Jim Stewartson, a Twitter influencer with 131K followers and 47K on Blue Sky, weaponizes disinformation—like framing Mike Flynn as QAnon’s "Q" and claiming Russia orchestrated a Supreme Court coup to steal the 2024 election (predicting Kamala Harris’ victory despite evidence). His "no coincidences" logic and reality inversion tactics, dismissing critics like Cheyenne Sardarizadeh or Mike Rothschild as paid enemies, mirror McCarthyism while distorting left-wing discourse. By promoting absurd, high-IQ-but-low-rationality theories, Stewartson undermines credibility, diverting focus from Trump’s Epstein ties to conspiratorial chaos that risks paralyzing political engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
This is a show that takes you inside the Stooniverse, where StewAnon and Blue Anon reside.
Within this universe, we examine a cult expert who gave up his Chilean foster child when he joined the Moonies, a former Trump supporter whose mom may be a serial killer, a former Breitbart journalist who wrote a steamy erotic novel, The Cult of Rafikiism, named after a character from the Lion King, QAnon, Extremism, Conspiracies, Disinformation, and more.
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And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that is creating and interpreting the language of the disinformation age.
Fucking nailed it that time.
That's great.
That was good.
All right.
So I have, I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm here today.
I have a special guest.
Go ahead and introduce yourself.
I'm Mark.
You might know me on Twitter as Dieber, but just a regular D Bernard.
The bird.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I got him.
I got him on my podcast.
Screw you, everyone else, who didn't get him.
I got him.
Exclusive right here.
All right.
So we are going to go, we are diving straight into Jim Stewartson today.
That's the topic.
And the title of the podcast is going to be The Case Against Jim Stewartson, but it's actually going to be part one because we're not going to stay here long enough to go through absolutely all of his stuff.
But there's a lot.
It's a lot.
It's a lot.
And but yeah, so you, I have you here because you have a lot of Jim Stewartson experience, right?
Not that you brag about it a lot.
Right, right.
But he has a list.
I don't have it here, unfortunately, but he has a he put out a list at one point I saw on his sub stack of list of people that he's eventually going to sue.
Yeah.
I believe you were on that list.
You were, you made the list.
Congratulations.
Thanks.
Yeah, there's quite a few on that list.
Yeah, yeah, it's not a very exclusive list.
No.
And it's almost all random Twitter accounts that just, I don't know, people who pissed him off.
Yeah, yeah.
People that spoke out against him, friends of those people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Who, I don't know.
Yeah.
Association sometimes.
I guess.
Right.
So let's get right into this.
Okay.
So doing another Jim Stewartson episode.
I already did one with Robin where we dove into, we did, I thought a really good episode about comparing Jim Stewartson to Joe McCarthy.
He's sort of a dime store, Joe McCarthy.
He's not doing anything nearly as big as Joe McCarthy was, obviously.
But the parallels were definitely there.
But we're doing another one because I ran across a Twitter space that Jim had done.
And it had, as I listened to it, it just had quite a few very specific examples that I thought were really, really useful to just show what he's what how he thinks, what he's up to.
So yeah, let's do it.
So for anyone who's unaware, Jim Stewartson is a Twitter influencer who engages in conspiratorial ideas, and mostly those surround the idea of Mike Flynn being Q, that is Q of QAnon, right?
And lumped in with that is the idea that there's this Russia mind control mass media influence campaign that's happening.
And also, attach to that on the side is surprisingly not front and center, but attached to the side always is that Donald Trump is either the mastermind of a conspiracy to bring a new dark age of fascism, or he's a rube that's being used by Russia to bring about a dark age of fascism.
And that sort of changes as the mood goes for Jim Stewartson.
Trump isn't actually front and center of his conspiracy world, unlike almost everyone else who's sort of in that group of people.
It's sort of a thing that sets him apart.
What's that does that sound right for you?
Did I miss something?
No, that sounds pretty accurate to me.
Yeah, Mike Flynn, it's all related to Mike Flynn and Russia.
Yeah.
Somehow it all ties back to that and then he throws in Satanism.
Just anything that fits his people strung along.
There's a Satanism angle sometimes and there's some actual people he's accused of being Satanists.
But we're not going to get into that specific stuff today.
And actually, we're not going to hit a lot of mind control stuff today, surprisingly.
He didn't hit it a lot in the Twitter space and so that'll be in part two.
Eventually.
Not like tomorrow or anything.
I'm not that prepared for this.
So also I'm going to mention to just the people who listen and pay attention to this kind of thing.
Ordinarily when I have a guest, I just kind of have like point form notes and we just talk.
And then when I do the podcast alone, solo, I have a script and I kind of follow the script because I can't, I don't have that gift of gab to like do a full conversation with no one when I don't have prepared what I'm going to say.
So today is different because I have a script and also a guest.
So there's going to be times where I stop the script and like do a thing and you know, we talk and then other times where I'm just talking and Mark is not talking.
But so it might sound a little something clunky.
I don't know.
I'm worried about it.
I'm worried about it.
I'm worried that this is going to sound not good.
You have to make up for it though, Mark.
I'm relying on you.
This would be amazing.
No pressure.
No pressure.
You're going to save me.
Yeah, no problem.
Great, good.
I like your enthusiasm.
Yeah.
So some people hold an absolutist view of politics.
In other words, they believe that Donald Trump is so absolutely evil that he's the only thing that can be evil.
And therefore, anyone who opposes him is an ally who must be supported.
To those holding these absolutist views, nothing that anyone says while opposing Donald Trump's policies or ideas is off limits.
Every idea is on the table.
Any rhetorical piece that makes Trump look bad in any way is good and pure and noble and definitely worth repeating.
But that also means that any lie is also totally fine.
Anyone who steps a little bit over the line in their opposition to Trump is only doing so because they're so passionate about the project.
We need to give our allies a little breathing room for some of the things they're going to need to do to defeat the monster currently in charge.
Trump, QAnon, and MAGA will all use lies and propaganda to convince people to vote with them.
If we plan to go into that political battle armed with only the truth and never being able to lie in any way, then we'll be at a severe disadvantage.
We've been losing so far because we've been unwilling to lie as much as the other side has.
For keen listeners to the podcast, the thought process I've been describing for a few minutes now is called the dishonesty of zealotry, wherein a person justifies deviating from the truth in order to push a political belief or a deeply held moral principle.
If lies win the day against lies, then we'll only have replaced one unreality for another.
The people who advocate for this will say that their lies are less racist and won't lead to mass deportations and the marginalization of minority groups.
Like, maybe.
But reducing the ability of people to discern actual reality will give some new enterprising politician an advantage they don't deserve.
And they'll also have unreality at their disposal to warp the minds of the populace at large.
This time, presumably, with the enthusiastic participation of the left rather than the right.
At that point, will it even be possible to know what the actual truth is?
Another factor is that when you're engaged in a battle of words and ideas, and both of you and your opponent are arming yourself with lies, there's no end, no bottom.
Each side points to the obvious untruths that the other side propagates and uses this to justify their own behavior.
This becomes a proverbial arms race.
Only the arms in question are not actual weapons, but complete and totalizing fictions that one chooses to live in because one is afraid of living in the fiction created by the opposing side.
When looking at someone's rhetoric to determine whether they're producing or spreading disinformation, our view needs to be properly calibrated.
Sometimes when you like a person, the tendency is to let some things slide.
Okay, maybe.
But we need to understand that when we act badly, the good things that we did when we weren't acting badly tend to mean very little or maybe nothing.
A murderer who attends church every Sunday and helps little old ladies to their cars at the grocery store is still a murderer.
Sometimes I get countered on this point with a retort like, people shouldn't be judged by their worst day or whatever.
Okay, but we're not talking about like a single action in a single moment of like rushed decision-making.
We're talking about something that's being done throughout the day, every day, for years.
Cropping out the relevant context of a scenario so that we can justify keeping someone around only makes us complicit in their misdeeds.
And in this case, their misdeeds concern our information environment.
Conspiracy theories are no longer the fun, laxadaisical thought experiments of times past.
Now, they're slowly swallowing the world in unreality, as it becomes increasingly more difficult to see what's really going on.
So we're going to pause there.
do you have any uh thoughts really hits everything on the point you know because i've set this up Set this up as Jim Stewartson creating his own fictional unreal world.
Yeah, and I've even seen on like the Media's Touch or whatever, some of those podcasts where I've seen one of like the popular hosts talk about exactly that, just why I'm like the right.
Yes.
Because, you know, why not?
And it's just like, how's that going to help anything?
It's not.
Yeah.
It's exactly what you said.
So, yeah.
I, um, one idea that I've come across kind of just yesterday.
Uh, it's not new, but I just had the conversation with the person yesterday was about the idea of you know becoming a little more extreme, maybe even being willing to breach violence, do violence in the name of, you know, what's right and righteous.
And the person who happened to be Jewish mentioned that they've been sort of bothered and plagued with questions of why people in why Jewish people specifically in Germany and in the in the time leading up to the Holocaust didn't fight back.
Uh, and that that I mean, that whole line of questioning is based on shaky ground.
That's victim blaming to start, right?
Right to say that it's also not something that would have changed the situation, right?
It's a situation that would have further justified and given more fodder for the propaganda machine to justify what they were doing.
Like it would have been more like, look, these people are also dangerously violent, and therefore we're saving society better by doing what we're doing.
The real thing that, you know, the real thing that would have changed that scenario isn't the willingness to commit violence, and it was never the unwillingness to commit violence that allowed it to happen then.
The real thing that would have moved the needle is the ability to overcome the propaganda, which is always about the ability for the people to understand what's real.
And that's right.
So deviating more into lies to like to try to counter the other lies, that's just a different set of lies.
That's it.
That's a that just feeds the propaganda machine that doesn't, you know, undo its work in any way.
Yeah.
It's more of another flavor.
And yeah, that makes a lot of sense because, I mean, that's what the people here, so you need people to have the correct information, the real information, to be able to do something, you know, actual.
So, yeah, that's a good point.
So, back to my script, my cleverly written and well-thought-out script that I've stressed about for more than a week about whether it's good enough.
So, on September 4th of 2024, two months before last year's U.S. federal election, Jim Stewartson hosted a Twitter space.
For anyone who's blissfully unaware of Twitter, a space is a separate virtual room in which a person can speak with other people, like in front of an audience.
Influencers can engage with supporters.
People can debate topics and ask questions.
That sort of thing happens in a space.
So, Jim Stewartson hosted this space.
He titled it Sabotage: How they plan to steal the election and how we know so much, even just in a title, right?
So, So while he does talk about a method by which the conspiratorial they plan to steal the election, I'm only going to give that bit a small bit of attention in this.
It didn't happen.
Certainly not in the way he was claiming, which is par for the course for everyone engaging in these conspiratorial ideas.
There's a lot of prediction, a lot of claims later of things that they predicted that were right.
And it's because it's the Alex Jones syndrome, right?
It's predict 20 things.
When one of them comes out right, you just claim that that was a useful hit.
And it's no different with Jim Stewartson.
Only he's not doing it as well as Alex Jones is.
Whatever.
Exactly.
So spending a lot of time on it like that would kind of be disappointing.
Much more time will be spent going through all the ways you can tell that what Jim Stewartson says is just conspiratorial nonsense that can be dismissed.
This wasn't the only space he hosted or that he spoke in.
I chose this one because it was like a single piece of media that had most of the greatest hits.
So here we go.
All right.
I don't have a producer, so I have to do all these things myself.
Real, real good podcasts have like a person in the background, like a guy in the chair, like you're sitting in a chair now that like does all this clicking in the background.
I have to do it while I'm talking, which is not a skill I've ever worked on in my life, really.
Except for when I play World of Warcraft.
Yeah, which micromanage pretty well.
But this isn't like World of Warcraft, so all that training didn't help me.
No, no.
Curse. Curse the...
Yeah, okay.
Many days and hours.
This clip needs a little bit of setup.
So I didn't want to include this huge long extra section of thing where he explains all of the, you know, that.
So I didn't want to have him go through what he predicted and all that stuff because it took like five minutes.
But here's the short version.
According to Jim Stewartson, Kamala Harris was definitely going to win, just like Biden won in 2020.
Then, according to him, the Trump team was going to attempt the same thing they had previously tried in 2020 with the Kraken lawsuits.
That was the, you know, 65 to 70-ish, you know, lawsuits challenging the result in every swing state that didn't go his way.
Only this time, according to Jim, they were going to be more prepared and more of these challenges were going to succeed.
And of course, this was what took a long time in the explanation in his explanation was explaining all the details of how he knew that they were going to be more prepared and all these things.
Right.
Which nonsense.
So he felt that then the decision ultimately was going to go to the Supreme Court.
And given that the Supreme Court had a string of questionable calls throughout 2023 and 2024 that seemed to lean heavily toward conservative ideals, they were definitely going to declare Trump the winner.
In, again, what took a fair amount of time in his explanation of how he knew that, you know, how the decision was going to go and everything else.
But that decision was going to plunge the world into darkness, which is always how it goes with these conspiratorial notions.
The next, very next thing is going to plunge the world into darkness.
And the coming apocalypse is why you have to, you know, continue paying attention and like and subscribe and retweet and all those things.
Always continuously the method.
This is Jim's proposed solution to this.
So here we go.
Right.
So I don't have that quite set up the way I want.
I have to explain something.
So the way StreamYard does this, if I add the window to the stage to play the clip, it you are going to hear, once I do this, you are going to hear yourself and the clip while this is on.
So I have to like remove this after.
Otherwise, whenever you talk, it's going to be super distracting because you're going to hear yourself looped back through my computer to your ear and fed like one and a half seconds after you speak.
And it will drive you insane, which I don't know what your sanity is like, but mine is on the edge, so I wouldn't want that to happen to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if I forget to take this off or whatever, just remind me because I might, I don't have a producer.
I mentioned that, right?
I don't have a producer.
Yeah, yeah.
I would hire someone, but I don't have a budget, so that also prevents that.
So here we go.
Here's Jim Stewartson talking about his solution to this proposed, you know, potential problem of the Supreme Court.
Now, when Elon Musk.
No, no, no, that's not the clip because it's skipped to the next one.
Okay, here we go.
Here it is the real one.
My solution is the president is a king.
He's not going to be a king except for one tiny little thing.
He's just going to close the building until January, and that's it.
So that's it.
That's it.
That's his whole.
It took 14 seconds or something for him to explain his whole solution.
It's super simple, right?
It's an ice cream stand, and you just close the ice cream stand, and then no one can get the ice cream, right?
Right.
It's simple.
So simple, right?
Okay.
So there's no way this could work.
It's not a solution that has the remotest hope of working.
Like, you might be able to make this idea work if you lock the building with the Supreme Court justices inside, right?
And you denied them any access to anyone that could carry messages outside, right?
Like, if you kidnap them and lock them inside, you know, like made it its own jail.
And in that scenario, actually, like, you might want to also deny them access to any, like, writing implements of any kind, right?
Which might include all the things they could write on, which might include walls, you know, like, you know, as soon as they write on the wall in blood and sign it, I mean, they're putting something in the law.
Like.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So also, any, you know, they could, you know, if you don't lock them in, they could just leave and then, like, go to, like, Office Depot or Staples or, you know, whatever, buy some pens and some paper and do their work in the friggin parking lot and just do it there.
They just write on stuff and then five of the nine have to agree and sign it.
And then you're good to go, right?
Like, this is not a solution that stops anything.
And it's stupid.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's incredibly stupid.
And it's just not possible or feasible.
And like, it's just like, I guess it's just not a solution.
Yeah, right.
So this isn't a solution worth imagining, but it is the kind of solution that grifting conspiracists come up with.
The first and most important thing to them is that it's original, which is to say that it's Stewartson's very own, right?
People who create conspiracy content desperately want originality points.
They get to tell their followers that there's a goal in mind, and it's very unlikely to ever happen.
So they never have to really worry about fulfilling any promises to anyone.
And even if it is attempted, they can always say it simply wasn't tried hard enough for it to ever work.
It was never good enough.
It, you know, was never, you know, done to the full extent or whatever, the way they imagined, which, by the way, they're not fully fleshing out all the details that would need to do.
So, and that's part of the grift, right?
But more than that, this solution would have required Biden to be a tyrant.
Stuartson says it would only be for a day, but this isn't how tyranny works.
If someone is a tyrant for a single day, and then the very next day their tyranny is reversed, then the whole thing would have been for naught.
Everyone does this calculation on their first day as a tyrant.
And therefore, usually this is cast as a move that's good for the people.
Tyrants typically use their tyrannical powers to extend those same tyrannical powers as long as is needed to complete the task.
And then, very often, new tasks come up in the meantime, and the tyrannical fixes for those tasks means that a new expiry day has to be set for the tyrannical powers to make sure that they stay in place long enough to be useful, and on and on it goes.
That's how tyranny works.
And this is why I push back so hard against these flawed ideas on the left.
If the response to the authoritarian lurches from the right is to just create an authoritarian on the left that just promises it won't be quite as racist, then what the fuck are we even doing?
Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right, I'll leave that there.
You have any more thoughts?
You have any comments?
That's exactly right.
I mean, we're just becoming the enemy, so to speak, right?
Yeah.
Just as bad and saying, oh, we're not going to be as bad as that.
Yeah, bullshit.
Yeah, well, even if you are, you know, it's the Neil Young principle, right?
It's a kinder, gentler machine gun hand is what it is.
Which you should always be against tyranny.
You should never allow, you know, like you should never allow any of these politicians to like get absolute power.
No, that's the whole point is that you're not letting them.
All right.
On to the next bit of madness from Jim Stewartson.
The next clip.
Here we go.
Well, I'm going to pull this up.
There we go.
Now, when Elon Musk left PayPal with Peter Thiel and the rest of them, the first thing he did was go and SpaceX.
But you might ask, what?
Why is this 20-something weirdo from South Africa have any business with our space program?
Well, turned out he was getting walked around in Congress by a special congressman named Dana Rorabacher.
Dana Rorabacher is the most Russian fucking congressman to ever walk in Congress.
And he was walking Elon Musk around pitching the idea of a private space, privatized space program with this particular weird incel as like the champion.
And so effectively, the Russians, the Russian congressman gave Elon Musk the keys to where he is now with this with SpaceX, with all of his government contracts and everything else.
All right.
So, did you follow that?
Yeah, that was a lot of just.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Well, I...
Yeah.
Tie that together.
Just, trust me, I know all these things.
Right.
So the impression that's made by this extreme oversimplification of events is that Elon Musk showed up, was introduced around Congress, was subsequently granted permission to run the entirety of the U.S. space exploration program using his company called SpaceX, and that all of this is happening with the express permission of, or perhaps the urging of, the Russians.
Why would the Russians be interested in privatizing the U.S. space program?
It's never said.
The partnership between NASA and SpaceX to provide services has been somewhat controversial and should be reconfigured to prevent a private citizen from having this much influence on the government.
Musk not only has the money to financially bankroll political candidates in a way that tends to push the needle further away from the will of the people, but he also has the ability to withhold or delay projects for politicians he doesn't support and fast-track projects for ones he does support.
This same dynamic exists with Peter Thiel's company Palantir, and that's another terrible mess that we should be cleaning up.
But by tying this into an it's all about Russia narrative needlessly complicates the matter and pulls the focus away from the palm greasing between private industry and the federal decision makers and toward the fictitious claims that Russia is the ultimate arbiter of the US's space program.
SpaceX wasn't simply handed the keys to the program.
SpaceX made a number of promises based on what the engineers at SpaceX believed should be possible.
And it turned out, kind of surprisingly, if you keep the record of the number of promises that Elon Musk's companies made and didn't come through with, but it turned out that those promises were achieved.
The most significant achievement was proven in December of 2015 when Falcon 9 landed its entire first stage rocket section intact.
This was a major breakthrough because it allowed these rockets to be reused in subsequent launches and it drastically reduced the cost of flights to space.
Previous to this achievement, the only time a rocket was reused in this way, landed on the surface of an orbital body and then later used for takeoff, was during the Apollo moon landing missions when orbital landing modules were landed on the moon and then later took off from the moon to reunite with the orbital craft for the return trip.
The reason why it took so long to accomplish this on Earth is that the Earth is a much more difficult environment for such an achievement.
The moon's gravity is one sixth of the gravity on Earth.
The moon landing craft in the Apollo missions were much less massive than stage 1 rocket sections.
The moon has no atmosphere to enter, no air particles to compress rapidly in front of a speeding object to burn up the entering vehicle.
No weather patterns to avoid.
No wind to provide sideways actual forces on a vehicle that's attempting to land.
The idea that Russia could have had some hand in delivering this technological achievement to the U.S. government and didn't opt to keep it for themselves is ridiculous.
The keen observer will note that this isn't exactly what Stewartson said either.
But by being deliberately vague, he gives himself wiggle room to squirm away from criticisms like this.
This rhetorical pattern is common among the conspiratorial.
Appear to say something that's both specific and sinister, but leave some room in there to say, that's not really what I said.
The undisputed heavyweight champion of this tactic is Jordan Peterson.
Stewartson isn't even in the same league as Jordan Peterson.
The problem with squirming away from this by saying, I wasn't really saying that Russia was in on the plan to grant SpaceX all of those government space projects, is that if that's not what Stewartson is saying here in this clip, then his entire statement begins to become meaningless.
There's no reason to mention Russia in that group of sentences unless he's planning to convince people that Elon Musk, the Republican Party, or maybe all of Congress and the Russian government are working very closely together to make this happen.
Stewartson never gives any answers to these sorts of questions and actively avoids being in conversation with anyone who might ask them.
But here's what I would ask if he had said that to me.
Why would the Russians care if the U.S. space program was privatized?
Shouldn't there be other Congress people involved in such a decision?
If this took many congresspeople to vote in favor of this, then are the others also in Russia's pocket?
Do we really believe that Russia is the de facto head of the Republican Party at large?
How does any of this in any way relate to the ability to land stage one rockets for reuse?
If you bothered to ask any of these questions, you would likely be labeled one of his trolls who's being paid by Mike Flynn to do something to get in Stewartson's way somehow.
He would definitely scold you for not being able to see the truth of the connections that are all happening behind the scenes and only he is smart enough to put together for you.
So, how did I do there?
That nailed it.
I like you a lot, Mark.
You agree with me a lot.
I'm sure glad I invited you on to.
Yeah, I mean, that's Stewartson's teeth.
I mean, he says those things, like, and you don't look into it at all or think about it a little critically.
It's just like.
Yeah, okay.
Well, I guess I guess Russians in charge, right?
Yeah, it's just, it's just some single congressperson that, you know, somehow has, you know, control of everything, even though I've rarely ever heard of him before.
And yeah, he's not the speaker of the house, but never even considered to be speaker of the house.
He doesn't appear to hold very much sway about anything else at all.
But somehow he's the linchpin key to everything and definitely in charge of it all.
Like, yeah, he's not even invited to those White House dinners that Trump holds.
Right.
Okay.
My question for Jim, I guess, would be, like, how does this help anything?
Yeah.
How does this help me?
What is this solving in any way?
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's the purpose of this, Jim?
Because it's just dumb.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How are you helping anyone to like, like, if you're going to have like an organized effort, if you were going to make this into a thing where you were going to organize, like, and, you know, let's say you were going to, you had 20 people and each was going to hold up a separate sign at a rally.
What would you have those 20 people say?
Like, make those 20 slogans for me based on all of these things.
Right.
Like, what do those look like?
Like, you know, Dana Rorabacher.
Like, what?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everyone's just like, huh?
Yeah.
No one has any idea.
The real world is just like, what?
They have no idea what you're talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This doesn't fit.
And also, it doesn't help.
Good point.
It doesn't help.
Yeah.
It's just a distraction of like, because anyone that's following him, that's just because this is not just like the first time he just talks about random crap.
He just goes on and on.
And the people that follow him are just like so stuck in it.
They're not seeing anything else that's really happening.
They're just so focused on nonsense.
It's just.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a lot of wasted effort.
So let's move on to the next clip.
This is a gooder.
This one being in the thing was a big reason why I wanted to use the clips from this space was this clip.
It's a good indication of the conspiratorial nature of his ideas.
So yeah.
Yeah, just stage.
it is i wrote an article you know called the worst movie plot because it's and i'm wrapping up here um You just think about where we are.
The world's richest man, a literal Nazi, a retired general officer.
Just for anyone who's confused, he means Mike Flynn when he talks about a retired general officer.
Okay.
Carrying on.
Former NSA, DIA, a genocidal dictator invading Europe, and this is important, Supreme fucking court are all on the same team.
All on the exact same team trying to do the same thing, which is to use this election to create some sort of constitutional crisis, some sort of, you know, violent uprising combined with lawfare, combined with, you know, the Supreme Court, you know,
that is going to potentially put us in the worst kind of position we've been in, you know, since 1860, in my view.
Okay.
So did I pick the right clip?
Yeah.
That was a good one.
Oh my gosh.
I forgot about that.
Like, total, yeah, the end of the world was happening.
Like, our country was done.
And they're all working together.
Yeah.
They're all working together.
They're all on the same team, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, like what what does the conversation in that room sound like?
Yeah, yeah.
Supreme Court was the Supreme Court, Putin, Flynn.
And Musk.
Yeah.
And yeah, and Flynn doesn't even belong.
He's not even important.
He's not even important.
Like, like, if you had Elon Musk and Putin and the Supreme Court, why would you include Flynn?
Yeah, why would he need to be there at all?
He's not.
Yeah, yeah.
The only way him can make it make sense for himself.
Yeah, he's got to wedge his favorite card in there somewhere.
Yep.
Okay.
So, a lot going on here.
Immediately when I hear it, I can catch the everything is connected sense that comes with conspiracist narratives.
There was a time when I had trouble picking that up, but I've developed a feel for it now, and the sense is sharper.
People who engage in conspiracy beliefs start with the idea that there are no coincidences.
Everything is connected.
And not in the dirk gently holistic sense.
Connected in the you can't fool me, I'm onto you paranoid sense.
It's almost inevitable that a grand conspiracy narrative is created because that's where the yellow brick road of no coincidences eventually leads.
In Stewartson's case, it leads to Russia through Mike Flynn.
Every conspiracy narrative generator has their own pet characters and plotline, as does every fiction author.
There's a reason why every James Bond movie heavily resembles each of its predecessor movies.
They were all cribbed from the mind of a single person who had a single collection of beliefs, thrilling fantasies, and chosen antagonists.
Casting a handful of real-life events as a movie plot, and in this case, the worst movie plot, gives Stewartson a meta-reality in which to wedge his ideas.
He's creating a fictional scenario that he's claiming is real about real people who are acting and coordinating in such a way that wouldn't be believed if it were fiction.
Did that make sense?
Yeah.
Okay, so when he expects you to believe it, he's suddenly saying that he realizes it's unbelievable and that that's the reason you should believe it, that it's really happening.
This is reality inversion.
He's attempting to say that the thing about this that makes it seem fake is actually the reason why you should think it's real.
So are these separate entities working together to create a mutually beneficial outcome?
No.
Is imagining that they are conspiring in this way going to help anyone make better decisions in the future?
Also no.
Is it proper to compare the seriousness of the current situation with the one experienced in the years just before the Civil War?
Still, no.
Stuartson is, what Stuartson is doing here, what many other conspiracists do.
They're creating an overly complicated scenario and relaying it very quickly and confidently to their audience.
It's difficult to follow what's needed to make this entire scenario actually work.
Because of this, the listener is forced to make a choice just to keep up with the conversation.
They can either give up on keeping up with the conversation because they interpret it as nonsense, or they can accept the premise in order to keep up with the rest of the plot being told.
In this case, the premise would be, Russia is the secret enemy behind all of the bad things that everyone else has done for as far back as anyone can remember, and they have either co-opted or partnered with every other bad person you can think of.
This is a non-debate version of the Gish Gallop.
Just as it becomes impossible for a debate opponent to debunk all of the errant notions of a Gish Galloper in real time, it also becomes impossible for someone casually listening to these sorts of rhetorical styles to properly assess each claim individually.
The fulcrum of the decision to either ditch the ideas or accept them is not based on the factuality of the content because those facts are coming too fast to assess, but rather on the charisma of the speaker.
Simply put, if you like whoever is speaking, you'll very likely accept all of the things they're saying when this is happening.
If you don't like them, you won't.
There are a few other factors involved, like whether or not the things being said are familiar to you, which leads to repetitions of the same complicated set of ideas gaining traction in your mind.
Also, whether or not the things being said lead to a satisfactory conclusion for your goals.
We can accept that a message like the one Jim Stewartson puts forward in this clip is meant for an audience that is strongly anti-Trump.
But not everyone who opposes Trump accepts these ideas.
A few thoughts occur to me that poke some serious holes in Jim Stewartson's idea.
The idea that this space occurred on September 4th, 2024, was the same day that two Russian nationals were indicted as part of the Tenet Media scandal.
For anyone who doesn't know or needs a reminder, Tenet Media was a company that hired content creators, well-known content creators.
The scandal occurred because an investigation by the Justice Department discovered that several content creators at Tenet Media were being paid a truly obscene amount of money with the specific understanding that they would include pro-Russian narratives in their regular content.
So this was Tim Poole, Dave Rubin, and a guy named Benny Johnson.
The money for the scheme, which was about 10 million US dollars, came from Russian media outlet Russia Today and was brought to the US via a fictional European businessman named Eduardo Gregorian.
It's almost comical, the name that they came up with for this guy.
He's almost like the name that the writers of a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon would have came up with.
So I had this clip that I wanted to wedge in.
This is what I kind of added in this morning sideways into this, but I'm pretty sure it still works out and fits in here.
This extra clip of Jim Stewartson talking about how it is that his detractors are being paid.
This has always been a big thing is how this makes sense to anyone, but it seems to make sense to Jim Stewartson.
So here's a clip of his explanation of how his detractors are getting paid.
Do stage.
we go um is communists a dangerous ideology no No, no, that's the wrong clip.
Why did you skip?
These people are not getting checks from like Putin and stuff that.
That is not how it works.
I mean, Tenant Media, apparently, which pays Tim Poole and a bunch of these assholes, apparently was literally getting money just from the Russians.
But most of the people out there working, quote, for the Russians, they're getting it through podcasts.
They're getting it through donations to various things.
You know, it is far more subtle than the indictment that the DOJ put out there.
Nevertheless, it's at least a sign that they're paying a little bit of attention and hopefully minimally a warning shot at a bunch of the people who are plainly just working for the fucking Russians.
I mean, you can't look at what people like Mike Flynn do, which is to literally say, Putin's going to blow up the government with his nukes.
Like, you can't, I mean, he's not hiding a thing.
I wrote an article called Overt, Not Clandestine, which is about these people like Flynn who, you know, for a while had a little subtlety.
There's no subtlety anymore.
tucker just goes to putin's grocery store yeah Again, it's so much there, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But, I mean, I think you've even been accused of getting paid, right?
Yeah, yeah, he's definitely accused a bunch of people being paid.
Yeah.
So this is how he thinks people are getting paid is just this mysterious method through podcasts and donations and quote-unquote various things, right?
Yeah.
Like donations to his good money.
Yeah, yeah.
Throwing that out there.
So, I mean, and this, we get this contrast because we have tenant media and we just found out how they're really getting paid.
Tenant Media had this money brought in.
But of course, that's what he's saying isn't happening with other people.
Like, why this disparity?
Why would they, yeah, this doesn't make any sense.
That story gave him like some credibility, though, to say that his stalkers or people against him are being paid.
So they're like, well, look, this just happened.
Yeah, yeah.
Tenant media is both an example of the exact thing that Stewartson has been saying, like media people getting paid, but is also getting paid in a very different way, a way that greatly exposes the path upon which the money is routed.
So the money for tenant media is moved nearly directly from Russia, and these people are getting paid like $400,000 a month to people with very, and these people were very large followings.
But at the same time, some other different, you know, money, Russian money, or maybe not Russian money, he's never really exact again, is taking a much more securitist route.
So that's one that you can't specifically see and being hidden by all these other methods, right?
One wonders why they wouldn't have used those same methods to hide the tenant media money, right?
And also why they would bother to pay, you know, people who have much smaller followings when they, you know, would have been easier to pay the people at, you know, Tim Poole, who has, I don't know, several hundred thousand followers, right?
I think over half a million.
you know why they'd bother with all the penny anti people like it doesn't this this whole strain of thing doesn't make any sense Exactly.
That is no sense at all.
So if Russia were really in a conspiracy with a series of American politicians and the world's richest man to fix elections and support common goals, why would they need to have their own Russian citizens do the deed?
Why would the money need to get smuggled in through the back channel of a fictitious person?
Why wouldn't Musk just hire these people himself or just have Musk provide what would be to him a staggeringly small amount of money to get the content creators in question to just say what they're meant to say?
Why would there need to be Russians in America at all to give the information to these content creators?
Couldn't Americans who were part of the conspiracy give the marching orders to the tenant media content creators?
Like, you know, how is this even working?
Why expose a Russia connection at all in this case?
In fact, if it had been Americans giving the orders and the content and the money to Tim Poole and gang, it would have been completely legal and would still be happening today.
And by the way, Tim Poole and gang is the world's worst hip-hop group, just saying.
But it's or is it more likely, in fact, that Russia does its own thing for its own reasons and keeps no counsel with the Republican Party or Elon Musk or Mike Flynn or the NSA or the CIA or any other American institution?
Is it more likely that Russia is just as clueless about what will and won't work to their advantage as any other nation that attempts to meddle in the affairs of their competitors?
And that they're just trying 20 different ways and we hear about one of those 20 and like it becomes a thing, right?
Like they're doing exactly the same thing as Alex Jones does with his predictions, essentially, where they just try a whole bunch of stuff and then some stuff happens to get some kind of traction, right?
What do you think?
Exactly right.
I mean.
Jen is exactly that.
He's he's the way he crafts these, he pretends like, You know, every explanation exactly explains every question he comes up with.
But really, mostly all of it, all of his explanations just lead to more questions.
And that's when he just shuts it down.
Blah, blah, blah.
I don't have time for this.
Blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's one of Blocky.
Because, I mean, as soon as you ask a serious question to any of those claims, he has no answer.
He's just like, well, I wrote about it here.
And it's just like, yeah.
Well, you wrote about that, but that still doesn't answer any of the questions.
Yeah.
Like, being brought up, like, why would you pay these small people that he thinks he's just so important that a country would pay someone to try to shut him up about?
Yeah, right.
He's in fact, Russia would probably try to keep him talking as long as possible because he causes more confusion, right?
Exactly.
Yeah.
And yeah, but yeah, yeah, so yeah, we can't question him because it just blocks him.
Yeah, and as far as the grift goes, if you haven't bought it already, keeping you around for longer doesn't help him in any way.
So shutting you up is the goal there.
Yeah, and you're not going to get it on while you pull anyone away.
Yeah.
So it's try to, you know, shut the door with you on the outside.
And that's.
Yep.
Not part of the family anymore.
Just another way that you can tell that he's not making a sincere effort to find any kind of truth here.
He's just looking to, you know, pull a snow job on as many people as possible.
Just, you know, confuse him as much as possible and keep them giving him money.
So let's do the next clip.
I think it's interesting.
All right.
Is communist a dangerous ideology?
Absolutely.
Is China a dangerous foe?
Absolutely.
But when you see the flip outs about the CCP and Flynn calling, using every synonym for communist he can think of to describe Democrats, it has nothing to do with those ideologies.
It has everything to do with fascism needing an ideological scapegoat.
So I think that clip is very interesting and telling, but not because of spec, you know, literally what he's saying, because of what it means in context to the greater amount of what Jim does.
What are your thoughts?
first hear that do you ever that's not a thing he says very often So I thought that was interesting that he said that there.
What do you think about his take on China and the CCP?
Yeah, it's they're dangerous, but they're not in a conspiracy against us.
They're just the other side's ideological scapegoat.
Yeah.
I don't know what he means by that because he just throws in random stuff.
Well, okay, right.
So he's it's an interesting moment here, right?
It says that it shows, first of all, that Stewartson is certainly capable of understanding a nuanced relationship with a nation that has a lot of plans and schemes that oppose the plans and schemes of his own nation, but that nevertheless isn't part of a global conspiracy to like, you know, cause the apocalypse or whatever he thinks is going to happen.
And one might well note that the place that Russia takes in Stewartson's conspiracy narrative is the same spot that China takes in Mike Flynn's conspiracy narrative.
And this might help us understand why Stewartson takes a more rational view of this particular nation, right?
One could easily come to the conclusion that Flynn's position on both Russia and China are what defines Stewartson's subsequent positions on each of those, right?
Because Flynn would probably call Russia, say more kind words about Russia, very similar to the ones Stewartson's just said about China, right?
Like, yeah, okay, you know, got to be a little careful.
They're a foe, right?
But, you know, they're not, they're not the absolute enemy here.
Like, let's, you know, be cautious.
But also, what he says at the very end, I thought was interesting, where he says that he said, what did he say?
He said, it has everything to do with fascism needing an ideological scapegoat.
But isn't that also a thing that Jim is doing here where he's making Flynn and Russia into an ideological scapegoat?
Like, it's like he's describing his own thought process, but flipping everything around to be, you know, just, like, you could rewrite his statement the opposite, you know, with a, you know, China for Russia and etc.
And it would still make sense on the other side.
He's looking for an ideological scapegoat for his ideas.
And his scapegoat is Flynn.
And of course, it helps, it helps him that Flynn is also not a good person and has his own ideas that need to be opposed.
And so therefore, if you appear to be defending Flynn, he gets to say, oh, yeah, but what are you saying?
He's a good person.
Like, we should go to lunch with him.
We should partner up with him.
We should give him our money.
Like, what are you saying?
Like, no one's saying that.
Right.
So.
Yeah, you're protecting Flynn.
Yeah, yeah.
He uses the absolutist stick to try to say that you're either absolutely with him or absolutely against him and there's no middle ground.
You know, you can't have middle ground against fascists, right?
And then that, you know, not being able to have middle ground against fascists gets to be used in any way that the people who, you know, hold the stick like in this case.
Now you have to, you know, agree with me that Flynn and Russia are definitely doing this, all these things with Elon Musk and the Supreme Court to, you know, bring about the end of democracy.
Yeah, if not, you're just an enemy now.
Yeah.
Then you're one of the enemies.
Yeah.
And you're getting paid by them.
Yeah, right.
Which why would you need to get paid if you were also on board in the first place?
That also doesn't make sense, but that's not a thing that matters.
Doesn't need to make sense.
All right.
So this is our last clip.
But it's a gooder.
This is.
I like the gooders.
Oh, yeah.
It's a real gooder.
All right.
Here we go.
I am, among other things, a very stubborn son of a bitch.
And I do not like being told what to say and what not to say.
And so when people tell me not to say things, the first thing that I think to myself, well, the first thing is, who the fuck are you?
But the second thing is, why?
Why do you care?
Why are you so intent if I'm just such a crazy blue-in-on weirdo on distracting me from this one point?
If I'm so crazy, just leave me alone.
Like, why are you making it your, in many cases, and the dozens of them who've made a life for years now, like, just trolling this guy and my friends.
Okay, so did that live up to the hype?
Was that a gooder?
Yeah, that was a gooder.
The first thing I think about is he says that and it's just like, well, why don't you do that with Flynn?
Yeah.
Just leave him alone.
Yeah, just leave him alone.
Just leave him alone.
He's a crazy right-wing weirdo.
Why don't you just leave him alone?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, if he's just such a right-wing weirdo, why do you, yeah.
If they spent their whole life and it's just like, you've been doing it for five years, you brag about every time like a certain day comes up, just brag about it that you made it your life.
And Flynn isn't even important.
Flynn didn't get invited to be a part of the Trump administration.
Friggin' Pete Hegseth gets to be the Secretary of Defense, right?
Like, how much of a snub is that to Mike Flynn?
You know, he's an actual did was a general in the military.
Like, I.
Yeah, he's done nothing.
Absolutely.
Yeah, exactly.
So picture this.
Jim Stewartson is just sitting in a Starbucks, sipping on his latte, minding his own business, and discussing global politics with his friends about how, you know, Russia and Flynn and Musk and the Supreme Court are all in on it together.
And then you and I, we're waiting for our lattes and we overhear him.
And then we start sticking our noses in where they don't belong.
We start telling him and his friends that they're all wrong about everything, right?
Like, we'd be the assholes in that situation, right?
You and me, we'd be the assholes.
Right, right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, right, right.
Yeah.
But, of course, that's, that's ridiculous.
That's not really, you know, that's, I mean, if you were just listening to what he said, he's just, he's just talking to his friends and we're trolling him and his friends.
They're just him and his friends are just getting along.
Like, like, yeah, yeah, just leave us alone, right?
We're just, we're minding our own business.
We're just, we're allowed to have our little conversation here with just us about this.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, it's not like that at all.
Not like that at all.
So this is a big part of why Jim Stewartson has made himself such a problem.
And this has several important aspects.
So first, right off the bat, it's reality inversion, right?
He's stating outright that attempts to correct him are reinterpreted as the enemy is trying to divert him from the truth.
And you can almost hear him saying that he must be over the target to be getting so much flack, right?
He wants people to think that the presence of detractors is a sign that he's a bold truth teller rather than just a toxic asshole.
So many times over the past several years, people have attempted to point out why Stewartson's ideas are flawed.
Why would a person do this? He asks.
The obvious answer is that they don't want the information environment to be poisoned with unreal ideas.
Some of these people may have even hoped, once upon a time, to course correct him to a less conspiratorial path so as to make him a more useful ally.
Usually, this is why I correct people in my life.
It's because I want them to be more correct and to think more clearly about our shared reality.
Like, if I had a friend that every time we hung out, all he could talk about was just like how it was like Mike Flynn is cue and like they did this like mind control operation to like, you know, do something with Russia and Elon Musk and blah blah blah.
I'd say, look, Jim, like, we're trying to play fucking Scrabble here.
Like, could you just get over it already?
Just sip your latte.
Like, we're just chilling here.
Like, yeah.
But not according to Stewartson.
To hear him tell it, the act of contradicting him is highly suspicious behavior and can be easily explained by casting you as the enemy.
This has happened many times before with many prominent people who actively push back against unreal ideas.
Cheyenne Sardarizadeh of BBC Modern BBC Monitoring.
Mike Rothschild, author of Jewish Space Lasers and the Storm is Upon Us, Griff Somke of the Did Nothing Wrong podcast, Brent Lee, former conspirator, former conspiracist and host of the Some Dare Call It Conspiracy podcast.
Professionals and prominent people who have attempted to point out the ways in which some aspect of Jim Stewartson's rhetoric fails to make sense and have subsequently been placed into his conspiracy narrative as part of the conspiracy against him.
Quite literally, Jim Stewartson claims that his detractors are being paid by Russia and or Mike Flynn to engage in the business of pointing out Stewartson's errors.
The idea that money moves every needle and changes every decision has long been part of conspiracy narratives as a plot device to explain why someone in the story seems to be acting in a way that's outside of the expected.
In conspiracy land, doctors who've all taken the pledge to do no harm are coordinating the destruction of civilization by participating in a vaccine program to poison the population.
NASA and a dozen other national space agencies are coordinating their efforts to keep the true shape of the Earth a secret from the general population.
Entire teams of military personnel along with a host of CIA agents and private contractors are collectively keeping key details about the events of September 11th under wraps to prevent some calamitous truth from being known to everyday people.
And why are any of them acting in this way?
Because someone is paying them.
Money solves every problem according to conspiracists and in their minds because of this simple axiom the true nature of every event can be found by merely discovering who profited by having the conclusion turn out the way it did.
Follow the money.
But I ask the question, how much would your boss have to increase your salary by to get you to participate in murder?
Maybe even mass murder?
How much would that increase have to be to maintain your silence for the rest of your life?
Money does make some decisions more likely, but not everyone has the moral slipperiness to be willing to go that far.
So why does anyone think it would happen to entire groups of other people?
This is just a hand-waving response, a catch-all explanation that's meant to explain away the inconvenient fact that money only encourages people to do things that don't offend their morality and dignity.
So, Mark, how much would your boss have to pay you to get you to participate in the depopulation of, I don't know, the planet?
A lot.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know if I'd be hard to live with myself, but I mean, money is nice.
Well, you know, I mean, someone's imagining you living with yourself bathing in money the whole time.
I mean, you know, it goes a lot to dissuade the conscience, right?
But then, of course, the fact that you're bathing in money and then also somehow just living the rest of your life as though you weren't bathing in money and hiding all that money somewhere also is difficult to explain, right?
Like, you're pretty good at hiding all that money.
Why aren't you using that money to like quit your job and go on vacations everywhere and like just live your life?
Like, why aren't you spending the rest of your life in Vegas if the money is just pouring in, right?
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Instead, you're going back to your grueling job that you probably, you know, have some level of distaste for if you're anything like me.
And, like, you know.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Oh, well, I guess I got to keep up this fucking grind.
Like, you know, make it look like I'm not making all this money.
Like, what's this farce all about, really?
You know, like, yeah, now I have to pretend like I'm not making money.
And, like, why?
Why?
It's miserable.
Yeah.
It doesn't make any sense.
None.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I would, I mean, if I was making that money, I would not be at my job.
That's a hundred.
Yeah.
Who would?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Of course you wouldn't.
No.
I've been told that they believe I don't have a job.
I'm just like, all right.
Oh, okay.
I wish I could believe I didn't have a job.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wish I got paid money to laugh at you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That would be.
Wow.
Be pretty amazing.
Right.
So the final piece of this particular bit is that is most insulting is that while Stewartson claims that some people have taken on permanent projects to troll him off the internet, that's actually what he himself has attempted to do with countless people, including many of the people who have called out his unreal ideas.
Mike Rothschild in particular has been the repeated target of swaths of Stewartson trolls for several years now.
But there's another aspect of this.
Early on in his newly adopted quest of destroying QAnon as a concept, and we're talking way back in August of 2020, Stewartson was allying himself with people who had similar goals.
One of those people was someone named Aubrey Caudle, also known as Kurtaner.
Now, Coddle was a Canadian man who had previously been part of Anonymous, the loosely organized hacking collective that had tried to change the world by exposing truths, exposing truths that they said no one else would expose.
Most of what Anonymous actually got up to was trolling people into oblivion.
There were a few legitimate hackers, but the vast majority of people in anonymous were just lending computing strength and raw keyboard warrior power to coordinated trolling efforts.
So in late 2020, when Stewartson began looking for allies, he found Aubrey Caudle also looking for people to add to an already gathered army of internet trolls.
Caudle was interested in telling QAnon that it didn't get to claim the anonymous movement for itself.
Most of the legitimate hackers from the old school anonymous days didn't show up for the reunion.
So the only real weapon this group had left was the blunt force of trolling people into oblivion.
Mock them and meme them and otherwise taunt them until they find the environment so tainted with conflict that your side seems to revel in such that they just stop showing up.
I'm not sure what happened to the Aubrey Coddle-Jim Stewartson partnership or why they parted ways, but I feel certain that it's from their association that Stewartson got the idea that bullying people online was and still is the most effective use of his time.
And anyone who attempts to tell him that he's wrong is just a bully who's attempting to bully him back.
And the only two options there are to capitulate to the bully or stubbornly refuse to admit defeat and just troll their side even harder.
And through this process, one can find the trauma bonding with avid followers that in turn becomes the building blocks of tribalism.
A tribe called Stuanon.
So, what do you think of the tribe called Stuanon, Mark?
I'm not a big fan of that tribe.
I mean, that was good, though.
That was good.
Yeah.
The Aubrey Coddle-Kurtaner connection.
Yeah, and I mean, definitely the bullying, like, with his triumph, he definitely thinks that.
Because that's what he does completely.
He just, and I mean, we see it all the time with man.
Like, he goes to those lengths with using, you know, saying homophobic things and like the lengths he goes to where he thinks he's being, you know, fighting something or being good.
He's just, he's bullying himself.
Yeah.
And yeah.
And then his followers just, like, I don't know.
They just think he's amazing and want to stick up for him.
And, you know, he says, you know, he gives them a playbook of how to deal with people that are against him.
Yeah.
Push them harder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've written just a small bit of the, you know, bit of what will happen in part two of this Jim Stewartson bit, the case against Jim Stewartson.
And it's going to include a bunch of that stuff as to the step-by-step process he he advises and why that's all nonsense.
But yeah, it's the root of it is found right here in this Aubrey Caudle anonymous reunion that happened in late 2020 to push back against QAnon.
Yeah.
That's definitely where it started.
Yeah.
Here we are.
So I feel like I shouldn't need to say this out loud, but just in case anyone is confused about the matter, attempting to bully people into giving up their beliefs is not going to convince them to give up their beliefs.
If anything, you'll only succeed in getting them to associate their beliefs more strongly with their own identities and then to want to defend those identities with all possible force.
That same sense of Why do you care what I say would be experienced by the targets of Jim's trolling efforts and thus causing them to dig in harder the exact way he digs in when challenged.
It's a method to guarantee that there's always going to be an opposition that's motivated to keep fighting back.
It's what you do when what you really want is to fight rather than to convince anyone of anything rational.
Stewartson isn't innocently pontificating to an audience of friendlies here.
He has a small bullhorn with 131,000 followers on Twitter and 47,000 on Blue Sky.
And he's asking them all to help him get a larger bullhorn.
Allowing him to slowly poison the minds of everyone on the left is an unacceptable course of action.
Stewartson would want to get credit for anything he ever predicted that comes true.
Therefore, he needs to take responsibility for any damage he does to the information environment along the way.
Stepping up to the microphone while claiming that no one should criticize him for stepping up to the microphone is asinine.
So in conclusion, Jim Stewartson is a source of disinformation.
He doesn't mistakenly pass on bad information that other people have created.
He creates his own bad ideas and passes those off as useful for his community.
And those ideas, when believed, skew the ability of the listener to a decidedly more conspiratorial world.
I've been told Jim Stewartson is right about so many things.
The things he's off about are just a byproduct of an attempt to push so hard against the things Trump does.
Why put so much effort against Stewartson when you could be putting that effort in against Trump?
Well, here's why.
Every source of disinformation distracts and distorts people's ability to work out what's actually happening.
Right now, we have a right wing that's more or less completely scuppered by disinformation, such that they're only just now finding out about Trump's decades-long association with their own sworn enemy, Jeffrey Epstein.
And roughly half of those people are fighting their own cognitive dissonance to find a narrative that allows them to continue expressing thankfulness that Trump is president.
Meanwhile, we have a left wing that's ostensibly on the side of reason, except that it's not entirely so.
People like Jim Stewartson nestle into the left side of the political spectrum, adopt convincingly all of the key tribal beliefs, then begin spreading nonsense.
Disinformation can affect anyone.
This doesn't fold along an IQ line.
In fact, there's good reason to believe that being more intelligent increases the likelihood that a person will come to trust their own opinions to the exclusion of disconfirming facts.
The ability to think clearly about reality has less to do with an impressive IQ as it does with good thinking habits.
Think of the mind like a kitchen.
There isn't any way to clean your kitchen enough to actually get rid of all bacteria, but you can clean it well enough so that you won't poison yourself whenever you cook food there.
And that's the goal.
Having a place to prepare food that won't kill you.
But you have to keep it up.
You can't just clean your kitchen once a month.
It needs steady maintenance.
And so does your mind.
And for that matter, when we're talking about the overall rationality of an entire society, we will need to have an area of influential thinkers that are also subsequently free of problematic and conspiratorial thinking.
We need the left wing to be firmly anchored in rationality.
We cannot allow personalities like Jim Stewartson to mainline bad ideas to the otherwise rational group in exchange for getting a few extra shots off against Trump.
It will lead to the left being unable to continue fighting effectively as it slowly devolves into increasingly conspiratorial nonsense.
And that's what I'm trying to prevent here.
So did I win the debate?
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Drop the mic.
Yeah, that was cool.
Walk off stage.
Yeah.
Very well said.
Thank you.
I love when people agree with me.
This is great.
It's fantastic.
I mean, that's pretty much exactly how I feel.
Yeah.
I figured you would.
I'm any better.
Yeah.
Can't really say it any better.
I'm not really one with the wordsmith.
More of a one-liner type of guy.
You're a picture guy.
Yeah, yeah.
You're a meme guy.
Yeah.
I love it.
You're.
No, really.
Like, your memes, the ones people should follow you on Twitter.
Everyone should follow you on Twitter, really.
dan's bird it's uh it's uh like i'm not like jim stewartson talks about using memes as a method of like warfare which is ridiculous i think to try to make political points with memes um Especially like solely with memes.
That's also even more so.
But like as a level of absurdity to point out the ridiculous parts of just life.
That's where me, that's where meme gold is.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And that's where you are.
That's why like I just, as soon as I found your feed and it had all these memes, they're just like point out how stupid and absurd everyday life was, all that.
I just, I just love it.
And I, I don't want to put like make you feel uncomfortable with like all these things because I don't know how many you make or if you even make any, I don't know, but just like you have a way to collect them all and show them all.
And I just, I love it.
I just, it's great.
Yeah, it's usually, I mean, yeah, because life's tough.
And yeah.
That's the way I look at it.
Life's tough.
And you have to laugh at shit because it's just things are so awful around.
Yeah.
It's like, if not, I'm just going to go nuts.
Which I'm already pretty crazy, but you know.
Yeah.
Well.
Need some relief.
Yeah.
Someone asked me once why anyone listens to violent music, for example, or something like that.
And I said, well, you know, or depressing music.
Why anyone listens to depressing music?
If you're depressed, why do you listen to depressing music?
And I said, well, part of it is because you like the idea that someone else understands the thing you're feeling.
Yep.
Like, it's not about becoming, you know, like wanting to become more depressed.
Right.
It's about understanding that other people feel the same thing.
And through that, understand that there's some kind of connection and shared feeling, shared reality about this.
And so, you know, when you see memes that point out things like how stupid your brain works because it's very difficult for people to point out and to, yeah, my brain did this stupid thing today.
Right, right.
You know, most people can't express what stupid thing their brain did.
But when you see it in a meme, you go, oh, no, I get it.
I get it, man.
Thank you.
I needed that.
I didn't know that I needed it even.
But that, that was, yeah, my brain just did a stupid thing and it's going to do it again.
I know it.
And like, I thought I was alone because no one else is in my brain to know that it did that thing.
But like, yeah, it did that thing.
Wow.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Great.
Yeah.
So, as mentioned, there will be another part to this where I go into there's.
There's a bunch of I mentioned there's a bunch of greatest hits from Jim Stewartson here and there are right, I think I hit a bunch of the gooders, but there's a bunch that he were didn't come up.
Right, so mind control wasn't really a part of this mind war, which is the, the name of his sub stack uh, and I think it was also the name of the documentary that he did.
I don't know, I haven't even watched that yet.
We didn't mention any psychological operations or active measures right yeah yeah, those are the greatest hits too.
Yeah yeah, that's greatest hits part two, yeah, so that'll be coming up.
Um, look forward to that in a future episode.
I don't know how long it'll take for me to put that together.
I gotta.
I have some other content to get to in the meantime.
But uh, there'll be more of these.
For anyone who's hate listening right now because you're a fan of Jim Stewartson, there'll be more of these.
Yeah, yeah.
So uh, where can people find you Mark?
Um yeah just uh, mainly on Twitter.
Uh, I don't even know what my handle is at Dansberg21, D-A-N-Z.
Yeah, D A N Z B Y R D 21.
So it's a Canadian podcast, man.
No, you gotta pronounce it right.
All right, all right, I don't insist on many Canadianisms, but that one I like.
All right, I'll remember that one.
Yeah, Zed's a much cooler name and one of the greatest moments I thought from Pulp Fiction was the moment.
The moment where Bruce Willis is.
He's just finished his spoiler 30 year old movie spoiler editor for Pulp Fiction but he's just finished getting away from the weirdo sex dungeon and he's.
He's stolen the bike and he goes to pick up his woman and she's like, Where's my car?
Oh, I had to crash that car, baby.
Whose bike is this?
He's like, It's not a bike, baby.
It's a chopper.
Whose chopper is this?
She says, It's Zed's.
Yeah, yeah.
Who's Zed?
And then he says, Zed's dead, baby.
Yeah.
Zed's dead.
That's so good.
So good.
Yeah, it's such a great movie all around.
That line, cinema history, that line right there.
Yeah.
Zed's dead, baby.
Yeah.
Zed's dead.
You have to watch that again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Amazing.
So, if anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this, you can put that well-thought-out email together and send it to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
You can find me on Twitter.
I have a very, very small number of people blocked.
Almost no one, despite the fact that people claim that they, you know, the trolls that want to, you know, I don't, they tend to block me instead of I block them, whatever.
Troll me.
Troll me.
Bring it.
I don't care.
But you can find me at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
You can find me at Spencer Watson on Blue Sky, even though I'm not there as often.