Robin Erickson, aka "the Swedish Internet Terrorist," dissects Jim Stewartson’s toxic discourse—his baseless claims about QAnon’s Mike Flynn as a "grand puppet master" and psychological warfare by Fort Bragg/Russia, despite no evidence. Stewartson’s absolutism mirrors McCarthyism, labeling critics like David Gilbert (Vice) or Cheyenne Tadiraja (BBC fact-checker) as disinformation agents while ignoring verified Russian amplification of QAnon. His rhetoric weaponizes misinformation, blurring opposition to conspiracy with complicity, and risks fueling extremist narratives beyond January 6th, exposing a dangerous paradox: the very tactics he condemns define his own influence. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that's here for the long haul.
So before I get into it today, I want to remind everyone that if anyone has any comments, complaints, concerns, questions about anything we go over on this episode of this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And without further ado, we're going to get right into it today.
I have a special guest today.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Close.
Yeah, this is Robin Robin Erickson.
To some, I'm known as the Swedish Internet Terrorist.
That's the name.
My enemies, I don't like to use that word, but people that dislike me very strongly, they've been giving me that nomer.
So yeah, Swedish internet terrorist Robin.
Great.
Awesome.
Well, maybe someday I'll have worked hard enough that I can earn such lofty titles.
Yeah, your work online has been mostly in relation to a certain person that we're going to talk about today, primarily.
Jim Stewartson is an online influencer who engages in toxic discourse online.
He presents himself as someone who wants to push back against the excesses and unrealities of the right, but then immediately engages in flagrant exaggerations, unproven and unprovable claims, and rage incitement of left-leaning spaces.
He divides communities that would otherwise be able to effectively work against misinformation in areas like vaccine misinformation and election denialism.
He mixes his doom prophecies with requests for monetary support.
His fear-mongering is usually meant to be a placeholder for actual evidence of his claims.
He regularly insinuates that his audience is powerless to defeat the oncoming set of problems and uses this injection of fear to relieve his followers of cash while never showing any product for their support, except for a new round of fear-inducing content.
The current environment in which the potential problems from a new Trump administration increase anxieties, which Jim Stewartson is only too happy to capitalize on.
So, just going to pause there.
You have been a target of Jim Stewartson, and you have targeted him with your content.
Have any thoughts first on a brief outlook, a brief look on Jim Stewartson and your experience with him?
Okay, so a very, very brief outlook on it.
Between 2018 to beginning of 2020-21, I was very, very into observing QAnon, criticizing QAnon.
And when Jim first entered the anti-disciplined info community, that was in August 2020.
And he came in with a boom.
It attracted a fair amount of attention.
And so we got to know each other that way.
We were on friendly terms for the first couple of months.
And then that quickly changed when he started an organization that was called the Thinking Project.
Now, that is an entire episode or two episodes by itself, but in short, the purported purpose of the organization was to help family members or people have been falling into QAnon to help their family members to come out, which I mean, that's a noble goal.
It's very respect worthy.
Very quickly, however, it started to look very many of these old TTP.
The thing probably started to look a bit fishy.
Not everything was the way it appeared.
And I saw that within the organization itself, I saw a lot of similarities to what was QAnon.
And that gave me cause for concern.
So I started looking a little bit more.
And soon enough, I was one of the most vocal and public critics of Jim Stewartson.
And that ultimately led to me getting some screenshots from the mod shot in the Discord group they had, which then made it into Vice in an article written by David Gilbert.
And long story short, when that happened, I became Jim Stewart's mortal enemy.
And we have been butting heads ever since.
That's the short story of it.
Right.
So that's going to lead right into the comparison today I'm going to make a little bit later in the episode is a direct comparison between Jim Stewartson and Joseph McCarthy.
And I hope to make that case very clear.
But first, I just want to make sure that everyone kind of understands what Jim Stewartson is, what his main thrust is, because it seems to me that a lot of people sort of follow him.
Like I, of the people I follow on Twitter, there's a fair number that also follow him.
And they're, to my mind, they're all very reasonable people.
It's possible that some follow him just because they want to keep track of him.
You know, they want to know what he's saying so that they could be prepared for it, you know, in a way that they're working against disinformation and they see him as a disinformation source.
And so therefore they're watching the disinformation at the source, which is something I sometimes do with some people.
I don't support everyone I follow on Twitter.
No, and also there have to be, but if for someone that's new to Jim Stewartson who hasn't followed him for a long time and haven't really been paying attention, I can see why people will be inclined to think, yes, this guy's onto something because he feeds into certain fears that you find in the center letter.
He fits into those fears and many things he says, I mean, they are right in the part of the picture, but it's when he put everything together and he's creating a narrative of a grand conspiracy.
That's where he's posing a danger.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's, so it's a thing that confuses people who are in these communities that are right now what passes for the left, which is just whatever's against whatever's happening on the right.
That's what the left is right now, mostly.
So it includes, to a great extent, people in the center who traditionally would have been sort of politically in the center.
But if they oppose anything on the right, they're on the left.
There's, that's the way that the absolutism and the polarization of this thing has occurred, is that if you're against the right, you're on the left, which is also how in the States, especially in the US, the whole spectrum has shifted to the right because everything to the left of the right is the left.
It doesn't matter where it is.
So yeah, it just becomes this thing.
If you're opposing Trump and you're looking for allies, I could see how someone could follow him because he does have a large following.
He does have a lot of people that listen to him and maybe they try to engage with that to try to push back harder.
You know what I mean?
But this is what we need to do right now is we need to look at the people who muddy the waters in this way.
Look at the people who are not useful on the side that's pushing against Trump.
Because I don't think this should come to a left versus right thing.
I think it should come to a sanity versus insanity thing.
It should be about usefulness versus not usefulness thing.
And I haven't seen a lot of useful things from Trump.
There have been, you know, some people want to say he did this right or that right or whatever.
Yeah, maybe.
But most of it has been very, very not useful, very counter to usefulness.
And so I think we need people who are being more useful to push back against the things that aren't useful.
And it shouldn't be about politics.
It really shouldn't.
If you have authoritarianism that's rising and you have a Donald Trump that's just picking people not based on whether they're good at anything, but based on whether they will be loyal to him, that's not good.
And it wouldn't matter if he was on the left.
If Trump was all about all the leftist ideas and he was looking to only pick people who were loyal to him to do his leftist views, everyone on the left should also work against him.
So when you have people who want to push back against that and they see Jim Stewartson also pushing back against it, they see an ally and they get confused by it because a lot of these people, like doctors who push back against the anti-vaccine rhetoric, don't have a lot of time to look into Jim Stewartson and what he's really about.
They just don't.
So some of them might retweet some of his stuff because it sounds useful to the side they're on.
And they're engaged in a level of meta thinking there, right?
Like they've shortcut, you know, because they don't have time to look into every single person in all of the many things they're doing.
But this is increasing the influence of a person that's very much not useful and running against usefulness in this in a lot of ways.
So we're going to hit this gently today.
We're going to do a brief look at what he does, how it's not useful, and with an idea that probably we're going to hit it again in some deeper dives.
There's another podcast that I, another podcaster I work with whose podcast is entirely about Jim Stewartson's content and the many people who are attached to him.
And I'm going to be working with that podcaster as well.
And this is going to be a long effort, but today starts.
Today is the start.
So Jim Stewartson claims that he is fighting a mind war.
That is literally the name of his substack, Mind War.
Did he also have a I thought I heard it that he had a documentary that he that didn't get released.
Was that right?
It was called Mind War.
It was called Mindfuck with the U with the asterisk.
Mind fuck.
It's right.
Okay.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah, he ended up having to release it himself.
The documentary itself, it's I watched it.
I don't even know where to begin with.
But it's an assortment of various clips, some from The Insurrection, if I remember right.
Various clips of QAnon, and then it's just Jim Stewartson sitting in what looks like a warehouse, something like that.
He's sitting in the office chairs in the middle, and it's just him talking and talking and talking and presenting how he perceived that QAnon came to be about and the dangers and so on.
And it's just one long flow of misrepresentation, misunderstandings.
And I'm not sure if I would say misinformation or disinformation.
I mean, trying to say more misinformation because I think at the time when he made it, he wasn't as informed about QAnon as he is today, even though he's not particularly informed today either.
But today he knows better than he did then.
But in my opinion, it's garbage.
It's not worth watching whatsoever.
Right.
Yeah, well, we won't be linking to it.
So his sub stack is literally called Mind War, the Psychological War on Democracy.
This is where he's at.
He believes that mind control is real.
So I've wanted to do an episode about mind control for a while now.
I know that I'll get to it eventually.
It's going to be a deeper dive into mind control.
But suffice it to say for right now, mind control isn't real.
Like to me, when we talk about mind control, this is part of an ongoing set of exaggerations that occur partly on the part of people who exaggerate things for a griff, but also on the part of places like Hollywood that want to tell a story about someone that has mind controlled.
And that's an interesting story.
It's not really true.
A lot of people point to MKUltra did mind control.
MK Ultra didn't do mind control.
No, the MK Ultra closed down after multiple of the subjects that they tried to control the minds of subjects that didn't know what was going on.
The only thing they succeeded, they only succeeded in severely damaged those people, psychological damage, in some cases, lifelong damage.
Not one single time did they actually manage to control someone to become an assassin or anything like that.
It was a complete flop from that perspective.
But it's funny, but it's considered a reference in popular culture.
We see it again and again.
It's like in Clockwork Orange.
Clockwork Orange is heavily influenced by MK Ultra when you have those scenes where I don't remember anyone to make it when it's tied up in the chair and with eyes open.
It's forced to watch.
Positioning him to do certain things or to not do certain things.
Yeah, right.
And that is a narrative.
And that's a narrative that you see in QAnon being using about the people being mind controlled.
And Jim Stewartson is using the same narrative when he's laying out how Mike Flynn, who is the grand puppet master in his world, how he controls people with the memes, with the video clips and so on.
So it's a direct parallel to Clockwork Orange in many ways.
But people believe that it's happening in real people being controlled by video clips, the Congline and so on.
You're not being controlled.
Can they eventually have you change your opinion about maths?
Of course.
Of course, it happens all the time.
It's no different from sales marketing.
You steer people a certain direction, but it's not controlled.
You don't change someone's personality by making them watch videos, especially not as quick and fast as some will claim.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not like you can just hypnotize a person to do this.
When I look at mind control, I see uh, what's what's usually happening?
And if, in fact, in many cases in the conspiracy sphere, when I see someone use the word control, really the, they're substituting a different word, which is, affect some things, affect other things, have some effect, some influence, but not the same thing as control, right?
So this is a is an exaggeration.
So Sometimes you can influence a person's decisions, but that's not the same thing as controlling their decisions.
It might be possible to influence whether a person buys a certain product, but that's not the same thing as controlling them to buy the product, right?
And this happens all the time.
It might be that, I mean, it's said very often, my own prime minister, Justin Trudeau, attended a WF conference and then took the little book from there and he sent a copy to each of the premiers of all the provinces.
He was a big fan.
Obviously, something happened there, affected Justin Trudeau, but it's not like he went there and they controlled him.
That's a different thing.
So this game of exaggeration is constantly played by the people who are looking to exaggerate reality for their own story that they're trying to tell.
And I mean, this is no more than, no different than what happens in any Hollywood script.
It wants to tell a fantastical story about a political thriller about the Manchurian candidate.
You have a person that's mind controlled.
They have complete control over all the decisions a person does.
But that's not real.
That's just a Hollywood story.
That's not how it works.
In MKUltra, you're right.
They affected people.
They jarred them loose from their position.
They did discombobulate them.
They greatly traumatized them.
But this wasn't leading to mind control.
This was, they had a hope that they might, which was also awful and they probably should have thought better of this, but we don't get to make their decisions for them.
But they didn't ever control anyone.
They didn't ever get anyone to become an assassin.
They didn't ever, you know, achieve any of the goals that they had in mind.
It just led to a lot of terrible outcomes for the people that they experimented on.
And we know about MK Ultra.
We have the documents.
We went through them.
It doesn't, you know, there aren't any signs that any are like missing.
There's a couple pieces that are yet edited out.
You know, there's some parts that are still unknown, but they're like little bits of paragraphs and this sentence here or that person there to protect them.
And it's not that we have entire sections of it that, you know, the conspiracy world would like to say that, oh yeah, but there's parts of it that were successful and that we don't know about.
That's fiction.
They have no proof of it.
It's just something they make up that might be true in their minds.
And they make it up so that it, you know, can support the idea they have that these terrible things are happening.
There's no proof of it.
And that's what you really need is proof.
So that's definitely mind control.
Mind control isn't real.
It's no one has ever successfully done it.
It's just we need to put that one to bed.
So another claim that he makes is that Russians are in control of the U.S. government.
And the exact amount of control the Russians have is always left to the audience to interpret.
Yeah, of course.
And, of course, it's quite easy to make that argument because, I mean, inarguably, I mean, Russia has been exerting influence over U.S. politicians one way or another.
I don't remember which year it was, but it was one year when there was a delegation, I think, six or seven U.S. senators or congressmen, women that went to Russia for the 4th of July of all bloody days they were in Russia.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Which is, I mean, that's a horrible look.
And what drove them to think, oh, yeah, this is a great idea.
We're going to be in Russia for 4th of July.
I mean, that's just, no, guys, of all the days as an American, you decide to go to Russia in an official capacity of sorts.
You choose 4th of July.
And with things like that, I mean, it doesn't look good.
And I mean, there is an undeniable influence by Russia on US politics.
And I have no doubt in my mind that Russia have information on some U.S. politicians that they use to leverage when they want.
Most likely they do.
That there is no Russian influence.
That would be an absurdity to say.
And I'm not saying that.
What I am saying is that the Russian influence on US politics, also on the global scene, doesn't look the way that many conspiracy theorists want to make it out to be.
When Russia is interfering with US politics in particular, they do it not by so much active involving and creating new things.
They tap in what's already there.
They tap into the racism.
They tap into the transphobia and they only amplify what's there.
They don't have to condition the American population to believe new things, to have feelings about things that they don't already have.
All they do is they tap into it and they amplify it.
That's all they have to do.
Then the US population, they do the work for them.
And historically, that is how much of Russia's influence operations have worked.
A good example of that is even today, many believe that the AIDS virus was a creation by the US government.
And this was one of the most successful psyops ever.
It almost cost Russia nothing.
What Russia did, they got some small, small newspaper in India to write an article that blamed the United States for the AIDS virus.
This was, I think, 1983 thereabouts.
And from that little article, it propagated itself.
First, it was propagated into Afghan news and then it hit the global scene.
And that was the manufactured light, manufactured by the KGB that has hit the world.
And still to this day, we are dealing with aftermath from it because there's still a lot of people that are denying this, denying either the say that it's manufactured, some are denying the existence of the virus.
I mean, you have all kinds of experience around it, but they all trace back this one article that cost Russian intelligence services next to nothing.
And that is how they operate.
They just plot little seeds, and with a bit of luck, it explodes and it grows everywhere.
That's all they have to do.
And in one way, I'm reluctant to use the word respect, but I can respect the skill that they do up with those things, and especially at such a low cost and effort.
And that is where Russia is very, very good at what they are doing, because they've been perfecting this since the 40s, 50s, 30s, thereabouts.
They have been perfecting it all over all through the years.
And Putin, he has been at KGB.
So of course he also know all those things.
Yeah.
It's you're right.
Russian influence on other nations is troubling and difficult.
But again, this is a situation where influence has been elevated and exaggerated to be control, which is not, you know, there's a clear difference between these two things.
And Jim Stewartson uses the idea that there are Russian influences to fearmonger to, you know, push his grift higher, to push his influence higher.
And that's not useful.
It's just not useful.
No, it isn't.
And I remember, I think it was just a few months before Jim Stewartson came into the anti-QAnon scene.
There was a study.
I can't remember from which group it came.
But that study, it really showed that when it came to QAnon, that Russia had been amplifying QAnon content, which again goes with what they're doing.
They see some of this already there and they jump onto it and they can do it at a very low cost.
And he just gets some Twitter boss and whatnot and had a tweet out a conspiracy theorist that aligned with what QAnon is saying.
That's all was needed.
And that is very well documented.
And no one would dispute that, except maybe Jim Stewartson, because that Russia will be operating in that way.
That doesn't go in line with his narrative, where Flynn and Russia are directly behind QAnon itself.
They are Q.
So he doesn't like, but that report, that is not convenient to him, even though it is as factual as it can be.
But it contradicts his narrative.
So he's been ignoring that one.
Right.
Yeah.
That's typical of conspiracist influencers is to ignore the pieces that are inconvenient for them.
So another claim that he has that go along with the other claims is that QAnon as a phenomenon was a psyop that was perpetrated on the world by the U.S. military.
So this is a little bit nebulous because the exact shape and nature of the involvement of the U.S. military is left to the reader's imagination.
Again, just like other claims he has.
But this invokes a thing that I call on this podcast Schrödinger's meaning, in which Stewartson can claim to one audience that he didn't actually say that the U.S. military was involved, while constantly insinuating to another audience that the participation of people like General Mike Flynn, former national security advisor to Trump during Trump's first term, it means exactly that.
How do you say that this, you know, I think Flynn is a three-star general?
I'll have to double-check that, but he's not a...
He's a lieutenant general.
Lieutenant General?
Okay, right, but he's...
And then he's here in stores involved.
I don't know.
I don't care enough.
I don't know.
I know people call him General Mike Flynn.
And, you know, so he's a very high-ranking officer in the U.S. military.
How you have...
But retired, yes.
Right.
Right.
But how you have him involved in this without and always insinuating that he's involved in this.
He has all these resources with which to do it.
Where else would those resources come from except for the U.S. military apparatus, right?
If pressed on it, we don't, you know, I've never had the chance to, you know, question Jim about this, but if pressed on it, he would probably insinuate, like a lot of conspiracists do, that, yeah, you know, it's hand wave over it all.
Know he's.
He's a general in the U.S. Military has, has access to you know apparatus.
He was the national security advisor.
There's there's there's uh, the NSA is as all kinds of things that they're doing behind the scenes somewhere that no one knows about, and in there somewhere is, is all the things that happen that i'm telling, that i'm telling you about right now, which is just a bunch of uh, ad hoc, shoot from the hip explanation for things that you have no proof for, which is exactly my point is that most of the things he says are either unproven or just unprovable.
It's just he's telling a story and hoping that people buy it, and some people have uh, and this, this whole thing, buying into these unreal stories.
This is not useful.
We we can't allow the sort of the opposite side that's working to fight against the very bad unrealities that are occurring on the right side of the, the political spectrum.
We can't allow the side that's against them to just dive straight into unreality, even if they think it's good to oppose what's happening under the on the other side, because that's not going to help us.
That's just going to be a different set of fictional scenarios that we become wrapped up in um to backtrack very little bit.
Uh, there are actually, because normally uh Jim, he's tiptoeing a little bit around on to directly point out that this is a?
U.s military.
He's usually tiptoeing around it uh, there's a lot of insinuations and so on, but there are cases where he's been very uh blunt and straight to the point and saying really outright, no uh, U.s military is involved in this.
And as an example on that, we do have a post from him, from uh what I think.
Is it what they do have today?
It's the seventh, so it's gonna be a year in three days.
In december last year, on december 10th, he wrote, i'd like to know if Potus, SEX TECH, SEC ARMY and Joint Staff are clueless about psychological warfare being conducted on American citizens because U.s ARMY psyop in Fort Liberty Bragg in parenthesis is covering it up.
When I asked for psyop group about Qanon accounts they follow, I got blocked.
Their recruitment videos are nearly indistinguishable from Qanon content and they have a very sketchy record of hiring what's going on in north Carolina.
So there he's actually directly pointing the fingers to Fort Bragg, saying that Fort Brag is directly and unbeknownst to the president, unbeknownst to the uh Jointo staff uh, unbeknownst to everyone except uh, psyop group that you're actively actually uh operating on behalf, that you're acting as q1.
He's saying that outright in that one post.
So there are instances where he's been that direct and blunt about it.
He's started saying no, U.s military uh, they are doing military operations, psyop operation against the US Populace.
Right.
Yeah, that's interesting that he lists, this is also a common thing that I've seen conspiracists do where they have a general claim that they pepper with a couple very specific things that are meant to be facts connecting them.
So he lists Fort Liberty, Fort Bragg, that this facility might exist.
It would appear to the audience that he's looked this up, that he knows a specific thing about it, but you still have to trust him that he knows.
He's not connected to dots there, that what they're doing at this facility is this PSYOP operation.
And this is sort of the myths that comes out that's meant to confuse people about the realness of what he's saying.
So Fort Bragg, Fort Liberty, I don't remember which name that should be used.
I think it's Fort Liberty seen as a bit dodgy nowadays because of history and so on.
I'm not sure which one there, but no, it's very real.
It exists.
It's a huge, huge US military base.
It's a huge one.
So you will have a lot.
So you have a lot of U.S. military personnel that are going to be connected because there are literally tens of thousands of troops, I think, that are stationed there.
So of course, a lot of U.S. military personnel are going to have connections to Fort Bragg.
And that is nothing abnormal by any measure.
It's a huge military base.
They have them all over.
But whenever Jim see someone have any kind of connection to Fort Bragg, he will immediately associate it with Mike Flynn because Mike Flynn supposedly have been there.
I really don't know myself.
He also associates with Michael Aquino, the Satanist, because supposedly he has been going there.
So Jim is making the league that, okay, Aquino, who is a Satanist, he's been at Fort Bragg.
Mike Flynn has been at Fort Bragg.
They have to be connected.
And that's what he did in, don't remember when, he was doing this campaign that Mike Flynn is a Satanist.
And he was making that connection between Mike Flynn and Aquino.
That's just absurd.
I mean, what kind of proof is there connected?
Okay, they both have a connection to the same military base that has tens of thousands of troops.
That's nothing strange that happens.
But it's again, this conspiracist mindset, there are no coincidences.
Well, in the real world, we do have coincidence.
They happens all the time.
They happen all the time.
Yeah, that coincidences do happen.
And the nature of them is also interesting.
So I just looked it up here quickly.
Fort Liberty used to be called Fort Bragg.
It is one of the largest military installations in the world by population.
Over 52,000 military personnel.
So this is a very large installation.
It's been featured in movies.
So mentioning it as part of a conspiracy story would get people to immediately understand what it is.
It's something about its level of importance.
They would recognize it as a recognizable military installation where the U.S. military does operations of some kind.
And so that's useful as a sort of a plot point on a conspiracy story.
But also, a lot of people have been there, a huge number.
I mean, through the years, it's been millions.
I mean, I don't know how long, I don't know how long Mike Flynn be served, but I mean, he'd been serving probably four or five decades, you know, he'd be serving.
There have been millions through Fort Bragg through that period.
Must have been.
Yeah.
So this whole thing, this loose association of these two guys are both in the army with nothing else, not in the same branch of the military, not in the same division, not in the same platoon.
It doesn't have to be their own.
They're both in the same army.
So that can't be a coincidence.
Well, that's the easiest thing.
It's like saying two people drove a car.
You know, they both drove Ford pickups.
That's not a coincidence that you could use to connect two people as part of a conspiracy of any kind.
This madness has to have a stop at some point.
So, yeah, yeah.
You know, the level of coincidence needs to be measured in some way.
And we don't have a real way to measure that.
There's no real measure here.
So moving on.
A lot of Stewartson's claims are either demonstrably false, notably ridiculous, completely unprovable, or a combination of these.
So we're not going to get into too many more of these claims today, hopefully another day, or perhaps on the other podcast that the other podcaster I'm going to be working with.
Six Degrees of Stew is the name of that podcast.
But I want to acknowledge that they exist and that many of them are just wrong.
And that these are the reasons why I want to put in some effort into pushing back on his influence because it does become dangerous.
It does.
So an examination of Stewartson's rhetorical stance and style has led me to directly compare Stewartson to Joseph McCarthy, as I said before.
For anyone who's not familiar or has forgotten, Joe McCarthy was a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who led the House Un-American Committee in the early 1950s.
McCarthy used the threat of communist influence in the U.S. military and government to remove opponents and attempt to reshape the American administrative and military apparatuses, or I don't know, maybe that's apparati.
I've never had to use that word in the plural.
Apparatus.
I think it remains to say, yeah.
Into a more loyal shape.
That loyalty being one that apparently only he alone was able to properly determine.
So I want to make a note here that Jim Stewartson does occasionally accuse some people of being communists, but that isn't the basis for the comparison here.
I worry that this allows for a ready-made straw man argument for Stewartson to weaponize against this analysis.
If he can say that all we have is the word communist and then anyone who uses the word communist is automatically doing McCarthyism, then he could just say that we don't have anything at all.
We don't have any basis for comparison here.
But if Stewartson never called anyone communist, I would still make this exact comparison.
And I'm going to show exactly the basis for those comparison on these following points.
So Stewartson is LARPing as a character whose public-facing life or identity is entirely defined by opposition to a single idea or person.
So in this case, with Jim Stewartson, this is Mike Flynn as Q and the influence of this on the American people.
This is the very narrow set of ideas that he is basing his entire public personality on.
And of course, we all know what Joe McCarthy was based on.
Was all all based on communist influence um.
Point number two, the character that Jim plays then elevates and exaggerates the righteousness and need of this opposition to this set of ideas.
This narrow, very narrow selection of ideas uh, and of course this was also what was done with Joe Mccarthy.
Mccarthyism is was, was the idea that the the ultimate right and good thing we can do is end communism and end communist influence.
For Jim Stewartson, it's to end Q and end Mike Flynn as Q and to end, uh the influence of all of these things on American life uh.
Point number three, the character that Jim plays then continually reinterprets everything and everyone around the need to be in opposition to this set of ideas.
So the goodness or badness of everyone else in the world becomes answered by whether or not they helped or hindered him in his righteous goal of taking out the opposition, the narrow set of ideas that he's opposed to um, and this, of course, is exactly what Joe Mccarthy did.
Everyone in Joe Mccarthy's world was either with him or against him, in the in the absolutest sense.
Uh, if you showed any sign that you weren't 100 with him, it's probably because you had communist sympathies, and this is the hallmark of Mccarthyism and it is the hallmark of Jim Stewartson's notions.
If you to Jim Stewartson, if you're not 100 with him, if you dare to criticize him in any way, you're a psyop, you're you're paid by Mike Flynn, perhaps even to write articles that oppose him.
Uh, the article you mentioned from VICE, I think.
He also said that the, the author of that was, was uh paid?
Uh, you just said that.
Uh yeah, that's David Gilbert.
Uh, he said that the David Gilbert is controlled opposition and yeah so yeah, that again goes back to the TTP days, and something that ties in with with what you've been saying now is, uh yeah, you Stewerson complaining about psyops and so on.
Uh, a quick background, uh, in around 2000, I think, 18 thereabouts uh, there was a lot of talk about an Israeli group that's called SIDE Group and this they specialized in well, psychological operations.
I mean, that's what they did and uh, they probably did it pretty darn well.
I mean Israeli intelligence, they are good at what they're doing.
Uh, SIDE Group, they had to close.
They closed down after uh, they were in under investigation by uh, by Rob Mueller, so they actually closed down in connection Into his investigations.
Now, and this is something I find very, very interesting.
This is from James Thinking Project, from a conversation he had with the other moderators in the mod channel there.
He said, and I quote, my dark side wants to be side group for the good guys.
With resources and time, we could wreck any cult and or help any family get their loved ones out.
Rich people and governments would pay a shitload of money for this.
There's lots of risk to this, though.
So holding fire on this one for right now.
Don't know if this helps, but that's what's in my head.
So there he's expressing himself that he wants to manipulate people.
He wants to actually run the side of himself.
He's saying it there out loud on black and white to other people in the moderation group in the thinking project.
So, I mean, that again shows that he's not someone that's acting in good faith.
He isn't.
And I don't care if you say, I want to be side group for the good guys.
Who are the good guys?
The moment you try to influence, to stir people against their will, so to speak, you try to influence people like that, you are not one of the good guys anymore, period.
If you try to manipulate people into thinking the way you want them to think, you are not a good person.
I don't care what you want to make them think.
That is not the way things should work in the world.
Yeah, this runs straight into one of my ideas, which is what I call the dishonesty of zealotry.
In the general concept of the dishonesty of zealotry, a person believes so strongly in their cause, their goal, that they're willing to be dishonest in pursuit of it.
And in game theory, this becomes the idea that if the other side is lying so much and those lies are very effective as a sort of information weapon, if you will, then it can become seductive or tantalizing to use that same weapon for your own side.
I think some people get confused and start to think that this is like, in Jim Stewartson's terms, like an information war and that lies are weapons in that war.
They become like a greater level of armament and that this essentially becomes like an escalation of rhetorical force in which they're interested in, well, okay, if the other side is willing to use chemical weapons and, you know, and we're losing because of it, then at what point do we also use chemical weapons in order to even the playing field, right?
If they're using lies against us, then at what point do we also use lies for our side to push back against this?
Indeed, it's like I'm sure that now if you take the Ukraine war as an example, Russia has been using phosphorus.
And then there have been calls for that, yeah, we should retaliate in the same way.
But the moment you do that, how are you any better?
Yeah.
Okay, Russia dropped phosphorus on civilians.
Oh, now we're going to do the same.
You are only becoming what you're fighting the moment you use monstrous methods like that yourself.
Yeah.
And there was a time when humans conducted warfare this way.
They felt desperate enough that they were willing to do this.
I mean, this was a hallmark of World War II, right?
Bombing civilian cities and centers.
Dresden burned to the ground.
Tokyo was firebombed.
A million people died in a single night.
I mean, these weren't even nuclear weapons.
We talk about Russia and Nagasaki, but they didn't even need those to do all these other terrible things.
And to the people that did them, I mean, those were the allies that burned Dresden in Tokyo.
They were reacting to what they saw as a very serious threat.
That's not meant to be an excuse for them.
It's sort of a reason, which is different.
But, you know, we have to look back at those situations and evaluate them honestly as the atrocities they were.
We don't get to sugarcoat them because they were done for our side, right?
And the same thing for Jim Stewartson.
He's, you know, in this thing that you read out here, he's advocating for using the techniques of misinformation as essentially an information weapon to use against the people that he says are weaponizing information against his political side.
Interesting, but I think that this is an overstep.
And I think we are right to judge him for that overstep.
You know, I don't know how much of the things he puts out he actually believes.
But based on what you just read, it's possible that he doesn't believe them, but he feels those lies are necessary to manufacture the support to push back hard enough against the other side, right?
Indeed.
And that is a difficult thing to say about Jim, whether he believes what everything he says, if he only believes part of it, or if it's all an act.
My belief is that at some point, he didn't really believe it.
But now he's been telling this story for so long and he's been creating his controlled opposition, as he's been calling people like me more journalists than I can even remember on the top of my head that he'd been labeled as controlled opposition.
And then, of course, we bite back.
And that confirms what he's saying.
Because he can't accept that maybe we are right.
Maybe I'm wrong here.
So I think at this point, he's probably believing a lot of the things he's saying.
Some things, of course, he doesn't.
I mean, I'm sure he doesn't believe some of the things he's been saying about me, for example.
But those are things that he's been saying just to disgrace me as a critic, to make people shut off their mind.
If they encounter something I'll write, he will be labeling me as a Swiss internet terrorist who's paid by Mike Flynn.
And that only shuts off people's thinking processes if I talk to someone that's supportive of him.
They will ask, oh, no, that's Robin Erickson, the Swedish internet terrorist and the Jim Stewartson will be telling us about, no, everything he says is wrong.
At that point, it doesn't matter if I show them Straight examples of where Jim Stewart has been outright wrong about something, where he done, when he had been informed that he's outright wrong about them, he'd been sweeping it under the rug.
There have been instances where he'd been doing that when I've been in replies to his posts, and I've been directly pointing out that this Jim Stewart got wrong.
His reaction has been to first attack Robin.
He's a Switch inter-terrorist full-time for 40 months, for six months.
And he was like, that I've been paid to do this against him.
That's my full-time job.
That's the only thing I do in the world.
It's stalk Jim Sturson for money and be mean to him.
And of course, people will stop listening.
And then the next thing he'd been doing, when I've been presenting the fact, this Jim got wrong.
Here you have the real facts.
You can compare them.
It's very obvious.
He hides my reply.
Yeah.
And that's again and again.
Yeah, this comes right up to and brushes over point number four that I have here, which is that with Jim Stewartson's content and also with Joe McCarthy, any significant person who steps forward to counter this set of ideas is labeled as an agent or sympathizer of the opposition.
And this is very direct and explicit in both Joseph McCarthy's case, where he accused many, many people of being communists, but also in Jim Stewartson, who, as you say, I mean, if anyone goes to Twitter and they go to your account, your pinned tweet is literally a thread of people that Jim Stewartson has attacked.
I mean, at some point, we'll go through a whole list, but not today.
Yeah, that would take several episodes just to go through that.
Oh, yeah.
It is over a dozen people.
I think there, I think, just 14 people or so on that list.
Many of them are well-known journalists, well-known experts in their field.
One of the guys, Mark Andre, I forgot his last name, a Canadian just like you.
He is one of the four most, he's a leader when it comes to extremists.
He's consulting the Canadian government on it.
He's really specialized on terrorism.
He knows these things on the great depth.
I'm not sure.
I can't remember why he's on James Stewart's shit list, but he's there.
Mark Andre Argentino, that's his name.
He's one.
And I mean, I don't think he ever even said something negative about Jim.
But for whatever reason, he's on Jim's shit list.
And there are so many like him.
People are highly respected in their areas of expertise that they don't align what they're saying contradicts what Jim is saying.
And that's all you need to do to be declared an enemy of his.
You don't even have to confront his ideas.
Yes, your ideas are confronting his ideas.
That is enough.
But then there are also examples like if you take from BBC, Cheyenne Tadiraja.
Sorry, Cheyenne, I can't pronounce your last name.
But last year, maybe a bit of background on Sean for those that don't know him.
Sean, he's working for BBC and he is a senior fact checker with them.
One of the things that I respect a lot with Cheyenne is that he will fact check this information from both sides equally.
If something comes from the right, he will fact check it.
It can be something in the Israeli conflict.
If there's disinformation that favors Palestine, if there's disinformation, he will fact-check it.
If it's disinformation that favors Israel, he will fact-check it.
He checks both sides.
If it favors Ukraine, he'll fact-check it.
If it favors Russia, he'll fact-check it.
I have great respect for him, but he's doing it in such an unbiased manner.
And that is the way it should be.
You shouldn't be afraid of fact-checking your own side with whatever side it is.
We joke sometimes that the truth has a left bias, but that's not really true.
It's just only true because of what the right is doing.
But yeah, you're right.
Being unbiased in this, being able to call out your own side, as it were, is very useful.
And that's partly why I do this right now.
Stewartson needs to be checked.
Yeah.
And yeah, and to go back to Cheyenne, because Jim Stewartson, I mean, he, like most people, used to respect and admire Cheyenne because of the work he does.
He's been doing a lot of important work throughout the years.
If I remember right, his career really started off with him countering a QAnon disinformation.
That's where his career really started to take off.
And then it's been going headed to where he's now today, and he's fact-checking everything.
And in the beginning, Jim really appreciated the guy.
See here, here we have a tweet from Jim Stewartson from August 29, 2020.
If you're following me, you should be following Cheyenne.
He's my favorite journalist on this subject, QAnon being the subject.
Dude, proactively tight stuff out and isn't afraid to report it.
The hallmarks, the hallmarks of a good journalist.
I mean, Jim is absolutely right there.
He's 100% spot on.
And in connection with that, he was retweeting a post of Cheyenne.
That is about QAnon.
I'm not going to be reading that one.
But then for fast forward to October 3rd, three years later, 2023, Cheyenne did the absolute deadliest of deadly sins in the world of Jim Stewartson.
He openly confronted things Jim have been saying.
And who boy did Jim's tone change?
Yeah.
Jim's response to that was to repost Cheyenne.
And in that, Jim wrote, PSA, Cheyenne is an insufferable tanky moron who hangs out with my stalkers.
That would, for example, be people like me because me and Sean are mutuals.
He's the mutual with Mike Rothschild, who Jim have a deep, deep hatred for.
And he's a mutual people that are regularly criticizing Jim Stewartson.
But in the case of me and Cheyenne, we have been mutuals, I think, since 2019, 2018, back in the days when I was still very, very critical of QAnon and when I did admittedly also a lot of trolling of QAnons.
We've been mutuals for a long time.
Predating Jim Stewartson, we didn't know the guy when we started following each other.
And that goes with most of the people that he classifies as my stalkers.
And anyway, so that was the repost of Cheyenne.
And in that post, Cheyen wrote about Jim Stewart.
And he showed it for screenshots from Jim Stewart Post.
And he wrote 4.3 million views for this thread, Africa by Stewartson, featuring a series of utterly bizarre conspiracy theories about Donald Trump, his lawyer, Alina Haba, and Michael Flynn, which sounds more like the plot of a really bad supernatural horror film than real life.
And I hope you will be linking that one.
Yeah, they'll be in the show notes.
Because the screenshot that Cheyenne included, what you see there, it is bonkers.
It is bonkers.
It's how anyone can take that seriously.
But yeah, of course, that was a moment when Sean went from someone that Jim respected, even though he didn't respect him publicly, at least he would respect him in private, I'm sure.
But when that happened, he became a tanky moron.
And I think, and then a bit later, he's saying that let's see here, that Sean is a disinformation agent, disguising himself as a debunker, a disinformation agent.
Right.
One of the most respected people in the field of fact-checking from BBC, probably one of the most well-respected news networks, news channels in the world.
A disinformation agent?
Come on, stop.
No, it's just ridiculous.
It is.
It really is ridiculous.
This one here that you had a large number of links of different points.
And this one here stood out to me directly related to what you're talking about, because he mentioned, as you said, on October 3rd, he linked this post and called Cheyenne Stardarizade an insufferable tanky moron because he'd been fact-checked by him.
And then this year, this year in September, he reposted it again with just a screenshot of Cheyenne's post.
But he said, and this is a quote from Jim Stewartson's tweet.
He says, Cheyenne has a habit of jumping in when topics get too close to home because he's either not very bright or he's intentionally cooperating with a long smear campaign to protect Mike Flynn.
So there's two points here.
As soon as I see this, I see two things immediately.
First, I see in the second part of what he said, this is a logical fallacy called bifurcation, where he presents an outcome as having only two possible resolutions and one of them has to be false.
And then he, you know, steers everyone away from the one into the other, which he's saying that Cheyenne is either not very bright or intentionally cooperating with a smear campaign.
These are obviously not the only two outcomes here.
It could be that Cheyenne is an actual debunker of misinformation working for the BBC.
As you've said, there's other possibilities even that, you know, it's not just these two.
I think Cheyenne has already shown that he's not an idiot.
And you're far from proving based on this that he's part of an intentional smear campaign.
But this is how it's presented to try to show people, to try to lead people to the idea that all the information that works against me is just an elaborate smear campaign that is a huge disinformation complex that's meant to steer you away from the truth that I'm providing for you, right?
It is.
It is.
And that is the idea he'd been pushing since January, February, 2020.
He'd been pushing that idea.
And only back then, he was lumping his group of critics together.
And there was another small group already already known their names.
Of course, Mike Rothschild, Holt, who else, a whole bunch of journalists that he was lumping together into this controlled opposition.
And then there were a lot of people around us, like people following me and so on.
If they dare to say something about Jim, well, then the media became part of the control opposition.
So all in the early days, when he was small, I mean, he didn't have any platform.
not like he has today.
Maybe 10, 20,000 followers at the most.
He didn't have any significant platform.
He definitely would not have been a threat to what he purported that Mike Flynn is doing.
He would not be a threat to that.
But only then, supposedly, he was such a big threat.
It required the collected resources of professionals in media and then small, as well, suppose in Jim's view, foot soldiers like myself.
It required only conglomerate of dozens of people at a point when he was basically a nobody.
And that's the narrative that has been carrying on.
And of course, the more well-known he has become, of course, also the more people are starting to see what he's doing.
And you get more and more people that, okay, this dude, no, he's no good.
Something needs to be said about it.
So of course, that group has been growing.
And with that, his controlled opposition, as he liked to frame it, has been growing.
And that is evidence in itself that he is right.
And that is the thing that people are criticizing him.
That's been treated as confirmation that, oh, yeah, I am onto something here.
I mean, why would they be afraid of me if I'm not right?
No, we are not afraid of him.
What we are afraid of is the propagation of disinformation, of misinformation.
That's what we're afraid of, because misinformation, disinformation, that gives people bad ideas.
That is what causes things like January 6th.
Yeah.
I mean, and now we, I don't think, and I hope certainly not that we won't see repeat on it from the left.
But had we seen those trends that we see now with, especially with the center left, with the conspiracies around the election, I mean, when you look at all the arguments, it's a perfect rehash of what we saw four years ago.
It's almost a carbon copy.
The only difference is that the center left, the left aren't as heavily indoctrinated as QAnon and the right was.
But we are getting there and we are getting their thoughts and we are getting there because of people like Jim Stewart.
Yeah, all those people on the left.
They're bringing the left here.
And that is a danger.
Yeah, it's a big danger.
Yeah.
And you pretty much described my second point that I was going to make, but you didn't say the keywords, so I'm going to go over it anyway, which is you're right, that he's using the fact that he's being pushed back against and characterizing that as proof that he's right.
So he says in this that Cheyenne has a habit of jumping in when topics get too close to home.
So he doesn't actually say sort of the key phrase, but he does sort of mean the key phrase, which people who are in this space have heard a lot, which is over the target.
Right, right.
So the idea is that conspiracists claim a lot is that you're really upset about this.
I must be over the target, right?
Like I'm getting a lot of flack.
You only get flack from the anti-aircraft gun when you're at an important target, which is the metaphor being applied here, but it's not an apt metaphor.
You get a lot of flack when you're wrong as well, right?
When you're just wrong and dangerously wrong, which doesn't have anything to do with how right you are or how useful what you're saying is.
It can actually mean the opposite of that, which I had an episode about where I talked about this.
I call it reality inversion, where you take the evidence that you're wrong and interpret it to the opposite, to be the evidence that you're right.
It takes actually very little to convince yourself that, oh, that thing that would tend to indicate that I'm wrong.
Well, I can just say that that just means I'm right instead.
It takes almost nothing.
It's really weird.
And human brains are actually not very good at a lot of stuff.
And this aspect of how we think and the way that we can just invert this is not a useful feature, actually, of the way we think, right?
So, and I want to point that out is that he's using this.
He's, as you pointed out, as you described, he's using the idea that we're pushing back on him to be proof that he's right.
And he's not.
That's not proof that he's right.
Actually, proof would be proof that he's right, but he actually doesn't have proof either.
He's just trying to say that because people are upset by what I say, I must be saying something useful.
Which is not true.
Indeed, and actually, I'm not sure exactly what he's referring to here, but he's been using over the target a couple of times through the years.
And here's a quite funny one from March 26, 2021.
So the reason I am in this dumb lawsuit out of all the randoms on Twitter is two things.
One, I'm 100% over the target.
Two, this is part of a crazy op that excuse a whole bunch of the people responsible for QAnon and some people who are supposed to be against it.
Though some people against it, that would then be people like me, the Swedish internet terrorist, because I mean, that's where I built my reputation on Twitter was by being anti-Q.
And all the other people are criticizing them.
But yeah, I'm 100% over the target because there was probably talks about he was going to get sued for something.
I really can't remember what that would have been about.
But yeah.
And again, there are a bunch of times when he'd been claiming to be over target.
So he's really using these cliches.
And the shame is so.
I mean, to me, for someone that's supposedly working in the anti-disinfo sphere to use that phrase unironically.
I mean, you didn't really mean it.
What are you doing, man?
No, no.
No one who's serious in this info use that phrase seriously.
You might do it sarcastically or whatever, but not like meaning as that as a proof that you are right about something.
The moment you do that, you are no better than all the bloody QAnon thought leaders because they've been doing it.
You are no different from them.
You're the same bloody yoke.
Yeah.
And what you mentioned there in that tweet that you just read is also circling back to one of the points I made about the comparison with McCarthyism, right?
Because he's interpreting the fact that you push back on him as that you are not really pushing back against QAnon.
Because in his interpretation, the only real way to push back against QAnon is to also go along with his ideas.
It's the only real way to do it, right?
I mean, this is...
If you don't acknowledge that Mike Flynn is Q, if you don't support that idea, you are not really against QAnon.
That's...
That's as simplistic as it is.
It becomes a sort of a purity test for your willingness to push back against the thing that he's against.
And that's not useful.
It's just, it's not logical.
And we need to call it out when we see it.
That's how it is.
So I think we're going to end here.
This has been good.
Where can people find you?
You're on Twitter, you're on Blue Sky.
What are your handles there?
So just going to give a little bit of quick background to my handles and also a very, very quick touch on a fun little, yeah, Jim Stewartson-related story to my handle.
So my handle on both Blue Sky and on Twitter or X, as we should call it today, otherwise Elon Musk will be upset with us.
My handles on both is Ankh Morporkian.
Ankh Morporkian, that is a reference to my advice favorite novelist, Terry Pratchett's Discord series, where you have a talent that's called Ankh Morpork.
Okay.
Now, the fun thing about this is that I think two years ago now, one of James Jordson's supporters was probably intrigued by my username and she looked into it.
And she found out, okay, it's tied into Terry Pratchett, his Discord novels.
And somewhere she found on some libertarian forum where libertarians were phrasing his books.
I mean, his books are brilliant.
They are humorous.
And he's using a medium of a fantasy world of communicating very well of how things are working in modern society.
Even though it's set in a kind of a medieval setting, he's been bringing in things like how radio is influencing us, how media is influencing us.
You know, you just mentioned he becomes someone on those aspects.
He does it in a very funny and clever way.
So anyway, this supporter of Jim Stewart found that and said that Terry Pratchett is a funnel to libertarianism and to fascism.
But Terry Pratchett been writing, no, it's as far from supportive of fascism as you could possibly get.
Yeah, never heard that said about Terry Pratchett.
No, no, it is blew my mind when I saw like, like, no, you're really going to attack Terry Pratchett of all people.
Like, no, don't go there.
And it's so uninformed.
The Terry Pratchett to libertarian pipeline.
What is that?
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I was genuinely upset when I read.
Like, no, because I don't cry very often, especially not if some famous person dies.
But when I heard of his illness and when he passed away, I cried.
It broke my heart because I'd been reading him since the mid-80s.
I've been reading his books.
I just love him so much.
So it broke my heart when I saw that.
But anyway, so my handle on Twitter is Ankh Morporkian.
A-N-K-H underscore more pork and M-O-R-P-O-R-K-I-A-N.
And my handle on Blue Sky is the same without underscore.
And that's where you can find me.
And also the two only social media channels I use.
Well, great.
That's excellent.
People can find me at the email address I mentioned at the start of the episode, but can also find me on Twitter at Spencer G Watson and on Blue Sky at Spencer Watson.
So with that, I think we'll sign off.
So it's been really fun having you on the podcast and talking about this.