A crossroads. A marketplace of ideas. A subreddit evolving in the age of Trump’s second term. We dive into R/Conspiracy to see where our head is at.
Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes:
https://patreon.com/qaa
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 324, The State of Our Conspiracy.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Citizens of America, I address you today about one of the nation's most pressing matters.
I'm speaking, of course, of the conspiracy-themed subreddit, where the wildest beliefs of the English-speaking niche internet wash up on our national shores and vie for the position of America's next top conspiracy theory.
r slash conspiracy, as the subreddit is commonly known, has long been a bellwether for the state of crankdom, which in the wake of QAnon has involved varying levels of right-wing politics.
So, how is our favorite subreddit faring today, having sailed past the first 100 days of Trump's second term?
Will we find it hopelessly contaminated with GOP talking points?
Have entertaining and somewhat harmless conspiracy theories made a comeback?
Is any class consciousness leaking through?
And how's the critical thinking as a whole?
At the very least, I am here to tell you that after years of loosely following these posts, I can report that it is.
We have an interesting r slash conspiracy.
And I kind of was thinking about it today, and I was explaining it to somebody, and the way I think of r slash conspiracy is like, it's like a port.
It's like a crossroads of some sort, where the kind of more niche internet and the mainstream internet connect with each other, where ideas get tested in both directions.
Normies irritate people with more esoteric knowledge.
Esoteric guys try to sell in their specific shit.
It's a big kind of open marketplace, and it's at the connection of basically...
All of these different platforms and some of these darker boroughs.
So today we will be hearing about, and this is obviously not even remotely including all of the things we'll be covering, but George Clooney and Mark Zuckerberg's battle over a satanic council seat, Earth's population being fake, and a new hybrid conspiracy theory combining transvestigation and satanic panic applied to the Statue of Liberty.
Aha!
Yeah, we have some shiny diamonds, boys.
It's been a while since her hallowed robes made their way, gracing across the pages of our conspiracy.
Yeah, in this case, they're focusing in on the nose and very manly brow, which they've decided.
Female?
I don't think so.
So, boys, yeah, do you guys have any thoughts before we jump in about, like, what you kind of expect to see in this episode, where you think our conspiracy might be?
Well, I mean, I'm an our conspiracy peruser.
So I've been monitoring the temperature for a while.
And yeah, I think as you found out in your investigation, you know, there's a lot more debate.
There's a lot more critical thinking.
It really seems that the libs have taken over our conspiracy for the majority.
Has our conspiracy gone woke?
For a while, our conspiracy became only vaccine conspiracy.
Conspiracy theories.
And I kind of dipped out.
I really don't like reading the medical conspiracy stuff.
I just find that real.
It gives me the ick.
Is that the proper usage of that term?
I think so.
I know so.
And so I dipped out for a while.
But I think with, you know, as Travis was sort of saying before the recording, you know, you have these other platforms that are much friendlier to right-wing conspiracy theories like...
x formerly known as twitter like telegram you know all of these other places that are predominantly sort of right-leaning conspiracy theories and i feel like the the sort of uh liberalization of reddit has spread to our conspiracy as well is that a good thing i'm not sure am i 100% I'm also not sure.
But just judging by the amount of debunking, debating, and critical thinking that is taking...
Mm-hmm, correct.
Yes.
Which is a beautiful thing.
Travis, what's your take before we get started?
Well, you know, I'm always interested in the ways in which conspiracists come up with theories that explain their lack of power or deteriorating power.
I mean, I think that maybe we're going to see some explanations about why Trump can't do exactly what he wants to do because he's being thwarted by dark, unseen forces.
Yeah, that was always my first guess.
So let's jump right in.
First up, we have an interesting case of community debunking proving that no matter how much they hate Bill Clinton, and I am right there with you, it does not mean you have to fall for sloppy misrepresentations as evidence.
So this post was by Illwhile9723.
It is titled, Bill Clinton Hotel Room, and they have replaced the eyes in Bill Clinton with ones.
Just in case, I guess, like, Bill Clinton is searching his own name on Reddit to, like...
You know, track the guy down and kill him.
Yeah, or if the liberal overlords have some kind of catch-all for people talking about their faves.
And it is a post of an image.
Now, I would describe this as a kind of murky image that looks like it was taken, I don't know, from behind some sort of piece of dirty glass.
There's a Paris Hilton-style figure that is rubbing the back of a jubilant Bill Clinton who is nude on a towel.
He's holding the TV remote, and he's looking up in pleasure as he gets the massage and watches TV.
It's almost like an Enlightenment painting.
Yeah, exactly.
It's got the proper glow to it.
And so here we have the top comment.
Ursica says, we have been over this before.
This photo is from 2016, and it was made by a British artist, Alison Jackson, who sets up lookalikes in compromising situations in an art series called Mental Images, and they link to the art project.
So that's pretty straightforward.
I love that that's just right at the top.
It has 1.4k upvotes versus the original post that only has 70 upvotes.
The community is not allowing this Bill Clinton piece of art to be passed off as Illuminati leaks.
But we have the first response to Ushrikas deleted.
And the second one is...
Flinigan says, of course it's fake.
That woman is of age.
Pretty good.
Other people have taken a slightly different approach.
Emmy replies, looks like GTA 6. And GotBannedThirdTime replies, Now I can't unsee it.
They do have a point.
It does kind of look like a GTA 6 screenshot.
I'll tell you how I knew it was fake right away, is Bill Clinton looks way too good, way too healthy in it.
I mean, he's hard to really make out.
I don't know how much detail you see.
What makes this image interesting, because it does feel like it was captured sort of secretly and quickly with a low-quality phone and low light.
Something kind of like, you know, dirty about not just the scene playing out, but the way it's captured.
And so, yeah, that's sort of like its blurriness, its fuzziness makes it more believable.
Yeah, I feel like this is like, what if the bellhop had, like, a hidden camera while he was bringing in ice or something?
You know what I mean?
Like, it has that kind of aesthetic, but that's because it specifically was meant to have that aesthetic, and that's the entire series point.
I wonder how much of this, like, people on Reddit, they want, like, just new, fresh content over and over.
That's the appeal, is that you go there and there's something new that human beings have upvoted and see something that's sort of, like, exciting and sort of, like, not...
The same thing you see over and over again.
But this is old, stale content, which makes, yeah, just not the Reddit experience.
I want to see something, some fresh conspiracy theories.
Maybe some novel ways of misinterpreting artworks.
Not this old, recycled one.
The mod has even put a tag on the post and it says, Not Bill.
Lookalike for art.
Art good.
Deepfakes bad.
See, this is how you know that our conspiracy is starting to lean.
You think the lips have taken over?
Starting to lean a little bit.
I would not say left.
I would say centrist.
I would say your rad lib.
Because no true right-winger and no right-wing conspiracy theorist would ever go out of their way to say that deepfakes are bad.
Shoddy attempts at doing full QAnon satanic panic are shot down pretty quickly, in fact.
I've got this beautiful post by someone called SurePerspective348, entitled, George Clooney and Mark Zuckerberg engaged in a warlock's battle over a satanic council seat.
Hillary Clinton is a witch.
And it is actually an outtake.
It's a boomer-ass, like, screen cap of a PDF e-book written by a woman whose name is Veronica Swift.
And I thought it would be interesting to read the actual passages that he posted.
The head of the Satanic Council holds a position called the Phoenix, and that position was held for nearly 30 years by George Soros, who stepped down around 2018-2019.
Soros was succeeded by Barack Obama, who is the current Phoenix of the Satanic Council.
Each quadrant has a number of Grand High Priests and Priestesses, and one of the Grand High Priestesses for the Eastern U.S. quadrant was held by Gloria Vanderbilt until her death in 2019.
She was supposed to be succeeded by Hillary Clinton, but for whatever reason, Hillary was unable to take that position, one she was groomed for her whole life.
If you're shocked by these names, I understand.
I'll reiterate that this system runs the world political structure and its members are at the top of each society.
Being appointed in childhood as a successor and trained to take a position as Grand High Priest or Priestess is one way to get a seat on the Satanic Council.
The other way to get a seat on the Satanic Council is to do battle for the position in a witch's battle.
After Gloria Vanderbilt died and her successor Hillary did not step up to take that position, for whatever reason that may be, to fill the position, there was a witch's battle instead.
Kind of repeating yourself, the grammar is a little bit of a mess here.
Now, directly below Grand High Priests and Priestesses in the hierarchy structure of the Brotherhood is a rank called just High Priest or High Priestess.
For Gloria's position, two High Priestesses did battle, and the winner took that position.
The two witches who participated in that particular battle for Gloria's position were Beyonce of singing fame and Meghan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry of the UK royalty.
Dude, Beyonce of singing fame is one of the funniest ways I've ever seen Beyonce referred to.
Of singing fame.
You've seen her singing.
I feel like this is just wish casting of, like, celebrities that you want to see in, like, a Harry Potter-style, you know, wand-off.
Yeah, but there's, like, lore.
It does feel a bit like she's taken Harry Potter's structure and just kind of shifted over some of her fave celebs.
Yup, the royals of most, if not all, countries are all involved in this system, too.
System with a capital S. Yeah.
Hillary's husband, Bill Clinton, was also eligible to take a position on the Satanic Council when two other men on the council, Baron Hilton, who was Hilton's grandfather, the Hilton Hotel mogul, and Hal Taxel, possibly an architect.
He's been difficult to research.
Both died.
Like Hillary, Bill did not step up to take either position, but a number of other high priests were eligible for those positions, including George Clooney.
Actor and head of the Hollywood Warlocks and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook /Meta.
Even though she is now out of the system and isn't able to see these battles in person, it was clear to Jesse that George Clooney was the one that took Baron Hilton's seat.
So Jesse is like an SRA-like victim that quite a few conspiracy theorists use as their source.
But it's a satanic panic.
One of those first-hand accounts of satanic panic recovered through hypnotherapy often.
It was clear to Jessie that George Clooney was the one that took Baron Hilton's seat.
She did wistfully note, though, that she would have given anything at that time, quote, to watch Zuckerberg kick Clinton's ass.
Another recent revelation about the Satanic Council is that one of its subgroups is called Merlin, as in King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
That Merlin.
This Merlin isn't an individual, but rather a group that consists of five high-level male sorcerers who are also called elders.
These five Merlin men have seats on the Satanic Council, but they are also concurrently members that sit above the Holy See, above the Vatican.
One Merlin is a cardinal in the Catholic Church.
Another heads up the Orthodox Church.
Merlin's job has been to groom and train each generation's Antichrist candidates.
So I love this because it means that there's an Antichrist draft every year.
Yes.
And the council's like...
You know, I could see some of these playing for some of the top teams.
But I guess, like, how many Antichrists do you need?
Like, I guess every year they just go, you're all turned down.
Thank you for showing up.
Can you imagine, like, a couple young parents?
They're, you know, standing outside the sort of, like, newborn wing.
And they're trying to look and see, oh, there's our little guy.
There's our little guy.
We can see him.
Looking through the window.
The babies are waving.
They're wiggling their toes.
And then next to them, there's, like, four wizards.
They've got their hands clasped together.
They're pulling at their beards.
They're looking sinister.
It's fucking George Clooney, too, confusing it further because once you see George Clooney in a hospital, you don't expect him to be there in his capacity as a satanic priest.
You're thinking, maybe this guy is going to help me.
You know that they have a little cottage industry of books and seminars about how to ensure your baby is entered into the Antichrist draft.
Yeah.
It's true.
And many people say that the Antichrist candidates should be paid for their work before they even make it to the professional leagues because it's rude because a lot of these battles are obviously on TV and a lot of people are making a lot of money and these young Antichrist candidates, you know, they don't get much out of it.
Part of their craft is necromancy.
Talking to the dead so that they can access the wisdom of the old dead Illuminists to properly train their charges.
Appropriately, the public name for the Antichrist candidates they are training is Arthur, just like in the fable.
Merlin are also responsible for the new quantum global financial system for the Brotherhood, and Jesse asserts that they have named their new quantum financial system Excalibur.
Yup, not even fairy tales.
Legends and lore are safe from the infiltration of the system.
Yeah, the system has made King Arthur woke.
There's no way they're going to allow this in our conspiracy now.
There's no place for this kind of lore anymore.
What do you mean?
I'm curious to see what the comments are.
Yeah.
Does it make sense why the Kennedy Empire was deemed Camelot?
The Kennedy clan were Brotherhood Illuminati as well.
After John F. Kennedy died, Jackie Kennedy married another very high-ranking Brotherhood member, Aristotle Onassis.
If this book is killing your worldview, I'm sorry.
I've been there.
She's kind of a legend.
Like, this book is a beautiful, beautiful mind, a beautiful tapestry.
Veronica Swift.
I mean, it sounds like a series of, like, children's or, like, adolescence books that would have come out in, like, 1994.
This one's called An Illuminati Primer, Understanding the System Through the Eyes of Its Whistleblowers.
And on her, like, basically what looks like a mommy blog on her website, she says that she is educator, researcher, blogger.
Author.
Gardner.
Yeah.
So here are the responses.
Xanax Picasso writes, That's some god-awful writing.
To which Mental Decoherence responds, Seriously, what the fuck is this shit?
LOL.
Sit Ubu Sit Good Dog writes, You know this book was self-published.
Lol.
Zikuhan replies, They run the system, but they don't run reality.
Their objective is to keep people playing along with it.
I see things differently now.
I'm curious where my life will go now.
In my immediate space, they are in fear.
Not fear of me.
Fear of the reality of things to themselves.
It makes sense why Satan is pulling strings with the DDS to try to have me go back to the system's narrative about who I am.
Yeah, that's a...
That's an outlier.
That's an intervention needed, for sure, somewhere in the world, whoever sat down at a keyboard and typed that.
Next up, we have PitifulArm saying, this is going to go right over a lot of Redditors' heads.
Lol.
In before, give me some of that shit you're smoking.
This is the dumbest thing I've seen all day.
And this is why people think conspiracies are crazy.
Pay them no mind.
NPCs do exist.
And it's a majority.
And then the OP, SurePerspective348 says, Check my post about George Bush being a werewolf from the same book.
Most people are laughing at the idea, but I think it's plausible.
Everything in this book is.
A couple of the old heads, you know, just trying to fight for territory on their old battleground.
I mean, what I really like about this post is that it includes a map that shows, like, how the territory is divided amongst the satanic forces, like, you know, north, south, west, and east.
And there's this little strip of the country in the middle that has this claim by no one, like North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas.
Those are controlled.
Those are fine.
Those are controlled by no satanic entities, according to this map.
But that's fucked up that Texas, which kind of feels like a conservative stronghold, is actually controlled by the Satanists.
Yeah, have you ever heard Spanish spoken there?
That's the Satanist language.
Only the most cursed can understand.
So, you know, in this kind of flurry of, like, latest posts that I was exploring, I found a good example of how disappointment can be processed.
In this case, disappointment that the FBI director, who guested on a ton of QAnon shows, now doesn't even buy that Epstein's death wasn't a suicide.
But it includes a quote that says, I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
And I can only describe this picture of Patel, I believe, like giving testimony in Congress as like a kid in a Nickelodeon children's show.
Like he has his hair like spiked right up with gel.
He's looking up at like some animal mascot that's in front of him teaching him how to do the ABCs.
Yeah.
So, I mean, The Post is a media-ite article, and somebody below the OP, Ringo Pendragon, has kind of grabbed the part of the text that he thinks is interesting.
The quote from the article says, FBI Director Cash Mattel threw cold water on the popular conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
During a Senate appropriation hearing on Thursday, Senator John Kennedy quizzed the FBI director about the circumstances surrounding the death of Epstein.
Quote, Jeffrey Epstein hang himself or did somebody kill him?
Kennedy asked Patel.
Patel replied by saying he accepts that Epstein died by suicide.
Quote, I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Patel.
The comment is particularly notable from Patel, who, prior to taking over as head of the FBI, regularly trafficked in Epstein conspiracy theories.
He repeatedly accused the FBI of sitting on Epstein's client list instead that he'd pushed for it to be released on day one of the Trump administration.
With 108 days now having passed since President Donald Trump was inaugurated and 77 days having passed since Mattel was confirmed as FBI director, Senator Kennedy, like many on the right, wants to know where the Epstein files are.
This has got to be one of the biggest L's for conspiracy heads in the early Trump days, this whole Epstein files fiasco.
Well, and, you know, gosh, once they get into real jobs and real positions of power, they change their tune pretty quick.
I mean, if I've got to lean into my own conspiratorial brain, which I've promised listeners and co-hosts that I would be doing more of this year, you know, it's like, you know, the moment that Patel became FBI director, they take him to a nice little room, they sit him down.
And they show him a video of a different angle of the Kennedy assassination, and they go, any questions, bud?
And he goes, nope, nope, not at all, sir.
Got it, thank you.
Got it, thank you.
Epstein did kill himself big time.
He really, yeah, and, oh yeah.
I think that that is possible, but I wonder if things have degraded so badly that that whole sit-down meeting is just badly put together.
The guy tries to find the file and he's like, wait, wait, I got the different angle file.
Fuck, VLC needs to be updated.
I could see it, but I would require a few more bloopers to make it believable.
Yeah, that's true.
I mean, I do imagine that running one of the most well-funded federal law enforcement agencies is kind...
Kind of like recording this podcast.
Yeah.
So here are the responses from the good community at Our Conspiracy.
We've got Blackout Stone saying, Everyone who gets put into office is already compromised.
They lie out their ass, then they consume all their own shit.
Lie out their ass and then consume their own shit.
So they shit lies and then they eat the lies.
Yeah, something like that.
It's like a one-man human centipede, or maybe they all get together to connect.
Yeah, what if Ouroboros wasn't eating itself, but instead just continually shitting into its own mouth?
Yeah, not a lot of people think of the human centipede in those more kind of spiritual or philosophical terms.
Yeah, I agree.
EmbarrassedDuck200 says, his job is to defend his boss who had him killed.
So this is interesting because it's like, oh yeah, right, the Epstein thing happened under Trump.
So that would mean that Trump was, like, probably in charge of the cover-up at the time.
So that's a confusing one, I think, for conspiracy theorists.
Oh, yes, well...
Not great.
And Alex Jones fan 420 replies, he doesn't want to get Epstein'd or JFK'd by our greatest ally.
And Law Researcher 777 replies, check your facts, he loves Israel.
So that's another confusing one.
Why do they love Israel?
Well, I don't get it.
All of this is hurting my brain.
And here, we may have another piece of evidence that libs have infiltrated r slash conspiracy.
Glycophosphate says, member of Trump administration is dumber than the stump film at 11. Well...
And then my favorite post is this thing that happens once in a while, where they'll realize that the right-wing guy is like an actual freak, like physically something is deeply wrong with them.
So overall, Door2718 says, I was looking at this guy's eyes on HD today, and what the fuck is he on?
Now this is somebody who is 60 years old or above.
Who says I was looking at him on HD?
Well, I mean...
Is that like off?
Does that mean like off the internet?
I don't know.
Internet's SD, TV, HD.
He did the zooming in thing.
He's like, uh, computer enhance.
And then he's like, oh, this guy looks like a speed freak that's, like, getting agitated.
This is another lib thing that I've been seeing a lot happening recently, is all of their political enemies are on drugs.
You know, no matter what it is, they're like, God, did you see the way his hand was moving?
Like, what is he on?
I mean, they're doing it with Elon constantly, you know, being like, wow, look, he's tripping balls.
He's on hallucinogens.
And it's like, he might be.
He might be.
But you actually don't know that for sure.
You just don't.
Oh, here we go.
Jake is going to fucking tell limbs not to call them on drugs.
I mean, Elon is one where I wouldn't make this argument.
I would at least pick Don Jr.
Because they are obsessed with the idea that he's a total cokehead, like always doing coke in all his videos or whatever.
But like, these are weird people.
And like, yeah, they might look like they're...
But you just don't know for sure.
You can't know.
Okay, but what's for sure is that they're evil, ghoulish freaks.
Yes.
What you're saying is why drag innocent drugs into this?
Exactly.
They didn't do anything.
Drugs haven't done anything to you.
Well, maybe they have.
Maybe they have.
That wasn't the only post expressing disappointment.
This next one is pissed off that some sort of Hollywood-centric version of the storm has not happened yet.
Reasonably Redacted writes, Six months later, how much of Hollywood has fallen?
Did I miss it?
When can I expect this great fall of Hollywood to begin?
And there's a screen cap of a tweet by at Jack Unheard.
Holy shit!
Trump's Department of Defense Chief of Staff Cash Patel calls for the declassification of the Epstein and Diddy lists.
All of Hollywood is about to fall.
And that was from the 7th of November, 2024.
So this feels bad, but...
Yeah, I mean, Diddy is...
On trial currently.
I mean, he seems like he's in quite a bit of trouble.
But he already was before Trump took office, so...
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, it's true.
Kind of a hard sell, that one.
Yeah.
So here are the comments.
Lampy version 2 writes, Can't wait to finally see the proof that redacted and redacted did horrible things to redacted.
Let's get real.
Unless any of the aforementioned redactions specifically mention an Obama or a Clinton, nothing will be proven.
Even then...
I imagine they are evidently clean.
You do?
Huh.
If Epstein took that long to get to, the Clintons slash Obamas slash Trumps must be untouchable.
Whoa!
The Clintons, the Obamas, and the Trumps?
The three together?
No, no, no.
These are mortal enemies, my friend.
I like that, though, right?
Like, you get an image, potentially, of a poster who can see that they're all evil.
Or, I'm not sure, because the last sentence is kind of confusing, too.
Even then, I imagine they are evidently clean.
You know, this is interesting because I think it shows a division between, like, the hopium conspiracists and, like, the Doomer conspiracists.
Because, like, the hopium types, I mean, I think it's a fairly new phenomenon, the idea that...
All the bad guys are going to be exposed, and we're going to know that they're bad, and then the people I support will be proven good, and then I'll get to say to everyone, I told you so.
That's a very nice fantasy.
But these Redditors, they're not on that train.
They don't want endless hopium.
They're sick of being tricked over and over again.
So they're a little bit more in the Doomer sphere.
Oh, yeah.
And there's a Doomer subsection of these people that we'll be exploring in a moment.
Yeah.
I feel like so many conspiracies online now are no longer like hopium, but they're copium.
The Trump conspiracy theorists are coping that he's not doing all of the awesome stuff that they wanted him to do.
They're feeling like they're maybe getting owned a little bit because, you know, the economy is not doing great.
You know, they are feeling repercussions of Trump's decisions, whether that be, you know, a price hike on your Nintendo Switch 2 accessories or your...
Egg prices remaining at $10 a dozen.
And then you've got your liberals who are also huffing copium because they were so sure that Trump was defeated.
Kamala would wipe the floor with him.
And now they've got to deal with this guy for another four years.
And so I feel like everybody is coping.
And it's this weird point where we still want to turn our anger at the opposite political constituents.
But since we're all suffering, it doesn't feel as good anymore.
I don't know.
There is something weird in the water that I've noticed in these first hundreds.
I do feel like everybody's taken severe losses.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Everyone has been very down, has been getting kicked while they're down.
Yeah.
Like, everyone's at some point in that cycle, but I feel like everyone is a little more cynical, at the very least, on both sides of this big digital war.
Oh, it's such a fucking mess.
Alright, continuing with the replies.
Hematite2 says, Jake, can you take this supremely lib response?
Devin Chat replies, No matter how many times they are proven wrong, they will simply ignore it and move on to the next narrative.
Literally, the only way to change a conservative mind is to expose them to the consequences they deliberately voted for.
And then, when they're out of a job of house, they'll make a post crying about how, quote, they didn't vote for this.
This is a supremely lib take, which is...
The idea is, like, you're gonna be out of a job and home, and then you'll come crying and saying, I shouldn't have voted for Donald Trump.
Has there been any, like, better evidence that, like, you know, what liberals are accused of, which is being kind of, like, elitists and, you know, well-off, like, has there any been better evidence for this where the majority, at least online, the people who have time to argue about this online, which I think is, you know, obviously...
Oh, I think it goes without saying that we're talking about a subsection of political sickos here.
Yeah, political sickos who are basically like, ugh, like, it's gonna suck when your grandma gets deported, or, like, guess all your employees are deported.
It does have a tinge, too, of classism, where it's kind of like, oh, yeah, these dumb, uneducated hicks, they're working some low-paying job, and they're the ones that are going to get fired.
I'm fine at my fucking email job.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I get the sense of that, too.
I'm fine.
Hey, you know, I don't like this, but I'm going to be fine.
It's you poor losers that are really going to be on the fucking...
It is just an unfortunate side of that, but it's not everybody.
I don't think, you know, for once, I'm going to actually say, not all liberals.
No, and I would couch everything.
Every criticism I make about liberals on whole really can be confined to online people who have the time to argue, like arguing, who want to own, you know, they have that same thing inside of them that MAGA had when Trump first won.
where they really just want to stick it to their political enemies, you know, and they don't necessarily care about, you know, people who are actually suffering real consequences, like people who are being disappeared off the streets, people who are, you know, losing their jobs, losing their homes, all of that stuff.
It's just to win.
It's just, it's about winning and they want to do it.
I do think we live in potentially the most petty and spiteful era.
Yes, I agree.
I agree about that.
Well, I don't know.
That is kind of what defines our era.
Pettiness and spite.
Just everyone's got a chip on their fucking shoulder and everyone's figured out what dumbass is standing in the way of them and the perfect version of the country or their lives or whatever, you know?
We have one last comment here that I found interesting.
Admirable Way replies, the ones who believe money wouldn't reign supreme have fallen.
That's a thing, right?
Literally like every other's time.
Money seems to be this culture's god.
So, they're getting there.
Some of this shit, as we'll see in a bit, there's some decent thinking, you know?
So this next post is fascinating because, as we discussed earlier, there's a kind of defeatist and nihilistic strain that exists among our conspiracy posters, if not an expression of full-on depression.
And what I found interesting here is it's like a rant about this guy's life, but as long as the original rant, there's an edit where he responds to everybody replying to him.
So there's a kind of sense of how the community responded and how this guy's trying to kind of double down or over-explain.
So here we go.
Yes, this is from Agitated Passion, the title of the post.
Does anyone wonder what the fuck we're doing?
I mean, I can already relate to the title of this.
Like, this is going to be short and rambled, but what's the fucking point?
The whole we need to wake up.
For fucking what?
So we can realize we're living in a broken system?
I know this isn't a new thought, it's not revolutionary, but you go through the whole spirituality pipeline until you end up doing a full 360 just praying you didn't fucking know what was going on.
Time theory states that everything from start to end has already happened.
Free will is a scam.
The idea that you have any control of your life is a fucking scam.
It's pay to play, and if you weren't...
I love the video game references.
It's pay to play, and if you weren't born with the right cards, you need to lie, cheat, and scam your way to win.
Capitalism is a fucking joke.
A set of rules made up for us to follow that literally have no fucking meaning.
And even if I wanted to live a life of hedonism, I still need a job for it.
It becomes depressing.
I find myself sliding through stages of nothing matters, do whatever you want, with harming anyone, and nothing matters, what's the fucking point in being here?
The fucking kicker.
There's nothing after this.
We come from nothing.
We leave to nothing.
God bless the asleep that can walk through life following social rules and living within the boundaries we were given.
I've tried it.
I fucking hated it.
And it's not like you could just close your eyes and pretend that you can't see behind the veil again.
Like, when you're awake, you're awake.
So, what's the point?
I have another 30 to 40 years of this shit.
Some of it is great, don't get me wrong, but shit's just getting worse, honestly.
I don't know where I was going with this.
Eat, fuck, sleep, I guess.
Edit.
Hey, guys.
Thanks for all the advice.
Just a few things.
This was a rant.
Nothing more.
I'm a 37-year-old female from Australia.
I've traveled both Australia extensively and have done multiple trips overseas.
I've lived many lives and have touched grass.
I have a ton of hobbies, indoor and outdoor.
I don't have many friends, but I do have one close one and my partner.
I've lived in many places in my country.
I've gone through stages in spirituality and started meditation at seven years old.
I've always been quote-unquote awake.
I'm fascinated by religion, all of it.
I'm an omnist.
I'm not interested in subscribing to one mythological story when they are all so well tied into each other.
There are many things I am grateful for.
I don't sit in bed rot day in and day out, although lately it feels a little more like that.
Autumn weather is all over the place.
When I say free will doesn't exist, it doesn't mean that I'm going to sit and do nothing.
It means every action you take is a part of a larger butterfly effect that goes out from beyond your life.
And because the start and end have already happened, every one of your actions and conversations have to happen.
I'm a little bit of a nihilist.
That's okay.
For the men that are suggesting I have a child, I'm glad that worked for you, but it won't for me.
Again, this was more a rant.
A lot of people get it.
You see what's going on in the world, it's all a big game.
You do the right thing, smile, laugh, go on walks, eat out, shop, travel, but it just feels like it's pointless.
If you don't understand that without automatically jumping to depression, I don't think you're understanding yet.
Good luck on your paths.
I do have to say that these posts, like, I have a lot of compassion for.
I mean, you know, it does sound like depression, unfortunately.
But also, yeah, like, I relate to a lot of the concepts, these philosophical or spiritual concepts, and then they lead to a feeling of meaninglessness in the kind of rote repetition of modern life.
So hope you're okay out there, whoever posted that.
But it wasn't, like, it wasn't pooped on completely by the community, which is cool.
There's like 257 up...
I'm sure a lot of people gave her bad advice.
But at the same time, it's interesting because at first you're like, oh, this is like a teenager going through an existential crisis.
And then it's like, oh no, I'm a 37-year-old woman from Australia.
So it's like, I don't know.
I just found it interesting.
And there is a side to this subreddit that is, I think, getting a little depressed.
I wonder if there is some law of depression amongst conspiracists just because they got what they wanted in Trump being elected.
They're operating from a theory, which is, you know, not an entirely unsound theory, which is that, like, the whole Washington establishment is corrupt.
It's just a network that sort of serves itself.
And what we need is we need an outsider who's not beholden to that system, who has never been, like, in office before to shake things up, and then they're going to fix everything.
And then they got—they thought this— I mean, it's at least when you believe that, oh, well, all politicians are corrupt.
It would get fixed if an outsider came in, but that's never going to happen.
At least you have that hope.
And now Trump comes in and he fulfills this sort of like this vision of a Washington outsider and it's you're still not getting what you want.
You're left with nothing but darkness.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
It is time for a little bit of a mood booster after that.
This post has been deleted by the person who posted it because he got so much shit for it, but it is a very, very fun conspiracy.
Earth's population is fake.
I truly believe 7 billion people, give or take, aren't real.
You're more important than you think.
This is amazing.
This is like the dead internet theory, but like for reality.
So the guy clearly had a more elaborate explanation, but he deleted it.
But what's interesting is to examine the replies that are really highly rated.
So we have 1.2k upvoted reply here.
Particular Prophet294 says, You definitely need to visit India.
You won't find the space to put the foot down, and you'll think otherwise on the population.
So you...
You just go to a crowded space and then like, oh, okay, well then...
I guess these billions are real.
Yeah.
Roy1984 replies, yeah, OP is wrong assuming that the average person on Earth consumes as much as an average U.S. citizen.
Content Mycologist62 says, yeah, I wonder how much he's traveled because the world is fucking massive.
Sandy Riverside replies, I was a field supervisor for the U.S. Census during the 2010 count in Brooklyn.
We counted around 3 million people in that borough.
There's no such thing as having a quota for enumerators.
And no, we don't model shit.
I sent my team door-to-door to soup kitchens, houseboats, nursing homes, you name it.
It's impossible to count everyone in the world, but it's not the chaotic practices you describe, and your numbers are too low.
I don't buy your assessment.
This is a funny one.
I have actually engaged in the bureaucratic practice of census counting, and it just does not line up with my experience, sir.
The New One Is Worse says, Bro notices that most of the world doesn't get to live like an American, can't accept that living in poverty is physically possible, quote, 7 billion people must not exist.
And here we have a person who is actually in support.
Megs replies, Bravo!
First time I have heard a new conspiracy theory that wasn't completely batshit.
I would guesstimate that less than 2 billion is a gross underestimation, but that also 7 to 8 billion is also a gross overestimate.
My estimate is 4 to 5 billion.
So here we have a centrist who wants to say, yeah, 2 to 3 billion people aren't real, but not 7 billion.
But there is a good amount of people on Earth that are not real.
Next up, we've got a guy posting a tweet by a figure that you might recognize.
It's our good friend Stephen Miller.
And the person just says, seems like a pretty big conspiracy.
Username Protected Hologram.
And the Stephen Miller tweet says, when the Biden administration mass imported millions of illegals and criminals into our nation, the U.S. political, judicial, financial, and media power structures did nothing to slow him down, but eagerly accelerated it.
When the Trump administration tries to remove those same invaders, the entire system tries everything in its power to keep them here.
Understand who the system is for and who it is against.
So this got quite a few upvotes, so there's still a good right-wing, I think, faction here.
We've got 578 upvotes, and then here are the replies.
Gulf Hole says, who the system is for, rich people, corporations.
Who the system is not for, everyone else.
Earthling Human replies, yes.
And what kind of people do you think Stephen Miller works for?
Smooth Door 5 says, LMAO at using this sub to promote the words of Stephen Miller.
All of these right-wing nutjobs with their bot army constantly infiltrating this sub.
That's the actual conspiracy, these threads, right here.
And Scanner105 replies, I hate these guys so much.
So there's a theory, there's a conspiracy theory as part of the kind of, I guess, like somewhat lib-aligned R-conspiracy users that the Trumpists and right-wingers on that subreddit are bots.
I mean, God, it comes down to, like, yes, lots of people aren't real, or the people I don't like are real.
The people who are saying things I don't like are not existing in real life.
I remember, like, early on, when I was, like, kind of a pilled young man, and I would argue with people on Twitter and stuff, most of the replies, most of the replies, I would say the majority of them, just accused me of being a bot.
Yeah, it's kind of like a thought-ending cliche, as Travis would put it.
Another good way to gauge overall community interests is to pull up the highest performing posts since Trump took office.
Top interests that I found included Jeffrey Epstein and Luigi Mangione, who I think those were like the protagonists of the film Casino.
So let's get this kicked off.
These are the top performing posts.
Three posts of a tweet by Professor Zinkas says, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of sex trafficking children.
A judge refuses to release the list of who she sold them to.
Up until the list is released, we have only one conclusion.
All of them are on it.
Every less damned billionaire, prince and politician, have a nice day.
You know, Professor Zinkus obviously didn't want to include professors there.
And yeah, the post is just, don't forget.
So, that's a pretty straightforward one.
It's basically saying, like, these motherfuckers are all in on it.
Kind of a loose shot at the elite.
The next post also basically just reminds people of something.
Just a reminder.
And it's a post from, I believe, originally a Guardian article.
Virginia Joffrey, one of Jeffrey Epstein's most prominent abuse survivors, dies by suicide.
And then there's a montage of a tweet by Virginia Joffrey that says, I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal.
I have made this known to my therapist and GP.
If something happens to me in the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them.
Too many evil people want to see me quieted.
And then there's a little blue butterfly.
Yeah, this is a...
Yeah, this is really...
I saw this being reposted a lot.
This is something that she did tweet, like, a couple years ago.
It's kind of the same situation that we're in with McAfee, where he did in the past say, oh, I would never kill myself, but then, like, the circumstances in his life changed so much that it kind of makes sense he would kill himself, and so you're left with this perfect conspiratorial, like, hole.
It sucks.
And also the death is tragic, obviously.
But not every top performing post about Jeffrey Epstein is as grim.
Astral Rocker posts, the 300 plus year old vampire didn't kill himself.
And it's a picture of Jeffrey Epstein contrasted perfectly with the image of Andrew Jackson on a $20 bill.
Yeah.
It's like a crazy, like, montage of half-half.
Like, half the face is the Bill and half the face is Jeffrey.
Yeah.
And then they've circled, like, features like a crease between your eyebrows.
Yeah.
A crease where your cheek, like, pulls back when you smile.
A crease under your mouth, above your chin.
And he's like, see?
They both have these.
But I think these creases are pretty common.
Every 300 years, Jeffrey Epstein resurfaces.
During our lifetimes, he was a pedophile.
But in past lifetimes, he was a president.
He was a Mason.
The idea that Andrew Jackson was somehow Jewish is very funny to me.
Yeah.
But people love this post.
6.6k upvotes, like one of the top performing posts in the last year.
So people are still having some fun.
Another post, and this was, I guess, like how our conspiracy broadly kind of processed the Luigi Mangione stuff, is this post by ConsciousNobody9571.
Reminder that it wasn't Luigi.
And it's a measure between the eyebrows of Luigi Mangione, both masked and unmasked, I believe, once he's already been captured and he's against like a kind of jailhouse wall.
And so the argument here is that these two people can't be the same person because there's a wider bridge between the eyebrows.
Yeah, they're saying that the person who was captured by these street cameras has too much clean shaved space right above the bridge of his nose, whereas Luigi has a near unibrow, so they could not possibly be the same person.
The next post is even more kind of vague.
All right.
User AllLoveAlways writes...
Does this all seem strangely surreal and scripted to anyone else?
And it's the huge...
It's the perp walk.
Yeah, it's the huge perp walk picture.
Which, it was scripted.
It was scripted, like, by the fucking New York police to show that they got the guy that kind of humiliated them by escaping them on bike, and they're perp walking him for no reason with the media.
Yeah, it is scripted.
Yeah, it was an orchestrated event specifically for photos like this.
You got it.
Yeah, it's not a conspiracy.
You've caught on.
The other bake that they love with Mangione is the coat bake.
So the coat bake argues that, like, different security camera photos of Mangione have a different status of having pockets on his, like, green kind of hoodie overcoat thing.
And it's just a quote.
This is an insult to the intelligence of the American people, Luigi Mangione.
So, just circling pockets, pockets, no pockets.
No pockets.
Pockets.
What happened to the pockets?
Pockets and brows.
I don't know.
You know what?
I think that, you know, if in the case where all you really need is to establish reasonable doubt as a defense, this isn't bad.
I hope, I hope Luigi's defense is at least taking a look at these photos.
I mean, their argument, I guess, and it's not very clear, is that they caught some random guy and put him in jail because they can't figure out who actually did it.
Which is pretty wild, like, that they would have snatched a...
A guy, like, right off the street planted all the evidence and it's just some random dude.
Well, it's the police, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
I guess they could just be snatching some Italian guy.
But there was quite a bit of diversity of thought in the top posts of 2025.
This one rocks because this is like, I don't know, I actually like this one.
All Purpose Official says our phones are programmed to listen for running water from a sink.
We already know our phones are constantly listening.
That much is obvious.
This is not a joke.
I am almost 100% certain that our phones can listen for and distinguish the sound of a faucet running water.
Why do I think this?
Because every single time, without fail, when I do my dishes or wash my hands while watching anything on the internet...
An ad will play within 30 seconds, sometimes immediately after I've wet my hands.
These SOBs know we have wet hands and we have a harder time skipping the ad.
I fully believe this for years.
I love this idea.
Damn, that's pretty good.
That they have an algorithm for listening to when your hands are wet and you can't skip the ad and they just jam in a bunch of ads.
I mean, that is devious.
Kind of a decent one, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where it's like, I wonder if I have to talk to someone.
Like, engineers.
Like, could someone do this?
Could you do it?
Yeah, could you do it?
Like, could a phone detect the sound of running water and then, like, you know, choose that time to start playing ads?
This is a very popular post.
Like, one of the top performing of the last year.
9.5k upvotes.
And we have a lot of responses of people that are on board.
Like, they have their own experiences with this.
Hesham replies, LMAO.
I remember thinking this, like, four to five years ago when I didn't have an ad block on my phone for about a month.
Every time I'd get my hands wet, it'd immediately start playing ads.
Always had an ad block on besides that in the last 15 years.
Don't let them mush your brains with their shitty ads.
Break free.
It also happens with wireless headphones.
As soon as I'd moved to a different room to the one my phone was in, it'd start playing ads.
So they're also detecting your proximity to your phone so that they can make sure you can't get back to your phone fast enough to skip the ad.
3T Scroat says, I was literally going on a schizo rant to my wife a few months ago about this LMAO.
It literally knows when I'm in the shower or doing dishes and plays a long 30-minute ad that have to be skipped, but if I'm actively watching, it's short, non-skippable ads.
One Steak says, The most bizarre thing I've ever seen is watching YouTube late at night with headphones.
A couple ads, as expected.
Then I dozed off completely, and somehow, either the Beats headphones or the front camera knew I was asleep and started playing a 20-minute long advertisement about God, which I woke up halfway through.
I was scared to shit.
Now this is awful.
To get in the way of people's bowel movement schedules?
Ugh, truly, truly depraved.
You were scared to go to the bathroom?
I was scared.
I think it's more like, I was scared to shit.
Not like I was scared to poop, but like, I was scared to shit.
But, no, Jake, tell us more.
Come on, no, no, no, I want to hear you.
I was scared to shit.
What if I shouldn't play an ad?
That broke him.
Scared to sleep.
Scared to shit.
Scared to wash my hands.
But you know what this is?
It's all, like, I think, legitimate fears of, like, corporate manipulation.
Oh, I'm not even saying this is false.
Yeah.
This isn't like out of the realm of possibility.
The other day, I went to log into Final Fantasy Online and it said, your account has been terminated.
And I was like, what the fuck?
Like, I never cheat.
I never do anything wrong.
And I realized that like a couple months ago when my like bank account had gotten hacked, my bank reversed a bunch of charges on the particular day.
And one of them happened to be my Final Fantasy Online subscription.
And so they can terminate your account if you charge back the monthly sub.
So I like, you know, reached out to support and they were like, yes, they were like, you can get your account back, but you have to pay us back for the month that got charged back.
Travis, what is happening?
It didn't have $15, and so I had to spend an extra $5 to get enough so that I could reinstate my thing.
I could have done two transactions, one for $10 and one for $5, but I was like, that's so many transactions.
I'm just going to do it.
So it's like these companies are constantly manipulating us to just squeeze us for a little bit extra.
It's hoping that we're lazy.
It's hoping that we want to take the most convenient route, even if it means we have to pay $500.
I think these kinds of fears and anxieties are creeping into every aspect of life.
How else are our phones and these corporations that control them fucking us over in tiny incremental amounts that we don't even realize that we're listening to Jesus while we go to sleep?
You know, at first I was going to accuse you of this is not that, but you really brought it home.
Yeah, you know what?
You connected all the dots.
Corey, you keep that rant in, and I'm saying that because I want listeners to know that other rants were edited out.
I would never edit out a rant, do not listen to Jake, and definitely do not write in.
Definitely, definitely don't do that.
I like this sort of conspiracy theory because I think it's another good example of the ways in which sometimes conspiracists, even if they're wrong in the specifics, they can be right in a more general sense, even if it's not the case that the phones are listening to water in order to trick people into watching ads that they can't skip because their hands are wet.
That one I kind of doubt.
But I mean, it is true that because of surveillance capitalism, these companies are just gathering as much data as humanly possible on us in order to better...
manipulate us i mean there's a recent article in uh futurism that talks about how apparently facebook was able to detect when like teen girls deleted selfies on their facebook account so it could afterwards serve them beauty ads real sick shit so which i would argue is at least as insidious more insidious than like you know listening for water so it's like one of those things where it's like well it's something that's like i think is perfectly legitimate to pay attention to to be paranoid about about the ways in which they pay
attention to all the behavioral data we can feed to them so that they can like you know exploit our fears and insecurities that's real that happens All right, we're moving on to another high-performing post.
No wonder cancer is everywhere, says Aggressive Dot 9747.
And it is a meme of Willem Dafoe as Steve Zissou and Willem Dafoe as his character in The Lighthouse.
So obviously the Steve Zissou looks cleaner and happier and colorful.
And it says, me when I thought recycling would save the world.
And then the grim, black and white, grizzled captain from The Lighthouse has text above him saying, Me after I found out that plastic corporations invented plastic recycling to put the responsibility onto the consumer even though they knew plastic recycling was both chemically and financially not feasible, and now I have plastic in my brain, lungs, and testicles.
And I'm going to give it—this one's—I'm 100% on board.
There's mainstream documentaries about how they lied about plastic recycling.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've read about this, too, about how, like, that was just a campaign in order to basically get people more on board and more comfortable with petroleum-based containers.
So we're going to give it to this one.
Salute to you, aggressive dot.
I do love that the majority of these are conspiracy posts are...
Anti-corporate.
I mean, it's an anti-capitalist.
I think that we're seeing more and more of that.
There is, like, one that we'll not touch on, but that was kind of ugly and transphobic.
That was just a kind of celebration of Trump not allowing gender-affirming surgeries to minors.
So just a general cheer for that.
So that does exist, too, but it wasn't in the top.
It was like kind of halfway down the top performing.
Still pretty big.
So it's, again, a very interesting place.
Certainly a marketplace of ideas.
All kinds.
Here's another pretty based post, if I were to say.
Anam Lenskyfeller says, what happened to suspending all foreign aid?
And it's a Patrick Bateman meme.
He says, impressive, very nice, looking at the USAID to Ukraine being zero under Trump and $175 billion under Biden.
And then the second one is Patrick Bateman saying, now let's do Israel.
So it is worth looking at why the United States gives foreign aid to a country currently engaging in a genocide.
I do agree with this poster and Mr. Patrick Bateman.
I can't imagine I'm going to...
Regret agreeing with Patrick Bateman.
He seems like a nice guy.
Did you check about this person's posting history?
Because sometimes people make posts like this because they are very well informed, and sometimes people make posts like this because they have certain prejudices that align with posts like this.
However, there is no sign of that in this post.
There's no symbols pointing to that in this post.
This is purely a post about foreign aid, and I would agree that it's worth looking at why we're doing that.
Now, yes, you're right.
This guy might be a Nazi.
I have no idea.
I will note that it seems like the meme comes from...
There's a watermark on this meme, and it's from what looks like being libertarian.
Yeah, so...
What a mess.
The next post, quite high-performing, is amazing as well.
It says, be careful when you protest.
And it's basically a photo of an undercover cop at a protest.
And it's pointing to the fact that you can see the outline of his vest, that he has cuffs in his back pocket, that there's wire poking out the side, that he has a thin blue line bracelet and cop boots.
And it's basically, you know, a kind of guide to recognizing when there's an undercover cop.
Yeah, you know, I was gonna say that could be a pack of Zins in his back pocket, but with all of the other...
All right.
I think it's time to examine another high-performing post that made me chuckle a little bit.
So legal throwaway posts, does this look like a woman to you?
I think it's Lucifer.
I'll explain.
And they've included a picture of the head of the Statue of Liberty with tourists hanging out of her crown.
And the text of the post reads, I don't believe that the Statue of Liberty is meant to be a woman.
I believe it's actually a representation of Lucifer, the Lightbringer.
From the literal crown of thorns to the chains at the feet, I believe that statue is actually Lucifer.
We had mixed reactions to this, although the very top post is pretty brutal.
I'd look into the Roman goddess Libertas.
Makes a lot of sense.
And if you look into it, it's exactly that.
So if you know it's the goddess Libertas, then to even bake this in any way is just to bake the manliness of the face of the Statue of Liberty, I suppose, which is awesome to transvestigate the Statue of Liberty.
That is a new cool thing.
But Legal Throwaway, interestingly, says, taking a break from all the political posts, here's something different for the sub.
And 3.7k people were like, hell yeah.
Thank you for bringing some good old stuff.
Yeah, and SemaJ009 says, See, this is the good shit.
Good, old-fashioned conspiracy vibes.
I like how people browse posts like, you know, that sort of unhinged, little paranoid kind of posting?
That just sets off dopamine in my brain.
Ah, this is the good shit.
Another highly rated reply is a little more like, woo, like losing it in the rabbit hole.
Overroadkill replies, the statue also faces east, where the sun rises, Morningstar, symbolizing bringing light.
In Roman folklore, he was depicted as a male bearing a torch.
Side note, it's also why I believe that Freemasons are Luciferian, with most not even knowing the significance of their quote-unquote beliefs.
When one is a Freemason, they are said to be quote-traveling east, and they are quote-illuminated or brought into the light.
Now, who from the East could be giving them this light?
Could it be the Lightbringer, the Eastern Star?
And the female equivalent to Freemasonry is literally called the Order of the Eastern Star.
Doesn't get more obvious than that.
So, a lot of people thought that was, like, a cool and interesting addition.
Yeah.
Finally, ABCDEF, whatever, writes, This is the content I thought I was going to get when I joined this sub.
Thanks.
You know, these people are like connoisseurs of schizo-posting.
Some are a little too right-wing, a little too dumb, a little too, you know, but like this, actually the Statue of Liberty is Lucifer.
That hits the sweet spot for them.
I wanted to close the episode with a post that I thought was basically written for this episode.
It popped up a couple days ago, and the OP asks, What conspiracy theory will you always defend until the day you die?
The replies are obviously a great place to take the temperature of the community's core beliefs.
I sorted them by most upvoted, and to my pleasant surprise, this is what I found amazing.
Salami Tsunami said...
The U.S. two-party system is a dog and pony show owned and operated by the corporate overlords in order to keep the working class divided.
Bam.
Beautiful.
We love to see it, folks.
Yeah, beautiful.
We love to see a poster get it right.
And keep in mind, I'm sure anybody that we express any kind of support of will probably be revealed to be a Nazi in some way.
That's just the milkshake duck effect.
I can't do anything about that.
We just have to take these posts on face value for now.
Next up.
We've got Big Boat, 69, 420.
What those numbers mean?
Unsure.
Yeah.
They write, the Las Vegas shooting was not just one guy out of a window.
A much, much bigger cover-up is going on.
You know, I've...
Yep.
I'm weird about that.
That was a weird one.
So I think, yeah, I think we don't have the full story about that.
I've always been blown away by the fact that, like, according to, like, multiple investigations, there is no officially known motive for that, which is just in the official, like, accounts from, like, the Las Vegas PD and the FBI and stuff.
And it's like, I think it is a very strange, baffling case.
Third most popular post?
Is from Cheese Scone, and they write that it's not red versus blue, it's the 1% versus you.
I mean, like...
You know, interesting to see this shit.
This is the top-performing replies.
I didn't cherry-pick these.
You know, it sort of seems like that our conspiracy is becoming less red v.
blue and a little bit more black-pilled.
Maybe a mix of black-pilled and, like, almost Marxist.
But there's, like, some class analysis.
I mean, rudimentary, but something.
Kiwameta Baka says that we're all gonna be okay.
That's actually kind of cheerful.
Is that cheerful or is that cynical?
No, that's a conspiracy is that we're all going to be okay.
So we're not all going to be okay.
Yeah, we're all not going to be okay.
This is another Doomer post.
Kind of Doomer post, yeah.
That we're fed an entirely false story about 9-11, as evidenced by them finding an intact passport at the base of pulverized to dust skyscrapers.
I do have to say that the passports that survived the plane crash thing is not great.
That's a tough one.
I think this is, like, silly.
Like, what they found is, like, so many things were destroyed, but these papers were...
I don't think...
I think there's lots of things to talk about, about, like, how, you know, how, like, the role of, you know, the Saudis was downplayed in the official report and all these good...
I think there's lots of interesting angles on how the...
You know, there's lots of more...
There's lots of information that's come out about what the CIA knew about the hijackers before the event, which is, you know, interesting.
This is dog shit.
I've heard this before.
I don't know.
It's not just like, we found an intact paper.
I don't know.
Eh, not good enough for Travis.
Not good for me, no.
All right, next post.
TooManyPips writes, there were advanced civilizations before the Ice Age, way before 10,000 years ago.
This isn't one that I believe, but I do like this idea that there was an advanced civilization that got wiped out like the dinosaurs and were constantly sort of finding little pieces of their civilization via archaeology.
But then, like, what about Neanderthals?
What about, like, Homo habilis, Homo erectus?
Like, what about our kind of lineage of evolution?
Do you think that happened twice on Earth?
Like, we evolved down that path twice over and had to start over?
Well, we didn't have to become an entire species.
It could be, like, there was a civilization and then we...
We reverted back to, like, hunter-gatherers.
Yeah, it could have been dolphins, too.
They could be dolphin-shaped.
Sure.
Yeah, they could have been extraterrestrials that lived on the planet for a really long time.
They got wiped out, and then their remains, plus their DNA, combined with some other stuff to make us.
I think this stuff being near the top just shows that there's a lot of, like, ancient aliens and ancient civilization heads among the art conspiracy people, because the very next one says that we are not the first advanced civilization, which actually is...
Kind of true.
If you examine history through the lens of ethnocentrism, you'll realize that we basically dismissed a lot of civilizations as primitive that were actually way more advanced than we give them credit for as we rewrote history, especially Mesoamerican civilizations, etc.
But I think this is a bit more Gaia TV and ancient aliens than what I'm saying.
Well, there's a lot of old heads on the sub, too.
You know, Reddit can skew a little bit older, at least in my experience.
And there's a lot of the kind of, like, remaining sort of old head arc conspiracy guys who were anti-government, you know, not party, who are ancient alien, ancient civilization guys.
So it makes sense that there's still kind of a fossilization of those core beliefs, like, still, you know, in the sub.
Another return to 9-11 with the next post that says the towers were a controlled demolition.
So that's a pretty classic one.
I don't even think it's worth talking about that much.
But the next one was interesting.
Finally, something QAnon-adjacent.
Mermaid Manus writes, the Podesta emails had coded language in them.
So this is kind of a broader claim.
Obviously, they're probably referencing the cheese pizza stuff.
Yeah, this is just Pizzagate.
But he's even cleaned it of that, right?
Yeah, right.
It's like one level of abstraction away from Pizzagate.
So it's like the gentlest entry into Pizzagate that you could possibly put into words.
I could get down with this one, I think.
Oh, no.
I think I could get down.
If they're like, hey, is Hillary going to be available tomorrow?
We are throwing a taco hot...
Hot dog party.
Yeah, you know, maybe that's coded language for something.
Is Jake accidentally redoing Pizzagate on our podcast?
I'm just saying, it might not be for, like, these horrible things that we think it's coded for.
It might be something much more mundane.
But the fact that he's distilled it down to, I think there is coded language in here.
I mean, have either of you guys ever sent a coded language text?
I have.
It's arguable that coded language can be interpreted pretty broadly.
Yeah, that's all I'm saying.
I'm with it on the broadest, most mundane level.
I'm with it.
He's pizza curious.
Okay, the next post is interesting because it is still a highly voted post, but it just makes a bunch of claims, and then there's an edit defending against the critique to the claims.
Sweezel writes...
A couple spring to mind.
Princess Diana's death was orchestrated by the cabal that controls the royal family.
She had just become pregnant by a Muslim man.
Same goes for Virginia Guffrey, murdered on the order of some backroom royalist organization.
Moon landings were faked to try to bankrupt the Soviets and to also start to point out eyes to the sky as part of the reason why Kennedy was assassinated was the disclosure of contact with off-world life.
Last, as an Aussie, Harold Holt.
The Prime Minister of Australia disappeared while swimming in the ocean.
He oversaw the sale of Pine Gap to America.
I still say that there is a UAP under that base as it was very close in time to nuclear testing in Australia.
Edit.
For those offering alternative theories, the title was which theories would you defend forever, not let's jump on a wagon and tell people why they're wrong.
I don't care what you say.
This is what I believe, and it's unshakable.
It is surprising that there's this, there's like 236 upvotes, and there's some crazy stuff here.
Moon landing is fake.
Disclosure of off-world life is there.
There's a UAP under the Pine Gap Australian base.
Royalists killed Geoffrey, and Princess Di was killed for tarnishing royal blood with, I suppose, sleeping with what they're terming a Muslim man.
That's quite a bit of stuff to read through and go, yep, I'm on board.
Yep, yep, yep.
No replies to this.
I have no problem with any of these ideas.
So, you know, I think people are still pretty out there.
Next one is a classic.
Rockaway428 says, P. Diddy was behind Biggie's murder.
Yeah, that's not out of the question.
There's quite a bit of interesting evidence that makes this somewhat credible.
And finally, we have another one that I really have no problem with, but is also a little conspiratorial about the r slash conspiracy subreddit.
And we're going to end with this post.
I think we've ridden the rainbow.
So give us the very last post here.
Alpha Menel writes, dead internet theory, AI and bots everywhere in majority.
Even here.
So we are living in a styrofoam world of fake connections online.
This is an interesting one because this one's been kicking around for a while.
But it's like only in the last few years has it been able to be really viable because of the proliferation of AI tools that are like cheap and like easy to access.
So I don't know.
It's an interesting example of like hyperstition.
There's this sort of like this paranoia or this sort of belief or this sort of like myth that's sort of like, I'm not saying it's real, but certainly it's more plausible now than it was even five years ago.
So Travis, to finish the episode up, I wanted to ask you and Jake, what surprised you?
Are any of the impressions you had walking in changed from examining this slice of life?
Yeah, you know, it is interesting that it's not sort of as sort of like rabidly partisan.
Our conspiracy is not as rabidly partisan as I have seen it be in the past, especially during like 2016, like, you know, during the rise of Trump.
It felt like a real hyper that they said they were against both parties, but it was a very sort of like right-leaning sort of like pro-Trump kind of place.
I don't know.
Maybe because of the sort of the doomer sort of cloud that sort of everyone's sort of under, that has become sort of like more willing to sort of criticize the right and sort of like and criticize right-wing conspiracy theories.
Yeah, I do get the sense, you know, like we kind of talked about at the beginning, that everyone kind of has had a kind of partisan disappointment with their own camp, has had like the rug pulled out from underneath them.
Whether you're a Biden voter that got rug pulled about his mental health and Yeah,
that's a really good point.
It feels like on...
On Reddit, people aren't pretending to win.
They're upset about the loss in whatever way, shape, or form they've experienced it.
Whereas on X or on Blue Sky, everybody's pretending that they're winning all the time.
So it's a very interesting flip, and I wonder what that is.
I wonder if Reddit being a place where you can post longer, as opposed to these kind of short-form post platforms, if that has something to do with people being able to write more, and therefore there's more meaningful discussion, and not everything is kind of a clapback or a quick reply or a gif or whatever, if that contributes to it or what.
But I guess that's a really- Really interesting sort of takeaway.
And I guess to answer your question, Julian, the thing that surprised me is that there's not a ton of alien stuff.
You know, in the absence of partisan conspiracy theories, usually you tend to kind of fall back on alien stuff because it's fairly non, you know, it can be fairly nonpartisan.
But r slash UFOs is a huge community, though.
I think that, like, that kind of draws those people away because they want a more specific place to talk about the aliens and the...
Reptilian, Draco, or whatever?
I guess, yeah.
I guess it's just, you know, it's not quite as weird as it used to be, and you can see that with some of the replies to the post saying, these are the kind of posts I miss, you know, the weird stuff about Statue of Liberty, yada, yada, yada.
So, yeah, it's lost a little bit of weirdness, and it's gained a little bit of insight, which I suppose is somewhat of a good thing.
But maybe also a little bit of a death.
And maybe also a lot of bit of all Nazis and we just don't know.
Yeah, yeah.
Postscriptum, we do not, in fact, support anybody that we read posts from and have no idea if and or they are Nazis.
Yeah, and if they are, we apologize for platforming them.
I mean, it's not a platforming.
What we're doing is we're taking the temperature of what people are posting there and what ideas are floated around, you know?
And no, I did not encounter ruthlessly...
Over and over, you know, kind of fascist or right-wing posting.
I also think outside of periods of competition, like outside of an election and stuff like that, I think people just don't come with a fight as much.
They're back to their lives.
Their guy won or their guy lost.
They might be a bit bitter, but they're not necessarily going to r slash conspiracy at that point to debate the more political stuff.
I think honestly, too, people don't want that anymore.
There's a lot of people who are just like, I'm fucking done, man.
I don't want to discuss politics anymore.
This is too grim, too depressing.
Because it doesn't feel like there's any way out through either of the parties.
Yeah.
You know?
So...
Anyways, that was r slash conspiracy.
Hopefully you enjoyed that and or it triggered your Manchurian candidate.
Whatever you do, please, please direct all complaints to Julian.
No.
Oh, you don't have Twitter anymore, so you can't even do that.
Don't direct anything to anybody.
Although you should direct yourself to patreon.com slash QAA if you are not yet a subscriber.
So you can get a second episode for every main one and access to the entire archives.
Hundreds of episodes.
Delightful episodes.
And this kind of felt like it could have been.
You know, our premium episodes, if you haven't subscribed, they tend to be a little bit weirder, sometimes a little bit more specific.
They'll go on kind of a random tangent.
Sometimes we let ourselves get a little bit goofier there, you know, analyzing some pop-cultury stuff as opposed to, you know, the mains where we'll do deep dives on figures.
or, you know, talk about new stuff.
So I would say if I weren't a host of this podcast, I would say that the premium, you know, I would probably sign up for it for a little while.
If Jake were not himself, he would be you and he would sign up.
That's good.
For a little while, for a little while at least.
Eventually something else.
My Final Fantasy sub would, you know, I would have to choose one or the other and we all know where that would go.
But, you know, for a little while I think the premium content, it would really scratch the right itch in my brain.
So if you think that you think like me and you haven't subscribed yet, maybe...
Do what I might do if I weren't me.
Yeah, fact, and I think very well and clearly put.
Thank you.
QAApodcast.com is our website.
Listener, until next week, may the OP post you and edit you.
We have auto-cued content based on your preferences.
