't climb are like, that would be cool.
They go up the fastest and it's given the same amount of medals.
Like I didn't realize there were so many insane, absurd medals in the Olympics.
Like underwater hockey gets a medal, but like bouldering and lead climbing can't get their own category.
Wait, did you not just make up underwater hockey?
That's real.
I think that's real.
What the hell is underwater hockey?
Listen, we don't need to fact check Liv, but I've never fucking heard of underwater hockey.
Yeah.
That's the name?
Is the speed climbing, is that where they're kind of also like lifted by whoever's at the bottom?
Like they're pulling them up essentially, like at the same time as they're going like really fast?
Or is there nobody really on belay unless they fall?
I think the person at the bottom is not pulling them up, Jake.
They just make sure that if they fall that the rope would not be slack.
Yeah, belaying is hard, especially in those contexts, but I don't think they're getting pulled up all that much.
It'd be hard to pull a person up at that speed.
That's not really a thing.
Yeah, I just wonder if there's a little- because it seems like in some of the events there's a little room for cheating.
Like, I was reading about the speed walking competition.
where people were slowing down the video and basically being like, wait a minute,
these guys are jogging.
And the officials had to come and they'd be like, well, you know, the rules technically is,
you know, if it looks like one foot is on the ground to the naked eye, meaning you can't slow the footage down
with your own eye, then it's perfectly legal.
But basically you have all of these people kind of jogging and I don't know, it just seems like there's a lot of room
for cheating, which I think is funny.
I love rules that are completely arbitrary.
Like, if the vibe is there, then they won't be disqualified.
It's a real sport.
I think the Olympics is faulty because it has everything that we just mentioned.
Cheating, for sure, Jake's correct.
Underwater hockey, not something Liv made up.
But also, there's no podcasting.
Yeah, that's true.
And that's problematic because it means I will never win a gold.
No, the only people who are going to win a gold is Knowledge Fight, who do three-hour episodes covering the most insane rants from Alex Jones.
Well, that's distance podcasting.
I'm a podcast sprinter.
Yeah, I'm like a 100-meter podcasting type guy.
I'm so excited about the... First of all, I've been watching more Olympics this year than I ever have in my entire life, for whatever reason.
And I'm so happy that all my favorite X Games sports are now part of the Olympics.
You can watch biking, you can watch, you know, skateboarding, vert, street, all that stuff.
It's awesome.
I went to the X Games last year.
Okay, we know.
And then you fucking bought a skateboard and immediately hurt your shin.
Oh, did I talk about that on the show?
No, you told me.
I told you, as a friend?
As a friend, who is now using it for podcasting fodder.
Alright, should we get into the satanic panic?
Yeah, we probably need to continue this episode.
I'd be happy just sitting here talking about Olympics with all you guys.
Yeah.
Well folks, the time has come once again to usher in the Prince of Darkness with synchronized diving, beach volleyball, and air pistol shooting.
That's right, every couple years we call the devil back to this earthly realm by spending an exorbitant amount of money on the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, and France 2024 is no exception.
I think it's Paris 2024, but you know, of course you wouldn't know the difference.
You probably think France is the capital of Paris.
Yeah, France is the capital of Ubisoft.
I did see an inordinate amount of clipping in gymnastics.
There were people falling through the mat.
There were people, there were a lot of people T-posing.
Yeah, I saw, yeah, there was a lot of speed climbing on the rooftops of Paris.
This is so stupid because I am about to make an Ubisoft joke.
The ceremony included performances by Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, and Ezio from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed.
Yeah.
In like a big fencing mask, like it didn't even really look like an Assassin's Creed outfit.
He was playing the lute.
Viewers took issue with many elements of the opening ceremonies, including a performance
by French heavy metal band Gojira.
The segment opens with a headless woman, meant to be Marie Antoinette, holding her head with
hair made of flame singing, Ah, It'll Be Fine in French.
Yeah.
Julian, I mean, is this a band you're familiar with or?
I am not familiar with a lot of French heavy metal.
I admit that I have just never been into metal, other than maybe my high school new metal phase, where I was listening to like Korn, Tool, Limp Bizkit, which many metalheads will say, that's not metal.
And so I don't count myself in their numbers.
But respect for Gojira for performing what they did and the way they did.
Fun fact, the lead singer of Puddle of Mud was recently in a SWAT standoff in Burbank, California.
Apparently barricaded himself inside of his car.
That's the lead singer of Puddle of Mud.
Okay.
Probably also not metal.
Awesome.
Two real metal guys.
This is not that.
I've just won, I've won negative gold medals for information today.
Yeah, they're searching your house to find any medals they can take away from you.
So, the performance from Gojira features lots of pyrotechnics, heavy metal music, so I can kind of understand why people are clutching their pearls, but had anyone done merely an ounce of research, they would have discovered that the song pays homage to the French Revolution, which was heavily influenced by the American Revolution, which you would think the 1776ers would be into.
No, I think the trad, like, Americans are now like, killing monarchists is bad.
Like, why don't we think of the poor lady, Mary Antoinette, all the brutal mob, basically like a woke mob, went and killed her.
How could they decapitate our kings?
And queens?
Others took issue with some bull statues seen and circled during the opening ceremonies and the games themselves, as well as a prominent moment where a mechanical horse and rider stride across a body of water.
People claim that this was meant to signify the passage from Revelations, Behold a Pale Horse, or the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Death.
This is the Torchbearer at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Their spectacle bears a striking resemblance to the apocalyptic scene from the 2003 movie, The Animatrix, which tells the story of how mankind fell to the machines.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to unalive with sword and with hunger and with unaliveness
and with the beasts of the earth.
The horse was ridden up the same level by a mast officer of the gendarmerie,
a branch of the French armed forces responsible for public safety, policing and maintaining order.
They operate both as a military force and a police force.
According to the show's designers, the gendarmerie officer riding the horse symbolizes the strength, resilience and unity of the Olympic spirit, while underscoring the importance of security and order during such a significant international event.
Okay, that is so good.
We're so cooked.
How cooked is that?
I thought for sure they were gonna be like, oh yes, this passage from the Bible, from Revelations, but it was like a scene from the Animatrix?
You gotta be kidding me.
My favorite novel is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of an Unaliveness Foretold.
Found Alive is funny because, like, there's no actual evidence that saying, like, death or kill will, like, destroy your video in the algorithm.
There's, like, some people kind of felt that way, and so everyone has just started to do that now.
It's like, oh, well, you know, if it is the case, then we want our video to be boosted on the algo.
Right.
You know, you want people to know that the fucking Paris Olympics was a reference to the Animatrix movie.
Which, the idea of a mechanical horse with a rider, yeah, that is something that only the Animatrix could bring into our culture.
It just shows that all these people have insanely shallow knowledge of anything, even entertainment.
Even entertainment, like the most surface-level pop culture entertainment, they have a very limited pool of.
Yeah, because even, like, the bull as well, like, that's, like, perfectly fine Christian Catholic imagery within, like, medieval early modern Europe.
There's no... It's not satanic.
Like, yeah.
Guy on horse.
Wow.
Sounds like a satanic thing.
See, I thought that the horse looked much more like the opening credits of the HBO Westworld series.
I thought that maybe there was going to be some...
That looked closer to me, but the Animatrix?
The Animatrix, which I owned on DVD by the way.
Jesus Christ.
I don't know why I had it, but I know we had the Animatrix on DVD.
Maybe my dad got it.
Jake is like, okay, it seems like these people are ankle deep in culture.
He's like, what if I were hovering like an inch above the water somehow?
Yeah, what if I were on Marty McFly's hoverboard, stranded in the middle of the lake, hovering just a couple centimeters off of the water?
Yeah.
Now, all of this is more than enough to coax the Antichrist out of retirement.
However, these events did not seem to draw the majority horror of Republicans, MAGA extremists, or ESPN commentators.
Nope.
Instead, it was something much more terrifying, as if they had been ripped from the pages of H.P.
Lovecraft himself.
Although I will say, if H.P.
Lovecraft knew what drag queens were, he would be terrified of them.
He would write an entire book about that.
Yeah, I was gonna say, like, H.P.
Lovecraft is insanely racist.
H.P.
Lovecraft was afraid of Italians.
Thousands of angry Olympic viewers flocked to social media to express their outrage that the opening ceremony allegedly depicted a representation of The Last Supper painting that featured women and other folks who were dressed in drag.
According to the Olympics Opening Ceremony producers and choreographers, the performance wasn't meant to mimic or mock da Vinci's painting in any way.
Anne Deschamps, the 2024 Olympics spokesperson, issued this statement.
Clearly, there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.
On the contrary, I think concerning the Thomas Jolie drag performance, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance.
Looking at the results of the polls that we shared, we believe that this ambition was achieved.
If people have taken any offense, we are of course really, really sorry.
Leave it to the French to be like, oh, this like totally insane belief that you have about what we did.
If you if you did think that, we are so sorry.
We're so sorry that your brain is poisoned.
I mean, the guy who was kind of at the center of that is Philippe Catherine, who's like a Kind of legendary French musical act and general kind of like art whack job and freak.
He's, he's awesome.
Like he's amazing.
He's kind of a, he's a real core part of French culture.
He's like, uh, I guess like an equivalent somewhat, this is not exact, but like a John Waters kind of figure where.
Everyone knows and recognizes him, and he's known for always being out on a limb and bringing fresh weirdness to the scene, which is cool and awesome, and we love that in art, of course.
Not if we're gonna be trying to find Satan and Lucifer everywhere, I suppose.
Yeah, this is the guy who was painted in blue and had the Ring of Flowers crown.
Yeah, totally pleasant.
The segment's designer, Thomas Jolie, also responded, saying he wasn't drawing inspiration from The Last Supper at all, but instead the Greek god Dionysus and pagan festivals meant to honor the Olympians.
In fact, if you watch the segment a little more closely, the group of performers aren't even behind a table.
It's actually just a raised platform.
Outraged conservatives also pointed to the crown worn by the performer positioned center stage, claiming that she was wearing a halo, and this was a direct reference to Christ and the Last Supper.
And while it is true that many paintings of Jesus depict him with a halo, Da Vinci's Last Supper does not.
Nevertheless, thousands of people began sharing the clip, mocking the performance, and drawing up wild conspiracy theories.
Understandably, NBC filed copyright takedowns on some of the clips.
After all, the Olympics are a peacock exclusive now, prompting Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to demand the satanic clips be restored so they could be shared far and wide.
The French Olympic Committee has been hard at work taking down videos of their satanic, trans, and occult opening ceremonies claiming copyright laws.
It's our First Amendment right to share these videos and our outright outrage over the anti-Christian Olympic opening ceremonies.
See, if I really thought that these videos represented satanic, trans, and occult symbolism, I simply would not share them.
That would not be very Christian of me.
I wouldn't be spreading the, you know, like culturally diseased satanic content.
But we know what this is.
It's just a content mill.
And if you can't feed it clips, then it doesn't work.
Yeah, it is great that, like, politicians are now, like, Facebook conspiracy moms.
Marjorie Taylor Greene in the most literal sense.
Also, like, it was the Olympic opening ceremony.
I think people saw it.
Like, they're trying to silence us from showing this clip that millions of people have already watched.
Yes.
God forbid you have to pay $7.99 and watch it, you know, on streaming services.
I also think that she's invented a new tongue twister here.
Outright outrage over the anti-Christian Olympic opening ceremonies.
She sells seashells by the seashore.
But yeah, I thought that the satanic rituals and stuff were kind of like the ring, right?
Like if you watch it, you know, you invite Satan into your home.
So I thought that this was funny, the idea that she's like, we demand the satanic ritual be restored so it can be shared far and wide.
She wants to bake.
It's ridiculous.
She wants to bake.
Everyone has now internalized the idea that baking is like praxis.
As if you could memory hole the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.
Yeah, big risk there.
You meet a guy in a dark alley, he opens his trench coat, he goes, hey, I got a couple of raw VHSs right here.
The 2024 opening Olympic ceremony, very rare.
That was a, uh, Strange Days, a weird Strange Days reference, which nobody'll get, which, ah, who cares?
But it wasn't just pilled politicians that were disappointed in the Olympics' attempt to draw the world into hellish fire and brimstone.
ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith took to the airwaves to condemn the Feast of Dionysus as well.
Liv, have you seen this?
No, I haven't.
Oh, this is fucking insane!
Okay, Julian, please, a clip if you would.
So why didn't you tell us beforehand?
Surely you must have had an idea that people would have reacted to this.
You had conservatives talking about how they had their children watching the opening ceremonies and didn't know that's what they were gonna see!
And I saw some of the dancing.
I'm an adult.
I saw some of the dancing that was going out there.
I saw somebody, just because you paint somebody in blue don't mean they ain't naked!
That person that was in blue was naked!
Am I lying?
Am I lying?
They were naked!
There was no warning here.
It's not required for the adults.
I get that part.
But opening ceremony of the Olympics, you know a bunch of people were watching that with their children.
And some people don't want their children seeing that.
Whether you like it or not, folks have a right to want their children to see and not see what they choose.
I don't have a problem.
Remember, I'm a conservative with my dollars.
I'm a liberal every other way.
I'm liberal.
I get it.
I'm cool.
But I know tens of millions of conservatives won't be.
Stephen A. Smith is awesome.
Yeah, I'm just fucking outraged on behalf.
Like, oh, the children see the big man in blue and he's on a food platter.
They're going to think it's okay to eat big men in blue and that he's naked.
And the children, the children, they saw somebody gay.
They saw somebody that's wearing a woman's outfit, but they're a man.
Like a criticism that amounts to basically saying that like the blue man group is immoral.
This dumb fuck would have been on the side of the Shakespearean theater, protesting the fucking men playing women.
Fuck, man.
God, America's just so addicted to being outraged on camera.
Okay, everybody, let me get you started here.
What are we pissed off about today?
Hey, are you enjoying yourself?
Are you having a good time?
Are you enjoying your family?
I don't think so.
See, I am not against gay people, but I just don't want other people who don't like gay people to have to see them.
That's such a special- Steve and I always have, like, the most special insane texts.
And, like, I'm fine with this as a liberal, but, like, have we considered conservatives have feelings too?
It's, like, amazing.
Oh, yeah.
People should be able to control the images in their television.
People's feedback should be taken into account, uh, at all times.
Like, can you fucking imagine if we followed that?
They would have the censorship they've been complaining of.
Also, isn't being a conservative with your dollars and a liberal every other way just a libertarian?
Being a conservative with your dollars, yes.
I fund anti-trans groups.
But I'm liberal because I think that women should have sex with me before marriage.
Moving on, one TikTok influencer suggested that Paris was soon punished by God with a massive blackout following the
opening ceremony.
God himself sent a message after the opening ceremony of the Olympics where the Last Supper was mocked.
Paris reportedly experienced torrent rains and a citywide power outage after the opening ceremony.
Approximately 85,000 people were affected by the blackout except for one building.
This church, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
You can see here in this picture that the whole section of this city was completely blacked out except for this church.
How crazy is that?
It says in the Word of God that God cannot be mocked.
So what do you think?
Is this God giving a sign and showing himself after they mocked Jesus at the opening ceremony?
I like the idea that like the first sign we've had of like God's like justice and like anger is just like that he's mad about that specific like opening ceremony.
You can see in the picture of Montmartre that the fucking neighborhood is on!
You can see the lights in people's homes!
It's also night, by the way, so people don't all have their lights on.
Some people are fucking sleeping because they don't care about the fucking Olympics.
Then you have one photo from one angle of, like, one street in a totally different part of Paris.
Jesus Christ, man.
So this same conspiracy was also shared by Robbie Starbuck, a far-right influencer and former music video director on X. He writes, During the power outage in Paris, notice the thing that's still fully lit, Sacré-Cœur Church.
Zoom in on the dark photo.
Incredible find by at Galahad of Malta, especially in context of the Olympics anti-Christian opening.
No, it is not a find, buddy.
I mean, first of all, the first picture.
Even the neighborhood that you say is off!
I can see lights in the bottom right corner!
There are multiple lights in that photo, you idiot!
Also, the other image that he shares in his tweet is a stock photo image that was uploaded to Getty Images in October of 2016.
And in the image on the left, when you zoom in on the church like Julian mentioned, the buildings around it still have power.
There's also power on the buildings in the foreground in a totally different neighborhood, which I think that's, I think this might actually be Belleville, which is my neighborhood.
Oh, maybe not.
Oh, cool.
It was also not a massive power outage as conspiracy theorists claimed, but just a small section of the power grid that was back up after 10 minutes.
This was confirmed by Anitis, the company responsible for the portion of the grid that went down.
They published this statement on Twitter.
Yesterday evening at 11.30 pm, a network incident due to a technical anomaly caused power cuts in several areas of Paris.
All customers were restored in 10 minutes at most.
You really have like an Air Canada like announcer voice in French there.
That's right.
That's good.
That's right.
So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a Q&A.
So, we're going to be doing a Q&A.
So, we're going to be doing a little bit of a Q&A.
That's right.
So this says, last night at 1130, God himself took out all of the power.
It took 300 days for it to come back.
In those days of darkness, we resorted to cannibalism.
Your family is in danger, even as far as the United States.
The first person that we ate, his name, Robbie Starbuck.
We drank him like a good cup of coffee.
We drank his blood like a cold brew with a cold foam on the top.
I don't know, like if the punishment for the anti-christian, supposedly anti-christian opening ceremonies was a temporary inconvenience that in the middle of the night that most people did not notice, I don't know.
I feel like this God's not as wrathful as I've been led to believe.
Yeah.
Some people woke up and realized that their porn torrents had been interrupted in the night.
Do you know what that does to French society?
One of the angels is like, come on father, punish these heathens.
Bring down your wrath.
And God's like, 10 minutes, no internet.
I can do 10 minutes on one part of the power grid in Paris.
10 minutes.
Listen, I'm not what I used to be.
The devil is winning this war.
I'm so tired.
You put them in time out.
So, by the way, this isn't the first time the Olympic ceremony has ginned up satanic panic.
In fact, sometimes Olympic opening ceremony conspiracies can transcend space and time.
For example, people claiming that the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics predicted the COVID-19 pandemic.
In actuality, the performance featuring nurses in hospital beds was meant to honor the NHS, or Britain's National Health Service.
COVID was actually the first time that nurses in hospital beds existed.
They didn't do that beforehand.
We're hearing the devil is winning and nurses now have big boobs, push-up bras, and it's slightly too open.
And then they come to take care of the patient, but instead of helping them, they just have sex with them.
Uh, we're getting reports, uh, that a, uh, nurse, uh, wearing Joker makeup is standing outside of a prominent children's hospital.
God damn, man.
These people are really just, they're just, they're just anything.
You can't, you can't feed them anything.
Stop watching content.
You have a content timeout.
Maybe God was right.
Yeah, plunge us all into the dark ages.
He needed to target Robbie's Starbucks house.
So, Satanic Panic isn't the only thing on the menu at the Paris Olympics.
More mundane-slash-kind-of-fun conspiracy theories have been circulating on social media as well.
I know this because my partner has become quote-unquote Olympics obsessed, like many of us, which I believe is due to the sheer amount of fantastic coverage provided by N*****.
Now Travis and I were talking about this the other day and perhaps this has led to the reason I've watched so much Olympics, we all have watched so much Olympics this year, is that the **** and they're not paying, I'm not doing an advertisement.
For fuck's sake Jake!
Don't do it then, let's just move on.
Then what the **** are you doing?
Let's not play brands and products that do not pay us.
The app is so good, it's got every sport you could want, it's right there!
No, you don't have to lick the boots of the product.
Also, I think that the tiles are badly organized, it's hard to fucking find content.
No, it's not that good.
Okay, uh, Corey, can you beep out when I say n*****?
Yes, beep it out again when he said it the second time there.
Okay, great.
Good.
Just imagine that Jake was saying that the Olympics have been broadcasted on nWord.
Okay.
Come on!
I think God's gonna send you a ten minute blackout.
We have to cut him out.
Cut him out because he was doing slurs.
Now, if you can imagine an Olympic sport, it's ready for you, on demand.
This led to a particularly hilarious evening in the Rakitansky household, where my wife was blown away at my knowledge of BMX freestyle trick names.
Now, I could only hold out for so long before admitting that I had learned about such things as a tailwhip, a can-can, and tabletop from various extreme sports video games over the years.
Specifically, 2Xtreme, Matt Hoffman's Pro BMX, and Ubisoft's recent Riders Republic.
Anyways, on to the conspiracies.
My lord.
You know, you have that like Brett Easton Ellis like thing where like an American Psycho, he'll write down the name of every song that plays or every product that he uses, except you don't do it like out of style.
It's just how your mind works.
Yeah, which makes it better.
Which makes it better that there's no style.
You're like the nicest version of Patrick Bateman.
Oh boy, I should talk to my therapist about that.
You should talk to your therapist about a skincare routine.
And returning those videotapes.
The Olympics- My therapist just texted me, that's funny.
The Olympics subreddit is awash with scandals and controversies, with users discussing everything from alleged hergy-bargy going on under the Sand River Bridge during the men's and women's triathlon, to the young pole vaulter whose dreams of a gold medal were crushed by his own gigantic penis.
That's right!
I saw that.
Oh, that was funny.
One of the more interesting theories to go viral was the conspiracy that Turkey, low on athletes but desperate for an Olympic medal, sent a 51-year-old hitman to compete in the Games.
Yes!
He was so cool.
He was so awesome.
He was awesome.
Let's talk about him.
Now, by the way, this is total bullshit.
The man, Yusef Disik, has been a part of Turkey's Olympic delegation since 2008, okay?
The event was the 10-meter air pistol, a sport I didn't even know existed, and one that, with a little practice, might be the only way to earn my family a coveted Olympic medal.
These guns that they use are fucking insane.
They look like something out of Robocop or Blade Runner.
Yeah, it was cool because everyone else is super high-tech.
They have a little rack above their eyebrows that block one eye and then get rid of blur in the other one.
They all look very high-tech, and this guy just looked like a dude.
He had both his eyes open and was just holding up his pants in his pocket, just leaning back.
Amazing.
Yusuf rolls up.
He's wearing a t-shirt, black warm-up pants, no gear besides his prescription glasses, and a pair of small yellow earplugs.
Yeah, and he's not aiming with one eye.
He aims with both eyes open, which is awesome.
He looked like he had literally wandered off the street, picked up a pistol, and won a silver medal at the Olympics.
His demeanor was so casual that social media users suggested that Yusuf, having been a professional hitman all his life, could have easily taken the gold, but chose to play silver so as not to draw too much attention.
For those who are big fans of Yusuf and the Turkish air pistol team at large, fear not.
He told Turkish media he fully intends on going for the gold in the 2028 Olympics set to take place in Los Angeles.
So, guys, we can go see him.
Not Liv, but my fellow Los Angeleans.
Why would Liv not be allowed in LA?
Well, I don't know.
I don't know if we want to talk about her charges.
That pesky no-fly list.
I had a buddy once, a Canadian guy who was on the no-fly list for America and I asked him why and he was like, ah buddy, I was a real fuck-up as a kid.
He had a tattoo on his shoulder that was like, W-G-A-C-A.
It was almost like where we go when we go out, but I asked him, I was like, what is that?
I was like, what does your tattoo stand for?
And he goes, what goes around comes around, bud.
Amazing.
Anyway, no fly list.
I hope maybe he's been let in now.
This was not the same guy who fucked his, like, wrestling, uh, figurine thing?
No, no different guy.
But this guy wanted to become a wrestler.
He told me once that his dream- his dream was to shave a- to grow his hair out really long, kind of like Travis' length, and then shave a bald circle in the top so that he could look like a quote, rude barbarian.
This guy got banned from entering America for being too Canadian.
Yeah.
To, like, stay there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He threw his cousin through a window at Wasega Beach.
He tried to like smuggle a cube of Molson's onto a plane.
Another topic of great interest online was the depth of the Olympic swimming pools.
Now, this year in Paris, the pool used for the swimming events was measured at only 2.2 meters.
This is quite a bit more shallow than the suggested 3.0 meters or even 2.5 meters, which is to be considered the minimal depth of Olympic swimming pools as outlined by FINA, the sports governing body.
What this means is that the swimmers overall will be moving slower due to the shallow water being slightly more choppy.
And there were people discussing this kind of in the mainstream media as well about how the swimmers times were slower than to be expected.
None of the athletes have really complained about the depth of the pool as everyone is still competing in the same conditions.
But some users on social media wondered if the shallow pool was a measure put in place by shadowy forces to restrict the number of world records broken.
In 2008 at the Beijing Olympics, a staggering 23 world records were broken, leading the governing committee to consider strict guidelines concerning the fabric of the swimmer's attire and the depth of the pools.
This one is kind of weird to me because if you're the Olympics, wouldn't you want lots of records to be broken?
Wait, so they're like nerfing the swimmers?
Yes, yes, yes, it's getting nerfed, yeah.
That's such a funny way to think about it.
Yeah, the pool's getting nerfed.
But it was approved.
It was a temporary pool that was built in La Défense Stadium or whatever.
And it was approved by the Olympic Committee.
Apparently, another interesting fact is you can't have the pools too deep because it can mess with the swimmers' minds if they look down and the water is too deep beneath them.
I thought that was really interesting.
They get scared.
Yeah, they get too scared.
My final fun conspiracy theory revolves around a broken paddle during a table tennis match.
So, unusual circumstances led to Chinese table tennis star Wang Shukun getting his paddle broken.
He had just won the gold medal in mixed doubles and was raising the Chinese flag when his paddle was broken by a photographer.
And there was speculation online that this was a targeted attack.
A video of the incident published by Chinese Phoenix TV News on social media prompted followers to attempt to piece together events, posting screen grabs, which they suggested showed the incident may have been deliberate.
Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site, was also abuzz with speculation that the bat may have been taken out of Wang's kit bag in a targeted attack by a rival nation.
Some social media accounts, curiously with no followers or previous posts, pointed blame at one photographer in particular.
So Wang then went on to lose the singles event the next day, but he refused to blame it on the broken paddle.
But everybody was baking this.
They were trying to bake from different angles.
How did his paddle get out of the bag?
Yeah, this is just illustrative of the waning power of the CIA.
They can only afford to break a guy's paddle between events.
Used to be they could break the paddle in the middle of the event and actually affect the outcome.
So that's it for my kind of, you know, not so fun conspiracy theories.
And then your kind of more standard, kind of fun ones.
You know, how conspiracies used to be before everything went to shit.
Yeah, we used to be able to accuse poor Turkish guys of being hitmen.
And now we can't have fun anymore.
Now, for my segment, I want to discuss a disinformation campaign that was aimed at
the Olympics that was not successful at all.
And that is the fake documentary called Olympics has fallen.
At least, I'm willing to declare this not successful because it doesn't appear that, like, any American conspiracy theorist picked up on it, even like the most gullible ones.
So, according to the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center, this particular documentary was produced by a Kremlin-aligned group known as Storm 1679.
I don't know where they get these names.
Just, you know, these cybersecurity people give great names to these people who produce disinformation.
This particular group was previously known to disinformation researchers
because they had tricked some Hollywood actors into making these cameo videos.
So cameo the site where you can, like, you know, ask sometimes some famous actors to record a short video
about, you know, usually most every topic you can imagine.
So they got these actors to make a video directed at someone named Vladimir and to encourage this person
to get help with a substance abuse problem.
And then Storm 1679, this group, edited the videos to make it seem like the celebrities
were talking about a substance abuse problem suffered by Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
So it's just part of a smear campaign.
I do like how that one could also work against Putin.
Yeah, yeah.
Good point.
They didn't think that through too well.
They're insulting Vlad the Impaler.
Famously innocent.
One of the biggest celebrities to fall victim to this was Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood.
And this is the video they produced to make it seem like Elijah Wood was talking about Zelensky's supposed substance abuse problem.
I, uh, run into him at my local little, like, uh, specialty, uh, grocery store thing.
It's pretty cool.
He seems nice.
Elijah Wood?
Yeah.
Oh, I love him.
Vladimir.
Hi.
Elijah here.
I hope this finds you happy, healthy, and well.
This is so weak.
Honestly, this is incredibly weak-sauce shit.
I've seen so much funnier uses of cameo to trick celebrities into saying shit that they don't want to.
help. This is so weak. This is terrible. Honestly, this is incredible weak sauce shit. Like I've
seen so much funnier uses of cameo to like trick celebrities into saying shit that they
don't want to. And like there's like a cut in the middle.
Yeah, extremely bad. Yeah.
This is exactly the level of effort we saw in the memes that, as we all know, won Donald Trump the presidency in 2016.
So in June of 2023, Storm 1679 circulated a fake documentary called Olympics Has Fallen.
And on the surface level, it appears to be a documentary produced by Netflix and narrated by Tom Cruise, which criticizes, you know, Olympics leadership as corrupt.
In reality, Netflix had no involvement in it, and it uses a deep faked Tom Cruise voiceover.
So I'm going to play the intro of that fake documentary, and I have a feeling that part of the reason why it didn't take off is that the fake Tom Cruise voice speaks kind of awkwardly, and it gets even biographical details about Tom Cruise wrong.
Hi, everyone.
It's me, Tom Cruise, the actor.
But hardly anyone knows that for a long time, I had my heart set on a career in sports that might have become serious if not for the severe knee injury.
I believe it's my ardent love for sport that makes me so good in action movies.
That's why watching how the corrupt officials who seized the sport Olympus are gradually turning one of the greatest passions of my life into an instrument for siphoning off money is beyond bearable.
I mean, I see how someone like incredibly old Facebook grandma would fall for this, because I don't know, like there are some like AI generated Facebook pages that like obviously look fake, that like a bunch of people believe.
But it is just yeah, it's uninspired.
Yeah, I don't think I have a feeling Tom Cruise has never once in his life said, it's me, Tom Cruise, the actor.
It's like it starts with the very first words are very strange and awkward.
It's a very ESL kind of produce.
You need you need a guy on the team who's like good with like writing scripts, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
It's like, I don't know.
I feel like feel like who's ever producing these fake videos.
We're like, oh, you know, we need to we need to find a way to to fool people.
You know, Americans love celebrities.
Let's find a way to get videos of celebrities.
And they can't quite get it right.
They can't quite figure out how to use celebrity in order to boost the credibility of the fake content they're producing.
They went too big.
They got too big of a star for their conspiracy fake documentary.
It's hard to believe.
You know, if they had gone for somebody, you know, a little bit more B-tier or C-tier, you know, C-tier celebrity even, or a stuntman maybe who worked on one of Tom Cruise's movies, I think it would be a little bit more believable.
But to get Cruise himself?
Yeah, I can see why this one probably didn't do too well, despite the fact that the production for the most, you know, for your average conspiracy slop is decent.
I mean, they got the high res Netflix logo at the beginning.
I mean, that's something.
They have the B-roll, but like they don't have like there are some like AI videos I've seen where they have the mouth moving with it.
And it's like not honestly all that bad.
I can see people falling for it, but they didn't.
They didn't.
I don't think they were able to go for that high level budget, I guess.
Yeah, they made a weird decision at the very beginning where they must have seen they were like, oh, the mouth isn't moving properly.
So instead, they just do like a very extreme close up on Tom Cruise's like the top half of his face, like his nose upward.
And the resolution, like from whatever video they tried to get, like isn't that great.
So when they zoom in, it gets real pixelated and bad.
Which is crazy because, like, some of the best deepfakes have involved Tom Cruise.
There's that guy who's, like, so good at basically faking that he looks like Tom Cruise by just swapping out his face because he has a similar physique.
But yeah, no, this is low-effort shit.
Low-effort slop.
Yeah, pretty terrible.
By the way, I just checked into it's like, we was talking about like, what, Tom Cruise wanted to be an athlete?
Knee injury?
What the hell is he talking about?
And this is all bullshit.
So I so I checked into it.
So the height of Tom Cruise's athletic career was playing football for his high school, for his high school's varsity team as a linebacker, but he was cut from the squad after getting caught drinking beer before a game.
Ooh!
And at the age of 18, he moved to New York City to pursue acting.
So this idea that he was like, oh, he wanted to be an athlete, but he got a knee injury appears to be just made up.
I don't know why the fuck they decided to just make something up and then have a really awkward speaking style.
It's like, you're right.
It is trash.
They kicked me off the squad.
They kicked me off the squad.
For what?
I was drinking beers.
I was drinking beers before the game.
It feels like a washed-up version of, like, when the Indonesian president was, like, blackmailed with, like, a fake sex tape made by the CIA.
But instead of this one, it's like, oh, this is obviously fake.
No one is believing this.
Mm hmm.
So the IOC succeeded in having this fake documentary removed from YouTube, but it did remain available on other apps like Telegram.
But despite that, I really hadn't seen any evidence it was noticed by even the most gullible American conspiracy theorists.
I mean, it's funny to imagine some Russian group trying to figure out how to dupe Americans, which, you know, doesn't seem like it should be too hard.
But having just a miserable time with a celebrity angle.
Just goes to show you that not every piece of misinformation that the Russians crank out is capable of capturing the attention of millions of Americans.
Sometimes, just like all content creators, sometimes you shit out a dud.
Of course, I also want to touch on the insane online gender controversy regarding the Algerian Olympic boxer Iman Khalif.
So she's someone who is like always identified as a woman who is a female listed on her birth certificate, has boxed competitively for six years with no issues, but she was subjected to accusations that she is a man or possibly transgender from a bunch of paranoid weirdos, including JK Rowling.
So this was Just widespread.
The accusation initially came from a controversial boxing organization, which is not recognized by the International Olympics Committee, and it is allegedly based on some tests, the details of which have not been released.
So that organization is the International Boxing Association, or the IBA, and it's primarily supported by the Russian energy company Gazprom.
They don't test for chromosomes because there are instances where, like, cisgender women who, like, you know, have functioning uterus also just have XY chromosomes.
to the Russian news agency TASS last year that Haleph had XY chromosomes,
but Kremlin did not disclose testing details or evidence of this claim.
They don't test for chromosomes because there are instances where like cisgender women
who like, you know, have functioning uterus also just have XY chromosomes.
Like it just, it happens sometimes.
Yeah, so it would be irrelevant even if we had more details about what exactly happened.
Kremlin have also told reporters that the tests administered on Halef showed elevated testosterone levels, and that also would be irrelevant even if they presented Details of a test.
So this the statement also contradicts a July 31st IBA statement stating that Halef was not subject to a testosterone exam for the World Boxing Championships and instead put through a separate test that found that she had a competitive advantages over other women athletes.
Don't know what that means.
So, the International Olympic Committee spokesman, Mark Adams, explained why they rejected both the IBA and this testing entirely by saying this.
The whole process is flawed.
From the conception of the test, to how the test was shared with us, to how the tests have become public, it's so flawed that it's impossible to engage with.
So this long sort of uproar on social media is based upon absolutely nothing substantive.
But it basically, you know, led to, I don't know, what's really concerning about me is that seems like this is like the most mainstream I've ever seen, like transvestigations.
And, you know, that is a dark, dark road for, you know, for everyone involved.
It is unfortunate that a lot of concern for transphobia can't just be related to, like, how it negatively affects trans women, that we have to be like, oh yeah, no, cis women are also going to be negatively affected by this.
Like, more cis women will be, like, attacked in women's bathrooms because they're perceived as more masculine, etc.
But yeah, I mean, it's only really gonna get worse.
And the metric for women's sports, like, where it's like, oh, she has an unfair advantage, is so fascinating to me, obviously.
Because, like, in men's sports, no one would ever discuss, like, Phelps, for instance, who has just a multitude of, like, incredible biological advantages in swimming from being disqualified.
Right, or like a basketball player who's 7'2".
Nobody's talking about Michael Phelps' beautiful pussy.
Exactly.
Extremely unfair.
The video that was like being shared by like right-wing weirdos like basically being like look at look at how hard she like look at how hard she hits like you know there's something up here it was a video where the opposing boxer had like completely left their jaw open and so of course just got absolutely rocked and I saw people people commenting on it who actually understand the sport and they're like no the She just left her jaw completely wide open for the hook, and so it connected really hard.
Amon also doesn't have some perfect record.
No, she gets beaten all the time!
I think that what we can underestimate here is that these people have a profound hatred for trans people, but they also have a profound hatred for women.
So that hatred, there's plenty to go around, folks.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
It just becomes a contest of enforcing some image of what femininity means, also based upon white Western beauty standards.
There's a reason why all these scandals are happening to non-white women, primarily.
It's like, this is how she looks, so I don't think that she's a woman.
I mean, Transvestigation is so funny.
It always just goes so far and gets so many things wrong.
Like, there's been a thing spreading that Kyle Rittenhouse is a woman.
Like, getting a lot of traction.
It's just, they're just psychotic.
And it all started when I think he endorsed Ron Paul, which is very funny, instead of Trump.
They're like, oh, that's a woman.
That's a woman.
I knew it.
And also Trump saying like he should have went to jail right after that.
Yeah, that's so awesome.
I mean, you love to see these people turning on each other.
But yeah, the real obviously the real victims here are going to be trans people.
And it's like once in a while there'll be like a stray bullet for cis women.
And, you know, there'll be probably more attention on that than just the everyday hatred and You know, injustice is done to trans women, trans men, trans non-binary people, just anybody that even remotely falls in that category or identifies that way, like they're going to be and have been targeted so much.
But then we we get to see it surface to the top of the media way more when it's something like this.
It was interesting because you see some transphobes who are cornered about the idea of like, oh, you know, she was assigned female at birth.
She has like female genitalia.
And they're like, oh, but, you know, his testosterone levels are super high.
And so therefore, like, which is a weird idea that like, OK, I guess people who were assigned female at birth who have high testosterone levels are men now, which I guess is like would be affirming to like a bunch of trans men.
But like, I guess they've done it exogenously, so it doesn't count.
There are genuinely a growing number of people who are just kind of like Tightening the definition of womanhood and who genuinely are openly fine with, like, contextualizing people like Iman as, like, not women, even if they know all the actual details.
They're like, no, that's fine.
Like, the social world I live in, I cannot accept someone who looks like that being considered a woman, having the social legal status of womanhood.
So it is genuinely coming for more people, I think.
Transphobia.
Which is so fucked up to think that some like idiot sitting in their easy chair, you know, scrolling through, you know, scrolling through the Olympics streaming app has become the arbiter of, uh, you know, they can, they know what gender is and they know what it looks like one way or the other.
I mean, it's just to even have that thought process and go like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
I was enjoying this sporting competition, but now there's something like something has gotten in the way.
And it's something that I have, I have seen with my own eyes.
I am studying the dick print.
I am studying the camel toe.
And I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer appreciate the Olympics.
Wow, folks.
Well, don't forget to inspect each other's genitals.
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May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
You are all gold medalists in our hearts.
We have autocued content based on your preferences.
We are all gold medalists in our hearts.
Rome.
What the fuck?
You can't get any more plain in sight, bro.
It's right in your fucking face.
They do it purposely, dude.
I know you're gonna get some thinking, oh, no, no, that's just art.
Art.
You're mocking Jesus, bro.
Like, they mock God all the time.
It's right in your fucking face.
Like, whoever doesn't think this, their head is so far up their ass.
I remember as a kid, the Olympics used to be fucking cool to watch.
I will not watch any of that shit anymore.
I don't give a fuck.
Like, fuck all of them.
I don't give a fuck if you United States wins.
They just mock God all the time.
Fuck the people in Paris.
Fuck all the countries.
Fuck them all.
Like, this shit is out of hand.
The only thing is, they have to make it gay too, right?
