Reality Inversion examines how conspiracy theorists like Sandy Hook Truthers and Alex Jones twist evidence—demanding death certificates in 2014 only to dismiss them as fake, or framing Twitter bans as proof of persecution despite later accepting reinstatement. Stephanie Kemmerer links this to Orwell’s doublethink and Mike Raines’ "knee-jerk contrarianism," while Spencer warns of protest footage manipulation, like 2014 Canada clips mislabeled as 2022 China. Both stress verifying sources (e.g., journalists Robert Evans or Jake Hanrahan) over viral claims from QAnon or blue-check accounts, urging critical scrutiny in polarized discourse to avoid distorted narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that has an audience so small they probably wouldn't even notice if I changed the content.
So we are here today.
I'm your host, Spencer, and I'm here today to do an episode about a thing I'm calling reality inversion.
So before I get into any of that in our guest today, I'm just going to remind everyone, if you have any comments, questions, concerns, anything like that, you can send that to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And with that, we're going to get right into it today.
So first, our guest, Stephanie Kemmerer, the great.
Hello.
How you doing?
I'm okay.
How are you?
Good.
Yeah.
Reality inversion is, you know, the name already says a lot of what it is, which is what I like about coming up with a name for things.
If it says exactly what it is, I don't have to do a lot of work.
It's a state where a person begins to see evidence that should disprove an idea as instead further supporting an idea or making it seem more likely in their mind.
Each one of us looks at situations and tries to work out what's true and what isn't true.
And knowing how to sift through and see what evidence to use is a key part of our lives now because we all have way more evidence of everything, every answer you could possibly ask for.
You have someone giving an answer that, you know, something that they claim is evidence for it.
No matter what the answer is, I guarantee someone has thought of, you know, that maybe someone should want this answer.
And we have more answers than we have evidence sometimes.
So really, we have people who are just completely backward.
And the more, seems sometimes that the more evidence you give them, the further they go away from what the conclusion really should be.
And it's a very strange situation.
I think it's mostly related to confirmation bias.
Like if you assume very strongly that you're correct about a thing before you ever attempt to interpret any evidence about it, then all the evidence, you know, in your mind will tend to just reinforce the conclusion that you already came up with before you started.
And we need to stop doing that.
We need to evaluate evidence critically and on its merits and as though it's in a vacuum without a conclusion attached.
So where are you on this?
Well, I, you know, I've been reading over the 2014 Sandy Hook Truther Facebook transcripts.
And this is something that we're seeing over and over and over again.
You know, they back in 2014.
And by the way, I did a search on some of the people in the group and they're still into this stuff 10 years later, which is really scary.
And you see them talking about the evidence that they need in order for their minds to accept that Sandy Hook happened.
And they're saying that they want death certificates.
Well, Lenny Posner gave them his son's death certificate.
And then when they had that, they began baking it.
So you see it playing out in this 1,100 page transcript and it over and over and over again, where this is what we need to prove Sandy Hook happened.
And they get that.
And then they're pouring over the death certificate and they're like, oh, this M doesn't look like this M or this doesn't look.
And then they play it into their conspiracy theory where, oh, this death certificate was obviously faked.
And then stay on target.
This means that we're on the right path.
And it, you know, the debunking becomes part of the conspiracy theory.
Right.
So it sounds like they are putting up a false goalpost claiming that, you know, this is what we need in order to believe that something like Sandy Hook really happened.
And then as soon as they get it, they're instead looking at it for reasons to not believe it.
Right.
They're examining.
They're trying to, suddenly everyone is a signature expert and there's, oh, this isn't really this person's signature because the M loops a different way or whatever.
Maybe the font on the thing doesn't quite look, you know, as good, but that's sometimes that's how it's scanned in or whatever.
You know, there's all kinds of other little things, but they they're instead of accepting it, instead of, you know, honestly looking at the level of evidence that they claimed beforehand that they would accept, they're instead looking again for new reasons to go with the conclusion they had in the first place, which in this case is that Sandy Hook didn't happen.
Just in case anyone is the least bit confused about our language here, Sandy Hook was real.
Children were murdered.
Parents mourned.
It's a real event.
All right.
That out of the way.
Yeah.
It's, it's interesting to see this in real life, right?
Yeah.
And Lenny, Lenny's dealt with this for going on 12 years now.
The 12th anniversary of Sandy Hook will be in December of this year.
And he's been fighting back against this stuff.
And, you know, from a personal perspective, having spoken to him on the phone, having texted with him, I try to tell people it is real.
It did happen.
These parents really lost their loved ones.
And it's become so iconic in the conspiracy world.
And I think it's not just iconic for the Overton window shift, but I think it's also iconic because that was my exit.
And now, and that's, that seemed pretty extreme and it still does.
But now stuff like that has become the entry point for a lot of people.
And it's this constant doubling down, the reality inversion.
You know, every single answer is met with another question and it becomes part of their narrative.
And of course, everyone's an expert on everything from photos and all of that to there was one guy in the chat.
It's like, oh, I'm a valet driver and I could tell you that those cars parked in the parking lot.
That's not how they park cars.
So everybody's using.
And in the People versus Alex Jones, Kelly Watt, one of the Sandy Cup truthers is like, I run a cleaning company.
So I knew that there should be blood here and there and here and there.
It's like, so everybody's using this tiny bit of knowledge that they have, which could be useful in some circumstances.
But now all of a sudden they're experts.
And I think that plays into the reality inversion because you're creating a level of expertise that isn't there to feed into it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of conspiracy beliefs rely on reality inversion to exist at all.
It's why online conspiracies seem to be so contradictory to people who don't believe in them.
I mean, we look at it sometimes and we think, well, we should just be able to point this out.
And then the person will somehow snap out of it and come to, but that's not how it works at all.
The very idea of controlled opposition, I put that in quotes here, controlled opposition.
That this could ever occur successfully in a real scenario, it just seems completely bizarre to a critical thinker that, but it causes no concern at all for a person engaging in conspiracy beliefs.
Psyops become a storytelling mechanism that become part of the catch-all explanations that are essential for like smoothing out the rougher edges of like the conspiracy story, right?
Like if it doesn't quite make sense, you can always say, oh, that was a psyop, that, you know, a little bit of conflicting thing.
That was a thing they put there on purpose to confuse us.
It's like the trickster god that leaves the dinosaur bones, you know, at that one layer so that it looks like the earth is hundreds of millions of years old or billions of years old when they really want to believe that it's only a few thousand.
As soon as a conspiracist is able to convince themselves that an opposing piece of evidence is actually the mystical they, in quotes, that is attempting to puppetize both sides of the political spectrum so as to shepherd the world into the gates for some kind of harvest season, they've truly moved from reality into like full unreality.
Some people who listen to this podcast who hear me describe that will think no one really thinks that, right?
Oh, I assure you, there are people that really think that.
So what's your take on this?
Well, and I like the example that you had given in the notes, you know, and I'm, and I'll admit, I've never read 1984, but I'm, you know, I think everybody's familiar in general with the spoiler alert for 1984.
Yeah, it's a 70-year-old book or whatever.
And the whole idea of propaganda and controlling the narrative, that is a very big part of reality inversion.
And if you want an example of this, watch the South Tower collapse from 9-11.
Watch it in a conspiracy quote-unquote documentary, and then watch the actual footage with the actual footage.
You'll hear the one guy who was down near the base of the South Tower when he recorded it.
He was like, it looks like the tower's coming down.
We've got to get out of here.
And then he runs.
That's the only real commentary.
And with the conspiracy documentaries, and just, I just want everyone to, when I'm talking about conspiracy theory documentaries, the air quotes are implied.
So please understand that they are showing a top-down angle.
They don't want you to see the bottom of the building because if you saw the bottom of the building, you would understand that it collapsed from the top.
So they'll only show you like the collapse from the other angle of the building.
And over top of that, they'll be talking control demolition, control demolition.
And with that, if they had just shown you even that top-down angle without their commentary, you're like, well, I don't know, you know?
So they're putting this notion in your head, this controlled demolition.
And as you're watching it, then you begin to think, oh, it's controlled demolition.
But they never show you the footage of the people who are filming it from the ground because you can see you hear boom slap, boom, slap, boom, slap, boom, slap.
And you see that it's falling from the top down.
Control demolition starts at the base every single time.
So that is one of the examples that they use.
And another example is Sandy Hook with Robbie Parker's press conference.
And all the YouTube videos have the headline, Sandy Hook Father says, should I read off the card?
He says, should I get started?
Or should I start?
And because it's like EVP, when they're playing footage of EVP, they're telling you, oh, it sounds like this little girl is saying, Daddy, I'm lost.
And all you're, and you start to hear that then.
Right.
So the reality inversion, it is like 1984, where they're showing you footage and they're suggesting what it means.
So if you listen to that, it's going to look like controlled demolition.
If you listen to that, it's going to sound like Robbie Parker saying, read off the card.
What you're describing there is essentially just simple juxtaposition, right?
Two pieces of information that aren't necessarily related.
And then you put them at the same time.
Traditional juxtaposition is two images side by side, but the same idea is like a headline that goes with a picture or like a voiceover that goes with a video.
I've seen examples of this where someone has a video of some kind of calamity and they claim this is happening.
This is a one example I had was a person who claimed that there was a concentration camp kind of thing in Canada that was organized by Justin Trudeau to hold all the people who were that had tested positive for COVID.
And when I looked it up, when I was able to look it up myself, I found out that the video was actually footage from something that was going on in China.
I think it had happened several years previous.
And, you know, it's presented on TikTok with just the video alone and just a voice telling you, interpreting, attempting to interpret for you what they want you to believe based on that.
And if you tried to just watch the video without any sound, it would completely remove the attempt to interpret it for you.
And then you could make some conclusion yourself, which it's not necessarily in this country.
It's not necessarily, you know, this week.
It's not even necessarily this decade where whatever they're showing you happened.
And as soon as you remove it from all the things that they're attempting to connect to, it means a lot less.
And you have to kind of now, you have to look at a lot of pieces of data this way.
And it's a lot more difficult.
We live in this world now.
You know, all of these methods of media distortion are available to pretty much everyone.
It's not something you need a large amount of equipment to do or even knowledge.
But I like that you circled into my 1984 reference because this is a key component that I mentioned several times on the podcast.
It's an amazing book.
People should read it again, even if you've read it, read it for the first time.
Everyone kind of knows what's going on with it.
Most people focus on the idea of Big Brother that was mentioned.
I like the reference I make from George Orwell's 1984 is the concept of double think, where you might know the truth, but you are expected to.
It's your duty to deny the truth based on in 1984, it was a patriotic duty to deny the lies that the enemy has tried to put in front of you.
And in George Orwell's 1984, the state is just doing all these things.
to them and doing it almost right in front of them.
In fact, I will point out for people who have maybe not read the book recently and need to be reminded that the state is made up of three ministries that are administering all of the functions of the state.
And each of the ministries is named after the opposite of what it's actually doing.
There's the ministry of truth, which is in charge of telling lies.
There's the ministry of plenty, which is in charge of rationing.
And there's the ministry of peace, which is in charge of doing all the war stuff.
And I think to me, obviously, George Orwell did this on purpose.
He was attempting to show people that in that world where you are expected to double think, to think about the lie, the social veneer that is a lie in your whole world.
You also have to remember that the state is also doing this and you are, you know, everything in the world is unknowable in his world.
And that was the point that once you let the very powerful people get too much control over the message and get a personal benefit from that, it's going to be very hard to get it back.
And they will expect you to look away from the truth.
And that's what's happening when we're looking at reality inversion.
When you show someone the evidence of why they're wrong and instead of realizing and, you know, we imagine they're going to pop out of it.
That's not how it works, really.
Instead of that, they say, oh, well, of course, of course you would say that.
Maybe you're in on it.
Maybe you're one of the people that is confused by this at the very least.
Of course, right?
Getting kicked off Twitter now is a sign that you're a bold truth teller rather than that you just behaved badly and insulted some people, right?
The fact that you can take that and just switch it around and be like, no, no, I was doing a good thing here rather than just being a dickhead.
Where are we?
Where are we?
Well, now that Twitter is controlled by Emerald Mindcomp, getting kicked off Twitter isn't as much of a badge, honestly, you know, if you think about it.
Reality inversion, I mean, I consider this to be like the Bizarro problem.
There's a concept in comics that started with Superman.
I suspect it was because they ran out of ideas, but they came up with this kind of neat idea that they called Bizarro Superman, that there was a mirror world where everything was the opposite of what it is here, except that they had a hard time defining what is opposite.
They definitely got a version of Superman that was just as powerful as Superman.
So was a really useful hero for a comic book.
But it's really weird to try to look at it and realize what they figured should be the opposite.
So in Bizarro World, the Earth, it's not a sphere, but it's not flat.
It's a cube.
And in Bizarro World, Bizarro Superman does bad things.
He has to in order to counter the, you know, our version of Superman, which is inherently good.
He's inherently bad, which is opposite, except that then you have the problem where, okay, well, the people in Bizarro World are also doing bad things, and that's a sign of things that they should do.
Do they cheer when Superman does bad things or do they do they also uh boo Superman when he does bad things?
Because in our world, we cheer Superman when he does good things, and so you have this weird triad where you're like, Okay, well, in order for this to be truly opposite, the bizarro people have to behave in a very strange way.
They have to both like and hate Superman because they like that he's doing bad things, but they have to boo him.
And so, when you look at this and you look at that, we have a we have a Elon Musk who is in charge of Twitter now, and he is also one of the unreality bros now, right?
I've seen Elon say, use the word, I must be over the target, or that someone else must be over the target.
You're really pushing back on this, you know, very strongly.
They must be over the target, right?
We're pushing back on it because it's just that much more wrong, except that they're using it as evidence for this must be right.
And Elon Musk has said that, but still, they're able to convince themselves that being kicked off Twitter, like you say, being kicked off Twitter is a sign of truth telling.
Like, why would Elon do this to me?
But he's, he's, you know, he's one of us, but you know what I mean?
Like, like all the opposites, all the attempts to be opposite start to fold in on each other, and you get this weird mix of conflict because you can't just make everything across the board, just flip it and be the opposite of what it is.
You can't just invert all the truths because you're going to get these conflicts, right?
Yeah.
And it's also, I mean, Alex Jones was bragging for the longest, you know, he was genuinely upset when he got kicked off Twitter.
And I think that was 2017.
And then he was kind of, you know, he was using that.
He was like, oh, we've been deplatformed from YouTube, which, you know, shout out to Lenny for helping that happen.
And then, you know, he got kicked off Twitter and all this other stuff.
And he was using that to talk about what a brave truth teller he was.
And now he's back on Twitter.
And instead of actually taking calls like he used to, now he takes comments from Twitter spaces.
And so the contradiction, he never really, I mean, he has tried very weakly to kind of fix that contradiction.
But honestly, you know, if Jones is such a brave truth teller, then he shouldn't have accepted Elon's, you know, open arms to come back on Twitter.
He should have said, no, I'm staying off because if I go back on, then, but they also invert that by saying, you know, now Twitter is free because this fascist dipshit is in charge of it now.
Yeah, but and like you point out, when they get kicked off Twitter for just being crappy people, how do they square that with their idea that Elon Musk is on our side and he freed this platform for all the freedom of speech that we want?
And I don't know how they do that.
And it's a mystery.
Somehow they square that with everything else.
But I think it's possible with a level of like fractured mental state.
I do have one more example of this.
It involves a shout out that I want to do to another podcast called the Adventures in Hell World podcast.
The O in world is a cue for anyone asked to search for it.
The great Mike Raines, champion of arguments of the internet.
He has, I'll include a link in the notes for the episode.
He has a list of signs of conspiratorial thinking.
And sign number four is a thing that he calls knee-jerk contrarianism, wherein a conspiracist doesn't know how to interpret a particular news item.
So their first take is to just declare that it must be the opposite of whatever the news is currently telling them is true.
And this is, this is, I've seen this where people say, well, I definitely know, you know, the one thing I do know is that it's not whatever the news is saying.
And, you know, the media has some problems.
The news has some problems, but it's not bizarro world where they're just trying to tell you the opposite of whatever is happening.
If you're in that space, you need to like find some other touchstone for the ability to see what is happening.
Because, yeah, you shouldn't just put your mouth to the pipe of CNN and uncritically believe everything that you're told there because a lot of that is just opinion also, by the way.
But nor should you just think that whatever they say is the opposite of truth and just obviously false and inverted.
We have to do a better job of sifting through everything.
And God help us at some point, media hopefully does a better job of giving us information that isn't just littered with all these little pitfalls.
But you can't just think it's the opposite either.
Like I go to Fox News and I read, and I don't just think that it's the opposite of whatever Fox News is telling me either.
Like as many problems as I know are there with Fox News, I know that they also have a lot of things on there that are actually true.
And I can't just take whatever they say and say, oh, it's just the opposite of that because I don't like Fox News.
That's ridiculous.
Yeah.
And I would also like to caution people to be very careful about the media they consume with the current protests that are going on around the country.
And I recommend David Gilbert, who currently works for Wired.
There are a lot of different, you know, like left-wing and anarchy accounts.
And, you know, I think they're doing a fairly decent job of covering this.
CNN is not doing a very good job of covering it.
And Cheyenne, I can never pronounce his last name.
And I apologize.
He's a BBC reporter.
And he does a lot with that.
Oh, this video or this photo that's going around that claims to be from 2022 China is actually from 2024 Canada.
You know, he does a lot of that.
And, you know, him and David Gilbert and Jared Holt, you know, these, these are some of the big name accounts that are, and I'm sorry that some of the names escape me of, you know, of other accounts, but they're be very, very careful.
And I think a lot of the video of people with boots on the ground, that's showing you the stuff that even mainstream media doesn't want you to see, you know?
So now when stuff like this happens, like with the George Floyd protests, these are times when everything is so polarized and everything is so messed up.
You have to be double check, triple check, quadruple check your sources.
Yeah, see who else agrees with whatever it is.
See if there's another angle that you can view it from.
See if we can view a video without sound, without someone, you know, if you catch someone attempting to interpret the image for you, that's a huge red flag for me.
You know, interpretation, you know, understanding in your own mind the difference between just observation and interpretation.
That's an incredible first step to avoiding a lot of these pitfalls because there are a huge number and a growing number of accounts that are essentially grifting that are attempting to take advantage of high tension, high emotion situations, especially warlike situations, to reuse footage from other events to try to, you know, and, you know, present them as though they're the new footage.
It's incredibly cheap because they already have it.
They don't have to send anyone there.
And they can just claim that this is blah and you should hate it and be afraid.
Be angry.
Watch for the next one that comes up that will also make you feel afraid and angry.
And all of it is terrible.
All of that is terrible.
But watch out for that.
Watch out for people that are attempting to interpret it for you.
That's not what news is supposed to be.
Call them out on it.
And if you are sure it's happening and you don't know how to tell them, contact me.
I know exactly how to tell them.
I know exactly how to pick apart every one of these and show you exactly where they're doing it and what they shouldn't be doing.
It's fine.
Also, Robert Evans, the host Behind the Bastards, his handle is I Write OK.
He is literally boots on the ground out in Portland covering this stuff right now.
And he's covered stuff in the past, boots on the ground.
In fact, Behind the Bastards is rerunning old episodes while he's out there.
But he's also a good source for understanding what is going on at the protests.
And be very careful.
A lot of these blue and on accounts are spreading the right-wing talking points about these protests.
So it is a very scary time.
And, you know, avoid blue and on, avoid QAnon, avoid stew-anon, avoid all of that stuff.
And, you know, look to the experts.
And Robert Evans is, he is, and Jake Hanrahan.
Those are two journalists who have had boots on the ground in war situations overseas.
And I'm not sure if Jake Hanrahan lives in the U.S. or the UK, but that those are both two journalists who have had boots on the ground in literal war situations.
And I know Robert Evans has done it across the seas and over here too.
So that's what you want is you want people who are there or have been in similar situations.
Those are the people who can more accurately interpret.
Because if you've never, and I've never been in a war situation, I don't think you have.
If you've never been tear gassed, if you've never been at one of these big protests, then you're not going to have a clear head to really interpret what's going on.
It's even difficult to do it once you have.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I've never been in a protest or a war zone of any kind, but the probably closest thing I've ever been to for that, honestly, is a rock concert.
You know, you go into the mosh pit in a rock concert.
Even if you're not in the mosh pit, you're on the side of it.
You're in the what they call general seating section where there are no seats, people are just milling about, and the music's playing, and everyone is paying attention to the thing on the stage.
And they're, you know, all the things they're doing are in relation to that, and it's very loud.
You know, the senses you get from that and the decisions you make there, they're a very strange sense because you feel the crowd.
It's not even like you see it because you only see the people right there, but you know the place is full.
You know that when the crowd wants to move some way, you pretty much have to move with them.
You know, and it might seem like in a riot situation, we look at this sometimes where there's a riot and everyone moved one way.
It's not clear psychologically that everyone made the choice to riot.
It's clear that they all moved with the crowd.
And it's, so it's, I hope someday to have like a, like a, someone who knows more about the psychology of like mob violence or or mob mentality, because that will be really, really interesting.
But from my experience of just being in a crowd that is very energetic, you know, in the mosh pit, they do show some levels of violence.
It's not like they're cracking their skulls open, but they are, you know, wanting to express some level of push and shove and everything else.
It's not a rational space.
Like even it's at a rock concert, a Marilyn Manson concert I went to in 1999.
I couldn't say that very many people there were rational.
And maybe we shouldn't do those.
I don't know.
But yeah, having all these people in a spot all moving in one direction, all doing a thing, and you don't know what the people in the front are doing or on the sides are doing.
You don't know any of that stuff.
That's a whole new game inside your head that most people haven't thought about.
They haven't thought about what they're going to do in that situation if it ever comes up.
They all look at this.
They would look at the thing from the outside from pictures and everything else of, oh, yeah, well, all those people are bad because they did that.
It's not that clear.
It's really just not that clear.
Yeah.
And just please be careful with, you know, and if you do see an account that is posting footage of the protests, don't just take that video.
Click on the account, read their bio, see who they're following, see who their followers are, see what other things that they've posted.
You need to get a better sense.
And these protests are very scary because you have people on both the left and the right spreading disinformation and just, you know, it may take a few extra minutes to clarify, but it's worth doing that.
Yeah, if you're going to make a decision that's essentially an opinion of how you're going to feel about this very important event, give it more than two minutes.
Give it more than five minutes.
Like really try to consider a lot of the things that are going on and other angles that you could view it from, other people you could talk to about it, all that stuff.
These things are more important than knee-jerk reactions.
So yeah, we're way off course for reality inversion.
But this was fun.
I'm sorry, but no, but you are seeing a lot of reality inversion with what's going on.
And, you know, as angry as we may be for whatever side that we're on, it's important to look at how it's being utilized.
And, you know, there is a lot of reality inversion going on with the bicycle locks.
And why do all these tents look the same?
And I'm just asking questions.
So, you know, I think it does play in.
You know, it is a current event that does play into reality inversion quite a bit.
Okay.
Well, we're going to wrap this up.
Where can people find you, Stephanie?
If they're looking to talk to you, catch up with what you're doing.
Where can they find that?
I have a public account, which is at Steph in Doubt.
And I have a locked account, which is at MC PacedFace.
And the McPasteface account is like stuffed animals and cuter stuff.
And the public account, I try to be a little less, you know, goofy.
But really, free advice for everyone in the world.
Pretty much everyone could stand to be goofy at least a couple of times a day, really.
Just let your goofy flag fly.
Yeah, we need a little, we need a little levity.
And right now.
Yeah, with so few ways to be happy, why do we stomp on little, little things that do make us happy?
That seems silly.
So, yeah, I can be found mostly arguing with people on Twitter at Spencer G. Watson.
And I have some things going on on Blue Sky and Threads too, but I rarely go there.
So really the misinformation war frontline is happening on Twitter.
That's where I am, if I'm anywhere.
So yeah, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, get back to me on that.