A Mom’s For Liberty ‘Legislator of the Year” winner arrested for sexually abusing children and distributing CSAM. A horrifying politically motivated assassination. Julian dives into the disturbing details in charges filed against State Representative RJ May III and Travis debunks right wing claims that shooter Vance Luther Boelter is a Democrat.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Yeah, you know, we chose this title at the last second.
I'm a little hesitant, I have to say.
I think it's perfect.
I think we are just a Cormac McCarthy novel at this point.
Most of our episodes should just be the description of, like, a red, blood-red sun and just kind of the endless dust and grim planes of American existence.
Well, I'm definitely an assassin.
I took the creed.
Wow.
Amazing.
Continuing my tradition of picking awful topics that bum me out, I've chosen to cover a story that starts with a little-known messaging app and ends with the arrest of a state representative for distributing child sexual abuse material.
After years spent warning voters about drag queens and trans kids.
Travis has chosen something just as depressing for his segment, the rights spinning of a Christian nationalist's politically motivated assassinations into some sort of Marxist plot, a pure inversion of reality.
What ties these two stories together?
Nothing.
There's no togetherness.
We are giving up on all social bonds.
Fuck it.
And I've chosen nothing.
I refuse to play.
Right now, every time I look over at Jake, he's like blending into a small crowd.
He's just kind of disappearing into a group of four or five people that are milling around.
And so I can't even tell if he's there.
But I can hear him.
Yeah, just brushing pieces of straw and hay off my shoulders, off my cape, if you will.
Yeah, you did do an amazing job.
Thank you.
And I'm just glad that there was a kind of large wheelbarrow with hay in it for you to not, you know, pass away.
I've been doing this a long time, you know?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, on that note, let's get started.
In late March of 2024, the messaging app KIK flagged a user called JoeBiden69.
There are four N's.
According to internal logs, the account shared more than 220 videos over just five days.
Most of the content involved minors, some toddlers, in sexually explicit acts.
KIK reported the activity to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
That triggered a federal investigation.
What started as an anonymous tip quickly became something much bigger.
Federal investigators traced the uploads to a home in Lexington County, South Carolina.
That home belonged to State Representative Robert John R.J. May the 3rd.
So there is surprisingly little content, you know, involving R.J. There's an interview that's very boring where he just kind of rants about how, like, you know, the GOP are rhinos and...
But he does also appear on this weird radio interview on this show they call Regular Joe.
So I just want to kind of play regular Joe for you.
I'm just a regular Joe, not high or low.
A regular Joe.
And hello, Grand Strand.
Welcome to another episode of the Regular Joe Show.
I am Dominic Santoro, the average Joe, along with Brian Sweeney, the regular Joe.
Hey, and it's Glenn Dye, the above-average Joe.
And also, we have to add, we have somebody else behind the glass.
We have Louis, who's going to be the everyday Joe.
Yeah, we just call him Lou.
We just call him Lou for now.
Lou for now.
Lou for now.
Kind of reminds me of taking a bath when you said loofa.
Lou.
Sort of shades of Yankee Stadium.
Lou.
So, today our guest is going to be R.J. May, a Republican Party, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, representing District 88. Man, I wish we had this level of swag, dude.
These dudes have it on lock.
They're talking about loofahs.
They're saying, Lou, and it's unclear what they're referencing.
They are clearly...
Yeah, they're guys.
They're just dudes.
Hey, look, I'm just a regular guy.
Look, some of these guys, they want to be special.
Some of these guys, they want to be not so special.
Trust me, a regular guy just like you.
And this week on Regular Joe, our guest is a notorious pedophile.
Pedo, pedo, pedo.
Exactly.
Awesome, and so bad, and I hate even imitating their style.
So just to get an idea of the stuff that they bitch about on this kind of show, I would like to play another clip.
I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it is a freight train doing 100 miles an hour.
With a dumpster fire inside of it.
Yes.
You can't make this stuff up.
No, you can't.
Washington Examiner, it's true.
Before we move on, don't you think that this is almost like a fad when we were growing up?
That the woke agenda, the naming of different names and genders, don't you think it is almost like, well, to my point, silly?
There's only two sexes.
If you believe anything, Catholic, Protestant, non-denominal like myself, it doesn't matter.
You know, we know that God made us, and he made man and woman.
There was no...
There was no Z, there was no there, there was no there.
When you examine all of the belief systems, whether it be Catholic, Protestant, or non-denominational, they're all in agreement.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
The Wokies, it's a fad.
It's a dumpster fire in a train going 100 miles per hour.
Look what just a couple of regular guys that believe a magical creature in the sky created man and woman.
Simple as that.
Couple of regular guys.
Hey, magic guy in the clouds.
He reaches down.
Man, woman, penis, vagina.
What's there to talk about?
Bing, bop, boom.
Regular guys.
Oh, man.
I hate them so much.
And they're so boring to listen to.
Me too.
But it's so funny to me that somebody's identity is couched around.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
What's all this non-regular stuff?
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Look, I'm just a guy who likes a bagel with butter on it, alright?
Hold the cream cheese.
I am unclear on what's happening, but we are now going to play the clip of when the pedophile state representative finally is introduced and he is calling in to the regular show.
Julian, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't he like more than a pedophile because he's actually a criminal?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, there's lots of words I could use, and we will be getting into exactly what he's done.
I think pedophile's a nice short to-the-point question.
Yeah, he's a rapist.
He's a criminal.
He's a child porn distributor.
And here he is, a regular Joe.
Here he is, a regular Joe.
What are, say, your top three priorities from a Freedom Caucus perspective?
Judicial reforms at the top?
Oh, yeah.
Transparency in education, getting rid of critical race theory and diversity, equity, inclusion, the brainwashing and indoctrination of our children at the top, and a parental bill of rights.
I think he's at the top also.
So this is his whole shtick.
He is beloved or was beloved by Mobs for Liberty.
They actually named him, you know, Politician of the Year in 2023.
Made him a nice little plaque.
If you scroll down, you can see this beautiful plaque.
Very poorly printed, unfortunately.
But yeah, Bombs for Liberty, South Carolina Legislator of the Year 2023, Representative R.J. May III for defending and creating legislation to protect parental rights in South Carolina.
So he will protect you from, you know, trans, the trans takeover of your child's mind and body.
But he will also have sex with children, unfortunately, and collect content in which children are abused.
So it's, you know, I mean, for me, that kind of like balances out, right?
Yeah, yeah.
We're real neutral.
We're good.
We're good, right?
Oh, yeah?
Yeah, they look like they'd leave a shitty tip at, like, the golf club, like, restaurant.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah.
For sure.
For sure.
Being, like, a real, like, far-right politician, it's gotta be so fucking easy.
Just gotta show up and be like, my number one agenda?
Ending the woke gender Marxism.
And then you get showered in, like, praise and attention and, like, awards and media appearances.
Yeah, they're like, my number one policy?
Look.
I'm against the thing I'm doing in secret.
Agents from Homeland Security Investigations working with the Department of Justice's Child Exploitation and Obscenity section linked the uploads to May's personal cell phone and laptop.
Forensic tools revealed 958 connections from May's home Wi-Fi to Kix servers.
Over 1,100 messages were exchanged during the window when the videos were sent.
Investigators also discovered that May had multiple encrypted communication apps installed, Kik, Telegram, Mega, and Loki Messenger.
He's such an awful degenerate.
He's like inventing new, Yeah, yeah, these must be made-up messengers.
He had to, like, you know, concoct, imagine new ways of communicating just to get through the praved content he likes.
He had Flinger installed and Borch.
Yeah.
So fucking grim, you kind of have to laugh.
Well, you don't have to, but I feel like I'm reflexively kind of protecting my brain and soul by laughing.
Almost like shielding myself from the awful reality that we are unearthing here.
No, this is real awful, yeah.
I've taken one too many hits.
My shields are down.
Yeah, don't complain about the content I bring you ever again.
Just after Kick flagged the account, all four apps were deleted within seconds of each other.
That kind of deletion, investigators said, wasn't casual.
It suggested someone knew what was coming.
And it didn't stop there.
Agents found a second identity.
May was allegedly using the alias Eric Rentling on a mega file-sharing account.
That profile linked to a Facebook account showing what appeared to be the back of May's head.
So he stayed anonymous on this fake Facebook account by posting a picture of the back of his own head.
Actually, his real head is like...
I'm going to stay anonymous.
I'm not going to get my face.
They can't recognize me by my hair and ears.
Let's see the facial recognition do some work on the back of my fucking skull.
Doesn't he know that they can do that by now?
They look at the back of your head.
They know exactly what your face looks like.
messages written in Spanish arranged meetings in Colombia with underage girls.
Un-fucking-real.
Some of the messages discussed payment.
Videos recovered from May's laptop appeared to show him in a Colombian hotel room with three young women.
All three investigators say were teenagers who had been paid.
The footage was time-stamped.
The audio was dubbed in English.
The girls looked nervous.
That material is now under review for possible human trafficking charges.
Prosecutors noted that US citizens who travel abroad for commercial sex with minors can be charged under the PROTECT Act.
Investigators also say May accessed online forums and private chat groups previously shut down for distributing child sex abuse material.
Court filings suggest he had a long-standing interest in incest-related content.
They say he was part of online communities where that kind of material was traded.
The DOJ hasn't named those platforms but said the pattern matches other international trafficking cases.
I can't believe this guy flew under the radar of Tim Ballard.
I mean, I'm sure.
I was going to say, I'm like.
Yeah.
We need you, buddy!
Yeah, this is a real textbook case for you.
Yeah, you'd be celebrated taking down a politician who's doing the exact kind of shit you claim that you're fighting against.
Well, it turns out the Underground Railroad is to allow pedophiles to escape the law.
It's a big underground system.
There's no mole children.
It's just a bunch of pedophiles like me.
It's just like Tim Ballard with a headlamp on being like, quick, this way.
Come on, guys.
You got your USB keys?
Okay, let's go.
He hands you like a helmet and a flashlight.
Come on, fellas!
In August 2024, federal agents raided May's home.
They seized 32 digital devices, laptops, phones, hard drives, thumb drives, and even a desktop computer.
Some were password protected.
Some needed to be forcibly unlocked.
One laptop contained files matching those shared by the Joe Biden 69 account, which there's such a fucking awful comedic twist to naming your pedophile account after the president that you hate and then 69 and probably four ends because Joe Biden 69 was already taken.
I don't know.
Maybe on some subconscious level, he's like, oh, you know, fucking Joe Biden, he's a fucking pedophile.
And then in his perverted mind, he said, and for that, I admire him, so I'm going to make my account named after him.
Yeah, I think I'm installing every app on Earth, and I'm going Biden on this shit.
I'm Brandon-ing out here.
Yeah, he's like, Joe Biden, 69. What?
No, he is truly, truly a sick fuck.
This is so fucking shocking, honestly.
And I'm sorry.
I'm sorry I'm covering this.
I'm frozen.
I'm frozen in my seat.
In a federal detention memo, prosecutors wrote that May had accessed and shared material that involved, quote, sadistic and masochistic conduct.
One video already existed in child protection databases.
It involved a known two-year-old victim from an unrelated case overseas.
The DOJ confirmed it is working closely with Interpol and Colombian authorities to investigate whether the footage shot abroad constitutes evidence of trafficking.
They noted that several chat messages recovered from May's account referenced specific hotels and flights to Bogota and Medellin.
pedophilic sex tourist and creator of child pornography and a collector and distributor.
Really, really...
He wasn't just a passive consumer.
He was a big part of the community.
Yeah.
Yes.
He was a notorious and prolific pedophile.
Court records also show May's use of encrypted storage platforms, two of which were hosted on overseas servers.
One megafolder contained nearly a thousand files organized by code words.
Investigators said the labeling system mirrored those used by known CSAM rings.
That's child sex abuse material, and that's how they reference it, CSAM.
Until his arrest, May had no criminal record.
He was a sitting lawmaker.
But on June 11, 2025, federal agents showed up at his house and took him into custody.
The next day, a grand jury indicted him on 10 counts of distributing CSAM.
Each count, 5 to 20 years.
If convicted on all charges, May could be facing up to 200 years.
At his bond hearing, prosecutors didn't hold back.
They pointed to May's international travel, his access to minors, including his own children, and his familiarity with encryption tools.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Dull...
Told the court that his political status didn't make him safer.
It made him more dangerous.
The judge agreed there is no bond.
May is considered a flight risk.
May's attorney, Dane Phillips, argued that someone else could have used the Wi-Fi.
He showed a family photo that included the password written on a whiteboard in the house.
So his wife basically accidentally posted their Wi-Fi network password, I guess, at some point.
And so now they're trying to argue that, like, maybe someone else was doing that.
But there's so much evidence that doesn't involve the kind of Wi-Fi itself that it's going to be a tough one, I think, for them to argue.
He's like, the Wi-Fi, he bought me the ticket.
It got me to Medea, and the Wi-Fi did.
It took me right off the plane, right into the hotel.
Yeah, it's amazing.
It's like the idea would be that there's a pedophile hiding in the bushes outside his house, logged onto his Wi-Fi, doing prolific pedophilia.
Child porn stuff, but close enough to get the Wi-Fi, so that would mean a person who's really hanging around outside his house.
I really love that.
Truly fucked.
The attorney also argued that no CSAM was found on unlocked devices, but prosecutors fired back with IP logs, MAC address data, and file metadata.
It all matched up with May's travel schedule.
One filing linked the uploads directly to May's phone.
So, boys, you ready to get political?
At the time of his arrest, May was in his third term representing District 88. He was vice chair of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus, a group he helped start.
He'd be known for his hardline stances on so-called family values, gaining national attention for opposing abortion and gender-affirming health care.
He studied at the University of South Carolina and earned a master's degree from Tel Aviv University!
Israel!
Pedophile heaven!
In fact, if he manages to escape, he might be safe there.
He wouldn't be the first American pedophile to just bail and go there.
Unfortunately, he's not Jewish, so that might get in the way.
Before his election, he worked as a political consultant.
He also authored editorials warning about radical gender ideology and government overreach.
Stop overreaching.
In 2023, he co-sponsored a bill that banned gender-affirming care for minors.
He gave speeches warning about indoctrination and grooming.
At a Moms for Liberty event that same year, May was introduced as a champion for families.
That video is no longer on the internet.
Moms for Liberty, yeah, you can't take it back.
We have the plaque.
You know, we got the documents.
Man, my Alex Jones is worse than ever.
We got the documents, folks.
Moms for Liberty, they've always got the best picks.
For the pleasure of you two and not the listener, I did post in the document, the Moms for Liberty invites you to our April meeting.
Guest speakers, South Carolina Freedom Caucus, including Representative R.J. May from District 88, which the 88 is just like the cherry on the cake.
Like, to somehow have it be the Hitler number as well, obviously there's no pattern there.
Let's not, you know, do pareidolia on this shit, but still, I don't know.
Grim and weird.
In January 2024, just months before his kick account was flagged, May stood on the House floor and said, quote, We as legislators have an obligation to ensure that our children have no harm done to them.
Oh my fucking God.
He's awesome because he's almost doing the 14 words.
That quote was widely shared by conservative outlets, and it has taken on a slightly different meaning at this point, I think.
After the indictment, May was expelled from the Freedom Caucus.
Chairman Jordan Pace said the allegations were, quote, deeply disturbing.
Speaker Morel Smith suspended him without pay.
And Representative Davey Hyatt filed a formal ethics complaint.
Seems a little limp.
Some lawmakers said May had already been kind of isolating himself because, you know, once they raided his house, he fucking knew.
But he still had to show up.
And he was sweating.
And so he basically barely showed up.
He only showed up for, like, votes that he had to show up to.
He filed no legislation.
This was like a 10-month period, I think.
He spoke once on the House floor or in the whole period.
He basically was isolating himself, like, in the back in, like, an office.
Just not doing any of it.
Because he knew.
He knew.
He was fucking cooked.
He's like the dad in White Lotus Season 3. You know what I mean?
I've not seen a single episode of The White Lotus.
Julian, have you seen season three?
Of course I have.
I know you like that show.
You know, the father who's, like, trying to keep the vacation together.
Oh, yes.
But he knows he's just, like, fucking cooked the entire time.
I mean, I don't know.
yeah, maybe he was examined out too.
Maybe he, maybe he got his wife's pills and was doing that in the back of the legislative, Yeah, maybe.
God, that's got to be...
And you're going through your head of, like, all the times you appeared on, like, I don't know, the regular Joe show being like, we got to kill all these pedophiles.
Or standing up in front of the- I'm just a regular Joe.
Hey, hey, I'm just a regular guy.
Hey, you looking for pedophiles?
Maybe check out that above average Joe.
I don't like the way he's looking at him.
I don't like the way he dresses his hot dog.
They call me regular Joe Biden 69. Joe Biden 69. Joe Biden, he eats kids.
That's right.
Meanwhile, I got all the folders in my computer labeled pizza, hot dog, just like John Podesta.
Jesus Christ.
Democratic Representative Spencer Wetmore.
Another?
These are made up.
Spencer Wetmore summed it up bluntly.
Quote, this is someone who stood on the floor of the House and pontificated about protecting children.
These allegations go far beyond hypocrisy or criminal.
So, I think that's fair.
Governor Henry McMaster hasn't made a direct statement, but his office said disciplinary action is up to the legislature.
Meanwhile, May's office door has stayed shut since the day he was arrested.
In the days that followed, things kept getting worse.
Two new bills were filed.
One would require criminal background checks for lawmakers.
The other would give the House Ethics Committee more investigative power.
Neither bill made it out of committee, but the message was clear.
Something had to appear.
Like it was changing.
Oh, yeah, we're going to catch the next one, okay?
Okay, yeah, we now have pedophile detectors.
They are distributed to everybody.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, we absolutely were not clued in to a guy that sounds like the top 0.01% of child pornography consumers and distributors.
But next time, the next time, we'll find them.
As of now, May is still in custody.
His social media accounts are gone.
His website is down.
His house seat remains unfilled.
Insiders say the Speaker is waiting for a formal expulsion vote before calling a special election.
This case is one of the most serious federal prosecutions ever brought against a sitting South Carolina lawmaker.
Since the arrest, more details have surfaced.
Court documents say the feds are coordinating with two other field offices.
One lead is a potential encrypted server based in Texas, and it might have hosted some of the materials that May shared.
Back in South Carolina, Lexington County law enforcement has opened its own review.
They're looking into possible state charges like child endangerment and tampering with evidence.
So far, no charges there, but the sheriff's office says it's an ongoing investigation.
So it's basically like everyone who could possibly bring charges seems to be trying to bring charges to me, which makes sense.
Like, you know, if you're a prosecutor, you definitely want a piece of this asshole.
Yeah, if for no bigger reason than you've been, like, harboring a dangerous pedophile in your, you know, in your flock.
He's gone undetected for this long, and you've let him stand up and go on radio shows and say how much he's against this sort of thing.
Bro, if this was...
Oh, forget about it.
It would be the news cycle for a month.
Forget about it.
We never hear the end of it.
Yeah, but of course, like, that's not how this is going.
I mean, you're right.
I have not heard about this in any of the kind of, like, the conspiracist QAnon social media feeds I follow.
And it's odd because this is like the textbook thing that they're freaking out about, is that there are deeply depraved people who have high levels of power to the extent that they craft the laws that we are expected to live under.
Yeah, they are paid by taxpayer money.
Yes.
And one of them was using that money to go rape children in Colombia.
It is, like, yeah, it's like Jesus, like, you know, you're right.
People in power are very sick fucks more frequently than I'm comfortable with.
But in this instance, which, again, is just, like, one of those outrageous examples I've ever heard of, of a lawmaker being involved with this, now are you peep from the conspiracists, right?
Well, I mean, they have to contend with the idea that, like, real pedophiles don't just, like, send emails with, like, seemingly kind of, like, vague code words.
It's not the fun fantasy where you're like, I know they're a pedophile, but I can't find the exact evidence.
There's these code words.
I know what they mean.
There's nothing satanic.
There's no spice to it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's so straightforward.
You can't do Socratic questions about this.
It's just a statement.
Yeah.
What the fuck would Q even post?
A fucking link to an article?
Yeah.
Yeah, link to mainstream reporting about this and say the media isn't reporting on this.
It also tells them that when people are doing this kind of shit, that the platforms that they're doing it on are like, well, flag, this is weird.
Okay, this looks like a pattern of bad stuff that we've seen in the past.
Boom, right over to law enforcement.
Yeah, that's the thing.
He wasn't found out through anything political or due to his visibility.
It is literally just...
Yeah, there's no baking.
There was no baking that led to the arrest of this guy.
It was literally just, he got flagged.
They looked at what he got flagged for.
Real bad.
Okay, let's get him.
He deleted Blinkle.
He deleted romp.
He deleted all his apps.
In response to the scandal, the South Carolina House quietly changes tech policies.
As of July 2025, all state-issued laptops and phones will get biannual forensic audits.
They're literally checking these people's computers for child porn.
They're building it in.
They're like, we've got to check your computer.
Let me tell you, if you've ever been in a workplace for long enough, you've known this story.
Everything's going along fine, and then one employee who can't behave ruins it for everyone, creates a new policy that everyone has to abide by.
Yeah.
And lawmakers were advised via confidential memo to avoid encrypted messaging apps for government business.
So, you can't do your legislating on Kik.
You can't do your legislating on any of the words we've already come up with.
Even though fucking signal is being used by, like, Trump and his buddies and shit.
So, ugh, man.
It's just a fucking mess.
Some of May's former allies are doing cleanup.
His name has been removed from the Freedom Caucus website.
Archived newsletters have disappeared.
Donors have reallocated money elsewhere.
The House Judiciary Committee also opened an inquiry into what legislative staffers may have known about this.
They're interviewing aides and IT personnel.
So far, no official misconduct has been reported, but subpoenas remain on the table.
May's voting record is under renewed scrutiny as well.
He was a consistent yes vote on surveillance and sentencing enhancements for sex crimes, many of which included mandatory minimums.
His co-sponsors have begun distancing themselves from him, with at least two lawmakers calling their prior work together, quote, deeply regrettable.
Wow, so he voted on the reforms that are most likely going to keep him in jail longer?
It's like, I'm hiding in plain sight.
It must have been, like, yeah, it's total arrogance.
Like, well, I'm going to make this my main issue and be totally aggressive about it.
Therefore, no one will suspect me.
In addition, prosecutors disclosed that May had received at least five encrypted email forwards containing CSAM links between January and March 2024.
They believe he redistributed them via burner accounts.
One address was registered to a fictitious law firm in Charlotte.
The investigation is still active, and I'm sure a lot more will be developing.
But, you know, I think we've seen enough.
Yeah.
This is like when you call the election, you know, it's like, well, exit polls are...
are making it look like this guy is definitely in big, big trouble, and having him in jail is probably making the world a slightly safer place.
If this guy was agreed, by the way, Like, they wouldn't even be happy that, like, a Democrat got, you know, charged with, you know, anything related to child sexual abuse, anything like that.
But they would be like, this is it.
He's gonna rat.
He's gonna flip.
And we're gonna get everybody else.
It wouldn't be enough.
I mean, I'm sure this man could turn in a lot of other people.
I just hope there's no mechanism by which he can reduce his sentence.
Yeah, or somehow, like, wriggle out of this.
I rarely am for, you know, the prison system or cheerleading for that kind of stuff, but I think this guy should be in jail for the rest of his life.
Yeah, 200 years?
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Yeah, I think 200 years is about right.
And this is against all my instincts.
But, yeah, this guy, jail, 200 years.
Hopefully it's a bad jail that feels bad.
Okay, we got to move on to your awesome segment about political violence.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, moving on from that sort of little palate cleanser.
We're talking about sort of the symptoms of America's continued decay.
No children were harmed in the making of this segment, unlike mine.
I think, like, the political violence in this country is already generally baffling, even when described accurately.
Like, the motives of people who commit political violence is, like, just sometimes strange and incoherent.
It's always fucking, like, lone wolves.
This is part of the male loneliness epidemic.
People don't conspire to commit political violence anymore.
But I think that the bullshit that people spread about the violence makes it kind of impossible to, like, discuss online at all, which I kind of suspect is part of the point.
We see this in the discussion of the recent political assassination allegedly committed by Vance Luther Bolter.
Oh my god, it's a three-fucking-name assassin again!
What are we doing?
You know, it's a signature move.
I'm fucking pilled!
And unfortunately, there are three kind of cool names smashed together.
Bad guy, but three cool names.
Honestly, like, it's kind of as cool as your real name.
Yeah.
Vance Luther Bolter and your real name would be, like, an amazing, like, I don't know, cop duo or, you know.
Careful, you're gonna utter the Manchurian phrase that activates Travis.
I would love that.
I can't wait to, like, remote control Travis and have him do political violence in service of my beliefs.
Vance Luther Bolter is accused of posing as a police officer before fatally shooting Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark inside their suburban Minneapolis home.
Just beforehand, the same assailant allegedly went to a nearby residence and wounded Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette.
Both survived that shooting.
That's kind of confusing that you would move on to another shooting without, like, maybe he thought that they were dead?
It doesn't seem like, despite the documentation they found with all the, like, the names and GPS addresses and stuff, this doesn't seem like very well planned, actually.
So, barely an hour after the first kind of news alerts and before officials even named the suspects, right-wing commentators flooded social media with speculation about the shooter's identity and motives.
When Bolter's name finally surfaced, conspiracy entrepreneurs quickly claimed absurdly that he was a left-wing activist lashing out over health care access for undocumented immigrants.
Yeah, everybody knows that Anton Chigurh is a Democrat and a Marxist.
Now, these rumors, they weren't just fringe.
Elon Musk and two Republican U.S. senators and other high-profile figures amplified the unfounded narrative on Twitter.
Now, let's start with just kind of what's known on the matter, according to reporting and court records.
So, at approximately 2 a.m. on June 14th, Bolter, wearing tactical gear and a flesh-colored mask, knocked on Senator John Hoffman's door, claiming to be police.
Bro, it's like you wear the police outfit, but then you're wearing what looks like an insane, loose flesh mask.
It makes, like, the killer in fucking Halloween look down-to-earth and normal.
It looks to me like the mask he wears at the end of Dry.
You know what I'm talking about, Julian?
I haven't seen Drive in a while.
I forgot he was wearing a mask.
He's wearing like a really shitty oversized like rubber mask at the end when he goes to It's crazy, because in, like, these photos, you can see the kind of, like, wrinkles on the mask, so it's, like, clearly depicting an older man.
The mask is best described as if you were to, like, cover your, like, everything from the neck up with a layer of ballsack skin.
Yeah.
Encased in ballsack.
According to court records, the shooter claimed to be responding to a report of a shooting at the home.
Oh, hey, I'm coming because I'm responding to a shooting I'm about to do.
But it became immediately obvious to Yvette that this man was wearing a rubber mask.
No shit!
I think maybe Mission Impossible has sort of, like, given people a false idea of how convincing modern, commercially available rubber masks are.
When confronted, he shot the couple.
Their daughter called 911.
God, it's fucking awful.
Yeah, here's some photos of the man in the mask taken from a security camera.
Goofy.
He looks like a character in one of Jake's, like, early access games that, like, will never get finished.
Yeah.
He looks like a really bad 3D model of, like, a cop.
Yeah.
They haven't integrated the hair, you know?
Her eyes.
Yeah.
It's been, like, eight years in development.
So, uh, after this, the gunman continued, uh, his rampage.
At about 2.18 a.m., he rang the doorbell of another Democratic lawmaker, Representative Kristen Bonner.
But her family was away and was not at home, so he left.
It has a list of assassination targets.
Didn't even check to see if they were home before traveling to their home to commit these assassinations.
Not a thoughtful person, this guy.
Yeah, he makes Luigi Mangione look really organized.
About 12 minutes after this, a police officer was dispatched to the home of a third lawmaker, Senator Ann Rest.
The officer reports that they saw a bald man in a black SUV with police-style lights outside the home.
The officer tried to speak to the man in the vehicle, but he didn't respond.
The officer called for backup, but the man in the SUV drove away by the time the backup arrived.
Well, great job, guys.
And now we're after this at around 3.30 a.m., police conducting a welfare check at Speaker Melissa Hortman's residence found Bolter outside.
At this, the fire to the doorway killed Mark Hortman, rushed inside the home, killed Representative Hortman, shoots the family dog, Golden Retriever, apparently, then exchanged fire with police and then escaped out the back, abandoning the SUV.
This fucking piece of shit.
So he sees the police outside, and he's like, I gotta run in and murder!
And then get away, because the cops are awesome at their job.
God fucking damn it.
Two fucking innocent people and the dog, too.
Inside the SUV, police recovered five firearms, all legally purchased.
There were also body armor, blue and red dashlights, a fake police front plate, and a rubber mask.
Oh, so he ditched the mask, or is it another one?
It sounds like he ditched the mask, yeah.
He felt like the mask wasn't working anymore, so he gave up on that.
Either that or he had extras, you know?
Yeah, I suppose that's possible, too.
So additionally, they also found notebooks listing 45 state and federal officials, all Democrats or abortion rights supporters, and a GPS device that included the addresses of the lawmakers.
They also curiously found flyers for the local anti-Trump No Kings rally.
I mean, either they planted this or he was going to show up there and shoot people.
Yeah, sounds like, I mean, it sounds to me like he was like, all right, I'm going to do a spree.
I'm just going to fucking do it.
I'm going to go to every single, you know, Democrat's house that I can find.
I'm going to kill as many as I can.
Of course, they're using this flyer as like an excuse to call him like an anti-Trump guy, even though all evidence points to the opposite.
That would be like, well, he's clearly an appreciator of Democrats.
He had all their addresses.
Jesus.
Christ.
No, he was going to show up and do fucking...
Yep.
Looks like it.
These events launched the largest manhunt in Minnesota history, involving over 400 officers from 17 agencies, drones, canine teams, and armored vehicles.
During the manhunt, Bolter allegedly sent a text message to his roommate David Carlson, which said this.
I made some choices, and you guys don't know anything about this, but I'm going to be gone for a while.
Maybe dead shortly, so I just want to let you know I love you guys both, and I wish it hadn't gone this way.
Sorry, dudes.
I'm going to be a little late on Rent this month.
Went on a murder rampage.
I know we were all really looking forward to the latest Destiny expansion, but I'm probably going to be So, man, I hope you guys get that rare gear.
Bro, apologies for finishing your Cheetos.
I didn't mean to drink the milk that was in the fridge.
Also, I'm going to kill and probably be killed.
Court records also say that he sent a family member this text message.
Dad went to war last night.
Who's dad?
He's referring to himself.
It wasn't specified who he sent this message to.
Does he have children?
Yes.
Oh, my God.
This is insane.
Horrifying.
As officers from multiple law enforcement agencies fanned out across the state searching for Bolter, the suspect made a key mistake by going back to his farm in Green Isle, Minnesota.
Bolter was spotted by a neighbor Sunday evening who flagged down law enforcement.
Police swarmed the area and encouraged Bolter to surrender via a loudspeaker.
They did a real, uh, we have you surrounded, we have a warrant, come out peacefully, and it worked.
He finally surrendered after a 43-hour manhunt.
Jesus.
Now what was the motive for such a horrible, nightmarish crime?
A big clue may lie in the fact that, by all appearances, Bolter is a Christian nationalist who voted for President Donald Trump and opposes abortion and gay and trans rights.
So, Vance Luther Bolter lists himself on LinkedIn as the CEO of Red Lion Group, which is based in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He also worked with Minnesota Africans United, a statewide organization working with African immigrants in the state.
In one unearthed sermon, given in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2023, he condemns churches that are tolerant of abortion.
Wait, so he's like a pastor?
No, I mean, it sounds like he was part of this organization that does some proselytizing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so he did some preaching with help from a translator through that.
It's cool, yeah.
It's like the episode has a lot of cool foreign stuff, you know, like Colombia and Congo.
And the enemy!
The devil comes through and rips everything apart.
The churches are so messed up.
They don't know abortion is wrong, many churches.
Oh my God, she's translating it into French.
Fucking hell.
He seems like a real piece of shit.
He is a real piece of shit.
Bolter also has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation.
This is a Christian supremacist movement that seeks to bring about Christian dominion over all aspects of government and society.
He attended the Christ for the Nations Institute, where prominent New Apostolic Reformation figure Dutch Sheets was the executive director.
Oh my God, that name rules.
He also openly spoke of modern-day apostles.
When the body starts moving in the wrong direction, when they're one, and accepting the gifts, These guys are just violent psychopaths.
Like, how many times, how many times are we gonna fucking find some guy on this show who did, you know, who did real-world violence and then see him being like, The apostles and abortion and all these guys are just lunatics.
They're just lunatics that I think are capable of violence at any moment.
And it's just, you know, we just have to wait and see which one snaps.
It's awesome sharing a country with these people.
Well, and they think they're being, like, prosecuted.
That they're, you know, hey, we're just, like, peaceful innocent, you know, and everybody, we're getting so much undeserving hate.
You know, people, oh, they're being mean to me.
They don't trust me.
Yeah, Christians are under attack, for sure.
My ideology leads to violence.
It's like, well, here, we've got two people.
We've got two fucking extreme right-wing guys who are out here fucking on stage shouting about shit that they don't like.
And both, both violent psychopaths, both of them.
Two for two.
There's lots about this story is strange, but the political leadings of Vance Bolter, I think, is pretty clear.
Like, if you had to, like, guess where he was on the political spectrum, I don't think it's very ambiguous.
Bro, he thinks churches are too tolerant.
Do people really believe...
I try to keep some amount of distance between the violence I read about in my phone and my own sense of peace.
Did people really look at this guy and they were like, a Marxist through and through?
No, these are their questions.
How much of this shit, when they say this, do they actually truly believe in their heart of hearts?
Or how much of it is something that they say because it's politically expedient?
Or they think is going to be beneficial to their agenda if other people believe it.
They believe in nothing.
Yeah.
They believe in fucking nothing.
These people are literally Cormac McCarthy characters.
I actually, I think you're right, Jules.
Like, I think that they look at this and they go, okay, well, like, time to turn on the machine.
And, like, they know that, like, that if they instantly just come out and try to blame one political side, then the other side will go, well, no, here's, no, he actually belongs.
And then people are going, no, he belongs to you!
And that's what rises to the surface instead of, like, this horrible thing that this guy did.
The trauma that he caused.
The lives that he took.
The dog.
I mean, just an absolute fucking monster of a person.
And instead of having to deal with that, people are just like, well, I think you.
And they're like, no, he's on your team.
And they know that if they just flood the zone with that, then, like, you know, maybe people won't hone in on, like, the fact that these guys keep doing political violence.
Oh, yeah.
The body count is, like, incomparable.
It's incomparable.
People are always like, oh, the extreme left, like, it's like the fucking graph of, like, how many people are killed, like, in Palestine and how many Israelis are killed in the conflict.
It's like a tiny little fucking thing and then this giant.
Fucking, you know, body count.
It's insane.
Now, many right-wing conspiracists seized on the fact that Bolter was appointed to a nonpartisan state board.
Like many states, Minnesota is home to hundreds of nonpartisan and bipartisan boards and commissions, which are composed of thousands of people who typically win the appointment by just volunteering.
Bolter was appointed to the Workforce Development Council by former Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton and then reappointed by current Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz.
Now, obviously, the governor doesn't personally vet or have a close relationship with every single member of every single one of these state boards.
But this bureaucratic formality was enough for some of these conspiracies to label Bolter a Waltz appointee.
Yeah, I mean, you know, his mask was kind of bald.
He could have had that, like, camo, like, Harris Waltz hat.
It would have, you know, finished the look.
That tidbit was combined with the fact that deceased victim, Speaker Hortman, was the lone Democratic vote to repeal health care coverage for undocumented adults.
But she had voted this way because she made a deal with Republicans to pass a bipartisan budget and prevent a shutdown.
Conspiracy theory super spreader Mike Cernovich took these scraps of information to spin this ludicrous tale.
The vice president candidate for the Democrat Party is directly connected to a domestic terrorist.
That is confirmed.
The only question is whether Tim Walz himself ordered the political hit against a rival who voted against Walz's plan to give free health care to illegals.
This is so fucked up, too, that these motherfuckers who spend their entire lives and have made, you know, their careers online, you know, being anti-immigrant, anti-left, anti-democratic this whole time, they're like, well, if she had only voted, if she had only voted to give healthcare to the illegals that I hate so much and talk about how I hope they don't get any healthcare, she would still be alive today.
These fucking, these ruthless leftists, man, like, oh, God.
I'm just grateful that Cernovich has not been really that visible to the point where Jake has forgotten how his voice sounds.
Oh, I have no idea how his voice sounds.
Yeah, there's zero shot that if you had heard him speak, you wouldn't do his voice.
He's like this bizarre, like, squeaky kind of guy.
Fuck him.
Now, there's lots of reasons why this whole thing doesn't make sense, but one of them is that, like, Waltz also signed onto this agreement to end healthcare eligibility for undocumented adults in exchange for the GOP helping to pass a budget, so it's absolute insanity.
It's like, why are we talking about this?
This is not the fucking subject!
This has nothing to do with fucking immigration!
You fucking animals!
Yeah.
God, it's like, really, it's QAnon world.
Think mirror.
It's the exact opposite of reality.
Cool.
Fuck you.
Fuck these people.
Okay, sorry.
Joni Manorino, who has more than 600,000 followers on Twitter, said this of Hortman.
Rumor has it, she was preparing to switch parties.
The Democrats are violent scum.
So, there's the implication being that, like, she was on the verge of switching parties and therefore she was assassinated by the left for this reason.
It's not true.
In fact, she was actually at a Democratic fundraiser just hours before she was assassinated.
That's why, like, the Democrats killed, uh, who's that guy who's always, like, fucking up their votes?
That really annoying guy in Congress?
Uh, Joe Manchin?
Yes, yes, as we know.
They took Joe Manchin out back and they did the casino thing where his monologue just got cut off because the baseball bat hit him in the back of the head and they put him in an open grave.
No, no.
The Democrats let their whole party be pulled right with no murders, no nothing.
They went peacefully.
They wanted it, actually.
Yeah, they have Fetterman.
I'm sorry.
They would have offed him.
He would be easy to off, too.
I'm pretty sure you could touch his head in a way that would kill him instantly.
That is a fucking wild bake.
That they're like, rumor has it she was going to switch parties.
And so they killed her.
I wish the Democrats were half as fucking cool as, you know, the extreme right makes them out to be.
All right, hold on.
Yeah, the Democrats are, like, in their mind, they're just like, yeah, Joe Pesci Democrats, you know?
Yeah.
You think that's fucking funny?
Elon Musk quote tweeted someone who falsely claimed that Hortman was killed by the left, saying this.
The far left is murderously violent.
Just...
Like, they have nothing.
They have nothing.
This is fucking cotton candy.
It's totally made up.
It's like if I went around to all sorts of parties and I was like, the unicorn that runs by my house at night is so loud.
Yeah, Bernie Sanders has a lot of bodies under his floorboards.
Senator Mike Lee from Utah made several posts absurdly blaming the rampage on Marxism.
This is what happens when Marxists don't get their way.
Marxism is a deadly mental illness.
Marxism kills.
See, this is it.
This is it.
This is what happens when you have a Cold War that lasts forever.
When you fucking erase an entire fucking political ideology from the spectrum.
You can get away with fucking saying it exists even though it doesn't.
You don't even have a Communist Party in this country.
Every fucking Western country has a Communist Party.
Maybe not everyone, but we have a communist party in France, and they're not fucking killing people, dumbass.
I mean, obviously, this is like, again, exact opposite of reality.
It's absurd.
I mean, how the right can take a violent action committed against liberal lawmakers, committed by a Trump voting, apparently Christian nationalist kook, and then use these events to claim that it's evidence of left wing political violence.
It is mirror world.
Shout out to Naomi Klein.
She was so fucking right, dude.
Yeah, it's just they realize that, like, nobody's going to stop them if they point to the sky and they go, it's green.
You know, they just they know by now they know that like they can just say the opposite of what reality is.
And everybody who doesn't want to deal with the disc, you know, the uncomfortable reality is going to go.
the body count of the anti-communist crusade led by the United States of America is insanely high and still, still after all that carnage, after they made sure that there was no fucking way that a system that might actually, you know, involve a plan for society where we work together they were just, they made sure that that was erased and we still have to
And the adult in the room goes, now, now, now, Senator, the Marxist agenda.
Was rightly crushed.
Alright?
Hey, at the very least, we know that we are not under threat from that.
Whatever this is, it's not that.
We literally hunted them like witches and blackballed them from, like, entertainment industries.
It's insane.
This is the equivalent of a guy shooting someone, looking down at the corpse, and going, that's a really violent guy.
We put two nice old people in the fucking electric chair.
Yep.
The electric chair.
Yep.
We have a thing.
We have a thing that's a chair that so much electricity surges through it that it kills you.
And we strap people into this thing.
We fucking supported 2 million people being killed in Indonesia.
Their bodies dumped directly in the river.
Hillary Clinton has eaten hundreds of children.
No, mine was real.
John Podesta is ordering way too many children.
This country is so fucking psychotic.
Like, we are so gone.
Like, they truly cannot face what is actually going on.
Elon Musk expressed an even stronger commitment to this inverted reality after his AI chatbot, Grok, provided an answer he didn't like.
So when someone asks Grok whether the left or the right has been more violent since 2016, this AI chatbot's answer started with this sentence.
Since 2016, data suggests right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly, with incidents like the January 6th Capitol riot and mass shootings, e.g.
El Paso 2019, causing significant fatalism.
The body count is incomparable!
Yeah, again, I think this is a fair analysis.
I don't know how you would contradict such a fair and accurate statement, so I guess credit to Grok on this single sentence.
But upon seeing this output from Grok, Elon Musk said this.
This is objectively false.
Grok is parroting legacy media, working on it.
Oh my god.
You know what you should work on, dude?
You should work on getting a fucking gun and putting it in your mouth and putting your fucking guns out the back of your asshole, you piece of shit.
Yeah, I think you should get, I think you should fill your pockets with fucking firecrackers.
I think you should wear, like, pants soaked in gasoline.
I think you should put a bunch of firecrackers in your pocket.
I actually support, like, an outburst of far-left violence.
Yeah, me too.
Elon Musk.
That's it.
I'm fine.
Let's actually add to the body count.
Just one.
One guy!
Okay, well, I don't even know how you're going to beep all that.
Yeah, you got two people making threats.
That's just going to be like, beep!
I was just joining in.
I'm just so mad.
It's like this kind of episode is my least favorite kind where it's like it's the most violent, the most spun in a way that the actual cause of the violence is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to get dealt with.
That's from the ideology that was leading to it to the guns that were able to put it into action.
It's just like none of that is ever, ever going to change.
And we're going to constantly be having to fight people who believe that they are fighting an enemy that has long been...
It's just like, how does anybody have any hope whatsoever for the future of this country outside of just waiting for all of these people to die?
These bloodthirsty fucking delusional psychopaths are at the fucking helm.
It was always going to be this way.
We worked towards this.
We wanted this.
This is the plan.
And you have to trust it, Jake.
Not we.
Not we.
You, me, Travis.
We didn't do any of this, we're just, We picked a path.
It's more of a larger we.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I know.
I just want to clarify for the listener, we...
We live in the fucking imperial core of the most violent and criminal country of all time.
I just think that it's very—we talk about the risk associated with AI.
It feels like Elon is trying to automate the inverted reality.
Right now, it rests on manual labor from a network of conspiracists like Cernovich, like these sorts of people, like himself.
But he can't be on—I mean, he can be on Twitter all the time.
But he can't be there for every single event to take an event that makes the right look bad and then flip it on its head every single time.
So he's having AI create this inverted reality.
Sort of like making it faster and easier to live in the mirror world.
Well, yes, and the AI he's created is not even working the way he wants it to, so he has to then change that.
So it's like, on top of that, already the AI that's swinging the way he wants is like, when it comes up with a tiny piece of inconvenient reality, he's like, oh dear, we gotta change this.
I mean, it's like a fucking Monopoly player having something.
He's just such a fucking baby, man.
Like, he can't even face anything.
It's just like, no, don't like that.
Then don't flip a coin!
Don't flip a coin if you can't accept it with faces!
Heads, heads, sorry.
Not faces.
heads.
My brain is...
Listen, I take it back.
We don't need the far left to be involved.
I am pleading to Elon Musk's brain and nervous system to just give him an embolism.
Some kind of.
Something.
Something has to blow.
A fuse has got to blow.
Something.
Something.
Just anything.
That should be our new way of doing this so we don't get beeped.
I hope something happens to Elon Musk.
Yeah.
Could be anything.
Could be nothing.
But maybe something.
Something.
Thank you for listening to something, which is another episode of the QAA podcast.
If you're not already a subscriber and getting that second episode every week, you can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month.
You'll get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium apps.
Really good deal.
Join us.
Yeah.
And if you already joined us, like, thank you.
You rock.
Thank you very much.
You rock and you grok.
No, probably not the second.
For everything else, we have a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish commit unspeakable acts of violence on you, bless you, and keep you.
Thank you.
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All right.
Well, folks, the self-proclaimed party of peace, love, and tolerance is not exactly peaceful, loving, or tolerant.
Obviously, with the headline event being the former senior appointee for Tim Walz, assassinating.
Yeah, he assassinated a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband as well as wounding another and hurt his spouse.
And instantly, instantly, the usual suspects in the media Trump had nothing to do with ramping this.
Ironically, this did happen a few weeks after, though.
Tim Waltz said that we need to get meaner, though.
The governor's being mean and the governor's speaking out on that.
Well, maybe it's time for us to be a little meaner.
