Travis has returned from the mountains and claims he’s touched so much grass that he’s considering never going outside again. This is a good thing, because there’s lots of horrible news to catch up on – including corrupt county clerk Tina Peters’ voter fraud trial reaching its ultimate conclusion (it brings us no joy), and the richest person in the world going all in on Trump and Dark Maga.
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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.
if you're hearing this well done You found a way to connect to the internet.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 297.
Tina Peters, the Tesla CEO, and Trump.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Liv Aker, and Travis View.
Hello, beautiful QAA listeners.
It's so good to be back.
I just returned from doing some hiking and sightseeing around the Sierra Nevada, which was lovely.
I've lived in the state my whole life.
Before now, I haven't been able to see some of the nicer parts of it.
I hiked Ulta Peak.
Very, very challenging. It's about 11,200 feet at the top.
Wow. Yeah, I don't know if you've experienced altitude sickness.
It's... It affects everyone differently.
It just makes me sluggish.
I move at about 0.3 miles per hour.
Very, very slow. You know, the only time I really experienced it recently was on stage at the QAA live show in Boulder, Colorado, where I started to get lightheaded because my Marjorie Taylor Greene story was so fucking long.
And I hadn't divvied up the parts properly because I was like, We usually do this in a small studio with nobody watching.
And I ran out of air, basically had a panic attack, and made the decision on stage that I was okay if I died in front of a couple hundred of our listeners.
You needed to train with one of those high-altitude masks.
Yeah. Like basketball players prepare to go to Boulder to play.
But for me, I'm like, alright, I am ready to perform my satire.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it was a good time.
It's good to see your faces again.
I mean, I feel energized.
I feel ready.
I've touched so much grass.
I'm done with grass touching for a while.
I'm going to just enter cyberspace.
Be a digital being once more.
Yeah. It was smart to do it right before election season is picking up, just to get, like, a break, to get refreshed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I had considered that.
My brain has been fortified by trees and mountains.
Except now, except now, Travis is, uh, Climbing down the ladder of the Nebuchadnezzar.
He is crawling back up the machine's asshole.
He is shaving his head to be a nice, bald little baby and crawling back into the vial of pink goo.
Yeah, yeah. You know what?
I'm looking forward to it because I do enjoy this.
It fascinates me.
I assume that while I was camping in parts of the national parks and forests and I had no cell phone reception, that the information landscape would twist and bend in ways that I'm interested in but I would have no access to because, you know, I'm way out of range.
But I guess I didn't know how weird and dumb things would get.
So this is a catch-up episode.
This is me trying to dive again, opening up my sore eyes to figure out what the hell is going on.
I'll tell you this, nothing good.
I'm sure that's what you expected broadly.
Yeah, I assumed like, of course, I'm going to be out of cell phone range in the middle of Sequoia National Park, and then the team behind Q would reveal themselves or some shit.
I assumed that would happen. We're good to go.
You know, just a QAA podcast, no longer necessary.
It's like the German explorer, I think, that went on a trip to the Antarctic in 1914, before the war started, and came back in 1917.
Oh my god. Not hearing anything about society.
Yeah, that's amazing.
Literal borders shifted around.
Yeah. So today we are going to talk about an election conspiracy theorist who is actually facing very serious consequences and Elon Musk going full dark MAGA. Of course, there are also all those bizarre conspiracy theories about the tragic hurricanes, but we thought those deserve their own episodes, so we're going to unpack those on the next premium episode that's coming out.
Now, the story that's most relevant to my interests during my absence concerns the sentencing of Tina Peters, the 69-year-old former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado.
In 2021, Tina Peters made national news for being a very pilled election conspiracy theorist who was also in charge of overseeing the elections in Mesa County.
Which is a bad combo, it turned out.
That kind of combo can get you in prison for a few years.
Her unshakable belief that there was massive election fraud led her to facilitating unauthorized access to county voting equipment that she was supposed to safeguard.
In August, Peters was found guilty by a jury of Mesa County residents on seven counts for her actions.
Peters was found guilty of three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation.
She was also convicted of first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failure to comply with an order from the Secretary of State, all misdemeanors.
In October 3rd, Third, Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison.
That's a hefty sentence.
That's insane.
Do you think she had any idea, as she sort of, I guess, convinced herself that she was saving democracy, that she had any idea that she was committing these kind of serious offenses?
Or do we have any idea that she's in court, she's hearing the things?
Her lawyer's going, yeah, this is pretty serious.
I mean, yeah, the maximum they could send you is five for this and three for this.
And she's going, oh my god, oh fuck!
No, at no point did it seem like she ever really seriously comprehended the seriousness of her situation until she was convicted.
She started getting a little weepy then, but before then, you know, she has the ability of a conspiracist to believe something fully despite being absurd.
This is a huge problem with conspiracy theories, is you live in this alternate reality that does not overlap at all with real-world consequences.
Yeah, it's so interesting, like, to not even understand, like, the consequences of it.
It's not as if she was like, these are serious things I'm risking, but I'm doing it for Trump.
Maybe she had some idea of that.
But it was literally, it's like, yeah, no, this is the correct thing to do.
They're stealing the election. I doubt that in her mind she was like, if we lose this, I'm going for 10 years.
It's over. Yeah, and that it was worth losing her freedom over.
That I care about democracy so much, and I believe so much that this is right, that I will risk my freedom for this.
Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
It doesn't feel like any of these people—they all seem very surprised that they end up in jail.
The same with January 6th, obviously.
Totally. Yeah, yeah.
It's like they LARP. It's like, yes, I'm a patriot and I'm risking everything and they're coming at me, but I'm going to prevail.
And then when it doesn't go their way, they're bewildered.
Like, no, no, no. This isn't how the hero's journey goes.
The hero's journey is like, I face challenges, I face threats, but I prevail, not I go to prison and the things that I'm trying to prove are discarded, which is what happened in Tina Peters' case.
And unfortunately, they already have a built-in defense mechanism in how they view the world, which is when they do have to face consequences, they can easily pivot and be told by others within the conspiracy theory community that they're being persecuted, persecuted that the deep state, you know is is punishing them and trying to silence them because they Uncovered the truth, you know, you see very few of these people come out of
incarceration or on the other end of their punishment kind of changed and and Repentant unless they stand to get like a book deal or like a documentary or something if there's money in it on the other side I you know we have seen that but I wonder what like the Political landscape will be like when a lot of these people get out of prison in like five to ten years A lot of the people charged in the fallout of this.
Books? Yeah. It'll be content.
Everything, every experience can now potentially be content that earns you money.
That's what I think. I think that they will become influencers.
They will become... Many celebrities within these communities and there are plenty of people who will continue to sort of prop them up and cheer them along and no reason for them to sort of look back and think about, hey, maybe I fucked up and maybe these things that I believed in fucked me over and took away my freedom and got me in a lot of trouble and, you know, that sort of thing.
Now, I think it is fair to say that Tina Peters did not see this outcome coming.
In March, nine news journalist Kyle Clark asked her if she thought she was going to prison and she just kind of laughed it off.
What do you think the chances are that you and or Donald Trump are in prison a year or two from now?
Well, I'll tell you, if I was, if I thought I was going to prison, I would probably be on the beach somewhere, but, you know, relaxing.
That is also so fascinating of, like, what she would do if she thinks she was going away.
Just, you gotta enjoy Florida a lot less.
Now, we've mentioned Tina Peters on this podcast a few times over the years, not just because she is one of the most prominent election deniers, but also because of her interactions with other big figures in the QAA extended universe, like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former 8Koon admin Ron Watkins.
Back in 2021, Tina Peters was a featured guest at Mike Lindell's cyber symposium, which he held as part of a failed attempt to prove election fraud.
And Ron Watkins may have contributed to Tina Peters getting into trouble.
Now, I have a feeling they would have caught Tina Peters anyway, but there's this fuck-up by Ron Watkins that made it a lot easier to figure out that Tina Peters was doing things that she should not have been doing.
charges relate to the fact that Peters and her associates allowed a former pro surfer named Conan James Hayes into county offices to copy sensitive data. Authorities were tipped off that the data was breached after Ron Watkins posted blurry screenshots of information related to Dominion's election management system's voting machines.
Watkins claimed that these screenshots came from an anonymous whistleblower.
He posted about why he blacked out certain information in the videos and screenshots that he posted.
Individual frames need to be redacted very carefully.
A minor slip-up could potentially dox the whistleblower.
Yeah, that's correct.
He was accurate that he was very easy to dox the whistleblower if he posted the Wrong information, but that's exactly what he did.
One of the screenshots was of a spreadsheet of BIOS passwords for a small collection of computers, including election management system servers and client systems.
The problem is that the passwords for these systems are managed at the state level, and they're unique for each user, which means that officials for the state of Colorado were able to immediately know that the information came from the office of Tina Peters.
I wonder what ratio of that is like incompetence compared to apathy.
Like, because obviously Ronald Hawkins does not give a fuck about this lady.
No, I think a little bit.
I mean, he tries, I mean, obviously he tries to position himself as this hyper tech genius person.
Right. Right.
Right.
Right. Is going to be wrong or sloppy or messy in one way or another because they're starting from a bad place.
If you check the ballot for bamboo filaments, if you're in that sort of milieu, you probably don't know anything that's going on here.
Yeah, I would imagine that you're so preoccupied with this idea that you've convinced yourself that you're kind of in the middle of a Tom Clancy plot, you know, that you're not really thinking about anything else.
You're not really thinking about consequences, clearly in the case of Tina Peters.
Meanwhile, I'm like, if I send a parking ticket to the wrong...
Some anxious people are so careful because the last place I can be is jail.
It's the last place I can be.
I'm not going to do well there.
I know that. Most of my life, most of my choices revolve at the core around keeping myself out of jail.
So, you know, I can't really relate to this kind of behavior.
Yeah, like Travis said earlier, it's fascinating to me.
You can kind of accidentally throw away your life.
Seeing people who are not anxious at all handle, like, high-stakes situations is insane to me.
It's insane. It's insane.
It's like watching somebody, like, kite surf or something like that.
Just like, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, how do you... Like, what?
You're... You think you can do this?
You're gonna go? And it's fun?
It's like watching someone free solo.
Just, you know, like, climb. Just, like, a cliff face without any gear.
Now, the fact that authorities knew where the breach came from led to this funny in retrospect moment during the cyber symposium.
So while Ron Watkins was doing a quote-unquote data review, he suddenly stopped and then told the audience that he was advised by his lawyer to stop what he was doing and that Cohen and James Hayes needed to return what he took from the Mesa County clerk's office.
Yeah. Yeah, this is really important, guys.
It's important. Everybody quiet.
Ron, did you just say that someone took all of the hard drives from Mesa County office just now?
So what I said was, I just learned that Conan James Hayes may have taken, without authorization, the actual hard drives from the Mesa Colorado County clerk.
And he needs to produce those hard drives immediately and return them to the clerk.
No. And we should stop this data review until he produces the hard drives.
This is Toby from Mesa.
He knows. No, that did not happen.
The actual physical hard drives.
Hold on. No. Tina says no.
That did not happen. Okay.
Ron, you may have heard that incorrectly then.
Thanks. Okay.
How about, can Tina explain this then?
Because I just got a call from my lawyer that he talked to Tina to tell me that.
There it is!
I wonder if they played that during the trial.
Ron is different than a Tina because he only cares about his self-interest fundamentally.
Someone like Tina probably thinks she is doing something for the greater good.
Again, that image of an action figure or whatever.
Hero's journey. But Ron could not fucking care less.
No, no.
He seems like he has a more developed sense of risk management.
Yeah. He's like, he knows when my lawyer advises me to do something, when I'm talking live at the symposium, maybe I should listen.
I don't know what the relationship between Tina Peters and her lawyers was like, but it sounds like she was not great at listening.
This is absolutely insane.
This is why you can't be like a spy unless you work for the government, really.
You gotta have the government or some kind of law enforcement agency behind you because, one, you don't know what you're doing.
Two... You have a very high chance of fucking up and going to jail.
And three, you know, this is not your area of expertise.
You know, there are people who go to school for this, go to Langley for this.
I don't know if that's the actual place, but sounds right.
Or an expo. You know, you have to have done it at some point.
Your qualifications cannot be managed in a 4chan clone.
Yeah, all the best whistleblowers are people who used to work for the government and do intelligence stuff.
That's who we end up getting really good stuff from.
We never, ever really get anything good from people who were kind of like Jan, you know, Jan people who, you know, did some Googling and, you know, got some files sent to them and claimed that they're, you know, blowing the lid off some huge conspiracy theory.
The fact that Tina Peters was an election official who was also an election denialist, election conspiracy theorist, made her a celebrated hero within the conspiracist right.
In fact, at an event at Trump's Florida resort Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Trump himself called Tina Peters a rock star and said that authorities were only going after her because she was investigating voter fraud.
This is a rock star.
Cheers! Cheers! Cheers!
Cheers!
Yes, I know.
I'll be pardoning you.
I mean, this is funny.
It's like, I can't imagine how casually Trump throws people to the legal wall.
It's just constantly. Amazing.
They're like, President Trump, I'm going, I am commandeering a rocket ship, and I am going to prove once and for all that the moon landing is fake.
And he's like, God bless them, real heroes.
Going up, they're taking the launch, these horrible people at NASA, they've been covering it up for years, and we've got great people like this who are willing to fly to the moon.
President Trump, I am driving directly into Hurricane Milton to prove that it is controlled by the Democrats.
And look what they try to do when you drive into Milton.
Yeah. Look what they try to do to you when you drive right into the hurricane to prove that it's going after Republicans in Republican counties.
They'll crucify you.
All for trying to prove the truth driving straight into Milton.
I mean, I have to say, that has to be kind of a surreal experience for Trump.
Like, just being constantly surrounded by people who are sacrificing their entire lives to protect you and for your cause.
And it's like, that's just a shame.
Just one person after another, just jumping on a grenade and just sort of shrugging it off as you move through life.
I do wonder how or whether Trump would have run or how enthusiastically he would have run if he wasn't on trial, like if he didn't have legal issues.
That's a good question. Interesting question.
Because he's old. Like, clearly he doesn't want to be doing this.
I don't know. Maybe he does.
I don't know. I don't know. And I've seen people bring up the idea that there's a possibility if he doesn't win that he'll go to jail.
I mean, I'm not holding out hope for any kind of real punishment for him.
But, you know, I mean, it's a possibility.
And maybe that's really weighing on him.
No, I think that Trump pursues and seeks out, like, power and influence and praise as naturally and, like, helplessly as a magnet is attracted to iron.
It's just something that it does naturally.
He can't help himself. I don't think he can get help.
I was like, even if there's like a part of him, part of him, like maybe some sort of weird elements like, boy, this is really exhausting.
I can't believe I have to do this every day.
He knows he has to.
He has to seek it out just as a matter of course.
It's in his blood. It's in his instinct.
Yeah. It just feels right for him.
It's just as natural as breathing.
It's something he just has to do.
It's almost like a default setting from having to do the kind of shady business, you know, that he's just done his entire life.
That if somebody came up to him and they were like, oh, sir, sir, Mr.
President, I'm a swamp thing.
At night, I have to go back to the swamp and live under the water and the bog.
And, like, the only thing that stops me is, you know, reading the art of the deal.
And it's like, and it's terrible when they don't let you do it, you know?
Yeah. Yeah, it is this automatic sort of, look at this, look at what they'll do, look at what they'll do, make you live in the bog.
I think somebody could go up to him and say anything, anything, and he's probably not even listening.
To that degree, that he's already kind of gone into autopilot of what his response is going to be, and kind of like a freestyle rapper, you know, you've got 10 to 11 phrases that you kind of will fall back on to sort of float you to your next original thought.
After Tina Peters was arrested in 2022, Steve Bannon also had words of praise for her on his podcast.
I got news for you, and I got news for DHS, and I got news for the Gestapo.
I got news for you.
You're not going to break Tina Peters, and you're not going to break this movement, okay?
Because we have the receipts, and Tina Peters has the receipts.
He has the receipts.
Is that like an older...
Because yeah, my understanding is that is a Zoomer expression.
Yes, we never said...
No, we never said receipts.
We didn't care about receipts.
We didn't... If somebody said something and it seemed relatively plausible, we would either believe them or walk away and go, I think that person's full of shit.
This idea of being like, oh, and I've got the receipts.
That's a new-ish phrase.
Steve Bannon saying how much of a slay queen Tina Peters is.
Yeah. Boots the house down.
Steve Bannon, it should be mentioned, is also in prison right now.
He's serving the final weeks of a four-month sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.
So not someone to take advice from, apparently.
Not someone who knows how to stay out of prison.
He was already parted once for a different scheme from Trump.
Now he's back in prison again?
Come on after Bannon talked about Tina Peters listeners of his podcast started calling the police department that made the arrest the Grand Junction PD audio recordings of these calls were acquired by 9 news and the caller seemed to treat the arrests of someone They liked as if it's a like a customer service issue I want to talk to whoever the hell put those handcuffs on that nice woman. I saw it on the television I can't believe it. I'm a Colorado resident and I'm furious.
It's like Karen fascism Like, all their authority they generally feel like they have over people is like, yeah, when a waitress doesn't bring them their, like, double XL Coca-Cola cup or whatever.
So they're like, surely it works everywhere else like that.
Yeah, if I'm unsatisfied, that represents something sort of out of whack with the universe itself.
I just need to express myself by frustration to whoever's in charge, and they will fix it.
Now, that same caller threatened unsuccessfully to dox the police station.
Very simple. Very simple.
I want to talk to the sergeant at ours and make that decision, who sent them over there, or I'm going to put your number on the internet.
You did a thousand calls tonight.
Everybody already has our numbers.
It's public information. Is this like 911?
No, no. It's the police station itself.
So it's not an emergency line, fortunately.
I guess they didn't do that.
But they called the police station after they saw Steve Bannon get mad about Tina Peters' arrest.
That guy sounded genuinely upset.
He sounded genuinely upset of somebody that he's never met.
He doesn't know who committed a real crime.
We are in a really funny and sad sort of era.
I mean, look at what's happening.
This guy is like, I want to speak to the sergeant who made the arrest.
How dare you? This sweet old woman.
And I'll tell you what, if you don't put me on the phone with him right now, you're going to get a lot of angry calls from people on the internet.
It's like the extension of a citizen's arrest.
You're like a citizen's unarrest.
Right. And that guy's going around, you know, at the bar or whatever, you know, at the dinner table being like, no, I called him.
I called him. I left a message. I told him, you know, I said, if you don't put him on the line, I'm going to post a number on the internet and everybody's going to call in.
Like, people are generating their own content for, like, conversations that they'll have later at, like, the JCC or whatever.
Probably not the JCC, if we're being honest.
At the country club, we'll say.
I mean, it's like he was threatening basically like Gamergate harassment against a police station.
The idea is like, okay, I'm going to use the internet and all of the angry nerds who are constantly on the internet to make your life miserable, but it's a fucking police station.
It doesn't work that way. I love that the dispatcher was like, sir, everybody already has our number.
In fact, you're calling us now.
Also should be mentioned, like he said, like Sergeant at Arms.
So Sergeant at Arms is not a position in the regional police department.
The Sergeant at Arms is the chief law enforcement officer for a deliberative body like the Senate.
So the Sergeant at Arms is the person in charge of making sure that things are orderly in a legislature.
I want to talk to your inspector general.
Sounds like a high physician.
Yeah, do you think he was saying that to make her think that he understood how law enforcement worked?
And that maybe she should take his call a little bit more seriously?
Like, oh my god, he knows some of the specific positions inside the department.
Now, obviously, I have to imagine, like, all of this praise and encouragement, like, really helped Tina Peters dig in with her claims and push forward.
Because, like, you know, like, a county clerk is, like, you know, it's kind of like a, you know, it's a mid-level bureaucratic position.
I imagine day to day is pretty boring.
But now you've been getting praise from Trump.
You're getting praise from these podcasters who have millions of listeners.
You have people who are complete strangers who are taking time out of their day to defend you after you get arrested.
I mean, that has to make you feel like a hero.
Of course. And she's going to serve probably half of her sentence.
You know, she'll probably serve half of her sentence.
Time off for good behavior. She'll probably be in a minimum security facility.
And I wouldn't be surprised if she came out after all this and became, if Trump doesn't win the election and pardon her, which even if he won, he might forget.
He might forget about this digital soldier.
She'll probably be up at CPAC speaking again and be on podcasts and write a book.
I was a deep state political prisoner.
What reasons does she have to come out on the other side of this and reject all of this praise?
Reject all of this praise?
Reject the idea that she's some kind of hero?
That's way better than going, damn, I believed a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories.
I followed an idiot and I ended up getting sentenced nine years in jail.
It's going to affect my employment for the rest of my life.
It's going to affect my family, my relationships, all this stuff.
Oh boy, that's a lot to deal with.
Way easier to go like, I'm a political prisoner and I'm going on a book tour as soon as I get out.
I do wonder the odds of like the MAGA movement just kind of pushing her aside.
Because I guess the determinant of that is whether she's entertaining or not, which is so interesting.
Yeah, that's a good point.
If the movement doesn't have any use for her, then like who gives a fuck?
She can go rot, whatever.
But if she's like, you know, she could be a CPAC speaker, then I'm sure she'll get like a career...
So right before Tina Peters was sentenced, she was given the opportunity to address the judge.
Now, I fortunately have not had much personal experience with the criminal justice system, but it's my understanding that, like, after a conviction, it's no longer time to defend or justify your actions that led to the conviction.
Like, that's the time to express contrition or prove that you are otherwise a good citizen capable of rehabilitation or, like, communicate other factors that might lower the severity of the sentence.
But instead, Tina Peters used this opportunity to present evidence that was ruled inadmissible during her trial.
She went back over the claims that there was meddling with the vote count in the 2020 general election and the 2021 Grand Junction municipal election.
I like the idea that the judge is like, you're telling me it was stolen?
Well, in that case, sorry, we gotta undo this.
All of this is like Simpson's court.
It's like Simpson's court, Simpson's lawyers.
It all seems so ridiculous.
So I have a clip of a really amazing exchange between Tina Peters and the judge.
But first I have to explain like what she's trying to reference in this clip.
So one of the pieces of supposed evidence is called report number three.
And report number three was a report delivered by Corey Anderson, who is the husband of a former Mesa County Republican vice chair, and Sharona Bishop, one of Lauren Boebert's former campaign managers and election conspiracy theorists.
So this is just bullshit that was cooked up by some conspiracy theorists.
The allegations in report number three are tied to the tabulation and adjudication of ballots.
So this is the process by which the votes are counted and issues are resolved.
So the report essentially claimed falsely that the Dominion Voting Systems software used to tabulate the votes created a second adjudication database.
So it's the second database of the information in the ballots.
And this is bad because there's only supposed to be one.
So if there's two, something wrong happened.
These claims were investigated by the Republican Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubenstein, who published a report about it back in 2022.
What he discovered was that it is true that a second database was created, but it wasn't made automatically by the software or some sort of nefarious outside force.
It was actually created by an error by the former elections manager and one-time Tina Peters' ally, Sandra Browne.
And last year, Brown herself was sentenced to serve 30 days in jail and two years of probation for her role in the security breach involving Tina Peters.
Rubenstein's team found that during the adjudication, when Brown ran to some problems using the software, she didn't contact Dominion.
Which could have told her that she was performing the wrong procedure to fix the issue.
It's created by Sandra Brown, a friend and former ally of Tina Peters, which is funny when you think about it.
It's like they think they are trying to find evidence of fraud and what they found evidence was one of her employees fucking up and then cited that as evidence of fraud.
Always read the instruction manual, folks.
There's information in there, knowledge.
These are complicated machines.
In fact, Sandra Brown testified against Tina Peters as part of her plea deal.
In her testimony, Sandra Brown said that Tina Peters directed her to buy a burner phone so that they could communicate during the criminal investigation.
After Brown turned herself in, she says that Peters told her to stay quiet.
This is like Bebop and Rocksteady trying to pull off a heist.
Tina showed up the day I turned myself in.
Did she say anything to you?
She came in and she said, I love you and you have support and don't say anything.
She told me, quote, you know who gets stitches.
I love it.
This gang of old ladies, old white ladies being like, don't say nothing.
So the report from the district attorney regarding report number three concluded this.
We found extensive evidence that the conclusions in report three are false.
Finally, and most significantly, this investigation uncovered no evidence that would indicate outside interference with the election, and further has found evidence specifically contradicting the assertion that ballots could have been preloaded.
So this was two years ago.
I just want to emphasize. So this was this report number three was looked into by by legal authorities.
They checked it because they took it seriously and they found that was bullshit and they found why why the anomalies happened.
We know what happened. But during Tina Peters address to the judge prior to sentencing, she brought up report number three and the judge in frustration pointed out that it's relevant because the actual ballots themselves were counted.
So this is that exchange.
After ballots go in, there's a second fraudulent database that's created, and it's all documented in here.
There's an image taken of that ballot.
Then the ballot is changed, and we know it's been changed because it's lacking the.sha file, and it goes through adjudication differently, like it's a completely different ballot.
This is what report number three is.
So when you ask, were there any fraudulent votes?
They haven't read it. They don't know.
All right, I'm going to move along.
Sorry? I'm not going to let you go on about things that are completely irrelevant to the sentence.
This is irrelevant. No, it's not.
I've let you go on enough about this, but the votes are the votes.
You still didn't answer the question.
If this is my ballot and I put it in the machine, whatever it tabulates is whatever it tabulates.
No, it doesn't. It changes.
You're not letting me finish. Okay, please.
Whatever it tabulates is whatever it tabulates.
My hand vote, my ballot remains the same.
They counted those ballots.
Did they not? I understand what you're saying, Your Honor.
Did they count the ballots? No. The ballot images were changed, and that's what the total shows.
Okay, I'll move off of this because I can see that it, you know, I would encourage to read the report number three.
I've read them, ma'am. You've read all of them?
I've read those reports.
They were given to me at some point, I believe.
Good. Good. Well, so you know what I'm saying is true.
All right. Let me move on.
It's not funny. My life is on the line here, Your Honor.
It's not an allegation.
And two, that I know it's true.
You're saying that as if I believe you, and I did not say that.
That is why I made the sound, because it's insulting to me for you to just put that in a record in front of all of these people that I believe something to be true.
Okay, and I apologize for that, Your Honor.
That wasn't my intent.
I do apologize for that.
It gets a little fiery when your life is on the line, and I apologize.
The thing where she's trying to say, like, I'm sorry for doing the crime that I did.
Please, I'm rehabilitatable.
She's just doing a debate.
Yeah. This is the craziest.
She's already convicted at this point.
Yeah. She's right now getting into a tense back and forth with the guy who's about to decide how long she's going to be in prison.
What? It's just like, and this is serving no purpose.
She loves, she believes her conspiracy theory so much, and she loves presenting this supposed evidence, even though it's not good at all.
And it's so important to her that she was willing to bring it up at this point when doing so will almost guarantee will lead to a harsher sentence.
Well, because she knows it to be true.
That's the whole problem is that just to recap, because this is so insane.
She believed before anything, before a single ballot was cast, that the Democrats were going to try to steal the election because this was the mainstream narrative amongst Republicans, amongst Trump supporters, and from Trump himself. This was seeded long before a single ballot was cast. So she is going into the process knowing that they are going to try to steal the election.
So what does she do? She tries to find proof of the thing that she already knows. And in trying to find the proof of the thing that she already knows to be true, she is actually herself committing election fraud.
And now is going to go to prison for almost a decade for it.
If this is not a warning to people in this community, I mean, this is longer, I would say, than the majority of the January 6th sentences.
Is that fair to say?
That is correct. I mean, yeah.
I mean, she wasn't some dipshit who broke into the Capitol.
She was an election official, someone with serious responsibilities.
Who, you know, who, like, made, you know, I mean, she very nearly, they had to, like, they had to buy new machines because the old ones were compromised.
So she, like, yeah, she cost the Conti a lot of money, a lot of credibility, and, like, yeah, she abused the trust that she was given.
And she's already been convicted, you know, at this point that the video that you just played, and it seems like watching it that her mindset is like, okay, well, I've been convicted, but only because I haven't really convinced the judge of the facts yet.
If you just read report number three, it would be fine.
Like, have you read it, sir? And he's like, of course I fucking read it.
Like, it's an important component of the...
She's like, he just doesn't see it yet.
And like, that's a crazy place to be.
And I'd love to know what her life was like and her belief system was like before any of this, before Trump, was she like a regular person?
Was she normal?
Like, would she, did she have a record?
I mean, probably, probably not, but like to be convicted and then be like, well, they're only saying I'm guilty because they don't quite see it yet.
If I can just, if I can just convince them, and this is like, it happens on, we see it happen on all of these different levels.
It's like, if I can just convince my sister, you know, that they're trafficking children, she'll realize I was right all along and I'll be re-invited.
I'll be included once again in like my family's, uh, you know, events.
I'll be included somehow.
Oh God, it's so frustrating.
I'm so hopeless that anybody will find their way out of this.
It's a very strange evangelical mode of problem solving.
The idea that I can solve my problems and the world's problems by changing other people's minds and getting people to believe the things that I believe.
You know, it's like if only this is like the premise of the QAnon so-called Great Awakening.
If the whole world just realizes that actually Hillary Clinton like ate a child on a secret dark web video, then all of a sudden like, you know, the world will be a better place.
I just have to convince people of my particular conspiracy theories and then everything will be solved.
I don't know. When Judge Matthew Barrett handed down the sentence, he absolutely tore into her behavior, and some of the clips of this speech went viral.
I listened to the whole 20 minutes of it, and I wanted to play a few sections I thought were really, really appointed.
At one point, the judge discusses the mitigating circumstances that might lead to a more lenient sentence, but ultimately concludes that they are unsubstantial.
Your age, limited criminal history, and the like are certainly somewhat mitigating.
Your ties to the community are what they are, but your reputation at this point is poor because of what you've done here and after.
Your lies are well documented, and these convictions are serious.
I'm convinced you would do it all over again if you could.
You're as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.
You don't have those histories of drug and alcohol abuse.
There's no lifetime of trauma, not even close to the type of mitigating circumstances I would see from many folks who sit in that chair.
No, to the contrary, Ms.
Peters, you are a privileged person.
You are as privileged as they come.
And you use that privilege to obtain power, a following, and fame.
And to be sure, there's no doubt in my mind that it's exactly what you wanted, and it defies all sense of common sense to believe when you suggested to me a few moments ago that you didn't want this attention.
No, you crave it, ma'am.
And there is no one in this courtroom who would consider that to be anything other than the absolute truth.
But to get to the point of what it is that you did here, it's my impression distinctly that you never took your job of clerking particularly seriously.
You didn't complete the certification.
One scandal after another followed you in your time as the clerk.
And ultimately it was a belief that the echo chamber in which you live couldn't be wrong.
I usually, I feel like I always hate hearing, like, those, like, sentencing with judges, because it does just feel like they're talking to, like, an adult, like they're a child.
But, you know, maybe some people, they are acting like, I don't know.
Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it feels like the moment to be on a power trip and be really smug to the little cockroach you have.
Total power over. It is kind of icky.
But in this instance, what else are you going to do?
She is all in.
She did something really horrible and dangerous, and she was totally unrepentant.
And then I like that the judge sort of like really sort of criticized her for being a clout chaser.
Apparently, if you chase clout too much in the pursuit of crimes, that adds a couple of extra years to your sentence.
Furthermore, I think one thing that's worth mentioning is that if the roles were reversed and this was a Democratic-leaning clerk who committed voter fraud and election fraud to, I don't know, in service of their candidate winning, this would be talked about by the Republicans for the rest of our lives.
I think Democrats are probably, for the most part, going to forget about Tina Peters within a couple months, a couple years.
But if the roles were reversed, they would be running for years and years and years on the fact that a Democrat tried to fudge the voting records.
And remember, they were sentenced to prison.
And this is the reality.
I would imagine in that case that this specific clip would be shown again and again and again.
Democrats are also fairly law and order, like a lot of the general voter base Republicans especially.
They love these moments.
There's a certain irony to that as well.
The fact that Republicans watching this are like, this is so terrible.
Such a terrible, what do they say, lawfare?
You guys are like the punitive party.
Totally. If this was a liberal clerk, they would be like, the death penalty for treason.
There should be nothing less, you know?
Even us here, we're like, damn, nine years, that's a lot.
Like, damn, that's serious, you know?
The judge then scorched Peters for going rogue instead of following the law.
There are many things in my mind that are crystal clear about this case.
You are no hero, you abused your position, and you're a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again.
In your world it's all about you.
But at bottom this case was about your corrupt conduct and how no one is above the law.
No one in this country has absolute power.
Your position as a clerk and recorder, a constitutional position, does not provide you with a means by which to do your own investigation, to not listen to the judiciary, to not listen to the executives higher than you, to not listen to the legislature who sets the law as it may be.
This is nonsense.
Damn. I guess people shouldn't be doing their own investigations.
I think this judge is anti-do-your-own-research.
Well, I mean, when your job is to follow the order, follow the law, and then follow the Secretary of State, this is like, I don't know, this hyper-individualism in her position is catastrophic.
No, you are part of a system.
You are part of a structure designed to accomplish a goal.
You're not just a lone wolf out doing whatever you want.
And clearly the structure works because she ended up getting caught and getting severely punished for this, which is so funny because you hear from QAnon or just your general MAGA people or just general Republicans all the time that the Democrats are cheating and they're getting away with all sorts of illegal things.
Here's an example of somebody who did something illegal and the election system caught it and they're getting punished.
Judge Barrett then referenced Tina Peters' pathological lying.
This includes her denial of the fact, which was captured on video, that she tried to kick one of the officers who arrested her.
You have no qualms with violating the court's orders because you're innocent.
Because you didn't do anything wrong.
You were just doing your job.
You have no problem trying to kick an officer.
Your explanation about what happened is preposterous.
It's on video.
You have no problem lying to officers.
It's happened multiple times.
They're recorded conversations.
It's just more lies.
No objective person believes them.
No, at the end of the day, you cared about the Jets, the podcasts, and the people finding over you.
You abdicated your position as a servant to the Constitution, and you chose you over all else.
Yes, you are a charlatan, and you cannot help but lie as easy it is for you to breathe.
You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.
And this is what makes Miss Peter such a danger to our community.
It's the position she held that has provided her the pulpit from which she can preach these lies.
Oof, harsh.
She can't be sitting there being like, okay, like I'm going away for a long time.
This guy is so mad at me.
Yeah, I mean, pretty harsh.
You know, I mean, I'll speak generally.
I am against how the American carceral system is conducted, except when it's used against annoying, powerful people I don't like.
Of course. Yes, I agree.
That is my abolish the prisons and then make another prison, but it's only the bad guys that they put in there.
I think what you guys are asking for is kind of what they have in Minority Report, some kind of precog system that allows us to know for sure by being able to see into the future who actually is doing the voter fraud.
So yeah, she is now in a correctional facility, and I think this conviction comes in opportune time because, you know, the election is just a few weeks away, and this surely sends a strong message to election officials that they may face serious consequences if they try some funny business.
And that's relevant because Trump and his allies are obviously going to attempt to overturn the election again if he loses.
And that may involve pressuring election officials to engage in illegal activity.
But here's the thing. This conviction may motivate election workers, including election workers with maybe loose ethics or sympathies to Trump, to take the straight and narrow path.
But it only works if they're rational actors.
Like, if they're as pilled as Tina Peters, this isn't going to dissuade them because, just like, zealotry is more powerful than fear of legal consequences.
Like, Tina Peters didn't seem to, like, really understand what the fuck was happening until, you know, the conviction.
Until even afterwards, she wasn't behaving as if she understood the gravity of her position.
She is, like, a true believer.
And, like, true believers just aren't gonna...
Hopefully, they're just not these kinds of positions of power.
But, like, they don't understand that, like, Bad things might happen if you do a bad thing.
If you break the law and then, you know, you might still go to prison even if all your favorite podcasters come and rally around you.
Hundreds of people just throwing their lives away for their god emperor, Donald Trump, and obviously he does not give a shit.
Does anyone know, in the last election, they used the Dominion voting systems.
Who would ever want to be...
Is there still a public-private relationship there?
What company would ever sign up to do the election machines?
Good point. I suppose if you're software or any kind of system involved in administering the election...
There's a not insignificant chance that a large mob of right-wingers are going to go after some of your employees.
So, yeah, that's a good question.
I don't know how they're handling the election this time around, but God, what a miserable state of affairs that you have to think about, like, basically OPSEC, thinking about, like, What person in your company is going to be unfairly blamed for some nonsense because they decide that you are some sort of election-controlling villain?
Fantastic. Elon and Trump sitting in a tree.
Donald Trump was back in the place he was shot five years ago on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, an event that sort of felt like the beginning of the end for America, at least for this podcast when it happened.
But quite a lot of things have changed since then.
One new addition Trump has brought to the return of the place where he almost got his head split open like a watermelon is billionaire Elon Musk, who has decided to side very, very explicitly with the Republicans during this two-year American election cycle.
What was perhaps the most noteworthy component of Elon appearing in the rally happened right before he got to speak as Trump was introducing him on stage, where he seemed to very clumsily jump up and down, flinging his limbs in an incredibly uncoordinated fashion to make the shape of an X. And I would recommend you look up the photos yourself.
But it seems like this isn't the first time Elon Musk has done this, as I've been able to find a couple videos of him on various stages jumping up and down and forming an ex with his body, like he's a big baby whose mommy is jingling keys in front of him.
It's truly remarkable how uncoordinated he is.
He does have the energy.
I don't know if any of our listeners remember these, but there used to be these old wooden toys, and they had a button on the bottom, and when you press the button, the toy would sort of collapse, and when you would release the button, it would kind of spring back up again, and he's got that kind of movement to him.
It's like ragdoll physics, sort of.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like when your character dies in game right as you're jumping, and it just kind of like flings.
But it's like ragdoll physics from like Saints Row 2, you know, before they had really kind of perfected it and gotten the weight right, you know?
I have a pet theory about why he does this, and it may be incredibly wrong, but I believe it.
That he's making an X shape with his body to celebrate or advertise for his social media website, Twitter.
Yeah. I think it has something to do with him being like, look, I'm fun, I'm cool, I'm like goofy, I'm a crazy, goofy, silly, fun guy.
Like, I'm not like a crazy, a crazy sort of like rich, like weirdo.
I don't know. It seems like he's trying to sort of like humanize himself in a weird way.
Zuckerberg used to do this, but now he's got it on lock.
Oh yeah, he's got it. Zuckerberg is back to being 100% non-reptilian.
I don't know why he got his swag up recently or how he did that.
He's got some serious swag going on.
All it took was like a little bit of scruff, like growing his hair out a little bit, like kind of ditching the old Caesar cut and getting kind of like a cool zoomer chain.
But boy, it's done.
It's really done wonders.
It feels like, for me, like, the last time Elon knew how to express, you know, excitement at a large, high-energy social gathering was at, like, 10-year-old birthday parties.
When he was 10, people are jumping everywhere.
That's that you kind of figure somewhere has passed.
That just locked in.
Okay, when there's a big, exciting party, people are jumping up and down, and he's just been that way for 40 years.
Here's an audio clip of Trump introducing Elon at the rally, where he gets up on stage, does his stupid jump, and then begins his stupid speech to the crowd.
...to be joined tonight by one of the people who is going to help us build this incredible future, and he is a truly incredible guy.
And I don't say that that often.
He's a great gentleman.
He's done such an unbelievable job for North Carolina, for Georgia, for Alabama, for Florida...
For Tennessee, his name is Elon Musk.
He saved free speech.
He created so many different great things.
Where is he?
Come on up here, Elon.
He created the first major American car company in generations, and his rocket company is the only reason we can now send American astronauts into space.
Come here. Take over, Elon.
God, yes, take him.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, everyone.
As you can see, I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark MAGA.
Well, first of all, I want to say what an honor it is to be here.
And, you know, the true test of someone's character is how they behave under fire.
And we had one president who couldn't climb a flight of stairs.
And another who was fist-pumping after getting shot.
Fight, fight, fight!
Blood coming down the face.
Really grim stuff.
Truly, truly melted times.
I feel like Elon is quite adeptly glazing Trump, though, because he knows how to praise his physical prowess.
That's something he knows that Trump will like.
He's understood how to get in his good graces.
Elon is the kind of guy that Trump thinks young people think is cool.
And also, it's so funny, he came out with like, basically he opened with a meme.
He's like, I'm dark mega, by the way.
Like, you can tell he's loving it.
He's loving being behind the bulletproof glass.
He's loving the shoulder taps from Trump.
I mean, he really...
I think he's really loving this.
Oh, yeah. He looks like a kid at, like, a toy store or something.
Totally. Totally. Like, it's a very childlike joy.
I think he feels very important.
Yeah, yeah. The dark manga comment is in relation to the fact that his hat was a manga hat, but it was just, like, black.
Which is, like, most of the crowd, and in the video, you can't really see.
But they're like, okay, sure.
Not to mention that, uh, in the QAnon lore, uh...
Black hats are actually the enemy.
That's true. He also wore a shirt which read Occupy Mars, which is great.
Presumably asking someone else to do it because he has not been able to so far.
This speech in general was unsurprisingly not particularly spectacular, with him generally stumbling through a couple talking points.
But the Democrats are bad, they want to steal the election, take away your guns, etc.
Here is a short sample.
America is the home of the brave.
And there's no truer test than courage under fire.
Who do you want representing America?
Yeah. Absolutely.
And I think this election is the most important election of our lifetime.
This is no ordinary election.
The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech.
They want to take away your right to bear arms.
They want to take away your right to vote effectively.
You've got 14 states now that don't require voter ID. California, where I used to live, has just passed a law banning voter ID for voting.
I still can't believe that's real.
So, how are you supposed to have a proper election if there's no ID? It's just meaningless.
Just really a good companion to have on the road for Trump.
Really spectacular speech, very high energy from the crowd.
But it's interesting that he copied a democratic talking point, which is now used by Trump, by saying that 2024 is the most important election in modern history.
This idea is not particularly new for Elon Musk.
Not only is he very attached to the Trump campaign, as we can see by him joining at rallies, but he's also become convinced that if Trump loses, he'll be in hot water legally, as he explained in this clip from an interview he did with Tucker Carlson on the 7th.
If he loses, man, what...
You're fucked, dude. I'm fucked.
If he loses, I'm fucked. It does seem that way.
You can't just be like, you can't just be like, yo, I... Yeah, I'm like, how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?
Will I see my children?
I don't know. Because it's not like you can say, well, yeah, I maxed out to them, but, you know, I get...
I have no plausible deniability.
No! No, no, and I've been trashing Kamala nonstop.
Oh, I know! Well, the Kamala puppet, I call him, you know.
The machine that the Kamala puppet represents.
What are these guys talking about?
Well, hell no.
They seem to have some sort of, I mean, you're not imprisoned for backing the candidate that loses, but he seems to have some sort of idea that he's at risk.
I don't know. I don't know.
It really is confusing.
I don't really think they elaborate all that much.
And it's also like, you live, like, Joe Biden is the president.
Like, do you think you're going to jail now?
Yeah, yeah. If you're under threat of being incarcerated because of some sort of corrupt regime that just hates you so much for supporting Donald Trump, you would be in prison.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Elon has clearly gone all in for Trump recently, and he said he's going to continue campaigning with Trump in battleground states in the lead-up to the election next month.
But how did we get here?
Going back to the 2016 election, Musk was not nearly as fond of Trump as he is now, telling CNBC, for instance, that Clinton was better for the environment and the economy, and saying this, I feel a bit stronger that he's not the right guy.
He doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.
Decent Elon. Sure.
He's somewhere in between Ron Watkins and a weird South African guy.
I don't know. I mean, Trump's running mate literally called him Hitler.
You don't have to have the history of praising Trump to be welcomed into the fold.
He'll take anyone if they're able to do an about-face.
Yeah, he's just like, what are you saying about me lately?
Yeah, but it's funny because it's so weird to hear Elon say shit like that, but he is the CEO of an electronic car company.
That makes a lot more sense, that he cares about the environment.
Sure, and yeah, even if it's just for cynical branding reasons, getting people to believe that they're saving the environment by buying an electric car is good for business.
I was wondering, like, there's a negative association with electric vehicles among, like, men, that it's, like, gay, because it's good for the environment.
I wonder if there was some component of Elon that was, like, we're gonna make electric vehicles not gay.
We're gonna make it, like, a right-wing culture war, which doesn't seem to have worked, I guess, regardless.
Elon would then become appointed on an advisory council in Trump's cabinet in late 2016, and he would get a lot of flack at the time for doing this, because he was the CEO of an electric vehicle company.
In 2017, right before he would make a public visit to the White House, he would tweet out this.
In December, I agreed to join the Presidential Advisory Forum to provide feedback on issues that I think are important to our country and the world.
In tomorrow's meeting, I and others will express our objections to the recent executive order on immigration and offer suggestions for changes to the policy.
Advisory councils simply provide advice and attending does not mean that I agree with the actions by the administration.
My goals are to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy and to make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creation of hundreds if not thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all.
I understand the perspective of those who object to my attending this meeting, but I believe at this time that engaging on critical issues will, on balance, serve the greater good.
Later that year in June, Musk would break ties with Trump following him pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement.
Yet all of this happened before Elon Musk cured himself of the woke mind virus.
A bit more recently, in the early parts of the COVID pandemic, Elon would publicly support Trump's anti-lockdown stance, famously saying that America was headed to zero new cases of the new virus by April of 2020.
I literally had COVID for like a month.
Like, I'm just coming out of it.
It was awful. So wrong again.
But the two are still bashing heads.
Like when Musk very publicly threw himself behind DeSantis' presidential bid in 2022, saying he has historically voted for Democrats, but opposes Joe Biden because of his one redeeming quality, his support of unions.
In July of 2022, Elon would tweet this.
Can you imagine DeSantis, Joe Biden? Like, zero votes for both sides.
Oh my god.
Trump will go on his own social media site, Truth Social, to post about his feelings about the billionaire.
When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, Without which subsidies, he'd be worthless.
And telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, drop to your knees and beg, and he would have done it.
Just complete victory there.
In that beef. Don't think that was close.
No, I know. I know.
Unfortunately, Trump has a rhetorical gift sometimes.
With the DeSantis campaign obviously collapsing, Elon would, for a while, attempt to position himself as a neutral party in the election, tweeting this in March of 2024.
Just to be super clear, I am not donating money to either candidate for US president.
But this did not last very long, and Elon explicitly endorsed Trump in July, after the first assassination attempt against him.
Around this time, Elon also pledged to donate $45 million to a super PAC in support of Trump.
He would then found the America PAC, although he has yet to give $45 million to it.
The PAC is generally focused around getting undecideds out to vote for Donald Trump in important swing states, or, potentially, trying to get them out not to vote.
To quote from an independent article which describes one of the company's schemes, An image of an iPhone text message appears on the screen.
Hey, you need to vote.
The next message includes a picture of a bloody Donald Trump raising his fist above the headline, Trump rally assassination attempt, followed by a video clip of Trump on stage as shots are fired towards him.
This is out of control, replies a man lying in bed as the messages roll in.
How do I start? Register to vote, the sender replies.
It's easy. The message includes a link to America PAC, Elon Musk's Trump Supporting Political Action Committee.
The 15-second ad ends with a message to register to vote now.
Users are asked for their address, phone number, and age.
After they hit submit, they're told thank you, and that's it.
By the end of their visit to Musk's PAC website, not only were they not registered to vote, they also ended up handing over extremely valuable data to a billionaire-backed operation.
The voter registration page was active for at least a month according to website data.
People think they're registered to vote and they're not, basically, in swing states.
Good stuff. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty horrifying.
This tactic is currently under investigation for violations of election laws in Michigan.
I should hope so.
It feels like if you deceive people into thinking they're eligible to vote or registered to vote when they are not, that's got to be illegal.
It ought to be if it's not illegal. Maybe that's what Musk and Carlson were kind of giggling about, that he was going to be in trouble if Trump loses.
Yeah, I was thinking about that.
No, he's not laughing about the real crime that he committed.
It's actually probably just some imaginary crime or a wishless crime as some sort of victimization.
He's not thinking about the actual thing he did that's fucked up.
Probably related to also, like, publicly saying Kamala shouldn't be elected and, like, spreading election misinformation on Twitter, which we'll get to later.
The America PAC has also implemented a quote-unquote referral program for voters in swing states, advertised by Musk on Twitter on the 6th of October in a tweet that said this.
For every person you refer who is a swing state voter, you get $47.
Easy money. This scheme involves the PAC creating a petition in favor of protecting the First and Second Amendments, and giving those who signed it $47 if they refer another individual registered to vote in any swing state to the petition.
So technically, I guess, not a referral program for signing up to vote, which would be a federal crime.
The petition has also received 1 million signatures so far.
So it seems like it probably should be illegal too, because you're obviously not allowed to pay people to register to vote.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. It's one of those instances where, I mean, I guess we'll see how it plays out.
He thinks he hacked the electoral system.
He figured out a way to get a lot more votes for this guy that no one else, no political strategist has ever thought of, but he has figured out, but it's actually maybe just a crime.
I don't know. It is a hilarious, like it is a harebrained scheme.
Absolutely. Like there's clearly a reason why no one has thought of this.
Yeah, it does. It really is like tech startup, like, you know, wild, like, all right, no bad ideas.
You know, let's let's let's throw it.
Let's try. Let's talk about something.
Yeah, this isn't like Grubhub, where you refer somebody and it's like, you get $40 in Grub tokens.
The America Packet has also handled quite a bit of Trump's ground game in these states, hiring 400 employees dedicated to door knocking, and has collected information from millions of swing state voters to be used by the Trump campaign.
Borderline election fraud aside, Elon has also, of course, helped Trump's presidency through his ownership over X, the Everything app, where he has seized the Twitter handle at America to advertise for the America PAC and the referral program.
Elon has also done a very good job at ensuring right-wing misinformation confessed around the site, not only through a lack of moderation policy, but also by directly boosting this misinfo.
One example being him posting an AI video of Kamala Harris without specifying its AI. The beginning of the video sounds like this.
I, Kamal Harris, senior Democrat candidate for president, because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility of the debate.
Thanks, Joe. I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.
I'm both a woman and a person of color.
So if you criticize anything I say, you're both sexist and racist.
I may not know the first thing about running the country, but remember, That's a good thing if you're a deep state puppet.
I had four years under the tutelage of the ultimate deep state puppet, a wonderful mentor, Joe Biden.
Joe taught me rule number one, carefully hide your total incompetence.
I take insignificant things and I discuss them as if they're significant.
And I believe that exploring the significance of the insignificant is in itself significant.
Very low energy. Ooh, yeah, that's so bad.
And also, like, makes no fucking...
Like, their wannabe dunks don't even make sense.
It's like, okay, if Joe Biden was senile through his entire presidency, then Kamala would actually be the one running the country.
I mean, that's kind of common sense.
Even if you want to go with that, you know, Biden is essentially, like, you know, at some weekend at Bernie's situation...
So it doesn't even make sense.
That would actually make her more qualified to step into the role for real since she's been doing it in the shadows for four years.
It doesn't even make sense what they're trying to own her on.
It is funny because it really isn't subtle where she's like, yes, I am a DEI hire.
I am incompetent. But people are dumb.
I know. You never know.
It's like, what really strikes me is that it's not even as satire.
It's not like subtle.
It's not like they're imagining the voice of Kamala Harris, and what if she did say something that implied that she's incompetent or a deep state puppet?
It's like, what if she said all the criticisms I make of her, and she said them verbatim and just literal?
No subtlety, no subtext, and she just said the things that I say while I talk about how much I hate her.
Five secretaries of state have warned Musk in August that his Twitter-run AI program Grok has been disseminating false information about the election.
Just still, Grok is just like the worst name for anything.
One of the more insane instances of Elon's pro-Trump posting on Twitter came after the second, incredibly failed Trump assassination attempt, where he quote-tweeted a post that read, why they want to kill Donald Trump by saying this.
And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden slash Kamala.
Thinking emoji.
It's a great, very normal, very legal tweet to make.
And no one is even trying.
Like, come on, guys.
He would later delete the tweet and clarify that he wasn't encouraging someone to attempt to kill the vice president, saying this during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson.
Some people interpreted it as I was calling for people to assassinate Harris, but I was like, doesn't it seem strange that no one has even bothered to try?
No one tries to assassinate a puppet.
Isn't that kind of the same thing?
He's like, no, I wasn't calling for anybody to actually assassinate.
I was just saying, isn't it kind of weird that nobody has?
You're saying it's kind of unfair.
Yeah, yeah. Why can't things be equal?
Republicans always get the raw end of the deal.
Elon has boosted quite a bit of anti-Democrat election misinformation on Twitter, such as brooding the idea that FEMA has purposely withheld funds to help victims of Hurricane Helen, and tweeting that Democrats are flying quote-unquote asylum seekers to swing states in order to get them to vote.
But what is Trump doing for Elon?
Besides cleansing the country of the woke Mayan virus, of course.
While obviously Trump's word means literally nothing, in September of 2024, he claimed that he would create a, quote, government efficiency commission to audit the federal government headed by Musk.
Elon, quote, tweeted an article discussing this by saying this, I can't wait.
There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go.
So if you saw what Elon did to Twitter and think he should be able to do that to the United States of America, I have a presidential candidate for you.
That is terrifying.
Well, yeah. I think it also seems like a bit of a conflict of interest for Elon to head a commission involved in deciding where public funds go while also being a multi-billion dollar government contractor.
You can't be on both sides of the legislature on this one.
You can't be on both sides of the cash register.
I mean, he's going to try, but I don't see how that's going to work practically.
I mean, if Trump is the president, he can just, like, kill someone as the president.
I feel like he could probably hook that up for him.
I think that Elon, other than removing any kind of regulations that are preventing his...
Wildest space exploration dreams.
I think that they would make a massive move to embolden cryptocurrency and essentially make a lot of really obnoxious people very rich overnight, which would also, I think we would see the effects of for decades and decades to come.
This is to say, invest into Dogecoin right now.
Yeah, I imagine that that's, like, what they're kind of...
That's their immediate plan, is to remove any kind of environmental regulations, safety regulations.
We're going to see a lot more exploding rockets if Trump wins.
We're going to see a lot more space disasters and catastrophes and astronauts potentially losing their lives.
And we're going to have a lot of, like, very wealthy pay-pays sort of running free.
So, sounds...
Sounds pretty bad.
Sounds pretty...
pretty bad.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second premium episode for every single main episode.
There are well over 200 and probably a little bit more than that.
Plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
I guess that's also redundant.
For everything else, we've got a website, qaapodcast.com.
Elon, until next week, may this great guy building rocket ships and managing a great social media site bless you and jump up and down like a human being.
Liv, where can people find your stuff?
They can find me on liveagar.com.
It's my newsletter. I'm also streaming again.
Twitch.tv slash liveagar.
Lots of news. Fake news.
Fake news from Liv Agar.
If you want fake news in video format, you can follow her on Twitch.
And I've already done the outro, but I guess I'll do it again.
Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
I don't know. It's mind-blowing that they've not tried to prosecute even one.
Not even the worst offender on the Epstein client list.
They've not even tried to prosecute even one.
That's insane. Well, because they have a lot of diabetic grandmothers who were outside the Capitol on January 6th.
They're kind of occupied. Yeah, I mean, they've put, like, whatever, 500 or 600 January 6th protesters in prison and not one person on the Epstein client list.
Will that ever come out, do you think?
You know, I think part of why Kamala's getting so much support is that if Trump wins, that F's inclined list is going to become public.
Yes. And some of those billionaires behind Kamala are terrified of that outcome.
Yeah. Do you think Reid Hoffman's uncomfortable?
Yes. And Gates.
And Gates. Yeah.
I only ask that because you can certainly just look at them and you're like, that's a nervous person right there.
