The election has come and gone. Liv, Jake, Travis and Julian talk about conspiracism among online Republicans and Democrats in the wake of Trump’s victory. We also talk a bit about Kash Patel, who guested on QAnon podcasts before becoming the future Director of the FBI. Plus Jake brings us a sequel to his story: Letter from the Meme War.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe, Nick Sena, Jake Rockatansky. 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 301, Post-Traumatic Election Disorder.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Julian Fields, Liv Agar, and Travis View.
It's approximately 4 p.m.
on November 5, 2024.
I'm on the fifth floor of a hospital, still a little zonked on the Valium they gave me this morning.
The fluorescent ceiling lights are too bright, and they're reflecting in wobbling puddles off the linoleum as I shuffle towards the common room.
A woman in her 60s dressed in dark tones and wearing an oversized boater hat has the other dozen or so patients in a state of upheaval.
She's refusing to let them watch Avatar Way of the Water on the crummy TV because she hates science fiction and keeps clamoring for a movie that, in her words, has real people in it.
Yesterday, this approach backfired when she put on Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale and was displeased with a scene in which a young boy smears his cum across school lockers.
She's an orthodox Jewish convert, or so she claims.
It's hard to know when she's telling the truth.
What's for certain is that she wants Trump to be president again, watches Ben Shapiro, and is making the act of group-watching movies on benzos into a huge pain in the ass.
The only patient who doesn't seem bothered is the guy who ended up here because he overdosed on PCP after injecting his habitual mixture of fentanyl and meth.
He's wearing a tie-dye flaming hot Cheetos beanie and just came back to the common room after hitting a weed vape his girlfriend smuggled in for him.
After some arguing, they end up putting on Avatar, much to the displeasure of our common enemy, who wanders off to the shift supervisor's desk to try to score some pain pills.
I can't believe I ended up here from receiving the full Q disclosure download straight from the Akashic Records.
It almost killed me.
It's harder than meth and fentanyl.
But not quite as hard as PCP. Probably same category, PCP. Yeah, that guy like dipped his cigarette in PCP and then was smoking it and apparently his girlfriend was trying to like take it from him to hit it too and he just like clutched it like he got into like a trance, smoked the whole thing and then overdosed and...
Well, the rest is history.
That's how we became friends.
It's nearly midnight on November 5th, 2024, and it looks like Trump's going to sweep the swing states.
I'm the only one left in the common room.
Everyone else has taken their sleep meds and conked out.
I sit bleary-eyed, watching cable news, feeling nothing.
The next morning, it's clear he won the election.
A tall, middle-aged black guy in a leather jacket and distressed jeans wanders out of our shared room after sleeping for two days straight.
Who won?
he asks me.
Trump, I tell him.
Good, he says.
About a third of the patients support the Republican candidate.
I later hear the man, who has a tendency to think aloud, tell himself.
It took three days to find out Trump won.
Thank you, Jesus Christ.
Now it's your turn.
I assume he believes the second coming is imminent.
It's also clear he's lost track of time.
It's nearly midday on November 9th, 2024.
I'm out of detox and I have my phone back.
I've asked my co-host if I can write the intro to the post-election episode.
Travis responds, As long as it's more nuanced than a list of Democratic Party leaders and execution methods.
I give him a reluctant thumbs-up emoji.
I briefly consider listing the leaders and masking my intentions by simply describing what is happening to Gazans.
I doubt Travis will buy it.
It's 9.30am on November 12th, 2024.
I think I have a minor cold.
I'm wearing a hoodie with a fleece blanket wrapped around my neck.
I'm drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette as I write the intro to our 301st episode.
I'm on new depression meds and I'm six days sober.
It feels weird to regain the will to live as everything gets a little stupider and a little shittier.
I even hear that Liv moved to Canada in the wake of the election.
That's true.
Job's done.
Gotta go elsewhere.
Well, as the saying goes, bad for the country, good for the podcast.
Well, like, not even really anymore.
It's bad, ultimately, because we feel bad.
Speak for yourself.
I'm feeling great.
That's true, yeah.
But that's not due to anything in the political sphere.
I put $100,000 on Bitcoin, through the moon...
Meanwhile, I'm like a pharaoh that's being buried in the tomb, and I'm surrounding myself with Ghostbusters collectibles just to sort of ride out the apocalypse with my favorite toys next to me.
Yeah, you would be the first to be buried in Slimer pajamas.
Yeah.
Hello, beautiful listener, and welcome to our post-election episode, which also happens to be our 301st.
In store for you today, two lobes of our common brain.
The right side belongs to Travis Few, who's going to explore the bloom of rot and horror known as the Trump Cabinet.
Then, Liv will activate our left lobe, which some would argue is actually veering into being a neocon lobe, as she explores the various ways supporters of the Democratic Party are spinning out into conspiracy theories Yeah, America has a right lobe and a center lobe.
That's it.
That's the spectrum.
We've got vote machine hacking, hopes of a recount, and florid claims of a rigged election.
After we're done with the brain, it'll be time to go for the gut, where a half-digested peanut butter and jelly uncrustable is inspiring a Jake story, which I hear is a sequel to his much-lauded Letters from the Meme War from episode 26, which came out all the way back in February 2019.
But before I let my co-host take over, I've got some things to get out of the way.
As much as I hate to be fully earnest, there's no way around it.
The Trump victory is a horrible blow to the rights of the undocumented, the unhoused, trans people, and women's reproductive rights, among others.
The president-elect has already put out videos about his plans, and it's not pretty.
He's at the very least claiming he'll target trans people and treat the homeless essentially like they're vermin, unpleasant and unwanted in what he calls beautiful cities.
And I doubt it'll be by offering them places to live and social benefits.
He's made some incredibly dire promises when it comes to people living in the United States without legal citizenship, brutalization, incarceration, deportation, all things already happening, but it's certainly not good that he seems gung-ho on making the process even more cruel than it currently is.
There's also, of course, the question of the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by Israel and the United States, which he somehow supports more than the already terrible on the issue current administration.
So, all around shit prospects for the next four years.
I wish everyone involved in crafting and carrying out these plans the very worst, but I already wished the worst to the current administration, so make of that what you will.
Finding out a way to wish someone even worse than you wish Biden.
Obviously, in the wake of the election results, many people are blaming minorities, namely podcasters.
Trump did interviews with YouTube podcasters like Theo Vaughn, who spoke to him about how cocaine makes you into an owl.
Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan.
But he also went on other podcasts I'd never heard of, like Bussin' with the Boys, the barstool show.
Flagrant, which is hosted by some comedian.
And Six Feet Under, where he spoke to the legendary wrestler The Undertaker.
And of course, Trump also spoke to Aiden Ross, a kick streamer who gifted him a cyber truck wrapped with the bloody ear Trump raising his fist photo taken in the moments after the first assassination attempt.
Obviously, a lot of the blame lies at our feet.
A few episodes ago, we of course published a six and a half hour interview with Donald Trump.
And if you don't remember it, here's the clip that we got in the most trouble for.
Oh, man.
So, uh, so what's your body count?
Come on.
Not as high as Dick Cheney's, I'll tell you that.
Not as high.
No, no, no.
Like, it's an expression.
It means, like, how many people you've slept with.
Well, it's very rude to kiss and tell.
Ah, come on.
The people want to know.
Look, I've made a lot of love.
A lot of love, people tell me.
I can handle myself.
They always tell me, best I've ever had.
Cool, man.
What's your signature move?
Nothing out of the usual, you know, just great appetite.
I like to eat.
I like to eat a lot of ass.
Beautiful women, you know, they're caked up.
I'm caked up.
I've got lots of cake.
You slice it.
Is it a piece of cake?
It is.
And maybe the best cake.
Certainly the sweetest.
Definitely the most frosting.
Red, white, blue sprinkles.
A lot of cake.
A lot of ass.
A lot of eating.
A lot of paper plates and paper knives and forks as well.
Throw them in the ocean.
Nobody cares.
Hell yeah, dude.
That is epic.
And I endorse you for President of the United States of America.
Jesus Christ, Julian.
Yeah, we got a lot of heat for that one.
In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to have him on.
As usual, I should have listened to Mr.
View.
Speaking of top-ranked members of the Resistance, Travis, you want to take it from here?
Boy, you know, yeah, we talked a lot.
I feel like a main trajectory of the show is just the ways in which these conspiracist narratives and communities keep climbing up and up and up into, you know, the higher levels of, like, Power and wealth and stuff.
And here we have another example.
Right before the election, there was Elon Musk.
I mean, he pandered to QAnon and Pizzagate like the day before.
I don't know why.
Strange decision, but he did it.
And not new behavior from Elon Musk, like he posted a Pizzagate meme last year, which we talked about.
But this time, Musk shared a fake news article claiming that a I really didn't expect you to defend pedophiles right
up top.
Jesus Christ.
No.
Hey, you know.
I do love the idea like, oh, I guess walnut sauce means child slaves now.
Like, I guess that result means that that's the case.
Yeah.
The image that Musk shared also included the false claim that the Podesta brothers were suspects in the 2007 disappearance of three-year-old Madeline McCann.
Not true.
In fact, we did an entire episode about this particular conspiracy theory back in 2019.
So this is something that's just been floating around for a while and was now just amplified by certainly the most powerful private citizen on Earth, Elon Musk, in service of the, you know, the candidacy of Donald Trump.
So and then he followed up that tweet, you know, his comment on that tweet was the hammer of justice was coming.
Very, you know, very QAnon-y.
Then Musk also posted this one minute long Fashwave hype video of Trump.
So a watermark on the clip indicates that was produced by an ex-user who goes by the name National Revival.
And as that might indicate, as you might guess, that user promotes Nazi ideology.
So the account's location is listed as Aryan Hyperborea.
Oh my god.
Feels like maybe you're like reading too far into this.
Yeah, definitely.
I think there's a lot that's being misinterpreted here.
I think it's so beautiful that this all came from a Hearts of Iron 4 video game mod.
A 4chan editing style thing that was viral five years ago.
It is true.
Posting is real life.
Now the posters control all the branches of government.
That makes sense to me because if I've ever seen two human beings that resemble Roblox characters, it's fucking Elon Musk and Trump.
So at one point in the video, as Trump says, the future belongs to patriots.
The word patriots has the word Q in it where the O is supposed to be.
And then like all the letters except the Q disappear.
So Elon Musk promoted a QAnon video made by an esoteric Nazi, which is a true thing that happened.
Mm-hmm.
Didn't like a couple years ago when some journalist asked him about QAnon, he was like, lol?
Yes, yes, yes.
He was asked about it by the Washington Post, and his only response was lol.
I get the sense he's having a lot of fun egging on the QAnon community.
You know, he kind of gets that there's something fun there in riling them up.
Now he supposedly has some authority in Trump's cabinet position appointees.
Yeah.
It's great.
He's definitely second wave, though.
He's a fucking Reddit loser.
He doesn't have the deep Chan lore.
No, he doesn't.
Because he's someone who's like, can I buy epic meme points?
How do I purchase meme credibility?
I know.
Now, the QAnon community, I mean, obviously, they're very elated that Trump won the election.
Of course, they think that the second Trump administration will do all the things that they thought would happen the first time around.
You know, D-class, the mass arrests, the release of the cures, all that stuff.
On Truth Social, the QAnon influencer Kag Drogo posted this wish list.
Looking forward to seeing, colon, JFK files, 9-11 files, Epstein client list, end of fluoride in water, end of poison vaccines, end of or labeling GMOs, end of chemtrails, eliminating income tax, ending the Fed, lightning eliminating income tax, ending the Fed, lightning bolt, mass arrest of satanic pedos slash traitors, the best is yet to come, American flag emoji, American eagle emoji. -
American eagle emoji you have posted.
All QAnon you believe in once again.
What is going on?
Why has Yoda appeared?
What does that have to do with any of this?
Yoda, peeled I am, read too many posts on Truth Social I have.
Oh, God.
Alright, alright.
It's cool how the dollar menu is going to be like two times as expensive in four years as it is now.
Eliminating income tax and then putting like a 40% tariff on all imports.
Well, that won't matter so much, Liv, when McDonald's is the only place that you can get food in the United States.
Well, you have to invest now in Big Macs and you can 2X. True.
People will have to line up in what will be called the Mac lines, you know, but they'll only be serving chicken.
They'll only be serving chicken Macs, the worst sandwich McDonald's has ever unveiled.
All the talk of Cosmic, which was the McDonald's, like, coffee chain that they were gonna unleash, all gone under Trump.
Kamala would've had, she would've had lots of Cosmics, where you could get breakfast all day and all sorts of breakfast, all sorts of coffee drinks, but now, McDonald's only, no breakfast.
Getting rid of the salads, they're also gay.
Yeah.
No more crispy chicken wraps.
We're not doing anything wrapped, alright?
We're doing bun only.
Multiple bun.
Bun, bun on top.
Bun on bottom and bun in the middle.
Every sandwich.
I think, like, they published what his usual McDonald's meal is in the evening, and it's, like, two burgers plus, like, two Filet-O-Fish and, like, a chocolate milkshake.
It's beautiful.
That's good.
No carbs.
He's on the keto diet.
So excited for President Vance in six months.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
President Vance, who looks like a...
He's got, like, the eyes of, like, an evil Santa.
You know, in, like, weird Christmas movies where the Santa becomes evil?
That's kind of what he's got.
Sort of got those sort of, like, evil-looking mutton chops starting to form.
Did you guys see that guy on Twitter who posted that he, like, sucked off?
So, because Trump won an election, does that mean that he has defeated the deep state in the QAnon universe?
And, of course not.
Because, like, one of the things that makes the QAnon narrative so appealing is that involves this massively consequential but secret battle between Trump and the various forces of evil.
If the cabal was truly defeated, there would be no more exciting conflict.
So, QAnon promoter 107 explained why Trump's deep state enemies would continue to fight.
With a deep sigh of relief, the patriot community can rest assured that justice is coming.
Or can it?
Did election night seem a little too smooth sailing to you?
Did alarm bells go off in your head ring a dang dang dang dang?
Is there another shoe to drop?
Did you really think that the enemies of Trump and the United States were just going to roll over, accept defeat, get their orange jumpsuits on, and hop on the Gitmo bus?
You may ask, what's left for our deep state opponents?
Do they actually have any moves left?
Let me clue you in.
The short answer is yes and hell yes.
They, in parentheses, intend to deliver us into a Twilight Zone, a hellish alternative dimension of their making which will last forever.
If they get their way, not happening, mind you.
Right this moment, White Hats and their Black Hat counterparts are sailing full speed into the Constitutional Battle Zone, where they will turn their great ships side to side and begin blasting their cannons at each other at point-blank range.
Everything is just a movie.
It's like the Empire Strikes Back.
You can't have the good guys win for too long because you need the writing to get interesting again.
It's like there's going to be a scene where Trump gets into the office and he's like, it's quiet.
Too quiet.
And then the Democrats have their attack or whatever.
Well, yeah, you just hear the motion detector going like...
And then Trump's like, where are they?
Ten feet!
Five feet!
They're in the room!
And then Gorka gets up on top of the president's desk and looks into the rafters, and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are crawling towards them through the rafters with their double mouths coming out.
Somewhere, a couple of listeners are laughing at that reference.
Somewhere, a couple of listeners liked it when I made that comparison.
But the podcast host didn't care.
They want to move on to the next piece of news.
Jesus Christ.
Next time we have to laugh so he doesn't sing.
Yeah, QAnon followers have one reason to be really enthused, because this time around, they're going to have someone friendly to QAnon high up in government.
And I'm not talking about Michael Flynn.
It actually remains to be seen what role he'll have.
But in a recent interview with Tim Pool, he explicitly denied any plans to join Trump's government.
So I wanted to ask you then, I don't know if you can answer, but are there any plans for you to serve in the upcoming Trump administration?
None.
That's it?
That was easy.
All right.
What would you like to see happen then moving forward?
I'm a little tongue-in-cheek, but right now I don't have any plans.
I mean, that's what he says.
This is all fluid.
He might be bullshit, but that's what he says.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But also, it could be a thing of, you know, it's like, ah, the breakup was mutual.
Like, we both didn't want it to continue happening totally.
Yeah, I'm at that party because I don't want to be, you know.
Like, I had an invite.
I just didn't want to go.
Yeah, I'm curious what the deal there is, because, I mean, yeah, Flynn was always a fierce Trump loyalist, so I kind of assumed he'd be in the government, but here he is saying that he won't.
I think he's such a little suck-up and, like, I don't know, maybe Trump just is like, this guy's a fucking loser.
He sounds bitter, honestly.
He does.
He sounds bitter to me, too.
Yeah.
He's like, God damn it, boy.
I spent so many years, so many years online caping for you, finding all of your people, riling them up, getting them out to vote, and what do I get?
Nothing.
Toss me aside like Elsa.
Yeah.
I'm frozen out of the government, boy.
I'm frozen out of the government, boy.
Going to have to go back to civilian life as I know it.
Not looking forward to it.
You should give me a job, boy.
I know you pardoned me.
Saved me from prison.
But come on, boy.
Put me in something.
I don't care.
Head of education.
Whatever.
It doesn't matter to me.
I'll do my best.
Losers whine about their best.
But there's one person who will certainly be part of the Trump administration and has a history of encouraging QAnon followers, and that's Kesha Patel.
But he's better known by the name Kash Patel.
So Patel was previously an aide to Congressman Devin Nunes, and he's also the primary author of the so-called Nunes Memo, which is part of this broader effort by House Republicans to undermine the Justice Department's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
And he was hired by the Trump administration, where he was staff on the National Security Council before he moved to the office of the Director of National Intelligence, and then he moved to the Pentagon as, like, Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense.
It sounds like he was a guy who was, like, in there, who was like, let's find a good place for him, wherever he could be.
He didn't care where, somewhere high up.
That must mean that he was an excellent worker.
Yeah.
Right.
Someone who was, you know, there, it was like, it seemed it was very, very important to Trump for, for Cash to be there.
Near the end of Trump's first term, it was reported that Trump wanted to install Cash Patel as the deputy CIA director.
However, the CIA director at the time, Gina Haspel, threatened to resign in protest if he did do that.
And so that didn't happen.
So if you remember 2021, when MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell walked into that post-election meeting with Donald Trump, and he was photographed holding a document that contained some sort of secret plan to keep Trump president.
So one readable line from that list was a document that said, move Kash Patel to CIA acting.
That would have been much cooler than what happened.
I really would love to have a guy who wrote three children's books about Trump referring to him as king at the head of the CIA. That would have been, it would have been funnier, maybe funnier than what would happen.
I mean, but interesting.
So like this time around, there probably aren't going to be any more careerist like trying, steering Trump and getting him to do other things.
It seems like That was the leverage that the quote-unquote deep state had last time.
It's like, if you do this horrible thing, I'm just going to resign.
You're going to have to fill my positions.
It's going to be more chaotic, more work for you.
And that's what they did.
People will have less of a leverage in that sense this time around.
So it was rumored that Patel was the most likely candidate to be named CIA director, but that was just announced today as we're recording this is actually John Radcliffe, so that won't be happening, but you'll probably get some sort of position high in the, you know, the, I guess, the intelligence bureaucracy.
That's due to the confusion.
The FBI was going to entrap him based on his name, and so this was going to cause, you know, general hubbub between the agencies.
So Trump likes Patel so much because he is a diehard Trump loyalist.
A profile of Patel earlier this year was published in The Atlantic, and it was headlined, The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump.
That report includes one story of how Patel seemingly offered false testimony in order to protect Trump from the investigation into Trump's handling of classified documents.
In spring of 2022, after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into Trump's handling of federal records at Mar-a-Lago, Patel insinuated himself into the story, telling Breitbart News that he witnessed Trump verbally declassify whole sets of materials before leaving the presidency.
The claim ensured a starring role for Patel throughout the probe, ending with Patel testifying before a federal grand jury in exchange for a grant of limited immunity.
More crucially, Patel's assertion to Breitbart seemed to preview Trump's own approach to the case.
In August, shortly after federal investigations executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, I think he just heard, like, Trump's tummy rumble after a big meal.
He's like, whoa, I just heard him verbally declassify.
That's me being like, any beef jerky container moved to the lower section of the cabinet will be mine from now on.
So please, you know, follow the rules.
I mean, this is just crazy because it just sounds like what happened was that, like, you know, he's like, they finally got wind that they were investigating this whole classified documents thing.
And they're like, well, how do we get ahead of it?
How do we protect it?
And, like, Patel maybe volunteered to do this or he's asked to.
Okay, I'm just going to say I heard you verbally declassify the documents in question.
I'm going to go talk to friendly media to get that out, and then essentially lie, and then lie to a grand jury.
Commit perjury.
I feel like this is something Trump sometimes does a lot in order to test someone's loyalty.
They'll see if one of his underlings is willing to lie for him.
He did this with like Sean Spencer at the very beginning of the first Trump administration where he asked him to get out there and then lie about the size of the crowd of his inauguration.
But no, I mean, this is like Smithers and Mr.
Burns levels of kind of devotion and willing to self-sacrifice for the boss.
If you pay them, like, often just, like, 15 bucks, you can get your inauguration rated by an OnlyFans girl.
Sean Spicer, how do you even remember that guy's name?
How do you even remember that that guy existed?
That seems like a hundred years ago that people were like, Spicer!
I felt like, you know what, I totally forgot about the first Trump administration and trying to figure out, well, what is the second one going to be?
I unlocked this folder in my brain that was full of all the pointless bullshit I read during the first interview.
All those weird little side characters.
Remember, what was it, Rince Priebus?
Oh my god, these guys are ghosts!
They're gone, they're dead!
I know, they are gone, but now they've started haunting my memory as I try to speculate what the next four years are going to be.
The ghost of Priebus present?
A lot of them can be remembered by just watching Dancing with the Stars.
Spicer was on it.
Yeah.
Giuliani was on it.
Oh my god.
So, like Julian mentioned, Patel has also authored a trilogy of children's books that portray Trump as a medieval king and tell allegorical stories about Donald Trump fighting the deep state.
So it started with the book The Plot Against the King, but there was also a sequel, The Plot Against the King Part 2, 2000 Mules.
Okay.
And most recently, The Plot Against the King 3, The Return of the King.
Awesome.
You got your, like, six-year-old kid being like, Mama, what is the Nunes memo?
Well, you're joking about children, but, like, Kash Patel collaborated with, like, a Lego stop-motion child that spoke at that conference, remember?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, that's right.
He, like, did, like, a Lego stop-motion of his book.
Fuck.
That's right.
He's like, we've got everybody.
We've got Kash Patel who's willing to lie for me, and he's writing children's books.
We've got Lego boy.
Yeah.
Lego boys.
Stop motion technology is a lot better than it was.
We've got the Rizzler.
We've got the Rizzler.
We've got Rince.
The Costco guys.
Hey, get Rince up here.
I want to kiss him.
We've got the Bustin' boys as well.
Love them.
Bussin' boys, we've got former 2K streamer Aiden Ross.
Aiden Ross talks a lot about 2K, which is my favorite game, and...
Trump wanders into the house and tries to get into the shower of Kai Sinat.
Trump gets phantom-taxed.
So there seems to be a lot of indications that the incoming Trump administration will use the powers of government to, like, go after people who've, like, you know, defied Trump in some way.
In a recent interview on Steve Bannon's show, Patel said that this will include going after members of the media.
We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media.
Yes.
We're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
We're going to come after you.
Whether it's criminally or civilly, we'll figure that out.
But yeah, we're putting you all on notice.
And Steve, this is why they hate us.
He sounds so annoying.
It's like head of the CIA. We are the media now.
Patel is also someone who was mentioned in a Q drop all the way back in 2018.
Kesha Patel.
Name to remember.
Q. Yeah, that's because most Americans would not be able to remember that name.
And Kash Patel is a guy who has repeatedly pandered to and courted QAnon followers, especially since 2022.
Seems to have really ramped up that year.
Alex Kaplan at Media Matters has done a great job of documenting this.
So Patel got the most press for this when he used QAnon for a promotion for the plot against the King 2.
So the basis was that 10 of the signed books would not just feature the signature of the author, but also WWG1WGA, you know, the abbreviation of the QAnon slogan.
So Patel defended using this QAnon slogan during an appearance on the QAnon podcast, The Matrix Groove Hour.
Where We Go One, Where We Go All is, as you said, from a great movie that I watched a long time ago.
And people took to it.
And so what?
You know, it doesn't mean everyone's a conspiracy theorist.
And people keep asking me about all this Q stuff.
I'm like, what does it matter?
What I'm telling you is that there is truth in a lot of things that many people say.
And what I'm putting out there is the truth.
And how about we have some fun along the way?
There's so many people who subscribe to the Where We Go One, We Go One All mantra.
And it's, what's wrong with it?
We're just boys on a boat.
So what?
I love Ridley Scott.
You don't like Ridley Scott, the director?
I know.
Look, this was a great movie that I watched, maybe in the theater, maybe at a sleepover.
I can't really remember when I saw it, but I definitely remembered one of my favorite lines in any movie from it.
Where go one, we go where all.
One of us goes all, we go one.
I know.
Who's got the wherewithal to go with one?
I love how he didn't even remember the name of the movie.
No.
He's like, yeah, it's from the movie.
I can't remember which one, but it was from a movie.
I think it was called Twinks on a Boat.
In an interview with another pro-QAnon podcast called Grace Time TV, he praised the research acumen of the QAnon community and claimed that he talked about this QAnon research with Devin Nunes and Donald Trump.
One of the things that I have loved about following the Q community is that people are accessing open-source information.
They're not creating conspiracies out of thin air.
They're actually uncovering conspiracies that are available through open-source research.
I've seen on social media, on Truth Social, how good these researchers are, and I kind of wish I had some of them when I was doing Russiagate and some of these other things.
You know, Devin and I talk regularly, and I talk with the president all the time as well.
And we're just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have and how quick they are to grab it and suss through it and sort of thin it down and make it presentable.
And that is the singular best way on how you effectuate the change that you want in your community.
And if it's Q or whatever movement that's getting that information out, I'm all for it every day of the week.
The tone is a little bit like, yeah, we love you fucking morons.
Yeah, because I can't really imagine Trump, Cash, and Devin Nunes in some official office reading posts and being like, JFK Jr.
is still alive?
How come we didn't know that?
I know.
This is the thing about Cash is that he is definitely not a true believer.
He's said this explicitly.
He doesn't really buy into everything.
He's not a true follower.
What he likes, though, is that there's this highly engaged community of people who are all about Trump.
Yeah, who doesn't want to have a little fun along the way?
Watch a video of Hillary Clinton eating the face off a baby.
You know, in that same interview, Kash Patel explicitly denied that he's a quote-unquote QAnon-er, but he acknowledged that they're a larger community and suggested that it's useful to teach them the bigger message.
Are you a QAnon-er?
Like, no.
No.
So like everything else, you have to have fun with it.
And like I've told people seriously, I don't know, you know, the Q thing is a movement.
A lot of people attach themselves to it.
I disagree with a lot of what that movement says, but I agree with what a lot of that movement says.
And so you're never going to be 100% with anybody and you don't just go on shows to agree for the sake of agreeing, but you try to teach them the bigger message or put out the bigger wording of the truth.
That's awesome.
He's like, well, yeah, they get off topic, but sometimes you can just feed them GOP talking points.
That's right.
They're very receptive.
They put an extraordinary amount of trust in us and what we're saying, so they're good for that.
No, no, no.
I hear you about the mole children, but maybe you could talk about how we're not taxing tips.
Yeah, it sounds like he's, it's actually a pretty honest stance from the Trump campaign about how they feel about QAnon people, which is that, yeah, they're lunatics, but they're willing to push our message.
They love us.
They can be useful idiots.
And, you know, what's wrong with having a little bit of fun every now and again?
And are we so bad to play to that fun, you know?
So, this wasn't the only time that Patel suggested that it's useful for the Trump camp to engage with the QAnon community.
On yet another QAnon podcast called The Patriot Party News, Patel said that he tries to incorporate Q into his overall messaging scheme.
God, this guy's like Snoop Dogg.
He'll just do anything.
The number 17 means a whole lot to us.
Does any of that mean anything to you in your real life?
No, look, you know, I think people are having fun with Q, and I think also that, you know, I don't really follow him.
We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences, because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breadth of the MAGA and the America First movement.
And so what I try to do is what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise.
Is you can't ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following, but what you can do is educate them on what is true versus what is, you know, a conspiracy theory.
Man, he's giving away the game!
Okay, so basically, he's doing our job.
I love that he was, like, the start of this clip begins with, like, numerology shit of, like, if you add up, you know, Donald Trump is Jesus Christ is king, he gets to, like, 87.
If you also add up, Hillary Clinton is a pedophile, 87.
Does that make you feel anything?
He's like, ha ha ha, no, these guys are idiots.
But look, I mean, look, a lot of people are having a lot of fun being idiots, and, like, we can use them.
I hear Trump is gonna fire Gary Gensler and replace him with Tommy Numbers.
Yeah.
We need the numerology department to think about numbers.
Yeah.
I'm so tired already.
One episode into the new regime and I'm like yawning.
I'm so exhausted.
I'm like a little baby that needs to be tucked back into his nappy.
Wait, wait.
So you put a baby to sleep in his diaper?
No, I'm the diaper.
I'm confused.
I'm not following.
I don't...
So is it like Tatooine and like you've carved...
Like you're carved open and the baby survives by kind of like slotting inside you?
No, no, no, no.
You're not understanding.
That's Hoth.
Hoth.
Fuck Hoth, Liv.
Goddamn.
Two pieces of tape, baby's rump nestled.
I am the diaper in which to receive, you know, the gift.
Beautiful, beautiful poetry, man.
Thank you.
Patel expressed a similar sentiment on yet another QAnon podcast called Bards FM. By the way, he showed up on like all the QAnon podcasts.
There's another one I'm not even mentioning here.
It's called the X-22 Report that Patel was also on.
I was about to be like, how has he not been on X-22?
And of course he has.
Yes.
So on Bards FM, he seemed to suggest that Q was useful because it got Trump supporters engaged regardless of the supposed good or bad that Q is responsible for.
So whether it's Q or what have you, there's good that he's done, there's bad that he's done, and I think we need more people to mobilize around platforms to get engaged, and that's the key.
Q's never done anything.
What does he mean?
There's good posts, there's bad posts.
What are you fucking talking about?
Well, he's like, believe in Trump, good, but JFK Jr.'s still alive, not bad.
Code monkey, code monkey.
Some of his code is good.
Some of his code is bad.
And Q, he showed up with the horns.
That was bad.
But he also told us about Frazzledrip.
That was good.
Yeah, so this is a guy who believes in engaging, encouraging, and energizing the QAnon community.
For whatever reason, he sees QAnon followers as like an important and useful group within the larger MAGA movement to the extent that he will go on the podcast rounds, speak to all of them, Encourage and thank them for their support on behalf of Trump.
It's crazy because before he's been able to do this through media, through these podcast appearances or through posts on Truth Social or these kinds of things.
But now he's going to be some sort of figure within the intelligence community.
Not CIA director, apparently, but he's going to have something.
And I have a feeling that he's going to continue to pander to the QAnon community once he's in.
I don't know what that's going to look like, but it could be anything.
You know what I think would be interesting?
I want to see the Trump administration develop a civilian award for valor during the digital war.
So extraordinary feats as a digital soldier.
Something like that.
Some ribbon that they can actually give from the government to the digital soldiers.
From your lips to God's ears.
In general, though, Travis, how is the average QAnon Twitter poster or Truth Social Twitter poster, how are they taking this sweeping win?
Did the deep state just fail to rig the election this time?
No, actually, they still often believe in the idea that there was cheating going on, but now they've bought into this idea that it was too big to rig.
They give the example, so our votes somehow overwhelm the cheating.
Mm-hmm.
They are.
Or sometimes they even suggested that the only reason that that the blue states were blue was because of cheating.
And they don't allow things for like for or they don't require things like voter ID or something.
There's some sort of corrupt way that the blue states turn blue.
I mean, you know, I mean, like they're just never happy.
They never there's never like a victory condition.
They're eternally dissatisfied, but they also never lose either.
They're just always in limbo.
You know, I saw a couple of people online talking about the fact that Trump won differently.
This election cycle is proof that the Democrats cheated in 2020.
And basically what some of them have been saying is that because of COVID and because everybody was encouraged to use mail-in ballots, they were able to cheat and rig the votes in 2020.
But this year, because a lot more people showed up in person, there wasn't so much COVID going around, there's still a lot of You know, that the Democrats weren't able to steal the election this time around.
But it's so funny because I thought like, oh, well maybe, you know, one very small good thing that would come out of this is that, you know, the Republicans will be like, yes, okay, we believe in free and fair elections again.
But no, it's like, oh no, actually this is more proof that 2020 was stolen and now we believe that more than ever.
So yeah, we also never win.
We're never happy.
We never get a good anything.
Yeah, frustrating stuff.
America, resembling the very hospital floor that I opened the episode with.
Now that we've taken a look at what's going on in MAGA World following the election, it's time to cross the aisle over to the losing side and see what they've been up to.
As it turns out, Democrats have broadly been doing not very well.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
As we talked about in our preparation for the election episode, this election has led to a multitude of conspiracy theories concerning voter fraud.
Though what we didn't really expect was that it would also be being pushed by liberals.
And of course, in all fairness, it's a lot easier to accept the results of an election when you win.
Although I guess even for the right, they're still not happy.
But that doesn't mean the growing trend of conspiracism among liberals is not cause for concern.
One of the primary motivators behind conspiracy theories is feeling powerless.
And Democrats, being robbed of the Senate and presidency, not winning the House, and losing the popular vote to an even more radical Donald Trump than the one sworn in in 2016, has certainly evoked the feeling in many of them that they have lost control.
It really was a landslide.
Dems lost, and not even as bad as they lost in 2016, which has been really hard for many of them to explain.
So naturally, it did not take long for the conspiracy theories to begin to fester within certain online liberal spaces.
A day after the election, for instance, the hashtag DoNotConcedeKamala trended on Twitter with 185,000 tweets.
That's great, yeah.
That's awesome.
After years of yelling about election denialism, please, Kamala, become an election denialist.
I do think, honestly, a lot of it just goes down to, like, it's not fair that they get to do it.
Yes.
Like, we get to do it, too.
Like, if you get to do it.
They're having fun.
Yeah.
We need a liberal Count Chocula.
Oh yeah?
Tell me more about him.
We need a liberal Captain Crunch.
We need a liberal Scrooge McDuck.
We need a liberal Elmer Fudd.
One example of a post that went viral receiving 136,000 likes comes from at Progressive Guy, who said this.
He had no ground game.
He was out-fundraised.
He was out-spent.
He was out-volunteered.
Voter turnout was up.
Women voters showed up.
Something doesn't add up.
Oh, this is worse than Q writing.
Yeah, no, it's rough.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Women voters showed up?
Yeah, for Trump.
God, they lost, like, especially one of the biggest demographics that they underperformed in compared to Biden was young people.
I wonder why that is, huh?
Yeah, I mean, it really does, like, broadly, one of the main things just does seem like the incumbency disadvantage from 2020 to 2024.
Like, a lot of major parties across the world just debate and shit because of inflation.
However dumb that is, however much you want to have, like, an indictment of American voters that they're not high enough information to realize Trump will make it worse, like, that is just the case.
It's not, like, you can explain these things without going to conspiracy theories.
Sounds boring.
Yeah.
Like in the case of that tweet, a lot of Democrats were so blindsided by their loss, getting less votes among almost every Democratic in almost every state, that they began to spread conspiracy theories about the election being rigged, even without any sort of concrete idea as to how this could have been done.
One example of this that I found was from Mueller She Wrote, who received 139,000 likes on a tweet from November 6th that read this.
I hope in the coming days, someone is able to explain how we had record turnout, but 18 million fewer votes than 2020.
Both of those things can't be true.
Yeah, because the first one isn't true.
You had less turnout.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's just false.
Straight up.
To Mueller, she writes credit, I guess.
She is just asking questions.
Okay, yeah.
Mm-hmm.
One of the main reasons put forward by American liberals immediately after the election that it may have been stolen related to Kamala's total vote count.
On November 6th, DancingDG received 91,000 likes for a tweet that read this.
How can the total number of voters be less this year than there were in 2020 after we've had the biggest turnout than ever before?
Demand a recount and an investigation.
Hashtag do not concede Kamala.
There were 16 million unaccounted for mail-in ballots.
Attached to this tweet is an image of the Associated Press election results page, which shows Kamala at 66 million votes and Trump at 71 million, which would have put her substantially lower than Biden's 81 million in 2020.
How do you fucking include the response to your question in your screen cap?
That's awesome.
And you're wrong, of course.
That's, oh my God.
Facts matter.
Facts matter, guys.
In the days following the election, an image went viral that was titled U.S. Presidential Election Popular Vote, Democrat vs.
Republican, that showed that Democrats gained about the same amount of votes in 2012, 2016, and 2024, and gained obviously a substantially larger amount in 2020.
This is despite Trump almost holding the vote total he received in 2020.
Funny enough, both Republicans and Democrats spread this meme, Republicans as evidence that clearly Biden rigged the 2020 election, and Democrats as evidence that clearly Trump rigged the 2024 one.
Many of the latter became obsessed with the so-called missing 18 million votes, the difference between the amount of votes Kamala received on election day and the total amount of votes that Biden received in 2020.
One Twitter user posted this and received 67,000 likes.
Folks, it's not that 18 million voters didn't show up to vote.
It's that their 18 million votes are missing.
To get out of my tribe's view for a second, it's important to emphasize that the vote count the day after the election is not the total vote count.
One state in particular, California, a very populous and blue one, has been quite slow to count all its votes.
As it stands on November 11th, California is only 75% through its total vote count, and Kamala has 71 million total votes, 10 million more than she had on election day.
And seems to be likely to go up to around 76 million when all the counting is done.
So definitely less votes than in 2020 by a couple million, but not this substantial difference that both Republicans and Democrats were claiming as a reason for election fraud.
I mean, it makes sense because you have Harris being like, well, I own guns.
And like, you know, the actually the border stuff, we basically agree with Trump on.
And also Dick Cheney endorsed me.
So it's like, first of all, why would they pick you?
Your skim milk, their whole milk.
Obviously, they're going to go with the real thing.
And also, how disingenuous is that?
How are you supposed to, as a progressive, vote for a candidate endorsed by Dick Cheney?
I mean, I said this on Twitter, but I think the Democrats are essentially just the lubricant that the Republicans use to fuck people.
It really seemed like there were no Republicans that voted Trump in 2020 that voted Kamala in 2024.
There was no crossover there.
It's just your base showed up less.
It totally failed.
I mean, one of the big issues...
I had a friend who was canvassing in Arizona, and he was telling me one of the big issues that people would bring up when he would knock on doors was like, well, she never won a primary.
Yeah, I mean, it's true.
Who is this person?
We didn't pick her as a candidate, which, you know, Nancy Pelosi has done a kind of 180 on as well.
At first, she claimed there was a primary.
And then she's like, actually, she was a historically weak candidate and Biden should have dropped out earlier.
And then you find out later that they had internal polling showing that there were going to be 400 fucking, potentially 400 delegates going for Trump.
How are you supposed to trust these people?
Yeah, I mean, it really is.
I mean, even just, like, pushing Biden, like, earlier in the year, it's hard to take that seriously.
Especially after they pivoted and they were like, well, Trump is too old.
It's like, true, but how are people supposed to believe this?
If you donated to the Democrats in the wake of this election, please hit me up.
Julian at QAnonAnonymous.com.
I have some, like, business deals I'd like to propose to you.
I have some magic beans, I have a bridge...
I have a few things I could sell you.
I did.
I did donate.
Actually, I was gonna say.
Yeah, I did donate.
I donated $100 to Kamala Harris's campaign.
And I'll tell you why.
I'll tell you why.
Because when the DNC threw Biden out like a dog, I was like, good for you.
Yes, this is you're in the right direction.
No, Jake, I mean after the results.
They're fundraising after the rental.
They're not getting my money now.
I've gotten many emails in the last couple days that have said, like, hey, will you?
And now, I'm sure, Liv, you're going to get into it, but people are baking the campaign emails about fundraising now, saying that it signals a recount.
Jake, I still think you should get in touch with me, and we just need to discuss the wallet that you're holding your Dogecoin in.
I have some information I need to help you secure it.
These sort of vibes-based conspiracy theories about Republicans committing voter fraud also fail to explain the down-ballot success of many Democrats.
There are genuinely quite a few examples of this from various swing states, both at the state level and in the federal House and Senate.
But Republican Carrie Lake, for instance, seems to have lost by two and a half points in the Arizona Senate race, despite Kamala losing Arizona by almost six whole points.
Like, did they just, like, only rig it for Trump at the federal level and then, like, didn't bother to do it for the House and the Senate?
It doesn't really, it's not a very good...
Yeah.
Oddly enough, this discrepancy has also been used as evidence of voter fraud.
Mueller, she wrote, for instance, received 110,000 likes on a Twitter post on November 6th that said this.
So North Carolina went blue across the board except for president, dem governor, dem lieutenant governor, dem school superintendent, dem AG and two dem reps, and Trump.
Do I have that right?
Oh my god, man.
They hate Biden.
And Kamala was a part of the Biden presidency.
People saw her as an attachment to that.
She didn't do all that much to campaign outside of being a continuation of Biden.
So they left, like a lot of Dem voters, just left the top of the ballot blank.
That's what happened.
Yeah, let me fucking guess.
No one's going to be bringing up in these conspiracy theories a lack of an economic plan or any kind of addressing of Gaza.
I mean, it's just like, yeah, we gave them nothing and they didn't show up.
Or even just like not associating yourself with the president with this much inflation.
However much like inflation was a global issue, people associate it.
It's the same in Canada.
People think it's Justin Trudeau's specific fault that inflation has happened.
It's just like you have an incumbency disadvantage.
If you don't like not associate your candidate with the current president, people aren't going to show up.
I know you're in Canada because you dodged the draft into the second memoir.
Also, another point, and I was talking about this with Travis, like, outside of work.
It's like, you know, these influencers who are now going, like, isn't it a little bit weird?
Or, hey, like, this seems fishy.
It's like, why are we going to listen to people who, like, got this election so wrong?
And I just want to read a tweet from Mueller she wrote from before the election where she said, Time to make my official guess for the election.
I think Dems actually increase our lead in the Senate by one seat, and we flip the house pretty decisively, low double-digit pickups, and Harris wins, and a couple red states flip.
Now, to be fucking clear, everything you said was wrong!
Everything you said was wrong!
I'm sorry, but, like, these are the type of people, and I don't mean to signal out Alison Gill, I know she listens to the pod, so thank you for subscribing.
She does?
Wait, I do mean to signal her!
Fucking cut it out!
Knock it off!
You're better than this, but the thing is...
No, you are not!
She's not better than this!
This is a person who often says, look to my predictions, look at everything I got right, so that when she peddles new theories or speculations, it comes with an air of credibility.
I think this is incredibly disingenuous, and like Travis often says about QAnon, everybody is willing to point out the wins.
But they never want to point out the misses, the many misses along the way.
And I just think that, like, that's a problem with predictive entertainment where you are.
And, yeah, I know.
She says, guess.
Or she says, hey, just speculation or whatever.
But, like, what this does is it actually preps your audience.
It's like if I'm like, oh, hey, I'm thinking about maybe doing a Jake's Takes.
And people are like, oh, good, finally, you know, a break from politics.
And we can hear what he thinks about the new Banana Honey Uncrustables.
Answer, I haven't tried them yet.
But like, you know, it gets people hyped up because they go, oh, this person that I trust who I like, I really like them, and I like how they break down, you know, how they see it, what's happening in the real world, what's happening in news, so to speak.
But like, a lot of it isn't news.
A lot of it is just like predicting and speculation.
And we already went through this in 2016.
I went into this election despite knowing what I know about the deepest, darkest depths, you know, of the internet and how dedicated.
And even I was like, people were calling me, they were being like, oh man, what do you think is going to happen?
Like, I'm Really nervous.
And I was like, oh, she's got it.
Like, Trump's got no juice.
Like, all the assassination attempts, they didn't even really move the needle.
Look, Harris up by these many points, this many polls, blah, blah, blah.
And like, none of it mattered.
It was a crushing defeat.
And everybody is left so fucking bewildered that they're like, oh, I think Elon satellites are hacking the voting machines.
Like, you fucking...
Fucking idiots!
That's just as bad.
It's just as bad.
I'm sorry.
I've lost my mind over this.
You should know better.
You should know better.
Not you, listeners, who are listening to our show.
You do know better.
Liberals who listen to us are actually the good liberals.
Yeah, yeah.
If you listen to us, you haven't made any wild accusations.
You thought maybe, you know, maybe there's something to it.
But you haven't gone as far to go and post.
But here we are.
Here we are again.
And you know what it's going to be?
It's going to be another four fucking years of conspiracies.
But now it's from every fucking angle because nobody can grapple with how shitty their reality is about to get.
Nobody can.
All QAnon now.
All QAnon.
We live in a QAnon world.
We're talking about Kash Patel going to be, maybe going to be the CIA director.
Michael Flynn's going, ah, no plans for me yet.
But who knows?
Maybe there will be.
People were fucking getting angry at me because I was like, yeah, I'm not feeling this at the about the DNC convention.
It's like, yeah, we need Pfizer to come out with like a pill that just says DNC convention 2024.
You can take it and you can feel the joy and the vibes.
I had a tweet right after like Kamala got the nomination that like people are underestimating how much how Hillary Clinton this election cycle is going to get.
And I didn't, I did not realize how correct I was, but people were very angry about that.
Mm-hmm.
I got in trouble when I questioned, like, I was like, are you guys sure you want to spend, like, all this time being, like, weird?
Oh!
Isn't it weird?
Look at these weirdos!
And everybody was like, no!
It's working!
This is working!
Weird!
And he fucks couches!
It's working!
Dude, shut the fuck up!
Fuck up and let us, like, let us fucking meme.
We've got this thing under control.
Absolute devastation.
That shit didn't do nothing except make you feel good for, like, I don't know, two weeks?
And now you have to live in four years of this, it's going to be an absolute blow to progress in America for the next, like, we will be hearing people compare to Trump, like, as our own dad who's 30 years younger than us comes to visit us as we lay dying in the fucking space station above the crumbling planet.
That's what's gonna happen.
American liberalism has just completely failed in the past eight years.
Completely ident- like very easily fixable errors that is just completely doomed.
So many marginalized people in America.
Obviously Hillary Clinton like needs to go to prison for what she's saying.
You can't stop her, Travis.
You can't stop her.
I think the best prediction for the next four years is that me, Liv, and Julian are going to become absolutely insufferable.
And Travis will do his very best to just rein in the chaos.
That's okay.
We're going to come at him like raptors take down a T-Rex.
I see, Liv, you wrote that there was the top reply to this tweet, this Mueller she wrote tweet that says, Something is very fishy.
It won't stop nagging at me.
I hate that every single thing that pertains to him causes me to sound like a, quote, conspiracy theorist, but everything he does or happens around him is suspicious.
It just is.
It's so funny.
They're like, I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist.
I know that's bad.
I've spent four, I've spent eight years making fun of those people and calling them, but oh god, I don't, I can't help it.
I just gotta think that the satellites stole the election.
Like, god damn.
I got a feeling in my little tummy.
It just is.
I don't even have any medication to take.
I feel like the guy in the movies who's like, and somebody's like, quick, get him his pills!
Quick, get him a vape.
I got nothing.
I got nothing.
My coffee's empty.
Nothing.
No, even ice to hear jingling that Corey has to edit out.
I got no ice, no liquid, no coffee, no caffeine.
I got a Michael Jordan head.
Dick I got a Michael Jordan head.
And I got a Velociraptor.
And I got a Velociraptor here.
That's all I got.
Why are you showing us your toys?
What is happening?
I got a collector's coin.
Too big.
A big collector's coin.
Stop showing us objects in your room!
I've got...
Stack of poker chips disguised as a grinder.
Wait, grinder disguised as a stack of poker chips.
I got a leftover Halloween bag with candy in it.
Did you go trick-or-treating?
This is insane.
I wish I should have.
I should have gone trick-or-treating and never come back.
Jake is showing us these objects like it's a show-and-tell.
He's regressing.
He's going to have to start boofing his last drug, coffee.
I got a collectible of the Ecto-1 before they paint it in the movie.
It's just a black Cadillac.
My God.
Jake is like holding his teddy bear, crying himself to sleep.
Skepticism about the authenticity of this election has not been merely isolated to very online Democrats.
As this Mueller-She-Rot tweet was retweeted by DNC chair Jamie Harrison. - Oh, great.
So sure, yeah.
Oh, great.
No, it's not.
We don't have to reflect on that complete, utter failure to the party.
It's like, no, I was rigged.
Let's just keep doing it.
Let's keep the same people.
Like, Bidenland should just run every American election for the rest of history.
It's just it should all be out of fucking Delaware.
It's like, seems like they're buying this rigged thing pretty easily.
We could just keep going with that.
We need to get Biden's brain into a large machine so he can be Krang and just continue to advise.
You could put him inside John Fetterman's tummy.
That would look probably like...
Well, John Fetterman does have the exact level of brain function of the encasing that Krang is in, so that checks out.
Yeah, he can just sit in the pocket of his big hoodie.
We don't even have to carve his guts out.
Wow, Krang is really underdressed for his day in Congress.
What would be the technodrome in this, in our little, if we're just having fun here?
Oh, he's a senator, though.
Not a congressman, right?
Yeah.
Anyways, who cares?
Who cares?
Whatever.
It was fun for a little bit, but now it sucks.
I guess it is technically possible that there's large-scale voter fraud at the level of destroying millions of Democrat ballots all across the country, including many ballots in states like New York and California, which are Dem strongholds.
But if you don't have any evidence for it, then you can't just, like, suggest it offhand.
Like, oh, maybe 60 million ballots just went and disappeared.
It's just moon landing territory.
Oh, oh, we can't live?
Watch us.
I mean, that's the thing.
Who is there to stop you?
The right's going to be like, oh, you guys are conspiracy theorists?
No, they love it too.
Everyone is conspiracy theorists now.
There's no mediating force for either side of the culture war.
This podcast is like when you fight one of those bosses where the arena that you're fighting them in is shrinking slowly over time.
Little pieces are just kind of falling off.
And eventually me, Julian, Liv, Travis, Brad, and Annie are just balancing on one tiny little pillar surrounded by ghouls.
Surrounded by ads.
It's like the blue Fortnite thing.
I'm like Buff Peter Griffin.
And I'm just like a hundred planks.
People are building forts out of me.
I'm just like the wood in between enemies.
I thought that was funny.
Stop addressing the audience.
Stop it.
This is not to say that Democrats have not tried to produce some sort of evidence for this large-scale voter fraud in the past weeks.
Although I will warn you that, like the line about Kamala only receiving 61 million votes, these theories are all broadly a product of people who do not understand the inner mechanicians of the election process, finding components of the American election that happen every two years and saying that they're suspicious.
They are!
There's gerrymandering!
They're fucking trying to, like, disenfranchise tons of people!
I mean, yes!
But it's like, you won in 2022, right?
But it's not this!
Yeah, you still won, right?
There's no different...
Oh, well, if you can't run a fucking candidate that has the charisma of Joe Biden in 2020, what are we doing?!
A lot of the early conspiracy theories seem to be tied up in finding the 18 million Democrat ballots that Trump supposedly destroyed.
One post by Twitter user ShutUpAmanda, for instance, received 78,000 likes and read this.
I was literally told the same signature I've had for 18 years is somehow mismatch.
Hashtag do not concede Kamala.
Hashtag recount 2024.
Attached is a screenshot of a webpage that says this.
Ballot rejected.
Curable.
Your ballot has been rejected due to missing signature or signature mismatch.
Please contact your county's election office to ensure that your vote is counted.
For those who are unaware, a lot of work is put into verifying signatures of mail-in voters even in the weeks and months following an American presidential election.
The process of curing a ballot relates generally to fixing whatever has been deemed wrong with the mail-in in order for it to be counted.
Someone's vote requiring curing as a result of signatures not matching up is nothing new.
According to Ballotpedia, 1.5% of all mail-in ballots were rejected for some reason or another in the 2022 midterm elections.
Well, I wouldn't, like, trust a user called ballot pedo.
Now, it doesn't seem like we have the data for how many were rejected in 2024 yet, but if Kamala did genuinely get 81 million votes, like some Democrats say on Twitter, and she's expected to actually receive around 75 million votes, then this would require the rejection or disappearance in some way of 5 million mail-ins, which is, you know, a lot.
Yeah.
Making the assumption that 43% of Democratic votes were done via mail-in, which was the percentage of total ballots that were mail-in during 2020, that would mean that 14% of mail-in Democrat ballots were destroyed in some way.
This destruction would have had to have been done evenly across almost all demographics and scattered throughout all of the country minus Washington state, the only state that did not shift red in this election.
It seems like mail-in ballots were also used less frequently in this election than in 2020.
And remember, the fraud that Dems were alleging early on would have involved 16 million ballots, not 5 million, which would have been possibly closer to literally half or maybe at least a quarter or a third of all Democratic mail-ins, which is like fraud at such a level that like the evidence for it, other than people screenshotting that like, oh, my ballot like wasn't accepted yet, like a couple times would be more than that.
The absurdity of these numbers has not stopped Democrats online from speculating that individual examples of what appear to be ballot-counting anomalies constitute evidence of this supposedly large-scale fraud.
One general theme of this speculation relates to the fact that online government sites tracking one's voting history do not immediately update after votes were counted.
One example comes, again, from Mueller She Wrote, who posted this on Twitter on November 6th, receiving 9,000 likes.
So one of our podcast listeners checked their ballot status a week ago and it was listed.
Today, it's not there.
It just disappeared.
Anyone else experiencing this?
Oh, well, I'm glad that we're not the only podcast that has mentally ill people writing in.
And mentally ill people hosting it.
And we're referring to ourselves, okay?
We're not calling them.
Of course.
No, they're sane.
They're sane.
They're sane.
We're lost.
They're great.
We're lost.
Yeah, we're so crazy, dude.
In a society this twisted.
It makes sense to become the Joker.
I can't stop laughing painfully.
Included in this tweet was a screenshot of a State of New Jersey election history page, which does not show the 2024 presidential election on the user's history at all.
While I can't find specifics about New Jersey, although again I'm confused as to why they would be doing election fraud there, I found a post in the New Jersey subreddit expressing a similar concern, titled, Anyone else not seeing their ballot on the tracker?
The top comment on the thread read this.
I had a mail-in ballot, but I put it directly into the ballot box.
It says ballot received date 11-04-2024.
It was under mail-in ballot history, not election history.
Who cares?
You got the delegates from that fucking state!
Julian, you're on.
This is someone just explaining to the person.
The comment is clarifying.
Oh, okay.
Well, then I take back my fury.
But it doesn't matter, right?
Because it's New Jersey, right?
It went blue.
So according to this other user, your ballot status is not in election history, the screenshot page that Mueller She Wrote's audience member sent her, but instead elsewhere.
Yeah, God forbid that they fucking do some fact-checking before they repost this shit.
The fact that their quote-unquote election history status has yet to update is not a surprise, though.
Here's a quote from an article published leading up to the 2020 election from NJ.com.
What many voters may not realize is that the tracking system in New Jersey is not set up to tell you if your vote has been accepted or rejected on Election Day.
Quote, We built the ballot tracker to have some visibility on the back end for a voter's own record.
It's not meant to instantly confirm your vote, said Alicia D'Alsandro, spokeswoman with the State Division of Elections.
This is just like Sharpiegate, where the actual politicians were like, guys, no, no, the Sharpie thing is stupid.
Please, please don't do this.
Embarrassing.
And meanwhile, other officials are just retweeting garbage, so...
The end can't come soon enough.
I'll say this.
I know we've kind of gone in a little bit on Mueller, she wrote, but there are other liberal conspiracy theorists who are so much worse that we won't even talk about them on the show because we do not want to platform them in any way, shape, or form.
Well, they're not being invited to the White House and they're not being retweeted by officials.
Yeah.
Yes, agree.
Agreed.
That's fair, Julian.
That's fair.
We're covering this because it gets fucking mileage.
This is the mediating force in, like, online dem spaces.
That's what the level is now.
It's like, I don't know.
Look at these weird ballot anomalies.
I'm not going to look up whether they're anomalies or not.
And what's really interesting is, like, in the wake, like, on election night, I remember she tweeted, like, it's over.
Like, we lost PA. Like, it's over.
Like, the resistance starts now.
And I was like, oh, well, there you go, you know?
Like, there you go.
Like, that's really, okay, fine.
You want to do the resistance again?
Sure.
Like, that's cool.
But at least you're admitting.
But then as, like, the days go on, it's like, mm, that didn't sit quite well.
It's like, ah.
It's like people can't help themselves to be like, mm.
Is it really something that I don't like?
Or is it like a plot against it?
You know, it's just like people can't help themselves nowadays.
It's in the water.
It's in the fluoride.
It's the plot against the king, except it's about a guy who says, President Trump.
Oh, boy.
Alright.
Another theme I found in some Democrats worried about their mail-in votes not counting, one of which I even found in the replies to that Mueller She Wrote tweet, related to their ballots being marked as returned.
One user on Twitter named PamKeithFL received 104,000 likes posting this.
My absentee ballot in PA is marked as ballot returned, not as ballot counted.
Can someone confirm if there is a different status if it is counted?
See, at least this has to do with PA. At least you're not discussing a blue state making it completely fucking moot.
This sparked other Democratic voters in PA to check their status.
It seems to be a specific quirk of the terminology of the PA website.
But to quote from an article published on November 5th of this year for USA Today about voting in the state, The status column should indicate record ballot returned if your mail-in ballot has been accepted, received, and processed.
So it's, return means counted.
It's not, your vote is counted.
There were so many people talking about returned.
It was returned, returned to who, returned to where?
Return gate.
How do I get my ballot back?
Give me my ballot.
Yeah, how do I get, how do I, looks like we're gonna have to go get the ballots back.
Return gate, return gate to ballot.
Return gate to battle of the ballots.
I just can't wait for liberal J6. I can't wait for liberal 2000 mules.
I can't wait for all of it.
True.
Give it to me!
There will be some.
Some people will veer off wildly into conspiracy.
Midas Touch!
Midas Touch!
Please!
Save us!
Save us!
That's where it's gonna come from!
Save us!
We need you!
Even Bill Kristol was fucking telling the Dems, you need to have some sort of economic message.
You need to have some sort of progressive, like, message.
Bill Kristol's telling you this, that you shouldn't fucking associate with Cheney.
Oh, what are we doing?
Oh, Julian's got a big pizza pie on his face, folks.
Oh, man.
Look at him, he's turning into pepperoni.
I have such low expectations, and still, still I manage to be disappointed.
One of the more interesting mail-in-related conspiracies came from a Twitter user, Nesmat23, who received 56,000 likes on a post that contained screenshots of an email that in part read this.
The Dauphin County Board of Elections received a challenge to your absentee ballot you applied for in the November 5, 2024 general election.
That's awesome because that means that that's the word for dolphin in French.
So it's just like dolphin county.
So maybe they have mammals.
Maybe that's the fucking thing.
It's like we need to start counting the dolphin vote and then the Democrats can have the margin.
I think this is a French thing because Dolphin is also like heir to the throne in French, isn't it?
So I think that was your silly ass's fault.
This isn't America.
This is France.
No, I know.
I know.
I'm just saying.
I'm just proposing a solution is that maybe we need dolphins to vote.
Maybe we do.
Given that this post was made on November 6th, they likely received the email on the 3rd.
The reason I say that this one is interesting is because it does possibly seem attached to an actual plan by right-wing Pennsylvanians to sabotage the election, who issued more than 4,000 last-minute challenges against mail-in voters in PA at the start of November against residents who are living abroad.
Although, thankfully, more than three-quarters of these challenges have already been withdrawn on the 6th and the 7th.
And, to quote an NPR article, All of the county election boards who have held emergency hearings to review the remaining challenges agreed that the challenges carried no weight.
It's so funny.
They were waiting to cheat.
And they're like, oh, oh, we don't even need to.
Yeah, it's funny.
Like, you know, maybe if this was super close, it was a tip ball.
They could have illegally.
But they didn't need to.
Like, it was just so thorough, the laws for the Democrats.
I guess we can respect democracy and win?
This is an important example to include, though, as it does carry a concrete paper trail related to a couple thousand mail-in votes in PA and was broadly foiled in Pennsylvanian courts.
Democrats online managed to convince each other that enough fuckery was going on with the votes to petition Kamala Harris and the Democrats to demand a recount.
Twitter user TirelessFrog received 26,000 likes on a Twitter post that read...
Voter interference is happening, and if you're concerned about an illegitimate outcome, take action to contest it.
I've left a sample message in the replies.
Hashtag do not concede Kamala.
Hashtag do not concede.
And it's a link to the White House government contacts page.
I have some, um, like, election ninjas or whatever that the Democrats could use.
Hmm, would you say three ninjas?
No, it was that, what was that company, Travis, that did like the dumbass recount for the Republicans?
Yeah, it was, well, hold on.
Cyber ninjas!
Yes, right.
Cyber ninjas.
Oh!
That's right, cyber ninjas.
Who would be, who's gonna be our pillow guy?
We need a liberal cyber ninja.
We need a liberal Mike Lindell.
Who's gonna be, who would be our pillow guy?
I'm trying to think.
Is there a big popular liberal who owns like a sleepy bedtime product?
Is there?
I don't know if there is one.
What, like, Tempur-Pedic, maybe?
I don't know.
They're probably Nazis.
Gwyneth Paltrow, maybe?
She has, like, some goop stuff to help you sleep?
Yeah, maybe, maybe.
She would be good, I think.
Yeah, Hitler had Krupp.
Biden has Gwyneth Paltrow.
Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore.
I think these would all be good conspiratorial influencers.
I mean, she already is.
Her brand is perfect for damn conspiracy.
Yes!
Now that I think about that, I'm worried.
Goop army, rise up!
Gwyneth, if you're listening, I've got 30,000, 20 million votes for you to find.
Poor Travis is just, like, dejected.
We're hurting him.
This is so bad.
We're so sorry.
For real.
He's gonna quit the podcast within a couple months.
In their replies to this Twitter post asking to take action in the White House government contact page, they also said this.
I urge you to recount the election and investigate election interference.
Bomb threats have been called into multiple polling locations.
Domestic terrorists have burned ballot boxes.
Ballots are being discarded in an investigation and recount for this election is urgently needed.
I do wonder what the user means by ballots are being discarded.
If it's in reference to the conspiracy theories we've just gone over or something else, I assume it is.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
But regardless, these cases in scale are not enough to explain the Republican landslide victory.
Meaning, of course, that there is no evidence that a recount would do anything in terms of overturning the election.
But what if we also got Jill Stein to not run?
I mean, we just have to...
And the dolphin vote idea?
We just need a bunch of stuff.
The Jill Stein stuff was so funny because the American Green Party is totally fake.
They don't do anything at all.
But even considering that, if you add all of the independent votes to Kamala, she still loses.
Trump still wins the popular vote.
I'll tell you what a recount would do, Liv, is it would create more conspiracy theories.
The longer this gets drawn out, the more conspiracy theories will pop up.
Perhaps the funniest post related to this supposed recount I've seen comes from a Twitter account named Politics Video Channel who seems more legitimate because of the blue checkmark they paid for.
They made a post on Twitter that received 280,000 likes that said this.
Breaking.
Biden has been asked to do an election recount on Trump's victory.
It's like he's been asked.
He has to count the ballots.
Like he's been tapped to do a recount.
Biden has to do it.
It's supposed to be slightly misleading as it shows a photo of Biden speaking at the White House and Kamala behind him, making it seem like there's been like a formal official request.
But it does seem like the Dems have responded to this viral online campaign to stop the steal in some way, as the Harris campaign has continued to solicit donations, in part to pay off debts for their campaign, but also in part to raise a quote-unquote fight fund to help finance recounts.
No.
Which the Dem campaign has said is four races that were close.
So they're not saying, like, Trump stole the election, we're going to undo it.
But, you know, you can see who's going to put money into this.
I thought we didn't want money in politics.
You outraised Trump.
You had more money.
Now you need more, more money.
Bending in debt is really on the nose.
Pay us if we lose.
Pay us if we win.
Pay us!
Yeah, wasn't that the whole thing that was like, we've raised $1 billion?
They were like, Trump has no money.
Look at his rallies versus ours.
Like, look how few people he has.
And look how little money he has.
I remember that was like, that was the narrative over the last couple months was that nobody is at Trump's rally.
Everybody's at Kamala's rally.
Kamala's got $1 billion and Trump's got nothing.
He's in debt.
This is the equivalent of Panic in DC, except it's like Panic in MAGA World.
No, that's all it was!
Yeah, that's what it was!
So I guess everyone gets what they want here.
Voters get to throw away more money in the hopes that it'll overturn the results of the election, and Demo Leeds get to pay off their debts.
To the amazing DCCC advisors that gave them advice on how to run the campaign, good job, guys.
Make sure you get paid.
In all fairness to the Democrats, this does seem a bit more Coney 2012 than it does stop this deal.
Well, it was always going to be that way.
Yeah, it was always, everything is Coney 2012 now.
Perhaps with the exception of one of the more popular theories surrounding how Trump possibly sold the election, which relates to his newfound friend and possibly important member of his administration, Elon Musk.
Oh my god, we're gonna have to look at this guy.
Oh!
Honestly, I think Elon might be out quickly.
It's possible.
I don't think, like, Trump is gonna get mad at him.
That's my prediction.
That's my optimistic prediction.
I mean, the way Trump talks about him is, like, how you would talk about, like, your great-grandson playing with his, like, Tonka truck and his, like, little toy rocket.
This specific conspiracy relates to Starlink, a satellite internet service ran by SpaceX, one of Elon's companies.
Users online became convinced that Starlink was being used in some way at polling stations to alter the results of the election.
One Twitter poster named Michelle Baker received 65,000 likes in a post that read this.
And Red is being conservative because the post is in all caps, so she's clearly shouting.
Stop fucking saying that Trump won this election!
He didn't!
Pay attention to what's happening!
We all have access to the same information!
This election was rigged by Trump!
Leon!
Leon?
Yeah, that's what they call Elon.
They call him Elmo or Leon.
Oh, because the best way to defeat the Fourth Reich is to switch around their name a little bit.
It'll hurt their feelings.
If the Jews had just called him Hilter, then maybe my relatives wouldn't be dead.
Too dark, too deep, too real.
Awful.
And Russia!
Starlink was used!
Millions of votes, millions of votes weren't counted!
Wake the fuck up, America!
Oh my god.
Oh, boy, yeah, that's not good.
My brain is already boiling out of my ears.
Oh, we are so cooked.
There's nothing, there's nothing left for us.
Except maybe this little podcast.
Couple little laughs with the fellas and the ladies before it all goes to shit.
This one really is queuing on it.
Like, the other stuff, it's like, no, it's a little bit...
But this one, it's...
Yeah, no, it's not even close to as deranged.
This seems to be in part the result of a new segment from ABC30 in Tolera County, California.
They claim that Starlink services were utilized to help with connectivity issues at a local polling station.
Registrar Michelle Baldwin says access to connectivity was improved this year thanks to Starlink satellite internet.
She adds early technical difficulties with a tabulator machine were quickly fixed and did not impact vote count.
The real question is, was it connected to Wi-Fi?
We're just doing the same thing except instead of China, it's Elon Musk.
Well, this also is so QAnon-y to see one tiny piece of some local news thing and be like, wait a minute, mass fraud worldwide.
And I saw that specific clip being shared by a lot of Democrats on Twitter and other places as the evidence for Starlink was used en masse to flip the election results.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's so weird because, you know, I remember Harris giving the speech and she's like, there will be a peaceful transition.
And like, I think that's overall good in terms of they're not trying to get people to, you know, spin out into conspiracy theories.
But on the other side, if you share that this guy is like the next Hitler and then you're like, yeah, we're going to peacefully allow him to take it.
We don't even need like a Reichstag fire.
We don't we don't need a beer hall pooch.
Like, we'll just let him have it.
It's just inconsistent.
Well, I mean, I don't think it's inconsistent because she ran, because she's an office holder.
She ran to be an office holder, not a guerrilla revolutionary.
That was never something she ever promised.
Yeah, but if you're telling people that this is Hitler and he is going to end democracy.
Right.
And then you go, well, great.
Well, Hitler won.
Well, yeah, she was an office holder.
And then, yeah, I mean, it's like she, but that's what she is most of all, you know?
Yeah, so she's saying you gotta hand it to him.
Yeah, good.
Politifact confirmed that Starlink was utilized for election infrastructure in this specific county, quoting Ganyar Coulter, an election analyst for the Osset Institute, which focuses on election integrity and security, where she said this, Most of the rural part of the county has little to no access to broadband, and Starlink was used to have the electronic poll books connected to a county voter database.
So vote tabulators themselves were not connected to Starlink.
Nor is it really clear how it could be technically possible for Starlink to change the election results if they were.
But there was never any technical explanation for this.
It was just like they plugged the voting booths into Starlink and then Starlink changed the results.
The good part is they don't even need to do, like, the stupid, like, right-wing thing of, like, pouring out your Budweiser's or burning your Nikes because the Teslas are going to set fire to themselves.
That's true.
Another component of this relates to the theory that Elon has supposedly destroyed the evidence of fraud as a result of some Starlake satellites recently being deorbited.
One user named Joey Bonanno received 15...
which is such a stupid...
No, no, no, you're not allowed to laugh at that.
Received 55,000 likes on a Twitter post that read this.
Joey Banana, here he is.
He says, Over 700 Starlink satellites have been taken out of orbit.
13.7 million votes missing.
Millions received message that their ballot wasn't counted.
The vote count in V-A-N-J-N-Y-F-L-A-Z-N-V-W-I-M-I-P-A is skewed.
But Trump doesn't have more votes.
Harris has less votes.
Which is not true, by the way.
Trump gained more.
Trump gained more now.
He's projected to gain more than he did in 2020.
It is also like the certain amount of ballots are missing thing, where they just assume that they got the same amount of votes as they did now than they did in 2020, is so entitled.
Where it's like, no, there's no possible reason why people would not want a continuation of the Biden presidency.
There's no possible reason that voter turnout could have been less.
That some people couldn't have showed up now when they did show up four years ago.
Who on earth would not show up to vote in the last American election you'll ever have?
I think that just goes to show that people have varying degrees of extremism in politics.
Probably, if I had to guess, just between people who are on Twitter and people who are not.
Because liberals who are on Twitter are like, this is the last time that we will ever get to vote.
This is it.
If Biden doesn't win, we are.
Trump is king.
But then there are other people who are not on Twitter.
Liberals are like, yeah, I don't really care.
I have heard anecdotally the normie say this is the last election.
Okay, you know what?
Maybe it's all the last election.
Fuck me.
What do I know?
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe.
I voted.
I voted in the last election.
I did my part.
Who the fuck knows?
I don't know.
I did my parts.
I donated.
Fuck.
That's all I can do.
Donate again.
I don't think so.
You don't want to stop the steal, Jake?
She already got me once.
I know some of our listeners find the use of this word distasteful, but this Starling stuff really is just Blue Anon.
Unfortunately, I only expect this sort of thing to get worse, even more pervasive among online Democrats.
And while some of our liberal listeners might remind me that this is mostly a reflection just of the terminally online part of the base, it's important to remember that this is also how QAnon started.
Yeah.
Which is not to say that the two are morally equal, but instead to say that look at how hegemonic QAnon is now in the Republican Party.
This took seven odd years to happen to them.
How long do you think it could take for it to happen to your own party?
You know, the DNC chair is already retweeting, like, you know, speculative conspiracy stuff.
Damn, it could happen here.
It could happen here, but for liberal QAnon.
Yeah.
So dark.
And it's just if you see that ground of just like, yeah, let's just do conspiracies all the time.
It's like a lot harder to condemn QAnon, which is like actively a very bad and scary thing.
Like you're the opposition culturally and politically.
That's your job.
You are failing people.
This is where we've been trending, right?
You know, throwing around liberals calling people hopium and copium and you're a cuck and beta cuck and, you know, Dark Brandon and the fash wave and all of the stuff.
It's like they wanted it.
Like you said earlier, Liv, they felt left out.
So this is where we are trending and why not borrow the thing that worked so well for the Republicans that has now put them in a state where they are going to have near total power over the country by leaning into the most extreme, most far right.
The funny thing is that, gosh, imagine if the Democrats leaned into the most extreme, most far left of their party and had They, you know, incorporated them into messaging, like, in any kind of way.
Well, a lot of the elites are rich, though.
They don't want to do that.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, there's actually, you know.
So basically, we're going to have the blue pill and the red pill, but they're both going to be Soma from Brave New World, and you take them after you lose the election.
There's already a star-studded cast of liberal kooks who would love to spread more of these theories.
It really will be up to Democrats to rebuke them from gaining more cultural clout.
As they say, not my circus, not my monkeys.
Known craft beer and Adderall enjoyer Eric Garland, for instance, has reacted to the election day defeat by, I guess, blaming the Jews.
In a tweet that thankfully only got 2.6 thousand likes on Twitter, he said this.
2020, the winner got 81.3 million votes during a pandemic.
2024, a convicted felon won with 72.4 million.
No, the election was stolen by Netanyahu's spy network.
Which, by the way, was assembled by money sent from Biden.
Yeah, yeah, that would be...
I hate when my client state rigs my election.
Yeah.
Proudly, it seems like there is going to be a significant shift in the nature of resistance liberalism within this Trump presidency compared to the last one.
American liberals just generally, it seems, do not trust the mainstream media nearly as much as they did before.
This is for a couple reasons, one of which was that many were convinced that mainstream media coverage of Biden's age was a plot to get Trump elected.
Bezos explicitly preventing the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala this election cycle seems to be another very significant reason for this, with 250,000 people canceling their subscription to the Post after he intervened.
I also just think broadly that many liberals are realizing that the oppositional media storm against Trump in the last eight years just hasn't worked.
You know, he got a majority, like he won the popular vote this time.
They've done all of this, and then it didn't matter.
If they want to resist Trump, I think a lot of them have realized they have to do it in other ways.
The fallout from this broad shift that has been happening over the past few years is that a lot more American liberals are depending upon alternate media sources for their news, many of whom I have quoted in this segment of the episode.
While I'm not particularly fond of the mainstream media, I cannot imagine that an environment that encourages this sort of conspiracism is any better.
I think a lot of libs are engaging in these conspiracy theories because they think it's unfair that they can't also use the powers of baseless accusation.
But I think it's important to emphasize that if this becomes the norm for everyone to do, then QAnon wins.
You don't have the moral ground possible to oppose a group of people who are baselessly accusing you of insane shit when you're just doing it as well.
It's a much weaker position.
Yeah, I'm really worried that the real takeaway from this is that just viral smears are a winning strategy, you know?
The point is to concoct a story that enough people buy into that says something horrible about the evil people you don't like.
And whoever concocts, that's what fighting is.
Fighting is basically doing QAnon, doing a pizzagate at whoever it is you don't like.
I mean, yeah, that's just a nightmare.
Then all of a sudden, like, yeah, this, like, political discourse just becomes a game of who can make the best smear.
Letters from the Memoir, Part 2.
Dearest Anne, it's been five years since my last letter.
I apologize for not writing sooner, but I was very busy writing with Biden, as some of the younger guys say.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
It will be difficult for me to sum up these past five years as so much has happened, but I will do my best.
Please forgive me if I ramble on.
My execution date draws near, and yet I still have so much to share and post.
After the great battle of 2020, things were good.
Morale around the camp was joyful, and my fellow soldiers vowed to never speak the name of General Trump again, for he had been utterly defeated by our great general, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Some say old Joe rode into that final battle holding two scoops of ice cream instead of one.
I'm not sure if I saw any ice cream in his hands, but who am I to get in the way of a little fun?
For two weeks, the army, they rejoiced.
The greatest threat to democracy was now dead and gone, and a new day was on the horizon.
One free from lies, tyranny, and hurtful memes and posts.
But unfortunately, Anne, this didn't last long.
There were rumblings throughout the entire camp that even though our foe had been crushed, democracy still was somehow teetering on the edge.
Paranoia settled in.
Fellow soldiers were crumpling up their newspapers and turning on the radio instead.
They would gather in their pale green tents, listening to comedians break down complex legal scenarios.
Everyone was getting smarter.
One day, something strange occurred.
A fella by the name of Theodore Tinkle wandered out into the center of one of the battlefields near our camp.
The decaying field, still scorched from mortar memes and drenched with unposted drafts, was littered with old pey-peys, the frog's smug smile now twisted into a sullen grimace.
The young soldier inspected the ammunition, reading out loud the etching on the case.
It read, Copium.
Tinkle got an idea.
He loaded the meme into his rifle and fired it over the hill in the direction of the defeated army's camp, where they were tending to their wounded.
He heard a voice cry out from over the hill.
Ow!
It yelled.
When Tinkle slowly climbed over the hill to get a closer look, he saw a dejected MAGA soldier, pants around his ankles, tenderly rubbing a bright red mark on his buttocks.
Word spread throughout our ranks like wildfire.
Soldiers of all ages were picking up spent meme casings, repurposing them, and firing them back over the hill.
Everyone was having a great time watching the once smug digital soldiers duck for cover as they were peppered with their own ammunition.
A handful of podcasters constructed a giant wooden statue of General Biden with large aviator sunglasses made from reflective lenses.
When positioned at the proper angle, beams of sunlight exploded from the statue's eyes, torching enemy tents and setting fires to all of their Christmas trees and cups.
It was wild fun, Anne.
They were completely owned.
We were MAGA now, except the good kind.
Our cause was a noble one, and our conspiracy theories were real.
And while our leaders were busy deploying analog weapons somewhere off in the Middle East, we digital soldiers were packing our blunderbusses with rare Brandons and neon green brat attacks and launching them over the hill with glee.
We love guns now, Anne.
I can't quite explain it, but we here at the camp feel a deep connection to our patriot identity.
Perhaps it began when some of the deserters from the opposing army were accepted within our ranks and began posting their own content, but it's hard to say.
At some point along the way, we flew too close to the sun.
No one is sh- No one is sure when it happened, Anne.
Biden dead, replaced by Harris.
Some people blame the psychological operations, a genius campaign from Captain Walls, where pamphlets with the word weird written all over them were dropped en masse into enemy territory.
We could hear the maggots howling with rage as they read the pamphlets.
Surely this was the final nail in their coffin.
And when some of our boys began to yell, Couch!
Expletive!
I won't write the word.
All night, everyone was waiting for Trump's army to return fire.
Or commit seppuku and save themselves the humiliation of another defeat.
But the enemy armies didn't return fire.
Not publicly, no.
Their revenge was whispered deep into the DMs of women who were totally unaware of their existence.
They huddled together quietly in the caverns of Mordor, shifting their focus to an ancient enemy, a supreme evil.
Three supreme evils, actually.
Jews, immigrants, and trans people.
And on the night of November 4th, as our army sat around a blazing campfire, eating overpriced snacks and singing along with a handful of pollsters and pundits as they played the mandolin, the ground began to shake.
In horror, we looked over to see Trump's army of digital soldiers galloping over the hill, not on horses this time, but in self-driving electric vehicles.
We scrambled, trying desperately to post, but our comms had been completely compromised.
We were suspended, throttled, and shadowbanned.
Shadowbanned, Anne?
Some of us even shelled out $8 a month to the enemy in the hopes that our post would reach more patriots, but alas, that money went directly to the Nazis.
I can see the judgment in your eyes as you read this, but you have to believe me, Anne.
Paying the Nazis their monthly subscription was our only choice.
I don't have long, Anne.
I'm writing this letter to you from a gulag in South Jersey.
A number of us are to be hanged just a couple months from now.
January 6, 2025 is the date.
But don't cry for me as I am hopeful.
Some are saying General Harris laid a trap for the enemy and that soon their corruption will be revealed.
Something about satellites hacking voting machines.
It seems plausible.
But then again, what do I know?
I'm just a lowly specialist.
A grunt.
Serving.
I must wrap up this letter.
The jailer is knocking with...
I must wrap up this letter.
The jailer is knocking with our daily gruel.
A chicken Big Mac.
A chicken Big Mac from McDonald's.
It's awful, Anne.
I pray for the day of my release when you and I can enjoy a proper Big Mac with beef inside of them.
All my love, Specialist Brooklyn Dad.
My lord.
Okay, we have to wrap up this very long episode.
I guess it was always going to be so.
So, you know, we had to wait a little bit to make sure that the red wave that we've been planning for years was complete.
Hmm.
And, uh, by the way...
If you have issues with merch, please do contact us.
We are a little disappointed with the company running that, and so we are going to change partners, but we want you to get what you deserve and what you paid for, so definitely write in if you have any issues at all.
Thank you very much.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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Now you do realize, you said that you would rather play hockey and golf and be anonymous.
You do realize that it was because of Q that your name came into the spotlight.
I don't have the exact drop, but it was Kashyap Patel, a name to remember.
And so all the Q community was like, who is this guy?
That's how we actually found out who you were.
So I have you guys to blame.
I have my privacy.
You can blame Q, whoever Q is, and yeah.
And so your life forever changed when your name got put into a Q drop.
And I would say that's not a bad thing.
That's your impact better than being on HuffPo or the Facebook group of times, right?
